Chapters (30)
‘Anyhow – happy!’ she cried. ‘What is happiness? – what comes out of it? Why must we always be feeling each other’s pulses to see if we’re happy?’ She flung the word at him distastefully. It had evidently nothing to do, where she was concerned, with the purest, most exhausting kind of nervous exaltation, and she could make no use of it. He could have wept for her, and longed to say, ‘Can’t you be more of a woman?’ Instead, he smiled with an effect of tolerance and said, ‘You are very impatient.’
‘Oh, really,’ said she.
‘You jump on your feelings and put a pistol up to their heads to make the poor creatures explain themselves. You don’t give them a chance. You don’t, honestly, Sydney, give them a chance.’ He spoke with some energy.
‘Oh, all right, all right,’ said Sydney. ‘Don’t shout at me, James! The wood is quite quiet: I hear – I hear you quite well.’
She did not, after all, make him angry by this; he looked round through the trees in surprise, seemed to accept a reproof from the quiet line of the sea, and agreed with her. ‘Yes, the wood is quiet. I’ve been making a horrible noise. I’ll——’
‘Now don’t make a silence——’
‘Yes, I’m going to – listen——’
She clutched at his arm with elaborate manifestations of terror. They listened.
‘I won’t let you,’ she cried, ‘you shan’t – it’s as bad as the valley. How we ever sleep at the Hotel with all this saving itself up behind us, and that idiotic little tame sea slipping up and down, up and down the beach, I can’t think.’ She stamped her foot and shouted again and again; an echo woke up in the hills. ‘Now we’ve got a noise again, now we’re at home, James, now we’re perfectly at home.’
‘Sydney——’ Something had caught his attention; he looked speechlessly at her; there was something he wanted to ask. She went ahead of him, her bright scarf flickered ahead like a flame through the olives. He took some long strides to catch up with her. ‘Sydney——’ he said.
‘James?’
‘You won’t mind coming home with me. You’ve no qualms about leaving this place?’
All her high spirits came back to her. ‘Never a qualm,’ she said loudly and cheerfully, and looked at him with a bright eye. ‘Never a qualm …’