“I don’t see that I very well can.”
She stared up, arrested. “Why not?”
“Well, I don’t think she wants to.”
“Ronald…”
“I’m awfully sorry.” But his mother had turned away from him in contempt; her eyes were fixed on the door as though under their long, strange, relentless compulsion it must open again to deliver up Sydney. When he came forward she warded him off with a hand. He did not like to look at her, and did not know where else to look, so he stumbled back on to the balcony where he found, still alight, a cigarette that he had taken out of his mouth an age ago and balanced aslant on the rail. He rolled it round between his fingers, considering it, took two or three puffs and threw it into the darkness, then remained standing still there, waiting to be called back. After waiting for some time his tension began to relax again, but looking round at the sky, the sea, the tops of the trees he still saw everywhere his mother’s head in the circle of light from the reading-lamp printed everywhere on the darkness.
25
Going Away
A one-horse vehicle with a canvas hood called by the English visitors a shandrydan came round about three o’clock to drive Mr. Milton and Ronald down to the Genoa train. It appeared about half an hour before it had been ordered, and the limp horse in a bonnet, looking as if it had been propped up on its legs precariously, waited on the gravel, indifferent to the flies, long enough to advertise to the whole Hotel that somebody was going away. Departures at this time of the afternoon were unusual, and people coming downstairs after the siesta and people on their way out to the tennis courts stood about in the doorway (the double doors had been fixed back as for the passage of a grand piano) or gathered round the foot of the steps to smile at the inefficient way in which the concierge, the boots and one of the younger waiters were stacking up the light luggage on the box of the shandrydan. Antonio the boots was very popular; every time he let Milton’s leather hat-box or one of Ronald’s many dispatch-cases glissade past him and bounce on to the gravel there was laughter and a cry of “Oh, oh, Antonio!” And Antonio, knowing this to be part of a very amusing English song, would smile woodenly.
Nobody was quite sure how much of a “send-off,” under the circumstances, Milton would appreciate, but it was impossible to let pass such an excellent opportunity of embarrassing Ronald. Ronald was better liked than anybody else in the Hotel had been for a long time; it was always easy to be amusing about him; he roused genuine interest and curiosity, and, in the breasts of those who disliked his mother, an active instinct to protect and comfort. In twos and threes for mutual encouragement people were never tired of seeking him out and baiting him, giving him articles in the Morning Post to read, tripping him up over statistics or twitting him on an attachment to one or other of the Lawrences. He was the dearest boy, good humour itself, and one could not doubt that he genuinely enjoyed all this. The present prospect of seeing him shake hands all round, reply to a dozen mock-tender addresses and blushingly double his long legs under the low seat of the shandrydan kept tennis players from courts booked a week ago, wives from buying their husband’s tea and walkers down from the hills.
After the luggage had been arranged there was an interval, then Milton took form in the gloom of the lounge and appeared in the doorway, drew half back, glanced at his watch and hesitated, smiling uncertainly. In spite of a very secular grey squash hat he looked for the first time true to type, and several people realized sharply that a Church of England clergyman had for weeks been among them. The professional aspect stamped out the lover: he was once more approachable, showed up even as dedicated to approachability. There was a movement towards him. Friends gained all in a moment smiled for him up at the unflecked sky and congratulated him on his weather, intimates taking him up from before the dawn of that interlude regretted his going away loudly, and turned in anguish to one another with appeals to regret more. He nodded round with successive, finished-off little smiles and once or twice visibly swallowed. Miss Pym, standing down at the foot of the steps said to herself, “Morituri te salutant.”
People on the verge of departure always seemed to her to be saying this; there was something about them fated and sacrificial that made her feel self-conscious on their behalf yet somehow rather exalted. Presently Milton thought of something, murmured, and turned back into the lounge. The curtain having dropped for a minute with the usual good effect of tightening them up to further expectancy they all turned to one another again and said in low voices what a real pity it was that he should be going away. All sorts of things that he might have been to them appeared suddenly; with things they might have brought to his hearing for sympathy, taxed him with or asked him about.
Ronald came running down the steps in too much of a hurry to look at anybody. He flung his overcoats and another dispatch-case into the shandrydan, then went round to the box and gravely tested the roping-on of the luggage. The pile wobbled so menacingly that he was discouraged, left it alone and ran in again. During another interval he must have kissed and said goodbye to his mother, perhaps in her room, perhaps on the stairs. When they appeared in the doorway all that was visibly over between them. She still had a hand on his sleeve, but it was a light and casual contact of which neither of them seemed aware: she had already delivered him up to futurity. Those who had felt constrained to draw back from the scene of a parting began to return again. Ronald became their prey. Appalled by a publicity as of the scaffold he turned with some desperately trumped-up remark to his mother, but she was not behind him. Apart, at the top of the steps, bareheaded in the afternoon light she was standing, a little fatigued by all this, looking across at the hill that rose over the road and the group of young palms at the gate that seemed to be also serenely awaiting the exit.
“I say, if Milton doesn’t come soon we shall run it fine,” called Ronald in an unnatural, loud voice. Another woman would have jumped at this excuse to hurry back into the Hotel agitatedly calling, anything rather than stand there, just stand there. But Mrs. Kerr stood there, and women’s hearts hardened. “Oh no, Ronald,” she said, “you have plenty of time.”
Ronald braced up, with his back to the shandrydan, frowned up the steps to search out the interior gloom. A moment, his face lightened: Milton must be coming. Milton was coming, he was half-way down the steps with his hat off, bowing and smiling to left and right, and Ronald was half-way into the shandrydan. Then a voice—Mrs. Bellamy’s—called “Mr. Milton!” and Milton turned back. It was strange almost eerie, to hear Mrs. Bellamy’s voice, because she and Sydney had managed somehow to create an impression of having already departed. Since lunch-time when they had said their goodbyes they must have been up in their rooms. It was recalled with a shock that they were not to set out on their shorter journey up the coast till just before tea-time. Yet Tessa had been already translated, she was an amiable ghost, and her cousin a hard-sounding name with a cold-sounding echo. It was as though Milton running back up the steps with his same formal smile were going back into the shades.
The shades came to meet him not far inside the door. Tessa was breathless. “We’re so worried,” she said, “couldn’t find you this morning.” She shook his hand between both of hers with more little broken-off sentences. “Do so hope…did so wish…shall remember…”
Sydney, looking unnatural and urban in a dark-coloured travelling-dress, stepped out from behind her. “Well, goodbye,” she said, and she and Milton shook hands awkwardly.
“Well, goodbye,” said he, and after a moment’s hesitation as though he did not like to seem too abrupt ran down the steps and got into the shandrydan. She came a little way after him and stood with a hand on the concierge’s desk, from which she picked up an envelope and confusedly read the address, then looked after him again. Her manner was strained and unwomanly: the impulse that had brought her down here (it could not have been Tessa’s) had been highly unnatural. She did not wait to watch the d
eparture but turned and went upstairs again slowly, followed by Tessa.
Milton and Ronald looked up at the windows of the Hotel vacantly; everybody looked at each other, everybody waited. At last the driver climbed on to the box, at last he gathered up the reins. Milton and Ronald sitting stiffly side by side—their legs, willy-nilly entwined in the limited scope of the shandrydan, entangled in rugs and overcoats—relaxed, were bumped violently forward as the carriage moved on, let broad smiles break over their faces. Their friends who had been drawing deep breaths for this moment released an enormous “Good-by-ye!” A hundred jocularities that there had not yet been mood or occasion for were launched off bravely after the never-returning couple. One could tell them anything now, before it was too late, their memories were from henceforward a limbo. The voices went up to the sky, together or isolated. Ronald’s mother stood smiling and waving her hand; all round her the handkerchiefs fluttered…“Dear old Ronald…Steady, Ronald…Sure you know where you’re going, Ronald?…” and at the height of all this, “Cheer up, Milton!”
Someone flung a bunch of flowers at Ronald and it struck Milton on the side of the head and dropped just under the wheel; the stalks were crushed and a slimy smear appeared on the wheel and came round faster and faster and faster as the driver took the gravel sweep magnificently and turned off out of the gate. Cordelia Barry rushed out, picked up the flowers and flung them again, but this time they fell quite short, and everybody laughed.
Milton and Ronald, avoiding one another’s eye, leant over the back of the carriage waving their hats and shouting jocular nothings. The driver cracked his whip, the rattling wheels fled faster and soon the travellers, still waving and with big mouths open inaudibly, had disappeared. The little company on the steps sighed in immense desolation.
Before the sigh had come to an end Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Pym had detached themselves, and complete with their red parasols and swinging baskets hurried away. If they were still to make anything of the afternoon not a moment more must be wasted. They were well down the road under the chestnut trees coming out into leaf before Miss Pym observed rather breathlessly: “Strange how they still go on touching one—”
“Strange—so profoundly.”
“These goings away.” She sighed over a diminishing vista of hundreds. “Even when they’re simply spectacular, not at all partings…Emily, did you ‘say’ anything?” she added quickly, to hint that the answer should be in the negative. “I didn’t feel that one could…I didn’t feel that one could…”
“I must confess that I did. My wretched impulsiveness,” said Miss Fitzgerald, and put on that rather annoying expression of self-deprecation.
“Impulsiveness…oh!” said Miss Pym and smiled a discreet shade of pity.
“I suppose one must face one’s heredity. All the Fitzgeralds—”
“I know,” said Miss Pym rather sharply. They had begun to climb the hill; the sun was full on them and Miss Pym, pricking all over with her own particularly uncomfortable kind of heat that went in instead of going out was anxious not to hear about the Fitzgeralds. She was anxious that Emily should not begin to rehearse those unfortunate (but striking) examples of Fitzgerald impulsiveness back through the ages. An inclination to do this was Emily’s weakness, and it was always when disappointment, anxiety or lassitude should have drawn them together that they had to be most aware of one another’s weaknesses. They had faced this out and discussed it with one another simply and frankly. It was wonderful to have somebody, always there, with whom one could discuss the most difficult phases of one’s relationship (afterwards) simply and frankly. Whoever might come or might go, there would always be that. Friendship is such a wonderful basis in Life—or has such a wonderful basis in Life; either, she thought was true. Miss Pym thought of her friend Emily with tenderness, but wished that she would not pant in this exaggerated way to show that she was being hurried too fast up the hill. If she were being hurried too fast up the hill, why couldn’t she say so? “If we’re going too fast I expect you to tell me,” she said at last in a controlled voice.
“I thought we must be doing this for a bet,” said Miss Fitzgerald, and panted wrathfully.
“Who did you think I had betted?”
“Isn’t it ‘had bet’?”
They were both silent, and went up more slowly, wondering what they would find to discuss when (quite soon now) they came to the top. The terrace for which they were making had been the scene of profound discussions; there must be something about it, about the tilt of the ground or the way the trees grew. It had not for some time been revisited—in fact, they only seemed to have remembered about it today. Miss Pym now thought that as they both sat down with their faces towards the cool air and their backs against olive trees she would say, “Life itself, I think, is very wonderful.” But for this, she could not help asking, would she find Emily absolutely in tune?…When at last they had really arrived, had shut their parasols and flung down their baskets Miss Pym was surprised, however, to feel “Poor Mr. Milton!” torn out of her.
Miss Fitzgerald stopped panting and cried, “Yes, I know.”
“The Lee-Mittisons, among others, are so sorry. You know they are getting up Progressive Games?”
“I know,” said Miss Fitzgerald again, and stared out to sea rather absently, rather exclusively as one who could not bring Progressive Games or people who talked about them into focus.
This was not fair of her. “Not that I see any reason why they should have made use of him,” Miss Pym said indignantly.
“Surely he was capable of looking after himself?” Miss Fitzgerald suggested, still with the distant manner she wore when anyone “talked about men.”
Miss Pym did not believe that he was, or that Emily believed he was, but she said in a cold voice, “Obviously.” The word “obviously” has always a pained and painful sound when used between people who know each other too well. They both listened to it with fear and foreboding and yet felt incapable of making an overture. They wished that they had not come back to the terrace, which under some subtle influence seemed to have changed.
Then an instinct, a touch of genius, made Emily turn her head and say, “Eleanor, do you remember the day when we—so nearly lost one another?”
Eleanor remembered walking down the road with Mrs. Kerr and the horrible macaroni they had given her for lunch…
“Emily…”
The Hotel from up here was as small as a doll’s house; shoulder to shoulder they sat and looked down on it. Hand in hand, reunited, in perfect security, they sat and remembered that day.
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The Hotel Page 24