Chapter XIX

Dr. Lawrence talked of taking his daughters away from the Hotel. “I quite agree,” he had said, looking at Victor disdainfully, “that my daughter Veronica must marry somebody, but I fail to see any reason why she should marry you.” This had seemed an unnecessarily disagreeable way of putting things. Dr. Lawrence wore yellow spectacles out-of-doors where the interview had taken place; these gave him the advantage of looking sinister. An abrupt man, Victor thought, not at all the sort of person one would care to consult if one needed to visit a heart specialist. In spite of all the tennis and dancing Victor was beginning to put on flesh out here; he felt that Dr. Lawrence had noticed this; he had just borrowed twenty pounds from his father and this he felt that Dr. Lawrence knew. It had all been rather awkward. Veronica did what she could; she admitted to Victor that her father was a bit of a beast, and to her father that Victor was a bit of an idiot, then retired to bed for two days announcing that she had a headache. Dr. Lawrence entered into correspondence with some hotels on the French Riviera but they were full up: the affair hung fire.

“Our father,” Eileen Lawrence told Colonel Duperrier, “has got a devastating way of taking the starch out of things for us. We often fear that we shall die unmarried.”

“Oh ... surely?” Colonel Duperrier was much concerned. “I thought,” he said, “that girls could do pretty much what they wanted to now-a-days. I should have thought any of _you_ could.” He was entertaining Veronica’s sisters, after tennis, at the English tea-gardens; they sat together in a triangle round a small expectant table under a lemon tree. The declining sun made the girls’ arms and faces coral-pink and their dresses gold; Colonel Duperrier regretted more than ever that he had no nieces.

“We could,” said Eileen, “if we ever really wanted to do anything for long enough. But everything is undermined by other people’s damned subtleties—especially father’s. ‘Oh, of course, do it if you like, my dear,’ he says and looks at one as though one were diseased. ‘If you are so _very_ keen to, if you really think it is worth _while_.’ You see, one’s put at once in such an impossible position, having to be ‘very keen.’ It makes one so inferior to father, who is never keen on anything. Especially when it is a question of any of us marrying any of these young men—though it is the same thing with any career any of us ever want to take up: we do feel it must be an advantage to a girl to have some kind of career though she might not want to stick to it. And no young man, if one cares to look at it dispassionately, is worth all the fuss father expects us to make about him. Then father sighs and says, ‘Well, I’m afraid if you don’t feel more strongly than _that_ about it—’ and one looks so feeble. Our father,” said Eileen “is most fearfully subtle. No wonder he’s a specialist.”

“But I don’t think specialists need be subtle in _that_ way,” said Joan with an eye on Colonel Duperrier, who appeared surprised.

“One is tempted to wish,” observed Eileen, “that, for purposes of marriage at least, one hadn’t got a father at all, like Sydney Warren. Though in her case, anyway, it would be difficult to kick up a fuss. I must say, if Sydney really did want to get married—and she never gave me a bit that impression—it was very business-like of her to pick out anybody as eligible as dear old Milton. But then Sydney is a very precise sort of business-like girl. She was going, you know, to be a doctor.”

“I had no idea,” said Colonel Duperrier.

“_I_ think she’s cold-blooded,” said Joan, “she gives me the creeps rather. And I don’t think she’s a bit suitable for a clergyman’s wife: I can just see her looking disdainfully at the churchwardens and people.”

“She’ll make an excellent bishop’s wife,” said Colonel Duperrier. “All the bishops’ wives I have met were very disdainful. She’ll look very handsome, too, in kind of black satiny garments, twenty or thirty years hence.”

“The Honourable Mrs. Pinkerton would prevent his ever being a bishop,” said Eileen. “How she does hate him! She would bring it up against him just when he was going to be elected that he had once taken somebody else’s bath. It’s a pity, because Sydney would look very well in black, rather hard satin when she’s about forty-five, much more herself than she does now, here. Isn’t it funny that for everybody there seems to be just one age at which they are _really_ themselves? I mean, there are women you meet who are obviously born to be twenty (and pretty at that) and who seem to have lost their way since, and men you do wish you’d known when they were say, thirty, or twenty-four or feel sorry you mayn’t come across them when they’re forty or fifty-five, and children like that horrid little Cordelia who are simply shaping up to be pale, sarcastic women of twenty-nine and who won’t, once they’re that, ever grow any older.”

Joan Lawrence looked dreamy; when the tray was set down and Colonel Duperrier asked her to pour out tea and do hostess she blushed and looked very much startled. She had had a glimpse of herself and Colonel Duperrier having breakfast together on some verandah out in the Tropics, face to face with one another over a dish of some very large, futurist-looking fruit. She was not sure of her tropical background, she did not travel or read much, so it was sketched in vaguely; there was, as here, a profusion of heliotrope that coloured the scene and their silence, for they did not seem to be moving or saying anything. She was being looked at ... he had taken off his topee. She was wearing white muslin; embroidered, be-ribboned, diaphanous; she did not think she was wearing what was strictly speaking a frock.... What a thing to imagine: what an unspeakable liberty to have taken with Colonel Duperrier! She clattered the lid of the tea-pot, poured boiling water over her fingers, did not dare think any longer and did not know where to look.

“You don’t like sugar, do you, Colonel Duperrier?”

“Thank you, no sugar, and I don’t like very much milk.”

She had guessed this, she had known _instinctively_ that he would not take very much milk.

“This Hotel,” said Eileen, “seems to be producing brides in very large quantities. What a pity we have used up all the men. Do you think any others are likely to come out, Colonel Duperrier?”

“I can’t think.” He was wishing it were not impossible to take the Lawrences out separately. This would be all very well if he were simply taking out Eileen. But Joan had withdrawn from the tea-party, she sat and looked a long way away; he felt cheated of her. “I must say,” he went on with an effort, smiling round affably, “I think this would be an excellent _place_ to be in love, engaged and so on. It’s a pity we don’t most of us come out here till we’re elderly.” The tea-garden did for an instant flash on him a something half remembered or never quite visualized, with its lit-up lawns, its bulging gold lemons and oranges hanging down in the sun. His companions smiled. “All this,” he said, “would be ever so jolly.”

“Where were you in love?” asked Joan. “I mean, what was the scenery?” Tilting back her head, her hands clasped under her chin she gazed with a limpidity that might well have been mischievous beyond him and into the sunshine.

“What a thing to ask!” Eileen cried saucily. “Colonel Duperrier travelled a lot.”

Colonel Duperrier at this moment of nervousness and surprise did seem to himself to have travelled a long way. His thoughts went back through the conversation to look for something they had shied away from: what had somebody said about women born to be twenty and what they became? Somebody had lost themselves, been lost to one, vanished.... He knew that all women were born to be twenty—twenty-two, twenty-five possibly: the thing seemed obvious, looking at Joan. Something, however, had become of a Miss Maclean he had met at Darjeeling and of a subsequent lovely Mrs. Duperrier of whom he had asked no more than all she triumphantly promised, to be twenty at any age, he would not have counted the years. Perhaps in spite of herself, she had eluded him. Lost her way? She was lying alone now up there, up in her room, waiting angrily for the sun to go down and the light to go quite out and the darkness to stifle her, lying with the window open expectantly on to the void of sky, waiting to shiver, tossing to and fro in her poor mind while her body lay rigid, silent though she was so pent up, storing up her cries for him: “Oh, _here_ you are, Alec.... No, I didn’t really expect you to come in. Why should you have come in? I daresay you were happy down there....”

Mrs. Kerr and a party of friends who must have been having tea together further down the garden passed by and went out talking and laughing and Ronald strayed after them, looking slightly disoriented. His Panama was folded under his arm, he glanced sidelong at each of the tables under his lashes, prepared to swerve wide of them if anyone hailed him or put out a hand. Colonel Duperrier, though he did not take to the youth, was vaguely sorry for him; he was not, like Master Ammering, either plump, complacent, or noisy, and his idleness might well be a phase and had (like Colonel Duperrier’s own) the grace of dejection. He made, therefore, an encouraging sound in his throat and pulled back a chair from the table invitingly, while Eileen, who seemed to find Ronald’s manner of going by them provocative, shouted “Hi, Ronald!” so sharply that everyone jumped.

Having effected their capture they all three smiled at Ronald with the anxious benevolence, the slightly embarrassed solicitude which it seemed a gift of his own to inspire in all circles, and which had made, for some reason, his company out here particularly sought after. He was asked everywhere, to bridge, to dinner at other hotels, to the Lee-Mittisons’ coffee parties, and went, under some delicate indirect maternal compulsion, with always the same air of being strung up for martyrdom to the occasion as the young Sebastian of painters is strung to a tree. He did not look at present a happy boy as, leaning forward, slack wrists crossed on a knee, he gazed with an unreserved attentiveness which they found still further embarrassing from one Lawrence’s face to the other.

“It is neither of you, I think, that I am to congratulate on an engagement to Mr. Ammering?”

“No, thank Heaven!” said Eileen emphatically.

“Oh?” said Ronald, surprised, “but _wouldn’t_ you like to marry him? I thought he seemed so popular out here.”

“He is an exceedingly lucky young man,” pronounced Colonel Duperrier.

“Of course,” agreed Ronald politely. “I have just congratulated Miss Warren too,” he added, “and Mr. Milton, whom I met out walking together. They both looked very much surprised and rather offended. Surely I haven’t done the wrong thing, have I—they _are_ engaged?”

“Everyone knows,” said Eileen, “and I don’t suppose Sydney likes that: it isn’t select. But _you_ ought to know something about it, anyway; she will have told your mother.”

“I don’t think she has,” said Ronald vaguely. “I’m afraid not. I suppose my mother’s not the proper sort of matron. She would hardly, I suppose, provide the bosom that young women on these occasions are supposed to require. I’m afraid she may perhaps feel, like I do, that one’s friends, however various and delightful they may be at other times, are least interesting—while of course deserving all respect—at these moments when they approximate most closely to the normal. What people call life’s larger experiences,” said Ronald, “are so very narrowing.”

“What a vocabulary you’ve got, Kerr!” Colonel Duperrier said, respectfully offering his cigarette case. “I’ve never heard such a flow of language—Write?”

“I try not to,” said Ronald, looking ruefully at a cigarette as though he wished he had not taken it, and inclining with a sigh to Colonel Duperrier’s lighted match. It was another of these idyllic evenings, agonizingly meaningless; the evening air brought out the scent of the lemons. The Lawrences, shrugging up their woollen wraps round their shoulders slid forward in their chairs luxuriously and sank down into themselves like cats into their fur. Their blue smoke drifted away through the clearness. Joan said thoughtfully: “I don’t suppose it matters—talking, I mean—so long as you know exactly what you mean yourself. I don’t because I never do.”

“You may think all the more,” said Colonel Duperrier, knocking the ash of his cigarette off, not quite looking at her.

“Oh yes, I do think a good deal,” said Joan, swinging one foot and watching it, very mysterious.

“Do you really?” said Ronald with interest, coming wide awake. “What do you think about?”

“Well, really ...” interposed Eileen, after a hard stare—“Well, really, Ronald, you _are_ cool!”

To Colonel Duperrier’s amusement, Ronald reddened and stuttered. Ronald was thinner-skinned than one thought, he hated offending people and making them angry. But he couldn’t imagine, obviously, what he had done. “I, I’m most awfully sorry. But why...?”

“Well, I _mean_,” said Eileen, “really, if a person’s own thoughts aren’t their own ... I mean, if a person’s going to be expected to say what they feel about everything——”

“I didn’t say ‘feel,’ I said ‘think.’”

“Well, it’s the same thing,” said Eileen. They stared at one another.

“Oh,” said Ronald. “I’m very sorry. You see, what _I_ think is so public, if anyone’s interested.”

“Well, it would be—you’re only a boy.”

“Oh, look here, Eileen; don’t bullyrag Ronald——”

“It’s all right, thank you,” said Ronald, still rather pink. “I am very much interested in your sister’s point of view.”

“I haven’t got a point of view,” said Eileen indignantly. “I’m simply talking plain sense. Look here: if you look at a bun you don’t just think about it’s being a bun, do you: you wonder what you feel about it and whether it would be nice to eat, and whether it is somebody else’s bun and there would be a row if you did. And with a person, or anything else it’s the same thing.”

“Ah well,” said Ronald, “if that’s what you call thinking I daresay it may be private, very private indeed. You see, I don’t know anybody else who thinks like that: I had no idea——”

“I don’t suppose many people would take the trouble to explain to you how they do think. They’d just let you run on with your own ideas and nod and smile and say ‘How lovely!’ and think about something else all the time.”

Joan, while the privacy of her thoughts was being battled for, had remained, since her one intervention, abstracted; her gold hair spread out corolla-wise over the mounting folds of her scarf. “Feel my wrist, it’s like ice,” she said suddenly. “It must be awfully cold?”

“My dear child!”

“Oh! I don’t suppose it is cold really,” Joan felt as though of her own accord she had dropped a crystal and smashed it. “_Don’t_ let’s go,” she begged with pathetic eyes of Colonel Duperrier. “I don’t know why I said that at all—it was only my wrist.”

“_I_ don’t want to, I’m sure.” He looked around the garden regretfully as though they were not to come here again; it seemed a better garden than he had realized, more friendly. “But we can’t have you frozen,” he said and looked at Joan helplessly, because it would be ultimately beyond his province whether she were frozen or not.

“Idiot!” cried her sister, “where are your gloves?”

“These evenings,” explained Ronald, “come down like the knife of a guillotine. I must be getting on anyway, after my mother.” He rose and looked down at them thoughtfully: a queer (he seemed to think) and never entirely satisfactory group. “Are you coming my way?” he asked Eileen. Her mind leapt forward immediately to telling Veronica that Ronald—“Yes, my dear, I swear he did actually—” had asked her to come for a walk. “One to me,” she reckoned, “there’s nothing like being crisp with these slithery, day-after-to-morrow people who only half see you. He’d eat out of my hand, I’ll swear he would. I shall keep him out for an hour, take him round by the town.” Smiling she said to the others: “Do you mind, if Ronald and I move along?” Her only doubt, as coming out of the gate she turned the head of Ronald resolutely townwards, was whether she could postpone for so long the ecstasy of telling Veronica, who would be now, she knew, curled up in her bed by the window reading a magazine and eating peppermints and regretting more and more as the interval of solitude prolonged itself that the Affaire Victor should ever have occurred.

The other two were left in a solitude which, quite unprecedented, they felt to be exigent and a little singular. “I expect,” Joan said with a little stiff movement that did not do much for her, “that we had better be getting along too.”

“I expect we had,” said Colonel Duperrier. It was half past five, he discovered; up there she would be half insane with speculation. By this hour he had till to-day, never failed to present himself. He looked about him at the other tables, distant between the trees, where couples in rather forced and conscious intimacy still lingered, the evening before them, gazing a shade owlishly less at than around each other, oppressed by their leisure. Odd, thought Colonel Duperrier; queer, following his look, thought Joan. She propped her long chin on her chilly hand and sighed a melancholy, unresentful sigh. “Cheer up,” her friend said solemnly.

“I haven’t got such a cheerful disposition as you have.”

“I suppose I have got rather a cheerful disposition,” said Colonel Duperrier, glancing reluctantly at himself and looking away again.

“Of course,” she said in her matter-of-fact little voice, “you are wonderful.” She leant back to grope behind her chair for her racquet and repeated “Wonderful!” in a tone of indignation, perhaps because the racquet wasn’t there. “I expect,” she began again, “we ought to be——”

“I know. I really think we ought to be coming in. If you catch cold, you know, I should never forgive myself.”

“I promise I won’t catch cold,” poor Joan said faithfully, and getting up looked round her distractedly for the racquet propped against the side of her chair.

“Thank you very much,” she said, “for our nice tea.”

“It has been a pleasure to me,” said Colonel Duperrier.