Chapter XX

“Dear Mr. Milton,” exclaimed Mrs. Kerr, “is this true? Because if so, it’s splendid!”

He remained standing; she, propped reposefully among cushions, sat looking up at him. “Yes, you are charming,” he doubtfully thought, “you injurious woman.” He tried to look straight, as though dropping a plummet, into those profound brimming eyes, but the light from the ceiling invaded them, raw, hard-edged light as though cut out of tin-foil that, touching them, softened, swam down through them, melted; so that he could read nothing, looking however deep. He had to surrender to her effect of mild brilliancy, of being serious, eager, friendly. “Yes, it’s true,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”

After dinner, since Ronald’s arrival, she no longer went straight to her room but would sit with him on a sofa backed by a palm at the quieter end of the lounge. Here they looked, thought James Milton, approaching, like a fancy of Omar Khayyam’s, with a small tray of coffee between them, a stack of serious periodicals (presumably Ronald’s) and a basket of crystallized fruit which Ronald would advance to their guests with a deprecating liberality as though he did not really care for this sort of thing himself. Their guest one did definitely constitute oneself, Milton felt, by coming over to them; her graceful reception of one confirmed this, also the punctilious uprising of Ronald, who would continue to tower, prolonged by his shirt-front, indefinitely tall; crumpling gradually till asked to sit down again. Milton was not uninvited, he had insinuated himself down the lounge between eager conversationalists and touching chairbacks in response to a direct glance, a concentration upon himself of her general smile round as she looked at him.

Ronald pulled a chair forward at right-angles; Milton sat down with them.

“Then of course,” Mrs. Kerr said, summing him up, “you are happy.”

One is not, at such moments, expected to show oneself adequate; his smile and his gesture acknowledged becoming inadequacy. She nodded her womanly comprehension. “Quite,” said she.

“Excellent,” said Ronald with an air of seniority to both of them. He recrossed his legs and bit into a crystallized tangerine.

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Kerr thoughtfully, “I do perhaps understand a little of what this means to her.”

“She told you, of course.” Milton had presence of mind enough to make a startled gesture into a statement.

She nodded. “A little,” she said. “You know—well, of _course_ you know—she is a very quiet person. She didn’t say much, but she shone. She has the strangest possibilities of shining.” Mrs. Kerr seemed to have, as she spoke, a glimpse of Sydney from which he was excluded. “Of course,” she added in the perfunctory quiet voice in which perfect taste demands the making of certain statements, “_she_ is very happy ... I have wanted so much for her and expected, really, so little that seeing her so, so lit-up, so certain, has meant a great deal to me. You’ve done—do you really understand?—a great deal.”

“Thank you,” Milton said helplessly.

“There is no reason to thank _me_,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking at him very straight with her wide-opened eyes. “What is there to thank me for?”

Milton, abashed by this parade of innocence, looked at Ronald, wishing that he were not there. Mrs. Kerr, however, seemed determined to keep him.

“Now, Ronald,” she said with amusement, laying a hand on her son’s knee, looking down at it thoughtfully and drawing it away again, “feels sorry for people who are going to be married. He cannot believe (isn’t it so?) in ‘any satisfactory _modus vivendi_ between two people that is based on an attraction’!”

“I remain perfectly open-minded,” said Ronald, biting the stalk off a pear.

“About love itself,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking respectfully at her son, “he is profoundly sceptical. There is a part of life, Mr. Milton, that I should be very glad if you could explain to my poor Ronald.”

“It’s not a part of life,” said Ronald, “it may be a streak in it. People talk as though it were a transverse section.”

“You see?” said his mother. “But Sydney used to be a sceptic too, you know. I should rather like Ronald to talk to her now.”

“I don’t think Sydney would like that at all,” said Milton, and was made at once to feel he had transgressed some delicate code by this hint of the proprietary.

“I had an impression,” said Mrs. Kerr diffidently, “that Sydney always liked talking about anything she was perfectly sure of.”

“In spite of being rather a quiet person?”

“Quite compatibly with being rather a quiet person,” said Mrs. Kerr, illuminating, showing-up his petty irritation with her lovely smile. “I didn’t, you know, propose that poor Sydney who has so very lately, as one might say, graduated, should deliver to Ronald a kind of extension-lecture. I just vaguely conceived that she might make him feel what a silly, immature little gander he still is.”

“I wish she would,” said Ronald, “it would be so _cinquecento_; a disquisition on Amor by an inspired young woman.” He looked carefully at Milton trying, evidently, to consider him in the rôle of an inspiration.

“You have picked up ‘_cinquecento_’ from Miss Fitzgerald. It becomes a rather silly expression, Ronald dear, when it’s used so often and so indiscriminately. But ‘an inspired young woman,’” she decided turning to Milton, “is good. Don’t you find your inspired young woman rather lovely?”

“Rather lovely!” echoed Milton, as though learning a lesson.

“Sydney in love ...” mused Mrs. Kerr, and as though stepping back from the brink of some profound experience not her own, she said, “I envy you!”

Milton encountered Ronald’s clear, rather curious eye; they stared at one another narrowly. “One is fortunate,” Milton said and a stabbing sense of this irony made him shut his eyes sharply for a moment, as though the light were too much. When he looked up again Mrs. Kerr’s son was still searching him, and put forward in explanation of this: “Do excuse me, please, for staring so awfully but I’ve never heard anyone point-blank profess themselves happy before.” It was on the tip of the clergyman’s tongue to protest that he hadn’t; however, he merely said blandly: “Oh, indeed? If you care to, do certainly look!”

“You ought,” Ronald said, “to feel very responsible.”

“—Ronald _darling_, you’re not Mr. Milton’s father.”

“But I didn’t propose,” said her son, flushing hotly, “to apply the remark to Miss Warren. I merely meant he must feel very responsible for _himself_. A state of mind——”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Kerr briskly and waved him aside. She appeared to be rather oppressed by her Ronald; the boy became pompous. She looked at his overcast face in perplexity, puzzling herself again, it appeared, over some ancient error. Far back in the faraway history of Ronald—possibly in the espousal of Ronald’s father—there had been a mistake. She looked down the lounge. “Look, Ronald,” she cried with a glad inspiration, “there is one of your Lawrences, one of your curious girls. She is standing and looking too languishing down by the door. She has seen you, and, worse, she has seen you have something to eat. It would be nice to go over and talk to her, if you don’t mind. I don’t like to _look_ selfish, you know.”

She watched her son threading his way down the lounge, however, with such wistfulness, such an air of bereavement, and returned her attention to Milton with so courageous a smile, and with eyes for an instant so vacant that he could not but believe that she had made a real sacrifice in sending Ronald away. He reproached himself for a suspicion of being closed in on; and of their oasis of silence, light and solitude having become for him a rather remote and dangerous island. Her personality had a curious way of negativing her surroundings, so that unless one made constant resort to one’s senses the background faded and one conjured up in one’s half-consciousness another that better expressed her, that was half an exhalation from herself. The crude and vivid glitter of the lounge, the hard light striking with an impact almost audible on glazed stuffs, noisy colours, reddened skins, the urgent hum of talk, all these relaxed their grip on Milton’s consciousness, subsided. A feeling was produced in him of tempered lamp-light and clear gloom and of a window open on profoundly dark and rather restless trees, as Mrs. Kerr said thoughtfully: “Religion, I suppose, is an immense outlet for gratitude.”

“One would be sorry to make use of one’s religion as an outlet for anything.”

She retracted. “The psychologists have led one so astray.”

“The fallacy’s older than they are.”

“I suppose so,” agreed Mrs. Kerr. She went on with an effort, going against, obviously, all the fine instincts she had for reserve. “You have felt, I daresay, that force of ... of religion in Sydney. I’ve had to draw back there, because I don’t, as you see, understand. One never would hold her back, lacking that.”

“I don’t see her ever as a person to be absolutely held.”

She was stirred by amazement, caught a breath as though she must have misheard him and lifted her eyebrows. “Not held? You forget,” she said, “I’ve been her friend.” She reflected: “Does new power bring with it, perhaps, its own disabilities? You are, aren’t you, quite newly her lover? You mayn’t _see_ yet, may not admit intellectually, but you must surely _feel_ that....”

“You don’t think I quite understand what I’ve got?”

“I don’t think you can trust yourself yet to look down very deep. But you ought—she is yours; absolutely. We have all of us fallen away.” There was not a note in her voice of anything but triumph: she smiled at him like a priestess.

“You feel I need to be told this?” he said and felt his own smile twist his face awkwardly.

“There is need,” she said with a penetrating, long look. “You do know.” He felt again, through that window behind her, that dark garden distressed by the wind, around her those undisturbed shadows, that never-ebbing, mild light. “Suppose,” he began uneasily, “suppose I were less fortunate. Suppose—you see I am secure enough to indulge myself in these curiosities—she had simply caught at my hand, were gripping it desperately, because she was frightened, or had been misdirected, say, and lost her way—I would be right, knowing that, to keep hold of her, for her protection?”

“—A protection!” interposed Mrs. Kerr—“you think that with most innocent cynicism she would be capable of accepting? But go on, please, I won’t interrupt you.”

“That was all.” He laughed. “Vague curiosity. Should I be right?”

“If you cared to be just a convenience,” said Mrs. Kerr thoughtfully, “it wouldn’t be _wrong_. But can you believe she’d ... make use of you? Would it be, in the most ordinary woman, pretty or admirable? Could you reconcile that with the only Sydney possible for either of us? For our two Sydneys, I’m sure, are the same.”

“But there’s panic....”

“Panic doesn’t last more than its moment. Of course, there’s opportunism....” She caught Milton looking at her haggardly. “You didn’t think,” she said gently, “that I thought you meant _that_?”

He gave, to express scorn, a rather ghastly little monosyllabic laugh.

“It does sound silly,” agreed Mrs. Kerr. “It is silly, I think, to let oneself play, just because of one’s sense of absolute security with even the most far-fetched idea of her doing anything so careful and mean. An idea,” she said, shivering slightly, “has a curious power; it preys on one. Oh, you must promise me that you won’t,” she cried. “It frightens me—you could send yourself mad!”

“It’s nice of you to care,” said Milton.

“Do you think I don’t value _my_ Sydney?” she exclaimed and stared darkly at something, then brushed it away with her hand and smiled with a return of tranquillity. “One’s idea of a person,” she told him, “refuses to take certain possibilities, like a material refusing to take certain dyes. Don’t you feel so? For instance: for anyone else, any woman, as angry and hurt in her pride, and as disappointed as I’m afraid Sydney’s been with me lately, to have taken you up, with the strong position you’ve given her, would have been the inevitable, rather sordid perhaps but effective complete little gesture. One would have looked for it, wouldn’t one, and—taking the thing at its own valuation—rather applauded. One can’t help applauding the score-off, the adequate pat little retaliation, all the more perhaps because oneself one could never achieve it. And we both of us know,” said Mrs. Kerr radiantly, “that for her it would never be possible either. And even supposing we didn’t, that we weren’t so exclusive on her behalf, hasn’t she given us proof?”

“—If it were needed,” said Milton, and began chafing his hands together as though they were cold. He was silent a moment staring down at the edge of her skirts, at the ground. He dragged himself back to consider something. “What did you, by the way, mean by a proof?”

“But her loving you,” exclaimed Mrs. Kerr wide-eyed, “her loving you absolutely! Mr. Milton, do try and make her less hurt with me. Surely you can, can’t you? Make her happy enough to come back.” Mrs. Kerr, with her eyes and a gesture, gave herself away to him in perfect humility. “I do miss the child so!”

“But how’m I to know she’s still hurt?” the lover said dully, looking at her in remote admiration in which he had a quick sense of being identified with Sydney.

“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Kerr, recollecting Sydney’s change of state, “she’s not. But I was impatient and clumsy; I think she was hurt in her pride.”

“I cannot believe, Mrs. Kerr,” said Milton in a tone of such infinite irony that his voice sounded gentler than ever, “I can’t really believe that you’ve ever been clumsy. I should say that your patience was infinite. But she has this queer appetite for pain: it brings with it its own ingenuity against which one can’t be defended at all points.”

With a sigh she allowed herself to accept this as possible. “Thank you, you’re generous,” she said and examined him. “_You_, if you like, would have infinite patience. You two can’t, I think, fail to be happy together. I’m so happy about you—” she looked round with relief as though rising again to the surface and by taking everything in with such eagerness re-admitted the lounge to his consciousness—“and, as middle-aged women do feel, quite important; as though I were standing like your good Moses at some kind of vantage point and seeing ahead of both of you plainer than you can. It would be equally nice, I believe,” she concluded, swimming back to the plane she had started from, kind superficiality, “to be married to either of you.”

He was dismissed; she appeared to have done with him. The laughter and voices packed round them between the four looking-glassed walls seemed to rise to a climax, a positive shout. The lounge seemed for a moment to mean something—he glanced for a hint of the revelation at some of the faces but whatever it was had escaped him; the faces were shut-up and blank.

“If you will,” said Mrs. Kerr, “can you look out for Ronald? I don’t want him disturbed if he’s happy—just tell him I’m going to bed. It’s been so nice of you to talk to me about this, Mr. Milton. I’ve always felt that we knew each other and yet, do you realize, we’ve not spoken for more than a moment before. If I’ve kept you from Sydney, forgive me. You must go now and find her. Good-night.”

When she had gone he sat down on the rather hard sofa across which the cushions had, as she got up, tumbled down in disorder. He felt the light slanting down on him stupefyingly from the mirrors and ceiling a protection from feeling, a barrier, like an orchestra above which one could not, even if one had wanted to, make oneself heard.