Tessa Bellamy did not feel so well again to-day and lay wishing more
than ever that she knew what was the matter with her. Several complaints
had, it is true, been suggested to her by her doctors before leaving
England and she had come abroad with a perfectly open mind as to the
possibility of most of them. Not one, however, had proved itself
entirely satisfactory. She wanted something that would settle down with
her, simple and unexigent like an old family servant, so that they might
get to know each other and understand each other’s little ways. She was
distressed by any suggestion of impermanence; she was a homely woman.
One had to have Something in one’s life. She lay on a velvet sofa in her
bedroom with the head pulled round away from the window and wished that
she were a religious woman and that it were time for lunch and that
Sydney would soon come in.
Tessa had made a special arrangement with the management about dieting,
if it should be necessary. She paid an extra 5% to have the menu for
each meal brought up in advance; but so far she had liked the sound of
everything so much and hated so much to give trouble that she had not
asked for anything to be changed. She was not sure now whether she
should continue the arrangement; by which, of course, one did deprive
oneself of the pleasures of curiosity and suspense. On the other hand,
the arrival of the menu gave one something to think about during the
morning. She wished so much that she could make up her mind about this,
turned her head among the cushions and with a sigh refolded her hands on
her bosom. In Life one seemed always to be making decisions.
When Sydney came in she thought that Tessa, lying with closed eyes in
the thick green dusk of the closed jalousies, must be asleep. She stood
looking down for a moment and pretended to herself (to heighten a sense
of her real security) that Tessa was dead. She was fond of Tessa but
imagination often divorces itself from feeling; all that occurred to her
now was that in such a contingency she would have to leave Mrs. Kerr and
the sunshine and go back to London because Tessa, whose guest she was
here, would no longer be able to pay the bills. Later, however, she
produced a real pang of distress—how her own irritability and coldness
would glare back at her when Tessa was gone!
Tessa put a hand up and patted her front hair, then, opening her eyes
looked up at Sydney thoughtfully, not as one who has just been awakened.
“I’ve been thinking things over—” she said.
“Good!” exclaimed Sydney with the geniality that endeared her to Tessa.
“If it’s the menu, you know, I should keep that up. It’s an excellent
principle and I’m sure the manager respects you for it.”
“Oh, do you think so?” said Tessa and looking up with round eyes thought
how untrue it was that intellectual people did not make pleasant
companions. “But you know I do hate——”
“Giving trouble? But that’s what they’re paid for.... How are you
feeling?” Sydney looked down with solicitude. To think one felt ill, to
think only of that, to be so netted-down must be terrible....
Tessa, drawing in her chin upon its many duplications, lay still and
considered a moment, then began to tell Sydney exactly how she did feel.
While she was still talking the gong sounded; she got up and patted her
hair again, this time in front of the looking-glass. Breaking off with a
sigh she began to powder her nose. Sydney meanwhile pushed open the
jalousies, if she did not do this Tessa would quite contentedly make up
her face in the half-light and go downstairs like a nice little clown.
Sydney’s relations had been delighted that she should go abroad with her
cousin Tessa. It had appeared an inspired solution of the Sydney
problem. The girl passed too many of these examinations, was on the
verge of a breakdown, and railed so bitterly at the prospect of a year’s
enforced idleness that the breakdown seemed nearer than ever. Now an
ideal winter had offered itself: sunshine, a pleasant social round.
Sydney could be out of doors all day long; she might distinguish herself
in tennis tournaments, she might get engaged. And Tessa was so kind; she
was forty, married, motherly; she had no nerves, she had no children.
Her inside kept her happy and interested, she would be the ideal
companion for anybody inclined to be neurotic. She admired Sydney, whom
she maintained to be cheerful and amusing; it would be good for Sydney
to be with somebody who refused to consider her as anything but cheerful
and amusing. Sydney seemed as a rule to be so unfortunate in her choice
of friends.
Sydney untied the red handkerchief and combed back the hair from her
forehead. She frowned at her own reflection: was this what all these
people really saw when they looked at her? She was accustomed to stare
at people as from a point of vantage, forgetting she too had a face.
They had thoughts too (with these she often forgot to credit them). Did
_they_ also think as they looked at oneself? The strangeness is that a
cat can look at a king and _see_ him; we kings forget so often that cats
are more than objective.
“—a lucky girl you are,” Tessa was remarking, “to be able to walk about
like that in the sun without burning your face.—We’re to have an
asparagus omelette, Sydney: you know, _à l’Asperge_! We might come on
down, if you’re ready: they bring in the omelettes at once and it really
isn’t fair to the waiters....”
Very few people cared as much as this about being fair to the waiters;
the others came trickling into the dining-room gradually, by twos and
threes. The table Tessa had secured for herself was in a good position,
near the door but not too far away from a window. By turning her head a
little Sydney could feel the cool air on her face and see, under the
awning, palm-fronds rising up from the garden below, an orange tree in
fruit and the roofs of the town behind it, vivid against the sea. Mrs.
Kerr’s table was off to the right at such an angle from where they sat
that, without being too much observed, Sydney was able to watch it. It
was generally empty the longest of all. Behind Tessa the double doors
were spread wide in a hospitable gesture, like the hands of a maître
d’hôtel. Beyond, down the long prospective to the foot of the stairs one
could see visitors take form with blank faces, then compose and poise
themselves for an entrance. Those who thought punctuality rather
suburban would gaze into the unfilled immensity of the room for a moment
then vanish repelled. Others would advance swimmingly and talk from
table to table across the emptiness, familiarly, like a party of
pioneers. Men came in without their wives and did not always look up
when these entered. Women appearing before their husbands remained
alert, gazed into an opposite space resentfully and ate with an air of
temporizing, off the tips of their forks. When the husbands did come in
it seemed a long time before there was something to say. It seemed odder
than ever to Sydney, eyeing these couples, that men and women should be
expected to pair off for life.
During intervals between the courses women reft from intimate
conversation looked across at each other’s tables yearningly. Mrs.
Hillier held out by the fringe for a friend’s admiration a beautiful
crêpe-de-chine scarf she had bought in the shops. She had chosen it for
a wedding present but it was such a lovely green that she could not
resist wearing it, just till this evening, to take out the creases. The
three pretty daughters of a London doctor at a table in one of the
windows maintained their high level of uproariousness. They were the
first to be interrupted by Mr. Lee-Mittison, who was going a round of
the tables with an open botany case. He showed them the roots of a very
uncommon anemone, found in the hills. The three Lawrences turned their
shining heads to wrinkle up their noses at the botany case, but Mr.
Lee-Mittison was not to be discouraged. He dangled one of the roots at
them; his teeth and his glasses glittered benevolently.
“My wife and I,” he said, “hope to make another expedition to the hills
to-morrow, taking with us provisions for a picnic. We shall be delighted
for you three young ladies to accompany us.” He rested a hand on
Veronica Lawrence’s chair and beamed down on the top of her head. The
Lawrences made round eyes at each other and tittered unabashedly. Their
father, to show that he was in no way responsible for them, leaned back
and looked out of the window. “There is a special invitation,” continued
their friend, “for Miss Veronica, whom I know to be an excellent
walker.” He clicked the lid of the botany case, winked respectfully at
Veronica and passed on to another table.
The Lawrences had appropriated for general use the principal young man
of the Hotel, young Mr. Ammering; who having been unable to find a job
since the War was said to be suffering from nervous depression in
consequence and had come out here for a rest with his father and mother.
He seemed to be one of those young men of thirty (Public School and
University education, active, keen sportsman, good general capacities)
who advertize their willingness to try anything in the personal column
of _The Times_. Enforced inactivity must come very hard on poor Mr.
Ammering, who played tennis all day long with a set face and went out at
nights with the Lawrences to dances at other hotels, where he talked to
his partners most beautifully about the War.
Mr. Lee-Mittison after a moment’s pause—not diffident, only embarrassed
by the richness of his acquaintanceship—veered left towards the
Ammerings’ table. But Victor as he approached took up the local paper
and began to read the visitors’ list aloud to his parents, who listened
attentively. The nearer Mr. Lee-Mittison came the louder Victor read and
the more eagerly his parents listened. Something about the group of
them, rather too exclusively domestic, offended Mr. Lee-Mittison’s
social sense vaguely: he turned away. The Ammerings should not see his
anemones. He paused for a word with Mrs. Hillier who shook out the
fringe of her scarf at him, seeming delighted to talk, and decided to
cut out a visit to the Mellarshes who, quite newly married, were though
not talkative still solicitously watching one another eat.
The Honourable Mrs. Pinkerton and her sister-in-law the Honourable Miss
Pinkerton had professed to be interested in anemones: they had an
extremely fine garden at home which Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Mittison hoped to
visit. But though the two families were on excellent terms, in fact
becoming quite intimate, Mr. Lee-Mittison still did not like to approach
the good ladies at meal-time. They seemed somehow enclosed as they sat
there, moated about by their patent honourableness. Distinction drew a
bright line round their woolly white heads, detaching them from the
panorama of faces, distinction flowed down with their sleek satin
draperies into dark folds. Bowing towards their placid obliviousness,
Mr. Lee-Mittison passed on.
Sydney’s eye went over Tessa’s shoulder, fixing the doorway; Tessa’s
little smiles at her withered unnoticed.
“Hasn’t Mrs. Kerr come in yet?” said Tessa at last, her penetration
innocently revenging the death of the smiles. “How vague she is! I’m
afraid she will miss the omelette.”
“She doesn’t like omelettes,” said Sydney, looking solemnly at Tessa
with her strained dark eyes. She could have screamed when Mr.
Lee-Mittison, coming up unheard behind her, laid a hand on the back of
her chair. Putting down the case on the table he showed them his roots.
He liked Tessa to whom he had talked a great deal, but it was to Sydney
that his invitation was to be addressed. “My wife and I—” he began, and
glanced again at Tessa, regretfully. She was not young enough ...
“—provisions for a picnic,” he concluded.
“When?” said Sydney abruptly.
He flipped the air with his hand to enjoin patience. “I was about to
say: we shall be glad if you will join us to-morrow——”
“Oh, thank you, I can’t. I am sorry, I have an engagement.”
“_O-oh!_” said Tessa, who thought this would have been nice for Sydney;
while Mr. Lee-Mittison stared incredulously.
“Tut-_tut_!” he said. “Well, think it over....” Sydney’s strangeness
bothered him; the Lawrences had seemed so _glad_. From behind a screen
that hid the service-lift the waiters with their steaming dishes
debouched suddenly and sped like bees to distribute themselves among the
tables. Excusing himself quickly Mr. Lee-Mittison hurried back to his
own table where his wife who rejoiced in Herbert’s popularity had sat
all this time knitting. Now she leant sideways and pulled his chair
further out for him, tucked her knitting away in a bag and gave him all
her attention. The return was in the nature of a home-coming; she was
the kind of wife who can always create this atmosphere. “Well?” said
she.
Behind Tessa the doorway still framed emptiness. The meal clattered on.
Nearly everybody here was English: the air was allowed to come in
pleasantly through the open windows under green-striped awnings and feel
its way cool-fingered from flushing face to face. Nobody was hurried or
constrained, time put out no compulsion and the afternoon might have
stretched ahead, as it seemed to stretch, brightly blank. Over it,
however, habit had spun her web of obligations; a web infinitely fine
and fragile from which it was yet impossible to break without outrage.
Beyond the dining-room along the expanses of the lounge people risen
early from their tables were awaiting one another, meek beneath the rule
of precedent, to fulfil a hundred small engagements. Leisure, so linked
up with ennui, had been sedulously barred away. Each armchair, each palm
and bureau had become a trysting place where couples met to hurry off or
groups were reunited.
Meeting with an air of effort, that made her seem to be breasting a
current, the desultory trickle of the exodus, Miss Pym came in, very
late. She was scarlet-eyed, the last tear must have been recently wiped
away. Something wobbled in her throat, round which she twisted and
untwisted an anæmic string of turquoise beads. She seemed constrained to
look at everybody, then to look quickly away again. Sydney, leaning her
cheek on her hand turned from the door for a minute or two to study Miss
Pym. She had never seen what she still called to herself a “grown-up
person” so visibly ravaged by emotion. The emotional range of her elders
seemed to Sydney narrow and stereotyped; they reacted without variation
to stimuli from without. But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of
having been attacked from _within_.
Miss Pym looked diffidently at the waiter. She had cut herself off from
the omelette so he shrugged his shoulders and brought her up a plate of
macaroni from the servants’ lunch. This the bruised creature pitifully
but with evidence of hunger began to devour; the traditional British
struggle with macaroni brought her sharply down from tragedy to farce.
Sydney sighed impatiently and turned away.
Mrs. Kerr, half way across the dining-room, looked about her in
surprise. Discounting her own lateness she seemed to wonder if the other
visitors had been dispersed miraculously. Her eyebrows said “How odd!”
but did not seem to ponder over this. She sat down and looked out at the
orange tree; then took up her Tauchnitz and without another glance at
the room began to read.
Tessa and Sydney had been sitting on interminably; they had watched from
rise to fall of the curtain the whole drama of lunch. The fact was,
Tessa did not think it was wise to hurry. She turned round and round
pensively their basket of fruit, took each orange up, pinched it and put
it back again. The nicest-looking were never the softest: another of
Life’s perplexities.
“I think,” she said at last, “that I _will_ take another orange but I
won’t eat it here. I shall take it up to my room with me and eat it
there. I’m quite sure, you know, that oranges are _good_.... But don’t
let me keep you, Sydney, if you want to go and talk to Mrs. Kerr.”
“Why should I want to go and talk to Mrs. Kerr?” asked Sydney in an
unconcerned voice that echoed round the big, deserted, crumby
orange-scented dining-room.