“It certainly borders upon the ridiculous, however,” he added, after a pause.
But there was no light in the house: it was dark, closed-in, and shuttered; and it had a repellent air of complete withdrawal. He could not see a shutter, no target for the little stones he carried in his hand. And until he remembered that this was the blind side of the house he stood and wondered, revolving schemes of leaping to the roof—too far, uncertain, no retreat. But farther round the angle, at the beginning of the straight again, he would have a sideways view of the house’s other face: and now his eyes, wide open like a night bird’s, could see the tracing of a shutter lit.
He threw a stone: but he might have thrown it into a well of darkness. He never heard it land. It was his aim that was at fault, no doubt, for it was a difficult throw, oblique and in the night. As well as that his heart was beating high, and as he leaned on the parapet he felt his arm trembling, although it was not cold. More carefully he threw a handful all together: this time they rattled on the wood. They rattled on the shutter, but that was all; no motion in the house, and behind the window no movement of the light.
Well: he should have known that. So many, many times she must have heard the pebbles in the night: she would not open for an unknown fling of gravel. Yet still he tried again: with no result. Was she asleep? For a long time he waited. There was one untiring cricket in a crevice in the wall, and far away behind an owl was hunting through the olive trees and vines.
No, she was not asleep. She was singing very softly, and there was a creaking on the stairs. The song was a little louder: she had certainly come up the stairs. He strained, but he could not catch the words. A flamenco song, profound and sad, with those long falling half-tone quavers. She had come much nearer to the window now.
“A la mar fui por naranjas,
Cosa que la mar no tiene . . .”
He threw another stone, and the singing stopped, cut off. Far from the Place came the sound of laughter. Another stone, a handful more: but the shutters still were closed.
“The roof is the only thing,” he said, and he measured the distance down. A shocking drop, as far as he could judge. He lit a match, which made a round of light and showed the velvet outer darkness pressing in. He should have brought a torch, he said, as he swung himself up to the parapet.
He sat with his feet dangling over the emptiness a moment, and then considered all the plan again. “Why, you fool,” he said, “why not go and tap at the door like any Christian?”
Down the dark tower and the steps: how still it was. Here was the door. He rapped.
“Who is it?” she asked, above.
“Alain,” he whispered. He whispered it, ludicrously, through the letterbox. Pyramus with a ferro-concrete wall.
“Who?”
“Alain Roig.”
Steps on the stairs: the door went just ajar, most cautiously. “Who?” she said again.
“Alain.”
“Oh,” she said—a doubtful Oh. But she appeared there in the wider gap. With an automatic gesture Alain raised his hand; but finding neither hat nor cap but bag it faltered, at a loss.
“Alain?” she said again.
“Yes.” He had the bag off now. “I beg your pardon for coming at this time, but . . . Please may I come in?”
They were talking in whispers; and in the distance the music came booming through the darkness.
“Have you just come from the feast?” she asked, still not retreating from the door.
“Oh, I am not drunk or fooling, I assure you, Madeleine,” he said, with a sober vehemence that carried force.
“No. No, I did not think for a moment that you were,” she said with a nervous laugh. “But you see, it is so awkward, with this divorce and . . . You will excuse me, won’t you please? We will meet tomorrow.”
“The divorce is through.”
“Oh my God,” she said.
Then after some time she said in a low voice, “I am so sorry I cannot ask you in just now.”
“Then please come out with me. It is so important. I must talk to you, Madeleine.” He felt the sudden grip of despair as she hesitated still.
“Is it really so important? Would it not do tomorrow? The morning is so nearly here.”
“No. Please, please, Madeleine. I have to talk to you now.” Was it all going to fall to pieces?
She reached back and blew out the lamp. “Where shall we go?” she said. He was irradiated with instant happiness, and he said “Thank you. Oh thank you very much.”
He took her arm and they went slowly, feeling their way through the dark. Out of nothing she said, “This evening someone was throwing stones against my window. You expect it on a night like this.”
Alain said, “I threw the stones. I have been up there on the wall for a long time, wondering how to reach you.”
They went a few more steps in silence, and Alain said, “Let us go up on to the wall. We cannot wander among all the people in the town.”
Up the pitch-black steps he led her by the hand, and they were on the rampart, leaning side by side against the inner wall.
For some time they were silent. Alain had not thought he could be so moved: he tried hard to control his throat, but when he spoke his voice was trembling. He said “I wanted you to marry me, you see . . .”
He felt a moment of the most acute embarrassment, and then he said, almost angrily, “I am not playing with emotion, on my word. I love you, I love you, Madeleine. I cannot find the words. But marry me: please marry me.” The tumult of his spirits rose, almost to choke him.
“. . . walk along the wall,” she was saying.
In the darkness, as they paced slowly from the tower, arm linked in arm, his voice came, surprisingly close to her ear, “It would be such a kindness, don’t you see? I do admire you so.”
Silence. Then desperately, “I know you can hardly feel any strong romantic emotion about a man like me. But I would make no demands.”
She pressed his arm: but she said nothing, and when they had walked a long way he said, almost conversationally now, “In Prabang there is the forest—trees of crimson flowers. And the people wear blue cotton and huge mushroom hats: they are the kindest people in the world. In the garden of the bungalow there are mango trees and durriens. And orchids. Prithiane is not far away, and there are all kinds of shops. My colleagues are all charming men, and some of them have wives. There is Tianou for holidays and the bad weather—that is very much more Chinese: you can get jade and silk in the Chinese shops, and there is the Malay bazaar, where the Arabs come. Lacquer. In the harbor there are junks and sampans: you can take a boat to Bali or Singapore. The old men and little boys fly kites.”
They turned, by one consent, and went slowly toward the corner tower. He went on desultorily, describing the fantastic jungle birds and flowers, covering the unbearable suspense. Once she asked him what a lichee was. Suddenly he felt he could not evade it any more. “Still, that is not it,” he said. “In this I cannot be giving: it is you that must do that, and I beg and pray that you will. I am so lonely there: and now I love you. I think it would break my heart to go back, living there alone.” He had been impelled to this: it was the decisive step, and now he wished it all unsaid. The cruel beat of time stretched out and out.
“And Xavier?” she said.
“No promise made to him?”
“No. No promise. But you know . . .”
“I know. Poor devil. But the thought of you and Xavier makes my very soul revolt. I am not betraying him, I promise you. I told him that it was wicked to try to force your mind. He knows exactly what I think.”
“He has been very kind to me, very kind. But I am afraid of him. And I am so very sorry too . . . He watches me from up here sometimes. I have seen him in the moonlight on the wall.” Her hand was beating on his sleeve in desperate agitation. “And there is your family. Madame Margot. I could not do it, Alain.”
He leaned her against the wall: there were tears upon her cheek, and he
felt the fragility of her shoulders in his arms.
“We can go to Marseilles and take the boat from there,” he said. The ebullience in his chest was painful now, the happiness oppression almost more than he could bear.
“I was a half-dead man until this last month past,” he said; and vividly he recalled the sweetness of her forehead in the vineyard on the hill.
Silently they stood there, pressed as if they could never move again. Descending, his mind ranged furiously over the immediate needs of the next few hours. “We must go tonight,” he said, “and go while it is dark. You pack your things—pack just what you need and I will get a car. Côme’s car, I think. At dawn we shall be beyond Narbonne. Oh Madeleine, thank God you came. I love you so.”
“Dear kind Alain: I love you too.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT WAS WARM in the hotel: outside, the mistral was driving sparse flecks of rain and sleet horizontally over the glistening black roadway and the people on the pavements were bowed wretchedly against it. By the force of contrast their room seemed even more agreeable when they came in from shopping; but even if it had been a calm and sunny day the room would still have charmed them. It was in a good hotel—good in the sense that the bed was comfortable and the people kind. Alain had said in the morning how much difference it made if the girl who brought the coffee smiled and said good day: and although the coffee was indifferent, he said he was happier there than at the Crillon or the Ritz.
They had spent the morning buying things, tropical clothes and books for the voyage, and the crowds, the hurrying in the streets, and the sense of shared activity had done them good. It had dissipated the dumb awkwardness and embarrassment that had threatened to envelop them entirely when the door of their room first closed behind them; and their lunch had brought back their poise—had given them an ordinary and agreeable level to live upon for the time.
It is almost impossible to be really happy at a time of very strong emotion, but now they were beginning to succeed: their voices were natural again, and they laughed. By a tacit understanding neither had mentioned Xavier that day, and now how many hundred things were overlying that unspoken name, taking away from its immediacy. And now the feeling of reality was seeping in—the feeling that the situation was real, so real that it could be touched and quite believed. For Madeleine it was as if she had been assured in the night that the sun would light the world; it was as if she had believed it, but only with her mind, not with her heart; and as if she had now just seen the first rim of the sun upon the eastern sky.
They were packing, slowly and without method: their bags were agape upon the bed and on the floor. A hairbrush and a rolled-up pair of socks, destined to be left for ever, propped open the wardrobe door.
She suddenly pressed a folded waistcoat to her bosom and looked at Alain’s back—a look of whole-hearted, concentrated love.
He was bent over an open suitcase, ramming down a pair of shoes. “In our garden,” he said, “there are snails. Immense snails. They come out when it rains. I adore snails.” He took the shoes out and looked absently at them. “But Tran-Lhoc will never cook them.”
“I can make a cargoulade,” she said, and Alain turned with a smile, an open smile and with so much pleasure in it at seeing her again after that moment of being turned away, that she felt her own smile spread in answer to it, and a wave of fondness pierced her heart.
The shining black and upright Renault had been standing a long time outside the hotel: soon the policeman would be coming back with his angry words and his parking regulations. Xavier leaned over the wheel to look up at the hotel again: an unpretentious little place, painted white and green. L’Hôtel de l’Extrème-Orient. Speak English. At least it did not look like a bawdyhouse.
How much longer would they be? They were only there for packing now, and there was not much time to spare.
The hotel porter looked at him again. He took three steps across the pavement toward the car. But again Xavier’s gray and haggard face, set in dark and savage lines, unshaved, menacing, and extreme, his rich and sober clothes, the Légion d’Honneur in his buttonhole, made the porter hesitate, stand thoughtfully and turn: the face, especially.
There was no other entrance: no, they must come out this way. But was it worth it, all this waiting in the cold? He had seen them going in—had found them in the last two hours before the sailing of the boat. He had seen their faces, laughing as they turned the glass revolving doors; and what had been the effect? Nothing. Nothing of significance. Just the statement, There they are.
All the way along the coast—that furious, unrelenting drive—his feelings had been clear enough. Black hate and rage, unmixed and plain: but had it not been conventional black raging, abstract hatred? Now (and he had seen them now) what was the truth in his mind? Was it only tiredness, hunger, and the cold that made this apathy? Alain had taken Madeleine from him; and was indifference the only thing he felt?
There was wounded vanity; frustration too, and the habit of revenge: but fundamentally what did he feel? Indifference, was it indifference? Was this cold and deadened sentiment indifference? It was like the ashes with the fire gone out.
And if it was, and if it was indifference, just mere indifference, then this was the end. If now he felt a cold dislike for her and him, if he had not the strength of feeling to hate them now, then all that he had felt had been a fraud: as Alain had said, a self-deception and a fraud. If there was no bloody hatred now, there had been no love before.
“Am I to blame, my God? Am I to blame?” he asked, and the hotel porter looked at him again.
“If I feel nothing now . . .” He stared blankly through the glass. “If I regard her with indifference—no more than irritation, then it is the end. But what have I done? What have I done?”
If he was not responsible, where was the justice then? For if indifference was all his heart could feel, then he was dead. And if he had died, all feeling dead, and yet he had not killed himself, where was the crime? Whose responsibility? And if it was outside himself, what hope was there? He had loved with all his power: and where was that love now? A punishment without a crime: a final condemnation without foregoing wrong. He stared straight ahead, an appalled stare through the rain-flecked glass at nothing, then he covered his forehead with his hands.
But still the jet of fire might light again. When he saw them face to face, then it might blaze again and prove that he was still alive. They must be coming, must be coming: the boat was almost due.
He started the engine, made it hum, and the glass doors turned. He slid in the gear; was ready now. Yes, there they were; they bowed against the mistral as they reached the street, arms clasped, a suitcase in Alain’s other hand.
He would let them go a little way ahead, then quickly down to the quay before them: that was the best place, open and clear. The plan had charge: there was no reflection now.
“WHAT IS THE MATTER, petit chou?” said Madeleine. It was almost the first endearment she had ventured, and the continuing rigidity of Alain’s arm made her wish it then unsaid.
“Nothing . . . nothing,” he said, with the lie apparent. “I was—I was wondering about my razor. But it is in the little bag. I remember now.”
He had seen Xavier’s car and Xavier’s back down the side street on the right. A shop clock showed the time—no time to waste at all. No cabs. The street running to the quay was dead, stone dead and cold.
Three cabs passed suddenly, filled with late and hurrying passengers. A glance—haggard—showed that they were no use to him.
Madeleine looked at his face. What had she done? Was he regretting it? It was decisive now, the boat and then no turning back. Was she pushing herself on him, being carried along on his pity? The doubt was like a hammer in her face. For a moment she thought she was going to faint: he was a stranger, and she could not speak.
As they crossed on the cobbles he gripped her arm, and she felt it go numb with pain, but the racing words hardly faltered in her head
. Oh let it not be so, oh make it not be so, dear Mary Mother of God, pray make it not be so . . . The enormous roar of the siren almost engulfed the prayer.
They were on the quay, and Alain was hurrying her along, going brutally just in front, holding her as she stumbled on her unaccustomed high-heeled shoes.
“By God, we’ll take it as it stands,” said Alain, half aloud. Words of no significance: his mind meant he would smash all opposition down. How? Speed and thrust, the protection of the crowd; the power of will. No crowd. Only impatient sailors at the gangway’s foot. Sailors, and the figure that he knew.
HE HAD LEFT his car along the quay: he had seen three taxis send five men aboard. Now he was by the canvas-covered gangway, the only one: the only place. He shook his head to the question of a sailor and stood there, straight and dark, with his right hand in the pocket of his overcoat.
Here they were coming, hurrying fast along the quay: a sailor called again, and the last siren, hoarse and appalling in its nearness, filled the sky. They were hurrying: he could not see her face. A hundred yards to go, and already the sailors were busy with the gangway’s ropes, the bridge that joined the ship and shore. High up, on the top of the black cliff of the ship’s side, a tiny officer was shouting orders to the men.
They were coming nearer, nearer, half running, clasped together. Near enough now. Now near enough: now nearer still.
He turned away, filled with an indescribable weariness of soul. There they were: he did not care. The gesture he had planned would have no validity. He felt no hatred for them, not any trace of love, inverted love or plain: not even that remnant of affection that he might have hoped to find: only this immeasurable weariness, and emptiness, and cold. All passion far, far away and dead. But he did not care: he did not care: he could feel nothing very strongly any more.
The tall black cliff had moved: there was black water, a widening gulf of blackness, between the ship and quay. On the high deck there were white faces: and the bridge to the land, the gangplank, was rising, sliding itself into the side. The hole closed, and it was gone. There was no more bridge at all.
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