“Then we saw the native crawling out from the darkness of the bushes, most impenetrable darkness, into a patch of moonlight. He had a knife between his teeth. It was a ticklish moment. My friend Murphy whispered, ‘Don’t fire!’ We prepared—” Hanging breathlessly on his own words, Mr. Lee-Mittison looked immensely round at them. Their attention had again been distracted. Only Violet Bransome, now uniquely faithful, echoed:
“You prepared—And then—?”
“I will wait,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison, staring straight before him, “until the young ladies over there have finished talking.”
“Oh, thanks most awfully,” Victor was saying, his voice heard bleakly in the silence. Sydney, saying “Bounder!” in a soft aside beneath her breath, handed him across her matches. “And, oh, look here,” Victor added, “do go on and all that. It sounds thrilling. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“A story interrupted half-way through can hardly be of interest. Pray don’t let us keep you from your walk.” Mr. Lee-Mittison glared; none of the party felt comfortable.
Victor, who was not really such a bad young man, and who had been simply dominated by the most developed of his instincts, heaved himself off the ground and declared himself ready to depart again. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I simply came to say that if any of you wanted to wash your hands and faces after eating oranges, I’ve found a tank down there among those gardens, quite clean, not a bit slimy and with no frogs.”
“We have handkerchiefs, Mr. Ammering,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison.
“Have I got orange on my face or anything?” asked Veronica, and she turned her face up to Victor suddenly, away from the others, so that they could only guess by his expression what he saw there.
“You have,” said he. “You’ve got orange right up round your ears. And you’ve got little bits of egg and stuff along your mouth.”
“We have handkerchiefs,” repeated Mrs. Lee-Mittison.
“I’ll wash,” declared Veronica, and suddenly, incredibly, outrageously she gripped Victor’s hand, hoisted herself up by it and walked away with Victor down the hill. She left a gap across which the others looked at one another, and which they felt unable to draw up and fill. Mrs. Lee-Mittison wished that they would all go away now, for a moment; she wanted to move up closer and sit next to Herbert. There was an uncertain silence. Then James Milton, who had been subject all his life to a kind of idiocy of nervousness, burst out laughing. The horrid sound which he could not contain appalled him, till at last to cover it he said to Mrs. Lee-Mittison, “Youth calls to youth, doesn’t it?” She replied, “I’m afraid I do not understand you.” They all stared, Sydney with such contempt that her face remained imprinted burningly upon his memory. Presently, intending no offence but entirely forgetting that the story was to be continued, she also got up and strolled round the hill. She wanted to enjoy her own thoughts, which seemed all day to have been ceaselessly interrupted.
Veronica and Victor scrambled very companionably down towards the tank. The descent was in places almost precipitous; they had to lower themselves from tuft to tuft of grass. Once, coming to an empty slope, they lay and rolled down it; at another point they sat and slid. When trees interposed, they swung themselves joyously, like young apes, from trunk to trunk. Every now and then they reappeared into sight of those above, who, never ceasing to be aware of them, watched with covert but passionate interest. Their indifference, their recklessness, stirred something in the beholders, either envy or anger. At last, almost simultaneously, they leapt, with a dual cry just audible to their friends, into the soft tilled earth of a peasant’s garden. The little terrace projected like a shelf, like an apron-stage, over the depths of the valley. Here was Victor’s tank, round which, forgetting to wash, they soon began a most delectable water-battle.
“Look,” cried one of the Bransomes irrepressibly, “they’re splashing each other with water.” The rest remained perfectly blank; Mrs. Lee-Mittison knitted.
Veronica paused, and did her reputation the credit of a long, inquiring, guarded upward glance, which the steepness of the ground, the long grass, and the closeness of the trees at a point combined to baffie. One’s own visibility is impossible to calculate. Then she scooped something out of the tank and put it down Victor’s neck. He seized her wrist and doubled it backwards. She writhed, and with a voluminous and graceful movement kicked him. As in a dance he whirled her round him suddenly and kissed her ear and cheek. She hesitated, balanced against him, then appearing reconciled to his change of tactics, flung her head back and allowed him to continue. He must have kissed her lips then for the first time; their stillness for some moments was profound.
Sydney’s imagination had failed her; she found herself disappointed in her own society and was coming back slowly to rejoin the others. To her, looking down unawares, the couple gesticulating soundlessly below her in the sunshine appeared as in some perfect piece of cinema-acting, emotion represented without emotion. Then she wondered by what roads now unknown to her she might arrive at this: to be seen swinging back against a man’s shoulder in that abandon of Veronica’s. She wondered whether at such a moment she would be cut off from herself, as by her other emotions. She watched the miniature unreal Veronica toss back her hair and walk away. At Victor she forgot to look again; she had not thought of him.
She descended upon the others, who seemed to be stupefied by something and to be at the same time scrutinizing one another and avoiding each other’s scrutiny. Then with a burst of talking they all came alive again and began clearing up the lunch, collecting pieces of paper which had strayed away and sweeping up orange peel and egg-shells from among the grass. Eileen Lawrence whistled, Mr. Lee-Mittison sang. He was singing angrily a song that nobody knew. His wife was everywhere; she thanked the girls profusely as they heaped the debris into her basket. James Milton offered cigarettes about spasmodically. His cheeks burned. He kept striking matches, burning his fingers with them and throwing the matches away again with exclamations of unnecessary violence. He had never seen a man and woman kiss before and was battering in a kind of despair against the glass wall that divided him from experience. He was thankful, with a tinge of regret, that Sydney had not been among them; then he turned and saw her behind him, talking to Eileen Lawrence. He could not tell how long she had been there. Sydney was saying, “Do you mean to tell Veronica?” Eileen surprised him by saying, “Not unless she asks me—what’s the good?”
To the Lee-Mittisons, married, of an older generation, it was only possible for their guests to attribute one opinion. “Shocked!” they all assured themselves and instinctively moved away. James Milton found himself between two of the girls and walked with them along the side of the hill, the others distributed themselves ahead of him. He realized that the party had been divided against itself transversely into generations rather than vertically into sexes, and he was flattered to find himself accepted in this camp. They all moved off together, talking vaguely about anemones, the village and the view.
Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Mittison remained alone. She did not look at her husband, as she was afraid she might look at him stupidly, sympathetically, and knew that this would annoy him. After a pause, through which her needles clicked, she said: “Well, I think it’s going off well, don’t you? They all seem to be happy.”
He was walking restlessly round a small circle in which he seemed to be enclosed. His thumbs were tucked beneath the lapels of his coat and he stared round him critically at the expanse of day to be seen from the top of the hill. To left and right the sky sagged down to lower horizons.
“Happy? I dare say. I guaranteed to keep you thoroughly happy.”
“They’re dear girls. They’ll be coming back soon, won’t they?”
“Of course,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison, still unable to catch sight of any of his party, whom the hills seemed to have devoured. “I had suggested their going off on their own for a bit.”
“Excellent.”
“It is nice to be alone a little. Oh, Herbert, sit down on the mackintosh—wait, I’ll bring it over to you.”
“The hills are a bit lonely—I don’t quite like them going away so far.”
“Oh, they’ll be quite all right together—English girls. What a long bright day! We are always lucky in our weather.”
They were sitting side by side on the grass like a young couple, and for a moment she thought he might be going to pat her hand. She stopped knitting and waited, then, after a glance at his profile, quietly continued. She was saying to herself, “Oh, my dear Herbert, my poor Herbert!” and her mind grew dark with resentment against the others. If one might only, in intimation of what one felt, have pressed up ever so gently against his arm. But he had always to be considered successful; his head, though frequently bloody, might never be admittedly bowed. “Very lucky,” she repeated, “in our weather.”
“Halloo!” he shouted all at once, his hands, like a Triton’s, making a cave round his mouth. “Halloo-alloo-alloo-alloo!” They listened and heard only an echo at the end of the valley. He shouted again; still nobody answered.
“I’m a bit disappointed in Milton,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison. “I didn’t take him for that sort of fellow. I don’t think I’ll ask him to come with us again.”
“Perhaps better not,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison.
7
Out of Order
The lift was out of order. Mrs. Hillier, who was in a hurry, had for some time been pushing the third-floor button unavailingly: the lift did not even tremble. She then pushed the second- and fourth-floor buttons as an experiment, but to this also there was no response. She slid back the iron gates again and stepped out into the lounge so suddenly and so angrily that Miss Fitzgerald, who had been watching sympathetically, was quite frightened.
“The lift is out of order,” she said tersely. “Where can the concierge be?”
“He is always out at this hour. They say he has a wife in the town.”
“I do not see why we should be prevented from going to our rooms because the concierge happens to be married.”
“Anyhow, he is no good with the lift. They ought to keep a boy who thoroughly understands it.”
“He would have an attachment, too,” said Mrs. Hillier, who was really a cheerful and humorous person. With renewed determination she got back into the lift, and Miss Fitzgerald, getting in also for company, sat down beside her on the narrow seat. This was the most comfortable, intimate and exclusive corner of the Hotel and Miss Fitzgerald dreamily desired it. It was the kind of place in which one could have talked. They pushed each button successively, and even struck chords of two or three at a time. A wire twanged somewhere above and a chain rattled, but one did not move an inch.
“At any rate,” said Miss Fitzgerald, “it is better than to be taken half-way up and then stuck between two of the floors. My friend told me she once saw that happen to some ladies in a hotel at Switzerland. They were there for more than half an hour with their feet just visible below the ceiling of the lounge. The hotel was full of foreigners and it was most unpleasant.”
“Dreadful,” said the Anglo-Indian lady. She at all events could congratulate herself on her feet. “Oh!” she cried, peering bird-like through the bars of the gate, “can’t some of you help us?”
Colonel Duperrier and a Mr. Miller had risen and were approaching politely from different corners of the lounge. The ladies got out of the lift and the gentlemen, getting in, assured themselves that there was really something very wrong indeed.
“I cannot see,” said Mrs. Hillier mutinously, “why I should have to do without my scissors.”
Colonel Duperrier felt very sorry for her, she seemed to be beating her wings. “Couldn’t I—?” he began.
“Oh no, thank you.” The scissors were in her bedroom, as they both knew. One was drawn up from here out of ken, feet last, into the region of intimacies. “And I cannot see why they should expect one to walk up. I shan’t,” said Mrs. Hillier, flinging her gauntlet, to applause, in the face of the Management.
“I can’t see why they should,” agreed Miss Fitzgerald, while Mr. Miller, sighing over this insoluble enigma, returned slowly to his patience-board. Colonel Duperrier rang twice for the Management, then looked into the dining-room to see whether the head waiter were there and could be asked to do anything. At three o’clock in the afternoon the Management and the personnel seemed to be equally inaccessible. They were perhaps asleep, like many of the visitors.
Sleep, the thin uneasy sleep of daylight, had today been the refuge of many, for cold rain fell ceaselessly past the windows. It was a transparent rain without mist, like summer rain in England, through which trees and buildings for a great distance could be seen distinctly in a Japanese conventionality and flatness. Leaves and long palm-fronds shone and trickled. Curtained in this pale gloom, the Hotel seemed permeated by a sense of the rain’s despairing persistency, against which the reasonable conviction of visitors that the sun, bound by contract with the locality, must soon appear again, put up cold walls around an inward emptiness. In many rooms the tick of travelling clocks, the stutter of rain along the balconies, was being listened to attentively.
Mrs. Hillier snuggled up her woolly wrap round her ears, nodded to Colonel Duperrier and went back into the drawing-room. She seemed, from the desolation, dusk and excludedness of the lounge, to return at least into something. As she opened and shut the glass doors he heard a kind of gasp of feminine conversation, and saw his wife and many other ladies sitting round in a semi-circle with a firelight on their knees. There was one open fireplace in the Hotel and it was in the drawing-room. She must have told them at once that the lift was out of order, for there arose staccato indignation which the door shut off from him. The lounge with its grouped furniture was of an isolating vastness. A man, from here unrecognizable, sat leaning his back against one radiator; Mr. Miller with his patience-board had drawn up as close as possible to another. One longed for the disorder of firelight among the orderly shadows. One missed one’s dog. One missed the tug of association and habit towards one chair: there were too many, groves of chairs through which Colonel Duperrier wandered sadly. He could not even remember where he had been sitting before.
Miss Fitzgerald, standing on tiptoe, peeped over the lace blind through the glass of the drawing-room doors, sighed and shook her head. The room presented a too unbroken front of matronhood. She was expressing her feelings in dumb show for the benefit of nobody in particular, as is the habit of lonely, self-conscious women. She observed, still to nobody in particular, “Well, I suppose if piggy won’t get over the stile, I’ll have to walk.”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Colonel Duperrier.
“Oh, nothing,” said Miss Fitzgerald, startled, and began her painful ascent. Her room was on the highest floor. She disappeared.
A girl with fair hair proved on closer inspection to be one of the Lawrences. She was hunched over a writing-table, trying to write a letter with a Hotel pen that screeched and staggered. She leant on her elbows, tilting her chair up. At an impatient movement from her, two or three sheets of letter-paper, thinly covered, fluttered to the ground. “Oh, Lord!” she exclaimed, and dived after them.
“Let me!” said Colonel Duperrier, hurrying across the lounge.
“Got it, thanks,” replied Joan Lawrence, once more arranging the sheets round her elbow so that the slightest movement must again disturb them. Her writing was enormous, and watching her absently he could not help seeing “the very limit,” “macaroni” and “torn it.” He looked quickly away.
She twirled her pen and stared at the nib resignedly. “Pen’s the limit.”
“It looks it. You might find a better one in the drawing-room.”
“Oh, come,” said he, “you’ve never turned your back on don or devil! Go in and look for a pen. They won’t eat you.”
“If you were a kind man, you would.”
“Look here, take my Onoto.”
“Oh no, thanks. Nothing but grief and bitterness comes of borrowing other people’s Onotos. Do go and get me that pen. I dare you…!” She drew down her upper lip and stared at him with solemnity. Both liking each other better than ever, they laughed again. He was a tall brown man with long legs, a little younger than the Lawrences’ father. His hair was going white round the temples; strictly speaking, it was pepper and salt. He was one of their finest tennis players, and waltzed beautifully in the old-fashioned manner, holding one gingerly. His wife was the limit; she was one of the drawing-room set.
“Go on, I dare you to!” repeated Joan.
He stood a moment longer, tugging his short moustache, then braced himself, magnificently squaring his shoulders. “Oh, very well,” said he. He hesitated in front of the lace-hung doors, whose appearance seemed to appal him.
The Hotel Page 6
