Chapter XII

“Well,” Mrs. Kerr said expansively, meeting Sydney on the stairs next morning, “isn’t it _rather_ a nice puppy?”

She was dressed to go out, with a blue straw hat pulled down over her eyes. She had paused with a hand out to steady herself against the frame of the staircase window, and the north light defined the smiling curve of one cheek and drew prismatic colours out of an earring. She was evidently very happy.

“What puppy?” Sydney said blankly, looking up from a few steps below her.

“My Ronald. Isn’t it _rather_ a nice——”

“Oh very, yes. I thought it seemed a rather severe puppy last night but I daresay that was the journey.”

“Oh, severe?” said Mrs. Kerr delightedly. “Was he really severe? Sydney, you must tell me; how fearfully funny!” She narrowed her eyes for a moment as though she were trying to picture the meeting of Sydney and Ronald. “I don’t believe,” she admitted, “that he was pleased at finding everyone dancing. It didn’t, somehow, seem right. But I daresay he thought _you_ severe; I must ask him—you terrify me. He seemed rather dazed by you all.”

“I’m glad his first day is so fine,” said Sydney and felt as though by this she were somehow including herself in the happiness of the Kerrs.

“Yes, I’m always lucky,” agreed Mrs. Kerr. “Now we’re going out together. You can’t think what it is like to be going out with a son. It is unbelievably nice—I’d forgotten.”

“Well, good-bye,” said Sydney, standing back against the wall for her friend to pass. “I don’t suppose we shall see each other again to-day.”

“Oh, shan’t we? What a pity!” Mrs. Kerr said vaguely. “There’s that unfortunate Ronald,” she cried glancing out of the window, “marching up and down out there—do look—in a Panama hat. How horrid of me to dawdle!” She nodded to Sydney and went on smoothly downstairs leaving besides her faint perfume a sensible backwash of eagerness, expectancy and delight.

Sydney stared out at the hill, crude in sunshine, then went on upstairs. She thought how ironic it was that a day made to order for two people’s triumphant occasion must be at the same time dealt out as a background to everyone else. She felt she had no energy and could never get as far as her room, choose her gloves, find her parasol and put on her hat. At the thought of anything beyond this, her prospect for the day, she faltered. With a sense of reprieve she let herself be waylaid by Cordelia Barry, who was hanging about the stairs.

“I say, Miss Warren, it’s Thursday.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t go to the Convent on Thursdays, I was wondering ... I thought perhaps.... No, but of course you wouldn’t, would you? I don’t suppose it would suit you at all....” Cordelia, with an air of infinite calculation looked sideways at Sydney under her lashes. Sydney, remembering the promise Cordelia had exacted, had a pang of acute nostalgia for that afternoon of the carnations, sundered from her by the eternity of a different mood.

“I’m sorry, Cordelia: I’m going for a walk with Mr. Milton.”

“O-oh! That is a pity. I suppose I couldn’t come too? Oh no, but of course you wouldn’t want me, would you? But I don’t mind Mr. Milton if he doesn’t mind me, and I don’t see really why I shouldn’t come.”

“Neither do I. I suppose—You can come along if you want to,” said Sydney, denying a sense that this was mischievous on her part and a shade dishonourable. At all events to annoy somebody in her turn surely was owed to her? “He pretends,” she thought, “he professes to be fond of children. And it’s not as though we had anything to say to one another. We talk and talk, and cancel out each other’s ideas until it all comes down to what it was before: that we do not agree. At the end of it all it is as though nothing had been said. I do not even understand myself any better at the end of it and if that fails what is the use of conversation? Nothing will ever crystallize out of our being together; not so much as a notion.”

She deliberated, however, for some moments over her hats and scarves and returned more than once to the looking-glass to review herself critically.

Milton was waiting below in the lounge and his face did fall perceptibly as Sydney, at last appearing at the turn of the stairs, indicated Cordelia, less in tow than towing, capering possessively about her.

“Oh!” said he, and looking down at their two pairs of descending feet could think of nothing better to say.

Sydney wondered if her face had looked like that to Mrs. Kerr some moments ago: the comparison was distasteful. “This is Cordelia Barry,” she said with bright hardiness, “the eldest of three. She would like to come with us; you don’t mind, do you?” To her surprise, Milton turned away without a word to take his walking-stick from the rack behind him. “You don’t mind, do you?” echoed Cordelia shrilly.

“I’m very pleased, of course, if Miss Warren has invited you,” said Milton, holding open the door for them. But as Cordelia passed out behind Sydney with the self-assurance of a pet monkey he looked daggers at her profile.

“I’ve just seen the Kerrs going off,” he said to Sydney as he came abreast with her. “Ronald looks brighter this morning: indeed decidedly pleased with himself.” His pale-grey eyes encountered Sydney’s thoughtfully.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s nice to see them together.” She could tell by his tone that he was angry with her and was vaguely brandishing a weapon which he understood to be deadly but did not quite know how to use. He was nice-looking and at the moment unapproachable; she felt too spiritless to spar with him, and said, to propitiate, “It is a lovely day for a walk; I haven’t been for a walk for ages,” and looked at him gently. He noticed that her eyes had dark circles round them which were unbecoming and pitiful.

Milton had woken up this morning with the determination to take Sydney for a walk. Nothing in that moment of lucidity had seemed simpler to arrange, and nothing could actually have been simpler, as things had turned out. He knew as well as she did, and would have been prepared to admit to her, that the time they had spent together up to now had been profitless and left them both sore. But he was convinced (the conviction emerged with what now seemed inevitability from the confusion and ill-spent emotion of last night) that a need corresponding to his own must exist in her somewhere. A need perhaps, less of each other exclusively than of something only attainable jointly, of something rooted in each. “But I do not know how to begin,” he had complained to himself till this morning. Now he felt a mastery of the situation to be possible. “If I could only make her understand,” he thought, “there would be time enough for her to care for me.” At any rate here they were, walking together. The presence of this confounded little girl he chose to discount.

He turned, however, to talk to Cordelia kindly. They had chosen a road above the town for the sake of the view and meant to drop down through the fishermen’s quarters and come home by the sea. Cordelia begged that she might be allowed to visit the graveyard. Milton observed conventionally that her taste seemed a little morbid.

“Oh no, Mr. Milton; you really ought to see the graveyard here; it’s most uncommon and beautifully decorated. I suppose as a clergyman you’ve had so much experience of them that you get out of the way of noticing but I am sure you’d be struck by the one here. It’s _most_ blood-curdling.”

“If you like that sort of thing,” said Milton in the somewhat top-heavy manner in which he could not help talking to children, “you should get your mother to take you to the Campo Santo at Pisa.” Cordelia evidently suspected from his tone that he did not think her tastes sufficiently elevated, while Sydney remarked parenthetically that she did not see Mrs. Barry taking her children to Pisa.

“I might, of course,” suggested Cordelia, “be sent to a convent there to be taught to speak whatever they do speak. You see, my mother has got a perfect mania about languages. She would like me to be able to speak ninety-nine different ones even if I never learnt anything else. Though what, I should like to know, is the use of speaking ninety-nine languages if one has nothing to say? Now I think the nuns have no idea of teaching; I’ve never been so badly taught in my life. They flap about and go on and on at one and half the time one can’t understand what they’re saying and when one does it doesn’t make sense. I don’t wonder they got turned out of France—I’m not learning anything. However, the nuns think nothing matters so long as they go on being religious, and mother thinks nothing matters so long as they go on being French, so there you are.”

Sydney agreed that this was all very difficult. Milton who wondered what would become of this little girl was silent and looked so much depressed that Cordelia to cheer him up caught hold of his hand and swinging herself along by it asked him whether he was fond of reading. “I am,” said she. “My two favourite authors are Rider Haggard and the Baroness von Hutten. Who are yours?”

Milton hesitated and Sydney and Cordelia looked at him with curiosity. Conscious of Sydney’s attention, he was still debating how to answer most fruitfully when she said to Cordelia across him: “I don’t think Mr. Milton ever reads at all. I never see him with a book.”

“That’s not fair,” said Milton. “I read too much as a rule. I came out _here_ for....”

“For what?” said Sydney, looking about her expressively.

“For people,” said Milton unwarily.

“Oh!” they both exclaimed. “What an extraordinary thing to come for!—To come _here_ for,” Sydney added.

“Don’t you know any people? Do you like them so much?” Cordelia enquired. “How funny! I only like people in books who only exist when they matter. I think it is being in danger or terribly in love or discovering treasure or revenging yourself that is thrilling, and for that you have to have people. But people in hotels, hardly _alive_...!”

“Well, you don’t know what may not be happening to them,” Sydney emerging from her detachment felt it necessary to point out instructively. The road, a favourite promenade of the natives and visitors, rounded the face of a high embankment; they could have been looked down upon from the terraces of villas on one hand while on the other they were level with the tree-tops: the roofs of the town were below. Milton distractingly engaged in conversation by Cordelia, and Sydney released but not unfriendly looking ahead of her, they emerged on to a kind of gravelled plateau overlooking the sea. Here some benches had been placed, beneath umbrella-pines forming a kind of pergola, to promote contemplation of the bright panorama of coast. Beyond, the remoter hills were still snow-capped; others ran down to the sea in a succession of fine blue noses; headland behind headland fading towards France. The earth had this brilliant morning a kind of independent luminousness; there were still no shadows anywhere and the rocks, flat clustered roofs and campanili seemed to shed light as well as to receive it. For miles the bright-blue swelling glassiness of the sea received the coast gracefully among ripples that frayed continually into foam, slipped back into themselves, and slid on again. When Sydney, Mr. Milton and Cordelia had seated themselves on a bench, the fleshy spears of some cacti fringing the plateau darkly occupied the foreground of their vision. “Ah!” said Milton taking a deep breath of the air which here seemed to him stronger and fresher. Sydney was glad of his enjoyment of the day which to herself still seemed spilt out wastefully.

“Doesn’t everything look as though it was cut out and painted,” exclaimed Cordelia, joyously swinging her legs. “Cordelia!” said Milton, looking at her with an air of inspiration, “do you like nuts?”

“Very much. But I get plenty of them.”

“Or figs?”

“The seeds are bad for my teeth.”

“Well, dates?”

“I adore dates. I’m not encouraged to eat them much because they’re stickiest. But I do adore dates,” said Cordelia thoughtfully. “I wonder if I shall ever eat a date again?”

“You may at any moment,” said Milton, and he told her that there was a little fruit-shop that he knew of, just below, where she could buy for the three lire he proposed to give her enough dates for them all. “I adore dates too,” he added. “The shop is on the left, by the tram-terminus, and they will talk any language you like.” He gave the child a slight push that was unnecessary: she was already sliding off the bench. After a side-glance at Sydney who had opened her mouth to protest she fled to some concrete steps and with a yelp of excitement vanished down them.

“But she isn’t allowed to run about the town by herself,” said Sydney, vexed, “and she certainly isn’t allowed to eat between meals—she’s very much be-Nannied. Whatever made you do that?”

“She’s not the sort of child to get talked to, and I’m sure she has an inside like an ostrich. If her people encourage her to attach herself to strangers like that they’ll have to take the consequences. I sent her off because she’s been the most infernal nuisance all the morning.”

He was crimson. “You feel strongly about it,” said Sydney laughing at him, bathed in sunshine and forgetful of perils to Cordelia. “Moral indignation?” He did not interrupt her but something in his silence, his arresting consciousness of the gap Cordelia’s disappearance left between them and the clear view they had of each other, made her interrupt herself.

“I’m sorry she has bored you,” she said nervously. “I really ought not to have brought her.”

“No, I don’t think you ought. I asked you to come for a walk; I didn’t ask you to collect an expedition.”

“Well, really—” she began, then stopped again. Their conspicuous if isolated situation, the matter-of-fact sunshine and the sense that with all said and done they were English Visitors, he and she, sitting appropriately on a bench before a view designed for their admiration, had up to now kept her purely impersonal. So objective did she feel that she imagined a delighted Commune gazing down at the two of them, “English Visitors.” In the expansion of the free air she had laughed and felt that neither of them were realler than the scenery. Now, at some tone in his voice she was surprised by a feeling that some new mood, not of her own, was coming down over them like a bell-glass. The bright reality of the view, the consciousness of their unimportant, safe little figures were shut away from her; were always there but could no longer help. She felt the bell-glass finally descend as he, after a glance round at the other benches and over the edge of the plateau, said quickly—“The thing is, Sydney, aren’t I ever to know you?”

“I don’t see what you mean,” she said, suffocated by his manner. “Like everybody else, we see each other every day. Which was what, according to you, we are here for.”

Milton, losing touch with her, lost touch with himself and was terrified. He had said, “Yes, but I was wondering if you would marry me,” before he had had time to think, on an instinct that he must get out _something_ at any price and have it there to stand by. She had understood what he said before he did, and had answered: “You are very good, but no: I’m afraid it’s impossible”; so that he had proposed and been rejected before he had entirely realized that they were not still quarrelling about Cordelia. When this did dawn on him he turned to her in dismay. “I’m afraid,” he said with a return to his usual manner, “that that was terribly awkward of me.”

“Oh no, not at all,” said Sydney, smiling shakily. “It’s supposed to be very gratifying.”

“I did not mean to have said that to-day, I need hardly explain. It was unforgivable of me. But I suppose while we are on the subject that there is no further harm in my asking you, whether you can—as I think they call it—give me any hope?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” said Sydney feeling she had been asked something so preposterous that the answer was a matter for her common sense alone and that further enquiries need not be instituted.

“Very well,” said Milton and the bell-glass lifted, though it hung above them. She felt as though this image must have presented itself to him also, for he drew, as though released from constriction, another deep breath of air. After staring straight ahead at the hills for a moment he said, “Thank you”: she did not know for what, she supposed for her courtesy. This implied (she felt) a dismissal, a “You may go now, I have done with you!”