Elizabeth von Arnim Quotes
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But down from the end of the path it looked so charming that she wished she could paint it in watercolours—the great trees, the tempered sunlight, the glimpse of the old church at one end, the glimpse of the embosomed lake at the other, and in the middle, set out so neatly, with such a grace of spotlessness, the table of her first tea-party.
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Mrs. Fisher had never cared for macaroni, especially not this long, worm-shaped variety. She found it difficult to eat--slippery, wriggling off her fork, making her look, she felt, undignified when, having got it as she supposed into her mouth, ends of it yet hung out. Always, too, when she ate it she was reminded of Mr. Fisher. He had during their married life behaved very much like macaroni. He had slipped, he had wriggled, he had made her feel undignified, and when at last she had got him safe, as she thought, there had invariably been little bits of him that still, as it were, hung out.
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However, few marriages, he understood, were lasting successes, so that perhaps after all it didn’t much matter.
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How glad I am I need not hurry. What a waste of life, just getting and spending.
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She had been dragged in the most humiliating of all dusts, the dust reserved for older women who let themselves be approached, on amorous lines, by boys... It had all been pure vanity, all just a wish, in these waning days of hers, still to feel power, still to have the assurance of her beauty and its effects.
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But he felt too confident in Catherine’s beautiful nature to be afraid of Ned. Catherine, who loved beauty, who was so much moved by it—witness her rapt face at The Immortal Hour—would never listen to blandishments from anyone with Ned’s nose. Besides, Ned was elderly. In spite of the fur rug up to his chin, Christopher had seen that all right. He was an elderly, puffy man. Elderliness and love! He grinned to himself. If only the elderly could see themselves….
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Just about the time I had my first baby, Cornelia had hers; but there were six of them, to my one. It might have been supposed, seeing she had six, that she would have taken six times as long to get over her confinement as I did, who had only produced one. Not at all. She was up and about and as lively as ever within a week, while I wouldn’t like to count the weeks it took me to be merely up and about, let alone as lively as ever. I don’t think I was ever quite as lively as ever again. Lively, yes; but not as ever. Cornelia had lost her fellowlarker for good and all. If she wanted to lark, which she did almost at once, she had to lark alone. I stayed at home. I hung over cradles, doting. As far as Cornelia was concerned I had gone for good, disappeared behind a steadily increasing cloud of babies.
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Happy? Poor, ordinary, everyday word. But what could one say, how could one describe it? 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. ... Now she had taken off all her goodness and left it behind her like a heap in rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy.
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Too often she had seen the first indignation of disappointed parents at the marriage of the their children harden into a matter of pride, a matter of doggedness and principle, and finally become ridiculous. If the marriages turned out happy, how absurd to persist in an antiquated disapproval; if they turned out wretched, then how urgent the special need for love.
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The years lay spread out before her, spacious untouched canvases on which she was presently going to paint the picture of her life. It was to be a very beautiful picture, she said to herself with an extraordinary feeling of proud confidence; not beautiful because of any gifts or skill of hers, for never was a woman more giftless, but because of all the untiring little touches, the ceaseless care for detail, the patient painting out of mistakes; and every touch and every detail was going to be aglow with the bright colours of happiness.
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And so at Binz, dragged out of my pleasant dream to night and loneliness, I could not move for a moment for sheer extremity of fright. When I did, when I did put out a shaking hand to feel for the matches, the dread of years became a reality—I touched another hand. Now I think it was very wonderful of me not to scream. I suppose I did not dare. I don’t know how I managed it, petrified as I was with terror, but the next thing that happened was that I found myself under the bedclothes thinking things over. Whose hand had I touched? And what was it doing on my table? It was a nasty, cold hand, and it had clutched at mine as I tore it away. Oh—there it was, coming after me—it was feeling its way along the bedclothes—surely it was not real—it must be a nightmare—and that was why no sound came when I tried to shriek.
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I laughed on the way home, and I laughed again for sheer satisfaction when we reached the garden and drove between the quiet trees to the pretty old house; for when I went into the library, with its four windows open to the moonlight and the scent, and looked round at the familiar bookshelves, and could hear no sounds but sounds of peace, and knew that here I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose with never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I felt to the kindly Fate that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand my own blessedness, and rescued me from a life like that I had just seen -- a life spent with the odours of other people's dinners in one's nostrils, and the noise of their wrangling servants in one's years, and parties and tattle for all amusement.
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...to go into the garden in its snowed-up state is like going into a bath of purity. The first breath on opening the door is so ineffably pure that it makes me gasp, and I feel a black and sinful object in the midst of all the spotlessness.
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This was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.
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When they talked of love and women—and of course they sometimes talked of love and women — Lewes would bring out views which Christopher, whose views they used to be too, only he had forgotten that, considered, now that he had come to know Catherine, as so much—the word was his—tripe.
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There's no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing is to risk -to believe, and to risk everything for your belief.
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My dream, even now, is to walk for weeks with some friend that I love, leisurely wandering from place to place, with no route arranged and no object in view, with liberty to go on all day or to linger all day, as we choose; but the question of luggage, unknown to the simple pilgrim, is one of the rocks on which my plans have been shipwrecked, and the other is the certain censure of relatives, who, not fond of walking themselves, and having no taste for noonday naps under hedges, would be sure to paralyse my plans before they had grown to maturity by the honest horror of their cry, "How very unpleasant if you were to meet any one you know!" The relative of five hundred years back would have said "How Holy!”
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A wet day and indoors: that was the time and place to tell him. Of course if he became very silly she would tell him instantly; but as long as he wasn’t—and how could he be in an open taxi?—as long as he was just happy to be with her and take her out and walk her round among crocuses and give her tea and bring her home again tucked in as carefully as if she were some extraordinarily precious brittle treasure, why should she interfere? It was so amusing to be a treasure,—yes, and so sweet. Let her be honest with herself—it was sweet. She hadn’t been a treasure, not a real one, not the kind for whom things are done by enamoured men, for years,—indeed, not ever; for George from the first, even before he was one, had behaved like a husband. He was so much older than she was; and though his devotion was steady and lasting he had at no time been infatuated. She had been a treasure, certainly, but of the other kind, the kind that does things for somebody else. Mrs. Mitcham, on a less glorified scale, was that type of treasure.
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I'm sure it's wrong to go on being good for too long, till one gets miserable. And I can see you've been good for years and years, because you look so unhappy.
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The healthy attitude, the only reasonable one towards a fault made or a sin committed is surely a vigorous shake of one’s moral shoulders, vigorous enough to shake it off and out of remembrance. The sin itself was a sad waste of time and happiness, and absolutely no more should be wasted in lugubriously reflecting on it. Shall we, poor human beings at such a disadvantage from the first in the fight with Fate through the many weaknesses and ailments of our bodies, load our souls as well with an ever-growing burden of regret and penitence? Shall we let a weight of vivid memories break our hearts? How are we to get on with our living if we are continually dropping into sloughs of bitter and often unjust self-reproach? Every morning comes the light, and a fresh chance of doing better. Is it not the sheerest folly and ingratitude to let yesterday spoil the God-given to-day?
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Well, but I want to see Mrs. Cumfrit a minute—it isn’t late—it’s quite early—I’ll go in for just a minute——’ And thrusting the wrap into her hand he made for the drawing-room. She watched him shut the door behind him, and hoped it didn’t matter, her not announcing him. After all, he had but lately left; it wasn’t as if he were calling that day for the first time. On the contrary, this was the third time since lunch that he had come in.
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Steadfast as the points of the compass to Mrs. Arbuthnot were the great four facts of life: God, Husband, Home, Duty. She had gone to sleep on these facts years ago, after a period of much misery, her head resting on them as on a pillow; and she had a great dread of being awakened out of so simple and untroublesome a condition.
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Lewes was waiting, always Lewes, making profound and idiotic comments on everything, and wanting to sit up half the night and reason. Reason! He was sick of reason. He wanted some one he could be romantic with, and sentimental with, and poetic, and—yes, religious with, if he felt like it, without having to feel ashamed.
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In the eighties, when she chiefly flourished, husbands were taken seriously, as the only real obstacles to sin. 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.