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

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.

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 mediaeval

castle should already have been taken by some one 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

re-incarnation 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 free-handed 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 love-making, 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.