Frontier Passage Page 15

  One thing surprised him a good deal about Raquel. Though she was not in the least efficient, in the busy British sense of the word, he had always found her perfectly practical, in a quiet unobtrusive way, in her judgement, whether on people or situations; without stressing it, she had a good head on her shoulders. But in their present situation, which was full enough of difficulties even if she was right and he was wrong, and her husband was really fundamentally indifferent to her, she never seemed to think of the future, or to wish to make any sort of plan—whereas James, the Irishman, to whom love meant marriage, was constantly concerned with the next step, and many steps beyond. But not Raquel—she seemed perfectly content to rest in the exquisite present, or at most to look forward to a very near future, when they would become lovers. She never actually said this in so many words, but James realised almost at once that it was so—that he had only to put out his hand, as it were, to take that final bliss. He guessed that the strain and horror of those months in Madrid, coming on top of the long loveless years, had combined with the collapse of the whole society in which she had been brought up to induce this happy indifference, this obliviousness, almost, to all practical considerations. As to her apparent obliviousness to moral ones, that he felt he understood better. Years of marriage to a man who gave away his wife’s inherited jewels to his mistress of the moment might well, in spite of anything the Church might say, make a woman of spirit feel that she had regained her freedom in respect to love. And he was sure that she was perfectly genuine in her disbelief in a change of heart on Pascual’s part. But most of all, on that side, lay Spain, and the attitude of the Spanish people to love after marriage. James had once escorted a sober British delegation, visiting Madrid on some financial mission, on a round of sight-seeing which included one of the great historic country mansions outside the capital. He could see now their faces of horror when a grave major-domo, speaking French, showed them a magnificent four-poster bed in one room with the calm announcement—“Here His Excellency the Duke of D——slept with the Duchess of P——” referring to living persons. Spain was like that.

  But it was his obstinate inner conviction about Pascual which nevertheless enabled him, at the end, to go away without taking that for which everything in him craved. A cobweb film with a nightmare strength, linked somehow to that Irish fastidiousness and to his abnormal sensitiveness to others’ pain, impalpably blocked his way. Did she understand? He didn’t know. She had almost convinced him that he was wrong, and yet he could not move forward. Whether she understood or not, he also realised that she loved him so much—to James, it was a frightening realisation—that she would accept his wish, his impulse, even if it conflicted with her own ultimate need; and further that she was too schooled, too clever, too skilful to seek to impose her own needs and wishes on any man. There, he always felt a hint of inferiority with her—that terrifying disciplined technique of a great lady who came of a long line of great lovers was altogether beyond him. For she was potentially a great lover; his intelligence, as well as his blood and his nerves, proclaimed, fairly shouted that at him. Oh, God—why did he have to have these scruples? Why had she ever sent him to see Pascual? If he had not seen him—well, it would all have been different, he said to himself doggedly, setting his big ugly jaw.

  This time, when he left, she got up to see him off; so far they had advanced, that both felt it quite natural that she should do this, and either assumed that the Duquesa and anyone else who was aware of the proceeding should take it for granted too, or else just didn’t care whether they did or not. In fact the little group of James’s colleagues had come to take him and the Condesa rather for granted as a unit—to that extent they had imposed themselves on normal human society, which will, in the end, stand quite a lot from the beautiful, the able and the determined, especially if they are perfectly fearless and unconcerned, as Raquel at least certainly was. The idea that she should for one moment consider what a group of foreign newspapermen might think of her actions would certainly never have occurred to her—James realised that, and envied this aristocratic freedom.

  He sent his luggage down to the station by the hotel cab—they walked, round by the sea-wall and the Place Louis XIV. It was a lovely morning; the Dogs’ Club was in session on the beach, and Raquel, laughing, pointed it out to James—“Rosemary calls that one The President,” she said, indicating a grave brindled object of uncertain breed, with a grizzled muzzle. This pleased James; he had seen a good deal of Rosemary on this visit, she had been with them sometimes for lunch or tea, or in the evenings, and the lively objective amused quality of her mind had won his approval. “What a nice child that is,” he said as they walked on.

  “Is not she? Oh, she will help me when you are gone,” Raquel said, turning to him with one of her quick movements. “She has so much heart.”

  “Oh, God, my darling, I wish I didn’t have to go,” he said, drawing her arm through his and pressing it against his side.

  “I know—so do I also wish it,” she said. “But you must, I know. But you will return as soon as you can”—and she turned her face to him.

  “Yes. But it won’t be very soon,” he said. “This offensive—no one knows when it will come off, but there’s bound to be one soon, and then I shall be stuck.”

  “It won’t last long once it begins,” she said, proudly, confidently—“and then you will return.” Then, seeing his expression change—“Oh, forgive me!” she said. “But I cannot be other than what I am—I must feel as I do.”

  “I know—never mind,” he said gloomily.

  “And James——” she paused. “I do not wish to be tiresome to you, but you will do all, all you can this time to get some news of Juanito, will you not?” Her lovely face, suddenly, changed to an expression of deep distress. “I do so very much wish to know what is become of him. I need to know it,” she said, with a moving simplicity.

  “Dear love, I know you do. And I will do the possible and the impossible to find out,” he said. “You know that.”

  She dabbed at her eyes.

  “Yes, yes. You are so good.”

  “I’m not good!” James said, pausing and taking her by the elbows. “I adore you, and you know it, and I don’t care what I do for you. Besides, I understand,” he said in another tone. He was thinking of his mother.

  “Let’s say good-bye here,” he said suddenly. “Don’t come on.” They were standing just where the sea-wall abuts against the harbour entrance, beyond the last houses; the whole curve of the bay, green slopes, gay villas, the etched block of the town lay sparklingly distinct in the early light; the white mushrooms of spray put forth, silently, out beyond the mole, golden in the morning sunshine; the blue and green sardine boats, emerging like bullets from the narrow mouth of the port, bounded over the blue water towards it. He looked round at it all; he looked back at her.

  “Oh, how lovely it is! And how lovely you are!” he said, and put his arms around her and kissed her.

  “Good-bye, my dearest love,” he said. “Take care of yourself, for pity’s sake. Write me to Barcelona. Sure you’ve got enough money?”

  Even at that moment, the amused enigmatic look came on her face, at those last words.

  “Yes, my darling Englishman!” she said. “Plenty of money!” Then her face changed.

  “Oh, good-bye!” she said, and put her face up to his, and kissed his mouth violently. “Gome soon! I shall be half dead till you do,” she said, and slipped from his arms and walked rapidly away, with her light individual step, along the narrow sea-wall, back towards the hotel. Slowly, heavily, James turned in the other direction and went on to the station.

  He sat in the train on the long cross-country journey back to Toulouse and Perpignan, his luggage crammed with little gifts from Raquel to Pascual—cigarettes, sugar, pocket-handkerchiefs; she had no difficulty, it seemed, in reconciling a lover with such correct and even kindly attentions to her imprisoned husband. He sat heavily, exhausted with the pain of parting, and th
ought about Raquel. Much as he loved her, safe as he felt with her, he never quite understood her; never really knew what her mind within said to her. Because she was Spanish; the Scottish grandmother had never overcome the Spaniard in her. And thinking about the differences between the Spaniards and the English, easy as the two races found it to like and respect one another—because both were proud, silent, and combative, perhaps?—he remembered his first sight of Spain, and the illumination that that rapid impression had thrown on the whole race for him, over years.

  He had been on a motor tour, and had gone in at Irun, after ten days spent in France—and after an early lunch at San Sebastian had driven straight on to Burgos. And he remembered still, clearly, the peculiar shock that that first aspect of Spain had given him, when the car had climbed by the great looped road up to the pass that leads out of the coastal country, and dropped, less far, to the high plain which stretches away to Vitoria and Miranda. It was most beautiful, this high bare land between low mountains, where the eye travelled for miles over the brownish uplands, set with the villages which crowned each small eminence like islands in a lake—though they were far apart, he had counted fourteen in sight at once. Beautiful independently of any graces of rich vegetation, grass or tree—a beauty of the very bones of the land, of shape and structure and line, grave and austere. But it was the villages themselves that had caused the surprise, the shock. James Milcom had long held a theory that nothing so gives away the inherent character of a nation as its architecture, and especially the architecture of its villages and little towns, built by simple people for daily use, unpretentious and unfaked. And he had come straight from France, where even in the smallest village the houses were built in rows, facing neatly on the tree-bordered street—orderly parts of a common whole, arranged in a disciplined unity. How different were these villages of northern Spain! Strongly, even splendidly built of creamy or golden stone, the houses were set in no order at all—they faced all ways at once, to the back, to the corner of the next house, as irregular and haphazard as yellow bricks poured out of a sack—without any attempt at paths or gardens, surrounded by a sea of mud, through which men and cattle alike ploughed their way. And the churches! Each village had its church, set high in the midst; splendid buildings, these too, immensely lofty, reinforced with high narrow buttresses—but except for the east and west ends, without windows. Milcom had gone on his way marvelling, wondering what could be the inner character of this people. And he had found, as time went on and he came again and again to Spain, loving it each time more, that the village architecture had spoken no more than the truth—that in the Spanish character there was a haughty and ferocious individualism which did not readily brook any aims but private ones, or at least insisted on carrying out public aims in its own way, and had accepted for centuries a religious organisation which, while it had produced such a superb flowering of religious thought and mystical experience as was represented by S. Ignatius Loyola and Santa Teresa, had somehow failed to shed much illumination on the Spanish peasantry. And always there was also present that indestructible and defiant beauty in the very shape of the land, matching the dignified hauteur of the race. Grunting, James Milcom travelled on towards Spain.

  For one reason and another the Oldhead family postponed their expedition to the Grotte de Sare till a day or so after Milcom left. Though Ethel Oldhead was firm and energetic about visiting (and causing her family to visit) places of historic interest, her two main passions were really shopping and the cinema and in Biarritz and Bayonne she could gratify both—but especially in Bayonne. Oldhead and Rosemary hated Biarritz, with good reason, and could seldom be dragged there. Built flaringly and largely for a fashionable and expensive class of winter visitor, it was a dreary place now that winter-sports had deflected its international clientèle to the mountains, leaving it moribund—the closed Casino, the huge shuttered hotels, the almost empty streets produced a dismal effect of desolation; and the few shops that were open sought by exorbitant prices to recoup themselves for a scarcity of customers. But Bayonne, busy, shabby and unpretentious, its river crowded with tramp shipping, its narrow streets with provincial housewives, contained innumerable cheap and excellent shops, and was always alive with a cheerful, bustling, middle-class activity. There was that little shop in the Rue des Arcades where they made up both scent and powder to suit the individual purchaser’s complexion and taste, miraculously cheaply—catching the two o’clock bus from St.-Jean, you could nip in and buy your little paper screw of powder before the early house at the cinema, and afterwards go and drink frothing rich chocolate at Cazenave’s, before catching the seven o’clock bus back. Further up the same street, if you had courage to a degree lacked by the parent Oldheads, you could buy oysters for 3d. a dozen!

  A succession of good French films: Retour à l’ Aube, Entrée des Artistes, La Maison du Maltais, above all Prison sans Barreaux (which Ethel Oldhead insisted on seeing twice), caused a number of these expeditions to Bayonne during Milcom’s visit, but the day after he left Mr. Oldhead announced that they might as well do the Grotte de Sare and get it over, while the weather was still tolerable; and the following day they chartered a car and went, Crossman accompanying them, as his Press pass might assist in getting past the Gardes Mobiles—a wise precaution, since the entrance to the great cave is within a hundred yards or so of the frontier. But the French authorities were not minded to let military considerations interfere too much with financial ones; and though the party came on a police post about a kilometre short of the frontier, the chauffeur’s curt statement “Foreigners—for the grotto!” sufficed to get them past.

  The Grotte de Sare is rather an imposing specimen of those caves which abound both to the East and West of the Pyrenees. It has not the archaeological interest of the Mas d’Azil, nor the superb prehistoric drawings and paintings of the Altamira and other Spanish caves—a few rather doubtful scratchings are all it can boast in that line. But it had the distinction of sheltering Don Carlos and, it is said, seven hundred of his followers, for weeks on end, during the Carlist wars of the last century. Certainly, there would be room for them! From the great mouth, ninety feet across and perhaps forty feet high, whose stony upper lip is fringed with pendent ivy, to the furthest limit of the electric lighting provided for the benefit of tourists must be the better part of half a kilometre; and there are other unlit portions beyond. Rough steps and paths cut in the rock, rough wooden gangways and ladders lead the visitor in and out, up and down—now through long high galleries, now through shallow tunnel-like passages, now into huge caverns like vast rooms, or strange places of stalactites and stalagmites, where even the walls are as it were upholstered in the glittering whitish deposits of lime. Water drips, or gurgles or rushes at intervals, mostly out of sight—the Carlists must have got very damp. In two or three places colonies of bats hang from the stony roof, head-down and close enough to touch—a sinister sight, a dirty smell.

  To this odd place the three Oldheads and Crossman arrived on a soft misty November afternoon. An old peasant with a stubbly chin and very bad breath emerged from a cottage close by and sold them their tickets; he muttered something about sending “le jeune homme” and motioned them towards the entrance. Most of this was filled with a sort of shallow pool, in which an old punt lay half-submerged; a small stream chattered away from it over a stony bed—but by a path along the right-hand wall they picked their way into the cave. Even here by the entrance it seemed very dark at first, after the autumn sunshine outside, but presently their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, and Rosemary and Crossman ranged about, trying to see where the pool ended and the stream which obviously fed it began, and being re-called by anguished and angry protests from Mrs. and Mr. Oldhead respectively. In the course of these explorations they came on a câche of candle-ends and small bits of board with a nail driven through each, clearly intended for use as candlesticks; they both took a candle and a board, heated the nails with matches and affixed their candles, and then began to exp
lore further. But at this point a, tall, rather handsome youth in shirtsleeves, with, a very sulky expression, appeared with the old man—scowling at the strangers, he switched on the electric lights and motioning the visitors to follow, set off into the cave. They tailed after him, Rosemary and Crossman last, still sticking to their candles, in spite of his frowns and head-shakings. Perfunctorily, and always with the same appearance of resentment, he pointed out the various sights—the chamber attributed to Don Carlos; a horrid set of models of primitive man, clad in imitation skins; the stalactites, a waterfall, and so on; the only time his expression relaxed was when Mrs. Oldhead, walking along a wooden gallery, suddenly came on a colony of bats close in front of her, and screamed—this seemed to amuse him, and he laughed loudly and harshly.