Chapter XXIII

Tessa was so happy about Sydney’s engagement. She wrote long letters about it to her husband Anthony out in Malay; she spent less time upstairs with Baudouin, lying down on the sofa, and more time sitting alertly in the drawing-room, glowing at friends. She laid aside her air of a devotee and put on all the dignity of matronhood: one could never have guessed how well this would become her. The effect on her digestion was extraordinary. She smiled indefatigably and followed Sydney about with her eyes, and remained on behalf of the abstracted Milton and the less than ever approachable Sydney a shining testimony to the efficacy for all ills of Love. For the unconscious pair her confidence, had they taken their stand on it, might have been as a rock among the tangled undercurrents of criticism, of amusement, of pity, of speculation as to “whether it would last.” The thing was more than suitable; it was a coming together for which Time itself might have laboured to shape the couple; one could not look her in the face and deny the possibility. Her friends sighed out that they at least were glad _she_ was glad. Mrs. Kerr remarked: “That dear little woman looks positively bridal.”

Everybody, Tessa thought, was being so nice to her Sydney; charming things were said to the girl in her presence, and many others she had happened to miss were reported. She glowed for her brilliant Sydney, loved her better than ever and became speechlessly shy of her. Of Milton she was not shy at all, she could talk to him by the hour about Elective Affinities, and about Health, which she said was very important. “You know there is no need,” she would say looking at him reproachfully, “for any of us to be ill at all,” and Milton who had scarcely ever been ill in his life would nod back at her wisely. He had a particular softness for Sydney’s dear little cousin. She told him how wonderful it would be to her to see Sydney in a home of her own and with children, who would be, she was sure, the supreme children. “And I’m sure,” she would add, “that you’ll both be so wise and bring them up right, quite right from the very beginning. Our health you know, has to be built up from the very foundations. Our health—” He began to recognize this as the recurring decimal point in her conversation.

Tessa thought that it would be so nice for James to get to know Sydney’s great friend Mrs. Kerr really well before they all went back to England, so she planned a surprise on her own account, hired a car for the afternoon and invited Mrs. Kerr and Milton to drive with herself and Sydney up to a village high in the hills, from which, she had heard, one could look right over a ridge and see a quite unbelievable number of other hills whose similarity to one another made one surprised at the size of the world. There would be also a church with a very dark, old-looking painting and a Patisserie kept by a lady from Nice where they gave you an excellent tea. The weather never let Tessa down; the afternoon was delicious: Milton sat in front with the driver, Mrs. Kerr and Sydney behind; with Tessa, protesting that this was ideally comfortable, wedged in tightly between them. The aged Fiat rushed up the valley with a rattling sound, screeched at a change of gear and took the ascent laboriously. The hill leaned forward over a void and the hundred hair-pin corners they bumped round negligently made Tessa catch her breath. “We would be killed at any moment,” said Mrs. Kerr, “if Mrs. Bellamy were not too valuable.” When they came to the top they got out painfully, looked at the view at the other side, then walked out two by two to the monastery followed by all the little boys of the town. Tessa every now and then whispered to Sydney that Mrs. Kerr and James seemed to be making such friends, didn’t they, and getting on excellently. “I was sure they would, they are both so clever. I think we’ll keep a little further behind them, Sydney; they may be wanting to talk about you.”

The painting in the church was so dark that it might have been anything; Tessa could not help wondering why no connoisseur had already discovered it. The idea of this possible beauty stored up in secrecy made her quite dumb; she gripped Milton and Sydney each by an arm and forced them to stand and look up at it. She hoped that they might understand the picture better than she did and say what she felt about it, but when after a moment or two of attention they simply turned to smile at one another across her she felt constrained to put forward, “There’s something _about_ that face.... I know there’s something about the expression. If only it could be cleaned a little without destroying the value.... I should never feel the same, you know, about any picture in Florence; they are so _known_....” The air of the church was stale with the incense of years, the breath of long-dead congregations had not been disturbed; it was cold with the exhalations of stone forever in darkness. Mrs. Kerr wandered off by herself and stood in abstraction in front of the altar; a shaft of light from a window above her leant solid across the gloom. “I expect,” thought Tessa, “she is really very religious,” and she felt stirred again, as she had been by the picture. She kept the others waiting about because she did not like to interrupt Mrs. Kerr—she had always known that there was something _in_ Mrs. Kerr and at the moment perhaps it was near them. “I can’t stand this air any longer, I shall be sick,” exclaimed Sydney suddenly, and after a last glance towards the altar pushed aside the leather curtain over the door and went out hurriedly. The church stood on the rim of hill between the known and unknown landscapes, a melancholy outpost, and it would be pleasanter for Sydney to wait outside, though not, Milton seemed to think, to wait alone: he went out after her. Tessa sat down by herself at the end of the church and presently, after one or two uncertain glances round her, knelt.

Milton had managed to dispel the swarm of little boys who having presented a bunch of flowers to Sydney with a complimentary address had demanded to be paid for them; the three now intimate friends of the happy Tessa walked back with her to the village unaccompanied; talking and laughing in the manner of excursionists between the walls of blue air. The village, heaped up high in its walls, achieved another of these miracles of balance; it was the same as many other villages that they had explored, but as it was for the afternoon Tessa’s they exclaimed at its charm and oddity. Inside it was half-dark, noisome and complicated, with whistles of cold air spouting at them through archways, down staircases dark enough to be blind and from cellar doors. They entered the Patisserie with misgivings, but were let out unexpectedly from the end of a passage on to a terrace that overhung the void and let them see the extent of the further valley. They crossed over to the railing, spread out their hands there and sighed at the view. Milton turned aside to yawn irrepressibly two or three times; this was the effect that distances always produced on him. They stood in a row, close together, Mrs. Kerr and Sydney were side by side.

“Large world ...” said Mrs. Kerr, vaguely waving.

“Very.”

“Sydney will remember this when she goes back to England,” said Tessa, who though she had travelled a great deal always felt there was only _one_ view. In her memory one gave place to another kaleidoscopically: there was only one at a time.

“Oh, but don’t talk about Sydney going away,” said Mrs. Kerr. “It will be terrible. But surely, Sydney, you don’t think of going just yet?”

“Oh, next week, we expect,” said Sydney. “We think it will be better to get back before the rush begins.”

“_I_ shall be the rush,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I am so stupid, I never realize one’s come to the end of the season anywhere until I find everybody going away at once.”

“And then,” suggested Milton, “you don’t get a place in the train.”

“I always seem to get a place in the train; it’s very curious. But isn’t this a little too unselfish of you, Mrs. Bellamy, letting him take Sydney away from you so soon?”

“It was my idea,” said Tessa at once. She had come to believe this.

“I wouldn’t for worlds—” began Milton.

“No, I’m sure you wouldn’t really,” smiled Mrs. Kerr. “But one doesn’t have the chance of bringing a Sydney back with one every day.” There was a pause in which she looked thoughtfully down at Sydney’s hand on the railing beside her, then laid her own over it. “They are all going away,” she said to Tessa, “all the young ones. Ronald’s going quite soon too—down to Sicily.”

“Oh dear—oh dear,” sighed Tessa in placid deprecation of the laws of change. A lump rose in her throat as she too saw Mrs. Kerr’s hand lying in Sydney’s. Partings were terrible. Ought she to move away gently with Milton to the other end of the terrace?

“But perhaps,” said Mrs. Kerr, “you two’ll come back here together some day. I shall imagine you here.”

“Thanks,” said Milton and laughed uncertainly. “Do!”

Sydney took no notice of what was being said, she did not seem as though she had heard. She stood between Tessa and Mrs. Kerr as inanimate and objective as a young girl in a story told by a man, incapable of a thought or a feeling that was not attributed to her, without a personality of her own outside their three projections upon her: Milton’s fiancée, Tessa’s young cousin, Mrs. Kerr’s protégée, lately her friend.

“Sydney,” Milton asked her loudly, “_shall_ we come back here?”

“Oh, yes,” she said mechanically, “do let’s. Do let’s come back here—I’m so fond of this place.”

When they had finished tea they went back to the piazza outside the village to look for the Fiat, and having found the Fiat had to search further afield for their driver, a brigandish individual in a check cap who returned to them with reluctance. “Such a nice afternoon,” Mrs. Kerr smiled retrospectively as they slid away from the village, and as the keen air rushed forward to meet them, she drew down her chin luxuriously into the collar of her fur coat. The car swerved violently at the first of the corners and Sydney who had taken Tessa’s place in the middle was flung sideways with her cheek against the fur. “I wish there were not such a long way to go,” remarked Tessa, who after one look down had drawn quickly back and shut her eyes. “It’s not like motoring at all, it’s more like _dropping_.”

“Perhaps—” said Sydney and broke off because it was not fair to Tessa. She sat back quietly and began to concentrate her whole will and imagination. “If it could be the next corner,” she thought, “we should go over clean—there is that clear drop. Let it be the next corner....” But the next corner was passed. The rush of air and the movement had made her come alive again and she seemed to herself to be reasoning very clearly and accurately. There would be nobody really to suffer except poor old Anthony, out in Malay. She did not suppose James’s brother and sister would care very much; she did not feel him to have been loved more than conventionally, to have ever so faintly quickened a passion or coloured a life. “As for Ronald,” she thought, very keen and exultant as though there were a sword in her hand, “it would be better for Ronald.” She fixed her eyes on the back of the driver’s head and began to be perfectly sure of what was coming, perfectly confident.

“We mustn’t go over too quickly,” she thought, “there must be time to say something.” Under the rug her hand found out Mrs. Kerr’s sleeve and rested there ever so lightly. She racked her brain for all there would be to say, then relinquished the effort. At all events there would be a moment to look at each other, just to look at each other that would be best. “I don’t want to look at James—there is always that question of the future. I should be very much embarrassed.” Her mind became quite quiet again and she went on saying: “The next corner ... the _next_ corner.”

Round the next, barely round it, the brakes jarred, the car swayed on locked wheels, and stopped dead. The driver swore, peered ahead left and right, stood up in his place to give vent to what he was saying and swore more vehemently. Milton also rose in his place to see better and their view from behind was obscured. They had seen in a flash a long wagon of timber jammed cross-ways, shouting men, backing, terrified horses. Milton, after a moment, turned smiling to reassure them. “The idiots,” he said, “have been making a mess of this turn. They’re all right, but we may have some time to wait till they’re clear. The end of the timber’s got jammed against the rock, they must have been as nearly as possible over.”

“So, I suppose, were we?” Mrs. Kerr said, amused.

Milton nodded, after a half-glance at Sydney. “Our fellow _can_ drive,” he said gratefully. “We’re here for a bit—would you care to get out and have a look?”

Sydney shook her head. With both hands clasped on her lap she sat quite still, defeated. She could not look at Milton, who helped out Mrs. Kerr and Tessa and walked with them up to the wagon. In a minute or two he was back. “I say, aren’t you coming?” She shook her head again stonily. “Sydney ... has this given you rather a shock?”

She was plainly what people describe as “upset.” “They’ve no right to bring those things up here,” he angrily shouted.

“Well, they must build their houses, my dear.” It was the tolerance of lassitude. She looked over the side of the car down into the valley: a kind of farewell. It was a long way below—the depth of it would never be forgotten.

“Funny we shouldn’t have seen it ahead of us,” said Milton, thinking about the wagon, “or underneath us. It’s the way the rocks stick out—pretty dangerous, I must say.”

She agreed. “Pretty dangerous. Look here, I will come; but go on with the others. I’ll just stay here a moment or two.”

They were having—up here—a later view of the sun than their friends down below; by now the tennis-courts would be silent, the sea fading, the earliest lights coming out pale and exotic in hotels whose walls still had an afterglow. Here the sun was still full on the village, level on peak behind peak; the gold only gave way reluctantly to a mild rose, that chilled and abated and was transfused by shadows mounting up like smoke out of the valley. This isolation above the regular approach of night connected itself in her mind with her present shocked sense of having been flung back on to living. The depths of shadow from which they were barred away would have been to her infinitely grateful. Above, in this unnatural, endless prolongation of the daylight she for the first time felt life sharply, life as keen as death to bite upon the consciousness pressed inexorably upon her, held to her throat like a knife. Dazed by a realization of their import she stared at her hands, at her body, at the hills round her.

Later she had scrambled from the car and was running down the hill on her stiff legs unsteadily, calling to James.

Round the wagon a tumult was raging of admonition, sympathy and abuse. Several young men had sprung out of nowhere and were straining, shouting and heaving, alternately propping stones under the wheels of the wagon then trying to push the wagon forward over the stones. Other young men and some women came scrambling down in a state of happy excitement by a precipitous path from the village that struck down direct across the zig-zags of the road. Friends of the wagoner kicked the horses in the chest to make them back further, tugged them forward by the bridles and almost incessantly beat them over the head. Sydney saw Milton, scarlet and also shouting, trying to stop this and being swept aside amicably as one who knew nothing of the carting of timber or of the management of horses. Tessa, only too glad to be out of the Fiat, was trotting up and down like a little bear in her fur coat. No one, evidently, could have been sorrier for the poor horses than Mrs. Kerr, but she was trying to restrain Milton from further interference because he ran a momentary danger of being elbowed over the edge of the road. As Sydney approached, the situation was further complicated by a short log working loose from the pile, slipping down sideways and getting locked between the far-apart spokes of the wheel.

“It’s all so damned silly!” cried Milton exasperatedly. The crisis brought out in him at the expense of his rationality all that was latently English. Mrs. Kerr shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

“One of these horses is bleeding,” he added in helpless disgust.

“Then come away,” said Mrs. Kerr. “After all, we’re not asked to more than imagine what animals suffer. We aren’t asked to be certain—it mayn’t be so bad. I think I’ll go back to the car.”

Milton only half understood what she said and did not hear Sydney calling him. His attention was all for the horses. “They ought at least,” he exclaimed later on, “to have warned us up there in the village that this was ahead.” He turned to find Sydney there pale at his elbow and Mrs. Kerr gone.

“Will they be long?” she said anxiously. He nodded and she put a hand on his sleeve and guided him up the road again, past the Fiat where Tessa and Mrs. Kerr were sitting again, wrapped up in rugs. Sydney looked at them vacantly, turned to Milton to say something with the same air of vacancy, saw with alarm that the car was still close behind them and hurried him on to get further out of earshot. “I’m afraid,” she said, “that it’s quite impossible.”

He understood by some odd intuition; but kept her watching him for a moment or two while he listened intently to the clamour below, the isolated exclamations, the voices. “What’s quite impossible, Sydney? What do you mean?”

“Our marriage.”

“Oh!” he said quietly. “Oh!”

“I don’t know how we could ever have thought of it.”

“I’m afraid,” he said slowly, “I can’t see yet why it’s not right.”

She looked hopeless. “I suppose I can’t make you see. But I do know.”

“Since when?” She seemed protected by some kind of exaltation, so he let out his pain in sarcasm. “Recently, Sydney?”

“Just now. I suppose it was the shock of being alive—oh, how can I explain to you? I had had no idea we were as real as this. I’d never realized it mattered so much.... Oh my dear, no, don’t touch me. Come further—come round the bend of the road.”

“I wasn’t going to touch you,” he said, ashamed for both of them, half aware that an instinctive movement towards her must have been exaggerated by the effect of distance she gave him. By some defect of focus he had seen her as a long way away. They went up the hill painfully, as though it were steeper and turned the next corner which gave her back a kind of echo, a ghost of that early idea of deliverance. Further up she sat down on a bank by the side of the road; because she looked tired enough to fall sideways he sat down close to her, put an arm round her and propped her up against a brotherly shoulder. “Now tell me,” he said, “if you feel you can tell me.”

“_Now_ I understand—but it seems as if I ought to tell you what I didn’t understand. I think we have been asleep here; you know in a dream how quickly and lightly shapes move, they have no weight, nothing offers them any resistance. They are governed by some funny law of convenience that seems to us perfectly rational, they clash together without any noise and come apart without injury.”

“Do you think we’ve been ruled by this funny law of convenience?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation, but putting a hand out as though to propitiate him. “We have taken nothing into account. You and me—how could we ever have thought of it? It was just a dream. It seemed simple.”

“It never seemed simple to me. I was going to fight every inch of it.”

“But you’re not—” she began, broke off, and in a manner at once intimate and very impersonal leaned closer against his shoulder.

“Not what?” he said, urging this out of her.

“Not a fighter.”

“Not a born fighter perhaps ... I thought we could help each other.”

“Never. You could never have thought that.”

“If I am to let you go I shall have to learn to say ‘Never.’”

“Say it now—or shall I have to tell you everything?”

“I would rather you did. But no; the laws of convenience. I think I could guess what is coming ... Sydney?”

She did not answer. He saw her hand stealing up to her face and discovered that tears were coming out from under her eyelids and that she was trying to brush them away with the tip of a finger. “I haven’t got a handkerchief,” she said as she felt him detect this. “I left it behind in the car.” He managed still with an arm round her, shifting his position gently so as not to disturb her, to extract a clean handkerchief that he had pushed up his cuff.

“Thank you,” she said, crumpling up the handkerchief and staring at it. “You are, you are comfortable.”

“So they tell me,” said he and his mouth twisted in momentary bitter repudiation of comfortableness.

“I’d rather do this alone, if you don’t mind,” she said, as the tears began to come faster.

“Very well,—shall I walk up and down or will you?”

As she did not answer and did not stir he got up and left her. Patrolling their bit of road at absent speed with his hands in his pockets he could still feel her head heavy on his shoulder and the feeling of intimacy and nearness remained with him. He remembered, looking back with pity for them both, that questioning long look in which they had been baffled by one another under the olive-trees. At this moment of swinging apart he was one with her and was able to say “She is right.” Passing by her again and again where she sat he looked or did not look; either seemed to be natural. He could feel rather than perceive her there sitting upright, her hands on her knees, his handkerchief a dead-white blot in the dark. The tide of shadow had risen at last and engulfed them, drawing the hills together and making the valley seem to float up to them, spreading a film of silence in which the clamour from below was diffused. The last of the pink light faded slowly from the hills, the moon rose opaque and lustreless in the still lucent sky.

“Don’t come till you’re ready,” he called as he saw her getting up slowly.

“I’m ready now,” she said, coming towards him. His admission was ready for her.

“I do see what you mean,” he said. “I do understand.”

“Is there anything queer about my eyes; would one notice?” she asked, and turned her face up to his anxiously. He had to peer close in the half-light before he assured her. “No; nobody’d guess.” They turned and walked silently back to the car. Tessa was sitting round looking out eagerly for them over the back.

“They’ve had an idea,” she cried, “they’re going to saw off that long bit of timber. The driver says it was his idea. One of the men is fetching a saw.”

“And then we can go on again,” said Mrs. Kerr, making room for Sydney. “Why is it so much more tiring to sit still in something that doesn’t move?” Sydney climbed silently in and sat between them. By the time they had been able to pass the wagon, now drawn back further down into a bay of the road, she felt that the evening was already over, that they had been home for a long time, that all this had happened a year ago and only by some delay of the memory still seemed to concern them. As they walked rather slowly up the Hotel steps, weighed down with armfuls of wraps, and the disconcertingly keen lights steamed out on to them, Mrs. Kerr with an air of coming awake again remarked that Sydney was tired. “If you’re not too tired,” she said, “come in on your way up and say good-night to me. We shan’t have you many nights more.”

“Thank you,” Sydney said, “but don’t wait up for me. I’ll come early if I come at all.” After dinner she went straight to her own room, sleep came up over her like a wave as soon as she shut her eyes; a tall dark wave that gathered itself and waited above her a moment so that she was conscious of it before she was conscious of nothing. Then all night long she was climbing up the endless road again corner by corner to an empty town at the top.