Frontier Passage Read online

  It was the fashion some years ago, without much point, to refer to modern hotels as “vast caravanserais.” But the Hôtel de l’Europe at Perpignan really does recall the old oriental caravanserai, since it is built round a central court onto which, for its whole height of four or five floors, the bedroom windows open. This court is roofed with sparrow-wire and glass, and the effect is to make it look like an enormous parrot-cage in some zoo; the echoing properties of the tiled floor and glass roof make it as noisy as a parrot-cage too—it is also very stuffy. There are small tables for light “consommations” in the centre, and two rows of arm-chairs on either side of the gangway leading from the front door to the Bureau constitute the only public sitting-room provided by the management; they are usually occupied by wine-merchants or commercial travellers, sipping Dubonnet or Amer Picon, and silently watching the entry of other clients.

  In one of these chairs the Condesa sat while Milcom went to take rooms for them. Whenever the door opened, (which it did with an explosive bang, after first sticking), or a car back-fired in the street outside, she started violently, then sat back again, trying, by folding them together, to control the trembling of her bare hands. It was evident that she had not got over her reaction from that air-raid as they left Barcelona at all; she looked completely exhausted. Now and then she muttered to herself—“I must stop—I must stop being so silly.” But it was clear that she could not stop—at the next bang or crash she started and trembled as before, and put out her hand to the shabby little attache-case which reposed on the chair beside her.

  Presently Milcom came back to her.

  “I’ve got a room for you,” he said abruptly—“would you like to come up? You must be tired.”

  “Thank you.” But she made no move. “Are the shops open still?” she asked, glancing half-doubtfully at her little case, and then at him.

  He looked at his watch.

  “I expect so—yes. Do you want something?” His tone was not encouraging—it was almost brusque.

  She gave a little laugh. “I want almost everything! But soap and powder most of all.”

  “All right—shall I go and get you some? Anything else?”

  She said nothing for a moment—again she sat looking up at him doubtfully. At last, with a visible effort, she said—

  “Mr. Milcom, when you have done so much for us, it seems absurd to make a fuss about little things. But you see now that Miguel no longer brings me my allowance, I really have no money at all—for the present, whatever you get me, you must give me.”

  James was embarrassed by this. He had been embarrassed by taking the two rooms, on two different floors—and had taken refuge in that brusque abruptness to cover his embarrassment.

  “Of course, of course,” he now said hastily; “it’s only a long loan.” He was hearty, with the blatant heartiness of an embarrassed man who is also tired out—his eyes were like sockets in a skull with fatigue.

  “Just say what you need, and I’ll bring it,” he went on, very business-like—“it was stupid of me not to remember that you’ve no luggage. Soap and powder—and what else?”

  “I would like a sponge—and a nightgown, if I could.” Her voice was rather faint; his change of manner to this chilly businesslike tone was making these difficult requests more difficult still, was routing what was left of her courage and self-control.

  Poor James, however, was rendered still more embarrassed by this last commission.

  “What sort of a nightgown? I don’t know much about these things. Pink? You wouldn’t rather come and choose it yourself, would you?”

  At the word “pink” the Condesa suddenly began to laugh—and soon it was clear that she could not stop. “Yes, yes, pink!” Her words came out almost in a scream. “Pink, pink—oh, it is so funny!” She laughed louder and louder, till she was sobbing with laughter; the noise echoed up the parrot-cage, till the whole building resounded with laughter and sobs. Even to Milcom it was evident that this was raging hysteria. Before he could remember what to do she rose to her feet, really screaming now—“Yes, yes; I will come. I will choose.” A waiter came running from the bar, the manager hurried out of the Bureau, gave one look, and sent a page flying for the femme de chambre; then, with admirable promptitude, he sat the screaming woman down in her chair again, and dashed a glass of water in her face. When the maid came, with smelling-salts, he pressed them firmly under the Condesa’s nose.

  “Madame is overtired,” said James sourly, in excellent French—the little crowd of gaping attendants melted away, he was so stubbornly sour and dignified. “Her room is No. 153—take her up,” he said to the femme de chambre. Soused and gasping, but now silent, the Condesa was borne off. James called for aspirins, and followed; the maid had removed her coat and shoes and had laid her on the bed. James sent for tea, gave her some aspirins and a cup of the hot watery stuff; he closed the curtains, put the dingy quilt over her feet, and telling her to try and sleep, he left her. Then he went out into the town and resolutely bought a box of powder, a sponge, a white nightgown, six pocket-handkerchiefs and a cake of soap, which he had sent up to her, later on, together with a light dinner.

  This whole episode brought Milcom up sharply, for the first time, against the realities of his situation vis-à-vis Raquel de Verdura. It made him realise abruptly that they were no longer what they had been in Madrid, ghostly comrades in a city of ghosts, but a man and woman back in normal human society, involved in all the complications which human society normally imposes on relations between men and women. His embarrassment—which he now realised had actually, more than anything else, driven her to that burst of hysteria—made him worriedly aware of all this, and of something much more profound, which for the moment his mind shied away from. To protect himself from that disturbing certainty he began to concentrate on what he was to do with her, now that he had got her out of Spain. He thought about it a lot, alone that evening in Perpignan, dining in the big café built out over the river. He sat looking out through the plate-glass windows at the strings of lights along the two embankments, with the dark perspective of the house-fronts behind them, and the dark half-empty bed of the river between. It was a little like Dublin, Perpignan, he thought, with its river running slap through the town—and how nice that made a city, the interrupting river, breaking up the continuity of streets and houses, with the spacious embankments where you could see the sky, and the linking bridges forever to be crossed. Still, it was no good thinking about Dublin, he reflected gloomily; the point was what he was to do about Raquel. There she was lying, at that moment, on her dingy bed in the hotel, in the nightgown he had bought for her; beautiful, penniless, her husband in prison, and she herself, so far as he could judge, utterly incapable of doing anything whatever to earn her own living. But he had got to go back to Spain. She must be parked somewhere. He knew that she had a sister, the Duquesa de las Illas; she had told him for certain that the Duque de las Illas had been killed, but she believed her sister had been at Santander, so she might have escaped. She had spoken occasionally of her brother too, Juanito Torre de Modero, whose name was well known to James—but James himself had heard from sources as good as most that Juanito was almost certainly dead. God, what a war!—in which no one knew for certain where or how any of their kith and kin were. Anyhow the Duquesa seemed to be the best bet—and if she had got out from Santander she would probably be at San Sebastián or Biarritz—they seemed to congregate over on that side. He’d better ring up someone at Biarritz and find out—what a curse it was that there was no telephonic communication between Spain and the outside world. It made one more difficulty for newspaper correspondents. He paid his bill, strolled back along the embankment under the plane trees to the hotel, put a call through to a friend in Biarritz, and sat in the parrot-cage waiting for it; people were drinking and dining at the little tables in the centre, the noises of speech and crockery echoed up to the glass roof, as her terrible laughter had echoed a few hours before—she would never, he reflected,
be able to sleep.

  After several false summonses to the telephone box, which seem an inevitable accompaniment to making a long-distance call in France, he got through. Yes, the friend believed that the Duquesa was at St.-Jean-de-Luz, but he was not sure, nor did he know at all at which hotel. Yes, he could find out to-morrow and let James know. Yes, by six o’clock for sure. Any chance of seeing James at Biarritz? There might be? Oh, good. “Bung-ho!” said the friend, and rang off. James went wearily up to his room, ordered a last fine à l’eau, propped his portable type-writer on the rickety little table, and switching his mind dexterously off the Condesa and her affairs, began to write up a message about Barcelona for the Epoch.

  They passed the next day waiting for the telephone call. James had no great confidence that the Duquesa would really materialise, and still less that if she did, she would be in a position to support the Condesa; his anxiety made him if anything rather exasperated by Raquel de Verdura’s touching certainty that if only she could find her sister, all would be well. This certainty made the suspense the more painful to her, so James filled up the day as much as he could. In the morning they went shopping, in the rather inadequate shops of Perpignan, and bought shoes, a dressing-gown and slippers, some underclothes, and stockings—Raquel could not get over the abundance of silk stockings, a commodity which had by that time almost vanished from Spain. Then after an early lunch James hired a car, and they drove out into the country for the afternoon.

  They drove rather aimlessly at first, westward along the high road that leads towards the Pyrenees, and the pass into Spain at Le Perthus; here the planes were golden and the mulberry-trees yellowing along the roadsides, and on either hand, all over the gently broken country stretched the vineyards, dusty and withered now; the lowland vineyards of the Mediterranean coastal plain, from which comes the heavy sugary wine, full of alcohol and tasting faintly of caramel, which goes to the making of Dubonnet and Quinquina and Amer Picon. Along the dry beds of streams great belts of reeds stood up, their feathery heads already pale with autumn. It was a misty day, with light uncertain sun, but warm; the mountains rose blue and vague before them, and on their right the great mass of the Canigou towered huge and rather lowering under the clouds that, as usual, swathed its head. James drove gently, sensitive to the pensive quality of the season and the light, glad of the pause between the strain and effort of the past few weeks and fresh anxieties to come; and the Condesa, to whom peaceful drives in sun and open fields had become a strange and wonderful thing, sat quietly by his side.

  Near Le Boulou she caught sight of a signpost with the words “Amélie-les-Bains, 16 kilometres.”

  “Oh, what a charming name! Can’t we go there?”

  Of course they could, since there was no real reason why they should go to one place rather than another; they turned to the right, heading across open country towards the mouth of the Vallespir, the valley through which the rive Tech runs southward, parallel with the frontier range of the Pyrenees and close under it, till it reaches the open plain and crosses it towards the sea. Now the country became more broken; the white rocks stood out through the rich yellowish soil, covered with a scrub of myrtle and juniper and wild mimosa. They crossed the Tech by a slender stone bridge which leaps the river in one superb single span; it was so narrow that they had to wait till a solitary laden donkey had finished its passage before they could drive across—this is not surprising, since the bridge was built in the year 1340.

  Beyond the bridge the road followed the river itself, upstream along the valley; to their right they looked out across it to lower hills, and a turn of the road brought into view a lovely small town perched on the steep opposite slope, the brown roofs and creamy walls huddled together in a charming symmetry, the whole dom nated by two tall towers. It looked completely mediaeval and rather Spanish. Could that be Amélie-les-Bains, Raquel speculated? But it was not; it was Palalda, as another sign-post presently informed them—and in a few more minutes they ran into Amélie itself, that rather absurd little piece of rococo 19th century building, squashed in sunlessly and uncomfortably between the high jagged cliffs from which gush the waters which give it its name, its raison d’être, and its smell. Even as they drove across the first bridge, through whose plaster balustrades the green water could be seen steaming and swirling below them, the smell met them, as of a thousand rotten eggs. And it filled the whole town—the steep narrow main street, the tilted square outside the Thermes Jadis, where the fountain below the ancient plane trees runs with hot water from one spout, with cold from the other, the terrace in front of the Café which adjoins the square, where the wireless was braying out music from Radio Toulouse among the empty chairs and little tin tables.’ James would have liked to linger; he was amused by the graceful ridiculousness of the architecture, a bad Victorian copy of Bath, made by Frenchmen, and intrigued by the incredible abundance of the sulphurous waters, running recklessly away down the rocky gorge in an open river—but the Condesa, one of her new handkerchiefs held to her exquisite nose, said that the smell was intolerable and the music worse, and that there was no sun—which was true. So they got into the car again and drove on up the valley, once more informed by sign-posts that they were heading for Arles-sur-Tech and Prats-de-Mollo. James, happy, commented idly on the names; no prick of foreknowledge warned him, on that soft autumn day, of how well he would later come to know both these places.

  After the chilly rock-shadowed gorges of Amélie-les-Bains the valley broadens out again into the open level stretch in which Arles-sur-Tech stands, with orchards now bordering the road instead of vineyards, and sloping down to the grey rushing river—James and the Condesa, emerging gladly into the sunshine, drove slowly between the bright-leaved, bright-fruited orchard trees, with their background of wooded mountains golden with autumn, rich on the lower slopes with the deep glossy green of wild box. They told one another, truthfully, that it was a pretty place. In Arles they left the car and strolled about in the sunshine; they examined the Church, so jammed up against other buildings that its exterior is only visible here and there, and its small, ancient, and neglected cloisters; they sampled the dusty tranquil Place, and finally went and drank coffee outside the Hôtel des Glycines, sitting at a little tin table in the sun. The light filtered through the yellowing leaves of the trellised wistaria onto the shabby little tables, which were without occupants save for themselves—the stalks which in spring had held a wealth of pendent bloom hung down now, wiry, dry and brown, in long narrow spirals; the waiter drowsed against the doorway of the hotel, under the shiny black-and-gilt slabs which announced its name, a rather grubby napkin over his arm. Here there was no wireless, and the place struck both of them as far too remote and old-fashioned to possess such a thing—tucked away in its valley it seemed, James said, to be almost at the end of the world.

  “And where is quite the end?” Raquel asked idly, twisting one of the dead spiral stalks round her fingers, amused, contented, and quiet.

  He waved his hand on up the valley, where a great ridge, white with the first snow, hung like a curtain across the sky, closing the view.

  “Up there, at Prats-de-Mollo.” James had the journalist’s knack of getting names right at one glance, and remembering them; he gave Prats-de-Mollo no thought; he had just seen the name, and remembered it. The thought that was brushing his mind as they sat there, with the soft fluttering persistence of a moth, was that Arles was a sweet place, lost, forgotten and quiet; and that it would be very sweet to be staying in the Hôtel des Glycines with Raquel; to stroll out, early or late, into those autumn orchards by the river with her, and to climb by peasants’ paths up the hills through the golden woods. He pushed these moth-like fancies away, but, moth-like, they returned—he was almost glad of the interruption when Raquel said—“Couldn’t we go there?”

  “Go where?”

  “To Prats—whatever it is.”

  James looked at his watch. It was after four. He made enquiries of the waiter as to the dista
nce, and the sort of road, and they discussed it. It could just be done, but there would be no time to see anything, since they had to be back by six, and in the end they decided against it, and sat on where they were. Raquel had taken off her hat, and the last of the sunshine fell on her hair; above her black dress the colour of it was startling. It was the true brun châtain, the ripe-chestnut bronze which henna tries to imitate and fails—because the gloss on henna-dyed hair is purple, and the gloss on hair like the Condesa’s is like the gleam on a polished copper can. She was a startling figure altogether to be sitting outside the Hôtel des Glycines, silhouetted against its pale, rather shabby walls, under the pale withering leaves of the wistaria, by the little table with its faded cloth, in the black dress which she wore with the unconquerable Spanish distinction, with that incredible bronze head, and her long, high-nosed, lovely and archaic face. Sun and air and a real night’s rest—however noisy, without bombs or gunfire—had smoothed out some of the strained look that had become habitual with her; her face was relaxed and softened, and tranquil as James had never seen it. Its beauty, and pity for. her, beat on James’s heart like a series of soft drumming blows, so that presently he said that they had better be starting. They drove back to Perpignan, and at half-past seven, not six, Milcom got his call from Biarritz. Yes, the friend said, the Duquesa de las Illas was at St.-Jean-de-Luz, staying at the Hôtel Grande Bretagne—of which he thoughtfully supplied the number. James thanked him warmly. He told Raquel the news, and they decided that he should take her across to St.-Jean-de-Luz the next day. Then he put a call through to the Grande Bretagne for her, and after the usual immense delays of the French long-distance service—officially called Inter-urbain, but familiarly known as “Intaire”—she spoke with the Duquesa herself. Hearing her sister’s voice, for the first time in two years, disturbed and moved Raquel; James persuaded her to go at once to bed, against the long tiring cross-country journey, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, next day.