The triumphant self-absorption of Lady Catherine, a mood that comprehended not merely self-absorption but the absorption therewith of this immense and exciting and unprecedented Mr. Sempack, gave place abruptly to an entirely different state of mind, to astonishment and even a certain consternation. Central to this new phase of consciousness, was the vividly sunlit figure of little Mrs. Rylands, agape. Agape she was, dismayed, as though she had that instant been suddenly and horribly stung. A sound between the “Oo-er” of an infantile astonishment and a cry of acute pain had proclaimed her.
She stood in the blaze of the Caatinga, flushed and distressed, altogether at a loss in the presence of her surprising guests. She was bareheaded and she carried no sunshade. Her loose-robed figure had the effect of a small child astray.
A swift automatic disentanglement of Lady Catherine and Mr. Sempack had occurred. By rapid gradations all three recovered their social consciousness. In a moment they were grouped like actors who have momentarily forgotten their cues, but are about to pick them up again. Mr. Sempack stood up belatedly.
It was Lady Catherine who was first restored to speech.
“I have been telling Mr. Sempack that he ought to come into public life,” she said. “He is too great a man to remain aloof writing books.”
Mrs. Rylands’ expression was enigmatical. She seemed to be listening and trying to remember the meaning of the sounds she heard. It dawned upon Lady Catherine that her eyes were red with recent weeping. What had happened? Was this some mood of her condition?
Then Mrs. Rylands took control of herself. In another moment she was the hostess of Casa Terragena again, with the edge of her speech restored. “You’ve been persuading him very delightfully, I’m sure, dearest,” she smiled, the smile of a charming hostess — if a little wet about the eyes. “Is he going to?”
“No,” said Mr. Sempack, speaking down with large tranquil decision. But his mind was upon Mrs. Rylands.
A different line of treatment had occurred to Lady Catherine. She snatched at it hastily. She abandoned the topic of Mr. Sempack and his career. “But, my dear!” she cried. “What are you doing in this blazing sun? You ought to be tucked away in a hammock in the shade!”
Mrs. Rylands evidently thought this sudden turn of topic disconcerting. She stared at this new remark as if she disliked it extremely and did not know what to do with it.
Then she broke down. “Everybody seems to think I ought to be tucked away somewhere,” she said, and fairly sobbed. “I’ve done the unexpected. I’ve put everybody out.”
She stood weeping like a child. Consternation fell upon Lady Catherine. Mutely she consulted Mr. Sempack and a slight but masterly movement indicated that he would be better left alone with Mrs. Rylands. His wish marched with Lady Catherine’s own impulse to fly.
“I’ve got letters, lots of letters,” she said. “I’m forgetting them. I was talking. To post in Monte Carlo this afternoon. If we go, that is.”
Mrs. Rylands seemed to approve of this suggestion of a retreat and Lady Catherine became a receding umbrella that halted in the rocky archway for a vague undecided retrospect and then disappeared.
Mrs. Rylands remained standing, looking at the archway. She had an air of standing there because she had nowhere else in the whole world to go, and looking at the archway because there was nothing else on earth to look at. She might have been left on a platform by a train, the only possible train, she had intended to take.
“I thought I would talk to you,” she said, not looking at Mr. Sempack but still contemplating the vanished back of Lady Catherine.
“It is too hot for us to be here,” said Mr. Sempack, taking hold of the situation. “Quite close round the corner beyond the stone-pines, there is shade and running water and a seat.”
“It was absurd, but I thought I would talk to you.” Her intonation implied that this was no longer a possibility.
Mr. Sempack made no immediate reply.
The first thing to do he perceived was to get Mrs. Rylands out of the blaze of the sun. Then more was required of him. Evidently she had been assailed by some sudden, violent, and nearly unbearable trouble. Something had struck her, some passionate shocking blow, that had detached her spinning giddily from everything about her. And she had thought of him as large, intelligent, immobile, neutral — above all and in every sense neutral, as indeed a convenient bulk, a sympathetic disinterested bulk, to which one might cling in a torrent of dismay, and which might even have understanding to hold one on if at any time one’s clinging relaxed. He had been the only possible father confessor. Sexlessness was a primary necessity to that. In this particular case. For he knew, the thought emerged with unchallenged assurance, that her trouble concerned Philip and Philip’s fidelity. And instead of finding a priest, she had, just at this phase when the idea of embraces was altogether revolting to her, caught him embracing.
He glimpsed her present vision of the whole world as lying, betraying, and steamily, illicitly intertwined. And since his instincts and his habits of mind were all for resolving the problems of others and extracting whatever was helpful in the solution, since he liked his little hostess immensely and was ready not only to help in general but anxious to help her in particular, he did his best to push the still glowing image of Lady Catherine into the background of his mind and set himself to efface the bad impression their so intimate grouping had made upon Mrs. Rylands.
With an entirely mechanical submission to his initiative she was walking beside him towards the shade when he spoke.
“I was talking about myself to Lady Catherine,” he said and paused to help his silent companion down a stepway. “I think I betrayed a certain sense of my ungainliness. . . . I am ungainly. . . . Lady Catherine is full of generous impulsive helpfulness and her method of reassuring me was — dramatic and — tangible.”
Mrs. Rylands made no immediate reply.
A score or so of paces and they were in the chequered shade of the stone pines and then a zigzag had taken them out of the Caatinga altogether and down to a gully, with a trickle of water and abundant ferns and horse-tails and there in a cool cavernous place, that opened to them like a blessing, was a long seat of wood. Mrs. Rylands sat down. Mr. Sempack stood over her, a little at a loss.
“I thought I might talk to you,” she repeated. “I thought I might be able to talk to you.”
“And now — something has spoilt me,” he said. “Perhaps I know how you feel. . . . I wish. . . . If you cannot talk to me, perhaps you will let me sit down here and even, it may be, presently say a word or so to you.”
He sat down slowly beside her and became quite still.
“The world has gone ugly,” she said.
He stirred, a rustle of interrogation.
“It is all cruel and ugly,” she burst out. “Ugly! I wish I were dead.”
Mr. Sempack did not look at her. She swallowed her tears unobserved. “I was afraid this would happen to you,” he said, “from the very moment I saw you. Afraid! I knew it had to happen to you.”
She looked at him in astonishment. “But how do you know what has happened?”
“I don’t. That is — I know no particulars. But I know you thought of a life, subtle and fine as Venetian glass, and I know that is all shattered.”
“I thought life could be clean and fine.”
Mr. Sempack made no answer for a moment. Then he said: “And how do you know it isn’t clean and fine?”
“He told me lies. At least he acted lies. He pretended she was nothing ——”
Mr. Sempack considered that. “Has it ever occurred to you that your husband is a very young man? Sensitive minded and fine.”
“He!“
“Yes. In spite of everything. And telling a harsh truth is one of the last things we learn to do. Most of us never do. He hasn’t told all sorts of hard truths even to himself.”
“Hard truths and harsh truths!” said the lady, as though she did her best to apprehend Mr. Sempack’s indications. “You don’t know — the brutality. . . . ”
She choked.
“And she is nothing to him,” said Mr. Sempack serenely.
“You don’t understand what has happened. There they were. In the little bathing chalet. . . . ”
Her woe deepened. “Anyone might have come upon them!”
“Perhaps they had accounted for everybody but you.”
“My fault then.”
“They saw you?”
“Oh! they saw me.”
“And he stayed with her?”
“No. He came after me almost at once.”
“You told him to go back to her.”
“How do you know?”
“It was the first thing to say. And he didn’t go back.”
“He tried to excuse himself?”
“That was difficult.”
“He said horrible things. Oh horrible!”
Mr. Sempack’s silence was an invincible question and moreover Mrs. Rylands was driven by an irresistible impulse to tell the dreadful things that threatened to become destructive and unspeakable monstrosities if they were not thrust out while they still had some communicable form. Even now she told them with a shadow of doubt in her mind.
“He said, ‘I can’t live this life of milk and water. I must get excited somehow — or I shall burst!’”
“That stated a case,” said Mr. Sempack with deliberation. “That stated a case.”
She weighed this for some moments as though she felt it ought to mean something. Then she seemed to feel about in her mind for a lost thread and resumed: “I said nothing. I hurried on.”
“He asked you to listen?”
“I couldn’t. Not then.”
“You went on and he followed — that extremely inarticulate young man, trying to express things that he felt but could not understand. And you were in blind flight from something you did not wish to understand.”
“He caught hold of me and I dragged myself away.”
Mr. Sempack waited patiently.
“He shouted out ‘Oh hell‘ very loudly and dropped behind. I don’t know where he went. He is somewhere down there. Perhaps he went back to her.”
“And that was how it happened?”
“Yes,” she said, “it happened like that.”
She stared in front of her for a long time, and Mr. Sempack had so much to say that he found himself unable to say anything. To meet this case a whole philosophy was needed. The silence unrolled.
“My Philip!” she whispered at last.
It was clear that whatever idea she had had of talking to Mr. Sempack had evaporated from her mind. “I don’t know why I have told you of this,” she said at last with the slightest turn of her head towards him. “The heat. . . . I shall go back to bed. Put myself away.”
She stood up.
“I will come back with you as far as the house if I may,” said Mr. Sempack.
They walked in the completest silence. Not even a consolatory word came to him.
He watched her vanish between the white pillars into the deep cool shadows of the hall. “Poor young people! What a mess it is!” he said, and entirely oblivious of Lady Catherine, standing splendidly at the great staircase window and ready to descend at a word, he walked, downcast and thoughtful, along an aisle of arum lilies towards a great basin full of nuphar. He clasped his hands behind him and humped one shoulder higher than the other. His shambling legs supported him anyhow.
Here was something that it was immensely necessary to think out, and to think out into serviceable conclusions soon. He could not attend to the outlying parts of his person.
To Bombaccio, the first intimation that something had gone wrong in the house party of Terragena was brought by Miss Puppy Clarges. He had been putting out the English papers on the hall table and touching and patting the inkpots and pens and blotting-pads on the writing-tables in the southern recess of the hall and meditating on the just position of the various waste-paper baskets, and blessing and confirming all such minor amenities, when she came in. He wore a diamond ring, not one with an exceptional diamond like Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan’s, but just a diamond ring, and as he did things he exercised himself in a rather nice attitude with the hand upheld, that Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan affected. It seemed to Bombaccio a desirable attitude. She came in from the terrace towards the sea while he was posed in this way. She gave his hand a passing unintelligent glance and spoke brusquely. “Bombaccio,” she said, “I have to clear out at once. I’ve had a telegram that my half-sister in Nice is very ill.”
“But,” said Bombaccio. “I did not know the Signorina had had a telegram.”
“Nor anyone else. Wonderful how it got to me; isn’t it? But it did — and don’t you forget it. Don’t you give way to any weakening on that point. I’ve had a telegram that my half-sister in Nice is very ill and now I’ve told you — you know I’ve had it.”
Bombaccio bowed with grave submission.
“Off I go to pack and down I come to go. What car, Bombaccio?”
“I’ll ask Mrs. Rylands.”
“Don’t. Just get me that old Fiat in the village and I’ll clatter down to the station at Mentone right away. As soon as poss. It’s a case of life and death.”
“The next train for Nice,” reflected Bombaccio, “does not depart ——”
“Don’t go into figures,” said Miss Clarges. “Telephone and get that auto now.”
She reflected, knuckle to lip. “Wait a moment,” she said. “I’ll write a note — two notes.”
She went to a writing-table, placed a sheet before her, chose a pen and meditated briefly. Bombaccio waited. Then her pen flew. One note she addressed to her hostess. It was a note of exceptional brevity and it was unsigned. ”Sorry,” wrote Miss Clarges. ”I’m gone and I won’t worry you again.“
“Sorry I got caught,” Miss Clarges remarked to herself, and licked the envelope. ”Fools we were.”
Then she directed a more elaborate epistle to Mr. Geoffry Rylands. ”Dear Geoff,” she scribbled. ”That Limitless Field Preacher has got on my nerves. Another meal of talk with him and Mr. Pantaloon Buchan and I shall scream. I’ve fled to the Superba at Dear Old Monty. Where my friends can find me, bless ’em. A rividerci, Puppy.“
That got its swift lick also and a whack to stick it down.
“Here’s the documents!” she said.
Bombaccio was left developing a series of bows and gestures to express that all things in the world would be as the Signorina wished, while Miss Puppy vanished upstairs. Then he went slowly and thoughtfully to the telephone.
But he did not telephone. He hated the man who owned the old Fiat and there were two cars in the garage. One of them was booked for Monte Carlo after lunch, but that was no reason why Signorina Clarges should not have the other. In the well-known Terragena car she’d go through the French douane like a bird; in the hired car she wouldn’t. He would consult Signora Rylands. Or Signor Rylands.
And on reflection it became more and more distinctly unusual that a guest should depart in this fashion without some intimation from either host or hostess. There was something wrong in that. The fact of Signorina Clarges’ swift passage upstairs, originally a bare fact, became encrusted with interrogations; the brow of Bombaccio was troubled. She was giving all the orders. What should a perfect major-domo do?
Signora Rylands, he believed, was still in bed and inaccessible. Signor Rylands? Signor Rylands? But ——? Consider ——? He had gone off with Signorina Clarges to swim. Yes. Something must have happened. Where was Mr. Rylands now? Why was he not ordering the car for the Signorina Clarges? Had he by any chance insulted her — and was she departing insulted?
But then, was it possible to insult the Signorina Clarges?
Perhaps the best thing would be to consult Frant, Mrs. Rylands’ maid, a stupid English person who mistook secretiveness for discretion, but still the only possible source of indications just at present. . . .
These questionings were abruptly interrupted by the appearance of Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan coming through the front hall, with the vague, prowling air of a guest who has found nothing to do with his morning. He was wearing a new suit of tussore silk and wasting much neatness upon solitude. The wave in his hair was in perfect condition.
He brightened at the sight of Bombaccio. ”Dove e tutto?“ he asked. He liked to address every man in his own language, as a good European should, and this was his way of saying “Where’s everybody?”
Bombaccio replied with the most carefully perfect English intonation, “Colonel Bullace, Saire, is at the tennis.”
“E l’altri?“
Bombaccio expressed extreme dispersal by an expansive gesture and disowned special knowledge by a deprecatory smile. “Others are at the tennis,” he said.
“Lady Catherine?” asked Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, trying to be quite casual in his tone.
“She loves the garden!” said Bombaccio and began a respectful retreat.
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan hovered vaguely for a moment and then turned his face towards the front entrance. Abruptly the retreat of Bombaccio was accelerated and Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan looking round for a cause, became aware of Miss Clarges, clothed now with unusual decorum, at the bend of the staircase.
“How about that car, Bombaccio?” cried Miss Clarges.
Bombaccio, not hearing with all his might, disappeared, and the door that led to the domestic mysteries clicked behind him. “Damn!” said Miss Clarges. “Hullo, Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan!”
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan moved to show that he was hullo all right.
“I’ve got a half-sister dangerously ill — in Monaco, and I want a car. I’m all packed up and ready to go. Leastways I shall be in ten minutes.”
“Can I be of any assistance?” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan unhelpfully.
“Naturally,” said Miss Puppy. “I want some sort of car got and some of the minions to carry my bags up to the gates. Everyone seems to be out of the way.”
“Anything I can do,” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, looking entirely ornamental.
“If you’d just warm Bombaccio’s ear a bit,” said Miss Clarges. “What’s wanted is movement. Getting a move on.”
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan felt the reproach in her tone. “I will stir things up. I do hope your half-sister ——”
But Puppy had vanished upstairs again.
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan reflected. He would go to the bell and ring and when somebody came he would say in a gentle masterful way: ”La Signorina Clarges e nervosa da la sua automobiglia. Prega de l’accelerato prestissimo.“
But he would have much preferred to have gone on straight into the garden to look for Lady Catherine. He felt they went better together.
He found some difficulty in putting matters right with the minion who responded to his ring. The fellow did not seem to understand his own language and evidently missed the purport of Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan’s communication altogether. He seemed to think Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan was complaining of the manner in which Mrs. Rylands’ English chauffeur discharged his duties and expressed himself, with some vivid and entertaining pantomime, as being in the completest agreement. He repeated the expression “molto periculoso” several times with empressement. Now the Italian driver was a model of discretion. Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan was still trying, without too complete an admission of a linguistic breakdown, to mould the conversation nearer to Miss Clarges’ heart’s desire, when Lady Catherine appeared in the low oblong blaze of sunshine beyond the dark pillars of the portico. He dismissed the minion with a gesture and walked forward to meet her.
The hall behind him was left for a moment in silence and shadow, and then its ceiling and central parts resonated to the rich voice of Miss Clarges. “What the hell?” the voice of Miss Clarges inquired, passionately but incompletely, and her door slammed. She must have been listening on the landing. A few moments later, the muffled wheeze of a distant electric bell was audible from the servants’ quarters, a bell that kept on ringing persistently. Miss Clarges was ringing.
Before Lady Catherine became aware of Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan in the dim coolness of the entrance, her face betrayed a certain perturbation and she was hurrying. At the sight of him, she slackened her gait and became a sauntering queen, ruddy in the halo of the green umbrella.
“So hot,” she said, chin up and smiling. “Too hot! I’m coming in to write letters. Are you for Monte Carlo this afternoon?”
“In this blaze?” he doubted and shrugged his shoulders.
She hovered over him for a moment, not quite sure what to do with him.
“Lucky man!” she said. “You’ve got nothing to do but read the English papers and keep cool.”
She made her way round him to the staircase, smiling him down.
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan was left in the silent hall. He went to the table on the terrace side where the freshly-opened newspapers were displayed. He threw them about almost petulantly. He felt he had never seen less attractive newspapers. Even the head-lines of the Daily Express seemed dull. He sat down at last to The Times, to learn who had died and who had gone abroad.
Then came an interruption of Geoffry, very hot, moist and open-necked, in search of Bombaccio and drinks and ice for the tennis court. At his appearance on the terrace Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan shrank deeper into his arm-chair beside the pillar.
“Hullo!” said Geoffry. “Papers come?”
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan made a gesture of his newspaper to express anything Geoffry liked except an inclination to talk, and Geoffry passed on. He came back presently, followed by Bombaccio with a jingling tray and passed across the terrace and down the marble steps towards the tennis court. Then after a large interval of silence, came footsteps on the staircase. He turned hopefully and saw Miss Clarges in travelling dress. He stood up in spite of a faint disappointment. At any rate she was going.
“I’m off,” she said. “No chance of saying ta-ta all round. You’ll have to do it for me.”
“I hope it’s all right about the automobile.”
“God knows,” she said. “I’m going up the garden after my bags to see. Have to fuss round up there if it isn’t. Extraordinary they don’t bring a motor road right down to the house. Sacrificing comfort to gardening, I call it.”
She smiled conventionally and turned towards the entrance. Then she stopped short and became rigid. She had seen something outside there that as yet Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan could not see. ”Glory!“ she gasped.
She had forgotten Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan for an instant. Then she turned to him and saw his inquiring face. “I’ve left something in my room,” she explained, and turned tail and fled upstairs. The next moment the feet of two people became visible and then the all of them in the sunlit space uphill beyond the portico. Mrs. Rylands was approaching, and she walked like a woman in a trance and beside her in silence, looking very large and awkward and uncomfortable, was Mr. Sempack. Before the entrance, they parted without a word; Mr. Sempack stood irresolute and Mrs. Rylands came on in.
She did not seem to see Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan standing still beside the newspaper table.
She walked to the staircase and then, after a momentary pause, made her way up it, helping herself with a hand upon the banister.
For some seconds Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan remained lost in thought, and then, still thinking, he seated himself upon the newspaper table. Presently Miss Clarges appeared descending the staircase with an unwonted softness. She looked as though she might say almost anything to Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, but what she did say simply and almost confidentially was, “So long.” Then she went out into the sun-glare and vanished up the hill towards the gates upon the road.
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan shook his head slowly from side to side, disapprovingly, took counsel with his diamond ring, struggled off the table, and made his way, still thinking deeply, to his own room in the turret.
He paced his floor obliquely. It had become plain to him what had happened.
He was glad to have a little time to himself to consider the situation before facing the world. What exactly ought a fine-minded, thoroughly Europeanised American gentleman to do? Not simply that. He was really fond of his hostess. Fond enough to put his pose into a secondary place. What could he do for her?
The turret room had four windows that looked east and west and north and south and as Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan paced up and down from corner to corner, he would ever and again lift his downcast eyes, first to this pretty sunlit picture and then to that. And presently he became aware of something white, minute in perspective, something moving, far off, among the red sun-scorched rocks of the headlands to the west that came out like a scenery wing to frame the distant view of Mentone. He took a pocket monocular that lay upon his toilet table out of its case, focused it and scrutinised this distant object. It was a man in flannels scrambling along a little precipitous path that led round the cape. He moved with every symptom of haste and irritation. He slipped and recovered himself, and stood still for a moment in profile looking up at the shiny rocks, with an expression of reproachful inquiry. Unmistakably it was Philip Rylands.
He was making off. To nowhere in particular.
It was evening and Mrs. Rylands lay in bed in her unlit room. The windows were wide open but the blue serenities without were seen through a silken haze of mosquito curtain. And Mrs. Rylands was thinking.
Before lunch she had summoned Lady Catherine to her bedside and thrust most of her duties as a hostess upon her. “I’m ill,” she said. “I’ve had a shock, never mind what, dearest, don’t say a word about it, but it’s made me ill. I want to be alone, and there’s all this party!”
All Lady Catherine’s better self came uppermost. She kissed her friend. “I’ll see they get their lunch,” she said; “I and Bombaccio. It’s your privilege to be ill now, just as you please and whenever you please. And afterwards shall I pack some of them off?”
“They do very little harm,” said Mrs. Rylands. “I shall get on all right — in a bit. Get the bridge and tennis Stupids out of the house if you can — if they have somewhere to go. But don’t chase them out. They amuse each other. . . . Don’t make them uncomfortable. . . . I like to have Mr. Sempack about. I like him. When they have gone I will come down again.”
“And Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan?”
“He doesn’t matter. Just take hold of things, Kitty. I can’t arrange.”
Lady Catherine took hold of things. “Don’t you bother, Cynthia. Bombaccio and I could run four such parties.”
“Don’t want to see anyone. Just want to think.”
“I quite understand.”
A last murmur from the bed. “Don’t want to be told or asked about anything just now.”
A kiss in response and Lady Catherine had gone.
The head on the pillow snuggled under the sheet with an affectation of profound fatigue until Lady Catherine was surely out of the room, and then it was raised and looked round cautiously. Slowly, wearily Mrs. Rylands sat up again and became still, staring in front of her. The protective mask of the rather pathetic dear little thing had vanished. A very grave, very sad human being was revealed.
For a long time her mind remained stagnant. And when at last it did revive it did not so much move forward from thought to thought as sit down and contemplate her world unveiled.
She had been living in a dream, she realised, and only such a shock as this could have awakened her. She had been living in a dream wilfully. In spite of a thousand hints and intimations, she had clung to her beautiful illusions about Philip and herself and the quality of life. Now that she had not so much let go of her dream as had it torn from her hand, it began forthwith to seem incredible and remote. It was plain to her that for weeks and months she had understood Philip’s real quality — and refused to understand. She was already amazed to remember how steadfastly she had refused to understand.
When at last, late in the afternoon, a letter came from Philip, a note rather than a letter, written in pencil, it did but confirm the hard outlines of her realisations.
“My darling Cynthia,” wrote Philip. “What can I say to you, except ask you to forgive me? I suppose you think I’m an utter beast and I suppose I am an utter beast. Yet these things take one in a way you can’t understand and one finds out what seems just a lark isn’t. I do hope anyhow that whatever you say or do to me you won’t be too hard on old Puppy. It’s my fault first and foremost and all the time. It is dead against all Puppy’s code to go back on the hostess with whom she is staying in that fashion. But one thing led to another. I over-persuaded her and really we had not planned or arranged what happened. On my honour. It just came upon us. It may have been brewing in the air but I swear I didn’t plan it. We have always been pretty good friends, Puppy and me I mean, and I suppose we ought not to have done anything so risky as a swim together without anyone else. Her bathing dress tore on a nail. A pure accident. Things looked worse than they actually were. At the time it seemed just fun. Anyhow she has insisted on clearing out and she’s gone. And that’s that. I’d like to come and see you and have a talk when you feel up to it. I could kick myself to death that this should have happened to you, now above all. I feel the dirtiest of rotters. Nothing of the sort if I can help it shall ever happen again. That I swear. Forgive me and try to forget it all, for both our sakes. Your sorry Philip.”
She read that over in a whisper. “Your sorry Philip.”
She agreed.
She lay for a long time quite motionless with his note on the counterpane before her. It was exactly like him. How could she ever have imagined that he was anything else but precisely what that note displayed?
And yet he was so good-looking and with something fine — delusively fine was it? — about his face and bearing. So different from wary unreal Geoffry. Still.
Later on another letter was brought to her, a letter in a different hand, a large clear and firm script without a trace of the puerility of Philip’s still unformed writing, and this also she read and re-read. Now in the twilight she went on with the train of thought this second letter had set going.
“Dear Mrs. Rylands,” it began; “Forgive this rigmarole please that I am obliged to write to you. A sort of accident made you tell me something of your trouble and I feel perhaps you will not resent it if I write to you about it. Anyhow I must write about it even if you do not read it, because I can think of nothing else.”
She thought of his sprawling person dispersed over a writing-table, his face transfigured intently, and then came a memory of him like Pan half changed into an old olive tree of like some weather-worn Terminus, being kissed by Lady Catherine. For plainly she had been kissing him. Mrs. Rylands recalled that incident now without shock or repulsion. He was so different from her idea of a man who could love. Catherine might have been kissing an old leather-bound bible. . . .
“I want to write, if I may, as a close friend. I like and admire your husband very greatly and I like and admire you very greatly. I am, so far as you go, an old experienced man who has observed far more than he has experienced, and I think if I could make you see what has happened as I see it, it might cease to appear so conclusive and devastating an incident as perhaps it does now. It is significant enough, I admit, but indeed it is no sort of catastrophe.
“I have liked him ever since he came into the room at Roquebrune — the first time I saw him. He has exceptional vitality, energy, intelligence. He is extraordinarily young for his years. For all practical purposes he is still merely adolescent. He may still become a man of great distinction. Considering his position and opportunities he may yet play a quite considerable part in the world’s affairs.”
“That is what I had dreamt,” she said and her eyes went back to that pencil scrawl.
“What has happened does nothing to change that. There are points material to this issue which I do not think you apprehend. I do not see how they can have entered into your consciousness. I will try to put them to you — if you will be patient with me. Let me repeat, I think enormous things of your Philip. I don’t think that you made a mistake when you loved him and gave your life to him. And for you — you might be my daughter — I have that feeling, that only people who have been schooled to disinterested affection can have. I have watched you both. I care for you both deeply. I care doubly. I care for you also on account of him. I care for him also on account of you. Two fine lives are yours; two hopeful lives.”
“And then this!” she whispered and for some moments read no more.
“I want you to consider your differences. I don’t think you have ever thought about your differences. Everything has disposed you to ignore them. You are a finer thing than Philip but you are — slighter. You are completer but slighter. He is still unformed but larger and more powerful. He has the makings of a far bigger and stronger and more effective person than you can ever be. You must grant me that. I think you will grant me that. We human things; what are we? Channels through which physical energy flows into decision and act and creative achievement. There is a pitiless pressure to do. Living is doing. Life is an engine, a trap, to catch blind force and turn it into more life and build it up into greater and more powerful forms. That is how I see life. That is how you are disposed to see life. We are all under that pressure — in varying degrees. The chief business of every one of us, every one who has a consciousness of such things, is to master and direct and utilise his pressure. Most of us spend the better part of our lives trying to solve the problem of how that is to be done before all pressure of vitality is exhausted. And your Philip is under pressures, blind pressures, ten, twenty times as powerful as all the driving force in you. I hope this does not offend you?”
“There is a sort of truth in that,” said Mrs. Rylands.
“And now let me assure you he loves you. It is you he loves, have no doubt of it. And he loves you for endless things of course, but among them, chief among them, because of this, that you have self-control, you seemed to him, as you are, serene, wise, balanced, delicately poised.”
“Not now,” said Mrs. Rylands.
“He thinks, no! he realises, that you have direction, which is just what he lacks. That brought him to you perhaps first. That does and can continue to hold him to you. But that does not prevent old Nature, who has made us all out of the dust and the hot damp and the slime, pressing upon him and pressing him. He is living here in this warmth, in this abundance, far off from the business life and political life that might engage him; he came here — that is the irony of it — to be with you, to wait upon you here in the loveliest, most perfect setting. You know that was his intention. You know he has treated you sweetly and delicately. Until, as you think, you found him out.”
She nodded assent and turned the page quickly.
“But he wasn’t deceiving you. You haven’t found him out so much as he has found himself out. He meant all that devotion. If only some Angel above could have turned off the tap of his energy to a mere trickle, then this would really have been the paradise you thought it was, until to-day. But all he could do here, to be the perfect lover of your dreams, he could have done with one twentieth part of the energy that drives through his nerves and blood. You knew he was restless?”
“I thought it was this Coal Strike,” said Mrs. Rylands.
“Any voice that called to him, he had activity released to hear. And dear old Nature, horrible old Nature, has only one channel for the release of pent-up energy.”
“Horrible old Nature,” Mrs. Rylands agreed and seemed to recall some impression. Nature! So gross and yet with a queer power in her grossness, so revolting in an ugliness that sometimes became suddenly and disconcertingly holy and terribly beautiful! But what was Mr. Sempack saying?
“With you —— A man may show his love by a delicate restraint. Must indeed be very delicate and restrained. And here he was in this fermenting blaze with nothing else to do — nothing. He didn’t want to make love to any other woman. He loves nobody but you. If he had wanted to make love — consider! Lady Catherine here, is being driven towards trouble also by our tyrannous old Grandmother. There is no comparison in the loveliness of these two women. But Lady Catherine is an equal, a personality. He wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t dream of her. Because that would be a real infringement of you. That would be a real division of love. But on the other hand there was this Miss Clarges, who disavows all the accessories of sex — and is simply sexual. She is good company in the open air. She swims well and one can swim with her. Things change their emotional quality away from the house. Wet skin and sunburnt skin, movement and sunlight and a smiling face. Comes a flare-up, a desire, and a consoling and refreshing physical release. Nervous release. It can seem such a simple thing. My dear Mrs. Rylands, you may choose to think of it as horrible, you may be compelled to think of it as horrible, but indeed, I can assure you, at times it can be as healthy a thing physically as breathing mountain air. That is outside your quality, your experience, but not outside your understanding. If you care to understand; if you have the generosity to understand. But of course you have the generosity to understand. There is a case for them both. What concerns me most is the case for him.”
She put down the letter again. She had come to the end of a sheet.
“But I loved him,” she said. “This is asking too much.”
She lay still a long time. “It is asking too much,” she whispered.
She glanced again at what she had read. “Nervous release,” she re-tasted — and it tasted disgustingly.
What was wrong with Mr. Sempack — or what was wrong with her?
What were these different tunes that were being played simultaneously upon their two temperaments by the same world?
“It isn’t right,” she thought. “But I’m not clever enough, my head is not clear enough, to see where it is wrong. . . . I’m wrong too. I see I’m wrong. . . . Perhaps he’s righter than I am. . . .
“My poor little wits!”
It seemed to her that Sempack put things with a sort of reasonableness, but in a light that was strange, like the light in the tanks of Monaco Aquarium. It was as if the sun had suddenly gone green. Everything had very much the same shape but nothing had its proper colour. Everything had become deep. This man’s mind was as large and unusual as his body. She took up the next sheet and the light of Mr. Sempack’s mind seemed greener and colder and the things it illuminated deeper than ever.
“If he is to stay here centring his life wholly upon you, what is to be done with the nineteen-twentieths of his vitality that will be left over? It is not merely physical vitality we are dealing with. That might be devoted to swimming, climbing, tennis. But you cannot separate bodily and imaginative energy so completely; the one drags at the other. There is no such thing as purely physical vitality. The accumulation of energy amidst this warmth and beauty and leisure affects the imagination, demands not simply an effort but a thrill.”
There was a blank space of half a sheet.
“I am trying to expose the real Philip to you, this soul struggling with the mysteries of a body as a man struggles with an unbroken horse. And someone else also, I want to expose to you, whom perhaps you do not yet completely know, the real Cynthia Rylands. You see, I am not going to ask you to forgive him. That is the danger ahead for both of you. He will ask that, but I know better than he does in this matter, about him and about you. I want you to realise that there is nothing to forgive.”
She stopped to think that over and then read on.
“Philip is your job,” the resolute writing continued. “I see no other job in the world for you to compare with it or to replace it. Children? People overrate what a modern mother has to do for her children, as they underrate what she can do for her man. Women are for men and children are a by-product. You have given your life to Philip for better or worse, and nothing can ever take it altogether back. Try to take it back and you will leave a precious part of you to die.
“Is this true of all husbands and all wives? you may ask. No. Nothing is true of all husbands and all wives. Half the men in the world are nincompoops, and an unknown proportion of women idiots. I do not see that they and their horrid, sloppy relationships come into this discussion. Let them slop and squabble in their own way. I am thinking of two people of very fine quality and unequal energy. I am thinking of you and Philip. You can supply a protection, a charity, a help, a stability to that young man, without which he will just make the sort of mess of life natural to his type. And he is worth what you can give him. He has quality. He is Worth saving from his temperamental fate. But your first sacrifice has to be, the sacrifice of your instinctive sexual resentments. Your first effort has to be an enormous patience and charity. Your first feat has to be your realisation that much may be clean or cleansable in him, that would be, well — a little disgusting to you. I must make myself quite plain. It is not a question of your forgiving him this affair with Miss Clarges, after due repentance on his part, and going on again on your old lines with the understanding that nothing of the sort is ever going to happen again. What is before you is something much harder than that. It is a matter of bracing yourself up to the new idea that this sort of thing is likely to happen again in your lives, and that it may happen repeatedly, and however often it may happen, it has never to make the slightest diminution of your support of him or of his respect and confidence in you. While you stand over his life, you unbroken and resolute, no affair of this sort will ever wreck it. He will come back to you. You will be his fastness, his safe place. Every time more and more. But talk and think of offending and forgiving, put yourself on a level with Miss Puppy Clarges, fight her for him, peck the other hen, and shut yourself against him — in any way, in any way, and down he goes and down you go, and your two lives will dribble through a tangle of commonplace sexual quarrels and estrangements to some sort of muddling divorce or separation or compromise. . . .
“I don’t know why I write all this to you. Your brain is as fine as mine and you must know all that I am writing. As you read it it will come to your mind not as a new conviction but as the illumination of something that has always been there.
“You are Philip Rylands’ wife. In the fullest sense and to the last possible shade of meaning, you are his wife; you are a wife by nature, and the r?le of a wife is not to compete and be jealous, but to understand and serve and by understanding and serving rule. Wives are rare things in life, but you are surely one. You cannot possibly give yourself the airs of the ordinary married mistress. You have wedded yourself to your Philip — beyond jealousy — except for his sake. I can see you in no other part.”
Again came a sort of break in the writing.
“That is really all that I have to say to you. Perhaps I may add — rest assured that unless I am no judge of a man, when at last he comes to his full stature — through your protection and your help and stimulation — Rylands will be worth while. Through him you may do great things in the world and in no other way will you personally ever do great things. Because you are reflective; because your initiatives are too delicate for the weight and strains of life.”
Mr. Sempack had not signed this letter. There it ended.
After re-reading this communication Mrs. Rylands turned out her bedside lamp and lay quite motionless in the deepening twilight, and thought. Far away Mentone returned out of the evening blue that had drowned it and became a necklace of minute lights flung upon the deep azure darkness.
“He will be worth while.” Was that written to comfort her?
Worth while? Was that true? Would Phil really become that strong competent man laying a determining hand on human affairs she had once dreamt of, or were not both she and Mr. Sempack a little carried away by his good looks, by his occasional high gravity and by something generous and na?ve in his quality? . . . And also . . . Something dear about him? . . . Something very dear?
Mrs. Rylands found that she was weeping.
After all, she asked with an abrupt mental collapse, did it matter in the least if he was worth while?
“Sometimes such a dear,” she whispered.
She had thought and perhaps feared that a repulsion, a physical dislike might have crept between herself and Philip, but suddenly she realised that he was just as magnetic for her as he had ever been. She found herself longing for him to come to her, longing, irrationally, monstrously.
She would not send for him. She could not send for him. That would be too much. But she longed for him to come to her.
Downstairs an attenuated house party sat at dinner. The Mathisons and Geoffry Rylands had departed for Monte Carlo, moved and encouraged to do so by their host. Mr. Haulbowline had gone with them, making up his mind at the last moment when he realised that there might be no bridge in the evening. Unprotected by a bridge group he might have to be visible, audible and distinctive. And the Bullaces were away, dining with a dear old friend of the wife’s at Diano Marino, the widow of an army chaplain who had been killed and partially eaten, no doubt at Bolshevik instigation, by an ill-disposed panther in Bengal. To-morrow the Bullaces were going back to England. The coal situation in Britain was becoming more threatening every day and the chance of social disturbance greater. The Colonel felt that his place was in the field of danger there, and that at any moment his peculiar gifts might be in request for the taming of insurgent labour.
Miss Fenimore and Lady Grieswold were both present. In spite of some very suggestive talk from Lady Catherine their movements were uncertain. Lady Catherine had perhaps exaggerated the gravity of Mrs. Rylands’ health and her need for peace, and Miss Fenimore had felt not that she ought to go but that she ought to stay “in case someone was wanted.” Lady Grieswold held on firmly without any explanation, but Lady Catherine had reason for hoping that when it was manifest a bridge famine was inevitable her grip would relax. Though of course there was the possibility of a break away into patience. However that was to be seen.
The Tamars were due at Geneva in three days’ time and so Lady Catherine did nothing to dislodge them. They were very harmless; they had spent the day together in a long walk up the hills, had taken their lunch and she had done a water-colour sketch of the little chapel in the upper valley; they had returned just in time for dinner and heard of Mrs. Rylands’ collapse only in the drawing-room. They were quietly happy and tired and their sympathy was pleasantly free from any note of distress.
The table talk was for a time disconnected and desultory, with long pauses, and then it broke into a loose debate between Stoicism and Epicureanism, in which Mr. Sempack and Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan said nearly everything. Mr. Sempack started with a panegyric of the Stoic; it seemed to be there in his mind and it was almost as if he thought aloud. He addressed what he had to say away from Lady Catherine, markedly. His discourse seemed by its very nature to turn its back on her. Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan talked rather at Lady Catherine and Miss Fenimore, appealing to them for support by the direction of his head and smiles and gestures. The Tamars were mildly interested and ever and again at some of the flatter passages they smiled mysteriously at one another, as though, if they cared, they could put quite a different complexion on things. Philip was unaffectedly lost in thought. He did not pretend even to listen.
Lady Grieswold said little but became visibly uneasy as the discussion soared and refused to descend. She was wondering if the Tamars would like to play bridge and still more how she might give this very difficult conversation a turn that would enable her to suggest this. Perhaps they did not know how to play yet and might like to be shown — of course for quite nominal stakes. It was wonderful the things these intellectual people did not know. She never contrived to get her suggestion out for all her alertness and she went up to a bridgeless drawing-room and sat apart and felt she was a widow more acutely than she had done for many years, and retired quite early to bed showing, Lady Catherine noted with satisfaction, no disposition whatever for the consolations of the patience spread.
Mr. Sempack began in a pause, almost or altogether out of nothing. If anything could be regarded as releasing the topic its connexion was so remote that it vanished from the mind as soon as it had served its purpose. “It is remarkable,” he began, “how silently and steadily Stoicism returns to the world.”
“Stoicism!” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan and raised his fine eyebrows.
“Consolation without rewards or punishments, a pure worship of right and austerity. It came too soon into the world; it had to give place to Mithraism and Isis worship and the Christianities for two thousand years. Now— it returns to a world more prepared for it.”
“But does it return?” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan with a disarming smile.
Mr. Sempack pursued his own train of thought. “The simple consolations needed by life in an under-civilised world, the craving for exemplary punishments, rewards and compensations; those Christianity could give. And a substitutional love to make up for human unkindnesses — and failures of loyalty. . . . Not to be despised. By no means to be despised. . . . But in the cold light of to-day these consolations fade. In the cold clear light of our increasing knowledge. We cannot keep them even if we would. We strain to believe and we cannot do it. We are left terribly to the human affections in all their incompleteness — and behind them what remains for us? Endurance. The strength of our own souls.”
His voice sank so beautifully that for a moment or so Lady Catherine knew what it was to be wholly in love. What a great rock he was! What tranquil power there was in him! He divested himself of all beliefs and was not in the least afraid. He was withdrawing to his fastness from her. So far as he was able. He would not be able to do it, but it was magnificent how evidently he thought he could. Almost unconsciously she began to radiate herself at him and continued to do so for the rest of the evening whenever opportunity offered.
“But need it be Stoicism?” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan.
“What else?”
“For my part I do not feel Christianity is dead,” young Lord Tamar interpolated before Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan could reply. “Not in the least dead. It changes form but it lives.”
Lady Tamar nodded in confirmation. “It changes form,” she admitted.
Lady Grieswold made confirmatory noises, rather like the noises a very old judge might make in confirming a decision, and she took some more stuffed aubergine as if that act was in some way sacramental.
Mr. Sempack did not attend at once to these three confessions. He stared before him at the marble wall over Miss Fenimore’s head. He had an air of explaining something carefully to himself. “Christianity has prevailed,” he assured himself, “but indeed Christianity passes. Passes! — it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea-urchins and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits.”
He turned his large eye on Lady Tamar and took up her neglected remark. “If Christianity changes form, it becomes something else.”
Lord Tamar gave a little cough and spoke apologetically. ”Love,” said Lord Tamar, “remains. The spirit. Christianity is love. It is distinctively the religion of love. All the rest — is excrescence. There was no such religion before.”
Lady Tamar wanted to say “God is Love,” but her courage failed and so she blushed instead. Evidently both the Tamars felt their own remarks acutely.
“Christianity can only be a form of love,” said Mr. Sempack. “I doubt if it is that. And I doubt still more if anyone can argue that love is the highest thing in life. Is it? . . . Is it? . . . ” Lady Catherine watched him. Far over her head to things beyond, Mr. Sempack said, “No.” He developed his disavowals. “There are nobler things for the soul — the conquest of the limited self, for example, at heights and in visions and apprehensions altogether above passion. There are, I am convinced, great mountains above the little village of the affections, high and lonely places. There lies the Stoic domain. There we can camp and harbour. Stoicism, which was too great for the world when first it dawned upon men’s thoughts, comes back into life. Changed very little in essentials, but enlarged, because our vision of time and space has enlarged. It has returned so inevitably that it has returned imperceptibly. We have all become Stoics nowadays without knowing it. We have not been persuaded and convinced and converted; we just find ourselves there. We fall back by a sort of general necessity upon the dignity of renunciation and upon our subordination to a greater life. Perhaps we do not want to do it but we have to do it. What else can we do unless we play tricks with our intelligence and degrade ourselves to ‘acts of faith’? What gymnastics this century has seen since its beginning! We abandon the Christian exaggeration of the ego and its preposterous claims for an everlasting distinctiveness — perforce. We give up craving for individual recognition because we must. Loneliness. Perhaps. In a sense we are all increasingly alone. But then, since nowadays we are all increasingly something more and something less than ourselves, that loneliness is no longer overwhelming.”
This was in effect soliloquy. It may have been soundly reasoned but it had been difficult to follow. The desolate figure of little Mrs. Rylands was so vivid in his mind that he was still able to remain unresponsive to the glow he had evoked in Lady Catherine. He was talking neither to his hearers nor himself, but in imagination to that little lady upstairs against the disturbance of the lovely lady at the end of the table. He was making Cynthia his talisman against Catherine. By behaving like a wise man for Mrs. Rylands he might yet be able to arrest the deep warm currents about him and within him that were threatening to make a fool of him for Lady Catherine. The problem of that fine soul, so clear in its apprehensions and so fatally gentle in its will, flung so suddenly into a realisation of its immense unaided confrontation of the universe, was good enough to grip him. After he had written and sent her that letter he wanted to take it all back and begin all over again. Or to begin a second one and a longer. But the gong had arrested the latter impulse at the source and saved some of the material for this present allocution.
The rest of the dinner party were variously affected by his declarations. “But is one ever really alone?” asked Lord Tamar, carrying on the talk, and began to reflect upon what he was saying as he said it. What, asked a chilling voice within, what would stand by him in an ultimate isolation? If for example — but that was too horrible to think even. He glanced across the table at his wife and saw that she was longing to look at him in reply and could not do so. What stoicism, he asked himself, could help if that were stripped from him? But then, his warmer self hastened to interpolate, it could not be stripped from him because love makes things immortal! Yet what did that mean?
There came a silence. Miss Fenimore felt she had rarely enjoyed so deep and subtle a conversation. She did not understand a bit of it, but it swept her mind onward intoxicatingly. Her glasses flashed round the table for the next speaker.
This was Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan. He fingered the stem of his glass. “Now that,” he said, speaking slowly and thoughtfully, “is a point of view.”
Everyone else was relieved to find there was someone competent to take up Mr. Sempack. What Mr. Sempack had been talking about was a point of view. That was really very helpful. Attention, embodied particularly in Miss Fenimore, focused itself consciously on Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan.
“That,” Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan improved, “is a method of apprehension. I admit the decay of Christian certitude. It has gone. And I admit the dignity and greatness of the Stoic vision. Yes. But it is, after all, only one of several possible visions.” He paused and extended a fine index finger at Mr. Sempack. “Equally well you may look through the glass of another philosophy and see the world as a glad spectacle, as a winepress of sensation and happiness and sympathetic feeling and beautiful experiences. . . . ”
He was launched.
He lifted a glance to Lady Catherine. ”Loneliness is a fact,” he said; “yes. But loveliness also is a fact. Which fact do you care to make the most important, which shall be the focus of attention? You are free to choose, it seems to me, to go out of yourself if you will, rather than retreat to the innermost. Why take the loneliness of the soul rather than the loveliness of circumambient things?”
“Loneliness and Loveliness!” It was a long way from such silly talk to sound and sensible bridge, thought poor Lady Grieswold. People who had the sense to play bridge didn’t bother about such things. Awful stuff! And flouting Christianity too! Florence or Mentone? It would have to come to that. The nice people had gone.
“Against your Neo-Stoic,” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, still using his finger a little, “I set the Neo-Epicurean. I set such an attitude to the universe that a man may lament that he knows no God to thank for the infinitude of delicious things and marvellous possibilities wrapped up in the fabric of life.”
And so forth. . . .
Thus was issue joined downstairs and a long rather rambling and cloudy discussion between Stoicism and Epicureanism began. Miss Fenimore followed it from first to last with an enraptured incomprehension, while Philip brooded on his secret preoccupations and Mrs. Rylands lay upstairs on her great bed, preparing the things she had to say when at last Philip should come to her.
It was an entirely inconclusive discussion. Except that Lady Catherine, converted it would seem on the spot, presently announced herself a Stoic, to Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan’s visible surprise and distress.
Now why should she do that?
“But my dear Lady!” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan.
“Life should be stern,” said Lady Catherine triumphantly. . . .
After a time Philip, regardless of his formal duties as a host, got up and very quietly slipped away.
It seemed ever so late in the night when Philip came upstairs. He made a scarcely perceptible noise, but she was alert. “Phil dear!” she cried. “Are you there? Phil!”
He came softly out of the shadows, stood aloof for a moment, black, mysterious and silent against the blue night, and then was at the bedside. “I hoped you were asleep,” he said.
She clicked on her shaded light and the two regarded each other in a sorrowful scrutiny, perplexed with themselves and life.
“Cynthia,” he whispered. “Cynthia my darling; can you forgive?”
“Perhaps,” she panted and paused. “Perhaps there is nothing to forgive.”
“But ——?”
“Nothing that matters.”
“She’s cleared out.”
“It doesn’t matter. Don’t trouble about her. . . . You I think of.”
“I’ve been such a beast.”
“No. It happened. It had to happen. Something had to happen. You couldn’t help yourself. You’ve nothing to do here. You’ve been a prisoner here, waiting on me.”
“Oh! don’t say that. I meant to be so dear to you — my dear. But there’s something rotten in me.”
“No, no. Rotten! Dear, Phil dear, you’re not even ripe. But I’ve let you stay here. . . . ” She put out her hand and he sat himself on the bed beside her. He kissed her. “My dear,” he said. “Dear! Dear!”
“Listen,” she said and kept her hand upon him. She whispered. Both spoke in whispers. “Go to England, dear one. Things are happening there. Trouble and muddle. Men — men ought to work. You — you ought to find out. You ought to understand. You so rich and — responsible. Things have to be done. I can stay here. . . . ”
“You banish me?”
“No. This is banishment. Here. Here I can’t help you — to grow into the man you have to be. Not now. I’ve got to be three parts vegetable for a bit now — and then a sort of cow. No fit companion for a growing man. I don’t mind, dear. It’s worth it. It’s what I’m for. It had to be. But you —you go home to England now. You can’t stand idleness. You can’t stand these long empty days.”
He released her and sat thinking it out.
After a long pause he said, “I think you are right. I ought to go.”
“Yes —go.”
“We’ve got all the Red Valley property. All that Yorkshire stretch. The Vale of Edensoke. A third perhaps of the Rylands millions is in coal. I ought to know about it. I’ve let the older men, Uncle Robert and the others, do what they pleased.”
Now that was a man!
“Go for that,” she said. “Go for the sake of that.”
He turned his eyes to her. She did her best to look at him with a grave, quiet, convincing face and her strength was not enough. Suddenly the calm of her countenance broke under her distress and she wept like a struck child.
“Oh my dear!” he cried in an agony of helplessness; “that I should hurt you now! What have I done to you?” and threw his arms about her and drew her up close to him, very close to him, and kissed the salt tears.
“Poor Phil!” she clung to him weeping, smoothing his hair with one hand. “Dear Phil!”
End of Book One
For a brief interval it seemed probable that the dispersal of the party would be even more thorough than Mrs. Rylands and Lady Catherine had contemplated. Mr. Sempack, after what would appear to have been a troubled night, proclaimed his intention of going back to Nice forthwith to get some books and carry them off with him to Corsica.
His explanations lacked lucidity. He was not a good enough liar to invent a valid reason for going to Corsica. Lady Catherine, very subtly, left him to Mrs. Rylands, who summoned him secretly to the little sitting-room next her bedroom and received him in a beautiful flowery Chinese silk wrapper, and told him how she had looked forward to talking to him when the others had gone. She reduced him to the avowal that his motive in going was “mere restlessness,” contrived to convert the Corsican project into a few days’ walking from some centre upon the Route des Alpes, and made him promise to come back so soon as he had walked himself calm.
Neither she nor he made the slightest attempt to account for his restlessness. She accepted it as a matter of course. So with a slightly baffled air, carrying a knapsack and a small valise and leaving his more serious luggage as it were in pawn, Mr. Sempack took the local train for Nice.
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan was also affected by the general dislodgment. He discovered or invented a friend — Mrs. Rylands was in doubt which — a friend he had not met for years at that jolly hotel with the convex landlord at Torre Pellice up above Turin, and remained oscillating on the point of departure for some days — without actually going, keeping the friend in reserve.
The only irremovable visitor indeed was dear Miss Fenimore, who made it apparent, quietly but clearly, that she had never yet been in at the birth of a baby and this time nothing whatever would induce her to abandon her place in the queue. She was resolved to be useful and devoted and on the spot, and nothing but two or three carbinieri seemed likely to dislodge her. Lady Grieswold after circling vaguely about the ideas of Mentone or even Florence was drawn down by the centripetal force of the green tables to a not too expensive pension at Beausoleil.
The Tamars went off a day earlier than they had intended, they were taking a night at Cannes en route to stay with the Jex-Hiltons and talk to a distinguished refugee from Fascism whose house had been burnt, whose favourite dog had been skinned alive, and who had been twice seriously injured with loaded canes and sandbags on account of some mild criticism of the current regime. Lord Tamar had hitherto been too diplomatic to express even a private opinion of Mussolini, but he felt that possibly it might give pause to that energetic person’s dictatorial tendencies to learn that one or two English people of the very best sort were not in the very least afraid to meet his victims and make pertinent enquiries about him.
Colonel and Mrs. Bullace had some difficulties about their wagon-lit and went a day later than they had proposed. The Colonel threw a tremendous flavour of having been recalled over his departure. The vague suggestion that some sort of social struggle of a definitive sort was brewing in England grew stronger and stronger as his farewells came nearer. Philip came down to find him discoursing to his wife and Miss Fenimore and Lady Grieswold, who was going with the Bullaces as far as Monte Carlo.
“This coal difficulty is neither the beginning nor the end of the business,” he was saying. “Rest assured. We know. It is just the thin end of the Moscow wedge. They’ve been watched. They’ve been watched. Intelligence against intelligence.”
He would have preferred not to have had Philip join his audience, but he stuck to his discourse. Bombaccio brought his master his coffee and Philip sat back, hands in his trouser pockets, staring deeply at his guest.
“You really think,” said Miss Fenimore. “You really think ——?”
“We know,” said the Colonel. “We know.”
“Is this the social revolution again?” asked Philip.
“It would be, if we were not prepared.”
“But what are you prepared for?” asked Philip. “What do you think is going to happen? To need you at home?”
“The British working man, Sir, has to take smaller wages and work longer hours — and he won’t. Ever since the war and Lloyd George’s nonsense, he’s been too uppish. And he has to climb down. He’s got to climb down before he topples things over. That’s the present situation. And behind it — the Red Flag. Moscow.”
“Surely this coal business is a question in itself. We have the Coal Commission Report. The owners have haggled a bit about things and the men are inclined to be stiff, but there’s nothing that can’t be got over, so far as I can see. It’s a case of give and take. Baldwin is doing his utmost to bring the parties together and arrange a settlement and a fresh start. Won’t he get it? I don’t see where your social conflict is to come in.”
“I will explain,” said Colonel Bullace, and cleared his throat. He turned and rapped the table. “There will be no coal settlement.”
“Why?”
“Neither the miners nor the coal-owners will agree to anything.”
“Well?”
“Then there will be a lock-out and then — we know what they are up to all right — and then there will be a strike — of all the workers — yes, of all the workers in the country, a new sort of strike, Sir, a general strike, a political strike, an attempt at ——” The Colonel paused and then gave the words as it were in italics —“Red Revolution!”
“In England!”
Philip’s voice betrayed his unfathomable faith in British institutions.
“We know it. We know it from men like Thomas, sensible men. Too sensible for the riff-raff behind ’em. The hotheads, the Moscow crew, have had this brewing for some time. Don’t think we’re not informed. It has been their dream — for years. This coal trouble won’t be settled, rest assured, and I for one, don’t want to see it settled. No, Sir. The fight has to come and it may as well come now while we have men, real red-blooded men like Churchill and Joynson-Hicks and Birkenhead, to fight it through.
“Thrice is he armed who hath his quarrel just — yes.
“But Thricer he who gets his blow in fust.”
Colonel Bullace pronounced these words in ringing tones, nodded his head, and gave his host a stern grimly masticating profile until he caught his wife’s eye. His wife’s eye had been seeking capture for some time, and now, assisted by an almost imperceptible pantomime it said, “egg — moustache.” Colonel Bullace made the necessary corrections with as little loss of fierceness as possible.
“You mean,” said Philip, “that when Baldwin calls the conference of owners and men and tells them to make peace on the lines of the coal commission, he is, in plain English, humbugging — marking time for something else to happen? Something else about which he cannot be altogether unaware.”
“Mr. Baldwin is a good man,” said the Colonel. “But he does not fully realise what we are up against.”
Mrs. Bullace nodded. “He doesn’t know.”
“We do,” said the Colonel. “The General Strike, the Social Revolution in England is timed for the first of May, this first of May. The attack is as certain as the invasion of Belgium was in August 1914.”
A diversion was made by the appearance of Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan in the beautiful tussore suit. He hovered in the doorway. “Don’t tell me,” he expostulated, “that you are talking coal, in the midst of this delicious heat!”
He sauntered to the open terrace, rubbing the faultless hands, and returned to confide — with just one greenish glint of the diamond — his need of a plentifully sugared grape-fruit to Bombaccio’s satellite. He indicated the exact height of the sugar. “Zucchero. Allo montano. Come questa.”
Philip got up, hesitated towards the terrace and then went into the hall and upstairs to his wife’s room.
Both Philip and Cynthia had a feeling that they had much to communicate to each other and neither knew how to set about communicating. She even thought of writing him a long carefully weighed letter; it was a trick her father had in moments of crisis, retreat to his study, statements, documentation, distribution; her brain kept coining statements and formul?, but it seemed useless to write a long letter to some one who was so soon to depart and make letters the only means of intercourse. Moreover he kept drifting in and out of her sitting-room and sitting beside her couch, so that she had no time for any consecutive composition. He would pat her and caress her gently, sit about her room, fiddle with things on her dressing-table or take up and open books and then put them down again, and he would sometimes sit still and keep silence for five minutes together. He had a way of getting up when he had anything to say and walking about while he said it, and he seemed never to expect her to answer at once to anything he said. And if they were walking in the garden then on the contrary he would stop to deliver himself, and afterwards pick a flower or throw a pebble at a tree. As soon as Lady Grieswold and the Bullaces and Tamars were well out of the way, and the weekly visiting-day when the chars-a-bancs poured their polyglot freight through the garden was past, she came down out of her seclusion and walked about the paths and stairways with him and sat and talked here and there. They never seemed to thresh anything out and yet when at last he too had gone, she began to realise that they had, in phrases and fragments, achieved quite considerable exchanges. Three separate times he had said: “You’ve never looked so lovely as you do now,” which did not at all help matters forward but still seemed somehow to make for understanding.
She detected in herself a disposition to prelude rather heavily, to say often and too impressively: “Philip, dear; there is something I want to say ——” She hated herself every time she found that this preluding tendency had got her again, and had foisted itself upon her in some new, not instantly avoidable variation.
Yes, things were said and there were answers and acceptances. In the retrospect things fell into place and the remark of the late afternoon linked itself to the neglected suggestion of the morning. He had attended to her observations more than she had supposed, and expressed himself she realised with a fragmentary completeness.
Among the things she thought had been got over between herself and Philip was the recognition of their personal difference. They had to understand that their minds worked differently. Mr. Sempack had made that very plain to her, plainer even than he had intended, and she meant to make it very plain to Philip. Philip would have to make allowances for her in the days ahead. It was not only she who had to make allowances for Philip. They had to see each other plain. Illusions were all very well for lovers but not for the love of man and wife.
“I worry more with my mind over things than you do,” she had struggled with it. “Your mind bites and swallows; you hardly know what has happened, but mine grinds round and round. I’m an intellectualiser.”
“You’re damned intelligent,” said Philip loyally.
“That’s not so certain, Phil. I not only think a thing but I’ve got to think I’m thinking it. I’ve got to join things on one to the other. I’ve got to get out my principles and look at them, before I judge anything Philip, has it ever dawned on you that I’m a bit of a prig?”
“You!” cried Philip. “My God!”
He was so horrified; she had to laugh. “Dear, I am,” she said. “I don’t forget myself in things. You do. But I’m always there, with my set of principles complete, in the foreground — or the frame if you like — of what I’m thinking about. You can’t get away from it, if you are like that.”
“You’re no prig,” said Philip. “What has put that into your head?”
“And so far as I can see,” she said, “it’s no good making up your mind not to be a prig if you are a prig. That’s only going one depth deeper into priggishness.”
Philip had one of his flashes. “Still that’s not so bad as making up your mind that you won’t make up your mind not to be a prig, you little darling. This — all this is adorable and just like you. You are growing up in your own fashion, and so perhaps am I. I’ve always loved your judgments and your balance. . . . How little we’ve talked since our marriage! How little we’ve talked! And I always dreamt of talking to you. Before we married I used to think of us sitting and talking — just like this.”
That was a good phase of their time to recall. And she recalled it, with a number of little things he said later, little things that came back again and again to this question of some method, some reasoned substance, in their relationship that she had broached in this fashion. At times he would say things that amounted to the endorsement and acceptance of her own gently hinted criticisms. It was queer how he gave them back to her, enlarged, rather strengthened.
“Of course,” said Philip, half a day later; “all this taking things for granted is Rot — sheer Rot. Everyone ought to think things out for himself. Everyone. Coal strike. Everything. How lazy — in our minds I mean — people of our sort are! We seem to take it all out of ourselves keeping fit. . . . Fit for nothing.”
And: “Empty-minded. I suppose that people never have been so empty-minded as our sort of people are now. Always before, they had their religion. They had their intentions to live in a certain way that they thought was right. Not simply just jazzing about. . . . ”
It was extraordinary with what completeness he grasped and accepted her long latent criticisms of their life in common. “Puppy,” he remarked, “only put the lid on. I see I must get clear. The damned thing of it, wasn’t that at all. It was the drift. The day after day. The tennis. Just anything that happened.”
He had seized upon her timid and shadowy intimations to make a definite project for their intercourse while he was away. “Prig or no prig,” they were to explain their beliefs to each other, clear up their ideas, “stop the drift.” They were to write as fully and clearly as possible to each other. “God and all that,” he said. It didn’t matter.
“I’ve never written a letter, a real letter, I mean about serious things, in my life. I shall try and write about ’em now to you. Just as I see them over there. I shan’t write love-letters to you — except every now and then. Lill’ nonsense, just in passin’. I shall write about every blessed thing. Every blessed thing.
“You mustn’t laugh at the stuff I shall send you. It will clear my mind. People of our sort ought to be made to write things down what we believe. Just to make sure we aren’t fudging.”
Walking up and down with her in the broad path beyond the stone of the sweet Lucina, he remarked at large, loudly and with no sequence: “Prig be damned!”
And also he said: “A woman is a man’s keeper. A wife is a man’s conscience. If he can’t bring his thoughts to her — she’s no good at all.
“No real good.”
Then a confession. “I always thought of talking about things with you. When first I met you. We did talk rather. For a bit.”
Her fullest memory was of him late at night on the balcony outside her sitting-room. She was lying on a long deck-chair and he stood leaning against the parapet, jerking things at her, going from topic to topic, lighting, smoking, throwing away cigarettes.
“Cynthia,” he asked abruptly, “what do you think about Socialism and all that sort of thing?”
So comprehensive a question found her unprepared. One was trained at school, he went on, to think “that sort of thing.” Rot and not think any more about it. But it wasn’t Rot. There was such a thing as social injustice. Most people didn’t get a fair deal. They didn’t get a dog’s chance of a fair deal.
He stepped to another aspect.
“Have you ever thought of our sort of life as being mean, Cynthia?”
Latterly she had. But she wanted him to lead the talking and so she answered: “I’ve always assumed we gave something back.”
“Yes. And what do we give back?”
“We ought to give back ——” She paused.
“More than we do.”
“Considering what they get,” he said. “Rather!
“F’r instance,” he began and paused.
The moon with an imperceptible swiftness was gliding clear of the black trees and he stood now, a dim outline against a world of misty silver, taut and earnest, leaning against her balustrade. “I’ve been trying to make out this coal story for myself,” he said. “Rather late in the day seeing how deep in coal we are. But I’ve always left things to Uncle Robert and the partners. I grew up to the idea of leaving things to Uncle Robert.”
The face of Uncle Robert, Lord Edensoke, the head of the Rylands clan, came before her eyes, a hard handsome face, rather like Philip, rather like Geoffry; she could never determine in her own mind which he was most like. He was the autocrat of the Rylands world and she fancied a little hostile to her marriage. It was very easy to understand how Philip had grown up to the idea of leaving things to Uncle Robert.
“I don’t like the story,” Philip was saying.
“You know, Cynthia, it’s a greedy history, on our part.
“I wish old Sempack hadn’t trotted off in the way he did. I’d have liked to have had a lot of this out with him. That old boy has a kind of grip of things. I’m getting his books. I suppose it was just his tact took him off. He noticed something. Of that trouble. Thought we might want a bit of time together. We did. But I’d have liked to have had his point of view of a lot of things. We coal-owners f’r instance.
“You know, Cynthia, in the coal trouble, we coal-owners don’t seem to have done a single decent thing. I mean to say a generous thing. I mean we just stick to our royalties. We get in the way and ask to be bought off. I think you ought to read a bit of this Royal Commission Report. It’s in the file of the Manchester Guardian downstairs. I’ll mark you some papers. There’s the Commission’s report and the Labour Plan and various schemes and they’re all worth reading. These are things we ought to read. It’s a Tory Commission, this last one. The other wasn’t. The Justice Sankey one. But the things this Report is kind of obliged to say of us. Ever so gently, but it gets them said. The way we hang on. And get. I never saw it before. I suppose because I’ve never looked. Been afraid of being called a prig perhaps. Taking life too seriously and all that. But when you look straight at it, and read those papers — which aren’t Bolshevik, which aren’t even Labourite, mind you — you see things.”
He faced the socialist proposition. ”Are we parasites?” he asked.
Out of something he called their “net production” of coal, Rylands and Cokeson got in royalties and profits seventeen per cent. “Royalties by right and profits by habit,” he said. She made a mental note to find out about net production.
He laughed abruptly. “I’m talking to-night. I seem to be doing all the talking. Just outpouring.”
“Oh! I’ve wanted you to talk,” she said. “For all our life together I’ve been wondering —— What does he think? What does he feel? I mean about these things — these things that really matter. And this is how you feel. It’s so true, my dear, we don’t give enough. We’re not good enough. We take and we don’t repay.”
“But even if we did all we could, how could we repay?”
“We could at least do all we could.”
He stood quite still for a time and then came over to her. He bent down over her and sat down beside her, he kissed her face, cool and infinitely delicate in the moonlight, and crumpled up beside her chaise-longue, a dark heap with a pale clear profile, and his ear against her hand. She loved the feel of his ear.
“My dear, it’s so amazing!“ he whispered. “When we begin to look at ourselves. To see how near we may be to the things they say of us in Hyde Park.”
He brooded. “Getting all we do out of the country and doing nothing for it. A bit of soldiering in the war — but it was the Tommies got the mud and the short commons. And things like that. . . . What else have I done for — this?”
This in his whispered voice was all the beauty in their lives, this warm globe of silver and ebony in which they nestled darkly together.
“Presently I am expected to sit for Sealholme — just to make sure nobody gets busy with our royalties. . . .
“Suppose I stood for Sealholme on the other side!
“It is funny to wake up, so to speak, and find myself with all this socialism running about in my head.”
He rubbed his ear and cheek against her hand as a cat might do. “Is it you, has given me this socialism? I must have caught it from you.”
She pinched his ear softly. “You’ve been thinking.”
“If it isn’t you, it’s ——”
He paused for her to fall into his trap.
“Sempack,” she guessed.
“Bullace,” he said. “Queer beast. Something between an ass and a walrus. Egg on his moustache. But he gave the show away. All his talk about labour — and keeping labour down. So utterly mean. Bluster and meanness. Yes. But how does Bullace stand to Uncle Robert? . . .
“Where does Uncle Robert come in?”
Long silence.
“You are the rightest thing in the world, Cynthia. I’ve not given you a fair chance with me. I’ve never given us a fair chance with ourselves. We have to think things out. All this stuff. Where we are and what we are.”
He sighed.
“And then I suppose what we have to do.”
He went off at a tangent. “My Cynthia. I love you.”
“My dear“ she whispered and drew his head into the crook of her arm against her crescent breast and kissed his hair.
“Two kids. That’s been the pose. Pretty dears! Lovely to see how happy they are. Uncle Robert will see to things. But not such kids. Not such kids that we can’t spend twenty-two thousand a year on ourselves and bring a child into the world. What am I? Twenty-nine! . . . Too much of this darling kid business. We’re man and woman, caught unprepared. . . . ”
He had a flash of imagination. “Suppose I went and looked over this balcony and down there in the black shadows under the palm trees I saw the miners who pay for this house, with their lanterns, cramped as they are in the mine, creeping forward, step by step, picking and sweating through the shadows, eh? Chaps younger than me. Boys some of ’em. And suppose one or two of ’em looked up! . . .
“God! the things I don’t know! The things I’ve never thought about! The hours of perfect health I’ve spent on that cursed tennis court while all this trouble was brewing! . . . When you and I might have been talking and learning to understand!”
Astounding this burst of pent-up radicalism! How long had it been accumulating?
Brooding, reading, thinking; how silent he had been! And then these ideas, these very decisive ideas — for all their inchoate expressiveness.
So soon as Philip had departed it was Mrs. Rylands’ intention to begin a great clearing and tidying-up of her mind. She was delighted but also she was a little alarmed at her husband’s fall into violent self-criticism and his manifest resolve to think things out for himself. She felt that he might very easily outrun her in mental thoroughness, once he set his face in that direction, and so she would get as far along the road as she could before he could overtake her. She condemned other people for Stupidity, perhaps, too readily, but what if she were put to the question? How far from the indefensibly Stupid were the philosophical and religious assumptions upon which she rested? What really could she say she believed about the world? What did she think she was living for, if so comprehensive a question chanced to be put to her? And if she could so far accept that question as to imagine it put to her, wasn’t she in conscience bound to set about preparing her answer?
One of her Oxford cousins, some years ago, had made her a very pleasant and tantalising present of three books of blank paper, very good hand-made paper, gilt edged along the top and bound in green leather. She had resolved at once to write all sorts of things in these books, so many sorts of things, that still the pages remained virgin. But now was a great occasion. She had brought them with her to Italy. She looked for them and found them and took out one of these little volumes and handled it and turned its pages over. In this new phase of existence she had entered, she found her pleasure in the sense of touch much increased and it seemed to her that her delight in fine and pretty things was greater than it had ever been before. She almost caressed the little book and stood before her window holding it with both hands dreaming of the things she would put into it. She saw, though not very distinctly, pregnant aphorisms and a kind of index to her knowledge and beliefs spreading over those nice pages. The binding was quite beautifully tooled, the leather had a faint, exquisite smell and the end paper was creamy, powdered with gold stars, all held together by a diamond mesh.
She mused a great deal about what she would write first, but for a time she could not sit down to think out anything to the writing stage because Catherine would insist on talking to her. Hitherto she and Catherine had got on very well together but without any excesses of directness or intimacy. She had always accepted the view of her husband and his set that Catherine was “all right” and more sinned against than sinning, but she had never been disposed to wander imaginatively in those romantic tangles which made Catherine’s passions, it would seem, so different from her own.
Catherine’s role was to be a gallant and splendid beauty, a summoner and a tester of men. Men who were going east turned west at her passing and, for better or worse, were never quite the same men again. She had summoned and tested her wealthy husband until he had become an almost willing respondent, with a co-respondent of no importance, and left her the freest woman in the world. What she did was right; the essential purity of her character was not so much accepted as waved before the world like a flag. She did quite a lot of things. Cynthia had shirked her confidences because among other reasons she felt that it would make her own relations to Philip seem too abject. But the confidences came.
“I’d like to take you in the car along the upper Corniche and up to Puget-Théniers or Annot to-day,” she said. “It would do us both good. Everybody going has left me — jangling.”
“We might run against your Mr. Sempack,” said Cynthia. “Annot? Aren’t the Verdon gorges somewhere there?”
“I don’t see why all the blue mountains of France should be closed to us because Mr. Sempack is wandering about with a knapsack in a bad temper trying to remember something he has never as a matter of fact forgotten.”
Mrs. Rylands made no effort to understand. “We’d have to ask Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan to come,” she remarked.
Lady Catherine by a beautiful grimace expressed an extreme aversion to Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan. “This little sitting-room of yours is the only refuge. . . . ‘Dear Lady,’ he says. . . . Why doesn’t he go off to that other cultivated American of his at Torre Pellice?”
She became derogatory of Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan.
“I saw him from my window. He was walking along the path to the marble faun and he was waving that hand of his and bowing. All to himself. I suppose he was rehearsing some new remark.”
Her mind went off at a tangent. “Cynthia,” she said. “Do you think a man like Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan ever makes love to women — I mean, really makes love — actually?”
Mrs. Rylands declined to take up the speculation. Meanwhile Lady Catherine threw out material. “He may be seventy. Of course he’s pickled for fifty-five. He’d say things. Elegant things. Gallantry’s in the man. He’d say everything there had to be said perfectly — but then? . . . ” She brooded malignantly on possible situations.
“I suppose men go on with the forms of love-making right to the end of their lives — just like a hen runs about when its head’s chopped off.”
She came round through such speculations to what was evidently her disturbing preoccupation. “Now Mr. Sempack talks,” she said.
She plunged. “What do you think of Mr. Sempack, Cynthia? What do you think of him? What do you think of a man like that? There’s an effect of strength and greatness about him. And yet what does he do? Is he a snare and a delusion?”
She seated herself on the end of the sofa, side-saddle fashion with one foot on the floor, and regarded her friend expectantly.
“What are you up to with Mr. Sempack?” said Cynthia.
“Quarrelling.”
Mrs. Rylands would not take that as an answer. She remained quietly interrogative.
“He exasperates me,” said Lady Catherine.
“Everyone,” she went on, “seems to look up to him and respect him. Everyone, that is, who’s heard of him. Why? He’s tremendously big and I suppose there’s something big about the way he looks at the world and talks about progress, and treats all we are doing as something that will be all over in no time and that cannot matter in the least, but, after all, what does all this towering precipice sort of business amount to? He isn’t really a precipice. I suppose if some one up there in the mountains held him up and demanded his pocket-book, he’d do something about it. He couldn’t just try to pass it off with the remark that robbers would be out-of-date in quite a few centuries’ time and so it didn’t matter. Especially if they hit him or something.”
Mrs. Rylands was smilingly unhelpful.
“I believe he’d hit back,” said Lady Catherine.
“I don’t see why he shouldn’t,” said Mrs. Rylands.
“He’d be clumsy but he might hit hard. He’s one of those queer men who seem to keep strong without exercise. Unless walking is exercise.”
Mrs. Rylands offered no contributions.
“He seems to think women are like raspberries in a garden. You pick one as you go past, but you don’t go out of your way for her.”
“I can’t imagine a Mrs. Sempack.”
“It’s a bit of an exercise,” said Lady Catherine. “Rather like that awful hat of his, she’d be. Or his valise. Put up on the luggage rack, left in the consigne, covered with rags of old labels, jammed down and locked violently with everything inside higgledy-piggledy. And yet —— What is it, Cynthia? There’s something attractive about that man.”
“One or two little things I’ve observed,” reflected Cynthia absently, looking down at the dear green leather book in her hand. Then she regarded her friend.
Lady Catherine coloured slightly. “I admit it,” she said. “I suppose it’s just because he’s so wanting in visible delicacy. It gives him an effect of being tremendously male. He is that. Don’t you think that’s it, Cynthia? And something about him — as though there were immense forces still to be awakened. His voice; it’s a good voice. And something that smoulders deep in his eyes.”
Mrs. Rylands suddenly resolved to become aggressive.
“Catherine! Tell me; why did he go away from here?”
“That’s exactly what I want to know. He meant to go for good.”
“That’s why you made me see him.”
“I thought it was your place to see him.”
Mrs. Rylands put her head on one side and regarded her friend critically. “Did you make love to him —much?”
Lady Catherine’s colour became quite bright. “I want to see, my dear, what that man is like awake. I am curious. Like most women. And he hesitates and then runs away — to walk about Gorges! He did — hesitate. But this flight! . . . And here am I— left — with nothing in the world to do! . . . Except of course look after dear little you. Who’re perfectly able to look after yourself.”
Mrs. Rylands smiled with a perfect understanding at her friend. “And talk about him.”
“Well, he interests me.”
“You made love to him — and startled and amazed him. Why did you do it? You didn’t want to be Lady Catherine Sempack?”
“I want to make that man realise his position in the world. Making love — isn’t matrimony. One can be interested.”
It occurred to Lady Catherine that, in view of recent events, she might be wandering near a sore point. But Mrs. Rylands’ next remark showed her fully able to cover any sore point that might be endangered.
“Catherine — I don’t want to know about things I’m not supposed to know about — but isn’t there some one in England called Sir Harry Fearon-Owen? Who always goes about with his hyphen? Hasn’t he some sort of connexion ——?”
Lady Catherine concealed considerable annoyance rather imperfectly. She took a moment or so before she replied compactly.
“He’s in England. And he’s busy. Too busy even to write to his friends.”
“He’s preparing to save England from the Communist revolution, isn’t he? He’s one of Colonel Bullace’s great idols. The Colonel talked about him.”
Lady Catherine allowed herself to be reluctantly drawn off the Sempack scent.
“It’s amazing the things men will take seriously. Do you believe there is any sense in this talk about a revolution? Harry’s great stunt is the National Service League. As you probably know. Plans for doing without the workers in all the public services and that sort of thing — if it comes to a fight. I liked him. For a time. He’s a very good sort. And handsome. With a voice. Opera tenor blood perhaps — it saves him from being dull. But I can’t go on being in love with a man who’s in love with a Civil War, that nobody in his senses believes will happen.”
Lady Catherine wriggled off her sofa end and went to the window. She felt that Cynthia by dragging in Sir Harry had deliberately spoilt a good conversation. She still had a lot of speculative matter about Sempack in her mind that she would have liked to turn over. She had hardly begun. And the Fearon-Owen affair had got itself a little disjointed and wasn’t any good for talking about.
“These glorious empty days!” she said without any apparent perception of the trees and flowering terraces and sapphire sea below.
She stood against the blue for a time quite still.
She came back into the room and hung a shadowy loveliness over her recumbent hostess.
“If I thought there was a word of truth in this Great Rebellion of the Proletariat I’d be off to England by the night train.”