The Enchanted April Read online

She therefore stared at Mrs Arbuthnot and did not hear a word she said. And Mrs Arbuthnot stared too at Mrs Wilkins, arrested by the expression on her face, which was swept by the excitement of what she saw, and was as luminous and tremulous under it as water in sunlight when it is ruffled by a gust of wind. At this moment, if she had been at a party, Mrs Wilkins would have been looked at with interest.

  They stared at each other – Mrs Arbuthnot surprised, enquiringly, Mrs Wilkins with the eyes of someone who has had a revelation. Of course. That was how it could be done. She herself, she by herself, couldn’t afford it, and wouldn’t be able, even if she could afford it, to go there all alone – but she and Mrs Arbuthnot together…

  She leant across the table. “Why don’t we try and get it?” she whispered.

  Mrs Arbuthnot became even more wide-eyed. “Get it?” she repeated.

  “Yes,” said Mrs Wilkins, still as though she were afraid of being overheard. “Not just sit here and say ‘How wonderful’, and then go home to Hampstead without having put out a finger – go home just as usual and see about the dinner and the fish just as we’ve been doing for years and years and will go on doing for years and years. In fact,” said Mrs Wilkins, flushing to the roots of her hair, for the sound of what she was saying – of what was coming pouring out – frightened her, and yet she couldn’t stop, “I see no end to it. There is no end to it. So that there ought to be a break, there ought to be intervals, in everybody’s interests. Why, it would really be being unselfish to go away and be happy for a little, because we would come back so much nicer. You see, after a bit everybody needs a holiday.”

  “But – how do you mean, get it?” asked Mrs Arbuthnot.

  “Take it,” said Mrs Wilkins.

  “Take it?”

  “Rent it. Hire it. Have it.”

  “But – do you mean you and I?”

  “Yes. Between us. Share. Then it would only cost half, and you look so – you look exactly as if you wanted it just as much as I do – as if you ought to have a rest – have something happy happen to you.”

  “Why, but we don’t know each other.”

  “But just think how well we would if we went away together for a month! And I’ve saved for a rainy day, and I expect so have you, and this is the rainy day – look at it…”

  “She is unbalanced,” thought Mrs Arbuthnot – yet she felt strangely stirred.

  “Think of getting away for a whole month – from everything – to heaven—”

  “She shouldn’t say things like that,” thought Mrs Arbuthnot. “The vicar—” Yet she felt strangely stirred. It would indeed be wonderful to have a rest, a cessation.

  Habit, however, steadied her again, and years of intercourse with the poor made her say, with the slight – though sympathetic – superiority of the explainer, “But then, you see, heaven isn’t somewhere else. It is here and now. We are told so.”

  She became very earnest, just as she did when trying patiently to help and enlighten the poor. “Heaven is within us,” she said in her gentle low voice. “We are told that on the very highest authority. And you know the lines about the kindred points, don’t you—”

  “Oh yes, I know them,” interrupted Mrs Wilkins impatiently.

  “The kindred points of heaven and home,” continued Mrs Arbuthnot, who was used to finishing her sentences. “Heaven is in our home.”

  “It isn’t,” said Mrs Wilkins, again surprisingly.

  Mrs Arbuthnot was taken aback. Then she said gently, “Oh, but it is. It is there if we choose, if we make it.”

  “I do choose, and I do make it, and it isn’t,” said Mrs Wilkins.

  Then Mrs Arbuthnot was silent, for she too sometimes had doubts about homes. She sat and looked uneasily at Mrs Wilkins, feeling more and more the urgent need of getting her classified. If she could only classify Mrs Wilkins, get her safely under her proper heading, she felt that she herself would regain her balance, which did seem very strangely to be slipping all to one side. For neither had she had a holiday for years, and the advertisement when she saw it had set her dreaming, and Mrs Wilkins’s excitement about it was infectious, and she had the sensation, as she listened to her impetuous, odd talk and watched her lit-up face, that she was being stirred out of sleep.

  Clearly Mrs Wilkins was unbalanced, but Mrs Arbuthnot had met the unbalanced before – indeed, she was always meeting them – and they had no effect on her own stability at all; whereas this one was making her feel quite wobbly, quite as though to be off and away, away from her compass points of God, Husband, Home and Duty – she didn’t feel as if Mrs Wilkins intended Mr Wilkins to come too – and just for once be happy, would be both good and desirable. Which, of course, it wasn’t – which certainly, of course, it wasn’t. She also had a nest egg, invested gradually in the Post Office Savings Bank, but to suppose that she would ever forget her duty to the extent of drawing it out and spending it on herself was surely absurd. Surely she couldn’t – she wouldn’t ever do such a thing? Surely she wouldn’t – she couldn’t ever forget her poor, forget misery and sickness, as completely as that? No doubt a trip to Italy would be extraordinarily delightful, but there were many delightful things one would like to do, and what was strength given to one for except to help one not to do them?

  Steadfast as the points of the compass to Mrs Arbuthnot were the great four facts of life: God, Husband, Home, Duty. She had gone to sleep on these facts years ago – after a period of much misery, her head resting on them as a pillow – and she had a great dread of being awakened out of so simple and untroublesome a condition. Therefore it was that she searched with earnestness for a heading under which to put Mrs Wilkins, and in this way illumine and steady her own mind – and sitting there looking at her uneasily after her last remark, and feeling herself becoming more and more unbalanced and infected, she decided pro tem – as the vicar said at meetings – to put her under the heading Nerves. It was just possible that she ought to go straight into the category Hysteria, which was often only the antechamber to Lunacy, but Mrs Arbuthnot had learnt not to hurry people into their final 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 learnt 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 praye
rs. 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 medieval 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 biased 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 anyone 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.”

  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 enquiry. 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 medieval castle.

  This was very disturbing. There she was, accustomed to direct, to lead, to advise, to support – except Frederick; she long since had learnt 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 1,000, 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 organizing 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 leapt at conclusions – wrong ones, of course: witness the one that she, Mrs Arbuthnot, was miserable – the way she leapt 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 medieval 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 tomorrow 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 medieval 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 this egg had been corrupt, but she had at least supposed its end was to be creditable. Was she to deflect it from its intended destination, which alone had appeared to justify her keeping it, and spend it on giving herself pleasure?

  Mrs Arbuthnot spoke on and on, so much practised in the kind of speech that she could have said it all in her sleep, and at the end of the meeting, her eyes dazzled by her secret visions, she hardly noticed that nobody was moved in any way whatever, least of all in the way of contributions.