In the Mountains

'It sounds as though her late husband's family might originally have been French.'

'It does rather.'

'Possibly Huguenot.'

'Yes.'

'I was much astonished that she should be a widow.'

'Yet not one widow but two widows....' ran at this like a refrain in my mind, perhaps because I was sitting so close to a dean. Aloud I said, for by now I had completely recovered, 'Why, Uncle Rudolph? Widows do abound.'

'Alas, yes. But there is something peculiarly virginal about Mrs. Jewks.'

I admitted that this was so. Part of Dolly's attractiveness is the odd impression she gives of untouchedness, of gay aloofness.

My uncle broke off a stalk of the withered last summer's grass and began nibbling it. He was lying on his side a little below me, resting on his elbow. His black, neat legs looked quaint stuck through the long yellow grass. He had taken off his hat, hardy creature, and the wind blew his grey hair this way and that, and sometimes flattened it down in a fringe over his eyes. When this happened he didn't look a bit like anybody good, but he pushed it back each time, smoothing it down again with an abstracted carefulness, his eyes fixed on the valley far below. He wasn't seeing the valley.

'How long has the poor young thing—' he began.

'You will be surprised to hear,' I interrupted him, 'that Mrs. Jewks is forty.'

'Really,' said my uncle, staring round at me. 'Really. That is indeed surprising.' And after a pause he added, 'Surprising and gratifying.'

'Why gratifying, Uncle Rudolph?' I inquired.

'When did she lose her husband?' he asked, taking no notice of my inquiry.

The preliminary to an accurate answer to this question was, of course, Which? But again a vision of Mrs. Barnes's imploring face rose before me, and accordingly, restricting myself to Juchs, I said she had lost him shortly before the war.

'Ah. So he was prevented, poor fellow, from having the honour of dying for England.'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph.'

'Poor fellow. Poor fellow.'

'Yes.'

'Poor fellow. Well, he was spared knowing what he had missed. At least he was spared that. And she—his poor wife—how did she take it?'

'Well, I think.'

'Yes. I can believe it. She wouldn't—I am very sure she wouldn't—intrude her sorrows selfishly on others.'

It was at this point that I became aware my uncle had fallen in love. Up to this, oddly enough, it hadn't dawned on me. Now it did more than dawned, it blazed.

I looked at him with a new and startled interest. 'Uncle Rudolph,' I said impetuously, no longer a distrustful niece talking to an uncle she suspects, but an equal with an equal, a human being with another human being, 'haven't you ever thought of marrying again? It's quite a long time now since Aunt Winifred—'

'Thought?' said my uncle, his voice sounding for the first time simply, ordinarily human, without a trace in it of the fatal pulpit flavour, 'Thought? I'm always thinking of it.'

And except for his apron and gaiters he might have been any ordinary solitary little man eating out his heart for a mate.

'But then why don't you? Surely a deanery of all places wants a wife in it?'

'Of course it does Those strings or rooms—empty, echoing. It shouts for a wife. Shouts, I tell you. At least mine does. But I've never found—I hadn't seen—'

He broke off, biting at the stalk of grass.

'But I remember you,' I went on eagerly, 'always surrounded by flocks of devoted women. Weren't any of them—?'

'No,' said my uncle shortly. And after a second of silence he said again, and so loud that I jumped, 'No!' And then he went on even more violently, 'They didn't give me a chance. They never let me alone a minute. After Winifred's death they were like flies. Stuck to me—made me sick—great flies crawling—' And he shuddered, and shook himself as though he were shaking off the lot of them.

I looked at him in amazement. 'Why,' I cried, 'you're talking exactly like a man!'

But he, staring at the view without seeing an inch of it, took no heed of me, and I heard him say under his breath as though I hadn't been there at all, 'My God, I'm so lonely at night!'

That finished it. In that moment I began to love my uncle. At this authentic cry of forlornness I had great difficulty in not bending over and putting my arms round him,—just to comfort him, just to keep him warm. It must be a dreadful thing to be sixty and all alone. You look so grown up. You look as though you must have so many resources, so few needs; and you are accepted as provided for, what with your career accomplished, and your houses and servants and friends and books and all the rest of it—all the empty, meaningless rest of it; for really you are the most miserable of motherless cold babies, conscious that you are motherless, conscious that nobody soft and kind and adoring is ever again coming to croon over you and kiss you good-night and be there next morning to smile when you wake up.

'Uncle Rudolph—' I began.

Then I stopped, and bending over took the stalk of grass he kept on biting out of his hand.

'I can't let you eat any more of that,' I said. 'It's not good for you.'

And having got hold of his hand I kept it.

There now, I said, holding it tight.

He looked up at me vaguely, absorbed in his thoughts; then, realising how tight his hand was being held, he smiled.

'You dear child,' he said, scanning my face as though he had never seen it before.

'Yes?' I said, smiling in my turn and not letting go of his hand. 'I like that. I didn't like any of the other dear children I was.'

'Which other dear children?'

'Uncle Rudolph,' I said, 'let's go home. This is a bleak place. Why do we sit here shivering forlornly when there's all that waiting for us down there?'

And loosing his hand I got on to my feet, and when I was on them I held out both my hands to him and pulled him up, and he standing lower than where I was our eyes were then on a level.

'All what?' he asked, his eyes searching mine.

'Oh, Uncle Rudolph! Warmth and Dolly, of course.'

October 4th.

But it hasn't been quite so simple. Nothing last night was different. My uncle remained tongue-tied. Dolly sat waiting to smile at anecdotes that he never told. Mrs. Barnes knitted uneasily, already fearing, perhaps, because of his strange silence, that he somehow may have scented Siegfried, else how inexplicable his silence after that one bright, wonderful first evening and morning.

It was I last night who did the talking, it was I who took up the line, abandoned by my uncle, of wholesome entertainment. I too told anecdotes; and when I had told all the ones I knew and still nobody said anything, I began to tell all the ones I didn't know. Anything rather than that continued uncomfortable silence. But how very difficult it was. I grew quite damp with effort. And nobody except Dolly so much as smiled; and even Dolly, though she smiled, especially when I embarked on my second series of anecdotes, looked at me with a mild inquiry, as if she were wondering what was the matter with me.