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.”