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.