I
Miss Fitzgerald hurried out of the Hotel into the road. Here she stood
still, looking purposelessly up and down in the blinding sunshine and
picking at the fingers of her gloves. She was frightened by an interior
quietness and by the thought that she had for once in her life stopped
thinking and might never begin again. Ladies under discs of coloured
shade from their parasols came walking down the middle of the road; they
deflected their course to pass her. Their faces conveyed nothing, but
now and then they would smile, and Miss Fitzgerald would feel her throat
and chin contract as custom wrenched from her a small, stiff bow. She
stood there helplessly, as though she were waiting for a friend.
That Miss Fitzgerald should, after so violent an exit, simply continue
to stand there had been beyond the calculations of Miss Pym. _She_,
after a short blank pause of astonishment up in her room, had begun to
creep down the stairs warily. She listened, she clung to the bannisters;
taut for retreat at every turn of the staircase. The lift shaft rose
direct from the lounge and the stairs bent round and round it; she
stared down for a long time through the wire-netting case of the shaft
to assure herself that the lounge was empty. It was. There was not a
soul down there, not a movement among the shadows; it was eleven o’clock
and everybody would have gone out to the shops or the library, up to the
hills or down to the tennis-courts. Not a shadow crossed the veiled
glass doors of the drawing-room to interrupt the glitter from the sea.
Not a sound came up from the smoking-room. Miss Fitzgerald was not
there.
Miss Pym had been quite sure she _would_ not be there, but all the same
she let out a sigh of relief. Miss Fitzgerald had gone out: having
discharged with such bitterness of finality that last shot in her locker
she must have fled. At this crisis of ungovernable agitation Emily (how
well they knew each other!) would have taken to the hills. Miss Pym
could see plainly her figure stumbling up in the glare towards the shade
of the olive-trees, breast to breast with the increasing slope. She must
be given a little longer to get away.
Miss Pym, waiting about in the lounge, glanced back diffidently at the
last few minutes and then turned round square and faced them. She was
surprised to find herself cool, explanatory and reasonable. Her wait
prolonged itself, the minutes seemed interminable; now and then she
glanced at the lounge clock. She read the announcements pinned to the
notice board, looked along the letter-rack and read the names on the
envelopes stuck prominently on the concierge’s desk to await new
arrivals. These long-forecast shadows forever darkening the threshold of
the Hotel excited Miss Pym; for some new arrival that never arrived she
was storing up tenderness. She found that they were to expect (quite
soon perhaps), a clergyman, a Rev. J. D. L. Milton—_John?_ Three letters
for him and something that looked like a bill (or perhaps a receipt) had
been forwarded from an address she knew quite well, a country house in
Derbyshire. Gratifying how one’s intimate world contracted itself, how
one’s friends wove themselves in! Society was fascinating, like a jigsaw
puzzle!
Miss Pym heard somebody beginning to come downstairs and moved quickly
back to the notice board. Those firm steps coming down unhurriedly in a
light, continuous, increasing ripple sounded like Mrs. Kerr’s: it was
Mrs. Kerr herself who appeared at the turn of the staircase, drawing her
loose white gauntlets over her wrists. Without troubling to look down
into the lounge, she called “Sydney ... Sydney,” as though she did not
care to question or need to command but expected Sydney to take form
somehow out of a limbo to which forgetfulness had consigned her, and be
drawn up the stairs to where her friend stood beautifully, balanced
either for advance or immobility.
“Miss Warren isn’t here,” said Miss Pym. “She’ll have gone on down to
the courts, I daresay: she went past me in the corridor with her racquet
quite a little time ago.”
Mrs. Kerr said “Thank you,” smiled and accepted this. She did not seem
really to care whether Miss Warren were there or not, her “Sydney,
Sydney” must have been quite perfunctory. “Well, _I_ shall go down to
the courts,” she said, and came on down to take her parasol out of the
rack. She was accustomed to leave her nice parasol leaning up in the
rack there quite casually, for anybody to borrow, instead of taking it
up to her room with her. Miss Pym watched eagerly and Mrs. Kerr must
have felt a conjunction to be inevitable, for having made a show of
hesitation between three parasols not at all like each other, and
feeling Miss Pym still behind her she asked charmingly, hopefully: “And
are _you_ going down?”
Miss Pym never went near the tennis-courts, but a prospect of walking
down there and appearing publicly with Mrs. Kerr was delightful (poor
Emily, scrambling alone in the hills!) She abandoned a plan she had,
still embryonic, of going alone to the shops and wondered whether their
two names—her own and Mrs. Kerr’s—might not henceforward begin to be
coupled. She had a queer little thrill and held open the swing-door with
gratitude, almost with reverence. Mrs. Kerr with a vague inclination of
the head passed out before her. They crossed the gravel together under
the hundred windows of the Hotel.
When they turned out of the gates, however, Miss Pym flinched and felt
giddy. For there stood Miss Fitzgerald, twisting her fingers together
and staring straight at them. Had she been awaiting them there, malign
and patient; had they walked into an ambush? Then she saw how
drained-out, void of intention Emily was. She seemed hardly to see them.
She might have crept out here to bleed—but her wounded presence still
was an outrage. Miss Pym looked away.
“There’s Miss Fitzgerald!” said Mrs. Kerr pleasantly.
“Oh?—Yes.”
“Mustn’t she be waiting for you?”
“I....”
“You mustn’t let me be selfish,” said Mrs. Kerr.
Miss Fitzgerald, who must gradually have brought them into focus,
wheeled round nervously and hurried away. Everything that, abroad, an
English lady takes out with her swung from her arm and bumped as she
fled; the coloured straw satchel, the native umbrella, the golf jersey,
the net bag supplementing the satchel. There streamed from them, to Miss
Pym’s perception, a pitiful wraith. With all these, in shining readiness
for the day’s excursion, Emily had presented herself at her friend’s
door—less than an hour ago.
“Going all by herself?” observed Mrs. Kerr.
“Yes,” agreed Miss Pym, and after a moment cautiously licked her lips.
Mrs. Kerr balancing her parasol on her shoulder walked on, looking ahead
serenely. She did not seem to be wondering what on earth one of them was
to say next; she did not look as though it even remotely concerned her.
There were so many things that she might have said just now that Miss
Pym could have taken up easily, but she did not say one of them, only
exposed with indifference her profile to the sidelong, zealous research
of Miss Pym. Her profile did not commit her, it expressed an ironic
indulgence to fashion in the line of a hatbrim, the soft undulation of
hair, an earring’s pendulous twinkle, the melting suave lines of a scarf
round the throat. Mrs. Kerr took fashion in and subdued it and remained
herself.
Miss Pym with a welling-up in the depths of her, was moved to tell Mrs.
Kerr everything and did not know where to begin. She was a timid woman
but had for a moment the sufferer’s arrogance. She hesitated, pondered,
debated with herself and again with reluctance looked back.
It had been what she would have to describe as a quarrel. It had been a
Moment, not a succession of moments, not a gradual divergence of herself
and Emily from the path of loving forbearance. It had been a flare—or a
blotting-out, how could she better describe it?—like the horrible
blackness of spilt ink, suddenly everywhere, that makes one crinkle
one’s face up. They had seen each other crudely illuminated, and they
had seen each other as _vulgar_. She could not remember how it began,
she could not remember anything leading up to it, just that there had
been something intolerable about Emily from the moment she came to the
door.... That is the worst of anger, that terrible clarity. They had
had, at that moment when everything tottered, worse than a sense of
destruction; they had felt the whole force of a doubt in that moment:
had there ever been _anything_ there? Isolating doubt, which, coming
upon them suddenly, had sent Miss Fitzgerald blindly downstairs and left
Miss Pym, trembling, to put away the sketching-blocks and
newly-sharpened pencils and empty the steaming coffee from the Thermos
flask into the slop-pail.... If Miss Pym were to tell Mrs. Kerr all this
she couldn’t imagine what Mrs. Kerr would be likely to say.
She realized that she had not made any remark for a long time and
wondered in agony what Mrs. Kerr must be thinking of her. A slight turn
of Mrs. Kerr’s head, the ghost of a smile, the quickened shine of an
earring made her feel all at once she _could_ not tell Mrs. Kerr: she
was afraid.
“I think many people might maintain,” began Miss Pym laboriously, “that
this was an ideal place to pass the winter.”
“I’m sure it is,” said Mrs. Kerr.
“Except, of course, those _Spartans_ who enjoy the sleet and fogs, or
say they do, because they maintain that endurance, that is, endurance
practised as an act in itself, _constitutes_ enjoyment.”
She had pulled out a fine, full stop of sarcasm, but Mrs. Kerr seemed to
ignore it and said quite seriously: “Oh, but does anybody think that?”
“I, I suppose they must,” said Miss Pym, flustered. “But I do think that
to the Straightforward Person who can be frank with themselves and admit
that they do like to escape the difficulties of Life and the
unpleasantness—if they can do so without depriving themselves of
Experience or evading Responsibilities, or hurting Other
People—_then_....”
Where was she, what had she been going to say? This was the way that she
and Emily talked all day long, climbing the hills or sitting among those
warm rocks that fringe the Mediterranean. They drew in each other’s
ideas and gave out their own by a gentle process, like respiration. They
had pinned down the most slippery ethical subtleties for absorbing,
tireless analysis. Everything they said to each other was so _true_. Now
this was all becoming nonsense, futile in the ears of Mrs. Kerr. Her
waves came back bewildered, broken against something. She could not
endure the ordeal of this gracious listening. Was Mrs. Kerr like this
when Sydney Warren talked?
She drew a desperate breath and continued, “As I say, to the
Straightforward Person—and I think, you know, that the more one is that,
the more one is bound to admit to oneself that one is a Hedonist, and
that it is better not to fight or to drive oneself, but to lead and
develop——”
“Ah yes,” said Mrs. Kerr “I think you are so right. One’s first duty is,
I’m sure, to be warm. Other people may pose about their reasons for not
coming abroad, but you and I are much wiser.”
The road ran straight ahead of them, parallel with the coast and planted
with two regular lines of chestnut-trees. To the right the hills rose up
with climbing villas, to the left the town with its gardens crowded down
to the sea. As Miss Pym walked on, distressed but concentrated,
confessing herself a Hedonist, Mrs. Kerr touched her lightly on the arm
and said, “No, look; this way. We’re missing the turn to the
tennis-club!” She kept a hand on Miss Pym’s sleeve for a moment longer
and guided her gently. Their path struck off at a right angle between
high garden walls, a funnel of sunshine so narrow that two could not
walk abreast. Miss Pym, elated, deprecating, plunged down it ahead of
her companion, who had to pause for a moment to disentangle her parasol
from a long spray of creeper that swung down over a wall. Miss Pym felt
the heat on her thin back as she hurried crabwise, incoherently talking,
but she did not dare to put up her parasol because parasols are so
awkward when one is nervous, and how should she feel if she poked Mrs.
Kerr in the eye?
She approached the tennis-courts and heard the cries, the ping of the
balls, and saw the shining, darting figures and the shaded balconies of
the pavilion. Miss Pym felt behind her a drawing-away of Mrs. Kerr and
knew that she was now to be abandoned. Mrs. Kerr was looking through the
wire netting, her eyes went from court to court, then turned
dissatisfied to question the pavilion, then the benches underneath the
wall where players sat in groups or couples, waiting for their courts.
She watched these benches for some time, and Miss Pym watched her.
“Well, it’s been so nice ...” said Mrs. Kerr. Her voice trailed off into
a valedictory murmur. It had been so nice ... Miss Pym could never have
brought herself near the tennis-courts, she was shy of all the people,
she would never have come alone. They wore blazing, immaculate white and
bright woolly wraps huddled round them professionally. The quality of
their hard cool stare of indifference, yet so penetrating, was enhanced
for Miss Pym by the glare of the courts, the air charged with sunshine,
the treelessness, a kind of positiveness everywhere. She had a sense, so
acute from her own ill-health as to become intolerable, of the
stored-up, schooled, directed energy in all these fine bodies. She
turned in a panic, abruptly, upon Mrs. Kerr. “I’ll be going back,” she
said. “I——”
The other stood still by the turnstile. Her eyes now rested in
passivity, as after a home-coming, on a face they had discovered.
“I’ll be going back....” Yes, it was Miss Warren who, over there with a
scarlet handkerchief bound round her head, had been galvanized by
awareness, half risen, and remained staring towards them over the
courts. Miss Pym spoke again, louder, but Mrs. Kerr who was passing
through the turnstile gave no sign of attention. Only when Miss Pym was
half way up the path in retreat did Mrs. Kerr recollect her companion
and, turning, make some vague gesture, some unheard sound of farewell.