The Last September Part 16

Gerald said nothing, his ears faintly coloured.

"Clonmore" said Lois with indignation, and thought of the little friendly town with its tennis club.

"So it happened," said Gerald, looking at her. "It might have been anywhere else." He whistled and greeted the dogs, her dogs.

"Then ... it was dangerous coming?"

"Oh no. Not to speak of."

The house so loomed, and stared so darkly and oddly that he showed a disposition-respectful rather than timorous-to move away from the front of it. They walked to the tennis courts and round one court in a circle. "Lois ..." She veered off quickly; Laurence was working up there in his window. Gerald waved but had no response. "Doesn't he concentrate!" he said wistfully.

"I suppose so ... Does Laurence matter?"

"You know you ..."

"Gerald, you are the frightfully concentrated person, really."

"But I can't read ... Where can I ... where could we ... ?"

"-Here comes Mr. Montmorency."

Hugo, coming up to shake hands with Gerald, said it seemed a long time since they had met. The young man, by his way of standing and looking clearly and being positive, strongly connected himself with Marda. With an unexpected and crooked stab of nostalgia, he thought of the trees, the morning mountains, the tinkling and knocking stream. Of all of her he had kept, and had never had, and must try to regain, appeared most sharply the moment of that encounter: irrelevant moment, when, outside something, he had watched light run down her hair as she stooped for Gerald to light her cigarette. The quality of their silence, their separation after Gerald had left them- pressing on up to the house to look for Lois-now seemed the very ground of his closest approach to her. But he knew how the scene was perishable, how having drawn up into itself for life, like a plant, any reality that there was in him, it would die of his barrenness. Until finally, by even the same conjunction of mountains and light and trees, it would not be evoked again.

"No shaving under a hedge this morning?" he said genially.

"Oh no," said Gerald, surprised. Why should there be?

Lois, encouraged to find that by some growth of womanhood in herself her att.i.tude was already a wife's, at once proud and deprecating, stood there watching Gerald, most grateful for the repose of this interposition and willing that Mr. Montmorency should be detained. She knew from a glance they both gave her that she must have been startled by some sort of consciousness into beauty, and a particular placidness, a sense of being located, warmed her surroundings: the smooth lawn and heavy trees. Balancing foot behind foot on a line of the court faint from rain, she constructed a life in China-most regimental, alert and pleasantly surfaced-from j.a.panese prints she had ignored in shops, an idea of odd, angular archways and some strips of vertical writing. He must no doubt be a captain, and "captain's lady" had a ballad-like cadence. She almost took Gerald's arm.

"You find us diminished," said Hugo, "and a good deal quieter. Miss Norton has gone."

"Oh?"

"Marda," she hastily prompted.

"She was awfully nice and amusing," said Gerald, beaming out like the sun from behind a moment's perplexity. "I'd have loved to have met her again."

She explained to him afterwards, taking him off through the shrubberies, how things were at present with Mr. Montmorency: he was a ruined man. Gerald went rigid, something shut like a door on his sensibilities-the thing reeked of adultery. He produced an appalled silence. But about Lois's mother, he brought out finally, hadn't one heard he had once been ... ?

"But a thing can't be final," said Lois "not while one's alive."

Was this what she read? "But there's Mrs. Montmorency ..." It seemed fixed here, the Montmorencys' conjointness, among the stately furniture and long mild meals-earth to Lois's roots.

"But one can't arrange oneself; one doesn't so altogether live from inside: Marda just happened."

"Did she-?" began Gerald, appalled. Above this extraordinary undercurrent, it seemed to him his Lois was poised too perfectly.

Lois, in pink linen, perfectly sophisticated and cool, said: "No. She was just regretful. Also, she is engaged, you see."

"Is she? I should never have thought ..."

"-Her engaged? Well, how ought she to look? Like a kind of hen bird, all dim?"

"She was all herself. Doesn't love finish off people ... with something that isn't them, in a way you can feel?"

She understood him, but did not know how to agree. What must one be for him? She was shy of his uncomprehension of a particular notion of living she seemed only now to have formed. Did she give out an untrue ring to his touch? Where was the flaw? Or was Gerald, sublimely, the instrument of some large imposture?

"Complete-you mean, finished? ... Perhaps she is not really in love."

"But surely she isn't that sort ... she wouldn't just marry?"

"I don't think what Marda does matters; she simply is."

He looked desperate suddenly, as though she were behind bars. "Look here, no one matters. Don't let's talk ... I mean ... don't let's talk. Lois, there's so little time now, I'm desperate. I don't see when I am going to see you, ever. Lois, this miserable waiting; even happiness never lets one alone. When shall we be quiet?"

"But Gerald, we're quite young."

"I want nothing to happen but you. You are everything. I want so much of you."

She stood, perplexed, at the edge of the path; he kissed her with frightened violence. The laurels creaked as, in his arms, she bent back into them. His singleness bore, confusing, upon her panic of thoughts her physical apprehension of him was confused by the slipping, cold leaves. Her little sighs elated then alarmed him.

"What's the matter?" he said, lips close to her face.

"I don't like the smell of laurels. Let's come out of here." They went back, she put up anxious hands and asked him about her hair. "Is it twiggy and awful?" "Lovely." She wished that he were a woman. As they approached the steps where her aunt and uncle and Francie composed an abstracted group, she told him: "Aunt Myra wants me to go to a school of art."

"Oh ... Can you draw?"

"Gerald ... !"

"Darling, I've never seen them. How could I know?"

Lady Naylor exclaimed how delightful it was that Gerald had come over. Now they would hear the real, real news, she said; they always relied on Gerald. Sir Richard, taking his pince-nez off in amazement, could hardly believe it was Gerald again; he still thought subalterns came in rotation. Surely, he said candidly, it was yesterday they had had that interesting talk about the Militia? Gerald was given a chair of such voluptuous depth that his chin came barely above the edge of the tea-table. They congratulated him on the Rolfes' dance. In fact, they united to carry off the situation with such brilliance that Gerald might well have been a dun or a tax collector. Then, at a moment when talk seemed precarious, Marda obtrusively absent, and Lady Naylor eyed Lois's hair, the Trents arrived unexpectedly. They brought over another friend, this time from County Clare, to whom still more had happened. Gerald went into joyous eclipse; the Danielstown party sat breathless-hardly a chair creaked-the Trents looked at their friend complacently while the Trents' friend curdled the tea in one's mouth with tales of a.s.sault and cattle-driving.

"Well, I suppose we've a certain amount to be thankful for," smiled Mrs. Archie Trent as their friend, having been put through his hoops, settled down to tea. And she told Lois that she was looking remarkably well, and they hoped they would see her out with the Ballymoyles this winter. And meanwhile, what about cubbing?

"Lois is going to a school of art," said Lady Naylor.

"That seems a pity," said Mrs. Trent.

The friend, finishing his tea, said all the Irish art schools ought to be searched. He wouldn't say for certain, but he had a pretty shrewd suspicion what you would find there. If it came to that, he said, casts were hollow and you could keep a good deal inside the Venus of Milo. Sir Richard looked vaguely offended.

"I should go to the Slade," said Lois.

"Oh," said Mrs. Archie Trent, "not Rome, I suppose? Well, I shouldn't do anything of that sort in a hurry."

"Art is long," said Laurence, who liked conversation of this sort. The Trents' friend asked him how he liked Cambridge; he himself had a nephew who hoped soon to be going up. Laurence said he had heard that Cambridge was very nice.

The Trents' friend took Gerald aside after tea, to explain to him where the Army was going wrong. Mrs. Trent at once drew closer up to the teapot and said in a loud voice of confidence, she had heard Livvy Thompson was really engaged to that young Armstrong. "Nonsense," said Lady Naylor.

"But they were seen in Cork having tea, and the aunt denies it too vigorously. After all, it would be something for the Thompsons."

Lois, who was unfortunate, blushed; both ladies looked hard at her. "To begin with," declared Lady Naylor, "these young men are not at all marriageable. Besides, to tell you the truth-"

"But I don't see what else the girls are to do. I mean, look at the Hartigans."

"There's a future for girls nowadays outside marriage," said Lady Naylor inspiringly. "Careers-how I should have loved one. One reads so much about ..." She was an advanced woman: Mrs. Trent, who did not read, paused in respect but preserved an honest, bright pink expression of incredulity. She pictured those indoor women with clutched little bags getting hurriedly into the Dublin trams. It was no life. Her friend seemed, moreover, unwisely persistent in encouraging art for Lois; this, for young girls, often resulted in worse than spinsterhood. "All the same," she said, returning, "Livvy seems set on the young man. And she has a great deal of character."

"Well, if I were her aunt and her father, I'd never hear of it."

"Dear me," cried Mrs. Trent, kicking the table cheerfully, "we've made Lois blush at the very idea."

"Lois knows better," said Lady Naylor. And she gave Lois one of her rarest, most charming, direct and personal glances.

And indeed what a friend, thought Lois, going out to the steps to escape them all, if one had only just met, might Aunt Myra be.

CHAPTER FIVE.

A CLOUD slid over the sun; the stream went opaque as tortoisesh.e.l.l. Then, startling Hugo, the water suddenly flushed with light as the cloud moved east. Minnows, disturbed like thoughts, darted shadowy over the clear yellow stare of the stones. He dipped his stick in the water; then, drawing it out, thoughtfully looked at the shining end. At this point: eighteen inches; the stream, divided in two deep channels by the island of turf where he stood, went hurrying to the Darra. In its fold of the Darra valley the high white mill must remain sardonic. He was swept by an irresistible anger back to that affair of the pistol. For Marda had written: her hand had healed; no one had asked any questions or wondered, she said.

She had written to Lois, sending Hugo this message. It had pleased both the girls to underline his exclusion. She wrote also, Leslie had given her a dog-a correct dog, Lois expected, like all that was best in English country house life. Marda could not think what to do with the dog till she married; she would have to leave it in Kent ... And what else did Marda say, Francie had wanted to know. But Lois, who seemed to have swallowed the letter, postmark and all, could not remember. Later, she did seek out Hugo and offer to show him ... But he had put up surprise. Oh? Was there any particular-? No, he did not think on the whole he would trouble her ... Would the child see, he wondered, that the little oblique snub was not intended to stop at her, but to go past? His look now fell empty, reflective, on the tawny gla.s.s sliding water.

The child, having seen, went upstairs to describe his behaviour to Marda. Her unreticence was immoderate, though she was sensitive for him. She wrote scrupulously with an effect of hardness.

He is terrible, and, as the end of everything, they are to build a bungalow. She has it all her own way now; I don't know if he still even brushes her hair. Since you went, it has been the same time all day: three o'clock, after a long lunch. We all talk about my future (by common consent I am about nine now, very distracting and sunny; they like to have me about). It is to be a school of art, certainly-why did you never tell them I couldn't draw?-but we can't decide where. London, in view of my age, is supposed to be too large. In Dublin, a man who came to tea yesterday said there might be high explosives inside all the casts with capacious figures. In Cork I might pick up an accent, and Paris they will not hear of-my wretched virtue. But as a matter of fact, I have no future, in their sense. I have promised to marry Gerald.

Here she paused, for from now on it was all obscure ahead of her. Reading back, she was surprised by the woman she was. She took this merciless penetration for maturity's. But when she looked for Gerald there seemed too much of him. He was a wood in which she counted from tree to tree-all hers-and knew the boundary wall right round. But how to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees, this living silence? So she turned back to Mr. Montmorency, adding a paragraph. He had, this morning, snubbed her.

She would have been surprised to have seen him, at this same moment, step across to the island and stand there so rootedly. And he, his whereabouts even so much as suspected, would have been quite at her mercy. For to have followed the stream to this loneliest reach, beyond the plantation wall, where the meadow's hedge showered unknown blackberries over the water, was not to have walked, to have strolled even, but to have betrayed oneself in an emotional kind of straying. Further down, stepping-stones had been displaced by last winter's flood, there was a ruined cottage; n.o.body came here. Even Lois had given up, since her eighteenth birthday, coming to lie on her stomach along the bank, weep out a bottomless despair at nothing and look at herself in the stream. And this wildness within the demesne boundaries, within sound of the farmyard bell, had a particular desolation.

Hugo was pleased with the place; here he seemed to have stepped through into some kind of non-existence. And here, divorced equally from fact and from probability, he set up a stage for himself: the hall's half-light. Marda's hand is on the wide scrolled curve of the bal.u.s.ter-rail: he touches her hand, electric and quiet, with the deliberation of certainty, all his senses running into the touch. She stares recognition fixedly, darkly back ... For though in actuality she had had only one mood for him-cool and equivocal-he, frantic with this power disconnected from life, could now command her whole range imaginatively: her very features became his actors. And if this were not love... .

He was pleased with the place. They must all, he expected, be looking for him: it produced the faintest vibration behind the solitude. This morning, Myra was driving into Clonmore to lunch with the Boatleys; she had asked him to come, he had said he would see. He had intended by this "Good G.o.d, no," and if she were fool enough to interpret it otherwise, there was a rightness about her delay in starting. Francie would certainly go; she was painfully fascinated by military society. She would now be standing out on the steps, grey net veil strained elegantly over the tip of her nose, looking at her gloves in despair, persisting: "He must be somewhere!"

"How many of us do they really expect?" said Francie at last, getting into the car disconsolate.

Lady Naylor had not the slightest idea. "But they are accustomed to Ireland. She was a Vere Scott. And they know that I usually fill the car."

"You're not taking Lois?"

"Lois goes into Clonmore quite enough," replied Lady Naylor.

For Lady Naylor had further reasons for going into Clonmore. She had an a.s.signation with Gerald at half-past three, in Mrs. Fogarty's drawing-room. Fridays were club days, Mrs. Fogarty would be "up at the tennis" and her drawing-room, disembarra.s.sed for once of her large personality, remained at the disposition of friends. Lady Naylor, though she deplored Mrs. Fogarty's taste in beads, her husband, her stays-which stuck out half way up her back in a frill-and her too overflowing maternity, had fallen into the general habit of using her house as a kind of Ladies' Club, dropping in there at all times to leave parcels, wash her hands or meet friends. And she had the impression, always, that the maid who admitted her ran upstairs at once to put Mr. Fogarty under lock and key. Still, one knew that one's coming gave pleasure and gratification: she would enter the little drawing-room, even when empty, with her queenliness at its full.

Gerald, questioning but elated, turned up a little before time, much braced-in and polished about the belt. He had never been given an a.s.signation so directly. For she had said (this now divinely probable aunt of his): "I may be at the Fogartys', resting, about half-past three. If you should be pa.s.sing-though of course you may not be and I do not want to keep you away from the tennis-you might look in and have a chat. For it has been too bad today, I have hardly seen you. I have missed our usual talk. There is still so much ... But I daresay you won't be pa.s.sing." Her look, a special point to its wide-pupilled eagerness, transposed this to the imperative. The vigorous arch of her eyebrows insisted strongly. He, feeling himself ordered like a taxi-better still, like a nephew- had flushed with pleasure. Rath-er; he'd make a point-(Would she then call him Gerald?) "Of course I may not be there; we may not even come in; it is all quite uncertain," said Lady Naylor.

Riding home, the intoxication of Gerald had mounted. He guessed that she never rested, rarely leaned back in a chair, never pushed up her hat with a sigh or stretched tender feet out, unb.u.t.toning shoes. She would remain imperious, even in Oxford Street. So she was contriving for him; a special tribute.

Lady Naylor, coming in to the Fogartys' soon after four, was annoyed to find Gerald before her. She had now, instead of being discovered, to manoeuvre more or less openly for position. Disregarding the chair Gerald trundled up with its load of cushions, she placed herself (unaccountably, it would have to appear) on the narrow window-seat. Thus, she conceded no more to the room than an imposing silhouette of hat and boa, while Gerald, glancing round pessimistically at the chairs and remaining with elbow planted among photo frames on the mantelpiece, was exposed to her full in the strained green light coming over the bushes.

"Such a day," she sighed briskly. "We have lunched with the Boatleys. What a delightful colonel he must be. She, you know, is Irish; a Vere Scott. We must seem ridiculous to you, over here, the way we are all related."

"Topping, I think," said Gerald.

"Oh, I don't know! Now you lucky people seem to have no relations at all; that must feel so independent."

"I have dozens."

"Indeed? All in Surrey?"

"Scattered about."

"That sounds to me, of course," remarked Lady Naylor, pulling her gloves off brightly, "exceedingly restless. But you all came from Surrey, didn't you?"

"More or less," said Gerald, who was not sure. The Boatleys had not been sure where he came from, either; her day so far had been unsatisfactory.

"Now I do hope I'm not keeping you from smoking?"

She was. He smiled and lighted a cigarette. "You don't ... ?"

"Oh dear me no, I am quite old-fashioned. Now tell me-you know how I hate all this gossip in a garrison neighbourhood, but there is something I must set right. What is this nonsense I hear about Livvy Thompson? You know she's a friend of my niece's and comes a good deal to our house, and I do feel I ought to refute these stories about her."

"Oh?" said Gerald, alarmed. "I had no idea." "Hadn't you?" said Lady Naylor. "Well, you are a friend of the young man Mr. Armstrong's, so I felt I'd come straight to you. It appears they were seen in Cork having tea rather intimately and in consequence there are all sorts of rumours. Now it doesn't seem fair to a young girl, at the beginning of life, having her name coupled."

"I should have thought," said Gerald rather stiffly, "anyone could see Miss Thompson was entirely straight. And as for Armstrong- They are engaged, as a matter of fact."

"Oh, nonsense," said Lady Naylor pleasantly. "Oh yes," he nodded; then with his rather engaging childishness looked at her under his lashes. "But they don't want-"

"To begin with, the Thompsons would never hear of it. And they would be quite right. Of course, poor Livvy is motherless-"

"But many people are," said Gerald, faintly aggressive. "Lois is."

"Oh, naturally we should never consider a marriage like that for Lois. The point would not even arise. But even for Livvy- And then think of the young man's career: these early marriages ruin careers, and engagements are nearly as bad. I know Colonel Boatley feels- No, what you should do, I think, is: have a straight sensible talk with your friend Mr. Armstrong. I know how much you young men will take from each other. I think as a friend you should say to him-"

"But look here-" began Gerald and paused. "Look here, Lady Naylor-" He stopped dead and looked round the room which was darker since she had come in: the afternoon was clouding over. He was disengaging himself with some anguish of illusions he had brought here, which, during the first minute or so of their talk, had been fortified. When they came to Surrey, he had thought she was hoping to meet his mother. Crossing his legs, he rubbed the side of one shoe on the other with a slight creak at which she, betraying her tensity, started. Standing with lowered eyes, with an air of heaviness and confusion, he noted this movement, a tremor of light round the edge of her boa. With unusual calmness and virility he said: "As a matter of fact, I love Lois."

"Oh yes. But I'm afraid, you know, that she doesn't love you," said the aunt equably.

He overruled this without comment, simply by maintaining his att.i.tude. For all his physical lightness and vigour there was a quality in him she would describe as stodginess. "Then I gather she's told you we-"

"Oh, she's naturally pleased that you like her. And at her age, with her temperament, of course it is nice to love anyone."

"But you've just said she doesn't-"