Sydney, thoughtful over this, was certain that there must be other variations.
“There aren’t,” said Veronica defiantly. “I think you are usually fairly lucid, and at present I am; I have absolutely no illusions about anyone. Look at the things people say to you and the things they expect you to do, and the ridiculous way people don’t know what they want and the fuss they make when they can’t get it. Look at the sort of way people go on if you ask them for any opinion about anything you’ve done.”
“I never ask anybody else their opinion,” said Sydney (she felt odiously).
“One must have something to go by.”
“Go by yourself.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Veronica, rolling sideways on to her elbow to pluck a long white feather out of the eiderdown, “I suppose I’m rather humble, really. By the way,” she added after a pause in which two more feathers had been extracted, “what is your absolutely candid opinion of the man Victor?”
“How absolutely candid?—I mean, would anything hurt?”
“Nothing, thanks. Do I look it?”
“Well, candidly, I do think he’s rather a dreary young man.”
“I thought you did,” said Veronica briskly; “everybody seems to. Of course, I know him fairly well.”
“And isn’t he?”
“Oh, not more than others.” Veronica slipped off the bed and began to walk round the room thoughtfully. Hands on hips she paused a moment to look at herself in the wardrobe from every angle. “One might be led to expect,” she said with obvious relevance, “something better than all that, you know.” It did seem that for all she had been designed for she was tragically more than adequate. She remained staring at Sydney with a fated air while Sydney said: “He seems attached to you.”
“Of course,” said Veronica, matter-of-factly but without complacency.
“Do you want to get rid of him?”
“Yes—no. What would be the good? Everybody’s the same and I must have somebody.”
“Oh, well,” said Sydney, withdrawing. A moment’s rather fine light had played on Veronica, but now Sydney felt, in revulsion, a kind of contempt. Women, she thought, are all tentacles: this last remark suggested a wide but horribly purposeful groping about.
“And if you come to think of it,” said Veronica, “people who are fond of one may be damned dull, and absolutely monotonous, but they are rather touching. I hate pitying people, but I can’t help it. Fancy feeling like that! I do think men are pathetic, don’t you? If only they were more interesting.”
“I should have said they were interesting.”
“You wouldn’t if you’d had as many as I have,” said Veronica gloomily. “I do envy you being so fearfully clever, Sydney: it’s kept you young for your age. I dare say I thought men were interesting when I was about seventeen. Now I can see they’re all exactly the same.”
“If that’s the effect you produce on them,” said Sydney, “I should let them be. And it would be fairer. After all, as one was told when one wouldn’t finish up one’s dinner, there are many poor girls—”
“Oh, I dare say. But what am I to do? I don’t want to be anything. I’m not modern. I’d be perfectly happy the way I am if only other people weren’t exactly like they are. Sydney, you give me the creeps sitting there like an idol. Do say something. Tell me what you think will become of me.”
“Why do you ask me? I’m the last person in the world to be able to understand you. It would be better, even, to ask Victor.”
“I never talk to him. But you’re so lucid.”
“Who said that?” asked Sydney at once, pouncing on an adjective which did not seem to have its place in Veronica’s vocabulary.
“Mr. Milton,” said Veronica unabashed. “We think ‘lucid’ is a good word: we’ve taken it up. You should hear Eileen! He’s got a tremendous vocabulary: he said you were ‘clear-cut.’ ”
“Oh! How amusing. Does he talk about me?”
“Of course he does: he’s fearfully keen on you.”
“Oh! How amusing…”
Veronica laughed tolerantly. “In love, if you prefer it,” she continued. “I suppose as he’s middle-aged that that is rather more expressive.”
Sydney, feeling as though she had caught Milton unawares, felt rather ashamed of herself. The realization that came as those awkward-sounding words left Veronica’s lips was as sudden as though that scene on the plateau (which had disconnected itself from the rest of her memories) had not occurred. She had so entirely divested that ill-staged proposal of all the traditional trappings that she had come to account for it merely as a more blatant of his occasional solecisms. They had frequently met since then without awkwardness, without the ghost of an echo.
Sydney could never hear any mention of love without an envious pang for its object, and now, as though feeling came quicker than thought, she felt this pang sharply before she had had time to say to herself, “He is in love with me.”
“I dare say he may propose, you know,” said Veronica maternally, with an air of having their situation well in hand. “That will be awful for you: he’s a darling old thing—not so very old, either,” she amended politely—so politely that Sydney realized she must have transgressed an etiquette in depreciating Victor. “He is one of the few men,” said Veronica with a sigh, “who can talk intellectually to me and make me talk intellectually without feeling a fool.”
Sydney longed to overhear them. “He and I,” she said, “can’t talk to one another. He keeps tripping up and tripping me up like a bad dancer.”
“Oh, well,” said Veronica, “under the circumstances what can you expect?” And Sydney shrugged her impatience at this conception of things. Veronica sitting down at the dressing-table leant on her elbows, curling her feet round the rungs of the chair. She amused herself for some moments by squinting horribly at her own reflection, then she took up Sydney’s puff and began thoughtfully to powder her face. “Talking of types,” said she, “none of us seem to be making much impression on young Ronald, do we? Did you ever see such a mummy’s boy! Oh, I beg your pardon, Sydney, I was forgetting Mrs. Kerr was a friend of yours.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I must say, I do think she’s odd about Ronald. She doesn’t seem to have taken any notice of him for years, and now they go about all over the place like Romeo and Juliet. Of course, I dare say he makes a fearful fuss of her. These selfish mothers get the best of it all the way. I shall be a selfish mother.”
“As a matter of fact, you won’t,” Sydney said with a flash of insight.
“Well, I should never have the nerve to be as blatantly selfish as she is. I think she’s treated you very badly, too: that makes me furious—I say, Sydney, your powder doesn’t suit my face! Look, it makes me pale blue. You have got a skin, you lucky devil! I always use basanée.”
“Why do you think she has treated me badly?” asked Sydney dispassionately. She waited for Veronica to continue, and her expectations of what was coming raced ahead.
“Well, she has so absolutely given you the go-by, hasn’t she?” said Veronica, replacing the alabaster lid of the powder-bowl, then looking down to blow some powder off her dress. “It was ‘Sydney this’ and ‘Sydney darling that’ and ‘Where’s Sydney?’ and ‘Sydney and I are going together,’ and now he’s come she simply doesn’t see you.”
Sydney, after an interval, leant sideways to push the window farther open. She seemed to have forgotten Veronica, who energetically continued: “Of course I’m sorry for you. Everybody’s sorry for you.”
“Oh,” said Sydney.
“Do you mind the way she’s going on?” asked Veronica curiously.
“It hadn’t occurred to me that there was anything to mind,” said Sydney with a high-pitched little laugh and a sensation of pushing off something that was coming down on her like t
he ceiling in one of her dreams. It seemed incredible that the words Veronica had just made use of should ever have been spoken.
“Well, it has occurred to everybody else, you know,” said Veronica, and picking up a string of amber she held it against her dress and leant back to admire the reflection. “Take a word of advice from one who knows, my dear,” said Veronica sagely, “and never trust any woman an inch. They’re all alike, cats every one of them.”
“I thought there was something special you wanted to talk about,” Sydney broke in eagerly, making a dart for this way of escape from herself. For very nervousness she could not stop talking, and Veronica’s affairs now offered themselves gratefully as a kind of jungle in which her own values could be obscured and forgotten. “You were in despair, Veronica,” she insisted more eagerly; “you said just now you were in despair.”
“I know,” said Veronica willingly. “I did feel like nothing on earth. But you’ve cheered me up immensely. It’s queer how the most ridiculous little worry of somebody else’s will often take one’s mind off one’s own. But there really was something I wanted to ask you about. I’m engaged to Victor—would you advise me to be?”
Sydney could not help feeling that any matron in the Hotel could have done as much for Veronica while she pronounced wisely: “Not if you’re not happy, of course.”
“Well, I feel in a kind of way happy,” said Veronica, wriggling her shoulders. “You see, I do like Victor, and we do seem to be rather involved—which comes, of course, from having nothing to do here. Oh, don’t look so grim, Sydney, you look fearfully grim. I mean, you might say the usual sort of things even if you don’t mean them; you give me the creeps.”
“My dear,” said Sydney more warmly, “you must marry him if you care to. And I hope you’ll be fearfully happy.”
“You know I really don’t see why one shouldn’t be,” said Veronica, brightening, as though the possibility had only now presented itself. “Of course, he’s got no money and no work and nothing you’d call ability; but that makes me feel less of a mean pig.”
“ ‘Pig,’ Veronica?”
“For not feeling more thrilled. And he and I’ve got rather the same sense of humour. Of course, there are people at home I could marry, but there’s not really much to choose between any of them. You see, I’ve got absolutely no illusions. I do feel I might have been terribly fond of somebody; I don’t think I’m really hard or anything—do you? Do you think perhaps men aren’t what they used to be?…It’s all very well to say, ‘Don’t marry’!” cried Veronica, throwing both her hands up to forbid interruption and raising her voice, “but I must marry somebody. You see, I must have some children.”
“Well, you needn’t necessarily marry—”
“My dear Sydney!” exclaimed Veronica, horrified and scarlet. Her changes of mood, definite as the slipping-along of lantern slides, expressed themselves in changes of attitude, so that all unconsciously she was dramatic. Dejection once again drew out each line of her; she exclaimed: “But I’ve kicked Victor: what is the use of a man one can kick?”
The problem seemed likely to be one which she would be called upon to consider in its length and breadth repeatedly; she at once accepted the likelihood and turned away from it with a nod of admirable philosophy. “God knows!” sighed she not irreverently. The problem would be dismissed at its very reappearance with this undefeated gracefulness. Sydney had a return of her earlier admiration. Veronica had taken up a sound position midway between defiance and resignation and seemed likely to achieve serenity.
“And what shall you do?” asked Veronica, as though they had been talking over their plans for the day. “I mean, when you get back to England?”
Sydney was blank for a moment—back to where? “Oh, go on where I left off,” said she; “try and pass my next exam!”
“Oh! Why?”
“Well, I really—”
“—I don’t suppose I should understand, should I? Funny how well we know each other—I’ve never given myself away like this before—and yet how little we know. In an ordinary way, in London, we should run miles, I dare say, rather than meet. Of course, I should have met Victor anywhere. I say, I hope I haven’t made your bed uncomfy, rolling about. I really can’t sit on foreign armchairs: they’re so steep.” She picked her hat up from the floor, brushed the dust off it tenderly and put it on. “As you say, this is not such a bad hat.” She heaved a deep sigh. “I feel ever so much happier; you are wonderful. Have you got a shoe-horn? These shoes are so tight, really that’s why I dislike them. I say, will you come to tea with me and Victor at the Pâtisserie and look at him again? He’s sensitive really; if you were nice to him he’d buck up tremendously—you’d be surprised. We eat a tremendous amount of pâtisserie; we adore it, and it doesn’t seem worth while beginning to economize until there is some remote prospect of our getting married. And if we don’t get married—I mean, to each other—there will always be this to look back on. That’s what we feel.”
Sighing and talking, vaguely she drifted towards the door. There she turned back and brilliantly nodded.
A suspicion that this mood of lucidity had, after all, been induced by an over-indulgence in pastry cast a slight shadow on Sydney’s farewell. “I should be careful,” said she, “or you’ll both get most fearfully spotty. Look at those little Italians! Can’t you try some other narcotic?”
“You should be thankful we don’t drink,” said Veronica, and shut the door after her—not satisfactorily, for it clicked open again and began to creak on its hinges in the manner of hotel doors all over the world.
Sydney heard her quickening footsteps retreat; she listened forlornly, straining her ears for the last of them. Then she got up and tidied the bed; smoothed out the eiderdown, picked up the amber beads and hanging them round her neck stood telling them off like a rosary. Some premonition, such as that with which a recurring physical pain announces itself, made her snatch up Jude the Obscure quickly and stare at the pages, but there she found nothing but print. She looked up for a moment and—“She has so absolutely given you the go-by,” the room repeated, catching her unawares. The shapes of the furniture, everything that she looked at, said it again.
16
Villa
The Villa Tre Cipressi concealed itself to the last, blotted out among the trees of its hillside; a long lane with broken-down walls led circuitously to its gates through olive gardens. Since the last date of the Villa’s habitation the surface of the lane must have deteriorated; it was impossible now to imagine the burnished, sleek rushing down it of cars or the thin-shod delicate stepping of the Russian ladies. Miss Fitzgerald’s party going forward in the leisurely and spread-out manner called in Ireland “strealing” had begun to feel a profound disbelief in the existence of the Villa. Miss Fitzgerald had, however, in doing them the honours of what had been a private experience, constituted herself their hostess, and they hesitated to suggest this disbelief to her otherwise than obliquely, by a disposition to linger, sweep the hill with a glance then gaze back through the olive trees, or to seat themselves at intervals, with some obvious thought of encampment, along the smoother parts of the walls. In the selection of them for a social bouquet there had been nothing striking except in a last addition—Mr. Milton went on nearly everybody’s picnics (it seemed a destiny beyond his influence); Miss Pym, as half of a duality, had been inevitable; Mrs. Hillier had been led to tolerate these two good women who did not know India and this parson who did not play bridge by her passion for villa gardens. It was Ronald who had been the master-stroke; he redeemed the bunch of them and made their grouping together seem superbly conscious and studied, suggesting depths of art behind its effect of naivety. So at least Mr. Milton felt that Ronald must be thinking, and he did not doubt that Ronald was right.
After a series of sharp turns the Villa gates stared down on them, aware, one might have supposed, by their triumphant
whorls and scrolls of painted ironwork, of all they gained by presenting themselves so suddenly. A mild ascent led up to them, and the three cypresses, which had an air of drawing together in council, dominated the approach. They came up rather breathlessly and stood behind Miss Fitzgerald in silence, as though they were prepared to rush the opening, while she sent the great key she had produced beforehand screeching round in the lock. Then they pressed in behind her, looking to left and right of them up at the palm trees or between the boles which had an exotic, rather horrible fatness. The tangled gloom and the expanse of silence swallowed up their cries of admiration. Miss Fitzgerald, after checking off with nods of satisfaction all she still found here, invited Ronald to tell her whether this was not all he had hoped.
Ronald had hoped nothing; he had not wished to accompany her. They misunderstood one another (though she didn’t suspect this); she had marked him down from the first as being of that delightful age which expects to be taken seriously and which to one’s ardent gravity will make shy, delicious disclosures. Ronald preferred in any encounter with women of a no longer redeemable age that might be forced on him to retreat behind an impassible whimsicality which amounted to archness. Thus there had been a conflict in their methods of approach, the equal determinations of each of them to “take” the other rather than “be taken.” She had plumped down beside him that morning with her invitation at an instant of such crisis in his thoughts that he could have murdered her for the interruption. In Germany he had found he could not think; there had been too much time, some element of condensation had been lacking; here there had been nothing but a series of agonizing ruptures; the very fact of sitting down alone on bench or sofa seemed to be provocative, and Ronald could not think properly standing up. “Your mother,” she had begun, “wanted me to ask you if you’d come with us to the Russian Villa—I have been lent the key. She is sure you will be delighted with it.” There had been nothing left for Ronald to say.
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