“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 colder 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 back 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 hair 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 Misses Lawrence 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 Monet 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 today. 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 illusions—’ But perhaps you don’t read Russian plays? Even in fine weather, I must say I think the importance of personal relations is very much over-estimated. 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 over-estimated, 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.
9
My Little Boy
Three days afterwards the weather along that coast was once more fulfilling the expectation of visitors. Only a little wind remained to disturb the sea, to rustle dryly through the palm trees out on the promontory where the coast road disappeared towards Genoa and to rush to meet one round street corners with a disconcertingly ice-cold whistle. Against an opaque, bright blue sky the expressionless faces of the buildings had again their advertised and almost aching whiteness. The sounds, like the shadows, were exact and clear-cut, no longer blunted by the rain.
From end to end of the town the principal long street ran like a funnel; as Sydney came out of the flower-shop, her side of the street was slate-grey in the shadow of early afternoon. It was characteristic of her as an intelligent young English lady that she should have come to buy carnations during the hour of the siesta, cutting for her a caprice of her own direct across the custom of the land. The carnations, among which, walking slowly, she now was burying her face, were scentless, but gave one an acute pleasure by the chilly contact of their petals. She had an armful of two colours—sulphur with a ragged edge of pink and ashy mauve with crimson at the centre, crimson-veined. Carnations are not costly before they reach the flower-market, grown on terraces that stagger up the hills and picked in the grey quiet of the morning to the accompaniment of singing and of never-answered calls that come dropping down forlornly from terrace to terrace to the coast. On account of their low cost, their strangeness to the Northern eye and the vehemence of their colouring, they have become the vehicle of much emotion. One cannot, however casually, present these native carnations to a friend and remain unaffected, while the pleasure with which carnations are received is intensified by some vague agitation.
Sydney’s day had been so far as perfect as a bubble; she felt careless of it, as though the bubble could not burst. Happiness, she said to herself, is not to be solicited, but coming, for however short a time, comes with an appearance of finality, to be juggled with offhand. It seems to be some kind of balance, as in riding a bicycle, attempted painfully a thousand times and achieved at last without effort. Her senses were absorbed by the carnations, she barely looked ahead, and she could be conscious of the street only as a sharp distinction between sun and shadow. Crossing over, she walked in the sun, where dogs stretched their lengths in abandon on the hot pavement. She must have been made conspicuous by her abstraction or by her yellow dress; people turned to stare at her and a tram announced by a hum of overhead wires rushed past with a long smudge of faces turned her way. She left the street but delayed her return to the Hotel by following a series of by-paths, pausing now and then to stare idly through some barred gate into a garden. She was mapping out for herself a deep-down life in which emotions ceased their clashing together and friends appeared only as painted along the edge of one’s quietness.
At a turn of the footpath she met the Barry children going down to the shore with their nurse. There were several of them, very much alike; their number appalled Sydney, who stood back against the wall. Cordelia Barry, the eldest, walked by herself a little ahead of the others, ostentatiously carrying a book.
“The whole family of us all again, you see!” she exclaimed affectedly. “Oh, dear Miss Warren, what lovely carnations! Oh, I do love them!”
She was a child of about eleven, with long thin legs and an eager tremolo. Sydney, who considered that she had been demoralized by overmuch grown-up attention, said, “Do you?” unresponsively. She did not intend to give any carnations to Cordelia.
“You aren’t going for a walk, I suppose
?” said Cordelia wistfully. “Mother said I might go with anybody who would have me, but that I would have to go with Nanny if everybody else fell through.”
“Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you. But I expect it will be nice on the shore.”
“Hoo!” said Cordelia, pouncing on this note of falsity. She tilted her head back to stare up at Sydney from under the brim of her hat. “How stupid you’d be if you really believed that! Nice on the shore!”
“Come along, Cordelia!” called back Nanny in the flat voice of one who is employing the imperative continually and without effect.
Cordelia clutched at Sydney’s dress. “Lovely yellow thing,” she said feverishly. “Beautiful Miss Warren, won’t you take me for a walk?”
Sydney, who was still near enough to her own childhood to mistrust children profoundly, wondered what Cordelia could be getting at. “Not today,” she temporized; “some day, perhaps.”
“Come on, Cordelia!”
“Go on, Cordelia; Nanny’s calling.”
“She’s no Nanny to me,” said Cordelia in bitter repudiation. “Veronica Lawrence is very fond of children,” she added rapidly. “She said she’d take me for a walk any day. But I’m not so much interested in Veronica Lawrence.”
“Then you’re an ungrateful little wretch,” said Sydney. “Run along!”
“Do you promise, some day?” said the child despairingly.
“Very well, I promise.”
After another long stare that was at once ardent and sardonic, Cordelia, with reluctant steps and backward glances, went after her family. Sydney heard her calling Nanny a devil. But so long as Cordelia came on, Nanny, who was a broken woman, cared for none of these things.
Sydney, who knew that Mrs. Kerr was all this time sitting on her balcony, never more accessible than today, in a mood which the carnations were soon to reflect, still delayed luxuriously. She heightened the sweetness of exile by telling herself how soon the freshness of her carnations would be over, and how at any moment Mrs. Kerr might fall asleep for the afternoon, or get up and go out with somebody else. She even played with a regret at having packed off Cordelia, with whom she might have walked back still more slowly through the town.
When she did at last return to the Hotel the afternoon post had just come in and was spread out on the concierge’s table. There was nothing for herself, but a letter for Mrs. Kerr in Ronald’s large untidy writing caught her eye. She hesitated for a moment over this for she had not yet directly tried conclusions with Ronald; then, very confident of her balance, took the letter up with her and tapped lightly with the corner of the envelope on Mrs. Kerr’s door.
Sydney knew at once from her friend’s conscious air and rather marked immobility that she had been expected. The carnations, into which virtue seemed to have gone out of herself, were at this anticipated moment difficult to relinquish. She laid them down with a degree of awkwardness across the end of the sofa. Mrs. Kerr, who sat with her feet up, looking out at the sea, exclaimed: “Carnations!” incredulously, as though this were what she had been longing for, and with an unprecedented movement held up her face to be kissed.
“Will you put them in water?” she said, having looked at the flowers with wistful delight for a moment or two, and Sydney, with a feeling of surprise that she could not explain to herself, glanced round her, then began to arrange the carnations. She chose for the purpose a rather self-conscious-looking pottery mug that had been a present from Miss Pym. She arranged the flowers deliberately, and Mrs. Kerr looked on in expressive silence.
“Pleased?” said Sydney.
“Very, very much. I had been feeling like that: it was uncanny of you. Now they are perfect, Sydney; leave them alone and don’t keep fussing round them.”
“That was because I want them to look nice all round. I’m not restless.”
“No?” said Mrs. Kerr, revolving critically a possible new version of friend which she seemed slowly to accept.
“No, I am not. I have a capacity for being still that, left to myself, I would never have doubted, but that no one else, you specially, will ever let me believe in. Look—” She knelt down where she stood, then sat back and arranged herself, leaning her side and elbow against the side of the sofa. “I could stay like this for the rest of the afternoon,” said Sydney.
“Well, then stay still. Why should I disturb you?”
“You will, you are bound to—just now. Where did you think I had gone?”
“I was not allowed to think. I went out there and looked over the balcony, and that clergyman, that Mr. Milton, was walking about in the garden. He took off his hat and waved it to attract my attention. Then he began to talk for some time in the friendliest way.”
“Really? That was excessive of him. What did he say?”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I couldn’t hear. I just smiled and nodded. He is a cheerful, un-self-conscious person. I like him.”
“Un-self-conscious? He feels spikes everywhere and rushes to impale himself. But I feel an interest in him; he told Veronica Lawrence he admired me.”
“Very appealing of him. And so wise.”
“Wise—to tell?”
“No—to admire. Have many people, Sydney?”
Sydney flung round at her, startled into a brilliant flush. “I don’t know: I’ve never been sure of it.”
“Never mind,” said Mrs. Kerr, staring out at her friend from some profound reverie; “when you look like that, the question answers itself.”
“I suppose,” said Sydney after an instant’s reflection, “that extraordinary people do. Cordelia Barry—or did you only mean men?”
“No, I didn’t only mean men. Don’t be so fearfully on the defensive—or do you think I am likely to match-make?”
“I am sorry, that was horribly vulgar of me. It is so much easier to be vulgar and so much less noticed. I mean, you and I are supposed to assume, or to seem everywhere to assume, that that man down in the garden could be more to either of us than the other. Also, one has had it so ground into one that admiration, any exercise of the spirit, is only valuable to its object, to drive her, his, somebody’s mill.”
“ ‘Exercise of the spirit’…” said Mrs. Kerr, while Sydney listened like a stranger to this repetition of her own words. “If you call admiration that, you must agree that it would be allowed another value, even popularity: the value of a gymnastic.”
“Oh. Shaw’s Englishman and his moral gymnasium; yes, I know,” said Sydney scornfully.
“Now, there you are, Sydney; you’ve moved and you’ll say I disturbed you. Don’t be so out to suffer. Mr. Milton’s not the only person who runs on to spikes.”
“ ‘Out to suffer,’ ” said Sydney, looking down at herself, as it were, from the height of her exaltation. “Am I out to suffer?”
“I feel that you are,” said Mrs. Kerr, and pressing her head farther back into the cushions she looked at Sydney again in thoughtful silence. They could hear footsteps, perhaps James Milton’s, crunching the gravel below.
“Well, yes,” Mrs. Kerr said, “put it that way…Sydney, isn’t that a letter for me, over there by the carnations? Isn’t it from Ronald?”
“Yes, it is from Ronald. I brought it up with me, but I forgot to give it to you. Do you want it now?” Mrs. Kerr was holding out her hand for the letter, but Sydney did not seem to notice. “It’s a very fat letter; I expect it is his views on Germany. Do you want to read it while I’m here?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I think I ought to read it. Mothers do.”
“That you know best, of course.” Sydney, rising to her knees, reached across the table for the letter, which she handed to Ronald’s mother. Mrs. Kerr put on what Sydney called “the Ronald expression” and began to read, while Sydney watched her.
“My little boy,” she said at last, “is coming here.”
“Coming here?”
“Yes, here. Coming to the Hotel.”
Sydney, sitting quite still, remained blank for a moment and did not say anything. Then she got up and walked about the room, which, crowded up with the glare of the afternoon, now appeared to be much constricted. She did not even wonder as usual whether Mrs. Kerr were waiting for her to speak or if she had forgotten her. She looked for some time at the ornaments on Mrs. Kerr’s dressing-table, which had at one time, by their profusion, meaninglessness and evident air of being appreciated, “dated” her friend for her inevitably. She glanced for a moment, but only as if to assure herself of its still being there, at the portrait of Ronald.
Ronald, for the delectation of some circle of friends as to whose extent and nature she had never speculated, had sat for one of those expensive photographers who specialize in portraits of men. A disposition of the prevalent shadows with one fierce escape of light on to the jaw and temple combined, with the Promethean glitter of an eyeball, to bring about an effect of fine ruggedness, of an elemental something curbed. Each copy of this photograph, a sepia matt, must have cost Ronald about a guinea. Sydney turned away from it impatiently. “Why on earth,” she asked, “isn’t Ronald up at Oxford now?”
She had to wait for an answer until Mrs. Kerr, having glanced back to an earlier page of the letter and smiled to herself over something, perhaps an inconsistency she had detected, folded up the thin sheets casually and let them slide from the sofa to the floor.
“What did you say, Sydney? Ah yes, Oxford. He thought it would be better to travel for a time, you see, after leaving school. He wanted to expand again, he said, and he wished particularly, though I cannot think why, to spend a year in Germany. He would have preferred to go to Heidelberg, but his guardian wouldn’t hear of it, unfortunately. So he is going up to Oxford in the autumn, I believe.”
The Hotel Page 8