“THOUGH to tell you the truth,” said Lady Naylor, circulating among the
begonia beds at Mount Isabel, “though I am in a way sorry, I am not
altogether sorry that she is going.”
She glanced closely at Mrs. Carey’s profile, to see that her exact
shade of meaning had been taken. Mrs. Carey nodded and wrinkled up her
forehead, very profoundly. She was thinking about something else. She
stooped, pulled off three dead begonias and crumpled them into her
pocket.
“Because if that should be what she is going to do, I should rather she
did not do it with us. For one thing, the Lawes are relations, they
are cousins to a cousin of mine by marriage. One does not know what
they might not say about influence. Though no one could interfere less
than I do, one never knows, does one, what might go round through the
family? And really I am superstitious about her visits, already this
time she has lost a suitcase. One cannot help feeling responsible.”
“But are you certain,” asked Mrs. Carey, looking critically round this
part of her garden as though she were wishing to have it all up and
replant it again, “that she is going to break it off?”
“I shouldn’t like to say. She has got into a kind of a nervous habit
of sending telegrams. Up and down, up and down all day to the village.
Surely that is abnormal in an engaged girl? It is not even as if they
were buying a house or anything. It’s bound to be so unintimate--unless
she does not consider the post-mistress, and I do think really she
ought to because it is our post-mistress. And another thing--I don’t
really know that I ought to speak of this, but I really cannot discuss
it with poor little Francie--I don’t think she has at all a good effect
on Hugo. You know what he’s like usually? Well, he’s quite different.
Quite _empressé_.... But I don’t expect there is anything in that
really. One so easily says too much.”
She paused, sighed and waited. Mrs. Carey looked at her mildly. “Oh?”
she said. “Oh yes. But how do you mean?”
“I know Francie notices; I know she is unhappy. Of course she always is
unhappy, but she’s unhappy now in a different way. Of course one hates
to say it, but one does know what Hugo _is_ ...”
“Oh--is he really?” said Mrs. Carey, startled.
“What Hugo needs is real trouble. Now if poor little Francie died--”
“Is she seriously--?”
“No, I feel that he will die first, he has just that way of avoiding
things. Look how he didn’t marry Laura.... However, I expect I am being
quite ridiculous; I hate to exaggerate--it is from having Laurence so
much in the house. Have you noticed how clever young men--? I believe
he’s worse in England; they think him amusing. Of course there is no
harm in Marda; one has known her since she was little. She’s only
wild--two of her uncles were like that. Shall you ever forget how her
knee bled that afternoon? You know, I didn’t give another children’s
party for three years!”
Coming to the edge of the lawn, they looked down on a court where
Marda, Lois, Laurence and Nona Carey were playing tennis. The two
ladies, at peace and with the faint self-congratulation with which one
generation watches another, gazed with a statuesque remoteness over the
foreground. “She is, somehow, I don’t know ... charming,” said Mrs.
Carey, as Marda and Lois crossed and recrossed. “Shall we go round
before tea and look at the dahlias? I wanted to ask you ...”
They turned, having cast an imposing shadow over the consciousness of
the players, and went softly, heavily over the grass to the iron door
of the garden. It seemed natural to Mrs. Carey, half dissolved in the
brightness and depth of the afternoon, that Hugo should be attracted
towards a fellow-visitor; such things came on and passed, transitory as
a summer. She did not see that there was anything one need do; she said
so to Lady Naylor.
The fine weather was back again. Over the roof of Mount Isabel a
mountain sheathed in pink air looked gentle and distant. Light slid
over the heavy burnished trees; the cream façade of the house was like
cardboard, high and confident in the sun--a house without weight, an
appearance less actual than the begonias’ scarlet and wax-pink flesh.
Begonias, burning in an impatience of colour, crowded over the edge of
heart-shaped beds. As the four came up from the court there was silence
over the sheen of grass. Then a maid leaned out from the dark through
the drawing-room window sounding the brass tea-gong: a minor note.
Marda perhaps was wild, like her uncles, but not inconsiderate. She
had realized, almost upon arrival, that the worst thing she could
do would be to attract Mr. Montmorency. To be loved by him would be
the culminating disaster of her unfortunate visits. The idea seemed
to her silly--she could not think of herself as fatal--but rooted
itself during a fit of extreme apprehension induced by the loss of
her suitcase. She dreaded the suitcase might not be the close of
her record; having made the acquaintance of Hugo she saw it would
not be. She might not be fatal, but _here_ she was certainly fated.
She thought: “Damn him!” with conscious injustice and drew on every
resource, all that might once have been called the arts of her sex to
repel, to annoy and to bore him. That day of the beech walk, in old
Dannie’s cottage, she had had in a flash the measure of her unsuccess.
Persistently charmless, untiring in her attempts not to please, she
had still to retreat, resentful, upon a female wariness, guardedness,
circumspection she had always despised. Her reward: at the foot of
the stairs at bedtime, a contact of finger-tips--all of himself in
the touch--as he gave her her candlestick: a startled look over the
flame. And as the four candles went up with the ladies, drawing a tide
of shadow, she and Lois had turned at a turn of the stairs to see him
still there, looking up from the staggering mounting dark. She took
Lois’s arm.
That was the night he did not sleep, and Lois did not sleep either.
To-day, Smith had ridden over to Mount Isabel for tea and Nona.
He stood smiling over the glittering tray, in the high dark-yellow
shadows, pleased but anonymous. He was a man whose name one could not
remember. But his appearance agitated Mrs. Carey, who recalled that he
did not eat any tea. She hoped it would all be all right.
She said to Marda distractedly: “I am glad you are going to be happy: I
hope you will be really, really married.”
“Thank you so much,” said Marda. “I am sure I shall be.”
“Of course,” continued Mrs. Carey, still watching Smith, “I ought not
to congratulate him, I ought to congratulate you.”
“I am very fortunate.”
“Oh _no_, I don’t mean that at all. Show me your lovely ring--oh, you
haven’t got it on. But I expect you have got a lovely ring. Mr. Smith,
I hope you will play tennis?”
But Smith, who did not feel like tennis, had not brought shoes. Tennis
was not his idea at all. He had thought perhaps a little walk in the
garden, a few plums ... And Nona got up very pink and conscious and
circulated with plates of cake. She knew that she must throw off people
like Mr. Smith because next summer she was to be presented and have a
season in London. Lady Naylor could not help raising her eyebrows at
Mrs. Carey.
“Such a pity,” remarked Mrs. Carey, as they slid up arm-chairs to the
tea-table, “you didn’t bring over the Montmorencys. Wouldn’t they come?”
“_He_ might have come,” said Laurence, “but as I am not allowed to
drive there was not room in the car. There were too many of us.”
“Never mind,” said Marda. “I am going on Saturday.”
“Oh no, you aren’t!” cried Lois, and added respectfully: “Don’t be so
silly.”
Lady Naylor sighed. “Unfortunately, Marda must go back to England. I
don’t know what we shall do without her....”
“Do you like England?” said Nona Carey, moving away from Smith. “Are
you really going to live there? I always think it’s so new-looking. But
of course there’s a great deal going on.... Where do _you_ live, Mr.
Smith?”
“Eastbourne.”
Though Lady Naylor said at once that that must be very bracing, Smith
wilted under a general commiseration. He recrossed his legs, frowned
at the toe of his shoe and said he thought sometimes of going to East
Africa. A forlorn and slighted feeling the announcement of Marda’s
departure cast over them was heightened by this proposed defection of
Smith’s. Lady Naylor remarked disparagingly that that would be rather
lonely, while Mrs. Carey, seeing Smith at once against hot African
skies in a silhouette of nobility, felt they had been unkind and asked
him to come over here on the sofa and tell her about himself. He told
her. Nona sat and twirled on the music stool.
“Smith,” said Laurence, “you ought to stay and defend us.” And Smith
had to promise he would not leave the Army and go to East Africa till
they were all settled.
But to Laurence and Lois this all had already a ring of the past.
They both had a sense of detention, of a prologue being played out
too lengthily, with unnecessary stress, a wasteful attention to
detail. Apart, but not quite unaware of each other, queerly linked by
antagonism, they both sat eating tea with dissatisfaction, resentful
at giving so much of themselves to what was to be forgotten. The
day was featureless, a stock pattern day of late summer, blandly
insensitive to their imprints. The yellow sun--slanting in under the
blinds on full-bosomed silver, hands balancing Worcester, dogs poking
up wistfully from under the cloth--seemed old, used, filtering from
the surplus of some happy fulfilment; while, unapproachably elsewhere,
something went by without them.
Marda wanted more tea--but they were all distracted, an argument raged
round Smith. “You must, of course, go on Saturday?” said Laurence,
taking her cup. “Oh yes--why?” She leaned back from the bar of sun,
into the shade of the curtains. Shadow gave transparency to her
colours; its brown clarity hardened her face revealingly so that she
was exposed a moment, in her anxiety, without the defence of manner.
Her green linen dress went ghostly against the cretonne’s rather
jarring florescence.
“Just when it’s fine,” said Laurence, banal with sincerity.
“That is because I’m going.”
He listened a moment and, as the uproar of argument was sustained, said
quickly: “Lois and I aren’t a good addition--the Montmorencys think
so. Is that what bored you? Nobody’s ever gone so soon. There was a
walk I wanted to take you.” He rattled the cup and saucer at her in
desperation. “I think you make a mistake, going.”
“Oh, I expect so, but--”
“Look at Lois, her eyes are starting out of her head. When you’ve gone,
she’ll go up and cry on your bed. It will fill her mornings.”
“Oh, shut up, she can hear you.”
“No,” said Laurence, “she can’t, though she’s trying to. I’m not so
sorry, but I do think it’s unimaginative of you going. Why have you got
to see Mr. Lawe? I mean, quite dispassionately, isn’t there heaps of
time for him?... You see,” concluded Laurence, “I am enraged--by all
this--past snubbing-point.”
“I want some more tea,” said Marda, “more than anything in the world.”
Unable to attract the attention of their hostess, Laurence leaned
over the tray and took the teapot. On his way back to Marda he
guessed from the unmoving intentness with which she was staring
out at the begonias--they gave back little vermilion flecks to her
eyes--that there was some one at the bottom of this and that it was
Mr. Montmorency. He had learnt--from leaning out of his window while
his aunt talked to Mrs. Montmorency down on the steps--that they all
thought she contemplated breaking off her engagement. Personally he
thought this improbable. Mr. Montmorency himself was the supreme
objection; but also she would be getting herself a good home and what
went with it--money, assurance and scope. He himself only wished he
could do so as easily. He now stood above her holding the cup of tea
and could have counted three before she turned round. But then--oh, the
waste of his comprehension--he saw she was laughing.
She had laughed at a thought of the subdued surprise with which they
would come to her wedding; barely dressed as befitted because of that
unshaken disbelief in her; buttoning, till well up the aisle, their
white gloves. But the origin of their disbelief did not seem to her
funny; had acquired for her, in fact, a tragic vulgarity. So that she
did not explain the joke to Laurence; she thanked him and drank the
tea, which was all wrong.
Out, at last, through the window, dazzled, threading and separating
between the flower-beds, the party dispersed with their cigarettes.
Large to themselves, to each other graduating from a little below
life-size to an eye from the mountain ant-like--but smaller and less
directed--or like beads tipped out. A sense of exposure, of being
offered without resistance to some ironic un-curiosity, made Laurence
look up at the mountain over the roof of the house. In some gaze--of
a man’s up there hiding, watching among the clefts and ridges--they
seemed held, included and to have their only being. The sense of a
watcher, reserve of energy and intention, abashed Laurence, who turned
from the mountain. But the unavoidable and containing stare impinged
to the point of a transformation upon the social figures with their
orderly, knitted shadows, the well-groomed grass and the beds, worked
out in this pattern.
Driving home, tightly packed hip to hip in the back of the car between
Marda and Lois, and bumping conjointly over the inequalities of the
road, Lady Naylor told them of a discovery she had made. Mrs. Carey,
also, did not understand modern young people. They seemed, Mrs. Carey
had said, to have no idealism, no sense of adventure, they thought so
much of their comfort-- Possibly Mrs. Carey was wrong? But almost
she thought she agreed with her. In their youth, Mrs. Carey and she
would have been deeply excited by all that was happening round them.
Lady Naylor thought all young people ought to be rebels; she herself
had certainly been a rebel. But since the War, they had never ceased
mouching. She herself had had a deep sense of poetry; she remembered
going to sleep with Shelley under her pillow. She used to walk alone in
the mountains and hated coming in to meals. Mrs. Carey had noticed that
Nona would not miss a meal for anything--she was unpunctual always, but
never absent. But perhaps Mrs. Carey misjudged the girl? Mrs. Carey and
she had passed through periods of profound unhappiness. And yet their
youth was a golden period; they would not have missed it. It did seem a
pity, they both had agreed, to be born middle-aged.
These last remarks were directed with a degree of resentment at
Laurence’s back view, in the front of the car by the chauffeur. His
ears, of unfortunate conformation, curled out semi-transparent against
the evening light. Laurence said nothing, but thought; he must write
that novel, for here lay a gold-mine (then Spain and those first
editions, a Picasso and curtains for his rooms). He would vindicate
modern young people for his aunt and her generation. Only he did
not know if he should write about cocktail parties or whimsical
undergraduates.