LIVVY’S afternoon in Clonmore was such a great success that she forgot
the wool for her jumper. At first there had been uneasiness; she let
Lois drive while she looked carefully round the Square, went into the
Imperial Hotel to see if her father had left a stick and searched both
pavements of Cork Street, down which they drove from end to end. In
despair, she had just suggested going up to the tennis club to see was
there anyone there, when the rain came down--it had been threatening
all day, the mountains looked moist and close on their drive in. They
had to turn in to the Fogartys’. And there, to them anxiously awaiting
tea and social developments in Mrs. Fogarty’s artistic drawing-room,
entered severally all whom they wished to meet: Captain Carmichael,
Smith with Mrs. Vermont, finally Mr. Armstrong himself. Mr. Lesworth
did not appear (which, as Livvy whispered to friends, would be a
disappointment for Lois): it turned out that he was on extra duty. Mrs.
Fogarty had one of the narrow houses looking out on the Square; her
windows were screened from outside observation by cubes of evergreen;
between the pane and the evergreens rain fell darkly. Mrs. Fogarty’s
drawing-room was thronged with photographs; all the dear boys who for
years back had been garrisoned at Clonmore, many of whom, alas! had
been killed in that dreadful War. You could not stoop to put down
a cup on one of the little tables without a twinge of regret and
embarrassment, meeting the candid eyes of some dead young man. The
room was crowded with cushions that slid from the narrow seats of the
chairs and tumbled over the back of the sofa; cushions with pen-painted
sprays, with poker-worked kittens; very futurist cushions with bunches
of fruit appliques, dear old cushions with associations and feathers
bursting out at the seams. And there were cushions with Union Jacks
that she wouldn’t, she said, put away--not if They came at night and
stood in her room with pistols. And this was all the more noble in Mrs.
Fogarty in that she was a Catholic, with relations whose politics were
not above reproach at all. Mr. Fogarty was a retired solicitor; he
had no politics; he became very cross and reproachful when they were
discussed at the Club and said he supposed he could not help being a
philosopher. But he drank, which shows that nobody can be perfect. He
never appeared at tea.
As more and more people dropped in and the chairs gave out, the
subalterns pulled the cushions on to the floor and sat on them. Mrs.
Fogarty was delighted. The room warmed up, there was just enough air
left not to make one aware of discomfort in breathing. There was a
smell of wall-paper, tea and tea-cakes, polished Sam Browns and the
_Nuit d’Amour_ on Mrs. Vermont’s handkerchief which she pulled out
frequently to wipe honey from her fingers. They all felt very easy and
very Irish--the qualities radiated, perhaps, from Mrs. Fogarty, who sat
flushed with pleasure and hospitality, taking up rather more than half
of her own sofa. She wore a brown lace blouse and a tweed skirt, with a
green shell rope that swung and clinked on the teapot. Indeed, it was
all very harmonious; she did not know how she would have lived at all
without the military at Clonmore.
After tea, cigarettes went round, there was a kick and splutter of
patent lighters. Livvy said she would _not_ smoke, she would not
indeed: they might laugh but she was an old-fashioned girl. Her
continued protests attracted a good deal of attention, till she noticed
that old-fashioned girls were after all in the majority. The rector’s
daughters and Doreen Hartigan all sat looking approving and rather
unfinished about the mouth. So she accepted a strong cigarette of
Captain Carmichael’s, and Smith broke into a howl and said she had
sacrificed his ideal of womanhood. Mrs. Fogarty suggested music: they
helped her move the bowls and photographs off the grand piano which,
undraped and opened, gave out to Mrs. Vermont’s fingers some damp
chords. It was too bad, declared Mrs. Fogarty, listening doubtfully,
that their tuner had died in Cork and she hadn’t the heart to look for
another since. She said they must have real music, not just the piano.
Real talent was present, she added, and looked round compellingly.
There was a scuffle from which Mr. Smith was forced up. He stood with
his weight on one leg, stroking his hair detachedly, while Mrs.
Vermont looked through the music.
Mrs. Vermont remarked in passing to Captain Carmichael that this was a
country where the most extraordinary people died. “Well, I mean,” she
said, “who would have expected that of a piano-tuner? There was a house
where I went for tennis; they had had a parlourmaid there who died.
And last week I went for some little cakes to Fitzgerald’s and they
were all plain ones. I asked for some fancies and they said the woman
who did the icing had been taken, God rest her soul! Really, there’s
something grizzly about that cake shop.”
“In the midst of life we are in death, if you know what I mean,” said
Captain Carmichael.
Mr. Smith said he didn’t mind what he did sing: they all wanted
“The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God.” The piece was very tragic
and sinister, they all sat wrapt and Livvy did not notice that Mr.
Armstrong was pressing her arm till she felt Doreen Hartigan notice.
She moved away from him, closer to Lois.
“There’s a b-r-r-roken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carewe
And the Yellow God sits smiling up above.”
Lois blushed and let Livvy squeeze her hand. They both wondered: “How
should I feel under the circumstances?” The subalterns round all
looked dogged, clasping their knees, and thought of what one would
do for a woman. There was a stagger of emotional clapping. Then Mrs.
Vermont cried they were too ridiculous, the boys were sillies, she
couldn’t sing at all really, but if she must she would. So she sang
“Melisande,” which sent every girl there into a trance of self-pity; it
was so clearly written about oneself.
“With your eyes for fear and your mouth for love
And your youth for Pity’s grace
--All alone, Mel-lisande, all alone.”
The subalterns thought it pretty, high-class but rather dull, and
clapped with abandon when it was over. They cast up David Armstrong,
blushing and looking very much surprised at himself and all of them.
He blushed till half-way through “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” when he
became carried away and carried his audience with him.
“A woman came between us,
She was beautiful as Venus,”
brought a momentary return to consciousness. He looked at the ceiling
to avoid seeing Livvy and Lois. The atmosphere strained with cramp,
there was a creak of leather as subalterns readjusted their attitudes.
Mrs. Fogarty sent round a plate of chocolate biscuits. What a pity
it was, she said, that they did not get up some pierrots. When David
returned to his place Livvy was rose-pink; she fluttered at him her
remarkably long lashes.
“Indeed,” declared Mrs. Fogarty, looking from David to Smith (who had
no Christian name), “I never heard anything like the two of you. No,
not in Dublin in Horse Show week, nor in London nor Liverpool either.
You’re remarkably gifted. Isn’t it a pity they were all so sad? Shall
we all have a song now, something rousing, you know, that you sang in
the Great War?”
“Oh, do you know,” cried Mrs. Vermont, “I never knew Tipperary was
really a place till I came to Ireland?”
“Listen to her!” shouted Mrs. Fogarty, sweeping some more of the
cushions on to the floor. They were all delighted. Mrs. Vermont spread
her fingers over her face. Under cover of all this excitement Lois rose
and said they would have to go. She was sorry, because the party seemed
slightly insulted; also, Livvy was so happy. If David should die now,
she did not think Livvy would have to reproach herself. Also Captain
Carmichael had seemed intrigued; he had spoken mysteriously of the
adventures he had in the mountains and of the disguises he sometimes
put on. She knew he must feel like the Scarlet Pimpernel; she could
not help sympathizing. When she rose, he said they must meet again.
He and David came out to help them into their trap in the Imperial
yard, tucked them up in their rugs, relinquished them disapprovingly
to the exposures of the journey and stood looking after them with rain
dripping down their bronzed and military noses.
They drove home very much flushed and excited. The rain came down in
a curtain and hid the mountains; brown shining puddles were linked
along the road. They agreed about almost every one--especially Mrs.
Vermont and the D.I.’s niece--they laughed at each other over their
mackintosh collars, eyes bright with comprehension and sympathy, while
the strong rain stung their noses, then numbed them. Only when Livvy
said, “Melisande” was a beautiful poem, wasn’t it, something stiffened
in Lois: she said she thought it was sentimental.
“All that fuss, if you know what I mean, about just somebody.”
“Well, love is that, if you come to think,” said Livvy, “and myself I
think it is very satisfying.” There was something so very experienced
about the tip of her nose that Lois went flat. She felt that she
herself must be like a cake in which the flour had been forgotten.
She complained: “I wish we were not being late just this evening. Miss
Norton, you know, is arriving and I did so want to look nice. My nose
will not have thawed till half through dinner.”
“Oh, who is she? Is she pretty? How old is she? Is she engaged?”
“Never met her--though she often seems to have come to Danielstown.
But I feel she may be a person one wants to look pretty at. She annoys
Aunt Myra by being unfortunate in ways that are far more trying for
other people than for herself. When she was little she came over to
Danielstown to a children’s party: she fell down at once on the scraper
and cut her knee and there was a good deal of fuss and bloodiness. And
another time there were people to tea she started an argument about
Kimberley: they all stayed till past eight o’clock in the library
taking down the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ while other people who
were coming to dinner kept arriving. And another time she lost her
engagement ring at a tennis party and they were all very much upset.
She wrote afterwards to say it didn’t matter because she had broken
off her engagement anyhow and the man said he didn’t want the ring,
he said he wished it were at the bottom of the sea. I always thought
people breaking off an engagement went all noble, but that sounds to
me vindictive. Aunt Myra stayed put out.... She is twenty-nine.”
“It seems to me odd,” said Livvy, “that she shouldn’t have brought
anything off by this time. But I dare say,” she added, “that there has
been a disappointment.”
At this point they heard a lorry coming. Black and Tans, fortified
inwardly against the weather, were shouting and singing and now
and then firing shots. The voices, kept low by the rain, the grind
of wheels on the rocky road tunnelled through the close air with a
particular horror. To meet in this narrow way would be worse than a
dream; before the half-obscured lorry appeared Livvy had turned the
pony hurriedly up a boreen. They went up some way and waited under
a dripping thorn-bush: if Black and Tans saw one hiding they were
sarcastic. They heard the lorry grind past the mouth of the boreen with
apprehension, feeling exposed and hunted. Lois recalled with surprise
that she had cried for a whole afternoon before the War because she was
not some one in a historical novel: it had begun, she thought, because
they told her to go and practise. The road clear again, they discovered
they could not turn the trap; they had to back the pony out. “My!” said
Livvy, glaring at the horizon. “I wish I were driving a lorry! I should
like to crash those fellows head on!”
Just before eight, Livvy dropped Lois at Danielstown gates and drove
off, beating her pony into a gallop. Her father would kill her,
certainly! Lois raced up the avenue till she had no breath, then had
to crawl the rest of the way, recovering. Apprehensive, she strained
for the throb of the dinner-gong, a shriek of reproach from a window.
But her unpunctuality passed unnoticed: Miss Norton herself had only
just arrived. The hall was full of suitcases, a fur coat sprawled on a
chair, there was a tennis racquet, a bag of golf-clubs.
“Though where the poor female is going to play golf ...!” thought Lois.
“A nice coat.... Good, she has brought the _Tatler!_”
No one had even gone up to dress, from the library voices exclaimed
in excitement; voices complained insistently through the drawing-room
door. Lois undid the top buttons of her mackintosh and stepped out of
it, leaving a damp ring. Absently she wrung the water out of her hat.
She listened.
“She is certain she has left it in the train,” her aunt was saying;
“she says she would swear it was put in with her at Kingsbridge and
that she saw it after leaving Darramore. I do not believe myself in
travelling with suitcases, one is always counting--I believe in one
good trunk.”
“Looking at it from the porters’ point of view--” said Mrs.
Montmorency.
The library door clicked open and Laurence, looking quite enthusiastic,
shot into the hall. “She thinks telephoning will do it,” he said to
Lois. “I cannot make her understand about the Ballyhinch telephone.”
He disappeared, shouting, into the back part of the house. Evidently
there need be no hurry for anything. Lois sat on the hall table to
look at the _Tatler_. Early autumn fashions reminded her--this was an
opportunity to try on the fur coat. She hoped for the proper agony,
finding a coat she could not live without.... Her arms slipped silkily
through; her hands appeared, almost tiny, out of the huge cuffs. “Oh,
the escape!” she thought, pressing her chin down, fading, dying into
the rich heaviness. “Oh, the _escape_ in other people’s clothes!” And
she paced round the hall with new movements: a dark, rare, rather
wistful woman, elusive with jasmine. “No?” she said on an upward note:
the voice startled her, experience was behind it. She touched the fur
lightly, touched the edge of a cabinet--her finger-tips drummed with
a foreign sensitiveness. And the blurred panes, the steaming changing
trees, the lonely cave of the hall no longer had her consciousness in a
clamp. _How_ she could live, she felt. She would not need anyone, she
would be like an orchestra playing all to itself. “Is it mink?” she
wondered.
“You look so nice!” said Miss Norton, from the door of the library.
Lois went quite blank. “Oh,” she said.
“Where is that unfortunate Lady Naylor?”
“I can’t _think_-- Well, she is in the drawing-room.”
“Anyhow,” said Miss Norton, “I will go up now. When she sees me looking
less arrived she may forget about the suitcase.” She looked at Lois
earnestly. “I don’t lose things except coming here; I am efficient
really. But there seems a kind of fatality ...”
“I _know_.”
“Do you?” she said with interest, a keen disconcerting flash. “How odd
that you should!”
An approach seemed possible, imminent. Lois, feeling herself smiled
at, unwrapped herself from the coat without embarrassment. Miss Norton,
who did not seem surprised by the disappearance of the family, asked to
be shown where she was. They went upstairs together; she was on the top
floor, opposite Laurence.
“Who was the capable person? Who wouldn’t let me telephone--the young
man?”
“Laurence.”
“Oh, Laurence. And the other people: I couldn’t hear their names.
They seemed very much here--faintly resentful: I expect I must be
horrible for them. He at once accused me of having cut my knee on a
scraper--when I was three or four. Who did you say?”
“The Montmorencys.”
“Oh, Hugo and Francie? Of course I have heard of them. Isn’t she his
mother--practically?” Miss Norton took off her hat and looked at
herself in the glass dispassionately and closely. “God!” she remarked.
“He brushes her hair,” said Lois, laughing--in the sharp unshadowy
atmosphere produced by Miss Norton it sounded more of a giggle--and
swinging with her back against the edge of the door.
“Oh, then it is mutual.”
“I knew him best when I was a child.”
“Yes, he looks like that. Thank you so much; I think I have got
everything. Yes, heaps of hot water. Wouldn’t you like to go now: I
mean, won’t there be dinner?... Oh, Lois!”
Lois, from over the threshold, came back willingly. “Mm?” she said.
“I mean, you are Lois, aren’t you? I’ve heard so much ... No, don’t
be late: I should hate you to help me.” Miss Norton had taken her coat
off and stood in a frilled shirt looking round distastefully at her
suitcases. “Go,” she said, “do really.”
Lois, half-way down the gallery, met Laurence coming up. “Mm?” said
Laurence.
“I think she seems quite mad,” said Lois doubtfully.
“You would,” replied Laurence and went past her coldly.
X
ONE did not lightly telephone. There was a telephone six miles away,
at Ballyhinch, but its use made excessive demands upon the sympathy
and attention of the post-mistress. Marda could not understand--as
Sir Richard said, one would think she had come from America. From all
their angles she seemed to them very modern. They sat on the steps
after breakfast, waiting for post to come, discussing what they should
do. There was something agonizing to Sir Richard in the thought of
that suitcase. Marda said, it would not have mattered at all but that
her tennis shoes seemed to be in it. It was quite a relief when the
postman settled the matter by saying there had been another raid last
night in the Brittas direction and that all the wires were down again.
It had been a great raid, the postman said; if the boys had not fled
it would have been almost a battle. What times, said Francie, looking
at Marda doubtfully, they did live in! But other times, said Marda,
other disadvantages. Nobody hurt, they hoped? Well, said the postman,
the Black and Tans had been fired on, but why would they not be, they
themselves firing to the left and right continually? It seemed two of
them ones had pitched from the lorry the way you would think they’d be
killed and the boys had bolted, leaving the two lying.
“How do you know?” said Marda. The postman, looking austerely at her,
asked how would one help hearing? Though it was not for him to say what
was true and what was what you would hear. Sir Richard agreed with
this hastily and with some warmth: he did not want to have the postman
discouraged.
Marda received her six letters as a matter of course and glanced them
through sceptically. Lois watched her. Putting the letters away Marda
suggested that, since Laurence was so practical, he should drive her
into Clonmore or Ballydarra to buy more tennis shoes. Laurence feared
he did not drive the car nicely: he could avoid things but he was
inclined to wobble.
Sir Richard had disappeared on his morning round; how much of his corn
had been “laid” by the rain last night he did not like to imagine; it
was better to know. The rain had ceased before breakfast; loud drops
still drummed through the leaves; the trees with their rainy smell
were a wall of moisture. Thin vapours trailed on the sky over an
intermittent brightness; distances showed up thinly, as though painted.
“The end of our weather,” said poor Francie.
“But I feel,” persisted Marda, “I must have tennis shoes. I don’t mind
wobbling.”
“Laurence is more of the intellectual type,” explained Francie.
“I don’t think that matters.”
“It does with a car,” said Lois.
“I have never consciously driven _you_,” said her cousin coldly.
Marda laughed; she got up and stood on the steps. Fixed in their
row, the others all looked up at her. She was tall; her back, as she
stood looking over the fields, was like a young man’s in its vigorous
slightness. She escaped the feminine pear-shape, her shoulders were
square, legs long from the knee down. Her light-brown dress slipped
and fitted with careless accuracy, defining spareness negatively under
its slack folds. Sophistication opened further horizons to Lois. Marda
gathered her strung cornelians in one hand into a bunch at her throat;
they slipped down the nape of her neck. Standing vaguely she had still
that quality of directedness--from which they all swerved off in their
different ways. A hardy unawareness of self in her heightened one’s
own consciousness. Her lightest look watched, her casual listening
assessed, her speech was a lightning attack on one’s integrity out of
the stronghold of her indifference.
They remained sitting behind her with a vague sensation of having
been abandoned. Hugo came out, shut the glass door with precision and
blinked at the sky. “Clearing,” he said, then asked Marda to come for a
turn. Exercise seemed the order of the morning; Lois and Laurence were
later to go to the village with messages. Francie was waiting to go to
the garden with Lady Naylor.
“Am I or am I not to drive her?” wondered Laurence aloud, with
fatalism, looking after Miss Norton.
“She’ll certainly let you know.” Francie’s little ironical smile sent
her cheeks up, their faint flush wavering, under her eyes. She was
not so simple. Her diffidence, her inquiring softness, an outward
“laciness” of her personality--into which impressions seemingly
filtered like light, diffusedly, making no impact--covered a structure
of delicate hardness. She was in spirit insistent, tenacious and quick
in antagonisms; complexity tightened, as had been her delicate body’s,
by constant resistance to pain. She gave hospitality to the ever-living
Laura, she invited claims from Mrs. Archie Trent, she would have
endowed Lois, but she watched Marda turn beside Hugo into the beech
walk with raised brows, a cat’s blank unsparing lucidity.
“She’s very positive,” said Laurence, still looking after them.
“Positive about what?” asked Lois eagerly. Laurence held his breath
with annoyance and pulled up a sock.
Marda wanted nothing of Mr. Montmorency but entertainment. She was
an experienced fellow-visitor. He interested her; his negativeness
was startling. She had heard of him, and of it, in all parts of the
country, had arrived at several houses into a loud reaction, a kind
of indignant excitement following his departure. Her acquiescence
in finding him so exactly as he had been described was tempered by
incredulity, almost shock. And she could define in him qualities which
her friends in the rush of discussion had slurred or had overshot:
one, a kind of drawn-back apprehension in his approaches, as though
something bright were being brandished before his eyes. His look,
coming wavering round this interruption, had, in regard to herself, a
peculiar intensity. She was already real to him as a woman.
He now swung his blackthorn, slashing the air widely. “I remember this
walk,” she said. “I seem to have been here yesterday. But I thought it
was somewhere in Kerry, at Castle Reagh.”
“Oh no, it is here,” he said wisely. They laughed. Down the walk,
brightening air slipped like gauze round the beech trunks; great pewter
limbs went turning and straining up with the sheen of muscles. Drops,
infrequent and startling, loudly fell on his hat brim, icily on her
shoulders through the mesh of her dress. The path’s perspective was a
tunnel of glass. Her companion’s lameness of thought, the faltering
silence produced a kind of vacuum in her; she covered a yawn.
“This is not a good morning,” he suggested, “to walk under trees.”
“Really the worst possible.”
“Oh ... had we better--?” However, they walked on.
“I always come here,” he said in extenuation. “My turn to the right’s
mechanical. I was here as a boy, you know.”
“Were you here when I bled so much at that children’s party?”
“Not actually, but I have always heard of it. Didn’t you lose a ring?”
“At another party, at a more suitable age. It was the most lovely ring
I have ever had--Regent Street. The jeweller said it must be emeralds
because the lady was Irish and Timothy fully agreed with him. I had had
no idea I had such an expensive nationality.”
“What a pity!”
“Yes, those things are always a pity.”
He was not sure how much she included. “Did your--did Timothy mind?”
“Not so much as the Naylors. Later, he was killed on the Somme. But he
had two sons first, so it all came right--I mean, he married.”
“Oh yes ... I suppose you are often here? I have often heard of you.
And at Johnstown and Ballyduff and up in the North I have heard you
expected. But I was always going. Once, I believe, we crossed at an
avenue gate.”
The fact was, she acknowledged with a laugh, that they both visited
incorrigibly. She knew also, she told him, that he not only visited but
travelled; he had been almost everywhere but Canada.
“But I really should not have come back here,” she said. “There is
something in Lady Naylor’s eye: a despairing optimism. I feel that
suitcase won’t be the end of me here. There will be a raid and I shall
be shot on the avenue, not even fatally, or Laurence will take me out
and upset that car. Then really she will never forgive me, though the
efforts she makes will follow me over Europe.... How far do you think
this war is going to go? Will there ever be anything we can all do
except not notice?”
“Don’t ask _me_,” he said, but sighed sharply as though beneath the
pressure of omniscience. “A few more hundred deaths, I suppose, on our
side--which is no side--rather scared, rather isolated, not expressing
anything except tenacity to something that isn’t there--that never
was there. And deprived of heroism by this wet kind of smother of
commiseration. What’s the matter with this country is the matter with
the lot of us individually--our sense of personality is a sense of
outrage and we’ll never get outside of it.”
But the hold of the country _was_ that, she considered, it could be
thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted. Or seemed so--“Like
Shakespeare,” she added more vaguely, “or isn’t it?... But now tell
me,” she said, “about Lois?”
“Lois?” He was guiltily startled, thinking of Laura’s daughter.
“Lois--haven’t you noticed her? She sat beside you at dinner.”
He feared he was no good at people, he was preparing to say--but the
remark, tried over critically, seemed a kind of echo: he reminded
himself of Laurence. He was confused by her cool watching, her eyebrows
drawn up and together in ironical friendly despair at him. Her
face--like a Dutch doll’s; he defensively told himself, in its accurate
clear disposition of red-and-white colour--was, at this sudden pull-up
to her interest, like a mask in its halt of expression. Her features,
the dark line of hair springing over the white square of forehead, were
in their special relation like something almost too clearly written
that he still could not read; to be learnt now and puzzled over in
retrospect.
She was, in fact, repelled by his lack of sympathy. “Lois,” she said,
“is nice. She is in such a hurry, so concentrated upon her hurry, so
helpless. She is like some one being driven against time in a taxi to
catch a train, jerking and jerking to help the taxi and looking wildly
out of the window at things going slowly past. She keeps hearing that
final train go out without her. How I should hate to be young again!
But, I had no ambitions.”
He watched her unguarded profile. “Oh yes,” he said, “ambition?”
“I’ve never met any woman so determined to love well, so anxious to
love soon, so certain of her ability. She really prays for somebody to
be fatal; she eyes doors. And you are all disappointments.”
“To begin with,” said Hugo, nettled. “She’s not a woman--”
“Awful if nothing happens to her! She reminds me, too, of a little girl
I remember at school sports; in a team race, one of those things with
bean-bags. Hopping at the end of the line, working up to the front
slowly, simply sick with eagerness. Her turn comes, she is the whole
world: her eyes shoot out of her head--she drops the bean-bag. They all
groan.... It makes me go dry inside to think of it now.”
“There is a young man--Harold--Gerald. They dance on the avenue.”
“Like rabbits?”
“They have a gramophone.”
“Is he supposed to love her?”
“My wife thinks so. Laurence considers he suitably might. Her aunt
does not think it suitable at all and won’t hear a word of it, so he
officially doesn’t.”
“Anyhow, to be loved is not her affair at all, it is quite irrelevant.
She does not love him, poor little thing: he is useless.”
“I can’t think it necessary for a young girl, at her age, to love
anybody.”
“Oh, it is not,” she said impatiently, “at any age. But one has those
ideas.”
This dismissal, this lightness vexed him. Let her speak for herself.
She had, then, her whole sex’s limitations: a teachable shallowness, a
hundred little abilities. But he, prey to a constant self-reproach, was
a born lover; conscious of cycles in him, springs and autumns of desire
and disenchantment, and of the intermediate pausing seasons, bland or
frigid, eaten at either margin by past or coming shadows of change.
“I have not these ideas,” he said coldly.
They turned at the end of the walk through a gateway, into a fir
plantation. Here they walked between walls of dusk, to be released to
an airy green space, tree-pillared. The green strip, measureless on
ahead but narrow, slanted down on their left to the open meadows, on
their right was bounded by an uneven wall. Below the wall an unseen
swift stream flowed, tinkling and knocking. The path hesitated ahead
of them, faint on the bright green turf. Here the few beeches stood,
unrelated, lovely, desultory; between their trunks--the tall mountains,
vivid in a suffusion of distant light. The scene glittered. “More rain
coming,” said Mr. Montmorency.
But she stared ahead. A trench-coat flickered between the trees,
approaching. Her look focussed; there was an interchange. Coming to
them, the young man almost hurried. After consideration: “Hullo!” said
Mr. Montmorency.
“Hal-_lo!_” cried Gerald, flushing with expectation. Never had they
been so acclaimed. He was out this way, he explained, coming into
ear-shot, and was proposing to take advantage of something rash that
Lady Naylor had once said about dropping in to lunch any time. “They’re
not _out?_” he asked suddenly with, Marda noticed, a queer haggardness.
They were not? That was splendid, marvellous. Early about?--he had been
out all night, he told them. Oh yes--feeling Mr. Montmorency glance at
his chin interrogatively--he had shaved by the road; he had brought his
tackle with him, he often did. Here--no, that was his pistol: the other
pocket. Marda extolled his foresight. Mr. Montmorency had forgotten to
introduce them; they stood socially grouped round a beech and exchanged
cigarettes.
“Very busy now?” said Marda, bending down to the match Gerald sheltered.
“Off and on--generally on, but we don’t know.” She really seemed most
remarkable, he looked intently, just lightly enough to avoid a stare.
He liked talk like this, square and facty, compact with assumptions
Pleasant that she should be here at the house for lunch. Light slipped
back over the dints of her hair as she looked up again. Lunch seemed a
torch in the future; between now and lunch-time he would have come on
Lois, somewhere, somehow, and amazingly kissed her amazed hands. There
would be, till the kiss, no speaking--there she eluded him. He had
thought this out.
He had thought this out, seen ahead to this climax rather--as though a
flower’s centre had been revealed by an impetuous opening out of lovely
confused petals--on the lorry, breasting the darkness. Watching the
morning skylines form and creep out like enemies from the cold night,
he had burned at her nearness under the insistent groping of the wind.
Rushing under his eyes the hedge-tops shivered; he had laughed and
shivered, hand in his pistol pocket, hand on his razor. And now, as
looking at Marda he once more kissed Lois’s hands, he knew once more,
assured by her eyes, that keen truth of the first showing of daylight.
He was fortified in assurance. Leaning with her elbow against the tree,
returning casually his directness of look, she recalled some profound
and certain excitement, as of his first approach to the War. Now he
meant to go past the hands, to kiss the curve of Lois’s cheek as she
strained away, then stamp her uncertain mouth with his own certainty.
Naïvely, he looked at his wrist-watch.
“Yes, go on,” she said, looking up through trees where a bright breath
disturbed the closeness. He looked past her, the path led to Lois. This
green open path spaced out with trees was (he afterwards thought) like
something in heaven.
“It will rain by lunch-time,” said Mr. Montmorency. And indeed the sky
was already creeping together and fading, and the mountains’ sharpness
seemed a kind of anxiety.
“I wish,” said Gerald to Marda, “you’d been out up there this morning.
You wouldn’t know where you were, with the light coming.”
“Is there a smell of daylight? I once heard a man say--”
“Well, that is just like me--I was smoking.”
“Look, you must go on.”
“Yes, perhaps--” He went on. She was left only half protected by
irony from an inrush of desolation. His look and smile clung to her
memory with the tenacity of irrelevance: his steps on the grass died
out quickly. There was silence: a cold apprehension of rain in the
beeches, the tinkling and knocking of water beyond the wall. Hugo,
having walked a short way ahead, looked back at her sharply. She was
startled. “Bother!” she thought. For there was bother behind the look.
“Do we go on?” They walked on, but were oppressed by their lack of
objective. They met the white stare of a cottage, stared and turned.
“Dannie Regan lives there: he shot out an eye shooting rabbits and now
he’s losing the sight of the other. I used to go out with him when
I was a boy--so high. His mother lives with him--or should still; I
haven’t heard that she’s gone. She must be a hundred and four.”
“Do you know the man I am going to marry, Leslie Lawe? He’s a
stockbroker; he fishes a good deal. His people are in Meath.”
“Meath?... I didn’t know you--”
“I am really. I haven’t told the Naylors. They think my engagements
fantastic; you see, they have all come to nothing. But I ought to have
told the Naylors; it ought to have come at once, but there was that
wretched suitcase. I will say something at dinner, not lunch: please do
something to lessen the atmosphere of surprise.”
“When?”
“Oh, we think this winter.”
He looked from one window of the cottage to the other. “It will make
a break in the winter,” he said at last. “I dare say you will go
somewhere sunny. Algiers perhaps--Morocco, if you are able.”
“Yes, he is quite rich.”
“I shouldn’t go to the Riviera.... But I thought you didn’t believe in
this sort of thing?”
“I? Oh, I never said so.”
Now he came to think of it, she had not explicitly said so. “I hope you
will be happy.”
“I don’t expect I shall be much different.”
“I think,” he said, “I must go in and talk to Dannie. He will have
heard I’m back. It seems a good time now--do you mind?”
“I’ll talk to Mrs. Regan.”
“She’s deaf.”
“Then we’ll smile at each other--she’s not blind.”
They approached the doorway that yearned up the path like an
eye-socket. A breath of peat smoke, of cold trodden earth, of the
ghostly dark of white walls came out from the cottage. Dannie took form
on the darkness, searching with his one eye. He stood with his white
beard, helpless and eager. “Well!” exclaimed Hugo. Then Dannie broke
out: this was young Mr. Hugo, wasn’t he the lovely gentleman, as fine
and upstanding as ever. And here was his wife he’d brought with him,
the beautiful lady. And, trembling and searching, he took Marda’s hand.
He declared that she brought back the sight of youth to his eyes.