For two days the sun had been cut away by an opaque, pale-grey
absolutely cloudless sky: this made the shapes of hills and houses more
important; an ascent of the heights became arduous in the cool, close
air and one was loath to go far up any one of the valleys because one
felt it shutting on one like a book. The disappearance of sunlight from
the flowers deadened the colours of them; from being like flames,
spontaneous, they became tawdry and adventitious; bougainvillæas traced
a heavy pattern on the walls, geraniums were the flat stale pink of old
confectionery, and the mimosa blotched the faces of the hills as
monotone and pale as mustard. The distances were pellucid, one could see
for miles every detail of the coast, every ripple of the light sea, and
these became important and a little ominous; one felt weighed down by
them and half uneasy. Ronald, going alone up a river-bed in one of the
valleys, found himself hurrying.
The river had once been expansive and impetuous, it had carried some of
the hills along with it and flowed widely; at some points it had taken
up the whole floor of the valley, leaping past the foot of the rocks
hilariously or, dividing, made a long string of lemon-shaped islands.
Now its wide bed lay parched, a petrified torrent up which Ronald,
taking some pleasure in the performance, walked painfully with a sharp,
continuous, loudly-echoed clattering together of stones. The river was
young no longer, it had made an end of its variations and detours and
had worn away for itself a very deep channel down which it flowed
swiftly, with a sinister effect of purpose; steel-smooth, impenetrable
to the eye of Ronald, to whom it was no longer a companion. They should
have known one another centuries before.
The margins of land on either side, before the walls of the valley went
up, were under cultivation; they were divided cross-ways and when Ronald
scrambled up out of the river-bed to sit down on a sagging lip of turf
and nurse a barked ankle or extract a stone from his shoe it is more
than probable that he was trespassing. In such a country however one is
bound to trespass everywhere; much is forgiven if one be sufficiently
beautiful, have an innocent expression and do not seem to understand
Italian shouted from above. Ronald’s expression, ingenuous and nervous
as a foal’s, would have disarmed the angriest proprietor, but for this
there was no occasion; the valley seemed to be quite empty. Since he had
left behind the three young women, the goats, the staring men, there had
been nobody. Perhaps, he thought, the valley was to-day just _too_
narrow, too clothed in the echo of water, too deep beneath the tension
of the sky from hill to hill, and they had all turned back
instinctively. He wondered at himself for going on.
Three young women leaning over the parental gate had admired Ronald
loudly and in every detail. They had spoken so very distinctly that he
could only suppose they meant him to understand; he had slowed down in
an effort not to seem to be trying to escape them; his ears changed
colour, they remarked on this—it had been quite appalling. Their eyes
had licked him up and down like the eyes of the American lady at
Wurtemberg who had compared him to a Donatello, and he could not revenge
himself on _them_ by making out a kind of mental chart of their
repressions because one couldn’t well suppose that girls who behaved in
this way had any repressions. Which of course, as Ronald told himself
without enthusiasm, was excellent. They gave him, quite disinterestedly,
all sorts of encouragement and good advice.
The man who stared also had shouted a word of encouragement, the same
mystifying reference to some “bellissima.” Then the solitude had come
slowly to grips with him: there was nothing but the deserted bed of the
river, the vague, disorderly gardens—like some half-memory and, now and
then, a bird flying slowly across the sky. Ronald had nothing but a
little lonely gleam of intellectual pride to sustain him; he felt that
it must be good for him to be here but he was very much depressed. He
felt trapped; if he turned to run back down the valley there would be
nothing but valley to run to. “_O Solitude_,” he exclaimed in a thin
voice, “_ton sein vigoureux et morne déjà j’ai pu l’adorer_....” He
could not remember the rest of the paragraph, and besides, had not
Barrès lapsed from this to all the excesses of nationalism? What
unaccountable lapses, thought Ronald, precede maturity, which they are
even believed to constitute! He suddenly gave up clattering among the
stones, did not speak any more and hugging the side of the valley away
from the river walked on the turf quietly, because it appeared to him
that one could best enforce oneself on this noisy solitude not by more
noise but by silence. So quite quietly he rounded the turn of the valley
and came in sight of the rock where Sydney was sitting, looking up the
valley away from him. After gazing for some moments at her apparent
unconsciousness, he said slowly “Oh ... you?”
“Oh, _you?_” she exclaimed, mystified but not startled.
“I hope I didn’t alarm you!”
“No, I heard you coming but I didn’t turn round because I thought I knew
who it was. Were you expecting to find anybody in particular?”
“Well no, not really anybody. They all told me to hurry up because there
was a _bellissima Inglese_, but I imagined that, you know, was just a
general allusion to ‘that not impossible She’ and thought nothing more
of it.”
“They?”
“Some little girls at a gate and a man doing nothing particular.”
“Whenever anybody just says ‘they,’” said Sydney who showed signs of
being pleased to see him, “one thinks of Lear, doesn’t one, and a
perspective of long noses. ‘They’ watched me, too, coming up here, but
they didn’t say anything. I am glad to know they were impressed.”
“They are impressionable,” said Ronald. “If it is Mr. Milton you’re
expecting, he won’t like those girls a bit. They are a positive barrage.
Their conversation was very free.”
“I expect they liked you,” said Sydney, glancing at him with indifferent
admiration. “Also, of course, they wouldn’t be able to imagine why you
should want to walk up a valley alone unless there were a woman at the
end of it. Unless, of course, you had carried a long gun and wore tight
green velvet knickerbockers and showed every sign of going out to shoot
linnets.”
“I’m afraid,” said Ronald, “that’s very English of you.”
“I’m afraid I don’t like these people at all. I cannot see why they
should ever have been born, or why, at least, they should need to go on
being born over and over again so frequently.”
“I daresay,” said Ronald, “they enrich the soil.”
“I daresay,” said Sydney. She was sitting on a rock that jutted up
sharply out of the river-bed; it would once have been a perilous,
amusing place to sit. At present it complicated his position rather; if
he stayed where he was they would have to talk in high-pitched voices to
be heard above the noise of the water that hurried behind her, whereas
if he came across the stones and sat beside her he would be made to feel
himself rather tiresomely confidential and forthcoming. The rock however
was large enough for both of them and she settled the question by saying
matter-of-factly: “Here, come and sit down,” and twisting round so that
her legs, which had been stretched out in front of her, could leave more
room for him by dangling over the edge. “What a lot of energy is
wasted,” she observed, “in replacing one lot of people by another
exactly the same.”
She remarked this distantly, as though the indirectness of the stream of
things had been brought to her notice passingly but did not concern her.
Her attitude seemed to Ronald deplorable; leaning back on his elbow he
subjected her profile, covertly, to a perplexed and grieved scrutiny.
“And does this worry you at all?” he asked in the hope that while
preserving an equal detachment, he might make her at least aware of her
strange anæsthesia. An intelligent person, Ronald thought, should never
be entirely unperturbed. She turned to look at him with the dark
attentiveness of wandering thoughts.
“_Worry?_” she said slowly and tried to recall herself. “Why should I
worry? I can’t do anything about it all, can I?”
“My mother, you know, describes you as independent and vigorous.”
“I had no idea,” said Sydney thoughtfully, and longed to know exactly
how his mother _had_ described her. Ronald might have been a key to a
great deal; instead, he had his own obscure preoccupations. Except for
his eyes and forehead and a few of her gestures and mannerisms which
cropped up now and then in his conversation, out of tone with the rest
of him, he in no way resembled his mother. Mrs. Kerr, at least, had not
cared to replace herself. What qualities he had of hers had been given
over to him unreservedly; they did not seem in any way to be shared or
to bring the two into closer community. He, like the rest, revolved
round his mother enquiringly, with a perhaps more intimate but with the
same exterior curiosity. He was at most two or three steps higher up the
base of the monument: from here he said wisely to Sydney: “My mother,
you know, is intelligent. She understands, or she wouldn’t admire.”
“I suppose she wouldn’t,” said Sydney and let the thing drop. But though
Mrs. Kerr’s son did not interest her she felt drawn towards Ronald as
though he were a part of her youth and she asked, looking back for a
landmark to measure how far she had travelled, “And _you_ really do
mean, I suppose, to make rather a difference?”
“Well, one can’t help hoping one may,” said Ronald smiling at himself,
very elderly and indulgent. “Usen’t you, too?”
“_Usen’t?_” said Sydney, aggrieved at being so taken up.
“Oh, I suppose you still may; but you can’t overlook Mr. Milton.” Saying
this, he tried vainly to reconcile the importance and solitariness in
which she had just now been discovered with his idea of her as the
engaged girl. She sat looking down, with a faint droop (he thought he
detected), a hint of contrition, an acquiescence to being set aside of
which she seemed to be making a rather too sardonic and cool exhibition.
She felt this and said deferentially:
“Of course _you’ve_ got no patience with this sort of thing?”
“I may be young,” said Ronald, “but I’m never so grossly ingenuous as
downright to commit myself.” He began kicking the rock with his heel;
and with pursed mouth and a gleam of amusement she was not intended to
share, withheld his opinion.
“Why,” she asked in surprise, “who said you were young?”
“Oh, I understand you did. But of course,” he said lightly, anxious that
they should neither of them be embarrassed, “it seems an impression
one’s bound to create. Would _you_ ever have minded—why should one?” He
looked serenely past her down the valley—a little, she thought, too
serenely. Evidently he did mind. If he had not been likely to mind why
should his mother have told him? “Of course,” he vouchsafed, “it is in a
general way a mistake to involve oneself anywhere.”
Sydney felt wiser, but it is poor satisfaction to be wise with the
masses. She asked: “Do you never mean to involve yourself?” Perhaps he
never would, perhaps it was not possible to—a chilly suspicion.
“Oh I just mean to live in a rather simplified way and not to leave off
being reasonable. Now it’s a mistake, I’m quite sure, to deny an
attraction. One should cultivate it and be amused at oneself. Then one
would be civilized.”
“And what about other people?” said Sydney, “what about your mother, for
instance?”
“My mother? She is very civilized.” Puckering their lids up in the
sunless glare his eyes gazed past her, pale with a reflection of the
sky.
“I know, that is her great advantage. But don’t you think wherever she
was she’d be civilized _alone_? Do you think she would promote your kind
of civilization?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Ronald. “She is not an _earnest_
woman. I can’t imagine her ‘promoting’ anything.”
“She wouldn’t promote _that_, she wouldn’t want to. She isn’t at all
modern like you and me, you see. It isn’t necessary for her.”
Ronald remembered what his mother had said about “white tiles.” He felt
annoyed with Sydney and rounded on her: “I say, you don’t dislike my
mother, do you?”
“No, you know I don’t.”
“I wondered—people do, you know. Does Mr. Milton?”
“Why ever should he? I, I’ve never asked him.”
“He looks at her so—carefully.” Quite without malice Ronald imitated
Milton’s expression. “Of course, I think he seems a most discriminating
man,” he concluded politely. He had been gathering together, while he
spoke, small pebbles and fragments which had accumulated on the top of
the rock, reaching out for them negligently in all directions and
heaping them up beside him. Now suddenly he sat bolt upright and began
to hurl them one after another down the valley with a great effect of
muscularity and science. The pebbles skipped, the fragments of rock
rebounded on the boulders of the river-bed with little sharp distinct
sounds, pin-pricks through the silence. The hills seemed to peer
forward. This little tempest of exertion on Ronald’s part, into which he
seemed to have been surprised in spite of himself dishevelled the
stillness of the valley which unstressed by light or shadows and
unstirred by wind had hung gravely round them like a curtain.
“Oh do look out!” cried Sydney angrily. “You may hit James; he may be
coming up.”
“I suppose he may,” admitted Ronald but could not keep himself from
sending off his last three stones. “Then why doesn’t he come?” he said
relapsing on to his elbow again. “What is the matter?”
“I can’t think. I cut out lunch and came up here this morning because I
had a headache, and I left word that I’d be here if he cared to come up
afterwards. I said the third valley to the right, behind the convent. He
may have miscounted. Or he may not want to come.”
“But he must want to. After all it would be only reasonable.”
“You mean, consistently _un_reasonable?”
“No, if I were in love at all I should expect to be with you all day!”
said Ronald masterfully.
“Ah, to be in love _at all’s_ the initial mistake!”
“More really a misapprehension.”
While Ronald talked she often had a giddy sense of watching all she had
ever said being wound off from a spool again, backwards. Now and then
came a truth that she had let slip away; she received this last one back
again ice-cold. It went too deep and she wasn’t grateful to Ronald.
“Well, don’t you, my dear Ronald, ever misapprehend?”
“And don’t you be maternal!”
Catching some idea of a sound or a voice from one another they began to
listen, as though the very mention of Milton’s name must have cast out a
line to his consciousness and be drawing him up the valley towards them.
For a moment or two they felt he was to appear immediately. Sydney leant
forward expectantly but nobody came into sight at the turn of the
valley. She felt cold and bitterly reproached herself for not having
turned to smile sooner when she had been so sure she heard him coming
before, when it had only been Ronald. She did not look at her watch but
knew that she had reached that psychological moment, that turning-point
of any long wait when the likelihood of a friend’s arrival instead of
increasing with the advance of time begins to diminish. She feared that
through some intervention of a too far-seeing Providence on Milton’s
behalf she might never see him again. She prayed that this might not be
so: she felt sure that she loved him. Ronald, half aware of all this,
felt a long way away from her and began to wonder whether after all from
the first he had not intruded.
He said (to observe the effect), “I’ll be going, I think. I may meet
him—I’ll hurry him on. Anyhow he wouldn’t want to find me here.”
The effect was a panic. “No, don’t, please don’t go,” she exclaimed. “I
can’t bear this valley alone: it’s so empty.”
“You might have noticed that before,” he observed warming in spite of
himself at this display of femininity. “Nervy?”
“Yes, nervy,” she agreed with a little boy’s grin.
He sat down beside her again with mixed feelings of constraint and
gratification, and began—while their silence relaxed again, from an
alert, constricting consciousness of each other’s proximity into a
benign and restful indifference—to kick with swinging heels the side of
the rock.