FIFTEEN: HONEYMOONING
A monthhad passed, and in the last week of their honeymoon Mr. and Mrs. Grandison were staying at an hotel in Avignon. The sun was already hot when Anne came down to breakfast after waking her husband and leaving him to shave and to dress. The American ladies smiled at her as she came into the little courtyard, bidding her: “Good morning,” and hoping that she had passed a pleasant night.
A pleasant night! What could she answer to them? But Anne smiled back, and then she laughed, for she was happy to be alive, and her skin tingled with pleasure as she took her seat carelessly under the flowering oleander. A dog ran in from the street causing a diversion, the cat sunning herself on the cobblestones leapt on to one of the tables; the dog yapped, but he was in no mood for cats, and hearing his master’s whistle he ran out again. But watching them Anne felt as much excitement as if she had never seen a cat and a dog before. Her eyes were still bright with interest when the waiter came upwith coffee, and he also asked if she had slept well. On the tray there were two letters, one for her and one for Monsieur.
The first letters for three weeks! And Anne seized hers, forwarded from her hotel in Paris, and tore it open. It was from her father and ran as follows:
The Vicarage, Dry Coulter,Huntingdonshire.My dear Anne,The news of your marriage is not such a great surprise as you anticipated, but it is not the less welcome because I had an inkling that what moved you to fly abroad was much the same as that which moves the whitethroat to fly here in summer.Dear girl, I write strangely removed from you and the blessing I send is a more disinterested one than parents are usually in a position to give. My revelation has come to me late in life, but I am aware that it has changed me greatly, so that now I find it almost impossible to think of worldly things. However, I have packed up the old silver teapot which was your mother’s and have had it sent to you addressed to the Paris branch of our bank at Linton for greater safety.... You shall have the rat-tail spoons,but one seems to be mislaid. Your letter was the first communication for many weeks to recall me to this transient world, and to that extent I must admit that your marriage caused me pain. But no, I am wrong, something else has happened since you left—a sad tragedy.You will remember our little angelic visitors of the dove house, so faithful to one another and so happy as they chased the summer flies. You will recollect the pleasure he gave us with his song, always rather saddened, whilst she brooded over her mysteries in the little clay cup on the joist. Old Noah had occasion to go into the upper storey of the dove house and carelessly (for it was nothing but carelessness) left the hatch open. I did not notice anything for several days, then, going up myself, found the swallow dead. She must have flown up, attracted by the light, and have beaten her life out on the window-panes. He, poor fellow, had flown away. I pray that neither you nor your husband should ever know his sorrow. My best regards to the gentleman with the beautiful name, your husband.Your affectionate Father,Charles Dunnock.P.S. It gives me peculiar pleasure to inscribe Mrs. Grandison on the envelope.
The Vicarage, Dry Coulter,Huntingdonshire.
My dear Anne,
The news of your marriage is not such a great surprise as you anticipated, but it is not the less welcome because I had an inkling that what moved you to fly abroad was much the same as that which moves the whitethroat to fly here in summer.
Dear girl, I write strangely removed from you and the blessing I send is a more disinterested one than parents are usually in a position to give. My revelation has come to me late in life, but I am aware that it has changed me greatly, so that now I find it almost impossible to think of worldly things. However, I have packed up the old silver teapot which was your mother’s and have had it sent to you addressed to the Paris branch of our bank at Linton for greater safety.... You shall have the rat-tail spoons,but one seems to be mislaid. Your letter was the first communication for many weeks to recall me to this transient world, and to that extent I must admit that your marriage caused me pain. But no, I am wrong, something else has happened since you left—a sad tragedy.
You will remember our little angelic visitors of the dove house, so faithful to one another and so happy as they chased the summer flies. You will recollect the pleasure he gave us with his song, always rather saddened, whilst she brooded over her mysteries in the little clay cup on the joist. Old Noah had occasion to go into the upper storey of the dove house and carelessly (for it was nothing but carelessness) left the hatch open. I did not notice anything for several days, then, going up myself, found the swallow dead. She must have flown up, attracted by the light, and have beaten her life out on the window-panes. He, poor fellow, had flown away. I pray that neither you nor your husband should ever know his sorrow. My best regards to the gentleman with the beautiful name, your husband.
Your affectionate Father,Charles Dunnock.
P.S. It gives me peculiar pleasure to inscribe Mrs. Grandison on the envelope.
Anne smiled as she finished the letter, but her heart was troubled; never before had her father been so intimate with her—never had he revealed so much of himself. Her love for him came back to her, a sudden shock astonishing her, for it was a love of which she had hardly suspected the existence, while at the same moment she thought: “He can afford to write to me like this now I am safely married and he is in no danger of my coming back.”
Soon her emotion passed, and she looked around her with renewed excitement. “How lovely the blue sky and the blossom of the oleander!” The waiter was standing beside her setting out the coffee-pot and the milk jug, the cups and saucers, the two hot rolls, wrapped in napkins, and the four thin bricks of lustreless sugar. She picked up her husband’s letter and glanced at the envelope.
“How happy it will make Grandison to have a friendly letter from Richard!” she thought, recognizing the handwriting, and she sat wondering if, after all the letters they had written to him and the postcards they had sent, he still remained cold and unforgiving.
“He loved Grandison; he cared for nobody else, and yet Grandison never gave him any happiness and never showed him any consideration.I cannot bear to think of his feelings after they parted in anger on my account. But this letter must be to say that he has become reconciled to the marriage; he would not write otherwise.”
Richard had sent a wedding present, but when they had gone to the studio they found it locked, and after the third or fourth fruitless visit theconciergehad told them that he had gone away.
Anne looked again at the letter, and saw that it bore an English stamp and that the postmark was Dry Coulter; Richard must have gone home suddenly on a surprise visit.
“It is strange how real Dry Coulter is to me! I was unhappy while I was living there, yet all my memories of it are beautiful, and nowhere else in the world seems so real as that village. Are the English elms more beautiful than the olives? Is the song of the blackbird as lovely as Fleury’s flute? Why do I remember every detail of my life before my marriage and nothing of the things that happen to me now? Nothing is real to me now but Grandison, my happiness in him is such that I can enjoy no other beauty.”
And Anne reminded herself how she had been with him to the opera and to students’ balls in Paris night after night, but the memory of themwas already dim, a lovely voice thrilling her for a moment, a sea of lights, a crowd of faces.
“I cannot keep my attention fixed on the stage,” she said to herself. “At every moment I have to turn to glance at him, to look at his blunt healthy features, his soft and furry hair, his round head, so like a seal’s or an otter’s thrust suddenly above the surface of the water. All I remember of the opera, of the picture galleries, and of the castles which we saw yesterday, is catching Grandison’s eye to see whether he were moved by the same things that moved me—and because of that I felt no emotion except about him.”
She laughed, but her happiness was coloured with the regret that her only opportunity of seeing so many beautiful things should have been during her honeymoon.
“We should have been just as happy if we had stayed in that horrid room with the beautiful view.” And Anne recalled how they had spent their first days held in a web of unrealities, making declarations, mumbling affidavits before a consul, handing telegrams through wire netting, and patiently waiting for permission to get married. “Days vague and as impossible to remember as the waving of weeds seen through water,” she said. But Sir John, who had cut offhis son’s allowance while he was living in Paris with Richard Sotheby, had been pleased at the marriage and had sent a cable with his blessing and a thousand pounds from Ceylon.... And dismissing the past, Anne paused for a moment to wonder what their life would be like in the future. Grandison had consented to live in London and to take the job his father had offered him in the tea business.
“How long he is, dressing!” she exclaimed, and jumping up she ran up the yellow stairs to their bedroom.
She had forgotten to take Richard’s letter with her, but it was the first thing she spoke of.
“You’ve been using my powder puff,” she added, for his shaven cheek was delicious with scent.
“Stingy! Stingy! If there is anything I hate it’s stinginess!” he exclaimed, embracing her again. She fought with him but was overcome; they laughed, but their laughter changed suddenly to the seriousness of love-making.
“What a devil you are, Anne, slipping out of bed like a mouse without waking me until the moment you were going down to breakfast.”
“It is difficult to wake you,” she answered. “And I always feel a criminal when I do.”
“You are a sly hypocrite. But I vowed Iwould not come downstairs this morning until you had come up again to find me. You see your tricks don’t work.”
“For all you know I might have gone out with the American ladies.”
“I should have stayed here all day.”
“We are scandal enough as it is in this hotel,” she answered.
“Just as we were at Dijon.”
“If you will go down alone to breakfast, naturally you cause a scandal. People think something dreadful must have happened. They see that you care nothing for me, Anne. Love means nothing to you.”
Her looks were a sufficient answer to his reproaches, and he was silent as she seized him and bent over him.
“Keep still,” she whispered. Looking up, Grandison could see the ceiling of the darkened room striped with bars of light from the upturned slats of the shutters. Outside, the sunlight poured into the grilling street; an electric tram passed by, its passage announced by the swishing of overhead wires and followed by the crackling of electric sparks. Wrapped in the weakness of love, Anne and Grandison lay at each other’s mercy; each tiny movement was agony to them.
“Keep still! Keep still!” A cry broke from their lips, and then, in the solitude of perfect unity, they fell asleep. The overhead wires swished, an electric tram lurched past the hotel on grinding wheels, above which the soft crackle of electricity came like the sound of a silk skirt. Already the American ladies had left the hotel, the waiter in the courtyard had cleared away the cold coffee and the uneaten rolls; the forgotten letter had been handed in at the manager’s office; the chambermaid had looked through the keyhole and had gone away to wash vegetables in the kitchen, before either husband or wife spoke.
“What time is the bus?” he asked, girding his silk trowsers with a sash.
“In five minutes!” screamed Anne, looking at the gold wrist watch that Richard Sotheby had given her. Grandison seized his pocket-book and cigarettes, they snatched up their Panama hats and fled down the cool staircase with its smell of varnish and of glue, out into the baking heat of the street.
There was no taxi to be seen and no tram.
“Run!” he cried, and they ran, though the air came hot to the mouth and the sun slashed through their silk shirts, scorching their shoulders. They were late, but the char-a-banc hadwaited for them, and when Grandison had cried out: “No breakfast!” it waited while he rushed into the station buffet and came back with a bottle of sweet champagne, a long roll of bread and a green water-melon. They sat in the front seats, and the oilcloth cushions ran with their clean sweat, while they were drinking champagne out of the palms of their hands and spilling it over their knees as the heavy car lurched and bumped on the road. They laughed, and the melon juice ran over their chins and into their ears; they spoke their thoughts aloud heedless of the American ladies and the party of English school-teachers behind them, and the whole char-a-banc of twenty people was united by the happiness of watching them. Looking at the outlines of their shoulders, everyone was moved to a gay, slightly tipsy sentimentality; the discomfort of a whole day’s jolting, of being a school-teacher and wearing stays, or a double-breasted waistcoat and starched collars and side-whiskers, all such ills passed unnoticed. As for the lovers, they paid no attention to their companions and scarcely even looked at the sights they had come to see. Strolling through the Roman theatre and the bull-ring at Arles, they made silly jokes about asparagus, and on the way home broke into their first quarrel, Anne maintaining that acigale was a grasshopper, while Grandison reiterated that it was a sedentary dragonfly with a beetle’s body.
“A letter for you, Sir,” said the porter as they entered the hotel, and they looked at each other in embarrassment, wondering how they could have come to forget Richard’s letter. A word from him meant so much to both of them! But recollecting how it was that they had so nearly missed the bus that morning, they broke out laughing.
“Bad news,” said Grandison, his face changing suddenly. “Richard’s father, the grocer, has gone bankrupt. The worst is that I cannot help feeling I have had my share in causing it by my cursed extravagance. Richard paid for everything for me, and for Ginette.” As he said this his face flushed scarlet.
“It is more likely to be the hotel,” said Anne.
“Yes, that is what Richard says, and then there is a message about your father,” he added, handing her the letter. His face was still flushed, but the first feeling of shame had passed into one of anger with the outside world that threatened to break in upon his happiness.
Dry Coulter.Dear Seal,Why do you and Anne send me so many postcards? I ask because I got six yesterday; very disturbing when I am doing my best to forget you. “Let the dead bury their dead.” What does that mean? Perhaps I have got the phrase wrong, but for some reason though I don’t understand what it means I find it expresses my feelings.So don’t send me any more postcards. I shall think of you and Anne quite as much as you deserve, and I shall want to see you directly you come back to England.You ask me what I think of your compact with your father, and your giving up painting. I have no opinion about it: you must settle your own affairs as you think best. If you mean: do I think you would have been a good painter if you went on, I don’t. But I think you might have eventually done something else, I mean something serious, and badly as I think of you I still believe you capable of something better than being a tea-merchant in Mincing Lane. That seems to me a frivolous waste of time. One only has one life.I have plenty to distract me here: my father has involved himself in a tiresome disaster. Hehas gone bankrupt with no assets but an unfinished hotel with water-logged foundations, which would have flooded every winter. He has taken to his bed with a bad heart attack, and I have spent a hectic fortnight finding out the exact position. Meanwhile I have arranged for a show in Bond Street, and have got a commission to paint a portrait. I am setting up in London. The only drawback is that England always gives me indigestion. My mother is quite unmoved by the bankruptcy.Please tell Anne that I haven’t seen her father, but from what I can hear his position is much more serious. He has given up taking the services in church, and people think that he is definitely odd. The vicarage certainly looks odd; he wouldn’t open the door to me. I think Anne ought to come down as soon as possible. I will do what I can but I have got my hands full just now.Rachel sends her love; she is a pretty creature. I shall have to begin to think about sending her to Newnham in a year or two. There: I know you can’t help your character (a bad one) any more than I can help mine, so don’t let’s think of our characters and don’t send me any more postcards or letters.Au Revoir,Richard.P.S. Ginette has got the job she meant for Anne, as a mannequinstyle anglais. She writes to meevery day. Whose fault is that?
Dry Coulter.
Dear Seal,
Why do you and Anne send me so many postcards? I ask because I got six yesterday; very disturbing when I am doing my best to forget you. “Let the dead bury their dead.” What does that mean? Perhaps I have got the phrase wrong, but for some reason though I don’t understand what it means I find it expresses my feelings.
So don’t send me any more postcards. I shall think of you and Anne quite as much as you deserve, and I shall want to see you directly you come back to England.
You ask me what I think of your compact with your father, and your giving up painting. I have no opinion about it: you must settle your own affairs as you think best. If you mean: do I think you would have been a good painter if you went on, I don’t. But I think you might have eventually done something else, I mean something serious, and badly as I think of you I still believe you capable of something better than being a tea-merchant in Mincing Lane. That seems to me a frivolous waste of time. One only has one life.
I have plenty to distract me here: my father has involved himself in a tiresome disaster. Hehas gone bankrupt with no assets but an unfinished hotel with water-logged foundations, which would have flooded every winter. He has taken to his bed with a bad heart attack, and I have spent a hectic fortnight finding out the exact position. Meanwhile I have arranged for a show in Bond Street, and have got a commission to paint a portrait. I am setting up in London. The only drawback is that England always gives me indigestion. My mother is quite unmoved by the bankruptcy.
Please tell Anne that I haven’t seen her father, but from what I can hear his position is much more serious. He has given up taking the services in church, and people think that he is definitely odd. The vicarage certainly looks odd; he wouldn’t open the door to me. I think Anne ought to come down as soon as possible. I will do what I can but I have got my hands full just now.
Rachel sends her love; she is a pretty creature. I shall have to begin to think about sending her to Newnham in a year or two. There: I know you can’t help your character (a bad one) any more than I can help mine, so don’t let’s think of our characters and don’t send me any more postcards or letters.
Au Revoir,Richard.
P.S. Ginette has got the job she meant for Anne, as a mannequinstyle anglais. She writes to meevery day. Whose fault is that?
Anne crumpled the letter in her hand; she did not feel shame or anger as her husband had done; she had no irritation against the outside world but only pity. As she followed her husband to the stairs her mind was busy with plans for returning to England. She thought of her father, of the old grocer lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and of Mrs. Sotheby.
“All the same, we were right to send Richard all those postcards; he would have been more unhappy without any news of us.” Grandison was stamping about the room in a rage.
“It means no more to me than a famine in China,” he said.
“We had better pack our things; we shall have to go home to-morrow,” answered Anne.
In the train the outside world became once more “like the waving of weeds seen through water,” a series of noises, smells, and movements which concerned them little, and they did not speak of the future until they were on the boat, when Anne said: “Let’s deal with our affairs separately: while you are arranging with your father’s firm I will go down to Dry Coulter.”
Grandison nodded, and realizing that the cliffs before him were indeed those of Dover, that an interview with his uncle and his elder brother awaited him, and that his father would be back in England in a few days, a bitter regret seized him that he had ever seen Anne.
“Love for this woman is ruining my life,” he said to himself, but when he turned his head and he found himself gazing into her pale, fierce, happy face, he understood that he was helpless. He looked at his wife’s short straw-coloured hair, her intense grey eyes and her slim body, and listening to her abrupt speech he told himself that everything else was unimportant.
“I am glad I didn’t buy a bicycle,” said Anne. She had been thinking for a moment of the past.