The Enchanted April

by Elizabeth von Arnim

That was its conception; yet, as in the case of many another, the conceiver was unaware of it at the moment.

Her clothes, infested by thrift, made her practically invisible, her face was non-arresting, her conversation was reluctant, she was shy.

And if one’s clothes and face and conversation are all negligible, thought Mrs Wilkins – who recognized her disabilities – what, at parties, is there left of one?

Why couldn’t two unhappy people refresh each other on their way through this dusty business of life by a little talk – real, natural talk about what they felt, what they would have liked, what they still tried to hope?

For years she had been able to be happy only by forgetting happiness. She wanted to stay like that. She wanted to shut out everything that would remind her of beautiful things, that might set her off again longing, desiring…

There are miserable sorts of goodness and happy sorts – the sort we’ll have at the medieval castle, for instance, is the happy sort.”

To be missed, to be needed, from whatever motive, was, she thought, better than the complete loneliness of not being missed or needed at all.

All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains – exquisitely different in colour – were asleep too in the light, and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of the castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colours of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword.

Such beauty, and she there to see it. Such beauty, and she alive to feel it. Her

Happy? Poor, ordinary, everyday word.

It was as though she could hardly stay inside herself, it was as though she were too small to hold so much of joy, it was as though she were washed through with light. And how astonishing to feel this sheer bliss, for here she was, not doing and not going to do a single unselfish thing, not going to do a thing she didn’t want to do.

Aren’t you pleased you’ve got a wife with hair like curly honey?”

fancy wanting to shut someone out of heaven because she thought she would be shy of her!

while this was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.

but just recovering from the fatigue, the deep and melancholy fatigue, of the too much.

In the Eighties, when she chiefly flourished, husbands were taken seriously, as the only real obstacles to sin.

Gatekeepers? 🙄

Beds too, if they had to be mentioned, were approached with caution, and a decent reserve prevented them and husbands ever being spoken of in the same breath.

she didn’t believe that after a certain age people began anything.

she was sure no one, however old and tough, could resist the effects of perfect beauty.

She disliked jokes at all times, but in the morning she hated them – especially close up, especially crowding in her ears.

“Oh, but nobody helps anybody in heaven. That’s finished with. You don’t try to be, or do. You simply are.”

They left off talking. They ceased to mention heaven. They were just cups of acceptance.

Worse than jokes in the morning did she hate the idea of husbands.

After all, she could only marry one, anyhow, but you would think from the way everybody talked, and especially those persons who wanted to be husbands, that she could marry at least a dozen.

she had looked out into the gulf of the night, and it had suddenly seemed as if her life had been a noise all about nothing.

She wanted to be alone, but not lonely.

Was it possible that loneliness had nothing to do with circumstances, but only with the way one met them?

No good could come out of the thinking of a beautiful young woman.

Complications could come out of it in profusion, but no good. The thinking of the beautiful was bound to result in hesitations, in reluctances, in unhappiness all round. And here, if she could have seen her, sat her Scrap, thinking quite hard. And such things. Such old things. Things nobody ever began to think till they were at least forty.

Hardly anything was really worthwhile, reflected Mrs Fisher, except the past.

but kind ladies smiled, reason or no. They smiled – not because they were happy, but because they wished to make happy.

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.

Mrs Fisher had a great objection to other people’s chills. They were always the fruit of folly, and then they were handed on to her, who had done nothing at all to deserve them.

“But there are no men here,” said Mrs Wilkins, “so how can it be improper? Have you noticed,” she enquired of Mrs Fisher, who endeavoured to pretend she did not hear, “how difficult it is to be improper without men?”

“I see nothing,” Mrs Fisher could not this time refrain from interrupting – for what an intolerable trick. “At the most I hear, and that reluctantly.”

Most things connected with husbands were not talked about; and to have a whole dinner table taken up with a discussion as to where one of them should sleep was an affront to the decencies.

Life was full of meals. They took up an enormous proportion of one’s time,

she was more dejected than ever, overwhelmed by the discrepancy between the splendour outside her, the warm, teeming beauty and self-sufficiency of nature, and the blank emptiness of her heart.

it was quite plain that everything she did and said was effortless, and that she was just simply, completely happy.

she had found her celestial legs.

All three had breakfast that day in their rooms, moved by a common instinct to take cover.

This exquisite ignoring.

There was a sense of broken ice – they felt at once intimate and indulgent, almost they felt to him as nurses do – as those feel who have assisted either patients or young children at their baths. They were acquainted with Mr Wilkins’s legs.

And the more he treated her as though she were really very nice, the more Lotty expanded and became really very nice, and the more he, affected in his turn, became really very nice himself – so that they went round and round, not in a vicious, but in a highly virtuous, circle.

Why, one person in the world, one single person belonging to one, of one’s very own, to talk to, to take care of, to love, to be interested in, was worth more than all the speeches on platforms and the compliments of chairmen in the world. It was also worth more – Rose couldn’t help it, the thought would come – than all the prayers.

Dignity demanded that she should have nothing to do with fresh leaves at her age – and yet there it was – the feeling that presently, that at any moment now, she might crop out all green.

She had nothing against developing, against further ripeness, because as long as one was alive, one was not dead – obviously, decided Mrs Fisher – and development, change, ripening, were life. What she would dislike would be unripening, going back to something green. She would dislike it intensely – and this is what she felt she was on the brink of doing.

Soon she might not only think but say.

It is true she liked him most when he wasn’t there, but then she usually liked everybody most when they weren’t there.

Lotty was evidently, then, that which before marriage he had believed her to be – she was valuable. She certainly had been most valuable in introducing him to Lady Caroline and Mrs Fisher. A man in his profession could be immensely helped by a clever and attractive wife. Why had she not been attractive sooner? Why this sudden flowering?

He sees her as his trophy wife