They talked a long time as they paced the green lawns, linked arm in
arm, keeping their own path fastidiously.
Miss Keating, Mrs. Tailleur's companion, watched them from her seat on
the veranda.
She had made her escape from the great, lighted lounge behind her where
the men were sitting. She had found a corner out of sight of its wide
windows. She knew that Kitty Tailleur was in there somewhere. She could
hear her talking to the men. At the other end of the veranda the old
lady sat with her knitting. From time to time she looked up over her
needles and glanced curiously at Miss Keating.
On the lawn below, Colonel Hankin walked with his wife. They kept the
same line as the Lucys, so that, in rhythmic instants, the couples made
one group. There was an affinity, a harmony in their movements as they
approached each other. They were all obviously nice people, people who
belonged by right to the same group, who might approach each other
without any impropriety.
Miss Keating wondered how long it would be before Kitty Tailleur would
approach Mr. Lucy. That afternoon, on her arrival, she had approached
the Colonel, and the Colonel had got up and gone away. Kitty had then
laughed. Miss Keating suspected her of a similar social intention with
regard to the younger man. She knew his name. She had looked it up in
the visitors' book. (She was always looking up people's names.) She had
made with determination for the table next to him. Miss Keating, in the
dawn of their acquaintance, had prayed that Mrs. Tailleur might not
elect to sit next anybody who was not nice. Latterly she had found
herself hoping that their place might not be in view of anybody who was.
For three months they had been living in hotels, in horrifying
publicity. Miss Keating dreaded most the hour they had just passed
through. There was something terrible to her in their entry, in their
passage down the great, white, palm-shaded, exotic room, their threading
of the ways between the tables, with all the men turning round to stare
at Kitty Tailleur. It was all very well for Kitty to pretend that she
saved her by thus diverting and holding fast the public eye. Miss
Keating felt that the tail of it flicked her unpleasantly as she
followed in that troubled, luminous wake.
It had not been quite so unbearable in Brighton, at Easter, when the big
hotels were crowded, and Mrs. Tailleur was not so indomitably
conspicuous. Or else Miss Keating had not been so painfully alive to
her. But Southbourne was half empty in early June, and the Cliff Hotel,
small as it was, had room for the perfect exhibition of Mrs. Tailleur.
It gave her wide, polished spaces and clean, brilliant backgrounds,
yards of parquetry for the gliding of her feet, and monstrous mirrors
for reflecting her face at unexpected angles. These distances fined her
grace still finer, and lent her a certain pathos, the charm of figures
vanishing and remote.
Not that you could think of Kitty Tailleur as in the least remote or
vanishing. She seemed to be always approaching, to hover imminently and
dangerously near.
Mr. Lucy looked fairly unapproachable. His niceness, Miss Keating
imagined, would keep him linked arm in arm with his sister, maintaining,
unconsciously, inoffensively, his distance and distinction. He would
manage better than the Colonel. He would not have to get up and go away.
So Miss Keating thought.
From the lounge behind the veranda, Kitty's voice came to her again.
Kitty was excited and her voice went winged. It flew upward, touched a
perilous height and shook there. It hung, on its delicate, feminine
wings, dominating the male voices that contended, brutally, below. Now
and then it found its lyric mate, a high, adolescent voice that followed
it with frenzy, that broke, pitifully, in sharp, abominable laughter,
like a cry of pain.
Miss Keating shut her eyes to keep out her vision of Kitty's face with
the look it wore when her voice went high.
She was roused by the waiter bringing coffee. Kitty Tailleur had come
out on to the veranda. She was pouring out Grace Keating's coffee, and
talking to her in another voice, the one that she kept for children and
for animals, and for all diminutive and helpless things. She was saying
that Miss Keating (whom she called Bunny) was a dear little white
rabbit, and she wanted to stroke her.
"You see, you are so very small," said Kitty, as she dropped sugar into
Miss Keating's cup. She had ordered cigarettes and a liqueur for
herself.
Miss Keating said nothing. She drank her coffee with a distasteful
movement of her lips.
Kitty Tailleur stretched herself at full length on a garden chair. She
watched her companion with eyes secretly, profoundly intent under
lowered lids.
"Do you mind my smoking?" she said presently.
"No," said Miss Keating.
"Do you mind my drinking Kuemmel?"
"No."
"Do you mind my showing seven inches of stocking?"
"No."
"What do you mind, then?"
"I mind your making yourself so very conspicuous."
"I don't make myself conspicuous. I was born so."
"You make me conspicuous. Goodness knows what all these people take us
for!"
"Holy Innocent! As long as you sit tight and do your hair like that,
nobody could take you for anything but a dear little bunny with its ears
laid back. But if you get palpitations in your little nose, and turn up
your little white tail at people, and scuttle away when they look at
you, you can't blame them if they wonder what's the matter with you."
"With _me_?"
"Yes; it's you who give the show away." Kitty smiled into her liqueur
glass. "It doesn't seem to strike you that your behaviour compromises
me."
Miss Keating's mouth twitched. Her narrow, rather prominent front teeth
lifted an instant, and then closed sharply on her lower lip. Her throat
trembled as if she were swallowing some bitter thing that had been on
the tip of her tongue.
"If you think that," she said, and her voice crowed no longer, "wouldn't
it be better for us not to be together?"
Kitty shook her meditative head. "Poor Bunny," said she, "why can't you
be honest? Why don't you say plump out that you're sick and tired of
me? _I_ should be. I couldn't stand another woman lugging me about as I
lug you."
"It isn't _that_. Only--everywhere we go--there's always some horrible
man."
"Everywhere you go, dear lamb, there always will be."
"Yes; but one doesn't have anything to do with them."
"I don't have anything to do with them."
"You talk to them."
"Of course I do," said Kitty. "Why not?"
"You don't know them."
"H'm! If you never talk to people you don't know, pray how do you get to
know them?"
Kitty sat up and began playing with the matches till she held a bunch of
them blazing in her hand. She was blowing out the flame as the Hankins
came up the steps of the veranda. They had a smile for the old lady in
her corner, and for Miss Keating a look of wonder and curiosity and
pity; but they turned from Mrs. Tailleur with guarded eyes.
"What do you bet," said Kitty, "that I don't make that long man there
come and talk to me?"
"If you do----"
"I'll do it before you count ten. One, two, three, four. I shall ask him
for a light----"
"Sh-sh! He's coming."
Kitty slid her feet to the floor and covered them with her skirt. Then
she looked down, fascinated, apparently, by the shining tips of her
shoes. You could have drawn a straight line from her feet to the feet of
the man coming up the lawn.
"Five, six, seven." Kitty lit her last match. "T-t-t! The jamfounded
thing's gone out."
The long man's sister came up the steps of the veranda. The long man
followed her slowly, with deliberate pauses in his stride.
"Eight, nine," said Kitty, under her breath. She waited.
The man's eyes had been upon her; but in the approach he lowered them,
and as he passed her he turned away his head.
"It's no use," said Miss Keating; "you can't have it both ways."
Kitty was silent. Suddenly she laughed.
"Bunny," said she, "would you like to marry the long man?"
Miss Keating's mouth closed tightly, with an effort, covering her teeth.
Kitty leaned forward. "Perhaps you can if you want to. Long men
sometimes go crazy about little women. And you'd have such dear little
long babies--little babies with long faces. Why not? You're just the
right size for him. He could make a memorandum of you and put you in his
pocket; or you could hang on his arm like a dear little umbrella. It
would be all right. You may take it from me that man is entirely moral.
He wouldn't think of going out without his umbrella. And he'd be so nice
when the little umbrellas came. Dear Bunny, face massage would do
wonders for you. Why ever not? He's heaps nicer than that man at the
Hydro, and you'd have married him, you know you would, if I hadn't told
you he was a commercial traveller. Never mind, ducky; I dare say he
wasn't."
Kitty curled herself up tight on the long chair and smiled dreamily at
Miss Keating.
"Do you remember the way you used to talk at Matlock, just after I found
you there? You _were_ such a rum little thing. You said it would be very
much better if we hadn't any bodies, so that people could fall in love
in a prettier way, and only be married spiritually. You said God ought
to have arranged things on that footing. You looked so miserable when
you said it. By the way, I wouldn't go about saying that sort of thing
to people. That's how I spotted you. I know men think it's one of the
symptoms."
"Symptoms of what?"
"Of that state of mind. When a woman comes to me and talks about being
spiritual, I always know she isn't--at the moment. You asked me,
Bunny--the second time I met you--if I believed in spiritual love, and
all that. I didn't, and I don't. When you're gone on a man all you want
is to get him, and keep him to yourself. I dare say it feels jolly
spiritual--especially, when you're not sure of the man--but it isn't. If
you're gone on him enough to give him up when you've got him, there
might be some spirituality in _that_. I shall believe in it when I see
it done."
"Seriously," she continued, "if you'd been married, Bunny, you wouldn't
have had half such a beastly time. You're one of those leaning, clinging
little women who require a strong, safe man to support them. You ought
to be married."
Miss Keating smiled a little sad, spiritual smile, and said that was the
last thing she wanted.
"Well," said Kitty, "I didn't say it was the first."
Kitty's smile was neither sad nor spiritual. She uncurled herself, got
up, and stood over her companion, stroking her sleek, thin hair.
Miss Keating purred under the caress. She held up her hand to Kitty who
took it and gave it a squeeze before she let it go.
"Poor Bunny. Nice Bunny," she said (as if Miss Keating were an animal).
She stretched out her arms, turned, and disappeared through the lounge
into the billiard-room.