Grimshaw raised his hat to her. She was woman. And in her way she was unique.
“Punctual.”
“Yes.”
There was all her heart in the quiet smile she gave him, that bright and deep glance of the eyes. He held the door open for her; he spread the rug over her knees. There were people who stared, but no one who sniggered.
Grimshaw took his seat beside her.
“You’ll trust my driving?”
“I trust it,” she said.
They reached Widmouth about half-past three. Grimshaw garaged the car, and they had tea at a tea-shop, and then sat on the sands. Widmouth was becoming popular. It advertised itself on posters, all black and blue and green about an aggressive and very blue-eyed child menacing the world with a wooden spade. It had begun to collect its waste paper and banana skins and young women with sun scorched and scaly necks, and a concert party and beach huts. In a little while it would have a lawn tennis tournament all to itself.
Grimshaw and Elizabeth Royle watched the pale-faced people from the towns.
“Quite a bright place—these days. I remember it when it was little but a fishing village.”
“Yes,” said she, “just where people worked and lived.”
He threw desultory stones into the sea. They had not said much to each other; it did not seem to matter.
“I’m forty-nine.”
He tossed the statement at her much as he tossed one of the stones. He glanced at her face. She was gazing at the horizon.
“Forty-nine—but I don’t feel it. I have lived my life out in the open. I am as fit as ever I was.”
Her voice had a quality of repose when she answered him.
“I had never thought about it.”
“That’s unusual.”
“Is it? You are just—man—not a man, any sort of man. There’s a difference, sir.”
“Don’t call me ‘sir’,” he said; “or I shall have to call you ‘madam’.”
She smiled round at him.
“What would you call me?”
“Just—woman. What better thing could I call you than woman?”
“That would depend——”
“On the way I looked at woman?”
“Yes,” she said—“and on how she wanted you to look.”
On the homeward way Grimshaw pulled up his car on the moor beside a pile of rocks rising grey above the green of the bracken. The view was superb. They got out and wandered a little way over the moor, gazing and saying nothing. Her face and eyes were very gentle.
“I’m on a hilltop to-day, Mr. Grimshaw,” she said, “and you have put me there. I feel that I can see all over the world.”
“How did I put you there?”
“You must know—I’m proud——”
“My dear,” he said—and was silent a moment.
They wandered back to the pile of rocks and sat there in the evening sunlight, she a little higher than the man, his left shoulder almost touching her knees. A greater serenity possessed them both. They were equals. Each had waited for the other—and this hilltop.
“Forty-nine! Is it too old for you, Elizabeth?”
She remained very still.
“Not—if you want me——”
“I think I have wanted you for years, my dear. Some things come late. Better that than too early. Will you marry me, Elizabeth?”
“I will,” she said, as though pledging herself before the sea and sky and the old stones of the moor.
At the Cressford Arms a somewhat fussy manageress, standing upon her dignity, and not appreciating the dignity of man and woman, admonished Mr. Grimshaw.
“It’s not fair to me or to the hotel, sir. Heaven knows it is hard enough to manage girls these days. But turning their heads—and in public——”
Grimshaw corrected her impressions.
“I am marrying Miss Royle. Perhaps she had better cease to be a member of your staff.”
He saw the world’s eyes in the round, and astonished, eyes of the lady. Not caring much for the world’s opinion, he yet was very much aware of what the world would say.
“Grimshaw’s reached the old fool phase. Marrying a waitress from a country pub. A fine, upstanding wench—and supposed to be good as gold. Poor beggar!”
Perhaps the world was right. Was he not challenging fatal incompatibilities and misunderstandings, subtle differences in self-expression, inevitable disharmonies? But he was as determined as a boy can be, a sensitive boy—who—inspired by some intuitive sureness—pushes on past the protests of his elders.
He had few relations, two or three cousins and an aged aunt. He left them unwarned, and yet—somehow the news reached them. He received a letter written in a neat clerical hand; it came from Cousin John, a country vicar:
“My dear Richard,
“I feel it to be my duty—etc.——”
Grimshaw tore the letter up and burnt it, but some of its acid phrases stuck in his memory.
“The girl may be an excellent person, but how can you expect her to understand a cultured gentleman’s point of view?”
“Is it fair to the girl—and at your age?”
“She is bound to grate upon your sensibilities.”
Yes; it was possible that the Rev. John might be right, but not so right as he imagined. Grimshaw was obstinate.
He and Elizabeth Royle were married quietly at Tawbridge church. It was August. Grimshaw had managed to engage rooms on the Regent Parade at Widmouth. It was a deliberate and a challenging gesture. She had accepted his choice without a murmur, and suffered him to plunge with her into the thick of that holiday crowd and to become part of it. She did not ask for explanations. It is probable that she was more intuitively wise than he imagined, and that she let him point out the path, knowing that the time would come for her to pause and to point and to show him. She did a great deal of thinking, and her thinking was based on feeling. From the first she understood him utterly, but dissembled the completeness of her understanding.
Yes, let him give her Widmouth and all that Widmouth stood for. It was the most subtle of provings. There was wilfulness in it. She understood.
So they sat on the little green balcony attached to the white front of No. 3 Royal Parade, and bathed and sunned themselves, and listened to beach concerts, and went to the local cinema and sat among youths and girls, and listened to the gigglings and mock kisses smacked on the backs of hands when the picture grew sentimental.
They took a boat and sailed; they made excursions; they had every appearance of accepting Widmouth and its sea front and its people. They did not criticize it openly to each other, perhaps because they were so very satisfied with all that their own intimate life gave them.
But she smiled at him dearly in her thoughts.
“Are you bearing this for me? Is this—my measure? Are you afraid that I shall be afraid of reality? Do work—the companionship of her man bore such a woman as I am?”
She let it go on. She was feeling rich in body and soul. She watched for any signs of restlessness in him, the call of the wild, of his beloved birds, books, the open road. She had read his books, and found him—in them—the one man for whom she had waited, her great gentleman, the man who reverenced things.
She learnt to drive the car. Mornings came when she left him scribbling on the balcony, and went off alone in the car. She explored; she drove east and west; she searched; she found.
She came back one day to find him sitting on the balcony in an attitude of abstraction. He had not heard her enter the room. She stood at the open french window.
“I have found it,” she said.
He turned sharply. She felt that in him which questioned her and himself, their linked lives—his manhood and her womanhood.
“What have you found, Bess?”
“Your quiet corner—your little cove.”
He stood up. His eyes seemed to deepen. He spoke to her very gently.
“Then—Widmouth—this sort of place——?”<
br />
“My dear,” she said, and drew him in and kissed him, “are you Widmouth to me—or I to you? There are the real things for both of us. I know.”
Next day they drove out in the car, going south-west along the coast until they came to Tavy Cross. Elizabeth descended here to collect a key from an old stone house next to the Bank. They drove on; they turned seawards down a lane and came suddenly upon a gentle hill lying at the head of a green valley.
There was a little old farmhouse here that had been bought and recovered and lived in by an artist, standing in the thick of a wind-blown orchard, with grey walls keeping back the moorland. Below lay the sea. A path went down to it. The wild hillsides were all bracken and scabious and golden rod.
Grimshaw looked at the sea, the hills, the house, and then at her. A board above the gate told him that the place was for sale; for a moment he said nothing, but took the key from her, and entered the wild garden, and unlocked the door of this little, secret house. She stood beside him; she smiled.
“Am I Widmouth to you—or this?”
She could see that he was deeply moved. He walked into one of the empty rooms and stood at the window looking at the sunlight on the hills and the sea.
“You are this—and yet not this. I cannot let you be this, Bess. I did not marry you to bury you alive.”
She came and stood beside him.
“What if I love it just as you do? Besides, this is not all the world—but our secret corner when we need it, to come back to from our wanderings, to lie in the fern, and watch birds, and make books.”
He looked at her steadily for a moment, and then raised his wife’s hand and kissed it.
“Was ever woman so wonderful as you?”
THE MAN WHO CAME BACK
Sanger pulled up his car by the three old Lombardy poplars, where the road began to loop its way down to the Nibas village.
In the spring of the year four years ago, and on just such a day as this, he had marched at the head of “B” Company down into Nibas village. Yes; four years ago and on just such a day as this, with the young poplar leaves all gold and the young wheat very green in the fields, he had marched with the brown battalion down into Nibas village where Marie lived.
Sanger climbed out of the car, and stood on the grass bank where the poplars grew. He stood there very still, leaning against the trunk of a tree, and wondering, as a man must wonder at the changelessness of certain things.
Nibas had not changed. It lay there in its green valley, with its little red and white houses, and its church spire protruding from the tops of a grove of beech trees. The stream flickered. The old, red brick château seemed to float in the midst of a smother of apple blossom. Sanger remembered that immense old orchard, and the red brick walls, and the hedges of box, and the bluebells in the beechwoods.
But his eyes looked over and beyond Nibas towards the flank of a hill where the road began to climb again. There, a narrow, red brick house jutted up, its slate roof looking blue against the green of the hillside. It was the house where Marie had lived. And beside it he could distinguish the red roofs of the sheds and the cone of the kiln where Marie’s father had baked his tiles and crocks and hollow bricks—Les Tuileries.
Sanger gazed at that house. He was so very conscious of the strangeness of the occasion, that he should be here after four years as a wandering Englishman in his car, looking down on this French village. And the fruit blossom was out, and the trees growing green, and in him there stirred a pang of pain. Why had he come? Why rouse up old memories?
Yet he knew that an importunate curiosity had possessed him, though a voice had said:
“Never go back.”
An illusion died; people changed. Women got married. Nineteen-twenty-two was not nineteen-eighteen.
He remembered things. They were as vivid as the grass and the fruit blossom.
He had said:
“I will come back.”
And he had never gone back. Circumstances had been too strong for him. There had been his wound, his poverty, and those bitter post-war days when the world had not wanted him. Would he ever forget those six months without a job? Other illusions had vanished. And then his job had come to him; he had fastened his teeth into it; he could afford a small car and a three weeks hunting up of the strange past. He could afford to marry, and he had not married. Somehow, none of those post-war girls had piqued him. They had seemed so young and bright and hard.
He returned to his car. But he did not start up the engine. He sat and dreamed. And the voice interrupted his dreams.
“Only fools come back.”
He remembered the letters he had written to Marie, and those three letters she had sent him, grave, simple, quiet little letters. Yes; like her grey eyes. And then her letters had ceased. The silence had been unbroken, and it had lasted for nearly four years.
What had happened down there? Had Louis, her brother, returned? Did old Georges Cordonnier and his wife still sit by the stove? Gentle old people. And always their conversation had been of Louis, the son:
“Yes; when Louis comes back—everything will be all right.”
The work of the world would go on, tiles grow like leaves, the kilns belch smoke, the carts go in and out as of old.
As he sat there in his car, with the sunlight flickering through the poplar leaves, all the past came back to him with a vividness and a poignancy that were part of the Spring. The four years dwindled away. He knew that he had loved Marie Cordonnier as he had loved no other woman, for to him she had been different from all other women. She had possessed that mystical something that had made her woman to his man, and perhaps that was why no other woman had been able to move him as she had done.
“You silly ass!”
Yes; probably it was just the glamour of a memory, the romance of those strange and terrible days when men had lived in fear of the unknown; but Sanger started up the engine of his car and set her towards the village in the valley. His curiosity had become intensified, and to it had been added some other feeling.
He might call himself a silly ass, and assume that in all probability Marie was married and had children. Three years ago when her letters had ceased to arrive, he had supposed that some Frenchman had come back from the war, and that she had married the reality and forgotten the shadow.
His car passed along the red wall of the château, and the apple blossom was piled high above it. The broad street of Nibas opened before him, just as he had remembered it, quiet and empty, one half of it in the sunlight, the other in shadow. He saw the little “Place” with its pollarded limes, and the mayor’s house, and the high gables of the inn, the Toison d’Or. Battalion Headquarters had had their mess at the Toison d’Or. Sanger turned his car into the “Place,” and pulled up in front of the inn. They might be able to put him up there.
The people at the Toison d’Or had changed. A tall and sallow woman in black met him in the passage. He raised his hat to her.
“Good day, madame, I wish to stay here. Is it possible?”
She looked surprised, and he was thinking that his French had grown rather rusty.
“For how long, monsieur?”
“Oh, a night, or perhaps two nights.”
She scrutinized him carefully.
“Monsieur will want meals?”
“Something quite simple, madame, like the war. You see, I was in Nibas during the war.”
Her sallow face remained stark and unfriendly. She was a chilling person; she did not warm to the war and its memories.
“I will show monsieur a room.”
“I have a car outside. Can I garage it?”
“There is a place in the stable.”
She turned and led the way upstairs.
But no sooner had Sanger found himself established in Nibas than a strange shyness took possession of him. In those war days Nibas had seemed so English, but now he realized it as a place that was wholly and acutely French. It was not the village he remembered. It would stare at him
as a stranger, and its eyes might be none too friendly. It might not want to be reminded of the English and the war.
He had unpacked his suitcase, and spread his belongings about that French bedroom, with its wooden bedstead and bare floor, and its wooden cupboard and solitary hard chair. He sat on that chair by the window. He felt awkward and self-conscious and English. He realized that he was almost afraid to appear in the village street.
But this mood was absurd. He combated it. He told himself that he was going up the road to look at Les Tuileries. He might see Marie, and he might not. And why this fear of Marie?
The Cordonniers might have left the place, and even if he found them in that high and narrow red house, surely he could behave like a man of the world, and smile and offer a hand.
“Well, do you remember me?”
And supposing they had forgotten him? Would it matter? He would be just a stray Englishman, a ghost passing through, and he could pay his bill, get into his car, and disappear.
He went out. By the butcher’s shop at the corner of the “Place” he turned to the left in the direction of the church. The towering beech trees were coming into leaf, and as he passed into their shade a sense of chilliness made itself felt. It was like walking up the nave of a cathedral, for the branches met high overhead.
Yes; Nibas made him feel strange; he could remember a moonlight night when he had walked up that avenue with Marie. He remembered the things that they had said to each other.
“Beloved, we march to-morrow.”
“Is it to the trenches?”
“Yes.”
She had shivered in the hollow of his arm, and he had kissed her pale hair.
“But I shall come back.”
Between the trunks of the trees he saw a new red building down by the stream. It looked like a factory, and he thought how raw and ugly it was, and then forgot it. The road began to ascend, and he emerged into the sunlight, and there before him on the side of the hill he saw the house and the tile-works of the Cordonniers.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 62