Mrs. Lee-Mittison brought their _Continental Daily Mail_ down to the
lounge with her and sat on it. She did not wish to read it herself and
did not dare to put it down beside her because she knew that someone
would come up and ask just to glance at it—people so soon lose their
delicacy in these little matters. They would rumple it up and take the
creases out; Mrs. Lee-Mittison knew so few people who could look at a
paper without rumpling it. Whenever anybody strolled through the lounge
with the air of exhausted resources peculiar to this half-hour before
lunch-time, she knitted faster than ever and looked unconscious. Life
had developed in Mrs. Lee-Mittison a fine set of jungle instincts; she
could apprehend and be rigid before, looking over her glasses, she had
actually discerned with her usual mildness the approach of the
predatory.
“I do wonder if there is any news this morning,” said somebody (one of
the talkers) drifting about with her wool-work and looking distastefully
at each of the chairs. “There seems to me to have been no news for a
long time.”
“I _do_ wonder,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison truthfully. She did not as much
as glance at a headline before Herbert had done so—Herbert was upstairs
taking off his boots.
“It’s very odd, nothing definite seems to happen at all—I mean, of
course, there is always Politics but that goes on and on and on so, one
begins to lose interest. Especially out here where one cannot see what
effect they are having, though one does doubt really whether they do
have any effect.”
“There’s been that pit disaster.”
“Miners,” said the lady distastefully, “always seem to be getting into
trouble. One is so sorry, but it is difficult to go on and on
sympathizing, especially out here where one gets on just as well without
them—they burn wood, you know, and do everything else by electricity.”
Mrs. Lee-Mittison began to count her stitches audibly—“Do excuse me,”
she said, “but I am turning the heel—Oh, good morning, Mr. Milton. Back
from the Villa?”
Mr. Milton, looking nicer, more unconcerned than when he had first come
out and burnt to a pleasant brick-colour, bowed and sat down at one of
the writing-tables. “Letters to write before lunch,” he explained
politely, unscrewing the top of his pen. It did not yet seem to him
courteous to ignore the ladies he found in the lounge without making
some excuse for himself; life, however, had to be lived somewhere, so he
had acquired the trick of explaining parenthetically. “Chapter to
finish.” “Must keep up one’s philosophy....” “Ever read Jacks?...”
“Working out this beastly acrostic ...” or (showing a bundle of letters)
“Must just see what my friends’ve got to say....”
For a moment or two his pen worked slowly, conscious of the formation of
each letter as though the two ladies had been leaning over his shoulder;
then he settled himself square on his elbows and his pen flew. He stuck
out his long legs at either side of the writing-table which was small
and rickety, a rubber-shod heel tapped the floor noiselessly; he gave
both ladies the impression of being a person of affairs. “I do wonder,”
thought Mrs. Lee-Mittison, “whether he will ever be a bishop.... I do
wish he would cut off his moustache; I’m sure it gives people the wrong
impression. If he were a bishop he would have to. Perhaps if he were
married he would too. If I were married to him....”
Mrs. Lee-Mittison, who was not otherwise unmodest, often married herself
imaginatively to men she took an interest in, then reviewed the
possibilities of such a union. “I would do something for his hair at the
back,” she thought. “I am certain that is accidental baldness, not
hereditary. If only it could be taken in time....” The lady with the
wool embroidery opened her mouth: a torrent of conversation seemed to be
coming. Mrs. Lee-Mittison held up an admonitory knitting-needle.
“Hsssh,” said she, and the lady with the embroidery moved off haughtily
to the other end of the lounge. Milton, towards whom she glanced
solicitously made no sign, he had missed this bye-play. He blotted one
sheet with such force that the writing-table trembled, and began
another.
Mr. Lee-Mittison came downstairs and sitting down carefully reached out
for the newspaper. Its folds were by now so immaculate that it undid
with the suddenness of a pocket-map. Every time a door opened and shut
he looked over the top of the paper; he did not say anything but always
stared in the same way, quite impartially; nobody was allowed to feel
that their coming in and out did not matter, he did not challenge what
they were doing but liked to be sure that they had some good reason for
doing it and were not entirely irresponsible.
“Here,” he said to his wife, “is Miss Sydney. Good morning, Miss
Sydney.”
“Good morning, Miss Warren,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, who was at pains to
waylay anybody in whom Herbert might be interested.
“Good morning,” said Sydney, looking as though she had expected to find
the lounge quite crowded and to push her way through it.
“You’re in early, you know,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison, “you must have
miscalculated. It’s seven minutes past twelve. What have you done with
Mrs. Kerr and the boy?”
“Ronald has been with our party,” said Milton, “up at the Villa.”
Sydney, standing on the mat vaguely, was looking towards him as though
she had something to ask. He had an instinct to go over to her, with an
urgent feeling that it lay with him to do something he could not at the
moment recall. The glass doors behind and beside her flashing as they
opened and shut, the staircase going up and down and doubling off at
angles into oblivion and the way the lift came sliding down the shaft to
wait behind the latticed gates were all like so much expressionist
scenery, emphasizing the effect she gave of being distracted, mechanical
and at a standstill.
He did not like the Lee-Mittisons to see her so much at a loss and even
hoped that he might distract their attention by his own awkwardness,
which he felt to be palpable, as he towered, his hands on a chairback,
over the writing-table, not quite liking to sit down again. The
Lee-Mittisons were startled, obviously, by her so uncharacteristic
willingness—it seemed eagerness—to linger there and to bestow herself
upon them; she was known to proceed from point to point in her days with
a high impatience and without hesitancy. They repeated that she had come
back very early and asked her to sit down with them. She came over,
smiling.
“Look,” she cried, “at my beautiful new beads! They were a present this
morning—Mrs. Kerr gave them to me.” She took off the beads and passed
them round to her friends who held them up to the light and exclaimed at
the colour. “Aren’t they beautiful?” she repeated, as though she could
not yet be satisfied with everybody’s praise.
“Beautiful,” Milton said obediently, weighing the beads in his hand and
hating the amethysts. He gave them back with an appearance of reluctance
and thought: she had been valued at so-much, just these were what she
was worth. He watched her slip them over her head again and turn in a
kind of glittering animation, like a poplar in a gale, to Mrs.
Lee-Mittison. “I have always wanted amethysts—dreamed of them!” she
declared, and fingered the beads restlessly.
“Very nice of your friend Mrs. Kerr,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison; thinking
nothing or everything, watching the heel carefully, knitting away. Mr.
Lee-Mittison who had never given Sydney credit for being so good looking
decided to have a good look at her, turned half round in his chair and
crossed his legs comfortably in order to do so. “Who’s a lucky girl!”
said he and wagged a forefinger. “Won’t this be a day to remember?” Her
poise, her air of being caught-up admitted this; she laughed and looked
over at Milton. “Don’t go!” said she as with a keen sense of humiliation
on her behalf and an instinct to escape from all this he was gathering
up his papers. “Stay and tell us about the Villa—do stay!”
He was to be haunted—during an afternoon in which he avoided her
sedulously—by this ineffaceable new impression of her making a free
presentation of herself to all comers. Heaven forbid, he thought, she
should be “charming!” Her lack of “charm” had from the first been
distinct to him; it was a quality more than negative, she had a kind of
starkness that enforced itself on his judgment as “good,” like the
starkness of Norman architecture. It pleased him—he was frank enough to
admit this as vanity—to hear her spoken of as ungracious, unforthcoming,
frigid, even as repellent. He was accustomed to let himself in alone, as
it were, to his large, dark, lofty conception of her with a strong
sense, to forbid a possible oppression, of his own singularity as well
as of hers. “I don’t want her like that,” he thought angrily, as looking
down from his window about three o’clock he watched her noisy
setting-out for the tennis-courts with a party of the Lawrences and
their friends. “That’s not the girl who wouldn’t marry me,” he thought
and it was his sharpest criticism of her; for it was that passage on the
town bench high up in the sunshine which had given him till now his pang
of pride in her, his clearest feeling of her being incomplete and so
beyond the doom of limitation. She had offered herself as a break in
what seemed, as he was growing older, a general closing-down of
horizons. “She mustn’t be like this,” he said in his desperation and, to
hide her, clattered the shutters together and turned away. He felt that
most profound concern possible for another human being, when it becomes
a question no longer of the extent of one’s own possession of them, but,
transcending this, of what in their untouchable selves they _are_.
He went for a walk up the hill to the back of the villas, along the
precarious terraces from which the town looked small and the coast, in
spite of its uniform blueness, disordered and desolate. Having stared
for some time at all this, and at the unshadowed horizon with never a
boat, without any sense of having been enlarged or inspirited he came
down again hurriedly by a steep direct way, slithering on the baked
earth and sending stone after stone from beneath him bounding and
crashing to what seemed the imminent peril of the colony below. In such
a manner he descended to the tennis-courts and, exceedingly loath to go
in, stood staring through the wire-netting and dusting the earth from
his hands. To his relief and chagrin he could not see Sydney anywhere,
his day bade fair to have simplified itself and he contemplated his
future, over which an afternoon still to be filled up seemed to stretch
enormously, with a proper sense of reprieve but without appetite. One
had to amuse oneself, but he did not see the necessity.
At a point in his reflections she must have come up behind him
inaudibly, for her voice said abruptly, “Do you _never_ play
now-a-days?” He faced round guiltily and saw her, buttoned to the chin
in a blazer stridently flame-colour, with hands deep in the pockets,
less like herself of the morning than a rather aggrieved little boy.
“I never see _you_ here when I do.”
“I used to play once,” said Sydney. “I could play—I can’t any more.
Shall we walk somewhere?” With an expression of being still, though with
greater indifference, at anybody’s disposal, she nodded backward
indefinitely in the direction of the hills.
A silence, descending on them abruptly, protracted itself from minute to
minute as he followed her up the path. She held herself taut upright,
nervously, her racket sticking out from under her arm. Her vivid blazer
hurt his eyes in the glare, he had always to be looking away from her.
She was not like the woman in the swinging white cloak with whom he had
come this way in the advancing twilight on an evening when there had
been some kind of a shock, when he had been startled—perhaps by a wild
gash of light on some rocks. He recalled his own shiver, the shiver
about him in the very dark trees; something must have been immanent. The
path, the trees, their very contiguity seemed to be haunted; he wanted
to catch up the girl ahead and put out a hand to her for comfort at this
crisis of regret and nostalgia.
“Where shall we go?” he asked and she cried without turning round,
without, clearly, a thought for him, “Oh, anywhere, just down the road.
Not far or I’ll die!”
They went forward more hurriedly till, with a sense of escape from a
funnel, they came out into the road. Here, pausing, she looked up and
down; nothing beckoned in either direction though she continued to stand
alert as though a paradisiacal perspective should have opened up for
them. It was the same road, not to be changed for her, with its double
rank of trees, its villa gates somnolently ajar and its same air of
stretching mildly ahead to be sauntered down. The chestnuts already were
budding; soon, sign that the visitors must be gone, they would arch the
road over with their interknit fingery leaves. The air about them was
gummy, smelling faintly of spring. He caught his breath sharply—was this
moment also, like that other, slipping away to torment him?
“I shall be sorry,” he said, “when we’re gone. One might easily be so
happy here. It can’t, while one’s here, be impossible. It will be fatal
to go. The thought of those leaves coming out has a kind of taint about
it, like autumn.”
She looked at him doubtfully with a twitch of the lips at the thought
that might well have been scorn. “Mr. Milton,” she asked, “do you still
want to marry me?”
“Let’s walk on,” he said quickly, “don’t let’s just—just stand here....
Either way—this way then. _Oughtn’t_ we, don’t you think, to walk on?”
“Do please try and answer,” said she. “You embarrass me fearfully.” An
instinct made him catch at her elbow and guide her, as they walked, as
though between puddles. He felt her elbow shake.
“You know I love you,” he said, and was startled by the ring of this
avowal, the certainty. “Sydney, Sydney,” he sighed and felt at the back
of his closed eyes her white face and dark eyes looking up.
He looked at her again and for a moment she was nothing but a girl,
talking. “I will marry you,” she was saying then, “I do want to.”
Why was she quick to assure him of this? He met her eyes square,
searching up for him; eyes nearly black, overcharged, impenetrable,
crying out to be read. “You don’t love me?” he said.—“I mean, do you?”
“Oh, no.” She seemed appalled at the misapprehension, but her elbow,
rigid in his slackening grasp, asked not to be relinquished. “But you
know, I do want to,” she said.
“My dear Sydney....” Saying this, he turned to look, instinctively, up
and down the empty road.
“Yes, you could kiss me here,” she said, “if there’s nobody coming.” He
stooped quickly and kissed her.
“I think there _was_ somebody,” she laughed a moment afterwards, with
embarrassment, “looking through the gate of that villa. Shall we walk on
looking rather ordinary?” After a little of this “ordinary” walking on
she asked with anxiety, “You did _really_ want to marry, didn’t you?”
“How can you ask me that; can’t you see?” he exclaimed in torture.
“Anyhow,” she said, “even if I couldn’t see, it wouldn’t, would it—now I
have accepted you—be really a fair thing to ask?”
Mrs. Lee-Mittison, coming out cautiously through the garden gate of the
villa where she—(such a nice introduction!—) had been returning a call,
stood back for some time between the gateposts, a corner of her
card-case pressed against her lips, to watch them down the road.
“Such a little slip of a thing ... I don’t think she _understands_,”
said Mrs. Lee-Mittison.