THE VISIT OF MISS NORTON

IX

LIVVY’S afternoon in Clonmore was such a great success that she forgot the wool for her jumper. At first there had been uneasiness; she let Lois drive while she looked carefully round the Square, went into the Imperial Hotel to see if her father had left a stick and searched both pavements of Cork Street, down which they drove from end to end. In despair, she had just suggested going up to the tennis club to see was there anyone there, when the rain came down—it had been threatening all day, the mountains looked moist and close on their drive in. They had to turn in to the Fogartys’. And there, to them anxiously awaiting tea and social developments in Mrs. Fogarty’s artistic drawing-room, entered severally all whom they wished to meet: Captain Carmichael, Smith with Mrs. Vermont, finally Mr. Armstrong himself. Mr. Lesworth did not appear (which, as Livvy whispered to friends, would be a disappointment for Lois): it turned out that he was on extra duty. Mrs. Fogarty had one of the narrow houses looking out on the Square; her windows were screened from outside observation by cubes of evergreen; between the pane and the evergreens rain fell darkly. Mrs. Fogarty’s drawing-room was thronged with photographs; all the dear boys who for years back had been garrisoned at Clonmore, many of whom, alas! had been killed in that dreadful War. You could not stoop to put down a cup on one of the little tables without a twinge of regret and embarrassment, meeting the candid eyes of some dead young man. The room was crowded with cushions that slid from the narrow seats of the chairs and tumbled over the back of the sofa; cushions with pen-painted sprays, with poker-worked kittens; very futurist cushions with bunches of fruit appliques, dear old cushions with associations and feathers bursting out at the seams. And there were cushions with Union Jacks that she wouldn’t, she said, put away—not if They came at night and stood in her room with pistols. And this was all the more noble in Mrs. Fogarty in that she was a Catholic, with relations whose politics were not above reproach at all. Mr. Fogarty was a retired solicitor; he had no politics; he became very cross and reproachful when they were discussed at the Club and said he supposed he could not help being a philosopher. But he drank, which shows that nobody can be perfect. He never appeared at tea.

As more and more people dropped in and the chairs gave out, the subalterns pulled the cushions on to the floor and sat on them. Mrs. Fogarty was delighted. The room warmed up, there was just enough air left not to make one aware of discomfort in breathing. There was a smell of wall-paper, tea and tea-cakes, polished Sam Browns and the Nuit d’Amour on Mrs. Vermont’s handkerchief which she pulled out frequently to wipe honey from her fingers. They all felt very easy and very Irish—the qualities radiated, perhaps, from Mrs. Fogarty, who sat flushed with pleasure and hospitality, taking up rather more than half of her own sofa. She wore a brown lace blouse and a tweed skirt, with a green shell rope that swung and clinked on the teapot. Indeed, it was all very harmonious; she did not know how she would have lived at all without the military at Clonmore.

After tea, cigarettes went round, there was a kick and splutter of patent lighters. Livvy said she would not smoke, she would not indeed: they might laugh but she was an old-fashioned girl. Her continued protests attracted a good deal of attention, till she noticed that old-fashioned girls were after all in the majority. The rector’s daughters and Doreen Hartigan all sat looking approving and rather unfinished about the mouth. So she accepted a strong cigarette of Captain Carmichael’s, and Smith broke into a howl and said she had sacrificed his ideal of womanhood. Mrs. Fogarty suggested music: they helped her move the bowls and photographs off the grand piano which, undraped and opened, gave out to Mrs. Vermont’s fingers some damp chords. It was too bad, declared Mrs. Fogarty, listening doubtfully, that their tuner had died in Cork and she hadn’t the heart to look for another since. She said they must have real music, not just the piano. Real talent was present, she added, and looked round compellingly. There was a scuffle from which Mr. Smith was forced up. He stood with his weight on one leg, stroking his hair detachedly, while Mrs. Vermont looked through the music.

Mrs. Vermont remarked in passing to Captain Carmichael that this was a country where the most extraordinary people died. “Well, I mean,” she said, “who would have expected that of a piano-tuner? There was a house where I went for tennis; they had had a parlourmaid there who died. And last week I went for some little cakes to Fitzgerald’s and they were all plain ones. I asked for some fancies and they said the woman who did the icing had been taken, God rest her soul! Really, there’s something grizzly about that cake shop.”

“In the midst of life we are in death, if you know what I mean,” said Captain Carmichael.

Mr. Smith said he didn’t mind what he did sing: they all wanted “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God.” The piece was very tragic and sinister, they all sat wrapt and Livvy did not notice that Mr. Armstrong was pressing her arm till she felt Doreen Hartigan notice. She moved away from him, closer to Lois.

Lois blushed and let Livvy squeeze her hand. They both wondered: “How should I feel under the circumstances?” The subalterns round all looked dogged, clasping their knees, and thought of what one would do for a woman. There was a stagger of emotional clapping. Then Mrs. Vermont cried they were too ridiculous, the boys were sillies, she couldn’t sing at all really, but if she must she would. So she sang “Melisande,” which sent every girl there into a trance of self-pity; it was so clearly written about oneself.

The subalterns thought it pretty, high-class but rather dull, and clapped with abandon when it was over. They cast up David Armstrong, blushing and looking very much surprised at himself and all of them. He blushed till half-way through “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” when he became carried away and carried his audience with him.

brought a momentary return to consciousness. He looked at the ceiling to avoid seeing Livvy and Lois. The atmosphere strained with cramp, there was a creak of leather as subalterns readjusted their attitudes. Mrs. Fogarty sent round a plate of chocolate biscuits. What a pity it was, she said, that they did not get up some pierrots. When David returned to his place Livvy was rose-pink; she fluttered at him her remarkably long lashes.

“Indeed,” declared Mrs. Fogarty, looking from David to Smith (who had no Christian name), “I never heard anything like the two of you. No, not in Dublin in Horse Show week, nor in London nor Liverpool either. You’re remarkably gifted. Isn’t it a pity they were all so sad? Shall we all have a song now, something rousing, you know, that you sang in the Great War?”

“Oh, do you know,” cried Mrs. Vermont, “I never knew Tipperary was really a place till I came to Ireland?”

“Listen to her!” shouted Mrs. Fogarty, sweeping some more of the cushions on to the floor. They were all delighted. Mrs. Vermont spread her fingers over her face. Under cover of all this excitement Lois rose and said they would have to go. She was sorry, because the party seemed slightly insulted; also, Livvy was so happy. If David should die now, she did not think Livvy would have to reproach herself. Also Captain Carmichael had seemed intrigued; he had spoken mysteriously of the adventures he had in the mountains and of the disguises he sometimes put on. She knew he must feel like the Scarlet Pimpernel; she could not help sympathizing. When she rose, he said they must meet again. He and David came out to help them into their trap in the Imperial yard, tucked them up in their rugs, relinquished them disapprovingly to the exposures of the journey and stood looking after them with rain dripping down their bronzed and military noses.

They drove home very much flushed and excited. The rain came down in a curtain and hid the mountains; brown shining puddles were linked along the road. They agreed about almost every one—especially Mrs. Vermont and the D.I.’s niece—they laughed at each other over their mackintosh collars, eyes bright with comprehension and sympathy, while the strong rain stung their noses, then numbed them. Only when Livvy said, “Melisande” was a beautiful poem, wasn’t it, something stiffened in Lois: she said she thought it was sentimental.

“All that fuss, if you know what I mean, about just somebody.”

“Well, love is that, if you come to think,” said Livvy, “and myself I think it is very satisfying.” There was something so very experienced about the tip of her nose that Lois went flat. She felt that she herself must be like a cake in which the flour had been forgotten.

She complained: “I wish we were not being late just this evening. Miss Norton, you know, is arriving and I did so want to look nice. My nose will not have thawed till half through dinner.”

“Oh, who is she? Is she pretty? How old is she? Is she engaged?”

“Never met her—though she often seems to have come to Danielstown. But I feel she may be a person one wants to look pretty at. She annoys Aunt Myra by being unfortunate in ways that are far more trying for other people than for herself. When she was little she came over to Danielstown to a children’s party: she fell down at once on the scraper and cut her knee and there was a good deal of fuss and bloodiness. And another time there were people to tea she started an argument about Kimberley: they all stayed till past eight o’clock in the library taking down the Encyclopædia Britannica while other people who were coming to dinner kept arriving. And another time she lost her engagement ring at a tennis party and they were all very much upset. She wrote afterwards to say it didn’t matter because she had broken off her engagement anyhow and the man said he didn’t want the ring, he said he wished it were at the bottom of the sea. I always thought people breaking off an engagement went all noble, but that sounds to me vindictive. Aunt Myra stayed put out.... She is twenty-nine.”

“It seems to me odd,” said Livvy, “that she shouldn’t have brought anything off by this time. But I dare say,” she added, “that there has been a disappointment.”

At this point they heard a lorry coming. Black and Tans, fortified inwardly against the weather, were shouting and singing and now and then firing shots. The voices, kept low by the rain, the grind of wheels on the rocky road tunnelled through the close air with a particular horror. To meet in this narrow way would be worse than a dream; before the half-obscured lorry appeared Livvy had turned the pony hurriedly up a boreen. They went up some way and waited under a dripping thorn-bush: if Black and Tans saw one hiding they were sarcastic. They heard the lorry grind past the mouth of the boreen with apprehension, feeling exposed and hunted. Lois recalled with surprise that she had cried for a whole afternoon before the War because she was not some one in a historical novel: it had begun, she thought, because they told her to go and practise. The road clear again, they discovered they could not turn the trap; they had to back the pony out. “My!” said Livvy, glaring at the horizon. “I wish I were driving a lorry! I should like to crash those fellows head on!”

Just before eight, Livvy dropped Lois at Danielstown gates and drove off, beating her pony into a gallop. Her father would kill her, certainly! Lois raced up the avenue till she had no breath, then had to crawl the rest of the way, recovering. Apprehensive, she strained for the throb of the dinner-gong, a shriek of reproach from a window. But her unpunctuality passed unnoticed: Miss Norton herself had only just arrived. The hall was full of suitcases, a fur coat sprawled on a chair, there was a tennis racquet, a bag of golf-clubs.

“Though where the poor female is going to play golf ...!” thought Lois. “A nice coat.... Good, she has brought the Tatler!”

No one had even gone up to dress, from the library voices exclaimed in excitement; voices complained insistently through the drawing-room door. Lois undid the top buttons of her mackintosh and stepped out of it, leaving a damp ring. Absently she wrung the water out of her hat. She listened.

“She is certain she has left it in the train,” her aunt was saying; “she says she would swear it was put in with her at Kingsbridge and that she saw it after leaving Darramore. I do not believe myself in travelling with suitcases, one is always counting—I believe in one good trunk.”

“Looking at it from the porters’ point of view⁠—” said Mrs. Montmorency.

The library door clicked open and Laurence, looking quite enthusiastic, shot into the hall. “She thinks telephoning will do it,” he said to Lois. “I cannot make her understand about the Ballyhinch telephone.” He disappeared, shouting, into the back part of the house. Evidently there need be no hurry for anything. Lois sat on the hall table to look at the Tatler. Early autumn fashions reminded her—this was an opportunity to try on the fur coat. She hoped for the proper agony, finding a coat she could not live without.... Her arms slipped silkily through; her hands appeared, almost tiny, out of the huge cuffs. “Oh, the escape!” she thought, pressing her chin down, fading, dying into the rich heaviness. “Oh, the escape in other people’s clothes!” And she paced round the hall with new movements: a dark, rare, rather wistful woman, elusive with jasmine. “No?” she said on an upward note: the voice startled her, experience was behind it. She touched the fur lightly, touched the edge of a cabinet—her finger-tips drummed with a foreign sensitiveness. And the blurred panes, the steaming changing trees, the lonely cave of the hall no longer had her consciousness in a clamp. How she could live, she felt. She would not need anyone, she would be like an orchestra playing all to itself. “Is it mink?” she wondered.

“You look so nice!” said Miss Norton, from the door of the library.

Lois went quite blank. “Oh,” she said.

“Where is that unfortunate Lady Naylor?”

“I can’t think⁠— Well, she is in the drawing-room.”

“Anyhow,” said Miss Norton, “I will go up now. When she sees me looking less arrived she may forget about the suitcase.” She looked at Lois earnestly. “I don’t lose things except coming here; I am efficient really. But there seems a kind of fatality ...”

“I know.”

“Do you?” she said with interest, a keen disconcerting flash. “How odd that you should!”

An approach seemed possible, imminent. Lois, feeling herself smiled at, unwrapped herself from the coat without embarrassment. Miss Norton, who did not seem surprised by the disappearance of the family, asked to be shown where she was. They went upstairs together; she was on the top floor, opposite Laurence.

“Who was the capable person? Who wouldn’t let me telephone—the young man?”

“Laurence.”

“Oh, Laurence. And the other people: I couldn’t hear their names. They seemed very much here—faintly resentful: I expect I must be horrible for them. He at once accused me of having cut my knee on a scraper—when I was three or four. Who did you say?”

“The Montmorencys.”

“Oh, Hugo and Francie? Of course I have heard of them. Isn’t she his mother—practically?” Miss Norton took off her hat and looked at herself in the glass dispassionately and closely. “God!” she remarked.

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

“Oh, then it is mutual.”

“I knew him best when I was a child.”

“Yes, he looks like that. Thank you so much; I think I have got everything. Yes, heaps of hot water. Wouldn’t you like to go now: I mean, won’t there be dinner?... Oh, Lois!”

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

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

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

“I think she seems quite mad,” said Lois doubtfully.

“You would,” replied Laurence and went past her coldly.

X

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t think that matters.”

“It does with a car,” said Lois.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really the worst possible.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What a pity!”

“Yes, those things are always a pity.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like rabbits?”

“They have a gramophone.”

“Is he supposed to love her?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But she stared ahead. A trench-coat flickered between the trees, approaching. Her look focussed; there was an interchange. Coming to them, the young man almost hurried. After consideration: “Hullo!” said Mr. Montmorency.

“Hal-lo!” cried Gerald, flushing with expectation. Never had they been so acclaimed. He was out this way, he explained, coming into ear-shot, and was proposing to take advantage of something rash that Lady Naylor had once said about dropping in to lunch any time. “They’re not out?” he asked suddenly with, Marda noticed, a queer haggardness. They were not? That was splendid, marvellous. Early about?—he had been out all night, he told them. Oh yes—feeling Mr. Montmorency glance at his chin interrogatively—he had shaved by the road; he had brought his tackle with him, he often did. Here—no, that was his pistol: the other pocket. Marda extolled his foresight. Mr. Montmorency had forgotten to introduce them; they stood socially grouped round a beech and exchanged cigarettes.

“Very busy now?” said Marda, bending down to the match Gerald sheltered.

“Off and on—generally on, but we don’t know.” She really seemed most remarkable, he looked intently, just lightly enough to avoid a stare. He liked talk like this, square and facty, compact with assumptions Pleasant that she should be here at the house for lunch. Light slipped back over the dints of her hair as she looked up again. Lunch seemed a torch in the future; between now and lunch-time he would have come on Lois, somewhere, somehow, and amazingly kissed her amazed hands. There would be, till the kiss, no speaking—there she eluded him. He had thought this out.

He had thought this out, seen ahead to this climax rather—as though a flower’s centre had been revealed by an impetuous opening out of lovely confused petals—on the lorry, breasting the darkness. Watching the morning skylines form and creep out like enemies from the cold night, he had burned at her nearness under the insistent groping of the wind. Rushing under his eyes the hedge-tops shivered; he had laughed and shivered, hand in his pistol pocket, hand on his razor. And now, as looking at Marda he once more kissed Lois’s hands, he knew once more, assured by her eyes, that keen truth of the first showing of daylight. He was fortified in assurance. Leaning with her elbow against the tree, returning casually his directness of look, she recalled some profound and certain excitement, as of his first approach to the War. Now he meant to go past the hands, to kiss the curve of Lois’s cheek as she strained away, then stamp her uncertain mouth with his own certainty. Naïvely, he looked at his wrist-watch.

“Yes, go on,” she said, looking up through trees where a bright breath disturbed the closeness. He looked past her, the path led to Lois. This green open path spaced out with trees was (he afterwards thought) like something in heaven.

“It will rain by lunch-time,” said Mr. Montmorency. And indeed the sky was already creeping together and fading, and the mountains’ sharpness seemed a kind of anxiety.

“I wish,” said Gerald to Marda, “you’d been out up there this morning. You wouldn’t know where you were, with the light coming.”

“Is there a smell of daylight? I once heard a man say⁠—”

“Well, that is just like me—I was smoking.”

“Look, you must go on.”

“Yes, perhaps⁠—” He went on. She was left only half protected by irony from an inrush of desolation. His look and smile clung to her memory with the tenacity of irrelevance: his steps on the grass died out quickly. There was silence: a cold apprehension of rain in the beeches, the tinkling and knocking of water beyond the wall. Hugo, having walked a short way ahead, looked back at her sharply. She was startled. “Bother!” she thought. For there was bother behind the look.

“Do we go on?” They walked on, but were oppressed by their lack of objective. They met the white stare of a cottage, stared and turned.

“Dannie Regan lives there: he shot out an eye shooting rabbits and now he’s losing the sight of the other. I used to go out with him when I was a boy—so high. His mother lives with him—or should still; I haven’t heard that she’s gone. She must be a hundred and four.”

“Do you know the man I am going to marry, Leslie Lawe? He’s a stockbroker; he fishes a good deal. His people are in Meath.”

“Meath?... I didn’t know you⁠—”

“I am really. I haven’t told the Naylors. They think my engagements fantastic; you see, they have all come to nothing. But I ought to have told the Naylors; it ought to have come at once, but there was that wretched suitcase. I will say something at dinner, not lunch: please do something to lessen the atmosphere of surprise.”

“When?”

“Oh, we think this winter.”

He looked from one window of the cottage to the other. “It will make a break in the winter,” he said at last. “I dare say you will go somewhere sunny. Algiers perhaps—Morocco, if you are able.”

“Yes, he is quite rich.”

“I shouldn’t go to the Riviera.... But I thought you didn’t believe in this sort of thing?”

“I? Oh, I never said so.”

Now he came to think of it, she had not explicitly said so. “I hope you will be happy.”

“I don’t expect I shall be much different.”

“I think,” he said, “I must go in and talk to Dannie. He will have heard I’m back. It seems a good time now—do you mind?”

“I’ll talk to Mrs. Regan.”

“She’s deaf.”

“Then we’ll smile at each other—she’s not blind.”

They approached the doorway that yearned up the path like an eye-socket. A breath of peat smoke, of cold trodden earth, of the ghostly dark of white walls came out from the cottage. Dannie took form on the darkness, searching with his one eye. He stood with his white beard, helpless and eager. “Well!” exclaimed Hugo. Then Dannie broke out: this was young Mr. Hugo, wasn’t he the lovely gentleman, as fine and upstanding as ever. And here was his wife he’d brought with him, the beautiful lady. And, trembling and searching, he took Marda’s hand. He declared that she brought back the sight of youth to his eyes.

XI

IT rained before lunch-time. Gerald heard loud drops come after him as he went up the beech walk. Under every beech he expected to see Lois looking round in surprise. When he heard a dog in the undergrowth he turned, laughing with expectation. But it was the louche yellow dog from the lodge, intent on rabbiting. Soon a square black eye of the house—three—four—looked down at him through the branches; he came out under the whole cold shell of it, streaked with rain and hollow-looking from an interior darkness. The yellow dog passed him, looked back scornfully from the steps and pattered in at the door with an air of possession. “Hallo!” called Gerald, looking about him.

But she was nowhere; the place was cold with her absence and seemed forgotten. The tennis party became a dream—parasols with their coloured sunshine, rugs spread, shimmer of midges, amiable competition of voices. Something had now been wiped from the place with implied finality. Gerald told himself it was all very queer, quiet; that it was disappointing about Lois. He tugged the bell, a maid appeared in surprise, did her back hair hastily, encouraged him in with a smile and left him. The hall with staring portraits contracted round a glove on the table—a grey suède gauntlet strapped at the wrist—he picked up the glove and kissed it. But the house was full of ladies, the glove might as well be Marda’s—he dropped it doubtfully.

A lovely mystery of feminine life: what did a young girl do with herself in the mornings? Vaguely he pictured keyboards and pink ambling fingers. He recollected those sage-green sexless covers of intellectual books. He recalled the musty smell of work-boxes, the blush through transparent paper of shell-pink needlework wrapped away hastily. You never asked a girl what she was making.

He listened, took off his trench-coat, stepped to the drawing-room door. The five tall windows stood open on rain and the sound of leaves, rain stuttered along the sills, the grey of the mirrors shivered. Polished tables were cold little lakes of light. The smell of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes numbed his earthy vitality, he became all ribs and uniform. He was aware of intrusion. But he dared not go in unasked to the library, where Sir Richard might well look up from writing, sharp with pince-nez. He could not again face the hall—he was shy of the glove.

He took up the Spectator, read an article on Unrest and thought of the Empire. Mechanically his hand went up to his tie. He looked ahead to a time when it all should be accurately, finally fenced about and all raked over. Then there should be a fixed leisured glow, and relaxation, as on coming in to tea from an afternoon’s gardening with his mother in autumn. He turned in thought to confident English country, days like the look in a dog’s eyes, rooms small in the scope of firelight, neighbourly lights through trees. He thought of a woman, kind and palpable, who should never produce this ache, this absence.... A door dragged forward its portière; Lois came in from the dining-room, brushing rain from her frieze coat. He stood for a moment in a kind of despair at her agitation, as though he were trying to take her photograph. Then he stepped forward and kissed her, his hands on her wet shoulders.

“—Oh, but look here⁠—” cried Lois.

But she was his lovely woman: kissed. He shone at her, she helpless. She looked out at the hopeless rain.

“I love⁠—” he said eagerly.

“Oh, but look here⁠—”

“But I love⁠—”

“What are you doing in the drawing-room?”

“I’ve come to lunch.”

“Do they know?”

“I haven’t seen anyone.”

“I don’t know who to tell,” she said distractedly. “They have all disappeared; they always are disappearing. You’d think this was the emptiest house in Ireland—we have no family life. It’s no good my telling Brigid because she forgets, and the parlourmaid is always dressing. I suppose I had better lay you a place myself—but I don’t know where the knives are kept. I can’t think why you are being so sudden all of a sudden, in every way: you never used to be. I haven’t even done the flowers yet. I do wish you wouldn’t, Gerald—I mean, be so actual. And do be natural at lunch, or I shall look such a goat. You really might have asked me, I never mind talking things over. But now the gong will go at any moment. And how do you know I’m not in love with a married man?”

“You wouldn’t be so neurotic; I mean, like a novel. I mean: do be natural, Lois.”

“Don’t look so, so inflamed.... Miss Norton is here; she’s a girl—at least a kind of a girl. She’s awfully attractive.”

“I think I met her. She’s awfully—well, not beautiful, but ... Oh, Lois ...”

“Do be normal: do play the piano.”

“I can’t start playing the piano before I’ve even told them I’ve come to lunch. I may be musical, Lois, but I’m not artistic.”

“All right,” she said, and walked away from him round the room. So that was being kissed: just an impact, with inside blankness. She was lonely, and saw there was no future. She shut her eyes and tried—as sometimes when she was sea-sick, locked in misery between Holyhead and Kingstown—to be enclosed in nonentity, in some ideal no-place, perfect and clear as a bubble. Or she was at a party, unreal and vivid, or running on hard sands. “It wouldn’t have mattered so much at the seaside,” she said to Gerald.

“But we never are at the seaside.”

She opened a sandalwood box and looked in: three blue beads and a receipt of her own from Switzers: three-and-eleven for yellow velvet pansies, worn at a dance and spoilt. “It’s not even as though we were at a dance,” she added.

“Lois, I’ve been thinking about you all night, up in the mountains—right up there when you were asleep. You were wonderful.”

“Haven’t you been to bed at all?”

“No, you know I⁠—”

“Oh, Gerald⁠— Oh ... darling⁠— But you did have breakfast?”

The gong sounded: great brass balls went bouncing about the empty rooms. The parlourmaid looked in perfunctorily. “Lunch?” said Gerald to Lois.

“No one is in—and I don’t suppose lunch is even ready. Gerald, did you have breakfast?”

“An enormous breakfast at Ballydarra.... What were you saying, Lois; what did you call me then ... before the gong?”

But now she flushed and answered: “I’m sopping wet; I’m steaming, I smell like a dog. I should have thought you would want me to go and change. I should have thought you’d be—protecting.”

“You know I’d die for you.”

They looked at each other. The words had a solemn echo, as though among high dark arches in a church where they were standing and being married. She thought of death and glanced at his body, quick, lovely, present and yet destructible. Something passed sensation and touched her consciousness with a kind of weight and warmth; she glimpsed a quiet beyond experience, as though for many nights he had been sleeping beside her.

“What did I say then? Say it.”

“‘Darling’ ...”

But she turned away from some approach in his look.

Lady Naylor and Mrs. Montmorency passed, in profile, under the three west windows, pressed very close together under a green en-tout-cas, discussing the vice-regency of the Aberdeens. Simultaneously, Mr. Montmorency and Miss Norton were heard coming up the steps rather breathlessly, talking about money. They must both have been conscious of being a little vulgar, a little English, for as Sir Richard rattled open the glass door and went out to meet them, they broke off flatly.

“You must have got very wet,” said Sir Richard. “Marda, about that suitcase of yours. I have been thinking it over⁠—”

“Sir Richard, I can’t bear you to⁠—”

“My dear girl, a suitcase is a suitcase—I was just saying to Marda, Myra, that I have been thinking over that suitcase of hers⁠—”

“We had better have lunch at once,” said Lady Naylor imperatively.

“Miss Norton will have to change.”

“Hugo, how could you let her get so wet!”

“My dear, I am not an umbrella.”

“Marda, how could you go out without a mackintosh!”

In the drawing-room Gerald walked to a window and stared at the rain in perplexity, stroking the back of his head, looking rather an ordinary kind of subaltern. Lois looked at herself in a mirror, then went out to the hall to tell them about Gerald. Every one stared, she put up a hand to her face. “Mr. Lesworth has come to lunch,” she said deprecatingly. “You told him he could whenever he wanted, so I suppose he thought he might.”

“Of course,” said Lady Naylor; “I suppose you have told Sarah?”

“Well, I don’t know where to find her; she is always dressing.”

“Of course she is not always dressing; should I keep a parlourmaid who was? She only changes once a day, but you always go and look for her at the wrong times. Where is Mr. Lesworth?”

“In the drawing-room.”

“How extraordinary! Wouldn’t he rather be in the library? Richard, why didn’t you ask Mr. Lesworth into the library? I expect now he had better wash.”

Lois went upstairs: Marda came up after her and took her arm; Lois started. She could not think of anything to say, Marda was not even trying; they went up silently. “Some time,” Lois said as they parted, “can I show you my drawings? They’re fearfully bad.”

“Come up to my room after tea.”

Throughout luncheon, Sir Richard talked to Gerald about the South African War and the Cork Militia. He liked the young fellow. Laurence talked to Marda about whaling, Lady Naylor and Francie continued the Aberdeens, Lois tried to explain to Hugo about Augustus John. The rain stopped, they agreed that it had been only a shower. Lois and Gerald were side by side, but they did not have to speak, they simply passed things. The side of her next to Gerald felt numb.

“Raspberries?” she said towards the end of the meal, constrainedly.

“Please.” He was not nervous at all. Queer, she confusedly thought, how men throw off action without a quiver at severance from the self that goes into it. They remain complete, the action hangs in the air of the place, above the grass or furniture, crystallizing in memory; eternal, massive and edged to the touch of thought as, to the bodily touch, a grand piano. She herself felt bound to all she had done emotionally. But his kissing of her, his attack, were no longer part of him. He concentrated upon his raspberries, crushing them, on his cream with carmine beautifully folding through, on his flushing sugar. She watched the work on his plate. “Magnificent,” he said to Sir Richard, agreeing about the Cork Militia.

Going out through the hall, Laurence offered Gerald a cigarette. “American—extra mild.”

“Thanks—I⁠—”

“How is your jazz band?”

“Very little practising; not much time, you see.”

“Do tell me: did you kill anybody?”

“How much?” said Gerald, startled.

“Anybody last night?”

“Oh, good Lord, no!”

“Isn’t that why you go out?”

“We were looking for arms, really. And nights you find the most surprising people at home. We were after a fellow called Peter Connor: we got him.”

“Fight?” said Laurence eagerly.

“He was at home, in bed. These blighters think we are greater fools than we are.”

“Very cynical of him.... Oh, I say, Uncle Richard, Lesworth has captured Peter Connor.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Sir Richard, flushing severely. “His mother is dying. However, I suppose you must do your duty. We must remember to send up now and inquire for Mrs. Michael Connor. We’ll send some grapes. The poor woman—it seems too bad.” He went off, sighing, into the library.

Gerald was horrified. His duty, so bright and abstract, had come suddenly under the shadowy claw of the personal. “I had no idea,” he exclaimed to Laurence, “these people were friends of yours.”

“Can’t be helped,” said Laurence. “I dare say he was a dirty dog.... If you hate that cigarette, Lesworth, have one of your own. It seems a long time since we have seen you. How is this war of yours really going? Do you realize I know nothing—this might all just as well be going on in the Balkans. I sometimes rather wish that I were a gunman. There are one or two things I should like to ask—but don’t let me keep you if you want to talk to anyone else.”

“Rather not.”

The ladies were in the drawing-room laughing intimately, putting across the open door a barrier of exclusion. Laurence and Gerald wandered about the hall, taking note of each other indirectly and amicably. Laurence was by three years the younger, but imposed his own impression of seniority. Light hair tumbling, eyes startled open and limp grey flannels, he looked to Gerald as though he had slept through the morning. While Gerald circled, the grey glove lay on the table, its fingers crisped in derision. Outside, in an irresponsible burst of sunshine, the wet fields had a metallic brightness. Gerald thought of Lois’s shoulders, their rounded squareness, the feel of wet frieze under his grip. He was flattered but uneasy under Laurence’s interest, which had indeed, for the simple, the awkward menace of some one preparing to cast a net. He pursed his lips to a whistle and shrugged slightly.

“For instance, what do you, personally, think about all this?”

“Well, my opinion is⁠—”

“Oh, but I don’t want your opinion, I want your point of view.”

“Well, the situation’s rotten. But right is right.”

“Why?”

“Well ... from the point of view of civilization. Also, you see, they don’t fight clean.”

“Oh, there’s no public school spirit in Ireland. But do tell me—what do you mean by the point of view of civilization?”

“Oh—ours.”

Laurence smiled his appreciation: the conviction, stated without arrogance, had a ring of integrity. Gerald, embarrassed by this benevolence, had recourse again to the back of his head, so gratifyingly polished. “If you come to think,” he explained, “I mean, looking back on history—not that I’m intellectual—we do seem the only people.”

“Difficulty being to make them see it.”

“—And that we have what they really want ... though of course the more one thinks of it all, the smaller, personally, it makes one feel.”

“Oh? I don’t feel small in that way. But I’m not English⁠—”

“Oh, no—I beg your pardon.”

“—Thank God.”

“Don’t understand?”

“God may. Shall we look for the others?”

Gerald, shocked, preceded Laurence into the drawing-room. Their conversation, torn off rough at this edge, seemed doomed from its very nature to incompletion. Gerald would have wished to explain that no one could have a sounder respect than himself and his country for the whole principle of nationality, and that it was with some awareness of misdirection, even of paradox, that he was out here to hunt and shoot the Irish. His alertness was blunted, while he approached the ladies, by a slight stupor of effort; he was groping for something Napoleon had once said, something remarkably neat and apposite that Gerald had once copied into a pocket-book. Laurence had not hoped to explain, but had wished that Gerald could infer, that there was a contrariety in the notions they each had of this thing civilization. As a rather perplexing system of niceties, Laurence saw it; an exact and delicate interrelation of stresses between being and being, like crossing arches; an unemotioned kindness withering to assertion selfish or racial; silence cold with a comprehension in which the explaining clamour died away. He foresaw in it the end of art, of desire, as it would be the end of battle, but it was to this end, this faceless but beautiful negation that he had lifted a glass inwardly while he had said, “Thank God!”

Gerald knew that no one who spoke of God in that family way could have any belief. He had heard that Oxford was full of Socialism, of a wrongness that was the outcome of too much thinking, and in the light of this it did appear to him that Laurence’s conversation had been decidedly Sinn Fein. But he liked and respected Lois’s cousin, who made a man of one by that naïve curiosity as to bloodshed—curiosity to which Gerald had been a stranger since the days of the Boy’s Own Paper spread on the nursery floor. Also, he could not have looked so consistently bored at parties if he had not been, as they all said, very intellectual.

Lois, watching Gerald approach with an absence of smile that was almost a shadow, was certain she must have done him injustice. His constraint (the pursuit of Napoleon) had a rather grave beauty. Their kiss under the high ceiling must be present and palpable to him also. Aware of some growth of manliness in him, she wanted the feel of his lips again, to capture what she had missed before. And a quick glance of Marda’s from one to the other sealed their mood with a recognition.

“Can’t we go out?” she said generally, for Gerald to take up.

“It will rain again in a minute,” said Lady Naylor, glancing cynically at the weather. And indeed a few drops already sparkled against the sunshine. “Also I particularly want to talk to Mr. Lesworth. When he comes he is always playing tennis, or I forget. But now there are some things I really want to ask him ... I really want his point of view ...”

She sat down in a faded bowery chair, settling herself with a rustle of expectation. Francie, attracted, trailed her skirts and her fancy work down the sofa; Marda, putting a new cigarette in her holder, leaned over the back. From the constellation of eager faces Lois wandered away. The three were no more her enemies than were her own irresolution or the bright vicious raindrops blotting the pane. Yet their unforeseen combination defeated her finally. She yawned at the outlook.

“Lois, don’t yawn,” said her aunt. “Now I want to know, Mr. Lesworth, what Colonel Boatley really thinks of reprisals. Of course it will go no further, though you mustn’t think I want you to be indiscreet.... Laurence, just shut the door.”

Laurence shut himself out. And Gerald, sitting down with a sigh, said that of course it was all rather a problem. He caught Marda’s eye, dark and bright with amusement, and read there the doom of his afternoon.

“Yes? Yes? Yes? This is so interesting—you were asking me, weren’t you, Francie, and I said we would ask Mr. Lesworth.... Marda, do listen, dear, never mind, shake your ash on the carpet, you mustn’t miss this. Because these days when so much nonsense is talked on both sides I do feel one owes it to speak on some good authority—unless Mr. Lesworth would rather we didn’t. Now please go on!”

And Gerald, half hypnotized, consciously barren and not in his Colonel’s confidence, repeated to them what he had read in the Morning Post. As Lady Naylor said at the time, no one would dream of taking the Morning Post seriously, it was so anti-Irish, but an opinion on it from anyone so much “in things” as Mr. Lesworth was well worth hearing. And as she said afterwards, it was extraordinary how no amount of experience shook these young Englishmen up. Their minds remained cutting-books.

XII

AN armoured car called for Gerald at four o’clock and he was driven away through the rain. Towards the end of the afternoon he had become very dull, a kind of fog came over his personality; he confessed he was sleepy. Lady Naylor remarked what a pity it was he could not stay for his tea, that would have freshened him up again. There was still so much that she wanted to know. The drawing-room became to Gerald fantastic and thin like an ice-palace, and, reflected backwards and forwards in tall mirrors, seemed like a chain of galleries at Versailles down which, numbing with admiration, he had to advance wearily. He did not see Lois alone any more. She kept coming in, looking round vaguely, then going upstairs again. Upstairs, he could hear her playing the gramophone. She came out to the steps with Marda to see him off; they stood with arms linked, brushing the rain from their hair. The last they saw of him was a putteed leg being drawn in carefully. Something steel slid to; they waved, but never a hand came out. The machine seemed already to be digesting. He was swept from them with martial impersonality.

At half-past five Lois went to the top of the house with her drawing-books, paused for confidence, tickled a panel of Marda’s door. Coming into the changed and vivid room, she tipped her drawing-books disengagedly on to a window-seat. Marda sat on the writing-table, engaged in manicure. Little pots, pads and bottles paraded; a chamois leather was spread on her knee. A sweet smell of varnish, like pear-drops, was in the air.

“The most I can do,” said Lois, intent, “is to keep mine clean.”

“Quite enough. It’s just this habit of making up every part of one that’s exposed at all.... Lois, have a cigarette?”

“Oh ... thanks. You don’t mind my coming?”

“My dear, why?”

“What lovely brushes! What a ... what an uncommon photograph frame!”

“Yes, that’s Leslie Lawe.”

“Oh? Oh yes,” Lois paused uncertainly. “How good looking! Do—do you know him well?”

“Very. We’re engaged.”

“Oh, how lovely!” Lois had a shock of flatness.

“Oh, yes; didn’t you know?”

“Well, I thought you probably would be. Shall you live in London?”

“I suppose we shall. I suppose we shall have to.”

“Oh, how lovely!”

Marda laughed and began screwing on the lids of her little pots. In the light of her brilliant life, her deftness seemed to Lois inimitable. One would have had to have lived twenty-nine years as fast, as surely and wildly, to screw pink celluloid caps on to small white pots with just that lightness of finger-tip, just that degree of amusement, just that detachment in smile and absorption in attitude. And the pink smell of nail-varnish, dresses trickling over a chair, flash of swinging shoe-buckle, cloud of powder over the glass, the very room with its level stare on the tree-tops, took on awareness, smiled with secrecy, had the polish and depth of experience. The very birds on the frieze flew round in cognizant agitation.

“What a lovely dress!” said Lois, picking up the end of a red sleeve, so that she seemed to be standing hand in hand with the dress.

“Vienna.”

“And, oh, what a lovely green one!... Am I pawing things?”

“I like it. But haven’t you got some drawings?”

“Drawings? Oh, my drawings! Oh—I’m afraid they’d bore you.”

“I don’t expect so.”

“Well, I did just happen to bring them along.”

She had brought two drawing-books, cheerful in mottled bindings with tissue between the pages. She brought them across to Marda, then turned away. The drawings, in black ink, illustrated the Morte d’Arthur and Omar Khayyam. They remembered Beardsley. Lois, away at a window, heard Marda rustle the tissue paper: she watched the rain intently. Beyond the demesne trees, a farm cart rattled along the road. Marda, conscientious, turned back to the title page. Here she paused, for Lois had printed out, in uncertain Gothic:

“Oh,” said Marda.

“Browning.”

“But can you really?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“And are you sure that you can’t paint? Have you ever tried?”

“I hated two of the girls at school and I really rather do hate Mr. Montmorency. And I can’t help getting involved with people. Personal relations make a perfect havoc of me; my headmistress said so. Of course I haven’t had much scope here, so far. Being grown up seems trivial, somehow. I mean, dressing and writing notes instead of letters, and trying to make impressions. When you have to think so much of what other people feel about you there seems no time to think what you feel about them. Everybody is genial at one in a monotonous kind of way. I don’t seem to find young men inspiring, somehow. I suppose I shall. Did you ever have any difficulty about beginning?”

“I can’t remember. I never can see back to the other side of things that have happened.”

“I think I must cut that title page out. I wrote it when I was rather young. But surely love wouldn’t get so much talked about if there were not something in it? I mean even soap, you know, however much they advertise ...”

“Oh, there must be. Let me look at the drawings.”

Marda, still on the table with crossed knees, spread out the book briskly. But Lois, all in a glow, could not help remarking: “Somebody told me I was neurotic.”

“I shouldn’t worry.”

With a brutality of which she was unaware Marda returned to the drawings. Lois, thinking: “I do not interest her,” sat down on the floor with her back to the chest of drawers. Over the mottled carpet curled strange pink fronds: some one dead now, buying this carpet, had responded to an idea of beauty. Lois thought how in Marda’s bedroom, when she was married, there might be a dark blue carpet with a bloom on it like a grape, and how this room, this hour would be forgotten. Already the room seemed full of the dusk of oblivion. And she hoped that instead of fading to dust in summers of empty sunshine, the carpet would burn with the house in a scarlet night to make one flaming call upon Marda’s memory. Lois again realized that no one had come for her, after all. She thought, “I must marry Gerald.”

But with a jump of the heart she heard every page turn over. She received the print of each look as though her sensibility were the paper. Reactions to Lois’s drawings were as a rule momentary and staccato: “My dear!... They’re sinister ... what a marvellous muezzin!... Aren’t those the seven queens?” And indeed it had come to seem to herself that the drawings must really mean something. A glance at them, though she had lost the power to see them, gave her the kind of surprised assurance one might expect from motherhood.

Marda said nothing; once or twice she changed her attitude, shifting the book from knee to knee. Soot, dislodged by the rain, sifted sharply on to the paper fan in the grate, startling them to an exchange of glances. Then she said deliberately, closing the drawing-book:

“I think you’re cleverer than you can draw, you know.”

“Oh⁠—”

“You don’t mind, do you? Look—have another cigarette. Why can’t you write, or something?”

“That’s so embarrassing. Even things like—like elephants get so personal.”

“I know. I give up reading—I’m sick of their personal elephants.... Or act? But why do you stay here?”

“I can’t think,” said Lois, startled.

“You like to be the pleasant young person?”

“I like to be in a pattern.” She traced a pink frond with her finger. “I like to be related; to have to be what I am. Just to be is so intransitive, so lonely.”

“Then you will like to be a wife and mother.” Marda got off the writing-table and began to change her stockings. “Jacob’s ladder,” she explained. “It’s a good thing we can always be women.”

“I hate women. But I can’t think how to begin to be anything else.”

“Climate.”

“But I would hate to be a man. So much fuss about doing things. Except Laurence—but he is such a hog. Ought I to go to London?”

“Ever been abroad?”

Of course she had not, she said, because of the War, and of course she would like to. There was Rome, and she would like to stay in a hotel by herself.—There was just “abroad”: she always wondered how long the feeling lasted. And there was America, but one would have to have introductions or one would get a crick in one’s neck from just always looking up at things. She would like to feel real in London. She had never come out through a pass and looked down on little distinct white cities with no smoke. She had never been in a tunnel for more than five minutes—she had heard there were tunnels in which you could nearly suffocate? She had never seen anything larger than she could imagine. She wanted, she said, to see backgrounds without bits taken out of them by Holy Families; small black trees running up and down white hills. She thought the little things would be important: trees with electric lights growing out of them, she had heard of; coloured syphons. She wanted to go wherever the War hadn’t. She wanted to go somewhere nonchalant where politics bored them, where bands played out of doors in the hot nights and nobody wished to sleep. She wanted to go into cathedrals unadmonished and look up unprepared into the watery deep strangeness. There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference. She liked mountains, but she did not care for views. She did not want adventures, but she would like just once to be nearly killed. She wanted to see something that only she would remember. Could one really float a stone in a glacier stream? She liked unmarried sorts of places. She did not want to see the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower (could one avoid it?) or to go to Switzerland or Berlin or any of the Colonies. She would like to know people and go to dinner parties on terraces, and she thought it would be a pity to miss love. Could one travel alone? She did not mind being noticed because she was a female, she was tired of being not noticed because she was a lady. She could not imagine ever not wanting some one to talk to about tea-time. If she went to Cook’s, could they look out all the trains for her, in Spain and everywhere? She had never been to Cook’s. Was there any law about selling tickets to people under age?

Marda, smoothing the last wrinkle out of a stocking and fastening up a suspender, said she did not believe this was so.

“Of course anybody could do all that. But it would not be me.”

“But be interested in what happens to you for its own sake; don’t expect to be touched or changed—or to be in anything that you do. One just watches. Pain is one’s misunderstanding.”

The advice, fruit of her own relation to experience, unwisdom, lacking the sublimer banality, was—as she suspected while still speaking—to her young friend meaningless and without value. The infinite variance of that relation breaks the span of comprehension between being and being and makes an attempt at sympathy the merest fumbling for outlet along the boundaries of the self. Lois looked vaguely out at the sky, and thought how she could not possibly travel in Europe with a green canvas trunk with her school initials. She longed for three leather suitcases. She said sadly:

“The thought of places without one is so lonely.”

“Pull yourself together, my dear child.”

“Don’t you think honeymoons are great waste of travelling?”

“That reminds—I must write a letter. Don’t go—look, have another cigarette. What is the date?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

Evidently it did matter; Marda had to unpack the bottom of a suitcase and look the date up in a pocket-book. And from this Lois immediately concluded Leslie must be one of those keen square people who did not care for girls of nineteen, whose eyes slid past one’s look impatiently, who had no enthusiasms and read the biographies of politicians other than Disraeli. She heard Marda writing with little pauses and gushes; her shoulders and the stoop of her head took on an appearance of obligation. Lois thought how anxious to marry Marda must really be, how anxious not to frighten Leslie away from her, and how all her distantness and her quick, rejecting air must be a false effect, accidental and transitory.

“I think,” she said, “I must be a woman’s woman.”

“Oh yes. Where are we going to tennis to-morrow?”

“Castle Trent—but we won’t because of the rain. Is Mr. Lawe very social?”

“Reasonably. Of course, he likes his people nice. What was the name of the man at lunch—surname?”

“Lesworth. Gerald is very social. He smiles all the time like a dog. Do you think that is good in a man?”

“I am telling Leslie he wants to marry you—may I?”

“Will it give Mr. Lawe a good impression?”

“Well, it furnishes you rather. And I can’t think what else to say.”

“Don’t scratch it out,” said Lois after an interval, “but as a matter of fact he didn’t speak of marriage. He merely kissed me. The English have quite a different moral standard.”

“Besides, he had been up all night.”

“What are men one is engaged to like?”

“Very worried and kind,” said Marda, blotting a sheet of her letter. “Business-like, passionate and accurate. When they press you against their chests a paper crackles, and when you sit up again to do your face and arrange your hair, they cough and pull out the paper, all folded and say: ‘While I think of it, I just wanted to consult you about this.’ Dinner services come crashing through the air like in a harlequinade. You feel you have been kissed in a shop. I cannot be adequate. I suggested writing to those public schools for vacancies for our three little boys, but that was not nice apparently. When you are engaged you live in the future, and a large part of the future is improper till it has happened.”

“Oh ... what would happen now if you lost your engagement ring?” asked Lois with enjoyment.

“I daren’t wear it. Oh, look here, I am talking like a fool. I’m sorry, Lois, but you really must not talk to me when I am writing letters. I need Leslie. Dinner services don’t matter. If you never need anyone as much you will be fortunate. I don’t know for myself what is worth while. I’m sick of all this trial and error. Will you find a book or something? Don’t go!”

Lois did not wish to go, but thought “Why should she keep me here when she is thinking about Leslie?” She felt deprived and unhappy. She tried to imagine a situation in which Leslie would look ridiculous. She prayed that the three correct little boys might never be born. She hoped he would have five daughters, and all artistic. “One thing more,” she said, “how is it that men are so seldom photographed in profile? Do they have to look frank?”

Steps coming down the gallery, relentlessly, with intention, might have been Leslie’s but were unmistakably Laurence’s.

Laurence tapped and remarked through the door that his Aunt Myra wanted to know if the letters were ready. Timothy would be starting now; he could wait five minutes, but if he did would almost certainly miss the post.

“Damn!” said Marda.

“What d’you say?”

“Oh, come in. Why did I polish my nails?” Laurence sat down on the window-sill. He was annoyed and surprised to find Lois present. He suspected that she had been bothering Marda, confiding, fidgeting, asking about love and wishing to try on her hats. Probably she had brought up a poetry book and kept coming across with a thumb on the margin to point out the bits she loved. He wished that Lois would marry and leave Danielstown; he could perfectly see her as a very pink bride, later as a girl wife in the Tchehov tradition in a pink blouse, sucking sweets audibly, prattling of girl friends’ lovers, rustling papers endlessly. He only hoped that she might marry Gerald, who had no papers to rustle.

“I hope,” he said, “that Lois has been amusing you?”

“Don’t talk,” said Lois. “I mean, she wants to finish her letter.”

“Evidently,” said Laurence.

“Explain Leslie,” said Marda, writing rapidly. “It will help at dinner.”

“She is engaged,” said Lois, “to a Mr. Lawe. That is his photograph there. His name is Leslie.”

“Oh yes,” said Laurence.

“He is not comic,” said Marda, leaning around and pushing the letter away. “She makes him sound so—like ‘a Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.’ Lady Naylor will like it all, but I haven’t told her. Will you help Mr. Montmorency and Lois form a public opinion and not be surprised when I talk about him at dinner? About the end of the fish, I thought.... I cannot finish this letter; it will have to go to-morrow and I will wire.”

“And I have a piece of news for you. Castle Trent was raided for arms last night. Of course they didn’t find any. They think the thing was entirely amateur, nothing to do with the I.R.A. at all. They took away some boots. The Trents think one of the raiders was a gardener’s cousin from Ballydarra who hates the family. He left a quite unnecessary message behind with a skull and crossbones; he sounds to me rather a silly man. I am hoping perhaps they will come here to-night. We have two assegais and a stiletto that Uncle Richard uses for a paper-knife.”

“It is a paper-knife,” said Lois, “only made so as to look like a stiletto. How perfectly thrilling; do let us all sit up.”

“I shall sit up, but you had better go to bed. You might be insulted.”

“Really, I am not so female as all that.”

Laurence shrugged his shoulders.

“At any rate, don’t tell the others. Uncle Richard’ll get fussy and spoil it, and if Aunt Myra meets them she will keep them talking all night.”

“It seems so odd,” said Laurence, “that she should be my blood aunt and not yours.”

Marda looked at him thoughtfully over the back of her chair. She had not realized he could be so disagreeable. If he did not take care, he would grow up just like Mr. Montmorency. She told him so, and added that she was surprised he did not appreciate Lois. “She is very charming,” she said, “and very intelligent. Think of all the cousins you might have had. It’s not her fault that you’re not in Tahiti or Valladolid or wherever it was you wanted to go this summer. If I were not going to marry I should ask her to come abroad with me. I have never been less bored.”

“It would be marvellous,” said Lois. Now that Laurence had come in she felt more alone with Marda, and nearer; she could think of all the things she had wanted to say. Intoxicated by being told she was charming and by Laurence’s disapproval, she hitched herself up on to the end of the wooden bed, where she sat swinging her legs and smiling, all girlhood. She felt movement, a wind in her face as though she were on the prow of a ship. With a bound, life carried her forward again. She felt certain that Leslie would die or break off the engagement. “Marvellous,” she repeated.

“At any rate,” Laurence said, “you can ask her to be a bridesmaid.” And there was Lois, forlorn in the aisle, with hot air coming up her legs from a grating and tears dripping off her nose into a bunch of chrysanthemums. She would keep the ribbon from her bouquet and show it to Gerald in confidence while she unpacked on their wedding night.

“I am thinking of going abroad quite soon,” she said to Laurence.

“Mr. Montmorency has gone for a walk,” said Laurence. “He had to take an umbrella. Apparently he does not usually take an umbrella, but when he was half-way down the avenue Mrs. Montmorency suddenly said he must, because it had never rained like this before. So she took an umbrella and one for herself and started off down the avenue after him. Aunt Myra said she should not have done this because of her heart and looked round for me, but I had gone quickly into the dining-room, which is the last place anybody would look for one between meals. So she found Uncle Richard and he took another umbrella and ran quickly down the avenue after Mrs. Montmorency, telling her not to run like that. When he had caught her up he took the umbrella from her and went still more quickly, shouting, after Mr. Montmorency, who pretended not to hear and walked on with a back view of positive hatred.”

“But how do you know all this if you were in the dining-room?”

“When they were under way I went to the library window and looked after them.... Lois, did Lesworth tell you he has captured Peter Connor? He was in bed, apparently.”

“Laurence!” called Lady Naylor from the end of the gallery. “Where are you? What about Marda’s letters?... They can’t go now,” she went on, approaching. “Timothy waited ten minutes, and now he has got to run all the way, but he will certainly miss the post.... Oh, you are all here?”

She looked at her nephew and niece disparagingly and sat down on the bed. “It is an extraordinary thing,” she said generally, “the way nobody in this house can be trusted to remember messages.... It has been a tiring day,” she added. “Nobody could be nicer than that young Mr. Lesworth, but certainly he is not intelligent. And since then they have all been running down the avenue with umbrellas. And oh, what do you think? They have been raided for arms at Castle Trent. They think the whole thing must have been organized by their gardener’s cousin. They took some boots away.”

XIII

WHEN they had all gone to bed, lamps downstairs extinguished, doors upstairs shut with a rattle upon the last voices, Francie talked of Marda’s engagement and said she was glad. She was glad as a wife that the net should be flung wider. She talked, but Hugo did not answer; he was still too angry about the umbrella to speak when they were alone. So till well on into the night they lay beside each other under the darkness in an intent and angry silence. Then she wept and said they should never have come back to Danielstown.

“It’s as though I couldn’t remember where anything was.”

“Look here, if you can’t sleep, you’d better take something.”

“Hugo!”

“Oh, I suppose this place disagrees with you, too.” He had designed an insult, he could not bear her to intrude upon his wakefulness. Whichever way he turned in that mournful freedom—and the perspectives of his regret opened fanwise, profound avenues each white at the end with a faceless statue—she would come stumbling after him, hand to heart. “Try and sleep,” he said, and sent her away angrily.

She feigned sleep rigidly, hardly bearing to lie there. Her mind clenched tight, like a fist, at the isolation of this proximity. She longed to resume the life of day downstairs in the empty rooms. She had lain awake in the South of France hearing palm trees creak in the gritty and dry wind, hooked-back shutters rattle against the wall; she had lain awake in town with her room a battle of lights through the thin blinds, lights like her thoughts, flashing and crossing⁠— But across this battle-piece, under the long lances, had swarmed, like Ucello’s roses, small comforts, a kind of content at suffering, the tenderness of imagined contact. She had wept because he was not with her. Now a nostalgia for that solitude, for a wall so patient and smooth to the reaching hand where there was now a sleeper, came on her, quenching tears. He thought she slept.

But, “I remember,” she said, about two o’clock, “a Miss Lawe. I met her last in a tram in Dublin. I remember then she was talking of a nephew—I wonder would that be Leslie?”

“Did she say his name?”

“I can’t remember; I got out of the tram.... Hugo, I’m so thirsty.”

Sighing, he got out of bed.

Laurence could not sleep either. There must have been something at dinner.... He longed for the raiders and strained his ears in the silence—which had, like the darkness, a sticky and stifling texture, like cobwebs, muffling the senses. The rain had paused, the trees had shed the weight of it, never a drop came through them or tapped on his window-sill. Once he heard, he thought, a fleet of bicycles in the avenue; he sat up propped on his palms, assembled his attitude, and was prepared to go down and admit the party courteously. He meant to offer them bread and apples and leisurely conversation—and jam and whisky, but in relating the incident he would only mention the bread and apples, he liked that smack of austerity, an Oriental graveness. But there were no bicycles; no one knocked; all he had to say went sour in him. It was only some cattle come up close to the house, rubbing against the wires. They moved away.

He lit a candle, blinked at the startled flame and blew it out again. Darkness resumed, with a discomfortable suggestion of normality. There seemed proof that the accident of day, of action, need not recur. And from this blank full stop, this confrontation of a positive futurelessness, his mind ran spiderlike back on the thread spun out of itself for advance, stumbling and swerving a little over its own intricacy. He caught trains he had missed, rushing out to the boundless possible from the shining mouths of termini, re-ordered meals in a cosmopolitan blue, re-ate them, thought of thought but sheered away from that windy gulf full of a fateful clapping of empty book-covers. Far enough back, in a kind of unborn freedom, he even re-made marriages. Laura Naylor gave Hugo, scoffingly, bridal tenderness; they had four sons and all hurried out to coarsen in Canada. Here, in this that had been her room, Laura had lain on her wedding morning, watching a spider run up the canopy of the bed, while Hugo made ready, five miles off, to be driven over to take her hand at the altar by poor John Trent, and the four young sons in excitement jiggled among the cherubim. And it was Richard who married Francie, who came to him all in a bloom at his first request and made a kind of a basinette of a life for him, dim with lace. Aunt Myra enjoyed a vigorous celibacy, while Laurence, to be acclaimed a second Weiniger, blew out his brains at—say—Avila, in a fit of temporary discouragement without having heard of Danielstown. Lois, naturally, was not born at all.

But this involved a certain re-arrangement of Laurence’s character, for not for anything would he have put a pistol into his mouth, though he would have liked to fire a gun out of a window. This neglect of the raiders pricked his egotism. And alarmed by the dragging tick of the watch under his pillow, slowing down as at the mortal sickness of Time, he turned over and thought in a fury that he could not think why Laura should have married Mr. Farquar. The rudest man in Ulster he was, with a disagreeably fresh complexion and an eye like a horse. Her confusion had clotted up in the air of the room and seemed, in that closest darkness under the ceiling, to be still impending. Here, choked in the sweep of the bed-curtains, she had writhed in those epic rages; against Hugo, against Richard, against any prospect in life at all; biting the fat resistant pillows. Until once she had risen, fluttered at her reflection, dabbed her eyes, buttoned a tight sleek dress of that day’s elegance over her heaving bosom, packed her dresses in arched trunks (that had come back since to rot in the attics) and driven off, averting from the stare of the house an angry profile. Hotly, she went up North to attract and marry Mr. Farquar. It was in her to have done otherwise, but there is a narrow and fixed compulsion, Laurence recognized, inside the widest ranges of our instability.

Below, through the floor, a light drawling scrape climbed into stuttering melody, syncopated dance music, ghostly with the wagging of hips and horrid in darkness. Lois, child of that unwise marriage, was playing the gramophone. Laurence listened, paralysed with indignation, then reached out and banged a chair on the floor. She attended; the music broke off with a shock, there was a tingling calm, as after an amputation. He above, she below, they thought of each other with outrage.

Certainly, thought Laurence, there must have been something at dinner.

But Sir Richard and Lady Naylor were soundly asleep. She was dreaming about the Aberdeens, while he rode round the country on a motor-bicycle from which he could not detach himself. His friends cut him; he discovered he was a Black and Tan. But night rolled on over them thickly and uneventfully. The others exhausted themselves to sleep. The darkness clamped round their waking brains did not any one moment seem to abate its insane pressure; only, within an hour of breakfast they found themselves restored without reason to the illusion of daylight. With a kind of fatedness, a passivity, they resumed the operation of living.

The morning gave birth to a disappointment. Livvy arrived just as Lois was starting out for the village with Marda to send the telegram. Her horse was lame so she came over on a bicycle, and certainly, thought Lois, watching her lean the bicycle into the privet hedge, there were many things about Livvy that were a pity. For Marda stood at the top of the steps in a green jumper, fanning the telegraph form on the air to dry the ink. The green, queer and metallic, cut surprisingly into the steamy tones of the house and the morning. She would be gone in three days. And now while Livvy settled her hat and her front and prepared for speech, Marda, smiling, came down the steps and walked away down the avenue, not caring. She missed nobody. The dogs went with her: gloomily Lois’s eyes went after their wagging sterns.

“Listen,” said Livvy, clutching Lois’s elbow. “Ah, listen, Lois: what is the matter?—That is a natty jumper she’s got. I wonder, has she the pattern? Of course, it’s partly her figure. I wonder now that she didn’t marry.... Lois, will we go up to your room?”

Lois did not believe the bed was made. Livvy blushed in her little defined way and said she wished to be confidential. So they went into the drawing-room—where Gerald’s kiss was hanging: all the doubts of the night could not disperse it—and leaned on the grand piano. Lois was surprised to notice Livvy breathing on to her breast-bone and drawing something up on a long blue ribbon from intimate depths. A ring dangled. “No one could be more surprised than myself,” said Livvy modestly, averting her eyes from a finger on which the ring had flowered.

“Oh, well done!” Lois could have exclaimed with spontaneity. Checking this, she said doubtfully: “Oh, my dear ...”

“Who do you guess?”

“Mr.... Mr. Armstrong.”

“Aren’t you quick! Listen—swear that you won’t tell. For my father doesn’t know and I think he’d kill me.”

“How did you ... how did he ...”

“Well, it was like this. You see, he asked me at Mrs. Fogarty’s when would he see me again, and I said I might be going to Cork to the dentist Thursday, and he said he might be going to Cork too. So I thought no more of it. Think what I felt when, I getting out at the station, I saw him there standing as large as life and watching the train like a dog. So he asked me where was I going for tea, so I said if I wasn’t alone I might have dropped in at the Imperial because of the band, but that my father didn’t like me to go there alone because of the officers. He said would I go with him, and it was raining and my appointment wasn’t till half-past five, so I said that we ought not to be seen together, but I turned my hat right down and we went in and heard the band. He seemed very much confused, so I asked him was there anything on his mind and he said there wasn’t and I said there must be. So he went very scarlet and pulled his belt and looked up at the ceiling and said he did love me. Then the waiter came with the tea and I only hope he will not recognize me again. When the waiter had gone I said he might speak lower, and he said he couldn’t because of the band. Then I said that of course a thing like this came as a shock to a girl, and he said did it, and I said indeed it did. I said I was not sure if I could get accustomed to the idea of marriage at all, and he looked very much surprised. I said when would he wish it to be? And he said the worst of it was he had no prospects. I said we Irish were not mercenary, and that anyway I knew he had an uncle⁠— It was a great disadvantage to me, Lois, having to keep down so low under my hat all the time—for I could see the Hartigans’ aunt, Mrs. Foxe-O’Connor, the other side of a palm-tree, and a man my father buys cattle from kept rising up and staring round the room. And what with this and my being naturally very much confused, and David creaking about in his chair, and the band, I don’t know how much he heard of what I said at all.

“However, we thought it might be well to buy a ring, though I can’t wear it. David looked quite wandering and I had to get him across the traffic. And I felt pretty curious myself. You see, we have neither of us been engaged before, though I have had two offers. Then he said he must go to the barracks, so he put me into a tram to go to the dentist’s. Presently I noticed it was the wrong tram, but I hadn’t the heart to get out till it was round the corner after the trouble he’d taken, the poor boy. But the tram kind of bolted and I got out near the Cathedral and had to take a very expensive car. I was late at the dentist’s—he had out two of my teeth.”

All in a dream, it appeared, Livvy had wandered through wet residential Cork. All in a dream she had sat and bled from the gums in a train. She opened her mouth to show the two holes the dentist had made as though they were wounds of love, and Lois looked into them solemnly. Had they kissed at all? No, they had not had the opportunity. They could have taken a cab, but Livvy did not think it moral to drive in a cab with a man, for it roused his passions. Lois said she thought the smell inside of a cab would put anyone off, and Livvy said that in that case a cab would be waste of money.

“But can he marry? Can a second lieutenant?”

“Oh, I can wait some years. But I shall go and stay with his relations and wear a ring and all, so that there need not be any uncertainty.”

“Why not tell your father now and have it announced?” said Lois hopefully. She watched her own face looking up from the mottled piano-top and felt very singular, distant and destined, like Melisande. “I don’t think,” she said, “that I should be afraid of your father.”

For Livvy’s father seemed really a very despondent, mild man with a yellow drooping moustache that he had always to lift up over the edge of his teacup. It was hard to picture his chasing around after Livvy with a blackthorn, or smiting his fist on the dinner-table so that (as Livvy declared) the plates leaped, or going down with the half of a tart in his hand to destroy the cook. The worst she had seen him do, when Livvy was late, was to take his watch out and stand with his thumb on the lid—not looking at it, as though he could not abide the thought of Time—while two or three bubbles ran up his throat. He was a widower: Livvy declared her mother had died of him. He was a teetotaller: half a decanter of whisky was in his tantalus, but he had lost the key. Lois now assured Livvy her father would be the ideal father-in-law; she was sure that David would like him. He would come and stay and be so absolutely unobtrusive.

“He has a prejudice against Army officers,” said Livvy despondently. “He wouldn’t mind if it was the Navy—but what chance have I, living so far inland? If David was a general with gold all down his front and spoke of marriage, I think he’d still kill him. He says I’ll get the house burnt over his head with my goings on.”

“But if he heard you’d been compromised at the Imperial?”

“A girl can’t be compromised in the afternoon,” said Livvy gloomily.

Mr. Thompson did not entertain very much, but Lois remembered once staying to supper there, early that summer, with David and Gerald. That was before times got so bad and the officers had to be back early in barracks. Mr. Thompson’s dining-room looked on to trees, that fanned little gusts of light over the table then closed again in green darkness; it smelt of meat and there was an enormous pilastered mahogany sideboard like the front of a temple, inside which they could hear mice running about. Mr. Thompson was silent—from fear, they thought, rather than disapproval—he kept drawing long black horsehairs from the seat of his chair and laying them out on the cloth. At each hair, David and Gerald leaned forward and opened their mouths to speak. But Mr. Thompson went down in his collar so that they could not: they spoke to each other. And Lois, looking under her lids, had marvelled at this fortress of many opinions. His sister Miss Thompson was present, but she was deaf. The dining-room was dark red, with a smoky ceiling, and Gerald said afterwards he had felt like a disease in a liver. When the blancmange came in it lay down with a sob and Miss Thompson frowned at it. “Death of the cow,” thought Lois, and saved this up. Livvy kept looking warningly at her friends, but they were all polite. Some ducks filed in at the French window; the guests flapped with their napkins, but Mr. Thompson said: “Oh, let them be,” and sure enough the ducks went round the table with their usual urgent look and out by the window again. Mr. Thompson got up and shut out the May air. “Times change for the worse,” he said to Gerald, who agreed with him so emphatically that David had to repeat the interchange to the anxious Miss Thompson. No wonder Livvy found home dull.