The Last September

Elizabeth Bowen.

THE LAST SEPTEMBER.

Part One.

The Arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Montmorency.

CHAPTER ONE.

ABOUT six o"clock the sound of a motor, collected out of the wide country and narrowed under the trees of the avenue, brought the household out in excitement on to the steps. Up among the beeches, a thin iron gate tw.a.n.ged; the car slid out of a net of shadows down the slope to the house. Behind the flashing windscreen Mr. and Mrs. Montmorency produced-arms waving and a wild escape to the wind of her mauve motor veil-an agitation of greeting. They were long-promised visitors. They exclaimed, Sir Richard and Lady Naylor exclaimed and signalled: no one spoke yet. It was a moment of happiness, of perfection.

In those days, girls wore crisp white skirts and transparent blouses clotted with white flowers; ribbons threaded through with a view to appearance, appeared over the shoulders. So that Lois stood at the top of the steps looking cool and fresh; she knew how fresh she must look, like other young girls, and clasping her elbows tightly behind her back tried hard to conceal her embarra.s.sment. The dogs came pattering out from the hall and stood beside her; above, the large f.a.gade of the house stared coldly over its mounting lawns. She wished she could freeze the moment and keep it always. But as the car approached, as it stopped, she stooped down and patted one of the dogs.

As the car drew up the Montmorencys unwound from their rugs. They stood shaking hands and laughing in the yellow theatrical sunshine. They had motored over from Carlow. Two toppling waves of excitement had crashed and mingled; for moments, everybody was inaudible. Mrs. Montmorency looked up the steps. "And this is the niece!" she exclaimed with delight. "Aren"t we dusty!" she added, as Lois said nothing. "Aren"t we too terribly dusty!" And a tired look came down at the back of her eyes at the thought of how dusty she was.

"She"s left school now," said Sir Richard proudly.

"I don"t think I should have known you," said Mr. Montmorency, who had not seen Lois since she was ten and evidently preferred children.

"Oh, I think she"s the image of Laura-"

"-But we have tea waiting! Are you really sure, now, you"ve had tea?"

"Danielstown"s looking lovely, lovely. One sees more from the upper avenue-didn"t you clear some trees?"

"The wind had three of the ashes- You came quite safe? No trouble? n.o.body at the crossroads? n.o.body stopped you?"

"And are you sure now about tea?" continued Lady Naylor. "After all that-look, it"s coming up now. No, Francie, don"t be ridiculous: come in now, both of you."

They swept in; their exclamations, constricted suddenly, filling the hall. There was so much to say after twelve years; they all seemed powerless. Lois hesitated, went in after them and, as n.o.body noticed, came out again. The car with the luggage turned and went round to the back, deeply scoring the gravel. She yawned and looked out over the sweep to the lawn beyond, where little tufts of shadow p.r.i.c.ked like reeds from water out of the flat gold light. Beyond the sunk fence six Kerry cows followed each other across with wading step and stood under a lime tree. All the way up the house the windows were open; light came diagonally from window to window through corner rooms. Two storeys up, she could have heard a curtain rustle, but the mansion piled itself up in silence over the Montmorencys" voices.

She yawned with reaction. It was simply the Montmorencys who had come; whom, all day, one had been expecting. Yet she had been unable to read, had scattered unfinished letters over her table, done the flowers atrociously. Sweet peas had spun and trembled between her fingers from their very importance ... "I apologise for the mauve sweet peas," she would have liked to be able to say to Mrs. Montmorency. "I don"t care for mauve myself. I can"t think why I ever picked them; there were plenty of others. But, as a matter of fact, I was nervous." And- "Nervous?" she would wish Mr. Montmorency to ask her searchingly, "Why?" But she had her reserves, even in imagination; she would never tell him.

But she had seen at once that Mr. Montmorency, who must be really so subtle, would not take the trouble to understand her.

Her cousin Laurence had gone upstairs with a book when he heard the motor. Now she could hear him knocking out his pipe on a window sill. He leaned out further and asked pointing down, in a cautious whisper: "Are they all in?"

She signalled a warning, nodding.

"What are you doing?" he said.

"I don"t know. What are you doing?"

"Nothing particular."

"I thought I"d take the dogs down the beech walk."

"Why?"

"Oh, I just thought ..."

"Come up and tell me about the Montmorencys."

She signalled another warning: the Montmorencys were in the hall. To avoid the hall she had to go round to a side door and up the backstairs. These smelt of scrubbed wood, limewash, and the ducks already roasting for the Montmorencys" dinner. Pushing open a door at the top she let a gust of this through with her.

"Duck," said Laurence, sniffing gratefully. It still surprised her that Laurence, who looked ethereal, should spend so much time when he was not being intellectual in talking and apparently in thinking about food. She supposed that this was because he had, as he had once said, no emotional life. "I live," he used to say, "from meal to meal." When she said, "Why?" he put up his hands and his eyebrows and made a gesture. When he did this in front of Gerald she felt uncomfortable. Soldiers did not talk about food, they ate it. They ate, in fact, rather more than Laurence, but always with a deprecating, absent look.

Laurence had been reading in the anteroom, in one of a circle of not very comfortable sh.e.l.l-shaped chairs that no one took seriously. His room was a floor higher; it had not seemed worth while to go up. He had brought the wrong book and dared not go down for another; otherwise he would not have felt in need of her conversation. Personally, she liked the anteroom, though it wasn"t the ideal place to read or talk.

Four rooms opened off it, and at any moment a door might be opened, or blow open, sending a draught down one"s neck. People pa.s.sed through it continually, so that one kept having to look up and smile. Yet Lois always seemed to be talking there, standing with a knee on a chair because it was not worth while to sit down, and her life was very much complicated by not knowing how much of what she said had been overheard, or by whom, or how far it would go.

The high windows were curtainless; ta.s.selled fringes frayed the light at the top. The white sills-the shutters folded back in their frames-were blistered, as though the house had spent a day in the tropics. Exhausted by sunshine, the backs of the crimson chairs were a thin, light orange; a smell of camphor and animals drawn from skins on the floor in the glare of morning still hung like dust on the evening chill. Going through to her room at nights Lois often tripped with her toe in the jaws of a tiger; a false step at any time sent some great claw skidding over the polish. Pale regimental groups, reunions a generation ago of the family or neighbourhood, gave out from the walls a vague depression. There were two locked bookcases of which the keys had been lost, and a troop of ebony elephants brought back from India by someone she did not remember paraded along the tops of the bookcases.

"Whow-whow-whow!" said Laurence, imitating her panting. "Why do you hurry like that?"

"I suppose it"s a habit," said Lois, confused.

"What did you want?"

"Well, I came to tell you about the Montmorencys."

"Oh, all right; go on. Where are they?"

"Having more tea; Aunt Myra made them ... Well, they arrived, as you probably heard, and it was all rather devastating. There was a good deal of emotion. And she would do nothing but say she was dusty, and of course she was dusty, so there was nothing for me to say."

"So what did you say?"

"And he said he would never have known me."

"Honest, bluff sort of chap?"

"Oh, no" said Lois and flushed, for really Laurence was too insulting. She laughed and glanced at her finger nails-the only part of one"s person, she had observed, of which it was possible to be conscious socially. "Haven"t you met him?"

"I think I did once. I think I thought he was rather fatuous. But I was very young at the time-I mayn"t have met him at all."

"Isn"t it extraordinary," said Lois confidentially, "the way one"s nails grow-I mean, when one comes to think: yards and yards of inexhaustible nail coming out of one ... As a matter of fact," she added, "I once rather had illusions about Mr. Montmorency- since I was ten. He came to stay with my mother and me when we were at Leamington. After dinner-I was allowed to sit up-Mother walked out of the house and left us. We were trying chickens at that time and I daresay she went out to shut them up and then simply stayed in the garden. Mr. Montmorency and I talked for some time, then he got solemn and went to sleep all in a moment. I sat and watched him in absolute fascination. You know the way men go to sleep after dinner? Well, that wasn"t at all the way he did- Then my mother came back, very much refreshed at having been away from us, and said I was a rather bad hostess, and woke Mr. Montmorency up. I have thought since, anyone might have said she was a rather bad hostess. But everything she did seemed so natural."

"Oh, she was lovely," said Laurence, indifferent.

"So you see he is really not bluff, or he wouldn"t have gone to sleep in that perfectly simple, exposed way. He was melancholy and exhausted and wise, which I did appreciate as a child, when most visitors were so noisy at one."

"Extraordinary," said Laurence, looking out of the window.

Laurence was comfortable to talk to because of his indifference to every shade of her personality. With him, she felt committed by speech itself to a display of such unfathomable silliness that she might just as well come out-and did-with a.s.sertions surprising at times to herself. When he yawned, took a book up, said he was hungry or simply went away, she was not discountenanced. It was those tender, those receptive listeners to whom one felt afterwards sold and committed. It is true that when first she had met Laurence again she had wished to impress him as an intellectual girl. But an evening of signal failure when he had told her she should read less and more thoroughly and, on the whole he thought, talk less, had involved a certain rearrangement of att.i.tude. She had reattained confidence, expanding under his disapproval.

"It doesn"t occur to you," he said with an air of sinister triumph, "that the Montmorencys may have come up the front stairs while you came up the back stairs and be both in that room, listening?"

Unthinkable, but the very sound of the thing was a shock. Crimson, she ran to the door of the spare-room: struggling with unreason, knocked defiantly, rattled the handle. She went in, finally, with a sense of impertinence, for the new arrivals already were spiritually in possession.

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 ent.i.tled 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."

"d.a.m.n," 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 embarra.s.sment.

"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.

CHAPTER TWO.

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 awkwardness. 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 p.r.i.c.k: 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 gla.s.s, 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."

Myra kissed her-a compact, sudden pursing and placing of the lips. It was as though they were meeting again only now. The door swung to with a rush. "It"s been too bad, too bad-not even as if you had been in Canada."

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.

"Well," he said, looking roound the room.

"Well, Hugo ... isn"t it lovely?"

"Richard"s in great form-I thought I"d never get up at all to you-Not tired?"