Chapter 6

Maurice capitulated. It was a delightful formula. He wished that he had thought of it himself. It was she, he said, who had been hiding things from him. Her eyes, for instance. All this time he had been wondering about the expression of her eyes.

"And yet you deny the potency of the country," she sighed, "the miracle-working country, which compels a young man of twenty-seven to wonder about the expression of an old woman of forty-four."

"Madame," he said, "I am very old. I have ceased to take myself seriously. You are very young, for you can force others to treat you with curiosity and respect."

She reminded him that eight minutes ago he had taken himself seriously. "It was you who made me," he retorted, "you have given me back my youth."

They went on like that for quite a long time--gallant lawn-tennis--long base line rallies with an occasional smash. And then he said that he must be indiscreet--specifically so. Why had she come to St. Jean-les-Flots?

It was, she explained meditatively, an escape (he noticed that it was the second time that she had used that word). The Hotel Bungalow was very clean, the food was good, the air was marvellous....

She pulled herself together.

When you took a holiday, she said, you had to make a careful choice between old acquaintances and new ones. Which was likely to be the more tiring? She herself always went to new places at the wrong time of year. Then it was a case of friendship, or nothing. The people who visited watering places out of season were always either impossible or enchanting. Very often amusingly impossible and temporarily enchanting, but so much the better. There is a certain safety in the transitory.

Is Madame married? Maurice asked abruptly. It was the sort of question that had to be asked brusquely, or not at all.

"Yes--No--Yes. That is to say, I have a husband. He will probably come here for a day or two later. He is très comme il faut."

"Surely you do not blame him for coming to see you."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"It is magnificent, but it is not life. One is not always young enough to permit oneself these phantasies. At fifty-six it is silly to waste two days visiting some one you don't want to see. But there, Edmond is like that. Oh! the stability when he says 'my wife.' It is superb. It must be grand, too, when he says 'ma maitresse'; he has the property sense. And how he adores women, woman, all women, any woman. Even sometimes me. And when he doesn't, he keeps the habits. Toujours des petits soins. He never goes out of training, even at home."

"He sounds charming to live with."

"Ah, yes. That is it. He is charming. One cannot bear it. To have the five-finger exercises of his irresistibility played on one. To be the stiff piano on which he practises but never plays. It is too much. And one remembers the days when one was the concert grand. Pouf. It is not agreeable."

There was a pause. Maurice knew that she was going to say a great many other things.

But they had reached the Hotel Bungalow. Regretfully they parted.

He thought that she was a very remarkable woman indeed.

She thought how like her husband he was. Her husband twenty-five years ago.

At dinner she still was in black and white. Black covered with filmy laces, soft and shadowy and mysterious. After dinner they sat on the terrace and looked out at the inky relentless sea.

"Being sensible is no good at all," she said with sudden passion. "Courage is the only helpful virtue; when I married I was young and very pretty and I had thought about life a lot. I knew that in men fidelity had the importance that they gave to it. To a few--very few--it matters--but in most cases unfaithfulness is not a psychological thing at all; it is simply a temporary excess like getting drunk--squalid, if you like--but not touching your real relationships. Women bluff a lot on the subject and many are fools. They believe in the same law for both sexes. It is a ridiculous fallacy. Only Edmond was different. He loved women--_psychologically_. He was therefore inconstant, which is the real sin against marriage. He was a great lover, an artist. Every woman was to him what a canvas is to a painter, a violin to a violinist. The colours and the sounds he got were marvellous. Sometimes he would try impossible subjects--for fun--but always he could bring some sort of harmony out of everything. Ma foi, it amuses me to watch him now--now that it is difficult, and he is fifty-six and I don't love him--but then, when everything was easy and he was twenty-seven and I cared--then it was--well, it was different."

The way that her voice opened and shut reminded him of a sea anemone.

"It is not the way to talk to a stranger, is it?" she said abruptly, "but I feel as if I had known you for a long time. For twenty-five years, to be exact," she added.

Maurice felt curiously tongue-tied. He longed to tell her about Marthe. For the first time in his life he was finding a confidence difficult to make. He wondered why.

"Bon soir, Monsieur," she said, and she walked up to bed with a characteristic lack of pause or hesitation.

Maurice woke up--was woken up--knowing that he had something to look forward to. Sleepily he wondered what it was while patterns spread over his semi-consciousness--dreamily he saw Marthe in a filmy lace dress over black and he felt himself trying to play on a grand piano, every note of which was a sea anemone. Then he woke up completely, and with a delightful rush he remembered Madame and all of the marvellous things that she had told him and all of the significant things he had not yet said to her.

He walked down to breakfast whistling. In the courtyard he patted the dog and lifted the patron's son on to his shoulder, then he asked the patronne if the cook had a name and whether he might some day come and watch her churn butter. In the dining room he praised the coffee, and admired the geraniums. St. Jean-les-Flots must have a particularly fine soil for geraniums, and what air! Why, he felt a different man already.

Madame Marly--he had discovered her name--did not appear till lunch. They bowed to one another, and each talked a little to the waiter. It was delightful to keep their pleasure at arm's length. Coffee on the terrace brought them together.

"You are right," she said, "the country is an impossible place. It makes one talk."

"I love the country," he said.

"And then the sea. It is always going on without you."

"I have a passion for the sea," he murmured.

"I would like to wring the neck of the cook, chloroform the dog, buy Marie Aimée some lawn tennis shoes, and have a daily box of flowers from Paris."

"They shall be ordered at once."

"I should also like," she was looking out to sea, "to fill the hotel with people."

"You flatter me," he murmured.

"Perhaps," she added, "it would be simpler to go away."

"Simpler but impossible."

"Why impossible?"

"The air is unique. The Hotel Bungalow...."

"Please don't," she begged.

"Besides, for the first time in my life I am becoming discreet."

"Ah, no, my friend, believe me. It was merely that you, too, found it difficult to interrupt."

"I did not want to interrupt."

"There you had an advantage over me. I was longing to bring your remarks about the sea to an untimely end."

Her laugh was the most confidential thing in the world. You felt as if she had given you an unlimited credit of intimacy. He thought that she was looking ten years younger in her creamy crêpe de Chine dress, with her big straw hat, which seemed to have conquered, without an effort, the perfection and simplicity of the absolute.

"What is it called?" he asked fingering it.

"Crêpe surprise."

He asked her to describe its lines, but she refused.

"Ne parlons pas robes," she said.

They decided to go for a drive.

The cocher explained that he had lost his wife, but that "Lisette était un très bon petit cheval."

They laughed--at him, at one another, at the sun, at the sea, at everything. He told her about the convolvuluses, and she said he ought to write a book.

He told her his name.

She puckered her forehead a little, and looked to him for help.

He explained rather stiffly that he had written three novels, a book of short sketches, a book of light verse, and a phantasy on Algeria.

She asked what they were called. He told her.

She asked which was the best.

He said that "Sur les Rives" had the best things in it. Perhaps it was less finished than some of the others, but it was on a bigger scale, the conception was more interesting.

She asked what the conception was.

He told her that it was about a woman who, out of affection for her husband, and deep intrinsical virtue, refuses to become the mistress of the man she passionately adores. He goes away and she gives herself to the first person she meets with a look of him. Her original great struggle has exhausted all her powers of resistance.

Madame Marly was silent.

"It is true," she said, "for big things we have big resistances, and for little things little resistances. And so we live our lives in small weak lapses--not driven by hate or love, but by pique or boredom, lowering our flag to salute a pleasure boat, not a battleship. Pouf," she made a little gesture of disgust that he was beginning to know. "We occupy the places that other people make for us. We curl on their divans, we sprawl in their gutters, we sit proudly on the pedestals they put for us, we occupy their altars, and when we are alone, what happens to us? We dissolve into air."

"Not you," he said. "I feel it. You are so independent, so sure. Where are your hesitations? Your very doubts are challenges to truth."

"Challenges to truth," she said. "It is a nice phrase."

Driving back into the sunset they were silent. He wrapped her cloak round her, and once he kissed her hand, but it didn't feel as if it belonged to her. Her thoughts had taken her right away out of his presence, out of the carriage beyond the sunset. Where had they taken her? He wondered.

* * * * *

That night she came down, dressed in glowing apricot--"fold after fold to the fainting air."

As always, her clothes seemed part of her, without ends or beginnings, flowing from her, a streaming enhancing accompaniment. He asked her if her dress were nymphe émue or feuille morte. He was proud of knowing those two names. She said it was neither. He begged her to tell him, but she refused rather abruptly to discuss it. He said he loved her clothes--that he would like to know....

"Pour l'amour de Dieu, ne parlons pas robes."

He wondered at her irritability, but he obeyed.

They went out on to the terrace. The sea was black and angry, all the waves at cross purposes.

"What is your name?"

"Paula."

"What will you say when I tell you that I love you, that I want you?"

"You won't tell me because you will know that I don't want you to."

Her voice was a part of the wind.

"Why don't you want me to?" he was urgent--harsh with desire.

"Because it all happened twenty-five years ago."

He didn't understand.

"Because--because there are some things you can't do twice--like your book, they are the big things that create a strength of resistance. Because they are the beautiful things that belong to our dreams. Because they are of a magic fabric, into which you can weave no facts."

It was dark and he could not see her. The end of his cigarette was a bright spot in the night. The sea and the wind were the counterpoint of her voice.

He felt unreal and remote and small. A tiny strand in the vast design of destiny.

She got up and walked in. He did not move.

* * * * *

"Thank you for the flowers."

The sun was glittering frivolous and cynical.

The box he had ordered from Paris had arrived. First there was a mass of Juliette roses--gilt and velvet--then a staircase of sweet peas, flame-coloured, coral, crimson, magenta, purple, bronze and black.

Both together they drank in the blaze of colour.

Ecstatically he said to her,

"You can't thank _me_, can you? They are too beautiful."

"Perhaps not," she said, "but it was beauty unleashed by you."

He looked at her with adoring eyes. She gave you phrases which lit torches in your soul.

They walked down the beach together. The sea was light and mutinous.

"How untransparent it is," he said, "lapis lazuli and turquoise and chrysoprase--no emeralds or aquamarines, or sapphires."

"How are we to get in our purple without an amethyst?"

"I don't know."

"That is what comes from not reading the Book of Revelations," she said.

They saw big, dissolving, poisonous jellyfish in the sea, mysteriously without lines--and tidy slabs of jellyfish on the beach. They found a starfish, and wondered who came to dance a sword dance round it. They picked up shells that looked as if they had fallen out of fading sunsets or glimmering dawns--they looked into pools of shutting and opening sea anemones.

They never noticed a sardine box or an old boot.

They were happy.

Over her head was a scarlet paper sunshade. It looked like a huge tropical flower.

"Paula," he said--and his eyes opened to her like a magic trap door.

That night they stayed indoors.

"Tell me the things that life has given you," he said, "the things that have made you so rich."

"If I am rich," she said, "it is from the things that _I_ have given."

"Yes," he said, "but why do you impoverish yourself at my expense?"

"Please," she said, "don't talk about that. There are in all of us exposed places--you can call them pain or romance--Sehnsucht or memory--but they are the sanctuaries of our hearts--they cannot be violated."

"Paula," he said, "you have made too much of life. You have made it into the sort of hope that is always a disillusionment."

"Yes," she murmured very low.

"Why were you so unpractical?" his bantering tone revived her.

"I have done for some one (even for you, perhaps) what I have never done for myself;" she was smiling. "I will tell you a story. There was once a man who loved me. He was born with everything--a marvellous name, great riches, beauty, a magnetic quality that I have never seen equalled. I always reproached him with having added nothing to his inheritance--no glory--no achievement--'I have spent,' he would say, shrugging his shoulders. 'Wasted,' I retorted tartly. 'If you like. I have never admitted my past or my future as barriers--or even frontiers--to my actions. I have lived without forethought or arrière pensée--without the weakness of regrets or the stinginess of precautions,' and then he turned to me--his eyes were half shut and his voice was muffled as if a flood were battering on the door of his dispassionateness, 'I have had everything in life except you,' he said. I smiled at him, a little sadly, a little cynically. 'It is I who have given you the greatest gift,' I said. 'I have given you a regret and an illusion. Vous avez donc tout eu.' That night he killed himself."

"And you, Paula, did you feel a murderess?"

"No, a saviour."

* * * * *

She was dressed in pale lilac--the coolest lilac in the world. It rippled round her like loving caressing waves.

"What is your dress called, Paula?"

"Oasis," she said. "'Indian summer' would have been a better name."

"Tell me about it."

"Why do you always want to know?"

"I am writing a book."

"Tant pis."

She was out of temper.

The flowers arrived.

Old-fashioned pink roses, coral carnations, purple stocks, pink pinks, mauve orchids, moss roses, patterned chintz-like phlox.

"Oh!" she said, and for a moment she shut her eyes.

Then:

"Tell me about her," she said.

"Marthe?"

"Is that her name?"

"She is vibrant."

"But of course. What does she look like?"

"Her hair is like a dirty new coin. You feel that you could polish it into brightness. Her eyes are like tea--yellow camomile tea. Her mouth is big and rather grave. There are electric waves of aliveness running all through her."

"I do not like her."

"No?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"All that irrelevant, interfering vitality. It is dangerous."

"And slumbering, mysterious magnetism, is that not dangerous?"

"That, too."

There was a thunderstorm and the air got cool.

Madame Marly had a headache and dined in her room.

* * * * *

The next day was grey--grey air, a grey sky, a grey countryside, a grey sea--not luminous, lustrous grey, but opaque chiffon drawn across the world.

Paula's flowers had arrived--lemon-coloured hollyhocks, blue and mauve and purple delphiniums, filmy love-in-the-mist, primrose antirrhinums, snowy Madonna lilies with golden middles, huge creamy roses, tiny yellow rosebuds, straggling larkspurs.

She was dressed in a grey whipcord coat and skirt with a grey swathed turban. She looked distant--on the brink of disappearance--not so much as if she were going to travel but as if she were going to vanish.

She regarded the flowers with grave concentration. It was as if she felt for them a stern passionate devotion. She took one of the white roses and stroked it--as if it were a shy mother with her first child. Then she said:

"I want to go for a long walk."

They walked for miles and miles. The mist sprinkled her hair with dew-drops. It looked quite white. Her eyes were deep and brooding and you couldn't catch them.

"Paula," Maurice said, "how remote you are."

"Am I?" she said. And it made her more remote than ever.

He walked desperately, as if each step were an obstacle painfully overcome. She walked with a swaying unconscious rhythm, as if she did not know what she was doing.

She cut off his perfunctory attempts at conversation with a monosyllable. When they got home they were both tired.

They each decided to have a hot bath and rest before dinner.

She was dressed in very severe perfect black, marvellous lines, waiting to be sculpted.

He told her so.

She pursed her lips.

They sat in front of the fire in the hall.

"Tell me a little more about your husband?" he said.

"What can I tell you? I know him so well. You see, I have loved him and hated him--I have become indifferent to him--and I appreciate him. But I have had nothing from him that a hundred other people have not had--except, perhaps, his name."

"Marly?"

She looked at him in amazement.

"Marly?" she laughed. "Marly is not even my own name. We are all of us so very monogamous when we love, proprietary, exclusive, jealous, whatever you like to call it. Edmond's character was like a pergola. You walked in and out. There were always roses and jasmine, clematis and wisteria, peeps of the garden and patches of the sky--but never a shut door--never one. Oh," there was a breaking passion in her voice--"how I longed for four walls, for a lock and key, for a dungeon, for bars. 'Don't you know,' I would say to him, 'that much trodden territory becomes neutral?' and he would smile and say, 'you are generous.'"

Maurice was looking into the fire.

"Poor little Paula," he said. "But you were his only wife."

"Yes," she said, "a law-given copyright."

"Paula," he said, "will you do something for me?"

"I wonder. There are surely no somethings where we are concerned."

"I want you to describe several dresses to me. Your own perfect divine dresses. I want them for my book."

"So I am to be made use of, am I?"

Her eyes were flashing.

He was not looking at her.

"Yes," he said, "I am going to steal some of your genius."

She had left him. He was not surprised. She never said "Good-night."

The next day she had gone--very early, leaving no address, no letter.

She had, he heard, left his box of flowers at the village infirmary. He knew that that day it was to have been full of verbena, sweet geranium, sweet briar, thyme, myrtle, lavender and single roses....

* * * * *

Marthe had insisted that he should come with her to Lally. He was feeling foolish and fascinated--dressing was evidently a religion with the most solemn rites in the world. The gravity and concentration of every one astounded him--the firm vendeuse refusing to allow her cliente any freedom of choice. The pathetic cliente pining in vain for forbidden fruit--the hopelessly ugly and unrewarding, who alone were permitted to follow their fancies. Patterns were discussed in hushed but intense undertones, faint but all-important modifications were offered by the vendeuse to bridge the gulf between the figures of the mannequins and those of the clients. The brave longing of a squat pigeon to have the model reproduced "textuellement" was resolutely suppressed.

Marthe was discussing her vendeuse's child....

And then suddenly Maurice saw Madame Marly. She was without a hat and scattering her terrified staff with her eye.

She came straight to him, her voice was mocking.

"Maintenant, je peux donner des renseignements à Monsieur."

"I did not know," he blurted, "I had no idea," and then as the ultimate significance of their meeting disentangled itself from the immediate embarrassment,

"Thank God, I have found you."

* * * * *

Mlle. de Marveau married the Comte de Cély.

The Comtesse de Cély wanted an escape and became Madame Lalli.

Madame Lalli wanted an escape and became Madame Marly--for Paula was always Paula.

And then she met Maurice and her youth. Twenty-five years of age and experience and disappointment fell from her. But to keep her great illusion she offered her big resistance....

And then the tiny knife turned in the tiny wound. The unconscious buzzing machine touched the exposed nerve--the silly, absurd, irrelevant name.

The lover in pursuit of the beloved became the novelist examining the dressmaker, seeking for information. When professional meets professional.

This time she capitulated for she ran away.

* * * * *

That night Maurice wrote to her.

"Paula, I love you. I loved you always. I loved you invulnerable, wise, fortified beyond the wiles of men. How much more do I love you now with your one weak spot--so weak, so absurd that it can only be kissed, and laughed at and adored.

"Paula, my own, the twenty-five years have never existed. There is only one immortal moment--and that is to come.

"Beloved, best beloved, only beloved, I want you so badly.

"MAURICE.

"Besides, you have got to describe me several dresses for my new book."

XIII

AULD LANG SYNE

[_To HAROLD NICOLSON_]