“But they told me you had come on down!” cried Sydney Warren. Slipping
along the wall, at the edge of the courts, she gained the pavilion and
the back upper bench where Mrs. Kerr had seated herself. Mrs. Kerr
smiled and looked leisurely round her. From these high seats one had an
excellent view of the courts and could hardly be seen from them, sitting
far back in the shadow. At one’s feet a packed row of spectators leant
forward into the sun.
“I waited for nearly an hour,” said Sydney. “And Colonel Duperrier
_swore_ he had seen you go down. I couldn’t make it out, but I came. If
I’d ever imagined——”
“It never occurred to me you would wait. It would have been dreadfully
silly. And anyhow, it was nice to walk down with Colonel Duperrier.”
(Sydney repudiated Colonel Duperrier with a grimace.) “I walked down
with Miss Pym,” Mrs. Kerr said contentedly.
“I know—I was horrified. One of the pussies!”
“Oh, is she? She seemed intelligent. She was telling me she is a
Hedonist.”
“A _how_-much?”
“A Hedonist.”
“How Victorian!” Sydney said crossly, and hacked at the toe of her shoe
with her racquet.
“Do you think so,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I suppose,” she confessed, “one
forgets: we _are_ rather old pussies.”
“_Don’t_ be so——”
“My dear child, I’m her age. We do date when we talk. She had
quarrelled, I think, with her friend, the other artistic one. I came on
her down in the lounge nearly crying and the other, still nearer it, was
out in the road. You know, women’s lives _are_ sensational. Aren’t you
inclined to be intolerant with us all?”
Sydney seemed surprised at this quick little gush of humanity. She
stared at her friend, who was brilliantly earnest, then turned away
gloomily. “Oh, women’s _lives_....”
“Well, I suppose it’s inconsistent of me,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I’m not a
Feminist but I do like being a woman.”
Any approach to the personal seemed to be difficult. Sydney said airily:
“Oh, of course if one’s _one_ kind of woman——”
“Well, so are you,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking abstractedly at her young
friend. Sydney was probably twenty-two and had a clear pallor and
regular features of which the lines were now, as too often, strained and
broken up by an expression of over-eagerness. An exaggerated attention
to what was being said or suggested would arch up the eyebrows
tragically, harden the eyes and draw in the mouth to a line that
prefigured maturity’s. The forehead was broad and lovely and could have
been bland. The scarlet handkerchief bound round the head accentuated
her darkness and pallor, it had in common with other details of her
dress and appearance a faint kind of nervous swagger.
“You could be charming,” said Mrs. Kerr. “But I daresay an indifference
to one’s company which doesn’t comprehend the desire to please is really
the safest.—Won’t you go and play tennis?”
“I’m waiting for people in E Court to finish,” said Sydney and got up
slowly, not quite knowing whether to resent this as a dismissal. Mrs.
Kerr, with the air of a return to solitude, a cheerfulness faintly
suggestive of release, leant forward and signalled to someone below who
had been looking up for a long time, trying in vain to catch her eye.
“Oh yes,” she replied, “do go and play tennis. Surely it wasn’t wise to
come away from your partner when you were expecting a court?”
“But what are you going to do?” asked Sydney. Mrs. Kerr did not answer.
“I mean do you want me to go?” she began again. She did not want to
leave the pavilion, this “girl of your age” tone which was being used to
her really did give her something to resent. She did not want to go down
to the courts again; she knew that if Mrs. Kerr sat on here, watching
her meditatively, her play would all go to pieces.
“I have heard so much of your service. To-day I am really going to watch
it.”
“This is one of my off days.”
“Dear Sydney, whenever I come you tell me it’s one of your off days.”
Mrs. Kerr laughed. “I’m unlucky.”
“Oh, do you notice that? From the moment you come here I never hit
anything.”
“What on earth do you mean, my dear Sydney? How terribly sinister! It
had never _occurred_ to me that my eyes might be evil. I meant something
much more prosaic—that I happen to miss things.”
Sydney felt foolish. How like her (Mrs. Kerr would agree) to have drawn
so far-fetched, so morbid an inference. How unlike herself to have been
betrayed into so bald an assertion.
“Luck’s funny,” she said. “I don’t think it’s constantly good or bad,
but it’s sun-y or moon-y, if you know what I mean, and one’s born with
one kind or the other. Mine’s moon-y—I’d better go down.”
“Yes, I shouldn’t have kept you.”
Sydney played so badly that Colonel Duperrier was astonished. Now and
then he permitted himself a “tut-tut”—by implication a tribute—an _Et
tu, Brute_ at which she ironically chuckled. They crossed and recrossed
one another grimly. Along the margin of her vision, distended by
nervousness, shoulders were shrugged and disappointed onlookers strolled
away. At a net that grew ever higher Colonel Duperrier’s opponent,
Chinesely grinning, crouched and sprang incredibly. His partner a long
way behind him nonchalantly flipped at her balls. Away at the back of
the pavilion Mrs. Kerr remained sitting; the edge of her skirt, the tip
of her parasol came out into sunlight. From out of the black shadow that
hid the rest of her, her scrutiny like a fine wire was incessantly
tugging at Sydney’s consciousness.
The set was over, quickly over. Colonel Duperrier’s play had been
affected by the collapse of his partner; now, as their opponents
strolled off he laughed deprecatingly; stooping to let the balls run up
on to his racquet. He had several pleasant remarks in reserve to brush
away Sydney’s discomfiture, but some kind of apology from her was needed
to unlock them; he did not know how to begin. She did not apologize and
his embarrassment grew. No one could have been sorrier than he for the
poor girl, a fine player subject to this deplorable kind of paralysis.
He thanked God that he had not yet asked her to play with him in the
tournament and resolved never to do so, yet he was filled with a
special, protective benignancy for her.
“Terrible glare,” said he.
“There generally is.”
“I thought, particularly bad to-day....”
“I didn’t notice,” she said indifferently, wondering where to go now.
Anywhere she thought, but back to the pavilion after all this.
“We ought to move off,” he said, rousing her, “they want the court.
Well, I vote we take those two on again and get some of our own back.
Don’t we?”
Though he continued to admire Miss Warren he could be no longer
surprised that she was not popular in the Hotel. There was a certain
dark stare of aloofness.... He told himself that she was curiously
dammed-up; there was certainly something _in_ the girl. Generally
speaking, he preferred people who came out easily: she was not his type.
He came up abreast with her dutifully as they walked from the court,
then his face brightened, he knew he would soon be relieved of her as
Mrs. Kerr smiled and nodded down at them from the shade of the pavilion.
“Come on up!” he said eagerly, and Sydney was forced to precede him.
“We-ell?” said Mrs. Kerr, as though they had been a pair of victors.
“The glare is awful,” said Colonel Duperrier.
“I expect it is,” she agreed, and made room for them both. Colonel
Duperrier cheered up, soon: in a quiet way that diffused itself across
his features and attitude and the expression with which he watched the
players below he became very cheerful indeed. When he had left them Mrs.
Kerr asked Sydney to walk with her to the library. “Unless,” she said,
“you are going to play again.”
To go to the library one turned to the left instead of the right at the
top of the footpath; the same procession of chestnut-trees arched one
over with their boughs. At this hour the road was more frequented;
lunch-time had made perceptible its earliest magnetism. Visitors
strolled gravely hotelwards, and Villa Residents (proudly distinguished
by the possession of dogs). There was no traffic and a long-legged
English child in the middle of the road was able to read as she walked,
without menace.
“What a nice man, that Colonel Duperrier,” said Mrs. Kerr.
“Yes. Very patient.”
“_That_ seems a curious quality to attract you.”
“Anyone else would have killed me this morning. I suppose he has learnt
to be patient: that wife——”
“Poor woman!”
“It would be kinder if neurotics were to be chloroformed—did you admire
my service?”
“My dear child, don’t be heroic! I don’t remember it as anything
terrible. I don’t know, of course, how well you can play.”
Sydney was silent, stung by a sudden perception that Mrs. Kerr did not
really believe in her tennis at all. If she did not exist for Mrs. Kerr
as a tennis-player, in this most ordinary, popular of her aspects, had
she reason to feel she existed at all? It became no longer a question
of—what did Mrs. Kerr think of her? but rather—did Mrs. Kerr _ever_
think of her? The possibility of not being kept in mind seemed to Sydney
that moment, a kind of extinction. Mrs. Kerr had many friends; all these
demi-gods would leap up at a reference to one of the least of them,
shadowy and menacing. Men and women of supreme distinction and beauty,
they never appeared in person, were never described and so were never
allowed to diminish. The very fact that Mrs. Kerr never praised them,
seemed in fact rather flatly to take them for granted, was fresh reason
for self-laceration. “A delightful woman ... rather a charming person
... I thought, an amusing man....” These haunted Sydney, aloofly
inimical, these friends of her friend. People one did not know remained
on a different plane, inaccessible to one’s criticism. Sydney professed
herself (to friends of her own age) a Realist, and it was perhaps
because of this that her imagination which she dealt with austerely was
able to revenge itself obliquely upon her.
After a pause she said, “Well, you know one thing now about my play—if
it interests you. You do know how bad it can be. I think that was the
depths.”
“Oh dear, oh dear,” her friend said benevolently. “—Will you kindly
choose me another book?”
“Did you finish that last?”
Mrs. Kerr shook her head and looked sideways at Sydney in a way of her
own. She sighed, her eyelids delicately and sadly fluttered—she was a
lovely thing.
“Oh,” said Sydney, in a secret ecstasy, “you are incorrigible! Then why
do you go on asking me to choose you books?”
“I know there must be something in them.” The way this was said might
have stamped out of being, for Sydney, forever the friends of her
friend. “I know, you see, there _has_ to be something. I want so much to
be able to read them—I hope so much that I may.”
“I shall give up choosing you books.”
“Oh no, don’t do that ... Sydney darling. I suppose I _may_ be
incorrigible. I still seem to read for amusement.”
“But that was just it—I was so sure that man would amuse you. He’s got a
brilliant mind like—like what would appeal to you.”
“I’m sure he has. But you see he was much too clever for me so he only
seemed to me dull. And I do still like books to be—what shall I
say?—decent. Though I know it isn’t the thing to admit: you all have
such pure minds.... I’m sorry.”
“You don’t look a bit penitent. Tell me—has Ronald got a very pure
mind?”
“Alarmingly,” said Ronald’s mother, “but he’s learnt to respect my
limitations.”
Sydney, who was herself at times conscious of these
limitations—remotely, as in a dream—smiled at the thought of Ronald, a
long-limbed, intense-looking adolescent whom she was unlikely to meet.
Ronald was a long way away, in Germany. (She had put together her Ronald
from two photographs his mother possessed; a blurred snapshot and a
shadowy portrait-study.) One could smile over Ronald; or imagine him as
not distressing; he was not among the demi-gods. It was amusing to see
one’s own qualities in him pilloried by tender maternal derision. Ronald
was “young.” Yet all this might not have counted so much in his favour
if it had not seemed certain that Ronald was to remain in Germany.
“I should like to meet Ronald,” Sydney said benevolently. “And by the
way,” she added, “I must bring back Tessa another book. Anything that’s
bright and very loving, with a certain amount of illness in it will do
her beautifully, provided she doesn’t remember having read it before—Now
you’re not to say I’m horrid about Tessa: she’s as much amused at her
own taste in books as I am. She hasn’t got much time for novels
now—she’s reading Baudouin.”
“It would never do,” said Mrs. Kerr, “to bring back Mrs. Bellamy one of
your depressing books.” She slipped an arm through Sydney’s for a moment
as they turned together up a flight of cold steps to the library.