A one-horse vehicle with a canvas hood called by the English visitors a
shandrydan came round about three o’clock to drive Mr. Milton and Ronald
down to the Genoa train. It appeared about half an hour before it had
been ordered and the limp horse in a bonnet, looking as if it had been
propped up on its legs precariously, waited on the gravel, indifferent
to the flies, long enough to advertise to the whole Hotel that somebody
was going away. Departures at this time of the afternoon were unusual
and people coming downstairs after the siesta and people on their way
out to the tennis-courts stood about in the doorway (the double door had
been fixed back as for the passage of a grand piano) or gathered round
the foot of the steps to smile at the inefficient way in which the
concierge, the boots and one of the younger waiters were stacking up the
light luggage in the box of the shandrydan. Antonio the boots was very
popular; every time he let Milton’s leather hat-box or one of Ronald’s
many dispatch cases glissade past him and bounce on to the gravel there
was laughter and a cry of “Oh, _oh_, Antonio!” And Antonio, knowing this
to be part of a very amusing English song, would smile woodenly.
Nobody was quite sure how much of a “send-off,” under the circumstances,
Milton would appreciate; but it was impossible to let pass such an
excellent opportunity of embarrassing Ronald. Ronald was better liked
than anybody else in the Hotel had been for a long time; it was always
easy to be amusing about him, he roused genuine interest and curiosity
and, in the breasts of those who disliked his mother, an active instinct
to protect and comfort. In twos and threes for mutual encouragement,
people were never tired of seeking him out and baiting him, giving him
articles in the _Morning Post_ to read, tripping him up over statistics
or twitting him on an attachment to one or other of the Lawrences. He
was the dearest boy, good humour itself, and one could not doubt that he
genuinely enjoyed all this. The present prospect of seeing him shake
hands all round, reply to a dozen mock-tender addresses and blushingly
double his long legs under the low seat of the shandrydan kept
tennis-players from courts booked a week ago, wives from buying their
husbands’ tea and walkers down from the hills.
After the luggage had been arranged there was an interval, then Milton
took form in the gloom of the lounge and appeared in the doorway, half
drew back, glanced at his watch and hesitated, smiling uncertainly. In
spite of a very secular grey squash hat he looked for the first time
true to type and several people realized sharply that a Church of
England clergyman had for weeks been among them. The professional aspect
stamped out the lover, he was once more approachable, showed up even as
dedicated to approachability. There was a movement towards him. Friends
gained all in a moment smiled for him up at the unflecked sky and
congratulated him on his weather, intimates taking him up from before
the dawn of that interlude regretted his going away loudly and turned in
anguish to one another with appeals to regret more. He nodded round with
successive, finished-off little smiles and once or twice visibly
swallowed. Miss Pym, standing down at the foot of the steps, said to
herself, “We salute thee who are about to die.”
People on the verge of departure always seemed to her to be saying this;
there was something about them fated and sacrificial that made her feel
self-conscious on their behalf yet somehow rather exalted. Presently
Milton thought of something, murmured and turned back into the lounge.
The curtain having dropped for a minute with the usual good effect of
tightening them up to further expectancy, they all turned to one another
again and said in low voices what a real pity it was that he should be
going away. All sorts of things that he might have been to them appeared
suddenly; with things they might have brought to his hearing for
sympathy, taxed him with or asked him about.
Ronald came running down the steps in too much of a hurry to look at
anybody. He flung his overcoats and another dispatch case into the
shandrydan, then went round to the box and gravely tested the roping-on
of the luggage. The pile wobbled so menacingly that he was discouraged,
left it alone and ran in again. During another interval he must have
kissed and said good-bye to his mother, perhaps in her room, perhaps on
the stairs. When they appeared in the doorway all that was visibly over
between them. She still had a hand on his sleeve but it was a light and
casual contact of which neither of them seemed aware; she had already
delivered him up to futurity. Those who had felt constrained to draw
back from the scene of a parting began to return again. Ronald became
their prey. Appalled by a publicity as of the scaffold, he turned with
some desperately trumped-up remark to his mother, but she was not behind
him. Apart at the top of the steps, bareheaded in the afternoon light,
she was standing, a little fatigued by all this, looking across at the
hill that rose over the road and the group of young palms at the gate
that seemed to be also serenely awaiting the exit.
“I say, if Milton doesn’t come soon we shall run it fine,” called Ronald
in an unnaturally loud voice. Another woman would have jumped at this
excuse to hurry back into the Hotel agitatedly calling, anything rather
than stand there, just stand there. But Mrs. Kerr stood there, and
women’s hearts hardened. “Oh no, Ronald,” she said, “you have plenty of
time.”
Ronald, braced up with his back to the shandrydan, frowned up the steps
to search out the interior gloom. A moment, his face lightened; Milton
must be coming. Milton _was_ coming, he was half way down the steps with
his hat off, bowing and smiling to left and right, and Ronald was half
way into the shandrydan. Then a voice—Mrs. Bellamy’s—called “Mr.
Milton!” and Milton turned back. It was strange, almost eerie to hear
Mrs. Bellamy’s voice because she and Sydney had managed somehow to
create an impression of having already departed. Since lunch-time when
they had said their good-byes they must have been up in their rooms. It
was recalled with a shock that they were not to set out on their shorter
journey up the coast till just before tea-time. Yet Tessa had been
already translated, she was an amiable ghost and her cousin a
hard-sounding name with a cold-sounding echo. It was as though Milton
running back up the steps with his same formal smile were going back
into the shades.
The shades came to meet him not far inside the door. Tessa was
breathless “—Were so worried!” she said—“_couldn’t_ find you this
morning.” She shook his hand between both of hers with more little
broken-off sentences. “Do so hope ... did so wish ... shall
remember....”
Sydney, looking unnatural and urban in a dark-coloured travelling dress,
stepped out from behind her. “Well, good-bye,” she said, and she and
Milton shook hands awkwardly. “Well, good-bye,” said he, and after a
moment’s hesitation as though he did not like to seem too abrupt ran
down the steps and got into the shandrydan. She came a little way after
him and stood with a hand on the concierge’s desk from which she picked
up an envelope and confusedly read the address, then looked after him
again. Her manner was strained and unwomanly; the impulse that had
brought her down here (it could not have been Tessa’s) had been highly
unnatural. She did not wait to watch the departure but turned and went
upstairs again slowly, followed by Tessa.
Milton and Ronald looked up at the windows of the Hotel vacantly;
everybody looked at each other, everybody waited. At last the driver
climbed on to the box, at last he gathered up the reins. Milton and
Ronald sitting up stiffly side by side, their legs, willy-nilly entwined
in the limited scope of the shandrydan, entangled in rugs and overcoats,
relaxed, were bumped violently backward as the carriage moved on, let
broad smiles break over their faces. Their friends who had been drawing
deep breaths for this moment released an enormous “_Good_-by-ye!” A
hundred jocularities there had not yet been mood or occasion for were
launched off bravely after the never-returning couple. One could tell
them anything now, before it was too late, their memories were from
henceforward a limbo. The voices went up to the sky, together or
isolated. Ronald’s mother stood smiling and waving her hand, all round
her the handkerchiefs fluttered.... “_Dear_ old Ronald.... Steady,
Ronald.... _Sure_ you know where you’re going, Ronald?” ... and at the
height of all this “Cheer up, Milton!”
Someone flung a bunch of flowers at Ronald and it struck Milton on the
side of the head and dropped just under the wheel; the stalks were
crushed and a slimy smear appeared on the wheel and came round faster
and faster and faster as the driver took the gravel sweep magnificently
and turned off out the gate. Cordelia Barry rushed out, picked up the
flowers and flung them again; but this time they fell quite short and
everybody laughed.
Milton and Ronald, avoiding one another’s eye, leant over the back of
the carriage waving their hats and shouting jocular nothings. The driver
cracked his whip, the rattling wheels fled faster and soon the
travellers, still waving and with big mouths open inaudibly, had
disappeared. The little company on the steps sighed in immense
desolation.
Before the sigh had come to an end, Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Pym had
detached themselves and, complete with their red parasols and swinging
baskets, hurried away. If they were still to make anything of the
afternoon not a moment more must be wasted. They were well down the road
under the chestnut-trees coming out into leaf before Miss Pym observed
rather breathlessly: “Strange how they still go on touching one.”
“Strange—so profoundly.”
“These goings away.” She sighed over a diminishing vista of hundreds.
“Even when they’re simply spectacular, not at all _partings_.... Emily,
did you _say_ anything?” She added quickly, to hint that the answer
should be in the negative, “I didn’t feel that one _could_....”
“I must confess that I did. My wretched impulsiveness,” said Miss
Fitzgerald and put on that rather annoying expression of
self-deprecation.
“Impulsiveness ... oh,” said Miss Pym and smiled a discreet shade of
pity.
“I suppose one must face one’s heredity. All the Fitzgeralds——”
“I know,” said Miss Pym rather sharply. They had begun to climb the
hill, the sun was full on them and Miss Pym, pricking all over with her
own particularly uncomfortable kind of heat that went in instead of
coming out, was anxious not to hear about the Fitzgeralds. She was
anxious that Emily should not begin to rehearse those unfortunate (but
striking) examples of Fitzgerald impulsiveness back through the ages. An
inclination to do this was Emily’s weakness, and it was always when
disappointment, anxiety or lassitude should have drawn them together
that they had to be most aware of one another’s weaknesses. They had
faced this out and discussed it with one another simply and frankly. It
was wonderful to have somebody, always there, with whom one could
discuss the most difficult phases of one’s relationship (afterwards)
simply and frankly. Whoever might come or might go, there would always
be that. Friendship is such a wonderful basis in Life—or _has_ such a
wonderful basis in Life; either, she thought was true. Miss Pym thought
of her friend Emily with tenderness but wished that she would not pant
in this exaggerated way to show that she was being hurried too fast up
the hill. If she was being hurried too fast up the hill why couldn’t she
say so? “If we’re going too fast I expect you to tell me,” she said at
last in a controlled voice.
“I thought we must be doing this for a bet,” said Miss Fitzgerald and
panted mirthfully.
“Who did you think I had betted?”
“Isn’t it: ‘had bet’?”
They were both silent and went up more slowly, wondering what they would
find to discuss when (quite soon now) they came to the top. The terrace
for which they were making had been the scene of profound discussions;
there must be something about it, about the tilt of the ground or the
way the trees grew. It had not for some time been revisited, in fact
they only seemed to have remembered about it to-day. Miss Pym now
thought that as they both sat down with their faces towards the cool air
and their backs against olive-trees she would begin, “Life itself, I
think, is very wonderful....” But for this, she could not help asking,
would she find Emily _absolutely_ in tune?... When at last they had
really arrived, had shut their umbrellas and flung down those baskets,
Miss Pym was surprised, however, to feel “_Poor_ Mr. Milton!” torn out
of her.
Miss Fitzgerald stopped panting and cried, “Yes, I _know_.”
“The Lee-Mittisons, among others, are so sorry. You know they are
getting up Progressive Games?”
“I know,” said Miss Fitzgerald again and stared out to sea rather
absently, rather exclusively as one who could not bring Progressive
Games or people who talked about them into focus.
This was not fair of her. “Not that I see any reason why they should
have made use of _him_,” Miss Pym said indignantly.
“Surely he was capable of looking after himself?” said Emily, still with
the distant manner she wore when anyone “talked about men.” Miss Pym did
not believe that he _was_, or that Emily _believed_ he was, but she said
in a cold voice, “Obviously.” The word “obviously” has always a pained
and painful sound when used between people who know each other too well.
They both listened to it with fear and foreboding and yet felt incapable
of making an overture. They wished that they had not come back to the
terrace, which under some subtle influence seemed to have changed.
Then an instinct, a touch of genius made Emily turn her head and say,
“Eleanor, do you remember the day when we—so nearly lost one another?”
Eleanor remembered walking down that road with Mrs. Kerr, and the
horrible macaroni they had given her for lunch....
“Emily....”
The Hotel from up here was as small as a doll’s-house; shoulder to
shoulder they sat and looked down on it. Hand in hand, reunited, in
perfect security they sat and remembered that day.