Chapter XVIII

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.