Chapter 10

There was no way of getting into or out of the top garden at San

Salvatore except through the two glass doors, unfortunately side by

side, of the dining-room and the hall. A person in the garden who

wished to escape unseen could not, for the person to be escaped from

would be met on the way. It was a small, oblong garden, and concealment

was impossible. What trees there were—the Judas tree, the tamarisk, the

umbrella-pine—grew close to the low parapets. Rose bushes gave no real

cover; one step to right or left of them, and the person wishing to be

private was discovered. Only the north-west corner was a little place

jutting out from the great wall, a kind of excrescence or loop, no

doubt used in the old distrustful days for observation, where it was

possible to sit really unseen, because between it and the house was a

thick clump of daphne.

Scrap, after glancing round to see that no one was looking, got up and

carried her chair into this place, stealing away as carefully on tiptoe

as those steal whose purpose is sin. There was another excrescence on

the walls just like it at the north-east corner, but this, though the

view from it was almost more beautiful, for from it you could see the

bay and the lovely mountains behind Mezzago, was exposed. No bushes

grew near it, nor had it any shade. The north-west loop then was where

she would sit, and she settled into it, and nestling her head in her

cushion and putting her feet comfortably on the parapet, from whence

they appeared to the villagers on the piazza below as two white doves,

thought that now indeed she would be safe.

Mrs. Fisher found her there, guided by the smell of her cigarette. The

incautious Scrap had not thought of that. Mrs. Fisher did not smoke

herself, and all the more distinctly could she smell the smoke of

others. The virile smell met her directly she went out into the garden

from the dining-room after lunch in order to have her coffee. She had

bidden Francesca set the coffee in the shade of the house just outside

the glass door, and when Mrs. Wilkins, seeing a table being carried

there, reminded her, very officiously and tactlessly Mrs. Fisher

considered, that Lady Caroline wanted to be alone, she retorted—and

with what propriety—that the garden was for everybody.

Into it accordingly she went, and was immediately aware that Lady

Caroline was smoking. She said to herself, “These modern young women,”

and proceeded to find her; her stick, now that lunch was over, being no

longer the hindrance to action that it was before her meal had been

securely, as Browning once said—surely it was Browning? Yes, she

remembered how much diverted she had been—roped in.

Nobody diverted her now, reflected Mrs. Fisher, making straight for the

clump of daphne; the world had grown very dull, and had entirely lost

its sense of humour. Probably they still had their jokes, these

people—in fact she knew they did, for _Punch_ still went on; but how

differently it went on, and what jokes. Thackeray, in his inimitable

way, would have made mincemeat of this generation. Of how much it

needed the tonic properties of that astringent pen it was of course

unaware. It no longer even held him—at least, so she had been

informed—in any particular esteem. Well, she could not give it eyes to

see and ears to hear and a heart to understand, but she could and would

give it, represented and united in the form of Lady Caroline, a good

dose of honest medicine.

“I hear you are not well,” she said, standing in the narrow entrance of

the loop and looking down with the inflexible face of one who is

determined to do good at the motionless and apparently sleeping Scrap.

Mrs. Fisher had a deep voice, very like a man’s, for she had been

overtaken by that strange masculinity that sometimes pursues a woman

during the last laps of her life.

Scrap tried to pretend that she was asleep, but if she had been her

cigarette would not have been held in her fingers but would have been

lying on the ground.

She forgot this. Mrs. Fisher did not, and coming inside the loop, sat

down on a narrow stone seat built out of the wall. For a little she

could sit on it; for a little, till the chill began to penetrate.

She contemplated the figure before her. Undoubtedly a pretty creature,

and one that would have had a success at Farringford. Strange how

easily even the greatest men were moved by exteriors. She had seen with

her own eyes Tennyson turn away from everybody—turn, positively, his

back on a crowd of eminent people assembled to do him honour, and

withdraw to the window with a young person nobody had ever heard of,

who had been brought there by accident and whose one and only merit—if

it be a merit, that which is conferred by chance—was beauty. Beauty!

All over before you can turn round. An affair, one might almost say, of

minutes. Well, while it lasted it did seem able to do what it liked

with men. Even husbands were not immune. There had been passages in the

life of Mr. Fisher . . .

“I expect the journey has upset you,” she said in her deep voice. “What

you want is a good dose of some simple medicine. I shall ask Domenico

if there is such a thing in the village as castor oil.”

Scrap opened her eyes and looked straight at Mrs. Fisher.

“Ah,” said Mrs. Fisher, “I knew you were not asleep. If you had been

you would have let your cigarette fall to the ground.”

Scrap threw the cigarette over the parapet.

“Waste,” said Mrs. Fisher. “I don’t like smoking for women, but I still

less like waste.”

“What _does_ one do with people like this?” Scrap asked herself, her

eyes fixed on Mrs. Fisher in what felt to her an indignant stare but

appeared to Mrs. Fisher as really charming docility.

“Now you’ll take my advice,” said Mrs. Fisher, touched, “and not

neglect what may very well turn into an illness. We are in Italy, you

know, and one has to be careful. You ought, to begin with, to go to

bed.”

“I never go to bed,” snapped Scrap; and it sounded as moving, as

forlorn, as that line spoken years and years ago by an actress playing

the part of Poor Jo in dramatised version of Bleak House—“I’m always

moving on,” said Poor Jo in this play, urged to do so by a policeman;

and Mrs. Fisher, then a girl, had laid her head on the red velvet

parapet of the front row of the dress circle and wept aloud.

It was wonderful, Scrap’s voice. It had given her, in the ten years

since she came out, all the triumphs that intelligence and wit can

have, because it made whatever she said seem memorable. She ought, with

a throat formation like that, to have been a singer, but in every kind

of music Scrap was dumb except this one music of the speaking voice;

and what a fascination, what a spell lay in that. Such was the

loveliness of her face and the beauty of her colouring that there was

not a man into whose eyes at the sight of her there did not leap a

flame of intensest interest; but, when he heard her voice, the flame in

that man’s eyes was caught and fixed. It was the same with every man,

educated and uneducated, old, young, desirable themselves or

undesirable, men of her own world and bus-conductors, generals and

Tommies—during the war she had had a perplexing time—bishops equally

with vergers—round about her confirmation startling occurrences had

taken place—wholesome and unwholesome, rich and penniless, brilliant or

idiotic; and it made no difference at all what they were, or how long

and securely married: into the eyes of every one of them, when they saw

her, leapt this flame, and when they heard her it stayed there.

Scrap had had enough of this look. It only led to difficulties. At

first it had delighted her. She had been excited, triumphant. To be

apparently incapable of doing or saying the wrong thing, to be

applauded, listened to, petted, adored wherever she went, and when she

came home to find nothing there either but the most indulgent proud

fondness—why, how extremely pleasant. And so easy, too. No preparation

necessary for this achievement, no hard work, nothing to learn. She

need take no trouble. She had only to appear, and presently say

something.

But gradually experiences gathered round her. After all, she had to

take trouble, she had to make efforts, because, she discovered with

astonishment and rage, she had to defend herself. That look, that

leaping look, meant that she was going to be grabbed at. Some of those

who had it were more humble than others, especially if they were young,

but they all, according to their several ability, grabbed; and she who

had entered the world so jauntily, with her head in the air and the

completest confidence in anybody whose hair was grey, began to

distrust, and then to dislike, and soon to shrink away from, and

presently to be indignant. Sometimes it was just as if she didn’t

belong to herself, wasn’t her own at all, but was regarded as a

universal thing, a sort of beauty-of-all-work. Really men . . . And she

found herself involved in queer, vague quarrels, being curiously hated.

Really women . . . And when the war came, and she flung herself into it

along with everybody else, it finished her. Really generals . . .

The war finished Scrap. It killed the one man she felt safe with, whom

she would have married, and it finally disgusted her with love. Since

then she had been embittered. She was struggling as angrily in the

sweet stuff of life as a wasp got caught in honey. Just as desperately

did she try to unstick her wings. It gave her no pleasure to outdo

other women; she didn’t want their tiresome men. What could one do with

men when one had got them? None of them would talk to her of anything

but the things of love, and how foolish and fatiguing that became after

a bit. It was as though a healthy person with a normal hunger was given

nothing whatever to eat but sugar. Love, love . . . the very word made

her want to slap somebody. “_Why_ should I love you? _Why_ should I?”

she would ask amazed sometimes when somebody was trying—somebody was

always trying—to propose to her. But she never got a real answer, only

further incoherence.

A deep cynicism took hold of the unhappy Scrap. Her inside grew

hoary with disillusionment, while her gracious and charming outside

continued to make the world more beautiful. What had the future in it

for her? She would not be able, after such a preparation, to take hold

of it. She was fit for nothing; she had wasted all this time being

beautiful. Presently she wouldn’t be beautiful, and what then? Scrap

didn’t know what then, it appalled her to wonder even. Tired as she

was of being conspicuous she was at least used to that, she had never

known anything else; and to become inconspicuous, to fade, to grow

shabby and dim, would probably be most painful. And once she began,

what years and years of it there would be! Imagine, thought Scrap,

having most of one’s life at the wrong end. Imagine being old for two

or three times as long as being young. Stupid, stupid. Everything was

stupid. There wasn’t a thing she wanted to do. There were thousands

of things she didn’t want to do. Avoidance, silence, invisibility, if

possible unconsciousness—these negations were all she asked for at the

moment; and here, even here, she was not allowed a minute’s peace, and

this absurd woman must come pretending, merely because she wanted to

exercise power and make her go to bed and make her—hideous—drink castor

oil, that she thought she was ill.

“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Fisher, who felt the cold of the stone beginning

to come through and knew she could not sit much longer, “you’ll do what

is reasonable. Your mother would wish—have you a mother?”

A faint wonder came into Scrap’s eyes. Have you a mother? If ever

anybody had a mother it was Scrap. It had not occurred to her that

there could be people who had never heard of her mother. She was one of

the major marchionesses—there being, as no one knew better than Scrap,

marchionesses and marchionesses—and had held high positions at Court.

Her father, too, in his day had been most prominent. His day was a

little over, poor dear, because in the war he had made some important

mistakes, and besides he was now grown old; still, there he was, an

excessively well-known person. How restful, how extraordinarily restful

to have found some one who had never heard of any of her lot, or at

least had not yet connected her with them.

She began to like Mrs. Fisher. Perhaps the originals didn’t know

anything about her either. When she first wrote to them and signed her

name, that great name of Dester which twisted in and out of English

history like a bloody thread, for its bearers constantly killed, she

had taken it for granted that they would know who she was; and at the

interview in Shaftesbury Avenue she was sure they did know, because

they hadn’t asked, as they otherwise would have, for references.

Scrap began to cheer up. If nobody at San Salvatore had ever heard of

her, if for a whole month she could shed herself, get right away from

everything connected with herself, be allowed really to forget the

clinging and the clogging and all the noise, why, perhaps she might

make something of herself after all. She might really think; really

clear up her mind; really come to some conclusion.

“What I want to do here,” she said, leaning forward in her chair and

clasping her hands round her knees and looking up at Mrs. Fisher, whose

seat was higher than hers, almost with animation, so much pleased was

she that Mrs. Fisher knew nothing about her, “is to come to a

conclusion. That’s all. It isn’t much to want, is it? Just that.”

She gazed at Mrs. Fisher, and thought that almost any conclusion would

do; the great thing was to get hold of something, catch something

tight, cease to drift.

Mrs. Fisher’s little eyes surveyed her. “I should say,” she said, “that

what a young woman like you wants is a husband and children.”

“Well, that’s one of the things I’m going to consider,” said Scrap

amiably. “But I don’t think it would be a conclusion.”

“And meanwhile,” said Mrs. Fisher, getting up, for the cold of the

stone was now through, “I shouldn’t trouble my head if I were you with

considerings and conclusions. Women’s heads weren’t made for thinking,

I assure you. I should go to bed and get well.”

“I am well,” said Scrap.

“Then why did you send a message that you were ill?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then I’ve had all the trouble of coming out here for nothing.”

“But wouldn’t you prefer coming out and finding me well than coming out

and finding me ill?” asked Scrap, smiling.

Even Mrs. Fisher was caught by the smile.

“Well, you’re a pretty creature,” she said forgivingly. “It’s a pity

you weren’t born fifty years ago. My friends would have liked looking

at you.”

“I’m very glad I wasn’t,” said Scrap. “I dislike being looked at.”

“Absurd,” said Mrs. Fisher, growing stern again. “That’s what you are

made for, young women like you. For what else, pray? And I assure you

that if my friends had looked at you, you would have been looked at by

some very great people.”

“I dislike very great people,” said Scrap, frowning. There had been an

incident quite recently—really potentates. . .

“What _I_ dislike,” said Mrs. Fisher, now as cold as the stone she had

got up from, “is the pose of the modern young woman. It seems to me

pitiful, positively pitiful, in its silliness.”

And, her stick crunching the pebbles, she walked away.

“That’s all right,” Scrap said to herself, dropping back into her

comfortable position with her head in the cushion and her feet on the

parapet; if only people would go away she didn’t in the least mind why

they went.

“Don’t you think darling Scrap is growing a little, just a little,

peculiar?” her mother had asked her father a short time before that

latest peculiarity of the flight to San Salvatore, uncomfortably struck

by the very odd things Scrap said and the way she had taken to slinking

out of reach whenever she could and avoiding everybody except—such a

sign of age—quite young men, almost boys.

“Eh? What? Peculiar? Well, let her be peculiar if she likes. A woman

with her looks can be any damned thing she pleases,” was the infatuated

answer.

“I do let her,” said her mother meekly; and indeed if she did not, what

difference would it make?

Mrs. Fisher was sorry she had bothered about Lady Caroline. She went

along the hall towards her private sitting-room, and her stick as she

went struck the stone floor with a vigour in harmony with her feelings.

Sheer silliness, these poses. She had no patience with them. Unable to

be or do anything of themselves, the young of the present generation

tried to achieve a reputation for cleverness by decrying all that was

obviously great and obviously good and by praising everything, however

obviously bad, that was different. Apes, thought Mrs. Fisher, roused.

Apes. Apes. And in her sitting-room she found more apes, or what seemed

to her in her present mood more, for there was Mrs. Arbuthnot placidly

drinking coffee, while at the writing-table, the writing-table she

already looked upon as sacred, using her pen, her own pen brought for

her hand alone from Prince of Wales Terrace, sat Mrs. Wilkins writing;

at the table; in her room; with her pen.

“Isn’t this a delightful place?” said Mrs. Arbuthnot cordially. “We

have just discovered it.”

“I’m writing to Mellersh,” said Mrs. Wilkins, turning her head and also

cordially—as though, Mrs. Fisher thought, she cared a straw who she was

writing to and anyhow knew who the person she called Mellersh was.

“He’ll want to know,” said Mrs. Wilkins, optimism induced by her

surroundings, “that I’ve got here safely.”