Enchanted Autumn

by Mary Whistler

  She shook her head slightly, where it rested on his shoulder. But she felt she also had to say: “I don’t think there’s any connection between Mark’s kiss and the beautiful women in your life. And I wouldn’t have expected you to be jealous that night.”

  “No, but I was ... Surprisingly jealous! It was the first thing that made me realize that I was more serious about you than I imagined.” His arms tightened about her, and his voice took on a different note. “And now if any man kissed you, Jane, I would want to slit his throat!”

  “That sounds very primitive,” she said shakily.

  “I am primitive. I am from the Basque country, and we do not permit our women to be filched by other men in the Basque country.” Once more he tip-tilted her chin. “And you are my woman, aren’t you, Jane?” looking deep into her eyes. “You are going to give yourself to me without reservation, and be mine for ever and always?”

  “If - if you want me,” she answered, and knew that she trembled deep down at the roots of her being.

  “If I want you! If I want you, Jane! It isn’t so much that I want you, I need you! ... From now on you are going to be one of the most important things in life to me! You are going to be the centre of my life, the thing that will draw me back like a magnet from the ends of the earth. If I find it necessary to go there without you. Even the thought of you will console me when something happens that is particularly irksome, and the thought of holding you in my arms will be like a reward! Jane, darling, I want to think of you at La Cause Perdue until we can make some other, and perhaps better, plan. When the others leave I want you to stay on there, and Jeanne will look after you, and the whole house will be yours to do with as you wish. You can select whichever room you want for your own, and if nothing is quite as you like it then we will have it altered until it pleases you. I want you to have everything you want, Jane - all the things you’ve probably lacked so far in your little life - and I will seize every opportunity to get back to you, and if you become bored then I will arrange for you to visit Paris, and we will have a wonderful time while I show you the real Paris! Oh, Jane” - holding her passionately close - “life is going to be so blissful for us!” Jane wondered whether there was something slightly wrong with her hearing powers, and then decided that it was only because he didn’t realize he had omitted something.

  “You mean you - you want me to stay on here after the film is finished?”

  “Of course.” He smoothed her hair tenderly as if he was amazed she hadn’t worked that out for herself already. “I never thought when I bought the house that one day it would become really important to me ... The entirely fitting background for my own little love, my Jane!

  “But—”

  “No ‘buts’.” He kissed her perturbed eyes. “What else would I do with you, when I have to go away? I can’t drag you around with me.” His eyes glinted with a suspicion of humour. “My friends are not amongst the most prudish in the world, but such as they are they might think it just a little strange if I did that! And you wouldn’t like it, either, Jane... Believe me, it is here that you belong, and here that you must stay!”

  She felt herself moistening her lips, because they had gone so terribly dry. “You mean ... Stay as what?”

  “As whatever you like to call yourself ... The woman I adore! The woman I have been waiting for all these years!”

  “Then you are not - asking me to marry you?”

  His hands slackened their hold a trifle. He looked at her with eyes that reminded her suddenly of the eyes of the Sphinx. “How can I ask you to marry me, Jane? Didn’t I make it perfectly clear to you this morning that I will never marry again. Never!” he emphasized.

  She nodded her head like one who at last was beginning dully to comprehend. “Yes; you did make it clear. That was why I couldn’t quite understand when - tonight—”

  The words trailed away, as if words had suddenly become pointless, meaningless. She managed to free herself from his hold and stand up, and she could feel the colour rushing on its way to her cheeks, like a river in glorious spate, eager and anxious to scorch and burn them. In a few moments, when she was capable of being overwhelmed by confusion, she would be overwhelmed by it, and humiliation would begin to spread inside her until there wasn’t a corner of her being unaffected by it. But while she waited for that confusion to leap upon her, she just stood there looking helpless, as if the fine points of the situation were points that eluded her, and she couldn’t grapple with them, anyway.

  Etienne stood up also, and his voice was rough as he said: “Jane, don’t look like that! ... I’ve already apologized for being unnecessarily brusque this morning, and naturally I thought you understood. It is inconceivable to me that you didn’t understand, when I went out of my way to make you do so. When my wife died I vowed I would never marry again. She gave me something, and I gave her something, that put the whole of our association into a class apart from anything that is easily understood by most people. At the time of her death I couldn’t even envisage a moment arriving when I would even desire to marry again ... And however many failings I may have, I do not go back on my vows.” His face was curiously stony. “However I may feel about you, Jane, I have no intention of going back on my vows.”

  “The last thing I have any intention of doing,” she assured him, in the quietest voice she had ever used to anyone in her life, “is to try and persuade you to go back on your vows.”

  “Then” - he took a step towards her, looked down keenly into her face - “what is the position between us going to be, Jane? I have told you that I love you, and that is true.”

  “You have also told me that there are many ways of loving.” She ran a hand through her hair, as if the weight of it pressed upon her forehead, and the pressure was all at once intolerable. “I’m afraid it never occurred to me before that there are so many ways...” She tried to smile, but it was a travesty of a smile, because her eyes felt stiff and blind, as if a hard hand had hit them unexpectedly; and with the confusion rushing all over her the one thing she felt that she must do at all costs was to prevent the extent of it becoming noticeable. “I’m sorry if I have revived painful memories for you, I should have interrupted your bluntness this morning as a warning that I probably needed.”

  “Not a warning, Jane - a clarification of the situation between us.”

  “This morning there didn’t seem to be any danger of the situation between us getting out of hand.” She looked down at the carpet beneath her feet, full of the soft colours of an Aubusson, which he had had brought from the house to add to her comfort. ‘Tonight I don’t quite know what happened!... But I didn’t dash out of the house as soon as dinner was over to draw you after me! I don’t know why I hurled myself at you in the wood...”

  “You didn’t hurl yourself at me, Jane,” he told her, gently. “We are in love, and it is natural for the arms of the man you love to hold you.”

  She shook her head rather piteously. “But ours isn’t the sort of love we would want to perpetuate ... You because you know what real love is, I because I never intended to fall in love in the first place, and now that I seem to have done so I’ve got to get over it as quickly as possible. It’s just something that happened to us here amongst all these trees, and once we get away from them we shall return to normal...”

  “Do you honestly believe that?” he asked.

  She looked at him with agony behind her eyes making them appear twice their size. “Yes - because I’ve got to believe it!” She licked dry, humiliated lips. “You see, I’m not the sort of girl who could live as a man’s mistress - and that was what you were suggesting, weren’t you, when you talked about my remaining here, and your coming back as often as possible? It’s not that I value myself so highly that I think some man ought to offer me marriage ... But I’d like one day to have a home of my own, and a husband and children. Those are the things that most women want sooner or later, and I think you’ll want them for Adele one day, when she’s grown up, won�
�t you? You wouldn’t have offered your wife - as an alternative to marriage! - the sort of thing you offered me, would you? Not under any circumstances!”

  His lips became tightly compressed together, and his eyes grew darker than she had ever known them.

  “I’m not offering you an alternative to marriage. It’s simply that I cannot offer you marriage.”

  “And I don’t expect you to offer me anything.” She made a gesture with her hands. “Don’t you think they’ll be missing us at the house?”

  “Jane!” He moved nearer to her, and if she hadn’t backed a step he would have caught hold of her by her shoulders. “Don’t you think I want to ask you to be my wife?...”

  She turned away her face.

  “And what sort of love do you think I feel for you, when you refer to my having known real love?”

  “I don’t know.” She sounded utterly weary. “Do let’s go back to the house.”

  He started to pace up and down the room like a caged thing, his movements reminding her as they had done more than once before of the agile movements of a panther. And then when he came back to her his face was distorted with deep and violent feeling. He flung out his hands. “If I could only make you understand! ... A vow is a vow, and Marie-Therese had such a little time of happiness, and sometimes I am certain that if I had devoted the whole of my time to her she would have got well again! But I didn’t ... I couldn’t remain in one place for long, and the sort of simple backgrounds she liked would have been intolerable to me after a time. And then I was beginning to make a name for myself as a singer and entertainer, and there was every excuse for being unable to settle. I traded on that excuse, and she was so sweet and trusting, and she lived only for me...” He put up his hands to his face. “Oh, Jane, I have such a feeling of guilt, and it is always with me. Where she is concerned it will be always with me!”

  Jane felt her love for him rise up and take possession of every part of her mind and body, and banish all thought of self and self-interest. She moved towards him impulsively and touched his sleeve. “Oh, Etienne, I’m so sorry!”

  He looked at her out of blank eyes.

  “I’m so terribly sorry, Etienne!”

  “One day I’ll show you the little praying-stool she used ... It’s in my bedroom.”

  He turned away, and when he came back to her this time it was just as if he was appealing to her. He caught at her hands. “Jane, I don’t want to harm you, too! Why is it I can only fall in love with good women?”

  Jane smiled at him tenderly. “I don’t think you ever wanted to fall in love at all. And this time we must be sensible, and you mustn’t have any regrets. There mustn’t be any more regrets for you, Etienne – You have your work, and your success, and Adele - all her future to plan! For you there is so much that you need not feel that you are being deprived of anything.”

  “But I want you, Jane,” he told her, and snatched her into his arms and started to kiss her with almost frantic fervour. “I will be deprived of the best in life if I don’t have you!”

  She realized that his arms were determined to prevent any effort to release herself, and the wildness of his kisses had the effect of making her own blood sing; and if she didn’t concentrate all the power of her will on breaking away from him she knew that she never would break away. She would become a part of that unsatisfactory life of his - from a woman’s point of view - living only for the feel of his arms about her, the passionate hardness of his mouth on hers, the murmur of his endearments - in a fascinating mixture of French and English - in her ears. And, worse than that, she would spend her life just as Marie-Therese had spent her life, waiting for him to come to her ... And Marie-Therese had been at least his wife!

  “Jane, Jane! ... You can’t deny me, Jane! You can’t prevent us being happy!” he whispered.

  But she managed to free her mouth from his, and look up at him, while her hands pressed against his shoulders. “There would be a ghost between us, Etienne,” she said, shudderingly. ‘The ghost of Marie-Therese! ... Even if you don’t want to marry me, you would be putting me in her place! You vowed that you would put no one in her place!”

  He let her go at once.

  CHAPTER XIII

  The end of that week saw the end of Sandra’s period of vacation, and following upon it La Cause Perdue became a greater hive of activity than it had almost certainly ever been before in the whole of its history.

  Technicians, script-writers, camera-men, actors, actresses, and extras descended upon it. They overflowed into almost every house in the village, and the village inn became the focal-point for a good many of them in the evenings, and at every moment of the daytime when their services could temporarily be dispensed with. The ducks on the village pond set up such a quacking as they had never set up before because of all the excitement; the children poured out of school with the determination to get a glimpse of the strangers, and the old woman who exercised her goats outside the inn had them scattered so many times by lumbering trucks and other vehicles that one of them at least went off supplying her with the usual yield of milk.

  Jeanne Bethune went about with a tautening of her whole expression which betrayed how much she resented this intrusion, although Clarri had never been so excited in her life. The pony-tail vanished in favour of a more modish style of hairdressing, and Jacques went about with a permanently disgruntled expression because Clarri’s allegiance seemed to be temporarily diverted from him.

  Clarri even thought about approaching her master with a request to be included amongst the extras. But she never did get as far as that, because Jacques threatened to look more than disgruntled if she did.

  The weather, during those last days of September, was spectacularly fine. The beginning of October saw it just as fine, although the evenings were a little cooler, and the dawns were magnificently fresh. Jane was able to appreciate the beauty of the dawns because she frequently had to get up at a far earlier hour than she normally would, in order to persuade Sandra to desert her bed and be on the set in time for a long day’s filming. It took patience and perseverance to arouse Sandra when she was in no mood to be aroused, and her habit of keeping late nights made her disinclined to leave the comfort of her low French bed for even the most breathtaking splendours that the dawn could offer. And she liked to linger in her luxurious deep bath, and Jane found it time-saving to get her under the shower - if only she could persuade her to defer the pleasure of the bath until a more leisurely hour of the day - and then practically force her into slacks, and one of the breast- hugging sweaters she, favoured on these occasions. After which they would empty a pot of coffee between them, and walk down to the improvised studio, through the gradual golden light that was filtering through the trees, and with a riot of colour palpitating in the sky above them. There would be a delectable murmur of early bird-song, and a champagne coolness in the air, and all the dew-drenched flowers in the garden of La Cause Perdue would release their scents with a concerted rush that came at them like the odours of a perfumery.

  Sandra never felt the magic of those short early morning walks in the way that Jane did - perhaps because they were so often the only moments of magic in an over-long day for Jane - and, in any case, once she started filming Sandra became an entirely different personality from the glamorous American girl who had made good. She was a dedicated actress once she set foot on the set, and even before she reached the set she seemed to be brooding on all that lay ahead of her, the particular demands that were likely to be made of her, and anxious to shut out diverting influences. She was nervy, and irritable, and not very patient, and Jane had to be careful to do and say the right things in order not to add to the nerviness and irritability.

  Usually, when they reached the set, all the others would be there waiting for them, and sometimes Val Wade would look at his watch a little pointedly, as much as to say Sandra might have made it just a little sooner.

  Jane didn’t see much of Etienne once all the excitement got under way
. When she did occasionally catch a glimpse of him in his black slacks and shirt - sometimes covered by a black pullover which made him look curiously lean and elegant - he was too preoccupied to be noticeably aware of her. During the rushes, to which she was of course admitted, at the end of the day, he was sometimes quite close to her; but so were a number of other people, and interest in the results of the day’s work was the primary interest at such a time.

  The first love scene between the two principals made Jane feel as if her breath was temporarily suspended. She wasn’t jealous of Sandra - she wasn’t really in the least jealous of Sandra - but the sight of her in the arms of the man who had discovered the first weak links in her own defences, and the painful realism of their kisses, made her feel as if a knife had been plunged into her heart. Etienne - or Rene, as she had to accustom herself to thinking of him - was certainly an artist in that everything he undertook he carried out with the true artist’s touch, and Sandra had the same capacity for throwing herself heart and soul into a role.

  To see them together - victims of a slightly despairing love - no one would have believed that they were simply acting a part.