The Last September (10 page)

For Lois, this had all been exceedingly difficult. There she was, caught in her bedroom, she had not the face to come out. The door went paper-thin as they raised their voices. At first it had seemed all right: Aunt Myra knew she was in here, having just left her. But soon their tones changed, a keen hunting note came into them: they were on a topic. Carried away, Aunt Myra had forgotten. She heard “Lois … Lois … Lois …” She hummed and sang: they were
too intent To one’s sense
of
honour, such things
were agonising. She leaned right out of a window into the cooling air, into the hush of limes on the avenue; she watched Uncle Richard and Mr. Montmorency walk to the white gate. Their heads nodded down from their shoulders like old men’s happily; they spoke of Archie and Mrs. Archie and poor John. But from the room behind the other voices, flooding in through the door, came after her. She flung herself on her bed with a cry from the springs, pressing her ears shut till the lobes and her finger-tips ached: also she pulled the pillows over her head. It was hot thus, and still the voices penetrated. They came on steadily, like the Hound of Heaven. It was hard, really, the way they both kept at it.

The voices spoke of love: they were full of protest. Love, she had learnt to assume, was the mainspring of woman’s grievances. Illnesses all arose from it, the having of children, the illnesses children had; servants also, since the regular practice of love involved a home; by money it was confined, propped and moulded. Lois flung off the pillows and walked round the room quickly. She was angry; she strained to hear now, she quite frankly listened. But when Mrs. Montmorency came to: “Lois is very—” she was afraid suddenly. She had a panic. She didn’t want to know what she was, she couldn’t bear it: knowledge of this would stop, seal, finish one. Was she now to be clapped down under an adjective, to crawl round life-long inside some quality like a fly in a tumbler? Mrs. Montmorency should not!

She lifted her water jug and banged it down in the basin: she kicked the slop-pail and pushed the washstand about … It was victory. Later on, she noticed a crack in the basin, running between a sheaf and a cornucopia: a harvest richness to which she each day bent down her face. Every time, before the water clouded, she was to see the crack: every time she would wonder—what Lois
was.
She would never know.

SIR RICHARD
, to whom the idea about Lois and
Gerald percolated in time through the family
conversation, declared the idea was preposterous. What chiefly worried him was, might she not have mentioned to Gerald those guns in the lower plantations? He had charged her not to, but she was just like Laura, poor Laura’s own child in fact; she would talk and talk and you never knew where you had her. He announced, he had been thinking for some time subalterns should be fewer and more infrequent. He was delighted when he heard from the postman, and was able to pass on, how three young women in the Clonmore direction had had their hair cut
off
by masked men for walking out with the soldiers. And indeed they had got no sympathy from the priest either, the postman said, for the priest knew that English soldiers were most immoral.

“And how would you like,” Sir Richard said to his niece indignantly, “if a thing like that were to happen to you?”

“I should be bobbed,” said Lois. “I should take it as a sign. But I have never walked an inch with anyone, not what you would call
out
, Uncle Richard.”

“But masked men,” said Lady Naylor, “would be a very nasty experience for a girl of your age.” Lois said she would prefer the men to be masked; she would be less embarrassed in the event of meeting them afterwards.

“I wonder what they do with the hair?” she added. She thought inwardly: “If they’re going to take this attitude, I could not be blamed for falling in love with a married man.” She searched her heart anxiously. She wrote to Viola that she feared she might be falling in love with a married man. But when she looked at Mr. Montmorency next morning at breakfast, and still more when she had to drive him back from Mount Isabel, the idea seemed shocking. She regretted having sent her letter to post in such a hurry.

Scandalised by the memory, she drove home briskly. On the bright sky opposite, Mr. Montmorency’s pale face hung like an apparition’s. She took the curves of Mount Isabel drive with a rattle: the trap rocked on its axle, the traces creaked. Beyond the gates light lay flat and yellow along the hedges where brambles showered, hard red blackberries knocked on the spokes and swung back, shining. She took the short way, over a shoulder of mountain; the light pink road crushed under the wheels like sugar. Coming up out from the lanes, they bathed an hour or so in the glare of space. Height had the quality of depth: as they mounted they seemed to be striking deeper into the large mild crystal of an inverted sea. Out of the distance everywhere, pointless and unrelated, space came like water between them, slipping and widening. They receded from one another into the vacancy. On the yellow furze-dust light was hard and physical; over the parching heather shadow faded and folded tone on tone, and was drawn to the sky on delicate brittle peaks.

The road bent over a ridge, the trap ran down on the pony’s rump, he and she shifted back up their seats. They stared with unfocused intensity over each other’s shoulders. Gorse they said was never out of bloom, he commented. Nor kissing they said, she supplied out of season—yet she supposed this untrue, she supposed that they both sometimes must be. “And so much bitterness,” he exclaimed, “over this empty country!”

“What is it exactly,” she asked, “that they mean by freedom? What does it affect? What is it besides an excuse for war?”

“I suppose,” he said in his faint voice, as at the pit of a yawn, “some kind of a final peace—stability.”

“Then to fight’s absurd; the more one keeps on, the further from it one is. It’s a hopeless kind of beginning.” She looked at him earnestly, lucidly, like a puppy.

“You are very reasonable … Do you read the papers?”

“Well … I do hate things that have just happened.”

“—I don’t follow.”

“They’re so raw.”

The road was steep and the pony determined to trot; it stumbled, she pulled it up sharply. She was inclined to forget she was driving at all. He started and put out a hand to steady himself along the back of the seat. He hated things to be done badly; he was old-maidish. They were silent in a mutual criticism. As they came down, and the mountains drawing behind were once more scenic; as hedges ran up at the sides of the road, the illusion of distance between them faded, they obtruded upon each other; a time when they could have talked was gone. They might have said, she felt now, anything; but what had remained unsaid, never conceived in thought, would exercise now a stronger compulsion upon their attitude. She was to believe they had approached each other in the unintimacy of their silence. Shy with retrospective emotion she fidgeted in the trap, irked by his look, his manner, all his presence physically. Whenever she stretched a foot it touched his, always she seemed to be retreating, apologising, having to shift her position. When she sat well forward to give her attention to driving, their knees touched.

“This trap’s too small,” she said finally. Mr. Montmorency—face dull on the bright sky—replied: “Oh, I don’t know—it depends on how one arranges oneself.” If he only would not smile—but he smiled constrainedly. Next to Laura, she was the most fidgety person from whom he had suffered. But Laura’s un-repose had been irradiation, a quiver of personality. She was indefinite definitely, like a tree shining, shaking away outlines; a bay, a poplar in wind and sunshine. Her impulses—those incalculable springings-out of mind through the body—had had, like movements of branches, a wild kind of certainty. He had been half aware of some kind of design in her being, of which she was unaware wholly.

Whereas, here still was Lois (now Laura’s tree had fallen) twisted away from him on the opposite seat of the trap, outraging tone in her pink jersey—a shade or two nearer than Laura, perhaps, to the accuracy passing for beauty. She looked
genée,
dispirited—some failure, no doubt, in his company: he must be an old man to her. She glanced back once or twice at the mountains, from which a light peaty breath still came after them down the descending road.

She laughed suddenly, parted the reins, and jerking a rein in each hand, with wide elbows, chirruped and clucked to the pony. “This,” she said, “is how my governess used to drive. She used to say it came natural because all her people were horsy. She said her father had been a colonel and she used to plait hats out of crinkle paper and wear them. She loved my mother embarrassingly, and she was always embroidering things. My mother hated it—do you remember?”

“I don’t remember your governess. Hated what?”

“Being loved like that, and given embroidery. Miss Part used to laugh and say, ‘I’m afraid I’m terribly whimsical, Mrs. Farquar,’ and Mother used to say, ‘Oh no, I don’t expect you are really’—was it unkind?”

“Well, it sounds unkind.”

“I wonder if she would have liked being loved at my age—do you remember?”

“I don’t suppose she had made up her mind.”

Lois turned and looked at him so intently that he was uneasy suddenly: the bottom dropped out of the past, spilling all its security. He would never know how much Laura had said to her daughter those last ten years—years locked away from him: Lois had got the key. He said with acidity:
“If she and I had
married—”

“Oh,
yes… .”

“My dear child, you wouldn’t be here.”

“Oh, but half of me would be. And I daresay,” she said charmingly, “the other half of me would have been much nicer.” The turning-away of her look was more confidential than any directness.

“Thank you—don’t run over the little pigs!”

Michael Connor’s farm first announced itself by some pink little silky pigs running along the roadside. A sow got up, like a very maternal battleship. Connor children looked, shrieked, fell from a gate and fled to the farmhouse, skirting a pool of liquid manure in the front yard. It was a nice farm, Lois pointed out, it had the door and window frames painted blue, the colour of all the cart-wheels. The Connors were darling people; she drove past slowly, leaning over the side of the trap to see if the family were about. The house was one storey high, with a slate roof. Mr. Montmorency sat frowning; he could not remember if this was a man—Michael Connor—he ought to remember.

Michael Connor came out from a furze-thatched shed at the side. He took off his hat and shook hands with them both. His hand was bony, nervous and dry as earth. “It’s a grand evening,” said he with a melancholy smile.

“It is indeed. And how,” she asked, apprehensive, “is Mrs. Connor?”

“Ah, the poor woman … the poor woman!” Michael looked away from them, nobody spoke. Lois at last said: “Give her my love.”

“I will,” said Michael, “and proud she will be. And yourself s looking lovely, Miss Lois; a fine strong lady, glory be to God.”

“You remember Mr. Montmorency?”

“Sure indeed I do!” exclaimed Michael, and shook hands with Mr. Montmorency again with greater particularity. “And very well I remember his poor father. You are looking grand, sir, fine and stout; I known you all these years and I declare I never seen you looking stouter. And welcome back to Danielstown, Mr. Montmorency, welcome back, sir!”

“Are your grandchildren well?”

“They are,” said Connor gloomily, “but they’re very bashful. And they do be stravaiging about always and not contented at all. They are a great distress to herself, and she unable to come out after them.”

“But is Mrs. Peter Connor not with you?”

“She is, Miss Lois. But she is desthroyed with it all and disheartened. Indeed, miss, she is in great distress; and she always looking and starting and craning up the boreen. It is torn in herself she is; distracted for Peter and dhreading he’ll come. It would dishearten yours to be with her daily and nightly the way she is, the poor woman. And the military from Clonmore have the hearts torn out of us nightly, and we stretched for sleep, chasing and charging about in the lorries they have. Sure you cannot go a step above in the mountains without them ones lepping out from your feet like rabbits. Isn’t it the great pity they didn’t finish their German war once they had it started?”

“And no news at all of Peter?” Lois asked, diffident.

“We have not,” said Michael, expressionless. His face resumed its repose. The sum of detachment and sadness was this special kind of nobility. “And I don’t know what is to be the end of it,” resumed Michael, with a return to his conversational manner. “I couldn’t tell you what will be the outcome at all. These surely are times that would take the heart from
you. And
thank you, Miss Lois, and you too yourself, your honour.”

They once more shook hands, complimented each other again on the beauty of the evening, and Lois drove on. Michael stood at the gate till they turned the corner. The mountain farm, its wind-bitten firs dragged east, its furze-thatched byres, sank slowly under the curve of a hill. Looking longest after them, like an eye, a window glittered. Some geese that had gaped and straggled behind the trap relinquished the chase abruptly, stumbled round in a flock and went straining off in the other direction. Their backs were more than oblivious; they made the trap, the couple in it, an illusion. And indeed Lois and Hugo both felt that their pause, their talk, their passing had been less than a shadow.