The Enchanted April
only looked at her, and listened with the face of an attentive angel.
It seemed to Mr. Wilkins that it must be difficult to scold a Dester
who looked like that and so exquisitely said nothing. Mrs. Fisher, he
was glad to see, gradually found it difficult herself, for her severity
slackened, and she ended by saying lamely, “You ought to have told me
you were not doing it.”
“I didn’t know you thought I was,” said the lovely voice.
“I would now like to know,” said Mrs. Fisher, “what you propose to do
for the rest of the time here.”
“Nothing,” said Scrap, smiling.
“Nothing? Do you mean to say—”
“If I may be allowed, ladies,” interposed Mr. Wilkins in his suavest
professional manner, “to make a suggestion”—they both looked at him,
and remembering him as they first saw him felt indulgent—“I would
advise you not to spoil a delightful holiday with worries over
housekeeping.”
“Exactly,” said Mrs. Fisher. “It is what I intend to avoid.”
“Most sensible,” said Mr. Wilkins. “Why not, then,” he continued,
“allow the cook—an excellent cook, by the way—so much a head _per
diem_”—Mr. Wilkins knew what was necessary in Latin—“and tell her that
for this sum she must cater for you, and not only cater but cater as
well as ever? One could easily reckon it out. The charges of a moderate
hotel, for instance, would do as a basis, halved, or perhaps even
quartered.”
“And this week that has just passed?” asked Mrs. Fisher. “The terrible
bills of this first week? What about them?”
“They shall be my present to San Salvatore,” said Scrap, who didn’t
like the idea of Lotty’s nest-egg being reduced so much beyond what she
was prepared for.
There was a silence. The ground was cut from under Mrs. Fisher’s feet.
“Of course if you choose to throw your money about—” she said at last,
disapproving but immensely relieved, while Mr. Wilkins was rapt in the
contemplation of the precious qualities of blue blood. This readiness,
for instance, not to trouble about money, this free-handedness—it was
not only what one admired in others, admired in others perhaps more
than anything else, but it was extraordinarily useful to the
professional classes. When met with it should be encouraged by warmth
of reception. Mrs. Fisher was not warm. She accepted—from which he
deduced that with her wealth went closeness—but she accepted
grudgingly. Presents were presents, and one did not look them in this
manner in the mouth, he felt; and if Lady Caroline found her pleasure
in presenting his wife and Mrs. Fisher with their entire food for a
week, it was their part to accept gracefully. One should not discourage
gifts.
On behalf of his wife, then, Mr. Wilkins expressed what she would wish
to express, and remarking to Lady Caroline—with a touch of lightness,
for so should gifts be accepted in order to avoid embarrassing the
donor—that she had in that case been his wife’s hostess since her
arrival, he turned almost gaily to Mrs. Fisher and pointed out that she
and his wife must now jointly write Lady Caroline the customary letter
of thanks for hospitality. “A Collins,” said Mr. Wilkins, who knew what
was necessary in literature. “I prefer the name Collins for such a
letter to either that of Board and Lodging or Bread and Butter. Let us
call it a Collins.”
Scrap smiled, and held out her cigarette case. Mrs. Fisher could not
help being mollified. A way out of waste was going to be found, thanks
to Mr. Wilkins, and she hated waste quite as much as having to pay for
it; also a way was found out of housekeeping. For a moment she had
thought that if everybody tried to force her into housekeeping on her
brief holiday by their own indifference (Lady Caroline), or inability
to speak Italian (the other two), she would have to send for Kate
Lumley after all. Kate could do it. Kate and she had learnt Italian
together. Kate would only be allowed to come on condition that she did
do it.
But this was much better, this way of Mr. Wilkins’s. Really a most
superior man. There was nothing like an intelligent, not too young man
for profitable and pleasurable companionship. And when she got up, the
business for which she had come being settled, and said she now
intended to take a little stroll before lunch, Mr. Wilkins did not stay
with Lady Caroline, as most of the men she had known would, she was
afraid, have wanted to—he asked to be permitted to go and stroll with
her; so that he evidently definitely preferred conversation to faces. A
sensible, companionable man. A clever, well-read man. A man of the
world. A man. She was very glad indeed she had not written to Kate the
other day. What did she want with Kate? She had found a better
companion.
But Mr. Wilkins did not go with Mrs. Fisher because of her
conversation, but because, when she got up and he got up because she
got up, intending merely to bow her out of the recess, Lady Caroline
had put her feet up on the parapet again, and arranging her head
sideways in the cushions had shut her eyes.
The daughter of the Droitwiches desired to go to sleep.
It was not for him, by remaining, to prevent her.
Chapter 16
And so the second week began, and all was harmony. The arrival of Mr.
Wilkins, instead of, as three of the party had feared and the fourth
had only been protected from fearing by her burning faith in the effect
on him of San Salvatore, disturbing such harmony as there was,
increased it. He fitted in. He was determined to please, and he did
please. He was most amiable to his wife—not only in public, which she
was used to, but in private, when he certainly wouldn’t have been if he
hadn’t wanted to. He did want to. He was so much obliged to her, so
much pleased with her, for making him acquainted with Lady Caroline,
that he felt really fond of her. Also proud; for there must be, he
reflected, a good deal more in her than he had supposed, for Lady
Caroline to have become so intimate with her and so affectionate. And
the more he treated her as though she were really very nice, the more
Lotty expanded and became really very nice, and the more he, affected
in his turn, became really very nice himself; so that they went round
and round, not in a vicious but in a highly virtuous circle.
Positively, for him, Mellersh petted her. There was at no time much pet
in Mellersh, because he was by nature a cool man; yet such was the
influence on him of, as Lotty supposed, San Salvatore, that in this
second week he sometimes pinched both her ears, one after the other,
instead of only one; and Lotty, marvelling at such rapidly developing
affectionateness, wondered what he would do, should he continue at this
rate, in the third week, when her supply of ears would have come to an
end.
He was particularly nice about the washstand, and genuinely desirous of
not taking up too much of the space in the small bedroom. Quick to
respond, Lotty was even more desirous not to be in his way; and the
room became the scene of many an affectionate _combat de générosité_,
each of which left them more pleased with each other than ever. He did
not again have a bath in the bathroom, though it was mended and ready
for him, but got up and went down every morning to the sea, and in
spite of the cool nights making the water cold early had his dip as a
man should, and came up to breakfast rubbing his hands and feeling, as
he told Mrs. Fisher, prepared for anything.
Lotty’s belief in the irresistible influence of the heavenly atmosphere
of San Salvatore being thus obviously justified, and Mr. Wilkins, whom
Rose knew as alarming and Scrap had pictured as icily unkind, being so
evidently a changed man, both Rose and Scrap began to think there might
after all be something in what Lotty insisted on, and that San
Salvatore did work purgingly on the character.
They were the more inclined to think so in that they too felt a working
going on inside themselves: they felt more cleared, both of them, that
second week—Scrap in her thoughts, many of which were now quite nice
thoughts, real amiable ones about her parents and relations, with a
glimmer in them of recognition of the extraordinary benefits she had
received at the hands of—what? Fate? Providence?—anyhow of something,
and of how, having received them, she had misused them by failing to be
happy; and Rose in her bosom, which though it still yearned, yearned to
some purpose, for she was reaching the conclusion that merely
inactively to yearn was no use at all, and that she must either by some
means stop her yearning or give it at least a chance—remote, but still
a chance—of being quieted by writing to Frederick and asking him to
come out.
If Mr. Wilkins could be changed, thought Rose, why not Frederick? How
wonderful it would be, how too wonderful, if the place worked on him
too and were able to make them even a little understand each other,
even a little be friends. Rose, so far had loosening and disintegration
gone on in her character, now was beginning to think her obstinate
strait-lacedness about his books and her austere absorption in good
works had been foolish and perhaps even wrong. He was her husband, and
she had frightened him away. She had frightened love away, precious
love, and that couldn’t be good. Was not Lotty right when she said the
other day that nothing at all except love mattered? Nothing certainly
seemed much use unless it was built up on love. But once frightened
away, could it ever come back? Yes, it might in that beauty, it might
in the atmosphere of happiness Lotty and San Salvatore seemed between
them to spread round like some divine infection.
She had, however, to get him there first, and he certainly couldn’t be
got there if she didn’t write and tell him where she was.
She would write. She must write; for if she did there was at least a
chance of his coming, and if she didn’t there was manifestly none. And
then, once here in this loveliness, with everything so soft and kind
and sweet all round, it would be easier to tell him, to try and
explain, to ask for something different, for at least an attempt at
something different in their lives in the future, instead of the
blankness of separation, the cold—oh, the cold—of nothing at all but
the great windiness of faith, the great bleakness of works. Why, one
person in the world, one single person belonging to one, of one’s very
own, to talk to, to take care of, to love, to be interested in, was
worth more than all the speeches on platforms and the compliments of
chairmen in the world. It was also worth more—Rose couldn’t help it,
the thought would come—than all the prayers.
These thoughts were not head thoughts, like Scrap’s, who was altogether
free from yearnings, but bosom thoughts. They lodged in the bosom; it
was in the bosom that Rose ached, and felt so dreadfully lonely. And
when her courage failed her, as it did on most days, and it seemed
impossible to write to Frederick, she would look at Mr. Wilkins and
revive.
There he was, a changed man. There he was, going into that small,
uncomfortable room every night, that room whose proximities had been
Lotty’s only misgiving, and coming out of it in the morning, and Lotty
coming out of it too, both of them as unclouded and as nice to each
other as when they went in. And hadn’t he, so critical at home, Lotty
had told her, of the least thing going wrong, emerged from the bath
catastrophe as untouched in spirit as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
were untouched in body when they emerged from the fire? Miracles were
happening in this place. If they could happen to Mr. Wilkins, why not
to Frederick?
She got up quickly. Yes, she would write. She would go and write to him
at once.
But suppose—
She paused. Suppose he didn’t answer. Suppose he didn’t even answer.
And she sat down again to think a little longer.