Joan Lawrence looked dreamy; when the tray was set down and Colonel Duperrier asked her to pour out tea and do hostess, she blushed and looked very much startled. She had a glimpse of herself and Colonel Duperrier having breakfast together on some veranda out in the Tropics, face to face with one another over a dish of some very large futurist-looking fruit. She was not sure of her tropical background; she did not travel or read much, so it was sketched in vaguely: there was, as here, a profusion of heliotrope that coloured the scene and their silence, for they did not seem to be moving or saying anything. She was being looked at…he had taken off his topee. She was wearing white muslin; embroidered, beribboned, diaphanous; she did not think she was wearing what was strictly speaking a frock…What a thing to imagine; what an unspeakable liberty to have taken with Colonel Duperrier! She clattered the lid of the teapot, poured boiling water over her fingers, did not dare think any longer and did not know where to look.
“You don’t like sugar, do you, Colonel Duperrier?”
“Thank you, no sugar, and I don’t like very much milk.”
She had guessed this, she had known instinctively that he would not take very much milk.
“This Hotel,” said Eileen, “seems to be producing brides in very large quantities. What a pity we have used up all the men! Do you think any others are likely to come out, Colonel Duperrier?”
“I can’t think.” He was wishing it were not impossible to take the Lawrences out separately. This would be all very well if he were simply taking out Eileen. But Joan had withdrawn from the tea-party, she sat and looked a long way away; he felt cheated of her. “I must say,” he went on with an effort, smiling round affably, “I think this would be an excellent place to be in love, engaged and so on. It’s a pity we don’t most of us come out here till we’re elderly.” The tea-garden did for an instant flash on him a something half-remembered or never quite visualized, with its lit-up lawns, its bulging gold lemons and oranges hanging down in the sun. His companions smiled. “All this,” he said, “would be ever so jolly.”
“Where were you in love?” asked Joan. “I mean, what was the scenery?” Tilting back her head, her hands clasped under her chin, she gazed with a limpidity that might well have been mischievous beyond him and into the sunshine.
“What a thing to ask!” Eileen cried saucily. “Colonel Duperrier’s travelled a lot.”
Colonel Duperrier at this moment of nervousness and surprise did seem to himself to have travelled a long way. His thoughts went back through the conversation to look for something they had shied away from: What had somebody said about women born to be twenty and what they became? Someone had lost herself, been lost to one, vanished…He knew that all women were born to be twenty—twenty-two, twenty-five possibly: the thing seemed obvious, looking at Joan. Something, however, had become of a Miss Macklean he had met at Darjeeling, and of a subsequent lovely Mrs. Duperrier of whom he had asked no more than all she triumphantly promised, to be twenty at any age; he would not have counted the years. Perhaps, in spite of herself, she had eluded him. Lost her way? She was lying alone now up there, up in her room, waiting angrily for the sun to go down and the light to go quite out and the darkness to stifle her, lying with the window thrown open expectantly on to the void of sky, waiting to shiver, tossing to and fro in her poor mind while her body lay rigid, silent though she was so pent up, storing up her cries for him: “Oh, here you are, Alec…No, I didn’t really expect you to come in. Why should you have come in? I dare say you were happy down there…”
Mrs. Kerr and a party of friends who must have been having tea together farther down the garden passed by and went out talking and laughing, and Ronald strayed after them, looking slightly disorientated. His panama was folded under his arm; he glanced sidelong at each of the tables under his lashes, prepared to swerve wide of them if anyone hailed him or put out a hand. Colonel Duperrier, though he did not take to the youth, was vaguely sorry for him; he wasn’t, like Master Ammering, either plump, complacent, or noisy, and his idleness might well be a phase and had (like Colonel Duperrier’s own) the grace of dejection. He made, therefore, an encouraging sound in his throat and pulled back a chair from the table invitingly, while Eileen, who seemed to find Ronald’s manner of going by them provocative, shouted, “Hi, Ronald!” so sharply that everyone jumped.
Having affected their capture, they all three smiled at Ronald with the anxious benevolence, the slightly embarrassed solicitude which it seemed a gift of his own to inspire in all circles, and which had made, for some reason, his company out here particularly sought after. He was asked everywhere, to bridge, to dinner at other hotels, to the Lee-Mittisons’ coffee-parties, and went, under some delicate indirect maternal compulsion, with always the same air of being strung up for martyrdom to the occasion as the young Sebastian of painters is strung to a tree. He did not look at present a happy boy as, leaning forward, slack wrists crossed on a knee, he gazed with an unreserved attentiveness which they found still further embarrassing from one Lawrence’s face to the other.
“It is neither of you, I think, that I am to congratulate on an engagement to Mr. Ammering?”
“No, thank Heaven!” said Eileen emphatically.
“Oh!” said Ronald, surprised, “but wouldn’t you like to marry him? I thought he seemed so popular here.”
“He is an exceedingly lucky young man,” pronounced Colonel Duperrier.
“Of course,” agreed Ronald politely. “I have just congratulated Miss Warren, too,” he added, “and Mr. Milton, whom I met out walking together. They both looked very much surprised and rather offended. Surely I haven’t done the wrong thing, have I—they are engaged?”
“Everyone knows,” said Eileen, “and I don’t suppose Sydney likes that; it isn’t select. But you ought to know something about it, anyway; she will have told your mother.”
“I don’t think she has,” said Ronald vaguely. “I’m afraid not. I suppose my mother’s not the proper sort of matron. She would hardly, I suppose, provide the bosom that young women on these occasions are supposed to require. I’m afraid she may perhaps feel like I do, that one’s friends, however various and delightful they may be at other times, are least interesting—while of course deserving all respect—at these moments when they approximate most closely to the normal. What people call life’s larger experiences,” said Ronald, “are so very narrowing.”
“What a vocabulary you’ve got, Kerr,” said Colonel Duperrier, respectfully offering his cigarette-case. “I’ve never heard such a flow of language. Write?”
“I try not to,” said Ronald, looking ruefully at a cigarette as though he wished he had not taken it; he inclined with a sign to Colonel Duperrier’s lighted match.
It was another of these idyllic evenings, agonizingly meaningless; the evening air brought out the scent of the lemons. The Lawrences, shrugging up their wraps round their shoulders, slid forward in their chairs luxuriously and sank down into themselves like cats into their fur. Thin blue smoke drifted away through the clearness. Joan said thoughtfully: “I don’t suppose it matters—talking, I mean—so long as you know exactly what you mean yourself. I don’t, because I never do.”
“You may think all the more,” said Colonel Duperrier, knocking the ash of his cigarette off, not quite looking at her.
“Oh yes, I do think a good deal,” said Joan, swinging one foot and watching it, very mysterious.
“Do you really?” said Ronald with interest, coming wide awake. “What do you think about?”
“Well, really…” interposed Eileen, after a hard stare. “Well, really, Ronald, you are cool!”
To Colonel Duperrier’s embarrassment, Ronald reddened and stuttered. Ronald was thinner-skinned than one thought, he hated offending people and making them angry. But he couldn’t imagine, obviously, what he had done. “I—I’m most awfully sorry. But why…”
“Well
, I mean,” said Eileen, “really, if a person’s own thoughts aren’t their own…I mean, if a person’s going to be expected to say what they feel about everything—”
“I didn’t say ‘feel,’ I said ‘think.’ ”
“Well, it’s the same thing,” said Eileen. They stared at one another.
“Oh,” said Ronald. “I’m very sorry. You see, what I think is so public, if anyone’s interested.”
“Well, it would be—you’re only a boy.”
“Oh, look here, Eileen; don’t bullyrag Ronald—”
“It’s all right, thank you,” said Ronald, still rather pink. “I am very much interested in your sister’s point of view.”
“I haven’t got a point of view,” said Eileen indignantly. “I’m simply talking plain sense. Look here: if you look at a bun you don’t just think about its being a bun, do you? You wonder what you feel about it and whether it would be nice to eat, and whether it is somebody else’s bun and there would be a row if you did. And with a person or anything else it’s the same thing.”
“Ah well,” said Ronald, “if that’s what you call thinking, I dare say it may be private, very private indeed. You see, I don’t know anybody else who thinks like that; I had no idea—”
“I don’t suppose many people would take the trouble to explain to you how they do think. They’d just let you run on with your own ideas and nod and smile and say ‘How lovely!’ and think about something else all the time.”
Joan, while the privacy of her thoughts was being battled for, had remained since her one intervention abstracted, her gold hair spread out scroll-wise over the mounting folds of her scarf. “Feel my wrist, it’s like ice,” she said suddenly. “It must be awfully cold.”
“My dear child!”
“Oh! I don’t suppose it is cold really.” Joan felt as though of her own accord she had dropped a crystal and smashed it. “Don’t let’s go,” she begged with pathetic eyes of Colonel Duperrier. “I don’t know why I said that at all—it was only my wrist.”
“I don’t want to, I’m sure.” He looked around the garden regretfully, as though they were not to come here again; it seemed a better garden than he had realized, more friendly and intimate. “But we can’t have you frozen,” he said, and looked at Joan helplessly, because it would be ultimately beyond his province whether she were frozen or not.
“Idiot!” cried her sister. “Where are your gloves?”
“These evenings,” explained Ronald, “come down like the knife of a guillotine. I must be getting on anyway after my mother.” He rose and looked down at them thoughtfully: a queer (he seemed to think) and never entirely satisfactory group. “Are you coming my way?” he asked Eileen.
Her mind leapt forward immediately to telling Veronica that Ronald (“Yes, my dear, I swear he did actually—!”) had asked her to come for a walk. “One to me,” she reckoned; “there’s nothing like being crisp with these slithery, day-after-to-morrow people who only half see you. He’d eat out of my hand, I’ll swear he would. I shall keep him out for an hour, take him round by the town.” Smiling, she said to the others: “Do you mind if Ronald and I move along?” Her only doubt, as coming out of the gate she turned the head of Ronald resolutely townwards, was whether she could postpone for so long the ecstasy of telling Veronica, who should be now, she knew, curled up in her bed by the window, reading a magazine and eating peppermints, and regreting more and more, as the interval of solitude prolonged itself, that the affair with Victor should ever have occurred.
The other two were left in a solitude which, quite unprecedented, they felt to be exigent and a little singular. “I expect,” Joan said with a little stiff movement that did not do much for her, “that we had better be getting along, too.”
“I expect we had,” said Colonel Duperrier. It was half-past five, he discovered; up there she would be half insane with speculation; by this hour he had till now never failed to present himself. He looked about him at the other tables distant between the trees where couples in rather forced and conscious intimacy still lingered, the evening before them, gazing a shade owlishly less at than around each other, weighed down by their leisure. Odd, thought Colonel Duperrier; queer, following his look, thought Joan. She propped her chin on her chilly hand and sighed a melancholy, unresentful sigh. “Cheer up!” her friend said solemnly.
“I haven’t got such a cheerful disposition as you have,” she stated.
“I suppose I have got rather a cheerful disposition,” said Colonel Duperrier, glancing reluctantly at himself and looking away again.
“Of course,” she said in her matter-of-fact little voice, “you are wonderful.” She leant back to grope behind her chair for her racquet and repeated “Wonderful!” in a tone of indignation, perhaps because the racquet wasn’t there. “I expect,” she began again, “we ought to be—”
“I know. I really think we ought to be coming in. If you catch cold, you know, I should never forgive myself.”
“I promise I won’t catch cold,” poor Joan said faithfully, and getting up looked round distractedly, huntedly, for the racquet propped against the side of her chair.
“Thank you very much,” she said, “for our nice tea.”
“It has been a pleasure to me,” said Colonel Duperrier.
20
Mrs. Kerr
“Dear Mr. Milton,” exclaimed Mrs. Kerr, “is this true? Because if so, it’s wonderful!”
He remained standing; she, propped reposefully among cushions, sat looking up at him. “Yes, you are charming,” he doubtfully thought, “you injurious woman.” He tried to look straight, as though dropping a plummet, into those profound brimming eyes, but the light from the ceiling invaded them; raw, hard-edged light, as though cut out of tinfoil, that touching them softened, swam down through them, melted, so that he could read nothing, looking down into luminousness. He had to surrender to her effect of mild brilliancy, of being serious, eager, friendly. “Yes, it’s true,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”
After dinner, since Ronald’s arrival, she no longer went straight to her room, but would sit down with him on a sofa backed by a palm at the quieter end of the lounge. Here they looked, thought James Milton, approaching, like a fancy of Omar Khayyam’s, with a small tray of coffee beside them, a stack of serious periodicals (presumably Ronald’s), and a basket of crystallized fruit which Ronald advanced to their guests with a deprecating, vague liberality, as though he did not really care for this sort of thing himself. Their guest one did definitely constitute oneself, Milton felt, by coming over to them; her graceful delighted reception of one confirmed this, also the punctilious uprising of Ronald, who would continue to tower, prolonged by his shirt-front, indefinitely tall, crumpling gradually till asked to sit down again. Milton was not uninvited; he had insinuated himself down the lounge between eager conversationalists and touching chair-backs in response to a direct glance, a concentration upon himself of her general smile round as she looked at him.
Ronald pulled a chair forward at right angles; Milton sat down with them.
“Then, of course,” Mrs. Kerr said, summing up, “you are happy.”
One is not, at such moments, expected to show oneself adequate; his smile and his gesture acknowledged becoming inadequacy. She nodded her womanly comprehension. “Quite,” said she.
“Excellent,” said Ronald with an air of seniority to both of them. He recrossed his legs and bit into a crystallized tangerine.
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Kerr thoughtfully, “I do perhaps understand a little of what this means to her.”
“She told you, of course.” Milton had presence of mind enough to make a startled gesture into a statement.
She nodded. “A little,” she said. “You know—well, of course you know—she is a very quiet person. She didn’t say much, but she shone. She has the strangest possibilities of shining.” Mrs. Kerr
seemed to have, as she spoke, a glimpse of Sydney from which he was excluded. “Of course,” she added in the perfunctory quiet voice in which perfect taste demands the making of certain statements, “she is very happy…I have wanted so much for her and expected, really, so little that seeing her so, so lit-up, so certain, has meant a great deal to me. You’ve done—do you really understand?—a great deal.”
“Thank you,” Milton said helplessly.
“There is no reason to thank me,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking at him very straight with her wide-opened eyes. “What is there to thank me for?”
Milton, abashed by this parade of innocence, looked at Ronald, wishing that he were not there. Mrs. Kerr, however, seemed determined to keep him.
“Now, Ronald,” she said with amusement, laying a hand on her son’s knee, looking down at it thoughtfully and drawing it away again, “feels sorry for people who are going to be married. He cannot believe (isn’t it so?) ‘in any satisfactory modus vivendi between two people that’s based on an attraction’!”
“I remain perfectly open-minded,” said Ronald, biting the stalk off a pear.
“About love itself,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking respectfully at her son, “he is profoundly sceptical. There is a part of life, Mr. Milton, that I should be very glad if you could explain to my poor Ronald.”
“It’s not a part of life,” said Ronald, “it may be a streak in it. People talk as though it were a transverse section.”
“You see?” said his mother. “But Sydney used to be a sceptic too, you know. I should rather like Ronald to talk to her now.”
The Hotel Page 18
