Part 9 (1/2)

”Mr. Montmorency has gone for a walk,” said Laurence. ”He had to take an umbrella. Apparently he does not usually take an umbrella, but when he was half-way down the avenue Mrs. Montmorency suddenly said he must, because it had never rained like this before. So she took an umbrella and one for herself and started off down the avenue after him. Aunt Myra said she should not have done this because of her heart and looked round for me, but I had gone quickly into the dining-room which is the last place anybody would look for one between meals. So she found Uncle Richard and he took another umbrella and ran quickly down the avenue after Mrs. Montmorency, telling her not to run like that. When he had caught her up he took the umbrella from her and went still more quickly, shouting, after Mr. Montmorency who pretended not to hear and walked on with a back view of positive hatred.”

”But how do you know all this if you were in the dining-room?”

”When they were under way I went to the library window and looked after them ... Lois, did Lesworth tell you he has captured Peter Connor? He was in bed, apparently.”

”Laurence!” called Lady Naylor from the end of the gallery. ”Where are you? What about Marda's letters? ... They can't go now,” she went on, approaching. ”Timothy waited ten minutes, and now he has got to run all the way but he will certainly miss the post ... Oh, you are all here?”

She looked at her nephew and niece disparagingly and sat down on the bed. ”It is an extraordinary thing,” she said generally, ”the way n.o.body in this house can be trusted to remember messages ... It has been a tiring day,” she added. ”n.o.body could be nicer than that young Mr. Lesworth, but certainly he is not intelligent. And since then they have all been running down the avenue with umbrellas. And oh, what do you think? They have been raided for arms at Castle Trent. They think the whole thing must have been organised by their gardener's cousin. They took some boots away.”

CHAPTER FIVE.

WHEN they had all gone to bed, lamps downstairs extinguished, doors upstairs shut with a rattle upon the last voices, Francie talked of Marda's engagement and said she was glad. She was glad as a wife that the net should be flung wider. She talked, but Hugo did not answer, he was still too angry about the umbrella to speak when they were alone. So till well on into the night they lay beside each other under the darkness in an intent and angry silence. Then she wept and said they should never have come back to Danielstown.

”It's as though I couldn't remember where anything was.”

”Look here, if you can't sleep you'd better take something.”

”Hugo!”

”I suppose this place disagrees with you, too.”

He had designed an insult, he could not bear her to intrude upon his wakefulness. Whichever way he turned in that mournful freedom-and the perspectives of his regret opened fanwise, profound avenues, each white at the end with a faceless statue-she would come stumbling after him, hand to heart. ”Try and sleep,” he said, and sent her away angrily.

She feigned sleep rigidly, hardly bearing to lie there. Her mind clenched tight, like a fist, at the isolation of this proximity. She longed to resume the life of day downstairs in the empty rooms. She had lain awake in the South of France hearing palm trees creak in the gritty and dry wind, hooked-back shutters rattle against the wall; she had lain awake in town with her room a battle of lights through the thin blinds, lights like her thoughts flas.h.i.+ng and crossing- But across this battle-piece, under the long lances, had swarmed, like Uccello's roses, small comforts, a kind of content at suffering, the tenderness of imagined contact. She had wept because he was not with her. Now a nostalgia for that solitude, for a wall so patient and smooth to the reaching hand where there was now a sleeper, came on her, quenching tears. He thought she slept.

But, ”I remember,” she said, about two o'clock, ”a Miss Lawe. I met her last in a tram in Dublin. I remember then she was talking of a nephew-I wonder would that be Leslie?”

”Did she say his name?”

”I can't remember: I got out of the tram ... Hugo, I'm so thirsty.”

Sighing, he got out of bed.

Laurence could not sleep either. There must have been something at dinner ... He longed for the raiders and strained his ears in the silence-which had, like the darkness, a sticky and stifling texture, like cobwebs, m.u.f.fling the senses. The rain had pa.s.sed, the trees had shed the weight of it, never a drop came through them or tapped on his window-sill. Once he heard, he thought, a fleet of bicycles in the avenue; he sat up propped on his palms, a.s.sembling his att.i.tude, and was prepared to go down and admit the party courteously. He meant to offer them bread and apples and leisurely conversation-and jam and whisky, but in relating the incident he would only mention the bread and apples, he liked that smack of austerity, an Oriental graveness. But there were no bicycles; no one knocked; all he had to say went sour in him. It was only some cattle come up close to the house, rubbing against the wires. They moved away.

He lit a candle, blinked at the startled flame and blew it out again. Darkness resumed, with an uncomfortable suggestion of normality. There seemed proof that the accident of day, of action, need not recur. And from this blank full stop, this confrontation of a positive futurelessness, his mind ran spiderlike back on the thread spun out of itself for advance, stumbling and swerving a little over its own intricacy. He caught trains he had missed, rus.h.i.+ng out to the boundless possible through the s.h.i.+ning mouths of termini, re-ordered meals in a cosmopolitan blur, re-ate them, thought of thought but sheered away from that windy gulf full of a fateful clapping of empty book-covers. Far enough back, in a kind of unborn freedom, he even remade marriages. Laura Naylor gave Hugo, scoffingly, bridal tenderness; they had four sons and all hurried out to coa.r.s.en in Canada. Here, in this that had been her room, Laura had lain on her wedding morning, watching a spider run up to the canopy of the bed, while Hugo made ready, five miles off, to be driven over to take her hand at the altar by poor John Trent, and the four young sons in excitement jiggled among the cherubim. And it was Richard who married Francie, who came to him all in a bloom at his first request and made a kind of a basinette of a life for him, dim with lace. Aunt Myra enjoyed a vigorous celibacy, while Laurence, to be acclaimed a second Weiniger, blew out his brains at-say-Avila, in a fit of temporary discouragement without having heard of Danielstown. Lois, naturally, was not born at all.

But this involved a certain rearrangement of Laurence's character, for not for anything would he have put a pistol into his mouth, though he would have liked to fire a gun out of a window. This neglect of the raiders' p.r.i.c.ked his egotism. And alarmed by the dragging tick of the watch at his pillow, slowing down as at the mortal sickness of Time, he turned over and thought in a fury, he could not think why Laura should have married Mr. Farquar. The rudest man in Ulster he was, with a disagreeably fresh complexion and an eye like a horse. Her confusion had clotted up in the air of the room and seemed, in that closest darkness under the ceiling, to be still impending. Here, choked in the sweep of the bed curtains, she had writhed in those epic rages; against Hugo, against Richard, against any prospect in life at all; biting the fat resistant pillows until once she had risen, fluttered at her reflection, dabbed at her eyes, b.u.t.toned a tight sleek dress of that day's elegance over her heaving bosom, packed her dresses in arched trunks (that had come back since to rot in the attics) and driven off, averting from the stare of the house an angry profile. Hotly, she went up north to attract and marry Mr. Farquar. It was in her to have done otherwise, but there is a narrow and fixed compulsion, Laurence recognised, inside the widest ranges of our instability.

Below, through the floor, a light drawling sc.r.a.pe climbed into stuttering melody; syncopated dance music, ghostly with the wagging of hips and horrid in darkness Lois, child of that unwise marriage, was playing the gramophone. Laurence listened, paralysed with indignation, then reached out and banged a chair on the floor. She attended; the music broke off with a shock, there was a tingling calm as after an amputation. He above, she below, they thought of each other with outrage.

Certainly, thought Laurence, there must have been something at dinner.

But Sir Richard and Lady Naylor were soundly asleep. She was dreaming about the Aberdeens, while he rode round the country on a motor bicycle from which he could not detach himself. His friends cut him; he discovered he was a Black and Tan. But night rolled on over them thickly and uneventfully. The others exhausted themselves to sleep. The darkness clamped round their waking brains did not any one moment seem to abate its insane pressure; only, within an hour of breakfast they found themselves restored without reason to that illusion of daylight. With a kind of fatedness, a pa.s.sivity, they resumed the operation of living.

The morning gave birth to a disappointment. Livvy arrived just as Lois was starting out for the village with Marda to send the telegram. Her horse was lame so she came over on a bicycle, and certainly, thought Lois, watching her lean the bicycle into a privet hedge, there were many things about Livvy that were a pity. For Marda stood at the top of the steps in a green jumper, fanning the telegraph form on the air to dry the ink. The green, queer and metallic, cut surprisingly into the steaming tones of the house and the morning. She would be gone in three days. And now while Livvy settled her hat and her front and prepared for speech, Marda smiling came down the steps and walked away down the avenue, not caring. She missed n.o.body. The dogs went with her: gloomily Lois's eyes went after their wagging sterns.

”Listen,” said Livvy, clutching Lois's elbow. ”Ah, listen, Lois: what is the matter? That is a natty jumper she's got. I wonder has she the pattern? Of course, it's partly her figure. I wonder now that she didn't marry-Lois, will we go up to your room?”

Lois did not believe the bed was made. Livvy blushed in her little defined way and said she wished to be confidential. So they went into the drawing-room- where Gerald's kiss was hanging: all the doubts of the night could not disperse it-and leaned on the grand piano. Lois was surprised to notice Livvy breathing on to her breast bone and drawing something up on a long blue ribbon from intimate depths. A ring dangled. ”No one could be more surprised than myself,” said Livvy modestly, averting her eyes from a finger on which the ring had flowered.

”Oh, well done!” Lois could have exclaimed with spontaneity. Checking this, she said doubtfully- ”Oh, my dear... .”

”Who do you guess?”

”Mr... . Mr. Armstrong.”

”Aren't you quick! Listen-swear that you won't tell. For my father doesn't know and I think he'd kill me.”

”How did you ... how did he? ...”

”Well, it was like this. You see, he asked me at Mrs. Fogarty's when would he see me again, and I said I might be going to Cork to the dentist Thursday, and he said he might be going to Cork too. So I thought no more of it. Think what I felt when, I getting out at the station, I saw him there standing as large as life and watching the train like a dog. So he asked me where was I going for tea, so I said if I wasn't alone I might have dropped in at the Imperial because of the band but that my father didn't like me to go there alone because of the officers. He said would I go with him, and it was raining and my appointment wasn't till half-past five, so I said that we ought not to be seen together, but I turned my hat right down and we went in and heard the band. He seemed very much confused, so I asked him was there anything on his mind and he said there wasn't and I said there must be. So he went very scarlet and pulled his belt and looked up at the ceiling and said he did love me. Then the waiter came with the tea and I only hope he will not recognise me again. When the waiter had gone I said he might speak lower, and he said he couldn't because of the band. Then I said that of course a thing like this came as a shock to a girl, and he said did it, and I said indeed it did. I said I was not sure if I could get accustomed to the idea of marriage at all, and he looked very much surprised. I said when would he wish it to be? And he said the worst of it was he had no prospects. I said we Irish were not mercenary, and that anyway I knew he had an uncle- It was a great disadvantage to me, Lois, having to keep down so low under my hat all the time-for I could see the Hartigans' aunt, Mrs. Foxe-O'Connor, the other side of a palm tree, and a man my father buys cattle from kept rising up and staring round the room. And what with this and my being naturally very much confused, and David creaking about in his chair, and the band, I don't know how much he heard of what I said at all.

”However, we thought it might be well to buy a ring, though I can't wear it. David looked quite wandering and I had to get him across the traffic. And I felt pretty curious myself. You see, we have neither of us been engaged before, though I have had two offers. Then he said he must go to the barracks, so he put me into a tram to go to the dentist's. Presently I noticed it was the wrong tram but I hadn't the heart to get out till it was round the corner after the trouble he'd taken, the poor boy. But the tram kind of bolted and I got out near the Cathedral and had to take a very expensive car. I was late at the dentist's-he had out two of my teeth.”

All in a dream, it appeared, Livvy had wandered through wet residential Cork. All in a dream she had sat and bled from the gums in a train. She opened her mouth to show the two holes the dentist had made as though they were wounds of love, and Lois looked into them solemnly. Had they kissed at all? No, they had not had the opportunity. They could have taken a cab, but Livvy did not think it moral to drive in a cab with a man, for it roused his pa.s.sions. Lois said she thought the smell inside of a cab would put anyone off, and Livvy said that in that case a cab would be waste of money.

”But can he marry? Can a second lieutenant?”

”Oh, I can wait some years. But I shall go and stay with his relations and wear a ring and all, so that there need not be any uncertainty.”

”Why not tell your father now and have it announced?” said Lois hopefully. She watched her own face looking up from the mottled piano-top and felt very singular, distant and destined, like Melisande. ”I don't think,” she said, ”that I should be afraid of your father.”

For Livvy's father seemed really a very despondent, mild man with a yellow drooping moustache that he had always to lift up over the rim of his tea-cup. It was hard to picture him chasing around after Livvy with a blackthorn, or smiting his fist on the dinner-table so that (as Livvy declared) the plates leaped, or going down with the half of a tart in his hand to destroy the cook. The worst she had seen him do, when Livvy was late, was to take his watch out and stand with his thumb on the lid-not looking at it, as though he could not abide the thought of Time--while two or three bubbles ran up his throat. He was a widower: Livvy declared her mother had died of him. He was a teetotaller: half a decanter of whisky was in his tantalus but he had lost the key. Lois now a.s.sured Livvy her father would be the ideal father-in-law; she was sure that David would like him. He would come and stay and be so absolutely un.o.btrusive.

”He has a prejudice against Army officers,” said Livvy despondently. ”He wouldn't mind if it was the Navy-but what chance have I, living so far inland? If David was a general with gold all down his front and spoke of marriage, I think he'd still kill him. He says I'll get the house burnt over his head with my goings on.”

”But if he heard you'd been compromised at the Imperial.”

”A girl can't be compromised in the afternoon,” said Livvy gloomily.

Mr. Thompson did not entertain very much, but Lois remembered once staying to supper there, early that summer, with David and Gerald. That was before times got so bad and the officers had to be back early in barracks. Mr. Thompson's dining-room looked on to trees that fanned little gusts of light over the table then closed again in green darkness; it smelt of meat and there was an enormous pilastered mahogany sideboard like the front of a temple, inside which they could hear mice running about. Mr. Thompson was silent-from fear, she thought, rather than disapproval-he kept drawing long black horsehairs from the seat of his chair and laying them out on the cloth. At each hair, David and Gerald leaned forward and opened their mouths to speak. But Mr. Thompson went down in his collar so that they could not: they spoke to each other. And Lois, looking under her lids, had marvelled at this fortress of many opinions. His sister Miss Thompson was present, but she was deaf. The dining-room was dark red, with a smoky ceiling, and Gerald said afterwards he had felt like a disease in a liver. When the blancmange came in it lay down with a sob and Miss Thompson frowned at it. ”Death of the cow,” thought Lois, and saved this up. Livvy kept looking warningly at her friends, but they were all polite. Some ducks filed in at the French window; the guests flapped with their napkins but Mr. Thompson said: ”Oh let them be,” and sure enough the ducks went round the table with their usual urgent look and out by the window again. Mr. Thompson got up and shut out the May air. ”Times change for the worse,” he said to Gerald, who agreed with him so emphatically that David had to repeat the interchange to the anxious Miss Thompson. No wonder Livvy found home dull.

But the happiness of the evening, the closeness-up of the four to each other, the tremors they all transmitted, the cramp of inside laughter, remained with Lois as though they had held hands tightly under some large oppression. And-under that pressure of laughter compact to bursting point-a particular stored excitement of pride and pleasure, a jump of intimacy at each other's voices and movements. And the awareness stayed when, afterwards, they had laughed themselves out and were empty and solemn, tingeing their interchanges with unusual shyness. That supper marked a degree in her appreciation of Gerald-his crystalline niceness.

For Mr. Thompson, still with a little blancmange hanging off his moustache, got up and left them. And later Miss Thompson stood pulling down her skirt on her hips, when Gerald opened the door so beautifully that she had to go out through it, to perfect an experience. Then Livvy, to show what she thought of her family, got up and waltzed round the table, tugged open the window, ran on to the lawn and with unabated gentility jumped over all the croquet hoops, David following. And Gerald turned for the first time to look at Lois, who looked away. They poured out more barley-water and, in an ecstasy of bad manners, bubbled into their gla.s.ses. They went out and sat on the seat by the croquet lawn, under a bush of syringa. Waxy petals touched Lois's arm stretched out along the back of the seat, the air smelt of almonds, moths came slanting out of the bush, and glittered away on the dusk.

Miss Thompson declared it had been a pleasure, and had asked them to come again. Lois now said: ”I should tell your aunt, she has so little to interest her; I am sure she would be wonderfully sympathetic.”

”I always find it difficult,” Livvy said, ”to open the subject of marriage.” And as she looked down, looked significant, the word did flower over with implications, so that it was, to Lois, at once in a pit and upon a pinnacle that Livvy leaned and frowned and dangled her garnet ring.

”If only David were more determined!”

”But aren't you certain he wants to marry you?”