AN armoured car called for Gerald at four o’clock and he was driven
away through the rain. Towards the end of the afternoon he had become
very dull, a kind of fog came over his personality; he confessed he
was sleepy. Lady Naylor remarked what a pity it was he could not stay
for his tea, that would have freshened him up again. There was still
so much that she wanted to know. The drawing-room became to Gerald
fantastic and thin like an ice-palace, and, reflected backwards
and forwards in tall mirrors, seemed like a chain of galleries at
Versailles down which, numbing with admiration, he had to advance
wearily. He did not see Lois alone any more. She kept coming in,
looking round vaguely, then going upstairs again. Upstairs, he could
hear her playing the gramophone. She came out to the steps with Marda
to see him off; they stood with arms linked, brushing the rain from
their hair. The last they saw of him was a putteed leg being drawn in
carefully. Something steel slid to; they waved, but never a hand came
out. The machine seemed already to be digesting. He was swept from them
with martial impersonality.
At half-past five Lois went to the top of the house with her
drawing-books, paused for confidence, tickled a panel of Marda’s door.
Coming into the changed and vivid room, she tipped her drawing-books
disengagedly on to a window-seat. Marda sat on the writing-table,
engaged in manicure. Little pots, pads and bottles paraded; a chamois
leather was spread on her knee. A sweet smell of varnish, like
pear-drops, was in the air.
“The most I can do,” said Lois, intent, “is to keep mine clean.”
“Quite enough. It’s just this habit of making up every part of one
that’s exposed at all.... Lois, have a cigarette?”
“Oh ... thanks. You don’t mind my coming?”
“My dear, why?”
“What lovely brushes! What a ... what an uncommon photograph frame!”
“Yes, that’s Leslie Lawe.”
“Oh? Oh yes,” Lois paused uncertainly. “How good looking! Do--do you
know him well?”
“Very. We’re engaged.”
“Oh, how lovely!” Lois had a shock of flatness.
“Oh, yes; didn’t you know?”
“Well, I thought you probably would be. Shall you live in London?”
“I suppose we shall. I suppose we shall have to.”
“Oh, how lovely!”
Marda laughed and began screwing on the lids of her little pots. In the
light of her brilliant life, her deftness seemed to Lois inimitable.
One would have had to have lived twenty-nine years as fast, as surely
and wildly, to screw pink celluloid caps on to small white pots with
just that lightness of finger-tip, just that degree of amusement, just
that detachment in smile and absorption in attitude. And the pink smell
of nail-varnish, dresses trickling over a chair, flash of swinging
shoe-buckle, cloud of powder over the glass, the very room with its
level stare on the tree-tops, took on awareness, smiled with secrecy,
had the polish and depth of experience. The very birds on the frieze
flew round in cognizant agitation.
“What a lovely dress!” said Lois, picking up the end of a red sleeve,
so that she seemed to be standing hand in hand with the dress.
“Vienna.”
“And, oh, what a lovely green one!... Am I pawing things?”
“I like it. But haven’t you got some drawings?”
“Drawings? Oh, my drawings! Oh--I’m afraid they’d bore you.”
“I don’t expect so.”
“Well, I did just happen to bring them along.”
She had brought two drawing-books, cheerful in mottled bindings with
tissue between the pages. She brought them across to Marda, then turned
away. The drawings, in black ink, illustrated the Morte d’Arthur and
Omar Khayyam. They remembered Beardsley. Lois, away at a window,
heard Marda rustle the tissue paper: she watched the rain intently.
Beyond the demesne trees, a farm cart rattled along the road. Marda,
conscientious, turned back to the title page. Here she paused, for Lois
had printed out, in uncertain Gothic:
“‘I am a painter who cannot paint;
In my life, a devil rather than saint;
In my brain, as poor a creature too:
No end to all that I cannot do!
But do one thing at least I can--
Love a man or hate a man
Supremely--’
Lois Honoria Farquar: Her Book.”
“Oh,” said Marda.
“Browning.”
“But can you really?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“And are you sure that you can’t paint? Have you ever tried?”
“I hated two of the girls at school and I really rather do hate Mr.
Montmorency. And I can’t help getting involved with people. Personal
relations make a perfect havoc of me; my headmistress said so. Of
course I haven’t had much scope here, so far. Being grown up seems
trivial, somehow. I mean, dressing and writing notes instead of
letters, and trying to make impressions. When you have to think so much
of what other people feel about you there seems no time to think what
you feel about them. Everybody is genial at one in a monotonous kind
of way. I don’t seem to find young men inspiring, somehow. I suppose I
shall. Did you ever have any difficulty about beginning?”
“I can’t remember. I never can see back to the other side of things
that have happened.”
“I think I must cut that title page out. I wrote it when I was rather
young. But surely love wouldn’t get so much talked about if there were
not something in it? I mean even soap, you know, however much they
advertise ...”
“Oh, there must be. Let me look at the drawings.”
Marda, still on the table with crossed knees, spread out the book
briskly. But Lois, all in a glow, could not help remarking: “Somebody
told me I was neurotic.”
“I shouldn’t worry.”
With a brutality of which she was unaware Marda returned to the
drawings. Lois, thinking: “I do not interest her,” sat down on the
floor with her back to the chest of drawers. Over the mottled carpet
curled strange pink fronds: some one dead now, buying this carpet, had
responded to an idea of beauty. Lois thought how in Marda’s bedroom,
when she was married, there might be a dark blue carpet with a bloom
on it like a grape, and how this room, this hour would be forgotten.
Already the room seemed full of the dusk of oblivion. And she hoped
that instead of fading to dust in summers of empty sunshine, the carpet
would burn with the house in a scarlet night to make one flaming call
upon Marda’s memory. Lois again realized that no one had come for her,
after all. She thought, “I must marry Gerald.”
But with a jump of the heart she heard every page turn over. She
received the print of each look as though her sensibility were
the paper. Reactions to Lois’s drawings were as a rule momentary
and staccato: “My dear!... They’re sinister ... what a marvellous
muezzin!... Aren’t those the seven queens?” And indeed it had come to
seem to herself that the drawings must really mean something. A glance
at them, though she had lost the power to see them, gave her the kind
of surprised assurance one might expect from motherhood.
Marda said nothing; once or twice she changed her attitude, shifting
the book from knee to knee. Soot, dislodged by the rain, sifted sharply
on to the paper fan in the grate, startling them to an exchange of
glances. Then she said deliberately, closing the drawing-book:
“I think you’re cleverer than you can draw, you know.”
“Oh--”
“You don’t mind, do you? Look--have another cigarette. Why can’t you
write, or something?”
“That’s so embarrassing. Even things like--like elephants get so
personal.”
“I know. I give up reading--I’m sick of their personal elephants.... Or
act? But why do you stay here?”
“I can’t think,” said Lois, startled.
“You like to be the pleasant young person?”
“I like to be in a pattern.” She traced a pink frond with her finger.
“I like to be related; to have to be what I am. Just to _be_ is so
intransitive, so lonely.”
“Then you will like to be a wife and mother.” Marda got off the
writing-table and began to change her stockings. “Jacob’s ladder,” she
explained. “It’s a good thing we can always be women.”
“I hate women. But I can’t think how to begin to be anything else.”
“Climate.”
“But I would hate to be a man. So much fuss about doing things. Except
Laurence--but he is such a hog. Ought I to go to London?”
“Ever been abroad?”
Of course she had not, she said, because of the War, and of course she
would like to. There was Rome, and she would like to stay in a hotel
by herself.--There was just “abroad”: she always wondered how long
the feeling lasted. And there was America, but one would have to have
introductions or one would get a crick in one’s neck from just always
looking up at things. She would like to feel real in London. She had
never come out through a pass and looked down on little distinct white
cities with no smoke. She had never been in a tunnel for more than five
minutes--she had heard there were tunnels in which you could nearly
suffocate? She had never seen anything larger than she could imagine.
She wanted, she said, to see backgrounds without bits taken out of them
by Holy Families; small black trees running up and down white hills.
She thought the little things would be important: trees with electric
lights growing out of them, she had heard of; coloured syphons. She
wanted to go wherever the War hadn’t. She wanted to go somewhere
nonchalant where politics bored them, where bands played out of doors
in the hot nights and nobody wished to sleep. She wanted to go into
cathedrals unadmonished and look up unprepared into the watery deep
strangeness. There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like
buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference.
She liked mountains, but she did not care for views. She did not want
adventures, but she would like just once to be nearly killed. She
wanted to see something that only she would remember. Could one really
float a stone in a glacier stream? She liked unmarried sorts of places.
She did not want to see the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower (could one
avoid it?) or to go to Switzerland or Berlin or any of the Colonies.
She would like to know people and go to dinner parties on terraces, and
she thought it would be a pity to miss love. Could one travel alone?
She did not mind being noticed because she was a female, she was tired
of being not noticed because she was a lady. She could not imagine ever
not wanting some one to talk to about tea-time. If she went to Cook’s,
could they look out all the trains for her, in Spain and everywhere?
She had never been to Cook’s. Was there any law about selling tickets
to people under age?
Marda, smoothing the last wrinkle out of a stocking and fastening up a
suspender, said she did not believe this was so.
“Of course anybody could do all that. But it would not be me.”
“But be interested in what happens to you for its own sake; don’t
expect to be touched or changed--or to be in anything that you do. One
just watches. Pain is one’s misunderstanding.”
The advice, fruit of her own relation to experience, unwisdom, lacking
the sublimer banality, was--as she suspected while still speaking--to
her young friend meaningless and without value. The infinite variance
of that relation breaks the span of comprehension between being and
being and makes an attempt at sympathy the merest fumbling for outlet
along the boundaries of the self. Lois looked vaguely out at the sky,
and thought how she could not possibly travel in Europe with a green
canvas trunk with her school initials. She longed for three leather
suitcases. She said sadly:
“The thought of places without one is so lonely.”
“Pull yourself together, my dear child.”
“Don’t you think honeymoons are great waste of travelling?”
“That reminds--I must write a letter. Don’t go--look, have another
cigarette. What is the date?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
Evidently it did matter; Marda had to unpack the bottom of a suitcase
and look the date up in a pocket-book. And from this Lois immediately
concluded Leslie must be one of those keen square people who did
not care for girls of nineteen, whose eyes slid past one’s look
impatiently, who had no enthusiasms and read the biographies of
politicians other than Disraeli. She heard Marda writing with little
pauses and gushes; her shoulders and the stoop of her head took on
an appearance of obligation. Lois thought how anxious to marry Marda
must really be, how anxious not to frighten Leslie away from her, and
how all her distantness and her quick, rejecting air must be a false
effect, accidental and transitory.
“I think,” she said, “I must be a woman’s woman.”
“Oh yes. _Where_ are we going to tennis to-morrow?”
“Castle Trent--but we won’t because of the rain. Is Mr. Lawe very
social?”
“Reasonably. Of course, he likes his people nice. _What_ was the name
of the man at lunch--surname?”
“Lesworth. Gerald is very social. He smiles all the time like a dog. Do
you think that is good in a man?”
“I am telling Leslie he wants to marry you--may I?”
“Will it give Mr. Lawe a good impression?”
“Well, it furnishes you rather. And I can’t think what else to say.”
“Don’t scratch it out,” said Lois after an interval, “but as a matter
of fact he didn’t speak of marriage. He merely kissed me. The English
have quite a different moral standard.”
“Besides, he had been up all night.”
“What are men one is engaged to like?”
“Very worried and kind,” said Marda, blotting a sheet of her letter.
“Business-like, passionate and accurate. When they press you against
their chests a paper crackles, and when you sit up again to do your
face and arrange your hair, they cough and pull out the paper, all
folded and say: ‘While I think of it, I just wanted to consult you
about this.’ Dinner services come crashing through the air like in a
harlequinade. You feel you have been kissed in a shop. I cannot be
adequate. I suggested writing to those public schools for vacancies
for our three little boys, but that was not nice apparently. When you
are engaged you live in the future, and a large part of the future is
improper till it has happened.”
“Oh ... what would happen now if you lost your engagement ring?” asked
Lois with enjoyment.
“I daren’t wear it. Oh, look here, I am talking like a fool. I’m sorry,
Lois, but you really must not talk to me when I am writing letters. I
need Leslie. Dinner services don’t matter. If you never need anyone
as much you will be fortunate. I don’t know for myself what is worth
while. I’m sick of all this trial and error. Will you find a book or
something? Don’t go!”
Lois did not wish to go, but thought “Why should she keep me here when
she is thinking about Leslie?” She felt deprived and unhappy. She
tried to imagine a situation in which Leslie would look ridiculous.
She prayed that the three correct little boys might never be born. She
hoped he would have five daughters, and all artistic. “One thing more,”
she said, “how is it that men are so seldom photographed in profile? Do
they have to look frank?”
Steps coming down the gallery, relentlessly, with intention, might have
been Leslie’s but were unmistakably Laurence’s.
Laurence tapped and remarked through the door that his Aunt Myra wanted
to know if the letters were ready. Timothy would be starting now; he
could wait five minutes, but if he did would almost certainly miss the
post.
“Damn!” said Marda.
“What d’you say?”
“Oh, come in. Why did I polish my nails?” Laurence sat down on the
window-sill. He was annoyed and surprised to find Lois present. He
suspected that she had been bothering Marda, confiding, fidgeting,
asking about love and wishing to try on her hats. Probably she had
brought up a poetry book and kept coming across with a thumb on the
margin to point out the bits she loved. He wished that Lois would marry
and leave Danielstown; he could perfectly see her as a very pink bride,
later as a girl wife in the Tchehov tradition in a pink blouse, sucking
sweets audibly, prattling of girl friends’ lovers, rustling papers
endlessly. He only hoped that she might marry Gerald, who had no papers
to rustle.
“I hope,” he said, “that Lois has been amusing you?”
“Don’t talk,” said Lois. “I mean, she wants to finish her letter.”
“Evidently,” said Laurence.
“Explain Leslie,” said Marda, writing rapidly. “It will help at dinner.”
“She is engaged,” said Lois, “to a Mr. Lawe. That is his photograph
there. His name is Leslie.”
“Oh yes,” said Laurence.
“He is not comic,” said Marda, leaning around and pushing the letter
away. “She makes him sound so--like ‘a Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.’
Lady Naylor will like it all, but I haven’t told her. Will you help Mr.
Montmorency and Lois form a public opinion and not be surprised when
I talk about him at dinner? About the end of the fish, I thought....
I cannot finish this letter; it will have to go to-morrow and I will
wire.”
“And I have a piece of news for you. Castle Trent was raided for arms
last night. Of course they didn’t find any. They think the thing was
entirely amateur, nothing to do with the I.R.A. at all. They took away
some boots. The Trents think one of the raiders was a gardener’s cousin
from Ballydarra who hates the family. He left a quite unnecessary
message behind with a skull and crossbones; he sounds to me rather a
silly man. I am hoping perhaps they will come here to-night. We have
two assegais and a stiletto that Uncle Richard uses for a paper-knife.”
“It is a paper-knife,” said Lois, “only made so as to look like a
stiletto. How perfectly thrilling; do let us all sit up.”
“I shall sit up, but you had better go to bed. You might be insulted.”
“Really, I am not so female as all that.”
Laurence shrugged his shoulders.
“At any rate, don’t tell the others. Uncle Richard’ll get fussy and
spoil it, and if Aunt Myra meets them she will keep them talking all
night.”
“It seems so odd,” said Laurence, “that she should be my blood aunt and
not yours.”
Marda looked at him thoughtfully over the back of her chair. She had
not realized he could be so disagreeable. If he did not take care,
he would grow up just like Mr. Montmorency. She told him so, and
added that she was surprised he did not appreciate Lois. “She is very
charming,” she said, “and very intelligent. Think of all the cousins
you might have had. It’s not her fault that you’re not in Tahiti or
Valladolid or wherever it was you wanted to go this summer. If I were
not going to marry I should ask her to come abroad with me. I have
never been less bored.”
“It would be marvellous,” said Lois. Now that Laurence had come in
she felt more alone with Marda, and nearer; she could think of all
the things she had wanted to say. Intoxicated by being told she was
charming and by Laurence’s disapproval, she hitched herself up on to
the end of the wooden bed, where she sat swinging her legs and smiling,
all girlhood. She felt movement, a wind in her face as though she were
on the prow of a ship. With a bound, life carried her forward again.
She felt certain that Leslie would die or break off the engagement.
“Marvellous,” she repeated.
“At any rate,” Laurence said, “you can ask her to be a bridesmaid.”
And there was Lois, forlorn in the aisle, with hot air coming up her
legs from a grating and tears dripping off her nose into a bunch of
chrysanthemums. She would keep the ribbon from her bouquet and show it
to Gerald in confidence while she unpacked on their wedding night.
“I am thinking of going abroad quite soon,” she said to Laurence.
“Mr. Montmorency has gone for a walk,” said Laurence. “He had to take
an umbrella. Apparently he does not usually take an umbrella, but when
he was half-way down the avenue Mrs. Montmorency suddenly said he must,
because it had never rained like this before. So she took an umbrella
and one for herself and started off down the avenue after him. Aunt
Myra said she should not have done this because of her heart and looked
round for me, but I had gone quickly into the dining-room, which is
the last place anybody would look for one between meals. So she found
Uncle Richard and he took another umbrella and ran quickly down the
avenue after Mrs. Montmorency, telling her not to run like that. When
he had caught her up he took the umbrella from her and went still more
quickly, shouting, after Mr. Montmorency, who pretended not to hear
and walked on with a back view of positive hatred.”
“But how do you know all this if you were in the dining-room?”
“When they were under way I went to the library window and looked after
them.... Lois, did Lesworth tell you he has captured Peter Connor? He
was in bed, apparently.”
“Laurence!” called Lady Naylor from the end of the gallery. “Where are
you? What about Marda’s letters?... They can’t go now,” she went on,
approaching. “Timothy waited ten minutes, and now he has got to run all
the way, but he will certainly miss the post.... Oh, you are all here?”
She looked at her nephew and niece disparagingly and sat down on the
bed. “It is an extraordinary thing,” she said generally, “the way
nobody in this house can be trusted to remember messages.... It has
been a tiring day,” she added. “Nobody could be nicer than that young
Mr. Lesworth, but certainly he is not intelligent. And since then they
have all been running down the avenue with umbrellas. And oh, what do
you think? They have been raided for arms at Castle Trent. They think
the whole thing must have been organized by their gardener’s cousin.
They took some boots away.”