Chapter VIII

After Colonel Duperrier had left the drawing-room the ladies round the fire folded back their skirts over their knees again to keep the stuff from scorching, drew their chairs in closer and resumed their discussion of Mrs. Kerr. Their backs were turned in a kind of contempt to the tall windows through which cold light from the sky and the sea poured in on them gravely.

“I cannot think,” said one, “what a woman of that sort finds to do with herself.” She spoke with emphasis, this remark had been throughout a recurring-point in the conversation. “She has no interests. She hasn’t a large correspondence, she does nothing at all for herself. I personally find the day so very full here, it seems only too short.”

“I wouldn’t say _too_ short. But as days abroad go, one seems to get through them quickly enough.” To this there was a hum of agreement.

“She sits on her balcony in the sun,” said Mrs. Hillier, “a thing which I for one should never have time to do. I suppose one has too much conscience. If I ever do go out on my balcony for a minute and look along, there she always is, and if I call out in a friendly way ‘Whatever are you doing?’ she says ‘Nothing’ and looks amused and rather superior.”

“She doesn’t sketch, or one would understand her staring like that at the view. Of course, it is very beautiful.”

“She may think,” said another of the ladies, looking up from some _broderie anglaise_ over which she had been straining her eyes. She was of some prestige, her speech was slow and weighted down with implications. “She must think a good deal,” she decided; “nobody who was not thinking could do absolutely nothing all day and look so very superior about it, like a cat.”

“You mean that she has something on her mind?”

The lady of the embroidery rubbed her sore eyes with two fingers, revolving this slowly. She opened her eyes again tentatively, blinked once or twice and shut them again. “The light is very poor,” she said aggrievedly.

“Very. Won’t you take my place, Mrs. Hepworth, it is nearer the window.—You mean to say that she has something on her mind?”

“No, thank you very much, I do not care to move from this side of the fire.—I should rather say that she had something _in_ her mind all the time, at the back of it. One is never comfortable in talking to her, though she is, I am sure, brilliant. I have said to myself over and over again, when I’ve been with her: ‘That woman has something at the back of her mind.’”

“I wonder, what?” asked someone rashly. “That,” said Mrs. Hepworth coldly, “would be quite impossible to say.”

There were about seven ladies present, all embroidering something useless and therefore permissible, except Mrs. Duperrier, who, poor soul, was too restless, and another lady who with the aid of much gamboge and vermilion was touching up a water-colour, a sunset. At four o’clock they would all retire for tea, after that they would go downstairs to the basement into what was called the smoking-room and play bridge with the intermission only of dinner till it was time for bed. Though keen players, the seven were not to be numbered among the enthusiasts. Those, after a perfunctory glance at the weather, had sat down to their tables soon after eleven o’clock. Nobody who smoked but did not play bridge dared enter the smoking-room.

Out of deference to Mrs. Bellamy, who was among them, nobody had so far touched on the aspect of Mrs. Kerr which most profoundly intrigued them—her friendship with Sydney. Tessa, however, now showed herself lacking in that appreciation of their delicacy with which it had pleased them to credit her. Stretching out a plump pretty foot to the fire and looking down at it thoughtfully she remarked, “She seems a very kind woman. She’s been so kind to my cousin.”

“Ah really, yes?” said someone innocently. “Your cousin’s often with her, I believe.”

“Yes, they are a lot together. Sydney is a very clever girl,” said Tessa simply. “She is too clever for girls of her own age, I sometimes think, though, she is so high-spirited and cheerful and amusing that she is always popular. I often forget when I am with her, how clever she is. Do you know, she studied for years ... she has passed....” Here she enumerated, not accurately, Sydney’s academic distinctions which, while not conveying much to her audience, vaguely depressed them.

“Ah yes, it is nice for a girl to have a career. But I shouldn’t,” said a lady with some restraint, tempering her suggestion with a smile, “say that Miss Warren was high-spirited, exactly?” The others disagreed too forcibly with Tessa’s opinion of her cousin and respected Tessa too much to say anything at all.

Tessa continued, “Sydney is very affectionate.”

“She is very much ... absorbed, isn’t she, by Mrs. Kerr?”

“I have known _other_ cases,” said somebody else, looking about vaguely for her scissors, “of these very violent friendships. One didn’t feel _those others_ were quite healthy.”

“I should discourage any daughter of mine from a friendship with an older woman. It is never the best women who have these strong influences. I would far rather she lost her head about a man.”

“Sydney hasn’t lost her head,” said little Tessa with dignity.

“Oh but, Mrs. Bellamy—I was talking about _other_ cases.”

“And how few men there are out here—can one wonder the girls are eccentric? They say it’s the same at all these places—not a man to be had. I can’t think why people go on bringing their daughters out.”

“One wonders, indeed, why some types of women ever come out here.”

“Mrs. Kerr? Oh, do you think—?”

“Mmm-mmm.”

“But she may believe in the sun,” said Tessa. “Many people believe in the sun. Of course it’s always been known of, but quite recently a doctor at Baden——”

“She is not a sick woman,” pronounced the lady of the _broderie anglaise_.

“N-no?” said Tessa, petering out. “But I’m sure,” she resumed, after a pause for consideration, “that she has interests. I would say she was quite independent. Sydney tells me she likes to be a great deal alone.”

“Well, there now!” exclaimed a lady indignantly, dropping her needlework into her lap and holding both hands out. “Then why should she want to come out to a Hotel? She certainly is striking-looking but I would have every sympathy with her and make every effort to be pleasant to her if she were lonely. One knows oneself that is insupportable. As winter comes on with those long evenings one begins to feel hardly human, sitting evening after evening in an empty room. One can’t always be going out or visiting people or inviting people to come to one. If I shut my drawing-room door, I begin to feel restless at once; it feels so unnatural shutting oneself in with nobody. If I open it, one hears the servants laughing, or something to worry one. I am fond of reading but I always begin to feel that books are so bad; then of course I realize, well: it’s not fair, is it, to expect a book to take the place of human society? If the telephone-bell rings, to hear a voice and then be cut off simply unsettles one, and if it doesn’t ring the whole evening one begins to worry and imagine things about one’s friends. Once I sat with the door open and believe me, I could hear four different clocks ticking, I counted them, in different parts of the flat. It’s not of course that I’m nervous but I really begin to feel—if you’ll understand my saying anything so extraordinary—as if I didn’t exist. If somebody does come to the door or the telephone does ring I’m almost surprised to find I’m still there. One would go mad if one were not able to get abroad.”

She looked round with a shiver of retrospection at the semicircle which was her pleasant asylum. The others expressed their entire agreement. What they had all escaped was terrible. “But Mrs. Kerr,” said one, “seems to enjoy that—She’s a divorcée?”

“No, he died.”

“Fancy! She doesn’t give one a bit that impression....”

“Isn’t there a son?”

“Yes, she has a nearly grown-up son. I can’t think why she doesn’t make a home for him.”

“But if one does make a home for anybody one is still very much alone. The best type of man is no companion.”

“—Still, he is someone _there_.”

“Besides, my dear, make a home...! Of course it’s what one would love to do but it nearly kills one and it’s so expensive; and when all’s said and done it’s still so uncomfortable these days one can’t expect a man to stay in it. Of course we don’t mind in the same way about comfort, but really it is scarcely fit for oneself. So I said to my husband— ... he agreed.... It is so broadening to the mind, isn’t it? to travel and meet people; we have been so fortunate in the hotels that were recommended to us and we have been passed on from introduction to introduction so that we have always got to know people at once.”

“—And as for the son,” put in another lady who had been waiting with parted lips, “he really may not want her. And I rather wonder about him, too. One of my boys was at school with him and said he was not at all popular. He won’t say why, of course, the Kerr boy wasn’t popular; you know what boys are, they are so reserved. But one felt of course, that there was something. Boys, you know, are rather wonderful; they have a judgment that—well, a kind of instinct.”

“Like dogs?”

“Oh, my dear Mrs. Hepworth....”

“I must say, if the girl were in _my_ charge, were a cousin of _mine_....”

“Even then, though I wonder if one would be justified in interfering?”

“It would be difficult. But I do feel strongly....”

“Yes ... _yes_?”

“Well, I know of a case——”

They all broke off as the door opened and Sydney looked in nonchalantly as though she hardly expected to find whoever she was looking for.

“Oh, Tessa, there you are! I couldn’t think why you weren’t on your bed. We have no stamps: I have been looking for you in despair. Nobody I’ve met has a stamp and the concierge must be asleep somewhere!”

She was standing on the threshold holding the door open so that the cold air from the lounge rushed in from behind her. She did not look as though she had been out all day; her heavy eyes and the way her hair had been pushed away from her forehead suggested that she had a headache. She was asked to come right in, if she did not mind, and shut the door after her; and she complied absently. She came and stood behind Tessa’s chair while Tessa fumbled with her note-case; they all remarked her air of not unhappy abstraction and how, like a shy, self-centred child who has been sent down into company on a message and wishes at once to escape, she remained indifferent to their presence and made no effort to speak to them. Once she put her hand out and patted Tessa’s head idly. “Do hurry, darling,” said she.

“So you’ve been writing letters all day; dear me!” said the lady of the _broderie anglaise_, looking over her glasses.

“Nothing would persuade me to,” said Sydney.

“It’s dull for you young people on a day like this. No wonder the Miss Lawrences were romping.”

“Were they? I didn’t notice.”

“Oh, as you said ‘we’ I thought you had been with Veronica.”

“I haven’t seen Veronica all day,” said Sydney and while everybody listened intently she turned away from Tessa’s chair and wandered over to the window. “Doesn’t it rain; I like it!” she was moved to exclaim. “If I were Manet and alive now I would paint this and present the picture to the P. L. M. as a poster for the Côte d’Azur.” She smiled out at the rain with an air of complicity.

“Well, what on earth _have_ you been doing with yourself all day?” asked Mrs. Hepworth, who was so motherly looking that she could ask anybody anything point-blank.

Sydney frowned for a moment as though she were trying to remember. “Thinking,” she said at last, “with great pleasure of the thousands of villas round the hundreds of bays along these hundreds of miles of coast where the couples are living—as one is told they are living—for one another. Think what living for one another at close quarters would be like to-day. Think specially of what, before they became so rare, it would have been like to be living with a Russian. ‘It has been raining for weeks, the hay is rotting and we are living on allusions’—But perhaps you don’t read Russian plays? Even in fine weather, I must say I think the importance of the personal relations is very much overestimated. Oh, thank you, Tessa; then I’ll owe you three lire for the stamps.”

“Yes, we’re very shockable in here,” said Mrs. Hillier briskly, “as I expect you thought. Personally I think the interest of these improper couples is, in all weathers, very much overestimated, but for girls of your age they have always a great fascination. I know they had for me until I went to India. You and your young friend must have been enjoying yourselves, chatting away.”

“I haven’t got a young friend,” said Sydney, and now quite unable to refrain from laughing at herself she guffawed at Mrs. Hillier with a keen appreciation of her own ridiculousness but with unabated gloom.

“Then won’t you stay down here and make up the second four for bridge? You see there are only seven of us; we’ll be going down directly.”

“Oh thank you, no; I must be going up.”

“—You know the lift is out of order?”

“Is it? I never use it. I put the kettle on for tea just now and I must go and keep an eye on it.”

“Can’t Mrs. _Kerr_ keep an eye on the kettle for you?” Mrs. Hepworth called after her.

“She forgets about it,” said Sydney, as she left the drawing-room.