The Enchanted April
categories, having on more than one occasion discovered with dismay
that she had made a mistake; and how difficult it had been to get them
out again, and how crushed she had been with the most terrible remorse.
Yes. Nerves. Probably she had no regular work for others, thought Mrs.
Arbuthnot; no work that would take her outside herself. Evidently she
was rudderless—blown about by gusts, by impulses. Nerves was almost
certainly her category, or would be quite soon if no one helped her.
Poor little thing, thought Mrs. Arbuthnot, her own balance returning
hand in hand with her compassion, and unable, because of the table,
to see the length of Mrs. Wilkins’s legs. All she saw was her small,
eager, shy face, and her thin shoulders, and the look of childish
longing in her eyes for something that she was sure was going to make
her happy. No; such things didn’t make people happy, such fleeting
things. Mrs. Arbuthnot had learned in her long life with Frederick—he
was her husband, and she had married him at twenty and was now
thirty-three—where alone true joys are to be found. They are to be
found, she now knew, only in daily, in hourly, living for others;
they are to be found only—hadn’t she over and over again taken her
disappointments and discouragements there, and come away comforted?—at
the feet of God.
Frederick had been the kind of husband whose wife betakes herself early
to the feet of God. From him to them had been a short though painful
step. It seemed short to her in retrospect, but it had really taken the
whole of the first year of their marriage, and every inch of the way
had been a struggle, and every inch of it was stained, she felt at the
time, with her heart’s blood. All that was over now. She had long since
found peace. And Frederick, from her passionately loved bridegroom,
from her worshipped young husband, had become second only to God on
her list of duties and forbearances. There he hung, the second in
importance, a bloodless thing bled white by her prayers. For years she
had been able to be happy only by forgetting happiness. She wanted to
stay like that. She wanted to shut out everything that would remind her
of beautiful things, that might set her off again longing, desiring....
“I’d like so much to be friends,” she said earnestly. “Won’t you come
and see me, or let me come to you sometimes? Whenever you feel as if
you wanted to talk. I’ll give you my address”—she searched in her
handbag—“and then you won’t forget.” And she found a card and held it
out.
Mrs. Wilkins ignored the card.
“It’s so funny,” said Mrs. Wilkins, just as if she had not heard her,
“but I _see_ us both—you and me—this April in the mediaeval castle.”
Mrs. Arbuthnot relapsed into uneasiness. “Do you?” she said, making an
effort to stay balanced under the visionary gaze of the shining grey
eyes. “Do you?”
“Don’t you ever see things in a kind of flash before they happen?”
asked Mrs. Wilkins.
“Never,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.
She tried to smile; she tried to smile the sympathetic yet wise
and tolerant smile with which she was accustomed to listen to the
necessarily biassed and incomplete views of the poor. She didn’t
succeed. The smile trembled out.
“Of course,” she said in a low voice, almost as if she were afraid the
vicar and the Savings Bank were listening, “it would be most
beautiful—most beautiful—”
“Even if it were wrong,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “it would only be for a
month.”
“That—” began Mrs. Arbuthnot, quite clear as to the reprehensibleness
of such a point of view; but Mrs. Wilkins stopped her before she could
finish.
“Anyhow,” said Mrs. Wilkins, stopping her, “I’m sure it’s wrong to go
on being good for too long, till one gets miserable. And I can see
you’ve been good for years and years, because you look so unhappy”—Mrs.
Arbuthnot opened her mouth to protest—“and I—I’ve done nothing but
duties, things for other people, ever since I was a girl, and I don’t
believe anybody loves me a bit—a bit—the b-better—and I long—oh, I
long—for something else—something else—”
Was she going to cry? Mrs. Arbuthnot became acutely uncomfortable and
sympathetic. She hoped she wasn’t going to cry. Not there. Not in that
unfriendly room, with strangers coming and going.
But Mrs. Wilkins, after tugging agitatedly at a handkerchief that
wouldn’t come out of her pocket, did succeed at last in merely
apparently blowing her nose with it, and then, blinking her eyes very
quickly once or twice, looked at Mrs. Arbuthnot with a quivering air of
half humble, half frightened apology, and smiled.
“Will you believe,” she whispered, trying to steady her mouth,
evidently dreadfully ashamed of herself, “that I’ve never spoken to any
one before in my life like this? I can’t think, I simply don’t know,
what has come over me.”
“It’s the advertisement,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, nodding gravely.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Wilkins, dabbing furtively at her eyes, “and us both
being so—”—she blew her nose again a little—“miserable.”
Chapter 2
Of course Mrs. Arbuthnot was not miserable—how could she be, she asked
herself, when God was taking care of her?—but she let that pass for the
moment unrepudiated, because of her conviction that here was another
fellow-creature in urgent need of her help; and not just boots and
blankets and better sanitary arrangements this time, but the more
delicate help of comprehension, of finding the exact right words.
The exact right words, she presently discovered, after trying various
ones about living for others, and prayer, and the peace to be found in
placing oneself unreservedly in God’s hands—to meet all these words
Mrs. Wilkins had other words, incoherent and yet, for the moment at
least, till one had had more time, difficult to answer—the exact right
words were a suggestion that it would do no harm to answer the
advertisement. Non-committal. Mere inquiry. And what disturbed Mrs.
Arbuthnot about this suggestion was that she did not make it solely to
comfort Mrs. Wilkins; she made it because of her own strange longing
for the mediaeval castle.
This was very disturbing. There she was, accustomed to direct, to lead,
to advise, to support—except Frederick; she long since had learned to
leave Frederick to God—being led herself, being influenced and thrown
off her feet, by just an advertisement, by just an incoherent stranger.
It was indeed disturbing. She failed to understand her sudden longing
for what was, after all, self-indulgence, when for years no such desire
had entered her heart.
“There’s no harm in simply _asking_,” she said in a low voice, as if
the vicar and the Savings Bank and all her waiting and dependent poor
were listening and condemning.
“It isn’t as if it _committed_ us to anything,” said Mrs. Wilkins, also
in a low voice, but her voice shook.
They got up simultaneously—Mrs. Arbuthnot had a sensation of surprise
that Mrs. Wilkins should be so tall—and went to a writing-table, and
Mrs. Arbuthnot wrote to Z, Box 1000, _The Times_, for particulars. She
asked for all particulars, but the only one they really wanted was the
one about the rent. They both felt that it was Mrs. Arbuthnot who ought
to write the letter and do the business part. Not only was she used to
organising and being practical, but she also was older, and certainly
calmer; and she herself had no doubt too that she was wiser. Neither
had Mrs. Wilkins any doubt of this; the very way Mrs. Arbuthnot parted
her hair suggested a great calm that could only proceed from wisdom.
But if she was wiser, older and calmer, Mrs. Arbuthnot’s new friend
nevertheless seemed to her to be the one who impelled. Incoherent, she
yet impelled. She appeared to have, apart from her need of help, an
upsetting kind of character. She had a curious infectiousness. She led
one on. And the way her unsteady mind leaped at conclusions—wrong ones,
of course; witness the one that she, Mrs. Arbuthnot, was miserable—the
way she leaped at conclusions was disconcerting.
Whatever she was, however, and whatever her unsteadiness, Mrs.
Arbuthnot found herself sharing her excitement and her longing; and
when the letter had been posted in the letter-box in the hall and
actually was beyond getting back again, both she and Mrs. Wilkins felt
the same sense of guilt.
“It only shows,” said Mrs. Wilkins in a whisper, as they turned away
from the letter-box, “how immaculately good we’ve been all our lives.
The very first time we do anything our husbands don’t know about we
feel guilty.”
“I’m afraid I can’t say I’ve been immaculately good,” gently protested
Mrs. Arbuthnot, a little uncomfortable at this fresh example of
successful leaping at conclusions, for she had not said a word about
her feeling of guilt.
“Oh, but I’m sure you have—I _see_ you being good—and that’s why you’re
not happy.”
“She shouldn’t say things like that,” thought Mrs. Arbuthnot. “I must
try and help her not to.”
Aloud she said gravely, “I don’t know why you insist that I’m not
happy. When you know me better I think you’ll find that I am. And I’m
sure you don’t mean really that goodness, if one could attain it, makes
one unhappy.”
“Yes, I do,” said Mrs. Wilkins. “Our sort of goodness does. We have
attained it, and we are unhappy. There are miserable sorts of goodness
and happy sorts—the sort we’ll have at the mediaeval castle, for
instance, is the happy sort.”
“That is, supposing we go there,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot restrainingly.
She felt that Mrs. Wilkins needed holding on to. “After all, we’ve only
written just to ask. Anybody may do that. I think it quite likely we
shall find the conditions impossible, and even if they were not,
probably by to-morrow we shall not want to go.”
“I _see_ us there,” was Mrs. Wilkins’s answer to that.
All this was very unbalancing. Mrs. Arbuthnot, as she presently
splashed through the dripping streets on her way to a meeting she
was to speak at, was in an unusually disturbed condition of mind.
She had, she hoped, shown herself very calm to Mrs. Wilkins, very
practical and sober, concealing her own excitement. But she was really
extraordinarily moved, and she felt happy, and she felt guilty, and
she felt afraid, and she had all the feelings, though this she did
not know, of a woman who has come away from a secret meeting with
her lover. That, indeed, was what she looked like when she arrived
late on her platform; she, the open-browed, looked almost furtive as
her eyes fell on the staring wooden faces waiting to hear her try
and persuade them to contribute to the alleviation of the urgent
needs of the Hampstead poor, each one convinced that they needed
contributions themselves. She looked as though she were hiding
something discreditable but delightful. Certainly her customary clear
expression of candour was not there, and its place was taken by a
kind of suppressed and frightened pleasedness, which would have led a
more worldly-minded audience to the instant conviction of recent and
probably impassioned lovemaking.
Beauty, beauty, beauty . . . the words kept ringing in her ears as she
stood on the platform talking of sad things to the sparsely attended
meeting. She had never been to Italy. Was that really what her nest-egg
was to be spent on after all? Though she couldn’t approve of the way
Mrs. Wilkins was introducing the idea of predestination into her
immediate future, just as if she had no choice, just as if to struggle,
or even to reflect, were useless, it yet influenced her. Mrs. Wilkins’s
eyes had been the eyes of a seer. Some people were like that, Mrs.
Arbuthnot knew; and if Mrs. Wilkins had actually seen her at the
mediaeval castle it did seem probable that struggling would be a waste
of time. Still, to spend her nest-egg on self-indulgence— The origin of