The Last September (14 page)

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

“Hal-
lo
!” cried Gerald, flashing with expectation. Never had they been so acclaimed. He was out this way, he explained coming into earshot, 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 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 up the dints in 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 hedges shivered; he had laughed and shivered, a 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 early showing of daylight. He was fortified in assurance. Leaning with her elbow against the tree, returning casually his directness of look, she recalled some lovely 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. Naively, he looked at his wrist-watch.

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

“It will rain by lunch time,” said Mr. Montmorency. And indeed the sky was already creeping together and fading; 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.

“Danny 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 daresay 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 Danny … 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. Danny took form on the darkness, searching with his one eye. He stood with his white beard, helpless and eager. “Well!” exclaimed Hugo. Then Danny 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.

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 interior darkness. The yellow dog passed, 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, quite; 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 its staring portraits contracted round a glove on the table—a grey suede 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 flush through transparent paper of shell-pink needlework hastily wrapped away. 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. A 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 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 eye, 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—”

“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 seasick, 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 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.