The Last September (6 page)

“Aren’t women awful?” she cried gaily, as Gerald rejoined them. She knew the subalterns hated going about without her. “My dears, I do wish I knew if we really were asked. Lois is so—I mean, well,
you
know—vague, isn’t she?”

“Well, they wouldn’t mind, anyhow,” said David, and tried not to sound proprietory.

“Aren’t they hospitable!” Betty Vermont was not disappointed in Ireland. She had never before been to so many large houses with so small sense of her small-ness. Of course they were all very shabby and not artistic at all. Mrs. Vermont used to say, she longed to be turned loose in any one of them with a paint-pot—white—and a few hundred yards of really nice cretonne from Barkers.

“Half Ireland is here,” said David, looking out at the crowd of cars on the gravel-sweep. “I doubt if we get any tennis.”

“Ah well, David, there’s plenty of that at the club. Now, Gerald, don’t stand there glaring! You
do
disapprove of powder, you unkind wretch!”

“Rather not,” said Gerald, beaming. But all the same he did like girls to have natural complexions—he was perfectly certain Lois’s was. He was carrying all the rugs he could find slung over his shoulder and looked, she informed him, just like a Bedouin. This was not a thing she could have said to every man, because really the East had become so very suggestive. But he was the dearest boy, so absolutely nice-minded. They all went out.

“There seem to be many more people here than I thought we’d asked,” Lady Naylor was saying to Mrs. Carey of Mount Isabel. “Lois asks people she meets at the Clonmore club, and then forgets. I have been rather wondering about the raspberries; I’ve sent her out to the garden to see about getting in some more. Colonel and Mrs. Boatley are coming—she was a Vere Scott, a Fermanagh Vere Scott—Why is it that the Hartigans never will talk to men? I never think they give themselves a chance, do you? Oh, Mr. Lesworth, how kind to think of bringing the rugs out! And now there doesn’t seem anyone left to sit on them—- Look, would you break up that party of girls on the bank; I don’t think they seem to be sitting on anything, and anyhow they look dull and would like to talk. And I am sure they’d be glad if you’d smoke—the midges are terrible. Who is that girl in pale blue who’s just coming out?”

“Mrs. Vermont. She—er—I think Miss Farquar—”

“Oh well, never mind; it’s a pleasant surprise.” She went over to Mrs. Vermont with enthusiasm. “I’m so glad you could come, it’s delightful.”

Gerald looked round everybody again, carefully. Then he respectfully displaced the Miss Hartigans, spread out a rug on the bank and sat down between them. He was at a disadvantage, he could not remember if he had ever been introduced to them, whereas they were perfectly certain he had. They were pleased at his coming, though on the other hand they were suffering so terribly from the midges that what they wanted most at the moment was to scratch their legs peacefully.

“I call this a frightfully good party,” said Gerald breezily.

“Yes, it’s most enjoyable,” agreed Norah Hartigan.

“I don’t think there’s anything like these tennis parties you have in Ireland.”

“We have never been to tennis parties in England,” replied Doreen.

“Oh, you must certainly come over!”

“I daresay we should feel strange,” said Norah, and her sister agreed with her. Gerald smiled from one to the other so encouragingly that they told him how a sister of theirs, who was not here today, had once stayed for quite a long time near London and had been taken by an aunt, who was rather what they would call a London Society sort of person, to a very fashionable party—in South Kensington, it had been. But their sister had not cared for the party, she thought the

English unnatural and said it was extraordinary how their voices sounded when they were all shut up in the one room. “But excuse me,” concluded the elder Miss Hartigan, turning away because she was afraid the talk was becoming personal and scratching her ankle as discreetly as possible, “we should not say this to you.”

“It was splendid of you to forget I was English. Well, we shall all be leaving you soon, I daresay; all we jolly old army of occupation.”

“Oh, one wouldn’t like to call you
that,”
said Miss Hartigan, deprecatingly.

“—As soon as we’ve lost this jolly old war.”

“Oh, but one wouldn’t call it a
war.”

“If anyone would, we could clear these beggars out in a week!”

“We think it would be a great pity to have a war,” said the Hartigans firmly. “There’s been enough unpleasantness already, hasn’t there? … And it would be a shame for you all to go,” added Doreen warmly, but not too warmly because they were all men. In fact, it was all rather embarrassing, they fixed their eyes on the players firmly and wished that the set would finish. They thought how daring it was of Mr. Lesworth to come so far to a party at all, and only hoped he would not be shot on the way home; though they couldn’t help thinking how, if he should be, they would both feel so interesting afterwards. “Poor young fellow,” they thought with particular tenderness because he was so good-looking, and neither of them with this tenderness in their eyes dared to look at him.

Livvy was walking along the top of the bank with David Armstrong. She smiled, with a small tooth over her lower lip; the tip of her nose quivered downward with feminine sensibility. “It is really a long time since I have seen you, Mr. Armstrong.”

David was the nicest of all the subalterns; so agreeable. “Why, yes,” he agreed, “I suppose it really must be.” He glanced at the brim of her hat and added: “It has certainly seemed an awful long time to me.”

“Oh, you mustn’t say that!” cried Livvy; she blushed to the chin and laughed.

”
I
 
don’t see why I shouldn’t,” said David, alarmed but gratified.

“Well, I mean, you oughtn’t to say it like that!”

“But I can’t help saying what I mean.” His manliness increased with confusion. “I suppose I am that kind of fellow.”

“You
are
awful!” Livvy laughed so much from the shock of David’s behaviour that people sitting along the foot of the bank looked up expectantly. She would not share him, she hurried him off at an angle and then continued: “Why were you not at the Mount Isabel Bicycle Gymkhana? I understood you to say that you would be. It was the greatest pity you couldn’t be there, it was a grand gymkhana, and they had a putting competition too. And they had sentries armed in the avenue and made twenty-four pounds for the hospital. And the priest’s niece from Kil-nagowan fell off and cut her lip; she bled too dreadfully but Doreen Hartigan has her V.A.D. certificate. And two hundred people sat down to tea—how was it now that you couldn’t be there?”

“On duty,” said David, and took on a mystic and obstinate look. “I was up with some of the men and an N.C.O. in those mountains the other side of the Madder.”

Livvy felt in her spine, running down it from under her waistband, a sharp little thrill. She felt all the soldiers’ woman, and said in a glow: “Well, I call that too awfully dangerous.” He told her: “It’s what we are here for.” They glanced at each other, they both were embarassed—and showed it—at what they had seen. She stooped, and her hat was an elegant mushroom. From David’s complexion blushes cleared slowly away —the last having never quite vanished into his hair before another came after it up from his well-fitting collar.

“I can’t think what Lois can be doing.” She peered through gaps in the shrubbery towards the gate of the garden. This concern for her friend she put up and twirled like a parasol between them. She sighed: the expansion of her thin little frame, the rise and fall of her two little points of bosom were clearly visible under her white silk jersey. Her panama hat turned down and light tufts of hair came out in fluttering commas against her cheek-bones. From under the brim her eyes looked, slanting slightly up at the corners, with a veiled preoccupied kind of inquisitiveness. She was inquisitive as to so many things her friend Lois hoped one might not have to bother about. David watched her watch the shrubbery for her friend and thought, with a shock, that this really did seem a girl he was to be in love with. He had the fatalism of a recurrent sufferer.

“It will be too bad,” continued Livvy, “if she doesn’t come soon. You would think she might be picking those raspberries herself. You see, all the people she asked from Clonmore have come and were not expected. If she doesn’t come soon I must go—yes, indeed I must, Mr. Armstrong—and see about the two next fours. You see her cousin Laurence is no good for that, he is so intellectual, and Lady Naylor doesn’t much notice the tennis so long as the party goes off all right. But it seems too bad she shouldn’t see Mr. Lesworth. I expect Mr. Lesworth often speaks to you of her, doesn’t he, Mr. Armstrong?”

“Er—I don’t remember, really.”

“I think it’s wonderful to see a man so much in love. I must say I often wonder what love feels like. I always seem to feel so natural about the men I know. But I suppose that’s because I am so young—or perhaps I was born platonic. Do you believe in platonics, Mr. Armstrong?”

“Plato? Jolly old Grecian—what?”

“No, but listen—do you?”

“Well, what I think,” said David, looking carefully at his racquet and turning it over and over—”of course it is awfully difficult to express, but I think the right kind of girl and the right kind of fellow can be almost anything to each other, if you know what I mean?”

”
I
 
think,” said Livvy, “you put it rather wonderfully.” She suddenly waved her racquet. “Ah—there’s Lois!”

Lois came down the shrubbery path from the garden, startled, as if at her own great speed, flushed and visibly breathless. A pink unbuttoned cardigan slipped away at the shoulders; she had her hands in both the pockets to keep it on. Her hat flapped back, it rose above her face in surprise, like a wave. Behind her the bushes stirred in an almost visible backwash. Over the laurels, cropped knee-high at the back of the tennis court, her body rose and dipped with her long steps.

“Ah, here she is!” exclaimed several people, and all looked up the bank uncritically and kindly. The dark air of the shrubbery glittered with midges; she jerked her hands from her pockets and waved her way through. Chinks of sunlight darted up her like mice and hesitated away like butterflies. She had been looking down at the party deployed in all its promise with greed and eagerness, as at a box of chocolates; eyes like a thumb and finger hovering to selection. Now, engaged by their look, she became all profile; her step flattened, she would have liked to crawl. She was, as Mr. Montmorency had noticed, very self-conscious.

The Hartigans said to Gerald: “Here comes Lois. Isn’t she very sweet looking?” They smiled at each other across him.

He said, “Rather!” pocketing their tribute gratefully, with implicity, as a small boy pockets a tip. His directness baffled them, they were shocked—but he thought how nice they were. In this world, affections were rare and square—four-square—occurring like houses in a landscape, unrelated and positive, though with sometimes a large bright looming—as of the sunned west face of Danielstown over the tennis courts. He did not conceive of love as a nervous interchange but as something absolute, out of the scope of thought, beyond himself, matter for a confident outward rather than anxious inward looking. He had sought and was satisfied with a few—he thought final—repositories for his emotions: his mother, country, dog, school, a friend or two, now—crowningly—Lois. Of these he asked only that they should be quiet and positive, not impinged upon, not breaking boundaries from their generous allotment. His life was a succession of practical adjustments into which the factor of personality did not enter at all. His reserve—to which one was apt to accord a too sensitive reverence—was an affair of convenience rather than protection. Pressed for a statement, he could have said, “I love her,” to the Hartigans, Mrs. Carey, anyone there, without uneasiness, without a sense of the word’s vibrations or alarm at a loud impact on something hollow. So he looked up the bank at Lois, while the Hartigans watched.

Mr. Montmorency sat on the ground with his knees apart, holding his ankles limply. His grey flannel coat collar was turned up over his white shirt, as though there were a strong wind blowing. He was being talked to by ladies who sat on the green chairs high above him, and when he looked up to answer it was never higher than their knees. He had more than ever his waxen blinking look, as though exposed unnaturally, to the sunshine. His nostrils contracted slightly, as though the smell drawn up from the roots of the grass in a perpetual hot shimmer were more offensive than he cared to explain. He was to play in the next set, and Laurence looked forward to a melancholy exhibition of departed proficiency. A wiry tenseness and setting of teeth there would be, Laurence anticipated, then balls going straight and cleanly into the net. He would be the “magnificent” player of ten years ago, with little painful grunts as point after point was given away. Laurence guessed that Mr. Montmorency hated parties and conversation as much as he himself did, but being
less adept at
evasion or honouring less fiercely the virginity of his intelligence, could not escape from talking and being talked to.

Laurence achieved this escape by sitting always with a social alert expression between two groups; when one tried to claim him he could affect to be engaged by the other.

A net had been carefully stretched behind the seats to prevent balls going through to the shrubbery. But it was full of rents and these the balls, driven with force from the further back line, discovered unerringly. To cover these deficiencies children up from the lodge were on duty in the shrubbery; they stared and rambled, pushing among the laurels. They got their teas, an excellent view of the party and a halfpenny for every ball they recovered. Those who did not find any balls and seemed disappointed were given halfpennies also. So why, as Lady Naylor said, bother? She hated to see her guests go round the net, smearing their nice white flannels.