He hoped that nobody had caught sight of him, skirmishing about among the bushes. But, as usual, he had forgotten Marianne. She saw him and came to the conclusion that he was past praying for. He picked up women as a serge skirt picks up burrs. No sooner was Aggie out of the way than he must needs collect a new one. And when Solange, meaning to be kind, spoke in praise of him, she said nothing and looked glum.
“I shall go to see this play of his,” said Solange.
She was in high spirits and inclined to think well of everybody. For she had discovered that it was quite possible to reach East Prussia before noon on Wednesday and Adrian’s journey had been the main topic at lunch.
“It’s just a sample of what I can do,” she said. “I can be very inconvenient unless I’m placated. Now he’s got to get up at five and catch the six-thirty at Basingstoke.”
“He won’t. He’ll manage to miss it.”
“But wasn’t your grandmother an angel, Marianne? She might almost have been one of us. She talked of nothing else at lunch and she’s ordered a special breakfast for him. Do you think she guesses?”
“She may. She guesses most things.”
They had gone up to Miss Wilson’s room, but they were not practising their music. It was too hot. Ever since lunch the heat had been increasing in sudden jerks, like a car changing gear. Marianne sprawled on the battered sofa while Solange sat on the floor by the window sewing a button on to her shoe.
“I wouldn’t mind being old, if I could be sure of being like your grandmother. She has such fun.”
“Yes,” said Marianne. “I’ve often thought that. Don’t you think it would be a good plan if we could skip the next bit and jump straight into old age? I do.”
“The next bit? What next bit?”
“The bit that comes after this. After we’ve left off being what we are now. We’re all right now. We haven’t made any frightful mistakes yet. But sooner or later we shall get into some muddle or other.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Nor do I. But everybody I know has.”
Solange did not agree. She thought that the next bit was going to be fun.
“I haven’t done anything yet,” she pointed out. “I’ve got to go to Freiburg, and be a toxicologist, and fall in love, and see the Grand Canyon, and have some babies (when I’m married I mean, not yet) and learn to play the recorder.”
“You’ll be busy,” said Marianne. “I wonder if you’ll do any of it.”
“Why not? I’ll do some of it, anyhow. What do you want to do?”
Marianne sighed and said:
“I don’t know. It’s too hot to think.”
Solange looked round at her disapprovingly.
“What’s the matter with you to-day, Marianne? Do you know, you remind me of an awful picture I once saw in a farm-house. One of those printed annual supplements, done, I should think, in the ’nineties. A pop-eyed girl in a fringe and a blue sash. And it said: ‘Standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet?’ ”
“That’s poetry,” said Marianne suspiciously.
Solange laughed, and when she had finished laughing there was silence in the room. Both were aware that a slight chill had invaded their relationship. Those confidences yesterday had been a mistake. If Hugo had been a dancing partner Solange would have known what to say. She could have teased her friend about a May Week romance or shared with her the excitements of a first Commemoration Ball. But she winced and shied away from something inexplicable, some hint of profound gravity, which lay behind Marianne’s ridiculous preoccupation. For her own part she had no intention of being bothered by such weighty problems until she had had her fling. They were a mistake and they spoiled enjoyment. She meant to have a lot of fun before she sat sighing and dreaming over anybody.
“You’re getting sentimental,” she said crisply.
Marianne did not deny it, because she did not want to argue.
“But what’s the difference between emotion and sentiment?” she asked after a pause.
“Well, a sentiment is a feeling that doesn’t get you anywhere. I mean, it’s sentimental to go to church and get very worked up and ecstatic and then come home and behave like a pig to your family.”
“Um … yes …”
“And it’s sentimental to … think too much about a man … unless you’re going to marry him … or something.”
By something Solange meant consummated passion and Marianne understood her perfectly well.
“But how can you help …?”
“Anybody can control their feelings if they try.”
“Have you ever tried?”
“Well, once I had a rave on our elocution mistress at school. And she married and went to India. I thought my heart was broken. So I distempered our staircase and repainted the banisters bright red. It was a filthy job, but it cured me.”
“I see.”
Marianne lay for a moment on her back, staring at the ceiling. Then she leapt to her feet.
“I’m going to wash Tango,” she said.
“I thought you hated washing dogs.”
“I do.”
“What nonsense! On a Sunday. Come and play tennis if you must do something energetic ”
“No. I’m going to wash Tango.”
The stable-yard was deserted, for all the men had gone off in their Sunday clothes to walk with their girls upon the downs. And Marianne rediscovered her equanimity in that tidy world of corn-bins, sluiced brick pavements, and polished leather. She even relished the tarry smell of the soap which she used for Tango. All the old-time noises of her childhood were around her; the jerk and squeal of the pump-handle, the clatter of her buckets on the stone floor, and the pigeons lazily coo-rooing on the roof. She was safe in the yard. She was shielded against the encroaching tide of the larger world, the future, which had begun to undermine the present. This place was complete and enclosed, a rectangle of plain stone buildings containing just what it needed for itself and nothing unnecessary. The pigeons never flew far away from their roof and the pale sky above it had no vagrant clouds. Only a little turret with a weather-cock stood up, breaking the long line of slates and pointing its four arms to wider horizons.
She put on a white overall and dragged Tango into an empty loose box. As she scrubbed him, and went clanking in and out with her buckets, she whistled the old tune that Bates, the coachman, used to whistle when he cleaned che harness:
Have ye heard John James O’Hara
Playing on his old trombone?
Have ye heard John James O’Hara?
Ain’t he got a lovely tone?
Old Sousa’s band’s all right …
”Oh dear!”
She sat back on her heels and pushed the tawny hair out of her hot face. She had a pain somewhere. But if Solange was right, then washing Tango ought to banish it.
Have ye heard John James O’Hara
With his tiddle-iddle-um-tum-tara …
Washing Tango was hard work and the buckets were heavy. But she wanted to work very hard and tire herself out so that to-night, when she went to bed on the roof, she would go to sleep at once. She did not want to lie awake as she had lain last night. Because in the daytime she could rule her thoughts, but at night she could not. Lying in bed, under the balmy canopy of the sky, she had let them stray down a forbidden road. And as her limbs grew relaxed and drowsy she had begun to dream of the impossible as if it could happen. For it was impossible that she should ever gather him into her arms and soothe him to sleep there, holding him safe, away from all these people. It could never happen. And very immodest too, she supposed, to think of such a thing. At least, anybody else would think it immodest. And she blushed deeply as she bent over her buckets and tried to think of herself telling Solange.
“I want to sleep with him.”
Well, that was an awful thing to say. And not a bit true either. Because when people talked of sleeping with a person they meant something quite different, something that Marianne knew all about but never quite believed in. It happened to people, and some day it would happen to her, but not for ages, and when it did her grandmother had assured her that she would like it. Also she had been obliged, in the schoolroom, to read a great deal of poetry which hinted the same thing. But the hens and ducks and cows of the Ullmer Farmyards did not seem to like it much, and her earliest ideas on the subject had been gathered from them. Perhaps this was because they could not read. Anyhow the whole business was incredible. It had nothing to do with this pain that she could not banish, this longing to take him to her heart and, somehow, make him happy.
“To-morrow he will go away,” she thought.
She took her bucket to the door and flung water out on to the bright stones. It glittered in the sunlight and rushed in a shining torrent towards the grating in the middle of the yard. Soon it was gone and the damp stones were drying. The little commotion, the splash and the clatter died down and she could hear the pigeons on the roof again. Leaning against the door-post she stood still for a moment in the sunlight, resting her tired back. And she felt a swift pang of envy for the stable men who could stay for ever at Syranwood, safe in this small solid world, listening to the pigeons, working all day amid the friendly companionship of the animals, keeping their domain so bare and clean, and standing sometimes like this, to rest, in the sunlight against a door-post. Very soon she would have to go away. She had only been sent there to be kept quiet, for Mathilde had thought the life of foreign legations too unsettling. At Syranwood she had grown up, under the care of her grandmother and a governess, had kept a Nature note-book, was confirmed in Ullmer church, and rode ponies which got larger as her legs grew longer. Now she was supposed to be all ready for the next bit. In the autumn they spoke of sending her to her mother in Rome.
Tango, smelling of soap, shot off to find a nice midden where he could roll, and Marianne went upstairs to change her overall. There was an empty Sunday feeling about the house, as if even time was giving itself a rest. Still whistling she pulled off her white shroud and sat down beside the window in her petticoat, while she got some of Tango’s mud from behind her nails with an orange stick and a piece of cotton wool. When that was done she whipped herself on to attack her Sunday reading. For a year, ever since Miss Fosdyke left, she had kept it up. She had promised. On Sunday she would sit down and read a Great Book for an hour and in this way she might hope to become, in a few years, really well-read. She did not enjoy it, but as she had promised she persisted. Miss Fosdyke had cried so much at leaving her that she felt bound to humour the poor thing. Last week she had finished The Excursion and now she thought that she would try Paradise Lost. She went over to the bookshelf and thought as she surveyed the smug façade of bindings:
“Oh dear! How I do hate poetry!”
Taking down Wordsworth she extracted the bus ticket which she used as a marker and transferred it to Milton. To lie down on her bed, as she would have liked to do, would be fatal. She had fallen asleep too often over Sordello to risk it. So she chose the hardest chair in the room, sat down upon it, and went to work with scrupulous and earnest attention. But the long strips of blank verse stood up like walls against her. They would yield no meaning. Her eye kept slipping off the page, although Miss Fosdyke had prophesied that in a year’s time she would have conceived a passionate love of literature. She wished the miracle would hurry up.
In a small shelf at the head of her bed there were half a dozen books which had given her real pleasure. She had read them so often that she knew them by heart and wherever she opened them it was not like reading at all, but simply slipping off into another world where the very air was different. But not one of them would have passed Miss Fosdyke’s censorship. They were not Great Books. They were not poetry.
After twenty minutes’ hard labour she gave it up and reached over to her own shelf. Without looking she pulled out the first volume that she touched, opened it, and read:
‘… And how far a body can hear on the water such nights! I heard people talking at the ferry landing. I heard what they said, too, every word of it. One man said it was getting towards the long days and the short nights, now. T’other one said this warn’t one of the short ones, he reckoned—and then they laughed, and he said it over again, and they laughed again: then they waked up another fellow and told him, and laughed, but he didn’t laugh: he ripped out something brisk and said let him alone. The first fellow said he ’lowed to tell it to his old woman—she would think it was pretty good; but he said that warn’t nothing to some things he had said in his time. I heard one man say it was nearly three o’clock, and he hoped daylight wouldn’t wait more than about a week longer. After that, the talk got further and further away, and I couldn’t make out the words any more, but I could hear the mumble; and now and then a laugh, too, but it seemed a long ways off …’
The green and white of her bedroom melted away. She was floating down an enormous river in a country which she had never seen but which she knew as well as she knew the Ullmer Downs. She was doing what she had always longed to do: floating on, and on, with the current, close down to the water on a raft, not high up on a noisy boat, floating all day and all night with no goal in front of her and no place where she ought to stop. She heard the lap of the water against her raft and saw the lights of a little town blink out from the shore a mile away. For it was growing dark, and the river banks were long black lines under a dim sky. Only the water still had gleams of light in it somewhere, as if it had stored up lucence from the day. Between her and the shore it lay like a pale gleaming desert as the town swung past and was lost round a bend. She was happy. If only poetry could make her feel like that!