The Last September (2 page)

The Blue Room was of course empty; with no one to listen. The trunks had been carried up and set down, unstrapped, at the foot of the wide bed. The room smelt of bleaching cretonnes and ten days’ emptiness; curtains in a draught from the door made a pale movement. Lois had put a vase of geraniums on the dressing-table; now she admired their cubes in delicate balance spraying against the light. And there was the festival air of those candles, virgin, with long white wicks. Two armchairs faced round intently into the empty grate with its paper fan—in them Mr. and Mrs. Montmorency would sit perhaps, to discuss the experiences of the day. More probably, they would talk in bed. One of the things Lois chiefly wanted to know about marriage was—how long it took one, sleeping with the same person every night, to outlive the temptation to talk well into the morning? There would be nothing illicit about nocturnal talking, as there had been at school; no one would be entitled to open a door sharply with: “Now go to sleep now, you two; that’s enough for tonight,” as had so often happened on her visits to friends. Would conversation, in the absence of these prohibitions, cease to interest? Lois had heard of couples who disturbed each other by breathing and preferred to occupy different rooms: no allowance was made for such couples at Danielstown. The Blue Room dressing-room furniture was marble-topped to allow for spills or breakages of a gentleman’s bottles, and there was a virile
bootrack for every
possible kind of boot. Lois, doubtfully, had put moss-roses on Mr. Montmorency’s table.

“Didn’t it occur to you,” said Laurence, “that they couldn’t possibly have gone through without my seeing them?”

Lois came out and shut the door of the spare-room. “But panic,” she said, “is beyond one. Things like that are so awful. I shall never forget discussing a Miss 
Elliot—a very musical woman—with Livvy or someone, out here, and my dear,
she
was in there the whole time, and being English and honourable, began to rattle her chest of drawers. I could hardly look at her straight for the rest of the visit. However, she also covered herself with confusion, because she put all her vases of flowers outside her door at night, and Brigid fell over them bringing the morning tea. Aunt Myra was terribly irritated and talked about nursing homes.”

“I shouldn’t expect there will be anything so very hygienic about Mrs. Montmorency.”

“Damn,” said Lois, looking disproportionately worried and moving off towards her own room suddenly. “I have got letters to finish.” Speaking of Brigid had reminded her that there were letters on regimental note-paper lying about all over her room and that Brigid, who took an interest, would be likely to see them when she came up with the hot water. Not that they mattered really, but at the thought of the letters some people wrote her she did feel rather a fool.

Laurence had pale blue, rather prominent eyes that moved slowly, though the rest of his movements were jerky. Looking up at her now with a not unaware kind of blandness he said: “Do tell me, what do you write about?”

“Life in general.”

“You amaze me—now if I did write letters no one would read them if they were not intelligent. You must have the golden touch.”

“Naturally one is expected to be amusing.”

“And how many subalterns do you write to?”

This was disconcerting, also, she felt strongly, irrelevant. If these young men wrote to her, they were unimportant; besides, she only answered every third letter. These young men, concrete, blocking her mental view by their extreme closeness, moved shadowless in a kind of social glare numbing to the imagination. Whereas Mr. Montmorency came out distinct from the rather rare gloom with which she invested her childhood, her feeling for him providing agreeable matter for introspection. However much he might loom and darken up to the close-up view, he would never be out of focus.

“How many?” said Laurence again, picking up his book but still looking at her inexorably. The unkindest thing he had called her friend Livvy Thompson was— “a rather probable channel for the life-force,” and really when he asked questions of this kind she did not know what he must think.

But it was reticence as to a lack rather than as to a superabundance that produced her embarrassment.

“Three—no two,” she said coldly, “because one of them is a captain.”

Going into her room she shut the door. Laurence got up and walked round the anteroom. For the hundredth time he looked disparagingly along the backs of the books in the locked bookcases. Then he heard his aunt and Mrs. Montmorency beginning to come upstairs.

THE Naylors
and the Montmorencys had always
known each other; it was an affair of generations. Hugo had stayed at Danielstown as a boy for months together, and knew the place as well as his own house, he told Francie, and certainly liked it better. He had expressed this preference, which had come as a shock to her, when they were first engaged. She was pained as by an expression of irreligion. She consoled herself and rehabilitated him secretly by remembering he had had a stepfather and could never have known the meaning of family life—she had a delicate woman’s strong feeling for “naturalness.” She intended to make up to him for the deficiencies of his childhood, but, almost immediately after their marriage, Hugo sold Rockriver. Now she would always blame herself for not having dissuaded him, but he had been so set at the time on an idea of going to Canada and she so foolishly anxious to compensate him for what she was not by going there with him and thriving. So when the idea of Canada failed they had no home, and she, after all, no vocation. As for Hugo, he had expected little of life.

Francie had heard all her life of the Naylors of
Danielstown; her cousins and theirs had married; but Ireland is large and she had not met them till she came to Danielstown on a bridal visit. Then, of course, they had known each other always; there had been no beginning. She knew she had never in all her life been so happy as on that first visit; time, loose-textured, had had a shining undertone, happiness glittered between the moments. She had had, too, very strongly a sense of return, of having been awaited. Rooms, doorways had framed a kind of expectancy of her; some trees in the distance, the stairs, a part of the garden seemed always to have been lying secretly at the back of her mind.

It was, also, on that first and only other visit, that she had made friends with Myra—that in itself was memorable. Myra was “interesting,” cultivated, sketched beautifully, knew about books and music. She had been to Germany, Italy, everywhere that one visits acquisitively. It had been a bond to discover that Francie and Myra must have been in Germany at the same time, the summer of ‘92, though without meeting. Myra was the same age as Francie—they had been presented the same year, though not at the same Drawing-room—and thought of Hugo as quite a boy: she could not help showing it. Sometimes, guessing what she had shown, she would laugh and say something clever and quite
irrelevant to cover the awk
wardness. For Hugo was ten years younger than both of them, Francie’s husband.

Francie and Myra had had long remarkable talks about almost everything, confidential if not alarmingly intimate—walking, driving, on the seat by the Caroline allspice tree and at the head of the stairs at night—where their candle-flames stooped from their vehemence.

When at the end of that visit the Montmorencys left Danielstown this had seemed to Francie more of a pause than a break in the continuity. “Next spring,” they all four promised each other, shaking hands and kissing at the foot of the steps—It was then autumn, the bronze trees were sifted through by the wind and shivered along the outlines— “Next summer, Hugo,” Myra exclaimed,
“at latest
!” and the last view they had of her was as standing bright and imperative. Only as they drove away did the trees run watery into the sky and Francie’s lids prick: she slipped her hand into Hugo’s under the rug. And, pressing it, he had alone to continue the business of turning and yearning and waving back till a bend in the avenue.

She had felt, perhaps, a chilly breath from the future. Between their smart turning out, with a roll of carriage-wheels, through the gates with their clipped laurels, and their swerving in with a grind of motor brakes twelve years afterwards, nothing large was to intervene. Their life, through which they went forward uncertainly, without the compulsion of tragedy, was a net of small complications. There was the drag of his indecisions, the fine snapping now and then of her minor relinquishments. Her health, his temperament, their varying poverty—they were delayed, deflected. She was ordered abroad for successive winters, to places he could not expect to endure. He came and went without her; going for consolation, of course, to Danielstown. The Naylors sent her out wails, injunctions and declarations. They would never, never be happy till she was with them also!

So at last Hugo and Francie returned together. And today something—-that break in the trees on the avenue, something unremembered about the face of the house, some intensification of the silence surrounding it, or perhaps simply Lois’s figure standing there on the steps—made the place different.

Lady Naylor and Mrs. Montmorency now went upstairs together. Francie looked down at the top step to see if the marks were still there—becoming much excited in the course of an argument about Robert Hugh Benson she had waved her candle and scattered a rain of hot grease. But there was a new stair-carpet. Myra looked down also, but ir remember. She had argued 
with so many people in twelve years—nowadays she argued about Galsworthy.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said, lowering her voice as they approached the ante-room, “if we found Laurence up here—my nephew.
He is with us a good
deal, between Oxford. Though I expect it is dull for him. He is not out of doors very much; he is very intellectual. Though, of course he plays tennis.”

Francie was much relieved, on entering the anteroom, to find that Laurence had gone. “It’s so nice, she said, “the way you have the house full of young people.” She turned to the right instinctively, to her old door.

“No, this way, Francie, the Blue Room. The rooks on that side of the house disturbed so many people; we’ve changed the rooms round she prefers them.”

As they came into the Blue Room, Francie saw their two faces reflected in the tall
dressing-table glass, with the door swinging behind. Myra’s aged!”, she thought with a shock. Her never seemed to have changed at all.

She said: “You look wonderful, you know. I couldn’t think when I was ever to see you again, or Richard either.”

The linen of Myra’s sleeve was cool to the touch of the dusty Francie. Myra wore a grey linen dress with embroidered panels, a lace scarf twice round the throat and a green hat dipping in front and trimmed with clover. Her bright grey eyes with very black urgent pupils continued in a deep crease at each outside corner. High on the curve of her cheeks, like petals, bright mauve-pink colour became, within kissing distance, a net of fine delicate veins. Her eyebrows, drawn in a pointed arch, suggested tragic surprise till one saw the arch never flattened, the face beneath never changed from its placid eagerness, its happy dissatisfaction. “
Has
she aged?” Francie thought, glancing closely and shyly again as they parted. Yes, she felt something set now in Myra; she was happier, harder.

Myra receded now that the kiss was over. There was life to go on with, the duty of love and pleasure fully discharged. She moved round the Blue Room, nodded out of a window to someone distant coming out from some trees—she could never learn how one vanishes in the dark of a house. She glanced intently along the books in the book-trough. “Lois has not changed the books!” she exclaimed. “You know how I like them to be appropriate. Here’s a technical book on rubber a man left behind last summer—it looks ridiculous. She’s a girl who never forgets the same thing twice: always, something different… .”

“She looks sweet, I think. And surely the image of Laura.”

“She’s not so much like Laura in character. There’s a good deal, I sometimes think, of poor Walter.

“Wasn’t it terribly sad about Walter?”

“To tell you the truth, it was what we always expected,” said Lady Naylor.

When Francie was left alone she went to the window and shook the dust out of her motor veil. Then—she was so very tired from motoring, everything seemed to rush past—she sat down on the sofa and put her hands over her eyes. Her mind lay back in the slience, but there was a kind of sentinel in her, waiting for Hugo. She did not know what she should say if he noticed the drive from Carlow really had been too much for her. She had said beforehand she was afraid it might be too much, and he had said: Nonsense, that she was fit for anything nowadays. Flattered by this, she gave in. She was so tired—-just for these few moments when she let herself go—she could not bear to realize Danielstown. Her thoughts ached. When she looked out, there were some intolerable trees and a strip of gold field hot on the skyline.

When she heard steps comiing, she fled to the wash-stand. Her skin was dry, her hair felt laden and limp, it was so dusty. But that was the fine, the phenomenal weather for which, in this country, one could not be thankful enough. When Hugo came through from his dressing-room she was washing her hands—they turned in the water like gentle porpoises in a slaver of violet soap.