Elisabeth Von Arnim - The Enchanted April

The Enchanted April

Elizabeth von Arnim

ALMA CLASSICS

Alma Classics
an imprint of

alma books
Castle Yard
Richmond
Surrey TW10 6TF
United Kingdom

The Enchanted April first published in 1922
This edition first published by Alma Classics in 2018

Cover design: Will Dady

Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

isbn : 978-1-84749-721-5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

The Enchanted April

I t began in a womans club in London on a February afternoon an uncomfortable club, and a miserable afternoon when Mrs Wilkins, who had come down from Hampstead to shop and had lunched at her club, took up The Times from the table in the smoking room, and running her listless eye down the agony column saw this:

To Those Who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine. Small medieval Italian castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be let furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1,000, The Times .

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

So entirely unaware was Mrs Wilkins that her April for that year had then and there been settled for her that she dropped the newspaper with a gesture that was both irritated and resigned, and went over to the window and stared drearily out at the dripping street.

Not for her were medieval castles even those that are specially described as small. Not for her the shores in April of the Mediterranean, and the wisteria and sunshine. Such delights were only for the rich. Yet the advertisement had been addressed to persons who appreciate these things: so that it had been, anyhow, addressed too to her, for she certainly appreciated them more than anybody knew more than she had ever told. But she was poor. In the whole world she possessed of her own only ninety pounds, saved from year to year, put by carefully pound by pound, out of her dress allowance. She had scraped this sum together at the suggestion of her husband, as a shield and refuge against a rainy day. Her dress allowance given her by her father was 100 a year, so that Mrs Wilkinss clothes were what her husband urging her to save called modest and becoming, and her acquaintance to each other, when they spoke of her at all, which was seldom for she was very negligible, called a perfect sight.

Mr Wilkins, a solicitor, encouraged thrift, except that branch of it which got into his food. He did not call that thrift he called it bad housekeeping. But for the thrift which, like moth, penetrated into Mrs Wilkinss clothes and spoilt them, he had much praise. You never know, he said, when there will be a rainy day and you may be very glad to find you have a nest egg. Indeed we both may.

Looking out of the club window into Shaftesbury Avenue hers was an economical club, but convenient for Hampstead, where she lived, and for Shoolbreds, where she shopped Mrs Wilkins, having stood there some time very drearily, her minds eye on the Mediterranean in April and the wisteria and the enviable opportunities of the rich, while her bodily eye watched the really extremely horrible sooty rain falling steadily on the hurrying umbrellas and splashing omnibuses, suddenly wondered whether perhaps this was not the rainy day Mellersh Mellersh was Mr Wilkins had so often encouraged her to prepare for, and whether to get out of such a climate and into the small medieval castle wasnt perhaps what Providence had all along intended her to do with her savings. Part of her savings, of course perhaps quite a small part. The castle, being medieval, might also be dilapidated, and dilapidations were surely cheap. She wouldnt in the least mind a few of them, because you didnt pay for dilapidations which were already there; on the contrary by reducing the price you had to pay, they really paid you. But what nonsense to think of it

She turned away from the window with the same gesture of mingled irritation and resignation with which she had laid down The Times , and crossed the room towards the door with the intention of getting her mackintosh and umbrella and fighting her way into one of the overcrowded omnibuses and going to Shoolbreds on her way home and buying some soles for Mellershs dinner Mellersh was difficult with fish and liked only soles, except salmon when she beheld Mrs Arbuthnot, a woman she knew by sight as also living in Hampstead and belonging to the club, sitting at the table in the middle of the room, on which the newspapers and magazines were kept, absorbed, in her turn, in the first page of The Times .

Mrs Wilkins had never yet spoken to Mrs Arbuthnot, who belonged to one of the various church sets, and who analysed, classified, divided and registered the poor whereas she and Mellersh, when they did go out, went to the parties of Impressionist painters, of whom in Hampstead there were many. Mellersh had a sister who had married one of them and lived up on the Heath, and because of this alliance Mrs Wilkins was drawn into a circle which was highly unnatural to her, and she had learnt to dread pictures. She had to say things about them, and she didnt know what to say. She used to murmur Marvellous, and feel that it was not enough. But nobody minded. Nobody listened. Nobody took any notice of Mrs Wilkins. She was the kind of person who is not noticed at parties. Her clothes, infested by thrift, made her practically invisible, her face was non-arresting, her conversation was reluctant, she was shy. And if ones clothes and face and conversation are all negligible, thought Mrs Wilkins who recognized her disabilities what, at parties, is there left of one?

Also, she was always with Wilkins that clean-shaven, fine-looking man who gave a party, merely by coming to it, a great air. Wilkins was very respectable. He was known to be highly thought of by his senior partners. His sisters circle admired him. He pronounced adequately intelligent judgments on art and artists. He was pithy, he was prudent, he never said a word too much, nor, on the other hand, did he ever say a word too little. He produced the impression of keeping copies of everything he said, and he was so obviously reliable that it often happened that people who met him at these parties became discontented with their own solicitors, and after a period of restlessness extricated themselves and went to Wilkins.

Naturally, Mrs Wilkins was blotted out. She, said his sister, with something herself of the judicial, the digested and the final in her manner, should stay at home. But Wilkins could not leave his wife at home. He was a family solicitor, and all such have wives and show them. With his in the week he went to parties, and with his on Sundays he went to church. Being still fairly young he was thirty-nine and ambitious of old ladies, of whom he had not yet acquired in his practice a sufficient number, he could not afford to miss church, and it was there that Mrs Wilkins became familiar, though never through words, with Mrs Arbuthnot.

She saw her marshalling the children of the poor into pews. She would come in at the head of the procession from the Sunday school exactly five minutes before the choir, and get her boys and girls neatly fitted into their allotted seats, and down on their little knees in their preliminary prayer, and up again on their feet just as, to the swelling organ, the vestry door opened and the choir and clergy, big with the litanies and commandments they were presently to roll out, emerged. She had a sad face, yet she was evidently efficient. The combination used to make Mrs Wilkins wonder, for she had been told by Mellersh, on days when she had only been able to get plaice, that if one were efficient one wouldnt be depressed, and that if one does ones job well one becomes automatically bright and brisk.