In the Mountains Part 20

'Did you say sentiment?' asked Dolly.

'Did I say anything?' I asked in surprise, turning my head to her. 'I thought I was thinking.'

'You were doing it aloud, then,' said Dolly. 'Was the word sentiment?'

'No. Sediment.'

'They're the same thing. I hate them both.'

_September 24th._

What will happen to Mrs. Barnes and Dolly when I go back to England? The weather was a little fidgety to-day and yesterday, a little troubled, like a creature that stirs fretfully in its sleep, and it set me thinking. For once the change really begins at this time of the year it doesn't stop any more. It goes on through an increasing unpleasantness winds, rain, snow, blizzards--till, after Christmas, the real winter begins, without a cloud, without a stir of the air, its short days flooded with suns.h.i.+ne, its dawns and twilights miracles of colour.

All that fuss and noise of snow-flurries and howling winds is only the preparation for the great final calm. The last blizzard, tearing away over the mountains, is like an ugly curtain rolling up; and behold a new world. One night while you are asleep the howls and rattlings suddenly leave off, and in the morning you look out of the window and for the first time for weeks you see the mountains at the end of the valley clear against the eastern sky, clothed in all new snow from head to foot, and behind them the lovely green where the sunrise is getting ready. I know, because I was obliged to be here through the October and November and December of the year the house was built and was being furnished. They were three most horrid months; and the end of them was heaven.

But what will become of Mrs. Barnes and Dolly when the weather does finally break up?

I can't face the picture of them spending a gloomy, half-warmed winter down in some cheap pension; an endless winter of doing without things, of watching every franc. They've been living like that for five years now. Where does Dolly get her sweet serenity from? I wish I could take them to England with me. But Dolly can't go to England. She is German.

She is doomed. And Mrs. Barnes is doomed too, inextricably tied up in Dolly's fate. Of course I am going to beg them to stay on here, but it seems a poor thing to offer them, to live up here in blizzards that I run away from myself. It does seem a very doubtful offer of hospitality.

I ought, to make it real, to stay on with them. And I simply couldn't. I do believe I would die if I had three months shut up with Mrs. Barnes in blizzards. Let her have everything--the house, the Antoines, all, all that I possess; but only let me go.

My spirit faints at the task before me, at the thought of the persuasions and the protests that will have to be gone through. And Dolly; how can I leave Dolly? I shall be haunted in London by visions of these two up here, the wind raging round the house, the snow piled up to the bedroom windows, sometimes cut off for a whole week from the village, because only in a pause in the blizzard can the little black figures that are peasants come sprawling over the snow with their shovels to dig one out. I know because I have been through it that first winter. But it was all new to us then, and we were a care-free, cheerful group inside the house, five people who loved each other and talked about anything they wanted to, besides being backed rea.s.suringly by a sack of lentils and several sacks of potatoes that Antoine, even then prudent and my right hand, had laid in for just this eventuality. We made great fires, and brewed strange drinks. We sat round till far into the nights telling ghost stories. We laughed a good deal, and said just what we felt like saying. But Mrs. Barnes and Dolly? Alone up here, and undug out? It will haunt me.

_September 25th._

She hasn't noticed the weather yet. At least, she has drawn no deductions from it. Evidently she thinks its fitfulness, its gleams of suns.h.i.+ne and its uneasy cloudings over, are just a pa.s.sing thing and that it soon will settle down again to what it was before. After all, she no doubt says to herself, it is still September. But Antoine knows better, and so do I, and it is merely hours now before the break-up will be plain even to Mrs. Barnes. Then the _combats de generosite_ will begin. I can't, I can't stop here so that Mrs. Barnes may be justified to herself in stopping too on the ground of cheering my solitude. I drank the castor oil solely that her mind might be at rest, but I can't develope any further along lines of such awful magnanimity. I would die.

_September 26th._

To-day I smoked twelve cigarettes, only that the house should smell virile. They're not as good as a pipe for that, but they're better than the eternal characterless clean smell of unselfish women.

After each cigarette Mrs. Barnes got up un.o.btrusively and aired the room. Then I lit another.

Also I threw the cus.h.i.+ons on the floor before flinging myself on the sofa in the hall; and presently Mrs. Barnes came and tidied them.

Then I threw them down again.

Towards evening she asked me if I was feeling quite well. I wasn't, because of the cigarettes, but I didn't tell her that. I said I felt very well indeed. Naturally I couldn't explain to her that I had only been trying to pretend there was a man about.

'You're sure those grape-stones--?' she began anxiously.

'Oh, certain!' I cried; and hastily became meek.

_September 27th._

Oaths, now. I shrink from so much as suggesting it, but there _is_ something to be said for them. They're so brief. They get the mood over.

They clear the air. Women explain and protest and tiptoe tactfully about among what they think are your feelings, and there's no end to it. And then, if they're good women, good, affectionate, unselfish women, they have a way of forgiving you. They keep on forgiving you. Freely. With a horrible magnanimousness. Mrs. Barnes insisted on forgiving me yesterday for the cigarettes, for the untidiness. It isn't a happy thing, I think, to be shut up in a small lonely house being forgiven.

_September 28th._

In the night the wind shook the windows and the rain pelted against them, and I knew that when I went down to breakfast the struggle with Mrs. Barnes would begin.

It did. It began directly after breakfast in the hall, where Antoine, remarking firmly '_C'est l'hiver_,' had lit a roaring fire, determined this time to stand no parsimonious nonsense, and it has gone on all day, with the necessary intervals for recuperation.

Nothing has been settled. I still don't in the least know what to do.

Mrs. Barnes's att.i.tude is obstinately unselfish. She and Dolly, she reiterates, won't dream of staying on here unless they feel that by doing so they could be of service to me by keeping me company. If I'm not here I can't be kept company with; that, she says, I must admit.

I do. Every time she says it--it has been a day of reiterations--I admit it. Therefore, if I go they go, she finishes with a kind of sombre triumph at her determination not to give trouble or be an expense; but words fail her, she adds, (this is a delusion,) to express her grat.i.tude for my offer, etc., and never, for the rest of their lives, will she and Dolly forget the delightful etc., etc.

What am I to do? I don't know. How lightly one embarks on marriage and on guests, and in what unexpected directions do both develope! Also, what a terrible thing is unselfishness. Once it has become a habit, how tough, how difficult to uproot. A single obstinately unselfish person can wreck the happiness of a whole household. Is it possible that I shall have to stay here? And I have so many things waiting for me in England that have to be done.

There's a fire in my bedroom, and I've been sitting on the floor staring into it for the past hour, seeking a solution. Because all the while Mrs. Barnes is firmly refusing to listen for a moment to my entreaties to use the house while I'm away, her thin face is hungry with longing to accept, and the mere talking, however bravely, of taking up the old homeless wandering again fills her tired eyes with tears.

Once I got so desperate that I begged her to stay as a kindness to me, in order to keep an eye on those patently efficient and trustworthy Antoines. This indeed was the straw-clutching of the drowning, and even Mrs. Barnes, that rare smiler, smiled.

No. I don't know what to do. How the wind screams. I'll go to bed.

_September 29th._

And there's nothing to be done with Dolly either.

'You told me you put your foot down sometimes,' I said, appealing to her this morning in one of Mrs. Barnes's brief absences, 'Why don't you put it down now?'

'Because I don't want to,' said Dolly.

'But _why_ not?' I asked, exasperated. 'It's so reasonable what I suggest, so easy--'

'I don't want to stay here without you,' said Dolly. 'This place _is_ you. You've made it. It is soaked in you. I should feel haunted here without you. Why, I should feel lost.'

'As though you would! When we hardly speak to each other as it is--'

'But I watch you,' said Dolly, smiling, 'and I know what you're thinking. You've no idea how what you're thinking comes out on your face.'

'But if it makes your unhappy sister's mind more comfortable? If she feels free from anxiety here? If she feels you are safe here?' I pa.s.sionately reasoned.

'I don't want to be safe.'

'Oh Dolly--you're not going to break out again?' I asked, as anxiously every bit as poor Mrs. Barnes would have asked.

Dolly laughed. 'I'll never do anything again that makes Kitty unhappy,'

she said. 'But I do like the feeling--' she made a movement with her arms as though they were wings--'oh, I _like_ the feeling of having room!'