After Colonel Duperrier had left the drawing-room the ladies round the
fire folded back their skirts over their knees again to keep the stuff
from scorching, drew their chairs in closer and resumed their discussion
of Mrs. Kerr. Their backs were turned in a kind of contempt to the tall
windows through which cold light from the sky and the sea poured in on
them gravely.
“I cannot think,” said one, “what a woman of that sort finds to do with
herself.” She spoke with emphasis, this remark had been throughout a
recurring-point in the conversation. “She has no interests. She hasn’t a
large correspondence, she does nothing at all for herself. I personally
find the day so very full here, it seems only too short.”
“I wouldn’t say _too_ short. But as days abroad go, one seems to get
through them quickly enough.” To this there was a hum of agreement.
“She sits on her balcony in the sun,” said Mrs. Hillier, “a thing which
I for one should never have time to do. I suppose one has too much
conscience. If I ever do go out on my balcony for a minute and look
along, there she always is, and if I call out in a friendly way
‘Whatever are you doing?’ she says ‘Nothing’ and looks amused and rather
superior.”
“She doesn’t sketch, or one would understand her staring like that at
the view. Of course, it is very beautiful.”
“She may think,” said another of the ladies, looking up from some
_broderie anglaise_ over which she had been straining her eyes. She was
of some prestige, her speech was slow and weighted down with
implications. “She must think a good deal,” she decided; “nobody who was
not thinking could do absolutely nothing all day and look so very
superior about it, like a cat.”
“You mean that she has something on her mind?”
The lady of the embroidery rubbed her sore eyes with two fingers,
revolving this slowly. She opened her eyes again tentatively, blinked
once or twice and shut them again. “The light is very poor,” she said
aggrievedly.
“Very. Won’t you take my place, Mrs. Hepworth, it is nearer the
window.—You mean to say that she has something on her mind?”
“No, thank you very much, I do not care to move from this side of the
fire.—I should rather say that she had something _in_ her mind all the
time, at the back of it. One is never comfortable in talking to her,
though she is, I am sure, brilliant. I have said to myself over and over
again, when I’ve been with her: ‘That woman has something at the back of
her mind.’”
“I wonder, what?” asked someone rashly. “That,” said Mrs. Hepworth
coldly, “would be quite impossible to say.”
There were about seven ladies present, all embroidering something
useless and therefore permissible, except Mrs. Duperrier, who, poor
soul, was too restless, and another lady who with the aid of much
gamboge and vermilion was touching up a water-colour, a sunset. At four
o’clock they would all retire for tea, after that they would go
downstairs to the basement into what was called the smoking-room and
play bridge with the intermission only of dinner till it was time for
bed. Though keen players, the seven were not to be numbered among the
enthusiasts. Those, after a perfunctory glance at the weather, had sat
down to their tables soon after eleven o’clock. Nobody who smoked but
did not play bridge dared enter the smoking-room.
Out of deference to Mrs. Bellamy, who was among them, nobody had so far
touched on the aspect of Mrs. Kerr which most profoundly intrigued
them—her friendship with Sydney. Tessa, however, now showed herself
lacking in that appreciation of their delicacy with which it had pleased
them to credit her. Stretching out a plump pretty foot to the fire and
looking down at it thoughtfully she remarked, “She seems a very kind
woman. She’s been so kind to my cousin.”
“Ah really, yes?” said someone innocently. “Your cousin’s often with
her, I believe.”
“Yes, they are a lot together. Sydney is a very clever girl,” said Tessa
simply. “She is too clever for girls of her own age, I sometimes think,
though, she is so high-spirited and cheerful and amusing that she is
always popular. I often forget when I am with her, how clever she is. Do
you know, she studied for years ... she has passed....” Here she
enumerated, not accurately, Sydney’s academic distinctions which, while
not conveying much to her audience, vaguely depressed them.
“Ah yes, it is nice for a girl to have a career. But I shouldn’t,” said
a lady with some restraint, tempering her suggestion with a smile, “say
that Miss Warren was high-spirited, exactly?” The others disagreed too
forcibly with Tessa’s opinion of her cousin and respected Tessa too much
to say anything at all.
Tessa continued, “Sydney is very affectionate.”
“She is very much ... absorbed, isn’t she, by Mrs. Kerr?”
“I have known _other_ cases,” said somebody else, looking about vaguely
for her scissors, “of these very violent friendships. One didn’t feel
_those others_ were quite healthy.”
“I should discourage any daughter of mine from a friendship with an
older woman. It is never the best women who have these strong
influences. I would far rather she lost her head about a man.”
“Sydney hasn’t lost her head,” said little Tessa with dignity.
“Oh but, Mrs. Bellamy—I was talking about _other_ cases.”
“And how few men there are out here—can one wonder the girls are
eccentric? They say it’s the same at all these places—not a man to be
had. I can’t think why people go on bringing their daughters out.”
“One wonders, indeed, why some types of women ever come out here.”
“Mrs. Kerr? Oh, do you think—?”
“Mmm-mmm.”
“But she may believe in the sun,” said Tessa. “Many people believe in
the sun. Of course it’s always been known of, but quite recently a
doctor at Baden——”
“She is not a sick woman,” pronounced the lady of the _broderie
anglaise_.
“N-no?” said Tessa, petering out. “But I’m sure,” she resumed, after a
pause for consideration, “that she has interests. I would say she was
quite independent. Sydney tells me she likes to be a great deal alone.”
“Well, there now!” exclaimed a lady indignantly, dropping her needlework
into her lap and holding both hands out. “Then why should she want to
come out to a Hotel? She certainly is striking-looking but I would have
every sympathy with her and make every effort to be pleasant to her if
she were lonely. One knows oneself that is insupportable. As winter
comes on with those long evenings one begins to feel hardly human,
sitting evening after evening in an empty room. One can’t always be
going out or visiting people or inviting people to come to one. If I
shut my drawing-room door, I begin to feel restless at once; it feels so
unnatural shutting oneself in with nobody. If I open it, one hears the
servants laughing, or something to worry one. I am fond of reading but I
always begin to feel that books are so bad; then of course I realize,
well: it’s not fair, is it, to expect a book to take the place of human
society? If the telephone-bell rings, to hear a voice and then be cut
off simply unsettles one, and if it doesn’t ring the whole evening one
begins to worry and imagine things about one’s friends. Once I sat with
the door open and believe me, I could hear four different clocks
ticking, I counted them, in different parts of the flat. It’s not of
course that I’m nervous but I really begin to feel—if you’ll understand
my saying anything so extraordinary—as if I didn’t exist. If somebody
does come to the door or the telephone does ring I’m almost surprised to
find I’m still there. One would go mad if one were not able to get
abroad.”
She looked round with a shiver of retrospection at the semicircle which
was her pleasant asylum. The others expressed their entire agreement.
What they had all escaped was terrible. “But Mrs. Kerr,” said one,
“seems to enjoy that—She’s a divorcée?”
“No, he died.”
“Fancy! She doesn’t give one a bit that impression....”
“Isn’t there a son?”
“Yes, she has a nearly grown-up son. I can’t think why she doesn’t make
a home for him.”
“But if one does make a home for anybody one is still very much alone.
The best type of man is no companion.”
“—Still, he is someone _there_.”
“Besides, my dear, make a home...! Of course it’s what one would love to
do but it nearly kills one and it’s so expensive; and when all’s said
and done it’s still so uncomfortable these days one can’t expect a man
to stay in it. Of course we don’t mind in the same way about comfort,
but really it is scarcely fit for oneself. So I said to my husband— ...
he agreed.... It is so broadening to the mind, isn’t it? to travel and
meet people; we have been so fortunate in the hotels that were
recommended to us and we have been passed on from introduction to
introduction so that we have always got to know people at once.”
“—And as for the son,” put in another lady who had been waiting with
parted lips, “he really may not want her. And I rather wonder about him,
too. One of my boys was at school with him and said he was not at all
popular. He won’t say why, of course, the Kerr boy wasn’t popular; you
know what boys are, they are so reserved. But one felt of course, that
there was something. Boys, you know, are rather wonderful; they have a
judgment that—well, a kind of instinct.”
“Like dogs?”
“Oh, my dear Mrs. Hepworth....”
“I must say, if the girl were in _my_ charge, were a cousin of
_mine_....”
“Even then, though I wonder if one would be justified in interfering?”
“It would be difficult. But I do feel strongly....”
“Yes ... _yes_?”
“Well, I know of a case——”
They all broke off as the door opened and Sydney looked in nonchalantly
as though she hardly expected to find whoever she was looking for.
“Oh, Tessa, there you are! I couldn’t think why you weren’t on your bed.
We have no stamps: I have been looking for you in despair. Nobody I’ve
met has a stamp and the concierge must be asleep somewhere!”
She was standing on the threshold holding the door open so that the cold
air from the lounge rushed in from behind her. She did not look as
though she had been out all day; her heavy eyes and the way her hair had
been pushed away from her forehead suggested that she had a headache.
She was asked to come right in, if she did not mind, and shut the door
after her; and she complied absently. She came and stood behind Tessa’s
chair while Tessa fumbled with her note-case; they all remarked her air
of not unhappy abstraction and how, like a shy, self-centred child who
has been sent down into company on a message and wishes at once to
escape, she remained indifferent to their presence and made no effort to
speak to them. Once she put her hand out and patted Tessa’s head idly.
“Do hurry, darling,” said she.
“So you’ve been writing letters all day; dear me!” said the lady of the
_broderie anglaise_, looking over her glasses.
“Nothing would persuade me to,” said Sydney.
“It’s dull for you young people on a day like this. No wonder the Miss
Lawrences were romping.”
“Were they? I didn’t notice.”
“Oh, as you said ‘we’ I thought you had been with Veronica.”
“I haven’t seen Veronica all day,” said Sydney and while everybody
listened intently she turned away from Tessa’s chair and wandered over
to the window. “Doesn’t it rain; I like it!” she was moved to exclaim.
“If I were Manet and alive now I would paint this and present the
picture to the P. L. M. as a poster for the Côte d’Azur.” She smiled out
at the rain with an air of complicity.
“Well, what on earth _have_ you been doing with yourself all day?” asked
Mrs. Hepworth, who was so motherly looking that she could ask anybody
anything point-blank.
Sydney frowned for a moment as though she were trying to remember.
“Thinking,” she said at last, “with great pleasure of the thousands of
villas round the hundreds of bays along these hundreds of miles of coast
where the couples are living—as one is told they are living—for one
another. Think what living for one another at close quarters would be
like to-day. Think specially of what, before they became so rare, it
would have been like to be living with a Russian. ‘It has been raining
for weeks, the hay is rotting and we are living on allusions’—But
perhaps you don’t read Russian plays? Even in fine weather, I must say I
think the importance of the personal relations is very much
overestimated. Oh, thank you, Tessa; then I’ll owe you three lire for
the stamps.”
“Yes, we’re very shockable in here,” said Mrs. Hillier briskly, “as I
expect you thought. Personally I think the interest of these improper
couples is, in all weathers, very much overestimated, but for girls of
your age they have always a great fascination. I know they had for me
until I went to India. You and your young friend must have been enjoying
yourselves, chatting away.”
“I haven’t got a young friend,” said Sydney, and now quite unable to
refrain from laughing at herself she guffawed at Mrs. Hillier with a
keen appreciation of her own ridiculousness but with unabated gloom.
“Then won’t you stay down here and make up the second four for bridge?
You see there are only seven of us; we’ll be going down directly.”
“Oh thank you, no; I must be going up.”
“—You know the lift is out of order?”
“Is it? I never use it. I put the kettle on for tea just now and I must
go and keep an eye on it.”
“Can’t Mrs. _Kerr_ keep an eye on the kettle for you?” Mrs. Hepworth
called after her.
“She forgets about it,” said Sydney, as she left the drawing-room.