The Last September (4 page)

“It would come hard on your shoes, I expect,” said Mr. Montmorency distantly.

“And the men we know can’t get over here in the evening now.”

“Still, I expect you have a very gay time,” said Mr. Montmorency and turned away.

In the dining-room, the little party sat down under the crowd of portraits. Under that constant interchange from the high-up faces staring across—now fading each to a wedge of fawn-colour and each looking out from a square of darkness tunnelled into the wall—Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, ‘their nephew, niece and old friends had a thin, over-bright look, seemed in the air of the room unconvincingly painted, startled, transitory. Spaced out accurately round the enormous table—whereon, in what was left of the light, damask birds and roses had an unearthly shimmer—each so enisled and distant that a remark at random, falling short of a neighbour, seemed a cry of appeal—the six, in spite of an emphasis in speech and gesture they unconsciously heightened, dwindled personally. While above, the immutable figures, shedding into the rush of dusk smiles, frowns, every vestige of personality, kept only attitude—an outmoded modishness, a quirk or a flare, hand slipped under a ruffle or spread over the cleft of a bosom-cancelled time, negatived personality and made of the lower cheerfulness, dining and talking, the faintest exterior friction.

In Laurence’s plate of clear soup six peas floated. Six accurate spoonfuls, each with a pea in it, finished the soup. He glanced right in his aunt’s direction, left in Mrs. Montmorency’s; they were both talking. Mr. Montmorency, listening to Lady Naylor seemed to be looking across at Laurence, but he sat with his back to the light so that Laurence, short-sighted, could not be sure—he preferred uncertainty.

Lady Naylor spoke of the way things were, with her pointed spoon poised over her plate. She noticed the others were waiting and with a last bright emphatic look in Hugo’s direction bent to finish her soup. He said at once to Laurence: “And what do
you
think of things?”

“Things? Over here?”

“Yes—yes.”

“Seem to be closing in,” said Laurence, crumbling his bread detachedly. “Rolling up rather.”

“Ah!” nodded Mr. Montmorency, in significant comprehension.

“Ssht!” exclaimed Lady Naylor, running out a hand at both of them over the cloth. She frowned, with a glance at the parlourmaid. “Now you mustn’t make Laurence exaggerate! All young men from Oxford exaggerate. All Laurence’s friends exaggerate: I have met them.”

“If you have noticed it,” said her nephew, “it is probably so.”

Lois, on his other side, leant eagerly to Mrs. Montmorency. “If you are interested, would you care to come and dig for guns in the plantation? Or if I dig, will you come as a witness? Three of the men on the place here swear there are guns buried in the lower plantation. Michael Keelan swears he was going through there, late, and saw men digging. I asked him, ‘What were they like?’ and he said, ‘The way they would be,’ and I said, why didn’t he ask them what they were doing, and he said, ‘Sure, why would I; didn’t I see them digging, and they with spades?’ So it appears he fled back the way he had come.”

“—Ah, that’s nonsense now!” Sir Richard exploded. “Michael would see anything: he is known to have seen a ghost. I will not have the men talking, and at all accounts I won’t have them listened to.”

“All the same,” pursued Lois, “I feel that one ought to dig. If there is nothing there I can confound Michael for the good of his soul, and if there should be guns, Uncle Richard, just think of finding them! And surely we ought to know.”

“And why would we want to know? You’ll have the place full of soldiers, trampling the young trees. There’s been enough damage in that plantation with the people coming to sightsee: all Michael’s friends.

Now I won’t have digging at all, do you understand?” said Sir Richard, flushed.

Francie felt torn in herself, dividedly sympathetic. “I expect one can’t be too careful … The poor young little trees … And besides,” she added to Lois, “one might blow oneself up.”

“This country,” continued Sir Richard, “is altogether too full of soldiers with nothing to do but dance and poke old women out of their beds to look for guns. It’s unsettling the people, naturally. The fact is, the Army’s got into the habit of fighting and doesn’t know what else to do with itself, and also the Army isn’t at all what it used to be. I was held up yesterday for I wouldn’t like to say how long, driving over to Ballyhinch, by a thing like a coffee-pot backing in and out of a gate, with a little brute of a fellow bobbing in and out at me from under a lid at the top. I kept my temper, but I couldn’t help telling him I
didn’t know what the country was coming to—and just when we’d get the horses accustomed to motors. ‘You’ll do no good,’ I told him, ‘in this unfortunate country by running about in a thing like a coffee-pot.’ And those patrols in lorries run you into a ditch as soon as look at you. They tell me there’s a great deal of socialism now in the British Army.”

“Well, it’s difficult for them all,” said his wife, pacific, “and they’re doing their best,
I
think.
The
ones who come over here seem quite pleasant.”

“What regiment have you now at Clonmore?”

“The First Rutlands.”

“And there are some Field Gunners and Garrison Gunners too,” added Lois. “Most people seem to prefer the Garrison Gunners.”

“The Garrison Gunners dance better,” said Laurence to Mrs. Montmorency. “It would be the greatest pity if we were to become a republic and all these lovely troops were taken away.”

“Fool,” said Lois across the flowers. Mr. Montmorency looked at her in surprise.

Lady Naylor continued: “From all the talk, you might think almost anything was going to happen, but we never listen. I have made it a rule not to talk, either. In fact if you want rumours, we must send you over to Castle Trent. And I’m afraid also the Careys are incorrigible … Oh yes, Hugo, it’s all very well to talk of disintegration; of course there is a great deal of disintegration in England and on the Continent. But one does wonder sometimes whether there’s really much there to disintegrate … I daresay there may have been … And if you talk to the people they’ll tell you the whole thing’s nonsense: and after all what is a country if it isn’t the people? For instance, I had a long conversation this morning with Mrs. Pat Gegan, who came down about the apples—you remember her, Hugo, don’t you, she always asks after you: she was really delighted to hear you were coming back—’It is the way the young ones do be a bit wild,’ she said, and I really agree with her. She said young people were always the same, and wasn’t it the great pity. She is a most interesting woman: she thinks a great deal. But then our people
do
think. Now have you ever noticed the English? I remember a year ago when I was staying with Anna Partridge in Bedfordshire— She is always so full of doing things in the village, little meetings and so on. Well, I went to one of her meetings, and really—those village women sitting round in hats and so obviously despising her! And not a move on their faces. I said to her afterwards: ‘I do think you’re splendid, Anna, the way you throw yourself into things —but really what you can do with people with so little brain—’ She seemed quite annoyed and said that at least they were loyal. I said they hadn’t got any alternative and if they had an alternative I didn’t suppose they’d see it. She said they had hearts of gold if they didn’t wear them on their sleeves, and I said I thought it was a pity they didn’t—it would have brightened them up a bit. She said that at least one knew where one was with them, and I said I wouldn’t live among people who weren’t human. Then I thought it seemed a shame to unsettle her, if she really likes living in England… . Oh, and I said to Mrs. Gegan this morning: ‘Some of your friends would like us to go, you know,’ and she got so indignant she nearly wept. And the Trents were telling me— Oh, Hugo, the Trents are coming over to tennis tomorrow, specially for you and Francie. And the Thompsons are coming, and I believe the Hartigans. The Hartigan girls are still all there, you’ll be surprised to hear. Nobody seems to marry them—and oh, a Colonel and Mrs. Boatley are coming, and three or four of the Rutlands—”

“Five,” said Lois.

“—Anyhow, several Rutlands. Everyone’s so delighted to hear that you and Francie are back.”

“The Trents,” said Lois to Mr. Montmorency, with indignation, “swear that you and they are related. But you are not, surely? It is a perfect obsession of theirs.”

When he said he supposed that he was, through an aunt’s marriage, she became pensive. It seemed odd that even the Trents should have a closer claim than she had—though it was she who had been humming with agitation the whole morning. The sweet peas in the urn before them bore evidence to her agitation: they all slanted to the west like a falling haystack. It was true she had hoped nothing more of him, but he
still was in shadow, faintly, from the kindly monolith of her childhood. What he might have been, what he persisted in being, met in her mind with a jar, with a grate of disparity. The face she had watched sleeping— wiped clear of complexity, quiet but so communicative in stillness that, watching, she seemed to have shared in some kind of suspense, stayed—like the bright blur from looking too long at a lamp—over the face now turned to her, intelligent, dulled, with its sub-acid smile. She was likely to think of him now as a limitation, Mrs. Montmorency’s limitation; something about Mrs. Montmorency that was a pity. The Trents could have him.

“I expect,” she said slightingly, “you are related to everyone.”

“The longer one lives in this country,” he all too agreeably said, “the more likely that seems.”

Yet she had been certain she felt him looking at her while she argued with Uncle Richard about the guns. Seeking a likeness, perhaps. It was this consciousness that had lent her particular fervour—though she was interested in the guns. Though when she turned round his profile was turned away—in, it seemed, the most scornful repudiation.

He had, as a matter of fact, been looking at her, but without intention and with a purely surface observation of detail. When she turned away, the light from behind ran a finger round the curve of her jaw. When she turned his way, light took the uncertain dinted cheek-line where, under the eyes, flesh was patted on delicately over the rise of the bone. Her eyes, long and soft-coloured, had the intense brimming wandering look of a puppy’s; in repose her lips met doubtfully, in a never determined line, so that she never seemed to have quite finished speaking. Her face was long, her nose modelled down from the bridge then finished off softly and bluntly, as by an upward flick of the sculptor’s thumb. Her chin had emphasis, seemed ready for determination. He supposed that unformed, anxious to make an effect, she would marry early.

“Danielstown can’t have been so exciting when you were here before,” said Lois to Mrs. Montmorency.

But Mrs. Montmorency, in an absence of mind amounting to exaltation, had soared over the company. She could perform at any moment, discom-fitingly, these acts of levitation. She was staring into one of the portraits.

LOIS was sent upstairs for the shawls; it appeared that a touch of dew on the bare skin might be fatal to Lady Naylor or Mrs. Montmorency. On the stairs, her feet found their evening echoes; she dawdled, listening. When she came down everybody was on the steps—at the top, on the wide stone plateau —the parlourmaid looking for somewhere to put the coffee tray. Mrs. Montmorency sat in the long chair; her husband was tucking a carriage rug round her knees. “If you do that,” Lois could not help saying, “she won’t be able to walk about, which is the best part of sitting out.”

No one took any notice: Mr. Montmorency went on tucking.

“Haven’t you got a wrap for yourself?” said Lady Naylor. Lois took a cushion and sat on the top step with her arms crossed, stroking her elbows. “I shouldn’t sit there,” her aunt continued, “at this time of night stone will strike up through anything.”

“If you don’t get rheumatism now,” added Francie, “you will be storing up rheumatism.”

“It will be my rheumatism,” said Lois as gently as possible, but added inwardly, “After you’re both dead.” A thought that fifty years hence she might well, if she wished, be sitting here on the steps, with or without rheumatism—having penetrated thirty years deeper ahead into time than they could—gave her a feeling of mysteriousness and destination. And she was fitted for this by being twice as complex as their generation—for she must be: double as many people having gone to the making of her.

Laurence, looking resentfully round for somewhere to sit—she had taken the only cushion—said: “I suppose you think ants cannot run up your legs if you cannot see them?”

Mr. Montmorency surprised her by offering a cigarette. He had a theory, he said, that ants did not like cigarette smoke. The air was so quiet now, the flame ran up his match without a tremble. “The ants are asleep,” she said, “they disappear into the cracks of the steps. They don’t bite, either; but the idea is horrid.”

“Don’t you want a chair?” When she said she didn’t, he settled back in his own. Creaks ran through the wicker, discussing him, then all was quiet. He was not due to leave the ship in which they were all rushing out into time till ten years after the others, though it was to the others that he belonged. Turning half round, she watched light breathe at
the
tips
of the
cigarettes; it seemed as though everybody were waiting. Night now held the trees with a toneless finality. The sky shone, whiter than glass, fainting down to the fretted leaf line, but was being steadily drained by the dark below, to which the grey of the lawns, like smoke, as steadily mounted. The house was highest of all with toppling imminence, like a cliff.