Chapter XXII

Unwilling to go further, distrustful of himself and of the valley Milton leant against a tree at the mouth of it and looked disparagingly up the river-bed. He wished Sydney had not asked him to meet her here.

He had spent the morning writing to his brother and sister to tell them about his engagement, and it worried him that he had forgotten to post the letters and was still carrying them round in his pocket. He knew them to be lively and expressive and likely to do him credit on their arrival in England, having just enough manly glow about them and just enough boyish reticence. His flair for a right note was a perpetual temptation to cynicism, and his consciousness that these letters so bound to strike a note of sincerity _were_ in intention sincere and had been written face to face with himself with a zealous effort to avoid misrepresentation, did not make him any better at ease about them. He wondered if anyone ever tried to describe the experiences of love without a bottomless suspicion of imposing upon themselves, of falsity. Momentous letters should be posted white-hot; they impinge too much on the memory, are weighed over and over again by the conscience. He felt an indecorum in going to meet Sydney with these in his pocket, these meanly adequate little summings up of his position vis-à-vis to herself, his praises of her already qualified by a faint possessiveness. So at least he assured himself; it was a pretty enough scruple for a leisurely lover, in this little world of suspended activity where there was time for the finest of shades. But he pressed on it rather too eagerly. Deeper than this, beyond the domain of scruple, he was not at ease.

Their meetings, since the night of his conversation with Mrs. Kerr, had been of the type disturbed and momentary, whose sum total is an effort of separation. Was he apprehensive of meeting her again in this bare narrow place, the stage for a crisis, where no side-issue could offer itself to be grasped at and there would be nowhere to escape to from Mrs. Kerr and all she had said? Since their talk in the lounge Mrs. Kerr had been with him unceasingly; his thoughts even in sleep were full of anguished reasonings with her. He did not cease to batter, crying “No, no, no!”, against the shut doors of her eloquent reserve. The more clearly he remembered how little Sydney’s infinitely loyal friend had actually said the more did he despair of Sydney’s lover for having understood so much. The thought of Sydney waiting for him now (if she had not been impatient and gone away) in all good faith at the top of the valley, of the all-assuming confidence she had in him which seemed the curiously simple and yet perfect flowering of her strange nature, like flowers springing out on a bare almond-tree, destroyed his confidence in himself.

Next week Milton would go back to England. He had written this to his brother, taking some pleasure in committing himself definitely to the arrangement, but the fate of the good resolution lay with the unposted letters, still in his own control. He would go back, and she a little later would follow him; or she might even prefer to come back with him now. Could she wish to stay longer? Her tie with the Hotel (that still exerted, he was aware, an agonizing restraint) had better be broken off summarily, at the cost of he could not tell how much damage to her integrity, without help from himself, without a word from him that her confidence did not invite. They had mentioned Mrs. Kerr frequently, but there had never been more than a little head of her stamped as it were for circulation on a conversational coin. They had not talked of her, she had not in person entered their field.

In a week, perhaps, the coast and hills would have vanished forever for both of them: he did not think that either he or she would return. A year from now it would need an effort of memory to bring the place to life again for a moment; he would start at its name and realize that it had been without them both, after all, some shadowy continuity. If an earthquake were to ruin the town or a landslide demolish the whole coast he thought he would be left with hardly a pang once the horror subsided. The place would persist unimpaired in his memory, not much loved, scarcely thought of but rarely complete if he happened to turn to it; as the least loved, most rarely revisited plans often remain. The momentary impacts of colour and smells and lights on his senses that had built up the place for him would be forgotten, only the sum of them that he might have received in an idle half-day would remain. A thousand hours superimposed on each other would melt into one; a thousand that had in turn been unique, coloured differently each from the others by mood or circumstance.

“Will she ever,” he wondered, “be so complete to me; not a succession of moments but one? Will these evenings, mornings, lights, memories, shadows, half-apprehensions, glimpses ever fall away or run together and be merged in the whole of her? Could I love her so well if they were? Is there a human being any more than a Godhead with which one could bear to be face to face?”

He left the tree and started at a good pace up the valley. A stone which somebody might have thrown came bounding down from the heights and struck the river-bed; later on a couple of goats following one another across an almost perpendicular piece of hill looked down at him sardonically. “So much for you,” they intimated and blinked their onyx eyes. Presently he met Sydney and Ronald coming to meet him at a swinging pace down the river-bed. They were so deep in conversation and were making such a noise among the stones that for a minute or two they neither heard nor noticed him. Ronald was flushed and looked interested; the inequalities of the ground shook his words, which came at a great rate out of him and kept the lock of hair flopping up and down on his forehead. His arms swung loose and were flung out sideways occasionally to help maintain, when a stone rolled sharply from under him, a precarious balance. Milton noticed that the two were like each other; they had the same build and the same carriage and might have been brother and sister—to, he believed, the advantage of both. He realized that this was the first time he had ever seen them together. It would be the last time, also, perhaps. They had been foredoomed in the very nature of things to miss one another. Biting his lip he looked back—had he been instrumental? There was pathos for him in this ghost of a contact, well-timed in this drained-out colourless ghost of a day. Angrily, with a sense of destruction he put up his hands and shouted.

Sydney started, her face turned vividly towards him and she waved her walking-stick, then came hurrying down the river-bed, springing for speed’s sake from boulder to boulder clear of the loose stones. “Slacker!” she exclaimed, “Rotter, James!” Her soft hatbrim flapped back in the wind of her motion, the ends of her bright scarf fled through the air behind her. She was radiant and boisterous. Ronald, who had been making a good point, remained in mid-stream behind her shutting his mouth reluctantly.

“Where have you been?” she cried breathlessly, “If I’d the slightest grain of proper female pride I shouldn’t look at you.... I told this Ronald hours ago that you’d be coming any minute; that if you didn’t mountains would have slid on you. And here we find you hardly even hurrying!” She scrambled up the bank and took his arm.

“I had no idea—I didn’t mean to delay.”

“You must have been thinking,” said Sydney; “it’s really too bad of you.” With animation she waved Ronald forward, and Ronald, coming up after her made a benevolent third till they came to a point where a parting of ways became possible. Here he nodded good-bye and made off by a steep track that doubled back up the side of the hill. Going up he whistled, turned once or twice to stare out over their heads at the sea and showed plainly that he had forgotten or at least was no longer concerned with them. It was Milton, not Sydney, who kept looking after him rather uncertainly, as though he had half a mind to call him back, until Ronald disappeared into a fold of the hill. Too light-heartedly, Ronald had shaken them off.

“Do let’s not think about Ronald,” Sydney said, recalling him with a sigh; “I should like us just to be together.”

“But my dear....”

“Aren’t we happy?” she rather fiercely exclaimed.

He nodded. “And you know,” he said and pressed her arm gently, “that silences me.”

“I can’t see anything to be silent about,” said she and smiled crookedly. “Kiss me!”

“How horribly quiet it is,” she said still with a hand on his arm as he let her go again. “Don’t remind me _I_ came here: I won’t ever again—an experiment’s failed. James, I won’t let you be happy if you mean to surround me with silences—sinister silences that bulge like a bubble and never quite burst.”

He laughed. “You don’t like the ineffable.”

“Nothing’s ineffable.”

“You are.”

“No, I’m not. I am not elemental and dumb. If you like I’ll explain myself perfectly. Now be practical: talk about plans. Have you written those letters?”

“I wrote them this morning.”

“That is splendid. I do want to feel we’ve got some sort of attachment outside this improbable place. I wrote last night and slipped down last thing when the lounge was quite empty to put them into the concierge’s box. It was locked so I couldn’t take them out again and I went to bed hugging myself. When did you post yours?”

“I haven’t posted them yet,” he said ruefully.

“Oh, why _didn’t_ you?” she exclaimed, then recovered herself confusedly. “I mean, doesn’t that make me seem horribly eager? But I had to, I couldn’t resist it; I couldn’t go on carrying this bomb about. They’ll all say, at home, ‘Well, what _has_ she done now?’ They’ll be quite sure that there must be something wrong somewhere because I somehow always just manage not to do anything right. All the people I like are rotters. I can’t pay my bills. If I don’t use my brains I get dissipated, and if I do use my brains I get ill. I wonder if you’ve any idea what I’m like—well, I don’t mean that exactly, I’m sure you’ve got heaps of ideas about me. But I don’t think you’re much good at outlines—you see a kind of haze of possibilities with a very faint nucleus. It’s a fatal combination, I’m sure, to be clever and kind, you can never see clear: it’s a sort of a squint. The stupidest person out here could describe me immediately.”

“I tell you one thing we have in common,” said Milton—“we do both like running ourselves down. I shall never tell you what I’ve thought about myself—I couldn’t bear you to agree with me.”

“I should hate you to believe all I’ve said. You never would, James, would you?”

“Not while you look with those eyes——”

“Oh yes, yes, yes,” she said and sighing and shutting her eyes leaned her head on his shoulder. “I do love you.” With his arms round her he began to speak impetuously but she pressed a hand over his mouth to silence him and kept it there while she went on—“There is nobody else in the world now, nobody else in the world. I’ve thought so much about you. I want to be with you always. You’re so kind.” He felt the hand tremble and drew it away to say——

“Kind?”

“Yes, kind. Do you think that is ordinary? Do you know, I thought you were never coming. I was so afraid, up here this afternoon that you wouldn’t come at all. I thought you’d been sent away from me. I thought Someone knew better.”

“Who could know better?” he said with a cold feeling.

“Oh, _I_ don’t know,” she said, beginning to laugh. “I am an idiot. Come on, let’s walk faster; it’s beginning to be chilly. One loses one’s way in the day here when there’s no sun.”

They went quickly on in the direction of the convent, anxious to be clear of the valley; discussing as they walked their plans for the immediate future. Sydney promised that if Tessa could spare her she would go back with Milton to England; though if Tessa seemed at all reluctant she should feel obliged to stay on another three or four weeks. They agreed to be married in June. “I do hope,” she said, smiling doubtfully, “that I shan’t be utterly useless to you.” Before they came out on to the road she stopped him again and said she was hungry and wanted to eat some more nuts. She took a handful of walnuts and almonds out of her pocket and he cracked them by two for her, one against the other, between the palms of his hands.

“I wonder why I can’t do that,” she exclaimed, “my hands are really like iron!... I’ve been eating these on and off all to-day, they are better than lunch.”

“Extraordinary idea!” he exclaimed and threw up his hands expressively. She replied that her day appeared to her to have been spent intelligently and that she was not yet incapable of planning out a day for herself, though she could not answer for what might become of her after marriage.

He suggested that if she were not now too tired and hungry they should, instead of returning tamely to the Hotel by the road, strike out across the base of the next two hills and drop down on the Hotel through the olive-trees. The alacrity with which she jumped at this made him suspect her of flagging inwardly but he did not dare to withdraw his suggestion. Seen again from the mouth of the valley the horizon, the suddenly revealed expanse of sky, appeared beyond all memory to have enlarged themselves. He could not have believed in such clear air. The afternoon was yet more coldly grey, the trees stood out from one another in the absolute distinctness of this hour before they should begin to run together into dusk. Under the opaque sky the sea was white, glassy except where now and then a hundred ripples gave the effect of a shiver. Here and there a cyprus waited, dark among the olives. The evening had an ache about it, a hush of timelessness, and Milton wondered if he should forget this too. They walked in the half-light of the olive-trees as though deep down under water; Sydney’s face was pale and some deception of shadow made it look melancholy but the colours of her scarf burnt. “This is a wonderful thing,” he said and caught at the end of the scarf. “I love it. I like all the colours you wear, especially white——”

“That’s not——”

“Yes, it is. It’s the clearest and brightest. Don’t ever be frightened and muddled and dark, my dear, even in clothes.”

“But, James, for a clergyman’s wife—I can’t wear scarlet and flame-colour. Your life——”

“Do you think of that as muddled and dark?” he said, realizing how little they knew each other and how difficult it would be for her ever to know him.

“I don’t think of it, I think of you. I confess I don’t half like the sound of it.”

“But, Sydney—” He glanced round a moment as though Mrs. Kerr were behind him, smiling at Sydney.

“But we’re going to live it. Any life would look bad from the brink; if we had to make the decision we’d probably never be born. But most lives are the same, I’m sure, once one’s in mid-stream. Ours will be lovely. But you won’t see me often again in a Roman scarf.”

“Don’t change, don’t be different,” he cried. “I love you so much as you are.” She looked at him in reproach: at that moment he loved her as sharply as though she already were lost to him. He snatched at the moment and, letting go of everything, asked to be carried away by it; shutting his eyes to be nearer and holding her close. They were both blotted out, himself and herself were forgotten: he came to a brink.

Time carried him on again after he could not say how long a cessation of being. He knew that through all this the hill had been waiting with their two figures upon it framed in solitude. Coming back to her there in his arms at a sound or a movement she made he did not dare to ask her where she had been. Eye to eye they looked at each other questioningly as though trying to learn from one another if they had been together, then each looked away as though afraid to read they had been forgotten.

“I’m rather afraid,” she said, making a movement to break away from him, and in answer to all his questions kept repeating, “I _am_ rather afraid.” He could smile at this, feeling exalted; he let her go but later drew an arm of hers through his own and made her walk on again. Her air was irresolute, she seemed to be trying to shape her thoughts into words. She said at last, having looked again at him solemnly as though enjoining him to understand this better than she could—“Haven’t we—or I, at least, for my part—undertaken rather too much?”

He saw some shadow of what she meant but nothing more than a shadow. He was inclined to take her gesture as traditional, her mood as generic, she was a young woman—very young as a woman. With compressed lips she withdrew her arm. “Oh, no,” she said, “why should I ask you? The difficulty is my own.”

“No, look here, Sydney ... why should we be afraid? It’s a way out for us both—can’t you see it so?—a way out of ourselves. Don’t you remember the boy—Curdy—in the fairy tale who opened a door straight on to the sky and was told to walk through it? He didn’t like it at all—naturally—there was just the sky there and some of the stars were under him. However he went forward and just found himself walking—he had no idea how. If we go straight ahead——”

“I’d have gone back through the door. I’m not the stuff for a fairy tale. I’ve no faculty of wonder, James. Nothing is new to me.”

He didn’t like to say, “Do I offer you nothing, then?” He found himself guilty of having supposed that he did. She was new to him in every aspect, in all that she was and meant. He could not imagine a time when he would not take a stranger’s pleasure in looking at her across a room. He could not imagine a time when her movements would be calculable to him, or when she would cease to reappear just as he had not expected from behind the veil of his thought.

“I think you’re wrong there,” he said gently. “After all, you haven’t lived so very long. You may be surprised——”

She interrupted him here, not by saying anything but by an odd silence. Her face had a strained kind of stillness as though it might at any moment break up into tears. She tramped beside doggedly, as though she were really very tired, along the rough track, ducking her head mechanically now and then to avoid the branches. She seemed so drawn away from him that he could not realize his arms had been round her a moment ago. He cried, “Sydney, you’re not happy!” The exclamation was torn from him, he would have given much to recall it.

“I tell you I am,” she said obstinately and coldly, “if you’re happy, I’m happy.” She managed to make him feel he had blustered at her and he said, with less warmth, “Oh very well, my darling, I don’t want to bully you.” He had never been in love before and he had never quarrelled with anybody. This he supposed was now (or would soon be) a “lovers’ quarrel” coming with a too-obliging promptness to link up for him the two experiences. Was this then a glimpse of their composite temper—irrational, touchy and vain? He longed to ask her this—he believed her to be saner than he was. His face, bright with an incommunicable glow of speculation, suddenly angered her.

“Anyhow—_happy_!” she cried, “what _is_ happiness—what comes out of it? Why must we always be feeling each other’s pulses to see if we’re happy?” She flung the word at him distastefully. It had evidently nothing to do, where she was concerned, with the purest, most exhausting kind of nervous exaltation and she could make no use of it. He could have wept for her, and longed to say, “Can’t you be more of a woman?” Instead he smiled with an effect of tolerance and said, “You are very impatient.”

“Oh, really,” said she.

“You jump on your feelings and put a pistol up to their heads to make the poor creatures explain themselves. You don’t give them a chance. You don’t, honestly, Sydney, give them a chance.” He spoke with some energy.

“Oh, all right, all right,” said Sydney, “don’t shout at me, James! the wood is quite quiet: I hear—I hear you quite well.”

She did not, after all, make him angry by this, he looked round through the trees in surprise, seemed to accept a reproof from the quiet line of the sea, and agreed with her. “Yes, the wood is quiet. I’ve been making a horrible noise. I’ll——”

“Now _don’t_ make a silence——”

“Yes, I’m going to—listen——”

She clutched at his arm with elaborate manifestations of terror. They listened.

“I won’t let you,” she cried, “you shan’t—it’s as bad as the valley. How we ever sleep at the Hotel with all this saving itself up behind us and that idiotic little tame sea slipping up and down, up and down the beach, I can’t think.” She stamped her foot and shouted again and again; an echo woke up in the hills. “Now we’ve got a noise again, now we’re at home, James, now we’re perfectly at home.”

“Sydney—” Something had caught his attention, he looked speechlessly at her, there was something he wanted to ask. She went ahead of him, her bright scarf flickered ahead like a flame through the olives. He took some long strides to catch up with her. “Sydney”—he said.

“James?”

“You won’t mind coming home with me. You’ve _no_ qualms about leaving this place?”

All her high spirits came back to her. “Never a qualm,” she said loudly and cheerfully, and looked at him with a bright eye. “Never a qualm....”