Chapter II

“But they told me you had come on down!” cried Sydney Warren. Slipping along the wall, at the edge of the courts, she gained the pavilion and the back upper bench where Mrs. Kerr had seated herself. Mrs. Kerr smiled and looked leisurely round her. From these high seats one had an excellent view of the courts and could hardly be seen from them, sitting far back in the shadow. At one’s feet a packed row of spectators leant forward into the sun.

“I waited for nearly an hour,” said Sydney. “And Colonel Duperrier _swore_ he had seen you go down. I couldn’t make it out, but I came. If I’d ever imagined——”

“It never occurred to me you would wait. It would have been dreadfully silly. And anyhow, it was nice to walk down with Colonel Duperrier.” (Sydney repudiated Colonel Duperrier with a grimace.) “I walked down with Miss Pym,” Mrs. Kerr said contentedly.

“I know—I was horrified. One of the pussies!”

“Oh, is she? She seemed intelligent. She was telling me she is a Hedonist.”

“A _how_-much?”

“A Hedonist.”

“How Victorian!” Sydney said crossly, and hacked at the toe of her shoe with her racquet.

“Do you think so,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I suppose,” she confessed, “one forgets: we _are_ rather old pussies.”

“_Don’t_ be so——”

“My dear child, I’m her age. We do date when we talk. She had quarrelled, I think, with her friend, the other artistic one. I came on her down in the lounge nearly crying and the other, still nearer it, was out in the road. You know, women’s lives _are_ sensational. Aren’t you inclined to be intolerant with us all?”

Sydney seemed surprised at this quick little gush of humanity. She stared at her friend, who was brilliantly earnest, then turned away gloomily. “Oh, women’s _lives_....”

“Well, I suppose it’s inconsistent of me,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I’m not a Feminist but I do like being a woman.”

Any approach to the personal seemed to be difficult. Sydney said airily: “Oh, of course if one’s _one_ kind of woman——”

“Well, so are you,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking abstractedly at her young friend. Sydney was probably twenty-two and had a clear pallor and regular features of which the lines were now, as too often, strained and broken up by an expression of over-eagerness. An exaggerated attention to what was being said or suggested would arch up the eyebrows tragically, harden the eyes and draw in the mouth to a line that prefigured maturity’s. The forehead was broad and lovely and could have been bland. The scarlet handkerchief bound round the head accentuated her darkness and pallor, it had in common with other details of her dress and appearance a faint kind of nervous swagger.

“You could be charming,” said Mrs. Kerr. “But I daresay an indifference to one’s company which doesn’t comprehend the desire to please is really the safest.—Won’t you go and play tennis?”

“I’m waiting for people in E Court to finish,” said Sydney and got up slowly, not quite knowing whether to resent this as a dismissal. Mrs. Kerr, with the air of a return to solitude, a cheerfulness faintly suggestive of release, leant forward and signalled to someone below who had been looking up for a long time, trying in vain to catch her eye. “Oh yes,” she replied, “do go and play tennis. Surely it wasn’t wise to come away from your partner when you were expecting a court?”

“But what are you going to do?” asked Sydney. Mrs. Kerr did not answer. “I mean do you want me to go?” she began again. She did not want to leave the pavilion, this “girl of your age” tone which was being used to her really did give her something to resent. She did not want to go down to the courts again; she knew that if Mrs. Kerr sat on here, watching her meditatively, her play would all go to pieces.

“I have heard so much of your service. To-day I am really going to watch it.”

“This is one of my off days.”

“Dear Sydney, whenever I come you tell me it’s one of your off days.” Mrs. Kerr laughed. “I’m unlucky.”

“Oh, do you notice that? From the moment you come here I never hit anything.”

“What on earth do you mean, my dear Sydney? How terribly sinister! It had never _occurred_ to me that my eyes might be evil. I meant something much more prosaic—that I happen to miss things.”

Sydney felt foolish. How like her (Mrs. Kerr would agree) to have drawn so far-fetched, so morbid an inference. How unlike herself to have been betrayed into so bald an assertion.

“Luck’s funny,” she said. “I don’t think it’s constantly good or bad, but it’s sun-y or moon-y, if you know what I mean, and one’s born with one kind or the other. Mine’s moon-y—I’d better go down.”

“Yes, I shouldn’t have kept you.”

Sydney played so badly that Colonel Duperrier was astonished. Now and then he permitted himself a “tut-tut”—by implication a tribute—an _Et tu, Brute_ at which she ironically chuckled. They crossed and recrossed one another grimly. Along the margin of her vision, distended by nervousness, shoulders were shrugged and disappointed onlookers strolled away. At a net that grew ever higher Colonel Duperrier’s opponent, Chinesely grinning, crouched and sprang incredibly. His partner a long way behind him nonchalantly flipped at her balls. Away at the back of the pavilion Mrs. Kerr remained sitting; the edge of her skirt, the tip of her parasol came out into sunlight. From out of the black shadow that hid the rest of her, her scrutiny like a fine wire was incessantly tugging at Sydney’s consciousness.

The set was over, quickly over. Colonel Duperrier’s play had been affected by the collapse of his partner; now, as their opponents strolled off he laughed deprecatingly; stooping to let the balls run up on to his racquet. He had several pleasant remarks in reserve to brush away Sydney’s discomfiture, but some kind of apology from her was needed to unlock them; he did not know how to begin. She did not apologize and his embarrassment grew. No one could have been sorrier than he for the poor girl, a fine player subject to this deplorable kind of paralysis. He thanked God that he had not yet asked her to play with him in the tournament and resolved never to do so, yet he was filled with a special, protective benignancy for her.

“Terrible glare,” said he.

“There generally is.”

“I thought, particularly bad to-day....”

“I didn’t notice,” she said indifferently, wondering where to go now. Anywhere she thought, but back to the pavilion after all this.

“We ought to move off,” he said, rousing her, “they want the court. Well, I vote we take those two on again and get some of our own back. Don’t we?”

Though he continued to admire Miss Warren he could be no longer surprised that she was not popular in the Hotel. There was a certain dark stare of aloofness.... He told himself that she was curiously dammed-up; there was certainly something _in_ the girl. Generally speaking, he preferred people who came out easily: she was not his type. He came up abreast with her dutifully as they walked from the court, then his face brightened, he knew he would soon be relieved of her as Mrs. Kerr smiled and nodded down at them from the shade of the pavilion. “Come on up!” he said eagerly, and Sydney was forced to precede him.

“We-ell?” said Mrs. Kerr, as though they had been a pair of victors.

“The glare is awful,” said Colonel Duperrier.

“I expect it is,” she agreed, and made room for them both. Colonel Duperrier cheered up, soon: in a quiet way that diffused itself across his features and attitude and the expression with which he watched the players below he became very cheerful indeed. When he had left them Mrs. Kerr asked Sydney to walk with her to the library. “Unless,” she said, “you are going to play again.”

To go to the library one turned to the left instead of the right at the top of the footpath; the same procession of chestnut-trees arched one over with their boughs. At this hour the road was more frequented; lunch-time had made perceptible its earliest magnetism. Visitors strolled gravely hotelwards, and Villa Residents (proudly distinguished by the possession of dogs). There was no traffic and a long-legged English child in the middle of the road was able to read as she walked, without menace.

“What a nice man, that Colonel Duperrier,” said Mrs. Kerr.

“Yes. Very patient.”

“_That_ seems a curious quality to attract you.”

“Anyone else would have killed me this morning. I suppose he has learnt to be patient: that wife——”

“Poor woman!”

“It would be kinder if neurotics were to be chloroformed—did you admire my service?”

“My dear child, don’t be heroic! I don’t remember it as anything terrible. I don’t know, of course, how well you can play.”

Sydney was silent, stung by a sudden perception that Mrs. Kerr did not really believe in her tennis at all. If she did not exist for Mrs. Kerr as a tennis-player, in this most ordinary, popular of her aspects, had she reason to feel she existed at all? It became no longer a question of—what did Mrs. Kerr think of her? but rather—did Mrs. Kerr _ever_ think of her? The possibility of not being kept in mind seemed to Sydney that moment, a kind of extinction. Mrs. Kerr had many friends; all these demi-gods would leap up at a reference to one of the least of them, shadowy and menacing. Men and women of supreme distinction and beauty, they never appeared in person, were never described and so were never allowed to diminish. The very fact that Mrs. Kerr never praised them, seemed in fact rather flatly to take them for granted, was fresh reason for self-laceration. “A delightful woman ... rather a charming person ... I thought, an amusing man....” These haunted Sydney, aloofly inimical, these friends of her friend. People one did not know remained on a different plane, inaccessible to one’s criticism. Sydney professed herself (to friends of her own age) a Realist, and it was perhaps because of this that her imagination which she dealt with austerely was able to revenge itself obliquely upon her.

After a pause she said, “Well, you know one thing now about my play—if it interests you. You do know how bad it can be. I think that was the depths.”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” her friend said benevolently. “—Will you kindly choose me another book?”

“Did you finish that last?”

Mrs. Kerr shook her head and looked sideways at Sydney in a way of her own. She sighed, her eyelids delicately and sadly fluttered—she was a lovely thing.

“Oh,” said Sydney, in a secret ecstasy, “you are incorrigible! Then why do you go on asking me to choose you books?”

“I know there must be something in them.” The way this was said might have stamped out of being, for Sydney, forever the friends of her friend. “I know, you see, there _has_ to be something. I want so much to be able to read them—I hope so much that I may.”

“I shall give up choosing you books.”

“Oh no, don’t do that ... Sydney darling. I suppose I _may_ be incorrigible. I still seem to read for amusement.”

“But that was just it—I was so sure that man would amuse you. He’s got a brilliant mind like—like what would appeal to you.”

“I’m sure he has. But you see he was much too clever for me so he only seemed to me dull. And I do still like books to be—what shall I say?—decent. Though I know it isn’t the thing to admit: you all have such pure minds.... I’m sorry.”

“You don’t look a bit penitent. Tell me—has Ronald got a very pure mind?”

“Alarmingly,” said Ronald’s mother, “but he’s learnt to respect my limitations.”

Sydney, who was herself at times conscious of these limitations—remotely, as in a dream—smiled at the thought of Ronald, a long-limbed, intense-looking adolescent whom she was unlikely to meet. Ronald was a long way away, in Germany. (She had put together her Ronald from two photographs his mother possessed; a blurred snapshot and a shadowy portrait-study.) One could smile over Ronald; or imagine him as not distressing; he was not among the demi-gods. It was amusing to see one’s own qualities in him pilloried by tender maternal derision. Ronald was “young.” Yet all this might not have counted so much in his favour if it had not seemed certain that Ronald was to remain in Germany.

“I should like to meet Ronald,” Sydney said benevolently. “And by the way,” she added, “I must bring back Tessa another book. Anything that’s bright and very loving, with a certain amount of illness in it will do her beautifully, provided she doesn’t remember having read it before—Now you’re not to say I’m horrid about Tessa: she’s as much amused at her own taste in books as I am. She hasn’t got much time for novels now—she’s reading Baudouin.”

“It would never do,” said Mrs. Kerr, “to bring back Mrs. Bellamy one of your depressing books.” She slipped an arm through Sydney’s for a moment as they turned together up a flight of cold steps to the library.