The Last September (13 page)

“He brushes her hair,” said Lois, laughing—in the sharp unshadowy atmosphere produced by Miss Norton it sounded more of a giggle—and swinging with her back against the edge of the door.

“Oh, then it is mutual.”

“I knew him best when I was a child.”

“Yes, he looks like that. Thank you so much; I think I have got everything. Yes, heaps of hot water.

Wouldn’t you like to go now: I mean, won’t there be dinner? … Oh, Lois!”

Lois, from over the threshold came back willingly. “Mm?” she said.

“I mean, you are Lois, aren’t you? I’ve heard so much … No, don’t be late: I should hate you to help me.” Miss Norton had taken her coat off and stood in a frilled skirt looking round distastefully at her suitcases. “Go,” she said, “do really.”

Lois, half way down the gallery, met Laurence coming up. “Mm?” said Laurence.

“I think she seems quite mad,” said Lois doubtfully. “You would,” replied Laurence, and went past her coldly.

ONE 
did not lightly telephone. There was a telephone six miles away, at Ballyhinch, but its use made excessive demands upon the sympathy and attentions of the postmistress. Marda could not understand—as Sir Richard said, one would think she had come from America. From all their angles she seemed to them very modern. They sat on the steps after breakfast, waiting for post to come, discussing what they should do. There was something agonising to Sir Richard in the thought of that suitcase. Marda said, it would not have mattered at all but that her tennis shoes seemed to be in it. It was quite a relief when the postman settled the matter by saying there had been another raid last night in the Brittas direction and that all the wires were down again. It had been a great raid, the postman said; if the boys had not fled it would have been almost a battle. What times, said Francie, looking at Marda doubtfully, they did live in! But other times, said Marda, other disadvantages! Nobody hurt, they hoped? Well, said the postman, the Black and Tans had been fired on, but why would they not be and then themselves firing to the left and right continually? It seemed two of them ones had pitched from the lorry the way you would think they’d be killed and the boys had bolted, leaving the two lying.

“How do you know?” said Marda. The postman, looking austerely at her, asked how would one help hearing? Though it was not for him to say what was true and what was what you would hear. Sir Richard agreed with this hastily and with some warmth: he did not want to have the postman discouraged.

Marda received her six letters as a matter of course and glanced them through sceptically. Lois watched her. Putting the letters away, she suggested that since Laurence was so practical he should drive her into Clonmore or Ballydarra to buy tennis shoes. Laurence feared he did not drive the car nicely; he could avoid things but he was inclined to wobble.

Sir Richard had disappeared on his morning round; how much of his corn had been “laid” by the rain last night he did not like to imagine; it was better to know. The rain had ceased before breakfast; loud drops still drummed through the leaves; the trees with their rainy smell were a wall of moisture. Thin vapours trailed on the sky over an intermittent brightness; distances showed up thinly, as though painted. “The end of our weather,” said poor Francie.

“But I feel,” persisted Marda, “I must have tennis shoes. I don’t mind wobbling.”

“Laurence is more of the intellectual type,” explained Francie.

“I don’t think that matters.”

“It does with a car,” said Lois.

“I have never consciously driven
you
,” said her cousin coldly.

Marda laughed; she got up and stood on the steps. 
Fixed in their row, the others all looked up at her. She was tall, her back as she stood looking over the fields was like a young man’s in its vigorous slightness. She escaped the feminine pear-shape, her shoulders were square, legs long from the knee down. Her light brown dress slipped and fitted with careless accuracy, defining spareness negatively under its slack folds. Sophistication opened further horizons to Lois. Marda gathered her strung cornelians in one hand into a bunch at her throat; they slipped down the nape of her neck. Standing vaguely she had still that quality of directedness—from which they all swerved off in their different ways. A hardy unawareness of self in her heightened one’s own consciousness. Her lightest look watched, her casual listening assessed, her speech was a lightning attack on one’s integrity out of the stronghold of her indifference.

They remained sitting behind her with a vague sensation of having been abandoned. Hugo came out, shut the glass door with precision and blinked at the sky. “Clearing,” he said, then asked Marda to come for a turn. Exercise seemed the order of the morning; Lois and Laurence were later to go to the village with messages, Francie was waiting to go to the garden with Lady Naylor.

“Am I or am I not to drive her?” wondered Laurence aloud, with fatalism, looking after Miss Norton.

“She’ll certainly let you know.” Francie’s little ironical smile sent her cheeks up, their faint flush wavering, under her eyes. She was not so simple. Her diffidence, her inquiring softness, an outward “laci-ness” of her personality—into which impressions seemingly filtered like light, diffusedly, making no impact —covered a structure of delicate hardness. She was in spirit insistent, tenacious and quick in antagonisms; 
complexity tightened, as had been her delicate body’s, by constant resistance to pain. She gave hospitality to the ever-living Laura, she invited claims from Mrs. Archie Trent, she would have endowed Lois, but she watched Marda turn beside Hugo into the beech walk with raised brows, a cat’s blank unsparing lucidity.

“She’s very positive,” said Laurence, still looking after them.

“Positive about what?” asked Lois eagerly. Laurence held his breath with annoyance and pulled up a sock.

Marda wanted nothing of Mr. Montmorency but entertainment; she was an experienced fellow visitor. He interested her; his negativeness was startling. She had heard of him, and of it, in all parts of the country, had arrived at several houses into a loud reaction, a kind of indignant excitement following his departure. Her acquiescence in finding him so exactly as he had been described was tempered by incredulity, almost shock. And she could define in him qualities which her friends in the rush of discussion had slurred or had overshot: one, a kind of drawn-back apprehension in his approaches, as though something bright were being brandished before his eyes. His look, coming wavering round this interruption, had, in regard to herself, a peculiar intensity. She was already real to him as a woman.

He now swung his blackthorn, slashing the air widely. “I remember this walk,” she said. “I seem to have been here yesterday. But I thought it was somewhere in Kerry, at Castle Reagh.”

“Oh, no, it is here,” he said wisely. They laughed. Down the walk, brightening air slipped like gauze round the beech trunks; great pewter limbs went turning, straining up with the sheen of muscles. Drops, infrequent and startling, loudly fell on his hat-brim, icily on her shoulders through the mesh of her dress, The path’s perspective was a tunnel of glass. Her companion’s lameness of thought, the faltering silence produced a kind of vacuum in her; she covered a yawn.

“This is not a good morning,” he suggested, “to walk under trees.”

“Really the worst possible.”

“Oh … had we better—?” However, they walked on.

“I always come here,” he said in extenuation. “My turn to the right’s mechanical. I was here as a boy, you know.”

“Were you here when I bled so much at that children’s party?”

“Not actually, but I have always heard of it. Didn’t you lose a ring?”

“At another party, at a more suitable age. It was the most lovely ring I have ever had—Regent Street. The jeweller said it must be emeralds because the lady was Irish, and Timothy fully agreed with him. I had had no idea I had such an expensive nationality.”

“What a pity!”

“Yes, those things are always a pity.”

He was not sure how much she included. “Did your—did Timothy mind?”

“Not so much as the Naylors. Later, he was killed on the Somme. But he had two sons first, so it all came right—I mean, he married.”

“Oh, yes … I suppose you are often here? I have often heard of you. And at Johnstone and up in the North I have heard you expected. But I was always going. Once I believe we crossed at an avenue gate.”

The fact was, she acknowledged with a laugh, that they both visited incorrigibly. She knew also, she told him, that he not only visited but travelled; he had been almost everywhere but Canada.

“But I really should not have come back here,” she said. “There is something in Lady Naylor’s eye: a despairing optimism. I feel that suitcase won’t be the end of me here. There will be a raid and I shall be shot on the avenue, not even fatally, or Laurence will take me out and upset that car. Then really she will never forgive me, though the efforts she makes will follow me over Europe … How far do you think this war is going to go? Will there ever be anything we can all do except not notice?”

“Don’t ask
me,”
he said, but sighed sharply as though beneath the pressure of omniscience. “A few more hundred deaths, I suppose, on our side—which is no side—rather scared, rather isolated, not expressing anything except tenacity to something that isn’t there—that never was there. And deprived of heroism by this wet kind of smother of commiseration. What’s the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually—our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we’ll never get outside of it.”

But the hold of the country
was
that, she considered; it could be thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted. Or seemed so—”Like Shakespeare,” she added more vaguely, “or isn’t it? … But now tell me,” she said, “about Lois.”

“Lois?” He was guiltily startled, thinking of Laura’s daughter.

“Lois—haven’t you noticed her? She sits beside you at dinner.”

He feared he was no good at people, he was preparing to say—but the remark tried over critically seemed a kind of echo: he reminded himself of Laurence. He was confused by her cool watching, her eyebrows drawn up and together in a friendly despair at him. Her face—like a Dutch doll’s, he defensively told himself, in its accurate clear disposition of red-and-white colour—was, at this sudden pull-up to her interest, like a mask in its halt of expression. Her features, the dark line of hair springing over the white square of forehead were, in their special relation, like something almost too clearly written that he still could not read; to be learnt now and puzzled over in retrospect.

She was, in fact, repelled by his lack of sympathy. “Lois,” she said, “is nice. She is in such a hurry, so concentrated upon her hurry, so helpless. She is like someone being driven against time in a taxi to catch a train, jerking and jerking to help the taxi along and looking wildly out of the window at things going slowly past. She keeps hearing that final train go out without her. How I should hate to be young again! But, I had no ambition.”

He watched her unguarded profile. “Oh, yes,” he said, “ambition.”

“I’ve never met any woman so determined to love well, so anxious to love soon, so certain of her ability. She really prays for somebody to be fatal; she eyes doors. And you are all disappointments.”

“To begin with,” said Hugo, nettled, “she’s not a woman—”

“Awful if nothing happens to her! She reminds me, too, of a little girl I remember at school sports; in a team race, one of those things with bean bags. Hopping at the end of the line, working up to the front slowly, simply sick with eagerness. Her turn comes, she is the whole world: her eyes shoot out of her head— she drops the bean bag. They all groan … It makes me go dry inside to think of it now.”

“There is a young man—Harold—Gerald. They dance on the avenue.”

“Like rabbits?”

“They have a gramophone.”

“Is he supposed to love her?”

“My wife thinks so. Laurence considers he suitably might. Her aunt does not think it suitable at all and won’t hear a word of it, so he officially doesn’t.”

“Anyhow, to be loved is not her affair at all, it is quite irrelevant. If she does not love him, poor little thing, he is useless.”

“I can’t think it necessary for a young girl, at her age, to love anybody.”

“Oh, it is not,” she said impatiently, “at any age. But one has those ideas.”

This dismissal, this lightness vexed him. Let her speak for herself. She had, then, her whole sex’s limitations: a teachable shallowness, a hundred litde abilities. But he, prey to a constant self-reproach, was a born lover; conscious of cycles in him, springs and autumns of desire and disenchantment, and of the intermediate pausing seasons, bland or frigid, eaten at either margin by the past or coming shadows of change.

“I have not these ideas,” he said coldly.

They turned at the end of the walk through a gateway into a fir plantation. Here they walked between walls of dusk, to be released into an airy green space, tree-pillared. The green strip, measureless on ahead but narrow, slanted on their left to the open meadows, on their right was bounded by a broken wall. Below the wall an unseen swift stream flowed, tinkling and knocking. The path hesitated ahead of them, faint on the turf. Here the few beeches stood unrelated, lovely, desultory: between their trunks—the tall mountains, vivid in a suffusion of distant light. The scene glittered. “More rain coming,” said Mr. Montmorency.