The Last September (7 page)

But now, as three balls in succession fled through the leaves, she broke off a conversation and cried: This was too much! Would some kind person—she looked at Laurence—go round and help? He rose, reluctant: simultaneously Mr. Montmorency went gratefully round the net at the other end. He was followed by an anxious little boy called Hercules, the only child among the guest and gravely
de trop.
They all three met in the middle.

Laurence said—beating the bushes vaguely— “Imagine, sir, a small resurrection day, an intimate thingy one, when the woods should give up their tennis balls and the bundles of hay their needles: the beaches all their engagement rings and the rivers their cigarette cases and some watches. The sea’s too general an affair of furniture and large boilers, it could wait with the graves for the big day.—Yes, Hercules, that is a tennis ball but it is pre-war. Put it back in the rabbit hole for the children to find. It is worth a halfpenny to them—Last term I dropped a cigarette case into the Cher, from the bridge at Parson’s Pleasure. It was a gold one, left over from an uncle, flat and thin and curved, for a not excessive smoker. It was from the days when they wore opera cloaks and mashed, and killed ladies. It was very period, very virginal; I called it Henry James; I loved it. I want to see it rush up out of the Cher, very pale, with eyeballs, like in the Tate Gallery. It wants a woman to be interested in a day like that, to organise; perhaps the Virgin Mary? Don’t you think, sir?”

Mr. Montmorency, startled at this address, replied: “I have never been to the Tate Gallery.”

“Talking of being virginal, do you ever notice this country? Doesn’t sex seem irrelevant?”

“There certainly are a great many unmarried women,” said Mr. Montmorency, looking doubtfully through the net at the Miss Hartigans.

“It is: ‘Ah, why would we?’ And indeed why should they? There is no reason why one should not so one never does. It applies to everything. And children seem in every sense of the word to be inconceivable.”

“My mother has five,” said Hercules, “I am the youngest. Hercules is a family name because I am the only boy, but when I go to school I shall be called Richard after my godfather as everybody says that Hercules even as an initial would be such a disadvantage to me, though not nearly so bad as being afraid of bats.”

“I wonder you aren’t at school now,” said Mr. Montmorency.

“It
would be holidays now anyhow, so I should be
bound to be here. That is my eldest sister, playing tennis. They do not see how I can possibly go to school till I have got over being afraid of bats. Besides, I am using up the end of my sisters’ governess.”

“Nobody could possibly be sorrier for you than I am, Hercules,” said Laurence. “This is an unreal party.”

“Well, nobody brought you, I suppose,” said Hercules.

The strong and dreadful smell of laurels made them all irritable. Hercules tore off the tips of the bland leaves which kept slapping against his forehead. Laurence came with a ball on his racquet to Mr. Montmorency and said: “I am sure this is one that you lost with Uncle Richard and poor John Trent and the man who did not go to Ceylon, in the summer of
‘06.”

“Whereas, I did not go to Canada.”

“No, you never did, did you?”

Lady Naylor came and looked at them through the netting. “If between you you cannot find any balls,” she said, “Laurence, you had better please fetch that other box from the back hall. They are beginning a new set with only three.”

“I have two here that seem quite clean, but they haven’t much bounce,” said Hercules.

“Oh, that is splendid, you
are
a good little boy!” She took the balls from him through a hole. “Here are a nice lot to go on with,” she called out hopefully, rolling them to the court. Mr. Montmorency and Laurence went on searching.

“Now take Aunt Myra: what does she think she’s doing?”

“It it comes to that,” said Mr. Montmorency, nettled, “what do you think
you’re doing? Why are you here at all if you don’t like it—as Hercules said? I was happy here at your age, I was full of the place, I asked nothing better. I ask nothing better now.”

“Oh,” said Laurence.

“However, I have no doubt you are right in being dissatisfied; I daresay it is progress,” said Mr. Montmorency angrily. “I daresay it is good for the race.”

Laurence, who did not consider that he had anything to do with the race, replied with some indignation: “I have no money; where do you expect me to get any money from? I was to have gone to Spain this month with a man and last year I should have gone to Italy with another man, but what do you expect me to go on? I have to eat somewhere, don’t I, and here it is simply a matter of family feeling.”

“This is one of the balls, I shall throw it over … I had no idea that you were such a materialist.”

“I can’t help my stomach. Besides I like eating, it is so real. But I should like something else to happen, some crude intrusion of the actual. I feel all gassy inside from yawning. I should like to be here when this house burns.”

“Quite impossible; quite unthinkable. Why don’t you fish or something?… Nonsense!” he added, looking warningly at the house.

“Of course, it will, though. And we shall all be so careful not to notice.”

“Are you the undergraduate of today?”

“I wish I were. I should love to be quite abstract.”

Mr. Montmorency, offended by all this clever conversation, felt more than ever his isolation, his homelessness. Life was to him an affair of discomfort, but that discomfort should be made articulate seemed to him shocking. The over-fine machinery of his mind ceaselessly strained and caught and was agonisingly jerked over details. His refuge was manly talk; he suspected Laurence. He said: “You are fortunate. There was never a time when I had not other people to think about.”

Laurence, who immediately thought this womanish, 
said: “Oh yes, love.” He flicked out and studied the word indifferently—coin of uncertain value.

“Not entirely. One had a certain debt… .”

“Oh, yes. Yes.”

Laurence became more formal, very much better mannered. He recalled that the man was married, had given away his integrity, had not even a bed to himself. The husband, glancing a last time through and under the bushes, was negligible, diffused even a certain staleness. Laurence sheered away mentally, moved further off through the shrubbery. He had been talking foolishly, in his vein of the third or fourth quality, and regretted now having talked at all. He felt there had been something morbid about his intrusion, as in a visit to a prison.

“I was to have played in that second set,” said Mr. Montmorency. “It seems to be nearly over: perhaps I shall play in the third.”

“Tea will be coming, never forget tea.” Indeed a move was being made to the house already. Tea was too grave an affair to be carried out, besides, one wasn’t accustomed to stability in the weather.

“Oh, Hugo, come out now, dear,” cried Francie, walking past with Mrs. Hartigan. “I am sure it doesn’t matter about the balls. And the Trents have come— don’t you see them? We are just going back to the house to meet them now.”

“Archie? Splendid!” He burst from the shrubbery at the other side, gained the path and hurried towards the house. At a turn of the path, in an arch cut under some holly, he saw Gerald and Lois standing, talking, looking down earnestly at their racquets. With her head bent, Lois was like her mother. He stared, then passed them quickly.

But Lois did not notice him going by. She was saying: “I feel certain you have illusions about me, I don’t believe you know what I’m like a bit.” And while she spoke she counted the crimson strings in her racquet: three down, six across.

MRS. VERMONT
ate more hot cakes than she cared to remember because they were so good and nobody seemed to notice. She went on to chocolate cake, then to orange layer cake, to which she returned again and again. An idea she had had that one should not eat very much when invited out languished; she finished up with a plate of raspberries. She put all thought of her figure resolutely behind her. Mother, of course, had filled out terribly, but oneself mightn’t.

“Nummy-nummy,” she said, pointing out the raspberries to David Armstrong who sat beside her. “David have some!”

Livvy Thompson, sitting beyond David, deplored these women who talked baby talk. She felt that her own appeal to men was more serious. “Mr. Armstrong has got to play in the next set,” she said warningly.

“Hoity-toity!” thought Betty Vermont (she never used the expression aloud as she was not certain how one pronounced it: it was one of her inner luxuries). Turning to Mrs. Carey (the Honourable Mrs. Carey) who sat on her other side, she said frankly:

“Your scrumptious Irish teas make a perfect piggy-wig of me. And dining-room tea, of course, makes me a kiddy again.”

“Does it really?” said Mrs. Carey, and helped herself to another slice of chocolate cake. She thought of Mrs. Vermont as “a little person” and feared she detected in her a tendency, common to most English people, to talk about her inside. She often wondered if the War had not made everybody from England a little commoner. She added pleasantly: “This chocolate cake is a speciality of Danielstown’s: I believe it’s a charm that they make it by, not a receipt.”

“Things do run in families, don’t they? Now I am sure you’ve all got ghosts.”

“I can’t think of any,” said Mrs. Carey, accepting another cup of tea. She smiled and nodded across the table to Mrs. Archie Trent who had just come in. “We have been much more worried lately by people taking away our car. Of course it is always brought back again, but one doesn’t like to think of its being used for nefarious purposes. That is the worst of a Ford.”

Mrs. Vermont opened her mouth to tell Mrs. Carey the latest Ford story, then checked herself because in Ireland they seemed to like Fords so seriously. She observed instead: “All this is terrible for you all, isn’t it? I do think you’re so sporting the way you just stay where you are and keep going on. Who would ever have thought of the Irish turning out so disloyal—I mean, of course, the lower classes! I remember Mother saying in 1916—you know, when that dreadful rebellion broke out—she said: “This
has
been a shock to me; I never shall feel the same about the Irish again!” You see, she had brought us all up as kiddies to be so keen on the Irish and Irish songs. I still have a little
bog oak pig she brought me back from an exhibition. She always said they were the most humorous people in the world, and with hearts of gold. Though of course we had none of us ever been in Ireland.”

“Well, I hope you are pleased with us now you have come,” said Mrs. Carey hospitably. “I expect you have all been enjoying this lovely weather?”

“Oh
well
—you see we didn’t come over to enjoy ourselves, did we? We came to take care of all of you— and of course, we are ever so glad to be able to do it. Not that I don’t like the country; it’s so picturesque with those darling mountains and the hens running in and out of the cottages just the way Mother always said. But you see one can’t help worrying all the time about Timmie—my husband—and all the boys; out all night sometimes with the patrols or else off in the mountains.”

“Terrible. And do you find this a tiring climate?”

A word attracted Mrs. Trent’s attention across the table. “Terrible what?” she said. “Terrible who?” She was youngish, brusque and dominant; the high pink colour over her face as from riding hard in a wind gave her a look of zestfulness alarming to Mrs. Vermont. “I shouldn’t worry,” she said to Mrs. Vermont.

Mrs. Vermont replied with a shade of asperity that it was
they
who were in a position to worry and therefore must not. “‘Cause
we’re
here to take care of you!” The remark, caught in a momentary silence around the table, was received with civility, interest and attention. “That’s splendid!” said Mrs. Trent heartily. She got up, having finished her tea rapidly, and went to smoke outside. Her husband was M.F.H. and really, thought Mrs. Vermont, they did not seem to worry about anything but wire. Mrs. Vermont turned for support to David: his ears were scarlet, he rapidly stirred his tea.

Five days ago, an R.I.C. barracks at Ballyrum had been attacked and burnt out after a long defense. Two of the defenders were burnt inside it, the others shot coming out. The wires were cut, the roads blocked; there had been no one to send for help so there was no help for them. It was this they had all been discussing, at tea, between tennis: “the horrible thing.” No one could quite understand why Captain Vermont and the subalterns did not seem more appalled and interested. It was not apparent how the subject rasped on their sensibilities. These things happened, were deplored and accepted, and still no one seemed to look on David or Gerald, Smith, Carmichael or Mrs. Vermont’s Timmie as a possible remedy. Here they all were, playing tennis, and everyone seemed delighted. “If they’d just let us out for a week—” felt the young men. David could not look up as he stirred his tea. What was the good of them? This they felt everyone should be wondering. But the party would indeed have been dull without them, there would have been no young men. Nobody wished them elsewhere.

Lois had been worrying chiefly because Gerald had illusions about her, also, as to whether Aunt Myra noticed the raspberries still would not go round. The guests for which she was responsible were not only unexpected but ravenous. And while she sat watching Aunt Myra, Gerald sat watching herself as though she were an entirely different person, not the sort of person one could describe at all. After tea she played on the upper court with Captain Vermont, against Gerald and Nona Carey. She played well, all her strokes came
off; it seemed that worry agreed with her. It could not agree with Gerald, who played badly. Then it occurred to her: he was not worried; she had not the power to worry him. Some idea he had formed of herself remained inaccessible to her; she could not affect it.