THE DEPARTURE OF GERALD

XVII

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 eyes, 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 Gunner 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 barrack 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 to-night,” 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 look!” shrieked Denise every time, flinging herself against the wall to conceal the draperies. “It’s all a surprise for to-night.” 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 some one, “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. Every one 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 war,” 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 tension 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 fox-trot 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 uproar. She was priceless. She had light-red hair fluffed over her forehead, a wide smile punctuated by gaps in her teeth and 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 to-night. We—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 deep 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 to-night 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; down 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.

“Oh, take care,” wailed Denise, “mind my draperies!” She freed an end of the muslin and, as no one listened, began with angry laughter to pepper them all with floor-powder. The D.I.’s niece looked at Daventry queerly and suddenly: their eyes were now on a level. His eyes, dark with fatigue and nervousness, were set in too close together, like a good-looking shark’s.

Cicely Ralte yawned slightly; the struggle did not abate. “We shall all be tired when it comes to to-night,” she said to the adjutant.

But he said: “Here comes Miss Farquar, looking as fresh as paint.”

Lois came to the door with David Armstrong. Livvy would not come up to the hut till this evening, she would be confused, she feared; she didn’t know how much they knew. She was down in Clonmore now, buying sophisticated-looking black pansies to wear in her dress. She and Lois were spending the night in Clonmore, with the Fogartys. Lois was dazed still from her long drive under the strained white sunless sky. Sir Richard and Lady Naylor had viewed her departure with the gloomiest apprehensions, but Francie had insisted she would enjoy herself. It must be flat for her these few days, Francie said, after Marda had gone. And she had slipped a sachet of Californian Poppy into the top of the suitcase, with Lois’s green tulle dress.

Lois and David looked through the door at the young men all in a tangle with a sensation of helplessness, as though it devolved on themselves to unwind them. Then they stepped in and shook hands with Mrs. Rolfe and her girl friends. Lois, pleasing the adjutant by her freshness, wore a light-blue felt hat and a blue cardigan. She suspected she should not be walking about the camp without a chaperon, but could not see how to avoid this: she had come up here to look for Mrs. Vermont. She went pink from the heat of the room and felt Mr. Daventry look at her—then shut his eyes again. There was a desperation about Mr. Daventry she could have loved. But he apparently craved relaxation: she had found out she did not relax Mr. Daventry.

Gerald was not here—she guessed from the eyes of commiseration. He was a serious dancer and did not care to tire himself by sliding. Possibly he was on duty, possibly would be waiting at Mr. Fogarty’s. Now, she could remember nothing of him but the leg he had drawn so tenderly into the armoured car. She had heard nothing of him from that moment; he might have been sealed up permanently in tin, like a lobster. Did he regret the kiss?—he had not added a word to it.

Mr. Simcox, the fattest and sweetest of all the Gunners, started the gramophone with an eye on herself and came to ask for a dance. He looked so hot, she said she would rather wait till the evening. “Remember,” said Mr. Simcox, spreading a hand on his heart. And by some mysterious evocation, the hut, lit up, vibrated; the air was warm like smoke on her cool arm, and she went throbbing along with Gerald, feeling his hand on her back through her thin dress—too near to see each other—his lashes reverent by her hair. She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room.

She thanked Mr. Simcox and said she would keep number six and would not lose count. Mrs. Vermont, looking peevish suddenly, said it was tea-time now and shooed the young men out of the hut like chickens. They dispersed through the mud in the tired, wise light of the afternoon.

That evening a wind came up. Lois and Livvy dressed in Mrs. Fogarty’s spare room, stumbling round the edge of the large bed. They took turns at the looking-glass; in the intervals of their toilet they ran to the window to look out. It was strange and pleasant to Lois to be in a town again. The square, where some crisp leaves whirled autumnly, was pervaded by an excitement. Though only twelve couples had been invited to Mrs. Rolfe’s dance, all Clonmore seemed to know of it. People kept coming out quickly through the swing doors of the Imperial. Some one played half a waltz and broke off, discouraged; two commercial travellers clapped one another on the shoulder. Livvy pinned the black pansies under her bosom and turned to invite admiration. Lois thought the pansies looked common, but, knowing they must have cost four-and-six, said they were most original. Lois’s green tulle dress slipped over her head like a cataract. She shone, coming out through the top of it. If only Marda could see her ... It was half-past six: she had promised herself to think of Marda.

They were dressing early, they were to dine with a Mrs. Perkins up in the huts. Mrs. Perkins could not promise there would be much for dinner, but after all this was Ireland and it would be rather jolly.

Captain Vermont was to call for them: they buttoned their over-coats over their ball-dresses. Mrs. Fogarty kissed them half-way downstairs, and warned them not to break hearts. She would see them later, she was coming to watch the dance.

Since the acquisition of Betty, Captain Vermont’s stock of conversation to pretty young things had given out naturally; biologically the time was past for it. They walked rather silently up past the barracks and picked their way over the mud between the huts. A chill of darkness was coming down on the air. The wind came, knife-like, down through the lines of huts from the mountain, over a gulf of land where the farms were dark—apprehensive, the young girls patted the whorls of their hair. The Perkins’ hut exposed a flank to the wind; it was chilly, one slipped one’s bare arms out of one’s coat reluctantly, going to table.

The dinner was not so jolly as Lois had feared. Mrs. Perkins looked distraite and had a whispered argument with her husband about a tin-opener. Mrs. Vermont could talk of nothing but poor Denise (“As though,” said Livvy, “she were having at least a baby instead of only a dance”). Captain Perkins and Captain Vermont apologized repeatedly to the girls for being old and married; their wives told them not to be so silly. Their wives said the girls could perfectly well see there was no room for young men here; already their six chairs grated against the match-boarding. The girls would have young men in the course of the evening. Lois agreed politely, but Livvy wished they had stayed to dinner down in Clonmore where one could have at least watched Mr. Fogarty drink. She sat squinting, watching the wasted powder flake off her nose.

A bottle of white wine was divided among the ladies with depressing impartiality; the men drank whisky. Mrs. Perkins’ pince-nez glittered with more animation. But the wind like a lunatic fidgeted with the hut, frames creaked, doors rattled, a shudder went down the walls; a gust through a crack set the lights dementedly swinging. During a strained little silence, between two gusts of the wind, Mrs. Vermont observed that an angel must be passing over the house; she wanted them to listen for its wings. They listened; they thought of empty country blotted out by the darkness. “Quiet here, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Perkins.

“Better not circulate too far between the dances,” said Captain Perkins, “and don’t go down to the wires. It’s dark, for one thing; we don’t want any of these girls lost.”

“Grandpa!” said Mrs. Vermont. Livvy noted, there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else’s husband. “I don’t go for walks between dances,” said Livvy, bridling.

“You don’t know what you’ll do now!” said Mrs. Vermont, and they all laughed.

Lois was anxious, there was a tight little ball in her throat; she could hardly swallow. She was always “strung-up” before a dance. But to-night it was worse; she had not the expectation of being claimed: she was really doubtful. She had not had a word from Gerald; he hadn’t been round to the Fogartys’. Was she not nice to kiss; was he disappointed? Her green frock glinted under the light; she kept looking down at her breast, and into her lap, where the folds ran off in shadow under the table. If he were not there when she came, if she did not see him before he saw her (as she came uphill in the dark) standing full in pink light by the door, staring eagerly on to the slab of darkness that was to give her up—she should die, she thought. For this morning she had written to Viola that she intended to marry Gerald.

XVIII

THE Rolfes’ door swung open and shut; bursts from the gramophone came downhill like somebody coughing. As the Perkins’ party stepped up from the duckboards Gerald spun past the door with the D.I.’s niece, in a nimbus of gauze draperies. The room was sticky with strawberry light, unlit lanterns wobbled between the electric light cords; the dancers seemed to be moving slowly in jam. A group of young men stood by the door, coughing. But one hadn’t yet made one’s official appearance: Lois blinked and began to tug out her silver shoes from her pockets; somebody pulled her on down a passage to change.

In what Denise called the kitchenette at the end of the passage the five spare men were smoking, looking into their glasses of whisky and wishing to play bridge. Lois looked in and they all waved to her, but Livvy pulled her away quickly: she said that must be the gentlemen’s cloak-room. Lois met, with surprise, her own eyes of interrogation in six inches of mirror between the coats.

David came to claim Livvy, Betty went swooning off over the chalky lake of the floor with Mr. Simcox, Mr. Daventry stared at the passage door with severity, balanced his cigarette on the rim of the gramophone and came up to Lois and frowned, without speaking. He opened his arms slowly. They danced; she had no idea she could dance so beautifully. At the end of the record Mr. Daventry impassively moved back the needle again. “Tiring day,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t think so.” They went on dancing.

The D.I.’s niece picked off ends of her tangerine draperies from various parts of Gerald and walked away with an aquiline-looking gunner. Over Lois’s temple Mr. Daventry’s jaw moved slightly; his neck muscles strained. Again he revived the gramophone. Lois, breathless, said: “Isn’t there going to be an interval?” “Not necessarily,” replied Mr. Daventry. Meanwhile, one wall of the hut seemed propped against Gerald’s rigid, resentful back.

“What a crowd ...”

“I beg your pardon?”

She did not speak again. Anxiously dancing, she merely constituted Mr. Daventry’s revenge. Mrs. Vermont, going past Gerald, said: “Oh, diddums?” She asked Mr. Simcox if he had noticed, nice-looking boys looked their nicest sulky? Mr. Simcox, looking round so carefully that he missed a step, said he would not call that sulky ... More worried.

“Nonsense, Tubby, what’s he got to worry about?”

“You never know.”

Mr. Simcox was a bit of a philosopher, because he was so fat. He gave up Mrs. Vermont with a sigh to another young man and went across for somebody’s young, shy sister. “No luck?” he said on the way, to Gerald. And Gerald looked at him candidly, with despair.

The evening “went” with a rush, with a kind of high impetuousness out of everybody’s control. Every one looked and spoke and danced close up with a kind of exalted helplessness; intimacy tightened the very air. Sandwiches were ambrosia, brightening the eyes; rims of plates went electric where fingers touched. Mrs. Rolfe laughed all the time, you would have said with despair. She climbed past couples very close up at the darkest part of the passage, she entered the kitchenette with a shriek and swept some cards from the table. The spare men danced with each other. She ran in and out of her bedroom, shaking a plate of chocolates at the couples sitting out on the chest-o’-drawers and on the washstand covered with Turkish cushions. If the hut had risen and soared up into the air, so that some one stepping out at the door had to step back dizzily, she would hardly have been surprised. Indeed, two subalterns running down to the mess for more siphons did leap to the mud as from a great height.

The room was hot; they drew the curtains back and opened the windows, then were stared in at oddly by hard little squares of night. Couples went out for walks, to cool their faces. Livvy was kissed twice and went off to powder her chin. “Of course, this is post-war madness,” said Mr. Simcox, standing beside a window.

“Oh yes,” agreed Lois.

“Awful, really.... I expect you understand what I mean?”

“Oh yes.” Wishing Mr. Simcox were not intrigued, she put her two hands out of the window, as into a well, to feel wind cold on her wrists. Gerald came up behind her.

“Mine next,” he said, as though they had just parted. “What a row!” he yelled.

“This jazz,” said Simcox. “They ought to have let me bring my band,” complained Gerald, “it wouldn’t have taken up much more room than Mrs. Fogarty.”

Mrs. Fogarty had indeed come in and sat at the end of the room in a purple tea-gown. Her circumference was enormous, her feet stuck out beyond it—but she was such a darling. Every time a couple stumbled over her feet she beamed and nodded in the friendliest way. She had just whispered to Gerald, who brought her a glass of lemonade: “Here, where’s your girl?” And her eyes had rolled at him, dark with worry. Gerald could not have borne to disappoint Mrs. Fogarty.

Gerald did not dance silently. His hand supported her wrist, cool and familiar. Lois felt she was home again; safe from deserted rooms, the penetration of silences, rain, homelessness. Nothing mattered: she could have gone to sleep. But he woke her.

“Look here: what have I done?”

“How⁠—?” said she, quite inadequate.

“You know. But why are you—why must we⁠—?”

“Gerald—oh, do be—sssh!”

A couple sheered off from them.

“I didn’t think you’d be cruel,” he said to her hair, almost confidentially.

“But it’s you who’ve been cutting me.”

“But how? When? You’ve never once looked—Lois, you’re lovely, but you’re so—”

“Look here, we can’t talk and dance.”

“Which does that mean you don’t want to do?”

She looked at a button of his mess coat. “Talk,” she said after a little contented interval. He slid his hand up her wrist, they danced on. The D.I.’s niece trailed past them, laughing at Daventry: they had a pool of space to themselves on the crowded floor. The pink room melted round, beatific and syrupy. He was closer than ever under the lovely compulsion of movement.

“You do dance divinely.”

“What?” he said, like the ghost of Daventry. Some one stopped the gramophone, they looked at each other, shocked. Something had made him absurdly unhappy: she would have liked to have comforted him.

“Let’s go out.”

“Won’t it be cold for you?”

“Gerald,” said she, discouraged, “don’t be an aunt.”

The wind whipped round the edge of the hut, ran through her hair at the roots and stung her ears—a sinister energy in this fixed and angular world, for one could not see anything moving. Gerald walked, unknown, beside her, up in the dark. “At one time,” said Lois, wrapping her wild skirts round her, “a girl would have died of this.”

“Cigarette?”

“Oh—will it light here?”

“I can light one most places.” So she bent over his hands, a cup of fire. There were two bright specks in his eyes.—Then the match whirled off and died on the dark. “I can’t think what you think has gone wrong,” she said.

“You were so queer that Thursday. You’d been like part of me, the night before; then everything seemed—wrong. I dare say I was a brute; I oughtn’t to have—though as a matter of fact I’ll never be sorry.... If you’d been just angry or anything ... But you seemed to go right away: I didn’t know where I was. All lunch you were like a girl at a tennis club. Then you left me down there with them all to talk rot and went off with that beastly gramophone.”

“That was not my fault—did you want me to listen to you talking rot?—Gerald, I didn’t realize you were resentful; I didn’t think you could be.... I was waiting for you to write.”

“I began so many letters, I used half a box of note-paper. I couldn’t think what to say.”

“Still, you might have written.”

“But how?” he said candidly.

She could not remember, though she had read so many books, who spoke first after a kiss had been, not exchanged but—administered. The two reactions, outrage, capitulation, had not been her own. “You were hoping I would write?” she said, seeing light suddenly.

“You see, you had always been so understanding.”

“But, Gerald, I should have thought you’d have been shocked if I’d⁠—”

“Oh?... Perhaps I would. But I wanted something to make things natural. I shall never forget what I felt in that armoured car. You will always be connected up in my mind with the smell of oil—Lois, do you think I am terribly introspective?”

“You know, you were tired.”

“Perhaps it was that,” he said, puzzled. “But bumping along back to barracks, and you going in again with that girl to that topping house ...”

“Do you think it’s a topping house?”

“It seems so to me.”

This new version of the changeable afternoon was a shock to her. It had gone on for him, too; doors that she had not thought of shutting and windows opening, the drone in the drawing-room, rain with a different importance. Might she perhaps have thought more about Gerald and wondered less? Splashing along the brown road to Clonmore she could now see the armoured car diminish—with Gerald its only nerve. But she thought of the empty spare room and how it avenged him.

“Marda’s gone, you know.”

“But she had just come to lunch, surely?”

“Gerald!... Can’t you feel any difference between some one to lunch and somebody staying?”

“She hadn’t a hat,” said Gerald after consideration.

“She went two days ago: she’s in Kent now.”

“I’m sorry,” said Gerald civilly. Feeling a strained, fierce pause, he added: “She seemed awfully nice, I thought.”

“Don’t you wonder at all if I miss her?”

“I expect you must. I always miss visitors, though they’re a bother beforehand.”

“She hadn’t any beforehand—that seems so odd now.”

“Lois ... you aren’t angry, then?”

“Oh?” Recollecting herself, she looked round the darkness vaguely. A couple were coming towards them; she put a hand on his sleeve to make him be quiet, his other hand came over it. They heard Daventry’s angry laugh, his partner’s feet ran stickily on the duckboards. Gerald and Daventry passed in the dark with, it seemed, a queer silent interchange.

“Mr. Daventry seems old to be a subaltern.”

“It’s absurd that he should be—all this peacetime bother. He had a company in France in 1916, later on he was acting major. He’s a splendid fellow, I’m sorry you haven’t seen more of him. He won’t go about much, outside barracks. The fact is,” he added apologetic, “he’s sick at being over here. It doesn’t seem to agree with him.”

“Do you really like it?”

“Oh, well, it’s a job. Though I rather see Daventry’s point—it doesn’t seem natural.”

They had come to the end of the huts—the foot of the steep slope a wall, the top heavily wired. Under the wall a sentry inhumanly paced like a pendulum. The country bore in it strong menace. Gerald looked out at it, his face blinking in and out of the dark, faintly red with the pulse of his cigarette. She nursed her bare elbows, unconsciously shivering. He seemed at once close and remote, known and un-personal; she understood why, up to now, she had searched for him vainly in what he said. He had nothing to do with expression. She put out a hand to where he was, shadowy and palpable. He threw his cigarette away, turned—and said nothing. The sentry passed.

They went back the way they had come, between the huts.

“Gerald, I wasn’t angry ... at what you did....”

“No, you were wonderful all the time.”

“Don’t you understand?” she said sharply—“Gerald?”

“Understand?... Lois!”

While they kissed, she heard, in the silence of their footsteps, some one moving about in a hut up the lines. The sound was a long way off, at the other side of a stillness.

“Your arms are so cold.”

“I’ve been so lonely.”

“They’re so cold.” He kissed them, inside the elbows. Later: “I like the back of your head,” she said with exploring finger-tips.

“I never thought you looked at me.”

“Gerald, I’ve been so ... vacant.”

“I never thought you wanted me.”

“I⁠—” she began. The soft sound of her dress in the wind became, by some connection of mood, painfully inexplicable to her—the pain was its own, from not being understood. “Gerald, your buttons hurt rather.”

“My darling⁠—” He let her go, but still, above consciousness, held one of her hands, solemnly. “Shall you really be able to marry me?”

“I don’t know till you’ve asked me.”

“Don’t laugh⁠—” he cried.

“Can’t you hear I’m not laughing?”

“Lois⁠—” Something more was coming; she waited, hearing him draw a breath. “Let’s go back and dance,” he said almost religiously—“shall we?”

The hut was compact with movement: she stood back in alarm, as before a revolving door in destructive motion. Now it was gone, she remembered sharply the smell of earth.... David Armstrong leaned from his partner wildly and struck Gerald over the head with a red balloon.

Mrs. Rolfe had had an idea that the dance might well finish up with a cotillion. She was vague about cotillions, but towards this end she had distributed balloons, whistles that ran out long tongues when you blew them, and streamers from striped cardboard batons with which dancers might hit one another over the head. Mrs. Vermont thought these things went better with fancy dress, but Denise said a rag was a rag at any time. Girls ducked and shrieked and waved their streamers over their partners’ shoulders. Denise, radiant in black with a trail of nasturtiums, was waltzing—affair of prolonged “hesitations”—with Betty’s husband. She bit off a streamer, spat out a mouthful of paper and said, with a shiver of happiness: “Isn’t it marvellous, Timmy? I can hardly believe I’m awake!”

“Ra-ther!” replied Captain Vermont, with blurred enthusiasm. He was being buffeted by Mr. Simcox and somebody’s sister.

“Betty’s been just too marvellous,” went on Denise—“Oh, Timmy, do have a shot at Reggie Daventry—there, with the girl in scarlet. He looks just too refined!”

But Timmy failed to find Daventry. “Betty’s tons the prettiest here,” cried Denise, ecstatic.

“Oh, come!” expostulated Captain Vermont, squeezing her waist. It gave him a warm, tender feeling to think how fond she and Betty were of each other.

“Tell me,” said Denise, as nearly as possible snuggling, “are we terribly reckless? Would this annoy the Irish?”

“They won’t know.”

“They have heaps of spies.”

“I say, sssh, Denise, there are heaps of them here to-night.”

“Spies?”

“Irish—the Raltes and Co.”

“They’re different.”

“Still, they’ve got feelings.”

Denise sighed. “I could go on like this for ever.” But Captain Vermont rather thought he would like a drink. A balloon exploded. “Glory!” cried Mrs. Fogarty. So they burst four more to keep her amused.

“Is this like a bombardment?” asked Moira Ralte.

“No,” said Mr. Simcox.

If they were not careful, they would knock over the gramophone. Mr. Daventry thought it was time they did. It was time something happened. He danced the D.I.’s niece down the passage and kissed her with her head pressed back in the coats. She struggled, futile, slippery as a weasel. As he kissed again her face went stiff and she shut her eyes. When these opened, they were as shrewd as ever: still he did not know what she thought. The drums in his temples were now insistent; he could not forget them even while he was dancing. She had dabbed herself over with White Rose. Her frizzy hair tickled his mouth as he bent close to her.

“Do you get kissed a lot?”

“Englishmen never could keep their mouths to themselves.”

“You won’t know yourself when we’re gone!”

“You should get back home while you can, the lot of you.”

“What would become of Uncle?”

“Did you like your whisky?” She put a hand up rudely to shield herself from his breath. This reminded Daventry, who let go of the common little hell-cat abruptly and walked away to the kitchenette, where he heard a siphon. Lois stood in the door, waiting while David got her some soda-water. But wouldn’t she try a little something? Just a little something to dance on—no? Daventry, standing back and tilting his drink about in his glass, stared at her feet with owlish ferocity.

“Sorry about your silver shoes, Miss Farquar.”

“There are some beautiful walks round here,” said David, grinning.

“Miss Farquar should float, not walk; she looks like a water-lily,” said Daventry, looking over her green frock with his discomforting eyes. “Come on and dance,” said David, taking her empty glass. Lois began to say she was keeping the next for Gerald. But: “Miss Farquar and I are hungry, we are going to find a sandwich,” said Daventry.

In the box of a dining-room plates of dishevelled sandwiches sat in unmasked electric light. There was no one there. Mr. Daventry, looking hard at her, put the palm of his hand to his left temple with a curious, listening air, as though to see if a watch had stopped.

“Chicken and ham,” he said, “tongue and turkey; they’re all cat, they say.” (“What shall I say?” thought Lois.) He looked at a chair with contempt, then sat down on it. “I don’t think I’ve met you before,” he continued.

“Perhaps you didn’t notice.”

“Dear me,” said Mr. Daventry, looking into a sandwich. “No, I don’t think it could have been that.”

“Then it can’t be explained,” said Lois, and (she felt) glittered excitedly. He suggested the army of Wellington; buckskins. Looking up thoughtfully, he directed upon the wall just over her head his strained dark look that was almost a squint. “You live round here?”

“More or less⁠—” She was startled to meet the dark look on a level. Hers was, he said, a remarkably beautiful country.

“I am afraid you⁠—”

He affably shrugged. Did that matter? He stared at her arms, at the inside of her elbows, with such intensity, she felt Gerald’s kisses were printed there. Was this a bounder?—She knew she had no criterion.

“Have a nice walk?” he inquired.

“Did you?” she countered.

“I expect so,” said Mr. Daventry, after consideration. “As a matter of fact, I am not quite at my best.” They looked hard at each other. “Nothing,” he said, “appeals to me.” She moved her arms nervously on the silk of her dress. For she saw there was not a man here, hardly even a person.

“How do you mean ‘more or less’?” he said suddenly.

“Well, I don’t live anywhere, really.”

“I do: I live near Birmingham.” He put the half-eaten sandwich down, with distaste, on the edge of the cloth and pulled up a plate to cover it. She felt she was quite finished with. Suppose, she thought, they were all like this! Should she go? She made a movement, he did not see; she was disappointed. He put the hand to his temple, again listening.

“Tired?”

“Oh no,” he said, with irony.

“I’m going back now.”

“Such a pity. Anyone so charming ...”

“Well, I’m bored,” she said.

“It’s a pity you don’t know about my head, it’s a most curious head, it would interest you.... How shall I keep you? Look here, seriously, about Lesworth⁠—”

“Oh?” she inquired, suddenly cold inside.

“About our young friend⁠—” He pulled up his chair close; she had a feeling like gates shutting. “Tell me this⁠—”

But the roar of merriment, solid and swerving evenly as a waterfall past the door, splintered off in a crash. Silence came, with hard impact. “Thank God, they’ve upset the gramophone!” Daventry smacked his knee, remotely, as though rehearsing the gesture. His look decomposed in laughter. “Done in,” he said, drawing life from the thought. Simultaneously, a universal shriek went up: it was smashed, finished. “Really,” she thought, “you laugh like Satan!”

“Well, well,” said Daventry, tilting his drink about, “it’s been a pleasant evening.” Here they all came—a stampede in the passage. She was glad of them, for under the storm of his mirth that swept their island, disarranging the interlude, she had sat cold and desolate. A gramophone passing, a gramophone less in the world, it was not funny. But between bursts of laughter she had felt him look at her lips, at her arms, at her dress, like a ghost, with nostalgia and cold curiosity. About their young friend?—she wasn’t to know.

Mrs. Vermont seemed broken also, she leaned on the adjutant. “Stay her with sandwiches,” called out somebody, “comfort her with—with—more sandwiches!” Moira mopped her eyes with a trail of her dress, but nobody noticed. They jostled about the table. Plates rang, shunted in all directions. “Sitting in here?” cried Gerald, exalted, “splendid!” Somebody waved a mouth-organ: could one dance to that? More and more squeezed in at the door: the room would burst. The cracks of the walls that had been straight a minute ago like bars now seemed to bulge out visibly: light glared down on the resolution of backs and pink, reaching arms. “Our young friend, our young friend, our young friend,” thought Lois, and watched Gerald. Though she watched wherever he went, she could not see him. There was nothing, in fact, to which to attach her look except his smoothness and roundness of head, which seemed for the first time remarkable. She looked for his mouth—which had kissed her—but found it no different from mouths of other young men who had also been strolling and pausing between the huts in the dark. The page of the evening was asterisked over with fervent imaginary kisses. And one single kiss in the wind, in the dark was no longer particularized: she could not remember herself, or remember him.

As he came up, she looked quickly away. She looked at an empty plate down on the floor, at a thin disk of cucumber flaccid against its rim. “What have I done?” she thought: she looked at the plate with dread. And: “Oh, sandwich?” said Gerald, turning to bring up some more. “... Or perhaps it will seem natural to-morrow?” Nothing could keep her from having to eat a sandwich. “Darling ...” he whispered, brushing against her shoulder.

“Tired?” asked Mr. Simcox, seeing her face.

“Oh no,” she said, with Mr. Daventry’s best irony.

XIX

MR. and Mrs. Montmorency were sitting on the steps as Lois drove up the avenue. Francie waved, Hugo looked warily round the Spectator. “Well ...?” cried Francie, as Lois came into ear-shot. Above, twenty dark windows stared over the fields aloofly out of the light grey face of the house. The trees had rims of light round them; everything seemed a long way away. With a sigh, Hugo put down the Spectator and came to lift Lois’s suitcase out of the trap.

“Well ...?”

“Oh, marvellous.... But what do you think: we broke the gramophone!”

“Oh, the poor gramophone!”

“It was the Gunners’ gramophone.... Where are the others?”

“We have no idea.”

The Montmorencys now felt certain it must be a tiring day: even Lois looked pale. They had been having an intimate conversation about the future, both with a sense of courage as from sweeping aside some decency. Why not, Hugo had said, build a bungalow somewhere? “With no stairs?” Francie kindled at the idea, slipping a hand under Hugo’s. “And live there always?” Certainly—why not?—they would un-store the furniture. And at the thought of their tables and sofas coming again out of limbo, Hugo’s face was illumined by a look of defiance.

“But where would we build?” said Francie, wrinkled up with delightful anxiety. Hugo said they would motor round for a bit and no doubt some idea would suggest itself. “We could choose the view,” said Francie. But at this point, for some reason, he had taken up the Spectator.

The man came round for the pony: Lois sat down on the steps and began to chatter. It was surprising, really, how much had occurred. And fancy, the Colonel had been furious.... Even Hugo listened with some attention. “Dear me,” he said when they heard about Mr. Daventry. Francie expected it must be a great relief for a man in that state of mind to meet a girl to whom he could really talk. “But he didn’t talk; he really was most extraordinary. Of course, he was once a major.” Francie wished she had seen her go off in that green frock—all, how should she say? like a poppy, only a different colour. Would Lois put it on for them all to-night?

“It’s not really a frock one sits in,” said Lois discouragingly. Francie said it was almost a pity in some ways that Laurence was so intellectual. “I know, we’ll make Hugo waltz with you, he waltzes beautifully.” But the thought of Hugo waltzing—as Hugo suspected—made Lois melancholy.

Laurence, disturbed by her voice, shut an upstairs window. His industry nowadays was remarkable. He dragged at his hair and stared at the trees through a flawed pane, across which Laura Naylor had scratched her name with a diamond. At his elbows, books were in toppling stacks; movement produced an avalanche. A wasp hung round him, tentative, scrawling Z’s on the air. “Go away,” he muttered, “you are superfluous.” Finally, he was obliged to open the door and shoo the wasp out of it; it undulated across the landing and in at the half-open door of Marda’s room, as though it had an appointment. Though he did not care for the wasp, Laurence went in after it, to see if she had not left South Wind behind. She had indeed—which was like her. The wasp dithered above the looking-glass in triumph; he took aim with the book and almost hit it. An eight-day clock still ticked; it was five to four, it would soon be tea-time.

As he came out, Lois appeared at the top of the stairs, carrying a suitcase.

“Hullo! what have you brought that up for?”

“Oh yes,” she said, putting it down in surprise. “I meant to have left it half-way.”

“Well⁠—?”

“Really,” she cried, unreasonably, “this house is nothing but Montmorencys; they are an absolute state of mind.... I only wanted to see if you were here.”

“Well, I’m not, practically: I’m working.”

“Oh—why do you work in the spare room?”

“I was dealing with a wasp.”

“Laurence, I had a marvellous dance.”

“Splendid!” He turned to his door, but she, in tremendous need of his un-sympathy, brought out, imploringly: “They were all there, every one. And, my dear, the wind; I thought the hut would be blown away. And we broke the gramophone. There was a most sinister man called Daventry, with shell-shock ...”

“Good,” said Laurence, “and you look sleepy!”

Lois, lamblike under the force of suggestion, leaned back against the banisters, yawning. “Livvy kicked all night, she will be a horrible wife.... Laurence, I wish you would tell me something to read.”

“I should go to sleep.”

The idea seemed grateful: she thought of her room with the high ceiling, the foreign touch to the cheeks of afternoon pillows, the delicious crime of crossing one’s stockinged ankles over the rucked-back quilt and the slow recession of fact down a long tunnel till the windows stretched and faded. But, pulling at her fingers, she said impatiently: “But I want to begin on something; I do think, Laurence, you might understand. There must be some way for me to begin. You keep on looking into rooms where I am with silent contempt—what do you think I am for?”

He leaned against the frame of his doorway, looking at her with surprise and a degree of humanity. To-day four weeks, Term would have begun again; he did for a moment stretch to an effort of comprehension: there was nothing for her to go on with. The vacancy, more than negative to him, which had succeeded Marda made the natural claims of a life on his young cousin. With that concession to fancy one makes for the doomed or the very weak, he suggested she should go on with her German. He gave her two grammars, a dictionary and a novel of Mann’s, which she took from him doubtfully. When he was back at his table, his door ajar, she went across stealthily to the door opposite.

“There’s a wasp in there,” called out Lawrence.

“Oh, I just thought I’d see if ...”

But she went downstairs, defeated, forgetting her suitcase.

She had not seen Gerald again this morning, though all contracted with apprehension she had waited in Mrs. Fogarty’s drawing-room—the multiplicity of the photographed young men’s faces, candid and vigorous, further appalling her. An orderly had come down with a note from barracks. The crested envelope, handed in with its air of a claim on her, had austerity, like some limb of an institution. She lost her last sense of Gerald, she felt committed. Fumbling open the envelope, asking: “What have I done?” she wondered what had become of that last lonely disk of cucumber on the plate. After “My darling darling”—she was reprieved, provisionally; Mrs. Fogarty, coming in in a wrapper—greatly worn, she said, after last night’s gaiety—had insisted that if she would not drink port she must drink milk—it was a long morning—and eat some of this nice sponge cake.

And: “I know who has been breaking hearts!” said Mrs. Fogarty, knifing the sponge cake which was moist and eggy and “gave” to the knife deliciously, like an eiderdown.

The ante-room chairs, now looking at Lois askance, knew also. What she had done stretched everywhere, like a net. If she had taken a life, the simplest objects could not more have been tinged with consequence. The graded elephants on the bookcases were all fatality. She went into her room hurriedly. “All the same,” she thought, looking round with patronage at the virginal wall-paper, “it is something definite.” And with curiosity, with complicity almost, she looked at herself in the glass.

Gerald’s straight, round writing had—to her imagination—a queer totter, like some one running for life in tight shoes.

“—I have so much to say to you, though there is all time now there seems to be no time. Lois, when I am with you you make me awfully dumb with your darling wide-awake eyes, and when we are apart you seem so close I feel you must understand, so why try to explain when I am so stupid? So I won’t try to say what I feel; all that matters is that you are beautifully beautiful. Sometimes, till now, I have felt you must think me awfully stupid and introspective and dull; I have wondered so much what you did think about all the time: it seems unbelievable now that I am really to know. You seemed so complicated, it was cheek to associate you with the sort of person that I am, and now you are lovely and simple and all mine. Last night doesn’t seem like part of my life at all—I can’t believe it was me who danced and drank whiskies and tinkered about with the gramophone—and yet it’s the reallest thing ever. And what I am doing this morning seems so important—although it keeps me away from you—because I am doing it for you. It is awful to think of you here in Clonmore and not to be able to get to you, and yet it is wonderful to think of you waiting, and of who you are waiting for being me. Lois, your dear cold arms were so lovely, I mustn’t think of them now. All your life I am going to keep you and wrap you up and protect you and never let you be cold again. It is awful to think you have ever been lonely and sad—you are so brave, you know, and I never guessed—and yet I am almost glad of that, because it makes some reason for me. Darling, I kiss the thought of you and feel so terribly humble. I must not write more now. If you can, leave a letter for me at the Fogartys’. Does she guess? I thought perhaps you might like to confide in her. But of course I will tell nobody, as you wish. Good-bye, my most beautiful woman; I cannot write how I love you.

“Gerald.”

Folding the sheets again in their order, she thought: “It is you who are beautiful,” and later: “If this thing is so perfect to anyone, can one be wrong?” An escape of sunshine, penetrating the pale sky in the south-west, altered the room like a revelation. Noiselessly, a sweet-pea moulted its petals on to the writing-table, leaving a bare pistil. The pink butterfly flowers, transparently balancing, were shadowed faintly with blue as by an intuition of death. Lois bowed forward, her forehead against the edge of the table.

Steps in the ante-room; she slipped the letter under the blotter and turned round consciously. “I hear you are back,” said Lady Naylor, entering. “I hear it was such a success that they broke the gramophone. Now I want to hear all about it.” She sat down.

“Well, to begin with⁠—”

“One moment—have you unpacked your frock?”

“Oh! I left my suitcase.... I went up to Laurence to borrow a German grammar.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t go on with German,” said Lady Naylor, “it still offends so many people; Italian is prettier and more practical. I could lend you Il Piccolo Mondo Antico, or Dante⁠— However, tell me about the dance.”

“Well, first of all⁠—”

“—By the way, I’ve just heard from Marda. She has arrived quite safely, I’m glad to say. She says Kent is dull, which I dare say it would be, but of course she is glad to be with Leslie.”

“Did she say so?”

“She naturally would be. You can read it; I’ve got the letter downstairs.... Who broke the gramophone? I hope you weren’t anywhere round when it happened: these things are always remembered. Were the Raltes there? Did they look pretty? I wonder, really, at their mother allowing them; she professes to have them in such control. However, I dare say this will be the last of these dances.”

“Oh, why?”

“If you had heard what we heard at the Trents’.... There was a man there from Kerry. He really made us feel quite uncomfortable. Though, as your uncle said afterwards, one knows what the Trents’ friends are: everything happens to them. However⁠— Were the Vermonts there? She would be quite in her element. And Mr. Armstrong? I have heard he and Livvy were seen in Cork together at the Imperial, by Mrs. Foxe-O’Connor. And the young man who was here to lunch, who talked so much ... in the armoured car ... oh—Lesworth?”

“Yes, he was there.”

“I am surprised at them all having time,” said Lady Naylor. “However, if they danced more and interfered less, I dare say there would be less trouble in the country. It appears that in Kerry ...” Her voice became colder with inattention and dwindled away. Lois was certain she eyed the pink blotter. This zigzag approach to Gerald, this ultimate vagueness, were sinister. Lady Naylor, after some moments of odd and oppressive silence, observed that the sweet-peas were dying. “The water must be unhealthy, it’s going green. In fact, all the flowers need doing. Perhaps after tea⁠— How would you like to go to a school of art?”

“Marvellous,” said Lois after reflection.

“Francie was very much struck by your drawings. And Marda said you certainly needed an interest.”

“Oh. Was she discussing me?”

“We were all saying that girls needed interests and I thought she seemed to agree particularly. She has not made much of her life, so far—though of course if she marries Leslie—and I’ve always thought that music or drawing, or writing a little, or organization of some kind⁠—”

“Did Marda say what she thought of my drawings?”

“She seemed to think they were nice.... A quarter to five!” exclaimed Lady Naylor reproachfully. “The tea will be cold.... You look sleepy, Lois. Did you hear the Montmorencys are going to build a bungalow?”

“Here?”

“Don’t be silly⁠— Besides, according to that friend of the Trents, it would be blown up or burnt in a month or two. Certainly,” added Lady Naylor, looking out at the sky, “I call this a tiring day.” She got up with a sigh.

Later that evening Lois, half-way up to the garden with scissors and basket, overtook Mr. Montmorency walking all by himself up the shrubbery path. Pulling leaves from the laurels he shredded them carefully.

“I hear,” he said, as she came up alongside, “you are taking up German?”

“Unless Italian might be more practical.... I hear you are going to build a bungalow?”

“Oh, I don’t know; that is chiefly Francie’s idea.” They walked in silence, she dragging her basket against the laurels. They had not been alone since the drive from Mount Isabel. She remembered how once she had hoped so much, and how he had been infinitely disobliging. Now she had a tenderness for him, devoid of attraction, as though they had been a couple of widows.

“No stairs would be nice.”

“But it would be certain to have other disadvantages.”

“Apparently,” she said with effrontery, “Marda arrived quite safely.”

“It should be a surprise to us all,” said Hugo, sarcastic, “that she has not fallen out of the train. Even she cannot think of anything better to say to a hostess. And the information, I always feel certain, leaves hostesses cold. Once one is clear of their gates, interest ends with responsibility.”

“And she says Kent is dull.”

“I cannot believe she finds it so.”

“She is frightfully philosophic. Perhaps she was dull here.” (She thought: “Even now, shall we never be natural?”)

“Have you seen her letter?”

“No ... have you?”

“No, your aunt has lost it.”

He pushed open the door, then followed her into the garden which, deep in its walls, seemed impossibly large, for one could not see to the end of it: it was crossed by espaliers and crowded with apple-trees. Down the borders, the September yellow and scarlets were metallic in unsunny light. Dahlias, orange and wine-coloured, blazed and gloomed. He turned down one path, she kept to the other; they silently parted. Here she had come with Marda—never with Gerald—they had sat on the green seat, pressed blisters out of the paint and spat out their plum-stones into the box border opposite. Entered to-day, the usual breath of the garden was cold to her face. The branches were quiet as though in anxiety, the flowers appeared to be clamouring vainly, forgotten. Coming to the hedge of sweet-peas she began at the purple end, diligently. “Though myself,” she could not help saying, “I do not care for purple sweet-peas.”

When she reached up to the top of the hedge her sleeves fell back from her arms and she thought of Gerald. She felt him looking at her through the thinning stems. The sweet-peas were practically over, and indeed she was glad, she thought, snipping and tugging with blunt garden scissors. In yesterday’s dusk the Square with its flitter of leaves had been all autumnal; smoke was blue in the air and, later, the dark where they kissed had a sharp intimation of autumn. She loved in autumn a stronger, more shadowy keen spring, sweet shocks of good-bye, transition. Summer meanwhile stayed on inside these walls, forgotten.

The fact was, that though one determined to-night to sit under the lamp and learn verbs, her Italian or German would not dispose of last night, which remained, like the tear in her green tulle dress, to be dealt with practically. After an anxious glance at the possible, a pain so sharp that it seemed her own forbade recantation. It was inevitable that she should marry Gerald. Mrs. Montmorency at least—she thought with relief as she came to the red sweet-peas—would be infinitely sympathetic and pleased. The unbelievable future became fixed as the past under the flutter and settling down of a flock of comments, which, as she turned in imagination back to the house and steps and saw lips forming themselves in unconscious readiness, seemed already uttered. And as Mr. Montmorency came up a path at an angle, with the two garden kittens toppling after him, she was surprised he did not repeat: “Well, I hope of course that you may be happy. And decision of any kind is an excellent thing in your mother’s daughter.”

Instead, he came to the other side of the hedge and, picking off some bleaching tendrils, observed that the sweet-peas would soon be over. The house flowers must keep her busy, he added. And taking out his pocket-knife he cut three sweet-peas, with precision. Having made this gesture of sympathy, he continued to move with her down his side of the hedge.

“It is extraordinary,” said Lois. “I feel as if I had been away for a week.”

“Yet you find us going on much the same?” He looked at her through the stems ironically but without intelligence. And she could not try to explain the magnetism they all exercised by their being static. Or how, after every return—or awakening, even, from sleep or preoccupation—she and those home surroundings still further penetrated each other mutually in the discovery of a lack.

XX

LADY NAYLOR, who wished for a clear steady light these lengthening evenings, saw to the lamps personally. In big yellow gloves she accurately trimmed the wicks, between the morning’s head-lines and a thorough talk with the cook. But the smell of oil was repugnant to her and now she said with some sharpness:

“You have no conception of love⁠— You are in my light.”

Lois moved from the lamp-room window. “I really have,” she said, “really.”

“Nonsense,” her aunt said, looking round for a rag. Lois began to slide a matchbox about, and her aunt, taking the matches away mechanically, thought how hard it was that a woman like this, who could bring the matter on to an intellectual plane at once, should have to do lamps at all. Anna Partridge, whose brain was all shreddy with rabbit-combing and raffia, had had electric light for years, just from living in England; even the Trents talked of harnessing their waterfall.

“When I was your age I never thought of marriage at all. I didn’t intend to marry. I remember, when I was nineteen I was reading Schiller.”

“I don’t think about marriage, I ...”

“Then you can have no conception ...”

“I read,” said Lois, with dignity.

“Girls nowadays do nothing but lend each other these biological books. I was intensely interested in art.”

“But, Aunt Myra, young men are quite usual.”

“It all comes of dancing and all this excitement.”

“But Gerald is not excitable; he was in love with me the other day before lunch.”

“He was half asleep,” said Lady Naylor. “At the best of times he has not much conversation. Of course, I rate brains so highly; perhaps I am wrong. But remember, you cannot hope to be always in love, and then ...”

“But you said I had no conception ...”

“There you are, in my light again.”

Lois moved further away from the window. She wished she had not started this explanation. She had felt, somehow, that it should be less embarrassing in the lamp-room. She thought of Gerald’s unquestioning shoulder, where she would lean her head. “But I can’t explain,” she said; “I never heard of a girl being asked to explain. I always thought ...”

“Real feeling explains itself,” said Lady Naylor and polished some oil off the base of a lamp triumphantly.

“But if he comes to tea ...”

“Oh, we cannot help that, of course.”

“But if he spoke to Uncle Richard ...”

“Your uncle would be very much worried. Really, Lois, I do think you might be more sensible and considerate.”

Lois saw this point of view only too perfectly. She wrinkled her forehead. She did not want to be hard on her Uncle Richard and she could not help sympathizing with Aunt Myra, who had so much to organize as it was. Feeling did seem to her out of proportion with life, and that this disproportion should be so evident generally, that her aunt should think she was making an irrelevant fuss, strongly discouraged her. But she reassembled herself; she had been led to understand that love ...

“But surely love ...”

“You have no conception of love,” repeated Lady Naylor, and thought again of electric light in Bedfordshire.

“But shall I never do anything?”

“Go to a school of art.”

“Where?”

“It could be arranged.”

“But I don’t think I really draw well.”

“That is no reason why you should marry.”

It was, of course, no reason; acknowledging this, and seeing light from the barred window fall so coldly on the oilcloth top of the lamp-table, Lois felt quite at a standstill.

“However ...” said Lady Naylor. She looked with her brilliant eyes dubiously, almost shyly, at the door behind Lois’s head. She swept the rags and the lamp scissors into a drawer, shut the drawer on their malodour, and pulled off her gloves, sighing. She saw life, perhaps, as a shuffle of setting to partners, then a drawn-out, coupled but somehow solitary curtsying, to him, the other, the rest of the eight. “However ...” she said. And the qualification committed herself and her niece, a shade alarmingly. Lois knew that Gerald might come to tea.

“You do see,” said Lois, and stared at her aunt’s ringed hands which reappeared from the gloves, “that I didn’t want to be clandestine?”

“Oh, of course you were quite right,” said Lady Naylor without enthusiasm. She went down to talk to the cook.

Kathleen, the cook, who resembled her mistress in personality so closely that their relation was an affair of balance, who had more penetration than Lady Naylor and was equally dominant, inferred much of the situation from her mistress’s manner. Herself, she had felt this was bound to occur. For an hour or so, they had countered each other amiably in the lime-washed gloom of the kitchen, over a basin of green-pea soup. Lady Naylor announced with unusual deprecation, there would be an officer coming over to tea. Kathleen, refolding her hands royally, asked, would she slap up a sally-lunn? On the whole, Lady Naylor thought drop-cakes. Kathleen immediately placed the officer. Strolling down the yard in the course of the afternoon to execute a couple of chickens, she watched dispassionately from under the chestnuts Gerald crouch on his motor-bicycle up the avenue. Lois, standing about with the dogs, went down to meet him. For tea, Kathleen sent up an unaccountable iced cake, ironically festive.

Francie was glad Mr. Lesworth was coming to tea. For the day strained with ominousness, as though it were going to burst. Hugo, pacing about on the avenues with The Conquest of Mexico under his arm, disparaged repose. “By the way,” he said once, coming up, “if you should be happening to write to Marda Norton ...”

“Oh, but I shan’t be; not till I send her our little present. Besides, I have nothing to say.”

“She might write to you about the eau-de-Cologne.”

“Oh no, she thanked me.”

“There was a point I wanted to clear, about Metternich—you remember that argument? I’ve just come on a book—I suppose I had better write myself.”

“But no one knows her address; Myra lost the letter.”

“Ah yes, of course.... That settles it.” He smiled—one would have said with relief. Francie, looking down in despair at her blouse as he walked away, saw that the jabot was crumpled. She could not understand how a woman who travelled with suitcases could look as smooth as Marda. But then, she was all outlines: detail seemed to collect and obtrude in the middle of Francie. She went up to change, glad that Gerald was coming, sounding with some attention the silence under the avenue trees. For the fact was, life attenuated to the snapping-point; in Gerald’s continuity, in Lois’s, she must invest her own.

Gerald propped up his motor-bicycle, looked up carefully at the closed windows—in one, from behind a blot of light, Francie was nodding—and said that he should not really have come. Troops had been fired on coming back into Clonmore, near that level-crossing. The situation was tightening; there was a lot to do.

“Oh. Then it is a pity you came,” said Lois.

Gerald said nothing; his ears faintly coloured.

“Clonmore!” said Lois with indignation, and thought of the little friendly town with its tennis club.

“So it happened,” said Gerald, looking at her. “It might have been anywhere else.” He whistled and greeted the dogs, her dogs.

“Then ... it was dangerous coming?”

“Oh no, not to speak of.”

The house so loomed, and stared so darkly and oddly that he showed a disposition—respectful rather than timorous—to move away from the front of it. They walked to the tennis courts and round one court in a circle. “Lois ...” She veered off quickly, Laurence was working up there in his window. Gerald waved, but had no response. “Doesn’t he concentrate!” he said wistfully.

“I suppose so.... Does Laurence matter?”

“You know you ...”

“Gerald, you are the frightfully concentrated person, really.”

“But I can’t read.... Where can I ... where could we⁠—?”

“—Here comes Mr. Montmorency.”

Hugo, coming up to shake hands with Gerald, said it seemed a long time since they had met. The young man, by his way of standing and looking clearly and being positive, strongly connected himself with Marda. With an unexpected and crooked stab of nostalgia, Hugo thought of the trees, the morning mountains, the tinkling and knocking stream. Of all of her he had kept and had never had and must try to regain appeared most sharply the moment of that encounter: irrelevant moment, when, outside something, he had watched light run down her hair as she stooped for Gerald to light her cigarette. The quality of their silence, their separation after Gerald had left them—pressing on up to the house to look for Lois—now seemed the very ground of his closest approach. But he knew how the scene was perishable, how having drawn up into itself for life, like a plant, any reality that there was in him, it would die of his barrenness. Until finally, by even the same conjunction of mountains and light and trees, it would not be evoked again.

“No shaving under a hedge this morning?” he said genially.

“Oh no,” said Gerald, surprised. Why should there be?

Lois, encouraged to find that by some growth of womanhood in herself her attitude was already a wife’s, at once proud and deprecating, stood there watching Gerald, most grateful for the repose of this interposition and willing that Mr. Montmorency should be detained. She knew, from a glance they both gave her, that she must have been startled by some sort of consciousness into beauty, and a particular placidness, a sense of being located, warmed her surroundings, the smooth lawn and heavy trees. Balancing, foot behind foot, on a line of the court faint from rain, she constructed a life in China—most regimental, alert and pleasantly surfaced—from Japanese prints she had ignored in shops, an idea of odd, angular archways and some strips of vertical writing. He must no doubt some day be a captain, and “captain’s lady” had a ballad-like cadence. She almost took Gerald’s arm.

“You find us diminished,” said Hugo, “and a good deal quieter. Miss Norton has gone.”

“Oh?”

“Marda,” she hastily prompted.

“She was awfully nice and amusing,” said Gerald, beaming out like the sun from behind a moment’s perplexity. “I’d have loved to have met her again.”

She explained to him afterwards, taking him off through the shrubberies, how things were at present with Mr. Montmorency: he was a ruined man. Gerald went rigid, something shut like a door on his sensibilities—the thing reeked of adultery. He produced an appalled silence. But about Lois’s mother, he brought out finally, hadn’t one heard he had once been ...?

“But a thing can’t be final,” said Lois. “Not while one’s alive.”

Was this what she read? “But there’s Mrs. Montmorency....” It seemed fixed here, the Montmorencys’ conjointness, among the stately furniture and long mild meals—earth to Lois’s roots.

“But one can’t arrange oneself; one doesn’t altogether live from inside: Marda just happened.”

“And did she ...?” cried Gerald, appalled. Above this extraordinary undercurrent, it seemed to him his Lois was poised too perfectly.

Lois, in pink linen, perfectly sophisticated and cool, said: “No. She was just regretful. Also, she is engaged, you see.”

“Is she? I should never have thought ...”

“... Her engaged? Well, how ought she to look? Like a kind of hen bird, all dim?”

“She was all herself. Doesn’t love kind of finish people off ... with something that isn’t them, in a way you can feel?”

She understood him, but did not know how to agree. What must one then be for him? She was shy of his uncomprehension of a particular notion of living she seemed only now to have formed. Did she give out an untrue ring to his touch? Where was the flaw? Or was Gerald, sublimely, the instrument of some large imposture?

“Complete—you mean finished?... Perhaps she is not really in love.”

“But surely she isn’t that sort ... she wouldn’t just marry?”

“I don’t think what Marda does matters; she simply is.”

He looked desperate suddenly, as though she were behind bars. “Look here, no one matters. Don’t let’s talk ... I mean ... don’t let’s talk. Lois, there’s so little time now, I’m desperate. I don’t see when I am going to see you, ever. Lois, this miserable waiting; even happiness never lets one alone. When shall we be quiet?”

“But, Gerald, we’re quite young.”

“I want nothing to happen but you. You are everything. I want so much of you.”

She stood, perplexed, at the edge of the path; he kissed her with frightened violence. The laurels creaked as, in his arms, she bent back into them. His singleness bore, confusing, upon her panic of thoughts, her physical apprehension of him was confused by the slipping, cold leaves. Her little sighs elated then alarmed him.

“What’s the matter?” he said, his lips close to her face.

“I don’t like the smell of the laurels. Let’s come out of here.” They went back, she put up anxious hands and asked him about her hair. “Is it twiggy and awful?” “Lovely.” She wished that he were a woman. As they approached the steps where her aunt and uncle and Francie composed an abstracted group, she told him: “Aunt Myra wants me to go to a school of art.”

“Oh ... Can you draw?”

“Gerald ...!”

“Darling, I’ve never seen them. How could I know?”

Lady Naylor exclaimed how delightful it was that Gerald had come over. Now they would hear some real, real news, she said: they always relied on Gerald. Sir Richard, taking his pince-nez off in amazement, could hardly believe it was Gerald again; he still thought subalterns came in rotation. Surely, he said candidly, it was yesterday they had had that interesting talk about the Militia? Gerald was given a chair of such voluptuous depth that his chin came barely above the edge of the tea-table. They congratulated him on the Rolfes’ dance. In fact, they united to carry off the situation with such brilliance that Gerald might well have been a dun or a tax-collector. Then, at a moment when talk seemed precarious and Marda obtrusively absent and Lady Naylor sat eyeing Lois’s hair, the Trents arrived unexpectedly. They brought over another friend, this time from County Clare, to whom still more had happened. Gerald went into joyous eclipse; the Danielstown party sat breathless—hardly a chair creaked—the Trents looked at their friend complacently while the Trents’ friend curdled the tea in one’s mouth with tales of assault and cattle-driving.

“Well, I suppose we’ve a certain amount to be thankful for,” smiled Mrs. Archie Trent as their friend, having been put through his hoops, settled down to tea. And she told Lois that she was looking remarkably well, and they hoped they would see her out with the Ballymoyles this winter. And meanwhile, what about cubbing?

“Lois is going to a school of art,” said Lady Naylor.

“That seems a pity,” said Mrs. Trent.

The friend, finishing his tea, said all the Irish art schools ought to be searched. He wouldn’t say for certain, but he had a pretty shrewd suspicion what you would find there. If it came to that, he said, casts were hollow and you could keep a good deal inside the Venus of Milo. Sir Richard looked vaguely offended.

“I should go to the Slade,” said Lois.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Archie Trent, “not Rome, I suppose? Well I shouldn’t do anything of that sort in a hurry.”

“Art is long,” said Laurence, who liked conversation of this sort. The Trents’ friend asked him how he liked Cambridge; he himself had a nephew who hoped soon to be going up. Laurence said he had heard that Cambridge was very nice.

The Trents’ friend took Gerald aside after tea, to explain to him where the Army was going wrong. Mrs. Trent at once drew closer up to the teapot and said, in a loud voice of confidence, she had heard Livvy Thompson was really engaged to that young Armstrong. “Nonsense,” said Lady Naylor.

“But they were seen in Cork having tea, and the aunt denies it too vigorously. After all, it would be something for the Thompsons.”

Lois, who was unfortunate, blushed; both ladies looked hard at her. “To begin with,” declared Lady Naylor, “these young men are not at all marriageable. Besides, to tell you the truth ...”

“But I don’t see what else the girls are to do. I mean, look at the Hartigans.”

“There’s a future for girls nowadays outside marriage,” said Lady Naylor inspiringly. “Careers—how I should have loved one. One reads so much about ...” She was an advanced woman: Mrs. Trent, who did not read, paused in respect but preserved an honest, bright-pink expression of incredulity. She pictured those indoor women with clutched little bags getting hurriedly into the Dublin trams. It was no life. Her friend seemed, moreover, unwisely persistent in encouraging art for Lois: this, for young girls, often resulted in worse than spinsterhood. “All the same,” she said, returning, “Livvy seems set on the young man. And she has a great deal of character.”

“Well, if I were her aunt and her father, I’d never hear of it.”

“Dear me,” cried Mrs. Trent, kicking the table cheerfully, “we’ve made Lois blush at the very idea.”

“Lois knows better,” said Lady Naylor. And she gave Lois one of her rarest, most charming, direct and personal glances.

And indeed what a friend, thought Lois, going out to the steps to escape them all, if one had only just met, might Aunt Myra be.

XXI

A CLOUD slid over the sun; the stream went opaque as tortoise-shell. Then, startling Hugo, the water suddenly flushed with light as the cloud moved east. Minnows, disturbed like thoughts, darted shadowy over the clear yellow stare of the stones. He dipped his stick in the water, then, drawing it out, thoughtfully looked at the shining end. At this point: eighteen inches; the stream, divided in two deep channels by the island of turf where he stood, went hurrying to the Darra. In its fold of the Darra valley, the high white mill would remain sardonic. He was swept by an irresistible anger back to that affair of the pistol. For Marda had written: her hand had healed; no one had asked any questions or wondered, she said.

She had written to Lois, sending Hugo this message. It had pleased both the girls to underline his exclusion. She wrote also, Leslie had given her a dog—a correct dog, Lois expected, like all that was best in English country house life. Marda could not think what to do with the dog till she married; she would have to leave it in Kent.... And what else did Marda say, Francie had wanted to know. But Lois, who seemed to have swallowed the letter, postmark and all, could not remember. Later, she did seek out Hugo and offer to show him.... But he had put up surprise. “Oh? Was there any particular⁠—?” No, he did not think on the whole he would trouble her.... Would the child see, he wondered, that the little oblique snub was not intended to stop at her, but to go past? His look now fell empty, reflective, on the tawny glass sliding water.

The child, having seen, went upstairs to describe his behaviour to Marda. Her unreticence was immoderate, though she was sensitive for him. She wrote scrupulously, with an affect of hardness.

“He is terrible, and, as the end of everything, they are to build a bungalow. She has it all her own way now; I don’t know if he still even brushes her hair. Since you went, it has been the same time all day: three o’clock, after a long lunch. We all talk about my future (by common consent I am about nine now, very distracting and sunny; they like to have me about). It is to be a school of art, certainly.—Why did you never tell them I couldn’t draw?—But we can’t decide where. London, in view of my age, is supposed to be too large. In Dublin, a man who came to tea yesterday said there might be high explosives inside all the casts with capacious figures. In Cork I might pick up an accent, and Paris they will not hear of—my wretched virtue. But as a matter of fact, I have no future, in their sense. I have promised to marry Gerald.”

Here she paused, for from now on it was all obscure ahead of her. Reading back, she was surprised at the woman she was. She took this merciless penetration for maturity’s. But when she looked for Gerald there seemed too much of him. He was a wood in which she counted from tree to tree—all hers—and knew the boundary wall right round. But how to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees, this living silence? So she turned back to Mr. Montmorency, adding a paragraph. He had, this morning, snubbed her.

She would have been surprised to have seen him, at this same moment, step across to the island and stand there rootedly. And he, his whereabouts even so much as guessed at, would have been quite at her mercy. For to have followed the stream to this loneliest reach, beyond the plantation wall, where the meadow’s hedge trailed unknown blackberries over the water, was not to have walked, to have strolled even, but to have betrayed oneself in an emotional kind of straying. Further down, stepping-stones had been displaced by last winter’s flood, there was a ruined cottage; nobody came here. Even Lois had given up, since her eighteenth birthday, coming to lie on her stomach along the bank, weep out a bottomless despair at nothing and look at herself in the stream. And this wildness within the demesne boundaries, within sound of the farmyard bell, had a particular desolation.

Hugo was pleased with the place; here he seemed to have stepped through into some kind of nonexistence. And here, divorced equally from fact and from probability, he set up a stage for himself: the hall’s half-light. Marda’s hand is on the wide scrolled curve of the baluster rail: he touches her still and electric hand with the deliberation of certainty, all the senses running into his touch. She stares recognition fixedly, darkly back.... For though in actuality she had had only one mood for him—cool and equivocal—he, now frantic with this power disconnected from life, could command her whole range imaginatively: her very features became his actors. And if this were not love ...

He was pleased with the place. They must all, he expected, be looking for him: it produced the faintest vibration behind the solitude. This morning, Myra was driving into Clonmore to lunch with the Boatleys; she had asked him to come, he had said he would see. He had intended by this “Good God, no,” and if she were fool enough to interpret it otherwise there was a rightness about her delay in starting. Francie would certainly go; she was painfully fascinated by military society. She would now be standing out on the steps, grey net veil strained elegantly over the tip of her nose, looking at her gloves in despair, persisting: “He must be somewhere!”

“How many of us do they really expect?” said Francie at last, getting into the car disconsolate.

Lady Naylor had not the slightest idea. “But they are accustomed to Ireland. She was a Vere Scott. And they know that I usually fill the car.”

“You’re not taking Lois?”

“Lois goes into Clonmore quite enough,” replied Lady Naylor.

For Lady Naylor had further reasons for going into Clonmore. She had an assignation with Gerald at half-past three, in Mrs. Fogarty’s drawing-room. Fridays were Club days, Mrs. Fogarty would be “up at the tennis,” and her drawing-room, disembarrassed for once of her large personality, remained at the disposition of friends. Lady Naylor, though she deplored Mrs. Fogarty’s taste in beads, her husband, her stays—which stuck out half-way up her back in a frill—and her too overflowing maternity, had fallen into the general habit of using her house as a kind of Ladies’ Club, dropping in there at all times to leave parcels, wash her hands or meet friends. And she had the impression, always, that the maid who admitted her ran upstairs at once to put Mr. Fogarty under lock and key. Still, one knew that one’s coming gave pleasure and gratification: she would enter the little drawing-room, even when empty, with her queenliness at its full.

Gerald, questioning but elated, turned up a little before time, much braced in and polished about the belt. He had never been given an assignation so directly. For she had said (this now divinely probable aunt of his): “I may be at the Fogartys, resting, about half-past three. If you should be passing—though of course you may not be and I do not want to keep you away from the tennis—you might look in and have a chat. For it has been too bad to-day, I have hardly seen you. I have missed our usual talk. There is still so much ... But I dare say you won’t be passing.” Her look, a special point to its wide-pupilled eagerness, transposed this to the imperative. The vigorous arch of her eyebrows insisted strongly. He, feeling himself ordered like a taxi—better still, like a nephew—had flushed with pleasure. Rath-er; he’d make a point—(would she then call him Gerald?). “Of course, I may not be there; we may not even come in; it is all quite uncertain,” said Lady Naylor.

Riding home, the intoxication of Gerald had mounted. He guessed that she never rested, rarely leaned back in a chair, never pushed up her hat with a sigh or stretched tender feet out, unbuttoning shoes. She would remain imperious, even in Oxford Street. So she was contriving for him; a special tribute.

Lady Naylor, coming in to the Fogartys’ soon after four, was annoyed to find Gerald before her. She had now, instead of being discovered, to manœuvre more or less openly for position. Disregarding the chair Gerald trundled up with its load of cushions, she placed herself (unaccountably, it would have to appear) on the narrow window-seat. Thus, she conceded no more to the room than an imposing silhouette of hat and boa, while Gerald, glancing round pessimistically at the chairs, remaining with elbow planted among photo-frames on the mantelpiece, was exposed to her full in the strained green light coming over the bushes.

“Such a day,” she sighed briskly. “We have lunched with the Boatleys. What a delightful Colonel he must be! She, you know, is Irish; a Vere Scott. We must seem ridiculous to you, over here, the way we are all related.”

“Topping, I think,” said Gerald.

“Oh, I don’t know! Now you lucky people seem to have no relations at all; that must feel so independent.”

“I have dozens.”

“Indeed? All in Surrey?”

“Scattered about.”

“That sounds to me, of course,” remarked Lady Naylor, pulling her gloves off brightly, “exceedingly restless. But you all came from Surrey, didn’t you?”

“More or less,” said Gerald, who was not sure. The Boatleys had not been sure where he came from, either; her day so far had been unsatisfactory.

“Now I do hope I’m not keeping you from smoking?”

She was. He smiled and lighted a cigarette. “You don’t ...?”

“Oh dear me, no, I am quite old-fashioned. Now tell me—you know how I hate all this gossip in a garrison neighbourhood, but there is something I must set right. What is this nonsense I hear about Livvy Thompson? You know she’s a friend of my niece’s and comes a good deal to our house, and I do feel I ought to refute these stories about her.”

“Oh?” said Gerald, alarmed. “I had no idea.”

“Hadn’t you,” said Lady Naylor. “Well, you are a friend of the young man Mr. Armstrong’s, so I felt I’d come straight to you. It appears they were seen in Cork having tea rather intimately and in consequence there are all sorts of rumours. Now it doesn’t seem fair to a young girl, at the beginning of life, having her name coupled.”

“I should have thought,” said Gerald rather stiffly, “anyone could see Miss Thompson was entirely straight. And as for Armstrong⁠— They are engaged, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said Lady Naylor pleasantly.

“Oh yes,” he nodded, then with his rather engaging childishness looked at her under his lashes. “But they don’t want⁠—”

“To begin with, the Thompsons would never hear of it. And they would be quite right. Of course, poor Livvy is motherless⁠—”

“But many people are,” said Gerald, faintly aggressive. “Lois is.”

“Oh, naturally we should never consider a marriage like that for Lois. The point would not even arise. But even for Livvy⁠— And then think of the young man’s career: these early marriages ruin careers, and engagements are nearly as bad. I know Colonel Boatley feels⁠— No, what you should do, I think, is: have a straight sensible talk with your friend Mr. Armstrong. I know how much you young men will take from each other. I think as a friend you should say to him⁠—”

“But look here⁠—” began Gerald, and paused. “Look here, Lady Naylor⁠—” He stopped dead and looked round the room, which was darker since she had come in: the afternoon was clouding over. He was disengaging himself with some anguish of illusions which he had brought here and which during the first minute or so of their talk had been fortified. When they came to Surrey, he had thought she was hoping to meet his mother. Crossing his legs, he rubbed the side of one shoe on the other with a slight creak at which she, betraying her tensity, started. Standing with lowered eyes, with an air of heaviness and confusion, he noted this movement, a tremor of light round the edge of her boa. With unusual calmness and virility he said:

“As a matter of fact, I love Lois.”

“Oh yes. But I’m afraid, you know, that she doesn’t love you,” said the aunt equably.

He overruled this without comment, simply by maintaining his attitude. For all his physical lightness and vigour, there was a quality in him she would describe as stodginess. “Then I gather she’s told you we⁠—”

“Oh, she’s naturally pleased that you like her. And at her age, with her temperament, of course it is nice to love anyone.”

“But you’ve just said she doesn’t⁠—”

“Not as I understand love.”

“But so long,” said Gerald, with the particular urbanity of an approach to rudeness, “so long as she and I both mean the same thing.”

“But you don’t,” said his friend in her kind, social voice. “That is what I am trying to make you see. With her temperament⁠—”

“I haven’t noticed her temperament,” said Gerald loyally, as if a temperament were a hump.

“Now that alone,” exclaimed Lady Naylor, waving her gloves in a rapid gesticulation, “would make a marriage quite fatal.... Mr. Lesworth, I don’t want to have to imagine you miserable. I have no sons of my own, you know, and Laurence being so intellectual⁠— And there is another thing ...” She paused, and with unusual nervousness, with a movement almost of Francie’s, touched her boa, her jabot, two carnations pinned in the lace. She had now to tilt straight at indecency. There was this question of money—a subject the English made free with, as free with as what was below their diaphragms, but from which her whole modesty shrank. “You may think me dreadful,” she said, “but there are things in life one must face. After all, I am Lois’s aunt....”

Gerald, blushing, stood agonized to attention.

“There is money,” she brought out at last. “I mean, you haven’t any, have you? Of course, I don’t see why you should have. But two people must live, though it’s all rather sordid. However, this need not arise. But I just want to show you⁠—”

“I know she’s got a beautiful home,” he said glumly.

“However ... You see, it’s impossible every way. But first and last, she does not love you.”

He was forced into the position which he would have described to a friend as bloody, of asserting she did. “Though I cannot think why.”

“Oh, but so many girls would!” she cried earnestly. “But for Lois I do think—we all think—a school of art. She cares for her drawing intensely.”

“She never speaks of it.”

“Ah, that just shows ... Lack of sympathy!” said the aunt with mournful complacency. “And it isn’t simply your age; it would be the same thing if you were a captain or even a major. Now I do think you ought to be sensible. It can all pass off so quietly. Nobody knows except me. Now what I suggest⁠—”

“—She might have told me she’d told you!” He stared round the changed room bitterly.

“That was just what I didn’t encourage, to tell you the truth. Oh, the child was most honest. But I thought you and I should approach this quite fresh and unprejudiced.”

“Did we have to?”

“Oh, Mr. Lesworth!” she cried, disconcerted. She resumed, firmly but with inspiration, something between a hospital nurse and a prophetess: “The less talk, the less indirect discussion round and about things, the better, I always think.”

While she considered her gloves and with gathering satisfaction prepared to put one of them on, he stood half-turned away from her, stubborn but indecisive. An unusual pendulum swung in him, he was ruined—resolute—ruined. He was dark with perplexed anger, from which his invincible “niceness” stood, in deprecation, aside. She blasphemed, and yet he had to admire her four-square propriety, her sound sense, the price she set on his Lois. And love, meanwhile, did not so much lie bleeding as sit back stunned, bruised, a little craven from shock. Gerald drew in his chin, swallowed, put a finger inside his collar as though to loosen it.

“Then I understand you don’t like this: you’re going to stop it?”

“—Now, my dear Mr. Lesworth, do think: would I ever ‘stop’ anything?”

“—You’re going to stop it because I’m too young and too poor and not ‘county’ enough—or whatever I ought to be?”

“You have entirely misunderstood me,” cried Lady Naylor, hurt.

“You don’t have to tell me I’m not good enough: that’s what I’ve battered my head against ever since⁠—”

“We all think you’re charming—the Montmorencys, every one! You know we’re delighted to see you⁠—”

“Oh, I’m all right for tennis,” said Gerald without rancour.

“There is no one I’d rather—as far as that goes⁠—” began Lady Naylor warmly.

“You feel it’s up to you to stop it,” he summed up. “And I can see that from your point of view you’re quite right. But there are some things you can’t stop. God knows, I’ve got little enough for Lois, and she ought to have everything, straight off, now. But I swear I’ll see that she gets it. I’ll give up the Army, anything. I know I’m going to work things out. If it were only what I want⁠— But she loves me—I dare say she’s pretty mad—but she does love me; I’ve looked at her eyes, I know. If she hadn’t seemed—if I hadn’t felt—if it hadn’t been just the only thing for us both, I’d never have said a word—I swear—I’d have died sooner.”