Chapter V

The party for Mr. Lee-Mittison’s expedition was assembling as directed in the lounge, at the foot of the stairs. They stood in a group, eyeing one another a little blankly. Veronica Lawrence came downstairs, twisting her scarf round her throat nonchalantly and pulling down her felt hat over her eyes. Mr. Lee-Mittison clicked the lid of his watch at her playfully.

“Oh, sorry!” cried Veronica. “Am I keeping you all?”

Victor Ammering heaved himself out of an armchair and came sauntering up, hunched and indecisive-looking, ruffled about the head like a young thrush. He stood tugging at the flaps of his pockets, and Mrs. Lee-Mittison hurrying to and fro in a last ecstasy of preparation stumbled over his feet.

Mr. Lee-Mittison, his Panama hat in his hand, was counting heads, making quick calculations, and checking over the parcels of lunch on the concierge’s desk. He called to his wife, who was advising everybody to take some kind of an alpenstock in case of difficult walking, “Now, are we all complete? Is there anyone else? I believe they’ve put out one too many packets of lunch.”

“Better than one too few,” observed one of the girls, and the rest laughed politely.

“Three-five-six-eight—No, there is no one to come, they have made a mistake. Now, Herbert, the girls are all ready, I think.”

“Then forward—march!” cried Mr. Lee-Mittison and the five girls followed by Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Mittison filed through the swing-door held back by James Milton, who brought up the rear. Glancing back through the glass he saw Victor, whose rather marked exclusion from the picnic-party he was at a loss to account for, pocket the remaining parcel of sandwiches. This was done calmly and not with the air of a sudden resolve. Mr. Milton puzzled, alert for experience, hurried after the others.

They went forward at a swinging pace, well spread out across the middle of the road. Carriages jingled past them and a motor rushed by containing Colonel and Mrs. Duperrier and Mrs. Kerr who were driving over the frontier to visit some friends. They all waved and smiled at Mr. Lee-Mittison’s party. This was a moment of keen pleasure for the Lee-Mittisons. _She_ carried a mackintosh over her arm in contempt of the sky, a bag of knitting in case they should sit down for long and a basket of delicacies, dates and chocolates, with which Herbert liked her to supplement the lunch. Under her hard hat she shone with happiness; she refused to allow Mr. Milton to carry the basket.

“Oh no, please,” she implored “it’s _our_ picnic!” and he saw that her day would be spoilt if she were not able to be the Martha.

Mr. Lee-Mittison was pleased with his wife, as with everybody, and now and then patted affectionately the folds of her mackintosh. The departure, always a fidgety piece of organization, had gone off magnificently with never a hitch, and he looked with satisfaction at the five girls with their short skirts and neat ankles walking in front of him. No one could have been less of a horrid old satyr than Mr. Lee-Mittison but he loved to surround himself with bright faces and the faces of young women are admittedly the brightest.

He knew himself to be a success with young people: he could spin yarns and imitate animals by the hour, and tell graphically of life in the East, bearing his descriptions out with photograph albums. He found that he need never want for young society; girls seemed to take to him naturally. He did not care for young married women, while widows depressed him—poor little souls. On this occasion, the capitulation of Sydney Warren had been a particular triumph. She walked before him with her characteristic quick step, a little out of time with the others; her hands pushed deep down into the pockets of her jersey. It was true that in the glimpse he had had of her face she had not looked merry, and that her back now did little to correct that impression. But if so, Mr. Lee-Mittison thought, a jolly day in the hills would be all the better for her.

The five girls had been all rather silent, but suddenly Eileen Lawrence burst into song: a chant in time with their marching:

“‘I had a good home that I lèft—lèft—lèft
Now don’t you think I was rìght—rìght—rìght
Me father was drunk so I packed up me trunk
And I lèft—lèft—lèft—’

Oh, get into step, Sydney!”

“Really, Eileen!” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, smiling with gratification at this burst of high spirits but glancing up at the villa windows under which they were still passing. The Lawrences were such dear girls, Herbert loved them so, but she did hope they were not going to be too rowdy.

“This feels like school again,” said Eileen, “left—left—left——”

“I can’t think what one would do,” observed Veronica, “if one’s father really were drunk.”

“Doctors daren’t——”

Two other girls, a pair of pale Miss Bransomes, giggled ecstatically.

“Specially Dad,” continued Eileen. “But as far as I know Dad’s never killed anybody.”

“Oh _Eileen_!” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison.

“I daresay,” said Veronica, “that if we pretended to everybody here that Dad did drink everybody here would believe us. They’re a cheery crowd.”

“Not a very _kind_ joke, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, pink with diffidence.

James Milton, in whose late parish most of the people had been elderly, looked with interest at these modern girls. Sydney, turning round suddenly, caught him watching them all with pleased curiosity and felt as his eye lingered hopefully on her that he was expecting a further contribution, still more characteristic, from herself. She was silent sardonically, partly to disappoint him, partly because she never felt in tune with the Lawrences and partly because she was self-conscious and felt stiff and clumsy at this sort of ragging.

Mr. Milton had been introduced to them all in the lounge by Mr. Lee-Mittison, who commended him to their good graces with a general wave of his hand. The Lee-Mittisons always went out of their way to be pleasant to strangers, making efforts to draw them as soon as possible into the social life of the Hotel centering round Mr. Lee-Mittison. They had been predisposed in Milton’s favour by the fact that he had come downstairs to breakfast and ordered an egg; this seemed to them virile. Very few people came down to breakfast, a discouraging meal to which the Lee-Mittisons by a punctual appearance and bright nods round tried in vain to impart an atmosphere. Accordingly they had button-holed Milton and told him that he positively must join their expedition this morning, they would take no denial. Milton looked flattered and bothered. “As jolly a set of girls as you’ll meet anywhere,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison, winking chastely.

Milton was a big man of about forty-three with the clear, ruddy-and-white complexion of a wax model from which the moustache and expressive mouse-coloured eyebrows sprouted unconvincingly, looking darker than they were. He was long-limbed and strongly built but evidently out of training, for he began to pant and be silent sooner than any of them when they took the steep path up the side of the hill. He had intelligent, bright eyes creased at the corners with humour and the assured, affable, occasionally rather inane manner of the innately shy and diffident man who has never had to venture outside a society where he is secure and appreciated, and who has brought himself to believe in spite of a deep-down protest that such a society is the world. One felt that it should be easy to impress, affect or discompose Mr. Milton and yet that he had seldom been impressed, affected or discomposed.

The path was cobbled, it went up glaring white beyond the edge of one’s vision, relieved only here and there by the shadow of an olive-tree. After some time it intersected a road that ran high up along the ends of the hill, and the party staggered a short way along the road and sat breathlessly down on the parapet. James Milton and the Lawrences took out their cigarette-cases and Milton offered his round.

“Oh you girls, you girls!” cried Mr. Lee-Mittison. “You do it charmingly, but how I wish that you wouldn’t!”

Sydney merely bent forward to the flame of a match that Milton was sheltering for her but the Bransomes, a pair of pale cousins, turned paler still with dismay. They had recently arrived and had been much gratified by an invitation to the picnic; they did not care if they smoked or not, having only wished to resemble as closely as possible the Lawrences and the alarming Miss Warren. They waved the cigarettes away and shook their heads mulishly.

Mr. Lee-Mittison ignored their sacrifice. He was sitting astride on the parapet facing his protégées, and he leant forward, extending and thumping his chest. “Look at me!” he shouted. “Sixty-four and never smoked, never touched a drop in my life. Sixty-four, I tell you.” He stuck out his chest still further and invited one of the Bransomes to thump it also, but she declined. “Regular habits, the fear of God, and water from the spring!”

“—Perrier when we are abroad!” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, knitting.

The olives below the parapet sighed and twinkled; between the branches the party looked down at the miniature roofs of the town and realized how far they had come. Little distinct shadows from branches above their heads shivered over their figures and faces. Veronica moved closer up to Sydney confidentially. She thought Sydney queer, rather interesting and wondered what she could possibly be thinking so hard about all the time. Sydney’s remoteness intrigued the fêted Veronica. She supposed with sincere generosity that the sort of men who did not admire herself might find Sydney very attractive. The absence of such a man here seemed bad luck on Sydney. But then, on the other hand, Sydney had curious ties.

“I never thought he’d get _you_,” said Veronica. “You always seem to be doing something else.” She placed a foot of her own beside a foot of Sydney’s and noted that while Sydney’s was the better shaped her own must be by half a size the smaller. “You seem to be wonderfully busy,” she said with a sigh.

Sydney glanced into the irreverent, sentimental boy’s-eyes of Veronica. There _was_ something pleasantly hard about her; at every contact one was conscious of the blade in her, deep down, with an edge to it.

“Constant dripping,” she said. “For twenty-four hours I seemed to meet no one but Mr. Lee-Mittison and every time we met he was so _sure_.—I wonder if _she_, or the first wife, ever wanted to marry him, or whether they _had_ to....”

“How _do_ you mean?” said Veronica with a spurt of laughter. She never waited to grope for one’s meaning, which instinct generally prompted one to offer her on the flat of the palm like a lump of sugar to a pony. “I can’t think,” she continued, “why he’s so determined to have you. You don’t effervesce. You’re not breathlessly modern—on his level!—every minute like we are. You can’t think how tired we get. That’s why Joan struck at coming this morning. She said she felt _old_....”

Sydney looked along at Mr. Lee-Mittison. “_Ape!_” said she. Mr. Lee-Mittison was trumpeting like an elephant and writhing an imaginary trunk at the delighted Bransomes.

“Oh, I don’t know; the old blighter rather amuses me,” said Veronica tolerantly, and squinted down at the tip of her cigarette. “Joan’s off colour, as a matter of fact,” she suddenly confided. “I believe she is keen on Victor Ammering.”

“But isn’t he——”

“Yes, he’s keen on me,” said Veronica indifferently. “But you get used to that if you’ve three sisters more or less the same age. Between us, we generally manage to keep people in the family.”

Sydney pondered; she had no sisters and the ethics of the situation were beyond her. “You mean,” she said, “it would be more trying for Joan if _I_ wanted Victor Ammering?”

“Oh, _I_ don’t want him, if that’s what you mean,” said Veronica, with the crudeness of sincerity. “Anyone can have him, as far as I am concerned.” She dangled an imaginary Victor airily, as though he were a marionette. “But I can’t imagine what you and poor old Victor would find to say to each other,” she added.

“He did once try and kiss me, ages ago, at a dance,” Sydney said, reminiscently smiling.

“I know, he told me: he said you were rather annoyed.”

“I know I was—I hate being messed about.”

“I said to him at the time: ‘Victor, you are the limit: you’ve no instinct.’”

“I should have thought he had heaps.”

Veronica looked at her sideways. “By the way,” she said, “why didn’t you go for that drive with Mrs. Kerr? They must have had heaps of room in the car and I should have thought——”

“Oh, I’m sick of motoring,” Sydney said, and threw her cigarette away into the olive-trees. “Besides,” she added sombrely, “I don’t know their friends over there.”

“Didn’t she ask you?”

“Not exactly—no. Why should she?”

“Oh, my dear girl, _I_ don’t know why she should!” Veronica shrugged her shoulders. A queer girl this, Veronica thought, well turned-out, clever presumably, with a complexion she might have done more with and awfully jolly feet, to sit brooding cheerlessly on a parapet because a middle-aged woman hadn’t asked her to go for a drive.

“Well, come on,” she said, “Moses is getting the tribes together.”

Sydney thought this surprisingly witty: she chuckled. “What do you think of our Aaron?” she asked, but Veronica did not hear. Mr. Lee-Mittison had swung his leg back over the parapet; his wife was putting her knitting away. They all got up rather unwillingly and began to climb the next path which left the road only too soon and was steeper than ever.

They came up at last to the brow of the hill and found themselves at the extremity of a long ridge that stretched ahead of them, going down sheer at each side into a valley. From where they stood the ground dipped away again slightly then rose in a series of undulations to a point of rock whereupon a pale-coloured village balanced itself improbably. A mule-track which must have made a more gradual ascent up the side of the hill looped itself over a ridge a little ahead of them and vanished again. Beyond the village more hills, a disheartening infinity, rose blade-like, without shadow, against the vapourless and metallic brilliance of the sky. From the grass, among the twisted shadows of olives, flame-bright anemones spurted; Mr. Lee-Mittison precipitated himself upon them with a cry of pleasure and triumph. A scent of thyme stung the nostrils, reinforcing the glare with its pungency till two of the senses reeled.

The picnic-party had not halted, doggedness had forbidden them even to pause, since they had left the parapet now immeasurably far below. Veronica Lawrence, wildly exclaiming “The Promised Land!” stumbled forward into the thyme and lay crucified. Eileen, incapable of more than a gesture, knelt down and stared in dismay at the hills which now promised no bounds to the activities of Mr. Lee-Mittison. The Bransomes, half-obliterated by the strain of the ascent, flopped sideways and in self-conscious abandon stood hugging an olive-tree.

Sydney found Mr. Milton beside her; his face was glazed and dark and in spite of his ceaseless mopping the sweat streamed down so that he could hardly open his eyes.

“_You_ don’t look hot at all,” he said reproachfully and Sydney who was enduring the burning discomfort of those who cannot perspire said snappily:

“Well, we can’t all express ourselves.”

“I wish,” he said ruefully, pushing a handkerchief round the inside of his collar, “that my self-expression were not quite so fluent.”

She pushed back her hat and put her hand up to her forehead: it felt hot as a pebble on an August beach. They had straggled a little nearer the village so that the brow of the hill rose behind them, cutting away the horizon; and the sea, when they turned to look for it, was only visible in a triangle at the mouth of the valley below. She felt him waiting for her to speak and reluctantly asked “Do you like the village?” nodding ahead.

“Yes,” he said, after a pause which gave the unhappy impression that he had sealed the village with his approval. “It’s jolly. It’s out of some background—looked at, you know, through an arch or the slit of a window. Look at the track leading up to it—there’s even a donkey.”

“Yes, some Flight into Egypt!” said Sydney. She gathered from the lightness of his manner in making the allusion that he was anxious not to appear unduly conversant with the National Gallery or the Uffizi, and wanted to ask him “Haven’t you lectured on the Renaissance?” But she knew how inexorably the Hotel would refuse to let him escape from all that he was, and had pity on his innocent holiday taste for incognito, foredoomed from its birth on the threshold of the Hotel. Everybody could see at once that he had lectured and perhaps even taken people round the National Gallery. She looked disparagingly at the village with its toppling campanile.

“I think,” she said, “that it’s rather too like a cruet.”

“It may have inspired the cruet,” he gravely amended. “Can you tell me why it is walled?”

She glanced suspiciously at him, but his limpid gaze held a real curiosity.

“Against the Saracens. They used to land along this coast and ravage the valleys; so they built the villages as high as possible and fortified them. I pity any Saracen that ever got into them, for they’re perfect honey-combs and the people I think are cruel—in a leisurely sort of way.”

“Ah!” said he with an air of pleased receptivity. “It would be interesting to get in touch with local records.”

“I don’t know whether there are any. Do you remember the Decameron lady who bathed in the sea near here and was carried off by a pirate whom she liked from the first moment better than her husband?”

“Husbands’ shares were not good in those days,” he said tolerantly. “I ought, by the way, to re-read my Decameron.”

She wanted to ask him whether the Decameron had indeed been dedicated to him by a friend. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” she said, suddenly smiling, “if the Saracens were to appear on the sky-line, land, and ravage the Hotel? They all take for granted—down there—that there aren’t any more Saracens, but for all we know they may be only in abeyance. The whole Past, for a matter of fact, may be one enormous abeyance. But I wonder,” she added while a cloud of depression crept over her, “how many of us they would really care to take away?”

He did not know how she wished him to answer and risked: “It would be an embarrassing choice.”

She sighed flatly. The dust, panic and ecstasy with which she had filled for a moment the corridors of the Hotel subsided. Once more she saw her fellow-visitors as they were to remain—undesired, secure and null. “Not many,” she said, and turning away from him seemed to be gazing down some distant, barred-away perspective of feminine loveliness. “Women must have deteriorated.”

She half expected from Milton a flutter of protest, then noticed that she must have lost his attention, he was thinking about something else. He flushed and looked hard at her suddenly.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Haven’t I met you before?”

“Only last night,” said she, and grinned at the recollection more or less overtly. Then she wondered whether he knew that by just such a question do young men—at dances and elsewhere—strike for the first time the personal note. It is asked leaning forward intensely with the implication “Your ever-remembered face!” He could not have said this to many young women; he said it this time too awkwardly.

“Ah yes, last night,” said he. “But surely before?—It occurred to me then.”

“I don’t think so. Unless you are the sort of person who remembers faces he has sat opposite to in a bus.”

“Ah well,” said James Milton. “It may have been that!”