Chapter X

For James Milton, after his first few days in the Hotel, everybody with whom he had exchanged a word or a glance or been brought even indirectly into contact had already divided themselves into his friends or enemies. Those who had not yet detached themselves hung about the outskirts of his consciousness as a kind of mist behind which threatening possibilities were for ever stirring, could be glimpsed for an instant, then subsided. He suffered, as he did at last confess to himself, and began to wonder why he had ever left his parish, where the crippling sensitiveness of his childhood had at least been deadened by the activity of every day, and where in the assured retreat of office he had had no need to question what he was. But the place was beautiful and completely satisfied him once he had been able to reconcile what he saw with what he had imagined and to recognize that while an ultimate Riviera could only have existence in the mind of God, this was as fair an imitation as it was reasonable to expect. He walked for the allied pleasures of coloured experience and of hardening his muscles, he tried to talk Italian to natives, to be answered incomprehensibly in patois or the local French; he played tennis not so badly and was to be surprised, in consequence, by the friendliness of the Lawrences, and he admitted to some vague attractions which it entertained him to discuss with himself.

He became friendly, comfortably and without attraction, with Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Pym. These two in spite of their experience of clergymen could not “place” him. From his moustache, one would have been inclined to take him for an Evangelical, on the other hand, it is Anglicans who step with fewest scruples into secular clothes. He had attended the conferences of neither party and remained irresponsive to the shibboleths of both. Miss Pym wrote, on an inspiration, to ask particulars of him from that friend in Derbyshire that he and she had early discovered to be mutual. But the friend in Derbyshire was an Anglo-Catholic and did not acknowledge the finer shades; she simply wrote back that he was a delightful man, adding a string of messages for him that gave no key. Colonel Duperrier also liked Milton; they exchanged stories about fishing in Donegal, discussed Europe and respected one another’s reserve. The Lawrences made him an apple-pie bed and used to send him suggestive Italian picture postcards anonymously to see how much he would stand.

But he was still avid for popularity. Though devoid of the more odious kinds of vanity, he had been given to understand that as an unattached, personable man he would be _persona grata_ anywhere: and he was troubled to find that this was not the case. He had avoided Sydney since that day of the Lee-Mittisons’ picnic: for some reason that he could not explain it was impossible to think of her without embarrassment, though at times she was nothing more to him than some curious picture whose worth he could apprehend but felt unable to analyse. It was with some unavowed idea of a circuitous approach to Sydney that he sought out her friend Mrs. Kerr; preparing to find himself to a degree, but not beyond that degree, disturbed by her.

He was oppressed by some patent hostilities.

“I am afraid,” he said to Miss Fitzgerald, as during the half-hour before lunch they sat together in the Hotel garden on iron chairs under an orange tree, “that I have done something to offend Mrs. Pinkerton.”

“Oh, I don’t see how you could have. Anyhow, she’s a fearful old snob,” said Miss Fitzgerald, who knew all about the bathroom, but had neither the face nor the heart to tell him.

“Oh, do you think so? She is the sort of old lady I have so often been asked to lunch with that I cannot help wondering why we do not get on.”

“She is the patroness of a living——”

“Well, I don’t want the woman’s living,” said Milton indignantly. “Does she think I’m going to pick her pocket for it?”

“How ridiculous you are!” laughed Miss Fitzgerald, who was exhilarated by violence. “You know, she would make a splendid Lady Catherine de Bourgh.”

“Ye-es,” said Milton thoughtfully, wondering who should be his Charlotte. He resumed, “Another person I should like an explanation with is Mr. Lee-Mittison. He took me up a mountain my first day here, lost me and has been looking daggers at me ever since. He seems to have forgiven the Lawrences and Miss Warren who were equally his victims, and I cannot see why I am singled out. After all, I was stranger to the hills than any of them.”

“I am very sorry for his wife,” said Miss Fitzgerald sighing pleasurably.

“I don’t know. I think he’s her fault. She mayn’t seem a very buoyant woman but I don’t suppose she’d like to be.”

“It’s very curious,” said Miss Fitzgerald, turning to look at him, “most men, I have noticed are hardest on men but with you it seems just the opposite. I don’t know whether it’s personal prejudice—” she sweetened the impertinence with a smile—“or the curious sombre rigidity of some old school of thought; perhaps Pauline?”

“I can’t think,” Milton said vaguely. At this particular hour of the morning he did not want to talk about himself and was still less interested in St. Paul.

“Perhaps,” she suggested, “you are brought too much into contact with women, the tiresome type. A clergyman’s life——”

“It never really strikes me that there’s very much difference. I mean there _are_ a certain rather limited _number_ of ways in which people can be idiotic—or if you like, wicked—and men and women seem to fall into them indiscriminately. It always irritates me to see anybody being bolstered up in their own particular kind of insufferableness by the friend who ought to be helping them, and I do think women (for their own ends, which makes it unpardonable) are worse about doing this than men. If that’s what you mean by my being severer on women? Otherwise I can’t see that in my department at any rate, men and women are noticeably different.”

“Or in any department,” said Miss Fitzgerald earnestly rallying to her standard. “And it interested me to hear you use the word ‘friend’ in that context. Meaning that friend and husband—or wife, as the case may be—should be synonymous.”

“Practically,” said Milton, looking round and wondering whether it would be possible to order an apéritif, and wishing since he feared this was not possible, that he had gone down to the town. “I suppose,” he continued conscientiously though with a slight effort, “that you think I am intolerant?”

“Oh no, not that: too, too acute.... One feels it a disadvantage. I suppose one is oneself too much in the habit of _generalizing_.” She broke off and reached up suddenly in apparent confusion to pluck a small, still rather sickly orange from a branch above her. This, without looking at it again, she bit, right into the peel.

“Surely that is rather bitter?” asked James Milton looking on solicitously.

“Yes,” said she with a wry face, wiping her mouth, “it was very bitter!” She turned crimson and began to laugh awkwardly. “Such an extraordinary thing to do: I _do_ do extraordinary things sometimes ... without thinking ... when I’m thinking hard.”

James Milton, who did think this was an extraordinary thing to have done, was silent. She glanced shamefacedly at her tooth marks in the orange, then guiltily up at the windows of the Hotel, then she wiped the orange and tucked it quietly away behind her.

“Look!” cried out James Milton considerately. “There’s Mrs. Kerr again, out on her balcony.”

“So she is—how nice she looks up there. You know, my friend Miss Pym is so fond of her, she says she is marvellously sympathetic. She is certainly an unusual woman, but so very charming. She is very much criticized here by a certain set, but then I am afraid some women have very small minds. Did you hear, her son is coming out next week? We are so glad, it will be delightful for her.”

“I say, is he really? I’m glad.”

“We are wondering,” continued Miss Fitzgerald, “what he and Sydney Warren will say to each other?”

“Really?” said James Milton, whose mind had leapt at once to this.

“Not of course that I mean anything ... well, you know, sentimentally. The boy is hardly grown up. No, I mean she has been so much in possession, really rather monopolizing Mrs. Kerr, who of course is incapable of not being nice to anybody and is so patient and sympathetic and good.” Miss Fitzgerald sighed “She’s been victimized....”

Later on, when Milton had followed Miss Fitzgerald into the dining-room, he stared with renewed curiosity at the back of Miss Warren’s head across the dining-room, as though he expected the shape and colour of her to be somehow different, or expected her to disclose her whole self to him in some gesture or attitude. He sat at his lonely table crumbling his bread exaltedly and wondering how soon Ronald could possibly arrive. He promised himself that, if Ronald were not delayed, it would be possible for him in a fortnight or even ten days to know Sydney absolutely. Then he had to recollect how unfriendly to him she had shown herself and wonder whether being thrown back on his society would tend to make her like him better. Tessa’s bright vague eyes surprised him in their wandering, he smiled and nodded.

“Mr. Milton keeps on looking at us,” whispered Tessa to Sydney. “I do wonder what he wants.”

Many people who admired Mrs. Kerr had already congratulated her; others who had still to do so sought her out as they streamed from the dining-room. A small crowd gathered about her as she stood in the doorway, like a tall bride, confused and elated. Many who did not like her at all had also congratulated, as they were anxious to see how she was taking it. “Splendid!” shouted and smiled Mr. Milton over the intervening heads; his long, rather pink face also towering.

“Yes, it’s splendid, isn’t it?” agreed Sydney from behind him. She was jostled against him all at once by more people pushing out from the dining-room and he said, putting out a hand to steady her: “I’m sure _you_ must be glad?”

At the end of that afternoon’s tennis he waited for Sydney and walked up with her from the club. “This young man, this Ronald,” he asked, “do you know him?”

“I feel I do,” said Sydney. “Mrs. Kerr has shown me his letters and she laughs at me occasionally and says I am like him. And there is a photograph, anyway, that one couldn’t help noticing. Altogether I feel he is to be a kind of comic character.”

“Oh! Does his mother think he is funny?” said James Milton, slightly jarred.

“But young people are always funny: as we get more sophisticated we can’t help realizing that ourselves—I don’t know whether that makes us less funny or more so.”

The sun had dipped to the line of the hills, so that the sky had a kind of gold sparkle which reflected itself on figures and faces. Even before the moment of sunset the air was already tingling with cold; the dark keen upstanding trees about them seemed slightly to shiver. Sydney flung the folds of her white fleecy cloak across her breast and holding them gathered against her paused a moment, looking back towards the tennis-courts with a wild Beatrice Cenci expression which did not correspond with her thoughts and of which she was wholly unconscious. Milton’s heart leapt to his mouth for that moment, then he felt the chill of dusk lay an ice-cold hand on him and he shuddered. He asked her impatiently if she were waiting for anyone else.

She said “No” in surprise, and walked beside him up the path to the Hotel, treading noiselessly in her rope-soled shoes. “It is an alarming idea,” said he, unable to maintain a silence of whose peculiar quality he became intolerably conscious, “that the young should be getting progressively more and more sophisticated. It is as bad as it is to be told, if one is a reader of adventure stories, that no part of dark Africa remains undiscovered, and that one-inch maps of all parts will be available shortly.”

“I suppose it would be, if one ever seriously considered youth romantic.”

“But I never said _I_ did. Romantic—I’m not that kind of middle-aged man. When I compared it to Africa, I didn’t mean I liked Africa; I dislike the thoughts of the wilds intensely but they make me so appreciative of the state of civilization in which I am living that I should be sorry if they disappeared.”

“So you feel civilized?” said Sydney, beginning to like him. Till now she had been discouraged by his facile (what she called “professional”) manner and by a middle-aged whimsicality reeking of the Barrie play.

“Much more so,” said James Milton, cursing himself for going on like this, and for that very manner and habit of mind of his, of which no one else could have been more contemptuously aware.

“More than whom?” said Sydney idly, but he refused to continue and she allowed him with unusual complaisance to swing her with him into a new mood, as though they had been a pair of dancers. The rocky crest of a hill to the east, at a great height, had suddenly been ribbed with scarlet. This vivid colour against the profound and quickly darkening sky was to northern eyes a challenge to credulity: and Sydney looking up with admiration and hostility, said, “I should never have believed it.”

“I have always believed it,” said James Milton, “but it is surprising to see.”

“You’ll see a hundred others,” she told him: and they hurried on, discussing in relation to this line of coast the phenomena of sunset. When they had come out into the road they walked more slowly between the lines of chestnut-trees, watching the light fade from the enormous faces of the hotels and retreat even from the villas above, which though suffused in dusk still glimmered. Night had arrived, as usual, with the catastrophic suddenness which does not for a long time cease to be alarming. They could hear forgotten windows being slammed indignantly, while lights springing up behind the curtains brought them out in hundreds in their uniformity, with here and there a figure passing regularly as a pendulum to and fro across the screen of lace. The hill smoked over with olives loomed, by some _trompe-l’oeil_ of the twilight seemed to topple, above the larger hotels; but their own in silhouette against the sea stood out as they approached it in greater significance.

She said, “I have often thought it would be interesting if the front of any house, but of an hotel especially, could be swung open on a hinge like the front of a doll’s-house. Imagine the hundreds of rooms with their walls lit up and the real-looking staircases and all the people surprised doing appropriate things in appropriate attitudes as though they had been put there to represent something and had never moved in their lives. Like the cook-doll that I always had propped up against the kitchen stove and the father-doll propped against the library book-shelves and the sitting-up doll in the bath that was really a china ornament and had no other attitude, and the limp dolls that wouldn’t do anything so had to be kept in the spare room beds, which I always think was an unconscious reflection on the ideal habits for visitors.”

“Yes,” said James Milton, for whom the Hotel was at once in miniature. “If one could see people all at once like that they wouldn’t matter so much.” Quite apart from and yet somehow parallel with the intellectual conception he had another idea of God, of which he permitted himself to be conscious, as an enormous and perpetually descending Finger and Thumb. What Sydney had just said fitted in with this alarmingly.

“If one could see them like that,” she continued, “one could see them so clearly, as living under the compulsion of their furniture—or the furniture they happen to have hired. It would seem very doubtful, I daresay, whether man were not, after all, made for the Sabbath—and worse, for beds and dinner-tables and washstands, just to discharge the obligations all those have created.”

“I don’t think I should ever believe that,” said Milton amused.

“Well, even you,” she continued. “Though it may have been an Idea in the first place that made churches to be built, it was the churches already existing, with rows of pews for people to sit in, and a pulpit and things all ready that had to be filled, that made you into a parson.”

“I’m afraid I don’t agree with you at all,” said he, with a finality that impressed her.

“It really isn’t worth disagreeing with: I was only talking for the fun of the thing. Of course I don’t believe that more than anything else.” They had been walking under the windows of their own Hotel, and she now paused in the gateway with the light from the Hotel door streaming out on to her looking at him remotely, as a gypsy might look over the garden-fence at a householder mowing his lawn. “I daresay,” her look seemed to say, “that in your encumbered kind of way you are happy. I am not, in any way, and I don’t want to be.” It was with this air at once complacent and desolate that she seemed proposing to part from him, for she glanced at her wrist-watch, murmured something in the nature of a farewell and slipped on ahead.

“Oh, I say!” exclaimed Milton helplessly, and racked his brains for something further to say to her.

“What?” asked Sydney looking down from the steps and with faint impatience swinging her racket.

“I hope you don’t think I was offended?” said he wildly.

“No. Why should you be?”

“What you said about churches ... I was afraid you might have thought——”

“Well,” said Sydney, “it’s no use trying not to offend people so I don’t think I ever think much one way or the other. I’ve given up listening agonizedly for the possible reverberations of every remark—which, if you’ll forgive my saying so, I think you do.”

“I’m sorry,” said he, with the humility of twenty years’ seniority.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter a bit. Good-night.” He had pulled open the swing door for her and she passed through it ahead of him, trailing her cloak which had slipped away from her shoulders. He gathered up the fringe of this from the floor and passed it to her. “Why good-night?” said he, and several people sitting about the lounge looked up in astonishment. “I mean, don’t we see each other at dinner?”

“Oh well, of course we see each other at dinner.” Sydney glanced round the lounge, took note of the astonished faces and, after another slight bow to Milton, went upstairs slowly, humming a tune.