“Hello, Hermione, are you back again? How do you feel?”
“Oh, better. And how are you—you don’t look well—”
“Oh!—I believe Gudrun and Winnie Crich are coming in to tea. At least they said they were. We shall be a tea-party. What train did you come by, Ursula?”
It was rather annoying to see him trying to placate both women at once. Both women watched him, Hermione with deep resentment and pity for him, Ursula very impatient. He was nervous and apparently in quite good spirits, chattering the conventional commonplaces. Ursula was amazed and indignant at the way he made small-talk; he was adept as any fat in Christendom. She became quite stiff, she would not answer. It all seemed to her so false and so belittling. And still Gudrun did not appear.
“I think I shall go to Florence for the winter,” said Hermione at length.
“Will you?” he answered. “But it is so cold there.”
“Yes, but I shall stay with Palestra. It is quite comfortable.”
“What takes you to Florence?”
“I don’t know,” said Hermione slowly. Then she looked at him with her slow, heavy gaze. “Barnes is starting his school of aesthetics, and Olandese is going to give a set of discourses on the Italian national policy—”
“Both rubbish,” he said.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Hermione.
“Which do you admire, then?”
“I admire both. Barnes is a pioneer. And then I am interested in Italy, in her coming to national consciousness.”
“I wish she’d come to something different from national consciousness, then,” said Birkin; “especially as it only means a sort of commercial-industrial consciousness. I hate Italy and her national rant. And I think Barnes is an amateur.”
Hermione was silent for some moments, in a state of hostility. But yet, she had got Birkin back again into her world! How subtle her influence was, she seemed to start his irritable attention into her direction exclusively, in one minute. He was her creature.
“No,” she said, “you are wrong.” Then a sort of tension came over her, she raised her face like the pythoness inspired with oracles, and went on, in rhapsodic manner: “Il Sandro mi scrive che ha accolto il più grande entusiasmo, tutti i giovani, e fanciulle e ragazzi, sono tutti—” She went on in Italian, as if, in thinking of the Italians she thought in their language.
He listened with a shade of distaste to her rhapsody, then he said:
“For all that, I don’t like it. Their nationalism is just industrialism—that and a shallow jealousy I detest so much.”
“I think you are wrong—I think you are wrong—” said Hermione. “It seems to me purely spontaneous and beautiful, the modern Italian’s passion, for it is a passion, for Italy, l’Italia—”
“Do you know Italy well?” Ursula asked of Hermione. Hermione hated to be broken in upon in this manner. Yet she answered mildly:
“Yes, pretty well. I spent several years of my girlhood there, with my mother. My mother died in Florence.”
“Oh.”
There was a pause, painful to Ursula and to Birkin. Hermione however seemed abstracted and calm. Birkin was white, his eyes glowed as if he were in a fever, he was far too overwrought. How Ursula suffered in this tense atmosphere of strained wills! Her head seemed bound round by iron bands.
Birkin rang the bell for tea. They could not wait for Gudrun any longer. When the door was opened, the cat walked in.
“Micio! Micio!” called Hermione, in her slow, deliberate singsong. The young cat turned to look at her, then, with his slow and stately walk he advanced to her side.
“Vieni—vieni quá,” Hermione was saying, in her strange caressive, protective voice, as if she were always the elder, the mother superior. “Vieni dire Buon’ Giorno alla zia. Mi ricordi, mi ricordi bene—non è vero, piccolo? È vero che mi ricordi? È vero?” And slowly she rubbed his head, slowly and with ironic indifference.
“Does he understand Italian?” said Ursula, who knew nothing of the language.
“Yes,” said Hermione at length. “His mother was Italian. She was born in my waste-paper basket in Florence, on the morning of Rupert’s birthday. She was his birthday present.”
Tea was brought in. Birkin poured out for them. It was strange how inviolable was the intimacy which existed between him and Hermione. Ursula felt that she was an outsider. The very teacups and the old silver was a bond between Hermione and Birkin. It seemed to belong to an old, past world which they had inhabited together, and in which Ursula was a foreigner. She was almost a parvenue in their old cultured milieu. Her convention was not their convention, their standards were not her standards. But theirs were established, they had the sanction and the grace of age. He and she together, Hermione and Birkin, were people of the same old tradition, the same withered deadening culture. And she, Ursula, was an intruder. So they always made her feel.
Hermione poured a little cream into a saucer. The simple way she assumed her rights in Birkin’s room maddened and discouraged Ursula. There was a fatality about it, as if it were bound to be. Hermione lifted the cat and put the cream before him. He planted his two paws on the edge of the table and bent his gracious young head to drink.
“Sicuro che capisce italiano,” sang Hermione, “non l’avrà dimenticato, la lingua della Mamma.”
She lifted the cat’s head with her long, slow, white fingers, not letting him drink, holding him in her power. It was always the same, this joy in power she manifested, peculiarly in power over any male being. He blinked forbearingly, with a male, bored expression, licking his whiskers. Hermione laughed in her short, grunting fashion.
“Ecco, il bravo ragazzo, com’ è superbo, questo!”
She made a vivid picture, so calm and strange with the cat. She had a true static impressiveness, she was a social artist in some ways.
The cat refused to look at her, indifferently avoided her fingers, and began to drink again, his nose down
