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.