The Enchanted April
In these hesitations did Rose spend most of the second week.
Then there was Mrs. Fisher. Her restlessness increased that second
week. It increased to such an extent that she might just as well not
have had her private sitting-room at all, for she could no longer sit.
Not for ten minutes together could Mrs. Fisher sit. And added to the
restlessness, as the days of the second week proceeded on their way,
she had a curious sensation, which worried her, of rising sap. She knew
the feeling, because she had sometimes had it in childhood in specially
swift springs, when the lilacs and the syringas seemed to rush out into
blossom in a single night, but it was strange to have it again after
over fifty years. She would have liked to remark on the sensation to
some one, but she was ashamed. It was such an absurd sensation at her
age. Yet oftener and oftener, and every day more and more, did Mrs.
Fisher have a ridiculous feeling as if she were presently going to
burgeon.
Sternly she tried to frown the unseemly sensation down. Burgeon,
indeed. She had heard of dried staffs, pieces of mere dead wood,
suddenly putting forth fresh leaves, but only in legend. She was not in
legend. She knew perfectly what was due to herself. Dignity demanded
that she should have nothing to do with fresh leaves at her age; and
yet there it was—the feeling that presently, that at any moment now,
she might crop out all green.
Mrs. Fisher was upset. There were many things she disliked more than
anything else, and one was when the elderly imagined they felt young
and behaved accordingly. Of course they only imagined it, they were
only deceiving themselves; but how deplorable were the results. She
herself had grown old as people should grow old—steadily and firmly. No
interruptions, no belated after-glows and spasmodic returns. If, after
all these years, she were now going to be deluded into some sort of
unsuitable breaking-out, how humiliating.
Indeed she was thankful, that second week, that Kate Lumley was not
there. It would be most unpleasant, should anything different occur in
her behaviour, to have Kate looking on. Kate had known her all her
life. She felt she could let herself go—here Mrs. Fisher frowned at the
book she was vainly trying to concentrate on, for where did that
expression come from?—much less painfully before strangers than before
an old friend. Old friends, reflected Mrs. Fisher, who hoped she was
reading, compare one constantly with what one used to be. They are
always doing it if one develops. They are surprised at development.
They hark back; they expect motionlessness after, say, fifty, to the
end of one’s days.
That, thought Mrs. Fisher, her eyes going steadily line by line down
the page and not a word of it getting through into her consciousness,
is foolish of friends. It is condemning one to a premature death. One
should continue (of course with dignity) to develop, however old one
may be. She had nothing against developing, against further ripeness,
because as long as one was alive one was not dead—obviously, decided
Mrs. Fisher, and development, change, ripening, were life. What she
would dislike would be unripening, going back to something green. She
would dislike it intensely; and this is what she felt she was on the
brink of doing.
Naturally it made her very uneasy, and only in constant movement could
she find distraction. Increasingly restless and no longer able to
confine herself to her battlements, she wandered more and more
frequently, and also aimlessly, in and out of the top garden, to the
growing surprise of Scrap, especially when she found that all Mrs.
Fisher did was to stare for a few minutes at the view, pick a few dead
leaves off the rose-bushes, and go away again.
In Mr. Wilkins’s conversation she found temporary relief, but though he
joined her whenever he could he was not always there, for he spread his
attentions judiciously among the three ladies, and when he was
somewhere else she had to face and manage her thoughts as best she
could by herself. Perhaps it was the excess of light and colour at San
Salvatore which made every other place seem dark and black; and Prince
of Wales Terrace did seem a very dark black spot to have to go back
to—a dark, narrow street, and her house dark and narrow as the street,
with nothing really living or young in it. The goldfish could hardly be
called living, or at most not more than half living, and were certainly
not young, and except for them there were only the maids, and they were
dusty old things.
Dusty old things. Mrs. Fisher paused in her thoughts, arrested by the
strange expression. Where had it come from? How was it possible for it
to come at all? It might have been one of Mrs. Wilkins’s, in its
levity, its almost slang. Perhaps it was one of hers, and she had heard
her say it and unconsciously caught it from her.
If so, this was both serious and disgusting. That the foolish creature
should penetrate into Mrs. Fisher’s very mind and establish her
personality there, the personality which was still, in spite of the
harmony apparently existing between her and her intelligent husband, so
alien to Mrs. Fisher’s own, so far removed from what she understood and
liked, and infect her with her undesirable phrases, was most
disturbing. Never in her life before had such a sentence come into Mrs.
Fisher’s head. Never in her life before had she thought of her maids,
or of anybody else, as dusty old things. Her maids were not dusty old
things; they were most respectable, neat women, who were allowed the
use of the bathroom every Saturday night. Elderly, certainly, but then
so was she, so was her house, so was her furniture, so were her
goldfish. They were all elderly, as they should be, together. But there
was a great difference between being elderly and being a dusty old
thing.
How true it was what Ruskin said, that evil communications corrupt good
manners. But did Ruskin say it? On second thoughts she was not sure,
but it was just the sort of thing he would have said if he had said it,
and in any case it was true. Merely hearing Mrs. Wilkins’s evil
communications at meals—she did not listen, she avoided listening, yet
it was evident she had heard—those communications which, in that they
so often were at once vulgar, indelicate and profane, and always, she
was sorry to say, laughed at by Lady Caroline, must be classed as evil,
was spoiling her own mental manners. Soon she might not only think but
say. How terrible that would be. If that were the form her breaking-out
was going to take, the form of unseemly speech, Mrs. Fisher was afraid
she would hardly with any degree of composure be able to bear it.
At this stage Mrs. Fisher wished more than ever that she were able to
talk over her strange feelings with some one who would understand.
There was, however, no one who would understand except Mrs. Wilkins
herself. She would. She would know at once, Mrs. Fisher was sure, what
she felt like. But this was impossible. It would be as abject as
begging the very microbe that was infecting one for protection against
its disease.
She continued, accordingly, to bear her sensations in silence, and was
driven by them into that frequent aimless appearing in the top garden
which presently roused even Scrap’s attention.
Scrap had noticed it, and vaguely wondered at it, for some time before
Mr. Wilkins inquired of her one morning as he arranged her cushions for
her—he had established the daily assisting of Lady Caroline into her
chair as his special privilege—whether there was anything the matter
with Mrs. Fisher.
At that moment Mrs. Fisher was standing by the eastern parapet, shading
her eyes and carefully scrutinising the distant white houses of
Mezzago. They could see her through the branches of the daphnes.
“I don’t know,” said Scrap.
“She is a lady, I take it,” said Mr. Wilkins, “who would be unlikely to
have anything on her mind?”
“I should imagine so,” said Scrap, smiling.
“If she has, and her restlessness appears to suggest it, I should be
more than glad to assist her with advice.”
“I am sure you would be most kind.”
“Of course she has her own legal adviser, but he is not on the spot. I
am. And a lawyer on the spot,” said Mr. Wilkins, who endeavoured to
make his conversation when he talked to Lady Caroline light, aware that
one must be light with young ladies, “is worth two in—we won’t be
ordinary and complete the proverb, but say London.”
“You should ask her.”
“Ask her if she needs assistance? Would you advise it? Would it not be
a little—a little delicate to touch on such a question, the question
whether or no a lady has something on her mind?”
“Perhaps she will tell you if you go and talk to her. I think it must
be lonely to be Mrs. Fisher.”
“You are all thoughtfulness and consideration,” declared Mr. Wilkins,
wishing, for the first time in his life, that he were a foreigner so
that he might respectfully kiss her hand on withdrawing to go
obediently and relieve Mrs. Fisher’s loneliness.
It was wonderful what a variety of exits from her corner Scrap
contrived for Mr. Wilkins. Each morning she found a different one,
which sent him off pleased after he had arranged her cushions for her.
She allowed him to arrange the cushions because she instantly had
discovered, the very first five minutes of the very first evening, that
her fears lest he should cling to her and stare in dreadful admiration
were baseless. Mr. Wilkins did not admire like that. It was not only,
she instinctively felt, not in him, but if it had been he would not
have dared to in her case. He was all respectfulness. She could direct
his movements in regard to herself with the raising of an eyelash. His
one concern was to obey. She had been prepared to like him if he would
only be so obliging as not to admire her, and she did like him. She did
not forget his moving defencelessness the first morning in his towel,
and he amused her, and he was kind to Lotty. It is true she liked him
most when he wasn’t there, but then she usually liked everybody most
when they weren’t there. Certainly he did seem to be one of those men,
rare in her experience, who never looked at a woman from the predatory
angle. The comfort of this, the simplification it brought into the
relations of the party, was immense. From this point of view Mr.
Wilkins was simply ideal; he was unique and precious. Whenever she
thought of him, and was perhaps inclined to dwell on the aspects of him
that were a little boring, she remembered this and murmured, “But what
a treasure.”
Indeed it was Mr. Wilkins’s one aim during his stay at San Salvatore to
be a treasure. At all costs the three ladies who were not his wife must
like him and trust him. Then presently when trouble arose in their
lives—and in what lives did not trouble sooner or later arise?—they
would recollect how reliable he was and how sympathetic, and turn to
him for advice. Ladies with something on their minds were exactly what
he wanted. Lady Caroline, he judged, had nothing on hers at the moment,
but so much beauty—for he could not but see what was evident—must have
had its difficulties in the past and would have more of them before it
had done. In the past he had not been at hand; in the future he hoped
to be. And meanwhile the behaviour of Mrs. Fisher, the next in
importance of the ladies from the professional point of view, showed
definite promise. It was almost certain that Mrs. Fisher had something
on her mind. He had been observing her attentively, and it was almost
certain.
With the third, with Mrs. Arbuthnot, he had up to this made least
headway, for she was so very retiring and quiet. But might not this
very retiringness, this tendency to avoid the others and spend her time