The Rendezvous and Other Stories

by Patrick O'Brian

  Leaning on the silence he waited, and the words came clear, calling over the distance, ‘Come back again, man: come back at the dark of the moon.’

  The Tunnel at the Frontier

  LOOKING UP he saw the sea at the end of the tunnel, the line of the horizon sharp, dividing the round mouth. On the sea, brilliant light, and a boat with a man in it, doing something with a net over the edge. Outside the tunnel the world was blazing with a white glare, but inside he could hardly see: there was a dull, sweating concrete path, and the walls curved, arching overhead.

  What the devil was the sea doing at the end of that tunnel? The sea? From that he asked himself What tunnel? and he paused, walked slower, coming up from the abstraction into which he had sunk. The tunnel must have been familiar, or he would not have wondered about the sea. Did he usually walk along it the other way?

  He recalled getting off the train, with a crowd of other people, their noise as they hurried through the tunnel with their feet echoing and flapping. They had hurried intently past him, although at first he had gone fast, imitating them. Now they had all gone and alone he went slowly: lagging still in his ear was the sound of the last people, their resonant feet before they left the tunnel to him.

  It was like waking up from a strong dream, one so strong that for minutes you lie on the borders of the dream and reality and wonder which is which. But it did not clear: there at the end of the tunnel was the sea, stretched tight, the flood of sunlit air, and all enclosed by the mouth of the tube, a round patch of another world, infinitely remote, and unreal – not so much distant (though the tunnel was still long before him) as on another plane.

  Slowly he went now, very slowly, his feet going of themselves. His mind was still heavy, turning slowly. It had been warm in the train: and everybody had got out.

  There were books under his arm; it was cramped with carrying them. He had been reading a book in the train, wedged in the blind corner by the corridor: people were standing all the way; he had not been able to see out. He must have been reading a long time before he went off into this meditation. The book had been about a man – he moved his hand to look at the book’s title, but it was much too dark in the tunnel. It had been about a man who had loved a woman and had married her, and they had lived very happily, part of one another for years and years, and she had died. She had been killed in the war: or had she died? Was he confusing it again?

  She had died. That was why he was so unhappy, because he had felt for this man and woman in the book, and he had caught the desperate, everlasting sorrow of the man, the dreadful unhappiness that was with him all the time and when he woke in the morning instead of a real life this man awoke to a silent blank, an emptiness that filled instantly with the realization, fresh each morning after the interval of sleep, and the sorrow welling blotted out each fresh day. This man had no comfort, because he did not believe in a future life; no hope, and he could not be a coward now and cheat and alter the order of his mind. He lived in the same house and all day her things were round him: there was nothing in his life that they had not done together.

  He had never liked other people much; they were so imperfect and dull by the side of her. But in a hateful world, with war and the threat of war every day at every turn, and tyranny, misery and oppression and grinding poverty of the spirit, he had been happy: and he was lost now, alone in it. Job had been blasted: but Job had a God. This man was quite alone. He had only his virtue and his courage, and his virtue and his courage were ebbing fast away.

  They had been very poor, and the dreadful details had piled on him. When there is a body in your bed, do you lie with it or stretch out on the floor; when the body is the corpse of your love, I mean? He could not do what they had always said they would do: she was buried roughly by officials, casual, hard, inimical municipal employees, and his hate for them had kept him alive for days and days. But it sagged, flagged away, and he had to simulate the motions of rage to feel it at the last.

  That was the book. That was the book: it had made him so unhappy.

  He stopped dead, and the sound of his feet echoed as he stood still, staring at the sea, far sea. That was the book? Irresolutely he put his free hand to his eyes, wavered. That was the book?

  He turned his back to the light and hurried back into the gloom, faster and faster, his feet alone and hurrying, faster until the echoes were confounded into the one dull noise of his flight.

  The Path

  I FORGET NOW why I went down the track alone: but I did, and Mary and my sister, the Franciscan nun, were to follow me in half an hour.

  It was a poor little brown track, nothing more than foot-worn, which was surprising for so important a frontier. The frontier itself was one of those noble, striking barriers between one country and another; a high, long mountain up whose farther side we had toiled, insect-small and hardly moving in the vastness of the landscape, all the morning. Then there was the top with a breathing of new air coming over it, a new sky, and stretching indefinitely below, another world, vague and indeterminate in the haze so far below, stretching away forever.

  In this middle state we could look back to see where the cities in the plain stood one behind the other, each with its pall of smoke, and from them every now and then a gleam of light flashing back from the glass of a moving car. But we were not much concerned with what we had left: it was what was to come that absorbed our whole attention. And yet I went on alone: I cannot think why; but no doubt we thought it best at that time.

  We said that we would meet again in the town. We none of us knew the town, and it appears now to be a hare-brained arrangement – so many opportunities for confusion, missing one another.

  The path, as I have said, was a narrow track, winding and easy to lose at first on the bare mountainside, so very strange and foreign, so very unlike the farther slope. I had not expected this at all. However, I was too much occupied with the little, immediate details of our journey to take in more than the general impression of it, and now I have only a confused recollection of brownness, a warm and naked descent over a rolling mountainside, immense on either hand.

  We had not been able to see the customshouse from up there, nor the town below, because of the fold of the mountain, but I had no doubt of the way. Though perhaps it is not exact to say that I had no doubt, because I was fortified and reassured when in a little while the path led between two embanked walls – obviously a road, constructed at one time with great labour, but never finished or carried up to the frontier itself.

  I was carrying the pack, as I should have said before: and because the distance to the customshouse was not very great I had not troubled to swing it on to my galled back again; I carried it in my arms, like a baby. It was very inconvenient; it had always been too heavy – in all the upward climb it had grown heavier – and now it hampered me intolerably. I continually shifted my grip, but nothing would do: it would not rest easy, and when I came in sight of the customshouse and saw that they were closing I cursed the wretched burden, cursed it with all my heart.

  By the time I reached the building all the doors were shut but one, a little side door probably meant for officials. I went through it without much hope, but nobody appeared to notice me and inside there was a scene of great activity. It was a very large shed with people in every direction, and I stood undecided for a time, not knowing what to do or where to go. Quite near me, on my left, was a kiosk, not unlike a paybox. It stood isolated there on the floor of the shed, and it drew my attention.

  There was a priest in the kiosk, a big, pink-faced man with barely room to sort his forms and papers. I was in such a hurry of spirits that it hardly seemed extraordinary to see him there, nor was it very strange that at the sight of my passport he should speak to me in English. A part of the reason for my confusion and trouble of mind was that I had stupidly brought the other two passports with me instead of leaving them with my wife and my sister: I had been worrying about the necessity for explanations and the difficulty of them, and I
was in a miserable state of indecision. He was so very helpful and unofficial that before we had exchanged half a dozen words I had shifted the whole problem on to him. He did not appear to find that there was any difficulty at all. As he turned the pages of the passports he said, looking at my sister’s face, that he had often seen her; not in the flesh, he added, but in the papers – which, considering the universal spreading of the church, is not astonishing. I was astonished, however, and gratified as well: I felt that I was the better received for it, and that I myself had a certain reflected glory, not without material advantage in so clerical a country.

  It was a pity, for the friendliness left his tone. He assured me that he would look after them when they came through, and towards them his voice was cordial: but for me he was no more than polite, and when I took my heavy pack to the inspectors I felt him looking after me.

  Now the confusion again and the hurry: I must pass over this, and the bad revelations of my pack, so exactly rifled, turned inside out by expert searchers. (They were perfectly correct, always civil – I could not complain – and everyone was searched.) All that my head cannot recall precisely now: indeed, I must quite soon have lost the sequence of happenings and the thread – it was all so very important, and because I was so conscious of it I foundered in a welter of explanation, doubt, uncertainty – worry and confusion that did not clear (and will not clear now, at this great interval of time) until I was free on the mountain again.

  From that time on, or rather from that place on, I have everything straight. It has been, after all, plain enough, uncomplicated.

  There is this path, brown in an uncoloured world of hills: it is halfway up the side, running straight, never rising much or falling. It is trodden into the side of the hill and it winds continually as it follows the swell and curve of the mountain.

  She started before me along this path, and I hurry to catch her up. It is easy walking, neither hot nor cold, and I go with long strides, fast and pursuing. I shall never catch her: I know that. I shall never catch her, however much I hurry – and I do hurry, press on hard without a moment’s slackening of the strongest continual effort; and I go fast, for all the weight of my pack.

  I shall never catch her: but I have this, that I am on the ground that she has travelled. The ‘never catching’, that is less important now: we are divided by the distance, but the path is our connection; and I shall never let the distance grow.

  The Walker

  IN THE COUNTRY around this village it is not as simple as one could wish to find a pleasant, easy path for walking. The roads inland are all uphill, and although it is true that they lead through magnificent, dramatic country – bold, falling rock with terraces of vines and olive trees standing among the dried-up, barren mountains – they are roads that have to be climbed with attention: the landscape makes continual demands upon one; the winding, rock-strewn paths need perpetual care, and both these things interfere with the real aim of a walk, which for me is a half-conscious gentle physical exercise, the perfect accompaniment to reflection. I do not say that the countryside is anything but superb, and for one who walks to see magnificence these paths are ideal: but that is not my aim, and sometimes I long for an ordinary sober country lane, a way through the level cornfields or a towpath along a quiet river or a sea wall between salt flats and a marsh. Then there is the heat: for a big, heavy man that is important, and in the summer (it lasts from April to November here) all these roads are tilted to the blazing sun throughout the day.

  The alternative is to walk along the sea. It is fresher in the summer, but there again it is not the kind of walking that I like best, for the sea is bordered by high cliffs: the sea comes right to their feet, and there is no way along the shore; one must be climbing or descending all the time.

  When I was a little boy I lived for a time in a place where there was an immense stretch of sand, hard, pounded sand upon which you could walk for miles and miles. You never had to watch your feet on the level sand: walking was effortless, and the rhythm of your steps and the half-heard incessant thunder of the sea induced that trance in which one can go on and on for ever, singing perhaps, or talking to the air. There were shells, too, far better than the shells are here, delicately stranded at the watermark, and all kinds of sea-wrecked things, trawlers’ floats, kelp, sea purses, spindrift, tarred or whitened planks of wood.

  That is the sort of beach or strand that is lacking here; for here, as I say, there is no way along the sea except by the cliffs, and although they do sometimes go down to a little bay of shingle, it is only to rise again abruptly within a hundred yards. It is not a coast for general wandering: it is not a shore where one can stroll at all, and that is my only complaint against this place. I have no others. My lodgings are clean and orderly, the people are used to me, they are quiet and civil, and nobody interferes with my work or my set habits.

  However, there is one walk that is neither violent nor exhausting. It is not a very good walk: it is an illogical, synthetic walk, but it is the best that I have been able to find and I have gone over the paths of it so often now that my feet find their way by themselves, leaving my mind free, to meditate or drift in vacancy, just as it pleases; and that is all that one can ask.

  I go out of the back of the village, past the fort: for this is a bad part, for the quarter’s rubbish dump is by the fort, and there is always a carrion smell and the thin dogs hunt about in shameful, mean-looking bands. The rubbish is supposed to be burned in that square concrete box, but although a cloud of stinking smoke drifts over it, the amount is never the less. I pass it and hurry over the bare drying-ground: the wind is almost always in the right direction, and as soon as I am on the level field the reek is blown away, so by the time I am halfway over it the unpleasant feeling has quite gone. This is the place where the women spread their washing out to dry, and in certain months of the year the men bring their nets to lie in the sun.

  Beyond the drying field one must branch off to the left, to the main road and follow it to the entrance of a broad cart track: this is where the walk begins. The track dips down between high banks, and very soon there are hedges on either side. These are the only hedges for miles around, and if it were not for the prickly pears that show here and there and the pomegranates that form part of the hedge itself, one might suppose the track an English lane. On the far side there are orange trees and vines, which destroy the effect, but all around the farmhouse that stands on the downward slope an ordinary market garden gives the green in ordered rows again – broad beans, cauliflowers and cabbages, lettuce, carrots, familiar plants. Farther down, the bushes close overhead and the lane becomes a tunnel through the green; then at the bottom there is the river. For nearly all the year the bed is dry, and even when there is some water flowing it is always possible to cross dry-shod. Now I turn to the right and follow the path downstream. Here there are laurels, a few willows, tamarisks and those tall, thin bushes that have purple sprays of flowers – the kind that bloom in the late summer and draw flights of peacock butterflies.

  Among the bushes there are dragonflies, for the river, flowing underground, leaves stagnant pools in the hollows: and up and down the river bed, low under the trees, innumerable swallows dash through the light; there are martins, too, and in the evening, when the bats are out and the swallows are no more than dark blurs, more sensed than seen, the white bottoms of the martins show, disembodied, weaving up and down.

  I follow the river then, and come to its mouth. This is in one of the little bays that I have mentioned: it stands between the cliffs on either hand, a half-moon of shingle, with tall reeds at the back of it and behind them an orchard of fig and orange trees. The river, when it is flowing, hugs the right-hand side, cutting along at the foot of the cliff itself, and the beach shows no sign of having a river in it at all.

  It is a shingle beach, with large pebbles at the back and small ones by the sea. Nearly always there is a high-water mark of broken reeds, bushes, driftwood and grass-like seaweed: this
line of vegetable rubbish (it is as much as two feet high sometimes) stays unmoved from one big storm to another. Only at the equinox, when the wind comes straight in from the sea, do the waves beat in so far, and then there is nearly always rain inland, so that the river brings down more dead reeds and bushes, and these, being unable to drive out to sea, drift in the little bay and are thrown in to the same high-water mark.

  It is only at these times, too, that the one boat that lives on that beach is hauled up far from the sea. It is a blue boat, shaped like those one made from paper as a child; the old man of the orchard uses it to fish for congers. He spends more time in his boat than working on his land, and it is said that he knows the rocks at the bottom of that bay better than most men know the rooms of the house they live in. But he is a savage old man, a solitary, and I do not speak to him nor he to me.

  When I am on the beach I usually walk up and down it. It is not that it is agreeable to walk upon – the shingle is so loose and shifting that one’s feet plunge deep and walking is painful – but it is the end of my walk. One must either go back the way one came (an unsatisfactory retreat) or else climb up the cliff, which is not walking any more. It is the cliff path that I nearly always take, up past the destroyed German searchlight and to the huge domed gun-emplacements home; but I walk up and down first to consider it.

  I walk, naturally, by whatever water mark there may be. Not the high ridge-like mark of the great storms, for that so rarely changes, but by the sea itself; and sometimes, when there has been a swell, or a storm in Africa, there are shells or wreckage on the beach.

  Once I found a wet brass ring. It had just arrived from who knows what rolling in the sea. It was a cheap ring, the kind that is sold in fairs: the sea had pitted it with eatings-out and dents, which gave it the look of vast antiquity. But in low relief on the flat part of it there was a swastika, and no doubt it had belonged to one of the Germans drowned here in the war. The ring filled me with repulsion, like a thing unclean: the round was so much the answering shape to the finger that had fitted it that I shuddered and threw it far into the sea, wiping my hands on the pebbles afterward. A human finger, by itself without a hand, is a disgusting thing. A human finger in the sea.