path: root/79073-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79073 ***




                                   THE
                             LAST SEPTEMBER

                                   by
                             ELIZABETH BOWEN

                           CONSTABLE & CO LTD
                                 LONDON


                              PUBLISHED BY
                      _Constable & Company Limited_
                             _London W.C. 2_

                                 BOMBAY
                             CALCUTTA MADRAS
                                 LEIPZIG
                        _Oxford University Press_

                                 TORONTO
                         _The Macmillan Company_

                         _First published 1929_

   Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London


                                   TO
                             JOAN GRACE REED


                    “Ils ont les chagrins qu’ont les
                     vierges et les paresseux....”

                                  _Le Temps Retrouvé._




                                CONTENTS


      THE ARRIVAL OF MR. AND MRS. MONTMORENCY           1

      THE VISIT OF MISS NORTON                        103

      THE DEPARTURE OF GERALD                         211




                THE ARRIVAL OF MR. AND MRS. MONTMORENCY


                                    I

ABOUT six o’clock the sound of a motor, collected out of the wide
country and narrowed under the trees of the avenue, brought the
household out in excitement on to the steps. Up among the beeches, a
thin iron gate twanged; the car slid out from a net of shadow, down
the slope to the house. Behind the flashing windscreen Mr. and Mrs.
Montmorency produced--arms waving and a wild escape to the wind of her
mauve motor-veil--an agitation of greeting. They were long-promised
visitors. They exclaimed, Sir Richard and Lady Naylor exclaimed
and signalled: no one spoke yet. It was a moment of happiness, of
perfection.

In those days, girls wore crisp white skirts and transparent blouses
clotted with white flowers; ribbons, threaded through with a view
to appearance, appeared over their shoulders. So that Lois stood at
the top of the steps looking cool and fresh; she knew how fresh she
must look, like other young girls, and clasping her elbows tightly
behind her back, tried hard to conceal her embarrassment. The dogs
came pattering out from the hall and stood beside her; above, the
vast façade of the house stared coldly over its mounting lawns. She
wished she could freeze the moment and keep it always. But as the car
approached, as it stopped, she stooped down and patted one of the dogs.

As the car drew up the Montmorencys unwound from their rugs. They stood
shaking hands and laughing in the yellow theatrical sunshine. They had
motored over from Carlow. Two toppling waves of excitement crashed and
mingled; for moments everybody was inaudible. Mrs. Montmorency looked
up the steps. “And this is the niece!” she exclaimed with delight.
“Aren’t we dusty!” she added, as Lois said nothing. “Aren’t we too
terribly dusty!” And a tired look came down at the back of her eyes at
the thought of how dusty she was.

“She’s left school now,” said Sir Richard proudly.

“I don’t think I should have known you,” said Mr. Montmorency, who had
not seen Lois since she was ten and evidently preferred children.

“Oh, _I_ think she’s the image of Laura--”

“--But we have tea waiting. Are you really sure, now, you’ve had tea?”

“Danielstown’s looking lovely, lovely. One sees more from the upper
avenue--didn’t you clear some trees?”

“The wind had three of the ashes--you came quite safe? No trouble?
Nobody at the cross-roads? Nobody stopped you?”

“And are you sure now about tea?” continued Lady Naylor. “After all
that--look, it’s coming up now. No, Francie, don’t be ridiculous; come
in now, both of you.”

They swept in; their exclamations, constricted suddenly, filling the
hall. There was so much to say after twelve years: they all seemed
powerless. Lois hesitated, went in after them and, as nobody noticed,
came out again. The car with the luggage turned and went round to the
back, deeply scoring the gravel. She yawned and looked out over the
sweep to the lawn beyond, where little tufts of shadow pricked like
reeds from water out of the flat gold light. Beyond the sunk fence, six
Kerry cows followed each other across with wading steps and stood under
a lime tree. All the way up the house the windows were open; light came
diagonally from window to window through corner rooms. Two stories up,
she could have heard a curtain rustle, but the mansion piled itself up
in silence over the Montmorencys’ voices.

She yawned with reaction. It was simply the Montmorencys who had come;
whom all day one had been expecting. Yet she had been unable to read,
had scattered unfinished letters over her table, done the flowers
atrociously. Sweet-peas had spun and quivered between her fingers from
their very importance.... “I apologize for the mauve sweet-peas,”
she would have liked to be able to say to Mr. Montmorency. “I don’t
care for mauve myself. I can’t think why I ever picked them; there
were plenty of others. But, as a matter of fact, I was nervous.”
And--“Nervous?” she would wish Mr. Montmorency to ask her searchingly,
“why?” But she had her reserves, even in imagination; she would never
tell him.

But she had seen at once that Mr. Montmorency, who must be really so
subtle, would not take the trouble to understand her.

Her cousin Laurence had gone upstairs with a book when he heard the
motor. Now she could hear him knocking out his pipe on a window sill.
He leaned out further and asked, pointing down, in a cautious whisper:
“Are they all in?”

She signalled a warning, nodding.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“I don’t know. What are you doing?”

“Nothing particular.”

“I thought I’d take the dogs down the beech walk.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I just thought ...”

“Come up and tell me about the Montmorencys.”

She signalled another warning: the Montmorencys were in the hall. To
avoid the hall she had to go right round to a side door and up the back
stairs. These smelt of scrubbed wood, limewash, and the ducks already
roasting for the Montmorencys’ dinner. Pushing open a door at the top
she let a gust of this through with her.

“Duck,” said Laurence, sniffing gratefully. It still surprised her that
Laurence, who looked ethereal, should spend so much time when he was
not being intellectual in talking and apparently thinking about food.
She supposed that this was because he had, as he had once said, no
emotional life. “I live,” he used to say, “from meal to meal.” When she
said, “Why?” he put up his hands and his eyebrows and made a gesture.
When he did this in front of Gerald she felt uncomfortable. Soldiers
did not talk about food, they ate it. They ate, in fact, rather more
than Laurence, but always with a deprecating, absent look.

Laurence had been reading in the ante-room, in one of the circle of not
very comfortable shell-shaped chairs that no one took seriously. His
room was a floor higher; it had not seemed worth while to go up. He had
brought the wrong book and dared not go down for another; otherwise
he would not have felt in need of her conversation. Personally, she
liked the ante-room, though it wasn’t the ideal place to read or talk.
Four rooms opened off it; at any moment a door might be opened, or
blow open, sending a draught down one’s neck. People passed through it
continually, so that one kept having to look up and smile. Yet Lois
always seemed to be talking there, standing with a knee on a chair
because it was not worth while to sit down, and her life was very
much complicated by not knowing how much of what she said had been
overheard, or by whom, or how far it would go.

The high windows were curtainless; tasselled fringes frayed the light
at the top. The white sills, the shutters folded back in their frames
were blistered, as though the house had spent a day in the tropics.
Exhausted by sunshine, the backs of the crimson chairs were a thin
light orange; a smell of camphor and animals drawn from skins on the
floor by the glare of morning still hung like dust on the evening
chill. Going through to her room at nights Lois often tripped with her
toe in the jaws of a tiger; a false step at any time sent some great
claw skidding over the polish. Pale regimental groups, reunions a
generation ago of the family or the neighbourhood gave out from the
walls a vague depression. There were two locked bookcases of which the
keys had been lost, and a troop of ebony elephants brought back from
India by some one she did not remember paraded along the tops of the
bookcases.

“Whow--whow--whow!” said Laurence, imitating her panting. “Why do you
hurry like that?”

“I suppose it’s a habit,” said Lois, confused.

“What did you want?”

“Well, I came to tell you about the Montmorencys.”

“Oh, all right; go on. Where are they?”

“Having more tea; Aunt Myra made them.... Well, they arrived, as you
probably heard, and it was all rather devastating. There was a good
deal of emotion. And she would do nothing but say she was dusty, and of
course she _was_ dusty, so there was nothing for me to say.”

“So what did you say?”

“And he said he would never have known me.”

“Honest, bluff sort of chap?”

“Oh _no_,” said Lois and flushed, for really Laurence was too
insulting. She laughed and glanced at her finger-nails--the only part
of one’s person, she had observed, of which it was possible to be
conscious socially. “Haven’t you met him?”

“I think I did once. I think I thought he was rather fatuous. But I was
very young at the time--I mayn’t have met him at all.”

“Isn’t it extraordinary,” said Lois confidentially, “the way one’s
nails grow--I mean, when one comes to think: yards and yards of
inexhaustible nail coming out of one. As a matter of fact,” she added,
“I once rather had illusions about Mr. Montmorency--since I was ten.
He came to stay with my mother and me when we were at Leamington.
After dinner--I was allowed to sit up--Mother walked out of the house
and left us. We were trying chickens at that time and I dare say she
went out to shut them up and then simply stayed in the garden. Mr.
Montmorency and I talked for some time, then he got solemn and went to
sleep all in a moment. I sat and watched him in absolute fascination.
You know the way men go to sleep after dinner? Well, that wasn’t at all
the way he did.... Then my mother came, very much refreshed at having
been away from us, and said I was a rather bad hostess, and woke Mr.
Montmorency up. I have thought since, anyone might have said she was a
rather bad hostess. But everything she did seemed so natural.”

“Oh, she was lovely,” said Laurence, indifferent.

“So you see he is really not bluff, or he wouldn’t have gone to sleep
in that perfectly simple, exposed way. He was melancholy and exhausted
and wise, which I did appreciate as a child, when most visitors were so
noisy at one.”

“Extraordinary,” said Laurence, looking out of the window.

Laurence was comfortable to talk to because of his indifference to
every shade of her personality. With him, she felt committed by speech
itself to a display of such unfathomable silliness that she might
just as well come out--and did--with assertions surprising even to
herself. When he yawned, took a book up, said he was hungry or simply
went away, she was not discountenanced. It was those tender, those
receptive listeners to whom one felt afterwards sold and committed. It
is true that when first she had met Laurence again she had wished to
impress him as an intellectual girl. But an evening of signal failure
when he had told her she should read less and more thoroughly and, on
the whole he thought, talk less, had involved a certain re-arrangement
of attitude. She had reattained confidence, expanding under his
disapproval.

“It doesn’t occur to you,” he said with an air of sinister triumph,
“that the Montmorencys may have come up the front stairs while you came
up the back stairs and be both in their room, listening?”

Unthinkable, but the very sound of the thing was a shock. Crimson, she
ran to the door of the spare room: struggling with unreason, knocked
defiantly, rattled the handle. She went in, finally, with a sense of
impertinence, for the new arrivals were spiritually in possession.

The Blue Room was of course empty; with no one to listen. The trunks
had been carried up and set down, unstrapped, at the foot of the wide
bed. The room smelt of bleaching cretonnes and ten days’ emptiness;
curtains in a draught from the door made a pale movement. Lois had
put a vase of geraniums on the dressing-table; now she admired their
cubes in delicate balance, spraying against the light. And there was
the festival air of those candles, virgin, with long white wicks. Two
arm-chairs faced round intently into the empty grate with its paper
fan--in them Mr. and Mrs. Montmorency would sit, perhaps, to discuss
the experiences of the day. More probably, they would talk in bed. One
of the things Lois chiefly wanted to know about marriage was--how long
it took one, sleeping with the same person every night, to outlive
the temptation to talk well into the morning? There would be nothing
illicit about nocturnal talking, as there had been at school; no
one would be entitled to open a door sharply with: “Now go to sleep
now, you two; that’s enough for to-night,” as had so often happened
during her visits to friends. Would conversation, in the absence of
these prohibitions, cease to interest? Lois had heard of couples who
disturbed each other by breathing and preferred to occupy different
rooms: no allowance was made for such couples at Danielstown. The Blue
Room dressing-room furniture was marble-topped to allow for spills or
breakages of a gentleman’s bottles, and there was a virile boot-rack
for every possible kind of boot. Lois, doubtfully, had put moss roses
on Mr. Montmorency’s table.

“Didn’t it occur to you,” said Laurence, “that they couldn’t possibly
have gone through without my seeing them?”

Lois came out and shut the door of the spare room. “But panic,” she
said, “is beyond one. Things like that are so awful. I shall never
forget discussing a Miss Elliot--a very musical woman--with Livvy or
some one, out here, and, my dear, _she_ was in there the whole time and
being English and honourable began to rattle her chest of drawers. I
could hardly look at her straight for the rest of the visit. However,
she also covered herself with confusion, because she put all her
vases of flowers outside her door at night, and Brigid fell over them
bringing the morning tea. Aunt Myra was terribly irritated and talked
about nursing-homes.”

“I shouldn’t expect there will be anything so very hygienic about Mrs.
Montmorency.”

“Damn,” said Lois, looking disproportionately worried and moving off
towards her own room suddenly. “I have got letters to finish.” Speaking
of Brigid had reminded her that there were letters on regimental
note-paper lying about all over her room and that Brigid, who took
an interest, would be likely to see them when she came up with the
hot water. Not that they mattered really, but at the thought of some
letters people wrote her she did feel rather a fool.

Laurence had pale blue, rather prominent eyes that moved slowly, though
the rest of his movements were jerky. Looking up at her now with a not
unaware kind of blandness, he said: “Do tell me, what do you write
about?”

“Life in general.”

“You amaze me--now if I did write letters no one would read them if
they were not intelligent. You must have the golden touch.”

“Naturally one is expected to be amusing.”

“And how many subalterns do you write to?”

This was disconcerting, also, she felt strongly, irrelevant. If these
young men wrote to her, they were unimportant; besides, she only
answered every third letter. These young men, concrete, blocking her
mental view by their extreme closeness, moved shadowless in a kind
of social glare numbing to the imagination. Whereas Mr. Montmorency
came out distinct from the rather rare gloom with which she invested
her childhood; her feeling for him provided agreeable matter for
introspection. However much he might loom and darken up to the
close-up view, he would never be out of focus.

“How many?” said Laurence again, picking up his book but still looking
at her inexorably. The unkindest thing he had called her friend Livvy
Thompson was--a rather probable channel for the life-force; and really
when he asked questions of this kind she did not know what he must
think.

But it was reticence as to a lack rather than as to a superabundance
that produced her embarrassment.

“Three--no, two,” she said coldly, “because one of them is a captain.”

Going into her room she shut the door. Laurence got up and walked round
the ante-room. For the hundredth time he looked disparagingly along the
backs of the books in the locked bookcases. Then he heard his aunt and
Mrs. Montmorency beginning to come upstairs.




                                    II


THE Naylors and the Montmorencys had always known each other; it was
an affair of generations. Hugo had stayed at Danielstown as a boy
for months together, and knew the place as well as his own house, he
told Francie, and certainly liked it better. He had expressed this
preference, which had come as a shock to her, when they were first
engaged. She was pained as by an expression of irreligion. She consoled
herself, and rehabilitated him secretly, by remembering he had had a
stepfather and could never have known the meaning of family life--she
had a delicate woman’s strong feeling for “naturalness.” She intended
to make up to him for the deficiencies of his childhood, but, almost
immediately after their marriage, Hugo sold Rockriver. Now she would
always blame herself for not having dissuaded him, but he had been so
set at the time on an idea of going to Canada and she so foolishly
anxious to compensate him for what she was not by going there with him
and thriving. So when the idea of Canada failed, they had no house, and
she, after all, no vocation. As for Hugo, he had expected little of
life.

Francie had heard all her life of the Naylors of Danielstown, her
cousins and theirs had married; but Ireland is large and she had not
met them till she came to Danielstown on a bridal visit. Then, of
course, they had known each other always; there had been no beginning.
She knew she had never in all her life been so happy as on that first
visit; time, loose-textured, had had a shining undertone, happiness
glittered between the moments. She had had, too, very strongly a sense
of return, of having been awaited. Rooms, doorways had framed a kind of
expectancy of her; some trees in the distance, the stairs, a part of
the garden seemed always to have been lying secretly at the back of her
mind.

It was, also, on that first and only other visit, that she had
made friends with Myra--that in itself was memorable. Myra was
“interesting,” cultivated, sketched beautifully, knew about books and
music. She had been to Germany, Italy, everywhere that one visits
acquisitively. It had been a bond to discover that Francie and Myra
must have been in Germany at the same time, the summer of ’92, though
without meeting. Myra was the same age as Francie--they had been
presented the same year, though not at the same Drawing-room--and
thought of Hugo as quite a boy: she could not help showing it.
Sometimes, guessing what she had shown, she would laugh and say
something clever and quite irrelevant to cover the awkwardness. For
Hugo was ten years younger than both of them, Francie’s husband.

Francie and Myra had had long remarkable talks about almost everything,
confidential if not alarmingly intimate--walking, driving, on the
seat by the caroline allspice tree, and at the head of the stairs at
night--while their candle-flames stooped from their vehemence.

When at the end of that visit the Montmorencys left Danielstown this
had seemed to Francie more of a pause than a break in the continuity.
“Next spring,” they all four promised each other, shaking hands and
kissing at the foot of the steps--it was then autumn, the bronze trees
were sifted through by the wind and shivered along the outlines--“Next
summer, Hugo,” Myra exclaimed, “_at latest!_” and the last view they
had of her was as standing bright and imperative. Only as they drove
away did the trees run, watery, into the sky and Francie’s lids prick:
she slipped her hand into Hugo’s under the rug. And, pressing it, he
had alone to continue the business of turning, yearning and waving back
till a bend in the avenue.

She had felt, perhaps, a chilly breath from the future. Between their
smart turning out, with a roll of carriage wheels, through the gates
with their clipped laurels, and their swerving in with a grind of
motor brakes twelve years afterwards, nothing large was to intervene.
Their life, through which they went forward uncertainly, without the
compulsion of tragedy, was a net of small complications. There was
the drag of his indecisions, the fine snapping now and then of her
minor relinquishments. Her health, his temperament, their varying
poverty--they were delayed, deflected. She was ordered abroad for
successive winters, to places he could not expect to endure. He came
and went without her; going for consolation, of course, to Danielstown.
The Naylors sent her out wails, injunctions and declarations. They
would never, _never_ be happy till she was with them also.

So at last Hugo and Francie returned together. And to-day
something--that break in the trees on the avenue, something
unremembered about the face of the house, some intensification of the
silence surrounding it, or perhaps simply Lois’ figure standing there
on the steps--made the place different.

Lady Naylor and Mrs. Montmorency now went upstairs together.
Francie looked down at the top step to see if the marks were still
there--becoming much excited in the course of an argument about Robert
Hugh Benson she had waved her candle and scattered a rain of hot
grease. But there was a new stair-carpet. Myra looked down also, but in
surprise; she did not remember. She had argued with so many people in
twelve years--nowadays she argued about Galsworthy.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said, lowering her voice as they
approached the ante-room, “if we found Laurence up here--my nephew. He
is with us a good deal, between Oxford. Though I expect it is dull for
him. He is not out of doors very much; he is very intellectual. Though,
of course, he plays tennis.”

Francie was much relieved, on entering the ante-room, to find that
Laurence had gone. “It’s so nice,” she said, “the way you have the
house full of young people.” She turned to the right instinctively, to
her old door.

“No, this way, Francie, the Blue Room. The rooks on that side of the
house disturbed so many people; we’ve changed the rooms round and put
Lois in there; she prefers them.”

As they came into the Blue Room, Francie saw their two faces reflected
in the tall dressing-table glass, the door swinging behind. “Myra’s
aged!” she thought with a shock. Her own face never seemed to have
changed at all.

She said: “You look wonderful, you know. I couldn’t think when I was
ever to see you again, or Richard either.”

Myra kissed her--a compact, sudden pursing and placing of the lips. It
was as though they were meeting again only now. The door swung to with
a rush. “It’s been too bad, too bad--not even as if you had been in
Canada!”

The linen of Myra’s sleeve was cool to the touch of the dusty Francie.
Myra wore a grey linen dress with embroidered panels, a lace scarf
twice round the throat and a green hat dipping in front and trimmed
with clover. Her bright grey eyes, with very black, urgent pupils,
continued in a deep crease at each outside corner. High on the curve
of her cheeks, like petals, bright mauve-pink colour became, within
kissing distance, a net of fine delicate veins. Her eyebrows, drawn in
a pointed arch, suggested tragic surprise till one saw the arch never
flattened, the face beneath never changed from its placid eagerness,
its happy dissatisfaction. “_Has_ she aged?” Francie thought, glancing
closely and shyly again as they parted. Yes, she felt something set now
in Myra; she was happier, harder.

Myra receded now that the kiss was over. There was life to go on with,
the duty of love and pleasure fully discharged. She moved round the
Blue Room, nodded out of a window to some one distant coming out from
some trees--she could never learn how one vanishes in the dark of a
house. She glanced intently along the books in the book-trough. “Lois
has not changed the books!” she exclaimed. “You know how I like them
to be appropriate. Here’s a technical book on rubber a man left behind
last summer--it looks ridiculous. She’s a girl who never forgets the
same thing twice; always something different....”

“She looks sweet, I think. And surely the image of Laura?”

“She’s not so much like Laura in character. There’s a good deal, I
sometimes think, of poor Walter.”

“Wasn’t it terribly sad about Walter?”

“To tell you the truth, it was what we always expected,” said Lady
Naylor.

When Francie was left alone she went to the window and shook the dust
out of her motor veil. Then--she was so very tired from motoring,
everything seemed to rush past--she sat down on the sofa and put her
hands over her eyes. Her mind lay back in the silence, but there was
a kind of sentinel in her waiting for Hugo. She did not know what she
should say if he noticed the drive from Carlow really had been too much
for her. She had said beforehand she was afraid it might be too much,
and he had said: nonsense, that she was fit for anything nowadays.
Flattered by this, she gave in. She was so tired--just for these
few moments when she let herself go--she could not bear to realize
Danielstown. Her thoughts ached. When she looked out, there were some
intolerable trees and a strip of gold field hot on the skyline.

When she heard steps coming she fled to the washstand. Her skin was
dry, her hair felt laden and limp, it was so dusty. But that was the
fine, the phenomenal weather for which, in this country, one could not
be thankful enough. When Hugo came through from his dressing-room she
was washing her hands--they turned in the water like gentle porpoises
in a slaver of violet soap.

“Well,” he said, looking round the room.

“Well, Hugo ... isn’t it lovely?”

“Richard’s in great form--I thought I’d never get up at all to you....
Not tired?”

“Indeed, no.... Doesn’t it all seem the same as ever?”

“I tell you one thing: Myra’s ageing. Didn’t you notice?”

“Oh,” said Francie vaguely. She stooped her face to the basin, the
rain-water comforted, creeping into the pores. “_Oh!_” She dried her
face in damask, among stiff roses. “But then, we all are.”

“She’s got into a terrible habit of shutting doors.”

“Times have been worse down here. Yes, I thought, you know, she had
rather a strained look. What does Richard think of the situation?...
Oh, and had you any idea that Lois was so grown up? I had imagined her
quite a schoolgirl. She’s so pretty, such a ... a frank little face.”

“She’s self-conscious,” said Hugo, “but I dare say most girls of that
age are.... I should lie down now for a bit, it will freshen you
up--though you don’t need it. Then would you like me to brush your
hair?”

Francie got her dressing-gown out of a trunk and lay down on the sofa.
She had just relaxed there when Hugo said that the sofa did not look
comfortable and she had better lie on the bed. He made a valley for
her head between the two pillows--he did not believe it rested anybody
to lie with their head high--and she lay down on the bed with her head
in the valley. “Oh, but I don’t think I ought to lie on this lovely
quilt,” she soon protested.

“They’re not fussy here,” returned Hugo; “do lie and be still.”

So she lay and watched him begin to unpack her two boxes, carry
dresses over his arms and lay them along the shelves of the
“gentleman’s wardrobe.” She wondered: whatever would Richard and Myra
think?--“Uxorious” they would be bound to declare; Richard who could
hardly handle a jug without dropping it, and Myra who would not have
him otherwise.

“What a disgusting noise,” said Hugo, pausing and listening.

“Somebody playing a gramophone--”

They might well say she had taken the brilliant young man he’d once
been and taught him to watch her, to nurse her and shake out her
dresses. And she knew she could, now, never explain to Myra what
she had failed to explain twelve years ago--when there had been
so much less to explain and to justify--how Hugo was too much for
her altogether. How she had tried, but had not been able, to keep
him--first from marrying her, then from giving up Canada, leaving his
friends when she had to go to the south of France, or from brushing her
hair in the evenings.

“Hugo, you might leave that blue dress out; I think I’ll wear it....
_When_ was it you were in love with Laura?”

“When I was twenty-two--I was in a sort of way. She was lovely
then--though indeed she was always lovely. But she was never happy at
all, even here. She never knew what she wanted--she was very vital.”

He hesitated over two pairs of evening shoes. “Leave the bronze ones
out,” she suggested. “They go with the blue.” She lay with her eyes
shut a moment, then asked, “But why wouldn’t she marry you?”

Francie’s delicacy, her absences from him, her long queer relapses into
silence gave her the right to ask curious things, as from a death-bed.
Hugo, wandering at the end of the bed, looked at her feet thoughtfully.

“She wanted her mind made up,” he said at last, “and I couldn’t do
that--why should I? I had enough to do with my own mind. And she was
Richard’s own sister--talk and talk and you’d never know where you had
her. And if she thought you had her, she’d start a crying-fit. Then she
went up North and met Farquar, and I imagine that that was all fixed
up before she knew where she was or had time to get out of it. After
that of course she really _had_ got something to be unhappy about. Yet
I don’t believe things ever really mattered to Laura. Nothing got close
to her: she was very remote.”

“I wonder if Lois is remote?”

“What I think I felt about Laura,” pursued Hugo, interested, “was,
she was never real in the way I wanted. Nobody was before you, as you
know.... If you get up now, I can brush your hair.”

“It is very dusty,” said Mrs. Montmorency.

She had met Laura in England and been very shy of her. Laura was
a success in England, and so quite brilliant--she was too Irish
altogether for her own country. Lois had been at school as usual
and did not come home because Laura had forgotten which day the
Montmorencys were coming. Six months afterwards, without giving anyone
notice of her intention, Laura had died.

“It still seems odd,” remarked Mrs. Montmorency, “that I shouldn’t have
met Lois.” Seating herself in front of the glass she took out the pins
one by one, then shook down her hair round her face--bright bronze
threads went in and out, crisply, over the light-grey waves--she ran
it through with her finger-tips, shaking her head ruefully. But the
dust seemed to have gone, perhaps because she was happier, less tired;
or perhaps she had left a drift of it between the two pillows. Her
husband, selecting a brush, knocked over the vase of geraniums. “The
darlings!” she cried out, mopping with her kimono-sleeve.

“Confusion,” said Hugo, shaking water out of the brush, “on all who put
vases on dressing-tables!”




                                   III


LOIS, dressed for dinner, was tidying her writing-table; two stamped
letters, her handiwork, leaned on the clock. She shook out her pink
suède blotter and started to sort its contents, but had to re-read
everything. Gerald, who had written about a tournament, concluded: “You
have the loveliest soft eyes.” She was perplexed, thought: “But what
can I do?” and snapped the letter, with others, under a rubber band.
Then she pulled out a drawer called “general” and swept the rest into
it. She had a waste-paper basket, but only for envelopes. Strokes of
the gong, brass bubbles, came bouncing up from the hall. She ran to the
glass, changed a necklace, had an apprehensive interchange with her own
reflection. What of the night?

Mrs. Montmorency and Laurence were in the drawing-room. They looked
anxious, nothing showed the trend of the conversation. The pale room
rose to a height only mirrors followed above the level of occupation;
this disproportionate zone of emptiness dwarfed at all times figures
and furniture. The distant ceiling imposed on consciousness its blank
white oblong, and a pellucid silence, distilled from a hundred and
fifty years of conversation, waited beneath the ceiling. Into this
silence, voices went up in stately attenuation. Now there were no
voices; Mrs. Montmorency and Laurence sat looking away from each other.

As Lois came in Laurence slapped his pockets over and saying something
about a pipe left the room quickly, leaving Lois in the grip of a
_tête-à-tête_. Mrs. Montmorency, seated in a window, held by a corner
a copy of the _Spectator_, that had slipped down against the silk of
her dress, as though she must be sure to retain this constant refuge
from conversation. Vague presence, barely a silhouette, the west light
sifting into her fluffy hair and lace wrappings so that she half
melted, she gave so little answer to one’s inquiry that one did not
know how to approach. So Lois stood staring, full in the light.

“Oh, you do look sweet!” exclaimed the visitor. “Black is so striking.
No, you are not like Laura--I don’t know who you’re like.”

“Aunt Myra isn’t sure about black for girls,” said Lois, sweeping
forward for admiration the folds of her dress. “But a white slip
lightens it.”

“And I expect you are having a wonderful time now you’re grown up?”

“Oh, well ...” said Lois. She went across to the fireplace and rose
on her tiptoes, leaning her shoulders against the marble. She tried
not to look conscious. She still felt a distinct pride at having grown
up at all; it seemed an achievement, like marriage or fame. Having a
wonderful time, she knew, meant being attractive to a number of young
men. If she said, “Yes, I do,” it implied “Yes, I am, very--” and she
was not certain. She was not certain, either, how much she enjoyed
herself. “Well, yes, I do,” she said finally.

“Tell me,” continued Mrs. Montmorency, “wasn’t that your cousin
Laurence?”

“As a matter of fact I am Uncle Richard’s niece and he Aunt Myra’s
nephew.”

“And isn’t he very intellectual?”

“I suppose he is, really.”

“I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Montmorency, “I had no idea how to talk to him.
I suppose _you_’d never find that difficult. I expect now, Lois, you’re
very modern.”

“Oh, well, not really,” said Lois, pleased. Mrs. Montmorency’s
expression, condensing now from her outline, was of such affection and
interest that Lois was moved to go on: “You could talk to him really
about almost anything except about politics. He isn’t allowed any here
because the ones he brings over from Oxford are all wrong.”

“_Wrong?_” cried the visitor with a startled flush, putting up a hand
to her face as though to press back the mounting colour. “Wrong--which
way? How do you mean, ‘wrong’?”

“Inconvenient.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Montmorency. And upon a recurrence of the puzzled
silence that had been the note of Lois’ entrance, Sir Richard came
in. Sir Richard was very much worried by visitors who came down early
for dinner: evidently he had not expected this of Francie. “Oh!” he
exclaimed reproachfully, “this is too bad; I had no idea you were down.
Myra’s been delayed--you know yourself how it happens.”

“Indeed, yes,” said Francie warmly. She would never have been in time
herself if she had had a home of her own. Only the little blanks and
rifts in her life accounted for her punctuality.

Sir Richard, touching his tie vaguely, wandered about the room,
displacing with some irritation the little tables that seemed to spring
up in his path, in the pent-up silence of a powerful talker not yet in
gear.

“Very fine weather,” he said at last, “warm at nights--or would you
like me to shut that window?” He was bothered; he could not remember
how well he had once known Francie, or decide at just what degree
of intimacy he was expected to pick her up again. “Lois has grown
up, hasn’t she?” he continued, pointing out his niece with an air of
inspiration. “She seems to me to have grown up very fast. Now how long
is it since you saw her over in England?”

“But I never did see her.”

“That was extraordinary,” said Sir Richard, looking from one to the
other. “Didn’t you meet poor Laura?”

“I did, but Lois was out.”

“That was too bad.” Sir Richard’s bother increased, with a suspicion of
something somewhere. He observed rather flatly: “Then it can hardly be
such a surprise to you that she’s grown up.”

“Not in the same way.”

“We can all sit out on the steps to-night,” said Lois, determined to
check the couple in their career of inanity. She went across to a
window and folded her arms on the sill.

The screen of trees that reached like an arm from behind the
house--embracing the lawns, banks and terraces in mild ascent--had
darkened, deepening into a forest. Like splintered darkness, branches
pierced the faltering dusk of leaves. Evening drenched the trees; the
beeches were soundless cataracts. Behind the trees, pressing in from
the open and empty country like an invasion, the orange bright sky
crept and smouldered. Firs, bearing up to pierce, melted against the
brightness. Somewhere, there was a sunset in which the mountains lay
like glass.

Dark had so gained the trees that Lois, turning back from the window,
was surprised at how light the room was. Day, still coming in from the
fields by the south windows, was stored in the mirrors, in the sheen
of the wall-paper, so that the room still shone. Mr. Montmorency had
come in and was standing where she had stood, his shoulders against the
mantelpiece.

“We can sit out on the steps to-night, can’t we?” persisted Lois. And
because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without
her, she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a
particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy
of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the
tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. “I
must break in on all this,” she thought as she looked round the room.

“Do you still go to sleep after dinner?” she asked Mr. Montmorency.

“It’s a thing that I never have done,” he said, annoyed.

“But it’s what I chiefly remember about you.”

“I’m afraid,” he said, tolerant, “you are mixing me up with some one
else.”

“Listen, Richard,” said Francie; “are you sure we will not be shot at
if we sit out late on the steps?”

Sir Richard laughed and they all shared his amusement. “We never have
yet, not even with soldiers here and Lois dancing with officers up and
down the avenue. You’re getting very English, Francie! Isn’t Francie
getting very English? Do you think maybe we ought to put sandbags
behind the shutters when we shut up at nights?”

“No, but Richard, seriously--” began Francie then, as they all
stared, laughed and had to give up and go on laughing. Now in County
Carlow they had said things were bad round here, that she made a grave
mistake in coming at all. But then, as Richard would certainly say,
that was County Carlow all over.

Lady Naylor came in arm-in-arm with Laurence and said they were all
very punctual. “The gong’s only gone three minutes, also I could be
certain I never heard any of you go down. But I was delayed, as I told
Richard to tell you. Shall we go in?”

“Francie wants to know,” said Sir Richard, offering Francie his arm,
“if we haven’t got a machine-gun?”

“Ah, you’re too bad!”

“_Do_ you dance on the avenue?” said Mr. Montmorency to Lois.

“Only once, for a bet. I and a man called Mr. Lesworth danced to the
white gate, and the man that we had the bet with walked after us
carrying the gramophone. But naturally, I don’t as a rule.”

“It would come hard on your shoes, I expect,” said Mr. Montmorency
distantly.

“And the men we know can’t get over here in the evening, now.”

“Still, I expect you have a very gay time,” said Mr. Montmorency, and
turned away.

In the dining-room, the little party sat down under the crowd of
portraits. Under that constant interchange from the high-up faces
staring across--now fading each to a wedge of fawn-colour, and each
looking out from a square of darkness tunnelled into the wall--Sir
Richard and Lady Naylor, their nephew, niece and old friends had a
thin, over-bright look, seemed on the air of the room unconvincingly
painted, startled, transitory. Spaced out accurately round the enormous
table--whereon, in what was left of the light, damask birds and roses
had an unearthly shimmer--each so enisled and distant that a remark
at random, falling short of a neighbour, seemed a cry of appeal, the
six, in spite of an emphasis of speech and gesture they unconsciously
heightened, dwindled personally. While above, the immutable figures,
shedding on to the wash of dusk smiles, frowns, every vestige of
personality, kept only attitude--an outmoded modestness, a quirk or a
flare, hand slipped under a ruffle or spread airily over the cleft of
a bosom--cancelled time, negatived personality and made of the lower
cheerfulness, dining and talking, the faintest exterior friction.

In Laurence’s plate of clear soup six peas floated. Six accurate
spoonfuls, each with a pea in it, finished the soup. He glanced right
in his aunt’s direction, left in Mrs. Montmorency’s: both were talking.
Mr. Montmorency, listening to Lady Naylor, seemed to be looking across
at Laurence, but he sat with his back to the light so that Laurence,
short-sighted, could not be sure--he preferred uncertainty.

Lady Naylor spoke of the way things were, with her pointed spoon poised
over her plate. She noticed the others were waiting, and with a last
bright emphatic look in Hugo’s direction bent to finish her soup. He
said at once to Laurence: “And what do _you_ think of things?”

“Things? Over here?”

“Yes--yes.”

“Seem to be closing in,” said Laurence, crumbling his bread detachedly;
“rolling up rather.”

“Ah!” nodded Mr. Montmorency, in significant comprehension.

“Ssh!” exclaimed Lady Naylor, running out a hand at both of them over
the cloth. She frowned, with a glance at the parlourmaid. “Now you
mustn’t make Laurence exaggerate. All young men from Oxford exaggerate.
All Laurence’s friends exaggerate: I have met them.”

“If you have noticed it,” said her nephew, “it is probably so.”

Lois, on his other side, leant eagerly to Mr. Montmorency. “If you are
interested, would you care to come and dig for guns in the plantation?
Or if I dig, will you come as a witness? Three of the men on the place
here swear there are guns buried in the lower plantation. Michael
Keelan swears he was going through there, late, and saw men digging. I
asked him, ‘What were they like?’ and he said, ‘The way they would be,’
and I said, why didn’t he ask them what they were doing, and he said,
‘Sure, why would I; didn’t I see them digging, and they with spades?’
So it appears he fled back the way he had come.”

“--Ah, that’s nonsense now!” Sir Richard exploded. “Michael would see
anything: he is known to have seen a ghost. I will not have the men
talking, and at all accounts I won’t have them listened to.”

“All the same,” pursued Lois, “I feel that one ought to dig. If there
is nothing there I can confound Michael for the good of his soul, and
if there should be guns, Uncle Richard, just think of finding them! And
surely we ought to know.”

“And why would we want to know? You’ll have the place full of soldiers,
trampling the young trees. There’s been enough damage in that
plantation with the people coming to sight-see: all Michael’s friends.
Now I won’t have digging at all: do you understand?” said Sir Richard,
flushed.

Francie felt torn in herself, dividedly sympathetic. “I expect one
can’t be too careful.... The poor young little trees ... and besides,”
she added to Lois, “one might blow oneself up.”

“This country,” continued Sir Richard, “is altogether too full of
soldiers, with nothing to do but dance and poke old women out of their
beds to look for guns. It’s unsettling the people, naturally. The fact
is, the Army’s got into the habit of fighting and doesn’t know what
else to do with itself, and also the Army isn’t at all what it used
to be. I was held up yesterday for I wouldn’t like to say how long,
driving over to Ballyhinch, by a thing like a coffee-pot backing in and
out of a gate, with a little brute of a fellow bobbing in and out at
me from under a lid at the top. I kept my temper, but I couldn’t help
telling him _I_ didn’t know what the country was coming to--and just
when we’d got the horses accustomed to motors. ‘You’ll do no good,’ I
told him, ‘in this unfortunate country by running about in a thing like
a coffee-pot.’ And those patrols in lorries run you into a ditch as
soon as look at you. They tell me there’s a great deal of socialism now
in the British Army.”

“Well, it’s difficult for them all,” said his wife, pacific, “and
they’re doing their best, I think. The ones who come over here seem
quite pleasant.”

“What regiment have you now at Clonmore?”

“The 1st Rutlands.”

“And there are some Field Gunners and Garrison Gunners too,” added
Lois. “Most people seem to prefer the Garrison Gunners.”

“The Garrison Gunners dance better,” said Laurence to Mrs. Montmorency.
“It would be the greatest pity if we were to become a republic and all
these lovely troops were taken away.”

“Fool,” said Lois across the flowers. Mr. Montmorency looked at her in
surprise.

Lady Naylor continued: “From all the talk, you might think almost
anything was going to happen, but we never listen. I have made
it a rule not to talk, either. In fact, if you want rumours, we
must send you over to Castle Trent. And I’m afraid also the Careys
are incorrigible.... Oh yes, Hugo, it’s all very well to talk of
disintegration; of course there is a great deal of disintegration in
England and on the Continent. But one does wonder sometimes whether
there’s really much there to disintegrate.... I dare say there may
have been.... And if you talk to the people they’ll tell you the
whole thing’s nonsense: and after all what is a country if it isn’t
the people? For instance, I had a long conversation this morning with
Mrs. Pat Gegan, who came down about the apples--you remember her,
Hugo, don’t you, she always asks after you: she was really delighted
to hear you were coming back--‘It is the way the young ones do be a
bit wild,’ she said, and I really agreed with her. She said young
people were always the same, and wasn’t it the great pity. She is a
most interesting woman: she thinks a great deal. But then our people
do think. Now have you ever noticed the English? I remember a year ago
when I was staying with Anna Partridge in Bedfordshire--she is always
so full of doing things in the village, little meetings and so on.
Well, I went to one of her meetings, and really--those village women
sitting round in hats and so obviously despising her! And not a move
on their faces. I said to her afterwards: ‘I do think you’re splendid,
Anna, the way you throw yourself into things--but really what you can
do with people with so little brain--’ She seemed quite annoyed
and said that at least they were loyal. I said they hadn’t got any
alternative, and if they had an alternative I didn’t suppose they’d
see it. She said they had hearts of gold if they didn’t wear them on
their sleeves, and I said I thought it was a pity they didn’t--it would
have brightened them up a bit. She said that at least one knew where
one was with them, and I said I wouldn’t live among people who weren’t
human. Then I thought it seemed a shame to unsettle her, if she really
likes living in England.... Oh, and I said to Mrs. Gegan this morning:
‘Some of your friends would like us to go, you know,’ and she got so
indignant she nearly wept. And the Trents were telling me-- Oh, Hugo,
the Trents are coming over to tennis to-morrow, specially for you and
Francie. And the Thompsons are coming, and I believe the Hartigans. The
Hartigan girls are still all there, you’ll be surprised to hear. Nobody
seems to marry them--and oh, a Colonel and Mrs. Boatley are coming, and
three or four of the Rutlands--”

“Five,” said Lois.

“--Anyhow, several Rutlands. Every one’s so delighted to hear that you
and Francie are back.”

“The Trents,” said Lois to Mr. Montmorency, with indignation, “swear
that you and they are related. But you are not, surely? It is a perfect
obsession of theirs.”

When he said he supposed that he was, through an aunt’s marriage,
she became pensive. It seemed odd that even the Trents should have a
closer claim than she had. Though it was she who had been humming with
agitation the whole morning. The sweet-peas in the urn before them bore
evidence to her agitation: they all slanted to the west like a falling
haystack. It was true she now hoped nothing more of him, but he still
was in shadow, faintly, from the kindly monolith of her childhood.
What he might have been, what he persisted in being, met in her mind
with a jar, with a grate of disparity. The face she had watched
sleeping--wiped clear of complexity, quiet but so communicative in
stillness that, watching, she seemed to have shared in some kind of
suspense, stayed--like the bright blur from looking too long at a
lamp--over the face now turned to her, intelligent, dulled, with its
sub-acid smile. She was likely to think of him now as a limitation,
Mrs. Montmorency’s limitation; something about Mrs. Montmorency that
was a pity. The Trents could have him.

“I expect,” she said slightingly, “you are related to every one.”

“The longer one lives in this country,” he all too agreeably said, “the
more likely that seems.”

Yet she had been certain she felt him looking at her while she argued
with Uncle Richard about the guns. Seeking a likeness, perhaps. It was
this consciousness that had lent her particular fervour--though she was
interested in the guns. Though when she turned round his profile was
turned away--in, it seemed, the most scornful repudiation.

He had, as a matter of fact, been looking at her, but without intention
and with a purely surface observation of detail. When she turned
away, light from behind her ran a finger round the curve of her jaw.
When she turned his way, light took the uncertain, dinted cheek-line
where, under the eyes, flesh was patted on delicately over the rise of
the bone. Her eyes, long and soft-coloured, had the intense brimming
wandering look of a puppy’s; in repose her lips met doubtfully, in
a never-determined line, so that she never seemed to have quite
finished speaking. Her face was long, her nose modelled down from the
bridge then finished off softly and bluntly as by an upward flick
of the sculptor’s thumb. Her chin had emphasis, seemed ready for
determination. He supposed that unformed, anxious to make an effect,
she would marry early.

“Danielstown can’t have been so exciting when you were here before,”
said Lois to Mrs. Montmorency.

But Mrs. Montmorency, in an absence of mind amounting to exaltation,
had soared over the company. She could perform at any moment,
discomfitingly, these acts of levitation. She was staring into one of
the portraits.




                                    IV


LOIS was sent upstairs for the shawls; it appeared that a touch of dew
on the bare skin might be fatal to Lady Naylor or Mrs. Montmorency.
On the stairs, her feet found their evening echoes; she dawdled,
listening. When she came down everybody was on the steps--at the top,
on the wide stone plateau--the parlourmaid looking for somewhere to put
the coffee tray. Mrs. Montmorency sat in the long chair; her husband
was tucking a carriage rug round her knees. “If you do that,” Lois
could not help saying, “she won’t be able to walk about, which is the
best part of sitting out.”

No one took any notice: Mr. Montmorency went on tucking.

“Haven’t you got a wrap for yourself?” said Lady Naylor. Lois took a
cushion and sat on the top step with her arms crossed, stroking her
elbows. “I shouldn’t sit there,” her aunt continued; “at this time of
night stone will strike up through anything.”

“If you don’t get rheumatism now,” added Francie, “you will be storing
up rheumatism.”

“It will be my rheumatism,” said Lois as gently as possible, but added
inwardly: “After you’re both dead.” A thought that fifty years hence
she might well, if she wished, be sitting here on the steps,--with
or without rheumatism--having penetrated thirty years deeper ahead
into Time than they could, gave her a feeling of mysteriousness and
destination. And she was fitted for this by being twice as complex as
their generation--for she must be: double as many people having gone to
the making of her.

Laurence, looking resentfully round for somewhere to sit--she had taken
the only cushion--said: “I suppose you think ants cannot run up your
legs if you cannot see them?”

Mr. Montmorency surprised her by offering a cigarette. He had a theory,
he said, that ants did not like cigarette smoke. The air was so quiet
now, the flame ran up his match without a tremble. “The ants are
asleep,” she said, “they disappear into the cracks of the steps. They
don’t bite, either; but the idea is horrid.”

“Don’t you want a chair?” When she said she didn’t, he settled back in
his own. Creaks ran through the wicker, discussing him, then all was
quiet. He was not due to leave the ship in which they were all rushing
out into Time till ten years after the others, though it was to the
others that he belonged. Turning half round, she watched light breathe
at the tips of the cigarettes; it seemed as though everybody were
waiting. Night now held the trees with a toneless finality. The sky
shone, whiter than glass, fainting down to the fretted leaf-line, but
was being steadily drained by the dark below, to which the grey of the
lawns, like smoke, as steadily mounted. The house was highest of all
with toppling immanence, like a cliff.

“I don’t think,” said Francie, “I remember anything so--so quiet as
evenings here.”

“Trees,” said Laurence, shifting his pipe. His shirt-front was high
above them, he stood by the door with his foot on the scraper.

“This time to-morrow,” said Lady Naylor, “we shall want to be
quiet--after the tennis party.” She let out a sigh that hung in the
silence, like breath in cold air.

“Oh yes, the party! The tennis party ...”

“Francie, did I tell you who were coming?”

“You told her,” said Laurence. “I heard you.”

“It is the people who don’t play tennis who make it so tiring.”

Something about the way, the resigned way, Francie’s hands lay out on
the rug gave her the look of an invalid. “It is a good thing,” said
Sir Richard, “you two never went out to Canada. I never liked the idea
myself; I was very much against it at the time, if you remember.”

“I was divided about it myself,” said Hugo. “It seemed worth trying,
and yet there was so much against it. I don’t know that I should have
done very much good--I wonder.”

They wondered with him, with degrees of indifference. Lois stroked her
dress--the feel of the stuff was like cobwebs, sticky and damp. There
must be dew falling.

“Oh!” cried Francie. “_Listen!_”

She had so given herself to the silence that the birth of sound, after
which the others were still straining, had shocked her nerves like a
blow. They looked, from the steps, over a bay of fields, between the
plantations, that gave on a sea of space. Far east, beyond the demesne:
a motor, straining cautiously out of the silence. A grind, an anguish
of sound as it took the hill.

“Patrols,” said Laurence.

Hugo reached out and pressed a hand on to Francie’s rug. “Patrols,” he
told her, translating the information.

Sir Richard explained severely: “Out every night--not always in this
direction.”

“They’re early; it’s half-past nine. Now I wonder ...”

The sound paused, for a moment a pale light showed up the sky in
darkness. Then behind the screen of trees at the skyline, demesne
boundary, the sound moved shakily, stoopingly, like some one running
and crouching behind a hedge. The jarring echoed down the spines of the
listeners. They heard with a sense of complicity.

“A furtive lorry is a sinister thing.”

“Laurence, it isn’t furtive!” said. Lady Naylor. “Can’t you be
ordinary? If it wouldn’t be taken in some absurd kind of way as a
demonstration, I should ask the poor fellows in to have coffee.”

“They’re careful enough,” said Hugo impatiently. It seemed that the
lorry took pleasure in crawling with such a menace along the boundary,
marking the scope of peace of this silly island, undermining solitude.
In the still night sound had a breathlessness, as of intention.

“The roads are so rough,” said Lois: she could see the wary load
lurching into the hedges. “I wonder now,” she added, “who is with the
patrol to-night?”

“Some one you know?” cried Francie. But Sir Richard, who did not like
his friends to be distracted from him by lorries any more than by
introspection or headaches or the observation of nature, bore this down
with one of his major chords:

“The lower tennis court, Hugo”--waving sideways into the darkness--“is
not what it used to be. Some cattle got on to it after the rain and
destroyed it. It’s had rolling enough to level a mountain, but it won’t
be the same for a long time. D’you remember the fours we had on that
court that summer--wasn’t it nineteen-six--you and I and O’Donnell and
poor John Trent?”

“I do. Now was it James O’Donnell or Peter that went to Ceylon?”

“That was a great summer; I never remember a summer like it. We had the
hay in by the end of June.”

The lorry ground off east towards Ballyhinch; silence sifting down
on its tracks like sand. Their world was clear of it and a pressure
lightened. Once more they could have heard a leaf turn in the trees
or a bird shifting along a branch. But they found it was now very
dark. Francie shivered, and Lady Naylor, rising formally, said she
thought they should go in. “Poor John Trent,” she added, gathering up
her cushions, “never got over that trouble he had with the Sheehans
over the Madder fishing. It went into court, you know, and of course
he lost. We always told him to keep it out of court. He was very
obstinate.”

“He was indeed,” said Sir Richard. “He made an enemy of Sheehan and
it’s not a good thing to have made an enemy. Though of course he’s
dead nowadays, so it may not matter.”

“It may to the Archie Trents.... Laurence, help Uncle Richard in with
the long chair, and remember to bring in your own chair afterwards.”

“I never had a chair.”

“Oh, they haven’t lighted the lamp in the hall. That is too bad! I am
lost without Sarah--do you remember Sarah, Francie? She died, you know.”

Lois, sitting still among rising, passing and vaguely searching
figures, cried: “But it’s only just beginning! You’re missing the whole
point. I shall walk up the avenue.”

Francie went in, groping; trailing her rug. The three men, carrying
wicker chairs, converged at the door: the chairs jostled. They all
put them down and apologized. Lois repeated: “_I_ shall walk up the
avenue.” But having arranged an order of procedure they all passed on
into the house, creaking and bumping. She walked down the steps alone:
she had wanted to be alone, but to be regretted.

“Mind you don’t get locked out!” her uncle shouted after her. The glass
doors shut with a rattle.

Lois walked alone up the avenue, where she had danced with Gerald.
She thought what a happy night that had been, and how foolish Mr.
Montmorency now thought them. He had seemed annoyed at her being young
when he wasn’t. She could not hope to explain that her youth seemed
to her also rather theatrical and that she was only young in that way
because people expected it. She had never refused a rôle. She could
not forgo that intensification, that kindling of her personality at
being considered very happy and reckless, even if she were not. She
could not hope to assure him she was not enjoying anything he had
missed, that she was now unconvinced and anxious but intended to be
quite certain, by the time she was his age, that she had once been
happy. For to explain this--were explanation possible to so courteous,
ironical and unfriendly a listener--would, she felt, be disloyal to
herself, to Gerald, to an illusion both were called upon to maintain.

Just by the lime, in that dancing night, she had missed a step and
sagged on his arm, which tightened. His hand slid up between her
shoulders; then, as she steadied back to the rhythm, down again. They
had set out laughing, noisy and conscious, but soon had to save their
breath. Gerald’s cheek, within an inch of her own, was too near to see.
All the way up, he had not missed a step; he was most dependable. And
remembering how the family had just now gone into the house--so flatly,
so unregrettingly, slamming the glass doors--she felt _that_ was what
she now wanted most--his eagerness and constancy. She felt, like a
steady look from him, the perfectness of their being together.

“Oh, I do want you!”

But he was very musical, he conducted a jazz band they had at the
barracks: while reaching out in her thoughts she remembered, the band
would be practising now. She was disappointed. To a line of tune the
thought flung her, she danced on the avenue.

A shrubbery path was solid with darkness, she pressed down it. Laurels
breathed coldly and close: on her bare arms the tips of leaves
were timid and dank, like tongues of dead animals. Her fear of the
shrubberies tugged at its chain, fear behind reason, fear before her
birth; fear like the earliest germ of her life that had stirred in
Laura. She went forward eagerly, daring a snap of the chain, singing;
a hand to the thump of her heart, dramatic with terror. She thought of
herself as forcing a pass. In her life--deprived as she saw it--there
was no occasion for courage, which like an unused muscle slackened and
slept.

High up a bird shrieked and stumbled down through dark, tearing the
leaves. Silence healed, but kept a scar of horror. The shuttered-in
drawing-room, the family sealed in lamplight, secure and bright like
flowers in a paper-weight--were desirable, worth much of this to
regain. Fear curled back from the carpet-border.... Now, on the path:
grey patches worse than the dark: they slipped up her dress knee-high.
The laurels deserted her groping arm. She had come to the holly, where
two paths crossed.

First, she did not hear footsteps coming, and as she began to notice
the displaced darkness thought what she dreaded was coming, was there
within her--she was indeed clairvoyant, exposed to horror and going to
see a ghost. Then steps, hard on the smooth earth; branches slipping
against a trench-coat. The trench-coat rustled across the path ahead,
to the swing of a steady walker. She stood by the holly immovable,
blotted out in her black, and there passed within reach of her hand,
with the rise and fall of a stride, a resolute profile, powerful as a
thought. In gratitude for its fleshliness, she felt prompted to make
some contact: not to be known seemed like a doom: extinction.

“It’s a fine night,” she would have liked to observe; or, to engage his
sympathies: “Up Dublin!” or even--since it was in her uncle’s demesne
she was straining under a holly--boldly--“What do you want?”

It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry; down from the
mountains, making a short cut through their demesne. Here was something
else that she could not share. She could not conceive of her country
emotionally: it was a way of living, an abstract of several landscapes,
or an oblique frayed island, moored at the north but with an air of
being detached and washed out west from the British coast.

Quite still, she let him go past in contemptuous unawareness. His
intentions burnt on the dark an almost visible trail; he might well
have been a murderer he seemed so inspired. The crowd of trees,
straining up from the passive disputed earth, each sucking up and
exhaling the country’s essence--swallowed him finally. She thought:
“Has he come for the guns?” A man in a trench-coat had passed without
seeing her: that was what it amounted to.

She ran back to tell, in excitement. Below, the house waited; vast on
its west side, with thin yellow lines round the downstairs shutters.
It had that excluded, sad, irrelevant look outsides of houses take in
the dark. Inside, they would all be drawing up closer to one another,
tricked by the half-revelation of lamplight. “Compassed about,”
thought Lois, “by so great a cloud of witnesses....” Chairs standing
round dejectedly; upstairs, the confidently waiting beds; mirrors
vacant and startling; books read and forgotten, contributing no more to
life; dinner-table certain of its regular compulsion; the procession of
elephants that throughout uncertain years had not broken file.

But as Lois went up the steps breathlessly, her adventure began to
diminish. It held ground for a moment as she saw the rug dropped in the
hall by Mrs. Montmorency sprawl like a body across the polish. Then
confidence disappeared, in a waver of shadow, among the furniture.
Conceivably, she had just surprised life at a significant angle in the
shrubbery. But it was impossible to speak of this. At a touch from
Aunt Myra adventure became literary, to Uncle Richard it suggested an
inconvenience; a glance from Mr. Montmorency or Laurence would make her
encounter sterile.

But what seemed most probable was that they would not listen.... She
lighted her candle and went up to bed--uncivilly, without saying good
night to anyone. Her Uncle Richard, she afterwards heard, was obliged
to sit up till twelve o’clock. He had not been told she was in, so did
not think it right to lock up the house.




                                    V


GERALD walked across the lawn to the lower tennis court, swinging
his racquet. Once he put up a hand and touched the back of his head,
but with assurance: it was perfectly smooth and round. His flannels
were gold-white in the sun; he almost shone. He smiled everywhere. It
was nonsense for him to pretend he did not care for parties; he went
everywhere, he liked to go out every day.

Everybody was sitting or standing about where the green slatted seats
were, at the edge of the shade. No one was playing yet; there were
two courts and eighteen players; they were discussing who was to play
first, their voices sharp with renunciation. Lois was nowhere; Laurence
sat on the ground smoking and taking no part in the argument. Lady
Naylor talked eagerly to a number of guests who, holding up parasols
very straight in the unusual sunshine and wearing an air of vague
happiness, were waiting for play to begin before settling down to
conversation. Livvy Thompson was organizing: as Lois’ friend she felt
this devolved upon her in Lois’ absence; also, she liked organizing.
“You and you,” she said shrilly, stabbing the air within an inch of
each player’s chest with a sharp forefinger, “and why not _you_ and
_you?_” But before she had ever finished arranging the second four,
the first would become involved again.

“Oh, Mr. Lesworth,” cried Lady Naylor, and waited for him to approach,
“if you really are coming out, would you bring some more rugs for some
more of the people to sit on?”

He turned and went back to the house. It seemed very odd about
Lois--now where could she be?

Livvy Thompson looked after him anxiously. Had not Mr. Armstrong come
also? During this temporary absence of her attention two fours arranged
themselves and walked hurriedly out to take possession of the courts.

The hall, very dark after sunshine, was full of wraps and racquet
presses; shoes had wandered away from each other under the chairs.
The rest of Gerald’s party--they had all driven out from Clonmore in
a hired motor--were still there, waiting for Mrs. Vermont. Captain
Vermont and David Armstrong stood holding her things while she powdered
her nose with difficulty before an antique mirror.

“Aren’t women awful?” she cried gaily, as Gerald rejoined them. She
knew the subalterns hated going about without her. “My dears, I do
wish I knew if we really were asked. Lois is so--I mean, well, you
know--vague, isn’t she?”

“Well, they wouldn’t mind, anyhow,” said David, and tried not to sound
proprietary.

“Aren’t they hospitable!” Betty Vermont was not disappointed in Ireland
after all. She had never before been to so many large houses with so
small a sense of her smallness. Of course, they were all very shabby
and not artistic at all. Mrs. Vermont used to say she longed to be
turned loose in any one of them with a paint-pot--white--and a few
hundred yards of some really nice cretonne from Barker’s.

“Half Ireland is here,” said David, looking out at the crowd of cars on
the gravel-sweep. “I doubt if we get any tennis.”

“Ah, well, David, there’s plenty of that at the club. Now, Gerald,
don’t stand there glaring! You _do_ disapprove of powder, you unkind
wretch!”

“Rather not,” said Gerald, beaming. But all the same he did like girls
to have natural complexions--he was perfectly certain Lois’s was. He
was carrying all the rugs he could find slung over his shoulder and
looked, she informed him, just like a Bedouin. This was not a thing she
could have said to every man, because really the East had become so
very suggestive. But he was the dearest boy, so absolutely nice-minded.
They all went out.

“There seem to be many more people here than I thought we’d asked,”
Lady Naylor was saying to Mrs. Carey of Mount Isabel. “Lois asks
people she meets at the Clonmore club, and then forgets. I have been
rather wondering about the raspberries; I’ve sent her out to the
garden to see about getting in some more. Colonel and Mrs. Boatley
are coming--she was a Vere Scott, a Fermanagh Vere Scott.... Why is
it that the Hartigans never will talk to men? I never think they give
themselves a chance, do you? Oh, Mr. Lesworth, how kind to think of
bringing the rugs out! And now there doesn’t seem anyone left to sit on
them.... Look, would you break up that party of girls on the bank; I
don’t think they seem to be sitting on anything, and anyhow they look
dull and would like to talk. And I am sure they’d be glad if you’d
smoke--the midges are terrible. Who is that girl in pale blue who’s
just coming out?”

“Mrs. Vermont. She--er--I think Miss Farquar--”

“Oh, well, never mind; it’s a pleasant surprise.” She went over to Mrs.
Vermont with enthusiasm. “I’m so glad you could come; it’s delightful.”

Gerald looked round everybody again, carefully. Then he respectfully
displaced the Miss Hartigans, spread out a rug on the bank and sat down
between them. He was at a disadvantage, he could not remember if he
had ever been introduced to them, whereas they were perfectly certain
he had been. They were pleased at his coming, though on the other hand
they were suffering so terribly from the midges that what they wanted
most at the moment was to scratch their legs peacefully.

“I call this a frightfully good party,” said Gerald, breezily.

“Yes, it’s most enjoyable,” agreed Norah Hartigan.

“I don’t think there’s anything like these tennis parties you have in
Ireland.”

“We have never been to tennis parties in England,” replied Doreen.

“Oh, you must certainly come over.”

“I dare say we should feel strange,” said Norah and her sister agreed
with her. Gerald smiled from one to the other so encouragingly that
they told him how a sister of theirs, who was not here to-day, had
once stayed for quite a long time near London, and had been taken by
an aunt, who was rather what they would call a London Society sort of
person, to a very fashionable party--in South Kensington it had been.
But their sister had not cared for the party, she thought the English
unnatural and said it was extraordinary how their voices sounded when
they were all shut up in the one room. “But excuse me,” concluded the
elder Miss Hartigan, turning away because she was afraid the talk was
becoming personal and scratching her ankle as discreetly as possible,
“we should not say this to you.”

“It was splendid of you to forget I was English. Well, we shall all be
leaving you soon, I dare say; all we jolly old army of occupation.”

“Oh, one wouldn’t like to call you _that_,” said Miss Hartigan,
deprecatingly.

“--As soon as we’ve lost this jolly old war.”

“Oh, but one wouldn’t call it a _war_.”

“If anyone would, we could clean these beggars out in a week.”

“We think it would be a great pity to have a war,” said the Hartigans
firmly. “There’s been enough unpleasantness already, hasn’t there?...
And it would be a shame for you all to go,” added Doreen warmly, but
not too warmly because they were all men. In fact, it was all rather
embarrassing, they fixed their eyes on the players firmly and wished
that the set would finish. They thought how daring it was of Mr.
Lesworth to come so far to a party at all, and only hoped he would not
be shot on the way home; though they couldn’t help thinking how, if he
should be, they would both feel so interesting afterwards. “Poor young
fellow,” they thought with particular tenderness because he was so
good-looking, and neither of them, with this tenderness in their eyes,
dared to look at him.

Livvy was walking along the top of the bank with David Armstrong. She
smiled, with a small tooth over her lower lip; the tip of her nose
quivered downward with feminine sensibility. “It is really a long time
since I have seen you, Mr. Armstrong.”

David was the nicest of all the subalterns; so agreeable. “Why, yes,”
he agreed, “I suppose it really must be.” He glanced at the brim of her
hat and added: “It has certainly seemed an awful long time to me.”

“Oh, you mustn’t say that,” cried Livvy; she blushed to the chin and
laughed.

“_I_ don’t see why I shouldn’t,” said David, alarmed but gratified.

“Well, I mean, you oughtn’t to say it _like_ that!”

“But I can’t help saying what I mean.” His manliness increased with
confusion. “I suppose I am that kind of fellow.”

“You _are_ awful!” Livvy laughed so much from the shock of David’s
behaviour that people sitting along the foot of the bank looked up
expectantly. She would not share him, she hurried him off at an
angle and then continued: “Why were you not at the Mount Isabel
bicycle gymkhana? I understood you to say that you would be. It was
the greatest pity you couldn’t be there, it was a grand gymkhana,
and they had a putting competition too. And they had sentries armed
in the avenue and made twenty-four pounds for the hospital. And the
priest’s niece from Kilnagowan fell off and cut her lip; she bled too
dreadfully, but Doreen Hartigan has her V.A.D. certificate. And two
hundred people sat down to tea--how was it now that you couldn’t be
there?”

“On duty,” said David, and took on a mystic and obstinate look. “I was
up with some of the men and an N.C.O. in those mountains the other side
of the Madder.”

Livvy felt in her spine, running down it from under her waistband, a
sharp little thrill. She felt all the soldiers’ woman, and said in a
glow: “Well, I call that too awfully dangerous.” He told her: “It’s
what we are here for.” They glanced at each other, then both were
embarrassed--and showed it--at what they had seen. She stooped, and her
hat was an elegant mushroom. From David’s complexion blushes cleared
slowly away--the last having never quite vanished into his hair before
another came after it up from his well-fitting collar.

“I can’t think what Lois can be doing.” She peered through gaps in the
shrubbery towards the gate of the garden. This concern for her friend
she put up and twirled like a parasol between them. She sighed: the
expansion of her thin little frame, the rise and fall of her two little
points of bosom were clearly visible under her white silk jersey. Her
panama hat turned down and light tufts of hair came out in fluttering
commas against her cheekbones. From under the brim her eyes looked,
slanting slightly up at the corners, with a veiled preoccupied kind of
inquisitiveness. She was inquisitive as to so many things her friend
Lois hoped one might not have to bother about. David watched her watch
the shrubbery for her friend and thought, with a shock, that this
really did seem a girl he was to be in love with. He had the fatalism
of a recurrent sufferer.

“It will be too bad,” continued Livvy, “if she doesn’t come soon.
You would think she might be picking those raspberries herself. You
see, all the people she asked from Clonmore have come and were not
expected. If she doesn’t come soon I must go--yes, indeed I must,
Mr. Armstrong--and see about the two next fours. You see, her cousin
Laurence is no good for that, he is so intellectual, and Lady Naylor
doesn’t much notice the tennis so long as the party goes off all right.
But it seems too bad she shouldn’t see Mr. Lesworth. I expect Mr.
Lesworth often speaks to you of her, doesn’t he, Mr. Armstrong?”

“Er--I don’t remember, really.”

“I think it’s wonderful to see a man so much in love. I must say I
often wonder what love feels like. I always seem to feel so natural
about the men I know. But I suppose that’s because I am so young--or
perhaps I was born platonic. Do you believe in platonics, Mr.
Armstrong?”

“Plato? Jolly old Grecian--what?”

“No, but listen--do you?”

“Well, what I think,” said David, looking carefully at his racquet
and turning it over and over--“of course it is awfully difficult to
express, but I think the right kind of girl and the right kind of
fellow can be almost anything to each other, if you know what I mean?”

“_I_ think,” said Livvy, “you put it rather wonderfully.” She suddenly
waved her racquet. “Ah--there’s Lois!”

Lois came down the shrubbery path from the garden startled, as if at
her own great speed, flushed and visibly breathless. A pink unbuttoned
cardigan slipped away at the shoulders, she had a hand in both the
pockets to keep it on. Her hat flapped back, it rose above her face
in surprise, like a wave. Behind her the bushes stirred in an almost
visible backwash. Over the laurels, cropped knee-high at the back of
the tennis court, her body rose and dipped with her long steps.

“Ah, here she is!” exclaimed several people, and all looked up the
bank uncritically and kindly. The dark air of the shrubbery glittered
with midges; she jerked her hands from her pockets and waved her way
through. Chinks of sunlight darted up her like mice and hesitated away
like butterflies. She had been looking down at the party, deployed in
all its promise, with greed and eagerness as at a box of chocolates;
eyes like a thumb and finger hovering to selection. Now, engaged by its
look, she became all profile; her step flattened, she would have liked
to crawl. She was, as Mr. Montmorency had noticed, very self-conscious.

The Hartigans said to Gerald: “Here comes Lois; isn’t she very
sweet-looking!” They smiled at each other across him.

He said “Rather!” pocketing their tribute gratefully, with simplicity,
as a small boy pockets a tip. His directness baffled them, they were
shocked--but he thought how nice they were. In his world affections
were rare and square--four-square--occurring like houses in a
landscape, unrelated and positive, though with sometimes a large bright
looming--as of the sunned west face of Danielstown over the tennis
courts. He did not conceive of love as a nervous interchange but as
something absolute, out of the scope of thought, beyond himself, matter
for a confident outward rather than anxious inward looking. He had
sought and was satisfied with a few--he thought final--repositories
for his emotions: his mother, country, dog, school, a friend or two,
now--crowningly--Lois. Of these he asked only that they should be
quiet and positive, not impinged upon, not breaking boundaries from
their generous allotment. His life was a succession of practical
adjustments, into which the factor of personality did not enter at
all. His reserve--to which one was apt to accord a too sensitive
reverence--was an affair of convenience rather than protection. Pressed
for a statement, he could have said, “I love her,” to the Hartigans,
Mrs. Carey, anyone there, without uneasiness, without a sense of the
words’ vibrations or alarm at a loud impact on something hollow. So he
looked up the bank at Lois, while the Hartigans watched him.

Mr. Montmorency sat on the ground with his knees apart, holding his
ankles limply. His grey flannel coat-collar was turned up over his
white shirt, as though a strong wind were blowing. He was being talked
to by ladies who sat above him on high green chairs, and though he
looked up to answer, it was never higher than their knees. He had more
than ever his waxen blinking look, as though exposed unnaturally to the
sunshine. His nostrils contracted slightly, as though the smell drawn
up from the roots of the grass in a perpetual hot shimmer were more
offensive than he cared to explain. He was to play in the next set,
and Laurence looked forward to a melancholy exhibition of departed
proficiency. A wiry tenseness and setting of teeth there would be,
Laurence anticipated, then balls going straight and cleanly into the
net. He would be the magnificent player of ten years ago, with little
painful grunts as point after point was given away. Laurence guessed
that Mr. Montmorency hated parties and conversation as much as he
himself did, but being less adept at evasion or honouring less fiercely
the virginity of his intelligence, could not escape from talking and
being talked to.

Laurence achieved this escape by sitting always with a social alert
expression between two groups, when one tried to claim him he could
affect to be engaged by the other.

A net had been carefully stretched behind the seats to prevent balls
going through to the shrubbery. But it was full of rents, and these
the balls, driven with force from the further back line, discovered
unerringly. To meet these deficiencies children up from the lodge were
on duty in the shrubbery; they stared and rambled, pushing among the
laurels. They got their teas, an excellent view of the party and a
halfpenny for every ball they recovered. Those who did not find any
balls and seemed disappointed were given halfpennies also. So why, as
Lady Naylor said, bother? She hated to see her guests go round the net,
smearing their nice white flannels.

But now, as three balls in succession fled through the leaves, she
broke off a conversation and cried: This was too much! Would some kind
person--she looked at Laurence--go round and help? He rose, reluctant:
simultaneously Mr. Montmorency went gratefully round the net at the
other end. He was followed by an anxious little boy called Hercules,
the only child among the guests and gravely _de trop_. They all three
met in the middle.

Laurence said--beating the bushes vaguely--“Imagine, sir, a small
resurrection day, an intimate thing-y one, when the woods should
give up their tennis balls and the bundles of hay their needles: the
beaches all their engagement rings and the rivers their cigarette
cases and some watches. The sea’s too general, an affair of furniture
and large boilers, it could wait with the graves for the big day....
Yes, Hercules, that is a tennis ball, but it is pre-war. Put it back
in the rabbit hole for the children to find; it is worth a halfpenny
to them.... Last term I dropped a cigarette case into the Cher, from
the bridge at Parson’s Pleasure. It was a gold one, left over from
an uncle, flat and thin and curved, for a not excessive smoker. It
was from the days when they wore opera cloaks and mashed, and killed
ladies. It was very period, very virginal; I called it Henry James; I
loved it. I want to see it rush up out of the Cher, very pale, with
eyeballs, like in the Tate Gallery. It wants a woman to be interested
in a day like that, to organize; perhaps the Virgin Mary? Don’t you
think, sir?”

Mr. Montmorency, startled at this address, replied: “I have never been
to the Tate Gallery.”

“Talking of being virginal, do you ever notice this country? Doesn’t
sex seem irrelevant?”

“There certainly are a great many unmarried women,” said Mr.
Montmorency, looking doubtfully through the net at the Miss Hartigans.

“It is: ‘Ah, why would we?’ And indeed why should they? There is no
reason why one should not, so one never does. It applies to everything.
And children seem in every sense of the word to be inconceivable.”

“My mother has five,” said Hercules, “I am the youngest. Hercules is a
family name because I am the only boy, but when I go to school I shall
be called Richard after my godfather, as everybody says that Hercules
even as an initial would be such a disadvantage to me, though not
nearly so bad as being afraid of bats.”

“I wonder you aren’t at school now,” said Mr. Montmorency.

“It would be holidays now anyhow, so I should be bound to be here. That
is my eldest sister, playing tennis. They do not see how I can possibly
go to school till I have got over being afraid of bats. Besides, I am
using up the end of my sisters’ governess.”

“Nobody could possibly be sorrier for you than I am, Hercules,” said
Laurence. “This is an unreal party.”

“Well, nobody brought you, I suppose,” said Hercules.

The strong and dreadful smell of laurels made them all irritable.
Hercules tore off the tips of bland leaves which kept slapping
against his forehead. Laurence came with a ball on his racquet to Mr.
Montmorency and said: “I am sure this is one that you lost with Uncle
Richard and poor John Trent and the man who did not go to Ceylon in the
summer of ’06.”

“Whereas, I did not go to Canada.”

“No, you never did, did you?”

Lady Naylor came and looked at them through the netting. “If between
you you cannot find any balls,” she said, “Laurence, you had better
please fetch that other box from the back hall. They are beginning a
new set with only three.”

“I have two here that seem quite clean, but they haven’t much bounce,”
said Hercules.

“Oh, that is splendid, you are a good little boy!” She took the balls
from him through a hole. “Here are a nice lot to go on with,” she
called out hopefully, rolling them to the court. Mr. Montmorency and
Laurence went on searching.

“Now take Aunt Myra; what does she think she’s doing?”

“If it comes to that,” said Mr. Montmorency, nettled, “what do you
think _you_’re doing? Why are you here at all if you don’t like it--as
Hercules said? I was happy here at your age, I was full of the place, I
asked nothing better. I ask nothing better now.”

“Oh,” said Laurence.

“However, I have no doubt you are right in being dissatisfied; I dare
say it is progress,” said Mr. Montmorency angrily. “I dare say it is
good for the race.”

Laurence, who did not consider that he had anything to do with the
race, replied with some indignation: “I have no money; where do you
expect me to get any money from? I was to have gone to Spain this month
with a man and last year I should have gone to Italy with another man,
but what do you expect me to go on? I have to eat somwhere, don’t I,
and here it is simply a matter of family feeling.”

“This is one of the balls; I shall throw it over.... I had no idea that
you were such a materialist.”

“I can’t help my stomach. Besides, I like eating, it is so real. But
I should like something else to happen, some crude intrusion of the
actual. I feel all gassy inside from yawning. I should like to be here
when this house burns.”

“Quite impossible; quite unthinkable. Why don’t you fish or
something?... Nonsense!” he added, looking warningly at the house.

“Of course it will, though. And we shall all be so careful not to
notice.”

“Are you the undergraduate of to-day?”

“I should love to be quite, quite abstract.”

Mr. Montmorency, offended by all this clever conversation, felt more
than ever his isolation, his homelessness. Life was to him an affair of
discomfort, but that discomfort should be made articulate seemed to him
shocking. The over-fine machinery of his mind ceaselessly strained and
caught and was agonizingly jerked over details. His refuge was manly
talk: he suspected Laurence. He said: “You are fortunate. There was
never a time when I had not other people to think about.”

Laurence, who immediately thought this womanish, said: “Oh yes, love.”
He flicked out and studied the word indifferently--coin of uncertain
value.

“Not entirely. One had a certain debt ...”

“Oh, yes, yes.”

Laurence became more formal, very much better mannered. He recalled
that the man was married, had given away his integrity, had not even
a bed to himself. The husband, glancing a last time through and under
the bushes, was negligible, diffused even a certain staleness. Laurence
sheered away mentally, moved further off through the shrubbery. He had
been talking foolishly, in his vein of the third or fourth quality, and
regretted now having talked still. He felt there had been something
morbid about his intrusion, as in a visit to a prison.

“I was to have played in that second set,” said Mr. Montmorency. “It
seems to be nearly over: perhaps I shall play in the third.”

“Tea will be coming, never forget tea.” Indeed, a move was being made
to the house already. Tea was too grave an affair to be carried out;
besides, one wasn’t accustomed to stability in the weather.

“Oh, Hugo, come out now, dear,” cried Francie, walking past with Mrs.
Hartigan. “I am sure it doesn’t matter about the balls. And the Trents
have come--don’t you see them? We are just going back to the house to
meet them now.”

“Archie? Splendid!” He burst from the shrubbery at the other side,
gained the path and hurried towards the house. At a turn of the path,
in an arch cut under some holly, he saw Gerald and Lois standing;
talking, looking down earnestly at their racquets. With her head bent,
Lois was like her mother. He stared, then passed them quickly.

But Lois did not notice him going by. She was saying: “I feel certain
you have illusions about me; I don’t believe you know what I’m like
a bit.” And while she spoke she counted the crimson strings in her
racquet: three down, six across.




                                    VI


MRS. VERMONT ate more hot cakes than she cared to remember, because
they were so good and nobody seemed to notice. She went on to chocolate
cake, then to orange layer cake, to which she returned again and again.
An idea she had had, that one should not eat very much when invited
out, languished; she finished up with a plate of raspberries. She put
all thought of her figure resolutely behind her. Mother, of course, had
filled out terribly, but oneself mightn’t.

“Nummy-nummy,” she said, pointing out the raspberries to David
Armstrong who sat beside her. “David have some!”

Livvy Thompson, sitting beyond David, deplored these women who talked
baby-talk. She felt that her own appeal to men was more serious. “Mr.
Armstrong has got to play in the next set,” she said warningly.

“Hoity-toity!” thought Betty Vermont (she never used the expression
aloud, as she was not certain how one pronounced it: it was one of her
inner luxuries). Turning to Mrs. Carey (the Honourable Mrs. Carey), who
sat on her other side, she said frankly:

“Your scrumptious Irish teas make a perfect piggy-wig of me. And
dining-room tea, of course, makes me a kiddy again.”

“Does it really?” said Mrs. Carey, and helped herself placidly to
another slice of the chocolate cake. She thought of Mrs. Vermont
as “a little person” and feared she detected in her a tendency,
common to most English people, to talk about her inside. She often
wondered if the War had not made everybody from England a little
commoner. She added pleasantly: “This chocolate cake is a speciality
of Danielstown’s. I believe it’s a charm that they make it by, not a
recipe.”

“Things do run in families, don’t they? Now I am sure you’ve all got
ghosts.”

“I can’t think of any,” said Mrs. Carey, accepting another cup of tea.
She smiled and nodded across the table to Mrs. Archie Trent, who had
just come in. “We have been much more worried lately by people taking
away our car. Of course it is always brought back again, but one
doesn’t like to think of its being used for nefarious purposes. That is
the worst of a Ford.”

Mrs. Vermont opened her mouth to tell Mrs. Carey the latest Ford story,
then checked herself because in Ireland they seemed to take Fords so
seriously. She observed instead: “All this is terrible for you all,
isn’t it? I do think you’re so sporting the way you just stay where
you are and keep going on. Who would ever have thought the Irish would
turn out so disloyal--I mean, of course, the lower classes! I remember
Mother saying in 1916--you know, when that dreadful rebellion broke
out--she said: ‘This _has_ been a shock to me, I never shall feel the
same about the Irish again.’ You see, she had brought us all up as
kiddies to be so keen on the Irish, and Irish songs. I still have a
little bog-oak pig she brought me back from an exhibition. She always
said they were the most humorous people in the world, and with hearts
of gold. Though of course we had none of us ever been in Ireland.”

“Well, I hope you are pleased with us now you have come,” said Mrs.
Carey hospitably. “I expect you have all been enjoying this lovely
weather?”

“Oh, _well_--you see, we didn’t come over to enjoy ourselves, did we?
We came to take care of all of you--and, of course, we are ever so
glad to be able to do it. Not that I don’t like the country; it’s so
picturesque with those darling mountains and the hens running in and
out of the cottages just the way Mother always said. But, you see, one
can’t help worrying all the time about Timmie--my husband--and all
the boys: out all night sometimes with the patrols or else off in the
mountains.”

“Terrible. And do you find this a tiring climate?”

A word attracted Mrs. Trent’s attention across the table. “Terrible
what?” she said. “Terrible who?” She was youngish, brusque and
dominant; the high pink colour over her face as from riding hard in
a wind gave her a look of zestfulness alarming to Mrs. Vermont. “I
shouldn’t worry,” she said to Mrs. Vermont.

Mrs. Vermont replied with a shade of asperity that it was _they_ who
were in a position to worry and therefore must not. “’Cause _we_’re
here to take care of you!” The remark, caught in a momentary silence
around the table, was received with civility and attention. “That’s
splendid!” said Mrs. Trent heartily. She got up, having finished her
tea rapidly and went to smoke outside. Her husband was M.F.H. and
really, thought Mrs. Vermont, they did not seem to worry about anything
but wire. Mrs. Vermont turned for support to David; his ears were
scarlet, he rapidly stirred his tea.

Five days ago, an R.I.C. barracks at Ballydrum had been attacked and
burnt out after a long defence. Two of the defenders were burnt inside
it, the others shot coming out. The wires were cut, the roads blocked;
there had been no one to send for help, so there was no help for them.
It was this they had all been discussing, at tea, between tennis: “the
horrible thing.” No one could quite understand why Captain Vermont and
the subalterns did not seem more appalled and interested. It was not
apparent how the subject rasped on their sensibilities. These things
happened, were deplored and accepted, and still no one seemed to look
on David or Gerald, Smith, Carmichael or Mrs. Vermont’s Timmie as a
possible remedy. Here they all were, playing tennis, and every one
seemed delighted. “If they’d just let us out for a week--” felt the
young men. David could not look up as he stirred his tea. What was the
good of them? This, he felt, every one should be wondering. But the
party would indeed have been dull without them, there would have been
no young men. Nobody wished them elsewhere.

Lois had been worrying chiefly because Gerald had illusions about her,
also, as to whether Aunt Myra noticed the raspberries still would not
go round. The guests for which she was responsible were not only
unexpected but ravenous. And while she sat watching Aunt Myra, Gerald
sat watching herself as though she were an entirely different person,
not the sort of person one could describe at all. After tea she played
on the upper court with Captain Vermont, against Gerald and Nona Carey.
She played well, all her strokes came off; it seemed that worry agreed
with her. It could not agree with Gerald, who played badly. Then it
occurred to her: he was not worried; she had not the power to worry
him. Some idea he had formed of herself remained inaccessible to her;
she could not affect it.

By now the upper court was in shadow, they all flickered against the
dark screen of the trees like figures cut out of light green velvet.
Below, where hot bands of light still blinded the players, there was
a suggestion of strain and violence. Whenever she looked down, Mr.
Montmorency seemed to be handing balls to his partner in silent anger.
She guessed it must be himself who was playing badly, so that while she
could not resist looking down, she had to keep looking away from him
just as fast.

“You were splendid,” said Captain Vermont when their set finished.

“Oh no, I wasn’t,” said Lois by reflex action, and wished all the other
things to which she was always replying, “Oh no, I didn’t,” or “Oh no,
I’m not,” were half as true. And she thought what a pity it was that
Mr. Montmorency, instead of exerting himself so fruitlessly, had not
been sitting there at the edge of the court to watch her.

She walked down the slope from the court with Gerald beside her.
Conscious of many people’s attention, she did not know if she seemed
enviable or foolish. “I wish you wouldn’t keep looking so pleased the
whole time,” she said to Gerald.

“Oh?... but I am.”

“What at?”

“Well, I love coming over here. I think you have such awfully nice
parties.”

“Oh, the party.... But David enjoys them, and he hasn’t got the same
expression as you have. In fact, he looks rather sick. What can be the
matter?”

“Well, we all feel a little rotten about that barrack.”

“_Don’t!_ Do you know that while that was going on, eight miles off, I
was cutting a dress out, a voile that I didn’t even need, and playing
the gramophone?... How is it that in this country that ought to be full
of such violent realness, there seems nothing for me but clothes and
what people say? I might just as well be in some kind of cocoon.”

“But what could you have done? You, you--”

“I might at least have felt something.”

“But you do; you’ve got the most wonderful power of feeling.”

“But you never take in a word I say. You’re not interested when I tell
you about myself.”

“You know I could listen all day to you talking.”

She thought: “As though you could make me talk all day!” To cover the
thought she said earnestly:

“You think we don’t all understand your not being there in time and
not doing anything afterwards? We’re not all such idiots. We know
it’s most terribly difficult for you and that you must obey orders.
It’s bad luck the orders are silly. It’s all this dreadful idea about
self-control. When _we_ do nothing it is out of politeness, but England
is so moral, so dreadfully keen on not losing her temper, or being
for half a moment not a great deal more noble than anyone else. Can
you wonder this country gets irritated? It’s as bad for it as being a
woman. I never can see why women shouldn’t be hit, or should be saved
from wrecks when everybody complains they’re superfluous.”

“You don’t understand: it would be ghastly if those things went.”

“Why? I don’t see--and _I_ am a woman.”

Which was, of course, exactly why it wasn’t to be expected or desired
she _should_ understand. He smiled, too happy to answer, and tore out a
handful of leaves from the privet hedge. She had this one limitation,
his darling Lois; she couldn’t look on her own eyes, had no idea what
she was, resented almost his attention being so constantly fixed on
something she wasn’t aware of. A fellow did not expect to be to a girl
what a girl was to a fellow--this wasn’t modesty, specially, it was an
affair of function--so that the girl must be excused for a possible
failure in harmony, a sometimes discordant irreverence. When he said:
“You will never know what you mean to me,” he made plain his belief in
her perfection as a woman. She wasn’t made to know, she was not fit for
it. She was his integrity, of which he might speak to strangers but of
which to her he would never speak.

He tore out another handful of leaves from the hedge and scattered
them carefully over the grass. They both laughed.

She was thinking: “When next I write to Viola, can I describe him?”
Viola flashed off her men in a phrase, with a sweep of her red quill
pen. The red pen had leaned from the Chinese inkpot, against the
window, like a thin flame, a leaning flamingo on that day’s sunny mist
in the Westminster street. It remained a picture of their intercourse.
They had said good-bye in December, a slight day, anxious between the
enormous past and future. The parting was hardly real, they had barely
kissed. They were impatient, nervous, waiting for the curtain to rise.
They had just left school.

They had left school the day before. Yet the new life had been
impatient for Viola, drawing her away from Lois in the taxi,
appropriating her with certainty. She had stepped from their taxi
toppling with school trunks with a kind of solemnity, as on to a
carpet stretched for her festal approach from the kerb to the doors
of her home. Next day, when they said good-bye, her hair was in place
already, woven into her personality. Her pigtail had been the one
loose end there was of her, an extension of her that had independence,
a puppyish walloping thing with nerves of its own. Now the hair was
woven in bright sleek circles over her ears, each strand round like an
eel’s body. The effect completed her; Lois knew she had been missing or
else discounting something all these years. Viola must have played at
being a schoolgirl just as Lois would have to play at being a woman.
Two expensive young men’s photographs had risen like suns on her
mantelpiece; these young men had loved since last Easter holidays;
their position was now regularized magically by the putting up of
Viola’s hair. For only little commonalities, she declared, had affairs
while still at school. And Lois, after that good-bye so distinct and
distant, as at the little end of a telescope, had left her with the
composed, knowing photographs and the red pen leaning against the
sunshine. She had wondered, going out to a day of shopping and the
night mail to be caught at Euston, whether life was to hold for her,
too, a man’s passion; and if so, when? And she had bought a dozen pairs
of silk stockings and the black georgette Aunt Myra said was “old.”

But a man’s passion was not at all the thing. My dear, too Dell-ish!
Viola went to what she supposed one would call her first ball; in
tulle she went, smoke blue, with a close gold-leaf round the hair--not
bright gold, dull gold. Various people had seemed intrigued, were in
fact intrigued rather definitely. There was So-and-so, an absurd person
(flash of the red pen), and the aloof, rather mask-like So-and-so--who
might intrigue Lois. But when it came to _So-and-so_ (a most brilliant
flash of the pen) Viola would admit to Lois she _was_ affected: it
really had been affecting. But enough of Viola. “Now, Lois darling, you
must tell me about them all: I must know everybody.”

And there arose, recurrently, the difficulty in describing Gerald. Who
else had been intrigued, Lois was not certain. How much was somebody
intrigued when they wished to sit out in a car in the barrack square
for four dances? Might not Viola consider sitting out in a car at all
rather Dell-ish? When some one tried to kiss you with whisky-ish
breath, how much were they intrigued and how much was whisky? She
thought a major proposed to her, though he seemed rather old, but he
was so much confused and had such a mumbly moustache she could not be
certain. And later on at the Clonmore Club a lady was pointed out to
her as, she was almost certain, that major’s wife. David had seemed
intrigued, but then he himself intrigued Livvy so very definitely and
did not a young man under these conditions become slightly sordid?
So Lois became so very general in her references that Viola was
suspicious: she asked, was there really anyone? Then she began to
write in a married-womanish tone of encouragement, which considering
she _could_ be married at any moment was really justified. Lois was
forced to state, there _was_ a man in the Rutlands, a Gerald Lesworth,
whom she found affecting. She supposed there was no question as to his
being intrigued; people seemed to notice. So Viola wrote back, she must
hear all about him, should have heard before: her Lol was really the
final Sphinx. She wanted to know, to see, to hear him, even to smell
him--because all the nicest men did smell, didn’t they, indefinably but
divinely. One noticed it when one was dancing or, sometimes, sitting
out. So now, please, everything; by return.

Viola did not like moustaches, but some men did qualify their
moustaches, surely? Gerald’s lay like a fine dark shadow, so that
his lip seemed to curl up more than it did. It answered his eyebrows
somehow--that had a way of drawing together while he spoke--and some
soft edgeless darkness about his eyes. If one mentioned his teeth
so white that his smile seemed a long slow flash in the tanned face,
didn’t it make him sound like Fairbanks? For he was _not_, at all.
He had a way of looking down while he spoke, as though his thoughts
were under his eyelids. From his look she had sometimes turned in
impatience, never in discomfort. There was emotion there unclothed in
the demi-decency of thought; nakedness, not a suggestive deshabille.
If he was looking away and one spoke, his eyes returned with an
extraordinary look of welcome. He had a good chin, cut sharply away
underneath with a strong shadow. His head was pleasant with bumps,
that made planes of light and shadow over his polished hair. And she
knew she liked something about the back of his neck: it was a personal
neck--not just a connection, an isthmus--with skin fitting closely over
the muscles.

As she stood looking at Gerald by the privet hedge, he emerged from the
mist of familiarity, clear to her mental eye. She saw him as though for
the first time, with a quick response to his beauty; she saw him as
though he were dead, as though she had lost him, with the pang of an
evocation. While she could hold him thus--before he receded or came too
closely forward--she wanted to run indoors and write to Viola. Viola
would be certain to tell her she loved him, and by that declaration, to
be expressed with vigour, Lois was too certain to be affected. She was
afraid at the thought of it.

She would have loved to love him; she felt some kind of wistfulness,
some deprivation. If there could only be some change, some movement--in
her, outside of her, somewhere between them--some incalculable
shifting of perspectives that would bring him wholly into focus, mind
and spirit, as she had been bodily in focus now--she could love him.
Something must be transmuted.... Or else, possibly, if he would not
love her so, could give her air to grow in, not stifle imagination.

He said: “What’s the matter? Bothered?”

“Thinking--about you, in a kind of way.”

“Good.”

“I was describing you. How would you describe me?”

He was surprised, he needed time to think of this; he did not know. “I
must just go in,” she said--“do you mind?--and write a letter. It’s so
important. Will you post it for me at Clonmore?”

But meanwhile, they had been irritating Lady Naylor, who seeing Lois
stand so vaguely down by the privet hedge, disclaiming implicitly
the party given for her amusement, was goaded to the point of an
interruption. Now she called: “Lois--Lois!”

Lois sighed and went to her.

“I want you to take the Trents and Maguires and Boatleys round
the garden,” she said as her niece approached. “I shall be coming
later”--she murmured: “when some more of the people have gone. Mrs.
Trent wants a cutting of the allspice and would like to see if there’s
anything else she would like. Tell Donovan.” She murmured again: “And
don’t let Mrs. Boatley get with Mrs. Maguire, she is a Christian
Scientist and will talk of it, and you know the Maguires’ little
nephew died of that. And if the Boatleys like the peaches give them
some; let Donovan pack them.” She added in a still lower tone of
reproach: “Because I don’t believe there were raspberries for them at
tea.”




                                   VII


FRANCIE was finding Laurence not so difficult after all, if one just
ran on quite naturally. They sat at the top of the steps together,
after everybody had gone. The fields looked wider, the sky more
gracious and distant seen through the clearing smoke of social
activity. The Trents left last but one, the Hartigans and their aunt
Mrs. Foxe-O’Connor had just gone jogging away up the avenue, knee to
knee in their little trap. The gravel at the foot of the steps was
all scored up and flung into spirals by the turning of wheels. Early
to-morrow, there would be a busy sound of gardeners raking it smooth
again. At present, there was the busy sound of rooks: it heightened
Mrs. Montmorency’s and Laurence’s peaceful lassitude to reflect that
rooks still had to talk, to flock and mix in intricate sociability. Men
and women had, since seven o’clock, been released from this obligation.

There was nothing to say, they did not have to say anything: they
exclaimed their thoughts casually, not answering one another’s, on
the retreat towards silence. All the afternoon they had been asking
questions, and ignoring the answers as far as possible. Laurence
knew he could not be asked by his aunt to bring the chairs in or see
whether Lois had locked up the garden while he sat here, so apparently
entertaining Mrs. Montmorency.

Francie had not wanted to know how anyone was; health played too large
a part in her life already. She had not wanted to know if they thought
the garden lovely--the supremacy of Danielstown garden made opinion
irrelevant--whether they preferred winter to summer because of the
hunting, or summer to winter because of the tennis. Neither had it
seemed to Laurence important whether anyone wanted more tea or had had
really enough, whether they feared to be driven into the ditch by Black
and Tans on the way home, or whether they knew Oxford. They both felt
themselves coming to life again slowly, now that the party was over,
and putting off a sort of antagonism. At an upstairs window they could
hear Lady Naylor and Lois discussing the guests, agreeing that it had
been a successful day.

Francie said: “I do wonder now whether this weather will last.”
This gold weather had all the delights of a new perception, it made
Danielstown real as a memory.

“I suppose they don’t really feel like that inside,” said Laurence.

“I wonder at them bringing a child like Hercules. I found him walking
about the house when I went up for my air-cushion. The poor little
fellow ... I let him blow up my air-cushion and then I took him and
showed him photographs of the Carnival that I brought back from Nice.
We talked quite a time; he tells me he is afraid of bats. I wonder now
why they called him Hercules.”

“Wouldn’t it be terrible to be in the Army ...”

“Isn’t that young Mr. Lesworth devoted to Lois? I wonder does she feel
it at all?”

“I always wonder what one does in the Army when one’s not doing
something particular, very particularly.”

“I wonder if they would marry?”

“Marry?” said Laurence, surprised into attention. “I don’t see why.
Though I don’t see why not. As Lois never does anything or seems
to want to, I suppose she must be expecting to marry some one. And
Lesworth is pleasant, I think, and rather pretty. He is like a
photograph of a man in an advertisement putting on the right kind of
collar. Doesn’t advertising develop--I sometimes wonder if one might
not think of taking it up.”

“But doesn’t she draw very nicely?”

“Well, she could draw people in the Army doing things, like Lady
Butler.”

“She is so sweet, I think; I love to watch her.”

“Her consumption of tennis is something enormous. There’s tennis
to-morrow at Castle Trent and I’ve got to drive her over. I often
wonder whether she really _would_ get assaulted by Black and Tans if
she went alone, or by sinister patriots, or whether she might not be
old enough now to look after herself.”

“I’m afraid at _her_ age,” said Francie, blushing; “her age isn’t any
protection.”

“I cannot imagine wanting to assault anybody. But then I never can
conceive of anybody else’s mentality--or isn’t that mentality? Why is
it so much worse for a young girl to miss tennis than for a young man
to miss Spain? I suppose it is something to do with the life force and
that one must not trace the connection.”

“I wonder why she’s so fond of that Livvy Thompson--she seems to me
managing.”

“She’s not fond--it’s contiguity. Why should they chop up the rather
beautiful name of Olivia into something that sounds like cat’s meat?”

_This_ Francie well understood, she herself did not care to be
called Frances, it sounded formal. She sighed, and gathered together
the folds of her grey-and-blue “mottledy” foulard. She had been
wondering--watching Hugo so happy with Mrs. Trent, and now the
speculation recurred to her--whether the woman Hugo had really needed
would not have worn coats and skirts, snapped her fingers at dogs
and recrossed her legs with decision. Mrs. Trent was an amusing good
sort; she so radiated the quality that Francie, after a minute or
two’s conversation, had felt quite a good sort also. Was she, though,
perfectly understanding? But then did not Hugo perhaps feel a little
smothered in one’s own understanding, a little reduced by it? For
instance: Francie thought, honestly, Hugo had played magnificently
this afternoon; several people had said to her: “It’s a delight to
see your husband play on these courts again”; they would not have
said that, surely, if he had not been playing magnificently! But even
so armed, she would not be able to combat Hugo’s conviction that his
tennis was going off, because it was something he never mentioned and
he would be furious at hearing it put into words. So still she would
have to feel his pride suffer--as though he were growing old, when
there wasn’t a shadow of age on him. She remembered how he had shown up
to-day, playing, sitting or walking, among the young men. She liked the
young men, but they seemed all limbs and faces, not yet related. She
wondered what Hugo had thought of the young men.

She thought of their room upstairs with quiet light in the ceiling;
of ghostly roses that still showed faintly when one drew the curtains
over the daylight. She supposed she ought to be lying down; she got up,
murmuring something, and went indoors. Laurence stood up, vacillating.
He wondered if they would meet him and make him do things if he were to
venture up for his book.

Francie, crossing the ante-room, was waylaid by Lady Naylor coming out
of Lois’s room. “Ah, there you are, Francie, good! Now I’m longing to
know what you thought of them all. To tell you the truth, I am thankful
it’s safely over. I hope they enjoyed themselves really: they _looked_
all right.”

“Indeed they must have! It was a great success.” They sat down on two
of the crimson chairs, stepping-stones over a lake of floor, to discuss
the party.

Francie declared how pleasant she had found Mrs. Archie Trent, and how
nice it had been to see Mrs. Carey again, and how handsome Nona was
growing up. And what a pity it was, she said, about the Hartigans; they
had been grown-up girls when she had seen them last, and it did seem
hard! “And oh,” she cried, in a glow of pleasure and sympathy, “isn’t
that young Mr. Lesworth very devoted?”

“Yes, he has charming manners; he comes over here a good deal. He’s so
helpful with chairs and rugs: I do wish he were Laurence!”

“But so devoted to Lois--and really one can’t be surprised. The way he
follows her round with his eyes--and his feet too--”

“_Sssh!_” exclaimed Lady Naylor. “She’s in her room! I wouldn’t like
her to pick up ideas like Livvy’s. Are you sure, by the way, you’re
not thinking of Mr. Armstrong? There’s a very great case of devotion
there. He follows Lois and Livvy follows him. I expect in the general
confusion, with so many people, you mixed up the young men. They are
all alike--it’s a pity, I always think. It’s a pity, too, about Lois
and Livvy; it isn’t a friendship I like. But poor Livvy’s motherless
and she’s always riding over to meals, and of course Lois needs girls
of her own age. She made very nice friends at her school in England,
but it’s so unlucky, they’re never allowed to come over. Something said
in the English press has apparently given rise to an idea that this
country’s unsafe. It’s unlucky for Lois. _I_ should never go by the
papers about England.... No, Francie, if you didn’t mix up the young
men, I really don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, it’s been very stupid of me,” cried Francie, flushing with
agitation. “Of course I should never have said if I hadn’t thought--if
I hadn’t been led to think ... No, I see now that I oughtn’t to have.
But I thought from what every one said ...”

“But I am still quite in the dark, dear,” said Lady Naylor, flushed
also and smiling with irritation. “I suppose, however, you must have
gathered that as I _don’t_ understand what you _do_ mean, what you mean
cannot really be so.”

“Oh, of course,” agreed Francie, ruffling the silk on her lap with
light, feathery touches. “All the same, I do think you ought to know,
Myra, that every one said ...”

“One cannot help what people say, though it is always annoying. Not
that I ever do know what they say: I make a point of not knowing.
You know how I’ve always turned my face against gossip, especially
these days: it’s annoying to hear of it everywhere, even at one’s
own parties. It’s a very great danger, I think, to the life of this
country.”

“Well, but really, you couldn’t say this was political. It seems to me
natural that people should take an interest--they’re all so fond of
her. If young Mr. Lesworth and Lois _are_ really--”

Lady Naylor was forced into open country. “Oh, is that it?” she
exclaimed in enlightenment. “But really, my dear Francie, what a fuss
about nothing! No, not you, dear; I never meant you made the fuss,
but really with all these hints: ‘People are saying,’ you might have
meant almost anything. One’s friends do excel themselves, really!
Just because they’ve played tennis together and danced once or twice!
Really, you would think they wanted one to divide one’s tennis parties
up like a Quaker meeting, and turn ballrooms into that horrible kind
of country dancing they have in England--Anna Partridge’s people do
it--women hopping one way, waving things, men all hopping the other
way, stamping. ‘Really,’ as I said to Anna Partridge, ‘if this is
what you call getting in touch with the people, give me what you call
feudalism!’”

“Yes. But really, Myra, is it so very improbable? They’re both so
young, and so--”

“Why yes, of course; exactly!” Lady Naylor sat up in her chair with
a heightening of colour, an incisive gesture; her eyes threatened a
falcon-swoop on her friend’s rash flank. “Ex-_actly!_ Which is one of
the many things that do make it so impossible.”

“I said ‘Improbable!’” Francie spoke with a funny zest. She hated
arguments as she hated rain; once caught in the rain she could hear
it crashing on her umbrella, feel it spill on her shoulders with
exhilaration. She knew so little excitement. She now felt for the first
time Myra’s equal in vigour and personality; she felt this opposition
to Myra must at last increase their confidence in each other.

“In the first place,” said Lady Naylor, “he’s a subaltern. Subalterns
can’t marry--not of course that they’re like priests, but they might
just as well be until they are captains and thirty. Colonel Boatley
feels very strongly ... Of course, he’s a thoroughly nice boy, so
much liked in the Regiment. But then, what are the Rutlands nowadays?
Of course they did magnificently in the War. But now they seem to be
full of people like that extraordinary little Mrs. Vermont, who turned
up perfectly pleased with herself this afternoon, in spite of Lois’s
having quite forgotten that she’d asked her. No, _he_ of course is
charming, but he seems to have no relations. One cannot trace him. His
mother, he says, lives in Surrey, and of course you do know, don’t you,
what Surrey _is_. It says nothing, absolutely; part of it is opposite
the Thames Embankment. Practically nobody who lives in Surrey ever
seems to have been heard of, and if one does hear of them they have
never heard of anybody else who lives in Surrey. Really altogether, I
think all English people very difficult to trace. They are so pleasant
and civil, but I do often wonder if they are not a little shallow:
for no reason at all they will pack up everything and move across
six counties.... Of course, I don’t say Gerald Lesworth’s people are
in _trade_--I should never say a thing like that without foundation.
Besides, if they were in trade there would be money, money on English
people shows so much and he quite evidently hasn’t any. No, I should
say they were just villa-ry.”

“But there are so many villas in England,” said Francie, “that some of
the people who live in them are bound to be nice. I often think so,
looking out of the train.”

“Very nice in their way, I am sure--but that’s not the immediate point,
dear. There is _no_ question at all--you understand?--of anything
between Mr. Lesworth and Lois. And of course naturally _they_ haven’t
thought of it--if they had, don’t you see, they’d be much more careful
to make it appear there wasn’t. Of course I agree that Lois ought to
be more careful. I was careful at her age; I was careful by instinct,
which is a thing that girls nowadays seem to lack. There seems nothing
to do between putting ideas in a girl’s head and letting her behave
like an absolute donkey. It is all very difficult, really. If she
were my own niece I should speak to her--I should certainly speak to
Laurence if he were going on like that--but as she’s Richard’s niece
I don’t very well see that I can. There’s so little to go on. And I
really cannot have Richard bothered, it makes him so difficult. When he
feels he ought to do something and isn’t sure what, there’s no saying
at all what he may do. One does dislike awkwardness. And it doesn’t
seem kind to ask the young man his intentions when if he _should_ have
any they would have to be quashed immediately.... No, one must leave
it at this. I rely on you, Francie, to contradict any more of this
gossip that comes your way, and you might ask Hugo to also--if he has
heard any-- Perhaps on the whole better not put the idea into his
head; he might forget and discuss it with Richard.... Meanwhile, I
shall talk to Lois seriously about her future. She draws very nicely;
I often think that she might take that up. I must tell her to show you
and Hugo some of her drawings.”

“But I don’t know anything about drawing.”

“Oh, all she needs is a little encouragement.”

“Just one thing, Myra--I think you’re so wise, you’re so perfectly
right, as you know. I do always in general believe in letting things
like this take their course. But ... as this thing can’t _have_ a
course, really mustn’t: is it quite fair to the young man? Because Lois
is so very--”

Here she broke off, scared by a terrible clatter in Lois’s room. A pail
had been kicked and some furniture violently shifted.

“Oh, Francie!” exclaimed Lady Naylor reproachfully. “You ought to
remember she’s there! One can’t be too careful! In fact, if you don’t
mind, I expect we had better not talk any more. You must go and lie
down--you’re looking as fresh as a rose, but I know how Hugo insists
upon it.”

They got up, she took Francie’s arm and led her as far as her door.
Francie felt like something being put back in its box. Lady Naylor went
down, calling, to look for Laurence and ask him to bring the chairs in
and lock up the garden.

For Lois, this had all been exceedingly difficult. There she was,
caught in her bedroom, she had not the face to come out. The door went
paper-thin as they raised their voices. At first it had seemed all
right: Aunt Myra knew she was in here, having just left her. But soon
their tones changed, a keen hunting note came into them; they were on a
topic. Carried away, Aunt Myra had forgotten. She heard “Lois ... Lois
... Lois ...” She hummed and sang: they were too intent. To one’s sense
of honour such things were agonizing. She leaned right out of a window
into the cooling air, into the hush of limes on the avenue; she watched
Uncle Richard and Mr. Montmorency walk to the white gate. Their heads
nodded down from their shoulders like old men’s, happily; they spoke
of Archie and Mrs. Archie and poor John. But from the room behind the
other voices, flooding in through the door, came after her. She flung
herself on her bed with a squawk from the springs and pressed her ear
shut till the lobes and her finger-tips ached: also she pulled the
pillows over her head. It was hot thus and still the voices penetrated.
They came on steadily, like the Hound of Heaven. It was hard, really,
the way they both kept at it.

The voices spoke of love: they were full of protest. Love, she had
learnt to assume, was the mainspring of woman’s grievances. Illnesses
all arose from it, the having of children, the illnesses children had;
servants also, since the regular practice of love involved a home; by
money it was confined, propped and moulded. Lois flung off the pillows
and walked round the room quickly. She was angry; she strained to
hear now, she quite frankly listened. But when Mrs. Montmorency came
to: “Lois is very--” she was afraid suddenly. She had a panic. She
didn’t want to know what she was, she couldn’t bear to: knowledge of
this would stop, seal, finish one. Was she now to be clapped down under
an adjective, to crawl round lifelong inside some quality like a fly in
a tumbler? Mrs. Montmorency should not!

She lifted her water jug and banged it down in the basin: she kicked
the slop-pail and pushed the washstand about.... It was victory. Later
on, she noticed a crack in the basin, running between a sheaf and a
cornucopia: a harvest richness to which she each day bent down her
face. Every time, before the water clouded, she would see the crack:
every time she would wonder: what Lois _was_-- She would never know.




                                   VIII


SIR RICHARD, to whom the idea about Lois and Gerald percolated in time
through the family conversation, declared the idea was preposterous.
What chiefly worried him was, might she not have mentioned to Gerald
those guns in the lower plantations? He had charged her not to, but she
was just like Laura, poor Laura’s own child in fact; she would talk and
talk and you never knew where you had her. He announced, he had been
thinking for some time subalterns should be fewer and more infrequent.
He was delighted when he heard from the postman, and was able to pass
on, how three young women in the Clonmore direction had had their hair
cut off by masked men for walking out with the soldiers. And indeed
they had got no sympathy from the priest either, the postman said, for
the priest knew that English soldiers were most immoral.

“And how would you like it,” Sir Richard said to his niece indignantly,
“if a thing like that were to happen to you?”

“I should be bobbed,” said Lois. “I should take it as a sign. But I
have never walked an inch with anyone, not what you would call _out_,
Uncle Richard.”

“But masked men,” said Lady Naylor, “would be a very nasty experience
for a girl of your age.” Lois said she would prefer the men to be
masked; she would be less embarrassed in the event of meeting them
afterwards.

“I wonder what they do with the hair,” she added. She thought inwardly:
“If they’re going to take this attitude, I could not be blamed for
falling in love with a married man.” She searched her heart anxiously.
She wrote to Viola that she feared she might be falling in love with
a married man. But when she looked at Mr. Montmorency next morning at
breakfast, and still more when she had to drive him back from Mount
Isabel, the idea seemed shocking. She regretted having sent her letter
to post in such a hurry.

Scandalized by the memory, she drove home briskly. On the bright sky,
opposite, Mr. Montmorency’s pale face hung like an apparition’s. She
took the curves of Mount Isabel drive with a rattle: the trap swung
on its axle, the traces creaked. Beyond the gates, light lay flat and
yellow along the hedges where brambles showered; hard red blackberries
knocked on the spokes and swung back, shining. She took the short way,
over a shoulder of mountain; the light-pink road crunched under the
wheels like sugar. Coming up out from the lanes they bathed an hour
or so in the glare of space. Height had the quality of depth: as they
mounted they seemed to be striking deeper into the large mild crystal
of an inverted sea. Out of the distance everywhere, pointless and
unrelated, space came like water between them, slipping and widening.
They receded from one another into the vacancy. On yellow furze-dust,
light was hard and physical; over parching heather shadow faded and
folded tone on tone, and was drawn to the sky on delicate brittle peaks.

The road bent over a ridge, the trap ran down on the pony’s rump;
he and she shifted back on their seats. They stared with unfocussed
intensity over each other’s shoulders. Gorse, they said, was never out
of bloom (he commented). Nor kissing, they said (she supplied), out
of season--yet she supposed this untrue; she supposed that they both
sometimes must be. “And so much bitterness,” he exclaimed, “over this
empty country!”

“What is it exactly,” she asked, “that they mean by freedom? What does
it affect? What is it besides an excuse for war?”

“I suppose,” he said in his faint voice, as at the pit of a yawn, “some
kind of a final peace--stability.”

“Then to fight’s absurd; the more one keeps on, the further from it one
is. It’s a hopeless kind of beginning.” She looked at him earnestly,
lucidly, like a puppy.

“You are very reasonable.... Do you read the papers?”

“Well ... I do hate things that have just happened.”

“--I don’t follow?”

“They’re so raw.”

The road was steep and the pony determined to trot; it stumbled; she
pulled it up sharply. She was inclined to forget she was driving at
all. He started and put out a hand, to steady himself, along the back
of the seat. He hated things to be done badly; he was old-maidish. They
were silent in a mutual criticism. As they came down and the mountains,
drawn behind, were once more scenic, as hedges ran up at the sides of
the road, the illusion of distance between them faded; they obtruded
upon each other; a time when they could have talked was gone. They
might have said, she felt now, anything; but what had remained unsaid,
never conceived in thought, would exercise now a stronger compulsion
upon their attitude. She was to believe they had approached each other
in the unintimacy of silence. Shy with retrospective emotion she
fidgeted in the trap, irked by his look, his manner, all his presence
physically. Whenever she stretched a foot it touched his, always she
seemed to be retreating, apologizing, having to shift her position.
When she sat well forward to give her attention to driving, their knees
touched.

“This trap’s too small,” she said finally. Mr. Montmorency--face
dull on the bright sky--replied: “Oh, I don’t know--it depends on
how one arranges oneself.” If he only would not smile--but he smiled
constrainedly. Next to Laura, she was the most fidgety person from
whom he had suffered. But Laura’s unrepose had been an irradiation,
a quiver of personality. She was indefinite definitely, like a tree
shining, shaking away outlines; a bay, a poplar in wind and sunshine.
Her impulses--those incalculable springings-out of mind through the
body--had had, like movements of branches, a wild kind of certainty. He
had been half aware of some kind of design in her being of which she
was unaware wholly.

Whereas, here still was Lois (now Laura’s tree had fallen), twisted
away from him on the opposite seat of the trap, outraging tone in her
pink jersey--a shade or two nearer than Laura, perhaps, to the accuracy
passing for beauty. She looked gênée, dispirited; some failure, no
doubt, in his company: he must be an old man to her. She glanced back
once or twice at the mountains, from which a light peaty breath still
came after them down the descending road.

She laughed suddenly, parted the reins, and jerking a rein in each
hand, with wide elbows, chirruped and clucked to the pony. “This,”
she said, “is how my governess used to drive. She used to say it came
natural because all her people were horsey. She said her father had
been a colonel and she used to plait hats out of crinkled paper and
wear them. She loved my mother embarrassingly, and she was always
embroidering things. My mother hated it--do you remember?”

“I don’t remember your governess. Hated what?”

“Being loved like that, and given embroidery. Miss Part used to laugh
and say, ‘I’m afraid I’m terribly whimsical, Mrs. Farquar,’ and Mother
used to say, ‘Oh no, I don’t expect you are really’--was it unkind?”

“Well, it sounds unkind.”

“I wonder if she would have liked being loved at my age--do you
remember?”

“I don’t suppose she had made up her mind.”

Lois turned and looked at him so intently that he was uneasy suddenly:
the bottom dropped out of the past, spilling all its security. He would
never know how much Laura had said to her daughter those last ten
years--years locked away from him: Lois had got the key. He said with
acidity: “If she and I had married--”

“Oh, _yes_....”

“My dear child, you wouldn’t be here.”

“Oh, but half of me would be. And I dare say,” she said charmingly,
“the other half of me would have been much nicer.” The turning away of
her look was more confidential than any directness.

“Thank you--don’t run over the little pigs!”

Michael Connor’s farm first announced itself by some pink little silky
pigs running along the roadside. A sow got up, like a very maternal
battleship. Connor children looked, shrieked, fell from a gate and fled
to the farmhouse, skirting a pool of liquid manure in the front yard.
It was a nice farm, Lois pointed out, it had the door and window-frames
painted blue, the colour of all the cart-wheels. The Connors were
darling people; she drove past slowly, leaning over the side of the
trap to see if the family were about. The house was one story high,
with a slate roof. Mr. Montmorency sat frowning; he could not remember
if this were a Michael Connor he ought to remember.

Michael Connor came out from a furze-thatched shed at the side. He took
off his wide straw hat and shook hands with them both. His hand was
bony, nervous and dry as earth. “It’s a grand evening,” said he with a
melancholy smile.

“It is indeed. And how,” she asked, apprehensive, “is Mrs. Connor?”

“Ah, the poor woman ... the poor woman!” Michael looked away from them,
nobody spoke. Lois at last said: “Give her my love.”

“I will,” said Michael, “and proud she will be. And yourself’s looking
lovely, Miss Lois; a fine strong lady, glory be to God.”

“You remember Mr. Montmorency?”

“Sure indeed I do!” exclaimed Michael, and shook hands with Mr.
Montmorency again with greater particularity. “And very well I remember
his poor father. You are looking grand, sir, fine and stout; I known
you all these years and I declare I never seen you looking stouter. And
welcome back to Danielstown, Mr. Montmorency, welcome back, sir!”

“Are your grandchildren well?”

“They are,” said Connor gloomily, “but they’re very bashful. And they
do be stravaging about always and not contented at all. They are a
great distress to herself, and she unable to come out after them.”

“But is Mrs. Peter Connor not with you?”

“She is, Miss Lois. But she is desthroyed with it all and disheartened.
Indeed, miss, she is in great distress; and she always looking and
starting and craning up the boreen. It is torn in herself she is;
distracted for Peter and dhreading he’ll come. It would dishearten yous
to be with her daily and nightly the way she is, the poor woman. And
the military from Carveen have the hearts torn out of us nightly, and
we stretched for sleep, chasing and charging about in the lorries they
have. Sure you cannot go a step above in the mountains without them
ones lepping out from your feet like rabbits. Isn’t it the great pity
they didn’t finish their German war once they had it started?”

“And no news at all of Peter?” Lois asked, diffident.

“We have not,” said Michael, expressionless. His face resumed its
repose. The sum of detachment and sadness was this special kind of
nobility. “And I don’t know what is to be the end of it,” resumed
Michael, with a return to his conversational manner. “I couldn’t tell
you what will be the outcome at all. These surely are times that
would take the heart from you. And thank you, Miss Lois, and you too
yourself, your honour.”

They once more shook hands, complimented each other again on the beauty
of the evening, and Lois drove on. Michael stood at the gate till they
turned the corner. The mountain farm, its wind-bitten firs dragged
east, its furze-thatched byres, sank slowly under the curve of a hill.
Looking longest after them, like an eye, a window glittered. Some grey
geese that had gaped and straggled behind the trap relinquished the
chase abruptly, stumbled round in a flock and went straining off in the
other direction. Their backs were more than oblivious; they made the
trap, the couple in it, an illusion. And indeed Lois and Hugo both felt
that their pause, their talk, their passing had been less than a shadow.

“That is not,” said Hugo, after reflection, “the Michael Connor that I
remember. He was a foxy man with a chin. Has that one a son Peter?”

“He has. I expect you guessed--he is on the run--‘Proscribed’ don’t
they call it? He could be shot at sight. He is wanted over an ambush
in County Clare; they got him once, but he escaped again--I was so
glad. I shouldn’t wonder if he was up the boreen at the moment. I know
he is home, for Clancey saw him three days ago. But don’t speak of
it--one cannot be too careful. Poor Mrs. Peter must be in a dreadful
state, wherever he is. Mrs. Michael is dying, you know: she has been
dying a long time. The last time I went up they wouldn’t let me see
her, because of the pain.... There are young men gone from three of the
farms up here--Captain Carmichael told me; he is Intelligence Officer.
And I know it is true, because Clancey told me too--I say, supposing
Gerald had happened to be with us and Peter Connor had come down the
boreen, would Gerald have had to have shot him, or would he have been
off duty?”

“Peter might have shot Gerald.”

“Oh no, not when he was with me. Besides,” she added, “Gerald is so
matter of fact. Nothing could make him into a tragedy.”

Hugo debating if she were subtle or very stupid, Lois busy with
melodrama, they drove home briskly. To the south, below them, the
demesne trees of Danielstown made a dark formal square like a rug on
the green country. In their heart, like a dropped pin, the grey glazed
roof reflecting the sky lightly glinted. Looking down, it seemed to
Lois they lived in a forest; space of lawns blotted out in the pressure
and dusk of trees. She wondered they were not smothered; then wondered
still more that they were not afraid. Far from here too, their
isolation became apparent. The house seemed to be pressing down low in
apprehension, hiding its face, as though it had her vision of where it
was. It seemed to gather its trees close in fright and amazement at the
wide, light, lovely unloving country, the unwilling bosom whereon it
was set. From the slope’s foot, where Danielstown trees began, the land
stretched out in a plain flat as water, basin of the Madder and Darra
and their fine wandering tributaries, till the far hills, faint and
brittle, straining against the inrush of vaster distance, cut the droop
of the sky like a glass blade. Fields gave back light to the sky--the
hedges netting them over thinly and penetrably--as though the sheen
of grass were a shadow on water, a breath of colour clouding the face
of light. Rivers, profound in brightness, flowed over beds of glass.
The cabins lifting their pointed white ends, the pink and yellow farms
were but half opaque; cast doubtfully on their fields the shadow of
living. Square cattle moved in the fields like saints, with a mindless
certainty. Single trees, on a rath, at the turn of a road, drew up
light at their roots. Only the massed trees--spread like a rug to dull
some keenness, break some contact between self and senses perilous
to the routine of living--only the trees of the demesne were dark,
exhaling darkness. Down among them, dusk would stream up the paths
ahead, lie stagnant over the lawns, would mount in the tank of garden,
heightening the walls, dulling the borders like a rain of ashes. Dusk
would lie where one looked as though it were in one’s eyes, as though
the fountain of darkness were in one’s own perception. Seen from above,
the house in its pit of trees seemed a very reservoir of obscurity;
from the doors one must come out stained with it. And the kitchen
smoke, lying over the vague trees doubtfully, seemed the very fume of
living.

But as they drove down the home-sense quickened; the pony, knowing
these hedges, rocketed hopefully in the shafts. The house became a
magnet to their dependence. And indeed it was nice, they felt in this
evening air, to be driving home, with all they would have to tell of
the Mount Isabel party, to all they would have to hear of Sir Richard’s
day in Cork. Friendly women smiled at them over half-doors of cabins.
And they both felt approached, friendlier, turning in up the avenue
under the arch of the trees; he accepting her with philosophy as though
she were his daughter, she comforted in her fancy, as though he had
wept coming over the mountains and told her his life was empty because
she could never be his wife.

She said: “I hope we shan’t have to wait for dinner; I couldn’t bear
it.” He said: “Really?” shocked to discover that he also had been
thinking of dinner.

Livvy Thompson had ridden over; she sat on the steps with her habit
over her knee, waving as they approached. She had sent a message round
to the yard when she heard the trap, so that a man immediately came
to take the pony. “Listen now--” she began. But Lois only gave her
a brush of the hand; she couldn’t speak till she had rushed past her
into the hall to look for the post, because of a tearing feeling of
expectation. There was Viola’s square blue temperate envelope on the
table. There was nothing more but some gloves Lady Naylor had worn in
Cork, some English papers, a box of tennis balls. She had again that
conclusive feeling of disappointment. “They’re back,” she said to Hugo.

“Listen now,” resumed Livvy, coming in after her. Lois slipped Viola’s
letter into her pocket and buttoned the flap over it. For what Viola
would think of Livvy she did not like to imagine.

Livvy was anxious to know if Lois had seen Mr. Lesworth lately, and, if
so, whether he had happened to mention Mr. Armstrong. Because it did
seem strange, she thought, about Mr. Armstrong; she almost feared that
he must be ill. When she heard Mr. Lesworth had not appeared either,
she was amazed, she said, that Lois was not more worried. It was now
too evident something must be the matter. She pointed out it was her
duty and Lois’s to find out if they were ill, or indeed if worse hadn’t
happened, as worse might, to the two young Englishmen in a hostile
country. Lois, thumbing Viola’s envelope, said she was quite certain
they would have heard. Livvy suspected something was hushed up for fear
of the English papers: nothing was ever allowed in the English papers
that could be mortifying for the English people to read.

“If they should only be ill,” she said, “there would be so many
little things we could do for them. It does seem in a kind of a way
an opportunity. I often think it is only when a man is ill that he
understands what a woman means in his life.”

Lois said that her own impression of a man ill was one of extreme
crossness and of inability to find the nicest woman attractive at
all. She pointed out that there was an excellent military hospital
at Clonmore, so that they need not imagine David and Gerald tossing
feverish and untended. She did not suppose they would be allowed a
visit, and confessed that, for her part, she found people lying down
while she stood up embarrassing; so curiously bumpy and extremely
difficult to talk to.

“But if he seemed at all unlikely to recover,” said Livvy, “there would
be several things I should like to say to Mr. Armstrong. If he should
recover after all, he would be gentlemanly enough to forget them,
though there would be no harm in their leaving a pleasant impression.
To tell you the truth, Lois, I have often wondered if he does not think
me a little reserved and cold. Does it ever seem to you that he looks
discouraged? You see, he is accustomed to English girls who are very
free; I believe there is almost nothing they will not let a man say and
that they get kissed before they get engaged. Now I should not like
him to think I had no heart at all. You know Irish girls in books are
always made out so fascinating and heartless; I should not like him to
think that of me. And if he does recover, he might go back to England
and get engaged to a girl simply out of his lower nature. I should not
like to feel I had spoilt a man’s life.”

“I expect,” said Lois, “it is their week for extra duty.” She thought:
“If only I weren’t so certain there’d be a letter from Gerald
to-morrow! If only he’d let me wonder! He is so terribly _there_....”
If only his coming or writing could have some touch of the miracle,
heal a doubt.

“Will you not stay to dinner?” she said to Livvy. “You could borrow one
of my frocks.”

“I’d like that yellow taffeta, though I should have to reef it in. It’s
a great inconvenience, Lois, being so slight as I am, though it does
seem to be admired. Are you sure your aunt will not mind?... But no,
thank you, I couldn’t; my father’d kill me for riding home after dark.
In fact, I should go now,”--looking up at the sky--“one never knows,
does one? Isn’t that too bad?”

“_Too_ bad,” agreed Lois, touching her letter. She walked round to the
yard with Livvy to get her horse. “But listen,” said Livvy, mounting,
“there’s one thing that we had better do. We can drive in to Clonmore,
Wednesday, to do some shopping: I really do need wool for a jumper.
And if we should meet Mr. Smith or Captain Carmichael, I should just
mention, laughingly, we hadn’t seen any of them for a long time. And
then it might all come out. Or if the worst came to the worst, we could
drop in to tea at the Fogartys’; if there was nobody else, there’d
be bound to be Mrs. Vermont. I don’t think she’s trustworthy, but if
there were anything definite she’d be bound to say--like illness, or an
ambush they were not supposed to mention. Or it might all come right
and the first we would meet might be Mr. Lesworth or Mr. Armstrong....
I certainly think, Lois, that is what we should do. If you can’t get
your uncle’s trap, I will take my father’s.”

She rode away. Lois listened until the romantic horse-hoofs had died on
the avenue, smothered in trees. This manner of Livvy’s of coming and
going gave her a setting--picaresque, historical somehow. She would
have been much worse if she had ridden away on a bicycle-- Then she
took Viola’s letter out of her pocket and read it out there in the
yard. Gnats danced in the underneath gloom of the chestnuts.

Viola did think Lois took feeling rather too earnestly. Lois must
not grow less interesting. She admitted the little Gerald might be
affecting; he was permitted to happen once. Gerald assimilated, she
should be more of a woman. Only don’t lose detachment, darling; do
not lose distance. Viola would be delighted if Lois would give her
“Trivia.” She confessed it did startle her to be reminded that up to
now she had been only eighteen by this talk of a nineteenth birthday.
She felt, she said, older than the rocks among which she sat--she wrote
from a rock-garden. Maurice Evans, a really ridiculous person, sat on a
pink tuft of something valuable, apparently painting her. By the way,
did Laurence read Pater? Maurice did not--did really anyone nowadays?
Did Lois think that Viola might intrigue Laurence? Laurence continued
a subject for speculation for three paragraphs. She only referred to
Mr. Montmorency indirectly, and at the very end. She warned against
introspection. “For introspection, darling, does make us the prey of
the nice-middle-aged.” She complained there was too much introspection
and tennis in Lois’s letters. “Don’t talk of yourself to that elderly
man.”

Lois, relieved but chagrined by the omission, wondered if Viola really
did read one’s letters at all thoroughly. She always noticed the
split infinitives--one could not be sure. Lois turned in at the back
door and pulled herself up to dress by the back-stairs banisters. She
sniffed--duck for dinner again: it seemed the end of a cycle. This
morning she had renewed the roses in Mrs. Montmorency’s room.

Crossing the ante-room, a spring in some board from her step made an
unlatched door swing open. She saw Mr. Montmorency in shirt-sleeves
brushing his wife’s hair. And Francie, facing the glass, saw Lois
reflected, standing still in alarm on the shining floor. They smiled at
each other. Mr. Montmorency, thoughtfully and heavily brushing, did not
observe the interchange.




                        THE VISIT OF MISS NORTON




                                    IX


LIVVY’S afternoon in Clonmore was such a great success that she forgot
the wool for her jumper. At first there had been uneasiness; she let
Lois drive while she looked carefully round the Square, went into the
Imperial Hotel to see if her father had left a stick and searched both
pavements of Cork Street, down which they drove from end to end. In
despair, she had just suggested going up to the tennis club to see was
there anyone there, when the rain came down--it had been threatening
all day, the mountains looked moist and close on their drive in. They
had to turn in to the Fogartys’. And there, to them anxiously awaiting
tea and social developments in Mrs. Fogarty’s artistic drawing-room,
entered severally all whom they wished to meet: Captain Carmichael,
Smith with Mrs. Vermont, finally Mr. Armstrong himself. Mr. Lesworth
did not appear (which, as Livvy whispered to friends, would be a
disappointment for Lois): it turned out that he was on extra duty. Mrs.
Fogarty had one of the narrow houses looking out on the Square; her
windows were screened from outside observation by cubes of evergreen;
between the pane and the evergreens rain fell darkly. Mrs. Fogarty’s
drawing-room was thronged with photographs; all the dear boys who for
years back had been garrisoned at Clonmore, many of whom, alas! had
been killed in that dreadful War. You could not stoop to put down
a cup on one of the little tables without a twinge of regret and
embarrassment, meeting the candid eyes of some dead young man. The
room was crowded with cushions that slid from the narrow seats of the
chairs and tumbled over the back of the sofa; cushions with pen-painted
sprays, with poker-worked kittens; very futurist cushions with bunches
of fruit appliques, dear old cushions with associations and feathers
bursting out at the seams. And there were cushions with Union Jacks
that she wouldn’t, she said, put away--not if They came at night and
stood in her room with pistols. And this was all the more noble in Mrs.
Fogarty in that she was a Catholic, with relations whose politics were
not above reproach at all. Mr. Fogarty was a retired solicitor; he
had no politics; he became very cross and reproachful when they were
discussed at the Club and said he supposed he could not help being a
philosopher. But he drank, which shows that nobody can be perfect. He
never appeared at tea.

As more and more people dropped in and the chairs gave out, the
subalterns pulled the cushions on to the floor and sat on them. Mrs.
Fogarty was delighted. The room warmed up, there was just enough air
left not to make one aware of discomfort in breathing. There was a
smell of wall-paper, tea and tea-cakes, polished Sam Browns and the
_Nuit d’Amour_ on Mrs. Vermont’s handkerchief which she pulled out
frequently to wipe honey from her fingers. They all felt very easy and
very Irish--the qualities radiated, perhaps, from Mrs. Fogarty, who sat
flushed with pleasure and hospitality, taking up rather more than half
of her own sofa. She wore a brown lace blouse and a tweed skirt, with a
green shell rope that swung and clinked on the teapot. Indeed, it was
all very harmonious; she did not know how she would have lived at all
without the military at Clonmore.

After tea, cigarettes went round, there was a kick and splutter of
patent lighters. Livvy said she would _not_ smoke, she would not
indeed: they might laugh but she was an old-fashioned girl. Her
continued protests attracted a good deal of attention, till she noticed
that old-fashioned girls were after all in the majority. The rector’s
daughters and Doreen Hartigan all sat looking approving and rather
unfinished about the mouth. So she accepted a strong cigarette of
Captain Carmichael’s, and Smith broke into a howl and said she had
sacrificed his ideal of womanhood. Mrs. Fogarty suggested music: they
helped her move the bowls and photographs off the grand piano which,
undraped and opened, gave out to Mrs. Vermont’s fingers some damp
chords. It was too bad, declared Mrs. Fogarty, listening doubtfully,
that their tuner had died in Cork and she hadn’t the heart to look for
another since. She said they must have real music, not just the piano.
Real talent was present, she added, and looked round compellingly.
There was a scuffle from which Mr. Smith was forced up. He stood with
his weight on one leg, stroking his hair detachedly, while Mrs.
Vermont looked through the music.

Mrs. Vermont remarked in passing to Captain Carmichael that this was a
country where the most extraordinary people died. “Well, I mean,” she
said, “who would have expected that of a piano-tuner? There was a house
where I went for tennis; they had had a parlourmaid there who died.
And last week I went for some little cakes to Fitzgerald’s and they
were all plain ones. I asked for some fancies and they said the woman
who did the icing had been taken, God rest her soul! Really, there’s
something grizzly about that cake shop.”

“In the midst of life we are in death, if you know what I mean,” said
Captain Carmichael.

Mr. Smith said he didn’t mind what he did sing: they all wanted
“The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God.” The piece was very tragic
and sinister, they all sat wrapt and Livvy did not notice that Mr.
Armstrong was pressing her arm till she felt Doreen Hartigan notice.
She moved away from him, closer to Lois.

  “There’s a b-r-r-roken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carewe
  And the Yellow God sits smiling up above.”

Lois blushed and let Livvy squeeze her hand. They both wondered: “How
should I feel under the circumstances?” The subalterns round all
looked dogged, clasping their knees, and thought of what one would
do for a woman. There was a stagger of emotional clapping. Then Mrs.
Vermont cried they were too ridiculous, the boys were sillies, she
couldn’t sing at all really, but if she must she would. So she sang
“Melisande,” which sent every girl there into a trance of self-pity; it
was so clearly written about oneself.

  “With your eyes for fear and your mouth for love
  And your youth for Pity’s grace
    --All alone, Mel-lisande, all alone.”

The subalterns thought it pretty, high-class but rather dull, and
clapped with abandon when it was over. They cast up David Armstrong,
blushing and looking very much surprised at himself and all of them.
He blushed till half-way through “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” when he
became carried away and carried his audience with him.

  “A woman came between us,
  She was beautiful as Venus,”

brought a momentary return to consciousness. He looked at the ceiling
to avoid seeing Livvy and Lois. The atmosphere strained with cramp,
there was a creak of leather as subalterns readjusted their attitudes.
Mrs. Fogarty sent round a plate of chocolate biscuits. What a pity
it was, she said, that they did not get up some pierrots. When David
returned to his place Livvy was rose-pink; she fluttered at him her
remarkably long lashes.

“Indeed,” declared Mrs. Fogarty, looking from David to Smith (who had
no Christian name), “I never heard anything like the two of you. No,
not in Dublin in Horse Show week, nor in London nor Liverpool either.
You’re remarkably gifted. Isn’t it a pity they were all so sad? Shall
we all have a song now, something rousing, you know, that you sang in
the Great War?”

“Oh, do you know,” cried Mrs. Vermont, “I never knew Tipperary was
really a place till I came to Ireland?”

“Listen to her!” shouted Mrs. Fogarty, sweeping some more of the
cushions on to the floor. They were all delighted. Mrs. Vermont spread
her fingers over her face. Under cover of all this excitement Lois rose
and said they would have to go. She was sorry, because the party seemed
slightly insulted; also, Livvy was so happy. If David should die now,
she did not think Livvy would have to reproach herself. Also Captain
Carmichael had seemed intrigued; he had spoken mysteriously of the
adventures he had in the mountains and of the disguises he sometimes
put on. She knew he must feel like the Scarlet Pimpernel; she could
not help sympathizing. When she rose, he said they must meet again.
He and David came out to help them into their trap in the Imperial
yard, tucked them up in their rugs, relinquished them disapprovingly
to the exposures of the journey and stood looking after them with rain
dripping down their bronzed and military noses.

They drove home very much flushed and excited. The rain came down in
a curtain and hid the mountains; brown shining puddles were linked
along the road. They agreed about almost every one--especially Mrs.
Vermont and the D.I.’s niece--they laughed at each other over their
mackintosh collars, eyes bright with comprehension and sympathy, while
the strong rain stung their noses, then numbed them. Only when Livvy
said, “Melisande” was a beautiful poem, wasn’t it, something stiffened
in Lois: she said she thought it was sentimental.

“All that fuss, if you know what I mean, about just somebody.”

“Well, love is that, if you come to think,” said Livvy, “and myself I
think it is very satisfying.” There was something so very experienced
about the tip of her nose that Lois went flat. She felt that she
herself must be like a cake in which the flour had been forgotten.

She complained: “I wish we were not being late just this evening. Miss
Norton, you know, is arriving and I did so want to look nice. My nose
will not have thawed till half through dinner.”

“Oh, who is she? Is she pretty? How old is she? Is she engaged?”

“Never met her--though she often seems to have come to Danielstown.
But I feel she may be a person one wants to look pretty at. She annoys
Aunt Myra by being unfortunate in ways that are far more trying for
other people than for herself. When she was little she came over to
Danielstown to a children’s party: she fell down at once on the scraper
and cut her knee and there was a good deal of fuss and bloodiness. And
another time there were people to tea she started an argument about
Kimberley: they all stayed till past eight o’clock in the library
taking down the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ while other people who
were coming to dinner kept arriving. And another time she lost her
engagement ring at a tennis party and they were all very much upset.
She wrote afterwards to say it didn’t matter because she had broken
off her engagement anyhow and the man said he didn’t want the ring,
he said he wished it were at the bottom of the sea. I always thought
people breaking off an engagement went all noble, but that sounds to
me vindictive. Aunt Myra stayed put out.... She is twenty-nine.”

“It seems to me odd,” said Livvy, “that she shouldn’t have brought
anything off by this time. But I dare say,” she added, “that there has
been a disappointment.”

At this point they heard a lorry coming. Black and Tans, fortified
inwardly against the weather, were shouting and singing and now
and then firing shots. The voices, kept low by the rain, the grind
of wheels on the rocky road tunnelled through the close air with a
particular horror. To meet in this narrow way would be worse than a
dream; before the half-obscured lorry appeared Livvy had turned the
pony hurriedly up a boreen. They went up some way and waited under
a dripping thorn-bush: if Black and Tans saw one hiding they were
sarcastic. They heard the lorry grind past the mouth of the boreen with
apprehension, feeling exposed and hunted. Lois recalled with surprise
that she had cried for a whole afternoon before the War because she was
not some one in a historical novel: it had begun, she thought, because
they told her to go and practise. The road clear again, they discovered
they could not turn the trap; they had to back the pony out. “My!” said
Livvy, glaring at the horizon. “I wish I were driving a lorry! I should
like to crash those fellows head on!”

Just before eight, Livvy dropped Lois at Danielstown gates and drove
off, beating her pony into a gallop. Her father would kill her,
certainly! Lois raced up the avenue till she had no breath, then had
to crawl the rest of the way, recovering. Apprehensive, she strained
for the throb of the dinner-gong, a shriek of reproach from a window.
But her unpunctuality passed unnoticed: Miss Norton herself had only
just arrived. The hall was full of suitcases, a fur coat sprawled on a
chair, there was a tennis racquet, a bag of golf-clubs.

“Though where the poor female is going to play golf ...!” thought Lois.
“A nice coat.... Good, she has brought the _Tatler!_”

No one had even gone up to dress, from the library voices exclaimed
in excitement; voices complained insistently through the drawing-room
door. Lois undid the top buttons of her mackintosh and stepped out of
it, leaving a damp ring. Absently she wrung the water out of her hat.
She listened.

“She is certain she has left it in the train,” her aunt was saying;
“she says she would swear it was put in with her at Kingsbridge and
that she saw it after leaving Darramore. I do not believe myself in
travelling with suitcases, one is always counting--I believe in one
good trunk.”

“Looking at it from the porters’ point of view--” said Mrs.
Montmorency.

The library door clicked open and Laurence, looking quite enthusiastic,
shot into the hall. “She thinks telephoning will do it,” he said to
Lois. “I cannot make her understand about the Ballyhinch telephone.”
He disappeared, shouting, into the back part of the house. Evidently
there need be no hurry for anything. Lois sat on the hall table to
look at the _Tatler_. Early autumn fashions reminded her--this was an
opportunity to try on the fur coat. She hoped for the proper agony,
finding a coat she could not live without.... Her arms slipped silkily
through; her hands appeared, almost tiny, out of the huge cuffs. “Oh,
the escape!” she thought, pressing her chin down, fading, dying into
the rich heaviness. “Oh, the _escape_ in other people’s clothes!” And
she paced round the hall with new movements: a dark, rare, rather
wistful woman, elusive with jasmine. “No?” she said on an upward note:
the voice startled her, experience was behind it. She touched the fur
lightly, touched the edge of a cabinet--her finger-tips drummed with
a foreign sensitiveness. And the blurred panes, the steaming changing
trees, the lonely cave of the hall no longer had her consciousness in a
clamp. _How_ she could live, she felt. She would not need anyone, she
would be like an orchestra playing all to itself. “Is it mink?” she
wondered.

“You look so nice!” said Miss Norton, from the door of the library.

Lois went quite blank. “Oh,” she said.

“Where is that unfortunate Lady Naylor?”

“I can’t _think_-- Well, she is in the drawing-room.”

“Anyhow,” said Miss Norton, “I will go up now. When she sees me looking
less arrived she may forget about the suitcase.” She looked at Lois
earnestly. “I don’t lose things except coming here; I am efficient
really. But there seems a kind of fatality ...”

“I _know_.”

“Do you?” she said with interest, a keen disconcerting flash. “How odd
that you should!”

An approach seemed possible, imminent. Lois, feeling herself smiled
at, unwrapped herself from the coat without embarrassment. Miss Norton,
who did not seem surprised by the disappearance of the family, asked to
be shown where she was. They went upstairs together; she was on the top
floor, opposite Laurence.

“Who was the capable person? Who wouldn’t let me telephone--the young
man?”

“Laurence.”

“Oh, Laurence. And the other people: I couldn’t hear their names.
They seemed very much here--faintly resentful: I expect I must be
horrible for them. He at once accused me of having cut my knee on a
scraper--when I was three or four. Who did you say?”

“The Montmorencys.”

“Oh, Hugo and Francie? Of course I have heard of them. Isn’t she his
mother--practically?” Miss Norton took off her hat and looked at
herself in the glass dispassionately and closely. “God!” she remarked.

“He brushes her hair,” said Lois, laughing--in the sharp unshadowy
atmosphere produced by Miss Norton it sounded more of a giggle--and
swinging with her back against the edge of the door.

“Oh, then it is mutual.”

“I knew him best when I was a child.”

“Yes, he looks like that. Thank you so much; I think I have got
everything. Yes, heaps of hot water. Wouldn’t you like to go now: I
mean, won’t there be dinner?... Oh, Lois!”

Lois, from over the threshold, came back willingly. “Mm?” she said.

“I mean, you are Lois, aren’t you? I’ve heard so much ... No, don’t
be late: I should hate you to help me.” Miss Norton had taken her coat
off and stood in a frilled shirt looking round distastefully at her
suitcases. “Go,” she said, “do really.”

Lois, half-way down the gallery, met Laurence coming up. “Mm?” said
Laurence.

“I think she seems quite mad,” said Lois doubtfully.

“You would,” replied Laurence and went past her coldly.




                                    X


ONE did not lightly telephone. There was a telephone six miles away,
at Ballyhinch, but its use made excessive demands upon the sympathy
and attention of the post-mistress. Marda could not understand--as
Sir Richard said, one would think she had come from America. From all
their angles she seemed to them very modern. They sat on the steps
after breakfast, waiting for post to come, discussing what they should
do. There was something agonizing to Sir Richard in the thought of
that suitcase. Marda said, it would not have mattered at all but that
her tennis shoes seemed to be in it. It was quite a relief when the
postman settled the matter by saying there had been another raid last
night in the Brittas direction and that all the wires were down again.
It had been a great raid, the postman said; if the boys had not fled
it would have been almost a battle. What times, said Francie, looking
at Marda doubtfully, they did live in! But other times, said Marda,
other disadvantages. Nobody hurt, they hoped? Well, said the postman,
the Black and Tans had been fired on, but why would they not be, they
themselves firing to the left and right continually? It seemed two of
them ones had pitched from the lorry the way you would think they’d be
killed and the boys had bolted, leaving the two lying.

“How do you know?” said Marda. The postman, looking austerely at her,
asked how would one help hearing? Though it was not for him to say what
was true and what was what you would hear. Sir Richard agreed with
this hastily and with some warmth: he did not want to have the postman
discouraged.

Marda received her six letters as a matter of course and glanced them
through sceptically. Lois watched her. Putting the letters away Marda
suggested that, since Laurence was so practical, he should drive her
into Clonmore or Ballydarra to buy more tennis shoes. Laurence feared
he did not drive the car nicely: he could avoid things but he was
inclined to wobble.

Sir Richard had disappeared on his morning round; how much of his corn
had been “laid” by the rain last night he did not like to imagine; it
was better to know. The rain had ceased before breakfast; loud drops
still drummed through the leaves; the trees with their rainy smell
were a wall of moisture. Thin vapours trailed on the sky over an
intermittent brightness; distances showed up thinly, as though painted.
“The end of our weather,” said poor Francie.

“But I feel,” persisted Marda, “I must have tennis shoes. I don’t mind
wobbling.”

“Laurence is more of the intellectual type,” explained Francie.

“I don’t think that matters.”

“It does with a car,” said Lois.

“I have never consciously driven _you_,” said her cousin coldly.

Marda laughed; she got up and stood on the steps. Fixed in their
row, the others all looked up at her. She was tall; her back, as she
stood looking over the fields, was like a young man’s in its vigorous
slightness. She escaped the feminine pear-shape, her shoulders were
square, legs long from the knee down. Her light-brown dress slipped
and fitted with careless accuracy, defining spareness negatively under
its slack folds. Sophistication opened further horizons to Lois. Marda
gathered her strung cornelians in one hand into a bunch at her throat;
they slipped down the nape of her neck. Standing vaguely she had still
that quality of directedness--from which they all swerved off in their
different ways. A hardy unawareness of self in her heightened one’s
own consciousness. Her lightest look watched, her casual listening
assessed, her speech was a lightning attack on one’s integrity out of
the stronghold of her indifference.

They remained sitting behind her with a vague sensation of having
been abandoned. Hugo came out, shut the glass door with precision and
blinked at the sky. “Clearing,” he said, then asked Marda to come for a
turn. Exercise seemed the order of the morning; Lois and Laurence were
later to go to the village with messages. Francie was waiting to go to
the garden with Lady Naylor.

“Am I or am I not to drive her?” wondered Laurence aloud, with
fatalism, looking after Miss Norton.

“She’ll certainly let you know.” Francie’s little ironical smile sent
her cheeks up, their faint flush wavering, under her eyes. She was
not so simple. Her diffidence, her inquiring softness, an outward
“laciness” of her personality--into which impressions seemingly
filtered like light, diffusedly, making no impact--covered a structure
of delicate hardness. She was in spirit insistent, tenacious and quick
in antagonisms; complexity tightened, as had been her delicate body’s,
by constant resistance to pain. She gave hospitality to the ever-living
Laura, she invited claims from Mrs. Archie Trent, she would have
endowed Lois, but she watched Marda turn beside Hugo into the beech
walk with raised brows, a cat’s blank unsparing lucidity.

“She’s very positive,” said Laurence, still looking after them.

“Positive about what?” asked Lois eagerly. Laurence held his breath
with annoyance and pulled up a sock.

Marda wanted nothing of Mr. Montmorency but entertainment. She was
an experienced fellow-visitor. He interested her; his negativeness
was startling. She had heard of him, and of it, in all parts of the
country, had arrived at several houses into a loud reaction, a kind
of indignant excitement following his departure. Her acquiescence
in finding him so exactly as he had been described was tempered by
incredulity, almost shock. And she could define in him qualities which
her friends in the rush of discussion had slurred or had overshot:
one, a kind of drawn-back apprehension in his approaches, as though
something bright were being brandished before his eyes. His look,
coming wavering round this interruption, had, in regard to herself, a
peculiar intensity. She was already real to him as a woman.

He now swung his blackthorn, slashing the air widely. “I remember this
walk,” she said. “I seem to have been here yesterday. But I thought it
was somewhere in Kerry, at Castle Reagh.”

“Oh no, it is here,” he said wisely. They laughed. Down the walk,
brightening air slipped like gauze round the beech trunks; great pewter
limbs went turning and straining up with the sheen of muscles. Drops,
infrequent and startling, loudly fell on his hat brim, icily on her
shoulders through the mesh of her dress. The path’s perspective was a
tunnel of glass. Her companion’s lameness of thought, the faltering
silence produced a kind of vacuum in her; she covered a yawn.

“This is not a good morning,” he suggested, “to walk under trees.”

“Really the worst possible.”

“Oh ... had we better--?” However, they walked on.

“I always come here,” he said in extenuation. “My turn to the right’s
mechanical. I was here as a boy, you know.”

“Were you here when I bled so much at that children’s party?”

“Not actually, but I have always heard of it. Didn’t you lose a ring?”

“At another party, at a more suitable age. It was the most lovely ring
I have ever had--Regent Street. The jeweller said it must be emeralds
because the lady was Irish and Timothy fully agreed with him. I had had
no idea I had such an expensive nationality.”

“What a pity!”

“Yes, those things are always a pity.”

He was not sure how much she included. “Did your--did Timothy mind?”

“Not so much as the Naylors. Later, he was killed on the Somme. But he
had two sons first, so it all came right--I mean, he married.”

“Oh yes ... I suppose you are often here? I have often heard of you.
And at Johnstown and Ballyduff and up in the North I have heard you
expected. But I was always going. Once, I believe, we crossed at an
avenue gate.”

The fact was, she acknowledged with a laugh, that they both visited
incorrigibly. She knew also, she told him, that he not only visited but
travelled; he had been almost everywhere but Canada.

“But I really should not have come back here,” she said. “There is
something in Lady Naylor’s eye: a despairing optimism. I feel that
suitcase won’t be the end of me here. There will be a raid and I shall
be shot on the avenue, not even fatally, or Laurence will take me out
and upset that car. Then really she will never forgive me, though the
efforts she makes will follow me over Europe.... How far do you think
this war is going to go? Will there ever be anything we can all do
except not notice?”

“Don’t ask _me_,” he said, but sighed sharply as though beneath the
pressure of omniscience. “A few more hundred deaths, I suppose, on our
side--which is no side--rather scared, rather isolated, not expressing
anything except tenacity to something that isn’t there--that never
was there. And deprived of heroism by this wet kind of smother of
commiseration. What’s the matter with this country is the matter with
the lot of us individually--our sense of personality is a sense of
outrage and we’ll never get outside of it.”

But the hold of the country _was_ that, she considered, it could be
thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted. Or seemed so--“Like
Shakespeare,” she added more vaguely, “or isn’t it?... But now tell
me,” she said, “about Lois?”

“Lois?” He was guiltily startled, thinking of Laura’s daughter.

“Lois--haven’t you noticed her? She sat beside you at dinner.”

He feared he was no good at people, he was preparing to say--but the
remark, tried over critically, seemed a kind of echo: he reminded
himself of Laurence. He was confused by her cool watching, her eyebrows
drawn up and together in ironical friendly despair at him. Her
face--like a Dutch doll’s; he defensively told himself, in its accurate
clear disposition of red-and-white colour--was, at this sudden pull-up
to her interest, like a mask in its halt of expression. Her features,
the dark line of hair springing over the white square of forehead, were
in their special relation like something almost too clearly written
that he still could not read; to be learnt now and puzzled over in
retrospect.

She was, in fact, repelled by his lack of sympathy. “Lois,” she said,
“is nice. She is in such a hurry, so concentrated upon her hurry, so
helpless. She is like some one being driven against time in a taxi to
catch a train, jerking and jerking to help the taxi and looking wildly
out of the window at things going slowly past. She keeps hearing that
final train go out without her. How I should hate to be young again!
But, I had no ambitions.”

He watched her unguarded profile. “Oh yes,” he said, “ambition?”

“I’ve never met any woman so determined to love well, so anxious to
love soon, so certain of her ability. She really prays for somebody to
be fatal; she eyes doors. And you are all disappointments.”

“To begin with,” said Hugo, nettled. “She’s not a woman--”

“Awful if nothing happens to her! She reminds me, too, of a little girl
I remember at school sports; in a team race, one of those things with
bean-bags. Hopping at the end of the line, working up to the front
slowly, simply sick with eagerness. Her turn comes, she is the whole
world: her eyes shoot out of her head--she drops the bean-bag. They all
groan.... It makes me go dry inside to think of it now.”

“There is a young man--Harold--Gerald. They dance on the avenue.”

“Like rabbits?”

“They have a gramophone.”

“Is he supposed to love her?”

“My wife thinks so. Laurence considers he suitably might. Her aunt
does not think it suitable at all and won’t hear a word of it, so he
officially doesn’t.”

“Anyhow, to be loved is not her affair at all, it is quite irrelevant.
She does not love him, poor little thing: he is useless.”

“I can’t think it necessary for a young girl, at her age, to love
anybody.”

“Oh, it is not,” she said impatiently, “at any age. But one has those
ideas.”

This dismissal, this lightness vexed him. Let her speak for herself.
She had, then, her whole sex’s limitations: a teachable shallowness, a
hundred little abilities. But he, prey to a constant self-reproach, was
a born lover; conscious of cycles in him, springs and autumns of desire
and disenchantment, and of the intermediate pausing seasons, bland or
frigid, eaten at either margin by past or coming shadows of change.

“I have not these ideas,” he said coldly.

They turned at the end of the walk through a gateway, into a fir
plantation. Here they walked between walls of dusk, to be released to
an airy green space, tree-pillared. The green strip, measureless on
ahead but narrow, slanted down on their left to the open meadows, on
their right was bounded by an uneven wall. Below the wall an unseen
swift stream flowed, tinkling and knocking. The path hesitated ahead
of them, faint on the bright green turf. Here the few beeches stood,
unrelated, lovely, desultory; between their trunks--the tall mountains,
vivid in a suffusion of distant light. The scene glittered. “More rain
coming,” said Mr. Montmorency.

But she stared ahead. A trench-coat flickered between the trees,
approaching. Her look focussed; there was an interchange. Coming to
them, the young man almost hurried. After consideration: “Hullo!” said
Mr. Montmorency.

“Hal-_lo!_” cried Gerald, flushing with expectation. Never had they
been so acclaimed. He was out this way, he explained, coming into
ear-shot, and was proposing to take advantage of something rash that
Lady Naylor had once said about dropping in to lunch any time. “They’re
not _out?_” he asked suddenly with, Marda noticed, a queer haggardness.
They were not? That was splendid, marvellous. Early about?--he had been
out all night, he told them. Oh yes--feeling Mr. Montmorency glance at
his chin interrogatively--he had shaved by the road; he had brought his
tackle with him, he often did. Here--no, that was his pistol: the other
pocket. Marda extolled his foresight. Mr. Montmorency had forgotten to
introduce them; they stood socially grouped round a beech and exchanged
cigarettes.

“Very busy now?” said Marda, bending down to the match Gerald sheltered.

“Off and on--generally on, but we don’t know.” She really seemed most
remarkable, he looked intently, just lightly enough to avoid a stare.
He liked talk like this, square and facty, compact with assumptions
Pleasant that she should be here at the house for lunch. Light slipped
back over the dints of her hair as she looked up again. Lunch seemed a
torch in the future; between now and lunch-time he would have come on
Lois, somewhere, somehow, and amazingly kissed her amazed hands. There
would be, till the kiss, no speaking--there she eluded him. He had
thought this out.

He had thought this out, seen ahead to this climax rather--as though a
flower’s centre had been revealed by an impetuous opening out of lovely
confused petals--on the lorry, breasting the darkness. Watching the
morning skylines form and creep out like enemies from the cold night,
he had burned at her nearness under the insistent groping of the wind.
Rushing under his eyes the hedge-tops shivered; he had laughed and
shivered, hand in his pistol pocket, hand on his razor. And now, as
looking at Marda he once more kissed Lois’s hands, he knew once more,
assured by her eyes, that keen truth of the first showing of daylight.
He was fortified in assurance. Leaning with her elbow against the tree,
returning casually his directness of look, she recalled some profound
and certain excitement, as of his first approach to the War. Now he
meant to go past the hands, to kiss the curve of Lois’s cheek as she
strained away, then stamp her uncertain mouth with his own certainty.
Naïvely, he looked at his wrist-watch.

“Yes, go on,” she said, looking up through trees where a bright breath
disturbed the closeness. He looked past her, the path led to Lois. This
green open path spaced out with trees was (he afterwards thought) like
something in heaven.

“It will rain by lunch-time,” said Mr. Montmorency. And indeed the sky
was already creeping together and fading, and the mountains’ sharpness
seemed a kind of anxiety.

“I wish,” said Gerald to Marda, “you’d been out up there this morning.
You wouldn’t know where you were, with the light coming.”

“Is there a smell of daylight? I once heard a man say--”

“Well, that is just like me--I was smoking.”

“Look, you must go on.”

“Yes, perhaps--” He went on. She was left only half protected by
irony from an inrush of desolation. His look and smile clung to her
memory with the tenacity of irrelevance: his steps on the grass died
out quickly. There was silence: a cold apprehension of rain in the
beeches, the tinkling and knocking of water beyond the wall. Hugo,
having walked a short way ahead, looked back at her sharply. She was
startled. “Bother!” she thought. For there was bother behind the look.

“Do we go on?” They walked on, but were oppressed by their lack of
objective. They met the white stare of a cottage, stared and turned.

“Dannie Regan lives there: he shot out an eye shooting rabbits and now
he’s losing the sight of the other. I used to go out with him when
I was a boy--so high. His mother lives with him--or should still; I
haven’t heard that she’s gone. She must be a hundred and four.”

“Do you know the man I am going to marry, Leslie Lawe? He’s a
stockbroker; he fishes a good deal. His people are in Meath.”

“Meath?... I didn’t know you--”

“I am really. I haven’t told the Naylors. They think my engagements
fantastic; you see, they have all come to nothing. But I ought to have
told the Naylors; it ought to have come at once, but there was that
wretched suitcase. I will say something at dinner, not lunch: please do
something to lessen the atmosphere of surprise.”

“When?”

“Oh, we think this winter.”

He looked from one window of the cottage to the other. “It will make
a break in the winter,” he said at last. “I dare say you will go
somewhere sunny. Algiers perhaps--Morocco, if you are able.”

“Yes, he is quite rich.”

“I shouldn’t go to the Riviera.... But I thought you didn’t believe in
this sort of thing?”

“I? Oh, I never said so.”

Now he came to think of it, she had not explicitly said so. “I hope you
will be happy.”

“I don’t expect I shall be much different.”

“I think,” he said, “I must go in and talk to Dannie. He will have
heard I’m back. It seems a good time now--do you mind?”

“I’ll talk to Mrs. Regan.”

“She’s deaf.”

“Then we’ll smile at each other--she’s not blind.”

They approached the doorway that yearned up the path like an
eye-socket. A breath of peat smoke, of cold trodden earth, of the
ghostly dark of white walls came out from the cottage. Dannie took form
on the darkness, searching with his one eye. He stood with his white
beard, helpless and eager. “Well!” exclaimed Hugo. Then Dannie broke
out: this was young Mr. Hugo, wasn’t he the lovely gentleman, as fine
and upstanding as ever. And here was his wife he’d brought with him,
the beautiful lady. And, trembling and searching, he took Marda’s hand.
He declared that she brought back the sight of youth to his eyes.




                                    XI


IT rained before lunch-time. Gerald heard loud drops come after him
as he went up the beech walk. Under every beech he expected to see
Lois looking round in surprise. When he heard a dog in the undergrowth
he turned, laughing with expectation. But it was the _louche_ yellow
dog from the lodge, intent on rabbiting. Soon a square black eye of
the house--three--four--looked down at him through the branches; he
came out under the whole cold shell of it, streaked with rain and
hollow-looking from an interior darkness. The yellow dog passed him,
looked back scornfully from the steps and pattered in at the door with
an air of possession. “Hallo!” called Gerald, looking about him.

But she was nowhere; the place was cold with her absence and seemed
forgotten. The tennis party became a dream--parasols with their
coloured sunshine, rugs spread, shimmer of midges, amiable competition
of voices. Something had now been wiped from the place with implied
finality. Gerald told himself it was all very queer, quiet; that it
was disappointing about Lois. He tugged the bell, a maid appeared in
surprise, did her back hair hastily, encouraged him in with a smile and
left him. The hall with staring portraits contracted round a glove on
the table--a grey suède gauntlet strapped at the wrist--he picked up
the glove and kissed it. But the house was full of ladies, the glove
might as well be Marda’s--he dropped it doubtfully.

A lovely mystery of feminine life: what did a young girl do with
herself in the mornings? Vaguely he pictured keyboards and pink ambling
fingers. He recollected those sage-green sexless covers of intellectual
books. He recalled the musty smell of work-boxes, the blush through
transparent paper of shell-pink needlework wrapped away hastily. You
never asked a girl what she was making.

He listened, took off his trench-coat, stepped to the drawing-room
door. The five tall windows stood open on rain and the sound of
leaves, rain stuttered along the sills, the grey of the mirrors
shivered. Polished tables were cold little lakes of light. The smell
of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes
numbed his earthy vitality, he became all ribs and uniform. He was
aware of intrusion. But he dared not go in unasked to the library,
where Sir Richard might well look up from writing, sharp with
pince-nez. He could not again face the hall--he was shy of the glove.

He took up the _Spectator_, read an article on Unrest and thought
of the Empire. Mechanically his hand went up to his tie. He looked
ahead to a time when it all should be accurately, finally fenced
about and all raked over. Then there should be a fixed leisured glow,
and relaxation, as on coming in to tea from an afternoon’s gardening
with his mother in autumn. He turned in thought to confident English
country, days like the look in a dog’s eyes, rooms small in the scope
of firelight, neighbourly lights through trees. He thought of a woman,
kind and palpable, who should never produce this ache, this absence....
A door dragged forward its portière; Lois came in from the dining-room,
brushing rain from her frieze coat. He stood for a moment in a kind
of despair at her agitation, as though he were trying to take her
photograph. Then he stepped forward and kissed her, his hands on her
wet shoulders.

“--Oh, but look here--” cried Lois.

But she was his lovely woman: kissed. He shone at her, she helpless.
She looked out at the hopeless rain.

“I love--” he said eagerly.

“Oh, but look here--”

“But I love--”

“What are you doing in the drawing-room?”

“I’ve come to lunch.”

“Do they know?”

“I haven’t seen anyone.”

“_I_ don’t know who to tell,” she said distractedly. “They have all
disappeared; they always are disappearing. You’d think this was the
emptiest house in Ireland--we have no family life. It’s no good my
telling Brigid because she forgets, and the parlourmaid is always
dressing. I suppose I had better lay you a place myself--but I don’t
know where the knives are kept. I can’t think why you are being so
sudden all of a sudden, in every way: you never used to be. I haven’t
even done the flowers yet. I do wish you wouldn’t, Gerald--I mean, be
so _actual_. And do be natural at lunch, or I shall look such a goat.
You really might have asked me, I never mind talking things over. But
now the gong will go at any moment. And how do you know I’m not in love
with a married man?”

“You wouldn’t be so neurotic; I mean, like a novel. I mean: do be
natural, Lois.”

“Don’t look so, so inflamed.... Miss Norton is here; she’s a girl--at
least a kind of a girl. She’s awfully attractive.”

“I think I met her. She’s awfully--well, not beautiful, but ... Oh,
Lois ...”

“Do be normal: do play the piano.”

“I can’t start playing the piano before I’ve even told them I’ve come
to lunch. I may be musical, Lois, but I’m not artistic.”

“All right,” she said, and walked away from him round the room. So
that was being kissed: just an impact, with inside blankness. She was
lonely, and saw there was no future. She shut her eyes and tried--as
sometimes when she was sea-sick, locked in misery between Holyhead
and Kingstown--to be enclosed in nonentity, in some ideal no-place,
perfect and clear as a bubble. Or she was at a party, unreal and vivid,
or running on hard sands. “It wouldn’t have mattered so much at the
seaside,” she said to Gerald.

“But we never are at the seaside.”

She opened a sandalwood box and looked in: three blue beads and a
receipt of her own from Switzers: three-and-eleven for yellow velvet
pansies, worn at a dance and spoilt. “It’s not even as though we were
at a dance,” she added.

“Lois, I’ve been thinking about you all night, up in the
mountains--right up there when you were asleep. You were wonderful.”

“Haven’t you been to bed at all?”

“No, you know I--”

“Oh, Gerald-- Oh ... darling-- But you did have breakfast?”

The gong sounded: great brass balls went bouncing about the empty
rooms. The parlourmaid looked in perfunctorily. “Lunch?” said Gerald to
Lois.

“No one is in--and I don’t suppose lunch is even ready. Gerald, _did_
you have breakfast?”

“An enormous breakfast at Ballydarra.... What were you saying, Lois;
what did you call me _then_ ... before the gong?”

But now she flushed and answered: “I’m sopping wet; I’m steaming, I
smell like a dog. I should have thought you would want me to go and
change. I should have thought you’d be--protecting.”

“You know I’d die for you.”

They looked at each other. The words had a solemn echo, as though
among high dark arches in a church where they were standing and being
married. She thought of death and glanced at his body, quick, lovely,
present and yet destructible. Something passed sensation and touched
her consciousness with a kind of weight and warmth; she glimpsed a
quiet beyond experience, as though for many nights he had been sleeping
beside her.

“What _did_ I say then? Say it.”

“‘Darling’ ...”

But she turned away from some approach in his look.

Lady Naylor and Mrs. Montmorency passed, in profile, under the three
west windows, pressed very close together under a green en-tout-cas,
discussing the vice-regency of the Aberdeens. Simultaneously, Mr.
Montmorency and Miss Norton were heard coming up the steps rather
breathlessly, talking about money. They must both have been conscious
of being a little vulgar, a little English, for as Sir Richard rattled
open the glass door and went out to meet them, they broke off flatly.

“You must have got very wet,” said Sir Richard. “Marda, about that
suitcase of yours. I have been thinking it over--”

“Sir Richard, I can’t bear you to--”

“My dear girl, a suitcase is a suitcase--I was just saying to Marda,
Myra, that I have been thinking over that suitcase of hers--”

“We had better have lunch at once,” said Lady Naylor imperatively.

“Miss Norton will have to change.”

“Hugo, how _could_ you let her get so wet!”

“My dear, I am not an umbrella.”

“Marda, how could you go out without a mackintosh!”

In the drawing-room Gerald walked to a window and stared at the rain in
perplexity, stroking the back of his head, looking rather an ordinary
kind of subaltern. Lois looked at herself in a mirror, then went out to
the hall to tell them about Gerald. Every one stared, she put up a hand
to her face. “Mr. Lesworth has come to lunch,” she said deprecatingly.
“You told him he could whenever he wanted, so I suppose he thought he
might.”

“Of _course_,” said Lady Naylor; “I suppose you have told Sarah?”

“Well, I don’t know where to find her; she is always dressing.”

“Of course she is not always dressing; should I keep a parlourmaid who
was? She only changes once a day, but you always go and look for her at
the wrong times. Where is Mr. Lesworth?”

“In the drawing-room.”

“How extraordinary! Wouldn’t he rather be in the library? Richard,
why didn’t you ask Mr. Lesworth into the library? I expect now he had
better wash.”

Lois went upstairs: Marda came up after her and took her arm; Lois
started. She could not think of anything to say, Marda was not even
trying; they went up silently. “Some time,” Lois said as they parted,
“can I show you my drawings? They’re fearfully bad.”

“Come up to my room after tea.”

Throughout luncheon, Sir Richard talked to Gerald about the South
African War and the Cork Militia. He liked the young fellow. Laurence
talked to Marda about whaling, Lady Naylor and Francie continued the
Aberdeens, Lois tried to explain to Hugo about Augustus John. The rain
stopped, they agreed that it had been only a shower. Lois and Gerald
were side by side, but they did not have to speak, they simply passed
things. The side of her next to Gerald felt numb.

“Raspberries?” she said towards the end of the meal, constrainedly.

“Please.” _He_ was not nervous at all. Queer, she confusedly thought,
how men throw off action without a quiver at severance from the self
that goes into it. They remain complete, the action hangs in the air
of the place, above the grass or furniture, crystallizing in memory;
eternal, massive and edged to the touch of thought as, to the bodily
touch, a grand piano. She herself felt bound to all she had done
emotionally. But his kissing of her, his attack, were no longer part of
him. He concentrated upon his raspberries, crushing them, on his cream
with carmine beautifully folding through, on his flushing sugar. She
watched the work on his plate. “Magnificent,” he said to Sir Richard,
agreeing about the Cork Militia.

Going out through the hall, Laurence offered Gerald a cigarette.
“American--extra mild.”

“Thanks--I--”

“How is your jazz band?”

“Very little practising; not much time, you see.”

“Do tell me: did you kill anybody?”

“How much?” said Gerald, startled.

“Anybody last night?”

“Oh, good Lord, no!”

“Isn’t that why you go out?”

“We were looking for arms, really. And nights you find the most
surprising people at home. We were after a fellow called Peter Connor:
we got him.”

“Fight?” said Laurence eagerly.

“He was at home, in bed. These blighters think we are greater fools
than we are.”

“Very cynical of him.... Oh, I say, Uncle Richard, Lesworth has
captured Peter Connor.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Sir Richard, flushing severely. “His
mother is dying. However, I suppose you must do your duty. We must
remember to send up now and inquire for Mrs. Michael Connor. We’ll
send some grapes. The poor woman--it seems too bad.” He went off,
sighing, into the library.

Gerald was horrified. His duty, so bright and abstract, had come
suddenly under the shadowy claw of the personal. “I had no idea,” he
exclaimed to Laurence, “these people were friends of yours.”

“Can’t be helped,” said Laurence. “I dare say he was a dirty dog....
If you hate that cigarette, Lesworth, have one of your own. It seems
a long time since we have seen you. How is this war of yours really
going? Do you realize I know nothing--this might all just as well be
going on in the Balkans. I sometimes rather wish that I were a gunman.
There are one or two things I should like to ask--but don’t let me keep
you if you want to talk to anyone else.”

“Rather not.”

The ladies were in the drawing-room laughing intimately, putting across
the open door a barrier of exclusion. Laurence and Gerald wandered
about the hall, taking note of each other indirectly and amicably.
Laurence was by three years the younger, but imposed his own impression
of seniority. Light hair tumbling, eyes startled open and limp grey
flannels, he looked to Gerald as though he had slept through the
morning. While Gerald circled, the grey glove lay on the table, its
fingers crisped in derision. Outside, in an irresponsible burst of
sunshine, the wet fields had a metallic brightness. Gerald thought of
Lois’s shoulders, their rounded squareness, the feel of wet frieze
under his grip. He was flattered but uneasy under Laurence’s interest,
which had indeed, for the simple, the awkward menace of some one
preparing to cast a net. He pursed his lips to a whistle and shrugged
slightly.

“For instance, what do you, personally, think about all this?”

“Well, my opinion is--”

“Oh, but I don’t want your opinion, I want your point of view.”

“Well, the situation’s rotten. But right _is_ right.”

“Why?”

“Well ... from the point of view of civilization. Also, you see, they
don’t fight clean.”

“Oh, there’s no public school spirit in Ireland. But do tell me--what
do you mean by the point of view of civilization?”

“Oh--ours.”

Laurence smiled his appreciation: the conviction, stated without
arrogance, had a ring of integrity. Gerald, embarrassed by this
benevolence, had recourse again to the back of his head, so
gratifyingly polished. “If you come to think,” he explained, “I mean,
looking back on history--not that I’m intellectual--we _do_ seem the
only people.”

“Difficulty being to make them see it.”

“--And that we have what they really want ... though of course the more
one thinks of it all, the smaller, personally, it makes one feel.”

“Oh? I don’t feel small in that way. But I’m not English--”

“Oh, no--I beg your pardon.”

“--Thank God.”

“Don’t understand?”

“God may. Shall we look for the others?”

Gerald, shocked, preceded Laurence into the drawing-room. Their
conversation, torn off rough at this edge, seemed doomed from its very
nature to incompletion. Gerald would have wished to explain that no
one could have a sounder respect than himself and his country for the
whole principle of nationality, and that it was with some awareness
of misdirection, even of paradox, that he was out here to hunt and
shoot the Irish. His alertness was blunted, while he approached the
ladies, by a slight stupor of effort; he was groping for something
Napoleon had once said, something remarkably neat and apposite that
Gerald had once copied into a pocket-book. Laurence had not hoped to
explain, but had wished that Gerald could infer, that there was a
contrariety in the notions they each had of this thing civilization.
As a rather perplexing system of niceties, Laurence saw it; an exact
and delicate interrelation of stresses between being and being, like
crossing arches; an unemotioned kindness withering to assertion selfish
or racial; silence cold with a comprehension in which the explaining
clamour died away. He foresaw in it the end of art, of desire, as it
would be the end of battle, but it was to this end, this faceless but
beautiful negation that he had lifted a glass inwardly while he had
said, “Thank God!”

Gerald knew that no one who spoke of God in that family way could
have any belief. He had heard that Oxford was full of Socialism, of a
wrongness that was the outcome of too much thinking, and in the light
of this it did appear to him that Laurence’s conversation had been
decidedly Sinn Fein. But he liked and respected Lois’s cousin, who
made a man of one by that naïve curiosity as to bloodshed--curiosity
to which Gerald had been a stranger since the days of the _Boy’s Own
Paper_ spread on the nursery floor. Also, he could not have looked so
consistently bored at parties if he had not been, as they all said,
very intellectual.

Lois, watching Gerald approach with an absence of smile that was almost
a shadow, was certain she must have done him injustice. His constraint
(the pursuit of Napoleon) had a rather grave beauty. Their kiss under
the high ceiling must be present and palpable to him also. Aware of
some growth of manliness in him, she wanted the feel of his lips again,
to capture what she had missed before. And a quick glance of Marda’s
from one to the other sealed their mood with a recognition.

“Can’t we go out?” she said generally, for Gerald to take up.

“It will rain again in a minute,” said Lady Naylor, glancing cynically
at the weather. And indeed a few drops already sparkled against the
sunshine. “Also I particularly want to talk to Mr. Lesworth. When he
comes he is always playing tennis, or I forget. But now there are some
things I really want to ask him ... I really want his point of view ...”

She sat down in a faded bowery chair, settling herself with a rustle
of expectation. Francie, attracted, trailed her skirts and her fancy
work down the sofa; Marda, putting a new cigarette in her holder,
leaned over the back. From the constellation of eager faces Lois
wandered away. The three were no more her enemies than were her own
irresolution or the bright vicious raindrops blotting the pane. Yet
their unforeseen combination defeated her finally. She yawned at the
outlook.

“Lois, don’t yawn,” said her aunt. “Now I want to know, Mr. Lesworth,
what Colonel Boatley really thinks of reprisals. Of course it will go
no further, though you mustn’t think I want you to be indiscreet....
Laurence, just shut the door.”

Laurence shut himself out. And Gerald, sitting down with a sigh, said
that of course it was all rather a problem. He caught Marda’s eye, dark
and bright with amusement, and read there the doom of his afternoon.

“Yes? Yes? Yes? This is so interesting--you were asking me, weren’t
you, Francie, and I said we would ask Mr. Lesworth.... Marda, do
listen, dear, never mind, shake your ash on the carpet, you mustn’t
miss this. Because these days when so much nonsense is talked on both
sides I do feel one owes it to speak on some good authority--unless Mr.
Lesworth would rather we didn’t. Now please go on!”

And Gerald, half hypnotized, consciously barren and not in his
Colonel’s confidence, repeated to them what he had read in the _Morning
Post_. As Lady Naylor said at the time, no one would dream of taking
the _Morning Post_ seriously, it was so anti-Irish, but an opinion
on it from anyone so much “in things” as Mr. Lesworth was well worth
hearing. And as she said afterwards, it was extraordinary how no amount
of experience shook these young Englishmen up. Their minds remained
cutting-books.




                                   XII


AN armoured car called for Gerald at four o’clock and he was driven
away through the rain. Towards the end of the afternoon he had become
very dull, a kind of fog came over his personality; he confessed he
was sleepy. Lady Naylor remarked what a pity it was he could not stay
for his tea, that would have freshened him up again. There was still
so much that she wanted to know. The drawing-room became to Gerald
fantastic and thin like an ice-palace, and, reflected backwards
and forwards in tall mirrors, seemed like a chain of galleries at
Versailles down which, numbing with admiration, he had to advance
wearily. He did not see Lois alone any more. She kept coming in,
looking round vaguely, then going upstairs again. Upstairs, he could
hear her playing the gramophone. She came out to the steps with Marda
to see him off; they stood with arms linked, brushing the rain from
their hair. The last they saw of him was a putteed leg being drawn in
carefully. Something steel slid to; they waved, but never a hand came
out. The machine seemed already to be digesting. He was swept from them
with martial impersonality.

At half-past five Lois went to the top of the house with her
drawing-books, paused for confidence, tickled a panel of Marda’s door.
Coming into the changed and vivid room, she tipped her drawing-books
disengagedly on to a window-seat. Marda sat on the writing-table,
engaged in manicure. Little pots, pads and bottles paraded; a chamois
leather was spread on her knee. A sweet smell of varnish, like
pear-drops, was in the air.

“The most I can do,” said Lois, intent, “is to keep mine clean.”

“Quite enough. It’s just this habit of making up every part of one
that’s exposed at all.... Lois, have a cigarette?”

“Oh ... thanks. You don’t mind my coming?”

“My dear, why?”

“What lovely brushes! What a ... what an uncommon photograph frame!”

“Yes, that’s Leslie Lawe.”

“Oh? Oh yes,” Lois paused uncertainly. “How good looking! Do--do you
know him well?”

“Very. We’re engaged.”

“Oh, how lovely!” Lois had a shock of flatness.

“Oh, yes; didn’t you know?”

“Well, I thought you probably would be. Shall you live in London?”

“I suppose we shall. I suppose we shall have to.”

“Oh, how lovely!”

Marda laughed and began screwing on the lids of her little pots. In the
light of her brilliant life, her deftness seemed to Lois inimitable.
One would have had to have lived twenty-nine years as fast, as surely
and wildly, to screw pink celluloid caps on to small white pots with
just that lightness of finger-tip, just that degree of amusement, just
that detachment in smile and absorption in attitude. And the pink smell
of nail-varnish, dresses trickling over a chair, flash of swinging
shoe-buckle, cloud of powder over the glass, the very room with its
level stare on the tree-tops, took on awareness, smiled with secrecy,
had the polish and depth of experience. The very birds on the frieze
flew round in cognizant agitation.

“What a lovely dress!” said Lois, picking up the end of a red sleeve,
so that she seemed to be standing hand in hand with the dress.

“Vienna.”

“And, oh, what a lovely green one!... Am I pawing things?”

“I like it. But haven’t you got some drawings?”

“Drawings? Oh, my drawings! Oh--I’m afraid they’d bore you.”

“I don’t expect so.”

“Well, I did just happen to bring them along.”

She had brought two drawing-books, cheerful in mottled bindings with
tissue between the pages. She brought them across to Marda, then turned
away. The drawings, in black ink, illustrated the Morte d’Arthur and
Omar Khayyam. They remembered Beardsley. Lois, away at a window,
heard Marda rustle the tissue paper: she watched the rain intently.
Beyond the demesne trees, a farm cart rattled along the road. Marda,
conscientious, turned back to the title page. Here she paused, for Lois
had printed out, in uncertain Gothic:

  “‘I am a painter who cannot paint;
  In my life, a devil rather than saint;
  In my brain, as poor a creature too:
  No end to all that I cannot do!
  But do one thing at least I can--
  Love a man or hate a man
  Supremely--’

  Lois Honoria Farquar: Her Book.”

“Oh,” said Marda.

“Browning.”

“But can you really?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“And are you sure that you can’t paint? Have you ever tried?”

“I hated two of the girls at school and I really rather do hate Mr.
Montmorency. And I can’t help getting involved with people. Personal
relations make a perfect havoc of me; my headmistress said so. Of
course I haven’t had much scope here, so far. Being grown up seems
trivial, somehow. I mean, dressing and writing notes instead of
letters, and trying to make impressions. When you have to think so much
of what other people feel about you there seems no time to think what
you feel about them. Everybody is genial at one in a monotonous kind
of way. I don’t seem to find young men inspiring, somehow. I suppose I
shall. Did you ever have any difficulty about beginning?”

“I can’t remember. I never can see back to the other side of things
that have happened.”

“I think I must cut that title page out. I wrote it when I was rather
young. But surely love wouldn’t get so much talked about if there were
not something in it? I mean even soap, you know, however much they
advertise ...”

“Oh, there must be. Let me look at the drawings.”

Marda, still on the table with crossed knees, spread out the book
briskly. But Lois, all in a glow, could not help remarking: “Somebody
told me I was neurotic.”

“I shouldn’t worry.”

With a brutality of which she was unaware Marda returned to the
drawings. Lois, thinking: “I do not interest her,” sat down on the
floor with her back to the chest of drawers. Over the mottled carpet
curled strange pink fronds: some one dead now, buying this carpet, had
responded to an idea of beauty. Lois thought how in Marda’s bedroom,
when she was married, there might be a dark blue carpet with a bloom
on it like a grape, and how this room, this hour would be forgotten.
Already the room seemed full of the dusk of oblivion. And she hoped
that instead of fading to dust in summers of empty sunshine, the carpet
would burn with the house in a scarlet night to make one flaming call
upon Marda’s memory. Lois again realized that no one had come for her,
after all. She thought, “I must marry Gerald.”

But with a jump of the heart she heard every page turn over. She
received the print of each look as though her sensibility were
the paper. Reactions to Lois’s drawings were as a rule momentary
and staccato: “My dear!... They’re sinister ... what a marvellous
muezzin!... Aren’t those the seven queens?” And indeed it had come to
seem to herself that the drawings must really mean something. A glance
at them, though she had lost the power to see them, gave her the kind
of surprised assurance one might expect from motherhood.

Marda said nothing; once or twice she changed her attitude, shifting
the book from knee to knee. Soot, dislodged by the rain, sifted sharply
on to the paper fan in the grate, startling them to an exchange of
glances. Then she said deliberately, closing the drawing-book:

“I think you’re cleverer than you can draw, you know.”

“Oh--”

“You don’t mind, do you? Look--have another cigarette. Why can’t you
write, or something?”

“That’s so embarrassing. Even things like--like elephants get so
personal.”

“I know. I give up reading--I’m sick of their personal elephants.... Or
act? But why do you stay here?”

“I can’t think,” said Lois, startled.

“You like to be the pleasant young person?”

“I like to be in a pattern.” She traced a pink frond with her finger.
“I like to be related; to have to be what I am. Just to _be_ is so
intransitive, so lonely.”

“Then you will like to be a wife and mother.” Marda got off the
writing-table and began to change her stockings. “Jacob’s ladder,” she
explained. “It’s a good thing we can always be women.”

“I hate women. But I can’t think how to begin to be anything else.”

“Climate.”

“But I would hate to be a man. So much fuss about doing things. Except
Laurence--but he is such a hog. Ought I to go to London?”

“Ever been abroad?”

Of course she had not, she said, because of the War, and of course she
would like to. There was Rome, and she would like to stay in a hotel
by herself.--There was just “abroad”: she always wondered how long
the feeling lasted. And there was America, but one would have to have
introductions or one would get a crick in one’s neck from just always
looking up at things. She would like to feel real in London. She had
never come out through a pass and looked down on little distinct white
cities with no smoke. She had never been in a tunnel for more than five
minutes--she had heard there were tunnels in which you could nearly
suffocate? She had never seen anything larger than she could imagine.
She wanted, she said, to see backgrounds without bits taken out of them
by Holy Families; small black trees running up and down white hills.
She thought the little things would be important: trees with electric
lights growing out of them, she had heard of; coloured syphons. She
wanted to go wherever the War hadn’t. She wanted to go somewhere
nonchalant where politics bored them, where bands played out of doors
in the hot nights and nobody wished to sleep. She wanted to go into
cathedrals unadmonished and look up unprepared into the watery deep
strangeness. There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like
buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference.
She liked mountains, but she did not care for views. She did not want
adventures, but she would like just once to be nearly killed. She
wanted to see something that only she would remember. Could one really
float a stone in a glacier stream? She liked unmarried sorts of places.
She did not want to see the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower (could one
avoid it?) or to go to Switzerland or Berlin or any of the Colonies.
She would like to know people and go to dinner parties on terraces, and
she thought it would be a pity to miss love. Could one travel alone?
She did not mind being noticed because she was a female, she was tired
of being not noticed because she was a lady. She could not imagine ever
not wanting some one to talk to about tea-time. If she went to Cook’s,
could they look out all the trains for her, in Spain and everywhere?
She had never been to Cook’s. Was there any law about selling tickets
to people under age?

Marda, smoothing the last wrinkle out of a stocking and fastening up a
suspender, said she did not believe this was so.

“Of course anybody could do all that. But it would not be me.”

“But be interested in what happens to you for its own sake; don’t
expect to be touched or changed--or to be in anything that you do. One
just watches. Pain is one’s misunderstanding.”

The advice, fruit of her own relation to experience, unwisdom, lacking
the sublimer banality, was--as she suspected while still speaking--to
her young friend meaningless and without value. The infinite variance
of that relation breaks the span of comprehension between being and
being and makes an attempt at sympathy the merest fumbling for outlet
along the boundaries of the self. Lois looked vaguely out at the sky,
and thought how she could not possibly travel in Europe with a green
canvas trunk with her school initials. She longed for three leather
suitcases. She said sadly:

“The thought of places without one is so lonely.”

“Pull yourself together, my dear child.”

“Don’t you think honeymoons are great waste of travelling?”

“That reminds--I must write a letter. Don’t go--look, have another
cigarette. What is the date?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

Evidently it did matter; Marda had to unpack the bottom of a suitcase
and look the date up in a pocket-book. And from this Lois immediately
concluded Leslie must be one of those keen square people who did
not care for girls of nineteen, whose eyes slid past one’s look
impatiently, who had no enthusiasms and read the biographies of
politicians other than Disraeli. She heard Marda writing with little
pauses and gushes; her shoulders and the stoop of her head took on
an appearance of obligation. Lois thought how anxious to marry Marda
must really be, how anxious not to frighten Leslie away from her, and
how all her distantness and her quick, rejecting air must be a false
effect, accidental and transitory.

“I think,” she said, “I must be a woman’s woman.”

“Oh yes. _Where_ are we going to tennis to-morrow?”

“Castle Trent--but we won’t because of the rain. Is Mr. Lawe very
social?”

“Reasonably. Of course, he likes his people nice. _What_ was the name
of the man at lunch--surname?”

“Lesworth. Gerald is very social. He smiles all the time like a dog. Do
you think that is good in a man?”

“I am telling Leslie he wants to marry you--may I?”

“Will it give Mr. Lawe a good impression?”

“Well, it furnishes you rather. And I can’t think what else to say.”

“Don’t scratch it out,” said Lois after an interval, “but as a matter
of fact he didn’t speak of marriage. He merely kissed me. The English
have quite a different moral standard.”

“Besides, he had been up all night.”

“What are men one is engaged to like?”

“Very worried and kind,” said Marda, blotting a sheet of her letter.
“Business-like, passionate and accurate. When they press you against
their chests a paper crackles, and when you sit up again to do your
face and arrange your hair, they cough and pull out the paper, all
folded and say: ‘While I think of it, I just wanted to consult you
about this.’ Dinner services come crashing through the air like in a
harlequinade. You feel you have been kissed in a shop. I cannot be
adequate. I suggested writing to those public schools for vacancies
for our three little boys, but that was not nice apparently. When you
are engaged you live in the future, and a large part of the future is
improper till it has happened.”

“Oh ... what would happen now if you lost your engagement ring?” asked
Lois with enjoyment.

“I daren’t wear it. Oh, look here, I am talking like a fool. I’m sorry,
Lois, but you really must not talk to me when I am writing letters. I
need Leslie. Dinner services don’t matter. If you never need anyone
as much you will be fortunate. I don’t know for myself what is worth
while. I’m sick of all this trial and error. Will you find a book or
something? Don’t go!”

Lois did not wish to go, but thought “Why should she keep me here when
she is thinking about Leslie?” She felt deprived and unhappy. She
tried to imagine a situation in which Leslie would look ridiculous.
She prayed that the three correct little boys might never be born. She
hoped he would have five daughters, and all artistic. “One thing more,”
she said, “how is it that men are so seldom photographed in profile? Do
they have to look frank?”

Steps coming down the gallery, relentlessly, with intention, might have
been Leslie’s but were unmistakably Laurence’s.

Laurence tapped and remarked through the door that his Aunt Myra wanted
to know if the letters were ready. Timothy would be starting now; he
could wait five minutes, but if he did would almost certainly miss the
post.

“Damn!” said Marda.

“What d’you say?”

“Oh, come in. Why did I polish my nails?” Laurence sat down on the
window-sill. He was annoyed and surprised to find Lois present. He
suspected that she had been bothering Marda, confiding, fidgeting,
asking about love and wishing to try on her hats. Probably she had
brought up a poetry book and kept coming across with a thumb on the
margin to point out the bits she loved. He wished that Lois would marry
and leave Danielstown; he could perfectly see her as a very pink bride,
later as a girl wife in the Tchehov tradition in a pink blouse, sucking
sweets audibly, prattling of girl friends’ lovers, rustling papers
endlessly. He only hoped that she might marry Gerald, who had no papers
to rustle.

“I hope,” he said, “that Lois has been amusing you?”

“Don’t talk,” said Lois. “I mean, she wants to finish her letter.”

“Evidently,” said Laurence.

“Explain Leslie,” said Marda, writing rapidly. “It will help at dinner.”

“She is engaged,” said Lois, “to a Mr. Lawe. That is his photograph
there. His name is Leslie.”

“Oh yes,” said Laurence.

“He is not comic,” said Marda, leaning around and pushing the letter
away. “She makes him sound so--like ‘a Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.’
Lady Naylor will like it all, but I haven’t told her. Will you help Mr.
Montmorency and Lois form a public opinion and not be surprised when
I talk about him at dinner? About the end of the fish, I thought....
I cannot finish this letter; it will have to go to-morrow and I will
wire.”

“And I have a piece of news for you. Castle Trent was raided for arms
last night. Of course they didn’t find any. They think the thing was
entirely amateur, nothing to do with the I.R.A. at all. They took away
some boots. The Trents think one of the raiders was a gardener’s cousin
from Ballydarra who hates the family. He left a quite unnecessary
message behind with a skull and crossbones; he sounds to me rather a
silly man. I am hoping perhaps they will come here to-night. We have
two assegais and a stiletto that Uncle Richard uses for a paper-knife.”

“It is a paper-knife,” said Lois, “only made so as to look like a
stiletto. How perfectly thrilling; do let us all sit up.”

“I shall sit up, but you had better go to bed. You might be insulted.”

“Really, I am not so female as all that.”

Laurence shrugged his shoulders.

“At any rate, don’t tell the others. Uncle Richard’ll get fussy and
spoil it, and if Aunt Myra meets them she will keep them talking all
night.”

“It seems so odd,” said Laurence, “that she should be my blood aunt and
not yours.”

Marda looked at him thoughtfully over the back of her chair. She had
not realized he could be so disagreeable. If he did not take care,
he would grow up just like Mr. Montmorency. She told him so, and
added that she was surprised he did not appreciate Lois. “She is very
charming,” she said, “and very intelligent. Think of all the cousins
you might have had. It’s not her fault that you’re not in Tahiti or
Valladolid or wherever it was you wanted to go this summer. If I were
not going to marry I should ask her to come abroad with me. I have
never been less bored.”

“It would be marvellous,” said Lois. Now that Laurence had come in
she felt more alone with Marda, and nearer; she could think of all
the things she had wanted to say. Intoxicated by being told she was
charming and by Laurence’s disapproval, she hitched herself up on to
the end of the wooden bed, where she sat swinging her legs and smiling,
all girlhood. She felt movement, a wind in her face as though she were
on the prow of a ship. With a bound, life carried her forward again.
She felt certain that Leslie would die or break off the engagement.
“Marvellous,” she repeated.

“At any rate,” Laurence said, “you can ask her to be a bridesmaid.”
And there was Lois, forlorn in the aisle, with hot air coming up her
legs from a grating and tears dripping off her nose into a bunch of
chrysanthemums. She would keep the ribbon from her bouquet and show it
to Gerald in confidence while she unpacked on their wedding night.

“I am thinking of going abroad quite soon,” she said to Laurence.

“Mr. Montmorency has gone for a walk,” said Laurence. “He had to take
an umbrella. Apparently he does not usually take an umbrella, but when
he was half-way down the avenue Mrs. Montmorency suddenly said he must,
because it had never rained like this before. So she took an umbrella
and one for herself and started off down the avenue after him. Aunt
Myra said she should not have done this because of her heart and looked
round for me, but I had gone quickly into the dining-room, which is
the last place anybody would look for one between meals. So she found
Uncle Richard and he took another umbrella and ran quickly down the
avenue after Mrs. Montmorency, telling her not to run like that. When
he had caught her up he took the umbrella from her and went still more
quickly, shouting, after Mr. Montmorency, who pretended not to hear
and walked on with a back view of positive hatred.”

“But how do you know all this if you were in the dining-room?”

“When they were under way I went to the library window and looked after
them.... Lois, did Lesworth tell you he has captured Peter Connor? He
was in bed, apparently.”

“Laurence!” called Lady Naylor from the end of the gallery. “Where are
you? What about Marda’s letters?... They can’t go now,” she went on,
approaching. “Timothy waited ten minutes, and now he has got to run all
the way, but he will certainly miss the post.... Oh, you are all here?”

She looked at her nephew and niece disparagingly and sat down on the
bed. “It is an extraordinary thing,” she said generally, “the way
nobody in this house can be trusted to remember messages.... It has
been a tiring day,” she added. “Nobody could be nicer than that young
Mr. Lesworth, but certainly he is not intelligent. And since then they
have all been running down the avenue with umbrellas. And oh, what do
you think? They have been raided for arms at Castle Trent. They think
the whole thing must have been organized by their gardener’s cousin.
They took some boots away.”




                                   XIII


WHEN they had all gone to bed, lamps downstairs extinguished, doors
upstairs shut with a rattle upon the last voices, Francie talked of
Marda’s engagement and said she was glad. She was glad as a wife that
the net should be flung wider. She talked, but Hugo did not answer; he
was still too angry about the umbrella to speak when they were alone.
So till well on into the night they lay beside each other under the
darkness in an intent and angry silence. Then she wept and said they
should never have come back to Danielstown.

“It’s as though I couldn’t remember where anything was.”

“Look here, if you can’t sleep, you’d better take something.”

“Hugo!”

“Oh, I suppose this place disagrees with you, too.” He had designed
an insult, he could not bear her to intrude upon his wakefulness.
Whichever way he turned in that mournful freedom--and the perspectives
of his regret opened fanwise, profound avenues each white at the end
with a faceless statue--she would come stumbling after him, hand to
heart. “Try and sleep,” he said, and sent her away angrily.

She feigned sleep rigidly, hardly bearing to lie there. Her mind
clenched tight, like a fist, at the isolation of this proximity. She
longed to resume the life of day downstairs in the empty rooms. She
had lain awake in the South of France hearing palm trees creak in the
gritty and dry wind, hooked-back shutters rattle against the wall; she
had lain awake in town with her room a battle of lights through the
thin blinds, lights like her thoughts, flashing and crossing-- But
across this battle-piece, under the long lances, had swarmed, like
Ucello’s roses, small comforts, a kind of content at suffering, the
tenderness of imagined contact. She had wept because he was not with
her. Now a nostalgia for that solitude, for a wall so patient and
smooth to the reaching hand where there was now a sleeper, came on her,
quenching tears. He thought she slept.

But, “I remember,” she said, about two o’clock, “a Miss Lawe. I met
her last in a tram in Dublin. I remember then she was talking of a
nephew--I wonder would that be Leslie?”

“Did she say his name?”

“I can’t remember; I got out of the tram.... Hugo, I’m so thirsty.”

Sighing, he got out of bed.

Laurence could not sleep either. There must have been something at
dinner.... He longed for the raiders and strained his ears in the
silence--which had, like the darkness, a sticky and stifling texture,
like cobwebs, muffling the senses. The rain had paused, the trees had
shed the weight of it, never a drop came through them or tapped on his
window-sill. Once he heard, he thought, a fleet of bicycles in the
avenue; he sat up propped on his palms, assembled his attitude, and
was prepared to go down and admit the party courteously. He meant to
offer them bread and apples and leisurely conversation--and jam and
whisky, but in relating the incident he would only mention the bread
and apples, he liked that smack of austerity, an Oriental graveness.
But there were no bicycles; no one knocked; all he had to say went sour
in him. It was only some cattle come up close to the house, rubbing
against the wires. They moved away.

He lit a candle, blinked at the startled flame and blew it out again.
Darkness resumed, with a discomfortable suggestion of normality.
There seemed proof that the accident of day, of action, need not
recur. And from this blank full stop, this confrontation of a positive
futurelessness, his mind ran spiderlike back on the thread spun out
of itself for advance, stumbling and swerving a little over its own
intricacy. He caught trains he had missed, rushing out to the boundless
possible from the shining mouths of termini, re-ordered meals in a
cosmopolitan blue, re-ate them, thought of thought but sheered away
from that windy gulf full of a fateful clapping of empty book-covers.
Far enough back, in a kind of unborn freedom, he even re-made
marriages. Laura Naylor gave Hugo, scoffingly, bridal tenderness;
they had four sons and all hurried out to coarsen in Canada. Here, in
this that had been her room, Laura had lain on her wedding morning,
watching a spider run up the canopy of the bed, while Hugo made ready,
five miles off, to be driven over to take her hand at the altar by
poor John Trent, and the four young sons in excitement jiggled among
the cherubim. And it was Richard who married Francie, who came to him
all in a bloom at his first request and made a kind of a basinette of
a life for him, dim with lace. Aunt Myra enjoyed a vigorous celibacy,
while Laurence, to be acclaimed a second Weiniger, blew out his brains
at--say--Avila, in a fit of temporary discouragement without having
heard of Danielstown. Lois, naturally, was not born at all.

But this involved a certain re-arrangement of Laurence’s character,
for not for anything would he have put a pistol into his mouth, though
he would have liked to fire a gun out of a window. This neglect of the
raiders pricked his egotism. And alarmed by the dragging tick of the
watch under his pillow, slowing down as at the mortal sickness of Time,
he turned over and thought in a fury that he could not think why Laura
should have married Mr. Farquar. The rudest man in Ulster he was, with
a disagreeably fresh complexion and an eye like a horse. Her confusion
had clotted up in the air of the room and seemed, in that closest
darkness under the ceiling, to be still impending. Here, choked in the
sweep of the bed-curtains, she had writhed in those epic rages; against
Hugo, against Richard, against any prospect in life at all; biting
the fat resistant pillows. Until once she had risen, fluttered at her
reflection, dabbed her eyes, buttoned a tight sleek dress of that
day’s elegance over her heaving bosom, packed her dresses in arched
trunks (that had come back since to rot in the attics) and driven off,
averting from the stare of the house an angry profile. Hotly, she
went up North to attract and marry Mr. Farquar. It was in her to have
done otherwise, but there is a narrow and fixed compulsion, Laurence
recognized, inside the widest ranges of our instability.

Below, through the floor, a light drawling scrape climbed into
stuttering melody, syncopated dance music, ghostly with the wagging of
hips and horrid in darkness. Lois, child of that unwise marriage, was
playing the gramophone. Laurence listened, paralysed with indignation,
then reached out and banged a chair on the floor. She attended; the
music broke off with a shock, there was a tingling calm, as after
an amputation. He above, she below, they thought of each other with
outrage.

Certainly, thought Laurence, there must have been something at dinner.

But Sir Richard and Lady Naylor were soundly asleep. She was dreaming
about the Aberdeens, while he rode round the country on a motor-bicycle
from which he could not detach himself. His friends cut him; he
discovered he was a Black and Tan. But night rolled on over them
thickly and uneventfully. The others exhausted themselves to sleep. The
darkness clamped round their waking brains did not any one moment seem
to abate its insane pressure; only, within an hour of breakfast they
found themselves restored without reason to the illusion of daylight.
With a kind of fatedness, a passivity, they resumed the operation of
living.

The morning gave birth to a disappointment. Livvy arrived just as Lois
was starting out for the village with Marda to send the telegram. Her
horse was lame so she came over on a bicycle, and certainly, thought
Lois, watching her lean the bicycle into the privet hedge, there were
many things about Livvy that were a pity. For Marda stood at the top
of the steps in a green jumper, fanning the telegraph form on the air
to dry the ink. The green, queer and metallic, cut surprisingly into
the steamy tones of the house and the morning. She would be gone in
three days. And now while Livvy settled her hat and her front and
prepared for speech, Marda, smiling, came down the steps and walked
away down the avenue, not caring. She missed nobody. The dogs went with
her: gloomily Lois’s eyes went after their wagging sterns.

“Listen,” said Livvy, clutching Lois’s elbow. “Ah, listen, Lois: what
is the matter?--That is a natty jumper she’s got. I wonder, has she
the pattern? Of course, it’s partly her figure. I wonder now that she
didn’t marry.... Lois, will we go up to your room?”

Lois did not believe the bed was made. Livvy blushed in her little
defined way and said she wished to be confidential. So they went into
the drawing-room--where Gerald’s kiss was hanging: all the doubts
of the night could not disperse it--and leaned on the grand piano.
Lois was surprised to notice Livvy breathing on to her breast-bone
and drawing something up on a long blue ribbon from intimate depths.
A ring dangled. “No one could be more surprised than myself,” said
Livvy modestly, averting her eyes from a finger on which the ring had
flowered.

“Oh, well _done!_” Lois could have exclaimed with spontaneity. Checking
this, she said doubtfully: “Oh, my dear ...”

“Who do you guess?”

“Mr.... Mr. Armstrong.”

“Aren’t you quick! Listen--swear that you won’t tell. For my father
doesn’t know and I think he’d kill me.”

“How did you ... how did he ...”

“Well, it was like this. You see, he asked me at Mrs. Fogarty’s when
would he see me again, and I said I might be going to Cork to the
dentist Thursday, and he said he might be going to Cork too. So I
thought no more of it. Think what I felt when, I getting out at the
station, I saw him there standing as large as life and watching the
train like a dog. So he asked me where was I going for tea, so I said
if I wasn’t alone I might have dropped in at the Imperial because of
the band, but that my father didn’t like me to go there alone because
of the officers. He said would I go with him, and it was raining and
my appointment wasn’t till half-past five, so I said that we ought not
to be seen together, but I turned my hat right down and we went in and
heard the band. He seemed very much confused, so I asked him was there
anything on his mind and he said there wasn’t and I said there must
be. So he went very scarlet and pulled his belt and looked up at the
ceiling and said he did love me. Then the waiter came with the tea and
I only hope he will not recognize me again. When the waiter had gone
I said he might speak lower, and he said he couldn’t because of the
band. Then I said that of course a thing like this came as a shock to
a girl, and he said did it, and I said indeed it did. I said I was not
sure if I could get accustomed to the idea of marriage at all, and he
looked very much surprised. I said when would he wish it to be? And he
said the worst of it was he had no prospects. I said we Irish were not
mercenary, and that anyway I knew he had an uncle-- It was a great
disadvantage to me, Lois, having to keep down so low under my hat all
the time--for I could see the Hartigans’ aunt, Mrs. Foxe-O’Connor, the
other side of a palm-tree, and a man my father buys cattle from kept
rising up and staring round the room. And what with this and my being
naturally very much confused, and David creaking about in his chair,
and the band, I don’t know how much he heard of what I said at all.

“However, we thought it might be well to buy a ring, though I can’t
wear it. David looked quite wandering and I had to get him across the
traffic. And I felt pretty curious myself. You see, we have neither
of us been engaged before, though I have had two offers. Then he said
he must go to the barracks, so he put me into a tram to go to the
dentist’s. Presently I noticed it was the wrong tram, but I hadn’t the
heart to get out till it was round the corner after the trouble he’d
taken, the poor boy. But the tram kind of bolted and I got out near
the Cathedral and had to take a very expensive car. I was late at the
dentist’s--he had out two of my teeth.”

All in a dream, it appeared, Livvy had wandered through wet residential
Cork. All in a dream she had sat and bled from the gums in a train. She
opened her mouth to show the two holes the dentist had made as though
they were wounds of love, and Lois looked into them solemnly. Had they
kissed at all? No, they had not had the opportunity. They could have
taken a cab, but Livvy did not think it moral to drive in a cab with
a man, for it roused his passions. Lois said she thought the smell
inside of a cab would put anyone off, and Livvy said that in that case
a cab would be waste of money.

“But can he marry? _Can_ a second lieutenant?”

“Oh, I can wait some years. But I shall go and stay with his relations
and wear a ring and all, so that there need not be any uncertainty.”

“Why not tell your father now and have it announced?” said Lois
hopefully. She watched her own face looking up from the mottled
piano-top and felt very singular, distant and destined, like Melisande.
“I don’t think,” she said, “that _I_ should be afraid of your father.”

For Livvy’s father seemed really a very despondent, mild man with a
yellow drooping moustache that he had always to lift up over the edge
of his teacup. It was hard to picture his chasing around after Livvy
with a blackthorn, or smiting his fist on the dinner-table so that
(as Livvy declared) the plates leaped, or going down with the half of
a tart in his hand to destroy the cook. The worst she had seen him
do, when Livvy was late, was to take his watch out and stand with his
thumb on the lid--not looking at it, as though he could not abide
the thought of Time--while two or three bubbles ran up his throat.
He was a widower: Livvy declared her mother had died of him. He was
a teetotaller: half a decanter of whisky was in his tantalus, but he
had lost the key. Lois now assured Livvy her father would be the ideal
father-in-law; she was sure that David would like him. He would come
and stay and be so absolutely unobtrusive.

“He has a prejudice against Army officers,” said Livvy despondently.
“He wouldn’t mind if it was the Navy--but what chance have I, living
so far inland? If David was a general with gold all down his front and
spoke of marriage, I think he’d still kill him. He says I’ll get the
house burnt over his head with my goings on.”

“But if he heard you’d been compromised at the Imperial?”

“A girl can’t be compromised in the afternoon,” said Livvy gloomily.

Mr. Thompson did not entertain very much, but Lois remembered once
staying to supper there, early that summer, with David and Gerald.
That was before times got so bad and the officers had to be back
early in barracks. Mr. Thompson’s dining-room looked on to trees,
that fanned little gusts of light over the table then closed again in
green darkness; it smelt of meat and there was an enormous pilastered
mahogany sideboard like the front of a temple, inside which they could
hear mice running about. Mr. Thompson was silent--from fear, they
thought, rather than disapproval--he kept drawing long black horsehairs
from the seat of his chair and laying them out on the cloth. At each
hair, David and Gerald leaned forward and opened their mouths to speak.
But Mr. Thompson went down in his collar so that they could not: they
spoke to each other. And Lois, looking under her lids, had marvelled at
this fortress of many opinions. His sister Miss Thompson was present,
but she was deaf. The dining-room was dark red, with a smoky ceiling,
and Gerald said afterwards he had felt like a disease in a liver. When
the blancmange came in it lay down with a sob and Miss Thompson frowned
at it. “Death of the cow,” thought Lois, and saved this up. Livvy kept
looking warningly at her friends, but they were all polite. Some ducks
filed in at the French window; the guests flapped with their napkins,
but Mr. Thompson said: “Oh, let them be,” and sure enough the ducks
went round the table with their usual urgent look and out by the window
again. Mr. Thompson got up and shut out the May air. “Times change for
the worse,” he said to Gerald, who agreed with him so emphatically that
David had to repeat the interchange to the anxious Miss Thompson. No
wonder Livvy found home dull.

But the happiness of the evening, the closeness-up of the four to each
other, the tremors they all transmitted, the cramp of inside laughter,
remained with Lois, as though they had held hands tightly under the
large oppression. And--under that pressure of laughter compact to
bursting-point--a particular stored excitement of pride and pleasure,
a jump of intimacy at each other’s voices and movements. And the
awareness stayed when, afterwards, they had laughed themselves out
and were empty and solemn, tinging their interchanges with unusual
shyness. That supper marked a degree in her appreciation of Gerald--his
crystalline niceness.

For Mr. Thompson, still with a little blancmange hanging off his
moustache, got up and left them. And later Miss Thompson stood
pulling down her skirt across her hips, when Gerald opened the door
so beautifully that she had to go out through it, to perfect an
experience. Then Livvy, to show what she thought of her family, got up
and waltzed round the table, tugged open the window, ran on to the
lawn and with unabated gentility jumped on all the croquet hoops, David
following. And Gerald turned for the first time to look at Lois, who
looked away. They poured out more barley-water and, in an ecstasy of
bad manners, bubbled into their glasses. They went out and sat on the
seat by the croquet lawn, under a bush of syringa. Waxy petals touched
Lois’s arm stretched out along the back of the seat, the air smelt of
almonds, moths came slanting out of the bush and glittered off on the
dusk.

Miss Thompson declared it had been a pleasure, and had asked them to
come again. Lois now said: “I should tell your aunt, she has so little
to interest her; I am sure she would be wonderfully sympathetic.”

“I always find it difficult,” Livvy said, “to open the subject of
marriage.” And as she looked down, looked significant, the word did
flower over with implications, so that it was, to Lois, at once in a
pit and upon a pinnacle that she leaned and frowned and dangled her
garnet ring.

“If only David were more determined!”

“But aren’t you certain he wants to marry you?”

“Yes, but he needs to have it all arranged for him. Just because I’m
such a capable girl.... Listen, Lois: if you were to be engaged to
Gerald Lesworth it would in a kind of way set the ball rolling. Then I
should say to my father--”

“Oh, but then I--”

“Of course he may not ask you. But that being so, I should say to my
father--”

“S_s_h!”

Laurence was well into the drawing-room before he recognized Livvy’s
shoulder-blades and saw her pink reflection nodding at him in a glass.
He flushed with annoyance and bowed. There was ink on his forehead,
between the eyebrows, where he had rubbed with the tip of his pen. “How
d’you do,” he said and, to Lois: “Has Miss Norton started? Started--set
out--gone to village? Eh?”

“Oh ... yes.”

“Pity. Did she seem to be ... waiting about at all?”

Livvy giggled. Lois said, oh no, she had not seemed to be waiting
about. Why?

“Curiosity. I could have gone for her; I have nothing to do.”

“She hadn’t got anything to do either.”

“Naturally.” The two girls leaning shoulder to shoulder on the piano
filled Laurence with an unutterable depression. He could not leave
them. He went to a table of books, took up a book on Nigeria, looked
intently into it and blew some dust from between the pages. He felt the
only living thing had gone out of the house. He felt hungry, though it
was not yet half-past eleven. He could not go upstairs and work, or in
fact settle down to anything. He felt as though he were the weather:
“Le temps, c’est moi!” He wished he were the sort of man who would go
out to the yard and take the car to pieces. Marda was the only person
who found him amusing--but perhaps he was not amusing, perhaps they
were right. “Mrs. Montmorency did not sleep either,” he said. “Notice
her eyes this morning?”

“Eh?” said Livvy.

“This is a dreadful house, Miss Thompson. I should not stay to lunch
if I were you. Besides, it’s only mutton, I asked the cook. Lois, have
you any foolscap? I thought I might write a novel.”

“Oh, _do!_ Oh, how lovely! But I have no foolscap; ask Uncle Richard.
He has some paper over from when he was going to write his memoirs....
Laurence, _are_ you going to stay in here?”

“Well, I’d rather not.” It occurred to him that he might do worse
than walk over to lunch with the Careys. There would be a freshness
in their dullness and dampness after the dullness and dampness here,
while his own would have a charm for them, a fertilizing strangeness.
The households had not seen anything of each other for three days.
Both families had driven over to Castle Trent to hear about the raid,
but had missed each other by half an hour. There would be the raid to
discuss, and how the Trents were taking it; also, the Careys lived
well--at the worst there could be nothing worse than mutton. “I am
going to lunch at Mount Isabel--any message to Nona?”

“_Oh!_” said Lois. Her eyes went dark with vivid and deep
disappointment at the thought of anybody doing anything without her.
She missed everything, no one would ever care, she would never marry.
She blinked as Laurence went out and shut the door.

“Funny thing,” said Livvy, “the way your cousin blushes whenever he
sees me.” She looked at herself in the tall glass and settled her side
hair. “Now, Lois, what I always feel: a girl is only young once--”

“I expect,” said Lois, “that that is all for the best.”




                                   XIV


“THOUGH to tell you the truth,” said Lady Naylor, circulating among the
begonia beds at Mount Isabel, “though I am in a way sorry, I am not
altogether sorry that she is going.”

She glanced closely at Mrs. Carey’s profile, to see that her exact
shade of meaning had been taken. Mrs. Carey nodded and wrinkled up her
forehead, very profoundly. She was thinking about something else. She
stooped, pulled off three dead begonias and crumpled them into her
pocket.

“Because if that should be what she is going to do, I should rather she
did not do it with us. For one thing, the Lawes are relations, they
are cousins to a cousin of mine by marriage. One does not know what
they might not say about influence. Though no one could interfere less
than I do, one never knows, does one, what might go round through the
family? And really I am superstitious about her visits, already this
time she has lost a suitcase. One cannot help feeling responsible.”

“But are you certain,” asked Mrs. Carey, looking critically round this
part of her garden as though she were wishing to have it all up and
replant it again, “that she is going to break it off?”

“I shouldn’t like to say. She has got into a kind of a nervous habit
of sending telegrams. Up and down, up and down all day to the village.
Surely that is abnormal in an engaged girl? It is not even as if they
were buying a house or anything. It’s bound to be so unintimate--unless
she does not consider the post-mistress, and I do think really she
ought to because it is our post-mistress. And another thing--I don’t
really know that I ought to speak of this, but I really cannot discuss
it with poor little Francie--I don’t think she has at all a good effect
on Hugo. You know what he’s like usually? Well, he’s quite different.
Quite _empressé_.... But I don’t expect there is anything in that
really. One so easily says too much.”

She paused, sighed and waited. Mrs. Carey looked at her mildly. “Oh?”
she said. “Oh yes. But how do you mean?”

“I know Francie notices; I know she is unhappy. Of course she always is
unhappy, but she’s unhappy now in a different way. Of course one hates
to say it, but one does know what Hugo _is_ ...”

“Oh--is he really?” said Mrs. Carey, startled.

“What Hugo needs is real trouble. Now if poor little Francie died--”

“Is she seriously--?”

“No, I feel that he will die first, he has just that way of avoiding
things. Look how he didn’t marry Laura.... However, I expect I am being
quite ridiculous; I hate to exaggerate--it is from having Laurence so
much in the house. Have you noticed how clever young men--? I believe
he’s worse in England; they think him amusing. Of course there is no
harm in Marda; one has known her since she was little. She’s only
wild--two of her uncles were like that. Shall you ever forget how her
knee bled that afternoon? You know, I didn’t give another children’s
party for three years!”

Coming to the edge of the lawn, they looked down on a court where
Marda, Lois, Laurence and Nona Carey were playing tennis. The two
ladies, at peace and with the faint self-congratulation with which one
generation watches another, gazed with a statuesque remoteness over the
foreground. “She is, somehow, I don’t know ... charming,” said Mrs.
Carey, as Marda and Lois crossed and recrossed. “Shall we go round
before tea and look at the dahlias? I wanted to ask you ...”

They turned, having cast an imposing shadow over the consciousness of
the players, and went softly, heavily over the grass to the iron door
of the garden. It seemed natural to Mrs. Carey, half dissolved in the
brightness and depth of the afternoon, that Hugo should be attracted
towards a fellow-visitor; such things came on and passed, transitory as
a summer. She did not see that there was anything one need do; she said
so to Lady Naylor.

The fine weather was back again. Over the roof of Mount Isabel a
mountain sheathed in pink air looked gentle and distant. Light slid
over the heavy burnished trees; the cream façade of the house was like
cardboard, high and confident in the sun--a house without weight, an
appearance less actual than the begonias’ scarlet and wax-pink flesh.
Begonias, burning in an impatience of colour, crowded over the edge of
heart-shaped beds. As the four came up from the court there was silence
over the sheen of grass. Then a maid leaned out from the dark through
the drawing-room window sounding the brass tea-gong: a minor note.

Marda perhaps was wild, like her uncles, but not inconsiderate. She
had realized, almost upon arrival, that the worst thing she could
do would be to attract Mr. Montmorency. To be loved by him would be
the culminating disaster of her unfortunate visits. The idea seemed
to her silly--she could not think of herself as fatal--but rooted
itself during a fit of extreme apprehension induced by the loss of
her suitcase. She dreaded the suitcase might not be the close of
her record; having made the acquaintance of Hugo she saw it would
not be. She might not be fatal, but _here_ she was certainly fated.
She thought: “Damn him!” with conscious injustice and drew on every
resource, all that might once have been called the arts of her sex to
repel, to annoy and to bore him. That day of the beech walk, in old
Dannie’s cottage, she had had in a flash the measure of her unsuccess.
Persistently charmless, untiring in her attempts not to please, she
had still to retreat, resentful, upon a female wariness, guardedness,
circumspection she had always despised. Her reward: at the foot of
the stairs at bedtime, a contact of finger-tips--all of himself in
the touch--as he gave her her candlestick: a startled look over the
flame. And as the four candles went up with the ladies, drawing a tide
of shadow, she and Lois had turned at a turn of the stairs to see him
still there, looking up from the staggering mounting dark. She took
Lois’s arm.

That was the night he did not sleep, and Lois did not sleep either.

To-day, Smith had ridden over to Mount Isabel for tea and Nona.
He stood smiling over the glittering tray, in the high dark-yellow
shadows, pleased but anonymous. He was a man whose name one could not
remember. But his appearance agitated Mrs. Carey, who recalled that he
did not eat any tea. She hoped it would all be all right.

She said to Marda distractedly: “I am glad you are going to be happy: I
hope you will be really, really married.”

“Thank you so much,” said Marda. “I am sure I shall be.”

“Of course,” continued Mrs. Carey, still watching Smith, “I ought not
to congratulate him, I ought to congratulate you.”

“I am very fortunate.”

“Oh _no_, I don’t mean that at all. Show me your lovely ring--oh, you
haven’t got it on. But I expect you have got a lovely ring. Mr. Smith,
I hope you will play tennis?”

But Smith, who did not feel like tennis, had not brought shoes. Tennis
was not his idea at all. He had thought perhaps a little walk in the
garden, a few plums ... And Nona got up very pink and conscious and
circulated with plates of cake. She knew that she must throw off people
like Mr. Smith because next summer she was to be presented and have a
season in London. Lady Naylor could not help raising her eyebrows at
Mrs. Carey.

“Such a pity,” remarked Mrs. Carey, as they slid up arm-chairs to the
tea-table, “you didn’t bring over the Montmorencys. Wouldn’t they come?”

“_He_ might have come,” said Laurence, “but as I am not allowed to
drive there was not room in the car. There were too many of us.”

“Never mind,” said Marda. “I am going on Saturday.”

“Oh no, you aren’t!” cried Lois, and added respectfully: “Don’t be so
silly.”

Lady Naylor sighed. “Unfortunately, Marda must go back to England. I
don’t know what we shall do without her....”

“Do you like England?” said Nona Carey, moving away from Smith. “Are
you really going to live there? I always think it’s so new-looking. But
of course there’s a great deal going on.... Where do _you_ live, Mr.
Smith?”

“Eastbourne.”

Though Lady Naylor said at once that that must be very bracing, Smith
wilted under a general commiseration. He recrossed his legs, frowned
at the toe of his shoe and said he thought sometimes of going to East
Africa. A forlorn and slighted feeling the announcement of Marda’s
departure cast over them was heightened by this proposed defection of
Smith’s. Lady Naylor remarked disparagingly that that would be rather
lonely, while Mrs. Carey, seeing Smith at once against hot African
skies in a silhouette of nobility, felt they had been unkind and asked
him to come over here on the sofa and tell her about himself. He told
her. Nona sat and twirled on the music stool.

“Smith,” said Laurence, “you ought to stay and defend us.” And Smith
had to promise he would not leave the Army and go to East Africa till
they were all settled.

But to Laurence and Lois this all had already a ring of the past.
They both had a sense of detention, of a prologue being played out
too lengthily, with unnecessary stress, a wasteful attention to
detail. Apart, but not quite unaware of each other, queerly linked by
antagonism, they both sat eating tea with dissatisfaction, resentful
at giving so much of themselves to what was to be forgotten. The
day was featureless, a stock pattern day of late summer, blandly
insensitive to their imprints. The yellow sun--slanting in under the
blinds on full-bosomed silver, hands balancing Worcester, dogs poking
up wistfully from under the cloth--seemed old, used, filtering from
the surplus of some happy fulfilment; while, unapproachably elsewhere,
something went by without them.

Marda wanted more tea--but they were all distracted, an argument raged
round Smith. “You must, of course, go on Saturday?” said Laurence,
taking her cup. “Oh yes--why?” She leaned back from the bar of sun,
into the shade of the curtains. Shadow gave transparency to her
colours; its brown clarity hardened her face revealingly so that she
was exposed a moment, in her anxiety, without the defence of manner.
Her green linen dress went ghostly against the cretonne’s rather
jarring florescence.

“Just when it’s fine,” said Laurence, banal with sincerity.

“That is because I’m going.”

He listened a moment and, as the uproar of argument was sustained, said
quickly: “Lois and I aren’t a good addition--the Montmorencys think
so. Is that what bored you? Nobody’s ever gone so soon. There was a
walk I wanted to take you.” He rattled the cup and saucer at her in
desperation. “I think you make a mistake, going.”

“Oh, I expect so, but--”

“Look at Lois, her eyes are starting out of her head. When you’ve gone,
she’ll go up and cry on your bed. It will fill her mornings.”

“Oh, shut up, she can hear you.”

“No,” said Laurence, “she can’t, though she’s trying to. I’m not so
sorry, but I do think it’s unimaginative of you going. Why have you got
to see Mr. Lawe? I mean, quite dispassionately, isn’t there heaps of
time for him?... You see,” concluded Laurence, “I am enraged--by all
this--past snubbing-point.”

“I want some more tea,” said Marda, “more than anything in the world.”

Unable to attract the attention of their hostess, Laurence leaned
over the tray and took the teapot. On his way back to Marda he
guessed from the unmoving intentness with which she was staring
out at the begonias--they gave back little vermilion flecks to her
eyes--that there was some one at the bottom of this and that it was
Mr. Montmorency. He had learnt--from leaning out of his window while
his aunt talked to Mrs. Montmorency down on the steps--that they all
thought she contemplated breaking off her engagement. Personally he
thought this improbable. Mr. Montmorency himself was the supreme
objection; but also she would be getting herself a good home and what
went with it--money, assurance and scope. He himself only wished he
could do so as easily. He now stood above her holding the cup of tea
and could have counted three before she turned round. But then--oh, the
waste of his comprehension--he saw she was laughing.

She had laughed at a thought of the subdued surprise with which they
would come to her wedding; barely dressed as befitted because of that
unshaken disbelief in her; buttoning, till well up the aisle, their
white gloves. But the origin of their disbelief did not seem to her
funny; had acquired for her, in fact, a tragic vulgarity. So that she
did not explain the joke to Laurence; she thanked him and drank the
tea, which was all wrong.

Out, at last, through the window, dazzled, threading and separating
between the flower-beds, the party dispersed with their cigarettes.
Large to themselves, to each other graduating from a little below
life-size to an eye from the mountain ant-like--but smaller and less
directed--or like beads tipped out. A sense of exposure, of being
offered without resistance to some ironic un-curiosity, made Laurence
look up at the mountain over the roof of the house. In some gaze--of
a man’s up there hiding, watching among the clefts and ridges--they
seemed held, included and to have their only being. The sense of a
watcher, reserve of energy and intention, abashed Laurence, who turned
from the mountain. But the unavoidable and containing stare impinged
to the point of a transformation upon the social figures with their
orderly, knitted shadows, the well-groomed grass and the beds, worked
out in this pattern.

Driving home, tightly packed hip to hip in the back of the car between
Marda and Lois, and bumping conjointly over the inequalities of the
road, Lady Naylor told them of a discovery she had made. Mrs. Carey,
also, did not understand modern young people. They seemed, Mrs. Carey
had said, to have no idealism, no sense of adventure, they thought so
much of their comfort-- Possibly Mrs. Carey was wrong? But almost
she thought she agreed with her. In their youth, Mrs. Carey and she
would have been deeply excited by all that was happening round them.
Lady Naylor thought all young people ought to be rebels; she herself
had certainly been a rebel. But since the War, they had never ceased
mouching. She herself had had a deep sense of poetry; she remembered
going to sleep with Shelley under her pillow. She used to walk alone in
the mountains and hated coming in to meals. Mrs. Carey had noticed that
Nona would not miss a meal for anything--she was unpunctual always, but
never absent. But perhaps Mrs. Carey misjudged the girl? Mrs. Carey and
she had passed through periods of profound unhappiness. And yet their
youth was a golden period; they would not have missed it. It did seem a
pity, they both had agreed, to be born middle-aged.

These last remarks were directed with a degree of resentment at
Laurence’s back view, in the front of the car by the chauffeur. His
ears, of unfortunate conformation, curled out semi-transparent against
the evening light. Laurence said nothing, but thought; he must write
that novel, for here lay a gold-mine (then Spain and those first
editions, a Picasso and curtains for his rooms). He would vindicate
modern young people for his aunt and her generation. Only he did
not know if he should write about cocktail parties or whimsical
undergraduates.




                                    XV


HUGO was dumb, his companion inattentive to him in silence. They walked
on the turf of the Darra valley, along the edge of the water: he beat
with his stick at the gold, strident ragwort. At every flash of the
stick she glanced in surprise, but did not say: “Spare them.” Lois,
straggling behind, threw in twig after twig to the swollen, hurrying
Darra; ran a short way with each in intense excitement, lost it and
threw in another. She seemed absorbed but remotely dependent, like one
of the dogs. If she had fallen in with a loud enough splash and a cry
she might have distracted the couple ahead, but she was surefooted and
not quite certain enough of herself to fall in on purpose.

Recollections of Laura were now wiped for him from the startlingly
green valley, leaving the scene dull. Not a turn of the rocks with the
river, not a break-down of turf along the brink, not the Norman keep
with perishing corners (where they leaned and quarrelled till Laura
had wished aloud it would fall on them) gave back to him what they had
taken of that eroding companionship. He and she might never have come
here; they were disowned. The sharp rocks breaking out from the turf,
the impassive speed of the water were naked and had to be seen as
themselves, in some relation excluding him; like country seen from the
train, without past or future. And, having given proof of her impotence
to be even here, Laura shrank and drew in her nimbus, leaving only--as
in some rediscovered diary of a forgotten year--a few cryptic records,
walks, some appointments kept, letters received and posted.

He now guessed, in fact, he had never loved her. Shocked but with
an enlivening sense of detachment, he turned to Marda--but still
had nothing to say. She walked rather too quickly beside him, with
long steps. She was leaving to-morrow; she was to be in England
indefinitely: she seemed content. And for this, his anger released from
Laura, settled upon her. He loved her: a sense of himself rushed up,
filling the valley. The rocks again were transmuted: broken all over in
planes of light, a defeated sharpness, they were no more limestone.

“Mrs. Montmorency knows Leslie’s aunt,” said Marda suddenly. “Do you?
It seems so extraordinary?”

“If I ever did I’ve forgotten her.”

“She’s so nice.”

“I have no doubt.”

“Let’s ask Lois to come and talk to us.”

“She seems quite happy. Where do you go--after to-morrow?”

“Oh, Kent. Doesn’t it seem extraordinary?”

Having given the matter rather too marked attention, he pronounced that
her sense of the extraordinary seemed to him extravagant. She agreed
there did seem to be some disparity in their outlook. “Disparity!”
he cried out. “Everything! What a good thing we shall never need to
understand each other.”

“I never try to understand anybody,” she said mildly.

“No, indeed,” he replied with sarcasm. “Who is worth it?”

At this she looked back again for Lois. She remembered Francie,
seeing them off from the steps in a pink blouse, and the look that
fluttered after them down the avenue. No wonder Francie looked like a
windflower--her husband had this unfortunate ability to be young at any
time. His unordered moods gave him the churlishness of a schoolboy; his
silliness embarrassed her. Yet anger did illuminate him becomingly:
brighter and harder, for the first time he could be conceived as
lovable. Though in this personal atmosphere generated by his temper she
was feeling least herself, most nearly negative.

“I should like to go over there,” she said, looking across the water to
where trees began on a skyline and went down steeply, powdered yellow
with light on their tops.

“We can’t,” he said, triumphant, “the stepping-stones are covered.” He
showed her a line of faint scars, a hesitation across the current.

“I never thought of there being stepping-stones. I only wanted to cross
because we couldn’t. Why does one always seem to be on the wrong side?”

“I should have thought you never were--don’t you even make rather a
point of that?”

She was exasperated past caution. “Mr. Montmorency, what _is_ the
matter?”

Seeing that he had overreached himself, been absurd, he raised his
eyebrows in courteous mystification--“Matter?”--did not reply but began
talking about his travels--the greenest river he knew was the Ain,
he said; had she ever looked down on the Ain?--an appointment he had
held in the North (a deterrent from travel), his five years in London
(release from the North), a business enterprise with which he had once
been connected. It had never been sound, he now saw, he said, but had
once had a chance of success. She took him as he had intended, as the
practical man _manqué_. They discussed the question of Canada, whether
he would have succeeded. She thought, emphatically, it was a pity he
had not tried. “But my wife’s health--” “Oh yes, Mrs. Montmorency ...”

“The fact is, I have not made her happy.”

“She would always be happy a little; she is wonderfully unselfish.”

“Do you mean--”

“Oh, what _is_ that? The ghost of a Palace Hotel?”

The mill startled them all, staring, light-eyed, ghoulishly, round a
bend of the valley. Lois had to come hurrying up to explain how it
frightened her. In fact, she wouldn’t for worlds go into it but liked
going as near as she dared. It was a fear she didn’t want to get over,
a kind of deliciousness. These dead mills--the country was full of
them, never quite stripped and whitened to skeletons’ decency: like
corpses at their most horrible. “Another,” Hugo declared, “of our
national grievances. English law strangled the--” But Lois insisted
on hurrying: she and Marda were now well ahead.

The river darkened and thundered towards the mill-race, light came full
on the high façade of decay. Incredible in its loneliness, roofless,
floorless, beams criss-crossing dank interior daylight, the whole
place tottered, fit to crash at a breath. Hinges rustily bled where a
door had been wrenched away; up six stories panes still tattered the
daylight. Mounting the tree-crowded, steep slope some roofless cottages
nestled under the flank of the mill with sinister pathos. A track
going up the hill from the gateless gateway perished among the trees
from disuse. Banal enough in life to have closed this valley to the
imagination, the dead mill now entered the democracy of ghostliness,
equalled broken palaces in futility and sadness; was transfigured by
some response of the spirit, showing not the decline of its meanness,
simply decline; took on all of the past to which it had given nothing.

Rooks disturbed the trees, disturbed the echoes. “_Don’t_ go in!” cried
Lois and clutched Marda’s arm convulsively.

“Come on,” said Marda, “I feel demoralized, girlish. Let’s hide from
Mr. Montmorency.” Lois shied through the gateway with more than
affected nervousness. This was her nightmare: brittle, staring ruins.
Mr. Montmorency, disgruntled, still dawdled by the river; the idea of
escape appeared irresistible. But the scene was strangely set for a
Watteau interlude. Inside the mill door, a high surge of nettles; one
beam had rotted and come down, there was some debris of the roof.

“If he starts shouting,” Lois said, apprehensive, “he’ll certainly
bring the mill down. Oh, I can’t come in, oh, I can’t possibly. Oh,
it’s beastly here; I feel sick. I think you are quite mad!”

“I think you’re a shocking little coward.”

“I’m not afraid of anything _reasonable_. But I’m simply nervous, one
can’t help that.”

“Come in through that door.”

“But it’s so _high_.”

Marda put an arm round her waist, and in an ecstasy at this compulsion
Lois entered the mill. Fear heightened her gratification; she welcomed
its inrush, letting her look climb the scabby and livid walls to the
frightful stare of the sky. Cracks ran down; she expected, now with
detachment, to see them widen, to see the walls peel back from a
cleft--like the House of Usher’s.

“Hate it?” said Marda.

“You’d make me do anything.”

The sun cast in through the window sockets some wild gold squares
twisted by the beams; grasses along the windows trembled in light.
Marda turned and went picking her way through the nettles; there was
a further door, into darkness--somewhere, a roof still held. “Marda,
help: here’s a dead crow!” “Tchch!”

“But it’s very dead!” Shuddering exaggeratedly, leaping in a scared
way over the nettles, Lois also made for the dark doorway, eager for
comment, contempt, consolation. She was a little idiot--appealing, she
felt quite certain, to a particular tenderness.

In the dark of a lean-to, Marda was moving dimly. “Stairs!” she
exclaimed with interest. Then she was back in a flash and stood in
the door, barring it. She stood intently; menace contracted about her
attitude.

“What?” whispered Lois.

“Ssh--some one’s asleep here.”

“Perhaps they’re dead?” She stared past Marda’s shoulder into the
darkness, and, desirous, laughed, then clapped the back of a hand to
her mouth--unnatural gesture, adequate to the drama. Gradually, she
was able to see a man lying face down, arms spread out; a coat rolled
into a pillow under his face which twisted sideways a little to let him
breathe. One fist, clenched loosely, strayed to a clump of nettles;
the knuckles must have been stung quite white. He could not feel the
nettles--one had to imagine sleep like that! Behind him, stairs went up
into visibility, to a gash of daylight.

Ashamed, the two young women stood elbow to elbow. Marda stepped back,
some plaster crackled under her heel.

“What’s that?” said the man softly.

“Come away quickly--come--”

But the man rolled over and sat up, still in the calm of sleep. “Stay
there,” he said, almost persuasively: a pistol bore the persuasion out.
They were embarrassed by this curious confrontation. Neither of them
had seen a pistol at this angle; it was short-looking, scarcely more
than a button. The man sat looking at them with calculating intentness,
like a monkey, then got up slowly: the pistol maintained its direction.

“Don’t be silly,” said Marda. “Go to sleep again. We’re not--”

“Are there any more of yez?”

“One--not interested either. Better let us go now, there will be less
talk.”

“We’re just out for a walk,” said Lois, surprised at her own voice.

“Indeed,” said the man. “It is a grand evening for a walk no doubt. Is
it from Castle Trent y’are?”

“Danielstown.”

The man’s eyes went from one to the other, and remained ironically
between them. His face was metal-blue in the dusk and seemed numbed
into immobility. “It is time,” he said, “that yourselves gave up
walking. If you have nothing better to do, you had better keep in the
house while y’have it.”

Marda, a hand on the frame of the doorway, remained unmoved, but Lois
could not but agree with him. She felt quite ruled out, there was
nothing at all for her here. She had better be going--but where? She
thought: “I must marry Gerald.” But meanwhile Marda, holding her arm
all the time, had softly, satirically pressed it. They could not but
feel framed, rather conscious, as though confronting a camera. The man,
who did not cease to regard them with uneasy dislike, asked which way
they had come, whom they had met, if they had observed any movement of
soldiers about the country. He remained dissatisfied; evidently they
had the appearance of liars.

Meanwhile Mr. Montmorency, suspicious of merriment somewhere and
determined to humour no one, had sat down to smoke on a parapet. At its
base the bank descended; the river rushed loudly, dark with its own
urgency, under his dangling feet. The mill behind affected him like a
sense of the future; an unpleasant sensation of being tottered over.
Split light, like hands, was dragged past to the mill-race, clawed
at the brink and went down in destruction. He looked at the opposite
hill, its distinct and peaceful trees. Marda belonged there and might
be imagined composedly walking. Knocking some ash off, he leaned
forward and groaned at the intervening water--“On the wrong side”--
He missed Francie; there welled up in him one great complaint to
Francie. She--selfless woman--would non-committally rustle; some tender
fidgeting always relieved her intentness of listening. Distressed
for her husband, she would let out little sighs. He would tell her
everything.... Yet he could not, for Marda was everywhere present, a
clear ruddy-white mask of surprise. She impinged on the whole of him,
on his most intimate sense of himself, with her cool sombre amusement.
Had she a ghost everywhere?--there was something of her in Francie.

“It is like this,” he began to rehearse, “what I need is--”

A shot, making rings in the silence. Eardrums throbbing, he gathered
up the reverberations with incredulity. A battle--a death in the mill?
_Whose_ death? He leapt to one thought, a flash of relief in the panic.
The front of the mill--he ran round to it--grinned with vacancy: corpse
of an idiot. He steadied himself in the door, watched his cigarette
drop into the nettles, then stumbled in over the debris. A crow’s
flight, stooping wildly among the rafters, dislodged a trickle of
plaster. He paused in the well of ruin, terrified for them all. But the
crow swerved out through the roof.

“Marda!”

“All right,” said Lois. They appeared in a doorway and looked at him
gravely, rather suspiciously. Marda put up a hand to her mouth--in an
incredible half-glimpse, he thought he saw blood round the lips.

Something released in his voice, he said: “Marda--for God’s sake--”

Lois, as though the mill were falling, went white, then crimson.
He had, distantly, some apprehension of an emotional shock. Marda,
perplexedly, continued sucking her hand. Then she took Lois’s
handkerchief, dabbed at her knuckles, wiped the blood from her
lips--where no more came--returned to her knuckles. “I have lost some
skin,” she said at last resentfully. “Just, a pistol went off--you
heard?--by accident. I seem to have lost some pieces of skin.”

“Let me go past,” he said violently.

“We swore--” began Lois.

“Some one went upstairs backward, not very sensibly, not having eaten
much for four days. There was some plaster--the pistol went off,
naturally. It was silly, really. Look at my beastly hand--I was holding
on to the door.”

“Let me get past--”

“But we _swore_, Mr. Montmorency--”

“_You_ deserve to be shot!” He turned in a manner terrifying to all of
them--most of all to himself--on this interruption. “You don’t seem to
see, you seem to have no conception--”

“Then why sit there and smoke?” said Lois, trembling. “I saw you--you
and your old conceptions.”

“Shut up,” said Marda, “oh, do shut up!”

“Don’t stand there, let me go past; I’ll--”

“Oh, do let’s talk about something else--”

“We swore,” went on Lois priggishly. “There never was anybody, we never
saw anybody, _you_ never heard--”

But nobody listened. Vaguely, he waved her silent.

“The fact is,” said Marda, “we are neither of us good at explosions.
Perhaps if we sat down and thought it over? Perhaps if you went for a
walk--_not_ up in the trees?”

“No more hide-and-go-seek,” he said, playful with fury. “Still
bleeding--?”

“Not like I can--I have rather a high standard. Do you remember the
scraper? No, I might have done--_this_--on the broken edge of a slate:
it will be the edge of a slate if you don’t mind. And, being me, it was
bound to happen.”

He was set on transgressing the decencies. “Don’t you _realize_ you
might have been--”

Marda laughed, coming out through the door of the mill beside him. He
looked at her lips--no higher--angrily--burningly. Lois looked quickly
away. She thought how the very suggestion of death brought this awful
unprivacy.

They took his place on the parapet. Warily, they watched him walk back
the way they had come, with effort, as though breasting a current.
Lois took up his forgotten matchbox, shook it and put it away in her
pocket. Their sex was a stronghold, they had to acknowledge silently;
traditionally, one could always retreat on collapse. Mr. Montmorency
having taken away with him any element of agitation, they were left
with a particular sort of shyness.

“How one talks!” said Marda.

Lois tied up the hand, she said it seemed like Providence that her
handkerchief should be clean to-day. Marda’s was coloured, that would
never have done. One had always heard that dye ran into the blood.

“I don’t think it would,” said Marda. “It boils, it is really a good
handkerchief.... This is the worst of big hands.”

“I suppose they are rather big.”

“Sorry we went in?”

“No.”

“You are being nice to me.... One won’t be girlish again--I think, as a
matter of fact, we were being goatish.”

“But I’ve had a ... a revelation,” said Lois. She bent forward over the
river, felt streaks of light fly over her face and felt that speech did
not matter when so much was being carried past. “About Mr. Montmorency
... he’s being awful about you, isn’t he?”

The statement, almost a query, fluttered up at the end. But Marda’s
face was inscrutable with reflections.

“About you. I had no idea--I was too damned innocent,” she explained
with precision--“till we all stood in there and shouted.--Hear him tell
me I ought to be shot?”

“He was all--dishevelled. He had to be adequate.”

“Oh, I didn’t mind. But, I mean, aren’t you rather--embarrassed?”

“One can’t help things.”

“_I_ was awful, I said, ‘You and your old conceptions.’ They are rather
old, aren’t they?... I mean, really: he was in love with my mother.”

“Well, I’m going away, aren’t I?”

“But, I mean, what is the good of this? It doesn’t make anything.”

Marda said, inconsequent: “I hope I shall have some children; I should
hate to be barren.”

“Once I really meant to love him, but it would never have done.”

Marda leant against Lois’s shoulder. “You are wonderful!”

“Not so protected as you imagine.”

“Nothing gets past your imagination.”

“I wish,” said Lois thoughtfully, “I had really been shot. But I
couldn’t be.” Later she added: “I’m sorry I said that about Mr.
Montmorency. What will become of him?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m glad he wasn’t my father.”

“He couldn’t be anything’s father.”

“Where shall you be this time to-morrow?”

“In the train.”

“Funny,” said Lois. “Queer.” Her heart thumped, she looked at her
watch. “Half-past six,” she said. “It’s harder, for some reason, to
imagine what I’ll be doing or where I shall be.”

“A nice walk with Laurence, a nice cheerful squabble. If you want
something to talk about, talk about me.”

“No, no, I mean ... No.” She looked up from the water. “You know,”
she said, “all this has quite stopped any excitement for me about the
mill. It’s a loss, really. I don’t think I’ll come down this part of
the river again.... Will you have to tell Leslie? I don’t think you
ought to: a swear _is_ a swear, isn’t it, even in England.”

Nothing would have induced Marda to confirm Leslie’s opinion that
her country was dangerous as well as demoralizing. He hated to think
of even his aunts at that side of the Channel. She expected, some
forty-eight hours ahead, to be walking with him in a clipped and
traditional garden, in Kentish light. Under these influences, she would
be giving account of herself. Leslie’s attention, his straight grey
gaze, were to modify these wandering weeks of her own incalculably, not
a value could fail to be affected by him. So much of herself that was
fluid must, too, be moulded by his idea of her. Essentials were fixed
and localized by their being together--to become as the bricks and
wall-paper of a home.

At present, the mill was behind her, tattered and irrelevantly
startling, like a dream of two nights ago. And Lois kept turning upon
her a tragic and obstinate gaze: she could sense a persistence of
Leslie upon the mental scene. Lois said, but defeatedly: “He is certain
to be suspicious.”

“I certainly won’t tell.”

“So it will be a secret?”

“A perfect secret.”

“Thank you so much,” said Lois. As though breaking a spell, she shifted
away down the parapet, put her feet to the ground, and was surprised to
feel her legs trembling under her. “Here,” she said generously, “comes
Mr. Montmorency.”

He came: “with demurest of footfalls.” They smiled and shouted along
the bank. Yes, they could come now; yes, they were feeling splendid.
“Shan’t we be late for dinner?”

“That is impossible,” shouted Mr. Montmorency, who was coming back to
them looking formal and pleasant.




                                   XVI


MARDA was not due to leave until after lunch, but throughout that
morning they were all distressed and sympathetic, could not settle down
to anything, walked about the house. Every time Lady Naylor saw Marda
she asked her if she ought not to be packing, and while Marda packed,
with her door open, Lady Naylor kept looking in to remark how sad it
was to see her thus engaged. Francie sat and sewed in the ante-room,
looking anxiously up whenever anyone passed. The rain fell, the windows
were open, the rooms smelt of window-sills. Francie rolled up her work
with a sigh and went up to tell Marda how sorry she was about the rain.

“You’ll have a wet drive,” she said.

“But the hood works,” said Marda, folding together the sleeves of a
scarlet dress.

“But rain is so sad when one’s going away. Nothing, I mean but a train
to arrive at.”

“But I really like trains: I am always talked to.”

“Hugo will be so sorry, he has so much enjoyed talking to you.”

“It’s been very nice of him.”

Sir Richard looked up Marda’s train in a May time-table and was worried
because he could not find it. Had she really any proof, he came up to
inquire, that it had been put on since? Would she not be wiser to
catch the 12.30 and have plenty of time for dinner in Dublin? Also,
what was he to do about her suitcase if it ever turned up? But he
almost feared now it would never turn up. He sighed and went back to
the library.

Laurence sat in his room with a book with the door open; he could see
across the landing into Marda’s room. Evidently she could not make
up her mind which hat to travel in: she tried on three and looked at
herself in each. He did not care for her looks or her clothes, really;
both were over-assured. But then he could not recall whose looks or
whose clothes he did care for. Finally, he went across to say he did
not want _South Wind_ back, she could keep it to leave in the train, or
simply pack it.

“Oh, thank you,” she said; “do write my name in it.”

He recoiled at this awful suggestion.

Her room had all come to pieces--dresses swirled on the bed, hats
perched everywhere; she had lost the wedge from the mirror so that it
wagged right forward, showing its blank side. She was taking more from
the house than herself and her luggage.

“You will have a wet drive.”

“The hood works,” said Marda mechanically, throwing some rolled-up
stockings out to make room for some shoes.

“Hasn’t Lois been up?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What can she be doing?”

“Last time I saw her she was bouncing a tennis ball on the dining-room
wall between the portraits. She says she has not much to do at present.”

“Anything I can--”

“Oh, if you’d write my labels--”

“I will indeed, but I hate block printing--need they--?”

“Well, I’m afraid I would rather--”

“Remarkable orange labels,” said Laurence, taking the packet from her
politely.

“Here is Livvy Thompson,” he added, looking out of the window. “She
must have ridden over to say good-bye.”

“But I don’t know her.”

“She doesn’t know that: you have met.”

Marda leaned out and called her good-byes to Livvy, who waved and
shouted up to her that she would have a very wet drive. Marda withdrew,
shutting the window abruptly.

“I am sorry,” said Laurence, “that our young men will not have a chance
to say good-bye to you.”

“I’ve only met one of them--Gerald.”

“Oh yes, you weren’t here for our last party. What a very short time
you _have_ been here.... I hope you’ll come back again soon--with your
husband?”

“Thank you, it’s very kind of you.”

Laurence bowed and went away with the labels.

When Lois heard Livvy’s voice on the steps she fled to the back of the
house and hid in a box-room. Sir Richard had to tell Livvy he did not
know where she was; last time he had seen her she had been sorting out
some packs of old playing-cards in the drawing-room and seemed very
busy. Livvy was much disappointed; however, she took her horse round,
then sat in the hall to wait.

Lady Naylor--who had spared her attention to Marda with difficulty:
this was a busy morning--was agitated by this development. She stood at
the foot of the stairs, calling Lois.

“She doesn’t seem to be anywhere,” Francie at last called helpfully,
from the ante-room.

“But Livvy Thompson is sitting in the hall.”

“Ask Hugo to find her.”

“I can’t find him either.”

“Perhaps they have both gone out to the garden?”

“Not in all this rain.”

Lady Naylor sighed, gathered up two of the kitchen kittens that were
trespassing on the stairs and plunged away through a swing door. It
was twenty to twelve: extraordinary how one’s mornings went! Lunch was
to be unnaturally early because of Marda’s departure: evidently, Livvy
would, remain for it. She looked reproachfully into the library. But
there Sir Richard was engaged with the herd, discussing the Darramore
pig fair.

Meanwhile Lois was very melancholy in the box-room. The window was dark
with ivy, she could not see out. The room was too damp for the storage
of trunks that were not finished with anyhow; mustiness came from her
mother’s old vaulted trunks and from a stack of crushed cardboard
boxes. On the whitewash, her mother, to whom also the box-room had been
familiar, had written L. N.; L. N., and left an insulting drawing of
somebody, probably Hugo. She had scrawled with passion; she had never
been able to draw. Lois looked, and strained after feeling, but felt
nothing. Her problem was, not only _how_ to get out unseen, but _why_,
to what purpose?

She did not really know Marda well; to go up and offer to help her
pack would surely appear unnatural? Or worse, one might seem to be
taking advantage of yesterday? One had been passingly intimate under
the pistol’s little acute, pig eye--but one had not spoken again of
it. If she were free, she could search the rooms for something that
looked plausibly Marda’s--a magazine, a handkerchief--and bring it up.
But then Livvy was unavoidable, varnished up to the height of a shine
with love and bursting open with confidences like a cotton-pod. She was
appalled by these thoughts of Livvy.

But Livvy was privileged. If she chose to announce her engagement even
Sir Richard must stop and listen. It was a passport at any frontier,
that kind of announcement. Spurred by an impulse she did not examine,
Lois picked up two cardboard lids and with infinite breathlessness
crept from the box-room. Through the back-stairs banisters she peered
and listened. Lady Naylor had given up calling, but could still be
heard complaining to some one in the basement that she did not know
where Lois was.

Marda had finished packing, but felt it would not be decent to reappear
so soon. Especially when weather did not permit of the “last walk,”
a formal parade of the grounds with her host and hostess before
lunch-time. She was pleased to see Lois appear in the doorway.

“I brought up some cardboard in case you were packing photographs.”

“But I haven’t got any photographs.”

“And you’re packed ... Would you like me to sit on anything?”

“No, I think they will all shut.”

“What about Leslie?”

“Oh, he is in talc--unbreakable.”

“I say, I have never seen your engagement ring.”

“Oh yes, we must see the ring,” called Laurence, from over the landing.
Surprised by a sudden stillness inside the whirlwind, he had been
settling down to a half-morning’s work. But he came across and breathed
on the ring with Lois, in an imitation of reverence, then returned
to his work, shutting the door loudly. Lady Naylor was heard on the
stairs again, talking to some one below as she came up. Lois uttered
an exclamation of despair and dashed behind a window curtain. Lady
Naylor came in with some cake in a cardboard box. She said she did not
believe the train had a tea-car, but that Marda should be able to get a
tea-basket at Ballybrophy. “But I am sure you won’t care for tea-basket
cakes, we none of us do.”

“Thank you _so_ much--”

“My dear,” said her hostess, “it is really a terrible pity about your
hand. Especially as it’s the left hand, as I’m afraid you will have to
be conventional and start wearing your ring again, now you are going to
England. It is extraordinary, Marda, the way things happen to you.”

“We must be thankful,” said Marda, “that nothing worse has happened
this time.” Both thinking of Hugo, they looked at each other
benevolently, brightly and blankly. “At least she has not thought of
_that_,” they both thought.

Lady Naylor looked with surprise at Lois’s feet. “If you are hiding
there,” she said, “it is simply silly. I have been calling you
everywhere. Livvy is waiting for you down in the hall.”

“But I don’t want to see her.”

“But she is waiting for you in the hall.”

“I’ve got nothing to say and I’m sick of always having to keep on
saying it.”

“I can’t help that, she is your friend. And I thought her feelings
seemed very much hurt.”

“She will stay to lunch, you know,” Lois retorted.

“How fickle girls are!” said Lady Naylor, sitting down on the
window-sill. Her manner of sitting and waiting most strongly encouraged
an exit.

Lady Naylor was more than busy, but could not resist this last
opportunity to discover, before the veil of an international marriage
descended, what Marda really thought of the English. For nothing of
Leslie was Irish except his aunts.

“Of course really,” she said, “you are very adaptable. I dare say we
all are, but with some of us it does not have to come into play. I dare
say you’ll be very happy indeed. Where did you think of living?”

Leslie had thought of London, Marda confessed an omission on her part.

“Of course that is hardly England,” said Lady Naylor, encouraging. “And
of course it will be lovely for you being able to go abroad so easily;
you will be so much nearer everything. And you will have no neighbours,
one never has, I believe.”

“Demoralizing ...”

“You could certainly never be happy living like Anna Partridge. She has
an unnaturally sweet disposition: I often pity her.... I always find
the great thing in England is to have plenty to say, and mercifully
they are determined to find one amusing. But if one stops talking,
they tell one the most extraordinary things, about their husbands,
their money affairs, their insides. They don’t seem discouraged by not
being asked. And they seem so intimate with each other; I suppose it
comes from living so close together. Of course they are very definite
and practical, but it is a pity they talk so much about what they are
doing. I can’t think why they think it should matter: supposing I came
up here and insisted on telling you what I had been doing the whole
morning!”

Marda, feeling how true this must be, pulled open an empty drawer and
looked into it, much depressed.

“Though I don’t think it is fair,” pursued Lady Naylor, “to say
they have no sense of humour, and of course they are anxious not to
appear conventional, and they are kindness itself once they have
‘placed’ one.... Marda, surely you are not going to travel in that
thin coat? Well, for heaven’s sake do not develop a cold till it can
be obvious that you haven’t caught it here. How very unfortunate you
have been in your weather! Just that one fine day at Castle Isabel
and yesterday evening when you went for your walk. Before you came it
was brilliant--such a pity you missed our last party--and as I was
saying-- Why, Hugo ...”

He did not seem pleased to be with them. He was nonplussed at finding
the door open, having prepared to tap on it inexpressively. Francie had
insisted on sending him up with some eau-de-Cologne. She expected that
Marda, being so modern, would not care for eau-de-Cologne, but wanted
to give her some little token for the journey: this was all she could
think of. To the idea of this present he offered surprising resistance.
Or could she not take up her present herself? Her large eyes of protest
reminded him--their plan of life must eliminate stairs for her;
already, she had been up to the top once. So here he was, prepared to
recede three steps when Marda should come to her door: he was of that
school.

He stood back from the door, looking past with surprise at the room’s
non-committal features--the chairs, the window--as though he were
specially struck by there being a room at all in this part of the
house, and especially this room. Some tree-tops fidgeted under his
scrutiny. Where had he been all the morning, his hostess wanted to
know; no one could find him. Indeed? They could not have looked far:
for he had been in the dining-room, down at the dark end, taking out
those old _Illustrated London News_, old bound volumes he remembered
since he was a boy. There was that Tsar being bombed by Nihilists: very
interesting.

“I can’t think how any of those Tsars had any confidence,” said Lady
Naylor gloomily.

He looked doubtfully at the bottle of eau-de-Cologne; Lady Naylor
asked at once what he had there, was told, and exclaimed at Francie’s
imagination.

“There is nothing like eau-de-Cologne at the end of a crossing, when
one is trying to look like something again. Of course, it may not be
so bad to-night: at present I don’t like the look of those trees. Our
inland weather does sometimes go by contraries; it may be surprisingly
calm when one gets to Kingstown. I often wonder if living on an island
does not make one more deeply religious--the French, for instance,
could never have our sense of dependence--though of course they have
railway accidents. But I shouldn’t think of it, Marda, that’s much the
best way. I am sure one is often sea-sick from nervousness.”

“I don’t know what Miss Norton’s friends will think of her hand,” said
Hugo. “Their worst suspicions will be confirmed; they will think we
have been shooting at her. Her stumble was most unfortunate.”

“I ought to have brought back that piece of slate from the mill.”

“I hold you responsible, Hugo; you should not have let her go climbing
about. Never mind, it will give them something to talk about.”

“You must draw on your imagination,” said Hugo to Marda. “Don’t let
them suspect how tame we all are. They will expect you to be a bit of a
heroine; you must tell them everything that might have happened.”

Marda, finding a place for the bottle of eau-de-Cologne at the top of
her dressing-case, declared: “That would be inexhaustible.”

“They may think it odd that you should have cut the _back_ of your
hand....”

The three closed suitcases had a look of finality. Marda wished to
go down and find Francie and thank her, they all three crossed the
landing at a high pitch of affability. Laurence gripped the hair over
his temples in larger handfuls and crouched lower down over his book.
His thoughts, tight with concentration, were darkened by a wave of
malignance. Marda’s door, which no one had shut, remained flapping and
clicking.

In the yard, under the dripping chestnuts, Lois and Livvy walked about
in their mackintoshes. This afternoon, Lois intended to wash the dogs;
they might anticipate the occasion by disappearance, so she thought it
better to go down now--they had had their dinners--and shut them up in
the stables. They had gone up and looked for no reason into the loft,
at the chaff and the dead swallows. They went back slowly, listening in
vain for the gong.

“It seems odd,” said Livvy, “she should be going away; she seems to
have only just come. I generally get so accustomed to your visitors. I
have said good-bye to her once--I had no idea I should be staying to
luncheon. However, I don’t suppose she will remember, she seemed rather
flurried. Laurence was up there with her; it seems odd to me to have a
man in one’s bedroom even in the morning, but I dare say she is rather
cosmopolitan.... It does seem a pity, Lois, you forgot to ask her about
that jumper pattern.”

“Do you remember those Black and Tans on the Clonmore road? They always
remind me of her.”

“Why?” said Livvy. Then with her holy look, which Lois had up to now
managed to keep in abeyance, she added: “That was a memorable day for
me, naturally.”

“Why?” said Lois crossly.

“David and I decided to go to Cork.”

“I thought you said that was just chance.”

“It was predestination. Now I must tell you, Lois--”

“Things that have come just before people seem like part of them.”

“How you do talk ...”

“No, I don’t.”

“Lois,” said Livvy sagaciously, “I hope things are not going wrong
between you and Gerald?” Since her engagement, she spoke of all young
men by their Christian names and made motherly little impulsive
advances in all directions, like Mrs. Vermont.

Hugo wished to return to the _Illustrated London News_, but the
parlourmaid was laying the table and looked at him in surprise. In the
hall the two young girls, hair damp from their excursion, were playing
left-hand catch with a tennis ball. So he had to go into the library
where his wife and Marda were still talking about eau-de-Cologne--Marda
against the mantelpiece, bright and hard-looking in her coat and skirt.
Eau-de-Cologne wasn’t scent, Francie summed up; she hated scent for it
seemed a kind of advertisement. Sir Richard joined them; they all four
talked in an eager, unnatural way, as though they had just met for the
first time.

Indeed, the unfamiliarity of the moment made them strange to
themselves, though it now seemed to have been waiting ahead of them
like a trap into which they had stepped with a degree of naturalness.
Sir Richard, the least affected, thought the Montmorencys unduly
animated and deplored departures. Visitors took form gradually in his
household, coming out of a haze of rumour, and seemed but lightly,
pleasantly superimposed on the vital pattern till a departure tore
great shreds from the season’s texture. Francie rubbed the palms of her
hands lightly on the tapestry of the chair-arms. She knew that life
was unkind and that Marda must have begun at least to suspect this;
she wondered how much Marda had understood from the eau-de-Cologne.
Marda, turned half-away from them, tapped a tune on the edge of
the mantelpiece, laughed at every shade of a silence and felt how
resolutely Hugo did not look at her now. There was to be no opportunity
for what he must not say to be father painfully not said. Hugo wished
there had been a fire: the room was cold with rain and branches went
restlessly up and down beyond the windows. Her face and figure, at
which he dared not look, compelled his imagination with ghostly
sharpness.

“You will have a very wet drive, I’m afraid,” said Sir Richard finally.
To Francie, the remark had a faint echo. Had it been what she was going
to say, or had she once said it?

Outside in the hall, Livvy skidded over the edge of a rug and came
down heavily, knocking over a wicker chair. The tennis ball bounced
away, Lois shrieked her condolences. They all made a movement of
consternation and were delighted.

Livvy came into luncheon fragrant with Pond’s Extract, a shiny patch
on her chin. She kept putting up a finger and feeling the bump: David
must “kiss it better” for her to-morrow. David should have witnessed
her courage: he seemed increasingly struck by her moral qualities; he
had never observed these things in a girl before. Yesterday he had
taken her over to tea at the Vermonts; at her suggestion, they had
“told” the Vermonts, in confidence. It had been a success: she had been
made to feel at once she belonged to the regiment. She had had no idea
Mrs. Vermont was so jolly; she had taken Livvy off for a real little
chat in her bedroom; they agreed what a rag it would be if the regiment
went to China. Livvy looked voluptuously from Sir Richard to Lady
Naylor, thinking what a surprise she had here for them both. She ate
two helpings of fricasseed chicken, in absolute silence, designing her
trousseau dressing-gown; and old Mr. Montmorency, who sat beside her,
did not speak either.

“I like lunch at one,” said Lady Naylor, surprised. “It shortens the
morning, but gives one so much more time in the afternoon. I can’t
think why we don’t have it always.”

“I see no reason why we should not, my dear,” said Sir Richard, who,
unlike an English husband, was not conservative in these matters.

The car came round twenty minutes too early, but Sir Richard said the
chauffeur was quite right. He could hardly bear to let Marda drink
her coffee and was but slightly mollified when she burnt herself. Mr.
Montmorency sugared his coffee twice over, to Livvy’s delight. They
drank coffee out in the hall, standing up; it was like the Passover.
Marda went upstairs and came down in her travelling coat. Hugo stood at
the foot of the stairs, in the back hall, tightening the screws of his
racquet press.

“Good-bye,” she said. “Thank you for being nice to me.”

“Oh,” said he, looking blindly at her with his pale eyes, “have I been
nice to you? Good!”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye--Marda.”

“Don’t come on to the steps--”

“No, I’ll finish this press--”

They both half-turned, heard the pendulum of the clock swing once: she
went on into the hall. Everybody was there but Lois.

Lois stood behind the door in the drawing-room, waiting. “Marda,” she
said through the crack. “Hullo?” said Marda. She came round the door,
pushing it a little way to behind her. They kissed.

“Marda, I can’t--”

“Never mind.”

“_Darling!_”

“Be good!”

“Happy journey!”

“Oh yes.” They parted.

Marda came back to the hall, not looking at anybody in particular,
putting her gloves on. Lady Naylor asked her if she had packed the
cake. Sir Richard patted her arm and said she was a good girl and must
be sure and be happy--then looked very much abashed and startled at
what he had done. Laurence looked bored, so bored; she was sorry for
Laurence. She said: “I am really going.” “I’m sorry you’re going, I
don’t think it’s--” They shook hands, he immediately turned--rather
rudely, his uncle thought, and walked into the library.

After all, there were only Sir Richard and Lady Naylor and Francie to
wave Marda off from the steps and watch the car up the avenue into a
veil of rain. Rather few, they felt, considering what a dear she had
been and how they had come to love her. Wondering why and where the
others had gone, they tried to present the broadest possible expanse
of smile and flutter. And of this effort the flick of Marda’s gloved
finger-tips round the hood conveyed the friendliest, the most satirical
recognition.

“Well, that’s that,” said Livvy, at last discovering Lois in the
drawing-room. “Partings make me ever so sad. Now listen, Lois--”

“I’m afraid I’m not well, I’ve eaten something,” said Lois. “I’m
sorry--” She clapped her handkerchief to her mouth and fled from
the drawing-room by the other door, stumbling over the _portière_.
Livvy went a little way after her, talking, then came back: “It is a
disadvantage to a girl,” she reflected, “that kind of stomach.”

Lois found in the empty spare room a piece of paper that crept on the
floor like a living handkerchief. Through the defenceless windows came
in the vacancy of the sky; the grey ceiling had gone up in remoteness.
More wind came through, flowers moved in the vases, the pages of a book
left open beside the bed turned over hurriedly. The pillow was dinted,
as though half-way through packing Marda had lain down lazily. Or as
though since last night the pillow had not forgotten the feel of her
head.




                        THE DEPARTURE OF GERALD




                                   XVII


CAPTAIN and Mrs. Rolfe of the Gunners were giving a dance in their hut.
Denise Rolfe and her dearest friend Betty Vermont of the Rutlands had
been more than busy the whole morning. Flustered and happy, they darted
about the hut, cutting sandwiches, scattering floor powder, pinning
draperies round the walls. They masked the electric lights with pink
crinkly paper to produce the desired enchantment. Every now and then,
one would collapse on to what remained of the furniture and, catching
the other’s eyes, burst into delighted laughter. It was all such a rag.
They smoked cigarettes and ground the ash into the floor to enrich the
polish; they tried the new records over again and again till Mrs. Rolfe
declared that the needles would give out and snapped down the lid of
the gramophone resolutely.

Mrs. Rolfe’s Colonel disapproved tacitly; Colonel Boatley did not think
the dance was a good idea either. Entertainments in barracks had been
given up long ago. But it was not easy to veto what ladies described
as “a little fun in the huts.” Married quarters in barracks were
limited; as the army of occupation was reinforced, lines of hutments
began to extend up the hill at the back of the Gunner barracks. There
was nothing to beat these hut dances; for one thing, the floors were
so springy. And the fewer the couples, the more intimate the occasion.
Denise and Betty both thought with contempt of the Rutlands’ official
dance in the barrack gymnasium, full of majors waltzing, where you were
nearly blown off the floor by the regimental bassoon.

“All the same,” said Betty, rubbing a board with her toe, a shade
despondent, “I wish this would polish _more_. You’re certain it won’t
be sticky?”

“Nothing could be stickier than the C.O.,” said Denise wittily. “If it
wasn’t for him, we should be keeping it up till breakfast.”

“It’s these wretched patrols and things,” said Mrs. Vermont.

“It seems odd being short of girls. I do feel I should be getting my
sister over.”

“There will be heaps for to-night,” said Mrs. Vermont, who thought
people’s young sisters rather a bother. The ladies of the neighbourhood
had praised Mrs. Rolfe’s kind intentions, but said that they feared
the roads were not fit for their girls these nights. But their girls,
meeting Mrs. Vermont at the tennis club, had told her they would be
certain to come. “In fact, if they all come,” said Mrs. Vermont,
apprehensive, “I may have to telephone down to the mess for some more
of our boys.”

Captain Rolfe came off duty at lunch-time, and during the afternoon
friends kept dropping in, by twos and singly, with offers to help.

“But don’t _look!_” shrieked Denise every time, flinging herself
against the wall to conceal the draperies. “It’s all a surprise for
to-night.” The subalterns, after a hasty look round, prepared to be
perfectly blind. They began to slide industriously, buffeted on the
head by the Chinese lanterns which Betty had hung too low. Tubby, Mr.
Simcox, sat down on a mat and was whisked round the room by his friends
to perform the functions of polisher.

“Really,” volunteered some one, “we ought to be rolling the floor with
champagne bottles....”

Girls who succeeded in coming over for the dance had arranged to be
“put up” in Clonmore, or in married quarters. The two Miss Raltes from
Castle Ralte in the Tipperary direction looked in about four o’clock,
pink from a twelve-mile drive and parental opposition. Father, in fact,
had been more than difficult. “He says,” said Moira Ralte, looking
beatifically round at the decorations, “that the whole proceeding is
not only criminal but lunatic. He says he can’t understand the C.O.
allowing it, with the country the way it is. We really did think, till
we got past the gates, he was going to stop us.”

“But we came,” said Cicely. Every one laughed. The Miss Raltes had
been cast as wild young Irish and rather liked themselves. But they
exchanged glances, uneasy. It had not been quite the thing, perhaps, to
have laughed at Father.

“It takes two to make a war,” said Mrs. Rolfe wisely. “_We_’re not
fighting.”

“More’s the pity,” said a Mr. Daventry of the Rutlands with violence.
“_God_, if they’d--” The Miss Raltes, unaccustomed to swearing,
looked down their noses. There was a moment of slight discomfort, of
national consciousness.

“Wouldn’t it be a rag,” said Moira, relieving the tension tactfully,
“if they tried to fire in at the windows while we were dancing?”

“_I_ shall draw the curtains!” cried Mrs. Vermont.

Cicely glanced at the gramophone, hummed a fox-trot and tapped her heel
on the floor, looking most unconscious. But the subalterns continued
to slide violently, rebounding against each other, and dancing was not
begun till the D.I.’s niece came in. The D.I.’s niece came in with
a flourish and was greeted with uproar. She was priceless. She had
light-red hair fluffed over her forehead, a wide smile punctuated by
gaps in her teeth and tireless repartee in a Cork accent. Denise and
Betty adored her. She was a Catholic, it seemed so queer to think that
she worshipped the Pope. The Miss Raltes hardly knew her. As she came
in, Daventry opened his arms, she ran into them with a gurgle and they
began to dance. The gramophone spurted hoarse music; other couples
followed the gramophone.

Mr. Daventry, the senior subaltern, elegant, tall and a shade satanic,
was “taken,” obviously, with the queer little person. She could talk
and dance at once with an equal skimmingness and she did. Daventry
shook her, murmuring: “Do shut up!” He whispered into her hair that she
danced like thistledown and that he hated to have it spoilt.

“Like how much?” shrieked the D.I.’s niece above the music, bobbing her
face up at him.

Mrs. Rolfe, as distracted hostess, allowed herself to drift into the
arms of the adjutant, who had looked in for a moment or two. He spoke
of himself as a busy man, but she knew this to be a pose. She danced
remotely and kept repeating: “Glasses for claret cup ... Glasses for
cider cup ... Cigarettes ... Cover the washstand ...”

“Washstand?” said the adjutant, solicitous.

“They will have to sit out in Percy’s and my bedroom. Do you think it
will matter?”

The adjutant took a firmer grip of Mrs. Rolfe, an ethereal girl with a
habit of drifting just out of one’s reach like a kite. He gulped, and
said rather too genially: “It will be no end of a rag to-night. We--we
must make the most of it; it may be the last for a bit. As it is, we’re
doubling the guards. The C.O.--”

“Pig!” said Denise, looking deep into the adjutant’s eyes.

“Mum,” said the adjutant, blinking. “And another thing: I’m afraid you
won’t have Dobson of the Rutlands, I’ve just met him--he’s to be out on
patrol.”

“Oh, but he _said_ he’d get out of that! Oh, but he promised me--”

“He’d no business to; he’s been due for patrol for ages. Their C.O.--”

“He spoils everything. Captain Dobson is one of my best dancers.” She
stopped short and turned off the gramophone. “Listen, Percy! They’re
sending Captain Dobson out on patrol at a moment’s notice. _Now_ I’d
like to know what I’m supposed to do? I’d calculated the numbers
exactly.”

“But, Dens,” said her husband, conscientiously. “We had four men
spare. And you’re certain of Lesworth and Armstrong.”

“_He_ won’t count!” They all laughed: Betty had told a few friends in
confidence ...

“And for a matter of that,” Denise still clouded, complained to the
adjutant, “Mr. Lesworth won’t count much either. He’s awfully keen on
the Farquar girl.”

The adjutant thought: “These attachments!” His C.O. did not like these
attachments, either. The gramophone in a perceptibly minor key began
again, they went on dancing.

“Suppose,” said the D.I.’s niece, during an interval, “all we girls are
left sitting to-night and nobody comes to dance with us?”

“Dance with each other,” said Cicely Ralte firmly.

“But I wouldn’t care to dance without men,” said the D.I.’s niece,
frankly languishing. She had hoisted herself on to the cabinet that
held the records and sat swinging her legs in their shiny stockings and
pulling her dazzlingly checked skirt over her knees. Her green eyes
roamed round, returning attention confidently.

Daventry, a hand on the edge of the cabinet, stood leaning with his
back to the wall’s art-muslin draperies. He kept shutting his eyes;
whenever he stopped dancing he noticed that he had a headache. He had
been out in the mountains all night and most of the morning, searching
some houses for guns that were known to be there. He had received
special orders to ransack the beds, and to search with particular
strictness the houses where men were absent and women wept loudest and
prayed. Nearly all beds had contained very old women or women with
very new babies, but the N.C.O., who was used to the work, insisted
that they must go through with it. Daventry still felt sickish, still
stifled with thick air and womanhood, dazed from the din. Daventry had
been shell-shocked, he was now beginning to hate Ireland, lyrically,
explicitly; down to the very feel of the air and smell of the water.
If it were not for dancing a good deal, whisky, bridge, ragging about
in the huts, whisky again, he did not know what would become of him,
he would go over the edge, quite mad, he supposed. He opened his
eyes: afternoon light lay in bars on the smoky air. The flash of his
partner’s legs in their glassy stockings exasperated him, he gripped
one of her ankles--harshly, as though it had been a man’s. She kicked,
and a high-heeled slipper went rocketing through the air. A forest of
hands went up. The D.I.’s niece looked down complacently on the compact
and plaited backs of the subalterns. The other girls tittered and hung
on the outskirts.

“Oh, take care,” wailed Denise, “mind my draperies!” She freed an end
of the muslin and, as no one listened, began with angry laughter to
pepper them all with floor-powder. The D.I.’s niece looked at Daventry
queerly and suddenly: their eyes were now on a level. His eyes, dark
with fatigue and nervousness, were set in too close together, like a
good-looking shark’s.

Cicely Ralte yawned slightly; the struggle did not abate. “We shall all
be tired when it comes to to-night,” she said to the adjutant.

But he said: “Here comes Miss Farquar, looking as fresh as paint.”

Lois came to the door with David Armstrong. Livvy would not come up
to the hut till this evening, she would be confused, she feared; she
didn’t know how much they knew. She was down in Clonmore now, buying
sophisticated-looking black pansies to wear in her dress. She and Lois
were spending the night in Clonmore, with the Fogartys. Lois was dazed
still from her long drive under the strained white sunless sky. Sir
Richard and Lady Naylor had viewed her departure with the gloomiest
apprehensions, but Francie had insisted she would enjoy herself. It
must be flat for her these few days, Francie said, after Marda had
gone. And she had slipped a sachet of Californian Poppy into the top of
the suitcase, with Lois’s green tulle dress.

Lois and David looked through the door at the young men all in a tangle
with a sensation of helplessness, as though it devolved on themselves
to unwind them. Then they stepped in and shook hands with Mrs. Rolfe
and her girl friends. Lois, pleasing the adjutant by her freshness,
wore a light-blue felt hat and a blue cardigan. She suspected she
should not be walking about the camp without a chaperon, but could not
see how to avoid this: she had come up here to look for Mrs. Vermont.
She went pink from the heat of the room and felt Mr. Daventry look
at her--then shut his eyes again. There was a desperation about Mr.
Daventry she could have loved. But he apparently craved relaxation: she
had found out she did not relax Mr. Daventry.

Gerald was not here--she guessed from the eyes of commiseration. He was
a serious dancer and did not care to tire himself by sliding. Possibly
he was on duty, possibly would be waiting at Mr. Fogarty’s. Now, she
could remember nothing of him but the leg he had drawn so tenderly into
the armoured car. She had heard nothing of him from that moment; he
might have been sealed up permanently in tin, like a lobster. Did he
regret the kiss?--he had not added a word to it.

Mr. Simcox, the fattest and sweetest of all the Gunners, started
the gramophone with an eye on herself and came to ask for a dance.
He looked so hot, she said she would rather wait till the evening.
“Remember,” said Mr. Simcox, spreading a hand on his heart. And by
some mysterious evocation, the hut, lit up, vibrated; the air was warm
like smoke on her cool arm, and she went throbbing along with Gerald,
feeling his hand on her back through her thin dress--too near to see
each other--his lashes reverent by her hair. She thought she need not
worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine
elsewhere or firelight in an empty room.

She thanked Mr. Simcox and said she would keep number six and would
not lose count. Mrs. Vermont, looking peevish suddenly, said it was
tea-time now and shooed the young men out of the hut like chickens.
They dispersed through the mud in the tired, wise light of the
afternoon.

That evening a wind came up. Lois and Livvy dressed in Mrs. Fogarty’s
spare room, stumbling round the edge of the large bed. They took turns
at the looking-glass; in the intervals of their toilet they ran to
the window to look out. It was strange and pleasant to Lois to be in
a town again. The square, where some crisp leaves whirled autumnly,
was pervaded by an excitement. Though only twelve couples had been
invited to Mrs. Rolfe’s dance, all Clonmore seemed to know of it.
People kept coming out quickly through the swing doors of the Imperial.
Some one played half a waltz and broke off, discouraged; two commercial
travellers clapped one another on the shoulder. Livvy pinned the
black pansies under her bosom and turned to invite admiration. Lois
thought the pansies looked common, but, knowing they must have cost
four-and-six, said they were most original. Lois’s green tulle dress
slipped over her head like a cataract. She shone, coming out through
the top of it. If only Marda could see her ... It was half-past six:
she had promised herself to think of Marda.

They were dressing early, they were to dine with a Mrs. Perkins up
in the huts. Mrs. Perkins could not promise there would be much for
dinner, but after all this was Ireland and it would be rather jolly.

Captain Vermont was to call for them: they buttoned their over-coats
over their ball-dresses. Mrs. Fogarty kissed them half-way downstairs,
and warned them not to break hearts. She would see them later, she was
coming to watch the dance.

Since the acquisition of Betty, Captain Vermont’s stock of conversation
to pretty young things had given out naturally; biologically the time
was past for it. They walked rather silently up past the barracks and
picked their way over the mud between the huts. A chill of darkness was
coming down on the air. The wind came, knife-like, down through the
lines of huts from the mountain, over a gulf of land where the farms
were dark--apprehensive, the young girls patted the whorls of their
hair. The Perkins’ hut exposed a flank to the wind; it was chilly, one
slipped one’s bare arms out of one’s coat reluctantly, going to table.

The dinner was not so jolly as Lois had feared. Mrs. Perkins looked
distraite and had a whispered argument with her husband about a
tin-opener. Mrs. Vermont could talk of nothing but poor Denise (“As
though,” said Livvy, “she were having at least a baby instead of only
a dance”). Captain Perkins and Captain Vermont apologized repeatedly
to the girls for being old and married; their wives told them not to
be so silly. Their wives said the girls could perfectly well see there
was no room for young men here; already their six chairs grated against
the match-boarding. The girls would have young men in the course of
the evening. Lois agreed politely, but Livvy wished they had stayed
to dinner down in Clonmore where one could have at least watched Mr.
Fogarty drink. She sat squinting, watching the wasted powder flake off
her nose.

A bottle of white wine was divided among the ladies with depressing
impartiality; the men drank whisky. Mrs. Perkins’ pince-nez glittered
with more animation. But the wind like a lunatic fidgeted with the hut,
frames creaked, doors rattled, a shudder went down the walls; a gust
through a crack set the lights dementedly swinging. During a strained
little silence, between two gusts of the wind, Mrs. Vermont observed
that an angel must be passing over the house; she wanted them to listen
for its wings. They listened; they thought of empty country blotted
out by the darkness. “Quiet here, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Perkins.

“Better not circulate too far between the dances,” said Captain
Perkins, “and don’t go down to the wires. It’s dark, for one thing; we
don’t want any of these girls lost.”

“Grandpa!” said Mrs. Vermont. Livvy noted, there seemed some communal
feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone
else’s husband. “I don’t go for walks between dances,” said Livvy,
bridling.

“You don’t know what you’ll do _now!_” said Mrs. Vermont, and they all
laughed.

Lois was anxious, there was a tight little ball in her throat; she
could hardly swallow. She was always “strung-up” before a dance. But
to-night it was worse; she had not the expectation of being claimed:
she was really doubtful. She had not had a word from Gerald; he
hadn’t been round to the Fogartys’. Was she not nice to kiss; was he
disappointed? Her green frock glinted under the light; she kept looking
down at her breast, and into her lap, where the folds ran off in shadow
under the table. If he were not there when she came, if she did not see
him before he saw her (as she came uphill in the dark) standing full in
pink light by the door, staring eagerly on to the slab of darkness that
was to give her up--she should die, she thought. For this morning she
had written to Viola that she intended to marry Gerald.




                                  XVIII


THE Rolfes’ door swung open and shut; bursts from the gramophone came
downhill like somebody coughing. As the Perkins’ party stepped up from
the duckboards Gerald spun past the door with the D.I.’s niece, in a
nimbus of gauze draperies. The room was sticky with strawberry light,
unlit lanterns wobbled between the electric light cords; the dancers
seemed to be moving slowly in jam. A group of young men stood by the
door, coughing. But one hadn’t yet made one’s official appearance:
Lois blinked and began to tug out her silver shoes from her pockets;
somebody pulled her on down a passage to change.

In what Denise called the kitchenette at the end of the passage the
five spare men were smoking, looking into their glasses of whisky and
wishing to play bridge. Lois looked in and they all waved to her, but
Livvy pulled her away quickly: she said that must be the gentlemen’s
cloak-room. Lois met, with surprise, her own eyes of interrogation in
six inches of mirror between the coats.

David came to claim Livvy, Betty went swooning off over the chalky lake
of the floor with Mr. Simcox, Mr. Daventry stared at the passage door
with severity, balanced his cigarette on the rim of the gramophone and
came up to Lois and frowned, without speaking. He opened his arms
slowly. They danced; she had no idea she could dance so beautifully. At
the end of the record Mr. Daventry impassively moved back the needle
again. “Tiring day,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t think so.” They went on dancing.

The D.I.’s niece picked off ends of her tangerine draperies from
various parts of Gerald and walked away with an aquiline-looking
gunner. Over Lois’s temple Mr. Daventry’s jaw moved slightly; his neck
muscles strained. Again he revived the gramophone. Lois, breathless,
said: “Isn’t there going to be an interval?” “Not necessarily,” replied
Mr. Daventry. Meanwhile, one wall of the hut seemed propped against
Gerald’s rigid, resentful back.

“What a crowd ...”

“I beg your pardon?”

She did not speak again. Anxiously dancing, she merely constituted
Mr. Daventry’s revenge. Mrs. Vermont, going past Gerald, said: “Oh,
diddums?” She asked Mr. Simcox if he had noticed, nice-looking boys
looked their nicest sulky? Mr. Simcox, looking round so carefully that
he missed a step, said he would not call that _sulky_ ... More worried.

“Nonsense, Tubby, what’s he got to worry about?”

“You never know.”

Mr. Simcox was a bit of a philosopher, because he was so fat. He gave
up Mrs. Vermont with a sigh to another young man and went across for
somebody’s young, shy sister. “No luck?” he said on the way, to Gerald.
And Gerald looked at him candidly, with despair.

The evening “went” with a rush, with a kind of high impetuousness out
of everybody’s control. Every one looked and spoke and danced close up
with a kind of exalted helplessness; intimacy tightened the very air.
Sandwiches were ambrosia, brightening the eyes; rims of plates went
electric where fingers touched. Mrs. Rolfe laughed all the time, you
would have said with despair. She climbed past couples very close up
at the darkest part of the passage, she entered the kitchenette with
a shriek and swept some cards from the table. The spare men danced
with each other. She ran in and out of her bedroom, shaking a plate of
chocolates at the couples sitting out on the chest-o’-drawers and on
the washstand covered with Turkish cushions. If the hut had risen and
soared up into the air, so that some one stepping out at the door had
to step back dizzily, she would hardly have been surprised. Indeed, two
subalterns running down to the mess for more siphons did leap to the
mud as from a great height.

The room was hot; they drew the curtains back and opened the windows,
then were stared in at oddly by hard little squares of night. Couples
went out for walks, to cool their faces. Livvy was kissed twice and
went off to powder her chin. “Of course, this is post-war madness,”
said Mr. Simcox, standing beside a window.

“Oh yes,” agreed Lois.

“Awful, really.... I expect _you_ understand what I mean?”

“Oh yes.” Wishing Mr. Simcox were not intrigued, she put her two hands
out of the window, as into a well, to feel wind cold on her wrists.
Gerald came up behind her.

“Mine next,” he said, as though they had just parted. “What a row!” he
yelled.

“This jazz,” said Simcox. “They ought to have let me bring my band,”
complained Gerald, “it wouldn’t have taken up much more room than Mrs.
Fogarty.”

Mrs. Fogarty had indeed come in and sat at the end of the room in a
purple tea-gown. Her circumference was enormous, her feet stuck out
beyond it--but she was such a darling. Every time a couple stumbled
over her feet she beamed and nodded in the friendliest way. She had
just whispered to Gerald, who brought her a glass of lemonade: “Here,
where’s _your_ girl?” And her eyes had rolled at him, dark with worry.
Gerald could not have borne to disappoint Mrs. Fogarty.

Gerald did not dance silently. His hand supported her wrist, cool and
familiar. Lois felt she was home again; safe from deserted rooms, the
penetration of silences, rain, homelessness. Nothing mattered: she
could have gone to sleep. But he woke her.

“Look here: what have I done?”

“How--?” said she, quite inadequate.

“You _know_. But why are you--why must we--?”

“Gerald--oh, do be--sssh!”

A couple sheered off from them.

“I didn’t think you’d be cruel,” he said to her hair, almost
confidentially.

“But it’s you who’ve been cutting me.”

“But how? When? You’ve never once looked--Lois, you’re lovely, but
you’re so--”

“Look here, we can’t talk and dance.”

“Which does that mean you _don’t_ want to do?”

She looked at a button of his mess coat. “Talk,” she said after a
little contented interval. He slid his hand up her wrist, they danced
on. The D.I.’s niece trailed past them, laughing at Daventry: they
had a pool of space to themselves on the crowded floor. The pink room
melted round, beatific and syrupy. He was closer than ever under the
lovely compulsion of movement.

“You do dance divinely.”

“What?” he said, like the ghost of Daventry. Some one stopped the
gramophone, they looked at each other, shocked. Something had made him
absurdly unhappy: she would have liked to have comforted him.

“Let’s go out.”

“Won’t it be cold for you?”

“Gerald,” said she, discouraged, “don’t be an aunt.”

The wind whipped round the edge of the hut, ran through her hair at the
roots and stung her ears--a sinister energy in this fixed and angular
world, for one could not see anything moving. Gerald walked, unknown,
beside her, up in the dark. “At one time,” said Lois, wrapping her wild
skirts round her, “a girl would have died of this.”

“Cigarette?”

“Oh--will it light here?”

“I can light one most places.” So she bent over his hands, a cup of
fire. There were two bright specks in his eyes.--Then the match whirled
off and died on the dark. “I can’t think what you think has gone
wrong,” she said.

“You were so queer that Thursday. You’d been like part of me, the night
before; then everything seemed--wrong. I dare say I was a brute; I
oughtn’t to have--though as a matter of fact I’ll never be sorry.... If
you’d been just angry or anything ... But you seemed to go right away:
I didn’t know where I was. All lunch you were like a girl at a tennis
club. Then you left me down there with them all to talk rot and went
off with that beastly gramophone.”

“_That_ was not my fault--did you want me to listen to you talking
rot?--Gerald, I didn’t realize you were resentful; I didn’t think you
could be.... I was waiting for you to write.”

“I began so many letters, I used half a box of note-paper. I couldn’t
think what to say.”

“Still, you might have written.”

“But how?” he said candidly.

She could not remember, though she had read so many books, _who_ spoke
first after a kiss had been, not exchanged but--administered. The two
reactions, outrage, capitulation, had not been her own. “You were
hoping I would write?” she said, seeing light suddenly.

“You see, you had always been so understanding.”

“But, Gerald, I should have thought you’d have been shocked if I’d--”

“Oh?... Perhaps I would. But I wanted something to make things natural.
I shall never forget what I felt in that armoured car. You will always
be connected up in my mind with the smell of oil--Lois, do you think I
am terribly introspective?”

“You know, you were tired.”

“Perhaps it was that,” he said, puzzled. “But bumping along back to
barracks, and you going in again with that girl to that topping house
...”

“Do you think it’s a topping house?”

“It seems so to me.”

This new version of the changeable afternoon was a shock to her. It
had gone on for him, too; doors that she had not thought of shutting
and windows opening, the drone in the drawing-room, rain with a
different importance. Might she perhaps have thought more about Gerald
and wondered less? Splashing along the brown road to Clonmore she could
now see the armoured car diminish--with Gerald its only nerve. But she
thought of the empty spare room and how it avenged him.

“Marda’s gone, you know.”

“But she had just come to lunch, surely?”

“_Gerald!_... Can’t you feel any difference between some one to lunch
and somebody staying?”

“She hadn’t a hat,” said Gerald after consideration.

“She went two days ago: she’s in Kent now.”

“I’m sorry,” said Gerald civilly. Feeling a strained, fierce pause, he
added: “She seemed awfully nice, I thought.”

“Don’t you wonder at all if I miss her?”

“I expect you must. I always miss visitors, though they’re a bother
beforehand.”

“She hadn’t any beforehand--that seems so odd now.”

“Lois ... you aren’t angry, then?”

“Oh?” Recollecting herself, she looked round the darkness vaguely. A
couple were coming towards them; she put a hand on his sleeve to make
him be quiet, his other hand came over it. They heard Daventry’s angry
laugh, his partner’s feet ran stickily on the duckboards. Gerald and
Daventry passed in the dark with, it seemed, a queer silent interchange.

“Mr. Daventry seems old to be a subaltern.”

“It’s absurd that he should be--all this peacetime bother. He had
a company in France in 1916, later on he was acting major. He’s a
splendid fellow, I’m sorry you haven’t seen more of him. He won’t go
about much, outside barracks. The fact is,” he added apologetic, “he’s
sick at being over here. It doesn’t seem to agree with him.”

“Do _you_ really like it?”

“Oh, well, it’s a job. Though I rather see Daventry’s point--it doesn’t
seem natural.”

They had come to the end of the huts--the foot of the steep slope a
wall, the top heavily wired. Under the wall a sentry inhumanly paced
like a pendulum. The country bore in it strong menace. Gerald looked
out at it, his face blinking in and out of the dark, faintly red with
the pulse of his cigarette. She nursed her bare elbows, unconsciously
shivering. He seemed at once close and remote, known and un-personal;
she understood why, up to now, she had searched for him vainly in what
he said. He had nothing to do with expression. She put out a hand
to where he was, shadowy and palpable. He threw his cigarette away,
turned--and said nothing. The sentry passed.

They went back the way they had come, between the huts.

“Gerald, I _wasn’t_ angry ... at what you did....”

“No, you were wonderful all the time.”

“Don’t you understand?” she said sharply--“_Gerald?_”

“Understand?... _Lois!_”

While they kissed, she heard, in the silence of their footsteps, some
one moving about in a hut up the lines. The sound was a long way off,
at the other side of a stillness.

“Your arms are so cold.”

“I’ve been so lonely.”

“They’re so _cold_.” He kissed them, inside the elbows. Later: “I like
the back of your head,” she said with exploring finger-tips.

“I never thought you looked at me.”

“Gerald, I’ve been so ... vacant.”

“I never thought you wanted me.”

“I--” she began. The soft sound of her dress in the wind became, by
some connection of mood, painfully inexplicable to her--the pain was
its own, from not being understood. “Gerald, your buttons hurt rather.”

“My darling--” He let her go, but still, above consciousness, held
one of her hands, solemnly. “Shall you really be able to marry me?”

“I don’t know till you’ve asked me.”

“Don’t laugh--” he cried.

“Can’t you _hear_ I’m not laughing?”

“Lois--” Something more was coming; she waited, hearing him draw a
breath. “Let’s go back and dance,” he said almost religiously--“shall
we?”

The hut was compact with movement: she stood back in alarm, as before a
revolving door in destructive motion. Now it was gone, she remembered
sharply the smell of earth.... David Armstrong leaned from his partner
wildly and struck Gerald over the head with a red balloon.

Mrs. Rolfe had had an idea that the dance might well finish up with a
cotillion. She was vague about cotillions, but towards this end she
had distributed balloons, whistles that ran out long tongues when
you blew them, and streamers from striped cardboard batons with which
dancers might hit one another over the head. Mrs. Vermont thought these
things went better with fancy dress, but Denise said a rag was a rag
at any time. Girls ducked and shrieked and waved their streamers over
their partners’ shoulders. Denise, radiant in black with a trail of
nasturtiums, was waltzing--affair of prolonged “hesitations”--with
Betty’s husband. She bit off a streamer, spat out a mouthful of paper
and said, with a shiver of happiness: “Isn’t it marvellous, Timmy? I
can hardly believe I’m awake!”

“Ra-_ther!_” replied Captain Vermont, with blurred enthusiasm. He was
being buffeted by Mr. Simcox and somebody’s sister.

“Betty’s been just too marvellous,” went on Denise--“Oh, Timmy, do have
a shot at Reggie Daventry--there, with the girl in scarlet. He looks
just too refined!”

But Timmy failed to find Daventry. “Betty’s _tons_ the prettiest here,”
cried Denise, ecstatic.

“Oh, come!” expostulated Captain Vermont, squeezing her waist. It gave
him a warm, tender feeling to think how fond she and Betty were of each
other.

“Tell me,” said Denise, as nearly as possible snuggling, “are we
terribly reckless? Would this annoy the Irish?”

“They won’t know.”

“They have heaps of spies.”

“I say, _sssh_, Denise, there are heaps of them here to-night.”

“Spies?”

“Irish--the Raltes and Co.”

“They’re different.”

“Still, they’ve got feelings.”

Denise sighed. “I could go on like this for ever.” But Captain Vermont
rather thought he would like a drink. A balloon exploded. “Glory!”
cried Mrs. Fogarty. So they burst four more to keep her amused.

“Is this like a bombardment?” asked Moira Ralte.

“No,” said Mr. Simcox.

If they were not careful, they would knock over the gramophone. Mr.
Daventry thought it was time they did. It was time something happened.
He danced the D.I.’s niece down the passage and kissed her with her
head pressed back in the coats. She struggled, futile, slippery as a
weasel. As he kissed again her face went stiff and she shut her eyes.
When these opened, they were as shrewd as ever: still he did not know
what she thought. The drums in his temples were now insistent; he could
not forget them even while he was dancing. She had dabbed herself over
with White Rose. Her frizzy hair tickled his mouth as he bent close to
her.

“Do you get kissed a lot?”

“Englishmen never could keep their mouths to themselves.”

“You won’t know yourself when we’re gone!”

“You should get back home while you can, the lot of you.”

“What would become of Uncle?”

“Did you like your whisky?” She put a hand up rudely to shield herself
from his breath. This reminded Daventry, who let go of the common
little hell-cat abruptly and walked away to the kitchenette, where he
heard a siphon. Lois stood in the door, waiting while David got her
some soda-water. But wouldn’t she try a little something? Just a little
something to dance on--no? Daventry, standing back and tilting his
drink about in his glass, stared at her feet with owlish ferocity.

“Sorry about your silver shoes, Miss Farquar.”

“There are some beautiful walks round here,” said David, grinning.

“Miss Farquar should float, not walk; she looks like a water-lily,”
said Daventry, looking over her green frock with his discomforting
eyes. “Come on and dance,” said David, taking her empty glass. Lois
began to say she was keeping the next for Gerald. But: “Miss Farquar
and I are hungry, we are going to find a sandwich,” said Daventry.

In the box of a dining-room plates of dishevelled sandwiches sat in
unmasked electric light. There was no one there. Mr. Daventry, looking
hard at her, put the palm of his hand to his left temple with a
curious, listening air, as though to see if a watch had stopped.

“Chicken and ham,” he said, “tongue and turkey; they’re all cat, they
say.” (“What shall I say?” thought Lois.) He looked at a chair with
contempt, then sat down on it. “I don’t think I’ve met you before,” he
continued.

“Perhaps you didn’t notice.”

“Dear me,” said Mr. Daventry, looking into a sandwich. “No, I don’t
think it could have been that.”

“Then it can’t be explained,” said Lois, and (she felt) glittered
excitedly. He suggested the army of Wellington; buckskins. Looking
up thoughtfully, he directed upon the wall just over her head his
strained dark look that was almost a squint. “You live round here?”

“More or less--” She was startled to meet the dark look on a level.
Hers was, he said, a remarkably beautiful country.

“I am afraid _you_--”

He affably shrugged. Did that matter? He stared at her arms, at the
inside of her elbows, with such intensity, she felt Gerald’s kisses
were printed there. Was this a bounder?--She knew she had no criterion.

“Have a nice walk?” he inquired.

“Did you?” she countered.

“I expect so,” said Mr. Daventry, after consideration. “As a matter
of fact, I am not quite at my best.” They looked hard at each other.
“Nothing,” he said, “appeals to me.” She moved her arms nervously on
the silk of her dress. For she saw there was not a man here, hardly
even a person.

“How do you mean ‘more or less’?” he said suddenly.

“Well, I don’t live anywhere, really.”

“I do: I live near Birmingham.” He put the half-eaten sandwich down,
with distaste, on the edge of the cloth and pulled up a plate to cover
it. She felt she was quite finished with. Suppose, she thought, they
were all like this! Should she go? She made a movement, he did not see;
she was disappointed. He put the hand to his temple, again listening.

“Tired?”

“Oh no,” he said, with irony.

“I’m going back now.”

“Such a pity. Anyone so charming ...”

“Well, I’m bored,” she said.

“It’s a pity you don’t know about my head, it’s a most curious head,
it would interest you.... How shall I keep you? Look here, seriously,
about Lesworth--”

“Oh?” she inquired, suddenly cold inside.

“About our young friend--” He pulled up his chair close; she had a
feeling like gates shutting. “Tell me this--”

But the roar of merriment, solid and swerving evenly as a waterfall
past the door, splintered off in a crash. Silence came, with hard
impact. “Thank God, _they’ve upset the gramophone!_” Daventry smacked
his knee, remotely, as though rehearsing the gesture. His look
decomposed in laughter. “Done in,” he said, drawing life from the
thought. Simultaneously, a universal shriek went up: it was smashed,
finished. “Really,” she thought, “you laugh like Satan!”

“Well, well,” said Daventry, tilting his drink about, “it’s been a
pleasant evening.” Here they all came--a stampede in the passage. She
was glad of them, for under the storm of his mirth that swept their
island, disarranging the interlude, she had sat cold and desolate. A
gramophone passing, a gramophone less in the world, it was not funny.
But between bursts of laughter she had felt him look at her lips,
at her arms, at her dress, like a ghost, with nostalgia and cold
curiosity. About their young friend?--she wasn’t to know.

Mrs. Vermont seemed broken also, she leaned on the adjutant. “Stay her
with sandwiches,” called out somebody, “comfort her with--with--more
sandwiches!” Moira mopped her eyes with a trail of her dress, but
nobody noticed. They jostled about the table. Plates rang, shunted in
all directions. “Sitting in here?” cried Gerald, exalted, “splendid!”
Somebody waved a mouth-organ: could one dance to that? More and more
squeezed in at the door: the room would burst. The cracks of the
walls that had been straight a minute ago like bars now seemed to
bulge out visibly: light glared down on the resolution of backs and
pink, reaching arms. “_Our_ young friend, our _young_ friend, our
young _friend_,” thought Lois, and watched Gerald. Though she watched
wherever he went, she could not see him. There was nothing, in fact,
to which to attach her look except his smoothness and roundness of
head, which seemed for the first time remarkable. She looked for his
mouth--which had kissed her--but found it no different from mouths of
other young men who had also been strolling and pausing between the
huts in the dark. The page of the evening was asterisked over with
fervent imaginary kisses. And one single kiss in the wind, in the
dark was no longer particularized: she could not remember herself, or
remember him.

As he came up, she looked quickly away. She looked at an empty plate
down on the floor, at a thin disk of cucumber flaccid against its rim.
“What have I done?” she thought: she looked at the plate with dread.
And: “Oh, sandwich?” said Gerald, turning to bring up some more. “...
Or perhaps it will seem natural to-morrow?” Nothing could keep her from
having to eat a sandwich. “Darling ...” he whispered, brushing against
her shoulder.

“Tired?” asked Mr. Simcox, seeing her face.

“Oh no,” she said, with Mr. Daventry’s best irony.




                                   XIX


MR. and Mrs. Montmorency were sitting on the steps as Lois drove up the
avenue. Francie waved, Hugo looked warily round the _Spectator_. “Well
...?” cried Francie, as Lois came into ear-shot. Above, twenty dark
windows stared over the fields aloofly out of the light grey face of
the house. The trees had rims of light round them; everything seemed a
long way away. With a sigh, Hugo put down the _Spectator_ and came to
lift Lois’s suitcase out of the trap.

“Well ...?”

“Oh, marvellous.... But what _do_ you think: we broke the gramophone!”

“Oh, the poor gramophone!”

“It was the Gunners’ gramophone.... Where are the others?”

“We have no idea.”

The Montmorencys now felt certain it must be a tiring day: even Lois
looked pale. They had been having an intimate conversation about the
future, both with a sense of courage as from sweeping aside some
decency. Why not, Hugo had said, build a bungalow somewhere? “With no
stairs?” Francie kindled at the idea, slipping a hand under Hugo’s.
“And live there always?” Certainly--why not?--they would un-store the
furniture. And at the thought of their tables and sofas coming again
out of limbo, Hugo’s face was illumined by a look of defiance.

“But where would we build?” said Francie, wrinkled up with delightful
anxiety. Hugo said they would motor round for a bit and no doubt some
idea would suggest itself. “We could choose the view,” said Francie.
But at this point, for some reason, he had taken up the _Spectator_.

The man came round for the pony: Lois sat down on the steps and began
to chatter. It was surprising, really, how much had occurred. And
fancy, the Colonel had been furious.... Even Hugo listened with some
attention. “Dear me,” he said when they heard about Mr. Daventry.
Francie expected it must be a great relief for a man in that state of
mind to meet a girl to whom he could really talk. “But he didn’t talk;
he really was most extraordinary. Of course, he was once a major.”
Francie wished she had seen her go off in that green frock--all, how
should she say? like a poppy, only a different colour. Would Lois put
it on for them all to-night?

“It’s not really a frock one sits in,” said Lois discouragingly.
Francie said it was almost a pity in some ways that Laurence was so
intellectual. “I know, we’ll make Hugo waltz with you, he waltzes
beautifully.” But the thought of Hugo waltzing--as Hugo suspected--made
Lois melancholy.

Laurence, disturbed by her voice, shut an upstairs window. His
industry nowadays was remarkable. He dragged at his hair and stared
at the trees through a flawed pane, across which Laura Naylor had
scratched her name with a diamond. At his elbows, books were in
toppling stacks; movement produced an avalanche. A wasp hung round him,
tentative, scrawling Z’s on the air. “Go away,” he muttered, “you are
superfluous.” Finally, he was obliged to open the door and shoo the
wasp out of it; it undulated across the landing and in at the half-open
door of Marda’s room, as though it had an appointment. Though he did
not care for the wasp, Laurence went in after it, to see if she had
not left _South Wind_ behind. She had indeed--which was like her. The
wasp dithered above the looking-glass in triumph; he took aim with the
book and almost hit it. An eight-day clock still ticked; it was five to
four, it would soon be tea-time.

As he came out, Lois appeared at the top of the stairs, carrying a
suitcase.

“Hullo! what have you brought _that_ up for?”

“Oh yes,” she said, putting it down in surprise. “I meant to have left
it half-way.”

“Well--?”

“Really,” she cried, unreasonably, “this house is nothing but
Montmorencys; they are an absolute state of mind.... I only wanted to
see if you were here.”

“Well, I’m not, practically: I’m working.”

“Oh--why do you work in the spare room?”

“I was dealing with a wasp.”

“Laurence, I had a marvellous dance.”

“Splendid!” He turned to his door, but she, in tremendous need of his
un-sympathy, brought out, imploringly: “They were all there, every one.
And, my dear, the wind; I thought the hut would be blown away. And we
broke the gramophone. There was a most sinister man called Daventry,
with shell-shock ...”

“Good,” said Laurence, “and _you_ look sleepy!”

Lois, lamblike under the force of suggestion, leaned back against the
banisters, yawning. “Livvy kicked all night, she will be a horrible
wife.... Laurence, I wish you would tell me something to read.”

“I should go to sleep.”

The idea seemed grateful: she thought of her room with the high
ceiling, the foreign touch to the cheeks of afternoon pillows,
the delicious crime of crossing one’s stockinged ankles over the
rucked-back quilt and the slow recession of fact down a long tunnel
till the windows stretched and faded. But, pulling at her fingers,
she said impatiently: “But I want to begin on something; I do think,
Laurence, you might understand. There must be some way for me to begin.
You keep on looking into rooms where I am with silent contempt--what do
you think I am for?”

He leaned against the frame of his doorway, looking at her with
surprise and a degree of humanity. To-day four weeks, Term would have
begun again; he did for a moment stretch to an effort of comprehension:
there was nothing for _her_ to go on with. The vacancy, more than
negative to him, which had succeeded Marda made the natural claims of a
life on his young cousin. With that concession to fancy one makes for
the doomed or the very weak, he suggested she should go on with her
German. He gave her two grammars, a dictionary and a novel of Mann’s,
which she took from him doubtfully. When he was back at his table, his
door ajar, she went across stealthily to the door opposite.

“There’s a wasp in there,” called out Lawrence.

“Oh, I just thought I’d see if ...”

But she went downstairs, defeated, forgetting her suitcase.

She had not seen Gerald again this morning, though all contracted
with apprehension she had waited in Mrs. Fogarty’s drawing-room--the
multiplicity of the photographed young men’s faces, candid and
vigorous, further appalling her. An orderly had come down with a
note from barracks. The crested envelope, handed in with its air of
a claim on her, had austerity, like some limb of an institution. She
lost her last sense of Gerald, she felt committed. Fumbling open the
envelope, asking: “What have I done?” she wondered what had become
of that last lonely disk of cucumber on the plate. After “My darling
darling”--she was reprieved, provisionally; Mrs. Fogarty, coming in
in a wrapper--greatly worn, she said, after last night’s gaiety--had
insisted that if she would not drink port she must drink milk--it was a
long morning--and eat some of this nice sponge cake.

And: “_I_ know who has been breaking hearts!” said Mrs. Fogarty,
knifing the sponge cake which was moist and eggy and “gave” to the
knife deliciously, like an eiderdown.

The ante-room chairs, now looking at Lois askance, knew also. What she
had done stretched everywhere, like a net. If she had taken a life,
the simplest objects could not more have been tinged with consequence.
The graded elephants on the bookcases were all fatality. She went into
her room hurriedly. “All the same,” she thought, looking round with
patronage at the virginal wall-paper, “it _is_ something definite.” And
with curiosity, with complicity almost, she looked at herself in the
glass.

Gerald’s straight, round writing had--to her imagination--a queer
totter, like some one running for life in tight shoes.

“--I have so much to say to you, though there is all time now there
seems to be no time. Lois, when I am with you you make me awfully dumb
with your darling wide-awake eyes, and when we are apart you seem so
close I feel you must understand, so why try to explain when I am so
stupid? So I won’t try to say what I feel; all that matters is that you
are beautifully beautiful. Sometimes, till now, I have felt you must
think me awfully stupid and introspective and dull; I have wondered so
much what you did think about all the time: it seems unbelievable now
that I am really to know. You seemed so complicated, it was cheek to
associate you with the sort of person that I am, and now you are lovely
and simple and all mine. Last night doesn’t seem like part of my life
at all--I can’t believe it was me who danced and drank whiskies and
tinkered about with the gramophone--and yet it’s the reallest thing
ever. And what I am doing this morning seems so important--although it
keeps me away from you--because I am doing it _for_ you. It is awful
to think of you here in Clonmore and not to be able to get to you, and
yet it is wonderful to think of you waiting, and of who you are waiting
for being me. Lois, your dear cold arms were so lovely, I mustn’t think
of them now. All your life I am going to keep you and wrap you up and
protect you and never let you be cold again. It is awful to think you
have ever been lonely and sad--you are so brave, you know, and I never
guessed--and yet I am almost glad of that, because it makes some reason
for me. Darling, I kiss the thought of you and feel so terribly humble.
I must not write more now. If you can, leave a letter for me at the
Fogartys’. Does she guess? I thought perhaps you might like to confide
in her. But of course I will tell nobody, as you wish. Good-bye, my
most beautiful woman; I cannot write how I love you.

                                                            “Gerald.”

Folding the sheets again in their order, she thought: “It is you who
are beautiful,” and later: “If this thing is so perfect to anyone,
can one be wrong?” An escape of sunshine, penetrating the pale sky in
the south-west, altered the room like a revelation. Noiselessly, a
sweet-pea moulted its petals on to the writing-table, leaving a bare
pistil. The pink butterfly flowers, transparently balancing, were
shadowed faintly with blue as by an intuition of death. Lois bowed
forward, her forehead against the edge of the table.

Steps in the ante-room; she slipped the letter under the blotter and
turned round consciously. “I hear you are back,” said Lady Naylor,
entering. “I hear it was such a success that they broke the gramophone.
Now I want to hear all about it.” She sat down.

“Well, to begin with--”

“One moment--have you unpacked your frock?”

“Oh! I left my suitcase.... I went up to Laurence to borrow a German
grammar.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t go on with German,” said Lady Naylor, “it still
offends so many people; Italian is prettier and more practical. I could
lend you _Il Piccolo Mondo Antico_, or Dante-- However, tell me about
the dance.”

“Well, first of all--”

“--By the way, I’ve just heard from Marda. She has arrived quite
safely, I’m glad to say. She says Kent is dull, which I dare say it
would be, but of course she is glad to be with Leslie.”

“Did she say so?”

“She naturally would be. You can read it; I’ve got the letter
downstairs.... Who broke the gramophone? I hope you weren’t anywhere
round when it happened: these things are always remembered. Were the
Raltes there? Did they look pretty? I wonder, really, at their mother
allowing them; she professes to have them in such control. However, I
dare say this will be the last of these dances.”

“Oh, why?”

“If you had heard what we heard at the Trents’.... There was a man
there from Kerry. He really made us feel quite uncomfortable. Though,
as your uncle said afterwards, one knows what the Trents’ friends
are: everything happens to them. However-- Were the Vermonts there?
_She_ would be quite in her element. And Mr. Armstrong? I have heard
he and Livvy were seen in Cork together at the Imperial, by Mrs.
Foxe-O’Connor. And the young man who was here to lunch, who talked so
much ... in the armoured car ... oh--Lesworth?”

“Yes, he was there.”

“I am surprised at them all having time,” said Lady Naylor. “However,
if they danced more and interfered less, I dare say there would be
less trouble in the country. It appears that in Kerry ...” Her voice
became colder with inattention and dwindled away. Lois was certain she
eyed the pink blotter. This zigzag approach to Gerald, this ultimate
vagueness, were sinister. Lady Naylor, after some moments of odd and
oppressive silence, observed that the sweet-peas were dying. “The water
must be unhealthy, it’s going green. In fact, all the flowers need
doing. Perhaps after tea-- How would you like to go to a school of
art?”

“Marvellous,” said Lois after reflection.

“Francie was very much struck by your drawings. And Marda said you
certainly needed an interest.”

“Oh. Was she discussing me?”

“We were all saying that girls needed interests and I thought she
seemed to agree particularly. _She_ has not made much of her life, so
far--though of course if she marries Leslie--and I’ve always thought
that music or drawing, or writing a little, or organization of some
kind--”

“Did Marda say what she thought of my drawings?”

“She seemed to think they were nice.... A quarter to five!” exclaimed
Lady Naylor reproachfully. “The tea will be cold.... You look sleepy,
Lois. Did you hear the Montmorencys are going to build a bungalow?”

“Here?”

“Don’t be silly-- Besides, according to that friend of the Trents,
it would be blown up or burnt in a month or two. Certainly,” added Lady
Naylor, looking out at the sky, “I call this a tiring day.” She got up
with a sigh.

Later that evening Lois, half-way up to the garden with scissors
and basket, overtook Mr. Montmorency walking all by himself up the
shrubbery path. Pulling leaves from the laurels he shredded them
carefully.

“I hear,” he said, as she came up alongside, “you are taking up German?”

“Unless Italian might be more practical.... I hear you are going to
build a bungalow?”

“Oh, I don’t know; that is chiefly Francie’s idea.” They walked in
silence, she dragging her basket against the laurels. They had not been
alone since the drive from Mount Isabel. She remembered how once she
had hoped so much, and how he had been infinitely disobliging. Now she
had a tenderness for him, devoid of attraction, as though they had been
a couple of widows.

“No stairs would be nice.”

“But it would be certain to have other disadvantages.”

“Apparently,” she said with effrontery, “Marda arrived quite safely.”

“It should be a surprise to us all,” said Hugo, sarcastic, “that she
has not fallen out of the train. Even she cannot think of anything
better to say to a hostess. And the information, I always feel certain,
leaves hostesses cold. Once one is clear of their gates, interest ends
with responsibility.”

“And she says Kent is dull.”

“I cannot believe _she_ finds it so.”

“She is frightfully philosophic. Perhaps she was dull here.” (She
thought: “Even now, shall we never be natural?”)

“Have you seen her letter?”

“No ... have you?”

“No, your aunt has lost it.”

He pushed open the door, then followed her into the garden which, deep
in its walls, seemed impossibly large, for one could not see to the end
of it: it was crossed by espaliers and crowded with apple-trees. Down
the borders, the September yellow and scarlets were metallic in unsunny
light. Dahlias, orange and wine-coloured, blazed and gloomed. He turned
down one path, she kept to the other; they silently parted. Here she
had come with Marda--never with Gerald--they had sat on the green seat,
pressed blisters out of the paint and spat out their plum-stones into
the box border opposite. Entered to-day, the usual breath of the garden
was cold to her face. The branches were quiet as though in anxiety,
the flowers appeared to be clamouring vainly, forgotten. Coming to
the hedge of sweet-peas she began at the purple end, diligently.
“Though myself,” she could not help saying, “I do not care for purple
sweet-peas.”

When she reached up to the top of the hedge her sleeves fell back from
her arms and she thought of Gerald. She felt him looking at her through
the thinning stems. The sweet-peas were practically over, and indeed
she was glad, she thought, snipping and tugging with blunt garden
scissors. In yesterday’s dusk the Square with its flitter of leaves
had been all autumnal; smoke was blue in the air and, later, the dark
where they kissed had a sharp intimation of autumn. She loved in
autumn a stronger, more shadowy keen spring, sweet shocks of good-bye,
transition. Summer meanwhile stayed on inside these walls, forgotten.

The fact was, that though one determined to-night to sit under the
lamp and learn verbs, her Italian or German would not dispose of last
night, which remained, like the tear in her green tulle dress, to be
dealt with practically. After an anxious glance at the possible, a pain
so sharp that it seemed her own forbade recantation. It was inevitable
that she should marry Gerald. Mrs. Montmorency at least--she thought
with relief as she came to the red sweet-peas--would be infinitely
sympathetic and pleased. The unbelievable future became fixed as the
past under the flutter and settling down of a flock of comments, which,
as she turned in imagination back to the house and steps and saw lips
forming themselves in unconscious readiness, seemed already uttered.
And as Mr. Montmorency came up a path at an angle, with the two garden
kittens toppling after him, she was surprised he did not repeat: “Well,
I hope of course that you may be happy. And decision of any kind is an
excellent thing in your mother’s daughter.”

Instead, he came to the other side of the hedge and, picking off some
bleaching tendrils, observed that the sweet-peas would soon be over.
The house flowers must keep her busy, he added. And taking out his
pocket-knife he cut three sweet-peas, with precision. Having made this
gesture of sympathy, he continued to move with her down his side of the
hedge.

“It is extraordinary,” said Lois. “I feel as if I had been away for a
week.”

“Yet you find us going on much the same?” He looked at her through
the stems ironically but without intelligence. And she could not try
to explain the magnetism they all exercised by their being static.
Or how, after every return--or awakening, even, from sleep or
preoccupation--she and those home surroundings still further penetrated
each other mutually in the discovery of a lack.




                                    XX


LADY NAYLOR, who wished for a clear steady light these lengthening
evenings, saw to the lamps personally. In big yellow gloves she
accurately trimmed the wicks, between the morning’s head-lines and a
thorough talk with the cook. But the smell of oil was repugnant to her
and now she said with some sharpness:

“You have no conception of love-- You are in my light.”

Lois moved from the lamp-room window. “I really have,” she said,
“really.”

“Nonsense,” her aunt said, looking round for a rag. Lois began to slide
a matchbox about, and her aunt, taking the matches away mechanically,
thought how hard it was that a woman like this, who could bring the
matter on to an intellectual plane at once, should have to do lamps at
all. Anna Partridge, whose brain was all shreddy with rabbit-combing
and raffia, had had electric light for years, just from living in
England; even the Trents talked of harnessing their waterfall.

“When I was your age I never thought of marriage at all. I didn’t
intend to marry. I remember, when I was nineteen I was reading
Schiller.”

“I don’t think about marriage, I ...”

“Then you can have no conception ...”

“I read,” said Lois, with dignity.

“Girls nowadays do nothing but lend each other these biological books.
I was intensely interested in art.”

“But, Aunt Myra, young men are quite usual.”

“It all comes of dancing and all this excitement.”

“But Gerald is not excitable; he was in love with me the other day
before lunch.”

“He was half asleep,” said Lady Naylor. “At the best of times he has
not much conversation. Of course, I rate brains so highly; perhaps I am
wrong. But remember, you cannot hope to be always in love, and then ...”

“But you said I had no conception ...”

“There you are, in my light again.”

Lois moved further away from the window. She wished she had not started
this explanation. She had felt, somehow, that it should be less
embarrassing in the lamp-room. She thought of Gerald’s unquestioning
shoulder, where she would lean her head. “But I can’t explain,” she
said; “I never heard of a girl being asked to explain. I always thought
...”

“Real feeling explains itself,” said Lady Naylor and polished some oil
off the base of a lamp triumphantly.

“But if he comes to tea ...”

“Oh, we cannot help that, of course.”

“But if he spoke to Uncle Richard ...”

“Your uncle would be very much worried. Really, Lois, I do think you
might be more sensible and considerate.”

Lois saw this point of view only too perfectly. She wrinkled her
forehead. She did not want to be hard on her Uncle Richard and she
could not help sympathizing with Aunt Myra, who had so much to organize
as it was. Feeling did seem to her out of proportion with life, and
that this disproportion should be so evident generally, that her aunt
should think she was making an irrelevant fuss, strongly discouraged
her. But she reassembled herself; she had been led to understand that
love ...

“But surely love ...”

“You have no conception of love,” repeated Lady Naylor, and thought
again of electric light in Bedfordshire.

“But shall I never do anything?”

“Go to a school of art.”

“Where?”

“It could be arranged.”

“But I don’t think I really draw well.”

“That is no reason why you should marry.”

It was, of course, no reason; acknowledging this, and seeing light from
the barred window fall so coldly on the oilcloth top of the lamp-table,
Lois felt quite at a standstill.

“However ...” said Lady Naylor. She looked with her brilliant eyes
dubiously, almost shyly, at the door behind Lois’s head. She swept the
rags and the lamp scissors into a drawer, shut the drawer on their
malodour, and pulled off her gloves, sighing. She saw life, perhaps, as
a shuffle of setting to partners, then a drawn-out, coupled but somehow
solitary curtsying, to him, the other, the rest of the eight. “However
...” she said. And the qualification committed herself and her niece, a
shade alarmingly. Lois knew that Gerald might come to tea.

“You do see,” said Lois, and stared at her aunt’s ringed hands which
reappeared from the gloves, “that I didn’t want to be clandestine?”

“Oh, of course you were quite right,” said Lady Naylor without
enthusiasm. She went down to talk to the cook.

Kathleen, the cook, who resembled her mistress in personality so
closely that their relation was an affair of balance, who had more
penetration than Lady Naylor and was equally dominant, inferred much
of the situation from her mistress’s manner. Herself, she had felt
this was bound to occur. For an hour or so, they had countered each
other amiably in the lime-washed gloom of the kitchen, over a basin
of green-pea soup. Lady Naylor announced with unusual deprecation,
there would be an officer coming over to tea. Kathleen, refolding her
hands royally, asked, would she slap up a sally-lunn? On the whole,
Lady Naylor thought drop-cakes. Kathleen immediately placed the
officer. Strolling down the yard in the course of the afternoon to
execute a couple of chickens, she watched dispassionately from under
the chestnuts Gerald crouch on his motor-bicycle up the avenue. Lois,
standing about with the dogs, went down to meet him. For tea, Kathleen
sent up an unaccountable iced cake, ironically festive.

Francie was glad Mr. Lesworth was coming to tea. For the day strained
with ominousness, as though it were going to burst. Hugo, pacing about
on the avenues with _The Conquest of Mexico_ under his arm, disparaged
repose. “By the way,” he said once, coming up, “if you should be
happening to write to Marda Norton ...”

“Oh, but I shan’t be; not till I send her our little present. Besides,
I have nothing to say.”

“She might write to you about the eau-de-Cologne.”

“Oh no, she thanked me.”

“There was a point I wanted to clear, about Metternich--you remember
that argument? I’ve just come on a book--I suppose I had better write
myself.”

“But no one knows her address; Myra lost the letter.”

“Ah yes, of course.... That settles it.” He smiled--one would have
said with relief. Francie, looking down in despair at her blouse as he
walked away, saw that the jabot was crumpled. She could not understand
how a woman who travelled with suitcases could look as _smooth_ as
Marda. But then, she was all outlines: detail seemed to collect and
obtrude in the middle of Francie. She went up to change, glad that
Gerald was coming, sounding with some attention the silence under the
avenue trees. For the fact was, life attenuated to the snapping-point;
in Gerald’s continuity, in Lois’s, she must invest her own.

Gerald propped up his motor-bicycle, looked up carefully at the closed
windows--in one, from behind a blot of light, Francie was nodding--and
said that he should not really have come. Troops had been fired on
coming back into Clonmore, near that level-crossing. The situation was
tightening; there was a lot to do.

“Oh. Then it is a pity you came,” said Lois.

Gerald said nothing; his ears faintly coloured.

“_Clonmore!_” said Lois with indignation, and thought of the little
friendly town with its tennis club.

“So it happened,” said Gerald, looking at her. “It might have been
anywhere else.” He whistled and greeted the dogs, her dogs.

“Then ... it was dangerous coming?”

“Oh no, not to speak of.”

The house so loomed, and stared so darkly and oddly that he showed a
disposition--respectful rather than timorous--to move away from the
front of it. They walked to the tennis courts and round one court in a
circle. “_Lois_ ...” She veered off quickly, Laurence was working up
there in his window. Gerald waved, but had no response. “Doesn’t he
concentrate!” he said wistfully.

“I suppose so.... Does Laurence matter?”

“You know _you_ ...”

“Gerald, you are the frightfully concentrated person, really.”

“But I can’t read.... Where can I ... where could we--?”

“--Here comes Mr. Montmorency.”

Hugo, coming up to shake hands with Gerald, said it seemed a long time
since they had met. The young man, by his way of standing and looking
clearly and being positive, strongly connected himself with Marda. With
an unexpected and crooked stab of nostalgia, Hugo thought of the trees,
the morning mountains, the tinkling and knocking stream. Of all of her
he had kept and had never had and must try to regain appeared most
sharply the moment of that encounter: irrelevant moment, when, outside
something, he had watched light run down her hair as she stooped for
Gerald to light her cigarette. The quality of their silence, their
separation after Gerald had left them--pressing on up to the house to
look for Lois--now seemed the very ground of his closest approach. But
he knew how the scene was perishable, how having drawn up into itself
for life, like a plant, any reality that there was in him, it would
die of his barrenness. Until finally, by even the same conjunction of
mountains and light and trees, it would not be evoked again.

“No shaving under a hedge this morning?” he said genially.

“Oh no,” said Gerald, surprised. Why should there be?

Lois, encouraged to find that by some growth of womanhood in herself
her attitude was already a wife’s, at once proud and deprecating,
stood there watching Gerald, most grateful for the repose of this
interposition and willing that Mr. Montmorency should be detained.
She knew, from a glance they both gave her, that she must have been
startled by some sort of consciousness into beauty, and a particular
placidness, a sense of being located, warmed her surroundings, the
smooth lawn and heavy trees. Balancing, foot behind foot, on a line
of the court faint from rain, she constructed a life in China--most
regimental, alert and pleasantly surfaced--from Japanese prints she
had ignored in shops, an idea of odd, angular archways and some strips
of vertical writing. He must no doubt some day be a captain, and
“captain’s lady” had a ballad-like cadence. She almost took Gerald’s
arm.

“You find us diminished,” said Hugo, “and a good deal quieter. Miss
Norton has gone.”

“Oh?”

“_Marda_,” she hastily prompted.

“She was awfully nice and amusing,” said Gerald, beaming out like the
sun from behind a moment’s perplexity. “I’d have loved to have met her
again.”

She explained to him afterwards, taking him off through the
shrubberies, how things were at present with Mr. Montmorency: he was
a ruined man. Gerald went rigid, something shut like a door on his
sensibilities--the thing reeked of adultery. He produced an appalled
silence. But about Lois’s mother, he brought out finally, hadn’t one
heard he had once been ...?

“But a thing _can’t_ be final,” said Lois. “Not while one’s alive.”

Was this what she read? “But there’s _Mrs._ Montmorency....” It seemed
fixed here, the Montmorencys’ conjointness, among the stately furniture
and long mild meals--earth to Lois’s roots.

“But one can’t arrange oneself; one doesn’t altogether live from
inside: Marda just happened.”

“And did _she_ ...?” cried Gerald, appalled. Above this extraordinary
undercurrent, it seemed to him his Lois was poised too perfectly.

Lois, in pink linen, perfectly sophisticated and cool, said: “No. She
was just regretful. Also, she is engaged, you see.”

“_Is_ she? I should never have thought ...”

“... Her engaged? Well, how ought she to look? Like a kind of hen bird,
all dim?”

“She was all herself. Doesn’t love kind of finish people off ... with
something that isn’t them, in a way you can feel?”

She understood him, but did not know how to agree. What must one then
be for him? She was shy of his uncomprehension of a particular notion
of living she seemed only now to have formed. Did she give out an
untrue ring to his touch? Where was the flaw? Or was Gerald, sublimely,
the instrument of some large imposture?

“Complete--you mean finished?... Perhaps she is not really in love.”

“But surely she isn’t that sort ... she wouldn’t just marry?”

“I don’t think what Marda does matters; she simply _is_.”

He looked desperate suddenly, as though she were behind bars. “Look
here, no one matters. Don’t let’s talk ... I mean ... don’t let’s talk.
Lois, there’s so little time now, I’m desperate. I don’t see when I am
going to see you, ever. Lois, this miserable waiting; even happiness
never lets one alone. When shall we be quiet?”

“But, Gerald, we’re quite young.”

“I want nothing to happen but you. You are everything. I want so much
of you.”

She stood, perplexed, at the edge of the path; he kissed her with
frightened violence. The laurels creaked as, in his arms, she bent back
into them. His singleness bore, confusing, upon her panic of thoughts,
her physical apprehension of him was confused by the slipping, cold
leaves. Her little sighs elated then alarmed him.

“What’s the matter?” he said, his lips close to her face.

“I don’t like the smell of the laurels. Let’s come out of here.” They
went back, she put up anxious hands and asked him about her hair. “Is
it twiggy and awful?” “Lovely.” She wished that he were a woman. As
they approached the steps where her aunt and uncle and Francie composed
an abstracted group, she told him: “Aunt Myra wants me to go to a
school of art.”

“Oh ... Can you draw?”

“_Gerald_ ...!”

“Darling, I’ve never seen them. How could I know?”

Lady Naylor exclaimed how delightful it was that Gerald had come over.
Now they would hear some real, _real_ news, she said: they always
relied on Gerald. Sir Richard, taking his pince-nez off in amazement,
could hardly believe it was Gerald again; he still thought subalterns
came in rotation. Surely, he said candidly, it was yesterday they had
had that interesting talk about the Militia? Gerald was given a chair
of such voluptuous depth that his chin came barely above the edge of
the tea-table. They congratulated him on the Rolfes’ dance. In fact,
they united to carry off the situation with such brilliance that Gerald
might well have been a dun or a tax-collector. Then, at a moment when
talk seemed precarious and Marda obtrusively absent and Lady Naylor sat
eyeing Lois’s hair, the Trents arrived unexpectedly. They brought over
another friend, this time from County Clare, to whom still more had
happened. Gerald went into joyous eclipse; the Danielstown party sat
breathless--hardly a chair creaked--the Trents looked at their friend
complacently while the Trents’ friend curdled the tea in one’s mouth
with tales of assault and cattle-driving.

“Well, I suppose _we’ve_ a certain amount to be thankful for,” smiled
Mrs. Archie Trent as their friend, having been put through his hoops,
settled down to tea. And she told Lois that she was looking remarkably
well, and they hoped they would see her out with the Ballymoyles this
winter. And meanwhile, what about cubbing?

“Lois is going to a school of art,” said Lady Naylor.

“That seems a pity,” said Mrs. Trent.

The friend, finishing his tea, said all the Irish art schools ought to
be searched. He wouldn’t say for certain, but he had a pretty shrewd
suspicion what you would find there. If it came to that, he said, casts
were hollow and you could keep a good deal inside the Venus of Milo.
Sir Richard looked vaguely offended.

“I should go to the Slade,” said Lois.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Archie Trent, “not Rome, I suppose? Well I shouldn’t do
anything of that sort in a hurry.”

“Art is long,” said Laurence, who liked conversation of this sort.
The Trents’ friend asked him how he liked Cambridge; he himself had a
nephew who hoped soon to be going up. Laurence said he had heard that
Cambridge was very nice.

The Trents’ friend took Gerald aside after tea, to explain to him where
the Army was going wrong. Mrs. Trent at once drew closer up to the
teapot and said, in a loud voice of confidence, she had heard Livvy
Thompson was really engaged to that young Armstrong. “Nonsense,” said
Lady Naylor.

“But they were seen in Cork having tea, and the aunt denies it too
vigorously. After all, it would be something for the Thompsons.”

Lois, who was unfortunate, blushed; both ladies looked hard at her.
“To begin with,” declared Lady Naylor, “these young men are not at all
marriageable. Besides, to tell you the truth ...”

“But I don’t see what else the girls are to do. I mean, look at the
Hartigans.”

“There’s a future for girls nowadays outside marriage,” said Lady
Naylor inspiringly. “Careers--how _I_ should have loved one. One reads
so much about ...” She was an advanced woman: Mrs. Trent, who did not
read, paused in respect but preserved an honest, bright-pink expression
of incredulity. She pictured those indoor women with clutched little
bags getting hurriedly into the Dublin trams. It was no life. Her
friend seemed, moreover, unwisely persistent in encouraging art for
Lois: this, for young girls, often resulted in worse than spinsterhood.
“All the same,” she said, returning, “Livvy seems set on the young man.
And she has a great deal of character.”

“Well, if I were her aunt and her father, I’d never hear of it.”

“Dear me,” cried Mrs. Trent, kicking the table cheerfully, “we’ve made
Lois blush at the very idea.”

“Lois knows better,” said Lady Naylor. And she gave Lois one of her
rarest, most charming, direct and personal glances.

And indeed what a friend, thought Lois, going out to the steps to
escape them all, if one had only just met, might Aunt Myra be.




                                   XXI


A CLOUD slid over the sun; the stream went opaque as tortoise-shell.
Then, startling Hugo, the water suddenly flushed with light as the
cloud moved east. Minnows, disturbed like thoughts, darted shadowy over
the clear yellow stare of the stones. He dipped his stick in the water,
then, drawing it out, thoughtfully looked at the shining end. At this
point: eighteen inches; the stream, divided in two deep channels by the
island of turf where he stood, went hurrying to the Darra. In its fold
of the Darra valley, the high white mill would remain sardonic. He was
swept by an irresistible anger back to that affair of the pistol. For
Marda had written: her hand had healed; no one had asked any questions
or wondered, she said.

She had written to Lois, sending Hugo this message. It had pleased both
the girls to underline his exclusion. She wrote also, Leslie had given
her a dog--a correct dog, Lois expected, like all that was best in
English country house life. Marda could not think what to do with the
dog till she married; she would have to leave it in Kent.... And what
else did Marda say, Francie had wanted to know. But Lois, who seemed
to have swallowed the letter, postmark and all, could not remember.
Later, she did seek out Hugo and offer to show him.... But he had put
up surprise. “Oh? Was there any particular--?” No, he did not think
on the whole he would trouble her.... Would the child see, he wondered,
that the little oblique snub was not intended to stop at _her_, but
to go past? His look now fell empty, reflective, on the tawny glass
sliding water.

The child, having seen, went upstairs to describe his behaviour to
Marda. Her unreticence was immoderate, though she was sensitive for
him. She wrote scrupulously, with an affect of hardness.

“He is terrible, and, as the end of everything, they are to build a
bungalow. _She_ has it all her own way now; I don’t know if he still
even brushes her hair. Since you went, it has been the same time all
day: three o’clock, after a long lunch. We all talk about my future (by
common consent I am about nine now, very distracting and sunny; they
like to have me about). It is to be a school of art, certainly.--Why
did you never tell them I couldn’t draw?--But we can’t decide where.
London, in view of my age, is supposed to be too large. In Dublin,
a man who came to tea yesterday said there might be high explosives
inside all the casts with capacious figures. In Cork I might pick up
an accent, and Paris they will not hear of--my wretched virtue. But as
a matter of fact, I have no future, in their sense. I have promised to
marry Gerald.”

Here she paused, for from now on it was all obscure ahead of her.
Reading back, she was surprised at the woman she was. She took this
merciless penetration for maturity’s. But when she looked for Gerald
there seemed too much of him. He was a wood in which she counted from
tree to tree--all hers--and knew the boundary wall right round. But how
to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees, this living
silence? So she turned back to Mr. Montmorency, adding a paragraph. He
had, this morning, snubbed her.

She would have been surprised to have seen him, at this same moment,
step across to the island and stand there rootedly. And he, his
whereabouts even so much as guessed at, would have been quite at
her mercy. For to have followed the stream to this loneliest reach,
beyond the plantation wall, where the meadow’s hedge trailed unknown
blackberries over the water, was not to have walked, to have strolled
even, but to have betrayed oneself in an emotional kind of straying.
Further down, stepping-stones had been displaced by last winter’s
flood, there was a ruined cottage; nobody came here. Even Lois had
given up, since her eighteenth birthday, coming to lie on her stomach
along the bank, weep out a bottomless despair at nothing and look at
herself in the stream. And this wildness within the demesne boundaries,
within sound of the farmyard bell, had a particular desolation.

Hugo was pleased with the place; here he seemed to have stepped
through into some kind of nonexistence. And here, divorced equally
from fact and from probability, he set up a stage for himself: the
hall’s half-light. Marda’s hand is on the wide scrolled curve of
the baluster rail: he touches her still and electric hand with the
deliberation of certainty, all the senses running into his touch. She
stares recognition fixedly, darkly back.... For though in actuality
she had had only one mood for him--cool and equivocal--he, now frantic
with this power disconnected from life, could command her whole range
imaginatively: her very features became his actors. And if this were
not love ...

He was pleased with the place. They must all, he expected, be looking
for him: it produced the faintest vibration behind the solitude. This
morning, Myra was driving into Clonmore to lunch with the Boatleys;
she had asked him to come, he had said he would see. He had intended
by this “Good God, no,” and if she were fool enough to interpret it
otherwise there was a rightness about her delay in starting. Francie
would certainly go; she was painfully fascinated by military society.
She would now be standing out on the steps, grey net veil strained
elegantly over the tip of her nose, looking at her gloves in despair,
persisting: “He must be _somewhere!_”

“How many of us do they really expect?” said Francie at last, getting
into the car disconsolate.

Lady Naylor had not the slightest idea. “But they are accustomed to
Ireland. She was a Vere Scott. And they know that I usually fill the
car.”

“You’re not taking Lois?”

“Lois goes into Clonmore quite enough,” replied Lady Naylor.

For Lady Naylor had further reasons for going into Clonmore. She had
an assignation with Gerald at half-past three, in Mrs. Fogarty’s
drawing-room. Fridays were Club days, Mrs. Fogarty would be “up at the
tennis,” and her drawing-room, disembarrassed for once of her large
personality, remained at the disposition of friends. Lady Naylor,
though she deplored Mrs. Fogarty’s taste in beads, her husband, her
stays--which stuck out half-way up her back in a frill--and her too
overflowing maternity, had fallen into the general habit of using
her house as a kind of Ladies’ Club, dropping in there at all times
to leave parcels, wash her hands or meet friends. And she had the
impression, always, that the maid who admitted her ran upstairs at
once to put Mr. Fogarty under lock and key. Still, one knew that one’s
coming gave pleasure and gratification: she would enter the little
drawing-room, even when empty, with her queenliness at its full.

Gerald, questioning but elated, turned up a little before time, much
braced in and polished about the belt. He had never been given an
assignation so directly. For she had said (this now divinely probable
aunt of his): “I may be at the Fogartys, resting, about half-past
three. If you should be passing--though of course you may not be and
I do not want to keep you away from the tennis--you might look in and
have a chat. For it has been too bad to-day, I have hardly seen you. I
have missed our usual talk. There is still so much ... But I dare say
you won’t be passing.” Her look, a special point to its wide-pupilled
eagerness, transposed this to the imperative. The vigorous arch of
her eyebrows insisted strongly. He, feeling himself ordered like
a taxi--better still, like a nephew--had flushed with pleasure.
_Rath_-er; he’d make a point--(would she then call him Gerald?). “Of
course, I may not be there; we may not even come in; it is all quite
uncertain,” said Lady Naylor.

Riding home, the intoxication of Gerald had mounted. He guessed that
she never rested, rarely leaned back in a chair, never pushed up her
hat with a sigh or stretched tender feet out, unbuttoning shoes. She
would remain imperious, even in Oxford Street. So she was contriving
for him; a special tribute.

Lady Naylor, coming in to the Fogartys’ soon after four, was annoyed
to find Gerald before her. She had now, instead of being discovered,
to manœuvre more or less openly for position. Disregarding the chair
Gerald trundled up with its load of cushions, she placed herself
(unaccountably, it would have to appear) on the narrow window-seat.
Thus, she conceded no more to the room than an imposing silhouette
of hat and boa, while Gerald, glancing round pessimistically at
the chairs, remaining with elbow planted among photo-frames on the
mantelpiece, was exposed to her full in the strained green light coming
over the bushes.

“Such a day,” she sighed briskly. “We have lunched with the Boatleys.
What a delightful Colonel he must be! _She_, you know, is Irish; a Vere
Scott. We must seem ridiculous to you, over here, the way we are all
related.”

“Topping, I think,” said Gerald.

“Oh, I don’t know! Now you lucky people seem to have no relations at
all; that must feel so independent.”

“I have dozens.”

“Indeed? All in Surrey?”

“Scattered about.”

“That sounds to _me_, of course,” remarked Lady Naylor, pulling her
gloves off brightly, “exceedingly restless. But you all _came_ from
Surrey, didn’t you?”

“More or less,” said Gerald, who was not sure. The Boatleys had
not been sure where he came from, either; her day so far had been
unsatisfactory.

“Now I do hope I’m not keeping you from smoking?”

She was. He smiled and lighted a cigarette. “You don’t ...?”

“Oh dear me, no, I am quite old-fashioned. Now tell me--you know how
I hate all this gossip in a garrison neighbourhood, but there is
something I must set right. What is this nonsense I hear about Livvy
Thompson? You know she’s a friend of my niece’s and comes a good deal
to our house, and I do feel I ought to refute these stories about her.”

“Oh?” said Gerald, alarmed. “I had no idea.”

“Hadn’t you,” said Lady Naylor. “Well, you are a friend of the young
man Mr. Armstrong’s, so I felt I’d come straight to you. It appears
they were seen in Cork having tea rather intimately and in consequence
there are all sorts of rumours. Now it doesn’t seem fair to a young
girl, at the beginning of life, having her name coupled.”

“I should have thought,” said Gerald rather stiffly, “anyone could see
Miss Thompson was entirely straight. And as for Armstrong-- They are
engaged, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said Lady Naylor pleasantly.

“Oh yes,” he nodded, then with his rather engaging childishness looked
at her under his lashes. “But they don’t want--”

“To begin with, the Thompsons would never hear of it. And they would be
quite right. Of course, poor Livvy is motherless--”

“But many people are,” said Gerald, faintly aggressive. “Lois is.”

“Oh, naturally we should never consider a marriage like that for Lois.
The point would not even arise. But even for Livvy-- And then think
of the young man’s career: these early marriages ruin careers, and
engagements are nearly as bad. I know Colonel Boatley feels-- No,
what you should do, I think, is: have a straight sensible talk with
your friend Mr. Armstrong. I know how much you young men will take from
each other. I think as a friend you should say to him--”

“But look here--” began Gerald, and paused. “Look here, Lady
Naylor--” He stopped dead and looked round the room, which was
darker since she had come in: the afternoon was clouding over. He was
disengaging himself with some anguish of illusions which he had brought
here and which during the first minute or so of their talk had been
fortified. When they came to Surrey, he had thought she was hoping to
meet his mother. Crossing his legs, he rubbed the side of one shoe on
the other with a slight creak at which she, betraying her tensity,
started. Standing with lowered eyes, with an air of heaviness and
confusion, he noted this movement, a tremor of light round the edge of
her boa. With unusual calmness and virility he said:

“As a matter of fact, I love Lois.”

“Oh yes. But I’m afraid, you know, that she doesn’t love you,” said the
aunt equably.

He overruled this without comment, simply by maintaining his attitude.
For all his physical lightness and vigour, there was a quality in him
she would describe as stodginess. “Then I gather she’s told you we--”

“Oh, she’s naturally pleased that you like her. And at her age, with
her temperament, of course it is nice to love anyone.”

“But you’ve just said she doesn’t--”

“Not as I understand love.”

“But so long,” said Gerald, with the particular urbanity of an approach
to rudeness, “so long as she and I both mean the same thing.”

“But you don’t,” said his friend in her kind, social voice. “That is
what I am trying to make you see. With her temperament--”

“_I_ haven’t noticed her temperament,” said Gerald loyally, as if a
temperament were a hump.

“Now that alone,” exclaimed Lady Naylor, waving her gloves in a rapid
gesticulation, “would make a marriage quite fatal.... Mr. Lesworth, I
don’t want to have to imagine you miserable. I have no sons of my own,
you know, and Laurence being so intellectual-- And there is another
thing ...” She paused, and with unusual nervousness, with a movement
almost of Francie’s, touched her boa, her jabot, two carnations pinned
in the lace. She had now to tilt straight at indecency. There was this
question of money--a subject the English made free with, as free with
as what was below their diaphragms, but from which her whole modesty
shrank. “You may think me dreadful,” she said, “but there are things
in life one must face. After all, I am Lois’s aunt....”

Gerald, blushing, stood agonized to attention.

“There is money,” she brought out at last. “I mean, you haven’t any,
have you? Of course, I don’t see why you should have. But two people
must live, though it’s all rather sordid. However, this need not arise.
But I just want to show you--”

“I know she’s got a beautiful home,” he said glumly.

“However ... You see, it’s impossible every way. But first and last,
she does not love you.”

He was forced into the position which he would have described to a
friend as bloody, of asserting she _did_. “Though I cannot think why.”

“Oh, but so many girls would!” she cried earnestly. “But for Lois I
do think--we all think--a school of art. She cares for her drawing
intensely.”

“She never speaks of it.”

“Ah, that just shows ... Lack of sympathy!” said the aunt with mournful
complacency. “And it isn’t simply your age; it would be the same thing
if you were a captain or even a major. Now I do think you ought to be
sensible. It can all pass off so quietly. Nobody knows except me. Now
what I suggest--”

“--She might have told me she’d told you!” He stared round the changed
room bitterly.

“That was just what I didn’t encourage, to tell you the truth. Oh, the
child was most honest. But I thought you and I should approach this
quite fresh and unprejudiced.”

“Did we have to?”

“Oh, Mr. Lesworth!” she cried, disconcerted. She resumed, firmly but
with inspiration, something between a hospital nurse and a prophetess:
“The less talk, the less indirect discussion round and about things,
the better, I always think.”

While she considered her gloves and with gathering satisfaction
prepared to put one of them on, he stood half-turned away from her,
stubborn but indecisive. An unusual pendulum swung in him, he was
ruined--resolute--ruined. He was dark with perplexed anger, from which
his invincible “niceness” stood, in deprecation, aside. She blasphemed,
and yet he had to admire her four-square propriety, her sound sense,
the price she set on his Lois. And love, meanwhile, did not so much
lie bleeding as sit back stunned, bruised, a little craven from shock.
Gerald drew in his chin, swallowed, put a finger inside his collar as
though to loosen it.

“Then I understand you don’t like this: you’re going to stop it?”

“--Now, my dear Mr. Lesworth, do think: would I ever ‘stop’ anything?”

“--You’re going to stop it because I’m too young and too poor and not
‘county’ enough--or whatever I ought to be?”

“You have entirely misunderstood me,” cried Lady Naylor, hurt.

“You don’t have to tell me I’m not good enough: that’s what I’ve
battered my head against ever since--”

“We all think you’re charming--the Montmorencys, every one! You know
we’re delighted to see you--”

“Oh, I’m all right for tennis,” said Gerald without rancour.

“There is no one I’d rather--as far as that goes--” began Lady Naylor
warmly.

“You feel it’s up to you to stop it,” he summed up. “And I can see
that from your point of view you’re quite right. But there are some
things you can’t stop. God knows, I’ve got little enough for Lois, and
she ought to have everything, straight off, now. But I swear I’ll see
that she gets it. I’ll give up the Army, anything. I _know_ I’m going
to work things out. If it were only what _I_ want-- But she loves
me--I dare say she’s pretty mad--but she does love me; I’ve looked at
her eyes, I know. If she hadn’t seemed--if I hadn’t felt--if it hadn’t
been just the only thing for us both, I’d never have said a word--I
swear--I’d have died sooner.”

“But she agrees with every one,” said Lady Naylor, taking off the glove
again in despair. “She is extremely keen to go to this school of art.”

“Where?” he said violently.

“Some good school.”

“Do you expect me not to trust her?”

“I should have a straightforward, sensible talk.”

“You’re not going to stop me seeing her?”

“I don’t know what sort of girls’ mothers and aunts you’re accustomed
to,” she said, nettled, “but how could you expect me to do such a
preposterous thing? It would be not only unkind but exceedingly
foolish. To begin with, she is not my own niece at all. It would be
for her uncle to decide. But Sir Richard is very easily worried: I
particularly do not wish-- You know we are always delighted to see
you at any time ...”

She paused. “It’s most awfully kind of you,” said he, by reflex action.

“In these days of frank unsentimental friendship between young people,
I do not see why you two should not have a perfectly friendly, sensible
talk. Of course there must be _no_ ... I mean, I know I can trust you
... I mean, you do quite understand you are not engaged, and not being
engaged there can be no question of--?”

“I promise I won’t kiss her.”

Lady Naylor was much embarrassed. She laughed impersonally and arranged
her boa. She expressed some envy of this generation, its frank
friendships.

“I don’t think I am very modern,” said Gerald flatly.

“Now Laurence is too modern: he does not seem to care about girls at
all.... For the present, I’d leave love out of the question--”

“But I thought that _was_ the question!”

A shadow went past the window. “Here comes Mrs. Montmorency,” said
Gerald. And he touched his moustache and blinked and looked round,
wondering which chair to offer.

“That is too bad! I sent her up to the Rectory.”

“Perhaps they were out.”

“I told her to wait; there would be plenty to read in the
drawing-room-- Well, you do understand, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid I--”

Francie was shown in. “Oh!” she cried, “what a lot of cushions!
Kittens! Fancy sitting on them, I should feel like a cannibal. No, I
don’t mean-- Mr. Lesworth! Isn’t this nice! Are those photographs
of your regiment? I had no idea there were so many officers.... Myra,
I remembered a little something I had to get at the chemist’s, so I
thought I’d call in here and save you that climb up the hill. They were
all out.”

“Well, that was very sweet of you, Francie,” said Lady Naylor.

“Oh, how patriotic!” cried Francie, knocking two cushions covered
with Union Jacks off the sofa. “She’s a Catholic, isn’t she? Oh, Mr.
Lesworth, don’t bother; I’m so clumsy.... I had no idea we were going
to meet you. Isn’t it a pity now that we didn’t bring Lois? Myra, isn’t
it too bad Lois didn’t come too.”

“Yes, it does seem a pity,” said Lady Naylor. Still faintly regretful
she got up, looked at herself in a mirror, arranged her boa and pulled
down the brim of her hat. Then she shook hands with Gerald warmly,
saying how much she had enjoyed their talk.




                                   XXII


“I SHALL never forget,” continued Francie, through the open
dressing-room door, “the way he picked up those cushions.”

“Which?” said Hugo, searching irritably among his collars. The feudal
system was weak at some points, he reflected--this Danielstown laundry.
The laundress’s father had helped to defend the house in the troubled
’sixties. Nostalgic, he thought of these neat democratic blue vans
labelled “hygienic” that called on Mondays. “Well really,” said he, “I
may just as well go to bed. I haven’t a collar left fit to dine in....
Which cushions?”

“Oh, horrors. But then they say the Fogartys are so kind.--Never mind,
Hugo; Richard’s and Laurence’s collars are just the same.--You know how
alive he is generally: well, that was all gone. It was like seeing a
waterfall stand still. You know, Hugo, it may be horrid, but I don’t
trust Myra sometimes. She says things aren’t, and then she turns and
makes these curious little dabs at them. She dislikes the Clonmore
rectory people, she says they are breath-y, she knows I don’t know them
and yet she insisted on my going up. And when I came down again she was
charming; I knew I must have annoyed her.”

“My dear Francie, life is too short for all this.” (Though that was
not the matter with life, really: life was too long.) Hugo frowned,
chin up in front of his glass. “It’s a good thing the evenings are
drawing in,” he said, with reference to his collar.

“Now what I should have said ...” resumed Francie, “though ideally,
really, I shouldn’t have said anything....”

“Talking of evenings,” said Hugo, “where do we go next? We’ve got to
fit in the Fitzgeralds before October. Oughtn’t you to be writing to
somebody? And oh, Francie, you might post some of these collars to the
Terenure laundry, if you can get the parcel out of the house quietly.”

“I shall miss here,” sighed Francie, looking out at the trees.

“You miss everywhere.” They both thought of the bungalow which, an
eternal present for them, would be never able to shine in retrospect.
Throughout dinner, Francie was distraite. She was making out in her
mind a little letter to Gerald. But, of course, that would never do.

“Hullo!” said Laurence, earlier, looking at the letters put out for
next morning’s post on the hall table. “Lois has written to Marda. I
thought no one knew her address.”

“She heard from Marda this morning,” explained his uncle, bending to
study the envelope with melancholy interest. “I understand that it was
about a dog. I shall be relieved when Marda is married. I wonder will
the young man be able to look after luggage.”

“I ran into Mr. Lesworth this afternoon,” Lady Naylor told Lois. “He
came into the Fogartys’ while I was resting there. Really, she keeps
quite a home for those young men--though nothing would ever take the
gloss off those cushions. He seemed very cheerful, he was on his way up
to the tennis.”

“He never goes to the tennis on Club days.”

“Oh, well, he seemed to be on his way up to the tennis. He told me of
that young Armstrong’s engagement to Livvy Thompson. It seems quite a
_fait accompli_, though secret, of course. How things do get round in a
garrison town! You knew, I suppose?”

“Well, Livvy did tell me.”

“What a bother for you!” said Lady Naylor. “It is a comfort to have
outgrown one’s friends’ engagements. I suppose _you_ couldn’t very well
tell her it was preposterous?”

“Well, I ...”

“Mr. Lesworth thought it a pity, in view of the young man’s future. He
expects Mr. Armstrong will not stand well over this with their Colonel
at all. I think he can’t understand his friends not being keener on his
career. I suppose it will end by their just going out to one of those
coffee or orange places in Africa. But, of course, Livvy is used to a
dull life.”

“But I don’t see ...”

“And there isn’t much else for her. I can’t see poor Livvy at a school
of art, though she might typewrite.”

“She would do for a model,” said Laurence, who had been listening with
interest to this conversation from his side of the table. “They should
be either voluminous or very spiky.”

At this point, the candles were brought in--Lady Naylor had been
delayed in Clonmore, they were dining late. The sharp flames shivered,
every one blinked; the dahlias became theatrical.

“Autumn,” pronounced Sir Richard. “There should be less of this
ambushing and skirmishing and hey-fidaddling now that the days are
drawing in.”

“But as an English friend of mine pointed out,” said Hugo, “this Irish
fighting is not cricket.”

Laurence maintained that this way of fighting was consistent, efficient
and very natural. Why, he asked, be high-toned about a war?

“Oh dear,” said Francie, “you sound just like a pacifist!”

“What else did Gerald say?” Lois wanted to know.

“I really cannot remember,” said Lady Naylor; “he was as pleasant as
ever, but, of course, not original. He seemed in a hurry to be getting
up to the tennis.”

Lois, dissatisfied, blinked gloomily in the candlelight.

About half-past ten, Francie--having been taken up to her room by
Myra, with a suggestion of having been put away for the night--crept
out again to the ante-room, listening. Her candlestick, wobbling with
indecision, brushed the ceiling with shadows. Wires twanged where some
cattle rubbed on a fence in the damp darkness. Francie went across and
tapped on Lois’s door.

Lois turned in alarm from the dark window where she stood holding her
elbows, not quite thinking. Her heart thumped as the crack of the door
widened, letting in foreign light. “Damn,” she thought with annoyance.
She had been up here for more than an hour and had not begun to
undress. To look more natural she undid her frock and stepped quickly
out of it.

Mrs. Montmorency, yellow under the chin, appeared deprecatingly.
She had just thought, she said, of a little chat. She looked round
hopelessly, she could not think where to put down her candle. This
decided--a little table presented itself--her difficulties seemed to be
over. She said at once: “The young man, Lois, seems so unhappy.”

“But we’re engaged,” said Lois, tying her dressing-gown firmly round
her hips.

“Oh ... Are you certain? Because ...”

“What did he say?” said Lois, at once defensive.

“My dear, I was up at the rectory. I am sure your aunt meant everything
for the best.”

Lois went to the glass and took down her hair distractedly. Shaking it
over her face she said, muffled: “You mean she has interfered?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say she’d done _that_. But it seems a pity ...”

“Really,” cried Lois, glad of the hair because her anger did sound to
herself faintly academic, “she is as designing as ... a cardinal.”

“As I said to Hugo, you have enough sense, you are so modern ... and
after all you will only be young once.”

“Oh. Were you all there?”

“My dear, I tell you, I was up at the rectory. But from the way he
picked up the cushions ... I can’t bear lives to go wrong.”

This came out so vehemently, with such an effect of passion that Lois,
surprised, said: “Neither can I, really.” And looking round, she
found the shadows exaggerated with solemnity; the thin candle-flames
stretched up anxiously: a predicament must have become noticeable, even
to the room. Impressed by strangeness, by this pressure of emergency,
Lois plaited her hair in two plaits instead of one and felt herself a
different woman.

“What they never see,” she said rapidly, “is, that I must do something.”

“I should write at once,” said Francie, “I’m not sure that I shouldn’t
even telegraph, if it were not for the post-mistress. I should say ...
Well, I don’t know really: I do wish Marda were here!”

“If I learn German they say, why not Italian? And when I learn Italian
they take no interest.”

Francie picked up the evening dress that Lois had just stepped out
of, stared, and remarked to it, almost with incredulity: “Love is
everything!”

“At least Gerald is definite. He, I ...”

“I _know_ love is so important.”

“At least it may get one somewhere.”

Francie, raising her voice to a scared note, as though she must make
quite certain what they were really talking about, cried: “There are
such mistakes!”

“I wouldn’t mind being properly tragic....”

“If one’s not quite certain, one never knows where one is.”

“--It’s just that I feel so humiliated the whole time.”

“But the young man ...” persisted Francie. They looked at each other,
or at where the other had been. Francie, deserted at once by the
conspiratorial courage that brought her in, dolefully put a finger over
her lips, as though betrayed irrevocably by what had come out of them.
She visibly shrank with misgiving.

“You seem very intellectual, Lois. Do--do you not love him?”

“I _must_,” said Lois. She put her hands up to the back of her neck,
fumbling open the clasp of her corals. She could feel the bright girl
she had been for Mrs. Montmorency disintegrate: much that even she had
taken to be herself went with the illusion.

“I just thought I might have helped,” said Francie, in a spent, remote
little voice, as though they were both coming back from a funeral to an
imposingly vacant house.

“Oh, you have indeed,” said Lois. And she stood there vacantly and, she
felt, rather gruesomely smiling, weighing her coral beads up and down
in a hand, trying to remember what they had both said, what they had
meant, what it had been about.

Francie took up her heavy candlestick and looked about for the door.
She sighed and said it had been a tiring day. She could not bear to
feel she was not missed out after all, had not been passed by because
there was nothing to pass her. It was late at night for so fundamental
a disappointment. There seemed some difficulty about getting her back
to her room, though they both desired this. Lois opened the door; they
heard Sir Richard and Hugo arguing up the stairs. Francie shielded her
candle-flame with her hand and wavered out round the door like a shadow.

Lois, hot with retrospective embarrassment, slipped from her clothes
and blew out the candles quickly. The dark was gratefully positive. She
lay on her side with knees drawn up to her chin, blankness snowing down
on her till, quite snowed up in blankness, she was asleep.

Next day, mist lay on the fields like a blanket, muffling sound so
that the postman arrived unexpectedly. He brought a letter from Gerald:
“For God’s sake see me.” She meant to go out to meet Gerald, bright and
matter of fact, but this miscarried: when he came, in the evening, she
was half-way down from the garden, fighting with Laurence over a snail.
He had walked on the snail on purpose.

“Ough--you fool ... you beast, Laurence!”

“Well, I didn’t mean to be kind to it.”

“Just because it had no mentality.”

“Not at all.”

“Ough, it’s all over the path.”

“It’s scrunched ... I dare say,” said Laurence, pleased, “I am
pathological.”

“Great fat feet!”

As a matter of fact, he was sorry about the snail; he had thought it
was just a shell, but he wasn’t going to say so. “Little mother,” he
said unpleasantly.

“Laurence, you’re insane. Ough, you’re wiping it off everywhere. I
shall be sick!”

“Do.”

“Well, I won’t then.”

“I had no idea you were so fond of animals,” he said as offensively
as possible. But he was not feeling up to much this evening and could
not think what else to say to her. He turned and walked briskly away
towards the avenue, conscious of having no objective. An unusual
evening, however, awaited him. In a boreen in the Castle Trent
direction he met three armed men coming out of a gate. They made him
put up his hands and march smartly down the boreen ahead of them.
He discovered that under these conditions the mind works fast but
unfruitfully; he noted details sharply and then forgot. When they came
to the wall of the graveyard he was embarrassed, but they only asked
for his shoes and the loan of his wrist-watch. Placing him with his
face close up to the wall they advised him for life’s sake not to look
round or stir for twenty minutes. “How shall I know?” said Laurence,
“you’ve got my watch.” But they did not care and went away with his
shoes. Laurence remained with his forehead against the stone for fifty
minutes, horse-flies biting him through the socks. Then he limped home
to dinner and an audience, considerably cheered. Three days after, the
watch was posted back to his Uncle Richard: it was in excellent order
and ticked as it was taken out of the package. “Which just shows,” said
Sir Richard, holding the watch to his ear with satisfaction. But that
was a day of confusion; nobody listened.

As Lois ran down from the garden, swollen about the personality with
annoyance, she saw Gerald waiting at a turn of the path by a holly
tree. He looked intently at her advancing, without comprehension, as
though she had been a picture. Though they were alone, he did not put
out a hand or move towards her. He stood there with the vigour, grief
and indifference of a tree that cannot help growing.

“Gerald?”

“What’s the matter?” he said, impassive.

“Oh, Laurence walked on a _snail!_”

“Bad luck!”

“My dear, he liked it.”

“Queer,” said Gerald, finding the word with difficulty.

“Where shall we go?” she asked, while something in her stopped like
a clock with foreboding. The encounter, uncoloured by surprise or
passion, left her quite at a loss. Unkissed, her mouth and cheeks felt
a touch of ice.

“It seems now,” said Gerald, impersonally, as though delivering a
message, “that we can’t ever be married.”

“Why? When?” she cried angrily.

Gerald looked at her under level eyelids. She remembered saying: “I
wish you wouldn’t keep looking so pleased the whole time.” Now his look
and silence were cold with a doomed expectancy: she nearly hated him.
Dumbly, in happy-seeming physical agreement like a pair of animals,
they wheeled off down the path together, crossed the yard rapidly and
came into the plantation ribbed with shadow and lanced across with
light about the eye-level. He told her her aunt agreed he was not good
enough, it would never do at all, her aunt had said. Looking angrily
up the tree-trunks, she exclaimed that her aunt was mad. She repeated
this with vehemence and confusion, pulling at her fingers. He listened
to her in silence, wounded, wounded. She wished they had not come
down--overruling possibly in each other some desire for space--to
the plantation where, constricted by firs, thought and movement were
difficult and upright shadows emphasized his severity. “She advised
me,” Gerald concluded, “to have a frank talk with you.”

“Is this the frank talk now?”

“She was certain you didn’t love me.”

“_Gerald_--why weren’t you furious?”

“I ... I don’t know,” he said, surprised by the question. She saw him
standing confused, like a foreigner with whom by some failure in her
vocabulary all communication was interrupted. Her mind halted and she
wanted to run away. “Gerald, come back. I’m wretched. Why do we have to
talk?”

“I thought you liked that....” Outside himself with passion he cried:
“I’d rather be dead than not understand!”

“But don’t you _know_ I ...? Gerald?”

If he did not know, it would be quite over. She watched with agony what
seemed to be his indifference. They were each waiting for the other.
_He_ watched her hand, on a tree-trunk, pick like a bird at the scaly
bark. Her hand, which immediately centred her consciousness of him,
paused and became quite rigid, fingers spread out. When he saw her hand
so quiet, he would have to be certain. And he immediately said with his
usual little resigned inflection: “You see, you are everything.”

“I know,” she said, impersonal.

“I suppose you are what I mean by life.... Do you understand at all?”

“You sometimes make me.” She wanted to add: “Touch me now:” it was the
only way across. In her impotence, her desolation--among the severe
trees--at not being compelled, she made a beseeching movement which
he--remote in a rather sublime perplexity that transcended pain--either
ignored or rejected. From the stables, the six o’clock bell sent out
relief in a jerky, metallic passage of sound through the plantation.
She wanted something to look at, to follow: a train curving past in a
rush. With an exaggerated movement, she put up her hands to her ears.
Gerald’s face, in a band of light, remained impassible.

“Gerald, you’re making us lose each other!” she shouted above the bell.

“But I mean to say: what would _you_ lose?”

“Everything.”

“Do you _mean_ that?” A light ran almost visibly up inside him. She saw
now where they were and why he had come.

She thought of going, hesitating with delight, to the edge of an
unknown high-up terrace, of Marda, of getting into a train. “No,” she
cried, terrified, “why should I?”

“Then we don’t mean the same thing.”

“Why don’t you make me ... like you?”

“I thought I could. I know I can--when I’m not with you.”

“Damn, damn,” said Lois. “I do want you!” Gerald said piteously: “Then
why can’t it all be simple?”

“But it’s our being so young,” she said, too eagerly, “and then, money.
I mean, we have got to be practical.”

He explained to her, wide-eyed: “It isn’t anything practical that makes
all this--like death. What _she_ said was; that if you loved me ...”

“It’s like a nightmare that even you should begin to talk. I thought
you were a rock: I was safe with you. Gerald, really, this is all like
a net; little twists of conversation knotted together. One can’t move,
one doesn’t know where one is. I really can’t live at all if it has
all got to be arranged. I tell you, even what I think isn’t my own,
and Mrs. Montmorency comes bursting into my room at nights. Even
Marda--nothing we said to each other mattered, it hasn’t stayed, she
goes off to get married in a mechanical sort of way. She thinks herself
so damned funny--it’s cheap, really. All that matters is what _you_
believe--Gerald, you’ll kill me, just standing there. You don’t know
what it’s like for a snail, being walked on....”

“I don’t understand you,” he cried in agony. “Who is a snail?”

“I didn’t ask you to understand me: I was so happy, I was so safe.”

Gerald noticed a change somewhere; the light was gone from his face,
moving down the trees it had disappeared. He looked at his wrist-watch.
They had been a short time together, almost twenty minutes. “When were
you happy?” he said accurately. He would have liked to be sure of this,
and of several other matters: she was not collected enough to explain.
He eyed the incredible wood, the path, her unchanged figure in the
cheerful blue woollen dress. Something struggled free in his brain and
said, quite apart from his numbed self: “My darling, don’t, don’t rack
yourself. You know this will be always the same for me. Whatever’s
impossible, you will always be perfect. I know we’re different about
things: if that didn’t hurt you it would never matter to me. I mean,
don’t let’s be disappointed. You know I’m not giving you up, I could
never have done _that_. But it’s just that, you see, you never ... I
suppose things can’t come out what one wants.... I suppose it would
hardly do....”

“But, Gerald, where are we?”

He said, “Don’t worry.” They were both, he knew, entirely lost.

“But what have I _done?_ What have I _not_ done?” After a minute,
during which she heard him finger his belt--his fingers slipped on the
leather--she shut her eyes and said, “So you’re certain I don’t love
you?”

No answer. “Oh, leave that belt alone, Gerald!”

Still no answer, as though he were asleep. And indeed he felt, as at
the approach of sleep, an immense indifference. She, tortured by the
loneliness of insomnia, had to cry out: “Won’t you even just try--won’t
you just kiss me?”

“I don’t think ...”

“All right.”

“Look, I must go now.” Vaguely, he saluted and began to go up the path,
towards the beech walk, towards the house.

“Good-bye?” she said.

He only half paused. “No, don’t let’s ...” “Where did you leave your
bicycle?”

He was well up the path; he called back: “Against the hedge. You know,
under the tennis courts.”

She knew; she remembered him pulling leaves from the privet hedge,
scattering them on the grass and throwing them over her. She remembered
that Mrs. Boatley was a Christian Scientist. It seemed a good thing
summer was practically over; there might not be more tennis parties.
But at this the incomprehensible glare of summer blinded her, bringing
tears to her eyes. “Gerald!” she called.

But by this time he seemed to be out of ear-shot.




                                  XXIII


ANOTHER thing Lady Naylor had noticed about the English was, a
disposition they had to be socially visible before midday. Soon after
ten, she had heard, Mrs. Vermont and her friends were to be seen about
the streets of Clonmore--from behind the still decently somnolent
blinds of inhabitants--with gloves buttoned tight at the wrists,
swinging coloured baskets. Before eleven, they would be seated behind
the confectioner’s window, deploring the coffee. Mrs. Rolfe had once
had Moriarty’s shutters taken down for her specially--and she wishful,
Moriarty said, to purchase the one pair of stockings only. A Mrs.
Peake, of the Gunners, demanded attention at the hairdresser’s before
ten. These unnatural practices were a strain in the town’s normality;
the streets had a haggard look, ready for anything. Really, as Lady
Naylor said, almost English. She thought of the south of England as a
kind of extension of Brighton, the north serrated by factory chimneys,
the middle a blank space occupied by Anna Partridge. Only Danielstown’s
being out of dropping- or popping-in distance from Clonmore
deprived her, as it transpired, of matutinal visits from Mrs. Vermont
and her friends.

Mrs. Vermont, however, overcame difficulties, hired a Ford and had
herself driven over one morning about eleven o’clock. She brought
her great friend Mrs. Rolfe; they were on their way to lunch at the
Thompsons’. This she explained before they were out of the car; _she_
knew what Mondays were, she did not want to alarm Lady Naylor--being
so much with Mother had made her considerate in these matters. Lady
Naylor, as a matter of fact, would have minded them less at lunch-time;
one didn’t notice people so much at meals, she discovered. When news of
the dropping in came down to the kitchen, she groaned: “My morning!”
Nothing could have been worse.

Francie was lying down with “a head”; Hugo was talking over old times
with the coachman, who had been pensioned off and brooded all day in
the harness-room, much at a loss. Lois, indirectly responsible for the
outrage, was not to be found. She had not been herself at all, these
last few days. Her aunt, after Gerald’s departure, had made a point
of saying: “Well, I hope, of course, you have not made a mistake. But
we all have to settle these things for ourselves, you know.” Francie
never failed to inquire if she were getting on nicely with the Italian;
her uncle agreed it was high time she went to that school of art. This
morning she seemed to be nowhere; shouting did not produce her.

Laurence, always unfortunate, was surprised on the steps with Locke.
“Oh God,” he said as the Ford came round the bend of the lower avenue.
He turned, too late, to escape; the girl wives were already shouting
and waving.

Betty said: “Denise, this is Mr. -- (Oh dear, how awful!) This is
Mrs. Rolfe of the Gunners; my great friend, you know.”

“Good,” said Laurence. Denise glanced up, apprehensive, at all the
windows. Laurence stood looking at them with resignation; he forgot to
open the door of the car though they brimmed out over it.

“_May_ we get out?” asked Betty, tittering up at him in the friendliest
way from a perfect swirl of furs and red crêpe de Chine. On their
knees, two little pairs of hands curled like loose chrysanthemums over
their kid pochettes. He let them out and they ran up the steps shaking
out their dresses. “_Oh_, what a brainy book!” cried Betty, pouncing.
“--My dear, just look what he’s reading--oh, you have got a brain! I
mean, fancy reading ...”

“You’re at college, aren’t you?” said Denise, fluttered.

“Sometimes,” said Laurence accurately. Opening his mouth very wide he
shouted for Lois. They shrieked and covered their ears. “I expect,” he
said finally, “I had better go in and look for--”

“Don’t go! I’m sure they will all come out.... I did want Denise to see
a lovely old Irish home.”

“Yes, we are quaint, really,” said Laurence, considering. “And you
oughtn’t to miss the Trents; has she seen the Trents?”

“Well, I hardly know the Trents. Here, we always feel that Gerald is
such a link.”

“Missing or otherwise,” Denise added.

“Exactly.” Betty smiled at him sidelong, but all the same, it did
seem a pity it should be Laurence that they had dropped in on with
unintended accuracy. _This_ was not at all what she had led Denise
to expect. Laurence’s not quite rudeness was, in fact, rather
international--she supposed, Oxford. She said: “I have a boy cousin
at Reading University. That’s quite near Oxford, isn’t it?” Denise,
plaintive, said that a wasp was bothering; she wanted to go indoors and
see the reputed ancestors. Betty flapped with her pochette and the end
of her fur. “She’s _terrified_ of wasps!”

“So am I,” said Laurence, backing, “absolutely _terrified_. I think I’d
better go and--better get a--” He disappeared through the glass door,
shutting it.

Denise said: “Well, I do think people are extraordinary.” They both sat
down and yawned. All these trees; it was quite extraordinary. “Is that
Lois’s cousin?”

“More or less.”

“Well, I always did think she was an odd girl.”

“Ssh, there’s Sir Richard writing in the library--Denise, _just_ look
through, sideways. He’s such a type.”

“O-oh ... yes. Is he a knight or a baronet?”

“Well, I don’t see how he could have been knighted.”

“My dear, ssssh!”

“He’s deaf. Oh, darling, look at those little teeny black cows. Those
are Kerry cows. They farm, you know; they have heaps of cattle.”

“I always meant to ask you: _are_ there Kilkenny cats?”

“Really,” said Mrs. Vermont, annoyed, as her friend yawned again and
she felt her own jaw quiver, “when one thinks these are the people we
are defending! I wonder if they’ll offer us any coffee. What I think
about Irish hospitality: either they almost knock you down or they
don’t look at you. Or I tell you what, we might go out to the garden
and get some plums. Only I would like you to see the drawing-room. I
wish these were Livvy’s people; the boys say her house smells--I hope
you aren’t bored, darling?--I mean, what I mean about Livvy; she does
grow on you. I can’t think what Gerald sees in this family, I must say.
It isn’t even as if Lois--”

“Of course, I always did think she was an odd girl.”

At this point Sir Richard, who was not deaf, came out in despair. He
said this was too bad; he couldn’t think what could have become of
Lois. “We might shout,” he said helplessly.

“Your nephew has been shouting.”

“Still,” said Sir Richard, and shouted again. “How are you all getting
on?” he said kindly, when he had recovered his breath.

Betty said with dignity: “There may be going to be an offensive.”

“_Sssh_,” whispered Denise, pinching her elbow.

“Though I ought not really to tell you.”

“Never mind,” said Sir Richard, “I don’t suppose it will come to
anything. Besides, now the days are drawing in-- But this is too bad
really, most unfortunate that my wife should not be here to receive
you. She will be most distressed.”

“Oh, but we just dropped in. As I said to Denise, what is the good of
being in Ireland if one isn’t a bit unconventional?”

“She will be most distressed.”

“Don’t bother! We’ve been admiring your darling cows.”

“I’ll just go in and inquire,” said Sir Richard firmly and disappeared,
shutting the glass door.

Denise said she would get the giggles: a seizure did seem to be
imminent. “Well, I must say, Gerald is well out of this family.”

“But, my dear, _is_ he?”

“Something’s happened. He’s _black_--even Timmy noticed. I said to
Timmy: ‘You _must_ find out’--’Cause I think, don’t you, that when men
get together ... You see, _I_ can’t--though I can’t bear to see the boy
suffer.”

“But I thought you said you--”

“Well, I’ve seen him in the distance and he didn’t look like himself at
all. But he hasn’t been near us, or to the Club, or into the Fogartys’.
And as I was saying to Mrs. Fogarty--”

“It seems to me he’s been treated rottenly. If it were one of our boys,
my dear, I should be fur-rious.”

“All the same, I do want to _see_ Lois....”

“What he sees in her, I cannot imagine. She’s what I should call rather
affected--”

“Sssh--Oh, hullo, Lois!” they cried in unison.

Lois, unbecomingly bright, came up from the beech walk.

“Oh, hullo,” she said, “splendid!”

“We’ve just been talking about you.”

“O-oh. _Can’t_ you stay to lunch?”

“No can do; we’re off to the Thompsons. My dear, aren’t you thrilled
about Livvy and David! Isn’t it marvellous?”

“Thrilled, it’s absolutely marvellous. _Do_ stay to lunch--I mean,”
she said agitatedly, “do come back to tea? Oh no, we shall all be
out. Oh, how rotten. Or come to tennis--no, I believe there won’t
be any more tennis; Laurence is going back to Oxford and the rain’s
washed all the marking off the court. Perhaps we could have a dance or
something--”

The two young wives eyed her lightly and curiously; their looks ran
over her form like spiders. They were so womanly, she could have turned
and fled back down the beech walk. “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore,”
she thought to herself wildly. And the pause, the suspicion of some
deformity that these ladies produced in her became so acute that she
smiled more widely. She buttoned her cardigan up to the top, then
unbuttoned it.

“Oh, but don’t go _now_,” she said, but looked at their Ford, longingly.

“Oh, we must, we have been here hours, watching your darling cows.”

“I’m afraid they’re very much in the distance. Does Aunt Myra--?”

“Oh, we’d hate to disturb her. Unless we might all run round the
garden--?”

“It’s locked and I’ve lost the key. I feel quite an outcast. That’s
what has been the matter the whole morning. Do have something to
eat--have some biscuits?”

“Unless we just come into the drawing-room for one moment?”

“I always think drawing-rooms in the morning are so depressing.”

Denise said she did not see how the same room could be much different,
but it was no good; Lois seemed determined to keep them out. From the
way she shifted her feet and stared round, you would have said she was
expecting bad news momentarily: she talked so much that they hadn’t a
chance to express themselves. She went in for a tin of _petit beurres_
and offered it with an odd air, rather propitiatory. Lady Naylor called
from an upstairs window that this was too bad, that she was so much
distressed, she would be down immediately. “She spends whole mornings
with the cook,” said Lois. “I cannot think what they do. I believe they
fence verbally. More biscuits?”

“No, we shall spoil our din-dins. Denise, we _must_ come. I hear old
Mr. Thompson is a terrible ogre. Any messages in Clonmore, Lois? Any
messages to Gerald?”

Lois thought she must blush, but did not; even her blood stood still.

“_I_ should ask him,” said Denise, “why he didn’t send _you_ a message.
_I_ think it was odd of him; I should be fur-rious.” Lois saw, with
interest, a ripple of light down their dresses; they nudged each other.
There must be something odd about her, really, if they had noticed; she
must clearly be outside life.

“How is the gramophone?” she said enthusiastically.

“Don’t _ask!_ Gerald is going to Cork to bring back a new one. We
thought we might all go too, it would be a rag.”

“Marvellous!”

“Look, I’ll just run Denise in to have a look at the drawing-room.”

“I shouldn’t, really. I haven’t done the flowers.”

“Gerald says all your looking-glasses make him feel sleepy. He’s a
funny boy, in a way,” said Betty innocently. “You don’t think we ought
to wait till we’ve seen your aunt? She won’t be offended?”

“I shouldn’t really; she’s probably been delayed.” Lady Naylor did, in
fact, arrive on the steps in time to utter exclamations of despair as
they drove away. “Too bad, _too_ bad!” she called, waving after them.
“You must come again soon!... Really, Lois, you might have found them
some fruit or something. Fancy puffing them out with biscuits at this
hour.”

“I tell you what I think it is about Lois,” said Betty cosily, nestling
down in the car as the trees rushed over them. “I think he’s left her.”

Denise agreed. “A boy needs keeping, if you know what I mean.” Betty
also told her what she thought about the Naylor family: they were going
down in the world. “I should not be surprised if they never used that
drawing-room,” she said viciously. “It smells of damp. Myself, I do
like a house to be bright and homey.”

                    *       *       *       *       *

The world did not stand still, though the household at Danielstown and
the Thompsons’ lunch party took no account of it. The shocking news
reached Clonmore that night, about eight o’clock. It crashed upon the
unknowingness of the town like a wave that for two hours, since the
event, had been rising and toppling, imminent. The news crept down
streets from door to door like a dull wind, fingering the nerves,
pausing. In the hotel bars, heads went this way and that way, quick
with suspicion. The Fogartys’ Eileen, called by a friend while she was
clearing away the supper, cried “God help him!” and stumbled up to Mr.
Fogarty’s door, blubbered. Mr. Fogarty dropped his glass and stood bent
some time like an animal, chin on the mantelpiece. Philosophy did not
help; in his thickening brain actuality turned like a mill-wheel. His
wife, magnificent in her disbelief, ran out, wisps blowing, round the
square and through the vindictively silent town.

Barracks were closed, she could not get past the guards; for once she
was at a loss, among strangers. She thought mechanically “His mother,”
and pressed her hands up under her vast and useless bosom. Trees in the
square, uneasy, shifted dulled leaves that should already have fallen
under the darkness. The shocking news, brought in at the barrack gates
officially, produced an abashed silence, hard repercussions, darkness
of thought and a loud glare of electricity. In Gerald’s room some new
music for the jazz band, caught in a draught, flopped over and over. An
orderly put it away, shocked. All night some windows let out, over the
sandbags, a squeamish, defiant yellow.

Mrs. Vermont heard when Timmy had just gone out; he was to be out
all night with a patrol. She was to sleep alone, she could not bear
it. Past fear, she ran to the Rolfes’ hut. She spent the night
there, sobbing, tearing off with her teeth the lace right round her
handkerchief. Captain Rolfe kept bringing her hot whisky. “I can’t,
I can’t, not whisky; it’s so awful.” They all felt naked and were
ashamed of each other, as though they had been wrecked. From the hut
floor--where they had danced--the wicker furniture seemed to rise and
waver.

“Percy, where did he--how was he--?”

“Through the head.”

“Then it didn’t--?”

“Oh no. Probably instantaneous.”

“Oh, _don’t!_ Oh, Percy, how can you!”

Denise repeated: “I can’t believe it.” And while the others sickly,
furtively stared, she tried to press from her hair the waves she had
had put in that morning. “You know, I _can’t_ believe it. Can you,
Betty? It’s so ... extraordinary.”

“Why can’t we all go home? Why did we stay here? Why don’t we all go
home? That’s what I can’t understand.”

“Percy, can _you_ believe it? I mean, I remember him coming in and
standing against this table--”

“Oh, don’t!--Percy, what became of _them?_ Where did they go? Those
devils!”

“Oh, got right away.”

“Didn’t anyone hear anything, any firing? I mean, didn’t it make a
noise?... Couldn’t they be tortured--why should they just be hanged or
shot? Oh, I do think, I mean I do think when you think--”

“Well, we’ve got to get ’em, haven’t we? Look, just try--”

“Oh, I _can’t_, I tell you-- Why can’t we all go home!”

“Percy, leave her _alone!_ Oh God, my head; I shall cut my hair off. I
mean, he came in and stood there against that table. Why did they get
just Gerald?--Oh yes, I know there was the sergeant--but _he_ won’t
die; I know he won’t die.... I can’t believe it! Percy, _can_ you
believe it? Percy, say something.”

Betty sobbed: “I should like to--oh, I should like to-- Those beasts,
those beasts!”

“Look, you two girls go to bed.”

“Oh, how can we!”

“Oh, why isn’t Timmy here? I mean, when I think of Timmy, and out
all night--_I_ can’t understand the King, I can’t understand the
Government: _I_ think it’s awful!”

But they went to bed--Percy spent the night on two chairs--and lay in
what seemed to both an unnatural contiguity, re-clasping each other’s
fingers, talking of “Him,” of “you know who” and “that boy” in the
eager voices, low-pitched and breaking, kept as a rule to discuss the
intimacies of their marriages. In the same moment they fell, dimly
shocked at each other, asleep. Then Denise saw Lois clearly, standing
affectedly on the Danielstown steps with a tin of biscuits, a room full
of mirrors behind her. And Betty woke with surprise to hear herself
say: “What I mean is, it seems so odd that he shouldn’t really have
meant anything.”

They heard an early bugle shivering in the rain.




                                   XXIV


MR. DAVENTRY arrived before the postman. He had not paid an unofficial
visit since he had been in Ireland; it seemed to him odd there should
be nothing to search for, nobody to interrogate. It was early, wet
tarnished branches came cheerfully through the mist. He had come to
the gate with a convoy on its way over to Ballyhinch; two lorries
had ground into silence and waited for him at the gate, alarming the
cottagers. He walked up the avenue lightly and rapidly: nothing, at
the stage things had reached for him, mattered. And superciliously he
returned the stare of the house.

He rang and made his demand. Lois came out slowly, dumb with all she
must begin to say--for who could an anxious waiting officer be but
Gerald? “Really ...” Lady Naylor had said, with a glance at the clock,
advising her to put down her table napkin. And Francie, smiling, had
covered up her egg for her.

“You?” she now said while everything, the importance of everything,
faintly altered. “Come and have breakfast.”

He told her that there had been a catastrophe yesterday, west of
Clonmore: a patrol with an officer and an N.C.O. had been ambushed,
fired on at a cross-roads. The officer--Lesworth--was instantly
killed, the N.C.O. shot in the stomach. The enemy made off across
country, they did not care for sustained fire, in spite of the hedges.
The men did what they could for the sergeant.

“Will he die?”

“Probably.”

“And Gerald was killed.”

“Yes. Would you--?”

“I’m all right, thank you.”

“Right you are.” He turned round and stood with his back to her. She
asked what time it had happened; he said about six o’clock. She thought
how accurate Gerald was and how anxious, last time, he had been to
establish just _when_ she had been happy because of him, on what day,
for how long. “They’d been out all the afternoon?” They both saw the
amazed white road and dust, displaced by the fall, slowly settling. “As
a matter of fact,” said Daventry, “we were mostly ready for things. I
don’t suppose--if he knew at all--it mattered.” “No, I don’t suppose,
to oneself, it ever would matter much.” But she thought of Gerald in
the surprise of death. He gave himself up to surprise with peculiar
candour.

“Thank you for coming.”

“I was passing this way anyhow.”

“But still, there was no reason why you should take the trouble.”

Daventry glanced at her, then at the gravel under his feet, without
speculation. Cold and ironical, he was a stay; he was not expecting
anything of her. He finally said: “It seemed practical. Would you like
me to--shall I just let the others know?” She nodded, wondering where
to go, how long to stay there, how to come back. Her mind flooded
with trivialities. She wondered who would go up to the tennis this
afternoon, if there would be anyone left who did not know, who would
expect him; she wondered what would become of the Jazz band. She saw
for days ahead she must not deny humanity, she would have no privacy.
“As a matter of fact, they are expecting me back to breakfast.”

But at the thought of Francie’s tender and proud smile, covering up
her egg, she was enlightened and steadied by grief, as at the touch of
finger-tips. She went into the house and up to the top to meet what was
waiting. Life, seen whole for a moment, was one act of apprehension,
the apprehension of death. Daventry, staring at her in memory--she was,
after all, a woman--went into the hall. Here, it pleased him to think
of Gerald socially circumspect under the portraits.

He waited. The dining-room door swung open on a continued argument;
they came out one by one, each on the threshold, balanced momentarily
like a ball on a fountain by the shock of seeing him. “Lady Naylor?”
he said to Francie. “Oh _no!_” she seemed appalled at the supposition.
“Isn’t ... Mr. Lesworth here?” “Not to-day.” Lady Naylor came last and
stared hardest: really, the Army seemed to be inexhaustible. He told
her. “Oh, no!” she said quickly, as though to prevent something. He
told her the circumstances. “Oh--_no_,” she repeated, and turned in
appeal to her husband. “That is ... that is too bad,” said Sir Richard
and in despairing confusion touched her shoulder. He looked back into
the dining-room at the chairs and plates and table, incredible in
their survival.

The fact was, they did not at all care for the look of Mr. Daventry.
They felt instinctively that he had come here to search the house.
Lady Naylor, still statuesque from the shock, made, even, a little
disdainful gesture, a kind of: “Here’s everything.” He, unconscious of
her impression of being brought to book, remained staring darkly and
piercingly past her. Behind her, across the dark dining-room, he saw
through a window the lawn striped with mist and sunshine. In Clonmore
it had rained that morning: they seemed to have escaped that too. She
said sharply: “Where’s Lois?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” he replied, indifferent.

“She--you have--?”

“Oh, yes.”

Her defensive dropped; she said with heartbroken eyes on his face: “You
know, we knew him so well. He came out here so often to tennis. It
seems queer that one can’t--that one never-- He was so--”

“Yes he was, wasn’t he?”

“His mother, he used to tell me about his mother. Who will write? I
should like to write to her. Yes, I want very much to write to her. I
think she might like--we did know him so well, you see-- Richard,
don’t you think I--?”

But Sir Richard had slipped away quietly; he was an old man, really,
outside all this, and did not know what to do. He was wondering, also,
about the Connors. Peter Connor’s friends--they knew everything, they
were persistent: it did not do to imagine....

Mr. Daventry said that was all, he thought; he must go now. He took
leave with unfriendly courtesy and went off abruptly, with an air that
obliterated them, as though he had never been into their house at
all. Then she exclaimed, recollecting herself: “_He_ must be unhappy;
I ought to have said something.” There was so much to do now, more
than would fit into a morning; she had some idea of postponing lunch.
And hearing the postman, she half thought, terrified by a sense of
exposure: “Suppose there should be a--suppose he should have--”

But there was no letter for Lois from Gerald.

No one was on the steps to hear the news from the postman; he went
away disappointed. Lady Naylor thought firmly: “Now I must go and find
Lois.” But she did not go; things seemed to delay her. She looked into
the drawing-room to see whether something--she wasn’t certain what--was
there. Francie, red-eyed, looked guiltily over the back of the sofa.
They did not say anything. The room became so sharply painful that Lady
Naylor almost exclaimed: “Lois has not done the flowers!”

It was Laurence who, walking about the grounds unguardedly, was exposed
to what they all dreaded. He came on Lois, standing beside a holly
tree. She could have moved away, but seemed not so much rooted as
indifferent.

“It’s all right,” she explained, and added: “I’m just thinking.”

His look became almost personal, as though he had recognized her. He
said: “I think I should. I expect--I don’t know--one probably gets past
things.”

“But look here, there are things that one can’t--” (She meant: “He
loved me, he believed in the British Empire.”) “At least, I don’t want
to.”

“Perhaps you are right,” he said, studying, with an effort of sight and
of comprehension, some unfamiliar landscape.

“Well, don’t stop, Laurence. You’re going somewhere, aren’t you?”

“Nowhere particular. Not if you--”

“No, I don’t specially. Though if it has to be anyone, you.”

Taking this for what it was worth, he went on, brushing awkwardly past
her against the laurels.

                    *       *       *       *       *

A fortnight later, Mrs. Trent drove over, the very evening of her
return from the North. She had been inexpressibly bored up there and
wished to complain. Lady Naylor, delighted, came out to meet her; it
was like old times again.

“The house feels empty. They’ve gone, you know.”

“Yes, dear me. I was sorry not to have seen the last of Hugo and poor
little Francie. What about their bungalow?”

“Oh, that was just an idea; they are quite off it. Bungalows inland
seem so pointless, cliffs are so windy and one cannot live on a flat
coast. No, they think now of going to Madeira.”

“Then they won’t un-store the furniture?”

“I don’t think so; they never cared for it much.”

“It’s a pity he never did go to Canada.” Mrs. Trent looked round at the
pleasant fields and lawns, the trees massive and tarnished, the windows
that from their now settled emptiness seemed to have gained composure.
Her sense of home-coming extended even to Danielstown. She went on:
“How’s Richard? And listen: are you getting in your apples?--we haven’t
begun. They never get anything done when I’m away. And tell me: how’s
Lois?”

“Oh, gone, you know.”

“_Gone?_ Oh, the school of art!”

“Oh no,” said Lady Naylor, surprised. “Tours. For her French, you know.
And to such an interesting, cultivated family; she is really fortunate.
I never have been happy about her French. As I said to her, there will
be plenty of time for Italian.”

“Oh, that’s splendid,” Mrs. Trent said vaguely but warmly. “Then of
course you must feel quiet. Did she and Laurence travel over together?”

“She seemed so offended at being thought incompetent and he was
worried at the idea of looking after her luggage, so we sent them over
separately; he crossed Wednesday, she Friday. Both nights, I hear,
it was rough.... Yes, it’s been sad here, lately; we’ve been so much
shocked and distressed about that unfortunate young Lesworth. I think
I felt it particularly; he had been out here so much and seemed so
glad to talk, and had come, in a way, to depend on one. Though it was
a shock, too, for Lois. You see they had really played tennis so often
and were beginning to be quite friends. She did not take it as hard
as I feared, girls of her generation seem less sensitive, really....
I don’t know; perhaps that is all for the best. And of course she has
so many interests. But it was terrible, wasn’t it; I still think: how
terrible. But he did have a happy life. I wrote that to his mother;
I said, it must always be some consolation to think how happy his
life had been. He quite beamed, really; he was the life and soul of
everything. And she wrote back--I did not think tactfully, but of
course she would be distracted--that it was _her_ first consolation to
think he died in so noble a cause.”

Mrs. Trent had for a moment an uneasy, exposed look. She said: “It was
heroic,” and glanced down awkwardly at her gloves. She missed a dog,
she felt unstayed, there was no dog.

“Heroic,” said Lady Naylor, and scanned the skies with eager
big-pupilled eyes that reflected the calm light. “Although,” she added,
half in surprise, “he could not help it.... But come in now and tell
Richard about the North, he will be amused, though sorry that you were
dull. To tell you the truth, we both rather feared you might be. Ah,
don’t mind the time, I’m sure it’s early; come in, come in!”

But Mrs. Trent could not, she was a punctilious person and wore a
wrist-watch. She had not even sent round her dog-cart to the back; a
man was walking the cob up and down the avenue. “A flying visit,” said
Lady Naylor mournfully, having prolonged the conversation by half an
hour. Then Mrs. Trent climbed briskly into the dog-cart and gathered
the reins up; they sighed at each other their resignation to parting.

“Then we see you on Tuesday. Be sure and come early, before the
Hartigans.” To the domestic landscape, Mrs. Trent nodded an approving
farewell. “Every autumn, it strikes me this place looks really its
best.”

“To tell you the truth, I really believe it does. There is something in
autumn,” said Lady Naylor. She remained on the steps looking after the
trap, her hands restlessly, lightly folded. Some leaves spun down from
the gate with a home-coming air.

The two did not, however, again see Danielstown at such a moment, such
a particular happy point of decline in the short curve of the day, the
long curve of the season. Here, there were no more autumns, except for
the trees. By next year light had possessed itself of the vacancy,
still with surprise. Next year, the chestnuts and acorns pattered
unheard on the avenues, that, filmed over with green already, should
have been dull to the footsteps--but there were no footsteps. Leaves,
tottering down the slope on the wind’s hesitation, banked formless,
frightened, against the too clear form of the ruin.

For in February, before those leaves had visibly budded, the
death--execution, rather--of the three houses, Danielstown, Castle
Trent, Mount Isabel, occurred in the same night. A fearful scarlet
ate up the hard spring darkness; indeed, it seemed that an extra day,
unreckoned, had come to abortive birth that these things might happen.
It seemed, looking from east to west at the sky tall with scarlet,
that the country itself was burning; while to the north the neck of
mountains before Mount Isabel was frightfully outlined. The roads in
unnatural dusk ran dark with movement, secretive or terrified; not a
tree, brushed pale by wind from the flames, not a cabin pressed in
despair to the bosom of night, not a gate too starkly visible but had
its place in the design of order and panic. At Danielstown, half-way
up the avenue under the beeches, the thin iron gate twanged (missed
its latch, remained swinging aghast) as the last unlit car slid out
with the executioners bland from accomplished duty. The sound of the
last car widened, gave itself to the open and empty country and was
demolished. Then the first wave of a silence that was to be ultimate
flowed back, confident, to the steps. Above the steps, the door stood
open hospitably upon a furnace.

Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, not saying anything, did not look at each
other, for in the light from the sky they saw too distinctly.




*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79073 ***