“I dare say,” said Sydney. She was sitting on a rock that jutted up sharply out of the river bed; it would once have been a perilous, amusing place to sit. At present it complicated his position rather; if he stayed where he was, they would have to talk in high-pitched voices to be heard above the noise of the water that hurried behind him; whereas if he came across the stones and sat beside her he would be made to feel himself rather tiresomely confidential and forthcoming. The rock, however, was large enough for both of them, and she settled the question by saying matter-of-factly, “Here, come and sit down,” and twisting round so that her legs, which had been stretched out in front of her, could leave more room for him by dangling over the edge. “What a lot of energy is wasted,” she observed, “in replacing one lot of people by another exactly the same.”
She remarked this distantly, as though the indirectedness of the stream of things had been brought to her notice passingly but did not concern her. Her attitude seemed to Ronald deplorable; leaning back on his elbow he subjected her profile, covertly, to a perplexed and grieved scrutiny. “And does this worry you at all?” he asked, in the hope that, while preserving an equal detachment, he might make her at least aware of her strange anaesthesia. An intelligent person, Ronald thought, should never be entirely unperturbed. She turned to look at him with the dark attention of wandering thoughts.
“Worry?” she said slowly, and tried to recall herself. “Why should I worry? I can’t do anything about it all, can I?”
“My mother, you know, describes you as independent and vigorous.”
“I had no idea,” said Sydney thoughtfully, and longed to know exactly how his mother had described her. Ronald might have been a key to a great deal; instead, he had his own obscure preoccupations. Except for his eyes and forehead and a few gestures and mannerisms which cropped up over-importantly in his conversation, out of tone with the rest of him, he in no way resembled his mother. Mrs. Kerr, at least, had not cared to replace herself. What qualities he had of hers had been given over to him unreservedly; they did not seem in any way to be shared or to bring the two into closer community. He, like the rest, revolved round his mother inquiringly with a perhaps more intimate but with the same exterior curiosity. He was at most two or three steps higher up the base of the monument: from here he said wisely to Sydney: “My mother, you know, is intelligent. She understands, or she wouldn’t admire.”
“I suppose she wouldn’t,” said Sydney, and let the thing drop. But though Mrs. Kerr’s son did not interest her she felt drawn towards him as though he were part of her youth, and she asked, looking back for a landmark to measure how far she had travelled, “And you really do mean, I suppose, to make rather a difference?”
“Well, one can’t help hoping one may,” said Ronald, smiling at himself, very elderly and indulgent. “Usen’t you, too?”
“Usen’t?” said Sydney, aggrieved at being so taken up.
“Oh, I suppose you still may; but you can’t overlook Mr. Milton.” Saying this, he tried vainly to reconcile the importance and solitariness in which she had just now been discovered with his idea of her as the engaged girl. She sat looking down, with a faint droop (he thought he detected), a hint of contrition, an acquiescence to being set aside, of which she seemed to be making a rather too sardonic and cool exhibition. She felt this and said deferentially:
“Of course you’ve got no patience with this sort of thing?”
“I may be young,” said Ronald, “but I’m never so grossly ingenuous as downright to commit myself.” He began kicking the rock with his heel and, with pursed mouth and a gleam of amusement she was not intended to share, withheld his opinion.
“Why,” she asked in surprise, “who said you were young?”
“Oh, I understand you did. But of course,” he said lightly, anxious that they should neither of them be embarrassed, “it seems an impression one’s bound to create. Would you ever have minded—why should one?” He looked serenely past her down the valley—a little, she thought, too serenely. Evidently he did mind. If he had not been likely to mind why should his mother have told him? “Of course,” he vouchsafed, “it is in a general way a mistake to involve oneself anywhere.”
Sydney felt wise, but it is poor satisfaction to be wise with the masses. She asked, “Do you never mean to involve yourself?” Perhaps he never would, perhaps it was possible not to—a chilly suspicion.
“Oh, I just mean to live in a rather simplified way and not to leave off being reasonable. Now it’s a mistake, I’m quite sure, to deny an attraction. One should cultivate it and be amused at oneself. Then one would be civilized.”
“And what about other people?” said Sydney; “what about your mother, for instance?”
“My mother? She is very civilized.” Puckering their lids up in the sunless glare his eyes gazed past her, pale with a reflection of the sky.
“I know, that is her great advantage. But don’t you think wherever she was she’d be civilized alone? Do you think she would promote your kind of civilization?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Ronald. “She is not an earnest woman. I can’t imagine her ‘promoting’ anything.”
“She wouldn’t promote that, she wouldn’t want to. She isn’t at all modern, like you and me, you see. It isn’t necessary for her.”
Ronald remembered what his mother had said about “white tiles.” He felt annoyed with Sydney and rounded on her: “I say, you don’t dislike my mother, do you?”
“No, you know I don’t.”
“I wondered—people do, you know. Does Mr. Milton?”
“Why ever should he? I—I’ve never asked him.”
“He looks at her so—carefully.” Quite without malice Ronald imitated Milton’s expression. “Of course, I think he seems a most discriminating man,” he concluded politely. He had been gathering together, while he spoke, small pebbles and fragments which had accumulated on the top of the rock, reaching out for them negligently in all directions and heaping them up beside him. Now, suddenly, he sat bolt upright and began to hurl them one after another down the valley with a great effect of mascularity and science. The pebbles skipped, the fragments of rock rebounded on the boulders of the riverbed with little sharp distinct sounds, pin-pricks above the sound of the water. The hills seemed to peer forward. This little tempest of exertion on Ronald’s part, into which he seemed to have been surprised in spite of himself, dishevelled the stillness of the valley, which unstressed by lights and shadows and unstirred by wind hung gravely round them like a curtain.
“Oh, do look out,” cried Sydney angrily. “You may hit James; he may be coming up.”
“I suppose he may,” admitted Ronald, but he could not keep himself from sending off his last three stones. “Then why doesn’t he come?” he said, relapsing on to his elbow again. “What is the matter?”
“I can’t think. I cut out lunch and came up here this morning because I had a headache, and I left word that I’d be here if he cared to come up afterwards. I said the third valley to the right, behind the convent. He may have miscounted. Or he may not want to come.”
“But he must want to. After all, it would be only reasonable.”
“You mean, consistently unreasonable?”
“No, if I were in love at all I should expect to be with you all day,” said Ronald masterfully.
“Ah, to be in love at all’s the initial mistake!”
“More, really, of a misapprehension.”
While Ronald talked she often had a giddy sense of watching all she had ever said being wound off from a spool backwards. Now and then came a truth that she had let slip away; she received this last one back again ice-cold. It went too deep and she wasn’t grateful to Ronald.
“Well, don’t you, my dear Ronald, ever misapprehend!”
“And don’t you be maternal!”
Catching some i
dea of a sound or a voice from one another they began to listen, as though the very mention of Milton’s name must have cast out a line to his consciousness and be drawing him up the valley towards them. For a moment or two they felt he was to appear immediately. Sydney leant forward expectantly, but nobody came into sight at the turn of the valley. She felt cold, and bitterly reproached herself for not having turned to smile sooner when she had been so sure she heard him coming before, when it had only been Ronald. She did not look at her watch, but knew that she had reached that psychological moment, that turning-point of any long wait when the likelihood of a friend’s arrival instead of increasing with the advance of time begins to diminish. She feared that through some intervention of a too far-seeing Providence on Milton’s behalf she might never see him again. She prayed that this might not be so: she felt sure that she loved him. Ronald, half aware of all this, felt a long way away from her, and began to wonder whether after all from the first he had not intruded.
He said (to observe the effect), “I’ll be going, I think. I may meet him—I’ll hurry him on. Anyhow, he wouldn’t want to find me here.”
The effect was a panic. “No, don’t, please don’t go,” she exclaimed. “I can’t bear this valley alone: it’s so empty.”
“You might have noticed that before,” he observed, warming in spite of himself at this display of femininity. “Nervy?”
“Yes, nervy,” she agreed with a little boy’s grin.
He sat down beside her again with mixed feelings of constraint and gratification, and began, while their silence relaxed again, from an alert, constricting consciousness of each other’s proximity into benign and restful indifference, to kick with swinging heels the side of the rock.
22
Rather Afraid
Unwilling to go farther, distrustful of himself and of the valley, Milton leant against a tree at the mouth of it and looked disparagingly up the river bed. He wished Sydney had not asked him to meet her here.
He had spent the morning writing to his brother and sister to tell them about his engagement, and it worried him that he had forgotten to post the letters and was still carrying them round in his pocket. He knew them to be lively and expressive and likely to do him credit on their arrival in England, having just enough manly glow about them and just enough boyish reticence. His flair for a right note was a perpetual temptation to cynicism, and his consciousness that these letters, so bound to strike a note of sincerity, were in intention sincere, and had been written face to face with himself with a zealous effort to avoid misrepresentation, did not make him any better at ease about them. He wondered if anyone ever tried to describe the experience of love without a bottomless suspicion of imposing upon themselves, of falsity. Momentous letters should be posted white-hot; they impinge too much on the memory, are weighed over and over again by the conscience. He felt an indecorum in going to meet Sydney with these in his pocket, these meanly adequate little summings-up of his position vis-à-vis with herself, his praises of her already qualified by a faint possessiveness. So at least he assured himself; it was a pretty enough scruple for a leisurely lover in this little world of suspended activity, where there was time for the finest of shades. But he pressed on it rather too eagerly. Deeper than this, beyond the domain of scruple, he was not at ease.
Their meetings, since the night of his conversation with Mrs. Kerr, had been of the type disturbed and momentary, whose sum total is an effect of separation. Was he apprehensive of meeting her again in this bare narrow place, the stage for a crisis, where no side-issue could offer itself to be grasped at, and there would be nowhere to escape from Mrs. Kerr and all she had said? Since their talk in the lounge Mrs. Kerr had been with him unceasingly; his thoughts even in sleep were full of anguished reasonings with her. He did not cease to bitter crying, “No, no, no!” against the shut doors of her eloquent reserve. The more clearly he remembered how little Sydney’s infinitely loyal friend had actually said the more did he despair of Sydney’s lover for having understood so much. The thought of Sydney waiting for him now (if she had not been impatient and gone away) in all good faith at the top of the valley, of the all-assuming confidence she had in him, which seemed the curiously simple and yet perfect flowering of her strange nature, like flowers springing out on a bare almond tree, destroyed his confidence in himself.
Next week Milton would go back to England. He had written this to his brother, taking some pleasure in committing himself definitely to the arrangement, but the fate of the good resolution lay with the unposted letters, still in his own control. He would go back, and she a little later would follow him; or she might even prefer to come back with him now. Could she wish to stay longer? Her tie with the Hotel that still exerted, he was aware, an agonizing restraint, had better be broken off summarily at the cost he could not tell of how much damage to her integrity—without help from him, without a word from him that her confidence did not invite. They had mentioned Mrs. Kerr frequently, but there had never been more than a little head of her stamped as it were for circulation on a conversational coin. They had not yet talked of her, she had not in person entered their field.
In a week, perhaps, the coast and hills would have vanished for ever for both of them: he did not think that either he or she would return. A year from now it would need an effort of memory to bring the place to life again for a moment; he would start at its name and realize that it had without them both, after all, some shadowy continuity. If an earthquake were to ruin the town, or a landslide demolish the whole coast, he thought he would be left with hardly a pang once horror subsided. The place would persist unimpaired in his memory, not much loved, scarcely thought of, but queerly complete if he happened to turn to it—as the least loved, most rarely revisited places often remain. The momentary impacts of colour and smells and light in his senses that had built up the place for him would be forgotten, only the sum of them, that he might have received in an idle half-day, would remain. A thousand hours superimposed on each other would melt into one; a thousand that had in turn been unique, coloured differently each from the others by mood or circumstance.
“Will she ever,” he wondered, “be so complete to me; not a succession of moments but one? Will these evenings, mornings, lights, memories, shadows, half-apprehensions, glimpses, ever fall away or run together and be merged in the whole of her? Could I love her so well if they were? Is there a human being any more than a Godhead with which one could bear to be face to face?”
He left the tree and started at a good pace up the valley. A stone which somebody might have thrown came bounding down from the heights and struck the river bed; later a couple of goats, following one another across an almost perpendicular piece of hill, looked down at him sardonically. “So much for you,” they intimated, and blinked their onyx eyes. Presently he met Sydney and Ronald coming to meet him at a swinging pace down the river bed. They were so deep in conversation and were making such a noise among the stones that for a minute or two they neither heard nor noticed him. Ronald was flushed and looked interested; the inequalities of the ground shook his words, which came at a great rate, out of him, and kept the lock of hair flopping up and down on his forehead. His arms swung loose, and were flung out sideways occasionally to help maintain, when a stone rolled sharply from under him, a precarious balance. Milton noticed that the two were like each other; they had the same build and the same carriage and might have been brother and sister—to, he believed, the advantage of both. He realized that this was the first time he had ever seen them together. It would be the last time, also, perhaps. They had been foredoomed in the very nature of things to miss one another. Biting a lip he looked back—had he been instrumental? There was pathos for him in this ghost of a contact, well-timed in this drained-out, colourless ghost of a day. Angrily, with a sense of destruction, he put up his hands and shouted.
Sydney started, her lit-up face turned vividly towards him, and she waved her walki
ng-stick, then came hurrying down the river bed, springing for speed’s sake from boulder to boulder clear of the loose stones. “Slacker!” she exclaimed. “Rotter, James!” Her soft hatbrim flapped back in the wind of her motion, the ends of her bright scarf fled through the air behind her. She was radiant and boisterous. Ronald, who had been making a good point, remained in mid-stream behind her, shutting his mouth reluctantly.
“Where have you been?” she cried breathlessly. “If I’d the slightest grain of proper female pride I shouldn’t look at you…I told Ronald hours ago that you’d be coming any minute; that if you didn’t mountains would have slid on you. And here we find you hardly even hurrying!” She scrambled up the bank and took his arm.
“I had no idea—I didn’t mean to delay.”
“You must have been thinking,” said Sydney. “It’s really too bad of you.” With animation she waved Ronald forward and Ronald, coming up after her, made a benevolent third till they came to a point where a parting of ways became possible. Here he nodded goodbye and made off by a steep track that doubled back up the side of the hill. Going up he whistled, turned once or twice to stare out over their heads at the sea, and showed plainly that he had forgotten or at least was no longer concerned with them. It was Milton, not Sydney, who kept looking after him rather uncertainly as though he had half a mind to call him back, until Ronald disappeared into a fold of the hill. Too light-heartedly Ronald had shaken them off.
“Do let’s not think about Ronald,” Sydney said, recalling him with a sigh. “I should like us just to be together.”
“But, my dear…”
“Aren’t we happy?” she rather fiercely exclaimed.
He nodded. “And you know,” he said, and pressed her arm gently, “that silences me.”
“I can’t see anything to be silent about,” said she, and smiled crookedly. “Kiss me!”
The Hotel Page 20