The Patisserie had a dozen little blue tin tables dotted about under a
happy-looking striped awning. Hither many people gravitated early in the
day. Mrs. Kerr, who had insisted they should visit the shops, had for
the last half-hour’s slow parade of the plate-glass given her companion
about a quarter of her attention and a little less than her
quarter-face. She had meanwhile chosen for Sydney and presented
charmingly a string of dull amethysts, saying it seemed too good to be
believable that they should be together once more. When she saw the
little tables and the English people round them sitting sideways and
eating patisserie off the tips of their forks with an amused air of
concession, she exclaimed with pleasure and her attention became
entirely distracted. The scene appeared to delight her and she
concentrated her delight into each of the smiling nods she sent across
to acquaintances.
“Do look, Sydney—how civilized!”
“How greedy!” said Sydney, who was trying to direct her friend to the
older end of the town where she would at least find nothing but fruit
shops.
“Yes, that’s just what I mean—how civilized! Anybody can eat at
mealtimes. Come over—oh Sydney, we must!”
“But we’re not hungry!”
“No, of course we’re not.” Mrs. Kerr propping up her parasol against a
table positively beamed. The table was as small as a mushroom between
them; she looked helplessly at her handbag, then passed it over to
Sydney to be disposed of and drawing off her gloves eagerly looked round
to see what other people were eating. “I’m so seldom allowed to do this.
Ronald is spending his own sort of morning—a very genuine dead villa—the
Riviera, you see, is so tiny—” (she tapped the table) “so why shouldn’t
I?”
“I never knew this _was_ your sort of morning. We might often have come
here.”
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Kerr, “that I hardly liked to suggest it. I could
never, of course, suggest it to Ronald.—Oh, Vermouth? You are ascetic! I
should like some chocolate. Will you drink very slowly, then we shan’t
have to go.”
“Oh! But weren’t we——?”
“But where is there to go? And I mean, why should we? But of course, my
dear, I will go anywhere. This is really your morning. If I didn’t spoil
you, you would never come near me now. I don’t know what you’ve been
doing; I never see you—Oh, look, there’s Veronica Lawrence with that
dreadful young man. What unnatural tastes she’s got: why doesn’t she run
after Ronald?”
“It would be very discouraging.”
“I don’t see why it should be; Ronald’s rather susceptible.”
Mrs. Kerr, her folded hands on the table, sat looking sideways;
absorbed. “He is looking at her with the most awful expression, with
cream on his chin. Isn’t passion debasing? Tell me, Sydney, are that
couple engaged?”
“Oh, probably.” Sydney looked conscious.
“Oh, does she tell _you_ these things?” asked Mrs. Kerr curiously. “What
a queer friendship! Does she show how tremendously sorry she is for you
or is she too deep? What does she say about me? It would amuse me to
know.”
“But why should we discuss you?”
“I can’t think. But you must talk personalities, surely.... Isn’t she
really rather a common little thing?”
“She rather attracts me.”
“Oh, if she only _attracts_ you.... It matters much more whom one likes.
Will you look for a plate and choose us both some patisserie—nothing too
sweet?” Sydney with a dazzled blank feeling got up indecisively. “You
know what I like—you’ve an instinct.” Mrs. Kerr looking up for a moment
let her general vague smile quickly be personal, and gave Sydney a
glimpse of her old mood, fleetingly, yet so that to turn away was an
agony. “Do go, won’t you?” she urged, with such a promise implicit that
the coming back would be memorable that Sydney left her forthwith,
slipping between the chairbacks to the shop door and the crowded
counter.
Here, moving up and down thoughtfully, she found herself elbow to elbow
with Victor who, fork in one hand and plate in the other, was also
selecting and in a practised manner spearing patisserie.
“Oh, hullo!” said he as she hesitated. “Can I help you in any way? I
know all these pretty well. Don’t go for the coffee kind, they look
first-rate but they’re hollow. Do you mind if I take the last green one?
Veronica’s fearfully keen on them. We come here a lot.”
“So Veronica told me.”
“Yes, by Jove, she did, didn’t she?” said Victor, remembering. “I say,
look here, don’t wish me the usual—I feel perfectly rotten.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Sydney. Her sympathy necessarily lacked direction,
because Victor was the sort of young man who continues to move about
uneasily while talking and to talk for a long time without looking
straight at one.
“Still, one’s only young once,” remarked Victor, and roamed away down
the counter. Later on, she followed him out through the door, which he
blocked for her by a moment’s misgiving as to the ultimate excellence of
his choice.
Mrs. Kerr had discovered herself back-to-back with a friend and had
turned to converse with her. The friend was animated, Mrs. Kerr
sympathetic. Sydney stood a moment to watch them.
“_Delicious!_” exclaimed the friend, a dark, vivid lady from another
hotel whose party, a broken-up circle, sat listening all at a loss and
turned now and then a long stare of timid resentment on the brilliant
intruder.
“_Absolutely_ delicious!” agreed Mrs. Kerr, then, catching sight of
Sydney, broke off still laughing and faced round once more to her table.
“You’ve been ages, my darling,” she cried, “have you brought the whole
shop?”
Sydney put down her plate on the table, showed with a gesture what
exactly she had brought and silently began sipping her vermouth. “That
‘darling’ must have been Ronald,” she thought. “What a habit of mind he
is!” “Do relations become a habit?” she asked. “I have so few.”
“I daresay they might,” said Mrs. Kerr very kind but abstracted. “What a
pity you’ve got so few”—she sampled the patisserie. “I mean after all,
home life—Why don’t you marry, Sydney?”
“I thought we’d been into that.”
“Yes, but it does worry me rather,” said Mrs. Kerr and turned upon her
friend’s downcast pallour a profound, limpid and prettily conventional
stare.
A sharp movement of Sydney’s foot shook the table, the china leaped on
the tin. “Well, if you’ll keep Ronald a year or two——”
“Sydney!” exclaimed Mrs. Kerr in a low voice, paused for a moment and
put down her fork. “Don’t be so, so ugly! It’s like—I don’t know what
it’s like: it’s not like _you_. I wish you hadn’t made these common
friends; I wish there’d been more girls of your own sort. When the very
essence of you is delicacy and fineness and, well, breeding, this
horrible veneer that you’ve affected lately seems so.... Well, it may be
what you’d call in ‘a grim kind of way funny,’ but——”
“_This_ seems in a grim kind of way funny,” said Sydney. “It’s like
being given tea by an aunt at the Zoo.”
“I only wish you had been taken more to the Zoo! It seems from the way
you sometimes talk that your friends must be common in the worst kind of
way—exotic! You’ve distressed even Ronald, though he is as a rule
neither observant nor critical; he said you were so unnatural, and
though at the time I was angry with him, I must say that when you talk
in that tone I should find you difficult to defend to anybody.”
“I’m sorry Ronald can’t like me.”
“Oh, I think that’s putting it too strongly,” Mrs. Kerr said gently.
“Perhaps I have put everything too strongly—Sydney darling, don’t sit
there in that queer stiff way as though you had swallowed something:
people will notice.... You know how reprehensible I am, how I do like my
friends to be pleasant. I would never have said anything if you hadn’t
shown your teeth at me; I wouldn’t for worlds have spoilt our morning.
But we won’t let it, will we?... Look, eat one of those little flaky
things you’ve brought, they look delicious.”
Sydney, trying to get down a mouthful of pastry that had become like
sawdust, had a sense of being widely yet concentratedly glared at,
though whether she had really attracted attention or this were merely
the sun striking down through the awning she did not dare to determine.
Certainly the conversations around had subsided and the general turning
away of eyes from their table, the fixed stares, across the street or
back into the shop or down on to plates, of which with a glance round
she had assured herself, were elaborate enough to be studied. Little
staccato remarks here and there seemed to prick up through a tensity.
She suspected that Mrs. Kerr, by her unusually bland expression of
basking in reverie, the unconcern of her movements and her solicitude
that Sydney should finish her pastry, must “be passing off” something.
Sydney in an effort to further this continued to eat pastry quickly, in
spite of a frightened feeling each time that she might not be able to
swallow. She could not help a shaken kind of exaltedness such as a child
feels when it has upset a table of china.
Presently she let herself fall back on an outside consciousness of their
both being well-dressed, distinguished-looking and leisurely, and
thought how plainly this must appear from the other side of the street
and how if she were someone else she would stand on the pavement and
look across at them. She would admire their graceful air of being
friends, of being completed by one another, and go away distracted by a
memory of them both sitting there in the temperate shade of the awning.
“I think,” she said conversationally, affected by the thought of this
admiration, “that this is a very good way of filling up a morning
abroad.”
“_I_ think so.... Shall we look for some carnations? Shall I buy some
for you?”
“Shall I buy some for Ronald?” Sydney looked into Mrs. Kerr’s face with
a smile, but impersonally, as though it were a picture. Mrs. Kerr seemed
to meet something hard in her eyes, for she raised an eyebrow
infinitesimally.
“He would love that, it would be quite new to him. I don’t think people
like to give him things usually. He doesn’t, I daresay, give the
impression of being in any sense very receptive. Poor Ronald, I wish he
could learn to be likable. I thought once that you might have done
something for him, but I don’t see now that you very well can.”
This little dead maternal design she laid out before Sydney with naïveté
and appeared to consider forlornly but with beautiful resignation.
Sydney, startled by its appearance, sat speechless and looked at her
friend whose unreproachableness quietly accused her. “I know,” said Mrs.
Kerr, apparently going off at a tangent and looking down so that there
was nothing but the movement of her eyelids and the modulations of her
light voice to give point to what she was saying, “that I haven’t
professed to believe a word of all you have, both of you, so expansively
and delightfully told me about life. I haven’t a grasp of abstractions,
and life, when you mean the theory of living, is an abstraction, surely?
You know I’ve been flippant and difficult but at least I did try to be
honest—I _didn’t_ believe. But my dear, I have so intensely wanted to: I
could have prayed (if ever one did) for either of you to justify
yourselves or, best of all, both of you. I’ve never professed that
anything could transcend the conventions; you have. Well, you’ve
insisted passionately that an understanding is possible between a young
man and young woman, that you can remain quite un-bothered, without
electricity or diffidence. Ronald’s insisted too. When I’ve said ‘Well
then?’ at intervals, you’ve both waved your arms and declared that you
couldn’t produce, at the moment, the right kind of person to demonstrate
with. Well, here you both are and I’m waiting. Has it been too
matter-of-fact of me? Possibilities burgeoned and I’m here waiting for
the most idyllic relationship to spring into flower. Can you wonder I’m
disappointed and cynical—it’s been a poor kind of triumph—at having had
to watch you two resolving yourselves into just such an ordinary state
of suspicion and watchfulness and elaborate antipathy as might precede
the most normal attraction in which the heart of a biologist could
rejoice?” She laughed deprecatingly; the whole idea of such attraction
seemed to be distasteful to her. “I’ve talked a long time,” she said,
“rather confusedly, and had to use several words that I rather dislike.
What I might have asked shortly—since it’s all really that I wanted to
know is: Why ever can’t you and Ronald be friends?”
Mrs. Kerr’s hand that lay with casually spread-out fingers under
Sydney’s eyes along the edge of the table, had some vague connection
with her personality but neither seemed to have anything to do with what
had been said. The amazed Sydney could not reconcile them.
“Do you mean what you’ve just been saying?” she said doubtfully. “Do you
really believe what you’ve just said? Did much really stand or fall on
our making a success of things—I and Ronald?”
“So it did seem to me,” said Mrs. Kerr also looking slightly bewildered
as though by all these questions Sydney were confusing the issue.
“Did you think you had helped us?”
“Only by ... valuing both of you.”
“I suppose,” said Sydney, struck by this, “you do in a kind of way value
us?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Kerr, “and I’ve missed _you_ very much. When I had to
throw away your carnations this morning I was sorry: I didn’t a bit want
to.”
“Only this morning? Carnations do last a long time,” said Sydney and
considered the phenomenon gravely. “One didn’t want to intrude, you
see,” she added.
“Intrude?” said Mrs. Kerr, repeating the rather middle-class word
wonderingly. Her gentle, mystified air was not sympathetic. “I think,”
she said slowly, as though trying how best to express herself to an
almost strange young woman, the school friend, as it might be, of a
daughter, “that you’ve been a little ... over-important about it
perhaps, haven’t you? I mean, how could your coming or not coming make
any difference between me and Ronald? He would have been pleased; he was
ready to be friendly; he knows just what you’ve been to me, and in his
own tied-up sort of way he is ever so grateful. He likes me to have
friends wherever I am. I don’t think,” she concluded, with a smile of
pity for the girl’s inevitable uncomprehension, “that anybody could put
things wrong between me and Ronald.”
“In fact, one seems to have taken too much for granted. Exaggerated of
one! Funny!” said Sydney and laughed.
“Oh, Sydney dear, no. Why? Don’t be so bitter.”
“Why bitter? I see how tiresome a girl can be.”
“Never tiresome, you’ve been charming; more than unselfish—giving up so
much of your time to me, giving me so much—I’ve accepted too much I’m
afraid.” Mrs. Kerr broke off with compunction.
“Why reproach yourself: don’t you find all your friends are the same?”
Mrs. Kerr sighed and looked down at her hands, allowing this to pass for
an admission. With a smile of particular ruefulness, that drew up the
eyebrows tragically and brought the face to its fullest profoundest
expression of all of her, she confessed: “But in your case I’ve been
specially guilty. I begin now to guess you’ve expected much more of me
and that I’ve been taking and taking without so much as a glance ahead
or a single suspicion of what you would want to have back. I’m afraid
we’ve gone wrong through your not quite understanding. You see I’m so
fond of you, but——”
“But?”
“Well, simply but! I mean, there is nothing else there. It has always
seemed to me simple to like people and right to be liked, but I never
can feel that much more is involved—is it? I have a horror, I think, of
not being, and of my friends not being, quite perfectly balanced. I
think moderation in everything—but perhaps I am cold.... Will you take
my purse now—if you won’t eat any more?—and go in and pay for the
cakes?”
To Sydney the cumulative effect of this succession of touches
(especially the last: herself brandishing with commercial insistence a
long bill that her bewildered debtor felt unable to meet) was one of
vulgarity. The attribution to herself of an irritable sex-consciousness
vis-à-vis to Ronald did not hurt but sharply offended. Mrs. Kerr,
however, sitting there with her half-smile, her evident deprecation of
the interlude, her invincible air of fastidiousness, had maintained her
own plane whereon “vulgarity” would be meaningless. Sydney could only
suppose that cruelty, as supremely disinterested as art, had like art
its own purity which could transcend anything and consecrate the nearest
material to its uses.
The friend sitting back to back with Mrs. Kerr had gone away minutes
ago; the little blue tables one by one were deserted. The business of
the Patisserie wilted temporarily before the approach of lunch-time.
Surprised by this isolation, as though the trees of a wood had melted
away from round them, the two left the shade of the awning and stood
dazzled for a moment looking vaguely up and down the street.
“Where now?” said Mrs. Kerr and laid a hand on Sydney’s sleeve in her
anxiety to be directed. Sydney could make no suggestion, she remembered
they were on an edge of Europe and had an impulse in the still active
top of her mind to suggest Prague, the Hook, or Rouen. The facility with
which it would be possible for her to cover larger distances and her
present complete inability to move from the kerbstone presented
themselves simultaneously. She could not command the few words, the few
movements which should take her away from Mrs. Kerr; or imagine where,
having escaped, she would find a mood, room, place, even country to
offer her sanctuary. Her home environment, apart from which the crisis
of to-day, of these last weeks, had produced itself, was seen very
clearly at this distance away from it but presented an impenetrable
façade with no ingress. She could see her life very plainly but there
seemed no way back into it, the whole thing might have been painted on
canvas with a clever enough but not convincing appearance of reality.
She thought, “So there is really nothing to go back to,” and said,
gently drawing her arm away from Mrs. Kerr: “I think, if you don’t mind
I’ll go back to the Hotel.”