IV

The Honourable Mrs. and Miss Pinkerton occupied two wide-balconied rooms

at the end of the first-floor corridor. Five times across the Hotel,

each on a floor, these corridors ran, dark, thickly carpeted, panelled

with bedroom doors. The front rooms looked over the town into dazzling

spaciousness, sky and sea; the back rooms were smaller, never so bright,

and looked over the road with its chestnut-trees into the side of the

hill. Into these the north light came slanting; no sky was visible until

one leant far out, only the scrambling olives and scared little faces of

the villas. Eyes from the villas could have peered down into the vacant

eyes of newly-awakened sleepers. At this side of the Hotel, screened by

opaque glass from the possibility of such observation, were the

bathrooms.

Mrs. and Miss Pinkerton were of course on the sunny side, with their

balconies from which the view could be patronized. The view was their

own; they were to enjoy the spiritual, crude and half-repellent beauty

of that changing curtain, so featureless save for the occasional passing

of a ship. They barricaded themselves in from the assault of noonday

behind impassable jalousies. No private suite with a bathroom was

available; it was possible, they brought themselves to comprehend dimly,

that in Hotels of this type none existed. They therefore had had

reserved, at some expense, the bathroom opposite to their doors for

their own exclusive occupation. One says “occupation” advisedly: here in

white-tiled sanctuary their bowls of soap, their loofahs, their scented

bath-salts could remain secure from outrage; here too their maid could

do their smaller washing and hang the garments up to dry before the

radiator. There generally were garments drying there; the two distrusted

foreign laundresses, perhaps with reason.

Other visitors on the first floor respected this arrangement which had a

certain beauty for them, the accretion of prestige. They bathed at the

other end of the corridor; if that bathroom was full they went up to the

second floor where people could not afford to have baths so often. James

Milton, a clergyman, was however unaware of this, and going upstairs

directly after his arrival locked himself into Miss Pinkerton’s

bathroom. Here he hoped to remove by steaming and by prolonged immersion

the grime, ingrained in one till one is almost polished, of a

transcontinental journey. This was the bath that he had been promising

himself for the last thirty-six hours: it had come to shine before his

numbing intelligence as in itself the journey’s bourne. He did not

notice the bath-salts but unthinkingly made full use of the loofah,

which he was surprised and pleased to find there.

He had arrived late, having dined on the train, and few people were at

hand to witness the arrival: a big man talking Italian above the folds

of a muffler and making abundant, baulked gestures at the boots and

concierge. He seemed unwilling to admit how well they could speak

English. The few onlookers, by hanging poised in their talk for an

infinitesimal second’s observation, bore in a sense of his squalor upon

him sharply. He was aware of the glow of clean faces, the glaze of

immaculate shirt-fronts. He felt them avert their eyes considerately.

Relegated, alien, blinking like an owl after his long dark drive in the

light’s untempered scrutiny he stood for a moment, then fled upstairs on

the way to Mrs. Pinkerton’s bathroom.

He took in enough of his No. 19, when the chambermaid switched the

lights up, to know that it faced out the wrong side, offered no space

for his baggage and was so furnished as to confuse thought, distract

contemplation and impede the movements of the body. The lace-veiled

window was pallid against the dark; pushing it open a little he let in

some cold air and heard the rustle of a palm-tree. Unwinding his muffler

and throwing off his great coat he waited only to take out his

sponge-bag and dressing-gown and sweep his towels along with him; then

made off down the corridor calling back to the chambermaid in three

languages that he was going to have a bath. He was an independent man

with a bump of locality on which he had grown with years increasingly

reliant, and he brought himself without difficulty to the door of a

hospitable-looking bathroom.

Mrs. Pinkerton and her sister-in-law never sat for more than a minute or

two in the drawing-room where other ladies foregathered. They withdrew

early to their own rooms, where they would embroider, eat little

pastries and drink coffee. No one else had ever been invited to join

them there; such an invitation was hardly to be expected; though the

Pinkertons had consented to be present once or twice at Mrs.

Lee-Mittison’s coffee parties. They felt, perhaps, a little lonely these

evenings, the comfortable feeling of enclosedness would fall away when

there was nobody to be enclosed against. In the high room, among

marble-topped furniture, they sat listening with well-bred attentiveness

to one another’s breathing. Through the thin walls every foot-step,

every shutting of a door should have been audible in the velvety silence

of the corridor. Yet the ladies had this evening no inkling of what was

to occur; no premonition seems to have troubled them.

The Honourable Edward Pinkerton had died before his father, Lord Parke.

Though he had not been young when he died such a frustration of life’s

high purpose for him—he was an only son—had lent him the pathos of

youth. Had his widow been less substantial and less palpably recent he

might have passed, by the references to him, as having died before his

majority. He remained “Poor Edward,” embalmed like a dead child in the

pity and patronage of the living. He was making a third with them, this

evening as ever, his mild, be-whiskered face, with that expression of

awe on it with which fancy is wont to invest the pictured faces of the

dead, looked out from a vast scrolled frame that over-shadowed the

silver-stoppered bottles on the dressing-table. A similar photograph

commanded the bedroom of Rosina, his sister to the exclusion of other

relationships. Rosina sat in an armchair pulled out under the light with

her work held up to her eyes, embroidering diligently. She and her

sister-in-law had grown very like one another, coiffured and dressed by

the same hands, worked upon from within by similar preoccupations. They

were more closely allied to one another in the memory of Edward than

they had either of them been to Edward himself. Somehow, up to the

moment of death, Edward had eluded both of them; it was after death they

had closed in on him relentlessly. Cherished little animosities

reinforced their ties to one another; Rosina maintained to herself

implacably that if she had been Edward’s wife she would have borne him

children; while Louisa was enough aware of this to be a little markedly

generous to Rosina, who was not in a position to refuse anything that

might be offered.

Mrs. Pinkerton sat turning over the pages of the _Tatler_ and talking to

Rosina while she embroidered.

“I see,” she said, “the Wyntons’ girl is to be married.”

“Ah?” remarked Rosina, snipping with her gilt scissors. “Who is he?”

“A _Barre_, apparently.”

“Are there Barres? I never heard of any. Where does it say he comes

from?”

“It says here,” replied her sister-in-law, looking at the paper closely,

“Hampshire.”

“There are no Barres in Hampshire,” said Rosina definitely.

“Then it is another of these marriages.” They both sighed.

“Elissa Howard,” Mrs. Pinkerton went on more cheerfully, “with a very

pleasant, cheerful letter. She is so considerate when one is abroad, or

ill. She is a woman that I always like to hear from. She is coming out

next month, to Nice, you know.”

“It will be pleasant to have Elissa within reach. One feels very

isolated.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Rosina, that you don’t _like_ the Hotel.... I cannot

understand how anyone can go to Nice: they say it is a kind of French

Brighton.”

“They say the Carnival is very pretty.... But I daresay,” Rosina

unguardedly added, “that it’s more expensive than we——”

“It’s not a question—” Mrs. Pinkerton was beginning. “_Come_ in!” she

cried in an exasperated voice. Lurgan, the maid, put her long wedge of a

face round the door.

“I beg your pardon, Madam, I’m sure,” she said, “but I put the Shetlands

to air an hour ago and now I cannot get into the bathroom....”

* * * * *

Three or four minutes after this announcement Tessa, thoughtfully taking

her hair down with Baudouin propped up before her, was surprised by the

entrance of Sydney, unusually animated.

“Mrs. Pinkerton and Rosina,” said Sydney, “cannot get into their

bathroom. They simply can’t. I’ve been watching. Both their doors are

open and they take it in turns to come and rattle incredulously at the

bathroom door. It is really funny; I wish you would peep out and look.

That determined little rat of a maid of theirs is being the man of the

party; she heaved her shoulder against the door just now as though she

were going to force it and Rosina cried ‘No, don’t, I forbid you—there

may be somebody there!’”

“Oh poor things!” said Tessa. “How awkward for them. Do you think they

will send for the manager?”

Tessa with her fluffy hair falling down round the innocent,

interrogatory O of her face looked younger, looked really rather—there

was no other word for it—sweet. She wrapped her kimono closer round her

and followed Sydney into the dusk of their end of the corridor, from

whence they expected to watch unobserved. But a moment later Miss

Pinkerton, down at the other end, turned in their direction a wild face

of appeal. She hesitated, then something in the essential Tessa brought

her towards them. She ignored Tessa’s _déshabille_. “Oh, Mrs. Bellamy,”

she began, “I wonder if you.... It is rather embarrassing....”

“I _know_. I am so sorry. Have you any idea?”

“We cannot understand,” said Miss Pinkerton. “We _cannot_ believe——”

“It can’t be deliberate,” said Tessa consolingly.

“Why don’t you ring for the manager?” asked Sydney, anxious to

precipitate a crisis.

“I think it would be better for us, under the circumstances, to send for

Madame.”

“But it may be a man.”

“It cannot be a _gentleman_....”

Mrs. Pinkerton appeared at the door of her bedroom. She looked

expressionlessly out from under an Olympic cloud of hair and seemed

immense. She said: “My sister may have told you of our difficulty?”

“You’ve _no_ idea?” Tessa said again, hopefully.

Mrs. Pinkerton shook her head. “One doesn’t like to be seen standing

here,” she said, and, an invitation seeming to be implicit, they

followed her back into her room. They must have been the first in the

Hotel to cross that threshold, it was a tribute to the humanity of

Tessa. Keeping the door a little open they listened and heard the

uninterrupted crash of water from two taps turned full on. Sydney

covertly pulled the “_Tatler_” towards her and glanced at its pages but

the stricken air of the two ladies pervaded the room and began to

oppress her. She realized that this must be something worse for them

than not, simply, getting what they paid for. It went deeper than that.

They were stupid but not, she felt, vulgar; all this lace and leather,

monograms everywhere and massive encrustations of silver meant less to

them, probably, than to herself to whom wealth and position would have

been conveniences to be made use of. They were part of the immense

assumption on which the Pinkertons based their lives. The Pinkertons

imposed themselves on the world by conviction. The damage at which they

now stood aghast was not a personal affront and they were ennobled by

the absence of personal resentment. The poor old things had, after all,

ventured out into the world along a kind of promontory.

Lurgan came in and stood by the door. “You would ’ave thought,” said

she, “that ’e would at least ’ave noticed Madame’s Shetlands, ’anging by

the radiator.”

“I don’t see why you should assume that it’s——”

“’Ark!” said Lurgan putting up a hand peremptorily.

The taps had been turned off and a fine baritone voice rose clear at the

cessation of the water. “Hail, gladdening Light,” ... it sang; an

evening hymn.

“Singing!” said Lurgan. It was inexpressible.

“It’s a lovely hymn,” Tessa said, propitiatory. Her face lighted up, and

she looked round at them. “I expect,” she said, “it’s the clergyman.

There was that Mr. Milton....”

“One would have expected greater delicacy,” said Mrs. Pinkerton and

indeed on that score Tessa did feel Milton to be indefensible. The

testimony of the radiator.... She looked helplessly at Sydney who,

overcome at the moment by a simultaneous desire to yawn and to laugh,

suggested that they should go back to their rooms—since there seemed

nothing at all to be done—and leave the Pinkertons and Lurgan to their

vigil.

“One could take steps ...” Mrs. Pinkerton was saying, frozen into an

attitude of reflection.

“Or would you wait till to-morrow to do so, and just let him finish his

hymn now and come out.”

“There are situations in life,” said Mrs. Pinkerton, “face to face with

which one is powerless.” Though she only meant that in the struggle for

life one is sorely handicapped by the obligations of nobility, Tessa and

Sydney gathered that Mrs. Pinkerton was prostrated. After a blank little

silence intended to express the inexpressible they murmured a solicitous

“Good-night” and slipped through the door.

James Milton met them coming out. The asceticism of a life time in such

matters had drawn him after ten minutes out of his bath. He had stood

and steamed in the warm air, then scrubbed himself dry and got into his

dressing-gown sooner than he had expected. The water now receding from a

rich black rim along the sides of the bath had done its work, he felt

his own man again, clear-brained and vigorous. He looked forward to

stretching out his limbs in a bed again—cramped by last night in the

train—when once he had unpacked and been able to come to terms with his

ridiculous room. He hoped to sleep till the palm-trees outside were

posed in blue air and white sunshine; when on opening his eyes a first

picture should spring to them brilliantly, vivid, as he leaned from his

window, with all the vividness of ideality. He still had a childish

pleasure in arriving at places at night, as though he had been brought

there blindfold. Humming a Gregorian chant he clicked back the bolt

sharply and came face to face with two ladies, one in a dressing-gown,

emerging simultaneously from an opposite room.

Tessa, horrified, fled down the corridor, they heard her door slam.

Sydney stared. She did not see why she should retreat, as she

momentarily expected Milton to do so, and she could not help being

amused at his discomfiture. Milton looked boiled, his face, neck and

ears were bright scarlet; his fine thin hair stood erect and his damp

moustache drooped at the ends like a sea-lion’s. He clasped his clothes

and towels against him in an ungainly bundle.

Milton also stared; it did not occur to him to retreat and there seemed

to be nowhere to go to. He felt quite sure he had met Sydney before. Her

dark eyebrows, square forehead and arrogant chin seemed already

familiar. On this evening of strangeness and new impressions she was out

of place, stepping out as she did from among his own recollections.

Unaware of himself he bowed gravely, while in the doorway behind her

horrified faces appeared for the moment, then vanished again.

V

The party for Mr. Lee-Mittison’s expedition was assembling as directed

in the lounge, at the foot of the stairs. They stood in a group, eyeing

one another a little blankly. Veronica Lawrence came downstairs,

twisting her scarf round her throat nonchalantly and pulling down her

felt hat over her eyes. Mr. Lee-Mittison clicked the lid of his watch at

her playfully.

“Oh, sorry!” cried Veronica. “Am I keeping you all?”

Victor Ammering heaved himself out of an armchair and came sauntering

up, hunched and indecisive-looking, ruffled about the head like a young

thrush. He stood tugging at the flaps of his pockets, and Mrs.

Lee-Mittison hurrying to and fro in a last ecstasy of preparation

stumbled over his feet.

Mr. Lee-Mittison, his Panama hat in his hand, was counting heads, making

quick calculations, and checking over the parcels of lunch on the

concierge’s desk. He called to his wife, who was advising everybody to

take some kind of an alpenstock in case of difficult walking, “Now, are

we all complete? Is there anyone else? I believe they’ve put out one too

many packets of lunch.”

“Better than one too few,” observed one of the girls, and the rest

laughed politely.

“Three-five-six-eight—No, there is no one to come, they have made a

mistake. Now, Herbert, the girls are all ready, I think.”

“Then forward—march!” cried Mr. Lee-Mittison and the five girls followed

by Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Mittison filed through the swing-door held back by

James Milton, who brought up the rear. Glancing back through the glass

he saw Victor, whose rather marked exclusion from the picnic-party he

was at a loss to account for, pocket the remaining parcel of sandwiches.

This was done calmly and not with the air of a sudden resolve. Mr.

Milton puzzled, alert for experience, hurried after the others.

They went forward at a swinging pace, well spread out across the middle

of the road. Carriages jingled past them and a motor rushed by

containing Colonel and Mrs. Duperrier and Mrs. Kerr who were driving

over the frontier to visit some friends. They all waved and smiled at

Mr. Lee-Mittison’s party. This was a moment of keen pleasure for the

Lee-Mittisons. _She_ carried a mackintosh over her arm in contempt of

the sky, a bag of knitting in case they should sit down for long and a

basket of delicacies, dates and chocolates, with which Herbert liked her

to supplement the lunch. Under her hard hat she shone with happiness;

she refused to allow Mr. Milton to carry the basket.

“Oh no, please,” she implored “it’s _our_ picnic!” and he saw that her

day would be spoilt if she were not able to be the Martha.

Mr. Lee-Mittison was pleased with his wife, as with everybody, and now

and then patted affectionately the folds of her mackintosh. The

departure, always a fidgety piece of organization, had gone off

magnificently with never a hitch, and he looked with satisfaction at the

five girls with their short skirts and neat ankles walking in front of

him. No one could have been less of a horrid old satyr than Mr.

Lee-Mittison but he loved to surround himself with bright faces and the

faces of young women are admittedly the brightest.

He knew himself to be a success with young people: he could spin yarns

and imitate animals by the hour, and tell graphically of life in the

East, bearing his descriptions out with photograph albums. He found that

he need never want for young society; girls seemed to take to him

naturally. He did not care for young married women, while widows

depressed him—poor little souls. On this occasion, the capitulation of

Sydney Warren had been a particular triumph. She walked before him with

her characteristic quick step, a little out of time with the others; her

hands pushed deep down into the pockets of her jersey. It was true that

in the glimpse he had had of her face she had not looked merry, and that

her back now did little to correct that impression. But if so, Mr.

Lee-Mittison thought, a jolly day in the hills would be all the better

for her.

The five girls had been all rather silent, but suddenly Eileen Lawrence

burst into song: a chant in time with their marching:

“‘I had a good home that I lèft—lèft—lèft

Now don’t you think I was rìght—rìght—rìght

Me father was drunk so I packed up me trunk

And I lèft—lèft—lèft—’

Oh, get into step, Sydney!”

“Really, Eileen!” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, smiling with gratification at

this burst of high spirits but glancing up at the villa windows under

which they were still passing. The Lawrences were such dear girls,

Herbert loved them so, but she did hope they were not going to be too

rowdy.

“This feels like school again,” said Eileen, “left—left—left——”

“I can’t think what one would do,” observed Veronica, “if one’s father

really were drunk.”

“Doctors daren’t——”

Two other girls, a pair of pale Miss Bransomes, giggled ecstatically.

“Specially Dad,” continued Eileen. “But as far as I know Dad’s never

killed anybody.”

“Oh _Eileen_!” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison.

“I daresay,” said Veronica, “that if we pretended to everybody here that

Dad did drink everybody here would believe us. They’re a cheery crowd.”

“Not a very _kind_ joke, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, pink with

diffidence.

James Milton, in whose late parish most of the people had been elderly,

looked with interest at these modern girls. Sydney, turning round

suddenly, caught him watching them all with pleased curiosity and felt

as his eye lingered hopefully on her that he was expecting a further

contribution, still more characteristic, from herself. She was silent

sardonically, partly to disappoint him, partly because she never felt in

tune with the Lawrences and partly because she was self-conscious and

felt stiff and clumsy at this sort of ragging.

Mr. Milton had been introduced to them all in the lounge by Mr.

Lee-Mittison, who commended him to their good graces with a general wave

of his hand. The Lee-Mittisons always went out of their way to be

pleasant to strangers, making efforts to draw them as soon as possible

into the social life of the Hotel centering round Mr. Lee-Mittison. They

had been predisposed in Milton’s favour by the fact that he had come

downstairs to breakfast and ordered an egg; this seemed to them virile.

Very few people came down to breakfast, a discouraging meal to which the

Lee-Mittisons by a punctual appearance and bright nods round tried in

vain to impart an atmosphere. Accordingly they had button-holed Milton

and told him that he positively must join their expedition this morning,

they would take no denial. Milton looked flattered and bothered. “As

jolly a set of girls as you’ll meet anywhere,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison,

winking chastely.

Milton was a big man of about forty-three with the clear,

ruddy-and-white complexion of a wax model from which the moustache and

expressive mouse-coloured eyebrows sprouted unconvincingly, looking

darker than they were. He was long-limbed and strongly built but

evidently out of training, for he began to pant and be silent sooner

than any of them when they took the steep path up the side of the hill.

He had intelligent, bright eyes creased at the corners with humour and

the assured, affable, occasionally rather inane manner of the innately

shy and diffident man who has never had to venture outside a society

where he is secure and appreciated, and who has brought himself to

believe in spite of a deep-down protest that such a society is the

world. One felt that it should be easy to impress, affect or discompose

Mr. Milton and yet that he had seldom been impressed, affected or

discomposed.

The path was cobbled, it went up glaring white beyond the edge of one’s

vision, relieved only here and there by the shadow of an olive-tree.

After some time it intersected a road that ran high up along the ends of

the hill, and the party staggered a short way along the road and sat

breathlessly down on the parapet. James Milton and the Lawrences took

out their cigarette-cases and Milton offered his round.

“Oh you girls, you girls!” cried Mr. Lee-Mittison. “You do it

charmingly, but how I wish that you wouldn’t!”

Sydney merely bent forward to the flame of a match that Milton was

sheltering for her but the Bransomes, a pair of pale cousins, turned

paler still with dismay. They had recently arrived and had been much

gratified by an invitation to the picnic; they did not care if they

smoked or not, having only wished to resemble as closely as possible the

Lawrences and the alarming Miss Warren. They waved the cigarettes away

and shook their heads mulishly.

Mr. Lee-Mittison ignored their sacrifice. He was sitting astride on the

parapet facing his protégées, and he leant forward, extending and

thumping his chest. “Look at me!” he shouted. “Sixty-four and never

smoked, never touched a drop in my life. Sixty-four, I tell you.” He

stuck out his chest still further and invited one of the Bransomes to

thump it also, but she declined. “Regular habits, the fear of God, and

water from the spring!”

“—Perrier when we are abroad!” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, knitting.

The olives below the parapet sighed and twinkled; between the branches

the party looked down at the miniature roofs of the town and realized

how far they had come. Little distinct shadows from branches above their

heads shivered over their figures and faces. Veronica moved closer up to

Sydney confidentially. She thought Sydney queer, rather interesting and

wondered what she could possibly be thinking so hard about all the time.

Sydney’s remoteness intrigued the fêted Veronica. She supposed with

sincere generosity that the sort of men who did not admire herself might

find Sydney very attractive. The absence of such a man here seemed bad

luck on Sydney. But then, on the other hand, Sydney had curious ties.

“I never thought he’d get _you_,” said Veronica. “You always seem to be

doing something else.” She placed a foot of her own beside a foot of

Sydney’s and noted that while Sydney’s was the better shaped her own

must be by half a size the smaller. “You seem to be wonderfully busy,”

she said with a sigh.

Sydney glanced into the irreverent, sentimental boy’s-eyes of Veronica.

There _was_ something pleasantly hard about her; at every contact one

was conscious of the blade in her, deep down, with an edge to it.

“Constant dripping,” she said. “For twenty-four hours I seemed to meet

no one but Mr. Lee-Mittison and every time we met he was so _sure_.—I

wonder if _she_, or the first wife, ever wanted to marry him, or whether

they _had_ to....”

“How _do_ you mean?” said Veronica with a spurt of laughter. She never

waited to grope for one’s meaning, which instinct generally prompted one

to offer her on the flat of the palm like a lump of sugar to a pony. “I

can’t think,” she continued, “why he’s so determined to have you. You

don’t effervesce. You’re not breathlessly modern—on his level!—every

minute like we are. You can’t think how tired we get. That’s why Joan

struck at coming this morning. She said she felt _old_....”

Sydney looked along at Mr. Lee-Mittison. “_Ape!_” said she. Mr.

Lee-Mittison was trumpeting like an elephant and writhing an imaginary

trunk at the delighted Bransomes.

“Oh, I don’t know; the old blighter rather amuses me,” said Veronica

tolerantly, and squinted down at the tip of her cigarette. “Joan’s off

colour, as a matter of fact,” she suddenly confided. “I believe she is

keen on Victor Ammering.”

“But isn’t he——”

“Yes, he’s keen on me,” said Veronica indifferently. “But you get used

to that if you’ve three sisters more or less the same age. Between us,

we generally manage to keep people in the family.”

Sydney pondered; she had no sisters and the ethics of the situation were

beyond her. “You mean,” she said, “it would be more trying for Joan if

_I_ wanted Victor Ammering?”

“Oh, _I_ don’t want him, if that’s what you mean,” said Veronica, with

the crudeness of sincerity. “Anyone can have him, as far as I am

concerned.” She dangled an imaginary Victor airily, as though he were a

marionette. “But I can’t imagine what you and poor old Victor would find

to say to each other,” she added.

“He did once try and kiss me, ages ago, at a dance,” Sydney said,

reminiscently smiling.

“I know, he told me: he said you were rather annoyed.”

“I know I was—I hate being messed about.”

“I said to him at the time: ‘Victor, you are the limit: you’ve no

instinct.’”

“I should have thought he had heaps.”

Veronica looked at her sideways. “By the way,” she said, “why didn’t you

go for that drive with Mrs. Kerr? They must have had heaps of room in

the car and I should have thought——”

“Oh, I’m sick of motoring,” Sydney said, and threw her cigarette away

into the olive-trees. “Besides,” she added sombrely, “I don’t know their

friends over there.”

“Didn’t she ask you?”

“Not exactly—no. Why should she?”

“Oh, my dear girl, _I_ don’t know why she should!” Veronica shrugged her

shoulders. A queer girl this, Veronica thought, well turned-out, clever

presumably, with a complexion she might have done more with and awfully

jolly feet, to sit brooding cheerlessly on a parapet because a

middle-aged woman hadn’t asked her to go for a drive.

“Well, come on,” she said, “Moses is getting the tribes together.”

Sydney thought this surprisingly witty: she chuckled. “What do you think

of our Aaron?” she asked, but Veronica did not hear. Mr. Lee-Mittison

had swung his leg back over the parapet; his wife was putting her

knitting away. They all got up rather unwillingly and began to climb the

next path which left the road only too soon and was steeper than ever.

They came up at last to the brow of the hill and found themselves at the

extremity of a long ridge that stretched ahead of them, going down sheer

at each side into a valley. From where they stood the ground dipped away

again slightly then rose in a series of undulations to a point of rock

whereupon a pale-coloured village balanced itself improbably. A

mule-track which must have made a more gradual ascent up the side of the

hill looped itself over a ridge a little ahead of them and vanished

again. Beyond the village more hills, a disheartening infinity, rose

blade-like, without shadow, against the vapourless and metallic

brilliance of the sky. From the grass, among the twisted shadows of

olives, flame-bright anemones spurted; Mr. Lee-Mittison precipitated

himself upon them with a cry of pleasure and triumph. A scent of thyme

stung the nostrils, reinforcing the glare with its pungency till two of

the senses reeled.

The picnic-party had not halted, doggedness had forbidden them even to

pause, since they had left the parapet now immeasurably far below.

Veronica Lawrence, wildly exclaiming “The Promised Land!” stumbled

forward into the thyme and lay crucified. Eileen, incapable of more than

a gesture, knelt down and stared in dismay at the hills which now

promised no bounds to the activities of Mr. Lee-Mittison. The Bransomes,

half-obliterated by the strain of the ascent, flopped sideways and in

self-conscious abandon stood hugging an olive-tree.

Sydney found Mr. Milton beside her; his face was glazed and dark and in

spite of his ceaseless mopping the sweat streamed down so that he could

hardly open his eyes.

“_You_ don’t look hot at all,” he said reproachfully and Sydney who was

enduring the burning discomfort of those who cannot perspire said

snappily:

“Well, we can’t all express ourselves.”

“I wish,” he said ruefully, pushing a handkerchief round the inside of

his collar, “that my self-expression were not quite so fluent.”

She pushed back her hat and put her hand up to her forehead: it felt hot

as a pebble on an August beach. They had straggled a little nearer the

village so that the brow of the hill rose behind them, cutting away the

horizon; and the sea, when they turned to look for it, was only visible

in a triangle at the mouth of the valley below. She felt him waiting for

her to speak and reluctantly asked “Do you like the village?” nodding

ahead.

“Yes,” he said, after a pause which gave the unhappy impression that he

had sealed the village with his approval. “It’s jolly. It’s out of some

background—looked at, you know, through an arch or the slit of a window.

Look at the track leading up to it—there’s even a donkey.”

“Yes, some Flight into Egypt!” said Sydney. She gathered from the

lightness of his manner in making the allusion that he was anxious not

to appear unduly conversant with the National Gallery or the Uffizi, and

wanted to ask him “Haven’t you lectured on the Renaissance?” But she

knew how inexorably the Hotel would refuse to let him escape from all

that he was, and had pity on his innocent holiday taste for incognito,

foredoomed from its birth on the threshold of the Hotel. Everybody could

see at once that he had lectured and perhaps even taken people round the

National Gallery. She looked disparagingly at the village with its

toppling campanile.

“I think,” she said, “that it’s rather too like a cruet.”

“It may have inspired the cruet,” he gravely amended. “Can you tell me

why it is walled?”

She glanced suspiciously at him, but his limpid gaze held a real

curiosity.

“Against the Saracens. They used to land along this coast and ravage the

valleys; so they built the villages as high as possible and fortified

them. I pity any Saracen that ever got into them, for they’re perfect

honey-combs and the people I think are cruel—in a leisurely sort of

way.”

“Ah!” said he with an air of pleased receptivity. “It would be

interesting to get in touch with local records.”

“I don’t know whether there are any. Do you remember the Decameron lady

who bathed in the sea near here and was carried off by a pirate whom she

liked from the first moment better than her husband?”

“Husbands’ shares were not good in those days,” he said tolerantly. “I

ought, by the way, to re-read my Decameron.”

She wanted to ask him whether the Decameron had indeed been dedicated to

him by a friend. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” she said, suddenly smiling, “if

the Saracens were to appear on the sky-line, land, and ravage the Hotel?

They all take for granted—down there—that there aren’t any more

Saracens, but for all we know they may be only in abeyance. The whole

Past, for a matter of fact, may be one enormous abeyance. But I wonder,”

she added while a cloud of depression crept over her, “how many of us

they would really care to take away?”

He did not know how she wished him to answer and risked: “It would be an

embarrassing choice.”

She sighed flatly. The dust, panic and ecstasy with which she had filled

for a moment the corridors of the Hotel subsided. Once more she saw her

fellow-visitors as they were to remain—undesired, secure and null. “Not

many,” she said, and turning away from him seemed to be gazing down some

distant, barred-away perspective of feminine loveliness. “Women must

have deteriorated.”

She half expected from Milton a flutter of protest, then noticed that

she must have lost his attention, he was thinking about something else.

He flushed and looked hard at her suddenly.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Haven’t I met you before?”

“Only last night,” said she, and grinned at the recollection more or

less overtly. Then she wondered whether he knew that by just such a

question do young men—at dances and elsewhere—strike for the first time

the personal note. It is asked leaning forward intensely with the

implication “Your ever-remembered face!” He could not have said this to

many young women; he said it this time too awkwardly.

“Ah yes, last night,” said he. “But surely before?—It occurred to me

then.”

“I don’t think so. Unless you are the sort of person who remembers faces

he has sat opposite to in a bus.”

“Ah well,” said James Milton. “It may have been that!”