“Well,” Mrs. Kerr said expansively, meeting Sydney on the stairs next
morning, “isn’t it _rather_ a nice puppy?”
She was dressed to go out, with a blue straw hat pulled down over her
eyes. She had paused with a hand out to steady herself against the frame
of the staircase window, and the north light defined the smiling curve
of one cheek and drew prismatic colours out of an earring. She was
evidently very happy.
“What puppy?” Sydney said blankly, looking up from a few steps below
her.
“My Ronald. Isn’t it _rather_ a nice——”
“Oh very, yes. I thought it seemed a rather severe puppy last night but
I daresay that was the journey.”
“Oh, severe?” said Mrs. Kerr delightedly. “Was he really severe? Sydney,
you must tell me; how fearfully funny!” She narrowed her eyes for a
moment as though she were trying to picture the meeting of Sydney and
Ronald. “I don’t believe,” she admitted, “that he was pleased at finding
everyone dancing. It didn’t, somehow, seem right. But I daresay he
thought _you_ severe; I must ask him—you terrify me. He seemed rather
dazed by you all.”
“I’m glad his first day is so fine,” said Sydney and felt as though by
this she were somehow including herself in the happiness of the Kerrs.
“Yes, I’m always lucky,” agreed Mrs. Kerr. “Now we’re going out
together. You can’t think what it is like to be going out with a son. It
is unbelievably nice—I’d forgotten.”
“Well, good-bye,” said Sydney, standing back against the wall for her
friend to pass. “I don’t suppose we shall see each other again to-day.”
“Oh, shan’t we? What a pity!” Mrs. Kerr said vaguely. “There’s that
unfortunate Ronald,” she cried glancing out of the window, “marching up
and down out there—do look—in a Panama hat. How horrid of me to dawdle!”
She nodded to Sydney and went on smoothly downstairs leaving besides her
faint perfume a sensible backwash of eagerness, expectancy and delight.
Sydney stared out at the hill, crude in sunshine, then went on upstairs.
She thought how ironic it was that a day made to order for two people’s
triumphant occasion must be at the same time dealt out as a background
to everyone else. She felt she had no energy and could never get as far
as her room, choose her gloves, find her parasol and put on her hat. At
the thought of anything beyond this, her prospect for the day, she
faltered. With a sense of reprieve she let herself be waylaid by
Cordelia Barry, who was hanging about the stairs.
“I say, Miss Warren, it’s Thursday.”
“Is it?”
“I don’t go to the Convent on Thursdays, I was wondering ... I thought
perhaps.... No, but of course you wouldn’t, would you? I don’t suppose
it would suit you at all....” Cordelia, with an air of infinite
calculation looked sideways at Sydney under her lashes. Sydney,
remembering the promise Cordelia had exacted, had a pang of acute
nostalgia for that afternoon of the carnations, sundered from her by the
eternity of a different mood.
“I’m sorry, Cordelia: I’m going for a walk with Mr. Milton.”
“O-oh! That is a pity. I suppose I couldn’t come too? Oh no, but of
course you wouldn’t want me, would you? But I don’t mind Mr. Milton if
he doesn’t mind me, and I don’t see really why I shouldn’t come.”
“Neither do I. I suppose—You can come along if you want to,” said
Sydney, denying a sense that this was mischievous on her part and a
shade dishonourable. At all events to annoy somebody in her turn surely
was owed to her? “He pretends,” she thought, “he professes to be fond of
children. And it’s not as though we had anything to say to one another.
We talk and talk, and cancel out each other’s ideas until it all comes
down to what it was before: that we do not agree. At the end of it all
it is as though nothing had been said. I do not even understand myself
any better at the end of it and if that fails what is the use of
conversation? Nothing will ever crystallize out of our being together;
not so much as a notion.”
She deliberated, however, for some moments over her hats and scarves and
returned more than once to the looking-glass to review herself
critically.
Milton was waiting below in the lounge and his face did fall perceptibly
as Sydney, at last appearing at the turn of the stairs, indicated
Cordelia, less in tow than towing, capering possessively about her.
“Oh!” said he, and looking down at their two pairs of descending feet
could think of nothing better to say.
Sydney wondered if her face had looked like that to Mrs. Kerr some
moments ago: the comparison was distasteful. “This is Cordelia Barry,”
she said with bright hardiness, “the eldest of three. She would like to
come with us; you don’t mind, do you?” To her surprise, Milton turned
away without a word to take his walking-stick from the rack behind him.
“You don’t mind, do you?” echoed Cordelia shrilly.
“I’m very pleased, of course, if Miss Warren has invited you,” said
Milton, holding open the door for them. But as Cordelia passed out
behind Sydney with the self-assurance of a pet monkey he looked daggers
at her profile.
“I’ve just seen the Kerrs going off,” he said to Sydney as he came
abreast with her. “Ronald looks brighter this morning: indeed decidedly
pleased with himself.” His pale-grey eyes encountered Sydney’s
thoughtfully.
“Yes,” she said, “it’s nice to see them together.” She could tell by his
tone that he was angry with her and was vaguely brandishing a weapon
which he understood to be deadly but did not quite know how to use. He
was nice-looking and at the moment unapproachable; she felt too
spiritless to spar with him, and said, to propitiate, “It is a lovely
day for a walk; I haven’t been for a walk for ages,” and looked at him
gently. He noticed that her eyes had dark circles round them which were
unbecoming and pitiful.
Milton had woken up this morning with the determination to take Sydney
for a walk. Nothing in that moment of lucidity had seemed simpler to
arrange, and nothing could actually have been simpler, as things had
turned out. He knew as well as she did, and would have been prepared to
admit to her, that the time they had spent together up to now had been
profitless and left them both sore. But he was convinced (the conviction
emerged with what now seemed inevitability from the confusion and
ill-spent emotion of last night) that a need corresponding to his own
must exist in her somewhere. A need perhaps, less of each other
exclusively than of something only attainable jointly, of something
rooted in each. “But I do not know how to begin,” he had complained to
himself till this morning. Now he felt a mastery of the situation to be
possible. “If I could only make her understand,” he thought, “there
would be time enough for her to care for me.” At any rate here they
were, walking together. The presence of this confounded little girl he
chose to discount.
He turned, however, to talk to Cordelia kindly. They had chosen a road
above the town for the sake of the view and meant to drop down through
the fishermen’s quarters and come home by the sea. Cordelia begged that
she might be allowed to visit the graveyard. Milton observed
conventionally that her taste seemed a little morbid.
“Oh no, Mr. Milton; you really ought to see the graveyard here; it’s
most uncommon and beautifully decorated. I suppose as a clergyman you’ve
had so much experience of them that you get out of the way of noticing
but I am sure you’d be struck by the one here. It’s _most_
blood-curdling.”
“If you like that sort of thing,” said Milton in the somewhat top-heavy
manner in which he could not help talking to children, “you should get
your mother to take you to the Campo Santo at Pisa.” Cordelia evidently
suspected from his tone that he did not think her tastes sufficiently
elevated, while Sydney remarked parenthetically that she did not see
Mrs. Barry taking her children to Pisa.
“I might, of course,” suggested Cordelia, “be sent to a convent there to
be taught to speak whatever they do speak. You see, my mother has got a
perfect mania about languages. She would like me to be able to speak
ninety-nine different ones even if I never learnt anything else. Though
what, I should like to know, is the use of speaking ninety-nine
languages if one has nothing to say? Now I think the nuns have no idea
of teaching; I’ve never been so badly taught in my life. They flap about
and go on and on at one and half the time one can’t understand what
they’re saying and when one does it doesn’t make sense. I don’t wonder
they got turned out of France—I’m not learning anything. However, the
nuns think nothing matters so long as they go on being religious, and
mother thinks nothing matters so long as they go on being French, so
there you are.”
Sydney agreed that this was all very difficult. Milton who wondered what
would become of this little girl was silent and looked so much depressed
that Cordelia to cheer him up caught hold of his hand and swinging
herself along by it asked him whether he was fond of reading. “I am,”
said she. “My two favourite authors are Rider Haggard and the Baroness
von Hutten. Who are yours?”
Milton hesitated and Sydney and Cordelia looked at him with curiosity.
Conscious of Sydney’s attention, he was still debating how to answer
most fruitfully when she said to Cordelia across him: “I don’t think Mr.
Milton ever reads at all. I never see him with a book.”
“That’s not fair,” said Milton. “I read too much as a rule. I came out
_here_ for....”
“For what?” said Sydney, looking about her expressively.
“For people,” said Milton unwarily.
“Oh!” they both exclaimed. “What an extraordinary thing to come for!—To
come _here_ for,” Sydney added.
“Don’t you know any people? Do you like them so much?” Cordelia
enquired. “How funny! I only like people in books who only exist when
they matter. I think it is being in danger or terribly in love or
discovering treasure or revenging yourself that is thrilling, and for
that you have to have people. But people in hotels, hardly _alive_...!”
“Well, you don’t know what may not be happening to them,” Sydney
emerging from her detachment felt it necessary to point out
instructively. The road, a favourite promenade of the natives and
visitors, rounded the face of a high embankment; they could have been
looked down upon from the terraces of villas on one hand while on the
other they were level with the tree-tops: the roofs of the town were
below. Milton distractingly engaged in conversation by Cordelia, and
Sydney released but not unfriendly looking ahead of her, they emerged on
to a kind of gravelled plateau overlooking the sea. Here some benches
had been placed, beneath umbrella-pines forming a kind of pergola, to
promote contemplation of the bright panorama of coast. Beyond, the
remoter hills were still snow-capped; others ran down to the sea in a
succession of fine blue noses; headland behind headland fading towards
France. The earth had this brilliant morning a kind of independent
luminousness; there were still no shadows anywhere and the rocks, flat
clustered roofs and campanili seemed to shed light as well as to receive
it. For miles the bright-blue swelling glassiness of the sea received
the coast gracefully among ripples that frayed continually into foam,
slipped back into themselves, and slid on again. When Sydney, Mr. Milton
and Cordelia had seated themselves on a bench, the fleshy spears of some
cacti fringing the plateau darkly occupied the foreground of their
vision. “Ah!” said Milton taking a deep breath of the air which here
seemed to him stronger and fresher. Sydney was glad of his enjoyment of
the day which to herself still seemed spilt out wastefully.
“Doesn’t everything look as though it was cut out and painted,”
exclaimed Cordelia, joyously swinging her legs. “Cordelia!” said Milton,
looking at her with an air of inspiration, “do you like nuts?”
“Very much. But I get plenty of them.”
“Or figs?”
“The seeds are bad for my teeth.”
“Well, dates?”
“I adore dates. I’m not encouraged to eat them much because they’re
stickiest. But I do adore dates,” said Cordelia thoughtfully. “I wonder
if I shall ever eat a date again?”
“You may at any moment,” said Milton, and he told her that there was a
little fruit-shop that he knew of, just below, where she could buy for
the three lire he proposed to give her enough dates for them all. “I
adore dates too,” he added. “The shop is on the left, by the
tram-terminus, and they will talk any language you like.” He gave the
child a slight push that was unnecessary: she was already sliding off
the bench. After a side-glance at Sydney who had opened her mouth to
protest she fled to some concrete steps and with a yelp of excitement
vanished down them.
“But she isn’t allowed to run about the town by herself,” said Sydney,
vexed, “and she certainly isn’t allowed to eat between meals—she’s very
much be-Nannied. Whatever made you do that?”
“She’s not the sort of child to get talked to, and I’m sure she has an
inside like an ostrich. If her people encourage her to attach herself to
strangers like that they’ll have to take the consequences. I sent her
off because she’s been the most infernal nuisance all the morning.”
He was crimson. “You feel strongly about it,” said Sydney laughing at
him, bathed in sunshine and forgetful of perils to Cordelia. “Moral
indignation?” He did not interrupt her but something in his silence, his
arresting consciousness of the gap Cordelia’s disappearance left between
them and the clear view they had of each other, made her interrupt
herself.
“I’m sorry she has bored you,” she said nervously. “I really ought not
to have brought her.”
“No, I don’t think you ought. I asked you to come for a walk; I didn’t
ask you to collect an expedition.”
“Well, really—” she began, then stopped again. Their conspicuous if
isolated situation, the matter-of-fact sunshine and the sense that with
all said and done they were English Visitors, he and she, sitting
appropriately on a bench before a view designed for their admiration,
had up to now kept her purely impersonal. So objective did she feel that
she imagined a delighted Commune gazing down at the two of them,
“English Visitors.” In the expansion of the free air she had laughed and
felt that neither of them were realler than the scenery. Now, at some
tone in his voice she was surprised by a feeling that some new mood, not
of her own, was coming down over them like a bell-glass. The bright
reality of the view, the consciousness of their unimportant, safe little
figures were shut away from her; were always there but could no longer
help. She felt the bell-glass finally descend as he, after a glance
round at the other benches and over the edge of the plateau, said
quickly—“The thing is, Sydney, aren’t I ever to know you?”
“I don’t see what you mean,” she said, suffocated by his manner. “Like
everybody else, we see each other every day. Which was what, according
to you, we are here for.”
Milton, losing touch with her, lost touch with himself and was
terrified. He had said, “Yes, but I was wondering if you would marry
me,” before he had had time to think, on an instinct that he must get
out _something_ at any price and have it there to stand by. She had
understood what he said before he did, and had answered: “You are very
good, but no: I’m afraid it’s impossible”; so that he had proposed and
been rejected before he had entirely realized that they were not still
quarrelling about Cordelia. When this did dawn on him he turned to her
in dismay. “I’m afraid,” he said with a return to his usual manner,
“that that was terribly awkward of me.”
“Oh no, not at all,” said Sydney, smiling shakily. “It’s supposed to be
very gratifying.”
“I did not mean to have said that to-day, I need hardly explain. It was
unforgivable of me. But I suppose while we are on the subject that there
is no further harm in my asking you, whether you can—as I think they
call it—give me any hope?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” said Sydney feeling she had been asked something
so preposterous that the answer was a matter for her common sense alone
and that further enquiries need not be instituted.
“Very well,” said Milton and the bell-glass lifted, though it hung above
them. She felt as though this image must have presented itself to him
also, for he drew, as though released from constriction, another deep
breath of air. After staring straight ahead at the hills for a moment he
said, “Thank you”: she did not know for what, she supposed for her
courtesy. This implied (she felt) a dismissal, a “You may go now, I have
done with you!”