“But I thought he liked dates!” cried Cordelia. Panting at the top of
the steps she stood clutching her package, appalled to see Milton walk
away rapidly in the direction from which they had come. She had run both
ways so as to waste as little time as possible away from her friends and
she couldn’t help feeling that the escape of Milton in so short an
interval could not but be due to some mismanagement on the part of Miss
Warren; who now alone on the bench sat staring before her, smiling
uneasily. There had seemed no risk in leaving him for a moment, he had
had every appearance of being rooted there, or better perhaps, tethered.
“But he _said_ he liked dates,” she repeated, bringing up reason to
support her astonishment.
The remark, which was not answered, seemed further to contribute to a
gloom that had taken the place of the affable Mr. Milton and which
momentarily, to both their perceptions, darkened the sunshine. Miss
Warren now rose abruptly, shook out her pleated skirts and for the first
time unfurling her parasol tilted it from her shoulder at an angle, with
a concentration upon these details of her own elegance which implied
dismally to Cordelia the exclusion of Mr. Milton even from memory. With
a renewed, more genuine smile to Cordelia she suggested that they should
continue their walk. Except for a few arcs and triangles in the gravel
before the bench the friendly clergyman might never have existed.
They followed the loops of the road in their gradual descent towards the
cemetery. Sydney was talkative; they discussed novels, the difficulties
of arithmetic and the superiority of cats over dogs. Once she turned and
looked back at the benches as though horrified by the thought that they
would still be there. Cordelia asked, “Have you forgotten something?”
and she answered, “Oh no,” in confusion. It transpired that Mr. Milton
had been recalled by an engagement of some importance, till then
forgotten. Cordelia, who was able to estimate the probable importance of
any engagement locally, said nothing. She suspected him to be a feeble
walker, and moreover a man of quick appetites as quickly forgotten. She
ate his dates and ceased to regret him; allowing the stones to
accumulate in one cheek and spitting them out by half-dozens with great
force. She proceeded down hill beside Sydney with a hop-skip-and-a-jump,
kicking up the powdery white dust so that it swirled round her feet and,
settling, iced the top of her shoes. She derived keen pleasure from
this, also from a sense of the enviableness of walking with this
appearance of intimacy with the distinguished Miss Warren. She hoped in
vain that they might meet some of her friends.
“I do think two’s better company,” she said at last, “but I hope this
hasn’t been a disappointment to you.”
“It’s a pity, of course,” said Sydney who could not help feeling it
would have been more vigorous, more admirable on Milton’s part to have
continued the walk with them. She believed herself able to recognize in
what had occurred simply another of his nervous impulses, there had
been, she was convinced, no impetus of emotion. In the unique encounter
of eyes they had had, as with raised hat he was turning away from her,
he had shown her nothing of what he felt but astonishment: a profound
astonishment, at which of them she could not be sure. Those pale-grey
eyes with their penetrating blankness were still vivid to her, but
though she now intensely desired to reproach herself she could not wring
from her memories any sense of his emotion. She came to doubt that she
had witnessed anything more painful than the momentary topple of a shy
but very potent vanity that had over-reached itself. A suspicion of
having been casually snatched at hardened her towards him. He had not
hurt her but he had set the pain of the earlier morning free to renew
itself; a nerve was insistently throbbing. She became aware, with the
knife-edge of a first realization, of each implication of the words,
expression, gesture, with which Mrs. Kerr had detached herself and in
smiling expectation gone past her downstairs.
In such a mood she was not proof against the ordinary reflections on
mortality as she looked with Cordelia through the cemetery gates. To see
better, they pressed up their faces against the cold bars. Cordelia for
the last ten minutes had been hurrying, her whole self narrowed down;
she had become silent with apprehension. She was tortured by a fear that
the cemetery with its ornaments might have rolled itself up and
vanished, or worse, that it might fail in its pungent appeal, so that
she would not this time experience what she had learned to describe as a
“frisson” as she gazed through the gloom of the trees down that
distracting prospective of monuments. Also, she had made herself
responsible for the reaction of Miss Warren from the moment they turned
down the suggestive cul-de-sac away from the sea, walled-in steeply and
vanishing at a succession of angles round the palm-tufted bases of the
hills.
The cemetery seemed quite deserted. Gashes of overcharged daylight
pressed in through the cypresses on to the graves; a hard light
bestowing no grace and exacting each detail. In the shade of the
pillared vaults round the walls what already seemed the dusk of evening
had begun to thicken, but the rank and file of small crosses staggered
arms-wide in the arraignment of sunshine. In spite of the brooding
repose of the trees a hundred little shrill draughts came between them
and spurting across the graves made the decorations beloved of Cordelia
creak and glitter. A wreath of black tin pansies swung from the arm of a
cross with a clatter of petals, trailing colourless ribbons; a beaded
garland had slipped down slantwise across the foot of a grave. Candles
for the peculiar glory of the lately dead had been stuck in the unhealed
earth: here and there a flame in a glass shade writhed, opaque in the
sunshine. Above all this uneasy rustle of remembrance, white angels
poised forward to admonish. The superlatives crowding each epitaph
hissed out their “_issimi_” and “_issime_” from under the millinery of
death. Everywhere, in ribbons, marbles, porcelains, was euphuism, a
suggestion of the salon, and nowhere could the significance of death
have been brought forward more startlingly.
“I must say,” remarked Cordelia, “I do like Italian graves; they look so
much more lived in.”
“They would certainly be more difficult than others to get clear of,”
said Sydney, and quickly in unthinking perturbation she pushed open the
cemetery gates, as though she were on a message to a friend’s house, and
hurried in. Once among the graves she stood with Cordelia behind her,
looking round again. She was oppressed by the thought, less of death
than of the treachery of a future that must give one to this ultimately.
She was not accustomed to consider death as other than a spontaneous
fine gesture. Now it hinted itself as something to be imposed on one,
the last and most humiliating of those deprivations she had begun to
experience. She thought, “It is all very well to escape to the future
and think it will always be there; but this is the end of the future.”
Looking up to watch a bird fly slowly across the sky she realized that
living as she had lived she had been investing the future with more and
more of herself. The present, always slipping away, was ghostly, every
moment spent itself in apprehension of the next and these apprehensions,
these faded expectancies cumbered her memory, crowded out her
achievements and promised to make the past barren enough should she have
to come back to it.
James Milton’s attempt to come further into her life, to regions by his
acquaintance of them surely sufficiently ice-bound, appeared in the
light of present considerations heroic: he had been staking his future.
But his future, she recollected, spun itself off into infinity. He did
not acknowledge finality anywhere; this made him leisurely-seeming and
easily generous. His impulses in any direction were not intensified by
her own sense of urgency. In the light shed serenely down from that
ultimate spaciousness he was covering life at an equable pace. He
presented himself an undriven, a comforting figure. She saw him
conducting a funeral; voluminous, fluttering, milkwhite, leaning like
one of these angels over the yawn of a grave to scatter his handful of
earth, his tribute to mortality; with the expression, a submerged beam,
of this having in a cognizant Mind its order. The word “death” used in
his presence would have a slow-dying ring to it, to which one would be
able to feel him subconsciously listening. She contemplated with a faint
inclination a life shared with someone for whom events would have this
overtone of significance.
And to be wanted! She remembered in what a mood she had climbed the
stairs that morning, and looked round her at the now forever undesired
dead. She tried to recall the feel of his handclasp and to imagine the
touch of his lips. With a sigh: “I am very ordinary!” she tried over any
terms of endearment which seemed within the range of his manner,
listening gravely for a ring which, like the word death, she felt they
would have for him.
Cordelia sat on the end of a grave among a little city of glass domes,
looking up intelligently. The child had read so many novels that she
might well have been expected to know what there was to be known about
the affairs of the heart. Feeling the bright eyes of Cordelia fixed for
some moments upon her Sydney began to wonder whether her lips had been
moving just now and if so, what Cordelia had thought; she feared that
she might have gone so far as what in Cordelia’s novels would be called
murmuring. Of this the child would approve too readily. For the moment,
however, her attention did not seem to have wandered from the graves and
she was determined not to allow Sydney’s to do so either.
“Did you know,” she began, “that it costs a great deal of money to be
buried permanently?”
“It never occurred to me.”
“A girl at the convent had a grandmother who died and she told me that
the grandmother’s last request was to be buried permanently. If you
aren’t—and it is fearfully expensive—they come and dig you up again.
Italians never think of this; they are most improvident. They spend a
lot of money trimming up the graves—I must say, they do do it very
nicely—and then after all their trouble the cemetery people come and dig
their relation up again, because the cemetery is too small and people
keep on dying and dying, and they have to go in _somewhere_, if you see
what I mean.”
“Oh!” said Sydney and glanced behind as though she might expect to see
the newly dead jostling one another in the gate. She felt that it had
been a mistake to have come here at all, even to recover herself. This
high-walled place with its one gate might well be a trap for her and she
wondered what she should do if, instead of the dead, Mrs. Kerr and
Ronald were to come in suddenly, talking and laughing (she could see
them) as they stepped over the graves. Why they should come to the
cemetery she could not imagine except that her dread of them, even in
thought, might well prove a magnet to their unconsciousness.
“Of course, of course,” she said loudly, “people must keep on dying.
They should have made allowances for that.”
“There is a rubbish heap at the back of the chapel.... If you’d come
with me I could show you....”
“What a horrid little ghoul you are,” Sydney said mechanically. She had
found that in actually dealing with children theories collapse and one
must retreat on the conventions. But when Cordelia in her reasonable
little voice objected “Why?” she could think of nothing to answer. There
seemed no reason, even conventionally, why she should impose on Cordelia
the adult idea of “morbidity.” “People wouldn’t like you to talk about
being dug up,” she said at last weakly, “though it seems to me a very
practical arrangement. The Italians are realists.”
“What is a realist?” asked Cordelia, while, having gathered up some
china flowers lying about on the ground she stuck these by their wire
stalks into the band of her hat. “Haven’t I made my hat smart? What
_are_ realists?”
“Ask Mr. Milton,” Sydney said promptly.
“Is he—?”
“No, of course not. But he will tell you what unenlightened people they
are.”
“He is a long-winded man,” said Cordelia, looking at her friend
sideways.
“Not at all,” said Sydney irritably. “And anyway, what do you know about
it?”
“Oh nothing, nothing at all. I don’t know what ‘long-winded’ means,
even.”
“Then you shouldn’t——”
“It was a sporting risk, after all,” said Cordelia gravely and Sydney,
rebuked, wished that she could be so honest. “Where,” she asked, “do
they put the English?”
“Over there; we have a very nice corner reserved. I’ll show you, shan’t
I? There’s a little girl of just my age—mustn’t the people in her hotel
have been upset about it? I often think—” she brooded.
“Yes, I daresay you do. I often used to. But it wouldn’t be much fun,
really, dying to impress other people, or to be picturesque or pitied.”
“I suppose not, really. But I couldn’t help just imagining, that day
they were so stuffy with us ’cause we broke the lift. I put my tongue
out after Mrs. Hillier when she had stopped and been sarcastic at me in
the passage, and I thought ‘Yah! if I liked you’d be sobbing and
sniffing to-morrow and putting flowers—carnations—on my coffin and
saying what a darling little girl I’d been!’”
They went on to look at the English end of the cemetery, where more
discreet memorials had been hewn into shapes better suited to granite
than to Carrara marble. All round the cypresses waited. How complete the
Riviera was, thought Sydney, one could even die here. Birds were rare;
she started as one dipped from a tree and flew zigzag with a shrill cry,
skimming the gravestones. Like an echo of the bird’s cry they heard the
creak of a hinge as the gate, hidden by trees, was pushed open
decorously. Sydney could feel her heart thump as they listened and
waited.
Presently Miss Pinkerton appeared between the cypresses, conscious even
of the dead, her face composed into an expression of nobility. She
looked to left and right of her through the graves and though she saw
Cordelia and Sydney she did not seem at first to recognize them. They
might have been figures in a crowd. Did they intrude?—She was carrying
narcissi. She approached—the path allowed her no alternative—but she
approached serenely; the encounter did not seem distasteful.
“Good-morning,” she returned in a low voice when Sydney bowed. They
turned to leave her.
“Such a lovely spot,” remarked Miss Pinkerton, not unwilling to detain
them.
“Lovely,” Sydney agreed. “So peaceful!”
“A friend of mine,” said Miss Pinkerton looking at them with her mild
august eyes, “has a cousin here.” She indicated the destination of the
narcissi. Sydney stooped to read the inscription.
“He was an admiral,” said Miss Pinkerton and sighed again.
“Isn’t he an admiral still?” exclaimed Cordelia, whom Sydney, pulling by
the hand abruptly began to lead away.
“You shouldn’t have asked that, Cordelia.”
“But why shouldn’t I—Oh, Miss Warren, don’t hurry so! One would think
you were running away from the admiral—why shouldn’t I have asked that?”
“I suppose,” said Sydney after some reflection, “because Miss Pinkerton
doesn’t know.”