In the Mountains

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

Because his tail comes out of his head.
So did the other donkey.
He took a fly and went home.
Orleans.

Having nothing else to offer Mrs. Barnes I offered her these, and suggested she should supply the questions.

She thought this way of dealing with riddles subversive and difficult. Dolly began to laugh. Mrs. Barnes, filled with the invigorating air, actually laughed too. It was the first time I have heard her laugh. I listened with awe. Evidently she laughs very rarely, for Dolly looked so extraordinarily pleased; evidently her doing it made to-day memorable, for Dolly's face, turned to her sister in a delighted surprise, had the expression on it that a mother's has when her offspring suddenly behaves in a way unhoped for and gratifying.

So there we stood, gesticulating gaily on the slippery slope.

This is a strange place. Its effects are incalculable. I suppose it is because it is five thousand feet up, and has so great a proportion of sunshine.

September 6th.

There were letters this morning from England that wiped out all the gaiety of yesterday; letters that reminded me. It was as if the cold mist had come back again, and blotted out the light after I had hoped it had gone for good. It was as if a weight had dropped down again on my heart, suffocating it, making it difficult to breathe, after I had hoped it was lifted off for ever. I feel sick. Sick with the return of the familiar pain, sick with fear that I am going to fall back hopelessly into it. I wonder if I am. Oh, I had such hope that I was better! Shall I ever get quite well again? Won't it at best, after every effort, every perseverance in struggle, be just a more or less skilful mending, a more or less successful putting together of broken bits? I thought I had been growing whole. I thought I wouldn't any longer wince. And now these letters....

Ridiculous, hateful and ridiculous, to be so little master of one's own body that one has to look on helplessly at one's hands shaking.

I want to forget. I don't want to be reminded. It is my one chance of safety, my one hope of escape. To forget—forget till I have got my soul safe back again, really my own again, no longer a half destroyed thing. I call it my soul. I don't know what it is. I am very miserable.

It is details that I find so difficult to bear. As long as in my mind everything is one great, unhappy blur, there is a chance of quietness, of gradual creeping back to peace. But details remind me too acutely, flash back old anguish too sharply focussed. I oughtn't to have opened the letters till I was by myself. But it pleased me so much to get them. I love getting letters. They were in the handwriting of friends. How could I guess, when I saw them on the breakfast-table, that they would innocently be so full of hurt? And when I had read them, and I picked up my cup and tried to look as if nothing had happened and I were drinking coffee like anybody else, my silly hand shook so much that Dolly noticed it.