The Last September (23 page)

Livvy came in to luncheon fragrant with Pond’s Extract, a shiny patch on her chin. She kept putting up a finger and feeling the bump: David must “kiss it better” for her tomorrow. David should have witnessed her courage: he seemed increasingly struck by her moral qualities; he had never observed these things in a girl before. Yesterday he had taken her over to tea at the Vermonts’; at her suggestion, they had “told” the Vermonts, in confidence. It had been a success: she had been made to feel at once she belonged to the regiment. She had had no idea Mrs. Vermont was so jolly; she had taken Livvy off for a real little chat in her bedroom; they agreed what a rag it would be if the regiment went to China. Livvy looked voluptuously from Sir Richard to Lady Naylor, thinking what a surprise she had here for them both. She ate two helpings of fricasseed chicken in absolute silence, designing her trousseau dressing-gown; and old Mr. Montmorency, who sat beside her, did not speak either.

“I like lunch at one,” said Lady Naylor, surprised. “It shortens the morning, but gives one so much more time in the afternoon. I can’t think why we don’t have it always.”

“I see no reason why we should not, my dear,” said Sir Richard who, unlike an English husband, was not conservative in these matters.

The car came round twenty minutes too early, but Sir Richard said the chauffeur was quite right. He could hardly bear to let Marda drink her coffee and was but slightly mollified when she burnt herself. Mr. Montmorency sugared his coffee twice over, to Livvy’s delight. They drank coffee out in the hall, standing up; it was like the Passover. Marda went upstairs and came down in her travelling coat. Hugo 
stood at the foot of the stairs, in the back hall, tightening the screws of his racquet press.

“Goodbye,” she said. “Thank you for being nice to me.”

“Oh,” said he, looking blindly at her with his pale eyes. “Have I been nice to you? Good!”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye—Marda.”

“Don’t come on to the steps—”

“No, I’ll finish this press.”

They both half-turned, heard the pendulum of the clock swing once; she went on into the hall. Everybody was there but Lois.

Lois stood behind the door in the drawing-room, waiting. “Marda,” she said through the crack. “Hullo?” said Marda. She came round the door, pushing it a little way to behind her. They kissed.

“Marda, I can’t—”

“Never mind.”

“Darling!”

“Be good!”

“Happy journey!”

“Oh yes.” They parted.

Marda came back to the hall, not looking at anybody in particular, pulling her gloves on. Lady Naylor asked her if she had packed the cake. Sir Richard patted her arm and said she was a good girl and must be sure and be happy—then looked very much abashed and startled at what he had done. Laurence looked bored, so bored; she was sorry for Laurence. She said, “I am really going!” “I’m sorry you’re going, I don’t think it’s—” They shook hands, he immediately turned-—rather rudely, his uncle thought, and walked into the library.

After all, there were only Sir Richard and Lady

Naylor and Francie to wave Marda off from the steps and watch the car up the avenue into a veil of rain. Rather few, they felt, considering what a dear she had been and how they had come to love her. Wondering why and where the others had gone, they tried to present the broadest possible expanse of smile and flutter. And of this effort the flick of Marda’s gloved finger-tips round the hood conveyed the friendliest, the most satirical recognition.

“Well, that’s that,” said Livvy, at last discovering Lois in the drawing-room. “Partings make me ever so sad. Now listen, Lois—”

“I’m afraid I’m not well; I’ve eaten something,” said Lois. “I’m sorry—” She clapped her handkerchief to her mouth and fled from the drawing-room by the other door, stumbling over the
portière.
Livvy went a little way after her, talking, then came back: “It is a disadvantage to a girl,” she reflected, “that kind of stomach.”

Lois found in the empty spare-room a piece of paper that crept on the floor like a living handkerchief. Through the defenceless windows came in the vacancy of the sky; the grey ceiling had gone up in remoteness. More wind came through, flowers moved in the vases, the pages of a book left open beside the bed turned over hurriedly. The pillow was dinted, as though half way through packing Marda had laid down lazily. Or as though since last night the pillow had not forgotten the feel of her head.

CAPTAIN and Mrs. Rolfe of the Gunners were giving a dance in their hut. Denise Rolfe and her dearest friend Betty Vermont of the Rutlands had been more than busy the whole morning. Flustered and happy they darted about the hut, cutting sandwiches, scattering floor-powder, pinning draperies round the walls. They masked the electric lights with pink crinkly paper to produce the desired enchantment. Every now and then, one would collapse on to what remained of the furniture and, catching the other’s eye, burst into delighted laughter. It was all such a rag. They smoked cigarettes and ground the ash into the floor to enrich the polish; they tried the new records over again and again till Mrs. Rolfe declared that the needles would give out and snapped down the lid of the gramophone resolutely.

Mrs. Rolfe’s Colonel disapproved tacitly; Colonel Boatley did not think the dance was a good idea either. Entertainments in barracks had been given up long ago. But it was not easy to veto what ladies described as “a little fun in the huts.” Married quarters in barracks were limited; as the army of occupation was reinforced, lines of hutments began to extend up the hill at the back of the Gunners barracks. There was nothing to beat these hut dances; for one thing, the floors were so springy. And the fewer the couples, the more intimate the occasion, Denise and Betty both thought with contempt of the Rutlands’ official dance in the barracks-gymnasium, full of majors waltzing, where you were nearly blown off the floor by the regimental bassoon.

“All the same,” said Betty, rubbing a board with her toe, a shade despondent, “I wish this would polish
more.
You’re certain it won’t be sticky?”

“Nothing could be stickier than the C.O.,” said Denise wittily. “If it wasn’t for him, we should be keeping it up till breakfast.”

“It’s these wretched patrols and things,” said Mrs. Vermont.

“It seems odd being short of girls. I do feel I should be getting my sister over.”

“There will be heaps for tonight,” said Mrs. Vermont, who thought people’s young sisters rather a bother. The ladies of the neighbourhood had praised Mrs. Rolfe’s kind intentions but said that they feared the roads were not fit for their girls these nights. But their girls, meeting Mrs. Vermont at the tennis club, had told her they would be certain to come. “In fact if they all come,” said Mrs. Vermont, apprehensive, “I may have to telephone down to the mess for some more of our boys.”

Captain Rolfe came off duty at lunch time, and during the afternoon friends kept dropping in, by twos and singly, with offers to help.

“But don’t
lookl
” shrieked Denise every time, flinging herself against the wall to conceal the draperies. “It’s all a surprise for tonight.” The subalterns, after a hasty look round, prepared to be perfectly blind. They 
began to slide industriously, buffeted on the head by the Chinese lanterns which Betty had hung too low. Tubby, Mr. Simcox, sat down on a mat and was whisked round the room by his friends to perform the functions of polisher.

“Really,” volunteered someone, “we ought to be rolling the floor with champagne bottles… .”

Girls who succeeded in coming over for the dance had arranged to be “put up” in Clonmore or in married quarters. The two Miss Raltes, from Castle Ralte in the Tipperary direction, looked in about four o’clock, pink from a twelve-mile drive and parental opposition. Father, in fact, had been more than difficult. “He says,” said Moira Ralte, looking beatifically round at the decorations, “that the whole proceeding is not only criminal but lunatic. He says he can’t understand the C.O. allowing it, with the country the way it is. We really did think, till we got past the gates, he was going to stop us.”

“But we
came
,” said Cicely. Everyone laughed. The Miss Raltes had been cast as wild young Irish and rather liked themselves. But they exchanged glances, uneasy. It had not been quite the thing, perhaps, to have laughed at Father.

“It takes two to make a row,” said Mrs. Rolfe wisely.
“We’re
not fighting.”

“More’s the pity,” said a Mr. Daventry of the Rutlands with violence. “God, if they’d—” The Miss Raltes, unaccustomed to swearing, looked down their noses. There was a moment of slight discomfort, of national consciousness.

“Wouldn’t it be a rag,” said Moira, relieving the tenseness tactfully, “if they tried to fire in at the windows while we were dancing?”

“
I
shall draw the curtains!” cried Mrs. Vermont.

Cicely glanced at the gramophone, hummed a foxtrot and tapped her heel on the floor, looking most unconscious. But the subalterns continued to slide violently, rebounding against each other, and dancing was not begun till the D.I.’s niece came in. The D.I.’s niece came in with a flourish and was greeted with uproars. She was priceless. She had light red hair fluffed over her forehead, a wide smile punctuated by gaps in her teeth and a tireless repartee in a Cork accent. Denise and Betty adored her. She was a Catholic; it seemed so queer to think that she worshipped the Pope. The Miss Raltes hardly knew her. As she came in, Daventry opened his arms, she ran into them with a gurgle and they began to dance. The gramophone spurted hoarse music; other couples followed the gramophone.

Mr. Daventry, the senior subaltern, elegant, tall and a shade satanic, was “taken,” obviously, with the queer little person. She could talk and dance at once with an equal skimmingness, and she did. Daventry shook her, murmuring: “Do shut up!” He whispered into her hair that she danced like thistledown and that he hated to have it spoilt.

“Like how much?” shrieked the D.I.’s niece above the music, bobbing her face up at him.

Mrs. Rolfe, as distracted hostess, allowed herself to drift into the arms of the adjutant, who had looked in for a moment or two. He spoke of himself as a busy man, but she knew this to be a pose. She danced remotely and kept repeating: “Glasses for claret cup … Glasses for cider cup … Cigarettes … Cover the washstand… .”

“Washstand?” said the adjutant, solicitous.

“They will have to sit out in Percy’s and my bedroom. Do you think it will matter?”

The adjutant took a firmer grip of Mrs. Rolfe, an ethereal girl with a habit of drifting just out of one’s reach like a kite. He gulped, and said rather too genially: “It will be no end of a rag tonight. Well, we must make the most of it; it may be the last for a bit. As it is, we’re doubling the guards. The C.O.—”

“Pig!” said Denise, looking into the adjutant’s eyes.

“Mum,” said the adjutant, blinking. “And another thing: I’m afraid you won’t have Dobson of the Rutlands, I’ve just met him—he’s to be out on patrol.”

“Oh, but he
said
he’d get out of that! Oh, but he promised me—”

“He’d no business to; he’s been due for patrol for ages. Their C.O.—”

“He spoils everything. Captain Dobson is one of my best dancers.” She stopped short and turned off the gramophone. “Listen, Percy! They’re sending Captain Dobson out on patrol at a moment’s notice.
Now
I’d like to know what I’m supposed to do? I’d calculated the numbers exactly.”

“But, Dens,” said her husband conscientiously, “we had four men spare. And you’re certain of Lesworth and Armstrong.”

“He
won’t count!” They all laughed: Betty had told a few friends in confidence…. 

“And for a matter of that,” Denise, still clouded, complained to the adjutant, “Mr. Lesworth won’t count much either. He’s awfully keen on the Farquar girl.”

The adjutant thought: “These attachments!” His C.O. did not like these attachments either. The gramophone in a perceptibly minor key began again, they went on dancing.

“Suppose,” said the D.I.’s niece, during an interval, “all we girls are left sitting tonight and nobody comes to dance with us?”

“Dance with each other,” said Cicely Ralte firmly.

“But I wouldn’t care to dance without men,” said the D.I.’s niece, frankly languishing. She had hoisted herself on to the cabinet that held the records and sat swinging her legs in their shiny stockings and pulling her dazzlingly checked skirt over her knees. Her green eyes roamed round, returning attention confidently.

Daventry, a hand on the edge of the cabinet, stood leaning with his back to the wall’s art-muslin draperies. He kept shutting his eyes; whenever he stopped dancing he noticed that he had a headache. He had been out in the mountains all night and most of the morning, searching some houses for guns that were known to be there. He had received special orders to ransack the beds, and to search with particular strictness the houses where men were absent and women wept loudest and prayed. Nearly all beds had contained very old women or women with very new babies, but the N.C.O., who was used to the work, insisted that they must go through with it. Daventry still felt sickish, still stifled with thick air and womanhood, dazed from the din. Daventry had been shell-shocked; he was now beginning to hate Ireland. Lyrically, explicitly; to the very feel of the air and smell of the water. If it were not for dancing a good deal, whisky, bridge, ragging about in the huts, whisky again, he did not know what would become of him, he would go over the edge, quite mad, he supposed. He opened his eyes: afternoon light lay in bars on the smoky air. The flash of his partner’s legs in their glassy stockings exasperated him, he gripped one of her ankles— harshly, as though it had been a man’s. She kicked, and a high-heeled slipper went rocketing through the 
air. A forest of hands went up. The D.I.’s niece looked down complacently on the compact and plaited backs of the subalterns. The other girls tittered and hung on the outskirts.