THE DEPARTURE OF GERALD (continued 2)

“But she agrees with every one,” said Lady Naylor, taking off the glove again in despair. “She is extremely keen to go to this school of art.”

“Where?” he said violently.

“Some good school.”

“Do you expect me not to trust her?”

“I should have a straightforward, sensible talk.”

“You’re not going to stop me seeing her?”

“I don’t know what sort of girls’ mothers and aunts you’re accustomed to,” she said, nettled, “but how could you expect me to do such a preposterous thing? It would be not only unkind but exceedingly foolish. To begin with, she is not my own niece at all. It would be for her uncle to decide. But Sir Richard is very easily worried: I particularly do not wish⁠— You know we are always delighted to see you at any time ...”

She paused. “It’s most awfully kind of you,” said he, by reflex action.

“In these days of frank unsentimental friendship between young people, I do not see why you two should not have a perfectly friendly, sensible talk. Of course there must be no ... I mean, I know I can trust you ... I mean, you do quite understand you are not engaged, and not being engaged there can be no question of⁠—?”

“I promise I won’t kiss her.”

Lady Naylor was much embarrassed. She laughed impersonally and arranged her boa. She expressed some envy of this generation, its frank friendships.

“I don’t think I am very modern,” said Gerald flatly.

“Now Laurence is too modern: he does not seem to care about girls at all.... For the present, I’d leave love out of the question⁠—”

“But I thought that was the question!”

A shadow went past the window. “Here comes Mrs. Montmorency,” said Gerald. And he touched his moustache and blinked and looked round, wondering which chair to offer.

“That is too bad! I sent her up to the Rectory.”

“Perhaps they were out.”

“I told her to wait; there would be plenty to read in the drawing-room⁠— Well, you do understand, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid I⁠—”

Francie was shown in. “Oh!” she cried, “what a lot of cushions! Kittens! Fancy sitting on them, I should feel like a cannibal. No, I don’t mean⁠— Mr. Lesworth! Isn’t this nice! Are those photographs of your regiment? I had no idea there were so many officers.... Myra, I remembered a little something I had to get at the chemist’s, so I thought I’d call in here and save you that climb up the hill. They were all out.”

“Well, that was very sweet of you, Francie,” said Lady Naylor.

“Oh, how patriotic!” cried Francie, knocking two cushions covered with Union Jacks off the sofa. “She’s a Catholic, isn’t she? Oh, Mr. Lesworth, don’t bother; I’m so clumsy.... I had no idea we were going to meet you. Isn’t it a pity now that we didn’t bring Lois? Myra, isn’t it too bad Lois didn’t come too.”

“Yes, it does seem a pity,” said Lady Naylor. Still faintly regretful she got up, looked at herself in a mirror, arranged her boa and pulled down the brim of her hat. Then she shook hands with Gerald warmly, saying how much she had enjoyed their talk.

XXII

“I SHALL never forget,” continued Francie, through the open dressing-room door, “the way he picked up those cushions.”

“Which?” said Hugo, searching irritably among his collars. The feudal system was weak at some points, he reflected—this Danielstown laundry. The laundress’s father had helped to defend the house in the troubled ’sixties. Nostalgic, he thought of these neat democratic blue vans labelled “hygienic” that called on Mondays. “Well really,” said he, “I may just as well go to bed. I haven’t a collar left fit to dine in.... Which cushions?”

“Oh, horrors. But then they say the Fogartys are so kind.—Never mind, Hugo; Richard’s and Laurence’s collars are just the same.—You know how alive he is generally: well, that was all gone. It was like seeing a waterfall stand still. You know, Hugo, it may be horrid, but I don’t trust Myra sometimes. She says things aren’t, and then she turns and makes these curious little dabs at them. She dislikes the Clonmore rectory people, she says they are breath-y, she knows I don’t know them and yet she insisted on my going up. And when I came down again she was charming; I knew I must have annoyed her.”

“My dear Francie, life is too short for all this.” (Though that was not the matter with life, really: life was too long.) Hugo frowned, chin up in front of his glass. “It’s a good thing the evenings are drawing in,” he said, with reference to his collar.

“Now what I should have said ...” resumed Francie, “though ideally, really, I shouldn’t have said anything....”

“Talking of evenings,” said Hugo, “where do we go next? We’ve got to fit in the Fitzgeralds before October. Oughtn’t you to be writing to somebody? And oh, Francie, you might post some of these collars to the Terenure laundry, if you can get the parcel out of the house quietly.”

“I shall miss here,” sighed Francie, looking out at the trees.

“You miss everywhere.” They both thought of the bungalow which, an eternal present for them, would be never able to shine in retrospect. Throughout dinner, Francie was distraite. She was making out in her mind a little letter to Gerald. But, of course, that would never do.

“Hullo!” said Laurence, earlier, looking at the letters put out for next morning’s post on the hall table. “Lois has written to Marda. I thought no one knew her address.”

“She heard from Marda this morning,” explained his uncle, bending to study the envelope with melancholy interest. “I understand that it was about a dog. I shall be relieved when Marda is married. I wonder will the young man be able to look after luggage.”

“I ran into Mr. Lesworth this afternoon,” Lady Naylor told Lois. “He came into the Fogartys’ while I was resting there. Really, she keeps quite a home for those young men—though nothing would ever take the gloss off those cushions. He seemed very cheerful, he was on his way up to the tennis.”

“He never goes to the tennis on Club days.”

“Oh, well, he seemed to be on his way up to the tennis. He told me of that young Armstrong’s engagement to Livvy Thompson. It seems quite a fait accompli, though secret, of course. How things do get round in a garrison town! You knew, I suppose?”

“Well, Livvy did tell me.”

“What a bother for you!” said Lady Naylor. “It is a comfort to have outgrown one’s friends’ engagements. I suppose you couldn’t very well tell her it was preposterous?”

“Well, I ...”

“Mr. Lesworth thought it a pity, in view of the young man’s future. He expects Mr. Armstrong will not stand well over this with their Colonel at all. I think he can’t understand his friends not being keener on his career. I suppose it will end by their just going out to one of those coffee or orange places in Africa. But, of course, Livvy is used to a dull life.”

“But I don’t see ...”

“And there isn’t much else for her. I can’t see poor Livvy at a school of art, though she might typewrite.”

“She would do for a model,” said Laurence, who had been listening with interest to this conversation from his side of the table. “They should be either voluminous or very spiky.”

At this point, the candles were brought in—Lady Naylor had been delayed in Clonmore, they were dining late. The sharp flames shivered, every one blinked; the dahlias became theatrical.

“Autumn,” pronounced Sir Richard. “There should be less of this ambushing and skirmishing and hey-fidaddling now that the days are drawing in.”

“But as an English friend of mine pointed out,” said Hugo, “this Irish fighting is not cricket.”

Laurence maintained that this way of fighting was consistent, efficient and very natural. Why, he asked, be high-toned about a war?

“Oh dear,” said Francie, “you sound just like a pacifist!”

“What else did Gerald say?” Lois wanted to know.

“I really cannot remember,” said Lady Naylor; “he was as pleasant as ever, but, of course, not original. He seemed in a hurry to be getting up to the tennis.”

Lois, dissatisfied, blinked gloomily in the candlelight.

About half-past ten, Francie—having been taken up to her room by Myra, with a suggestion of having been put away for the night—crept out again to the ante-room, listening. Her candlestick, wobbling with indecision, brushed the ceiling with shadows. Wires twanged where some cattle rubbed on a fence in the damp darkness. Francie went across and tapped on Lois’s door.

Lois turned in alarm from the dark window where she stood holding her elbows, not quite thinking. Her heart thumped as the crack of the door widened, letting in foreign light. “Damn,” she thought with annoyance. She had been up here for more than an hour and had not begun to undress. To look more natural she undid her frock and stepped quickly out of it.

Mrs. Montmorency, yellow under the chin, appeared deprecatingly. She had just thought, she said, of a little chat. She looked round hopelessly, she could not think where to put down her candle. This decided—a little table presented itself—her difficulties seemed to be over. She said at once: “The young man, Lois, seems so unhappy.”

“But we’re engaged,” said Lois, tying her dressing-gown firmly round her hips.

“Oh ... Are you certain? Because ...”

“What did he say?” said Lois, at once defensive.

“My dear, I was up at the rectory. I am sure your aunt meant everything for the best.”

Lois went to the glass and took down her hair distractedly. Shaking it over her face she said, muffled: “You mean she has interfered?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say she’d done that. But it seems a pity ...”

“Really,” cried Lois, glad of the hair because her anger did sound to herself faintly academic, “she is as designing as ... a cardinal.”

“As I said to Hugo, you have enough sense, you are so modern ... and after all you will only be young once.”

“Oh. Were you all there?”

“My dear, I tell you, I was up at the rectory. But from the way he picked up the cushions ... I can’t bear lives to go wrong.”

This came out so vehemently, with such an effect of passion that Lois, surprised, said: “Neither can I, really.” And looking round, she found the shadows exaggerated with solemnity; the thin candle-flames stretched up anxiously: a predicament must have become noticeable, even to the room. Impressed by strangeness, by this pressure of emergency, Lois plaited her hair in two plaits instead of one and felt herself a different woman.

“What they never see,” she said rapidly, “is, that I must do something.”

“I should write at once,” said Francie, “I’m not sure that I shouldn’t even telegraph, if it were not for the post-mistress. I should say ... Well, I don’t know really: I do wish Marda were here!”

“If I learn German they say, why not Italian? And when I learn Italian they take no interest.”

Francie picked up the evening dress that Lois had just stepped out of, stared, and remarked to it, almost with incredulity: “Love is everything!”

“At least Gerald is definite. He, I ...”

“I know love is so important.”

“At least it may get one somewhere.”

Francie, raising her voice to a scared note, as though she must make quite certain what they were really talking about, cried: “There are such mistakes!”

“I wouldn’t mind being properly tragic....”

“If one’s not quite certain, one never knows where one is.”

“—It’s just that I feel so humiliated the whole time.”

“But the young man ...” persisted Francie. They looked at each other, or at where the other had been. Francie, deserted at once by the conspiratorial courage that brought her in, dolefully put a finger over her lips, as though betrayed irrevocably by what had come out of them. She visibly shrank with misgiving.

“You seem very intellectual, Lois. Do—do you not love him?”

“I must,” said Lois. She put her hands up to the back of her neck, fumbling open the clasp of her corals. She could feel the bright girl she had been for Mrs. Montmorency disintegrate: much that even she had taken to be herself went with the illusion.

“I just thought I might have helped,” said Francie, in a spent, remote little voice, as though they were both coming back from a funeral to an imposingly vacant house.

“Oh, you have indeed,” said Lois. And she stood there vacantly and, she felt, rather gruesomely smiling, weighing her coral beads up and down in a hand, trying to remember what they had both said, what they had meant, what it had been about.

Francie took up her heavy candlestick and looked about for the door. She sighed and said it had been a tiring day. She could not bear to feel she was not missed out after all, had not been passed by because there was nothing to pass her. It was late at night for so fundamental a disappointment. There seemed some difficulty about getting her back to her room, though they both desired this. Lois opened the door; they heard Sir Richard and Hugo arguing up the stairs. Francie shielded her candle-flame with her hand and wavered out round the door like a shadow.

Lois, hot with retrospective embarrassment, slipped from her clothes and blew out the candles quickly. The dark was gratefully positive. She lay on her side with knees drawn up to her chin, blankness snowing down on her till, quite snowed up in blankness, she was asleep.

Next day, mist lay on the fields like a blanket, muffling sound so that the postman arrived unexpectedly. He brought a letter from Gerald: “For God’s sake see me.” She meant to go out to meet Gerald, bright and matter of fact, but this miscarried: when he came, in the evening, she was half-way down from the garden, fighting with Laurence over a snail. He had walked on the snail on purpose.

“Ough—you fool ... you beast, Laurence!”

“Well, I didn’t mean to be kind to it.”

“Just because it had no mentality.”

“Not at all.”

“Ough, it’s all over the path.”

“It’s scrunched ... I dare say,” said Laurence, pleased, “I am pathological.”

“Great fat feet!”

As a matter of fact, he was sorry about the snail; he had thought it was just a shell, but he wasn’t going to say so. “Little mother,” he said unpleasantly.

“Laurence, you’re insane. Ough, you’re wiping it off everywhere. I shall be sick!”

“Do.”

“Well, I won’t then.”

“I had no idea you were so fond of animals,” he said as offensively as possible. But he was not feeling up to much this evening and could not think what else to say to her. He turned and walked briskly away towards the avenue, conscious of having no objective. An unusual evening, however, awaited him. In a boreen in the Castle Trent direction he met three armed men coming out of a gate. They made him put up his hands and march smartly down the boreen ahead of them. He discovered that under these conditions the mind works fast but unfruitfully; he noted details sharply and then forgot. When they came to the wall of the graveyard he was embarrassed, but they only asked for his shoes and the loan of his wrist-watch. Placing him with his face close up to the wall they advised him for life’s sake not to look round or stir for twenty minutes. “How shall I know?” said Laurence, “you’ve got my watch.” But they did not care and went away with his shoes. Laurence remained with his forehead against the stone for fifty minutes, horse-flies biting him through the socks. Then he limped home to dinner and an audience, considerably cheered. Three days after, the watch was posted back to his Uncle Richard: it was in excellent order and ticked as it was taken out of the package. “Which just shows,” said Sir Richard, holding the watch to his ear with satisfaction. But that was a day of confusion; nobody listened.

As Lois ran down from the garden, swollen about the personality with annoyance, she saw Gerald waiting at a turn of the path by a holly tree. He looked intently at her advancing, without comprehension, as though she had been a picture. Though they were alone, he did not put out a hand or move towards her. He stood there with the vigour, grief and indifference of a tree that cannot help growing.

“Gerald?”

“What’s the matter?” he said, impassive.

“Oh, Laurence walked on a snail!”

“Bad luck!”

“My dear, he liked it.”

“Queer,” said Gerald, finding the word with difficulty.

“Where shall we go?” she asked, while something in her stopped like a clock with foreboding. The encounter, uncoloured by surprise or passion, left her quite at a loss. Unkissed, her mouth and cheeks felt a touch of ice.

“It seems now,” said Gerald, impersonally, as though delivering a message, “that we can’t ever be married.”

“Why? When?” she cried angrily.

Gerald looked at her under level eyelids. She remembered saying: “I wish you wouldn’t keep looking so pleased the whole time.” Now his look and silence were cold with a doomed expectancy: she nearly hated him. Dumbly, in happy-seeming physical agreement like a pair of animals, they wheeled off down the path together, crossed the yard rapidly and came into the plantation ribbed with shadow and lanced across with light about the eye-level. He told her her aunt agreed he was not good enough, it would never do at all, her aunt had said. Looking angrily up the tree-trunks, she exclaimed that her aunt was mad. She repeated this with vehemence and confusion, pulling at her fingers. He listened to her in silence, wounded, wounded. She wished they had not come down—overruling possibly in each other some desire for space—to the plantation where, constricted by firs, thought and movement were difficult and upright shadows emphasized his severity. “She advised me,” Gerald concluded, “to have a frank talk with you.”

“Is this the frank talk now?”

“She was certain you didn’t love me.”

“Gerald—why weren’t you furious?”

“I ... I don’t know,” he said, surprised by the question. She saw him standing confused, like a foreigner with whom by some failure in her vocabulary all communication was interrupted. Her mind halted and she wanted to run away. “Gerald, come back. I’m wretched. Why do we have to talk?”

“I thought you liked that....” Outside himself with passion he cried: “I’d rather be dead than not understand!”

“But don’t you know I ...? Gerald?”

If he did not know, it would be quite over. She watched with agony what seemed to be his indifference. They were each waiting for the other. He watched her hand, on a tree-trunk, pick like a bird at the scaly bark. Her hand, which immediately centred her consciousness of him, paused and became quite rigid, fingers spread out. When he saw her hand so quiet, he would have to be certain. And he immediately said with his usual little resigned inflection: “You see, you are everything.”

“I know,” she said, impersonal.

“I suppose you are what I mean by life.... Do you understand at all?”

“You sometimes make me.” She wanted to add: “Touch me now:” it was the only way across. In her impotence, her desolation—among the severe trees—at not being compelled, she made a beseeching movement which he—remote in a rather sublime perplexity that transcended pain—either ignored or rejected. From the stables, the six o’clock bell sent out relief in a jerky, metallic passage of sound through the plantation. She wanted something to look at, to follow: a train curving past in a rush. With an exaggerated movement, she put up her hands to her ears. Gerald’s face, in a band of light, remained impassible.

“Gerald, you’re making us lose each other!” she shouted above the bell.

“But I mean to say: what would you lose?”

“Everything.”

“Do you mean that?” A light ran almost visibly up inside him. She saw now where they were and why he had come.

She thought of going, hesitating with delight, to the edge of an unknown high-up terrace, of Marda, of getting into a train. “No,” she cried, terrified, “why should I?”

“Then we don’t mean the same thing.”

“Why don’t you make me ... like you?”

“I thought I could. I know I can—when I’m not with you.”

“Damn, damn,” said Lois. “I do want you!” Gerald said piteously: “Then why can’t it all be simple?”

“But it’s our being so young,” she said, too eagerly, “and then, money. I mean, we have got to be practical.”

He explained to her, wide-eyed: “It isn’t anything practical that makes all this—like death. What she said was; that if you loved me ...”

“It’s like a nightmare that even you should begin to talk. I thought you were a rock: I was safe with you. Gerald, really, this is all like a net; little twists of conversation knotted together. One can’t move, one doesn’t know where one is. I really can’t live at all if it has all got to be arranged. I tell you, even what I think isn’t my own, and Mrs. Montmorency comes bursting into my room at nights. Even Marda—nothing we said to each other mattered, it hasn’t stayed, she goes off to get married in a mechanical sort of way. She thinks herself so damned funny—it’s cheap, really. All that matters is what you believe—Gerald, you’ll kill me, just standing there. You don’t know what it’s like for a snail, being walked on....”

“I don’t understand you,” he cried in agony. “Who is a snail?”

“I didn’t ask you to understand me: I was so happy, I was so safe.”

Gerald noticed a change somewhere; the light was gone from his face, moving down the trees it had disappeared. He looked at his wrist-watch. They had been a short time together, almost twenty minutes. “When were you happy?” he said accurately. He would have liked to be sure of this, and of several other matters: she was not collected enough to explain. He eyed the incredible wood, the path, her unchanged figure in the cheerful blue woollen dress. Something struggled free in his brain and said, quite apart from his numbed self: “My darling, don’t, don’t rack yourself. You know this will be always the same for me. Whatever’s impossible, you will always be perfect. I know we’re different about things: if that didn’t hurt you it would never matter to me. I mean, don’t let’s be disappointed. You know I’m not giving you up, I could never have done that. But it’s just that, you see, you never ... I suppose things can’t come out what one wants.... I suppose it would hardly do....”

“But, Gerald, where are we?”

He said, “Don’t worry.” They were both, he knew, entirely lost.

“But what have I done? What have I not done?” After a minute, during which she heard him finger his belt—his fingers slipped on the leather—she shut her eyes and said, “So you’re certain I don’t love you?”

No answer. “Oh, leave that belt alone, Gerald!”

Still no answer, as though he were asleep. And indeed he felt, as at the approach of sleep, an immense indifference. She, tortured by the loneliness of insomnia, had to cry out: “Won’t you even just try—won’t you just kiss me?”

“I don’t think ...”

“All right.”

“Look, I must go now.” Vaguely, he saluted and began to go up the path, towards the beech walk, towards the house.

“Good-bye?” she said.

He only half paused. “No, don’t let’s ...” “Where did you leave your bicycle?”

He was well up the path; he called back: “Against the hedge. You know, under the tennis courts.”

She knew; she remembered him pulling leaves from the privet hedge, scattering them on the grass and throwing them over her. She remembered that Mrs. Boatley was a Christian Scientist. It seemed a good thing summer was practically over; there might not be more tennis parties. But at this the incomprehensible glare of summer blinded her, bringing tears to her eyes. “Gerald!” she called.

But by this time he seemed to be out of ear-shot.

XXIII

ANOTHER thing Lady Naylor had noticed about the English was, a disposition they had to be socially visible before midday. Soon after ten, she had heard, Mrs. Vermont and her friends were to be seen about the streets of Clonmore—from behind the still decently somnolent blinds of inhabitants—with gloves buttoned tight at the wrists, swinging coloured baskets. Before eleven, they would be seated behind the confectioner’s window, deploring the coffee. Mrs. Rolfe had once had Moriarty’s shutters taken down for her specially—and she wishful, Moriarty said, to purchase the one pair of stockings only. A Mrs. Peake, of the Gunners, demanded attention at the hairdresser’s before ten. These unnatural practices were a strain in the town’s normality; the streets had a haggard look, ready for anything. Really, as Lady Naylor said, almost English. She thought of the south of England as a kind of extension of Brighton, the north serrated by factory chimneys, the middle a blank space occupied by Anna Partridge. Only Danielstown’s being out of dropping- or popping-in distance from Clonmore deprived her, as it transpired, of matutinal visits from Mrs. Vermont and her friends.

Mrs. Vermont, however, overcame difficulties, hired a Ford and had herself driven over one morning about eleven o’clock. She brought her great friend Mrs. Rolfe; they were on their way to lunch at the Thompsons’. This she explained before they were out of the car; she knew what Mondays were, she did not want to alarm Lady Naylor—being so much with Mother had made her considerate in these matters. Lady Naylor, as a matter of fact, would have minded them less at lunch-time; one didn’t notice people so much at meals, she discovered. When news of the dropping in came down to the kitchen, she groaned: “My morning!” Nothing could have been worse.

Francie was lying down with “a head”; Hugo was talking over old times with the coachman, who had been pensioned off and brooded all day in the harness-room, much at a loss. Lois, indirectly responsible for the outrage, was not to be found. She had not been herself at all, these last few days. Her aunt, after Gerald’s departure, had made a point of saying: “Well, I hope, of course, you have not made a mistake. But we all have to settle these things for ourselves, you know.” Francie never failed to inquire if she were getting on nicely with the Italian; her uncle agreed it was high time she went to that school of art. This morning she seemed to be nowhere; shouting did not produce her.

Laurence, always unfortunate, was surprised on the steps with Locke. “Oh God,” he said as the Ford came round the bend of the lower avenue. He turned, too late, to escape; the girl wives were already shouting and waving.

Betty said: “Denise, this is Mr. ⁠— (Oh dear, how awful!) This is Mrs. Rolfe of the Gunners; my great friend, you know.”

“Good,” said Laurence. Denise glanced up, apprehensive, at all the windows. Laurence stood looking at them with resignation; he forgot to open the door of the car though they brimmed out over it.

“May we get out?” asked Betty, tittering up at him in the friendliest way from a perfect swirl of furs and red crêpe de Chine. On their knees, two little pairs of hands curled like loose chrysanthemums over their kid pochettes. He let them out and they ran up the steps shaking out their dresses. “Oh, what a brainy book!” cried Betty, pouncing. “—My dear, just look what he’s reading—oh, you have got a brain! I mean, fancy reading ...”

“You’re at college, aren’t you?” said Denise, fluttered.

“Sometimes,” said Laurence accurately. Opening his mouth very wide he shouted for Lois. They shrieked and covered their ears. “I expect,” he said finally, “I had better go in and look for⁠—”

“Don’t go! I’m sure they will all come out.... I did want Denise to see a lovely old Irish home.”

“Yes, we are quaint, really,” said Laurence, considering. “And you oughtn’t to miss the Trents; has she seen the Trents?”

“Well, I hardly know the Trents. Here, we always feel that Gerald is such a link.”

“Missing or otherwise,” Denise added.

“Exactly.” Betty smiled at him sidelong, but all the same, it did seem a pity it should be Laurence that they had dropped in on with unintended accuracy. This was not at all what she had led Denise to expect. Laurence’s not quite rudeness was, in fact, rather international—she supposed, Oxford. She said: “I have a boy cousin at Reading University. That’s quite near Oxford, isn’t it?” Denise, plaintive, said that a wasp was bothering; she wanted to go indoors and see the reputed ancestors. Betty flapped with her pochette and the end of her fur. “She’s terrified of wasps!”

“So am I,” said Laurence, backing, “absolutely terrified. I think I’d better go and—better get a⁠—” He disappeared through the glass door, shutting it.

Denise said: “Well, I do think people are extraordinary.” They both sat down and yawned. All these trees; it was quite extraordinary. “Is that Lois’s cousin?”

“More or less.”

“Well, I always did think she was an odd girl.”

“Ssh, there’s Sir Richard writing in the library—Denise, just look through, sideways. He’s such a type.”

“O-oh ... yes. Is he a knight or a baronet?”

“Well, I don’t see how he could have been knighted.”

“My dear, ssssh!”

“He’s deaf. Oh, darling, look at those little teeny black cows. Those are Kerry cows. They farm, you know; they have heaps of cattle.”

“I always meant to ask you: are there Kilkenny cats?”

“Really,” said Mrs. Vermont, annoyed, as her friend yawned again and she felt her own jaw quiver, “when one thinks these are the people we are defending! I wonder if they’ll offer us any coffee. What I think about Irish hospitality: either they almost knock you down or they don’t look at you. Or I tell you what, we might go out to the garden and get some plums. Only I would like you to see the drawing-room. I wish these were Livvy’s people; the boys say her house smells—I hope you aren’t bored, darling?—I mean, what I mean about Livvy; she does grow on you. I can’t think what Gerald sees in this family, I must say. It isn’t even as if Lois⁠—”

“Of course, I always did think she was an odd girl.”

At this point Sir Richard, who was not deaf, came out in despair. He said this was too bad; he couldn’t think what could have become of Lois. “We might shout,” he said helplessly.

“Your nephew has been shouting.”

“Still,” said Sir Richard, and shouted again. “How are you all getting on?” he said kindly, when he had recovered his breath.

Betty said with dignity: “There may be going to be an offensive.”

“Sssh,” whispered Denise, pinching her elbow.

“Though I ought not really to tell you.”

“Never mind,” said Sir Richard, “I don’t suppose it will come to anything. Besides, now the days are drawing in⁠— But this is too bad really, most unfortunate that my wife should not be here to receive you. She will be most distressed.”

“Oh, but we just dropped in. As I said to Denise, what is the good of being in Ireland if one isn’t a bit unconventional?”

“She will be most distressed.”

“Don’t bother! We’ve been admiring your darling cows.”

“I’ll just go in and inquire,” said Sir Richard firmly and disappeared, shutting the glass door.

Denise said she would get the giggles: a seizure did seem to be imminent. “Well, I must say, Gerald is well out of this family.”

“But, my dear, is he?”

“Something’s happened. He’s black—even Timmy noticed. I said to Timmy: ‘You must find out’—’Cause I think, don’t you, that when men get together ... You see, I can’t—though I can’t bear to see the boy suffer.”

“But I thought you said you⁠—”

“Well, I’ve seen him in the distance and he didn’t look like himself at all. But he hasn’t been near us, or to the Club, or into the Fogartys’. And as I was saying to Mrs. Fogarty⁠—”

“It seems to me he’s been treated rottenly. If it were one of our boys, my dear, I should be fur-rious.”

“All the same, I do want to see Lois....”

“What he sees in her, I cannot imagine. She’s what I should call rather affected⁠—”

“Sssh—Oh, hullo, Lois!” they cried in unison.

Lois, unbecomingly bright, came up from the beech walk.

“Oh, hullo,” she said, “splendid!”

“We’ve just been talking about you.”

“O-oh. Can’t you stay to lunch?”

“No can do; we’re off to the Thompsons. My dear, aren’t you thrilled about Livvy and David! Isn’t it marvellous?”

“Thrilled, it’s absolutely marvellous. Do stay to lunch—I mean,” she said agitatedly, “do come back to tea? Oh no, we shall all be out. Oh, how rotten. Or come to tennis—no, I believe there won’t be any more tennis; Laurence is going back to Oxford and the rain’s washed all the marking off the court. Perhaps we could have a dance or something⁠—”

The two young wives eyed her lightly and curiously; their looks ran over her form like spiders. They were so womanly, she could have turned and fled back down the beech walk. “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore,” she thought to herself wildly. And the pause, the suspicion of some deformity that these ladies produced in her became so acute that she smiled more widely. She buttoned her cardigan up to the top, then unbuttoned it.

“Oh, but don’t go now,” she said, but looked at their Ford, longingly.

“Oh, we must, we have been here hours, watching your darling cows.”

“I’m afraid they’re very much in the distance. Does Aunt Myra⁠—?”

“Oh, we’d hate to disturb her. Unless we might all run round the garden⁠—?”

“It’s locked and I’ve lost the key. I feel quite an outcast. That’s what has been the matter the whole morning. Do have something to eat—have some biscuits?”

“Unless we just come into the drawing-room for one moment?”

“I always think drawing-rooms in the morning are so depressing.”

Denise said she did not see how the same room could be much different, but it was no good; Lois seemed determined to keep them out. From the way she shifted her feet and stared round, you would have said she was expecting bad news momentarily: she talked so much that they hadn’t a chance to express themselves. She went in for a tin of petit beurres and offered it with an odd air, rather propitiatory. Lady Naylor called from an upstairs window that this was too bad, that she was so much distressed, she would be down immediately. “She spends whole mornings with the cook,” said Lois. “I cannot think what they do. I believe they fence verbally. More biscuits?”

“No, we shall spoil our din-dins. Denise, we must come. I hear old Mr. Thompson is a terrible ogre. Any messages in Clonmore, Lois? Any messages to Gerald?”

Lois thought she must blush, but did not; even her blood stood still.

“I should ask him,” said Denise, “why he didn’t send you a message. I think it was odd of him; I should be fur-rious.” Lois saw, with interest, a ripple of light down their dresses; they nudged each other. There must be something odd about her, really, if they had noticed; she must clearly be outside life.

“How is the gramophone?” she said enthusiastically.

“Don’t ask! Gerald is going to Cork to bring back a new one. We thought we might all go too, it would be a rag.”

“Marvellous!”

“Look, I’ll just run Denise in to have a look at the drawing-room.”

“I shouldn’t, really. I haven’t done the flowers.”

“Gerald says all your looking-glasses make him feel sleepy. He’s a funny boy, in a way,” said Betty innocently. “You don’t think we ought to wait till we’ve seen your aunt? She won’t be offended?”

“I shouldn’t really; she’s probably been delayed.” Lady Naylor did, in fact, arrive on the steps in time to utter exclamations of despair as they drove away. “Too bad, too bad!” she called, waving after them. “You must come again soon!... Really, Lois, you might have found them some fruit or something. Fancy puffing them out with biscuits at this hour.”

“I tell you what I think it is about Lois,” said Betty cosily, nestling down in the car as the trees rushed over them. “I think he’s left her.”

Denise agreed. “A boy needs keeping, if you know what I mean.” Betty also told her what she thought about the Naylor family: they were going down in the world. “I should not be surprised if they never used that drawing-room,” she said viciously. “It smells of damp. Myself, I do like a house to be bright and homey.”

The world did not stand still, though the household at Danielstown and the Thompsons’ lunch party took no account of it. The shocking news reached Clonmore that night, about eight o’clock. It crashed upon the unknowingness of the town like a wave that for two hours, since the event, had been rising and toppling, imminent. The news crept down streets from door to door like a dull wind, fingering the nerves, pausing. In the hotel bars, heads went this way and that way, quick with suspicion. The Fogartys’ Eileen, called by a friend while she was clearing away the supper, cried “God help him!” and stumbled up to Mr. Fogarty’s door, blubbered. Mr. Fogarty dropped his glass and stood bent some time like an animal, chin on the mantelpiece. Philosophy did not help; in his thickening brain actuality turned like a mill-wheel. His wife, magnificent in her disbelief, ran out, wisps blowing, round the square and through the vindictively silent town.

Barracks were closed, she could not get past the guards; for once she was at a loss, among strangers. She thought mechanically “His mother,” and pressed her hands up under her vast and useless bosom. Trees in the square, uneasy, shifted dulled leaves that should already have fallen under the darkness. The shocking news, brought in at the barrack gates officially, produced an abashed silence, hard repercussions, darkness of thought and a loud glare of electricity. In Gerald’s room some new music for the jazz band, caught in a draught, flopped over and over. An orderly put it away, shocked. All night some windows let out, over the sandbags, a squeamish, defiant yellow.

Mrs. Vermont heard when Timmy had just gone out; he was to be out all night with a patrol. She was to sleep alone, she could not bear it. Past fear, she ran to the Rolfes’ hut. She spent the night there, sobbing, tearing off with her teeth the lace right round her handkerchief. Captain Rolfe kept bringing her hot whisky. “I can’t, I can’t, not whisky; it’s so awful.” They all felt naked and were ashamed of each other, as though they had been wrecked. From the hut floor—where they had danced—the wicker furniture seemed to rise and waver.

“Percy, where did he—how was he⁠—?”

“Through the head.”

“Then it didn’t⁠—?”

“Oh no. Probably instantaneous.”

“Oh, don’t! Oh, Percy, how can you!”

Denise repeated: “I can’t believe it.” And while the others sickly, furtively stared, she tried to press from her hair the waves she had had put in that morning. “You know, I can’t believe it. Can you, Betty? It’s so ... extraordinary.”

“Why can’t we all go home? Why did we stay here? Why don’t we all go home? That’s what I can’t understand.”

“Percy, can you believe it? I mean, I remember him coming in and standing against this table⁠—”

“Oh, don’t!—Percy, what became of them? Where did they go? Those devils!”

“Oh, got right away.”

“Didn’t anyone hear anything, any firing? I mean, didn’t it make a noise?... Couldn’t they be tortured—why should they just be hanged or shot? Oh, I do think, I mean I do think when you think⁠—”

“Well, we’ve got to get ’em, haven’t we? Look, just try⁠—”

“Oh, I can’t, I tell you⁠— Why can’t we all go home!”

“Percy, leave her alone! Oh God, my head; I shall cut my hair off. I mean, he came in and stood there against that table. Why did they get just Gerald?—Oh yes, I know there was the sergeant—but he won’t die; I know he won’t die.... I can’t believe it! Percy, can you believe it? Percy, say something.”

Betty sobbed: “I should like to—oh, I should like to⁠— Those beasts, those beasts!”

“Look, you two girls go to bed.”

“Oh, how can we!”

“Oh, why isn’t Timmy here? I mean, when I think of Timmy, and out all night—I can’t understand the King, I can’t understand the Government: I think it’s awful!”

But they went to bed—Percy spent the night on two chairs—and lay in what seemed to both an unnatural contiguity, re-clasping each other’s fingers, talking of “Him,” of “you know who” and “that boy” in the eager voices, low-pitched and breaking, kept as a rule to discuss the intimacies of their marriages. In the same moment they fell, dimly shocked at each other, asleep. Then Denise saw Lois clearly, standing affectedly on the Danielstown steps with a tin of biscuits, a room full of mirrors behind her. And Betty woke with surprise to hear herself say: “What I mean is, it seems so odd that he shouldn’t really have meant anything.”

They heard an early bugle shivering in the rain.

XXIV

MR. DAVENTRY arrived before the postman. He had not paid an unofficial visit since he had been in Ireland; it seemed to him odd there should be nothing to search for, nobody to interrogate. It was early, wet tarnished branches came cheerfully through the mist. He had come to the gate with a convoy on its way over to Ballyhinch; two lorries had ground into silence and waited for him at the gate, alarming the cottagers. He walked up the avenue lightly and rapidly: nothing, at the stage things had reached for him, mattered. And superciliously he returned the stare of the house.

He rang and made his demand. Lois came out slowly, dumb with all she must begin to say—for who could an anxious waiting officer be but Gerald? “Really ...” Lady Naylor had said, with a glance at the clock, advising her to put down her table napkin. And Francie, smiling, had covered up her egg for her.

“You?” she now said while everything, the importance of everything, faintly altered. “Come and have breakfast.”

He told her that there had been a catastrophe yesterday, west of Clonmore: a patrol with an officer and an N.C.O. had been ambushed, fired on at a cross-roads. The officer—Lesworth—was instantly killed, the N.C.O. shot in the stomach. The enemy made off across country, they did not care for sustained fire, in spite of the hedges. The men did what they could for the sergeant.

“Will he die?”

“Probably.”

“And Gerald was killed.”

“Yes. Would you⁠—?”

“I’m all right, thank you.”

“Right you are.” He turned round and stood with his back to her. She asked what time it had happened; he said about six o’clock. She thought how accurate Gerald was and how anxious, last time, he had been to establish just when she had been happy because of him, on what day, for how long. “They’d been out all the afternoon?” They both saw the amazed white road and dust, displaced by the fall, slowly settling. “As a matter of fact,” said Daventry, “we were mostly ready for things. I don’t suppose—if he knew at all—it mattered.” “No, I don’t suppose, to oneself, it ever would matter much.” But she thought of Gerald in the surprise of death. He gave himself up to surprise with peculiar candour.

“Thank you for coming.”

“I was passing this way anyhow.”

“But still, there was no reason why you should take the trouble.”

Daventry glanced at her, then at the gravel under his feet, without speculation. Cold and ironical, he was a stay; he was not expecting anything of her. He finally said: “It seemed practical. Would you like me to—shall I just let the others know?” She nodded, wondering where to go, how long to stay there, how to come back. Her mind flooded with trivialities. She wondered who would go up to the tennis this afternoon, if there would be anyone left who did not know, who would expect him; she wondered what would become of the Jazz band. She saw for days ahead she must not deny humanity, she would have no privacy. “As a matter of fact, they are expecting me back to breakfast.”

But at the thought of Francie’s tender and proud smile, covering up her egg, she was enlightened and steadied by grief, as at the touch of finger-tips. She went into the house and up to the top to meet what was waiting. Life, seen whole for a moment, was one act of apprehension, the apprehension of death. Daventry, staring at her in memory—she was, after all, a woman—went into the hall. Here, it pleased him to think of Gerald socially circumspect under the portraits.

He waited. The dining-room door swung open on a continued argument; they came out one by one, each on the threshold, balanced momentarily like a ball on a fountain by the shock of seeing him. “Lady Naylor?” he said to Francie. “Oh no!” she seemed appalled at the supposition. “Isn’t ... Mr. Lesworth here?” “Not to-day.” Lady Naylor came last and stared hardest: really, the Army seemed to be inexhaustible. He told her. “Oh, no!” she said quickly, as though to prevent something. He told her the circumstances. “Oh—no,” she repeated, and turned in appeal to her husband. “That is ... that is too bad,” said Sir Richard and in despairing confusion touched her shoulder. He looked back into the dining-room at the chairs and plates and table, incredible in their survival.

The fact was, they did not at all care for the look of Mr. Daventry. They felt instinctively that he had come here to search the house. Lady Naylor, still statuesque from the shock, made, even, a little disdainful gesture, a kind of: “Here’s everything.” He, unconscious of her impression of being brought to book, remained staring darkly and piercingly past her. Behind her, across the dark dining-room, he saw through a window the lawn striped with mist and sunshine. In Clonmore it had rained that morning: they seemed to have escaped that too. She said sharply: “Where’s Lois?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” he replied, indifferent.

“She—you have⁠—?”

“Oh, yes.”

Her defensive dropped; she said with heartbroken eyes on his face: “You know, we knew him so well. He came out here so often to tennis. It seems queer that one can’t—that one never⁠— He was so⁠—”

“Yes he was, wasn’t he?”

“His mother, he used to tell me about his mother. Who will write? I should like to write to her. Yes, I want very much to write to her. I think she might like—we did know him so well, you see⁠— Richard, don’t you think I⁠—?”

But Sir Richard had slipped away quietly; he was an old man, really, outside all this, and did not know what to do. He was wondering, also, about the Connors. Peter Connor’s friends—they knew everything, they were persistent: it did not do to imagine....

Mr. Daventry said that was all, he thought; he must go now. He took leave with unfriendly courtesy and went off abruptly, with an air that obliterated them, as though he had never been into their house at all. Then she exclaimed, recollecting herself: “He must be unhappy; I ought to have said something.” There was so much to do now, more than would fit into a morning; she had some idea of postponing lunch. And hearing the postman, she half thought, terrified by a sense of exposure: “Suppose there should be a—suppose he should have⁠—”

But there was no letter for Lois from Gerald.

No one was on the steps to hear the news from the postman; he went away disappointed. Lady Naylor thought firmly: “Now I must go and find Lois.” But she did not go; things seemed to delay her. She looked into the drawing-room to see whether something—she wasn’t certain what—was there. Francie, red-eyed, looked guiltily over the back of the sofa. They did not say anything. The room became so sharply painful that Lady Naylor almost exclaimed: “Lois has not done the flowers!”

It was Laurence who, walking about the grounds unguardedly, was exposed to what they all dreaded. He came on Lois, standing beside a holly tree. She could have moved away, but seemed not so much rooted as indifferent.

“It’s all right,” she explained, and added: “I’m just thinking.”

His look became almost personal, as though he had recognized her. He said: “I think I should. I expect—I don’t know—one probably gets past things.”

“But look here, there are things that one can’t⁠—” (She meant: “He loved me, he believed in the British Empire.”) “At least, I don’t want to.”

“Perhaps you are right,” he said, studying, with an effort of sight and of comprehension, some unfamiliar landscape.

“Well, don’t stop, Laurence. You’re going somewhere, aren’t you?”

“Nowhere particular. Not if you⁠—”

“No, I don’t specially. Though if it has to be anyone, you.”

Taking this for what it was worth, he went on, brushing awkwardly past her against the laurels.

A fortnight later, Mrs. Trent drove over, the very evening of her return from the North. She had been inexpressibly bored up there and wished to complain. Lady Naylor, delighted, came out to meet her; it was like old times again.

“The house feels empty. They’ve gone, you know.”

“Yes, dear me. I was sorry not to have seen the last of Hugo and poor little Francie. What about their bungalow?”

“Oh, that was just an idea; they are quite off it. Bungalows inland seem so pointless, cliffs are so windy and one cannot live on a flat coast. No, they think now of going to Madeira.”

“Then they won’t un-store the furniture?”

“I don’t think so; they never cared for it much.”

“It’s a pity he never did go to Canada.” Mrs. Trent looked round at the pleasant fields and lawns, the trees massive and tarnished, the windows that from their now settled emptiness seemed to have gained composure. Her sense of home-coming extended even to Danielstown. She went on: “How’s Richard? And listen: are you getting in your apples?—we haven’t begun. They never get anything done when I’m away. And tell me: how’s Lois?”

“Oh, gone, you know.”

“Gone? Oh, the school of art!”

“Oh no,” said Lady Naylor, surprised. “Tours. For her French, you know. And to such an interesting, cultivated family; she is really fortunate. I never have been happy about her French. As I said to her, there will be plenty of time for Italian.”

“Oh, that’s splendid,” Mrs. Trent said vaguely but warmly. “Then of course you must feel quiet. Did she and Laurence travel over together?”

“She seemed so offended at being thought incompetent and he was worried at the idea of looking after her luggage, so we sent them over separately; he crossed Wednesday, she Friday. Both nights, I hear, it was rough.... Yes, it’s been sad here, lately; we’ve been so much shocked and distressed about that unfortunate young Lesworth. I think I felt it particularly; he had been out here so much and seemed so glad to talk, and had come, in a way, to depend on one. Though it was a shock, too, for Lois. You see they had really played tennis so often and were beginning to be quite friends. She did not take it as hard as I feared, girls of her generation seem less sensitive, really.... I don’t know; perhaps that is all for the best. And of course she has so many interests. But it was terrible, wasn’t it; I still think: how terrible. But he did have a happy life. I wrote that to his mother; I said, it must always be some consolation to think how happy his life had been. He quite beamed, really; he was the life and soul of everything. And she wrote back—I did not think tactfully, but of course she would be distracted—that it was her first consolation to think he died in so noble a cause.”

Mrs. Trent had for a moment an uneasy, exposed look. She said: “It was heroic,” and glanced down awkwardly at her gloves. She missed a dog, she felt unstayed, there was no dog.

“Heroic,” said Lady Naylor, and scanned the skies with eager big-pupilled eyes that reflected the calm light. “Although,” she added, half in surprise, “he could not help it.... But come in now and tell Richard about the North, he will be amused, though sorry that you were dull. To tell you the truth, we both rather feared you might be. Ah, don’t mind the time, I’m sure it’s early; come in, come in!”

But Mrs. Trent could not, she was a punctilious person and wore a wrist-watch. She had not even sent round her dog-cart to the back; a man was walking the cob up and down the avenue. “A flying visit,” said Lady Naylor mournfully, having prolonged the conversation by half an hour. Then Mrs. Trent climbed briskly into the dog-cart and gathered the reins up; they sighed at each other their resignation to parting.

“Then we see you on Tuesday. Be sure and come early, before the Hartigans.” To the domestic landscape, Mrs. Trent nodded an approving farewell. “Every autumn, it strikes me this place looks really its best.”

“To tell you the truth, I really believe it does. There is something in autumn,” said Lady Naylor. She remained on the steps looking after the trap, her hands restlessly, lightly folded. Some leaves spun down from the gate with a home-coming air.

The two did not, however, again see Danielstown at such a moment, such a particular happy point of decline in the short curve of the day, the long curve of the season. Here, there were no more autumns, except for the trees. By next year light had possessed itself of the vacancy, still with surprise. Next year, the chestnuts and acorns pattered unheard on the avenues, that, filmed over with green already, should have been dull to the footsteps—but there were no footsteps. Leaves, tottering down the slope on the wind’s hesitation, banked formless, frightened, against the too clear form of the ruin.

For in February, before those leaves had visibly budded, the death—execution, rather—of the three houses, Danielstown, Castle Trent, Mount Isabel, occurred in the same night. A fearful scarlet ate up the hard spring darkness; indeed, it seemed that an extra day, unreckoned, had come to abortive birth that these things might happen. It seemed, looking from east to west at the sky tall with scarlet, that the country itself was burning; while to the north the neck of mountains before Mount Isabel was frightfully outlined. The roads in unnatural dusk ran dark with movement, secretive or terrified; not a tree, brushed pale by wind from the flames, not a cabin pressed in despair to the bosom of night, not a gate too starkly visible but had its place in the design of order and panic. At Danielstown, half-way up the avenue under the beeches, the thin iron gate twanged (missed its latch, remained swinging aghast) as the last unlit car slid out with the executioners bland from accomplished duty. The sound of the last car widened, gave itself to the open and empty country and was demolished. Then the first wave of a silence that was to be ultimate flowed back, confident, to the steps. Above the steps, the door stood open hospitably upon a furnace.

Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, not saying anything, did not look at each other, for in the light from the sky they saw too distinctly.