Chapter IX

Three days afterwards the weather along that coast was once more fulfilling the expectations of visitors. Only a little wind remained to disturb the sea, rustle dryly through the palm-trees out on the promontory where the coast-road disappeared toward Genoa, and rush to meet one round street-corners with a disconcertingly ice-cold whistle. Against an opaque, bright-blue sky the expressionless faces of the buildings had again their advertised and almost aching whiteness. The sounds like the shadows were exact and clear-cut, no longer blunted by the rain.

From end to end of the town the principal long street ran like a funnel; as Sydney came out of the flower-shop her side of the street was slate-grey in the shadow of early afternoon. It was characteristic of her as an intelligent young English lady that she should have come to buy carnations during the hour of the siesta, thus cutting for herself a caprice of her own direct across the custom of the land. The carnations among which, walking slowly, she now was burying her face were scentless but gave one an acute pleasure by the chilly contact of their petals. She had an armful of two colours, sulphur with a ragged edge of pink and ashy mauve with crimson at the centre, crimson-veined. Carnations are not costly here before they reach the flower-market, grown on terraces that stagger up the hills and picked in the grey quiet of the morning to the accompaniment of singing and never-answered calls that come dropping down forlornly from terrace to terrace into the valleys. On account of their low cost, their strangeness to the northern eye and the vehemence of their colouring they have been made the vehicle of much emotion. One cannot, however casually, present these native carnations to a friend and remain entirely unaffected, while the pleasure with which carnations are received is intensified by some vague agitation.

Sydney’s day had been so far as perfect as a bubble; she felt careless of it, as though the bubble could not burst. Happiness, she said to herself, is not to be solicited, but coming, for however short a time, comes with an appearance of finality, to be juggled with off-hand. It seems to be some kind of balance, as in riding a bicycle, attempted painfully a thousand times and achieved at last without effort. Her senses were absorbed by the carnations, she barely looked ahead, and she could be conscious of the street only as a sharp distinction between sun and shadow. Crossing over she walked in the sun, where dogs stretched out their lengths in abandon on the hot pavement. She must have been made conspicuous by her abstraction or her yellow dress; people turned to stare at her, and a tram, announced by a hum of overhead wires, rushed past with a long smudge of faces turned her way. She left the street but delayed her return to the Hotel by following a series of bye-paths, pausing now and then to stare idly through some barred gate into a garden. She was mapping out for herself a deep-down life in which emotions ceased their clashing together and friends appeared only as painted along the edge of one’s quietude.

At a turn of the footpath she met the Barry children going down to the shore with their nurse. There were several of them, very much alike; their number appalled Sydney who stood back against the wall. Cordelia Barry, the eldest, walked by herself a little ahead of the others, ostentatiously carrying a book.

“The _whole_ family of us all again, you see!” she exclaimed affectedly. “Oh, dear Miss Warren, what lovely carnations! Oh, I do love them!” She was a child of about eleven with thin legs and an eager tremolo. Sydney, who considered that she had been demoralized by over much grown-up attention, said “Do you?” unresponsively. She did not intend to give any carnations to Cordelia.

“You _aren’t_ going for a walk, I suppose?” said Cordelia wistfully. “Mother said I might go with anybody who would have me, but that I would have to go with Nanny if everybody else fell through.”

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you. But I expect it will be nice on the shore.”

“Hoo!” said Cordelia, pouncing on this note of falsity. She tilted her head back to stare up at Sydney from under the brim of her hat. “How stupid you’d be if you really believed that! Nice on the shore!”

“Come along, Cordelia,” called back Nanny in the flat voice of one who is employing the imperative continually and without effect.

Cordelia clutched at Sydney’s dress. “Lovely yellow thing,” she said feverishly, “_Beautiful_ Miss Warren, won’t you take me for a walk?”

Sydney, who was still near enough to her own childhood to mistrust children profoundly, wondered what Cordelia could be getting at. “Not to-day,” she temporized, “some day, perhaps.”

“Come _on_, Cordelia!”

“Go on, Cordelia: Nanny’s calling.”

“She’s no Nanny to me,” said Cordelia in bitter repudiation. “Veronica Lawrence is very fond of children,” she added rapidly. “She said she’d take me for a walk any day. But I’m not so much interested in Veronica Lawrence.”

“Then you’re an ungrateful little wretch,” said Sydney. “Run along!”

“Do you promise, _some day_?” said the child despairingly.

“Very well, I promise.”

After another long stare that was at once ardent and sardonic Cordelia with reluctant steps and backward glances went after her family. Sydney heard her calling Nanny a devil. But so long as Cordelia came on, Nanny, who was a broken woman, cared for none of these things.

Sydney, who knew that Mrs. Kerr was all this time sitting on her balcony, never more accessible than to-day in a coloured mood which the carnations were soon to reflect, still delayed luxuriously. She heightened the sweetness of exile by telling herself how soon the freshness of her carnations would be over, and how at any moment Mrs. Kerr might fall asleep for the afternoon, or get up and go out with somebody else. She even played with a regret at having packed off Cordelia with whom she might have walked back still more slowly through the town.

When she did at last return to the Hotel the afternoon post had just come in and was spread out on the concierge’s table. There was nothing for herself but a letter for Mrs. Kerr in Ronald’s large untidy writing caught her eye suddenly. She hesitated for a moment at this, for she had not yet directly tried conclusions with Ronald; then, very confident of her balance, took the letter up with her and tapped lightly with the corner of the envelope on Mrs. Kerr’s door.

Sydney knew at once from her friend’s unconscious air and rather marked immobility that she had been suspected. The carnations, into which virtue seemed to have gone out of herself, were at this anticipated moment difficult to relinquish. She laid them down with a degree of awkwardness across the end of the sofa. Mrs. Kerr, who sat with her feet up, looking out at the sea exclaimed: “Carnations!” incredulously as though this were what she had been longing for, and with an unprecedented movement held up her face to be kissed.

“Will you put them in water?” she said, having looked at the flowers with wistful delight for a moment or two, and Sydney with a feeling of surprise that she could not explain to herself glanced round her, then began to arrange the carnations. She chose for the purpose a rather self-conscious-looking pottery mug that had been a present from Miss Pym. She arranged the flowers deliberately, and Mrs. Kerr looked on in expressive silence.

“Pleased?” said Sydney.

“Very, very much. I had been feeling like that: it was uncanny of you. Now they are perfect, Sydney; leave them alone and don’t keep fussing round them.”

“That was because I want them to look nice all round. I’m not restless.”

“No?” said Mrs. Kerr, revolving critically a possible new version of her friend which she seemed slow to accept.

“No, I am not. I have a capacity for being still that left to myself I would never have doubted, but that no one else, you specially, will ever let me believe in. Look—” she knelt down where she stood, then sat back and arranged herself, leaning her side and elbow against the side of the sofa. “I could stay like this for the rest of the afternoon,” said Sydney.

“Well, then stay still. Why should I disturb you?”

“You will, you are bound to—Just now: where did you think I had gone?”

“I was not allowed to think. I went out there and looked over the balcony, and that clergyman, that Mr. Milton, was walking about in the garden. He took off his hat and waved it to attract my attention. Then he began to talk for some time in the friendliest way.”

“Really? That was excessive of him. What did he say?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I couldn’t hear. I just smiled and nodded. He is a cheerful, unselfconscious person. I like him.”

“Unselfconscious? He feels spikes everywhere and is driven to impale himself. But I feel an interest in him; he told Veronica Lawrence he admired me.”

“Very appealing of him. And so wise.”

“Wise—to tell?”

“No—to admire. Have many people, Sydney?”

Sydney flashed round at her, startled into a brilliant flush. “I don’t know: I’ve never been sure of it.”

“Never mind,” said Mrs. Kerr, staring out at her friend from some profound reverie, “when you look like that, the question answers itself.”

“I suppose,” said Sydney, after an instant’s reflection, “that extraordinary people do. Cordelia Barry—or did you only mean men?”

“No, I didn’t mean men. Don’t be so fearfully on the defensive—or do you think I am likely to match-make?”

“I am sorry, that was horribly vulgar of me. It is so much easier to be vulgar and so much less noticed. I mean, you and I are supposed to assume, or to seem everywhere to assume, that that man down in the garden could be more to either of us than the other. Also, one has had it so ground into one that admiration, any exercise of the spirit is only valuable to its object, to drive somebody’s mill.”

“Exercise of the spirit ...” said Mrs. Kerr, while Sydney listened like a stranger to this repetition of her own words. “If you call it that you must agree that it would be allowed some other value, even popularly: the value of a gymnastic.”

“Oh, Shaw’s Englishman and his moral gymnasium; yes, I know,” said Sydney scornfully.

“Now there you are, Sydney, you’ve moved and you’ll say I disturbed you. Don’t be so out to suffer. Mr. Milton’s not the only person who runs on to spikes.”

“Out to suffer,” said Sydney, looking down at herself as it were, from the height of her exaltation. “_Am_ I out to suffer?”

“I feel that you are,” said Mrs. Kerr, and pressing her head further back into the cushions she looked at Sydney again in thoughtful silence. They could hear footsteps, perhaps James Milton’s, crunching the gravel below.

“Well yes,” Mrs. Kerr said at last, “put it that way.—Sydney, isn’t that a letter for me, over there by the carnations? Isn’t it from Ronald?”

“Yes, it is from Ronald. I brought it up with me but I forgot to give it to you. Do you want it now?” Mrs. Kerr was holding out her hand for the letter but Sydney did not seem to notice. “It’s a very fat letter; I expect it is his views on Germany. _Do_ you want to read it while I’m here?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I think I ought to read it. Mothers do.”

“That you know best, of course.” Sydney, rising to her knees, reached across the table for the letter, which she handed to Ronald’s mother. Mrs. Kerr put on what Sydney called “the Ronald expression” and began to read while Sydney watched her.

“My little boy,” she said at last, “is coming here.”

“Coming here?”

“Yes, here. Coming to the Hotel.”

Sydney, sitting quite still, remained blank for a moment and did not say anything. Then she got up and walked about the room which, crowded up with the glare of the afternoon, now appeared to be much constricted. She did not even wonder as usual whether Mrs. Kerr were waiting for her to speak or if she had forgotten her. She looked for some time at the ornaments on Mrs. Kerr’s dressing-table which had at one time, by their profusion, and meaningless and evident air of being appreciated, “dated” her friend for her inevitably. She glanced for a moment, but only as if to assure herself of its still being there, at the portrait of Ronald.

Ronald, for the delectation of some circle of friends as to whose extent and nature she had never speculated, had posed for one of those expensive photographers who specialize in portraits of men. A disposition of the prevalent shadows with one fierce escape of light on to the jaw and temple combine with the Promethean glitter of an eyeball to bring about an effect of fine ruggedness, of an elemental something curbed. Each copy of this photograph, a sepia matt, must have cost Ronald about a guinea. Sydney turned away from it impatiently. “Why on earth,” she asked, “isn’t Ronald up at Oxford now?”

She had to wait for an answer until Mrs. Kerr having glanced back to an earlier page of the letter and smiled to herself over something, perhaps an inconsistency she had detected, had folded up the thin sheets casually and let them slide from the sofa to the floor.

“What did you say, Sydney? Ah yes, Oxford. He thought it would be better to travel for a time, you see, after leaving school. He wanted to expand again, he said, and he wished particularly though I cannot think why, to spend a year in Germany. He would have preferred to go to Heidelberg, but his guardian wouldn’t hear of it, unfortunately. So he is going up to Oxford in the autumn, I believe.”

“I suppose he won’t mind being older than the people in his year?”

“I suppose not,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I should have thought it was a pity. However, I know very little about boys of that age. He will be twenty soon.”

“An impossible age,” said Sydney.

“I suppose it really is,” agreed Mrs. Kerr.

Sydney had by this time made up her mind that their future must not be devastated by a descent upon them of Ronald. She looked about her undecidedly, not certain whether to say “This is very generous of him” with irony, or, without irony, but with a display of emotion sure to be distasteful, “Oh, this is lovely for you; I am ever so glad,” or “It will be interesting to see you together,” with an implication of detachment and of relegating her friend to maternity. She could not guess to which of these observations Mrs. Kerr would be likely to react most desirably, and she felt herself embarrassed by a lack of insight into her friend’s personality, of which she had always been conscious, but which had till now added charm to their intercourse. Now that she might have to come to grips with the hypothetical mother in Mrs. Kerr she realized that she was powerless to estimate the force and scope of relationship of being to being; from consideration of which, as of something out of proportion with life as she saw it, she had always withheld herself.

Mrs. Kerr, her hands behind her head, gazed delightedly at the future. “How very nice,” she laughed, “how very nice and amusing.... Oh no, don’t laugh like that, Sydney; why should it seem funny to you? It’s very natural, only it’s so funny that we—he and I—never seem to have happened to be together in a place where there was nothing to look at and no one to visit and nowhere to go. So that I suppose one might almost say we have never been together—It is absurd for me to laugh,” she went on, in a glow of amused speculation, “but I’m so touched; it is so ridiculously touching of him. Fancy him writing like that and wanting to come, from _Dresden_.... I wonder where he will sleep: we must find him somewhere to sleep—I think that will be all right, don’t you, Sydney?”

“Have I been very dense?” asked Sydney, in a tone strange to herself. “I do not even seem to have realized you missed him, or thought of him much, or would be glad if he came.”

“But I suppose,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking back at the past in surprise, “that I didn’t realize it either.”

“_Has_ it been lonely and dull? They all said it must be lonely and dull for you, but I never——”

“Oh no, Sydney dear. You’ve made such a difference.”

“Have I?” Sydney said hungrily. Mrs. Kerr nodded; she was enclosed in her thoughts but this gleam of affection emboldened Sydney to ask, with a desperate directness, “And do you want him now—you are fearfully glad?”

“Sydney, you really are too clever sometimes to understand me. Can’t I be glad?”

Sydney felt herself beaten back by something that in spite of nature’s whole precedent she knew for a falsity; an imposture which her immaturity sensed but could not challenge. She knelt down again in bewildered, still angry submission by the side of her friend. “Of course I don’t mean that you shouldn’t be glad. On the other hand you know that to me the conventions don’t seem to fit you, and bar the conventions, why should I _assume_ that you are? You see, I’m not a mother and I don’t know any mothers well.”

She allowed herself to be reconquered as Mrs. Kerr, putting a hand out and vaguely caressing her hair, said thoughtfully, “No, you aren’t and you don’t; that’s quite true. Well, won’t you be generous enough to take me for granted?”