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<h2> Part Second—In the country. </h2>
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<h2> Chapter XV. Penelope dreams. </h2>
<p>West Belvern, Holly House<br/>
August 189-.<br/></p>
<p>I am here alone. Salemina has taken her little cloth bag and her notebook
and gone to inspect the educational and industrial methods of Germany. If
she can discover anything that they are not already doing better in
Boston, she will take it back with her, but her state of mind regarding
the outcome of the trip might be described as one of incredulity tinged
with hope. Francesca has accompanied Salemina. Not that the inspection of
systems is much in her line, but she prefers it to a solitude a deux with
me when I am in a working mood, and she comforts herself with the
anticipation that the German army is very attractive. Willie Beresford has
gone with his mother to Aix-les-Bains, like the dutiful son that he is.
They say that a good son makes a good— But that subject is dismissed
to the background for the present, for we are in a state of armed
neutrality. He has agreed to wait until the autumn for a final answer, and
I have promised to furnish one by that time. Meanwhile, we are to continue
our acquaintance by post, which is a concession I would never have allowed
if I had had my wits about me.</p>
<p>After paying my last week's bill in Dovermarle Street, including fees to
several servants whom I knew by sight, and several others whose
acquaintance I made for the first time at the moment of departure, I
glanced at my ebbing letter of credit and felt a season of economy setting
in upon me with unusual severity; accordingly, I made an experiment of
coming third-class to Belvern. I handed the guard a shilling, and he gave
me a seat riding backwards in a carriage with seven other women, all very
frumpish, but highly respectable. As he could not possibly have done any
worse for me, I take it that he considered the shilling a graceful tribute
to his personal charms, but as having no other bearing whatever. The seven
women stared at me throughout the journey. When one is really of the same
blood, and when one does not open one's lips or wave the stars and stripes
in any possible manner, how do they detect the American? These women
looked at me as if I were a highly interesting anthropoidal ape. It was
not because of my attire, for I was carefully dressed down to a
third-class level; yet when I removed my plain Knox hat and leaned my head
back against my travelling-pillow, an electrical shudder of intense
excitement ran through the entire compartment. When I stooped to tie my
shoe another current was set in motion, and when I took Charles Reade's
White Lies from my portmanteau they glanced at one another as if to say,
'Would that we could see in what language the book is written!' As a
travelling mystery I reached my highest point at Oxford, for there I
purchased a small basket of plums from a boy who handed them in at the
window of the carriage. After eating a few, I offered the rest to a dowdy
elderly woman on my left who was munching dry biscuits from a paper bag.
'What next?' was the facial expression of the entire company. My neighbour
accepted the plums, but hid them in her bag; plainly thinking them
poisoned, and believing me to be a foreign conspirator, conspiring against
England through the medium of her inoffensive person. In the course of the
four-hours' journey, I could account for the strange impression I was
making only upon the theory that it is unusual to comport oneself in a
first-class manner in a third-class carriage. All my companions chanced to
be third-class by birth as well as by ticket, and the Englishwoman who is
born third-class is sometimes deficient in imagination.</p>
<p>Upon arriving at Great Belvern (which must be pronounced 'Bevern') I took
a trap, had my luggage put on in front, and start on my quest for lodgings
in West Belvern, five miles distant. Several addresses had been given me
by Hilda Mellifica, who has spent much time in this region, and who begged
me to use her name. I told the driver that I wished to find a clean,
comfortable lodging, with the view mentioned in the guide-book, and with a
purple clematis over the door, if possible. The last point astounded him
to such a degree that he had, I think, a serious idea of giving me into
custody. (I should not be so eccentrically spontaneous with these people,
if they did not feed my sense of humour by their amazement.)</p>
<p>We visited Holly House, Osborne, St. James, Victoria, and Albert houses,
Tank Villa, Poplar Villa, Rose, Brake, and Thorn Villas, as well as
Hawthorn, Gorse, Fern, Shrubbery, and Providence Cottages. All had
apartments, but many were taken, and many more had rooms either dark and
stuffy or without view. Holly House was my first stopping-place. Why will
a woman voluntarily call her place by a name which she can never
pronounce? It is my landlady's misfortune that she is named 'Obbs, and
mine that I am called 'Amilton, but Mrs. 'Obbs must have rushed with eyes
wide open on 'Olly 'Ouse. I found sitting-room and bedroom at Holly House
for two guineas a week; everything, except roof, extra. This was more
than, in my new spirit of economy I desired to pay, but after exhausting
my list I was obliged to go back rather than sleep in the highroad. Mrs.
Hobbs offered to deduct two shillings a week if I stayed until Christmas,
and said she should not charge me a penny for the linen. Thanking her with
tears of gratitude, I requested dinner. There was no meat in the house, so
I supped frugally off two boiled eggs, a stodgy household loaf, and a mug
of ale, after which I climbed the stairs, and retired to my feather-bed in
a rather depressed frame of mind.</p>
<p>Visions of Salemina and Francesca driving under the linden-trees in Berlin
flitted across my troubled reveries, with glimpses of Willie Beresford and
his mother at Aix-les-Bains. At this distance, and in the dead of night,
my sacrifice in coming here seemed fruitless. Why did I not allow myself
to drift for ever on that pleasant sea which has been lapping me in sweet
and indolent content these many weeks? Of what use to labour, to struggle,
to deny myself, for an art to which I can never be more than the humblest
handmaiden? I felt like crying out, as did once a braver woman's soul than
mine, 'Let me be weak! I have been seeming to be strong so many years!'
The woman and the artist in me have always struggled for the mastery. So
far the artist has triumphed, and now all at once the woman is uppermost.
I should think the two ought to be able to live peaceably in the same
tenement; they do manage it in some cases; but it seems a law of my being
that I shall either be all one or all the other.</p>
<p>The question for me to ask myself now is, "Am I in love with loving and
with being loved, or am I in love with Willie Beresford?" How many women
have confounded the two, I wonder?</p>
<p>In this mood I fell asleep, and on a sudden I found myself in a dear New
England garden. The pillow slipped away, and my cheek pressed a fragrant
mound of mignonette, the self-same one on which I hid my tear-stained face
and sobbed my heart out in childish grief and longing for the mother who
would never hold me again. The moon came up over the Belvern Hills and
shone on my half-closed lids; but to me it was a very different moon, the
far-away moon of my childhood, with a river rippling beneath its silver
rays. And the wind that rustled among the poplar branches outside my
window was, in my dream, stirring the pink petals of a blossoming
apple-tree that used to grow beside the bank of mignonette, wafting down
sweet odours and drinking in sweeter ones. And presently there stole in
upon this harmony of enchanting sounds and delicate fragrances, in which
childhood and womanhood, pleasure and pain, memory and anticipation,
seemed strangely intermingled, the faint music of a voice, growing clearer
and clearer as my ear became familiar with its cadences. And what the
dream voice said to me was something like this:—</p>
<p>'If thou wouldst have happiness, choose neither fame, which doth not long
abide, nor power, which stings the hand that wields it, nor gold, which
glitters but never glorifies; but choose thou Love, and hold it for ever
in thy heart of hearts; for Love is the purest and the mightiest force in
the universe, and once it is thine all other gifts shall be added unto
thee. Love that is passionate yet reverent, tender yet strong, selfish in
desiring all yet generous in giving all; love of man for woman and woman
for man, of parent for child and friend for friend—when this is born
in the soul, the desert blossoms as the rose. Straightway new hopes and
wishes, sweet longings and pure ambitions, spring into being, like green
shoots that lift their tender heads in sunny places; and if the soil be
kind, they grow stronger and more beautiful as each glad day laughs in the
rosy skies. And by and by singing-birds come and build their nests in the
branches; and these are the pleasures of life. And the birds sing not
often, because of a serpent that lurketh in the garden. And the name of
the serpent is Satiety. He maketh the heart to grow weary of what it once
danced and leaped to think upon, and the ear to wax dull to the melody of
sounds that once were sweet, and the eye blind to the beauty that once led
enchantment captive. And sometimes—we know not why, but we shall
know hereafter, for life is not completely happy since it is not heaven,
nor completely unhappy since it is the road thither—sometimes the
light of the sun is withdrawn for a moment, and that which is fairest
vanishes from the place that was enriched by its presence. Yet the garden
is never quite deserted. Modest flowers, whose charms we had not noted
when youth was bright and the world seemed ours, now lift their heads in
sheltered places and whisper peace. The morning song of the birds is
hushed, for the dawn breaks less rosily in the eastern skies, but at
twilight they still come and nestle in the branches that were sunned in
the smile of love and watered with its happy tears. And over the grave of
each buried hope or joy stands an angel with strong comforting hands and
patient smile; and the name of the garden is Life, and the angel is
Memory.'</p>
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