The Greater Inclination

When the train at night-fall brought them to their journey’s end at the edge of one of the lakes, Lydia was glad that they were not, as usual, to pass from one solitude to another.  Their wanderings during the year had indeed been like the flight of outlaws:  through Sicily, Dalmatia, Transylvania and Southern Italy they had persisted in their tacit avoidance of their kind.  Isolation, at first, had deepened the flavor of their happiness, as night intensifies the scent of certain flowers; but in the new phase on which they were entering, Lydia’s chief wish was that they should be less abnormally exposed to the action of each other’s thoughts.

She shrank, nevertheless, as the brightly-looming bulk of the fashionable Anglo-American hotel on the water’s brink began to radiate toward their advancing boat its vivid suggestion of social order, visitors’ lists, Church services, and the bland inquisition of the table-d’hote.  The mere fact that in a moment or two she must take her place on the hotel register as Mrs. Gannett seemed to weaken the springs of her resistance.

They had meant to stay for a night only, on their way to a lofty village among the glaciers of Monte Rosa; but after the first plunge into publicity, when they entered the dining-room, Lydia felt the relief of being lost in a crowd, of ceasing for a moment to be the centre of Gannett’s scrutiny; and in his face she caught the reflection of her feeling.  After dinner, when she went upstairs, he strolled into the smoking-room, and an hour or two later, sitting in the darkness of her window, she heard his voice below and saw him walking up and down the terrace with a companion cigar at his side.  When he came up he told her he had been talking to the hotel chaplain—­a very good sort of fellow.

“Queer little microcosms, these hotels!  Most of these people live here all summer and then migrate to Italy or the Riviera.  The English are the only people who can lead that kind of life with dignity—­those soft-voiced old ladies in Shetland shawls somehow carry the British Empire under their caps. Civis Romanus sum.  It’s a curious study—­there might be some good things to work up here.”

He stood before her with the vivid preoccupied stare of the novelist on the trail of a “subject.”  With a relief that was half painful she noticed that, for the first time since they had been together, he was hardly aware of her presence.  “Do you think you could write here?”

“Here?  I don’t know.”  His stare dropped.  “After being out of things so long one’s first impressions are bound to be tremendously vivid, you know.  I see a dozen threads already that one might follow—­”

He broke off with a touch of embarrassment.

“Then follow them.  We’ll stay,” she said with sudden decision.

“Stay here?” He glanced at her in surprise, and then, walking to the window, looked out upon the dusky slumber of the garden.

“Why not?” she said at length, in a tone of veiled irritation.

“The place is full of old cats in caps who gossip with the chaplain.  Shall you like—­I mean, it would be different if—­”

She flamed up.

“Do you suppose I care?  It’s none of their business.”

“Of course not; but you won’t get them to think so.”

“They may think what they please.”

He looked at her doubtfully.

“It’s for you to decide.”

“We’ll stay,” she repeated.

Gannett, before they met, had made himself known as a successful writer of short stories and of a novel which had achieved the distinction of being widely discussed.  The reviewers called him “promising,” and Lydia now accused herself of having too long interfered with the fulfilment of his promise.  There was a special irony in the fact, since his passionate assurances that only the stimulus of her companionship could bring out his latent faculty had almost given the dignity of a “vocation” to her course:  there had been moments when she had felt unable to assume, before posterity, the responsibility of thwarting his career.  And, after all, he had not written a line since they had been together:  his first desire to write had come from renewed contact with the world!  Was it all a mistake then?  Must the most intelligent choice work more disastrously than the blundering combinations of chance?  Or was there a still more humiliating answer to her perplexities?  His sudden impulse of activity so exactly coincided with her own wish to withdraw, for a time, from the range of his observation, that she wondered if he too were not seeking sanctuary from intolerable problems.

“You must begin to-morrow!” she cried, hiding a tremor under the laugh with which she added, “I wonder if there’s any ink in the inkstand?”

* * * * *

Whatever else they had at the Hotel Bellosguardo, they had, as Miss Pinsent said, “a certain tone.”  It was to Lady Susan Condit that they owed this inestimable benefit; an advantage ranking in Miss Pinsent’s opinion above even the lawn tennis courts and the resident chaplain.  It was the fact of Lady Susan’s annual visit that made the hotel what it was.  Miss Pinsent was certainly the last to underrate such a privilege:—­“It’s so important, my dear, forming as we do a little family, that there should be some one to give the tone; and no one could do it better than Lady Susan—­an earl’s daughter and a person of such determination.  Dear Mrs. Ainger now—­who really ought, you know, when Lady Susan’s away—­ absolutely refuses to assert herself.”  Miss Pinsent sniffed derisively.  “A bishop’s niece!—­my dear, I saw her once actually give in to some South Americans—­and before us all.  She gave up her seat at table to oblige them—­such a lack of dignity!  Lady Susan spoke to her very plainly about it afterwards.”

Miss Pinsent glanced across the lake and adjusted her auburn front.

“But of course I don’t deny that the stand Lady Susan takes is not always easy to live up to—­for the rest of us, I mean.  Monsieur Grossart, our good proprietor, finds it trying at times, I know—­he has said as much, privately, to Mrs. Ainger and me.  After all, the poor man is not to blame for wanting to fill his hotel, is he?  And Lady Susan is so difficult—­so very difficult—­about new people.  One might almost say that she disapproves of them beforehand, on principle.  And yet she’s had warnings—­ she very nearly made a dreadful mistake once with the Duchess of Levens, who dyed her hair and—­well, swore and smoked.  One would have thought that might have been a lesson to Lady Susan.”  Miss Pinsent resumed her knitting with a sigh.  “There are exceptions, of course.  She took at once to you and Mr. Gannett—­it was quite remarkable, really.  Oh, I don’t mean that either—­of course not!  It was perfectly natural—­we all thought you so charming and interesting from the first day—­we knew at once that Mr. Gannett was intellectual, by the magazines you took in; but you know what I mean.  Lady Susan is so very—­well, I won’t say prejudiced, as Mrs. Ainger does—­but so prepared not to like new people, that her taking to you in that way was a surprise to us all, I confess.”

Miss Pinsent sent a significant glance down the long laurustinus alley from the other end of which two people—­a lady and gentleman—­were strolling toward them through the smiling neglect of the garden.

“In this case, of course, it’s very different; that I’m willing to admit.  Their looks are against them; but, as Mrs. Ainger says, one can’t exactly tell them so.”

“She’s very handsome,” Lydia ventured, with her eyes on the lady, who showed, under the dome of a vivid sunshade, the hour-glass figure and superlative coloring of a Christmas chromo.

“That’s the worst of it.  She’s too handsome.”

“Well, after all, she can’t help that.”

“Other people manage to,” said Miss Pinsent skeptically.

“But isn’t it rather unfair of Lady Susan—­considering that nothing is known about them?”

“But, my dear, that’s the very thing that’s against them.  It’s infinitely worse than any actual knowledge.”

Lydia mentally agreed that, in the case of Mrs. Linton, it possibly might be.

“I wonder why they came here?” she mused.

“That’s against them too.  It’s always a bad sign when loud people come to a quiet place.  And they’ve brought van-loads of boxes—­her maid told Mrs. Ainger’s that they meant to stop indefinitely.”

“And Lady Susan actually turned her back on her in the salon?”

“My dear, she said it was for our sakes:  that makes it so unanswerable!  But poor Grossart is in a way!  The Lintons have taken his most expensive suite, you know—­the yellow damask drawing-room above the portico—­and they have champagne with every meal!”

They were silent as Mr. and Mrs. Linton sauntered by; the lady with tempestuous brows and challenging chin; the gentleman, a blond stripling, trailing after her, head downward, like a reluctant child dragged by his nurse.

“What does your husband think of them, my dear?” Miss Pinsent whispered as they passed out of earshot.

Lydia stooped to pick a violet in the border.

“He hasn’t told me.”

“Of your speaking to them, I mean.  Would he approve of that?  I know how very particular nice Americans are.  I think your action might make a difference; it would certainly carry weight with Lady Susan.”

“Dear Miss Pinsent, you flatter me!”

Lydia rose and gathered up her book and sunshade.

“Well, if you’re asked for an opinion—­if Lady Susan asks you for one—­I think you ought to be prepared,” Miss Pinsent admonished her as she moved away.