“I never knew this was your sort of morning. We might often have come here.”
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Kerr, “that I hardly liked to suggest it. I could never, of course, suggest it to Ronald…Oh, vermouth? You are ascetic! I should like some chocolate. Will you drink very slowly, then we shan’t have to go?”
“Oh! But weren’t we—?”
“But where is there to go? And I mean, why should we? But of course, my dear, I will go anywhere. This is really your morning. If I didn’t spoil you, you would never come near me now. I don’t know what you’ve been doing; I never see you—Oh, look, there’s Veronica Lawrence with that dreadful young man. What unnatural tastes she’s got; why doesn’t she run after Ronald?”
“It would be very discouraging.”
“I don’t see why it should be; Ronald’s rather susceptible.” Mrs. Kerr, her folded hands on the table, sat looking sideways, absorbed. “He is looking at her with the most awful expression, with cream on his chin. Isn’t passion debasing? Tell me, Sydney, are that couple engaged?”
“Oh, probably.” Sydney looked conscious.
“Oh, does she tell you these things?” asked Mrs. Kerr curiously. “What a queer friendship! Does she show how tremendously sorry she is for you, or is she too deep? What does she say about me? It would amuse me to know.”
“But why should we discuss you?”
“I can’t think. But you must talk personalities, surely…Isn’t she really rather a common little thing?”
“She rather attracts me.”
“Oh, if she only attracts you…It matters much more whom she likes. Will you look for a plate and choose us both some pâtisserie—nothing too sweet?” Sydney with a dazzled blank feeling got up indecisively. “You know what I like—you’ve an instinct.” Mrs. Kerr, looking up for a moment, let her general vague smile quickly be personal, and gave Sydney a glimpse of her old mood, fleetingly, yet so that to turn away was an agony. “Do go, won’t you?” she urged, with such a promise implicit that the coming back would be memorable that Sydney left forthwith, slipping between the chair-backs to the shop door and the crowded counter.
Here, moving up and down thoughtfully, she found herself elbow to elbow with Victor, who, fork in one hand and plate in the other, was also selecting, and in a practised manner spearing, pâtisserie.
“Oh, hullo!” said he as she hesitated. “Can I help you in any way? I know all these pretty well. Don’t go for the coffee kind, they look first-rate but they’re hollow. Do you mind if I take the last green one? Veronica’s fearfully keen on them. We come here a lot.”
“So Veronica told me.”
“Yes, by jove, she did, didn’t she?” said Victor, remembering. “I say, look here, don’t wish me the usual—I feel perfectly rotten.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Sydney. Her sympathy necessarily lacked directness, because Victor was the sort of young man who continues to move about uneasily while talking and to talk for a long time without looking straight at one.
“Still, one’s only young once,” remarked Victor, and roamed away down the counter. Later on, she followed him out through the door, which he blocked for her by a moment’s misgivings as to the ultimate excellence of his choice.
Mrs. Kerr had discovered herself back to back with a friend and had turned to converse with her. The friend was animated, Mrs. Kerr sympathetic. Sydney stood a moment to watch them.
“Delicious!” exclaimed the friend, a dark lady from another hotel, whose party, a broken-up circle, sat listening all at a loss and turned now and then a long stare of timid resentment on the brilliant intruder.
“Absolutely delicious!” agreed Mrs. Kerr; then, catching sight of Sydney, broke off, still laughing, and faced round once more to her table. “You’ve been ages, my darling,” she cried. “Have you brought the whole shop?”
Sydney put down her plate on the table, showed with a gesture what exactly she had brought and silently began sipping her vermouth. “That ‘darling’ must have been Ronald,” she thought; “what a habit of mind he is!…Do relations become a habit?” she asked. “I have so few.”
“I dare say they might,” said Mrs. Kerr, very kind but abstracted. “What a pity you’ve got so few”…she sampled the pâtisserie. “I mean after all, home life—Why don’t you marry, Sydney?”
“I thought we’d been into all that.”
“Yes, but it does worry me rather,” said Mrs. Kerr, and turned upon her friend’s downcast pallor a profound, limpid, yet prettily conventional stare.
A sharp movement of Sydney’s foot shook the table, the china leaped on the tin. “Well, if you’ll keep Ronald a year or two—”
“Sydney!” exclaimed Mrs. Kerr in a low voice, paused a moment and put down her fork. “Don’t be so—so ugly! It’s like—I don’t know what it’s like; it’s not like you. I wish you hadn’t made these common friends; I wish there’d been more girls of your own sort. When the very essence of you is delicacy and fineness and, well, breeding, this horrible veneer that you’ve affected lately seems so…well, it may be what you’d call ‘in a grim kind of way funny,’ but—”
“This seems in a grim kind of way funny,” said Sydney. “It’s like being given tea by an Aunt at the Zoo.”
“I only wish you had been taken more to the Zoo! It seems from the way you sometimes talk that your friends must be common in the worst kind of way…exotic! You’ve distressed even Ronald, though he is as a rule neither observant nor critical; he said you were so unnatural, and though at the time I was angry with him, I must say that when you talk in that tone I should find you difficult to defend to anybody.”
“I’m sorry Ronald can’t like me.”
“Oh, I think that’s putting it too strongly,” Mrs. Kerr said gently. “Perhaps I have put everything too strongly—Sydney darling, don’t sit there in that queer stiff way as though you had swallowed something: people will notice…You know how reprehensible I am, how I do like my friends to be pleasant. I would never have said anything if you hadn’t shown your teeth at me; I wouldn’t for worlds have spoilt our morning. But we won’t let it, will we?…Look, eat one of those little flaky things you’ve brought, they look delicious.”
Sydney, trying to get down a mouthful of pastry that became like sawdust, had a sense of being widely yet concentratedly glared at, though whether she had really attracted attention or this were merely the sun striking down through the awning she did not dare to determine. Certainly the conversations around had subsided, and the general turning away of eyes from their table, the fixed stares—across the street or back into the shop or down on to plates—of which, with a glance round, she assured herself, were elaborate enough to be studied. Little staccato remarks here and there seemed to prick up through a tensity. She suspected that Mrs. Kerr, by her unusually bland expression of basking in reverie, the unconcern of her movements and her solicitude that Sydney should finish her pastry, must be “passing off” something. Sydney in an effort to further this continued to eat pastry quickly, in spite of a frightened feeling each time that she might not be able to swallow. She could not help a shaken kind of exaltedness such as a child feels when it has upset a table of china.
Presently she let herself fall back on an outside consciousness of their both being well-dressed, distinguished-looking and leisurely, and thought how plainly this must appear from the other side of the street and how, if she were someone else, she would stand on the pavement and look at them. She would admire their graceful air of being friends, of being completed by one another, and go away distracted by a memory of them both sitting there in the temperate shade of the awning. “I think,” she said conversationally, affected by the thought of this admiration, “that this is a very good way of filling up a morning abroad.”
“I think so…shall we look for carnations? Shall I buy some for you?”
“Shall I
buy some for Ronald?” Sydney looked into Mrs. Kerr’s face with a smile, but impersonally, as though it were a picture. Mrs. Kerr seemed to meet something hard in her eyes, for she raised an eyebrow infinitesimally.
“He would love that, it would be quite new to him. I don’t think people like to give him things usually. He doesn’t, I dare say, give the impression of being in any sense very receptive. Poor Ronald, I wish he could learn to be likeable. I thought once that you might have done something for him, but I don’t see now that you very well can.”
This little dead maternal design she laid out before Sydney with naivety and appeared to consider forlornly but with beautiful resignation. Sydney, startled by its appearance, sat speechless and looked at her friend, whose unreproachfulness quietly accused her. “I know,” said Mrs. Kerr, apparently going off at a tangent and looking down so that there was nothing but the movement of her eyelids and the modulations of her light voice to show or give point to what she was saying, “that I haven’t professed to believe a word of all you have, both of you, so expansively and delightfully told me about life. I haven’t a grasp of abstractions, and life, when you mean the theory of living, is an abstraction, surely. You know I’ve been flippant and difficult, but at least I did try to be honest—I didn’t believe. But, my dear, I have so intensely wanted to: I could have prayed (if ever one did) for either of you to justify yourselves, or, best of all, both of you. I’ve never professed that anything could transcend the conventions; you have. Well, you’ve insisted passionately that an understanding is possible between a young man and young woman that can remain quite un-bothered, without electricity or diffidence. Ronald insisted, too. When I’ve said ‘Well then?’ at intervals, you’ve both waved your arms and declared that you couldn’t produce at the moment the right kind of person to demonstrate with. Well, here you both are, and I’m waiting. Has it been too matter-of-fact of me? Possibilities burgeoned, and I’m here waiting for the most idyllic relationship to spring into flower. Can you wonder I’m disappointed and cynical—it’s been a poor kind of triumph—at having had to watch you two resolving yourselves into just such an ordinary state of suspicion and watchfulness and antipathy as might precede the most normal attraction in which the heart of a biologist could rejoice?” She laughed deprecatingly; the whole idea of such attraction seemed to be distasteful to her. “I’ve talked a long time,” she said, “rather confusedly, and had to use several words that I rather dislike. What I might have asked shortly—since it’s all really that I wanted to know—is: Why ever can’t you and Ronald be friends?”
Mrs. Kerr’s hand, that lay with casually spread-out fingers under Sydney’s eyes along the edge of the table, had some vague connection with her personality, but neither seemed to have anything to do with what had been said. The amazed Sydney could not reconcile them. “Do you mean what you’ve just been saying?” she said doubtfully. “Do you really believe what you’ve just said? Did much really stand or fall on our making a success of things—I and Ronald?”
“So it did seem to me,” said Mrs. Kerr, also looking slightly bewildered, as though by all these questions Sydney were confusing the issue.
“Did you think you had helped us?”
“Only by…valuing both of you.”
“I suppose,” said Sydney, struck by this, “you do in a kind of way value us?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Kerr, “and I’ve missed you very much. When I had to throw away your carnations this morning I was sorry; I didn’t a bit want to.”
“Only this morning? Carnations do last a long time,” said Sydney, and considered the phenomenon gravely. “One didn’t want to intrude, you see,” she added.
“Intrude?” said Mrs. Kerr, repeating the rather middle-class word wonderingly. Her gentle, mystified air was not sympathetic. “I think,” she said slowly, as though trying how best to express herself to an almost strange young woman, the school friend, as it might be, of a daughter, “that you’ve been a little…over-important about it, perhaps, haven’t you? I mean, how could your coming or not coming make any difference between me and Ronald? He would have been pleased, he was ready to be friendly; he knows just what you’ve been to me, and in his own tied-up sort of way he is ever so grateful. He likes me to have friends wherever I am. I don’t think,” she concluded, with a smile of pity for the girl’s inevitable incomprehension, “that anybody could put things wrong between me and Ronald.”
“In fact, one seems to have taken too much for granted. Funny!” said Sydney and laughed.
“Oh, Sydney dear, no. Why? Don’t be so bitter.”
“Why bitter? I see how tiresome a girl can be.”
“Never tiresome; you’ve been charming; more than unselfish—giving up so much of your time to me, giving me so much—I’ve accepted too much, I’m afraid.” Mrs. Kerr broke off with compunction.
“Why reproach yourself? Don’t you find all your friends are the same?”
Mrs. Kerr sighed and looked down at her hands, allowing this to pass for an admission. With a smile of particular ruefulness that drew up the eyebrows tragically and brought the face to its fullest, profoundest expression of all of her, she confessed: “But in your case I’ve been specially guilty. I begin now to guess you’ve expected much more of me, and that I’ve been taking and taking without so much as a glance ahead or a single suspicion of what you would want to have back. I’m afraid we’ve gone wrong through your not quite understanding. You see, I’m so fond of you, but—”
“But?”
“Well, simply but! I mean, there is nothing else there. It had always seemed to me simple to like people and right to be liked, but I never can feel that much more is involved—is it? I have a horror, I think, of not being, and of my friends not being, quite perfectly balanced. I think moderation in everything—but perhaps I am cold…Will you take my purse now—if you won’t eat any more—and go in and pay for the cakes?”
To Sydney the cumulative effect of this succession of touches (especially the last: herself brandishing with commercial insistence a long bill that her bewildered debtor felt unable to meet) was of vulgarity. The attribution to herself of an irritable sex-consciousness vis-à-vis to Ronald did not hurt, but sharply offended. Mrs. Kerr, however, sitting there with her half-smile, her evident deprecation of the interlude, her invincible air of fastidiousness, had maintained her own plane, whereon “vulgarity” would be meaningless. Sydney could only suppose that cruelty as supremely disinterested as art had, like art, its own purity, which could transcend anything and consecrate the nearest material to its uses.
The friend sitting back to back with Mrs. Kerr had gone away minutes ago; the little blue tables one by one were deserted. The business of the Pâtisserie wilted temporarily before the approach of lunch-time. Surprised by this isolation, as though the trees of wood had melted away from around them, the two left the shade of the awning and stood dazzled for a moment, looking vaguely up and down the street.
“Where now?” said Mrs. Kerr, and laid a hand on Sydney’s sleeve in her anxiety to be directed.
Sydney could make no suggestion; she remembered they were on an edge of Europe and had an impulse in the still active top of her mind to suggest Prague, the Hook, or Rouen. The facility with which it would be possible for her to cover larger distances and her present complete inability to move from the kerbstone presented themselves simultaneously. She could not command the few words, the few movements which should take her away from Mrs. Kerr, or imagine where, having escaped, she would find a mood, room, place, even country, to offer her sanctuary. Her own background, apart from which the crisis of today, of these last weeks, had produced itself, was seen very clearly at this distance away from it, but presented an impenetrable façade with no ingress. She could see her life very plainly, but there seemed no way into it; the whole thing might have been painted on canvas with a clever enough but not convincing appearance of reality.
18
I Do Want To
Mrs. Lee-Mittison brought their Continental Daily Mail down to the lounge with her and sat on it. She did not wish to read it herself, but did not dare put it down beside her because she knew that someone would come up and ask just to glance at it—people so soon lose their delicacy in these little matters. They would rumple it up and take the creases out: Mrs. Lee-Mittison knew so few people who could look at a paper without rumpling it. Whenever anybody strolled through the lounge with the air of exhausted resources peculiar to this half-hour before lunch-time, she knitted faster than ever and looked unconscious. Life had developed in Mrs. Lee-Mittison a fine set of jungle instincts; she could apprehend and be rigid before, looking over her glasses, she had acutally discerned with her usual mildness the approach of the predatory.
“I do wonder if there is any news this morning,” said somebody (one of the talkers), drifting about with her wool-work and looking distastefully at each of the chairs. “There seems to me to have been no news for a long time.”
“I do wonder,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison truthfully. She did not so much as glance at a headline before Herbert had done so—Herbert was upstairs taking off his boots.
“It’s very odd, nothing definite seems to happen at all—I mean, of course, there is always Politics, but that goes on and on and on, so one begins to lose interest. Especially out here where one cannot see what effect they are having, though one does doubt really whether they do have any effect.”
“There’s been the pit disaster.”
“Miners,” said the lady distastefully, “always seem to be getting into trouble. One is so sorry, but it is difficult to go on and on sympathizing, especially out here where one gets on just as well without them—they burn wood, you know, and do everything else by electricity.”
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