An hour passed, and the downstairs rooms at the hotel grew dim and were
almost deserted, while the little box-like squares above them were
brilliantly irradiated. Some forty or fifty people were going to bed.
The thump of jugs set down on the floor above could be heard and the
clink of china, for there was not as thick a partition between the
rooms as one might wish, so Miss Allan, the elderly lady who had been
playing bridge, determined, giving the wall a smart rap with her
knuckles. It was only matchboard, she decided, run up to make many
little rooms of one large one. Her grey petticoats slipped to the
ground, and, stooping, she folded her clothes with neat, if not loving
fingers, screwed her hair into a plait, wound her father’s great gold
watch, and opened the complete works of Wordsworth. She was reading the
“Prelude,” partly because she always read the “Prelude” abroad, and
partly because she was engaged in writing a short _Primer of English
Literature_—_Beowulf to Swinburne_—which would have a paragraph on
Wordsworth. She was deep in the fifth book, stopping indeed to pencil a
note, when a pair of boots dropped, one after another, on the floor
above her. She looked up and speculated. Whose boots were they, she
wondered. She then became aware of a swishing sound next door—a woman,
clearly, putting away her dress. It was succeeded by a gentle tapping
sound, such as that which accompanies hair-dressing. It was very
difficult to keep her attention fixed upon the “Prelude.” Was it Susan
Warrington tapping? She forced herself, however, to read to the end of
the book, when she placed a mark between the pages, sighed contentedly,
and then turned out the light.
Very different was the room through the wall, though as like in shape
as one egg-box is like another. As Miss Allan read her book, Susan
Warrington was brushing her hair. Ages have consecrated this hour, and
the most majestic of all domestic actions, to talk of love between
women; but Miss Warrington being alone could not talk; she could only
look with extreme solicitude at her own face in the glass. She turned
her head from side to side, tossing heavy locks now this way now that;
and then withdrew a pace or two, and considered herself seriously.
“I’m nice-looking,” she determined. “Not pretty—possibly,” she drew
herself up a little. “Yes—most people would say I was handsome.”
She was really wondering what Arthur Venning would say she was. Her
feeling about him was decidedly queer. She would not admit to herself
that she was in love with him or that she wanted to marry him, yet she
spent every minute when she was alone in wondering what he thought of
her, and in comparing what they had done to-day with what they had done
the day before.
“He didn’t ask me to play, but he certainly followed me into the hall,”
she meditated, summing up the evening. She was thirty years of age, and
owing to the number of her sisters and the seclusion of life in a
country parsonage had as yet had no proposal of marriage. The hour of
confidences was often a sad one, and she had been known to jump into
bed, treating her hair unkindly, feeling herself overlooked by life in
comparison with others. She was a big, well-made woman, the red lying
upon her cheeks in patches that were too well defined, but her serious
anxiety gave her a kind of beauty.
She was just about to pull back the bed-clothes when she exclaimed,
“Oh, but I’m forgetting,” and went to her writing-table. A brown volume
lay there stamped with the figure of the year. She proceeded to write
in the square ugly hand of a mature child, as she wrote daily year
after year, keeping the diaries, though she seldom looked at them.
“A.M.—Talked to Mrs. H. Elliot about country neighbours. She knows the
Manns; also the Selby-Carroways. How small the world is! Like her. Read
a chapter of _Miss Appleby’s Adventure_ to Aunt E. P.M.—Played
lawn-tennis with Mr. Perrott and Evelyn M. Don’t _like_ Mr. P. Have a
feeling that he is not ‘quite,’ though clever certainly. Beat them. Day
splendid, view wonderful. One gets used to no trees, though much too
bare at first. Cards after dinner. Aunt E. cheerful, though twingy, she
says. Mem.: _ask about damp sheets_.”
She knelt in prayer, and then lay down in bed, tucking the blankets
comfortably about her, and in a few minutes her breathing showed that
she was asleep. With its profoundly peaceful sighs and hesitations it
resembled that of a cow standing up to its knees all night through in
the long grass.
A glance into the next room revealed little more than a nose, prominent
above the sheets. Growing accustomed to the darkness, for the windows
were open and showed grey squares with splinters of starlight, one
could distinguish a lean form, terribly like the body of a dead person,
the body indeed of William Pepper, asleep too. Thirty-six,
thirty-seven, thirty-eight—here were three Portuguese men of business,
asleep presumably, since a snore came with the regularity of a great
ticking clock. Thirty-nine was a corner room, at the end of the
passage, but late though it was—“One” struck gently downstairs—a line
of light under the door showed that some one was still awake.
“How late you are, Hugh!” a woman, lying in bed, said in a peevish but
solicitous voice. Her husband was brushing his teeth, and for some
moments did not answer.
“You should have gone to sleep,” he replied. “I was talking to
Thornbury.”
“But you know that I never can sleep when I’m waiting for you,” she
said.
To that he made no answer, but only remarked, “Well then, we’ll turn
out the light.” They were silent.
The faint but penetrating pulse of an electric bell could now be heard
in the corridor. Old Mrs. Paley, having woken hungry but without her
spectacles, was summoning her maid to find the biscuit-box. The maid
having answered the bell, drearily respectful even at this hour though
muffled in a mackintosh, the passage was left in silence. Downstairs
all was empty and dark; but on the upper floor a light still burnt in
the room where the boots had dropped so heavily above Miss Allan’s
head. Here was the gentleman who, a few hours previously, in the shade
of the curtain, had seemed to consist entirely of legs. Deep in an
arm-chair he was reading the third volume of Gibbon’s _History of the
Decline and Fall of Rome_ by candle-light. As he read he knocked the
ash automatically, now and again, from his cigarette and turned the
page, while a whole procession of splendid sentences entered his
capacious brow and went marching through his brain in order. It seemed
likely that this process might continue for an hour or more, until the
entire regiment had shifted its quarters, had not the door opened, and
the young man, who was inclined to be stout, come in with large naked
feet.
“Oh, Hirst, what I forgot to say was—”
“Two minutes,” said Hirst, raising his finger.
He safely stowed away the last words of the paragraph.
“What was it you forgot to say?” he asked.
“D’you think you _do_ make enough allowance for feelings?” asked Mr.
Hewet. He had again forgotten what he had meant to say.
After intense contemplation of the immaculate Gibbon Mr. Hirst smiled
at the question of his friend. He laid aside his book and considered.
“I should call yours a singularly untidy mind,” he observed. “Feelings?
Aren’t they just what we do allow for? We put love up there, and all
the rest somewhere down below.” With his left hand he indicated the top
of a pyramid, and with his right the base.
“But you didn’t get out of bed to tell me that,” he added severely.
“I got out of bed,” said Hewet vaguely, “merely to talk I suppose.”
“Meanwhile I shall undress,” said Hirst. When naked of all but his
shirt, and bent over the basin, Mr. Hirst no longer impressed one with
the majesty of his intellect, but with the pathos of his young yet ugly
body, for he stooped, and he was so thin that there were dark lines
between the different bones of his neck and shoulders.
“Women interest me,” said Hewet, who, sitting on the bed with his chin
resting on his knees, paid no attention to the undressing of Mr. Hirst.
“They’re so stupid,” said Hirst. “You’re sitting on my pyjamas.”
“I suppose they _are_ stupid?” Hewet wondered.
“There can’t be two opinions about that, I imagine,” said Hirst,
hopping briskly across the room, “unless you’re in love—that fat woman
Warrington?” he enquired.
“Not one fat woman—all fat women,” Hewet sighed.
“The women I saw to-night were not fat,” said Hirst, who was taking
advantage of Hewet’s company to cut his toe-nails.
“Describe them,” said Hewet.
“You know I can’t describe things!” said Hirst. “They were much like
other women, I should think. They always are.”
“No; that’s where we differ,” said Hewet. “I say everything’s
different. No two people are in the least the same. Take you and me
now.”
“So I used to think once,” said Hirst. “But now they’re all types.
Don’t take us,—take this hotel. You could draw circles round the whole
lot of them, and they’d never stray outside.”
(“You can kill a hen by doing that”), Hewet murmured.
“Mr. Hughling Elliot, Mrs. Hughling Elliot, Miss Allan, Mr. and Mrs.
Thornbury—one circle,” Hirst continued. “Miss Warrington, Mr. Arthur
Venning, Mr. Perrott, Evelyn M. another circle; then there are a whole
lot of natives; finally ourselves.”
“Are we all alone in our circle?” asked Hewet.
“Quite alone,” said Hirst. “You try to get out, but you can’t. You only
make a mess of things by trying.”
“I’m not a hen in a circle,” said Hewet. “I’m a dove on a tree-top.”
“I wonder if this is what they call an ingrowing toe-nail?” said Hirst,
examining the big toe on his left foot.
“I flit from branch to branch,” continued Hewet. “The world is
profoundly pleasant.” He lay back on the bed, upon his arms.
“I wonder if it’s really nice to be as vague as you are?” asked Hirst,
looking at him. “It’s the lack of continuity—that’s what’s so odd about
you,” he went on. “At the age of twenty-seven, which is nearly thirty,
you seem to have drawn no conclusions. A party of old women excites you
still as though you were three.”
Hewet contemplated the angular young man who was neatly brushing the
rims of his toe-nails into the fire-place in silence for a moment.
“I respect you, Hirst,” he remarked.
“I envy you—some things,” said Hirst. “One: your capacity for not
thinking; two: people like you better than they like me. Women like
you, I suppose.”
“I wonder whether that isn’t really what matters most?” said Hewet.
Lying now flat on the bed he waved his hand in vague circles above him.
“Of course it is,” said Hirst. “But that’s not the difficulty. The
difficulty is, isn’t it, to find an appropriate object?”
“There are no female hens in your circle?” asked Hewet.
“Not the ghost of one,” said Hirst.
Although they had known each other for three years Hirst had never yet
heard the true story of Hewet’s loves. In general conversation it was
taken for granted that they were many, but in private the subject was
allowed to lapse. The fact that he had money enough to do no work, and
that he had left Cambridge after two terms owing to a difference with
the authorities, and had then travelled and drifted, made his life
strange at many points where his friends’ lives were much of a piece.
“I don’t see your circles—I don’t see them,” Hewet continued. “I see a
thing like a teetotum spinning in and out—knocking into things—dashing
from side to side—collecting numbers—more and more and more, till the
whole place is thick with them. Round and round they go—out there, over
the rim—out of sight.”
His fingers showed that the waltzing teetotums had spun over the edge
of the counterpane and fallen off the bed into infinity.
“Could you contemplate three weeks alone in this hotel?” asked Hirst,
after a moment’s pause.
Hewet proceeded to think.
“The truth of it is that one never is alone, and one never is in
company,” he concluded.
“Meaning?” said Hirst.
“Meaning? Oh, something about bubbles—auras—what d’you call ’em? You
can’t see my bubble; I can’t see yours; all we see of each other is a
speck, like the wick in the middle of that flame. The flame goes about
with us everywhere; it’s not ourselves exactly, but what we feel; the
world is short, or people mainly; all kinds of people.”
“A nice streaky bubble yours must be!” said Hirst.
“And supposing my bubble could run into some one else’s bubble—”
“And they both burst?” put in Hirst.
“Then—then—then—” pondered Hewet, as if to himself, “it would be an
e-nor-mous world,” he said, stretching his arms to their full width, as
though even so they could hardly clasp the billowy universe, for when
he was with Hirst he always felt unusually sanguine and vague.
“I don’t think you altogether as foolish as I used to, Hewet,” said
Hirst. “You don’t know what you mean but you try to say it.”
“But aren’t you enjoying yourself here?” asked Hewet.
“On the whole—yes,” said Hirst. “I like observing people. I like
looking at things. This country is amazingly beautiful. Did you notice
how the top of the mountain turned yellow to-night? Really we must take
our lunch and spend the day out. You’re getting disgustingly fat.” He
pointed at the calf of Hewet’s bare leg.
“We’ll get up an expedition,” said Hewet energetically. “We’ll ask the
entire hotel. We’ll hire donkeys and—”
“Oh, Lord!” said Hirst, “do shut it! I can see Miss Warrington and Miss
Allan and Mrs. Elliot and the rest squatting on the stones and
quacking, ‘How jolly!’”
“We’ll ask Venning and Perrott and Miss Murgatroyd—every one we can lay
hands on,” went on Hewet. “What’s the name of the little old
grasshopper with the eyeglasses? Pepper?—Pepper shall lead us.”
“Thank God, you’ll never get the donkeys,” said Hirst.
“I must make a note of that,” said Hewet, slowly dropping his feet to
the floor. “Hirst escorts Miss Warrington; Pepper advances alone on a
white ass; provisions equally distributed—or shall we hire a mule? The
matrons—there’s Mrs. Paley, by Jove!—share a carriage.”
“That’s where you’ll go wrong,” said Hirst. “Putting virgins among
matrons.”
“How long should you think that an expedition like that would take,
Hirst?” asked Hewet.
“From twelve to sixteen hours I would say,” said Hirst. “The time
usually occupied by a first confinement.”
“It will need considerable organisation,” said Hewet. He was now
padding softly round the room, and stopped to stir the books on the
table. They lay heaped one upon another.
“We shall want some poets too,” he remarked. “Not Gibbon; no; d’you
happen to have _Modern Love_ or _John Donne_? You see, I contemplate
pauses when people get tired of looking at the view, and then it would
be nice to read something rather difficult aloud.”
“Mrs. Paley _will_ enjoy herself,” said Hirst.
“Mrs. Paley will enjoy it certainly,” said Hewet. “It’s one of the
saddest things I know—the way elderly ladies cease to read poetry. And
yet how appropriate this is:
I speak as one who plumbs
Life’s dim profound,
One who at length can sound
Clear views and certain.
But—after love what comes?
A scene that lours,
A few sad vacant hours,
And then, the Curtain.
I daresay Mrs. Paley is the only one of us who can really understand
that.”
“We’ll ask her,” said Hirst. “Please, Hewet, if you must go to bed,
draw my curtain. Few things distress me more than the moonlight.”
Hewet retreated, pressing the poems of Thomas Hardy beneath his arm,
and in their beds next door to each other both the young men were soon
asleep.
Between the extinction of Hewet’s candle and the rising of a dusky
Spanish boy who was the first to survey the desolation of the hotel in
the early morning, a few hours of silence intervened. One could almost
hear a hundred people breathing deeply, and however wakeful and
restless it would have been hard to escape sleep in the middle of so
much sleep. Looking out of the windows, there was only darkness to be
seen. All over the shadowed half of the world people lay prone, and a
few flickering lights in empty streets marked the places where their
cities were built. Red and yellow omnibuses were crowding each other in
Piccadilly; sumptuous women were rocking at a standstill; but here in
the darkness an owl flitted from tree to tree, and when the breeze
lifted the branches the moon flashed as if it were a torch. Until all
people should awake again the houseless animals were abroad, the tigers
and the stags, and the elephants coming down in the darkness to drink
at pools. The wind at night blowing over the hills and woods was purer
and fresher than the wind by day, and the earth, robbed of detail, more
mysterious than the earth coloured and divided by roads and fields. For
six hours this profound beauty existed, and then as the east grew
whiter and whiter the ground swam to the surface, the roads were
revealed, the smoke rose and the people stirred, and the sun shone upon
the windows of the hotel at Santa Marina until they were uncurtained,
and the gong blaring all through the house gave notice of breakfast.
Directly breakfast was over, the ladies as usual circled vaguely,
picking up papers and putting them down again, about the hall.
“And what are you going to do to-day?” asked Mrs. Elliot drifting up
against Miss Warrington.
Mrs. Elliot, the wife of Hughling the Oxford Don, was a short woman,
whose expression was habitually plaintive. Her eyes moved from thing to
thing as though they never found anything sufficiently pleasant to rest
upon for any length of time.
“I’m going to try to get Aunt Emma out into the town,” said Susan.
“She’s not seen a thing yet.”
“I call it so spirited of her at her age,” said Mrs. Elliot, “coming
all this way from her own fireside.”
“Yes, we always tell her she’ll die on board ship,” Susan replied. “She
was born on one,” she added.
“In the old days,” said Mrs. Elliot, “a great many people were. I
always pity the poor women so! We’ve got a lot to complain of!” She
shook her head. Her eyes wandered about the table, and she remarked
irrelevantly, “The poor little Queen of Holland! Newspaper reporters
practically, one may say, at her bedroom door!”
“Were you talking of the Queen of Holland?” said the pleasant voice of
Miss Allan, who was searching for the thick pages of _The Times_ among
a litter of thin foreign sheets.
“I always envy any one who lives in such an excessively flat country,”
she remarked.
“How very strange!” said Mrs. Elliot. “I find a flat country so
depressing.”
“I’m afraid you can’t be very happy here then, Miss Allan,” said Susan.
“On the contrary,” said Miss Allan, “I am exceedingly fond of
mountains.” Perceiving _The Times_ at some distance, she moved off to
secure it.
“Well, I must find my husband,” said Mrs. Elliot, fidgeting away.
“And I must go to my aunt,” said Miss Warrington, and taking up the
duties of the day they moved away.
Whether the flimsiness of foreign sheets and the coarseness of their
type is any proof of frivolity and ignorance, there is no doubt that
English people scarce consider news read there as news, any more than a
programme bought from a man in the street inspires confidence in what
it says. A very respectable elderly pair, having inspected the long
tables of newspapers, did not think it worth their while to read more
than the headlines.
“The debate on the fifteenth should have reached us by now,” Mrs.
Thornbury murmured. Mr. Thornbury, who was beautifully clean and had
red rubbed into his handsome worn face like traces of paint on a
weather-beaten wooden figure, looked over his glasses and saw that Miss
Allan had _The Times_.
The couple therefore sat themselves down in arm-chairs and waited.
“Ah, there’s Mr. Hewet,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “Mr. Hewet,” she
continued, “do come and sit by us. I was telling my husband how much
you reminded me of a dear old friend of mine—Mary Umpleby. She was a
most delightful woman, I assure you. She grew roses. We used to stay
with her in the old days.”
“No young man likes to have it said that he resembles an elderly
spinster,” said Mr. Thornbury.
“On the contrary,” said Mr. Hewet, “I always think it a compliment to
remind people of some one else. But Miss Umpleby—why did she grow
roses?”
“Ah, poor thing,” said Mrs. Thornbury, “that’s a long story. She had
gone through dreadful sorrows. At one time I think she would have lost
her senses if it hadn’t been for her garden. The soil was very much
against her—a blessing in disguise; she had to be up at dawn—out in all
weathers. And then there are creatures that eat roses. But she
triumphed. She always did. She was a brave soul.” She sighed deeply but
at the same time with resignation.
“I did not realise that I was monopolising the paper,” said Miss Allan,
coming up to them.
“We were so anxious to read about the debate,” said Mrs. Thornbury,
accepting it on behalf of her husband.
“One doesn’t realise how interesting a debate can be until one has sons
in the navy. My interests are equally balanced, though; I have sons in
the army too; and one son who makes speeches at the Union—my baby!”
“Hirst would know him, I expect,” said Hewet.
“Mr. Hirst has such an interesting face,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “But I
feel one ought to be very clever to talk to him. Well, William?” she
enquired, for Mr. Thornbury grunted.
“They’re making a mess of it,” said Mr. Thornbury. He had reached the
second column of the report, a spasmodic column, for the Irish members
had been brawling three weeks ago at Westminster over a question of
naval efficiency. After a disturbed paragraph or two, the column of
print once more ran smoothly.
“You have read it?” Mrs. Thornbury asked Miss Allan.
“No, I am ashamed to say I have only read about the discoveries in
Crete,” said Miss Allan.
“Oh, but I would give so much to realise the ancient world!” cried Mrs.
Thornbury. “Now that we old people are alone,—we’re on our second
honeymoon,—I am really going to put myself to school again. After all
we are _founded_ on the past, aren’t we, Mr. Hewet? My soldier son says
that there is still a great deal to be learnt from Hannibal. One ought
to know so much more than one does. Somehow when I read the paper, I
begin with the debates first, and, before I’ve done, the door always
opens—we’re a very large party at home—and so one never does think
enough about the ancients and all they’ve done for us. But _you_ begin
at the beginning, Miss Allan.”
“When I think of the Greeks I think of them as naked black men,” said
Miss Allan, “which is quite incorrect, I’m sure.”
“And you, Mr. Hirst?” said Mrs. Thornbury, perceiving that the gaunt
young man was near. “I’m sure you read everything.”
“I confine myself to cricket and crime,” said Hirst. “The worst of
coming from the upper classes,” he continued, “is that one’s friends
are never killed in railway accidents.”
Mr. Thornbury threw down the paper, and emphatically dropped his
eyeglasses. The sheets fell in the middle of the group, and were eyed
by them all.
“It’s not gone well?” asked his wife solicitously.
Hewet picked up one sheet and read, “A lady was walking yesterday in
the streets of Westminster when she perceived a cat in the window of a
deserted house. The famished animal—”
“I shall be out of it anyway,” Mr. Thornbury interrupted peevishly.
“Cats are often forgotten,” Miss Allan remarked.
“Remember, William, the Prime Minister has reserved his answer,” said
Mrs. Thornbury.
“At the age of eighty, Mr. Joshua Harris of Eeles Park, Brondesbury,
has had a son,” said Hirst.
“. . . The famished animal, which had been noticed by workmen for some
days, was rescued, but—by Jove! it bit the man’s hand to pieces!”
“Wild with hunger, I suppose,” commented Miss Allan.
“You’re all neglecting the chief advantage of being abroad,” said Mr.
Hughling Elliot, who had joined the group. “You might read your news in
French, which is equivalent to reading no news at all.”
Mr. Elliot had a profound knowledge of Coptic, which he concealed as
far as possible, and quoted French phrases so exquisitely that it was
hard to believe that he could also speak the ordinary tongue. He had an
immense respect for the French.
“Coming?” he asked the two young men. “We ought to start before it’s
really hot.”
“I beg of you not to walk in the heat, Hugh,” his wife pleaded, giving
him an angular parcel enclosing half a chicken and some raisins.
“Hewet will be our barometer,” said Mr. Elliot. “He will melt before I
shall.” Indeed, if so much as a drop had melted off his spare ribs, the
bones would have lain bare. The ladies were left alone now, surrounding
_The Times_ which lay upon the floor. Miss Allan looked at her father’s
watch.
“Ten minutes to eleven,” she observed.
“Work?” asked Mrs. Thornbury.
“Work,” replied Miss Allan.
“What a fine creature she is!” murmured Mrs. Thornbury, as the square
figure in its manly coat withdrew.
“And I’m sure she has a hard life,” sighed Mrs. Elliot.
“Oh, it _is_ a hard life,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “Unmarried
women—earning their livings—it’s the hardest life of all.”
“Yet she seems pretty cheerful,” said Mrs. Elliot.
“It must be very interesting,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “I envy her her
knowledge.”
“But that isn’t what women want,” said Mrs. Elliot.
“I’m afraid it’s all a great many can hope to have,” sighed Mrs.
Thornbury. “I believe that there are more of us than ever now. Sir
Harley Lethbridge was telling me only the other day how difficult it is
to find boys for the navy—partly because of their teeth, it is true.
And I have heard young women talk quite openly of—”
“Dreadful, dreadful!” exclaimed Mrs. Elliot. “The crown, as one may
call it, of a woman’s life. I, who know what it is to be childless—”
she sighed and ceased.
“But we must not be hard,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “The conditions are so
much changed since I was a young woman.”
“Surely _maternity_ does not change,” said Mrs. Elliot.
“In some ways we can learn a great deal from the young,” said Mrs.
Thornbury. “I learn so much from my own daughters.”
“I believe that Hughling really doesn’t mind,” said Mrs. Elliot. “But
then he has his work.”
“Women without children can do so much for the children of others,”
observed Mrs. Thornbury gently.
“I sketch a great deal,” said Mrs. Elliot, “but that isn’t really an
occupation. It’s so disconcerting to find girls just beginning doing
better than one does oneself! And nature’s difficult—very difficult!”
“Are there not institutions—clubs—that you could help?” asked Mrs.
Thornbury.
“They are so exhausting,” said Mrs. Elliot. “I look strong, because of
my colour; but I’m not; the youngest of eleven never is.”
“If the mother is careful before,” said Mrs. Thornbury judicially,
“there is no reason why the size of the family should make any
difference. And there is no training like the training that brothers
and sisters give each other. I am sure of that. I have seen it with my
own children. My eldest boy Ralph, for instance—”
But Mrs. Elliot was inattentive to the elder lady’s experience, and her
eyes wandered about the hall.
“My mother had two miscarriages, I know,” she said suddenly. “The first
because she met one of those great dancing bears—they shouldn’t be
allowed; the other—it was a horrid story—our cook had a child and there
was a dinner party. So I put my dyspepsia down to that.”
“And a miscarriage is so much worse than a confinement,” Mrs. Thornbury
murmured absentmindedly, adjusting her spectacles and picking up _The
Times_. Mrs. Elliot rose and fluttered away.
When she had heard what one of the million voices speaking in the paper
had to say, and noticed that a cousin of hers had married a clergyman
at Minehead—ignoring the drunken women, the golden animals of Crete,
the movements of battalions, the dinners, the reforms, the fires, the
indignant, the learned and benevolent, Mrs. Thornbury went upstairs to
write a letter for the mail.
The paper lay directly beneath the clock, the two together seeming to
represent stability in a changing world. Mr. Perrott passed through;
Mr. Venning poised for a second on the edge of a table. Mrs. Paley was
wheeled past. Susan followed. Mr. Venning strolled after her.
Portuguese military families, their clothes suggesting late rising in
untidy bedrooms, trailed across, attended by confidential nurses
carrying noisy children. As midday drew on, and the sun beat straight
upon the roof, an eddy of great flies droned in a circle; iced drinks
were served under the palms; the long blinds were pulled down with a
shriek, turning all the light yellow. The clock now had a silent hall
to tick in, and an audience of four or five somnolent merchants. By
degrees white figures with shady hats came in at the door, admitting a
wedge of the hot summer day, and shutting it out again. After resting
in the dimness for a minute, they went upstairs. Simultaneously, the
clock wheezed one, and the gong sounded, beginning softly, working
itself into a frenzy, and ceasing. There was a pause. Then all those
who had gone upstairs came down; cripples came, planting both feet on
the same step lest they should slip; prim little girls came, holding
the nurse’s finger; fat old men came still buttoning waistcoats. The
gong had been sounded in the garden, and by degrees recumbent figures
rose and strolled in to eat, since the time had come for them to feed
again. There were pools and bars of shade in the garden even at midday,
where two or three visitors could lie working or talking at their ease.
Owing to the heat of the day, luncheon was generally a silent meal,
when people observed their neighbors and took stock of any new faces
there might be, hazarding guesses as to who they were and what they
did. Mrs. Paley, although well over seventy and crippled in the legs,
enjoyed her food and the peculiarities of her fellow-beings. She was
seated at a small table with Susan.
“I shouldn’t like to say what _she_ is!” she chuckled, surveying a tall
woman dressed conspicuously in white, with paint in the hollows of her
cheeks, who was always late, and always attended by a shabby female
follower, at which remark Susan blushed, and wondered why her aunt said
such things.
Lunch went on methodically, until each of the seven courses was left in
fragments and the fruit was merely a toy, to be peeled and sliced as a
child destroys a daisy, petal by petal. The food served as an
extinguisher upon any faint flame of the human spirit that might
survive the midday heat, but Susan sat in her room afterwards, turning
over and over the delightful fact that Mr. Venning had come to her in
the garden, and had sat there quite half an hour while she read aloud
to her aunt. Men and women sought different corners where they could
lie unobserved, and from two to four it might be said without
exaggeration that the hotel was inhabited by bodies without souls.
Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly
demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the
hungry hours. Towards four o’clock the human spirit again began to lick
the body, as a flame licks a black promontory of coal. Mrs. Paley felt
it unseemly to open her toothless jaw so widely, though there was no
one near, and Mrs. Elliot surveyed her round flushed face anxiously in
the looking-glass.
Half an hour later, having removed the traces of sleep, they met each
other in the hall, and Mrs. Paley observed that she was going to have
her tea.
“You like your tea too, don’t you?” she said, and invited Mrs. Elliot,
whose husband was still out, to join her at a special table which she
had placed for her under a tree.
“A little silver goes a long way in this country,” she chuckled.
She sent Susan back to fetch another cup.
“They have such excellent biscuits here,” she said, contemplating a
plateful. “Not sweet biscuits, which I don’t like—dry biscuits . . .
Have you been sketching?”
“Oh, I’ve done two or three little daubs,” said Mrs. Elliot, speaking
rather louder than usual. “But it’s so difficult after Oxfordshire,
where there are so many trees. The light’s so strong here. Some people
admire it, I know, but I find it very fatiguing.”
“I really don’t need cooking, Susan,” said Mrs. Paley, when her niece
returned. “I must trouble you to move me.” Everything had to be moved.
Finally the old lady was placed so that the light wavered over her, as
though she were a fish in a net. Susan poured out tea, and was just
remarking that they were having hot weather in Wiltshire too, when Mr.
Venning asked whether he might join them.
“It’s so nice to find a young man who doesn’t despise tea,” said Mrs.
Paley, regaining her good humour. “One of my nephews the other day
asked for a glass of sherry—at five o’clock! I told him he could get it
at the public house round the corner, but not in my drawing room.”
“I’d rather go without lunch than tea,” said Mr. Venning. “That’s not
strictly true. I want both.”
Mr. Venning was a dark young man, about thirty-two years of age, very
slapdash and confident in his manner, although at this moment obviously
a little excited. His friend Mr. Perrott was a barrister, and as Mr.
Perrott refused to go anywhere without Mr. Venning it was necessary,
when Mr. Perrott came to Santa Marina about a Company, for Mr. Venning
to come too. He was a barrister also, but he loathed a profession which
kept him indoors over books, and directly his widowed mother died he
was going, so he confided to Susan, to take up flying seriously, and
become partner in a large business for making aeroplanes. The talk
rambled on. It dealt, of course, with the beauties and singularities of
the place, the streets, the people, and the quantities of unowned
yellow dogs.
“Don’t you think it dreadfully cruel the way they treat dogs in this
country?” asked Mrs. Paley.
“I’d have ’em all shot,” said Mr. Venning.
“Oh, but the darling puppies,” said Susan.
“Jolly little chaps,” said Mr. Venning. “Look here, you’ve got nothing
to eat.” A great wedge of cake was handed Susan on the point of a
trembling knife. Her hand trembled too as she took it.
“I have such a dear dog at home,” said Mrs. Elliot.
“My parrot can’t stand dogs,” said Mrs. Paley, with the air of one
making a confidence. “I always suspect that he (or she) was teased by a
dog when I was abroad.”
“You didn’t get far this morning, Miss Warrington,” said Mr. Venning.
“It was hot,” she answered. Their conversation became private, owing to
Mrs. Paley’s deafness and the long sad history which Mrs. Elliot had
embarked upon of a wire-haired terrier, white with just one black spot,
belonging to an uncle of hers, which had committed suicide. “Animals do
commit suicide,” she sighed, as if she asserted a painful fact.
“Couldn’t we explore the town this evening?” Mr. Venning suggested.
“My aunt—” Susan began.
“You deserve a holiday,” he said. “You’re always doing things for other
people.”
“But that’s my life,” she said, under cover of refilling the teapot.
“That’s no one’s life,” he returned, “no young person’s. You’ll come?”
“I should like to come,” she murmured.
At this moment Mrs. Elliot looked up and exclaimed, “Oh, Hugh! He’s
bringing some one,” she added.
“He would like some tea,” said Mrs. Paley. “Susan, run and get some
cups—there are the two young men.”
“We’re thirsting for tea,” said Mr. Elliot. “You know Mr. Ambrose,
Hilda? We met on the hill.”
“He dragged me in,” said Ridley, “or I should have been ashamed. I’m
dusty and dirty and disagreeable.” He pointed to his boots which were
white with dust, while a dejected flower drooping in his buttonhole,
like an exhausted animal over a gate, added to the effect of length and
untidiness. He was introduced to the others. Mr. Hewet and Mr. Hirst
brought chairs, and tea began again, Susan pouring cascades of water
from pot to pot, always cheerfully, and with the competence of long
use.
“My wife’s brother,” Ridley explained to Hilda, whom he failed to
remember, “has a house here, which he has lent us. I was sitting on a
rock thinking of nothing at all when Elliot started up like a fairy in
a pantomime.”
“Our chicken got into the salt,” Hewet said dolefully to Susan. “Nor is
it true that bananas include moisture as well as sustenance.”
Hirst was already drinking.
“We’ve been cursing you,” said Ridley in answer to Mrs. Elliot’s kind
enquiries about his wife. “You tourists eat up all the eggs, Helen
tells me. That’s an eye-sore too”—he nodded his head at the hotel.
“Disgusting luxury, I call it. We live with pigs in the drawing-room.”
“The food is not at all what it ought to be, considering the price,”
said Mrs. Paley seriously. “But unless one goes to a hotel where is one
to go to?”
“Stay at home,” said Ridley. “I often wish I had! Everyone ought to
stay at home. But, of course, they won’t.”
Mrs. Paley conceived a certain grudge against Ridley, who seemed to be
criticising her habits after an acquaintance of five minutes.
“I believe in foreign travel myself,” she stated, “if one knows one’s
native land, which I think I can honestly say I do. I should not allow
any one to travel until they had visited Kent and Dorsetshire—Kent for
the hops, and Dorsetshire for its old stone cottages. There is nothing
to compare with them here.”
“Yes—I always think that some people like the flat and other people
like the downs,” said Mrs. Elliot rather vaguely.
Hirst, who had been eating and drinking without interruption, now lit a
cigarette, and observed, “Oh, but we’re all agreed by this time that
nature’s a mistake. She’s either very ugly, appallingly uncomfortable,
or absolutely terrifying. I don’t know which alarms me most—a cow or a
tree. I once met a cow in a field by night. The creature looked at me.
I assure you it turned my hair grey. It’s a disgrace that the animals
should be allowed to go at large.”
“And what did the cow think of _him_?” Venning mumbled to Susan, who
immediately decided in her own mind that Mr. Hirst was a dreadful young
man, and that although he had such an air of being clever he probably
wasn’t as clever as Arthur, in the ways that really matter.
“Wasn’t it Wilde who discovered the fact that nature makes no allowance
for hip-bones?” enquired Hughling Elliot. He knew by this time exactly
what scholarships and distinction Hirst enjoyed, and had formed a very
high opinion of his capacities.
But Hirst merely drew his lips together very tightly and made no reply.
Ridley conjectured that it was now permissible for him to take his
leave. Politeness required him to thank Mrs. Elliot for his tea, and to
add, with a wave of his hand, “You must come up and see us.”
The wave included both Hirst and Hewet, and Hewet answered, “I should
like it immensely.”
The party broke up, and Susan, who had never felt so happy in her life,
was just about to start for her walk in the town with Arthur, when Mrs.
Paley beckoned her back. She could not understand from the book how
Double Demon patience is played; and suggested that if they sat down
and worked it out together it would fill up the time nicely before
dinner.