Chapter 5

"How splendid!" George looked a little puzzled. "Is it for life saving?"

"Yes," June put in quickly.

"I'm not at all surprised." George beamed at her. "You always were as plucky as they made 'em and gifted. Do you remember how charmingly you used to sing? 'Not a big voice, but so true,' Mother used to say, and she's a great judge."

"Your mother has always been so sweet to me."

"What a talented woman like you wants to write for beats me."

George had got back to his grievance again, but she lured him on to the subject of irises on which they were both experts, and it was not till just before dinner that he hurried away.

Then suddenly he remembered that he hadn't asked her whose life she had saved. How silly and how selfish! It was so like her not to talk about herself, and then he saw on a patch of posters: "June Rivers awarded the Nobel prize," and though he was very late he stopped to buy an evening paper.

XI

COUNTERPOINT

[_To THE MARCHESE GIOVANNI VISCONTI VENOSTA_]

Matthew half shut his eyes--as he always did when he particularly wanted to see.

"For the first time in my life," he said, "I regret my myopia. Confronted with this room, imagination pales before sight."

Virginia looked round--at the strawberry ice brocade, at the gilt, at the Bouchers--so painstaking and so painful--at the palms that seemed to conceal manicurists and barbers.

"Look," he continued, "at our hostess. I am sure her ears and her nose take off at night. Her hair is a libel on horsehair and dye."

"Oh,"--Virginia's smile was playing like a light over his face--"think of the days when her eyes were like stars and her ears like shells and her hair was curling all over the place."

"Virginia," his voice was tender, "where you are there are no more palms, wigs turn into hair, rouge into blushes----"

"Matthew," she said, "you are a romantic and I am the only person in the world who knows it."

"You are the only person in the world with whom I am in love."

"For the moment."

"How practical you are!" he teased, "full of forethought and arrière pensées. Isn't the moment the capture of the divine?"

She sighed a little--wise with the wisdom of frustrated dreams, and she thought how happy he was--happy with the happiness of iridescent, ever-changing whimsies.

"Virginia, does that young man love you?"

"Which one?"

"The one in spectacles."

"I don't think so."

"Are you sure?"

"One can never be sure."

"Of course if he doesn't, it proves that I am right in saying that spectacles are fatal. They prevent people from using either their eyes or their imagination. Shall I go up to him and ask him?"

"He would answer: 'I don't understand.'"

"And I would explain: 'Virginia is the only lady in orange,' and he would look at you for a moment or two and, holding out his hand in an ecstasy of gratitude, he would say: 'Thank you. Yes, I love her.'"

"Matthew," she murmured, "what an unsuitable name."

They sat in silence, interfered with only by the necessity of convincing passers-by that they did not want to be interrupted.

"Matthew," she said, "do you see that tall fair man?"

"The blond beast?"

"With a very tall woman."

"With gold hair and eyes like cows in pictures of Christ in a manger?"

"Yes. He loves her."

"How suitable."

"But it isn't. He has a red-haired wife."

"How unsuitable."

"Matthew, do be serious. I like him."

"How complicated."

"I told him I hated his air of perfunctory but restrained passion, and he laughed."

"Any one would have."

"And we made friends."

"You always make friends with everybody."

"You are unsympathetic."

"I am, I confess, a little bewildered by the situation. Do I understand that you are suffering from an unrequited passion for a man who is illegitimately attached to a magnificent cow and legitimately bound to a bewitching squirrel?"

"Matthew, you really are provoking. What I mean is that he is making a fool of himself."

"Why not?"

"Because he might do something irrevocable."

"Lucky man."

She looked at him in desperation--a desperation half exasperation and half enchantment. If only Matthew would sometimes appear serious--there is something so restful about appearances. Instead of which he always remained superlatively unsatisfactory and superlatively irresistible.

"Virginia," he said, "let us leave all this and drive round the park and I will talk to you like a lover in a bad book and I will mean every word I say."

"We can't go yet," she murmured.

"Virginia,"--his voice was urgent--"I will be divinely pompous."

That was so like him. He always tried to safeguard the simplest, most sincere moments of his life by inverted commas. It was a little trick that always irritated her.

"What an artist you are," she remarked acidly.

"Yes, indeed," he assented, smiling her out of her irritation. And then: "I have known you, Virginia, ever since I can remember."

"You told me that the first time we met."

"It is still true."

"How magnificent."

It was her turn now to ward off what she was longing for. To be serious with Matthew was a form of disarmament you always regretted.

"And knowing you as I do, I recognise the crusading light in your eye and I must point out to you that your altruistic excursions have not always ended by tidying up the situation."

"Alas, no."

"Now, why plunge into the eternal triangle? There is really no rôle for you unless you propose to supplant the cow. What, by the way, is her name?"

"Grace."

"I don't like the statuesque," he said, wrinkling up his eyes. "Look at her ecstatic vacant expression. A dangerous combination."

Virginia wished she had not given him this theme. He would weave it into such marvellous patterns that she would never be able to get it out intact again.

"I must have some more facts," he said. "What is the squirrel called?"

"Estelle."

"And the hero?"

"Edgar."

"More and more suitable. What prophetic parents! How admirably they kept their heads at the font. The squirrel is very vivacious--is it a brave front, a blind eye or a shallow heart?"

"Estelle is a courageous woman and discreet with the unpierceable reticence of spontaneity."

"How delightful. I might try Estelle myself."

"You might."

"If I said 'I love you,' would she laugh or cry?"

"Laugh, I think."

"With a little hidden tear in her voice?"

"I have my doubts about the hidden tear."

"Then she would be no good to me. I like mixed effects."

At this moment Grace and Edgar danced by. They were both radiantly fair and a little colossal in scale. Her eyes were half shut and her mouth was half open.

"Matthew," Virginia was firm, "something must be done. How can he scale the heights of a great passion carrying that hold-all?"

"An empty hold-all isn't so very heavy."

"It is if you can't put it down."

"Virginia," he said, "your missionary zeal appals me. Why invade the situation? What are you going to tell the man? That he has children?"

"No. That he is throwing his life into a cul-de-sac."

"He won't believe you."

"No."

"And it will probably end by his falling in love with you and think what a terrible mess the cow and the squirrel will make."

Edgar came up to them.

"Will you give me the pleasure of a dance?"

"I should love to."

Virginia's apricot had become a strand in the pattern of the ball-room.

A parma violet lady settled on Matthew like a fly.

"I can't think how you have anything left to say to Virginia," she remarked disagreeably. "But I suppose you simply make love to her."

"It is not simple at all."

"Let us go and sit somewhere," Edgar was saying, and they went into another room.

All of our real indiscretions in life come in the form of generalisations. A name is a warning, and we really give ourselves away in abstract philosophisings applied by an intelligent companion to the particular.

"Why should we accept ready-made standards?" Edgar said. "None of the great governing forces of life can fit into a ditch of conventions."

"No."

"Sometimes you have to set out to sea and turn your back on the old familiar coastline."

"In a pleasure boat for an excursion."

"In a sailing ship for distant seas."

"Argosies have a way of turning into penny steamers."

"You ought not to say that--you of all people, who sail the seas in a tub with a sunshade."

"Oh," she said, "I am at the mercy of the winds. But you have a harbour and an anchor and a flag to fly."

"You are thinking that I'm a fool."

"Yes."

"One must sometimes cut one's losses."

"One must sometimes cut one's gains--a much more difficult thing."

"You can't throw away light."

"The world is brighter with your back to the sun."

"Virginia," he said, "I have made up my mind."

"What can I say? I am helpless. I see you going shipwreck on dummy rocks--the water let in by a penknife."

"You are cruel."

"Don't you think I know those frontiers, when paradise seems but a step away, but you know that it is a step you can't retrace?"

"Why should you want to go backwards?"

She looked past him into space.

"Behind us," she murmured, "lie so many things--memories of childhood, dim happy echoes, primroses and hoops and peace shot with laughter. When you have taken your step you daren't look back. Remembering hurts too much. And so you look forward--always forward, knowing that the promised land is behind you."

Grace was dancing round and round, wondering how one stopped. Away from him she felt restless and nervous and will-less and incomplete, like a frustrated animal lost and impotent, with smouldering rage in her heart and sulky fires in her eyes. Why didn't he come to release her, to calm the tearing fever of her blood?

Again and again she walked through the library and always he was on the sofa with Virginia--Virginia in her orange haze melting into cushions; and sometimes he was bending right forward, his whole body curved into urgency. And when she passed, he half looked up with the tail end of a smile falling as it were accidentally in her direction.

Estelle laughed and talked, her feet twinkled, her eyes danced. Marriage, she said, was an altogether delightful thing, quite different from what people thought----

Matthew was introduced to her. He explained that love was so important that it could only be discussed lightly. He said that her hair reminded him ... he wished he could think of what, but he had such a bad memory for metaphors. It took him all his time to remember that a harp was like water and Carpentier like a Greek god. It was funny, wasn't it, to have such a weak head. He thought it came from hay fever--he always had hay fever during the third week of May. It came entirely from honeysuckle.

Estelle said that she would like to sit in the library. Grace was in a corner pulling monosyllables out of her mouth like teeth.

Virginia was still in the middle of the sofa, a dissolving mass of orange mist. Edgar was talking away all risk of his suiting the action to the word. Estelle was dimpling.

"Do you remember," she said to Matthew, "that orange is flame-colour?"

"By Jove, yes," he said, "oriflammes and hell fire."

A low murmur came from the sofa.

"Will you introduce me to your husband?" Matthew asked.

They all talked together.

"By the way, Virginia," Matthew said, "the young man does love you."

"Dear me, how very nice."

"It only required me to point it out to him."

"Was he pleased?"

"Delighted. By the way, Mr. Wilmot,"--Matthew turned to Edgar--"do you ever wear spectacles?"

XII

VILLEGIATURA

[_To MARCEL PROUST_]

What a fool he had been to come. These wooden walls creaking at a touch, and the floors responding like an animal in pain to the lightest footstep. Not that Marie Aimée had light footsteps--far from it. She clattered about with the happy noisiness of a good conscience and perfect health. In her hands the opening of a door became an air-raid and yet what could you do, confronted with her rosy face beaming with a child-like confidence in giving pleasure and satisfaction.

No, it was entirely his own fault. Everything was what he might have expected. The sea was just where he had been told it would be, the air was relentlessly bracing, the cleanliness of the Hotel Bungalow reminded you of a shiny soaped face which had never known powder. It was all, he reflected, quite horrible. The salt-laden wind blowing the sand up from the dunes, the hard bright sunshine, the effect everything gave you of having been painted with the six colours of a child's rather cheap paint-box.

"A different man," she had said he would feel. Well he felt it already--the lassitude of his body feebly revolting against the impending bracing, his eyes watering at the glare. Health and inspiration, Marthe had said, dreamless sleep, an insatiable appetite and perfect peace in which to finish his novel. "Think how quiet it will be," she had said. As if the country were ever quiet, crowded as it was with locos and dogs and sabots. Surely peace meant Paris in August, with every one away, thick carpets and a noiseless valet.

Maurice imagined himself merging into a huge armchair, just able to see a square glass vase of Juliette roses--gilt petals lined with deep pink velvet. Why on earth were there never any flowers in the country? And no one would disturb him--no one. Privacy is only possible in a big town. Every detail of life in the Hotel Bungalow was revealed to him in a series of sights, sounds and smells. And should a fellow lunatic arrive, how was he to avoid him? At every meal there would be little exchanges of the banal, after dinner a game of billiards--even possibly, horror of horrors, potential excursions planned with zest and good fellowship. And all the time he would be saying "No," more and more ungraciously, or, worse still--and far more likely--saying "yes."

And then where would his novel be? Not that it was possible any way to write in a place where the sun was always in your eyes, the wind blew your paper away and creaking boards made sitting in your bedroom out of the question.

Marthe was a fool, given up entirely to hygiene and plans for other people. "You will come back bubbling over with physical fitness, your dear face all tanned," she had said. "Dear" indeed! It was simply a bribe. He was being bribed for his own good. And to think that like a great gaby he had been shoved off to the sea by one term of endearment, and to a place, too, where there was neither shade nor shadows, simply miles and miles of bright monotonous sea, three dusty cornflowers, two bedraggled poppies and the sun all around you.

Tanned, indeed! Why his face would be all blisters and his eyes bloodshot.

The insensitiveness of women!

If Marthe were here she would bathe before breakfast, feed the hens, find the eggs, encourage the cook, pat the dog, listen to the story of Marie Aimée's life, pick the cornflowers, praise the cook, churn the butter, play with the children, climb on to the hay cart, collect shells on the beach, lie in the sun, let the sand trickle through her fingers and explain with perfect sincerity that it was the most delightful place in the world.

But he didn't like paddling or shrimping or sailing or farmyard life. He wanted a velvet lawn, a cedar, a rose garden, lavender, a sun dial, iced lemonade and solitude. Or he wanted his own cool apartment, with drawn sunblinds, vases full of flowers, his immense writing table, and a deserted Paris around him.

Women always did to you as they wanted to be done by. That sort of literal interpretation of Christianity showed such a lack of imagination. It was no good telling Marthe that you didn't like the sea, she simply wouldn't believe it.

"Think of the sunset reflected in the wet sand," she would say, and if you told her that you didn't want to think about it, that it was no fit subject for an active mind, she would be hurt.

In any case no one had a right to make you do things for your own good. It was a horrible form of self-sacrifice. If Marthe had said, "_Please_ go to St. Jean-les-Flots and pick me a poppy," he would have been delighted, but to stay at the Hotel Bungalow in the interests of his own health was a very different matter.

Marie Aimée was putting a pot with one red geranium in it on his writing table. It was, she explained, still very early in the season but Monsieur must not be discouraged. Later it became very gay with dancing and Japanese lanterns in the garden. The Hotel Bungalow would be quite full, whereas now there was only Monsieur and a lady.

"A lady?"

"But yes, Monsieur."

"A young lady?"

"A lady of a certain age."

Maurice hoped that it would be an uncertain age. Of course every one over twenty would seem old to Marie Aimée. Probably the lady was on that exquisite frontier line, the early thirties, when the bud is already unfurling its petals, angles have softened into curves, and the significant is stirring in everything like a quickening child. Thirty, the age of delicate response, of subtle tasting, divorced equally from the ignorant impetuosity of youth and the desperate clutchings of middle age. How he disliked young girls with their sunburn, their manly strides, their meaningless giggles, their eternal nicknames! And, over their heads, a warning and a trade mark, that sword of Damocles--marriage.

Maurice was feeling a little happier. As he walked into lunch he felt a real twinge of curiosity. Ridiculous it was--why he was getting quite romantic, imagining an exquisite creature on a holiday from her husband. That was no doubt the result of the Hotel Bungalow. On the velvet lawn with the cedar, the rose garden, the sun dial and the iced lemonade, he would have been enjoying to the full his usual ironic detachment, but St. Jean-les-Flots would throw any one to romance.

He walked into the dining room. At the far end with her back to him sat the lady. She wore a white coat embroidered with black, a white skirt, a white hat with a white lace veil. On the chair beside her lay a Holland sunshade lined with green. It was he thought, deplorable, and indicated yellow spectacles. Her feet were very small and gave you the impression of an insecure foundation to her body. Her back was broad. She was certainly over forty. Forty, thought Maurice, the dangerous age--the desperate age. From forty to fifty, the flower in full bloom, the period of engulfing passions, of urgent transitory satisfactions. For how many women must it not be a ten years' death struggle.

"What a place," Maurice was disgusted; "it is driving me to melodrama."

The lady got up with a certain waddling stateliness (perhaps after all she was fifty). Her clothes fell into perfection--she walked slowly and calmly with appraising steps. The lace veil was over her face. She did not forget her sunshade, her bag, or her handkerchief. Louis, the waiter, opened the door for her. She sailed out like a gondola on the stage, or Lohengrin's swan. Her movements gave an effect of invisible wheels.

During the afternoon she remained undetectable, which was a tour de force at St. Jean-les-Flots, where the landscape was a successful conspiracy against concealment, and a sunshade could be seen for miles. Maurice had a tiresome feeling that she was lying out somewhere with that horrible sunshade over her head and a novel by Gyp on her lap. Had she, he wondered, ever read any of his books? Perhaps when she found out his name she would come up to him and say: "Are you _the_ Mr. Maurice Van Trean?" And when he had bowed in the affirmative, she would add that she liked "Sur les Rives" best of his books--"she had read them all many times--and especially that marvellous description of Camille's return to her husband."

Maurice walked for miles down the hard glaring white road. It was the most uncomfortable thing he could think of doing, and when you are determined to enjoy nothing there is a certain voluptuous satisfaction in a maximum of unpleasantness. The air was burning and solid. An occasional convolvulus drowned in dust straggled in weary clinging grace by the roadside--a pathetic symbol, he reflected, of the pale refined irrelevant women who fade ineffectually beside the highways of life. He thought of Marthe with her urgent pulsating rhythm, the rhythm he remembered bitterly, that had brought him here. He wished vindictively that she were beside him, the hard burning surface of the road biting through the soles of her shoes. He would walk on and on till there were blisters on her feet and her steps were lagging. His teeth were set in the grim satisfaction of revenge.

"This is the country," he would say. "Do you feel the health-giving sea breeze you told me about?"

He stopped suddenly. Walking towards him was the lady. The offensive sunshade was over her head, but her veil was up. She was, he supposed, forty-six--no, forty-four. Her eyes were wide apart, dark and indolent and long--brown or blue they might have been. Her face was wide and so was her mouth with lips like curtains drawn across the teeth. Her cheek-bones were high and her skin, like marshmallow, was marbled with the bright yellow lights and bright blue shadows of early afternoon. There was a curious grace about her broad solid figure, an unhurried indifferent grace, as if she said to herself, "I shall please at my own time." She was not pretty. Her clothes belonged to her as essentially as her limbs.

Maurice took off his hat.

"Forgive me, Madame, but I think that we are both living at the Hotel Bungalow."

"I think so, too," she said drily.

He thought that she thought that he was taking a liberty, which made him suppose that she was not quite a lady, which made him accuse himself of vulgarity.

And then she laughed, and his accusations, both of her and of himself, fled.

They walked back together and he explained to her just how much he hated the sea, the heat, the Hotel Bungalow, the cook, and Marie Aimée's footsteps. He explained how anxious he had been about her--how he had longed to see her face--how much her sunshade had depressed him--how her lace veil had been a personal enemy.

She said that she adored the country....

He told her that only in big towns could you find peace or flowers.

She said the Hotel Bungalow had "un caractère assez spècial...."

He did not listen to her comments--they were mere breathing places. On the subject of the sea he was, he thought, almost witty, with a touch of real indignation.

She said the sea was her passion....

He decided that she was an obstinate woman--entêtée. How ridiculous to love the sea--especially for some one who pretended to like the country. The two were practically incompatible. Could she explain her point of view?

The sea, she said, was such a wonderful escape....

He was thrilled. A thousand explanations of her presence at the Hotel Bungalow jostled one another in his mind.

Of course he quite understood what she meant about the sea. It had a certain spaciousness and it did, so to speak, quarantine you from life. For instance, in a rowing boat, it was impossible to feel the importance of being a snob.

That was not, she said, exactly what she meant....

Maurice was annoyed. He was accustomed to people who were proud to share his meanings.

Madame would perhaps be able to explain....

It was not, Madame murmured, a question of being able to explain, but of being able to interrupt....

Maurice flushed and relapsed into sulky silence. He watched his companion trotting by his side, taking three little steps to each one of his. He took a childish pleasure in making his strides as wide as possible, upsetting the rhythm of her walk. The brim of her hat hid her eyes. He felt that his uncertainty as to their expression gave the matter an interest that it did not intrinsically possess. Even if she were smiling, what did it matter?

Suddenly she turned to him.

"Has Monsieur anything more to conceal from me?" she asked.