The Hotel Page 5

  “I should have thought he had heaps.”

  Veronica looked at her sideways. “By the way,” she said, “why didn’t you go for that drive with Mrs. Kerr? They must have had heaps of room in the car, and I should have thought—”

  “Oh, I’m sick of motoring,” Sydney said, and threw her cigarette away into the olive trees. “Besides,” she added sombrely, “I don’t know their friends over there.”

  “Didn’t she ask you?”

  “Not exactly—no. Why should she?”

  “Oh, my dear girl, I don’t know why she should!” Veronica shrugged her shoulders. A queer girl this, Veronica thought, well turned-out, clever, presumably, with a complexion she might have done more with, and awfully jolly feet, to sit brooding cheerlessly on a parapet because a middle-aged woman hadn’t asked her to go for a drive.

  “Well, come on,” she said, “Moses is getting the tribes together.”

  Sydney thought this surprisingly witty: she chuckled. “What do you think of our Aaron?” she asked, but Veronica did not hear. Mr. Lee-Mittison had swung his leg back over the parapet; his wife was putting her knitting away. They all got up rather unwillingly and began to climb the next path, which left the road only too soon and was steeper than ever.

  They came up at last on to the brow of the hill and found themselves at the extremity of a long ridge that stretched ahead of them, going down sheer at each side into a valley. From where they stood the ground dipped away again slightly, then rose in a series of undulations to a point of rock whereon a pale-coloured village balanced itself improbably. A mule-track, which must have made a more gradual ascent up the side of the hill, looped itself over the ridge a little ahead of them and vanished again. Beyond the village more hills, a disheartening infinity, rose blade-like, without shadow, against the vapourless and metallic brilliance of the sky. From the grass, among the twisted shadows of olives, flame-bright anemones spurted: Mr. Lee-Mittison precipitated himself upon them with a cry of pleasure and triumph. A scent of thyme stung the nostrils, reinforcing the glare with its pungency till two of the senses reeled.

  The picnic-party had not halted, doggedness had forbidden them even to pause, since they had left the parapet now immeasurably far below. Veronica Lawrence wildly exclaiming “The Promised Land!” stumbled forward into the thyme and lay crucified. Eileen, incapable of more than a gesture, knelt down and stared in dismay at the hills which now promised no bounds to the activities of Mr. Lee-Mittison. The Bransomes, half-obliterated by the strain of the ascent, flopped sideways and in self-conscious abandon stood hugging an olive tree.

  Sydney found Mr. Milton beside her; his face was glazed and dark, and in spite of his ceaseless mopping the sweat streamed down so that he could hardly open his eyes.

  “You don’t look hot at all,” he said reproachfully; and Sydney, who was enduring the burning discomfort of those who cannot perspire, said snappily:

  “Well, we can’t all express ourselves.”

  “I wish,” he said ruefully, pushing a handkerchief round the inside of his collar, “that my self-expression were not quite so fluent.”

  She pushed back her hat and put her hand to her forehead; it felt hot as a pebble on an August beach. They had straggled a little nearer the village, so that the brow of the hill rose behind them, cutting away the horizon, and the sea, when they turned to look for it, was only visible in a triangle at the mouth of the valley below. She felt him waiting for her to speak and reluctantly asked, “Do you like the village?” nodding ahead.

  “Yes,” he said, after a pause which gave the unhappy impression that he had sealed the village with his approval. “It’s jolly. It’s out of some background looked at, you know, through an arch or the slit of a window. Look at the track leading up to it—there’s even a donkey.”

  “Yes, some Flight into Egypt!” said Sydney. She gathered from the lightness of his manner in making the allusion that he was anxious not to appear unduly familiar with the National Gallery or the Uffizi, and wanted to ask him, “Haven’t you lectured on the Renaissance?” But she knew how inexorably the Hotel would refuse to let him escape from all that he was, and had pity on his innocent holiday taste for incognito, foredoomed from its birth on the threshold of the Hotel. Everybody could see at once that he had lectured on and perhaps even taken people round the National Gallery. She looked disparagingly at the village with its toppling campanili.

  “I think,” she said, “that it’s rather too like a cruet.”

  “It may have inspired the cruet,” he gravely amended. “Can you tell me why it is walled?”

  She glanced suspiciously at him, but his limpid gaze held a curiosity.

  “Against the Saracens. They used to land along this coast and ravage the valleys, so they built the villages as high as possible and fortified them. I pity any Saracen that ever got into them, for they’re perfect honeycombs, and the people I think are cruel—in a leisurely sort of way.”

  “Ah!” said he with an air of pleased receptivity. “It would be interesting to get in touch with local records.”

  “I don’t know whether there are any. Do you remember the Decameron lady who fished in the sea near here and was carried off by a pirate whom she liked from the first moment better than her husband?”

  “Husbands’ shares were not good in those days,” he said tolerantly. “I ought by the way, to re-read my Decameron.”

  She wanted to ask him whether the Decameron had really been dedicated to him by a friend. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” she said, suddenly smiling, “if the Saracens were to appear on the skyline, land and ravage the Hotel? They all take for granted—down there—that there aren’t any more Saracens, but for all we know they may only be in abeyance. The whole Past, for a matter of fact, may be one enormous abeyance. But I wonder,” she added while a cloud of depression crept over her, “how many of us they would really care to take away?”

  He did not know how she wished him to answer and risked: “It would be an embarrassing choice.”

  She sighed flatly. The dust, panic and ecstasy with which she had filled for a moment the corridors of the Hotel subsided. Once more she saw her fellow-visitors as they were to remain—undesired, secure and null. “Not many,” she said, and turning away from him seemed to be gazing down some distant, barred-away perspective of feminine loveliness. “Women must have deteriorated.”

  She half expected from Milton a flutter of protest, then noticed that she must have lost his attention, he was thinking about something else. He flushed and looked hard at her suddenly.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Haven’t I met you before?”

  “Only last night,” said she, and grinned at the recollection more or less overtly. Then she wondered whether he knew that by just such a question do young men—at dances and elsewhere—strike for the first time the personal note. It is asked leaning forward intensely with the implication “Your ever-remembered face!” He could not have said this to many young women; he said it this time too awkwardly.

  “Ah yes, last night,” said he. “But surely before?…It occurred to me then.”

  “I don’t think so. Unless you are the sort of person who remembers faces he has sat opposite to in a bus.”

  “Ah well,” said Milton. “It may have been that!”

  6

  The Kiss

  Mrs. Lee-Mittison sat with the packets of lunch piled up around her like some homely goddess. She had spread out the mackintosh, on which she hoped she might later persuade Herbert to arrange himself—unobtrusively, for she did not wish to humiliate him before these dear girls who, unlike the girls of her own generation, seemed to be able to sit on questionably dry grass without after-effects. She sat with her hat tilted forward to protect her eyes from the glare, looking down at her work but not knitting, her whole being in a state of happy suspension, a pause as distant from life as a trance. The
sun wooed her persistently and at last, with a gesture from her almost dionysiac, she undid and flung open the woolly jacket buttoned across her chest.

  Herbert had taken the girls ahead with him farther along the way to the village; she could hear his voice upraised in a sustained and happy monologue and now and then a thin exclamation from one of the Bransomes. They must be picking anemones. Surprised at herself, she sat with bliss in her little oasis of solitude. She looked down the slope beside her into the valley below and saw a little house, with a blue door whose colour delighted her, beside the bed of a river. Two lemon trees were beside it, and this little house which she seemed at once to inhabit gave her the most strange sensation of dignity and of peace. She saw herself go climbing up the garden from terrace to terrace, calling the goat, and the goat, beautiful in its possessedness, come loping down to meet her, asking to be milked. At this she paused in perplexity, for she had never milked anything and turned cold at the thought of touching the udders of an animal. But in a moment this was over and she carried the milk frothing warm in the pottery jug inside, into the dark interior of the house which would not be dark from within. Here something turned her back and she could not follow herself; she saddened, feeling excluded from some very intimate experience. The house was lonely and in autumn, when the river was brimming, the rushing past of the water must be terrifying; its echo would line with sound the upright walls of the valley. On still spring nights the thud of a falling lemon would be enough to awake one in terror.

  The villino suddenly dropped away from her eye as though she had put down a telescope, and as her life sprang back into focus she must have been dizzy, for she felt sick at the thought of their hotel bedrooms that stretched, only interposed with the spare rooms of friends, in unbroken succession before and behind her. She felt sick at the thought of for how many mornings more she would have to turn the washstand into an occasional table by putting away the basin and jug in the cupboard and drape with Indian embroideries the trunk in which they concealed their boots.

  Mrs. Lee-Mittison saw that Sydney Warren and Mr. Milton had wandered away by themselves, and that Veronica Lawrence, apparently unattached, was strolling among the olive trees a little way down the slope. This did not seem like Veronica, and it was not like Veronica, either, to remain so persistently unaware of the ascending Englishman in the grey flannel coat coming so rapidly up towards her. Mrs. Lee-Mittison, with faint misgivings thought she recognized the set of those shoulders and, leaning forward a little, saw from the shape of the head that this was indeed Victor Ammering. She quivered; the hill was too small, there were too many other hills for her to believe that this could be anything but a deliberate intrusion. Herbert particularly had not wanted Mr. Ammering. He did not care at all for the young man, who was unintelligent, too talkative and did not bring at all a nice atmosphere into a party. Herbert was quite sure the girls didn’t like Mr. Ammering either and would not wish him to be invited; that was the most delightful aspect of modern girls; they all liked just being jolly together.

  “Veronica,” she called sharply, “here, just a minute, my dear!” She might have been calling back a paddling child from under the menacing curve of a breaker.

  “What for?” Veronica looked up at her astonished.

  “Mr. Ammering seems to be coming up the hill. I think he must be making some mistake.”

  “Well, it isn’t a private hill,” said Veronica. “I suppose he’s simply going for a walk.”

  “Don’t you think we had better tell him,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, “that his friends are not up here? It would save him the climb.” She fidgeted and swayed slightly; she was gathering Herbert’s happiness, all his little plans for the day, for protection under her feathers, and she gave such an impression of being ruffled-out, apprehensive and angry that she did actually make Veronica think of a hen, with head a little on one side and blinking bright eyes.

  “How odd,” said Veronica, sitting down on the grass still a little below her, “that Victor should have hit on this hill. I thought he was playing tennis. However, it’s his walk, and I suppose it’s his hill as much as ours. I can’t see that we can do anything about it, Mrs. Lee-Mittison, except be rude.” She took off her hat and shook back her fluffy cropped hair.

  “I hope I shall not be rude,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison with a quiver in her voice.

  “Hullo, Victor, I thought you were playing tennis!”

  “Do I look as if I was playing tennis?”

  “Fool! You can’t come here, it’s somebody else’s picnic.”

  “Well, I suppose I can walk about on the hill!”

  “Fool—you do look hot! Go and walk about on one of the other hills.”

  “It does not matter to us, Veronica,” called down Mrs. Lee-Mittison. “Mr. Ammering’s plans for the day are his own, of course. I think you had better come up here, if you don’t mind, and help me put out the lunch. Then we will call back the others.”

  Veronica pulled three pieces of bark from an olive tree and threw them in Victor’s face, then she turned her back on him and came scrambling up the hill. Mrs. Lee-Mittison produced from her bag and spread out a printed paper tablecloth; her smile of competency usual to these occasions was a little dimmed by a still apprehensive consciousness of Victor’s presence below. With Veronica’s help she arranged the eatables. Veronica piled up the oranges in the middle of the cloth and ringed them round with Mrs. Lee-Mittison’s little biscuits and the chocolates wrapped in scarlet and gold. “There: ‘The young housewife’!” she cried, sitting back on her heels complacently. Mrs. Lee-Mittison thought of the cottage below and had once more the queer little pang.

  Sydney and James Milton returned by the loop of the road, which they had followed, they said, for a short distance in order to look into the farther valley. She conveyed by the manner of her walk and by an air of serene inattentiveness that it was nothing to her that he should choose to accompany her; it must be his mistake; she had nothing to offer. Looking and feeling like her friend Mrs. Kerr, she sat down and turned her face to the view. Mr. Milton was not so hot now, but he had been bouncing half a dozen conversational balls assiduously, and it was in evident relaxation that he lay down on his back on the grass like a dog and smiled up at the sky.

  “Here, we can’t all lie down, you know; it’s dinner!” screamed Veronica. “Who do you think’s going to drop the hard-boiled eggs into your mouth? Gerrup!” At the indescribable sound she made, he sat up astonished. He had never been spoken to like this before and it deeply gratified him. By the time the others had assembled he was smiling and passing the food about and chaffing Veronica, perhaps a shade laboriously.

  “I say, I’d no idea you were a parson.”

  “Don’t I look like a parson?”

  “Oh no. I’m perfectly staggered. You may be a bishop or anything. Was I terribly disrespectful? Well, it’s not fair, anyway; you ought to wear that kind of collar.”

  “The dog-collar? Dear me, you think I ought to advertise?” He was elated to find himself so much at ease, so disarmingly secular. “You spotted me, didn’t you?” He turned to Mr. Lee-Mittison, hoping to be contradicted.

  “My dear fellow, that is neither here nor there. I have always said that there is no reason why a parson shouldn’t be a sportsman.”

  “That’s what my father says,” contributed one of the Bransomes. “I mean that there is no reason why a clergyman shouldn’t be a man. A Man of the World, you know.”

  “What on earth do you mean by ‘a man of the world’?” asked Eileen Lawrence scornfully. She had no patience with other people’s vocabularies. The Bransome coloured and seceded from the conversation. She resolved that when she returned to England she would cultivate a manner like the Lawrences’.

  “Speaking as a churchwoman—” tendered Mrs. Lee-Mittison, busy with the sandwiches.

  “Anything at all, in fact,” said Syd
ney, “so long as he is nothing of the priest.”

  “God forbid!” said Mr. Lee-Mittison seriously. He was a Protestant.

  “Well, it’s God’s affair—”

  “Oh, there’s Victor!” shrieked Eileen. “I say do look, Veronica, there’s Victor down there in the trees…Look, he’s eating an orange. Hi, coo-ee, Victor; come up!”

  “Oh, we don’t want Victor up here,” Veronica said, “he’s a bore. Oh, shut up, Eileen; leave him alone with his beastly orange. Messing it about all over his face, too, like a kid in a train.”

  “I think, as Mr. Ammering is evidently on his own, Eileen, we ought not to interrupt his walk.” Mrs. Lee-Mittison had spoken with authority, but Eileen took no notice and already the foundations of the picnic shook. Everybody stopped eating, rolled over sideways on their elbows and looked down. The Bransomes were intensely interested—how pathetic! “Why not ask him up?” said Sydney. James Milton suggested, “Would you like me to go down?”

  “I think we had better not interrupt Mr. Ammering’s walk,” repeated Mrs. Lee-Mittison desparingly. They all pointed out to her that he was already sitting down. She looked across at Herbert, the roof of her mouth turned cold; Herbert seemed so very much put out. She knew so much better than he did how often Herbert was hurt. Now all that lovely circle in which he most completely came alive had wavered, bulged and broken. She began a little wildly to recruit for attention. She tugged at Violet Bransome’s sleeve; she leaned sideways and tugged at the cousin’s; she signalled lavishly to Veronica and to Sydney. “I think Mr. Lee-Mittison has a story to tell you. I think he is going to tell you a story now…Mr. Milton,” she whispered across, “do ask Eileen Lawrence to stay quiet. And ask Herbert (he’s so far away from me) ask him to begin…”

  Mr. Lee-Mittison began the story, which was about Malay. He raised his voice, drew out his words and was emphatic. One by one the girls returned their eyes to his face reluctantly. The more suggestible among them took their cues from Mrs. Lee-Mittison and echoed her small exclamations. Herbert’s wife, with tightly folded hands, was leaning forward eagerly. It could not have been thought possible that she had heard this story before were it not for the glance around with which at the approach of any salient point she would gather up the attention of the circle, and the disyllabic titter with which she anticipated the humorous passages. Once she gripped a Bransome’s hand convulsively—“Isn’t it exciting?” After about ten minutes of this recital, Victor Ammering appeared on the outskirts of the circle, stepped across the botany-case and sat down. “I say,” he said—“(excuse me, sir!)—have any of you got a match?”