Three days afterwards the weather along that coast was once more
fulfilling the expectations of visitors. Only a little wind remained to
disturb the sea, rustle dryly through the palm-trees out on the
promontory where the coast-road disappeared toward Genoa, and rush to
meet one round street-corners with a disconcertingly ice-cold whistle.
Against an opaque, bright-blue sky the expressionless faces of the
buildings had again their advertised and almost aching whiteness. The
sounds like the shadows were exact and clear-cut, no longer blunted by
the rain.
From end to end of the town the principal long street ran like a funnel;
as Sydney came out of the flower-shop her side of the street was
slate-grey in the shadow of early afternoon. It was characteristic of
her as an intelligent young English lady that she should have come to
buy carnations during the hour of the siesta, thus cutting for herself a
caprice of her own direct across the custom of the land. The carnations
among which, walking slowly, she now was burying her face were scentless
but gave one an acute pleasure by the chilly contact of their petals.
She had an armful of two colours, sulphur with a ragged edge of pink and
ashy mauve with crimson at the centre, crimson-veined. Carnations are
not costly here before they reach the flower-market, grown on terraces
that stagger up the hills and picked in the grey quiet of the morning to
the accompaniment of singing and never-answered calls that come dropping
down forlornly from terrace to terrace into the valleys. On account of
their low cost, their strangeness to the northern eye and the vehemence
of their colouring they have been made the vehicle of much emotion. One
cannot, however casually, present these native carnations to a friend
and remain entirely unaffected, while the pleasure with which carnations
are received is intensified by some vague agitation.
Sydney’s day had been so far as perfect as a bubble; she felt careless
of it, as though the bubble could not burst. Happiness, she said to
herself, is not to be solicited, but coming, for however short a time,
comes with an appearance of finality, to be juggled with off-hand. It
seems to be some kind of balance, as in riding a bicycle, attempted
painfully a thousand times and achieved at last without effort. Her
senses were absorbed by the carnations, she barely looked ahead, and she
could be conscious of the street only as a sharp distinction between sun
and shadow. Crossing over she walked in the sun, where dogs stretched
out their lengths in abandon on the hot pavement. She must have been
made conspicuous by her abstraction or her yellow dress; people turned
to stare at her, and a tram, announced by a hum of overhead wires,
rushed past with a long smudge of faces turned her way. She left the
street but delayed her return to the Hotel by following a series of
bye-paths, pausing now and then to stare idly through some barred gate
into a garden. She was mapping out for herself a deep-down life in which
emotions ceased their clashing together and friends appeared only as
painted along the edge of one’s quietude.
At a turn of the footpath she met the Barry children going down to the
shore with their nurse. There were several of them, very much alike;
their number appalled Sydney who stood back against the wall. Cordelia
Barry, the eldest, walked by herself a little ahead of the others,
ostentatiously carrying a book.
“The _whole_ family of us all again, you see!” she exclaimed affectedly.
“Oh, dear Miss Warren, what lovely carnations! Oh, I do love them!” She
was a child of about eleven with thin legs and an eager tremolo. Sydney,
who considered that she had been demoralized by over much grown-up
attention, said “Do you?” unresponsively. She did not intend to give any
carnations to Cordelia.
“You _aren’t_ going for a walk, I suppose?” said Cordelia wistfully.
“Mother said I might go with anybody who would have me, but that I would
have to go with Nanny if everybody else fell through.”
“Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you. But I expect it will be nice on the
shore.”
“Hoo!” said Cordelia, pouncing on this note of falsity. She tilted her
head back to stare up at Sydney from under the brim of her hat. “How
stupid you’d be if you really believed that! Nice on the shore!”
“Come along, Cordelia,” called back Nanny in the flat voice of one who
is employing the imperative continually and without effect.
Cordelia clutched at Sydney’s dress. “Lovely yellow thing,” she said
feverishly, “_Beautiful_ Miss Warren, won’t you take me for a walk?”
Sydney, who was still near enough to her own childhood to mistrust
children profoundly, wondered what Cordelia could be getting at. “Not
to-day,” she temporized, “some day, perhaps.”
“Come _on_, Cordelia!”
“Go on, Cordelia: Nanny’s calling.”
“She’s no Nanny to me,” said Cordelia in bitter repudiation. “Veronica
Lawrence is very fond of children,” she added rapidly. “She said she’d
take me for a walk any day. But I’m not so much interested in Veronica
Lawrence.”
“Then you’re an ungrateful little wretch,” said Sydney. “Run along!”
“Do you promise, _some day_?” said the child despairingly.
“Very well, I promise.”
After another long stare that was at once ardent and sardonic Cordelia
with reluctant steps and backward glances went after her family. Sydney
heard her calling Nanny a devil. But so long as Cordelia came on, Nanny,
who was a broken woman, cared for none of these things.
Sydney, who knew that Mrs. Kerr was all this time sitting on her
balcony, never more accessible than to-day in a coloured mood which the
carnations were soon to reflect, still delayed luxuriously. She
heightened the sweetness of exile by telling herself how soon the
freshness of her carnations would be over, and how at any moment Mrs.
Kerr might fall asleep for the afternoon, or get up and go out with
somebody else. She even played with a regret at having packed off
Cordelia with whom she might have walked back still more slowly through
the town.
When she did at last return to the Hotel the afternoon post had just
come in and was spread out on the concierge’s table. There was nothing
for herself but a letter for Mrs. Kerr in Ronald’s large untidy writing
caught her eye suddenly. She hesitated for a moment at this, for she had
not yet directly tried conclusions with Ronald; then, very confident of
her balance, took the letter up with her and tapped lightly with the
corner of the envelope on Mrs. Kerr’s door.
Sydney knew at once from her friend’s unconscious air and rather marked
immobility that she had been suspected. The carnations, into which
virtue seemed to have gone out of herself, were at this anticipated
moment difficult to relinquish. She laid them down with a degree of
awkwardness across the end of the sofa. Mrs. Kerr, who sat with her feet
up, looking out at the sea exclaimed: “Carnations!” incredulously as
though this were what she had been longing for, and with an
unprecedented movement held up her face to be kissed.
“Will you put them in water?” she said, having looked at the flowers
with wistful delight for a moment or two, and Sydney with a feeling of
surprise that she could not explain to herself glanced round her, then
began to arrange the carnations. She chose for the purpose a rather
self-conscious-looking pottery mug that had been a present from Miss
Pym. She arranged the flowers deliberately, and Mrs. Kerr looked on in
expressive silence.
“Pleased?” said Sydney.
“Very, very much. I had been feeling like that: it was uncanny of you.
Now they are perfect, Sydney; leave them alone and don’t keep fussing
round them.”
“That was because I want them to look nice all round. I’m not restless.”
“No?” said Mrs. Kerr, revolving critically a possible new version of her
friend which she seemed slow to accept.
“No, I am not. I have a capacity for being still that left to myself I
would never have doubted, but that no one else, you specially, will ever
let me believe in. Look—” she knelt down where she stood, then sat back
and arranged herself, leaning her side and elbow against the side of the
sofa. “I could stay like this for the rest of the afternoon,” said
Sydney.
“Well, then stay still. Why should I disturb you?”
“You will, you are bound to—Just now: where did you think I had gone?”
“I was not allowed to think. I went out there and looked over the
balcony, and that clergyman, that Mr. Milton, was walking about in the
garden. He took off his hat and waved it to attract my attention. Then
he began to talk for some time in the friendliest way.”
“Really? That was excessive of him. What did he say?”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I couldn’t hear. I just smiled and
nodded. He is a cheerful, unselfconscious person. I like him.”
“Unselfconscious? He feels spikes everywhere and is driven to impale
himself. But I feel an interest in him; he told Veronica Lawrence he
admired me.”
“Very appealing of him. And so wise.”
“Wise—to tell?”
“No—to admire. Have many people, Sydney?”
Sydney flashed round at her, startled into a brilliant flush. “I don’t
know: I’ve never been sure of it.”
“Never mind,” said Mrs. Kerr, staring out at her friend from some
profound reverie, “when you look like that, the question answers
itself.”
“I suppose,” said Sydney, after an instant’s reflection, “that
extraordinary people do. Cordelia Barry—or did you only mean men?”
“No, I didn’t mean men. Don’t be so fearfully on the defensive—or do you
think I am likely to match-make?”
“I am sorry, that was horribly vulgar of me. It is so much easier to be
vulgar and so much less noticed. I mean, you and I are supposed to
assume, or to seem everywhere to assume, that that man down in the
garden could be more to either of us than the other. Also, one has had
it so ground into one that admiration, any exercise of the spirit is
only valuable to its object, to drive somebody’s mill.”
“Exercise of the spirit ...” said Mrs. Kerr, while Sydney listened like
a stranger to this repetition of her own words. “If you call it that you
must agree that it would be allowed some other value, even popularly:
the value of a gymnastic.”
“Oh, Shaw’s Englishman and his moral gymnasium; yes, I know,” said
Sydney scornfully.
“Now there you are, Sydney, you’ve moved and you’ll say I disturbed you.
Don’t be so out to suffer. Mr. Milton’s not the only person who runs on
to spikes.”
“Out to suffer,” said Sydney, looking down at herself as it were, from
the height of her exaltation. “_Am_ I out to suffer?”
“I feel that you are,” said Mrs. Kerr, and pressing her head further
back into the cushions she looked at Sydney again in thoughtful silence.
They could hear footsteps, perhaps James Milton’s, crunching the gravel
below.
“Well yes,” Mrs. Kerr said at last, “put it that way.—Sydney, isn’t that
a letter for me, over there by the carnations? Isn’t it from Ronald?”
“Yes, it is from Ronald. I brought it up with me but I forgot to give it
to you. Do you want it now?” Mrs. Kerr was holding out her hand for the
letter but Sydney did not seem to notice. “It’s a very fat letter; I
expect it is his views on Germany. _Do_ you want to read it while I’m
here?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I think I ought to read it. Mothers do.”
“That you know best, of course.” Sydney, rising to her knees, reached
across the table for the letter, which she handed to Ronald’s mother.
Mrs. Kerr put on what Sydney called “the Ronald expression” and began to
read while Sydney watched her.
“My little boy,” she said at last, “is coming here.”
“Coming here?”
“Yes, here. Coming to the Hotel.”
Sydney, sitting quite still, remained blank for a moment and did not say
anything. Then she got up and walked about the room which, crowded up
with the glare of the afternoon, now appeared to be much constricted.
She did not even wonder as usual whether Mrs. Kerr were waiting for her
to speak or if she had forgotten her. She looked for some time at the
ornaments on Mrs. Kerr’s dressing-table which had at one time, by their
profusion, and meaningless and evident air of being appreciated, “dated”
her friend for her inevitably. She glanced for a moment, but only as if
to assure herself of its still being there, at the portrait of Ronald.
Ronald, for the delectation of some circle of friends as to whose extent
and nature she had never speculated, had posed for one of those
expensive photographers who specialize in portraits of men. A
disposition of the prevalent shadows with one fierce escape of light on
to the jaw and temple combine with the Promethean glitter of an eyeball
to bring about an effect of fine ruggedness, of an elemental something
curbed. Each copy of this photograph, a sepia matt, must have cost
Ronald about a guinea. Sydney turned away from it impatiently. “Why on
earth,” she asked, “isn’t Ronald up at Oxford now?”
She had to wait for an answer until Mrs. Kerr having glanced back to an
earlier page of the letter and smiled to herself over something, perhaps
an inconsistency she had detected, had folded up the thin sheets
casually and let them slide from the sofa to the floor.
“What did you say, Sydney? Ah yes, Oxford. He thought it would be better
to travel for a time, you see, after leaving school. He wanted to expand
again, he said, and he wished particularly though I cannot think why, to
spend a year in Germany. He would have preferred to go to Heidelberg,
but his guardian wouldn’t hear of it, unfortunately. So he is going up
to Oxford in the autumn, I believe.”
“I suppose he won’t mind being older than the people in his year?”
“I suppose not,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I should have thought it was a pity.
However, I know very little about boys of that age. He will be twenty
soon.”
“An impossible age,” said Sydney.
“I suppose it really is,” agreed Mrs. Kerr.
Sydney had by this time made up her mind that their future must not be
devastated by a descent upon them of Ronald. She looked about her
undecidedly, not certain whether to say “This is very generous of him”
with irony, or, without irony, but with a display of emotion sure to be
distasteful, “Oh, this is lovely for you; I am ever so glad,” or “It
will be interesting to see you together,” with an implication of
detachment and of relegating her friend to maternity. She could not
guess to which of these observations Mrs. Kerr would be likely to react
most desirably, and she felt herself embarrassed by a lack of insight
into her friend’s personality, of which she had always been conscious,
but which had till now added charm to their intercourse. Now that she
might have to come to grips with the hypothetical mother in Mrs. Kerr
she realized that she was powerless to estimate the force and scope of
relationship of being to being; from consideration of which, as of
something out of proportion with life as she saw it, she had always
withheld herself.
Mrs. Kerr, her hands behind her head, gazed delightedly at the future.
“How very nice,” she laughed, “how very nice and amusing.... Oh no,
don’t laugh like that, Sydney; why should it seem funny to you? It’s
very natural, only it’s so funny that we—he and I—never seem to have
happened to be together in a place where there was nothing to look at
and no one to visit and nowhere to go. So that I suppose one might
almost say we have never been together—It is absurd for me to laugh,”
she went on, in a glow of amused speculation, “but I’m so touched; it is
so ridiculously touching of him. Fancy him writing like that and wanting
to come, from _Dresden_.... I wonder where he will sleep: we must find
him somewhere to sleep—I think that will be all right, don’t you,
Sydney?”
“Have I been very dense?” asked Sydney, in a tone strange to herself. “I
do not even seem to have realized you missed him, or thought of him
much, or would be glad if he came.”
“But I suppose,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking back at the past in surprise,
“that I didn’t realize it either.”
“_Has_ it been lonely and dull? They all said it must be lonely and dull
for you, but I never——”
“Oh no, Sydney dear. You’ve made such a difference.”
“Have I?” Sydney said hungrily. Mrs. Kerr nodded; she was enclosed in
her thoughts but this gleam of affection emboldened Sydney to ask, with
a desperate directness, “And do you want him now—you are fearfully
glad?”
“Sydney, you really are too clever sometimes to understand me. Can’t I
be glad?”
Sydney felt herself beaten back by something that in spite of nature’s
whole precedent she knew for a falsity; an imposture which her
immaturity sensed but could not challenge. She knelt down again in
bewildered, still angry submission by the side of her friend. “Of course
I don’t mean that you shouldn’t be glad. On the other hand you know that
to me the conventions don’t seem to fit you, and bar the conventions,
why should I _assume_ that you are? You see, I’m not a mother and I
don’t know any mothers well.”
She allowed herself to be reconquered as Mrs. Kerr, putting a hand out
and vaguely caressing her hair, said thoughtfully, “No, you aren’t and
you don’t; that’s quite true. Well, won’t you be generous enough to take
me for granted?”
X
For James Milton, after his first few days in the Hotel, everybody with
whom he had exchanged a word or a glance or been brought even indirectly
into contact had already divided themselves into his friends or enemies.
Those who had not yet detached themselves hung about the outskirts of
his consciousness as a kind of mist behind which threatening
possibilities were for ever stirring, could be glimpsed for an instant,
then subsided. He suffered, as he did at last confess to himself, and
began to wonder why he had ever left his parish, where the crippling
sensitiveness of his childhood had at least been deadened by the
activity of every day, and where in the assured retreat of office he had
had no need to question what he was. But the place was beautiful and
completely satisfied him once he had been able to reconcile what he saw
with what he had imagined and to recognize that while an ultimate
Riviera could only have existence in the mind of God, this was as fair
an imitation as it was reasonable to expect. He walked for the allied
pleasures of coloured experience and of hardening his muscles, he tried
to talk Italian to natives, to be answered incomprehensibly in patois or
the local French; he played tennis not so badly and was to be surprised,
in consequence, by the friendliness of the Lawrences, and he admitted to
some vague attractions which it entertained him to discuss with himself.
He became friendly, comfortably and without attraction, with Miss
Fitzgerald and Miss Pym. These two in spite of their experience of
clergymen could not “place” him. From his moustache, one would have been
inclined to take him for an Evangelical, on the other hand, it is
Anglicans who step with fewest scruples into secular clothes. He had
attended the conferences of neither party and remained irresponsive to
the shibboleths of both. Miss Pym wrote, on an inspiration, to ask
particulars of him from that friend in Derbyshire that he and she had
early discovered to be mutual. But the friend in Derbyshire was an
Anglo-Catholic and did not acknowledge the finer shades; she simply
wrote back that he was a delightful man, adding a string of messages for
him that gave no key. Colonel Duperrier also liked Milton; they
exchanged stories about fishing in Donegal, discussed Europe and
respected one another’s reserve. The Lawrences made him an apple-pie bed
and used to send him suggestive Italian picture postcards anonymously to
see how much he would stand.
But he was still avid for popularity. Though devoid of the more odious
kinds of vanity, he had been given to understand that as an unattached,
personable man he would be _persona grata_ anywhere: and he was troubled
to find that this was not the case. He had avoided Sydney since that day
of the Lee-Mittisons’ picnic: for some reason that he could not explain
it was impossible to think of her without embarrassment, though at times
she was nothing more to him than some curious picture whose worth he
could apprehend but felt unable to analyse. It was with some unavowed
idea of a circuitous approach to Sydney that he sought out her friend
Mrs. Kerr; preparing to find himself to a degree, but not beyond that
degree, disturbed by her.
He was oppressed by some patent hostilities.
“I am afraid,” he said to Miss Fitzgerald, as during the half-hour
before lunch they sat together in the Hotel garden on iron chairs under
an orange tree, “that I have done something to offend Mrs. Pinkerton.”
“Oh, I don’t see how you could have. Anyhow, she’s a fearful old snob,”
said Miss Fitzgerald, who knew all about the bathroom, but had neither
the face nor the heart to tell him.
“Oh, do you think so? She is the sort of old lady I have so often been
asked to lunch with that I cannot help wondering why we do not get on.”
“She is the patroness of a living——”
“Well, I don’t want the woman’s living,” said Milton indignantly. “Does
she think I’m going to pick her pocket for it?”
“How ridiculous you are!” laughed Miss Fitzgerald, who was exhilarated
by violence. “You know, she would make a splendid Lady Catherine de
Bourgh.”
“Ye-es,” said Milton thoughtfully, wondering who should be his
Charlotte. He resumed, “Another person I should like an explanation with
is Mr. Lee-Mittison. He took me up a mountain my first day here, lost me
and has been looking daggers at me ever since. He seems to have forgiven
the Lawrences and Miss Warren who were equally his victims, and I cannot
see why I am singled out. After all, I was stranger to the hills than
any of them.”
“I am very sorry for his wife,” said Miss Fitzgerald sighing
pleasurably.
“I don’t know. I think he’s her fault. She mayn’t seem a very buoyant
woman but I don’t suppose she’d like to be.”
“It’s very curious,” said Miss Fitzgerald, turning to look at him, “most
men, I have noticed are hardest on men but with you it seems just the
opposite. I don’t know whether it’s personal prejudice—” she sweetened
the impertinence with a smile—“or the curious sombre rigidity of some
old school of thought; perhaps Pauline?”
“I can’t think,” Milton said vaguely. At this particular hour of the
morning he did not want to talk about himself and was still less
interested in St. Paul.
“Perhaps,” she suggested, “you are brought too much into contact with
women, the tiresome type. A clergyman’s life——”
“It never really strikes me that there’s very much difference. I mean
there _are_ a certain rather limited _number_ of ways in which people
can be idiotic—or if you like, wicked—and men and women seem to fall
into them indiscriminately. It always irritates me to see anybody being
bolstered up in their own particular kind of insufferableness by the
friend who ought to be helping them, and I do think women (for their own
ends, which makes it unpardonable) are worse about doing this than men.
If that’s what you mean by my being severer on women? Otherwise I can’t
see that in my department at any rate, men and women are noticeably
different.”
“Or in any department,” said Miss Fitzgerald earnestly rallying to her
standard. “And it interested me to hear you use the word ‘friend’ in
that context. Meaning that friend and husband—or wife, as the case may
be—should be synonymous.”
“Practically,” said Milton, looking round and wondering whether it would
be possible to order an apéritif, and wishing since he feared this was
not possible, that he had gone down to the town. “I suppose,” he
continued conscientiously though with a slight effort, “that you think I
am intolerant?”
“Oh no, not that: too, too acute.... One feels it a disadvantage. I
suppose one is oneself too much in the habit of _generalizing_.” She
broke off and reached up suddenly in apparent confusion to pluck a
small, still rather sickly orange from a branch above her. This, without
looking at it again, she bit, right into the peel.
“Surely that is rather bitter?” asked James Milton looking on
solicitously.
“Yes,” said she with a wry face, wiping her mouth, “it was very bitter!”
She turned crimson and began to laugh awkwardly. “Such an extraordinary
thing to do: I _do_ do extraordinary things sometimes ... without
thinking ... when I’m thinking hard.”
James Milton, who did think this was an extraordinary thing to have
done, was silent. She glanced shamefacedly at her tooth marks in the
orange, then guiltily up at the windows of the Hotel, then she wiped the
orange and tucked it quietly away behind her.
“Look!” cried out James Milton considerately. “There’s Mrs. Kerr again,
out on her balcony.”
“So she is—how nice she looks up there. You know, my friend Miss Pym is
so fond of her, she says she is marvellously sympathetic. She is
certainly an unusual woman, but so very charming. She is very much
criticized here by a certain set, but then I am afraid some women have
very small minds. Did you hear, her son is coming out next week? We are
so glad, it will be delightful for her.”
“I say, is he really? I’m glad.”
“We are wondering,” continued Miss Fitzgerald, “what he and Sydney
Warren will say to each other?”
“Really?” said James Milton, whose mind had leapt at once to this.
“Not of course that I mean anything ... well, you know, sentimentally.
The boy is hardly grown up. No, I mean she has been so much in
possession, really rather monopolizing Mrs. Kerr, who of course is
incapable of not being nice to anybody and is so patient and sympathetic
and good.” Miss Fitzgerald sighed “She’s been victimized....”
Later on, when Milton had followed Miss Fitzgerald into the dining-room,
he stared with renewed curiosity at the back of Miss Warren’s head
across the dining-room, as though he expected the shape and colour of
her to be somehow different, or expected her to disclose her whole self
to him in some gesture or attitude. He sat at his lonely table crumbling
his bread exaltedly and wondering how soon Ronald could possibly arrive.
He promised himself that, if Ronald were not delayed, it would be
possible for him in a fortnight or even ten days to know Sydney
absolutely. Then he had to recollect how unfriendly to him she had shown
herself and wonder whether being thrown back on his society would tend
to make her like him better. Tessa’s bright vague eyes surprised him in
their wandering, he smiled and nodded.
“Mr. Milton keeps on looking at us,” whispered Tessa to Sydney. “I do
wonder what he wants.”
Many people who admired Mrs. Kerr had already congratulated her; others
who had still to do so sought her out as they streamed from the
dining-room. A small crowd gathered about her as she stood in the
doorway, like a tall bride, confused and elated. Many who did not like
her at all had also congratulated, as they were anxious to see how she
was taking it. “Splendid!” shouted and smiled Mr. Milton over the
intervening heads; his long, rather pink face also towering.
“Yes, it’s splendid, isn’t it?” agreed Sydney from behind him. She was
jostled against him all at once by more people pushing out from the
dining-room and he said, putting out a hand to steady her: “I’m sure
_you_ must be glad?”
At the end of that afternoon’s tennis he waited for Sydney and walked up
with her from the club. “This young man, this Ronald,” he asked, “do you
know him?”
“I feel I do,” said Sydney. “Mrs. Kerr has shown me his letters and she
laughs at me occasionally and says I am like him. And there is a
photograph, anyway, that one couldn’t help noticing. Altogether I feel
he is to be a kind of comic character.”
“Oh! Does his mother think he is funny?” said James Milton, slightly
jarred.
“But young people are always funny: as we get more sophisticated we
can’t help realizing that ourselves—I don’t know whether that makes us
less funny or more so.”
The sun had dipped to the line of the hills, so that the sky had a kind
of gold sparkle which reflected itself on figures and faces. Even before
the moment of sunset the air was already tingling with cold; the dark
keen upstanding trees about them seemed slightly to shiver. Sydney flung
the folds of her white fleecy cloak across her breast and holding them
gathered against her paused a moment, looking back towards the
tennis-courts with a wild Beatrice Cenci expression which did not
correspond with her thoughts and of which she was wholly unconscious.
Milton’s heart leapt to his mouth for that moment, then he felt the
chill of dusk lay an ice-cold hand on him and he shuddered. He asked her
impatiently if she were waiting for anyone else.
She said “No” in surprise, and walked beside him up the path to the
Hotel, treading noiselessly in her rope-soled shoes. “It is an alarming
idea,” said he, unable to maintain a silence of whose peculiar quality
he became intolerably conscious, “that the young should be getting
progressively more and more sophisticated. It is as bad as it is to be
told, if one is a reader of adventure stories, that no part of dark
Africa remains undiscovered, and that one-inch maps of all parts will be
available shortly.”
“I suppose it would be, if one ever seriously considered youth
romantic.”
“But I never said _I_ did. Romantic—I’m not that kind of middle-aged
man. When I compared it to Africa, I didn’t mean I liked Africa; I
dislike the thoughts of the wilds intensely but they make me so
appreciative of the state of civilization in which I am living that I
should be sorry if they disappeared.”
“So you feel civilized?” said Sydney, beginning to like him. Till now
she had been discouraged by his facile (what she called “professional”)
manner and by a middle-aged whimsicality reeking of the Barrie play.
“Much more so,” said James Milton, cursing himself for going on like
this, and for that very manner and habit of mind of his, of which no one
else could have been more contemptuously aware.
“More than whom?” said Sydney idly, but he refused to continue and she
allowed him with unusual complaisance to swing her with him into a new
mood, as though they had been a pair of dancers. The rocky crest of a
hill to the east, at a great height, had suddenly been ribbed with
scarlet. This vivid colour against the profound and quickly darkening
sky was to northern eyes a challenge to credulity: and Sydney looking up
with admiration and hostility, said, “I should never have believed it.”
“I have always believed it,” said James Milton, “but it is surprising to
see.”
“You’ll see a hundred others,” she told him: and they hurried on,
discussing in relation to this line of coast the phenomena of sunset.
When they had come out into the road they walked more slowly between the
lines of chestnut-trees, watching the light fade from the enormous faces
of the hotels and retreat even from the villas above, which though
suffused in dusk still glimmered. Night had arrived, as usual, with the
catastrophic suddenness which does not for a long time cease to be
alarming. They could hear forgotten windows being slammed indignantly,
while lights springing up behind the curtains brought them out in
hundreds in their uniformity, with here and there a figure passing
regularly as a pendulum to and fro across the screen of lace. The hill
smoked over with olives loomed, by some _trompe-l’oeil_ of the twilight
seemed to topple, above the larger hotels; but their own in silhouette
against the sea stood out as they approached it in greater significance.
She said, “I have often thought it would be interesting if the front of
any house, but of an hotel especially, could be swung open on a hinge
like the front of a doll’s-house. Imagine the hundreds of rooms with
their walls lit up and the real-looking staircases and all the people
surprised doing appropriate things in appropriate attitudes as though
they had been put there to represent something and had never moved in
their lives. Like the cook-doll that I always had propped up against the
kitchen stove and the father-doll propped against the library
book-shelves and the sitting-up doll in the bath that was really a china
ornament and had no other attitude, and the limp dolls that wouldn’t do
anything so had to be kept in the spare room beds, which I always think
was an unconscious reflection on the ideal habits for visitors.”
“Yes,” said James Milton, for whom the Hotel was at once in miniature.
“If one could see people all at once like that they wouldn’t matter so
much.” Quite apart from and yet somehow parallel with the intellectual
conception he had another idea of God, of which he permitted himself to
be conscious, as an enormous and perpetually descending Finger and
Thumb. What Sydney had just said fitted in with this alarmingly.
“If one could see them like that,” she continued, “one could see them so
clearly, as living under the compulsion of their furniture—or the
furniture they happen to have hired. It would seem very doubtful, I
daresay, whether man were not, after all, made for the Sabbath—and
worse, for beds and dinner-tables and washstands, just to discharge the
obligations all those have created.”
“I don’t think I should ever believe that,” said Milton amused.
“Well, even you,” she continued. “Though it may have been an Idea in the
first place that made churches to be built, it was the churches already
existing, with rows of pews for people to sit in, and a pulpit and
things all ready that had to be filled, that made you into a parson.”
“I’m afraid I don’t agree with you at all,” said he, with a finality
that impressed her.
“It really isn’t worth disagreeing with: I was only talking for the fun
of the thing. Of course I don’t believe that more than anything else.”
They had been walking under the windows of their own Hotel, and she now
paused in the gateway with the light from the Hotel door streaming out
on to her looking at him remotely, as a gypsy might look over the
garden-fence at a householder mowing his lawn. “I daresay,” her look
seemed to say, “that in your encumbered kind of way you are happy. I am
not, in any way, and I don’t want to be.” It was with this air at once
complacent and desolate that she seemed proposing to part from him, for
she glanced at her wrist-watch, murmured something in the nature of a
farewell and slipped on ahead.
“Oh, I say!” exclaimed Milton helplessly, and racked his brains for
something further to say to her.
“What?” asked Sydney looking down from the steps and with faint
impatience swinging her racket.
“I hope you don’t think I was offended?” said he wildly.
“No. Why should you be?”
“What you said about churches ... I was afraid you might have thought——”
“Well,” said Sydney, “it’s no use trying not to offend people so I don’t
think I ever think much one way or the other. I’ve given up listening
agonizedly for the possible reverberations of every remark—which, if
you’ll forgive my saying so, I think you do.”
“I’m sorry,” said he, with the humility of twenty years’ seniority.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter a bit. Good-night.” He had pulled open the swing
door for her and she passed through it ahead of him, trailing her cloak
which had slipped away from her shoulders. He gathered up the fringe of
this from the floor and passed it to her. “Why good-night?” said he, and
several people sitting about the lounge looked up in astonishment. “I
mean, don’t we see each other at dinner?”
“Oh well, of course we see each other at dinner.” Sydney glanced round
the lounge, took note of the astonished faces and, after another slight
bow to Milton, went upstairs slowly, humming a tune.