The Enchanted April

There was no way of getting into or out of the top garden at San Salvatore except through the two glass doors, unfortunately side by side, of the dining-room and the hall.  A person in the garden who wished to escape unseen could not, for the person to be escaped from could be met on the way.  It was a small, oblong garden, and concealment was impossible.  What trees there were—­the Judas tree, the tamarisk, the umbrella-pine—­grew close to the low parapets.  Rose bushes gave no real cover; one step to right or left of them, and the person wishing to be private was discovered.  Only the north-west corner was a little place jutting out from the great wall, a kind of excrescence or loop, no doubt used in the old distrustful days for observation, where it was possible to sit really unseen, because between it and the house was a thick clump of daphne.

Scrap, after glancing round to see that no one was looking, got up and carried her chair into this place, stealing away as carefully on tiptoe as those steal whose purpose is sin.  There was another excrescence on the walls just like it at the north-east corner, but this, though the view from it was almost more beautiful, for from it you could see the bay and the lovely mountains behind Mezzago, was exposed.  No bushes grew near it, nor had it any shade.  The north-west loop then was where she would sit, and she settled into it, and nestling her head in her cushion and putting her feet comfortably on the parapet, from whence they appeared to the villagers on the piazza below as two white doves, thought that now indeed she would be safe.

Mrs. Fisher found her there, guided by the smell of her cigarette.  The incautious Scrap had not thought of that.  Mrs. Fisher did not smoke herself, and all the more distinctly could she smell the smoke of others.  The virile smell met her directly she went out into the garden from the dining-room after lunch in order to have her coffee.  She had bidden Francesca set the coffee in the shade of the house just outside the glass door, and when Mrs. Wilkins, seeing a table being carried there, reminded her, very officiously and tactlessly Mrs. Fisher considered, that Lady Caroline wanted to be alone, she retorted—­and with what propriety—­that the garden was for everybody.

Into it accordingly she went, and was immediately aware that Lady Caroline was smoking.  She said to herself, “These modern young women,” and proceeded to find her; her stick, now that lunch was over, being no longer the hindrance to action that it was before her meal had been securely, as Browning once said—­surely it was Browning?  Yes, she remembered how much diverted she had been—­roped in.

Nobody diverted her now, reflected Mrs. Fisher, making straight for the clump of daphne; the world had grown very dull, and had entirely lost its sense of humour.  Probably they still had their jokes, these people—­in fact she knew they did, for Punch still went on; but how differently it went on, and what jokes.  Thackeray, in his inimitable way, would have made mincemeat of this generation.  Of how much it needed the tonic properties of that astringent pen it was of course unaware.  It no longer even held him—­at least, so she had been informed—­in any particular esteem.  Well, she could not give it eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to understand, but she could and would give it, represented and united in the form of Lady Caroline, a good dose of honest medicine.

“I hear you are not well,” she said, standing in the narrow entrance of the loop and looking down with the inflexible face of one who is determined to do good at the motionless and apparently sleeping Scrap.

Mrs. Fisher had a deep voice, very like a man’s, for she had been overtaken by that strange masculinity that sometimes pursues a woman during the last laps of her life.

Scrap tried to pretend that she was asleep, but if she had been her cigarette would not have been held in her fingers but would have been lying on the ground.

She forgot this.  Mrs. Fisher did not, and coming inside the loop, sat down on a narrow stone seat built out of the wall.  For a little she could sit on it; for a little, till the chill began to penetrate.

She contemplated the figure before her.  Undoubtedly a pretty creature, and one that would have had a success at Farringford.  Strange how easily even the greatest men were moved by exteriors.  She had seen with her own eyes Tennyson turn away from everybody—­turn, positively, his back on a crowd of eminent people assembled to do him honour, and withdraw to the window with a young person nobody had ever heard of, who had been brought there by accident and whose one and only merit—­if it be a merit, that which is conferred by chance—­was beauty.  Beauty!  All over before you can turn round.  An affair, one might almost say, of minutes.  Well, while it lasted it did seem able to do what it liked with men.  Even husbands were not immune.  There had been passages in the life of Mr. Fisher . . .

“I expect the journey has upset you,” she said in her deep voice.  “What you want is a good dose of some simple medicine.  I shall ask Domenico if there is such a thing in the village as castor oil.”

Scrap opened her eyes and looked straight at Mrs. Fisher.

“Ah,” said Mrs. Fisher, “I knew you were not asleep.  If you had been you would have let your cigarette fall to the ground.”

“Waste,” said Mrs. Fisher.  “I don’t like smoking for women, but I still less like waste.”

“What does one do with people like this?” Scrap asked herself, her eyes fixed on Mrs. Fisher in what felt to her an indignant stare but appeared to Mrs. Fisher as really charming docility.

“Now you’ll take my advice,” said Mrs. Fisher, touched, “and not neglect what may very well turn into an illness.  We are in Italy, you know, and one has to be careful.  You ought, to begin with, to go to bed.”

“I never go to bed,” snapped Scrap; and it sounded as moving, as forlorn, as that line spoken years and years ago by an actress playing the part of Poor Jo in dramatized version of Bleak House—­“I’m always moving on,” said Poor Jo in this play, urged to do so by a policeman; and Mrs. Fisher, then a girl, had laid her head on the red velvet parapet of the front row of the dress circle and wept aloud.

It was wonderful, Scrap’s voice.  It had given her, in the ten years since she came out, all the triumphs that intelligence and wit can have, because it made whatever she said seem memorable.  She ought, with a throat formation like that, to have been a singer, but in every kind of music Scrap was dumb except this one music of the speaking voice; and what a fascination, what a spell lay in that.  Such was the liveliness of her face and the beauty of her colouring that there was not a man into whose eyes at the sight of her there did not leap a flame of intensest interest; but, when he heard her voice, the flame in that man’s eyes was caught and fixed.  It was the same with every man, educated and uneducated, old, young, desirable themselves or undesirable, men of her own world and bus-conductors, generals and Tommies—­during the war she had had a perplexing time—­bishops equally with vergers—­round about her confirmation startling occurrences had taken place—­wholesome and unwholesome, rich and penniless, brilliant or idiotic; and it made no difference at all what they were, or how long and securely married:  into the eyes of every one of them, when they saw her, leapt this flame, and when they heard her it stayed there.

Scrap had had enough of this look.  It only led to difficulties.  At first it had delighted her.  She had been excited, triumphant.  To be apparently incapable of doing or saying the wrong thing, to be applauded, listened to, petted, adored wherever she went, and when she came home to find nothing there either but the most indulgent proud fondness—­why, how extremely pleasant.  And so easy, too.  No preparation necessary for this achievement, no hard work, nothing to learn.  She need take no trouble.  She had only to appear, and presently say something.

But gradually experiences gathered round her.  After all, she had to take trouble, she had to make efforts, because, she discovered with astonishment and rage, she had to defend herself.  That look, that leaping look, meant that she was going to be grabbed at.  Some of those who had it were more humble than others, especially if they were young, but they all, according to their several ability, grabbed; and she who had entered the world so jauntily, with her head in the air and the completest confidence in anybody whose hair was grey, began to distrust, and then to dislike, and soon to shrink away from, and presently to be indignant.  Sometimes it was just as if she didn’t belong to herself, wasn’t her own at all, but was regarded as a universal thing, a sort of beauty-of-all-work.  Really men . . .  And she found herself involved in queer vague quarrels, being curiously hated.  Really women . . .  And when the war came, and she flung herself into it along with everybody else, it finished her.  Really generals . . .

The war finished Scrap.  It killed the one man she felt safe with, whom she would have married, and it finally disgusted her with love.  Since then she had been embittered.  She was struggling as angrily in the sweet stuff of life as a wasp got caught in honey.  Just as desperately did she try to unstick her wings.  It gave her no pleasure to outdo other women; she didn’t want their tiresome men.  What could one do with men when one had got them?  None of them would talk to her of anything but the things of love, and how foolish and fatiguing that became after a bit.  It was as though a healthy person with a normal hunger was given nothing whatever to eat but sugar.  Love, love . . . the very word made her want to slap somebody.  “Why should I love you?  Why should I?” she would ask amazed sometimes when somebody was trying—­somebody was always trying—­to propose to her.  But she never got a real answer, only further incoherence.

A deep cynicism took hold of the unhappy Scrap.  Her inside grew hoary with disillusionment, while her gracious and charming outside continued to make the world more beautiful.  What had the future in it for her?  She would not be able, after such a preparation, to take hold of it.  She was fit for nothing; she had wasted all this time being beautiful.  Presently she wouldn’t be beautiful, and what then?  Scrap didn’t know what then, it appalled her to wonder even.  Tired as she was of being conspicuous she was at least used to that, she had never known anything else; and to become inconspicuous, to fade, to grow shabby and dim, would probably be most painful.  And once she began, what years and years of it there would be!  Imagine, thought Scrap, having most of one’s life at the wrong end.  Imagine being old for two or three times as long as being young.  Stupid, stupid.  Everything was stupid.  There wasn’t a thing she wanted to do.  There were thousands of things she didn’t want to do.  Avoidance, silence, invisibility, if possible unconsciousness—­these negations were all she asked for a moment; and here, even here, she was not allowed a minute’s peace, and this absurd woman must come pretending, merely because she wanted to exercise power and make her go to bed and make her—­hideous—­drink castor oil, that she thought she was ill.

“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Fisher, who felt the cold of the stone beginning to come through and knew she could not sit much longer, “you’ll do what is reasonable.  Your mother would wish—­have you a mother?”

A faint wonder came into Scrap’s eyes.  Have you a mother?  If ever anybody had a mother it was Scrap.  It had not occurred to her that there could be people who had never heard of her mother.  She was one of the major marchionesses—­there being, as no one knew better than Scrap, marchionesses and marchionesses—­and had held high positions at Court.  Her father, too, in his day had been most prominent.  His day was a little over, poor dear, because in the war he had made some important mistakes, and besides he was now grown old; still, there he was, an excessively well-known person.  How restful, how extraordinarily restful to have found some one who had never heard of any of her lot, or at least had not yet connected her with them.

She began to like Mrs. Fisher.  Perhaps the originals didn’t know anything about her either.  When she first wrote to them and signed her name, that great name of Dester which twisted in and out of English history like a bloody thread, for its bearers constantly killed, she had taken it for granted that they would know who she was; and at the interview of Shaftesbury Avenue she was sure they did know, because they hadn’t asked, as they otherwise would have, for references.

Scrap began to cheer up.  If nobody at San Salvatore had ever heard of her, if for a whole month she could shed herself, get right away from everything connected with herself, be allowed really to forget the clinging and the clogging and all the noise, why, perhaps she might make something of herself after all.  She might really think; really clear up her mind; really come to some conclusion.

“What I want to do here,” she said, leaning forward in her chair and clasping her hands round her knees and looking up at Mrs. Fisher, whose seat was higher than hers, almost with animation, so much pleased was she that Mrs. Fisher knew nothing about her, “is to come to a conclusion.  That’s all.  It isn’t much to want, is it?  Just that.”

She gazed at Mrs. Fisher, and thought that almost any conclusion would do; the great thing was to get hold of something, catch something tight, cease to drift.

Mrs. Fisher’s little eyes surveyed her.  “I should say,” she said, “that what a young woman like you wants is a husband and children.”

“Well, that’s one of the things I’m going to consider,” said Scrap amiably.  “But I don’t think it would be a conclusion.”

“And meanwhile,” said Mrs. Fisher, getting up, for the cold of the stone was now through, “I shouldn’t trouble my head if I were you with considerings and conclusions.  Women’s heads weren’t made for thinking, I assure you.  I should go to bed and get well.”

“I am well,” said Scrap.

“Then why did you send a message that you were ill?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then I’ve had all the trouble of coming out here for nothing.”

“But wouldn’t you prefer coming out and finding me well than coming out and finding me ill?” asked Scrap, smiling?

Even Mrs. Fisher was caught by the smile.

“Well, you’re a pretty creature,” she said forgivingly.  “It’s a pity you weren’t born fifty years ago.  My friends would have liked looking at you.”

“I’m very glad I wasn’t,” said Scrap.  “I dislike being looked at.”

“Absurd,” said Mrs. Fisher, growing stern again.  “That’s what you are made for, young women like you.  For what else, pray?  And I assure you that if my friends had looked at you, you would have been looked at by some very great people.”

“I dislike very great people,” said Scrap, frowning.  There had been an incident quite recently—­really potentates. . .

“What I dislike,” said Mrs. Fisher, now as cold as that stone she had got up from, “is the pose of the modern young woman.  It seems to me pitiful, positively pitiful, in its silliness.”

And, her stick crunching the pebbles, she walked away.

“That’s all right,” Scrap said to herself, dropping back into her comfortable position with her head in the cushion and her feet on the parapet; if only people would go away she didn’t in the least mind why they went.

“Don’t you think darling Scrap is growing a little, just a little, peculiar?” her mother had asked her father a short time before that latest peculiarity of the flight to San Salvatore, uncomfortably struck by the very odd things Scrap said and the way she had taken to slinking out of reach whenever she could and avoiding everybody except —­such a sign of age—­quite young men, almost boys.

“Eh?  What?  Peculiar?  Well, let her be peculiar if she likes.  A woman with her looks can be any damned thing she pleases,” was the infatuated answer.

“I do let her,” said her mother meekly; and indeed if she did not, what difference would it make?

Mrs. Fisher was sorry she had bothered about Lady Caroline.  She went along the hall towards her private sitting-room, and her stick as she went struck the stone floor with a vigour in harmony with her feelings.  Sheer silliness, these poses.  She had no patience with them.  Unable to be or do anything of themselves, the young of the present generation tried to achieve a reputation for cleverness by decrying all that was obviously great and obviously good and by praising everything, however obviously bad, that was different.  Apes, thought Mrs. Fisher, roused.  Apes.  Apes.  And in her sitting-room she found more apes, or what seemed to her in her present mood more, for there was Mr. Arbuthnot placidly drinking coffee, while at the writing-table, the writing-table she already looked upon as sacred, using her pen, her own pen brought for her hand alone from Prince of Wales Terrace, sat Mrs. Wilkins writing; at the table; in her room; with her pen.

“Isn’t this a delightful place?” said Mrs. Arbuthnot cordially.  “We have just discovered it.”

“I’m writing to Mellersh,” said Mrs. Wilkins, turning her head and also cordially—­as though, Mrs. Fisher thought, she cared a straw who she was writing to and anyhow knew who the person she called Mellersh was.  “He’ll want to know,” said Mrs. Wilkins, optimism induced by her surroundings, “that I’ve got here safely.”