Chapter XVI

The Villa Tre Cipressi concealed itself to the last, blotted out among the trees of its hillside; a long lane with broken-down walls led circuitously to its gates through olive-gardens. Since the last date of the Villa’s habitation the surface of the lane must have deteriorated; it was impossible now to imagine the burnished, sleek rushing-down it of cars or the thin-shod, delicate stepping of the Russian ladies. Miss Fitzgerald’s party, going forward in the leisurely and spread-out manner called in Ireland “streeling,” had begun to feel a profound disbelief in the existence of the Villa. Miss Fitzgerald had, however, in doing them the honours of what had been a private experience, constituted herself their hostess, and they hesitated to suggest this disbelief to her otherwise than obliquely, by a disposition to linger, sweep the hill with a glance then gaze back through the olive-trees, or to seat themselves at intervals, with some obvious thought of encampment, along the smoother parts of the walls. In the selection of them for a social bouquet there had been nothing striking except in a last addition. Mr. Milton went on nearly everybody’s picnics (it seemed a destiny beyond his influence), Miss Pym, as half of a duality, had been inevitable, Mrs. Hillier had been led to tolerate these two good women who did not know India and this parson who did not play bridge by her passion for villa gardens. It was Ronald who had been the master-stroke; he redeemed the bunch of them and made their grouping-together seem superbly conscious and studied, suggesting depths of art behind its effect of naïveté. So at least Mr. Milton felt that Ronald must be thinking, and he did not doubt that Ronald was right.

After a series of sharp turns the Villa gate stared down on them, aware, one might have supposed by their triumphant whorls and scrolls of painted ironwork, of all they gained by presenting themselves so suddenly. A mild ascent led up to them and the three cypresses, which had an air of drawing together in council, dominated the approach. They came up rather breathlessly and stood behind Miss Fitzgerald in silence, as though they were prepared to rush the opening, while she sent the great key she had produced beforehand screeching round in the lock. Then they pressed in behind her, looking to left and right of them up at the palm-trees or between the boles which had an exotic, rather horrible fatness. The tangled gloom and the expanse of silence swallowed up their cries of admiration. Miss Fitzgerald, after checking off with nods of satisfaction all she still found here, invited Ronald to tell her whether this was not all he had hoped.

Ronald had hoped nothing; he had not wished to accompany her. They misunderstood one another (though she did not suspect this); she had marked him down from the first as being of that delightful age which expects to be taken seriously and which to one’s ardent gravity will make shy, delicious disclosures. Ronald preferred in any encounter with women of a no longer redeemable age that might be forced on him to retreat behind an impassible whimsicality which amounted to archness. Thus there had been a conflict in their methods of approach, the equal determination of each of them to “take” the other rather than “be taken.” She had plumped down beside him that morning with her invitation at an instant of such crisis in his thoughts that he could have murdered her for the interruption. In Germany he had found he could not think, there had been too much time, some element of condensation had been lacking; here there had been nothing but a series of agonizing ruptures; the very fact of sitting down alone on bench or sofa seemed to be provocative and Ronald could not think properly standing up. “Your mother,” she had begun, “wanted me to ask you if you’d come with us to the Russian Villa—I have been lent the key. She is sure you will be delighted with it.” There had been nothing left for Ronald to say.

A number of disappearing pathways darted off from the avenue; Corinthian pillars suggested themselves through a net of undergrowth and the arch of a stone bridge let one suppose water. The party hung fire, embarrassed by this choice of attraction, then continued to move slowly up the avenue in a close formation. This was more than a Villa, it was a country house, with, for the moment, nothing but the distinct shadows and an irregular splash of water to give away its foreignness. Then Miss Fitzgerald caught Ronald by the arm and pulled him sideways, pointing excitedly as though they were to surprise some living thing. “Look,” she cried, “up there—the Villa!” They all had a glimpse of it and were repelled; forty supercilious white windows, blankly shuttered, a vacillating shabbiness across its grey face that was neither old nor new. It had a solidity that was not local, an assured air of having been finally answered for; but it was as disappointing as one’s first princess.

“Of course it isn’t like a _cinquecento_ villa,” said Miss Pym, anxious to make all allowances.

“It is amusingly suggestive, isn’t it,” Ronald said to Milton, “of the ‘Nuit de Portofino Kulm’?” and he was made to feel himself utterly isolated by Milton’s kind blank stare. “I’m afraid I haven’t read—” said Milton (Ronald felt, with complacency) “_Oh_ ...” said Ronald. He would have liked to discuss also, in the light of his own recent observations in Germany that mild baron of Charlottenburg who kept snakes in his parlour behind violet silk curtains. He sighed as though a door had been slammed in front of him. Perished civilizations interested Ronald, who had come too late to share a mild distress at their demise. Soon he was thinking fruitfully about Russia and was glad when Milton again gave him another opening by saying to Mrs. Hillier: “I often wonder whether the Russians weren’t after all the only people with any real notion of aristocracy.”

“Does that mean you did or didn’t like Russians?” said Mrs. Hillier, looking at him cautiously, while Ronald, almost simultaneously exclaimed, “So real it was that this world was no place for them!”

“Do you at all mean to suggest,” asked Milton, giving full attention to this last remark, “that they have simply been translated? Because I think that’s very tenable. It strikes me more and more as I live that this world’s no place for anyone with any real notion of anything and that its expulsion of them must be almost automatic.”

“Their type was very refined,” said Mrs. Hillier. “Lovely creatures—but one can never altogether like them.” She looked about at the garden which, with its profound and hidden hollows around them, seemed to be waiting. “I must say,” she confessed, “this is delightful. Shall we go over that bridge? The garden must go on indefinitely—Look, there’s a seat with steps up to it right on the hill!” She made for the bridge, appearing, so abrupt was the turn of the path, to have plunged waist-deep into the shiny dark leaves that flopped back heavy as fishes from the sweep of her skirts. These plants with their overpowering glossiness must have sprung from wet soil. Milton and Miss Pym went after her; Ronald and Miss Fitzgerald seemed to have been delayed by a short argument; perhaps as to the nature of aristocracy. The garden gave Milton a distinct feeling of nervousness as though he were being scornfully watched. To allow this was to underrate oneself, so he asked abruptly, “If one comes to think of it, what was the good of them?” There was a pause filled in by the agitation of leaves, then Miss Pym upon whom an ever deeper despondency must have been working, replied, “If you come to think of it, what is the good of us?”

“Well, really ...” said Mrs. Hillier.

“Us _three_?” asked Milton, in an attempt to evade the issue. He could tell from the set of Mrs. Hillier’s back that in another minute or two they might be at grips with the problem of Empire.

“No,” said Miss Pym still more wildly, “I mean us all, our class....”

Mrs. Hillier stared at her, then decided to laugh. “I didn’t know you were a Socialist!”

“But must one be a Socialist,” went on Miss Pym defiantly, “to wonder sometimes what is the good of us? Because one can’t help it (without wishing to attach oneself to any party) these days when so much is in the melting-pot.”

“It’s hardly easy to talk about, is it?” said Mrs. Hillier lightly with the well-bred instinct to cover this that she had also when anybody tried to discuss religious experiences (though at present, with the excuse of a specialist, that would have been more permissible). “I suppose,” she elected to say, “it’s a matter of example, really, isn’t it? I mean: giving the others something to go by. I mean, people do notice. Why, one feels it even out here—Italians _notice_.”

“But don’t you wonder if they don’t just think we’re lazy?” Miss Pym exploded. “I do: when my friend and I have been walking or reading and one feels them up on those terraces looking down on one and working away. Why, even in the Hotel, you know, one does wonder if the waiters——”

“You’re just getting acutely self-conscious, Miss Pym, that’s what’s the matter with you!” laughed Mrs. Hillier, bluntly and kindly. “The creatures are positively parasites. If you’d lived out of England as long as I have, and seen how——”

“—I’ve lived all over the Continent——”

“—Oh, but that is different. I mean, _that_ just tends to make one cosmopolitan.”

“Yes, but that’s just it,” cried Miss Pym, and then subsided, thoroughly confused.

This engagement left Milton’s attention free to escape from them, which, while he walked decorously enough alongside and keeping back here and there a branch with his walking-stick, it is to be feared that it did. The path, by going up steeply for short distances and only gradually coming down again, presented a clever effect of being Alpine; one felt one must have climbed to a great height. One was humoured in this by being railed away solicitously from small precipices, and by being made to walk dizzily over the arches of bridges from which ravines with water seemed to drop away. Every now and then an artful perspective would be offered, to be veiled once more by trees. Once, in a Corinthian arbour that seemed balanced on the top of a tree like a ball upon a jet of water, he had a glimpse of Miss Fitzgerald talking to Ronald.... “And I expect,” she said, after a prolonged and breathless inspection of the profile he vouchsafed her, “that you write poetry too, don’t you?” Before his path dipped again he heard Ronald reply in a very nearly extinguished voice, “Well, as I said before, you see, my subject is economics.” Milton, whose sympathies were all with Miss Fitzgerald, ground his teeth. He considered Ronald definitely disobliging in his refusal to give hostages anywhere. He had been prepared for clever indolence or for a cool kind of wantonness in Mrs. Kerr’s son, or for polite nullity, or resentful dullness in the son of Mrs. Kerr’s husband; he had begun to build, successively, on each of these probabilities. But he had not foreseen this refusal to emerge from behind a non-committal mannerliness, or the long ray to be directed upon them that showed them all up, even Sydney, in the maze of a gnats’ dance, an aimless passionate jiggle apart and together. It had not been in Ronald to precipitate a crisis on any plane: he was not, thought Milton, either vivid or generous enough. He had come to stare, one could only imagine, and Milton had a view of him lounging along a row of cages. He wondered how much Ronald had hurt Sydney, whether she had been able to make him hurt her at all; though she had been so visibly “out” from the earliest word of his coming, to make a juggernaut of her friend’s son. Milton did not know whether, except for that brief encounter in the ball-room, they had exchanged a word. This reservation would be enough to engage this perverse girl in still deeper designs on Ronald and to make her, to merely a lover, more inaccessible than before.

They climbed up to the skeleton of a summer house; the walls might have blown away or might simply have rotted. Miss Pym began to search about diligently, looking under the seat and into the corners and running the point of her walking-stick along the cracks of the pavement. She explained that “_they_” might have dropped something. This, for a moment, seemed so probable that Milton went just as eagerly down on one knee. “Think,” said she, “if one were to find a little purse, or a bangle that had slipped off, or even a button! I can’t believe they wouldn’t have left something; they must have come here day after day.” Milton laughed at her tolerantly, getting up again and dusting his knee. She didn’t explain why she should have concentrated her hopes on this arbour, she perhaps left the arbour to do so, for, perched out over the garden, it was as intimate as a nest. Mrs. Hillier sitting down dreamily, said, “It would have been a nice place for a proposal or something.”

Another allusion to a technique he had disregarded! Milton said quickly, “But we wouldn’t understand—do you realize?—a word that has ever been said here!”

“But people in the better-class Russian stories always seem to talk French or English.”

“I can’t imagine anybody who wasn’t obliged to make love in English.”

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Hillier looking at him thoughtfully, “that one only feels one’s own language a limitation if one is not sufficiently carried away.”

“Oh!” cried Miss Pym, waving, “here is Eleanor coming up!” Mrs. Hillier said she did hope that she really were coming alone. “Though of course,” she added, “I should be sorry if Ronald had actually fallen into a tank or anything. Though one can’t say that it might not be for the best. For I can’t think what is going to become of him!”

“I will go and look,” said Milton and, full of determination, left the arbour.

Descending, he called Ronald everywhere: the silence that received his voice gave him back an infuriating sensation, less of being unheard than of not being answered. The boy might be round any corner listening compassionately, telling himself that there went poor old Milton hollering away. So he pressed on in a shut-down kind of silence and was surprised and aggrieved as at each turn the emptiness renewed itself down pergola, lawn or glade. A flitting echo of Mrs. Hillier’s remark sent him suddenly towards the gleam of water. There was no path, he had to push his way out through some bushes to the rim of a larger tank that had been cut out, a square of vivid green water, under the jut of a cliff. The tank had a curb of yellow marble and he saw looking across it, that the smooth streaked sides went down for about three feet before they came to the water, which might be lower than usual but gave some suggestion by its unmuddied yet complete opaqueness of being very deep. The water looked solid; if a body disappeared through the surface it might leave a dint perhaps, a gash which would slowly heal, but never a ripple. He could not imagine the green line swelling up or fretted for even a moment against the face of the marble. He leant further over it, after a glance up of instinctive watchfulness at the cliff which like a lid on a hinge had seemed at that very moment to lean further over him, and inwardly smiled at the picture he made, a fanciful composition to which his attitude and manner consciously lent themselves, that could be called “Temptation to Murder.” He saw his own head and shoulders reflected, and the cliff and sky (though none of these impinged on the greenness) and presently, after some recorded disturbances of branches, the figure of Ronald which, coming out from under the cliff, stood on the curb of the tank nonchalantly, then sat down, dangling its legs. “He might say something,” Milton thought resentfully, but after some seconds of silence whose duration seemed insulting and ludicrous, he had to throw a “Well, hullo!” across the water in impatient concession.

“Hallo,” answered Ronald. “Exploring on your own?”

“Yes—you too?”

“Not quite,” said Ronald politely, “I’ve been exploring with Miss Fitzgerald.”

“Biggest tank I’ve seen,” said Milton, nodding down.

“Yes, isn’t it? More of a swimming bath.”

“What an echo—it’s like talking to about ten people!”

“Yes, it’s this cliff.”

“Can’t you come round?” said Milton impatiently.

“Beg your pardon?” asked Ronald and when the invitation had been repeated conveyed by his instant’s pause some surprise at it. He looked round the tank carefully but had to point out, with regret, that this seemed quite impossible owing to the way the bushes hung over. “But I daresay we’ll meet further on,” he said, “these curly paths are wonderfully good for meeting people. At least, so one would expect, but Miss Fitzgerald and I didn’t meet anybody. Not a ghost, even, though we were sure we would and were very anxious to.”

“What have you done with Miss Fitzgerald?”

“I think she went to find Miss Pym. I think perhaps she was lonely. You don’t believe, I hope, that I’ve dropped her into the tank?”

“The way you haunt it does seem suspicious!”

“But she’d have to come to the surface again: if I _had_, you know, I shouldn’t have dared come back. No, I came back for the tank itself—I like water.” Ronald, gripping the edge of the tank, leaned forward to watch with a smile the reflection of his dangling feet. Milton, sitting down opposite him, took out his pipe and lit it. He observed “You ought to have brought your mother—she would have liked this.”

“She’s a bad walker—I don’t mean she’s got corns or a heart or anything; she’s just lazy.”

“Or was not sorry, quite possibly, to get you off her hands for the morning,” laughed Milton with the bluff and stunning impertinence of which only the diffident are capable, and by which no one can be more appalled than themselves.

“I daresay,” said Ronald. “One does get tired of people.” He gazed across thoughtfully, not at Milton but at Milton’s reflection, which he was able to watch without raising his eyes while remaining as impenetrable to his vis-à-vis as the water below him. “Such an intelligent girl—” he remarked—“that Miss Warren.”

“Oh, you think so? Have you been talking?”

“No,” said Ronald. “She is one of the few people in this caravanserai who have nothing to say to me. I would not say, you know, that she was one of those casual talkers. She would have, I imagine, her moments that she saves herself up for.”

“She’s considered unfriendly.”

“Oh! But would you want her to be friendly?”

“It scarcely affects me—I have known her some time,” said Milton, making the slight reservation that Hotel time was reckoned quite differently.

“Oh, really?” said Ronald respectfully. “You see, where I am concerned she doesn’t appeal as an enterprise. She is already ‘in the family.’”

“Like an illness or a ghost?” suggested Milton, with a smile that must have been lost on Ronald since his faint image did not reproduce it.

“More like a ghost, I think. She is to be seen on the stairs—still, I daresay, if my mother hasn’t already gone out with her.”

“A hotel, you know, is a great place for friendships.”

“Mustn’t that be,” said Ronald, “what people come out for?”

“Perhaps some——”

“But are there really people who would do that?” asked Ronald sharply, in a tone of revulsion, as though he had brought himself up more squarely than he had anticipated to the edge of some kind of abyss. “You mean women?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Milton, smiling across at the agitation of Ronald, very secure and avuncular.

“There is nothing now to prevent women being different,” said Ronald despondently, “and yet they seem to go on being just the same. What is the good of a new world if nobody can be got to come and live in it?” Sitting above his impassive and pale reflection, crumpled forward on his folded arms he remained immobile while the echoes of his last exclamation still seemed to hang about under the slant of rock that roofed him into a cave. The decay of the garden must have seemed to him for a dark instant to have profited nothing. Such a collapse at a mere glance at female frailty into the most profound despair suggested, more than loss of balance, a sharp assault from the rear by some malignant power. Milton justified his own silence, his unwillingness to go to the assistance of Ronald by a sense that this collapse had an austere fitness and that the garden had been after all fully entitled to revenge itself.