The Last September Part 7

She opened a sandalwood box and looked in: three blue beads and a receipt of her own from Switzers: three-and-eleven for yellow velvet pansies, worn at a dance and spoilt. "It's not even as though we were at a dance," she added.

"Lois, I've been thinking about you all night, up in the mountains-right up there when you were asleep. You were wonderful."

"Haven't you been to bed at all?"

"No, you know I-"

"Oh, Gerald-Oh ... darling- But you did have breakfast?"

The gong sounded: great bra.s.s b.a.l.l.s went bouncing about the empty rooms. The parlourmaid looked in perfunctorily. "Lunch?" said Gerald to Lois.

"No one is in-and I don't suppose lunch is even ready. Gerald, did you have breakfast?"

"An enormous breakfast at Ballydarra- What were you saying, Lois; what did you call me then ... before the gong?"

But now she flushed and answered: "I'm sopping wet; I'm steaming, I smell like a dog. I should have thought you would want me to go and change. I should have thought you'd be-protecting."

"You know I'd die for you."

They looked at each other. The words had a solemn echo, as though among high dark arches in a church where they were standing and being married. She thought of death and glanced at his body, quick, lovely, present and yet destructible. Something pa.s.sed sensation and touched her consciousness with a kind of weight and warmth; she glimpsed a quiet beyond experience, as though for many nights he had been sleeping beside her.

"What did I say-then? Say it."

" 'Darling.' ..."

But she turned away from some approach in his look.

Lady Naylor and Mrs. Montmorency pa.s.sed, in profile, under the west windows, pressed very close together under a green en-tout-cas discussing the vice-regency of the Aberdeens. Simultaneously Mr. Montmorency and Miss Norton were heard coming up the steps rather breathlessly, talking about money. They must both have been conscious of being a little vulgar, a little English, for as Sir Richard rattled open the gla.s.s door and went out to meet them, they broke off flatly.

"You must have got very wet," said Sir Richard. "Marda, about that suitcase of yours. I have been thinking it over-"

"Sir Richard, I can't bear you to-"

"My dear girl, a suitcase is a suitcase- I was just saying to Marda, Myra, that I have been thinking over that suitcase of hers-"

"We had better have lunch at once," said Lady Naylor imperatively.

"Miss Norton will have to change."

"Hugo, how could you let her get so wet!"

"My dear, I am not an umbrella."

"Marda, how could you go out without a mackintosh!"

In the drawing-room, Gerald walked to a window and stared at the rain in perplexity, stroking the back of his head, looking rather an ordinary kind of subaltern. Lois looked at herself in a mirror, then went out to the hall to tell them about Gerald. Everyone stared, she put up a hand to her face. "Mr. Lesworth has come to lunch," she said deprecatingly. "You told him he could whenever he wanted so I suppose he thought he might."

"Of course," said Lady Naylor. "I suppose you have told Sarah?"

"Well, I don't know where to find her, she is always dressing."

"Of course she is not always dressing; should I keep a parlourmaid who was? She only changes once a day, but you always go and look for her at the wrong times. Where is Mr. Lesworth?"

"In the drawing-room."

"How extraordinary! Wouldn't he rather be in the library? Richard, why didn't you ask Mr. Lesworth into the library? I expect now he had better wash."

Lois went upstairs: Marda came up after her and took her arm; Lois started. She could not think of anything to say, Marda was not even trying; they went up silently. "Some time," Lois said as they parted, "can I show you my drawings? They're fearfully bad."

"Come up to my room after tea."

Throughout luncheon, Sir Richard talked to Gerald about the South African War and the Cork Militia. He liked the young fellow. Laurence talked to Marda about whaling, Lady Naylor and Francie continued the Aberdeens, Lois tried to explain to Hugo about Augustus John. The rain stopped, they agreed that it had been only a shower. Lois and Gerald were side by side but did not have to speak, they simply pa.s.sed things. The side of her next to Gerald felt numb.

"Raspberries?" she said towards the end of the meal, constrainedly.

"Please." He was not nervous at all. Queer, she confusedly thought, how men throw off action without a quiver at severance from the self that goes into it. They remain complete, the action hangs in the air of the place, above the gra.s.s or furniture, crystallising in memory, eternal, ma.s.sive and edged to the touch of thought as, to the bodily touch, a grand piano. She herself felt bound to all she had done emotionally. But his kissing of her, his attack, were no longer part of him. He concentrated upon his raspberries, crushing them, his cream with carmine beautifully folding through, his flushing sugar. She watched the work on his plate. "Magnificent," he said to Sir Richard, agreeing about the Cork Militia.

Going out through the hall, Laurence offered Gerald a cigarette. "American-extra mild."

"Thanks-I-"

"How is your jazz band?"

"Very little practising; not much time, you see."

"Do tell me: did you kill anybody?"

"How much?" said Gerald, startled.

"Anybody last night?"

"Oh, good Lord, no!"

"Isn't that why you go out?"

"We were looking for arms, really. And at night you find the most surprising people at home. We were after a fellow called Peter Connor: we got him."

"Fight?" said Laurence eagerly.

"He was at home, in bed. These blighters think we are greater fools than we are."

"Very cynical of him-Oh, I say, Uncle Richard, Lesworth has captured Peter Connor."

"I'm sorry to hear that," said Sir Richard, flushing severely. "His mother is dying. However, I suppose you must do your duty. We must remember to send up now and inquire for Mrs. Michael Connor. We'll send some grapes. The poor woman-it seems too bad." He went off, sighing, into the library.

Gerald was horrified. His duty, so bright and abstract, had come suddenly under the shadowy claw of the personal. "I had no idea," he exclaimed to Laurence, "these people were friends of yours."

"Can't be helped," said Laurence. "I daresay he was a dirty dog-if you hate that cigarette, Lesworth, have one of your own. It seems a long time since we have seen you. How is this war of yours really going? Do you realise I know nothing-this might all just as well be going on in the Balkans. I sometimes rather wish that I were a gunman. There are one or two things I should like to ask-but don't let me keep you if you want to talk to anyone else."

"Rather not."

The ladies were in the drawing-room laughing intimately, putting across the open door a barrier of exclusion. Laurence and Gerald wandered about the hall, taking note of each other indirectly and amicably. Laurence was by three years the younger but imposed his own impression of seniority. Light hair tumbling, eyes startled open and limp grey flannels, he looked to Gerald as though he had slept through the morning. While Gerald circled, the grey glove lay on the table, its fingers crisped in derision. Outside, in an irresponsible burst of sunshine, the wet fields had a metallic brightness. Gerald thought of Lois's shoulders, their rounded squareness, the feel of wet frieze under his grip. He was flattered but uneasy under Laurence's interest, which had indeed, for the simple, the awkward menace of someone preparing to cast a net. He pursed his lips to a whistle and shrugged slightly.

"For instance: what do you, personally, think about all this?"

"Well, my opinion is-"

"Oh, but I don't want your opinion, I want your point of view."

"Well, the situation's rotten. But right is right."

"Why?"

"Well ... from the point of view of civilisation. Also you see they don't fight clean."

"Oh, there's no public school spirit in Ireland. But do tell me-what do you mean by the point of view of civilisation?"

"Oh-ours."

Laurence smiled his appreciation: the conviction, stated without arrogance, had a ring of integrity. Gerald, embarra.s.sed by this benevolence, had recourse again to the back of his head, so gratifyingly polished. "If you come to think," he explained, "I mean, looking back on history-not that I'm intellectual-we do seem the only people."

"Difficulty being to make them see it?"

"-And that we are giving them what they really want ... Though of course the more one thinks of it all, the smaller, personally, it makes one feel."

"I don't feel small in that way. But I'm not English-"

"Oh, no-I beg your pardon."

"-Thank G.o.d!"

"Don't understand?"

"G.o.d may. Shall we look for the others?"

Gerald, shocked, preceded Laurence into the drawing-room. Their conversation, torn off rough at this edge, seemed doomed from its very nature to incompletion. Gerald would have wished to explain that no one could have a sounder respect than himself and his country for the whole principle of nationality, and that it was with some awareness of misdirection, even of paradox, that he was out here to hunt and shoot the Irish. His alertness was blunted, while he approached the ladies, by a slight stupor of effort; he was groping for something Napoleon had once said, something remarkably neat and apposite that Gerald had once copied into a pocket-book. Laurence had not hoped to explain, but had wished that Gerald could infer, that there was a contrariety in the notions they each had of this thing civilisation. As a rather perplexing system of niceties, Laurence saw it, an exact and delicate interrelation of stresses between being and being, like crossing arches; an unemotioned kindness withering to a.s.sertion selfish or racial; silence cold with a comprehension in which the explaining clamour died away.

He foresaw it the end of art, of desire, as it would be the end of battle, but it was to this end, this faceless but beautiful negation that he had lifted a gla.s.s inwardly while he had said, "Thank G.o.d!"

Gerald knew that no one who spoke of G.o.d in that family way could have any belief. He had heard that Oxford was full of Socialism, of a wrongness that was the outcome of too much thinking, and in the light of this it did appear to him that Laurence's conversation had been decided by Sinn Fein. But he liked and respected Lois's cousin, who made a man of one by that naive curiosity as to bloodshed-curiosity to which Gerald had been a stranger since the days of the Boys' Own Paper spread on the nursery floor-and who could not have looked so consistently bored at parties if he had not been, as they all said, very intellectual.

Lois, watching Gerald approach with an absence of smile that was almost a shadow, was certain she must have done him injustice. His constraint (the pursuit of Napoleon) had a rather grave beauty. Their kiss under this high ceiling must be present and palpable to him also. Aware of some growth of manliness in him, she wanted the feel of his lips again, to capture what she had missed before. And a quick glance of Marda's from one to the other sealed their mood with a recognition.

"Can't we go out?" she said generally, for Gerald to take up.

"It will rain again in a minute," said Lady Naylor glancing cynically at the weather. And indeed a few drops already sparkled against the sunshine. "Also I particularly want to talk to Mr. Lesworth. When he comes he is always playing tennis, or I forget. But now there are some things I really want to ask him ... I really do want his point of view. ..." Gerald sighed.

She sat down in a faded bowery chair, settling herself with a rustle of expectation. Francie, attracted, trailed her skirts and her fancywork down the sofa; Marda, fitting a new cigarette in her holder, leaned over the back. From the constellation of eager faces Lois wandered away. The three were no more her enemies than were her own irresolution or the bright vicious raindrops blotting the pane. Yet their unforeseen combination defeated her finally. She yawned at the outlook.

"Lois, don't yawn," said her aunt. "Now I want to know, Mr. Lesworth, what Colonel Boatley really thinks about reprisals. Of course it will go no further, though you mustn't think I want you to be indiscreet-Laurence, just shut the door."

Laurence shut himself out. And Gerald, sitting down with a sigh, said that of course it was all rather a problem. He caught Marda's eye, dark and bright with amus.e.m.e.nt, and read there the doom of his afternoon.

"Yes? Yes? Yes? This is so interesting-you were asking me, weren't you, Francie, and I said we would ask Mr. Lesworth-Marda, do listen, dear, never mind, shake your ash on the carpet, you mustn't miss this. Because these days when so much nonsense is talked on both sides I do feel one owes it to speak on some good authority-unless Mr. Lesworth would rather we didn't. Now please go on!"

And Gerald, half hypnotised, consciously barren and not in his colonel's confidence, repeated to them what he had read in the Morning Post. As Lady Naylor said at the time, no one would dream of taking the Morning Post seriously, it was so anti-Irish, but an opinion on it from anyone so much "in things" as Mr. Lesworth was well worth hearing. And as she said afterwards, it was extraordinary how no amount of experience shook these young Englishmen up. Their minds remained cutting-books.

CHAPTER FOUR.

AN armoured car called for Gerald at four o'clock and he was driven away through the rain. Towards the end of the afternoon he had become very dull, a kind of fog came over his personality; he confessed he was sleepy. Lady Naylor remarked what a pity it was he could not stay for his tea, that would have freshened him up again. There was still so much that she wanted to know. The drawing-room became to Gerald fantastic and thin like an ice-palace and, reflected backwards and forwards in tall mirrors, seemed like a chain of galleries at Versailles down which numbing with admiration he had to advance wearily. He did not see Lois alone any more. She kept coming in, looking round vaguely, then going upstairs again. Upstairs, he could hear her playing the gramophone. She came out to the steps with Marda to see him off, they stood with arms linked brushing the rain from their hair. The last they saw of him was a putteed leg being drawn in carefully. Something steel slid to; they waved, but never a hand came out. The machine seemed already to be digesting. He was swept from them with martial impersonality.

At half-past five Lois went to the top of the house with her drawing-books, paused for confidence, tickled a panel of Marda's door. Coming into the changed and vivid room, she tipped her drawing-books disengagedly on to a window-seat. Marda sat on the writing-table, engaged in manicure. Little pots, pads and bottles paraded; a chamois leather was spread on her knee. A sweet smell of varnish, like pear-drops, was in the air.

"The most I can do," said Lois, intent, "is to keep mine clean."

"Quite enough. It's just this habit of making up every part of one that's exposed at all-Lois, have a cigarette?"

"Oh ... thanks. You don't mind my coming?"

"My dear, why?"

"What lovely brushes! What a ... what an uncommon photograph frame!"

"Yes, that's Leslie Lawe."

"Oh? Oh yes," Lois paused uncertainly. "How good-looking! Do, do you know him well?"

"Very. We're engaged."

"Oh, how lovely!" Lois had a shock of flatness.

"Oh yes. Didn't you know?"

"Well, I thought you probably would be. Shall you live in London?"

"I suppose we shall; I suppose we shall have to."

"Oh, how lovely!"

Marda laughed and began s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g on the lids of her little pots. In the light of her brilliant life, her deftness seemed to Lois inimitable. One would have had to have lived twenty-nine years as fast, as surely and wildly, to screw pink celluloid caps on to small white pots with just that lightness of finger-tip, just that degree of amus.e.m.e.nt, just that detachment in smile and absorption in att.i.tude. And the pink smell of nail-varnish, dresses trickling over a chair, flash of swinging shoe-buckle, cloud of powder over the gla.s.s, the very room with its level stare on the tree-tops, took on awareness, smiled with secrecy, had the polish and depth of experience. The very birds on the frieze flew round in cognizant agitation.

"What a lovely dress!" said Lois, picking up the end of a red sleeve, so that she seemed to be standing hand in hand with the dress.