PART II
“C’est la France,” said Alix. She leaned beside him on the railing of the Channel steamer and looked through the blue of the July day to where the town thinly shaped itself, like a line of grey-white shells floating between sea and sky. Her phrase was spoken in a tone of quiet statement, unstressed by any emotion, yet Giles, while they watched the shore together, felt its echoes stretching back revealingly into the past and out towards the future.
That was really what had been at the bottom of her heart during all her time with them; France. And if she had talked about it so little that must merely have been, he reflected, because she cared about it so much. Of course she loved her own country; he could not expect or wish anything else; but had she, he wondered, any more love for England now than when she had first come among them? And he felt, when he asked himself the question, a little rueful and a little vexed. She was not a shallow child; that he knew; it was because she was not shallow that he minded her imperviousness to all that meant so much to them. With the imperviousness went an oddly mature security, as of a creature formed and fixed and not to be altered by circumstance; and it was when he thought of this security that Giles felt a little angry; for, after all, what had France given her, poor kid?
Giles did not think of his family, in particular, as benefactors to the little French girl. That side of her indebtedness was not one to engage his attention. It was England as a whole that he had hoped would by this time have crept about her heart; England with its gentle days of Spring, its balmy days of Summer; all the happy family life they had just come from; tennis, dogs, strawberries on the lawn, and long bicycle rides over the hills; England’s sweetness and fidelity embodied in his mother; its holiness in Toppie.
The starlike image of Toppie rose before the young man’s mind and with it his deepest doubt of the little French girl beside him. He had come from pity for the child’s unconscious plight, pity for the cruelty of her position there among them—a little creature so proud that it would have been to her a burning humiliation could she have guessed how her mother had dealt with her and them in foisting her upon them—he had come, from this initial pity, to feel affection, then an odd, perplexed respect, and finally a profound, a tender solicitude. It was upon her future in France, with her mother, that it centred; but that was the outward aspect of the inner fear; for when he thought of Toppie and of holiness the question he had also to ask himself was whether Alix was impervious to holiness, too?
Giles felt that he would be better able to face that question, and with it the whole problem of the child’s future, when he had seen “Maman.” That was why he was here. That was why he had said “yes,” on the morning, a fortnight ago, when Maman’s letter at last had come summoning Alix home. Since their interview, long ago in the Winter, he and Alix had never spoken of their mutual secret, that dreadful one-sided secret that Giles visualized as an unexploded bomb lying there between them and liable at a touch to go off and scatter the family happiness to fragments. The interview had ended in a pact. She was to help him; she had, poor little creature, helped him; he still felt stung with shame to think how much; to think how he had profited, how they all had profited, by her falsehoods. And he was bound to help her. He knew, when Maman’s letter came, all that lay behind the appeal as she said: “Oh, Giles, could you not come with me? and stay if only for a little while; so that at last you and Maman may meet?”
She felt that it would help if he were to know Maman. And it might well be that he could only effectually help Alix if he faced at last the baleful woman who had brought the hidden disaster to their lives. It was better that he should know, in regard to Alix’s future, what they were “up against.” It had not been of Maman he was thinking when he assented; it had been, as on that day last Winter, of Alix herself. And that was why he was here, on his way to Normandy and the village on the cliff, and it was Dieppe that was showing now, along its wharves, façades of sunlit houses.
“Don’t you think, Giles,” said Alix, “that the air in France is very different? Like golden wine?—There was a wine made at a little mountain village near Montarel—Vernay-les-Vouvières it is called—and the wine after it. I wish you could see that village. So high and steep it is, the road climbs for miles before you reach it; and higher still, above the village, is an old, old statue ofla Sainte Vierge, looking down over the vineyards and blessing them. When one stands beside her one sees over all the crests of the mountain-ranges; like blue rolling waves. We used to drink Vernay-les-Vouvières at Grand-père’s. It was very cheap, for it could not travel; it lost its bouquet at once if it travelled. And it was a delicious wine; so pale, so light, so delicate. One felt like singing when one drank it. I think the air of France makes one feel like that.”
Mrs. Bradley’s household, though not pledged to teetotal principles, eschewed all alcoholic drink, and Giles, as he listened, seeing the Virgin, the vineyards, the ingenuous piety, the pagan gaiety that Alix’s words conjured up, wondered what her impressions of their unenlivened meals must have been.
“I wish I could see Vernay-les-Vouvières,” he said. “A beautiful country yours must be, so near the Alps.—We have sunny days in England, you know. It’s a French superstition to think that English people go staggering about in a fog all the year round. You ought to have got over that,” he added. “Our weather is as good as the weather in Northern France; every bit.”
“But different, Giles. As good; but not so happy. Never like wine, I think. Always there is something soft and sleepy in the air. After the air of France it is like milk.”
“Milk is a very excellent thing.”
“Yes. Excellent. As a food. But it does not make one want to sing.”
To this Giles said nothing.
“For a French town Dieppe is not so specially beautiful,” Alix took up presently; for she and Giles knew each other so well that a disagreement could be allowed to fall between them disregarded. “I do not think that for a French town it has special beauty; yet, seen like this, with the harbours, and the wharves, and houses—all so golden, do you not think it is very lovely?”
Giles had just been thinking so. “Yes. Quite lovely,” he admitted. “For a French town it’s rather rambling and shambling, too, and I like that.”
“Ah, but it keeps its dignity all the same,” said Alix. “It has gone where it meant to go and when it got there it stood up well.”
“We have dignified towns,” said Giles. “Edinburgh; you must see Edinburgh one day, Alix; and Bath; and Ludlow. Of course, as to ramble, London is a bad offender; but London is beautiful all the same.”
“Beautiful, do you think, Giles? Beautiful you mean, then, as one might find the face of a dear, funny old great-grandmother beautiful, for what it means; but not for what it looks; I think it a very ugly town,” said Alix in her tone of happy statement—for Alix was very happy to-day. “It is like an old great-grand-mother over a tea-pot; and Paris is like a goddess with a wreath.”
“I like old great-grandmothers much better than goddesses,” said Giles.
All the same he understood. She was initiating these comparisons—and it was so uncharacteristic of her to make comparisons—not from any desire to disparage, but from the deep, joyous excitement, the love and pride that could not be repressed and that she could not overtly have expressed without expressing emotion as well. She thrilled with it, he knew, leaning beside him, her profile, forcible, intent, golden against the sea. It looked golden like that because the sun fell on it and the sea was blue; but he had always thought Alix’s skin a queer colour and never knew whether he liked or disliked it. Sometimes it was grey, like pussy-willows: and sometimes it was green, making one think of olive-trees or the patina on an old bronze; and sometimes, as to-day, it was pure gold; and always it seemed to be the final expression of significant structure rather than a decorative bloom, and to go with her blue eyes and black hair whichever tint it took. But, as he told himself, he was a sentimental Englishman and liked girls to be the colour of apple-blossoms.
Alix had fallen to silence now, and he was keeping his mind rather consciously on their friendly altercation, and even on Alix’s profile, because he did not wish to reflect on what lay before him. He had not an idea of what he was to say to Alix’s mother, or to do with her; and it was no good thinking about it until he saw her; saw her again.
Saw her again! How the phrase brought back the unforgettable pang and misery. How the unforgettable image floated in his memory, vivid yet unseizable; irrelevant as it were and not to be woven to any secure conclusion. It had been the stillest day, that Spring day in the Bois. The purpling grey of branches, above, behind the wandering pair, had melted to shroud-like distances and they had emerged before his astonished eyes like the spectral creatures of a clairvoyant vision; silent, and with linked arms. He had gazed at them, and as he gazed his impulse to go forward and greet his brother was checked ere it was formed. Owen here in Paris: Owen with madame Vervier—he had known at once that it was she; Owen to look like that. Rooted among the thinly scattered saplings of the wood he had remained, gazing until they passed away and the white distance received them into its folds as it had given them up—ominous disappearance of the brother he was never to see again. Rooted he stood, and heard the wild, monotonous phrase of a missel-thrush ring forth suddenly from overhead and felt his mind slowly take possession of the icy grief that crept upon it. Owen’s face had given him all the truth; its rapture; its terrible stilled restlessness. And though she was so quiet, walking there, her head bent down a little, her eyes fixed before her, Giles had felt, for all the innocence of his chaste boyhood, that she was so quiet because she possessed him so completely.
How clearly he could see her still, with her brooding brightness, her soft gloom. He could not see her as baleful; he could not see her as guilty; he only saw her walking there secure in power and loveliness. And this was the irrelevance, the tormenting discrepancy; for she was the woman who had taken Owen from Toppie; she was the woman who, after her lover’s death, had placidly made use of what assets he had left her; his family; and its trust in him and her. And she was the more baleful to him from the fact that, though he remembered her so vividly and knew such portentous things about her, herself he did not know at all.
There was one thing about her, however, that he could and ought to know at once, and the thought of it worked its way up into his mind while he and Alix leaned there. They had never again spoken of their secret, but, before he met her mother he ought to know whether Alix had told her what he knew of Owen’s stays with them in Paris. Before he saw madame Vervier he ought to know what she knew about him; and suddenly, his eyes fixed upon the wharves and houses of Dieppe, he said: “You think she’ll feel it all right that I’m come?”
“I wrote to her that you were coming,” said Alix. Her mind had perhaps been following some train of thought not far removed from his, for she spoke as if they were continuing a theme rather than taking it up. “She will be delighted.”
“Will she? Look here, Alix”—Giles gazed down over the railing at the sea—“she couldn’t be delighted, I take it, if she knew that I had a grievance about my brother on her account.”
He had spoken very abruptly, yet he had, he felt, put it well. In the little pause that followed his words, he was pleased with himself for having found any so colourless and unprovocative.
“What we know of your brother,” said Alix after her pause, “would not give her a grievance against you; only against him.”
“Against him?”
“Did he not deceive her, too?”
“Deceive her? Oh, I see. You think he didn’t tell her that he’d kept us in the dark?”
“He could not have told her, Giles; if that is really what you are asking me.”
Giles, a little confused, retraced his steps. “What I’m really asking you is whetheryou’vetold her. I want to know where I stand with her. Haven’t you felt that she ought to be told?”
Again Alix was silent, and for a longer time. Then she said: “It has been my great perplexity. She does not know. Of course she does not know. But I wrote to her at once, that time last Winter, and begged that I might come home; and when I found she could not have me, I thought it best to say nothing then. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you will blame me, Giles. But I thought it best to wait. It will give her such pain when she knows.”
It would never have given her so much pain Giles, with a sudden glow of indignation, felt, as it had already given her daughter. What Alix had suffered in wrestling with her problem was in her voice. “Blame you? I? You poor kid!” he exclaimed. And he added: “After all, his silence meant devotion to herself.”
“Do you think so?” said Alix. “I am afraid she will not feel it so. I am afraid she will feel that it meant cowardice and lack of loyalty;—as it does to me.”
Giles was now aware of an uncomfortable astonishment. He had to remember that Alix was nearly seventeen. A woman could not have spoken with a more secure assurance of putting him in his place; and if, by the same token, she put Owen in his place, was she not, from her own point of view, her woman’s dignity veiled only by her child’s ignorance, justified in doing so? For if Owen had really kept madame Vervier in the dark she might have a right to resentment. The two culprits should have had no secrets from one another.
“I see,” he repeated, lamely, as he felt. “And you would not like to spoil her memory of him?”
“We kept it from your mother and from Toppie because it would spoil their memory of him,” said Alix.
“I know; but you’ll own, won’t you, that it would be a far worse spoiling for them?”
“Yes. For them it would be worse. But why should anyone feel pain now, when it is all over? Why should anything be spoiled?”
“It’s only,” said Giles, going carefully, “that it seems unfair to your mother to let me come and keep her in ignorance of what I know. It’s for you to judge, Alix; but since you love your mother so much, I rather wonder that you can bear to keep such a secret from her. And, quite apart from me, oughtn’t she to know just what she does send you back to?”
“Send me back to?” Alix echoed, and her eyes met his strangely.
“Yes. Before you come back in the Autumn, don’t you think she ought to know?”
“Do you really imagine, Giles, that if Maman knew, she would send me back?”
“Well”—he felt that he flushed. He had not foreseen this emergency—“since I know, and since I want you back;—why not she?”
“Do you count Maman’s pride for nothing, Giles?”
Madame Vervier’s pride had never for a moment engaged his attention, and did not now. His attention was fully engaged by Alix’s pride, facing him with a look of granite.
“I don’t really see why she should take it so hardly,” he said after a moment; but he was horribly uncomfortable, for he was not speaking with frankness to his young friend. “Your relation to us has, really, nothing to do with her relation to Owen. It’s a new thing; and that’s an old one; and as you say, it’s all over.”
“But she could not have me there on false pretences, Giles,” said Alix. The pride had dropped now. It was as if with sudden sadness she saw too well the reasons for his misunderstanding. “I could not be there on false pretences. You have a right to think it of me since I have never told her. But it is all over now; the new as well as the old. I need never tell her. For I am at home again and I shall never go back to Heathside.”
“Never come back to Heathside!” Actually for the moment Maman, Owen, Toppie, all the grief and perplexity that hung about these figures, were swept from Giles’s mind by his deep discomfiture. “But this is only your holiday. Your mother’s letter said so.”
“She thinks it is only my holiday. But I am older now. I shall see to it that I do not return to England.”
Ass that he had been not to realize theimpasseto which their talk was leading them! Too obviously, from Alix’s side, this was an inevitable decision. And Giles saw that from his side it should have been so, too. With Alix safely back in France, there would be no more danger of pain for his mother and wreckage for Toppie; Owen’s memory might sleep in untarnished peace.
But Alix herself had come to count for far too much. It was as if he saw her walking away into a dark forest where dreadful creatures prowled. Ever since that day in his study, she had counted for too much. She was too fine, too brave, too loyal a little creature to be given up to her fate. He had felt that day that he would fight her fate for her, and he felt now that the moment had come for the first grapple. But the worst of the problem was that in fighting Alix’s fate he must fight her. He could not tell her the fact that would have turned her pride to dust and ashes. He could not tell her that her mother had sent her to them on pretences so false that the minor falsity she repudiated paled beside them. Horribly handicapped as he was for the contest, he seized his bull by the horns: “Look here, my dear child,” he declared, speaking with all the elder brother authority he could summon up, “you said to me that day when we talked that you were going to trust me. Well, I ask you to trust me now. I want you back. We all want you back. Let that suffice. No; wait a moment. I know what you are going to say;—if Toppie knew would she want you? I’ll take the responsibility of answering for Toppie. She is so fond of you that I know she would. Isn’t that enough, really? Can’t we leave it at that? And you’re quite right not to tell your mother. Let the whole thing rest for ever.”
Her eyes were on his while he spoke to her and she listened to him gently; but her face still kept the invulnerable look strange in one so young. “You are kind, dear Giles,” she said. “I do trust you. But you can’t answer for Toppie. You can’t answer for anybody. And I have not only myself to think of. I have Maman. Icananswer for Maman in this matter. She would not let me come.”
“Are you so sure of that?” broke from Giles. And now, pushed to it, he ventured far; he ventured very far, indeed. “After all she must have known that he kept a great deal from us. After all she must have known that he cared more for her than he did for Toppie; that he had been faithless to Toppie because of her.”
Poor little Alix. It was not fair. She paled in hearing him. And for a long moment she stood silent beside him, looking down at the sea. “May he not have kept that from her, too?” was what she found at last to say.
“Do you think that possible?” Giles asked; but he was sorry now, seeing the deep trouble on her face, that he had spoken.
“Perhaps it would not have been possible,” she said slowly. “But things may be known and yet remain unspoken, Giles.”
He could not question her further. He could not ask madame Vervier’s young daughter if she really believed that those things had been unspoken between his brother and her mother. There had been an element of desecration in going even so far as he had gone. And he had gained nothing by it, for after the little pause that fell between them, Alix added, in no spirit of retaliation as he saw, but as though she put up a final barrier against his persistence.
“And even if they were not there, Giles; even if all the difficult things we know of were not there, I should still not come back to Heathside. I do not care, ever, to leave France again. I could not, again, leave Maman.”
The train moved slowly, almost ruminatingly, along the golden landscape, a little local train stopping at every station. The crops were still uncut and their vast undulations were broken only by lines of lonely, poplared road, or marshalled woods venturing out, here and there, upon the plains. Empty and rather sad, for all the splendour of the gold beneath, the blue above, it looked to Giles; but that might have been, he knew, because of its associations for him with scenes of the war; and he was feeling a little sick, too, apprehensions of the approaching future seizing him as he and Alix sat silent in the second-class carriage, where both the windows were tightly shut. Alix had widely opened hers on entering, but at the first station a lady had got in—little shopping people of the localbourgeoisiethe passengers were, more estranged from fashion, Giles thought, than their equivalent English types—and, wrapping a scarf at once about her neck, she had complained of the effect of thecourant d’airupon hernévralgie. Without comment, Alix at once closed her window. No doubt she knew her compatriots and recognized the futility of discussion on this theme; but Giles reflected that Ruth and Rosemary would not so have submitted. They would have entered into altercation with the lady in the scarf and found pleasure in demonstrating her folly to her even if they did not succeed in keeping the window open. But to Alix altercation had no charms. Even when the lady, still mysteriously aggrieved in her furthest corner, murmured resentfully on aboutles anglais qui viennent nous déranger, Alix glanced meditatively at her for a moment and then resumed her survey of the landscape, indifferent to the misapprehension; and since Giles could not repress a smile, the lady, who still held up her scarf in retrospective protest, kept indignant eyes upon him.
“Now, you know, youarea worse-tempered people than we are. She’s still nursing her wrongs,” Giles murmured, and Alix, glancing at the lady of thenévralgie, answered, “She is negligible.”
Two men sat further on; one young, with high, ardent, excited eyes, like a collie’s, in a thin head; the other obese and red with white hairen brosseand a purple nip of ribbon in his button-hole. They leaned across the carriage towards each other and talked without cessation, rapping each other on the chest to a constant refrain of: “Puis—il me dit;—Et—je lui dis.” Passionately swift and even vindictive in utterance as they were, their personal geniality remained unimpaired.
A little boy on his mother’s lap ate chocolates, smearing his cheeks and palms. Clambering down, he was permitted, unchecked, to lurch towards Alix, staying himself on the knees he passed, and when he reached her he stretched forth his hand with assurance for the box of apricots she held. “Est-il mignon!” exclaimed the fond mother. But Alix did not even turn her eyes from the landscape. The disconcerted child stood gazing at her, too much astonished even to weep, and Giles, taking pity on him, offered the tick of his watch and jingled his bunch of keys in an attempt to distract his attention. But the little boy gave him no heed, and after a prolonged stare at Alix he made his way back to his mother; his first encounter, Giles imagined, with an unresponsive universe.
“I say, you are really rather hard-hearted,” he remarked. Here was another difference, for neither Ruth nor Rosemary could have remained so impervious to even such a repulsive little boy.
But Alix said: “I cannot look at a dirty face like that. If his mother had cleaned his face, I would have given him one.”
“Well, since he’s gone back to her, and you needn’t look at him, may I give him one?” said Giles; and, as Alix smiling, assented, Giles handed an apricot to the little boy, who took it without thanks and ate it, staring solemnly at Alix the while.
A thin blue crescent of sea cut into the fields on the right. In the distance, on a rise of country, a pale pink château stood with wings of sculptured woodland on either side, a long green lawn in front.
“It cannot be far now,” said Alix. The lady with the scarf, the mother with the little boy, the stout marketing lady, had all left them by now and she could open her window and stand by it to look out. “Vaudettes is four miles from the station. Maman will come to meet us, with monsieur de Maubert.”
“Who is monsieur de Maubert?” asked Giles. He had never heard the name before. But then he had never heard any names connected with Maman. How could he, since he never spoke of her?
“He is an old friend of ours; a very old friend,” said Alix. “I do not remember the time when we did not know monsieur de Maubert.”
“You like him?”
“Oh, very much.C’est un homme fort distingué,” said Alix, relapsing into French, with the effect, to Giles, of not sparing more than convention for their conversation. Her thoughts were fixed in anticipation. He could almost see her palpitate in her stillness with it. She might have been kinder to the little boy had she not been so unaware of everything but the approaching figure of Maman.
“How distinguished?” Giles, however, persisted.
“Oh, I am so ignorant, Giles. Wise things do not interest me, you know.” Alix smiled slightly down at him over her shoulder. “He has excavated cities; Persian; Mongolian;—que sais-je. He writes on antiquities. He has a beautifulappartementin Paris with collections of gems and bronzes. He is at oncesavantandhomme du monde.”
“And will he be the only guest except me?”
“Ah, that I do not know. There are threechambres d’invitésat Les Chardonnerets. But I have not heard that there is, as yet, anyone else.”
“Chardonnerets? That means?”
“It means goldfinches. That was a bird we always knew, even”—Alix paused—“even before your brother told us more of birds. Flocks come in Autumn to the thistles on the cliffs outside our gate. When they all fly together one sees the squares of gold on their wings—it makes a pattern on the sky, like a chain of golden coins; monsieur de Maubert’s strange old square coins. And their little twitter is like the chink of thin gold. We love them, Maman and I, and there is a tall ash-tree in the garden where they often perch in summer. You will see them, Giles. You will like Les Chardonnerets, I think.—Oh, now—I recognize now—I know those woods. We find daffodils in them, in Spring, among the faggots. You have not in England, have you, Giles, our great woods with all the ranged faggots that the woodmen pile so carefully in winter. And in Spring, at the edge of the wood, one sees around one the great plain, champagne-coloured. The next station will be ours,” said Alix.
He could hardly find again the face of the February day in the Bois. It was her form, her poise that gave her to one now, and Giles’s first impression of the white, sunlit figure waiting on the platform was of a Greek Victory, splendid, strong, exultant. Her face, under the falling lines of a white hat, was almost dissolved in a transparent shadow; only its grave, fixed smile, like a pearl in golden wine, remained, as it were, shaped and palpable.
He had seen her as theParisienne; the creature of elegance and artifice; but he found her almost primitive, set here in the sea-breezes, and so much more robust than he had remembered; if anything so delicate could so be called. Freshness and force breathed from her, and the classic analogies she brought to his mind were emphasized by her straightly falling dress—a tennis-dress, perhaps, for her arms were bare—tying at the breast with tassels and at the waist with a loosely knotted sash.
“Ma chérie! Ma petite chérie!” she said.
The train had come to a standstill and it was as if Alix had flown into her arms. She had been as silent as a spectre on that spectral day when he had first seen her. Her voice now startled him, as the missel-thrush’s voice had done. Tears were in it and tears were in her eyes as she clasped her child. And then, again, as they stood embraced, it was of something Greek they made Giles think; some beautiful relief on the pediment of a sunlit temple; garlands above them and happy maidens in procession on either side carrying baskets of fruit and chanting the reunion of mother and child. Ceres and Persephone it might be. Happy little Persephone, escaped at last from the kingdom of Dis.
Giles stood by, holding Alix’s dressing-case, and felt himself a modern tourist gazing at the masterpiece. Just as little difference, he saw it suddenly and clearly, any knowledge of his would make to madame Vervier. She was lifted, how or why he did not know, far above the dusty impressions of the throng, impervious to their comments, whether of blame or admiration. Even when in another moment her lovely eyes turned on him and, holding Alix against her with one arm, she stretched out a welcoming hand to him and said “Soyez le bien-venu, monsieur Giles.My little girl has had only good things to tell me of you”—even then he could not feel that he had gained in significance. So a queen might have received the young equerry who had safely restored to her the princess royal. They had been good to her child, the dusty throng. That was the importance they had in madame Vervier’s eyes; that, and no more.
Struggling with many thoughts Giles followed mother and daughter. The ghost of Owen walked beside him, and did it whisper: “You see: how could I have helped myself?”
Two other young men were also following madame Vervier and Alix. “Vous jouez le tennis, monsieur?” said one of them, the elegant one, in a gentle voice. He was a charming white-clad person, tall and slender, with eyes intensely blue, black hair brushed back from a starry forehead; and a face like a fox forfinesseandflairand like a seraph’s for sweetness. Perhaps he had perceived the something gagged and struggling in Giles’s demeanour and had wanted at once to make him feel that, unimportant as any young man must be to a goddess, he might count on having significance for a new friend. Giles said that he did play, and he and the charming person exchanged smiles. They might, somehow, have fought in the same trenches, side by side, Giles felt. There was at once a link between them. The other young man, who must, Giles thought, be an artist, was dressed in brown velveteen and blue linen and had a dark, square, suffering head.
Theplaceoutside the station was white and glaring, and the noises that came from the café across it were glaring, too. Giles reflected, with a certain satisfaction, that Alix need, at all events, feel no pride in this typical scene, and it was disconcerting to have his companion, as they made their way to the little waiting car, indicate with a wave of the hand the dusty green trees, the dusty white houses, the untidy green shutters, and the brittle lights on glasses and brasses in the restaurant and say: “This is the subject that our friend here has just been painting. You shall see it. A little masterpiece of light and colour.”
Of course, Giles growled inwardly as he doubled himself up on thestrapontinat right angles to Alix and her mother—the two young men in front—of course, the fact that a beautiful picture might be elicited from the stimuli of theplacedid not make theplaceitself more beautiful. And yet the memory of it, framed in this new conception of its uses, grew vexatiously in his mind as they left it far behind, eliminating the weary traveller’s impressions of noise, dust, and disorder, and growing to a pattern of white and green and grey wreathed harmoniously about a tawny ellipse. Yes, one could make something æsthetic out of it, ugly though it was for practical purposes; even inartistic he could see that—hang it!
The road counted off its sections in tall poplars. They passed behind madame Vervier’s head, and, though Giles was so aware of her, he looked at the poplars and the fields beyond them rather than at her. She and Alix talked in French together and Alix’s voice was revealed to him as like her mother’s when she spoke her native tongue; musical; rhythmical; dipping; poising, and then rising to a final lift, like a swallow’s flight. Their hands were clasped. Their eyes were on each other.
He could look at Alix after all, and from the poplars he shifted his eyes to her. He had never seen the child with that face before. Tender, radiant, and with something of pride so deep that it hovered on the brink of tears. Her glance met his and was tender for him, too, as though with Owen’s ghost it said: “You see: how is it possible not to love her?”
But was she as beautiful as all that? Giles gathered himself away from the admission. Was she even beautiful at all? He would have to look at her carefully if he were to say, and he stayed himself on the conviction that if it came to structure and line she could not be compared to Alix.
It was not what she looked like; it was what she meant that he was so aware of now. He had never before found himself in the company of a woman who seemed so to typify thefemme du monde, and if she were no longer of it, that fact was merely accidental. With every glance, gesture, rise and fall of voice, it was there that she belonged. He did not think that he liked thefemme du monde, so apt, he felt, at showing you no more than what she intended to show you of her real purpose, so sure that for every occasion she would know what to do far better than you could even understand. And yet, more than thefemme du mondeshe made him think of the mountain torrent—Alix had been right—in its strength, its splendour, and its danger, too. And he knew that he did not like dangerous women.
He had expected to find her gay, and, in spite of the memory, brooding, almost sombre, of the spectral spring day, to feel in her something of artifice and allurement. But if artifice there were, it was nothing added or adventitious; and of allurement there was none. She stood in her place, a goddess, and watched her worshippers, and when her human smile came, modelling her cheek to a sudden childlike candour, it had the oddity of an unexpected weakness.
It was to Alix alone that she talked; she had no word for him. Yet once or twice, as they drove, Giles was aware of being observed. All unimportant as he was, he felt her dark eyes turned on him, resting upon him, in meditation rather than in surmise. It was—he had noted this already—a curiously widely opened eye. Its rounded darkness gave to her contemplative gaze a fixed, abstracted quality. When you found her observing you, she did not look away; so that presently you wondered whether she was seeing you at all; whether the soft, wide gaze had not travelled to spaces far beyond you, including but forgetting you.
They had left the poplared road behind them and were among great fields, stretching on one hand to the horizon and on the other to the cliff-edge. A line of docile cows, tethered side by side, ate their way into a strip of wine-coloured clover; meadow pipits mounted from the turf and filled the salt, sweet air with myriads of falling silver bells; in the distance the tall palisades of a wood rose against the sky and it looked like an island floating on the level sunlight of the plain. The glimmer of white houses among the grey boles revealed, as they approached, an embowered village on the cliff and Giles needed to make no mental reconstruction of beauty here. He felt the authentic essence fill his breath as he gazed at the picture, never to be forgotten, he knew, of the vast blue sky, the vast sunlit plain, the tall trees green and silver, threaded with white cottages. His eyes were full of his delight.
“You know our villages?” said madame Vervier. It was the first phrase she had addressed him since they started.
“Only a few. Further north; and usually ruined ones,” said Giles.
“Only the tragic ones,” said madame Vervier. “Here we were untouched by the war, and our villages, too, are more beautiful than further north. In this part of Normandy they are often surrounded by these great ramparts of trees. It gives much character, much charm, does it not?”—and she smiled at him. She had noted his delight, and Alix was smiling at him, too.
“I’ve seen French pictures like it,” said Giles.
“Yes; some of the early Corots give one the grey and green and white.”
“Ah—it is too stately for a Corot.” The young man in white flashed a smile round at her as he drove. “Corot would see its intimacy, its charm, rather than its gravity. That great design against the sky;—no; we must find somebody else.”
Madame Vervier smiled back, sure of her point. “He would not look at the sky, my early Corot; he would look at the little white houses nestling in the trees; he would look at the curve of the white road with the whitewashed wall. That girl in the faded blue, with the brown hoop of bread upon her arm, he would put her in. Oh, yes; it is a Corot; an early Corot, André. I see the happy gentle touches of his brush.”
“Elle a raison,” said the young man with the dark square head, and André, driving with his easy skill, waved a hand of contented concession.
When they had passed within the precincts, the little town opened clearly to the sunlight and they were at once in theplacethat circled round a large pond where patient men in large straw hats sat fishing. Houses, stately in their modesty, looked over rows of pollarded fruit-trees and high walls tiled in red. Built of pale old brick and flint, with high-pitched roofs above dormer windows, they seemed to speak of a delicious leisure that was, in itself, an occupation. People who lived in such houses, Giles thought, would never be idle; yet all their industry would have the savour of an art. How darkly lustrous the windows shone; how unremittingly were those bright gardens tended. He saw, as they passed an open gate, a stout old man in a white linen coat tying muslin bags over the pears that ripened on the wall. Under acharmillea woman sat stemming currants. A family group in front of a shop were already taking the afternoon repose, the father with his newspaper, the wife and daughters with their sewing. Along the broad white street a peasant girl, her bare head as neat as a nut, clattered in sabots, carrying a great earthenware jar, and a small white woolly dog, of a breed unknown to Giles, barked languidly from his doorstep as they passed.
From theplacethe little town rayed out into leafy lanes and, as they entered one of them, a sunny round of sky and cliff-edge at the other end, framed in foliage, showed Giles that they were at their journey’s end. High hedges and thickets of wind-swept trees protected the little house, brick, flint, and tiles, from the gales that must, in stormy seasons, beat upon it from the sea. Flowers grew gaily, though untidily, beside the narrow flagged path that led from the wicket-gate to the back door. They crossed a band of cobblestones where oleanders grew in tubs, and, as they entered, passed a kitchen gleaming with ranged coppers. Giles as he followed madame Vervier and Alix, had the sensation of stepping into a fairy-tale. The Three Bears and Goldilocks might have welcomed one to such a bright, dark little house among its sunny thickets; its very smell was a fairy-tale smell; beeswax, seashells, and coarse clean linen. Such a smell as a child, once meeting it, would never in a long life forget. A tall clock tick-tocked on the stair; there was a great Normandyarmoire, softly gleaming, old and worn, at a turning of a passage; madame Vervier’s white figure went on before, and as she bent her head to lift a latch he saw her russet hair twisted up from the nape of her neck; and that, again, was like a picture he had seen. And then they were suddenly out upon a broad verandah, broad and wide, washed with sunlight and opening only on the blue. Sea-gulls floated by, high above the sea, at the cliff’s edge, on a level with the eyes. Vines fluttered, translucent, against the sunlight; the scent of the honeysuckle came balmily; the sea was sprinkled with white and russet sails.
A stately personage was reading in the shade. He was dressed in white; he had thick hair and a grey divided beard. Lifting his tortoiseshell eye-glasses from the bridge of his nose, he rose to greet them, and Giles found himself penetrated by the deep gaze of Jovian grey eyes set under a Jovian forehead; penetrated by the gaze and appraised, for the first time in his life, by standards mysteriously remote. This must be monsieur de Maubert, and Giles had never seen anyone like him, except once, perhaps, at Oxford, when a distinguished Frenchman had received a degree. Only the distinguished Frenchman, black, shrill, and restless, had so much less looked the part than did monsieur de Maubert. It was not exactly sustaining to say to himself that, hang it, monsieur de Maubert, after all, had probably never seen anyone like him; the advantage, he felt, must seem only to be his. But, under all his boyish perturbation, Giles knew that he was appraising monsieur de Maubert, too. Monsieur de Maubert was a magnificent person—magnificent, although his legs were short;—and he was a pagan. It was rather magnificent to be a pagan and Giles knew just how well he thought of the creed; but there were all sorts of things that monsieur de Maubert—he felt sure of it—could never see, and the difference between them was that, while Giles knew that he often groped in mystery, monsieur de Maubert would remain unaware that there could be anything significant unknown to him. Life, to him, was bathed inla lumière antique, and anything not so bathed was inessential. All sorts of things that Giles had only wondered about or surmised were suddenly made clear to him as he looked at madame Vervier’s other guest.
Monsieur de Maubert turned from Giles to put his hand on Alix’s shoulder. He observed her in silence for a moment with a most benignant smile, and then remarked: “Te voilà presque une grande personne, ma chère enfant,” and, stooping his head, he kissed her hand.
“Now you will want to see your room,” said Madame Vervier.
She had taken off her hat, and Giles for the first time saw her bareheaded. She stood there, looking at them, a little preoccupied, her hat hanging against her dress as she held it, and the sun flickered in upon her high-wreathed russet hair. Cut across her forehead and half tossed back, it seemed as simply, as cursorily done as that of a little girl who, for the first time, sweeps up her tresses. She was looking at them all; at monsieur de Maubert, at Alix, as he kissed her hand, and at Giles; but Giles felt, as he turned to her, that it was upon himself that the wide, abstracted gaze was dwelling. Monsieur de Maubert had appraised him; it was probable that madame Vervier had appraised him, too.
“After you have had your tea,” she said, “you will perhaps like to rest. Or would you care to come with us to Allongeville, where we are to play tennis?”
Giles said that he would write some letters after tea. He did not see his friend in white, who had apparently gone away with the car. And the dark young artist, too, had disappeared.
With Alix’s arm passed in hers, madame Vervier led him up a narrow staircase where the smell of beeswax, seashells, and linen seemed to cluster yet more thickly, and along a passage carpeted in matting where the sea-breeze, blowing in from windows at each end, made a singing noise. “Is Giles to have thechambre rose, Maman?” said Alix, and she exclaimed, as her mother, smiling, said, “Yes,” “Oh, I am so glad! I hoped for that!”
It was at the end of the passage, and when one entered one had before one in the windows nothing but sea and sky. Grey woodwork framed panels ofvoile de Gênes, rose, white, russet, and sepia. The little Louis Quinze bed was of grey painted wood, stately under its pink and russet embroideries. A bowl of rose-coloured carnations filled the air with spicy fragrance, and there was a tinycabinet de toilettewith an ancient set of rose-and-white china. Giles had never found himself installed in such a lovely room.
“Yes; this is your room,” said madame Vervier, as if she replied to a question. “You will be happy here, I think.”
Giles could only murmur that he would.
“We are very primitive,” said madame Vervier. “There are no bells. If you want Albertine, you must go to the stair and call down for her. She will hear and come.”
“Ah, she will not always come,” Alix demurred; whereat madame Vervier smiled and said that in that case he must call Alix.
Then they left him, and he could go to the window, turning away instinctively from the room and all it meant of madame Vervier, and stare at the sea, and, with a rising sense of dismay and fierceness in his heart, ask himself what he did there in the Circe sweetness. He was there because of Alix, of course; but how far away Alix had become. The process of removal seemed to have begun as they had leaned on the railing of the deck and seen Dieppe emerge over the water. In her declaration to him, when their talk so disastrously ended, she had drawn still further away; and now he saw her almost as a stranger, in a strange land. A foreigner; French; the daughter, only, of madame Vervier; no longer his little Alix.
When she knocked at his door, twenty minutes later, and told him that tea was ready, he felt that it was with a dull gaze that he met her. She had asked him to come because of something he could do to help her, but now her radiant demeanour seemed to demonstrate that she had brought him so that he might be enchanted. Madame Vervier was not a person in any need of help. There was nothing she asked less of you. Circe, Circe; that was the word in his mind. Only Circe, he supposed, allured; enticed; while madame Vervier only gazed at you with those wide, intent, indifferent eyes.
“Do you like Les Chardonnerets?” said Alix, standing in the door and smiling at him. She had changed her travelling dress for a white one, a straight white one made of a thin woollen stuff, like her mother’s; and her mother must have had it in readiness for her, for he had never seen her wear it before. Nor had he ever seen her look so happy.
“I suppose,” he said, with his hands in his pockets, standing in the middle of the lovely room, “you feel England has ceased to exist; and a good job, too.”
“But not at all, Giles,” said Alix, and there was a touch of gay malice in her smile. “How could I feel that when you are here?”
“Will cease to exist, as far as you are concerned, once I’m gone,” Giles amended.
“France has never existed for you at all,” Alix remarked, though her smile did not become less kind.
“I beg your pardon, young woman, it existed for me from the moment I set eyes on you,” said Giles gloomily, “to say nothing of the year I fought over here.”
Alix then did a very unexpected thing. She advanced into the centre of the room and clasped her hands around his arm and looked into his face. “Do not be heavy with me, Giles,” she said, “when I am so happy.”
He looked down at her fondly and sadly. “I suppose it’s because I see you happy, for the first time, that I feel heavy.”
“But why, Giles? Why? Must not a child be happy at finding herself again with her mother; in her own country? Would you not be happy in such a case? Were you not happy when you returned to your home and to your mother after the war?”
“That’s not quite the same,” Giles objected. “After all, you’ve not been in daily peril of your life. Of course you’re happy. But try not to show me, too plainly, how little we all mean to you. Try not to show me how quickly you’ll forget all about us when I’m gone.”
“But I should never forget you, Giles, even if I never saw you again!” said Alix, holding his arm and looking into his face.
Madame Vervier, as they stood thus, passed along the corridor and paused and looked in at them; looked, Giles felt, with surprise. Alix smiled round at her. “He thinks I do not care for England any longer, Maman, or for him, because I am so happy to be back in France with you,” she said.
Madame Vervier, after her pause, advanced slowly into the room, and her smile did not conceal from Giles her covert examination of himself. It was a smile deep and soft; superficially acquiescent; but concealing much. Vigilance was in it, and the sense, perhaps, of a special need for vigilance; the recognition, too, perhaps, of something unforeseen that England had already done to her child. Such untroubled intimacy between young man and maiden was not, Giles divined, in the traditions to which madame Vervier was accustomed. Yet her smile suggested no reproof and seemed to acquiesce serenely in Alix’s demonstration of alien habits.
She moved to them, and passed her arm in Alix’s, so that they stood, all three, linked together, and, smiling on, she remarked: “You must not give your good friend cause for such fancies, darling.”
She spoke in English and her English was almost as perfect as Alix’s. Therof “darling,” just rolled, like the almost imperceptible ripple on the smooth surface of a shell, made the word at once more playful and more caressing. And she went on, looking from one to the other: “You must not seem to forget him in finding me. Our kind allies must have no cause, at any time, for suspecting that we French have not faithful hearts.”
“But I have just told him, Maman, that I should never forget him,” said Alix as they moved towards the door. “And there can be no question of that, Giles, for you will come often and often to Les Chardonnerets, will you not?”
Giles did not answer this question. It was unexpected, and its sweetness was unexpected. His mind, however, was occupied with the discomfort that came to him at seeing himself made to appear so personally involved in regrets for Alix’s removal. It was not himself, first and foremost, he had been thinking of at all when he felt those regrets; it was of England; of his mother and Toppie; of the noisy, untidy, but devoted family life; of the birch-wood at evening where he had taught Alix the song of the willow-warbler; of his beautiful Oxford and “The Messiah” on Winter evenings. These were the things he wanted Alix to remember, and it could not console him to know that she expected to see him again when he felt sure that she would see his England disappear from her life without one pang.
A table had been laid in a corner of the verandah, and a stout woman, bareheaded and insavates, was carrying out tea and coffee.
Madame Vervier rearranged the tray, setting the tongs on the sugar, the strainer on a cup, placing the plate ofmadeleineshere, thebriochesthere; all mildly, with no savour of criticism for Albertine’s haphazard methods. In England such a ministrant at the tea-table would have been felt as a flaw on the prevailing perfection; yet Albertine, Giles divined, was also the cook; and a bevy of trim, capped English maids could hardly have evolved the lustre of cleanliness that reigned throughout the lovely little house. It was difficult to think of madame Vervier as poor; and more difficult to think of her doing things for herself. Yet all the loveliness had, he felt, been gathered together with something of the same mild dexterity that now brought order and comeliness to the tea-table. Madame Vervier was the sort of person who would pick up lovely things for a song; the Louis Quinze bedstead, thevoile de Gênes, the tall cream-whitecafetière, like one he had seen in a picture by—Chardin, wasn’t it?—and the teapot with a delicate spray of grey flowers, just touched with gilt, on its side—had all, he could imagine, been brought to her nest by the unerring instinct that leads the bird to select the white feather or the lichen. Alix had said, he remembered, that part of their revenue was derived from the rent of the fairy-tale house; he was sure that it was an investment that paid well. And she had probably herself made the dresses she and Alix wore. She could be extravagant if the money were there; if it were not, she was careful. One felt in her the essential freedom from material bondage.
Monsieur de Maubert was still in his shady corner with theNouvelle Revue Françaiseon his knee. The young artist had reappeared and was sitting on the steps, his chin on his hands, looking out at the sea. Madame Vervier took her place at the tea-table, monsieur de Maubert drew his chair beside her, and Giles’s friend strolled up from the cliff-path accompanied by yet another noticeable personage.
This was a youngish woman, though younger in form than in face, bareheaded and wearing a very short white skirt and a flame-coloured silk jacket. It was almost like seeing a tongue of electric fire, brilliant, supple, cold, run in among them, so different was she from the sunlight which seemed so completely madame Vervier’s element. It did not surprise Giles to gather, presently, that mademoiselle Blanche Fontaine was an actress, and a distinguished one. She was charming; he had seen that at once; but he had seen as soon that it was a charm with which he had nothing at all to do; the sort of charm one expected to pay ten-and-six for the sight and sound of and to feel, while it operated upon you, safely barred away from by a row of footlights. A presence so brilliant could not be said to cast a chill, but for Giles it certainly cast a discomfort. Who was she? What did she mean? Where had she come from, this young woman so lean, so white, so sickly-looking, yet so tough? Her smile, as she bit into hermadeleine, brought a long dimple that was almost a wrinkle into her cheek and her long, pale eyes scintillated under darkened lashes. He realized how noticeably independent of artificial aids to significance was madame Vervier from noting how frankly mademoiselle Fontaine had made use of them. She might even, by nature, he surmised, be a swarthy woman; but art had transformed her to a dazzling whiteness and her crinkled hair, that might be really black, repeated the lustrous flame of her jacket. Something in the fervour of her thin, gay lip, in the vigour of her thin, questing nose, even suggested to Giles a Semitic strain; but upon the racial edifice she had laid a pattern of strange, chiming colour that seemed in its vehemence and oddity to alter the very contour of her face. She had made of herself what she would; what she was, was unfathomable by any plummet in Giles’s possession.
They were all talking and laughing, all except Alix, who sat silent beside her mother, and the young artist with the dark, suffering head. He drank coffee; three cups of it, and black. Monsieur de Maubert’s sonorous tones were lifted by a note of drollery.
“He has lost himself in the clouds of mysticism.” They were talking of the book of a friend. “To stumble among rocks is less disconcerting than to stumble among clouds.Il erre—il erre— One sees him wandering away into the fog of his own imaginations.”
“Did you enjoy yourself in England, mademoiselle Alix?” mademoiselle Fontaine asked. “Did you make good studies there?”
“Yes. I went to a Lycée with the sisters of monsieur Bradley,” said Alix.
She looked more of a child, seen in this setting, than Giles had ever seen her look. Her silence was childlike; and her attitude, leaning slightly against her mother, her chair placed a little behind her. Yet, at the same time, Giles had never felt her manner more mature. She was familiar with mademoiselle Fontaine. She knew her of old. Yet what a sense of distance there was between them. Giles could not tell whether it was kept there, so unerringly, more by her manner or by mademoiselle Fontaine’s. They knew their place; both of them. Giles suddenly perceived that people in England did not know their places with anything like the same accuracy as people in France. Mademoiselle Fontaine was the distinguished actress. Alix was thetoute jeune fille; under her mother’s wing. They might meet for years and never advance by a hair’s-breadth to greater intimacy.
“Ah. Yes. You were with the family of monsieur.” The dimple came for Giles. The brilliant eyes circled round him; pierced him; cogitated; deduced; summed him up probably, Giles felt—(so much more shrewd was he than mademoiselle Fontaine could guess, for all her brilliancy)—as “Jeune homme respectable et tant soit peu lourd.”
“You must bring monsieur to tea with Grand’mère, Maman, and me, one day mademoiselle Alix,” she said. It was surprising to find that mademoiselle Fontaine was so immersed in family ties. “I haveun petit ‘foaks’.” So she pronounced the French term for fox terrier. “Tout-à-fait charmant.He will delight you.”
“There is a charming ‘fox’ in the family of monsieur,” said Alix.
“Some admirable work is being done in England,” said Giles’s friend, whose name, he now gathered, was monsieur le vicomte de Valenbois. “Your school of Bloomsbury. They are remarkable writers. They have invented a new method; oh, deep, crafty; though it seems to blow as easily as a flower. But then a flower has always its roots; its soil.—Tchekov, do you think? Dostoievsky?—They are much inspired, one feels, for all their sincerity, by the Russians. Or is it truly indigenous? Do the pavements of Bloomsbury really grow it quite spontaneously? That delicious Bloomsbury,” monsieur de Valenbois mused, his happy eyes on Giles, “of the Museum, the squares where Thackeray walks, the smell of fogs and jam.”
Giles was much bewildered. He did not remember ever having heard of a school of Bloomsbury.
Monsieur de Valenbois enlightened him and went on, putting Giles’s best foot forward for him, since it was evident that he did not know how to put it forward for himself. “And then your extraordinary Joyce. Ireland is his soil, indubitably, and no alien pollen has visited him. What a talent! Solitary; morose; erudite. He will found a school here amongnos jeunes. That is already evident. You have writers to be proud of. It is true we have our Proust to put beside them. You admire our Proust?”
“I’m sorry to say I don’t know him; or the morose Irishman either,” said Giles, with a genial grin for his own discomfiture.
“Monsieur Giles is a philosopher,” Alix now suddenly and surprisingly contributed. Though so withdrawn she had been listening, watching, and it was evident that she had a different conception of Giles’s best foot. “He is going to found a school, too. At Oxford.”
“I say! Draw it mild!” cried Giles, casting a glance of delighted amusement at his young friend.
“But is it not true, Giles, that the old philosopher, with the beard, thinks that you will found a school?” said Alix.
“I’m afraid he only hopes I’ll follow his,” said Giles.
“Philosophy is, indeed, a magnificent subject,” smiled monsieur de Valenbois, all gentle respect. “To follow a school adequately is often to find that one has founded a new one.—Does our Bergson interest you?”
Giles said that he did, very much, and found that Alix had succeeded in putting his best foot forward, for they now all talked about philosophy. Monsieur de Maubert, he gathered, was a disciple of Croce’s; monsieur de Valenbois had read William James and the Pragmatists; and madame Vervier had attended Bergson’s pre-war lectures at the Sorbonne. She found theélan vitalin too much of a hurry.
“We gallop, we gallop,” she remarked;—“but if I may not see my goal, let me linger by the way.”
“As for me,” cried mademoiselle Fontaine, “give mele bon vieux Papa de bon Dieuof my childhood! With him, at all events, one knows what to expect and where one is.”
The young artist had made no attempt to join the conversation and, now that he had finished his coffee, he got up, taking an easel, a camp-stool, and a box of paints, and went away out on to the cliffs. His morose profile passed along against the frieze of floating sea-gulls and madame Vervier, sadly shaking her head, said that Jules was in one of hishumeurs noires.
“Pauvre cher!” sighed monsieur de Valenbois.
It seemed that the young artist had an adored wife who was in a madhouse.
“I saw her before leaving Paris,” said madame Vervier. “She is quite gentle. She allowed me to hold her hand.—But lost; altogether lost; she was like a tame bird that has strayed from its cage and cannot find its way in the forest. There it sits, on a branch, and stares into the darkness. It is pitiful.”
A silence fell for a while after that, and Giles heard in it the echoes of the compassionate voice beating softly against each heart.
“He will do great things,” said monsieur de Maubert presently. It was as if he turned away from the gloomy fact and displayed for their comfort the golden coin it had minted. “It is an authentic genius.”
“Yes. If we can keep him alive to give it to us,” said madame Vervier.
“If anyone can keep him alive it is you, Hélène,” said monsieur de Maubert.
Charming people they were, and compassionate and wise, thought Giles, sitting there among them in the pellucid shadow while the gulls floated past in the golden light. Strains of Gluck’s “Orpheus” floated with the gulls through his mind. The thought of the young painter’s wife, lost in the shades, suggested that music, perhaps. But it was an Elysian scene.
When they were dispersed, all driving in monsieur de Valenbois’ car to Allongeville for tennis, all except monsieur de Maubert who withdrew to his room—to sleep, Giles imagined—Giles himself did not write letters. He wandered along the cliff-path and saw the lovely shore curving, far away, in azure bays beneath the gold-white cliffs. He looked at the scene and was not consciously absorbed in thought; but a process of testing, of reëstablishing, went on within him as if he felt about his roots to see that they were firm. He would have need of firmness, and the figure of Toppie went with him as an exorcising presence.
It was late when the party returned and assembled for a supper ofconsommé, chicken salad and a cream for which Albertine, saturnine yet complacent, was warmly praised. Alix looked drugged with happiness and fatigue and madame Vervier soon sent her to bed. Mademoiselle Blanche Fontaine, in the drawing-room with madame Vervier and monsieur de Maubert, read aloud the manuscript of a new play; the young artist went away to his hotel on theplace, and monsieur de Valenbois sat for a little while with Giles on the steps of the verandah to look at the fading dyes of the sunset and to talk of Scriabin, Stravinsky, and the Russian ballet. Giles had to own that he did not care much about the Russian ballet. He was always having to own things to monsieur de Valenbois who showed the happiest interest in his lapses, giving utterance, now and then, to a gentle long-drawn “Tiens!” Giles himself was very tired, however, and felt that he could not adequately defend his theories which rested upon an objection to the use of the body as a means of primitive expressionism. He soon said good-night and went up to his wonderful little room.
After he had gone to bed he lay for a long time awake, a fold of the coarse cool linen that smelt of orris root against his cheek. He heard mademoiselle Fontaine go away to her own villa, escorted by the other three. Then, when they returned, theSacre du Printempscame softly humming up the stairs, showing him that monsieur de Valenbois was also going to bed. After that the only voices left below were those of monsieur de Maubert and his hostess, sitting in quiet converse on the verandah.
They talked meditatively with pauses of appreciation for the beauty of the night, and madame Vervier must once have risen to advance and look out into the starry vastness, for Giles heard her say “Tiens;—qu’elle est grande, notre étoile, ce soir!”
It was late before the final words were vaguely wafted up to him: “Bonsoir, mon ami.” “Bonne nuit, ma chère Hélène.”