The Enchanted April Page 3

  But the vicar noticed. The vicar was disappointed. Usually his good friend and supporter Mrs Arbuthnot succeeded better than this. And, what was even more unusual: she appeared, he observed, not even to mind.

  “I can’t imagine,” he said to her as they parted, speaking irritably, for he was irritated both by the audience and by her, “what these people are coming to. Nothing seems to move them.”

  “Perhaps they need a holiday,” suggested Mrs Arbuthnot – an unsatisfactory, a queer reply, the vicar thought.

  “In February?” he called after her sarcastically.

  “Oh no – not till April,” said Mrs Arbuthnot over her shoulder.

  “Very odd,” thought the vicar. “Very odd indeed.” And he went home and was not perhaps quite Christian to his wife.

  That night in her prayers Mrs Arbuthnot asked for guidance. She felt she ought really to ask, straight out and roundly, that the medieval castle should already have been taken by someone else and the whole thing thus be settled, but her courage failed her. Suppose her prayer were to be answered? No, she couldn’t ask it – she couldn’t risk it. And after all – she almost pointed this out to God – if she spent her present nest egg on a holiday, she could quite soon accumulate another. Frederick pressed money on her, and it would only mean, while she rolled up a second egg, that for a time her contributions to the parish charities would be less. And then it could be the next nest egg whose original corruption would be purged away by the use to which it was finally put.

  For Mrs Arbuthnot, who had no money of her own, was obliged to live on the proceeds of Frederick’s activities, and her very nest egg was the fruit, posthumously ripened, of ancient sin. The way Frederick made his living was one of the standing distresses of her life. He wrote immensely popular memoirs – regularly, every year – of the mistresses of kings. There were in history numerous kings who had had mistresses, and there were still more numerous mistresses who had had kings; so that he had been able to publish a book of memoirs during each year of his married life, and even so there were great further piles of these ladies waiting to be dealt with. Mrs Arbuthnot was helpless. Whether she liked it or not, she was obliged to live on the proceeds. He gave her a dreadful sofa once, after the success of his Du Barri memoir,* with swollen cushions and soft, receptive lap, and it seemed to her a miserable thing that there, in her very home, should flaunt this reincarnation of a dead old French sinner.

  Simply good, convinced that morality is the basis of happiness, the fact that she and Frederick should draw their sustenance from guilt, however much purged by the passage of centuries, was one of the secret reasons of her sadness. The more the memoired lady had forgotten herself, the more his book about her was read and the more free-handed he was to his wife, and all that he gave her was spent, after adding slightly to her nest egg – for she did hope and believe that some day people would cease to want to read of wickedness, and then Frederick would need supporting – on helping the poor. The parish flourished because, to take a handful at random, of the ill-behaviour of the ladies Du Barri, Montespan, Pompadour, Ninon de l’Enclos, and even of learned Maintenon.* The poor were the filter through which the money was passed – to come out, Mrs Arbuthnot hoped, purified. She could do no more. She had tried in days gone by to think the situation out, to discover the exact right course for her to take, but had found it – as she had found Frederick – too difficult, and had left it – as she had left Frederick – to God. Nothing of this money was spent on her house or dress; those remained, except for the great soft sofa, austere. It was the poor who profited. Their very boots were stout with sins. But how difficult it had been. Mrs Arbuthnot, groping for guidance, prayed about it to exhaustion. Ought she perhaps to refuse to touch the money, to avoid it as she would have avoided the sins which were its source? But then what about the parish’s boots? She asked the vicar what he thought and, through much delicate language, evasive and cautious, it did finally appear that he was for the boots.

  At least she had persuaded Frederick, when first he began his terrible successful career – he only began it after their marriage: when she married him he had been a blameless official attached to the library of the British Museum – to publish the memoirs under another name, so that she was not publicly branded. Hampstead read the books with glee, and had no idea that their writer lived in its midst. Frederick was almost unknown, even by sight, in Hampstead. He never went to any of its gatherings. Whatever it was he did in the way of recreation was done in London, but he never spoke of what he did or whom he saw – he might have been perfectly friendless for any mention he ever made of friends to his wife. Only the vicar knew where the money for the parish came from, and he regarded it, he told Mrs Arbuthnot, as a matter of honour not to mention it.

  And at least her little house was not haunted by the loose-lived ladies, for Frederick did his work away from home. He had two rooms near the British Museum, which was the scene of his exhumations, and there he went every morning, and he came back long after his wife was asleep. Sometimes he did not come back at all. Sometimes she did not see him for several days together. Then he would suddenly appear at breakfast, having let himself in with his latchkey the night before, very jovial and good-natured and freehanded and glad if she would allow him to give her something – a well-fed man, contented with the world; a jolly, full-blooded, satisfied man. And she was always gentle, and anxious that his coffee should be as he liked it.

  He seemed very happy. Life, she often thought, however much one tabulated, was yet a mystery. There were always some people it was impossible to place. Frederick was one of them. He didn’t seem to bear the remotest resemblance to the original Frederick. He didn’t seem to have the least need of any of the things he used to say were so important and beautiful – love, home, complete communion of thoughts, complete immersion in each other’s interests. After those early painful attempts to hold him up to the point from which they had hand in hand so splendidly started, attempts in which she herself had got terribly hurt and the Frederick she supposed she had married was mangled out of recognition, she hung him up finally by her bedside as the chief subject of her prayers, and left him, except for those, entirely to God. She had loved Frederick too deeply to be able now to do anything but pray for him. He had no idea that he never went out of the house without her blessing going with him too, hovering, like a little echo of finished love, round that once dear head. She didn’t dare think of him as he used to be, as he had seemed to her to be in those marvellous first days of their lovemaking, of their marriage. Her child had died – she had nothing, nobody of her own to lavish herself on. The poor became her children, and God the object of her love. What could be happier than such a life, she sometimes asked herself, but her face, and particularly her eyes, continued sad.

  “Perhaps when we’re old… perhaps when we are both quite old…” she would think wistfully.

  3

  The owner of the medieval castle was an Englishman, a Mr Briggs, who was in London at the moment and wrote that it had beds enough for eight people – exclusive of servants – three sitting rooms, battlements, dungeons and electric light. The rent was £60 for the month, the servants’ wages were extra, and he wanted references – he wanted assurances that the second half of his rent would be paid, the first half being paid in advance, and he wanted assurances of respectability from a solicitor, or a doctor or a clergyman. He was very polite in his letter, explaining that his desire for references was what was usual and should be regarded as a mere formality.

  Mrs Arbuthnot and Mrs Wilkins had not thought of references, and they had not dreamt a rent could be so high. In their minds had floated sums like three guineas a week – or less, seeing that the place was small and old.

  Sixty pounds for a single month.

  It staggered them.

  Before Mrs Arbuthnot’s eyes rose up boots: endless vistas, all the stout boots that sixty pounds would buy – and besides
the rent there would be the servants’ wages, and the food, and the railway journeys out and home. While as for references, these did indeed seem a stumbling block – it did seem impossible to give any without making their plan more public than they had intended.

  They had both – even Mrs Arbuthnot, lured for once away from perfect candour by the realization of the great saving of trouble and criticism an imperfect explanation would produce – they had both thought it would be a good plan to give out, each to her own circle, their circles being luckily distinct, that each was going to stay with a friend who had a house in Italy. It would be true as far as it went – Mrs Wilkins asserted that it would be quite true, but Mrs Arbuthnot thought it wouldn’t be quite – and it was the only way, Mrs Wilkins said, to keep Mellersh even approximately quiet. To spend any of her money just on the mere getting to Italy would cause him indignation – what he would say if he knew she was renting part of a medieval castle on her own account Mrs Wilkins preferred not to think. It would take him days to say it all, and this although it was her very own money, and not a penny of it had ever been his.

  “But I expect,” she said, “your husband is just the same. I expect all husbands are alike in the long run.”

  Mrs Arbuthnot said nothing, because her reason for not wanting Frederick to know was the exactly opposite one – Frederick would be only too pleased for her to go, he would not mind it in the very least; indeed, he would hail such a manifestation of self-indulgence and worldliness with an amusement that would hurt, and urge her to have a good time and not to hurry home with a crushing detachment. Far better, she thought, to be missed by Mellersh than to be sped by Frederick. To be missed, to be needed, from whatever motive, was, she thought, better than the complete loneliness of not being missed or needed at all.

  She therefore said nothing, and allowed Mrs Wilkins to leap at her conclusions unchecked. But they did, both of them, for a whole day feel that the only thing to be done was to renounce the medieval castle, and it was in arriving at this bitter decision that they really realized how acute had been their longing for it.

  Then Mrs Arbuthnot, whose mind was trained in the finding of ways out of difficulties, found a way out of the reference difficulty, and simultaneously Mrs Wilkins had a vision revealing to her how to reduce the rent.

  Mrs Arbuthnot’s plan was simple, and completely successful. She took the whole of the rent in person to the owner, drawing it out of her savings bank – again she looked furtive and apologetic, as if the clerk must know the money was wanted for purposes of self-indulgence – and, going up with the six ten-pound notes in her handbag to the address near the Brompton Oratory where the owner lived, presented them to him, waiving her right to pay only half. And when he saw her, and her parted hair and soft, dark eyes and sober apparel, and heard her grave voice, he told her not to bother about writing round for those references.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said, scribbling a receipt for the rent. “Do sit down, won’t you? Nasty day, isn’t it? You’ll find the old castle has lots of sunshine, whatever else it hasn’t got. Husband going?”

  Mrs Arbuthnot, unused to anything but candour, looked troubled at this question and began to murmur inarticulately, and the owner at once concluded that she was a widow – a war one, of course, for other widows were old – and that he had been a fool not to guess it.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, turning red right up to his fair hair. “I didn’t mean – h’m, h’m, h’m…”

  He ran his eye over the receipt he had written. “Yes, I think that’s all right,” he said, getting up and giving it to her. “Now,” he added, taking the six notes she held out and smiling, for Mrs Arbuthnot was agreeable to look at, “I’m richer, and you’re happier. I’ve got money, and you’ve got San Salvatore. I wonder which is best.”

  “I think you know,” said Mrs Arbuthnot with her sweet smile.

  He laughed and opened the door for her. It was a pity the interview was over. He would have liked to ask her to lunch with him. She made him think of his mother, of his nurse, of all things kind and comforting, besides having the attraction of not being his mother or his nurse.

  “I hope you’ll like the old place,” he said, holding her hand a minute at the door. The very feel of her hand, even through its glove, was reassuring: it was the sort of hand, he thought, that children would like to hold in the dark. “In April, you know, it’s simply a mass of flowers. And then there’s the sea. You must wear white. You’ll fit in very well. There are several portraits of you there.”

  “Portraits?”

  “Madonnas, you know. There’s one on the stairs really exactly like you.”

  Mrs Arbuthnot smiled and said goodbye and thanked him. Without the least trouble and at once she had got him placed in his proper category: he was an artist and of an effervescent temperament.

  She shook hands and left, and he wished she hadn’t. After she was gone he supposed that he ought to have asked for those references, if only because she would think him so unbusiness-like not to, but he could as soon have insisted on references from a saint in a nimbus as from that grave, sweet lady.

  Rose Arbuthnot.

  Her letter making the appointment lay on the table.

  Pretty name.

  That difficulty, then, was overcome. But there still remained the other one, the really annihilating effect of the expense on the nest eggs, and especially on Mrs Wilkins’s – which was in size, compared with Mrs Arbuthnot’s, as the egg of the plover to that of the duck – and this in its turn was overcome by the vision vouchsafed to Mrs Wilkins, revealing to her the steps to be taken for its overcoming. Having got San Salvatore – the beautiful, the religious name, fascinated them – they in their turn would advertise in the agony column of The Times, and they would enquire after two more ladies, of similar desires to their own, to join them and share the expenses.

  At once the strain of the nest eggs would be reduced from half to a quarter. Mrs Wilkins was prepared to fling her entire egg into the adventure, but she realized that if it were to cost even sixpence over her ninety pounds her position would be terrible. Imagine going to Mellersh and saying “I owe”. It would be awful enough if some day circumstances forced her to say, “I have no nest egg,” but at least she would be supported in such a case by the knowledge that the egg had been her own. She therefore, though prepared to fling her last penny into the adventure, was not prepared to fling into it a single farthing that was not demonstrably her own, and she felt that if her share of the rent was reduced to fifteen pounds only, she would have a safe margin for the other expenses. Also they might economize very much on food – gather olives off their own trees and eat them, for instance, and perhaps catch fish.

  Of course, as they pointed out to each other, they could reduce the rent to an almost negligible sum by increasing the number of sharers – they could have six more ladies instead of two if they wanted to, seeing that there were eight beds. But supposing the eight beds were distributed in couples in four rooms, it would not be altogether what they wanted, to find themselves shut up at night with a stranger. Besides, they thought that perhaps having so many would not be quite so peaceful. After all, they were going to San Salvatore for peace and rest and joy, and six more ladies, especially if they got into one’s bedroom, might a little interfere with that.

  However, there seemed to be only two ladies in England at that moment who had any wish to join them, for they had only two answers to their advertisement.

  “Well, we only want two,” said Mrs Wilkins, quickly recovering, for she had imagined a great rush.

  “I think a choice would have been a good thing,” said Mrs Arbuthnot.

  “You mean because then we needn’t have had Lady Caroline Dester.”

  “I didn’t say that,” gently protested Mrs Arbuthnot.

  “We needn’t have her,” said Mrs Wilkins. “Just one more person would help us a gr
eat deal with the rent. We’re not obliged to have two.”

  “But why should we not have her? She seems really quite what we want.”

  “Yes – she does from her letter,” said Mrs Wilkins doubtfully.

  She felt she would be terribly shy of Lady Caroline. Incredible as it may seem, seeing how they get into everything, Mrs Wilkins had never come across any members of the aristocracy.

  They interviewed Lady Caroline, and they interviewed the other applicant, a Mrs Fisher.

  Lady Caroline came to the club in Shaftesbury Avenue, and appeared to be wholly taken up by one great longing – a longing to get away from everybody she had ever known. When she saw the club and Mrs Arbuthnot and Mrs Wilkins, she was sure that here was exactly what she wanted. She would be in Italy – a place she adored, she would not be in hotels – places she loathed, she would not be staying with friends – persons she disliked, and she would be in the company of strangers who would never mention a single person she knew, for the simple reason that they had not, could not have and would not come across them. She asked a few questions about the fourth woman, and was satisfied with the answers. Mrs Fisher, of Prince of Wales Terrace. A widow. She too would be unacquainted with any of her friends. Lady Caroline did not even know where Prince of Wales Terrace was.

  “It’s in London,” said Mrs Arbuthnot.

  “Is it?” said Lady Caroline.

  It all seemed most restful.

  Mrs Fisher was unable to come to the club because, she explained by letter, she could not walk without a stick – therefore Mrs Arbuthnot and Mrs Wilkins went to her.

  “But if she can’t come to the club how can she go to Italy?” wondered Mrs Wilkins aloud.

  “We shall hear that from her own lips,” said Mrs Arbuthnot.

  From Mrs Fisher’s lips they merely heard, in reply to delicate questioning, that sitting in trains was not walking about, and they knew that already. Except for the stick, however, she appeared to be a most desirable fourth – quiet, educated, elderly. She was much older than they or Lady Caroline – Lady Caroline had informed them she was twenty-eight – but not so old as to have ceased to be active-minded. She was very respectable indeed, and still wore a complete suit of black, though her husband had died, she told them, eleven years before. Her house was full of signed photographs of illustrious Victorian dead, all of whom she said she had known when she was little. Her father had been an eminent critic, and in his house she had seen practically everybody who was anybody in letters and art. Carlyle had scowled at her, Matthew Arnold had held her on his knee, Tennyson had sonorously rallied her on the length of her pigtail. She animatedly showed them the photographs, hung everywhere on her walls, pointing out the signatures with her stick, and she neither gave any information about her own husband nor asked for any about the husbands of her visitors, which was the greatest comfort. Indeed, she seemed to think that they also were widows, for on enquiring who the fourth lady was to be, and being told it was a Lady Caroline Dester, she said, “Is she a widow too?” And on their explaining that she was not, because she had not yet been married, observed with abstracted amiability, “All in good time.”