“I SHALL never forget,” continued Francie, through the open
dressing-room door, “the way he picked up those cushions.”
“Which?” said Hugo, searching irritably among his collars. The feudal
system was weak at some points, he reflected--this Danielstown laundry.
The laundress’s father had helped to defend the house in the troubled
’sixties. Nostalgic, he thought of these neat democratic blue vans
labelled “hygienic” that called on Mondays. “Well really,” said he, “I
may just as well go to bed. I haven’t a collar left fit to dine in....
Which cushions?”
“Oh, horrors. But then they say the Fogartys are so kind.--Never mind,
Hugo; Richard’s and Laurence’s collars are just the same.--You know how
alive he is generally: well, that was all gone. It was like seeing a
waterfall stand still. You know, Hugo, it may be horrid, but I don’t
trust Myra sometimes. She says things aren’t, and then she turns and
makes these curious little dabs at them. She dislikes the Clonmore
rectory people, she says they are breath-y, she knows I don’t know them
and yet she insisted on my going up. And when I came down again she was
charming; I knew I must have annoyed her.”
“My dear Francie, life is too short for all this.” (Though that was
not the matter with life, really: life was too long.) Hugo frowned,
chin up in front of his glass. “It’s a good thing the evenings are
drawing in,” he said, with reference to his collar.
“Now what I should have said ...” resumed Francie, “though ideally,
really, I shouldn’t have said anything....”
“Talking of evenings,” said Hugo, “where do we go next? We’ve got to
fit in the Fitzgeralds before October. Oughtn’t you to be writing to
somebody? And oh, Francie, you might post some of these collars to the
Terenure laundry, if you can get the parcel out of the house quietly.”
“I shall miss here,” sighed Francie, looking out at the trees.
“You miss everywhere.” They both thought of the bungalow which, an
eternal present for them, would be never able to shine in retrospect.
Throughout dinner, Francie was distraite. She was making out in her
mind a little letter to Gerald. But, of course, that would never do.
“Hullo!” said Laurence, earlier, looking at the letters put out for
next morning’s post on the hall table. “Lois has written to Marda. I
thought no one knew her address.”
“She heard from Marda this morning,” explained his uncle, bending to
study the envelope with melancholy interest. “I understand that it was
about a dog. I shall be relieved when Marda is married. I wonder will
the young man be able to look after luggage.”
“I ran into Mr. Lesworth this afternoon,” Lady Naylor told Lois. “He
came into the Fogartys’ while I was resting there. Really, she keeps
quite a home for those young men--though nothing would ever take the
gloss off those cushions. He seemed very cheerful, he was on his way up
to the tennis.”
“He never goes to the tennis on Club days.”
“Oh, well, he seemed to be on his way up to the tennis. He told me of
that young Armstrong’s engagement to Livvy Thompson. It seems quite a
_fait accompli_, though secret, of course. How things do get round in a
garrison town! You knew, I suppose?”
“Well, Livvy did tell me.”
“What a bother for you!” said Lady Naylor. “It is a comfort to have
outgrown one’s friends’ engagements. I suppose _you_ couldn’t very well
tell her it was preposterous?”
“Well, I ...”
“Mr. Lesworth thought it a pity, in view of the young man’s future. He
expects Mr. Armstrong will not stand well over this with their Colonel
at all. I think he can’t understand his friends not being keener on his
career. I suppose it will end by their just going out to one of those
coffee or orange places in Africa. But, of course, Livvy is used to a
dull life.”
“But I don’t see ...”
“And there isn’t much else for her. I can’t see poor Livvy at a school
of art, though she might typewrite.”
“She would do for a model,” said Laurence, who had been listening with
interest to this conversation from his side of the table. “They should
be either voluminous or very spiky.”
At this point, the candles were brought in--Lady Naylor had been
delayed in Clonmore, they were dining late. The sharp flames shivered,
every one blinked; the dahlias became theatrical.
“Autumn,” pronounced Sir Richard. “There should be less of this
ambushing and skirmishing and hey-fidaddling now that the days are
drawing in.”
“But as an English friend of mine pointed out,” said Hugo, “this Irish
fighting is not cricket.”
Laurence maintained that this way of fighting was consistent, efficient
and very natural. Why, he asked, be high-toned about a war?
“Oh dear,” said Francie, “you sound just like a pacifist!”
“What else did Gerald say?” Lois wanted to know.
“I really cannot remember,” said Lady Naylor; “he was as pleasant as
ever, but, of course, not original. He seemed in a hurry to be getting
up to the tennis.”
Lois, dissatisfied, blinked gloomily in the candlelight.
About half-past ten, Francie--having been taken up to her room by
Myra, with a suggestion of having been put away for the night--crept
out again to the ante-room, listening. Her candlestick, wobbling with
indecision, brushed the ceiling with shadows. Wires twanged where some
cattle rubbed on a fence in the damp darkness. Francie went across and
tapped on Lois’s door.
Lois turned in alarm from the dark window where she stood holding her
elbows, not quite thinking. Her heart thumped as the crack of the door
widened, letting in foreign light. “Damn,” she thought with annoyance.
She had been up here for more than an hour and had not begun to
undress. To look more natural she undid her frock and stepped quickly
out of it.
Mrs. Montmorency, yellow under the chin, appeared deprecatingly.
She had just thought, she said, of a little chat. She looked round
hopelessly, she could not think where to put down her candle. This
decided--a little table presented itself--her difficulties seemed to be
over. She said at once: “The young man, Lois, seems so unhappy.”
“But we’re engaged,” said Lois, tying her dressing-gown firmly round
her hips.
“Oh ... Are you certain? Because ...”
“What did he say?” said Lois, at once defensive.
“My dear, I was up at the rectory. I am sure your aunt meant everything
for the best.”
Lois went to the glass and took down her hair distractedly. Shaking it
over her face she said, muffled: “You mean she has interfered?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say she’d done _that_. But it seems a pity ...”
“Really,” cried Lois, glad of the hair because her anger did sound to
herself faintly academic, “she is as designing as ... a cardinal.”
“As I said to Hugo, you have enough sense, you are so modern ... and
after all you will only be young once.”
“Oh. Were you all there?”
“My dear, I tell you, I was up at the rectory. But from the way he
picked up the cushions ... I can’t bear lives to go wrong.”
This came out so vehemently, with such an effect of passion that Lois,
surprised, said: “Neither can I, really.” And looking round, she
found the shadows exaggerated with solemnity; the thin candle-flames
stretched up anxiously: a predicament must have become noticeable, even
to the room. Impressed by strangeness, by this pressure of emergency,
Lois plaited her hair in two plaits instead of one and felt herself a
different woman.
“What they never see,” she said rapidly, “is, that I must do something.”
“I should write at once,” said Francie, “I’m not sure that I shouldn’t
even telegraph, if it were not for the post-mistress. I should say ...
Well, I don’t know really: I do wish Marda were here!”
“If I learn German they say, why not Italian? And when I learn Italian
they take no interest.”
Francie picked up the evening dress that Lois had just stepped out
of, stared, and remarked to it, almost with incredulity: “Love is
everything!”
“At least Gerald is definite. He, I ...”
“I _know_ love is so important.”
“At least it may get one somewhere.”
Francie, raising her voice to a scared note, as though she must make
quite certain what they were really talking about, cried: “There are
such mistakes!”
“I wouldn’t mind being properly tragic....”
“If one’s not quite certain, one never knows where one is.”
“--It’s just that I feel so humiliated the whole time.”
“But the young man ...” persisted Francie. They looked at each other,
or at where the other had been. Francie, deserted at once by the
conspiratorial courage that brought her in, dolefully put a finger over
her lips, as though betrayed irrevocably by what had come out of them.
She visibly shrank with misgiving.
“You seem very intellectual, Lois. Do--do you not love him?”
“I _must_,” said Lois. She put her hands up to the back of her neck,
fumbling open the clasp of her corals. She could feel the bright girl
she had been for Mrs. Montmorency disintegrate: much that even she had
taken to be herself went with the illusion.
“I just thought I might have helped,” said Francie, in a spent, remote
little voice, as though they were both coming back from a funeral to an
imposingly vacant house.
“Oh, you have indeed,” said Lois. And she stood there vacantly and, she
felt, rather gruesomely smiling, weighing her coral beads up and down
in a hand, trying to remember what they had both said, what they had
meant, what it had been about.
Francie took up her heavy candlestick and looked about for the door.
She sighed and said it had been a tiring day. She could not bear to
feel she was not missed out after all, had not been passed by because
there was nothing to pass her. It was late at night for so fundamental
a disappointment. There seemed some difficulty about getting her back
to her room, though they both desired this. Lois opened the door; they
heard Sir Richard and Hugo arguing up the stairs. Francie shielded her
candle-flame with her hand and wavered out round the door like a shadow.
Lois, hot with retrospective embarrassment, slipped from her clothes
and blew out the candles quickly. The dark was gratefully positive. She
lay on her side with knees drawn up to her chin, blankness snowing down
on her till, quite snowed up in blankness, she was asleep.
Next day, mist lay on the fields like a blanket, muffling sound so
that the postman arrived unexpectedly. He brought a letter from Gerald:
“For God’s sake see me.” She meant to go out to meet Gerald, bright and
matter of fact, but this miscarried: when he came, in the evening, she
was half-way down from the garden, fighting with Laurence over a snail.
He had walked on the snail on purpose.
“Ough--you fool ... you beast, Laurence!”
“Well, I didn’t mean to be kind to it.”
“Just because it had no mentality.”
“Not at all.”
“Ough, it’s all over the path.”
“It’s scrunched ... I dare say,” said Laurence, pleased, “I am
pathological.”
“Great fat feet!”
As a matter of fact, he was sorry about the snail; he had thought it
was just a shell, but he wasn’t going to say so. “Little mother,” he
said unpleasantly.
“Laurence, you’re insane. Ough, you’re wiping it off everywhere. I
shall be sick!”
“Do.”
“Well, I won’t then.”
“I had no idea you were so fond of animals,” he said as offensively
as possible. But he was not feeling up to much this evening and could
not think what else to say to her. He turned and walked briskly away
towards the avenue, conscious of having no objective. An unusual
evening, however, awaited him. In a boreen in the Castle Trent
direction he met three armed men coming out of a gate. They made him
put up his hands and march smartly down the boreen ahead of them.
He discovered that under these conditions the mind works fast but
unfruitfully; he noted details sharply and then forgot. When they came
to the wall of the graveyard he was embarrassed, but they only asked
for his shoes and the loan of his wrist-watch. Placing him with his
face close up to the wall they advised him for life’s sake not to look
round or stir for twenty minutes. “How shall I know?” said Laurence,
“you’ve got my watch.” But they did not care and went away with his
shoes. Laurence remained with his forehead against the stone for fifty
minutes, horse-flies biting him through the socks. Then he limped home
to dinner and an audience, considerably cheered. Three days after, the
watch was posted back to his Uncle Richard: it was in excellent order
and ticked as it was taken out of the package. “Which just shows,” said
Sir Richard, holding the watch to his ear with satisfaction. But that
was a day of confusion; nobody listened.
As Lois ran down from the garden, swollen about the personality with
annoyance, she saw Gerald waiting at a turn of the path by a holly
tree. He looked intently at her advancing, without comprehension, as
though she had been a picture. Though they were alone, he did not put
out a hand or move towards her. He stood there with the vigour, grief
and indifference of a tree that cannot help growing.
“Gerald?”
“What’s the matter?” he said, impassive.
“Oh, Laurence walked on a _snail!_”
“Bad luck!”
“My dear, he liked it.”
“Queer,” said Gerald, finding the word with difficulty.
“Where shall we go?” she asked, while something in her stopped like
a clock with foreboding. The encounter, uncoloured by surprise or
passion, left her quite at a loss. Unkissed, her mouth and cheeks felt
a touch of ice.
“It seems now,” said Gerald, impersonally, as though delivering a
message, “that we can’t ever be married.”
“Why? When?” she cried angrily.
Gerald looked at her under level eyelids. She remembered saying: “I
wish you wouldn’t keep looking so pleased the whole time.” Now his look
and silence were cold with a doomed expectancy: she nearly hated him.
Dumbly, in happy-seeming physical agreement like a pair of animals,
they wheeled off down the path together, crossed the yard rapidly and
came into the plantation ribbed with shadow and lanced across with
light about the eye-level. He told her her aunt agreed he was not good
enough, it would never do at all, her aunt had said. Looking angrily
up the tree-trunks, she exclaimed that her aunt was mad. She repeated
this with vehemence and confusion, pulling at her fingers. He listened
to her in silence, wounded, wounded. She wished they had not come
down--overruling possibly in each other some desire for space--to
the plantation where, constricted by firs, thought and movement were
difficult and upright shadows emphasized his severity. “She advised
me,” Gerald concluded, “to have a frank talk with you.”
“Is this the frank talk now?”
“She was certain you didn’t love me.”
“_Gerald_--why weren’t you furious?”
“I ... I don’t know,” he said, surprised by the question. She saw him
standing confused, like a foreigner with whom by some failure in her
vocabulary all communication was interrupted. Her mind halted and she
wanted to run away. “Gerald, come back. I’m wretched. Why do we have to
talk?”
“I thought you liked that....” Outside himself with passion he cried:
“I’d rather be dead than not understand!”
“But don’t you _know_ I ...? Gerald?”
If he did not know, it would be quite over. She watched with agony what
seemed to be his indifference. They were each waiting for the other.
_He_ watched her hand, on a tree-trunk, pick like a bird at the scaly
bark. Her hand, which immediately centred her consciousness of him,
paused and became quite rigid, fingers spread out. When he saw her hand
so quiet, he would have to be certain. And he immediately said with his
usual little resigned inflection: “You see, you are everything.”
“I know,” she said, impersonal.
“I suppose you are what I mean by life.... Do you understand at all?”
“You sometimes make me.” She wanted to add: “Touch me now:” it was the
only way across. In her impotence, her desolation--among the severe
trees--at not being compelled, she made a beseeching movement which
he--remote in a rather sublime perplexity that transcended pain--either
ignored or rejected. From the stables, the six o’clock bell sent out
relief in a jerky, metallic passage of sound through the plantation.
She wanted something to look at, to follow: a train curving past in a
rush. With an exaggerated movement, she put up her hands to her ears.
Gerald’s face, in a band of light, remained impassible.
“Gerald, you’re making us lose each other!” she shouted above the bell.
“But I mean to say: what would _you_ lose?”
“Everything.”
“Do you _mean_ that?” A light ran almost visibly up inside him. She saw
now where they were and why he had come.
She thought of going, hesitating with delight, to the edge of an
unknown high-up terrace, of Marda, of getting into a train. “No,” she
cried, terrified, “why should I?”
“Then we don’t mean the same thing.”
“Why don’t you make me ... like you?”
“I thought I could. I know I can--when I’m not with you.”
“Damn, damn,” said Lois. “I do want you!” Gerald said piteously: “Then
why can’t it all be simple?”
“But it’s our being so young,” she said, too eagerly, “and then, money.
I mean, we have got to be practical.”
He explained to her, wide-eyed: “It isn’t anything practical that makes
all this--like death. What _she_ said was; that if you loved me ...”
“It’s like a nightmare that even you should begin to talk. I thought
you were a rock: I was safe with you. Gerald, really, this is all like
a net; little twists of conversation knotted together. One can’t move,
one doesn’t know where one is. I really can’t live at all if it has
all got to be arranged. I tell you, even what I think isn’t my own,
and Mrs. Montmorency comes bursting into my room at nights. Even
Marda--nothing we said to each other mattered, it hasn’t stayed, she
goes off to get married in a mechanical sort of way. She thinks herself
so damned funny--it’s cheap, really. All that matters is what _you_
believe--Gerald, you’ll kill me, just standing there. You don’t know
what it’s like for a snail, being walked on....”
“I don’t understand you,” he cried in agony. “Who is a snail?”
“I didn’t ask you to understand me: I was so happy, I was so safe.”
Gerald noticed a change somewhere; the light was gone from his face,
moving down the trees it had disappeared. He looked at his wrist-watch.
They had been a short time together, almost twenty minutes. “When were
you happy?” he said accurately. He would have liked to be sure of this,
and of several other matters: she was not collected enough to explain.
He eyed the incredible wood, the path, her unchanged figure in the
cheerful blue woollen dress. Something struggled free in his brain and
said, quite apart from his numbed self: “My darling, don’t, don’t rack
yourself. You know this will be always the same for me. Whatever’s
impossible, you will always be perfect. I know we’re different about
things: if that didn’t hurt you it would never matter to me. I mean,
don’t let’s be disappointed. You know I’m not giving you up, I could
never have done _that_. But it’s just that, you see, you never ... I
suppose things can’t come out what one wants.... I suppose it would
hardly do....”
“But, Gerald, where are we?”
He said, “Don’t worry.” They were both, he knew, entirely lost.
“But what have I _done?_ What have I _not_ done?” After a minute,
during which she heard him finger his belt--his fingers slipped on the
leather--she shut her eyes and said, “So you’re certain I don’t love
you?”
No answer. “Oh, leave that belt alone, Gerald!”
Still no answer, as though he were asleep. And indeed he felt, as at
the approach of sleep, an immense indifference. She, tortured by the
loneliness of insomnia, had to cry out: “Won’t you even just try--won’t
you just kiss me?”
“I don’t think ...”
“All right.”
“Look, I must go now.” Vaguely, he saluted and began to go up the path,
towards the beech walk, towards the house.
“Good-bye?” she said.
He only half paused. “No, don’t let’s ...” “Where did you leave your
bicycle?”
He was well up the path; he called back: “Against the hedge. You know,
under the tennis courts.”
She knew; she remembered him pulling leaves from the privet hedge,
scattering them on the grass and throwing them over her. She remembered
that Mrs. Boatley was a Christian Scientist. It seemed a good thing
summer was practically over; there might not be more tennis parties.
But at this the incomprehensible glare of summer blinded her, bringing
tears to her eyes. “Gerald!” she called.
But by this time he seemed to be out of ear-shot.