3
After dinner they went into the garden; some of them sitting on the lawn, some of them wandering about among the flowers.
The border was in the summer prime of lilies and peonies and anchusa and delphiniums; to its right was a great clump of lavender nearly ripe, and at the stage when it looks like veins of porphyry running through a rock of jade; a little to its left was a stiff row of hollyhocks.
“An amazingly distinguished flower, hollyhock!” said Guy, “it always gives a cachet to its surroundings, so different from sweetpeas, which look sordid in a dusty station garden, and fragrantly bourgeois beside the suburban lawn on which Miss Smith is playing tennis in lavender muslin....”
“Guy!” cried Lady Cust, looking round anxiously at the company, and laughing apologetically; Guy, however, went on undaunted; “but hollyhock is like the signature of a great painter, it testifies that any subject can be turned into art—or, rather, into that domain which lies between painting and poetry, where damoizelles, dressed in quaintly damasked brocades, talk of friendship and death and the stars in curious stiff conceits.”
“Guy! You are a duffer,” laughed Lady Cust again.
“Well, here come some of these damoizelles in their quaint brocades—do you think they are talking about friendship and death and the stars?
“Do you think they are talking about friendship and death and the stars? Do you think they are talking about friendship and death and the stars?” said Hugh Mallam with his jolly laugh, and he nodded towards Concha and Elfrida Penn and Lettice Moore and Winifred Norton, who, dressed in a variety of pale colours, were walking arm in arm up the border.
Sainte-Beuve in a fine passage describes the moment in a journey south when “en descendant le fleuve, on a passé une de ces lignes par delà lesquelles le soleil et le ciel sont plus beaux.”
Such a line—beyond which “the sun and the sky are more beautiful”—cuts across the range of every one’s vision; and the group of flower-bordered girls were certainly beyond that line for all who were watching them. Once again Teresa felt as if she were suddenly seeing the present as the past; and as long as she lived it would always be as that picture that she would see Concha’s wedding.
“Vera incessu patuit dea,” murmured Hugh, and then he added, a little wistfully, “they do look jolly!”
“You’d look just as jolly far off, in that light, Hugh,” said Dick, who was sitting blinking at his flowers, like a large, contented tom-cat.
The younger men who, with the exception of Guy, had been walking up and down between the hawthorn hedge, smoking cigars and deep in talk—probably about the War—went and joined the four girls; and after a few moments of general chatter Arnold flung his arm round Concha’s shoulder and Teresa could hear him saying: “Come on, Conch,” and they wandered off by themselves. She was glad; for she knew that Concha had felt acutely the estrangement from Arnold caused by his jealousy at her engagement.
Then Rory came and joined the party on the lawn, and sat down on the grass at the feet of Lady Cust.
“Well, what about a little Bridge?” said Dick, and he, Hugh, Sir Roger, and Colonel Dundas, went indoors for a rubber.
Shortly afterwards Lady Cust and Rory wandered off together in the direction of the lavender.
“Well, Rorrocks, so you’re really going to do it?”
“Yes, Aunt May, I’m in for it this time ... the great adventure!” and he laughed a little nervously, “Concha ... she ... don’t you think she’s pretty?”
“Awfully pretty, Rory, I do really ... a dear thing!”
They felt that there were many things they wanted to say to each other, these two; but, apart from reserve and false shame, they would have found it hard to express these things in words.
“Well, time does fly! It seems just the other day that I was scurrying up to Edinburgh for your christening ... and Fran ... Guy was only a year old.”
“Yes, ... I can hardly believe it myself,” and again he gave a little nervous laugh.
“Well, dear old thing,” and she laid a hand on his arm, “I’m your godmother, you know, and your mother and I ... I don’t believe we were ever away from each other till I married ... you’re sure ... it’s going to be all right, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Aunt May, it’s going to be all right.... I’m sure,” and again he laughed; and although he was very pale, his eyes were bright and happy.
“Shall we go and walk down the border and look beautiful too?” said Guy to Teresa.
“Well, and what about the play?” he asked, when they were out of ear-shot.
“It’s finished at last ... so I can breathe again. While I was writing I felt rather like a sort of Thomas the Rhymer, a thrall to ghosts and fairies; and I got half to hate the whole thing, as one is always inclined to hate a master.”
She was trying to be friendly, and thought it would please him if she told him about such intimate things; but he was not pleased.
Though he had never written anything long enough to give him at first hand the feeling she had described, yet he realised it was what certainly would be felt by a genuine dramatist or novelist; and it was not in his picture that Teresa should be either—Sophocles may have led his own choruses, but he did not lead those of Euripides.
“The play’s finished, and yet all this,” and she waved her arm vaguely in the direction of the house and garden and all the groups of people, “and yet all this goes on just the same.”