Frontier Passage Page 7

  “Very pertinent. But they either wish to get some foreign currency for their pesetas, and will therefore pay almost any price for it, or they have pesetas already, outside Spain, and don’t wish to put them back there, so that they will sell at a loss to keep their hands free. You can’t do much with pesetas to-day.”

  “It seems funny that they should want to lose money, all the same,” said Mrs. Oldhead, looking a little puzzled.

  “They want to so much that they’ll risk a good bit to do it,” said Crumpaun. “The penalty for smuggling pesetas out of Spain is death.”

  “When does Hamilton expect to get his salvo?” Hever asked. He was not interested in death in Spain.

  “Any day now.”

  “He’s an able chap,” Hever observed, lighting a large aged pipe and pulling at it—like all other journalists, he could never refrain from discussing his colleagues when the smallest opportunity offered. “Only so deadly melancholy.”

  “He’s nothing like so able or so melancholy as Milcom,” responded Crumpaun. “Know what they call Milcom in Spain? El Melancolico.” Both men laughed. “Milcom’s the Epoch man in Madrid,” Crumpaun explained for the benefit of the two Oldheads. “He’s almost the ablest living British journalist, in my opinion.”

  “He’s become so pro-Red,” Hever said, in a complaining tone.

  “Hamilton’s become so pro-Franco,” Crumpaun countered. “He got a rap on the knuckles for it the other day—told me so. Good specials almost always do become pro their particular country. Anyhow Milcom gets no end of snuff from being so in with the Reds.”

  “Crossman got very pro-Bolshevik when he was in Russia, I seem to remember,” Hever observed.

  “Yeah. Though Crossman’s a poor stick,” said Crumpaun detachedly, filling his glass—“Drinks too much.”

  Rosemary’s irrepressible giggle escaped her at this point. Her mother gave her a good-natured kick under the table; Crumpaun cocked an eye at her.

  “yes, young lady—drinks too much. Spirits, too—not this sensible stuff. Have some more.” He held out the bottle.

  “She’s had quite enough,” said Mrs. Oldhead, who was aware that she herself was feeling remarkably warm and cheerful as a result of the Spanish wine.

  Hever ignored this family by-play. He was intent on his own ideas.

  “It’s a very interesting thing, but Spain is producing just the same effect on people now as Russia used to,” he said. “Everyone seems incapable of telling the truth about it. Those parties of M.P.s that go wandering round Spain come back with just the same diametrically opposed yarns as the Intourist parties from Moscow used to bring. “I went to Barcelona, Madrid and Almeria—I saw fifty churches, and they were all either in ruins, or the doors were boarded up.” “I went to Barcelona, Madrid and Almeria—I saw fifty churches and they were all open and thronged, and Mass was going on.”

  Crumpaun laughed.

  “I know—I know. You can believe what the ordinary honest observant guy tells you about Germany or Italy or France or Turkey, but you can’t believe what an Archbishop tells you about Russia or Spain.”

  “But why is it?” Ethel Oldhead asked. She had noticed this phenomenon herself in the English press. “People must be able to see whether a church is open or shut.”

  “I believe they in fact can’t,” Hever told her. “Not where political ideals are involved to the extent that they are in Spain. There’s something about Communism and its antidotes, Fascism or Nazism, that actually affects the eyesight, I believe; certainly they always produce this wild partisanship and exaggeration. Ideology is the death of detachment.”

  Crumpaun winked at Mrs. Oldhead. “Clever guy, isn’t he?”

  “I wish I could get into Spain and see for myself,” Rosemary sighed.

  At this point the landlord appeared, in his shirt-sleeves, greeted Mr. Crumpaun warmly, and asked if they had all they wanted. Crumpaun praised the wine, and enquired after Madame. He was clearly a regular patron of the Biriatou inn.

  “Ask him what he thinks about the war,” Hever said, re-filling his horrible pipe. Crumpaun did so.

  “Ah, messieurs, c’est un champ de tir,” the inkeeper said. He spread his broad hairy hands out flat on the end of the table, leaned his weight on them, and expounded his views. The whole Spanish struggle, in his opinion, had been engineered by the Russians, the Germans and the Italians, in order that they might there try out their latest engines of war. Believe him, that was the fact. He knew it. Everyone knew it. He took his hands off the table and stood up. “Nous autres aussi, enfin,” he observed, as he moved away with Crumpaun’s note.

  “Gosh, these peasants are astute,” Crumpaun said when he had gone. “Objectivity, thy name is Frenchman.”

  “What is a champ de tir?” Rosemary asked.

  “Oh, a shooting-ground—where you try out guns on clay pigeons and targets, to see if they’ll shoot straight.”

  “But do you think that’s true?” she asked him, her eyes very big.

  “There’s truth in it, if it’s not the whole truth,” Crumpaun said, shovelling the change which a small girl brought him into his pocket. “That’s one reason why Non-intervention is such a non-starter.” He rose—“Well, I suppose we ought to be getting back.”

  They drove back through the late evening light, down the little winding road into Béhobie, where the yellow-and-white village dogs, with drooping ears and muzzles, are a living memorial to the Duke of Wellington’s quiet winter there, and his pack of English foxhounds; along the great Route Nationale, winding up hill and down dale on its way from the bridge at I run to Bayonne and Bordeaux, where the car flew over the grey-blue tarmac, under the golden foliage of the bordering plane-trees. The speed, the beauty of the road, the red wine and excitement all combined to make Rosemary a little giddy—she sat on the small seat with her face to the window, singing soundlessly to herself, and Mr. Crumpaun opposite watched her with pleasure, and murmured, much too loud, into her mother’s ear that she was a sweetheart of a kid.

  Mr. Oldhead too had had a good afternoon. He told his family about it when they got home. He had walked to the little pharos at the north end of the bay, had climbed up the chalky knoll on which it stands and photographed the view, and gone down to the breakwater on the far side and photographed the great Atlantic rollers sweeping in across the Bay of Biscay. He had met an elderly Spaniard of academic appearance and, it seemed, tastes, up by the pharos, who also took an interest—and a knowledgeable one at that—in photography; they had strolled back together along the front, and discussed Unamuno and de Madariaga, and had ended up with cuentras at the little Café de Paris, and Mr. Oldhead was pleased to have been introduced to it—it was small and quiet, he said, and the olives were good. Mrs. Oldhead asked if he had learned the academic Spaniard’s name? No—he hadn’t. Nor where he was staying? Rosemary enquired, with youth’s despairing impatience at the inefficient methods of age. No, nor that either. “Well, what’s he like?” she burst out at last—“Would you know him again, anyhow?”

  Her father laughed a little.

  “Yes, certainly. He was like all elderly Spaniards, to look at.”

  “And what’s that like?” she almost snapped.

  Mr. Oldhead considered.

  “Like a grey marble parrot,” he said at length—and Rosemary pounced on him and kissed his bald patch. At last her curiosity was satisfied—she saw the academic Spaniard.

  That evening went better than usual for Rosemary, because the Duquesa de las Illas had accomplished her transfer from the Moderne to the Grande Bretagne, and sat in the sombre lounge to be watched. “Her mother was English,” Mr. Oldhead remarked unexpectedly at one point.

  “How on earth do you know that?” his wife asked.

  “That old boy told me. Some peer’s daughter, I don’t remember the name—English or Scotch.”

  “That’s so,” put in Crumpaun who was sitting with them—“I remember being told that at the time.”

  Re
x, the grey and bearded hall porter, the one really efficient member of the Grande Bretagne staff, came puffily through the glass doors from the outer hall into the lounge and approached the Duquesa, who sat alone, meditatively examining the lacquer on her finger-nails. “One asks for Madame la Duchesse at the telephone, from Perpignan,” he said. The black figure rose swiftly, and followed Rex into the outer hall, where the telephone box was. Mr. Oldhead called ineffectually after him—“Hey, Rex!”

  “What do you want?” his wife asked.

  “To order breakfast for to-morrow. We shall want it at 7.30 if we’re going to catch the early train up the Rhune. Rosemary, go and tell him.”

  Rosemary went. The outer hall was draughty and chilly after the hot lounge, the front door was jerking and banging with every gust of wind; just inside it Rex stood behind his mahogany desk, reading the advertisements in La Petite Gironde; at the far end of the hall, under a brilliant light, the Basque manager and his Swiss wife, behind another mahogany desk, stood listening to the wireless, creaking uncertainly in Spanish from San Sebastián. The telephone box was opposite Rex’s desk, and the door had been left ajar; as Rosemary gave her message she could hear the Duquesa’s voice screaming a little as people are wont to scream for long-distance calls—she heard cries of joy, caught the name Raquel, and to her great surprise, some sentences in English. “Si, si, come here—of course! But yes! Come to-morrow.” Her message given, and written down by Rex, Rosemary returned the long-range bows of the manager and his wife and went back into the lounge.

  A few moments later the Duquesa reappeared, in tears, but with a radiant face; she swept across the room, oblivious of everything, to the lift, and rang—she was giving little half-sobs as she waited by the brass cage for it to descend—she was dabbing her eyes as, visible to all in the glass box within the brass cage, she was borne aloft to an upper floor. There was something curiously dramatic in this emotional exit—Crumpaun, like everyone else, stared after her.

  “I wonder what’s up,” he said, when the very visible lift had vanished from their sight.

  “Someone called Raquel is coming here to-morrow, from Perpignan,” said Rosemary obligingly.

  The effect of this statement was electrical. Mr. Crumpaun bounced upright in his shabby leather chair.

  “Raquel! Are you sure?”

  “Yes—I heard her at the telephone. But why?”

  “But that’s the sister—the Condesa! Holy Moses! Then she’s alive after all! I must find out about this.” He heaved himself up out of his chair, and in his turn hurried out through the glass doors—as they swung to and fro behind him the Oldheads could hear him adjuring Rex to get onto the “Inter” and get him the Hôtel de l’Europe, Perpignan, and pretty damn quick.

  Chapter Four

  This Side—St.-Jean-de-Luz

  The Oldhead family had rather a good day on La Rhune. In the little mountain train, which leaves the square by the main railway station as drably as a tram, and then rambles across the rolling coastal country, they eventually chugged steeply up to the very summit of that handsome irregular cone of grass and rock which is such a striking feature in the view from every part of the French Pays Basque. Though clouds obscured the distance, it was sunny near at hand, and warm enough to make Mr. Oldhead’s photographic potterings perfectly agreeable. The Franco-Spanish frontier passes right over the summit of La Rhune, and Rosemary, who was now under the spell of frontiers, was able to marvel at the casualness of this section, as she had marvelled at the elaborate ritual on the International Bridge at Irún the day before. Except for a single wooden notice with the word “Spain,” stuck up by some enterprising junior members of the Non-Intervention Commission’s observation personnel, there was nothing to show where one country ended and the other began—there were just rough slopes of grass and rock, with jutting crags here and there. Mr. Oldhead was unusually enterprising; the academic Spaniard had told him, it seemed, that if he went eastward along the ridges he would find a charming subject for a picture—a little col or saddle with combes running down from it on both sides, studded with small trees, and some picturesque and prominent rocks. They set out in search of this gem, and eventually found it—and while Mr. Oldhead took his photographs, Rosemary picked late pale-blue gentians, whose calyxes were exquisitely striped with green, and fragile mauve-pink autumn crocuses, and thought about smuggling, and suspected every sheep she saw of having black pesetas tied under its fleece; and Mrs. Oldhead sat on a rock smoking a cigarette, pleased to see her family so happy, and wondering if by taking rooms for herself and Rosemary further along the corridor, away from the view, she could reduce their weekly en pension terms at the Grande Bretagne.

  They got home about tea-time, and Mr. Oldhead, who was tired and stiff, went early to bed; but Rosemary remained in the hall, in theory learning her Spanish vocabulary, in practice gossiping with Mr. Crumpaun, till he was called away to bridge. So it came about that she was present when, at about 10.30, Rex opened the glass doors to admit the Duquesa, James Milcom, and the Condesa de Verdura. She looked up from her book, as one does automatically in hotel halls at some fresh entrance; noticed the Duquesa, and then, since everything about that lady interested her, gazed at her companions—and saw for the first time those two faces, the long, pale, rather gothic face of Raquel de Verdura, and that other, lined and melancholy, with the deep-set grey eyes. It was only a brief glimpse that she got, before Rex shepherded them into the glass-walled lift and they were borne aloft—but it was sufficient for her. She knew at once who the woman must be, and popped into the lounge where Mr. Crumpaun, in a red plush chair, was paying bridge with the elderly clergyman and two Non-Interveners. Luckily Mr. Crumpaun was dummy at that moment, and she breathed into his ear—“She’s come.”

  “Who’s come?”

  “The Condesa—the Duquesa’s sister.”

  “Oh, she has, has she?”

  “Yes, and a man.”

  “Spaniard?”

  “I don’t think so—he looked English and rather dismal.”

  Crumpaun burst into his loud jolly laugh.

  “That’ll be old Melancolico! Good for him—I heard a noise to-day about him coming over, but I didn’t believe it. They staying here?”

  “I suppose so—they went upstairs.”

  “Well, sweetheart, now you’ll meet a really good journalist,” said Mr. Crumpaun cheerfully. “My deal, is it? Okay.”

  But actually Rosemary didn’t meet Milcom for two days; to her disappointment he didn’t stay at the Grande Bretagne after all, he took a room at the Poste. She saw him once in the interval, when her father took her in before lunch to his new discovery, the Café de Paris—Milcom was sitting at one of the little brown tables talking to a man from the British Embassy; but as Mr. Oldhead didn’t know either of them, she could only look and speculate. However she was quite content—for Rosemary watching and speculating were becoming, at St.-Jean-de-Luz, a delightful and rewarding occupation. One learned quite a lot merely by doing that. Moreover this turned into a very rewarding morning, for just as they were leaving a short, rather heavily built man came in, wearing a neat urban overcoat of pepper-and-salt tweed with a velvet collar, and a black trilby hat, which he removed with a bow on seeing Mr. Oldhead, revealing a baldish head with the remains of grey hair very neatly brushed above a pale heavy face, with a beaky high-bridged nose and full-lidded grey eyes. His face was so impassive as to be almost sinister, Rosemary thought. When they got outside Mr. Oldhead informed her that that was the academic Spaniard; and Rosemary told her mother at lunch that Daddy was quite right, and that he was exactly like a grey marble parrot.

  Next morning the yellow-haired Mrs. Jones rang up to invite Rosemary to 12-o’clock coffee with her at the Bar Basque. The Bar Basque was a paradise for observation and speculation, and Rosemary, having obtained the parental permission, gleefully agreed. She fidgeted a little during the end of her Spanish lesson, and when it was over fairly ran down the narrow Rue Louis XIV and out
into the Rue Gambetta. This is the main shopping street of St.-Jean-de-Luz, and in it was situated the Photographie La Lune, to which Mr. Oldhead entrusted the development and printing of his precious photographs; Rosemary, acting on instructions, popped in to enquire whether the preliminary prints from the La Rhune expedition were ready—Mr. Oldhead was the sort of photographer who always had a set of medium-sized prints made first, to see the results of his handiwork. But she drew a blank—M. Durand, emerging from an inner room in his long blue alpaca overall, regretted infinitely, but the prints were not yet ready. Rosemary registered an instantaneous dislike of M. Durand, and darted on.

  Mrs. Jones was waiting for her already, sitting at one of the tables outside the. Bar Basque on the pavement among the bay-trees—and before Rosemary had finished panting and apologising, Mr. Crumpaun strolled up and joined them. “Well, how’s the sweetheart?” he hailed Rosemary, having lowered his comfortable bulk into a chair. Rosemary was becoming rather a pet of Mr. Crumpaun’s—he liked her intelligent amusing face and shining elaborate coiffure, and was amused by her eagerness about everything. Now newspaper men love to be amused; they spend such a high proportion of their working life hanging about filling in time—usually with alcohol—and waiting for something to happen, that any distraction is a godsend. And Rosemary Oldhead afforded Mr. Crumpaun a lot of distraction. He had already noted her faculty for watching and observing people, and he suspected her of putting two and two together much more smartly than her sixteen and three-quarter years and her foolish curled head would lead one to expect. This was a thing which the journalist in him admired, and while Rosemary watched people, Mr. Crumpaun watched her watching them, and noted her reactions. Now, seeing James Milcom’s tall figure crossing the road towards the restaurant, with his rather slouching walk, he hailed him, summoned him to their table, and introduced him to Rosemary and Mrs. Jones.

  Mr. Crumpaun, “sticking around” as he himself described it, “with an ash-can at St.-Jean, waiting for scraps,” had plenty of questions to ask the younger man about conditions in Madrid and Republican Spain generally, and the conversation was at first rather specialised; Rosemary listened with all her ears, but Mrs. Jones, attending to her face and poking at her platinum hair, became bored. At last she broke in with an enquiry about the Condesa de Verdura, and their escape. Milcom was not very forthcoming, but presently he turned to Mr. Crumpaun and asked if he knew the Duquesa?