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.