Frontier Passage

by Ann Bridge

“Si. You are right. Understanding is what one needs. One does not think, and so ones does not understand, or know; one is not careful enough. Women, now—one is accustomed to think that external things, and a little love, suffice for them. I see now that this is not so. External things are most unimportant. These poor simple creatures”—again he tapped the novel—“had great souls, a great love—in effect, a great life. One may truly say that of them. And yet they were altogether of the people.” He sighed again. “And at last I see also that those with great possessions, with a high position, may all the time be leading a small mean life, within.”

  “All that is most true, what you say,” said James; he felt that it was time for him to say something. The Conde’s self-revelation at once touched and disconcerted him.

  “Ah, I knew you would understand,” Pascual said. “I can speak to you as a friend. What a friend you have been to us! Both! And since you came before, I have wearied for your return. When the soul is full of some idea, one wishes to speak of it, to one at least—and I have now no one but you. See,” he said, settling himself squarely on his soapbox and looking earnestly at Milcom—“much is now clear to me that before I was blind to, about Raquel. You forgive me, amigo, that I speak to you of our own concerns? But indeed we have never had such a friend as you.”

  “De nada,” said James. “Please do not speak of the little I have done. It was a happiness.”

  But nothing would stop the Conde.

  “That is your good heart. Before, I had no such idea of the English—I though them haughty and cold, and lacking in heart. Now I know better. But concerning Raquel—if I get out from here, I shall try to make things otherwise for her. It will not be as in the past. I understand so much more, both what she is and, being what she is, what she needs.” He looked ahead of him, past Milcom, as if gazing at Raquel standing in the future as in a landscape. “She is not too old to have another child, or even several,” he said with great naturalness. “I shall make all otherwise for her,” he repeated. “At least, I shall try,” he added humbly.

  “I am so glad,” he said presently, “that I have spent these two years here, and been given this opportunity to learn something of the truth about life. This book, too—and those.” He waved at his fellow prisoners. “Outside, in my life as I lived it, I should never have come to know such as they, and learned what they have to teach. I have been fortunate.”

  James listened to all this with mounting feelings of distress, of horror, that were yet most strangely mixed with compassion and even an unwilling admiration for the man before him. So he wanted Raquel to go back to him and be his? Everything in James cried out in protest at the bare idea. And yet—oh God!—he had been right about the Conde the first time, and Raquel wrong. If there had never been that most sacred thing, a change of heart, in the world before, there was one now, and there it was, sitting in front of him, on a soapbox in a prison.

  But besides telling James his hopes for the future the Conde had, it appeared, a request to make. He did it with great humility—“You who have done so much for us should not be asked to do more.” Of course James told him to ask away, little guessing what was coming.

  There was, it seemed, a chance that the Conde might be got out, and that quite soon—exchanged for a well-known Republican prisoner. And for this he wished to invoke James’s good offices. A word to the British Embassy at Barcelona might help—they were concerned in the exchanges; so was the Madrid Embassy, now at St.-Jean-de-Luz. There were one or two Spaniards in Barcelona who would certainly be of use—he gave their names and addresses; one was that of Raque’s Red cousin, who had assisted in their escape and whom she had shuddered to meet.

  James was appalled by this request. His first sensation was one of wild revolt, of an absolute refusal to contemplate doing this thing, to which, if he did contemplate it, decency would ultimately compel him. He actually got up from his stool and took a step down the room, his very body seeking escape in movement from the pressure of this intolerable situation; then he realised that this would attract the attention of the other prisoners, and disconcert Pascual, and he sat down again. It was no good. Of course he would have to do it. But that his must be the hand to undo the door and let the fellow out was one of those turns of events which he privately called “needless.” He had listened to the Conde’s humble outpouring of his hopes and happy resolutions with an almost passionate wish that they could remain unspoken, or at least that it need not be he who heard; but he had been profoundly moved by them all the same. And now, as he sat on the soapbox scribbling down names and addresses, the Conde watching him with trustful happy eyes, the other prisoners chipping and whittling away at their bits of teak at the far end of the room, he had one of those moments of desperate lucidity which come to us, unsought and undesired. He too saw the future as a landscape, through which he must walk, with the figure of Raquel in it, bidding him farewell; he even had a momentary irrelevant wonder as to where and how they would say good-bye. During that brief flash of illumination the end was as clear as that, whatever desperate turns and twists his mind and heart might make, vague and dim as the intervening passages might be. It was one of the bitterest moments of Milcom’s life.

  The first step, however, was to finish the interview with decency. He could not hurry away. They sat and talked for some time, discussing when the offensive would begin, and where. James gave news of the outside world, such as there was. The Conde, again stooping to his soapbox, fished out a finished necklace of the carved peach stones threaded on a piece of thin string, for James to take to Raquel; it was an extraordinarily delicate and beautiful piece of work to have come from those big hands.

  “It should be on a silken cord,” the Conde said wistfully—“and a snap I could not make. I thought that perhaps you could get that done in Barcelona.” James promised to do so. Then the Conde pulled out of his breast pocket his magnum opus—a belt buckle, made of four rings of teak, each one interlocking with the next. It was not quite finished.

  “That, if God is good, and with your help, I shall give to her myself,” he said, with such an enraptured face of simple happiness that it was more than James could stand. He spoke of his hunger—which existed—and took his departure. This time the Conde embraced him at parting; James left the prison asking himself, with a sour smile, which of them was really the Judas.

  He set out for Barcelona next day with a profound distaste for both the errands which he had undertaken there. To have to go and bother the Embassy was the least of his worries, though it meant getting all the way out to Caldetas, and was almost certainly a work of supererogation—if the Embassy thought that any useful purpose would be served by getting the Conde released, they would be trying to get him released anyhow. James had the healthy respect of most better-class and experienced journalists for H.M. Diplomatic Service abroad:—quiet sensible helpful people, he thought them, and uncommonly well-informed as a rule. He knew something of the back-breaking work that these particular members of that service had been putting in over the exchanges of prisoners. It was a most thankless task, which in each case could only be carried through with any hope of success if someone sufficiently influential at Salamanca were sufficiently interested in some White prisoner on the Republican side to be willing to persuade the authorities to “trade” him for some Red prisoner on the Franco side, in whom someone sufficiently influential at Barcelona was sufficiently interested to be helpful. There then inevitably ensued a long wrangle over the respective value of the two prisoners, in which the Franquistas were undoubtedly the harder bargainers. Both sides were tiresome, the Republicans offering to trade unimportant Dukes or Marquises for “key” Red leaders, while the austere Nationalists would frequently not stoop to consider the wishes of their own families, and in any case seemed to care little whether any prisoners were released or not. Unless they had some religious significance—Milcom, like most journalists in Spain, had heard of the famous Franco attempt to exchange a quite valuable Republican pris
oner for the famous statue of Nuestra Señora de Covadonga, “Esta muy sagrada y muy venerada Imagen” which had been carried off into captivity by the Republican troops. No, apart from his own private feelings, which were wretched and conflicting enough, what James disliked in this business was all this getting himself mixed up with Whites and the relations of Whites. With the offensive pending, everyone in Barcelona would be as nervous as a sackful of witches, and touchy and suspicious in proportion—and it was the last moment when he wished to do anything to queer his own pitch.

  He reached Barcelona on the second of December, and got in touch with Raque’s cousin at once. The cousin was not particularly pro-Conde, but he was most anxious to hear about La Paquita, and when he found that James had actually been present at the execution, and had heard his story, he was so much impressed that he undertook to do all he could, as much for James’s sake as anything, the latter gathered. This produced a grimace from James—there you were! Just what he didn’t want. From the cousin he made his way out to Caldetas. The Embassy, he found, was already on the job—that is to say the Conde’s name was high up on a list of exchangees submitted by the British Agency at Burgos. James contributed Raquel’s Scottish grandmother, which the smooth-faced courteous young man whom he saw promptly noted in red on the list; he would put it up to the Minister, he said. These people were personally known to James? Friends of his? Ah yes. That went down too—James guessed at the note: “Personal friends of the Epoch correspondent.”

  “But of course—you got her out, didn’t you?” said the smoothfaced young man, smiting his well-brushed brow. “Stupid of me! This bombing makes one so stupid, don’t you find?”

  James did find that the bombing made him both tired and stupid. Barcelona was getting a pretty good plastering early in December of’38, though mostly by daylight; the nights were pretty quiet, thank goodness. But all this popping into shelters and running for doorways, and the noise and dust and general strain, were both fatiguing and stupefying.

  His own misery would have been sufficient to exhaust him anyhow. It increased from hour to hour. A flash of illumination, a foreseeing of the future, was one thing,—but walking through that future, step by step, was quite another, he found. The struggle between his love and his sense of right never ceased for an instant; even as he sat in the Embassy at Caldetas, talking to the smoothfaced young man, his heart was asking wildly how he could ever give Raquel up, even if the Conde were freed ten times over? He might be a changed man now, but in the past he had ill-used her cruelly, neglected and humiliated her; he had had his chance and he had thrown it away—why should he be given a second one now at his, James’s, expense? And at hers? Was this man’s newly-found goodness to be as much the enemy of Raquel’s happiness as his scoundrelism had been in the past? That would be the supreme irony.

  But his conscience would not let him accept any other solution. Back and back he came to the impossibility of knocking a man’s soul on the head at the very moment that it had come to birth. He, James, had no rights except what his love gave him—and Pascual, if he was any judge of a man’s heart, now had that right too. Night and day the conflict went on, his own inner stress and struggle mingling with the urgent stress around him. Barcelona was in a state of strain and tension; more and older men were being called up, women were more and more in evidence doing the work of men. God, how tough they all were!

  He went on the second day to Pablo the barber, in the Calle de las Floras, a small dirty street on the fringe of the harbour district. He went early in the morning, partly to avoid notice, partly because the bombing generally began later in the day; the shutters had only just been opened—there was no glass left in the windows—and a small boy in shirt-sleeves was sweeping out the shop. James asked for the dueño, and sat down with a cigarette to wait for him. The shop was fairly large, with five or six shabby leather chairs facing a row of fly-blown mirrors—at least it had been a row, but three had vanished altogether, and of those that remained, one was in two halves and one was splintered. After a leisurely interval the barber appeared, in his shirt-sleeves, carrying a copper can of hot water—a small thick-set fellow with grizzled curly hair and a magnificent moustache, like that of a Victorian dandy, who responded rather glumly to James’s greeting, and set about shaving him. James asked if he was the Señor Pablo, and received an affirmative nod. Early as it was, there was no one in the shop besides themselves and the small boy, who shuffled about in broken shoes much too big for him, rather inefficiently dusting and polishing; but James waited till his face was well enveloped in white lather and then, as the man bent over him with the razor, asked—“Where is Manuel Jereda?”

  The man either did not hear or pretended not to; he began to run the razor down James’s cheek. James put up his hand on the other side, wiped his lips free of foam, and said again—“I want news of Manuel Jereda.”

  “Never heard the name,” the barber muttered grumpily, and went on shaving James. It was a ridiculous situation; to talk through the lather was next to impossible—for a moment he wondered if Francisca had been pulling his leg. No—not then. He tried again; putting up his hand warningly, he muttered—“Nevertheless, La Paquita told me that you could tell me of him.”

  The barber laid aside the razor, took up another, felt the blade with his thumb, and muttered, as he bent over James’s whitened face again—“What do you know of La Paquita?”

  “I saw her die, four days ago,” James said. “She sent me to you half an hour before she died.”

  The barber turned and shouted to the small boy—“Diego! Go and fetch the newspaper!” Then he turned back to James again and went on shaving him. When the child had left the shop he said very low—“Why should I believe you? Who are you?”

  “I am English,” James muttered back. “And I shall ask you the same question till I get an answer, if it is seventeen times.”

  “So,” Pablo said thoughtfully. “So.” He glanced round—the shop was still empty; with a dingy cloth he wiped James’s face, and asked—“What is it you want to know?”

  “Where he is; what he is doing; whether he is well?”

  “And why do you, an Inglés, want to know these things, already knowing so much? You are a partizan?”

  “His sister, who is in France, desires to know these things,” James said, evading the question.

  In the splintered mirror in front of him he saw the barber’s face take on a faintly astonished expression.

  “His sister? She should know more than I, that one.”

  “On the contrary, she knows nothing. For months she hears no word. Therefore La Paquita sent me to you.”

  The barber shrugged his broad shoulders.

  “Well, as you know, he is ‘working’,” he said; “he is an officer with los rojos. He gets information, and he gets it out.” A grin, a mere movement of his beard, gave Pablo’s face a sudden frighteningly cynical and wicked expression. “He gets special leave for that, because they think he is working for them. And indeed he is always given something to tell them—small, and not important, but always true. He has to work fast, and he has done well. But it gets more and more difficult to do it fast enough,” he said, with a sort of thoughtful discontent.

  “Why?”

  “Ah, those pigs of French!” He used an excessively bad word. “Tighter and tighter they draw the net. One passage after another stopped. But he is a quick worker.”

  “And he is well? She will wish to know that—she is anxious.”

  “Blood of martyrs, a sick man could not do what he does! But you can tell her this—there is one more big job to be done, perhaps two; and after that, if all goes well, it will be over, and he will return to his own place.”

  “How soon?”

  “Depending on how all goes, within two weeks* or three.”

  Diego, the boy, came shuffling back, bringing the newspaper. Pablo handed it to James, who opened it and made a pretence of reading while Pablo wiped his razors. “See,” Milcom said
presently, pointing to the page; and as the barber leant over his shoulder—“I thank you,” he said. “I go soon to France, and I will give Manuel’s sister this news—and to no other.”

  He put down the paper, got up, and paid. Diego the boy was sent out to fetch change. While he was gone:—

  “That is right,” Pablo said. “But that she should not know this—that is the mystery! I thought she was seeing him regularly. After all, she is working herself.”

  “She is in France,” James said.

  “Verdad—I know she is.”

  A sick spasm of suspicion ran over Milcom like cold water down the spine. Gould it be that Raquel, for some reason, had been fooling him all this time? Then, for the first time since he entered the shop, he remembered that Juanito had two sisters. But Diego at that moment returning with his change, he gave no explanation, but said “Adiós” and went.

  He continued to think hard about what he had learned, all that day, with a sort of sickness at his heart. So Raquel’s brother was definitely a White spy, and Raquel’s sister another! A nice kettle of fish for him, Milcom, to be mixed up in. And if the Duquesa was in the Biarritz racket, as Pablo’s last words implied, could it really be that Raquel knew nothing of it? He went carefully over all Pablo’s words. “I thought she was seeing him regularly … I know she is in France … He gets information and he gets it out—he gets special leave to do that.” This could easily mean that Juanito himself was crossing the frontier—indeed it could hardly mean anything else. But if that were so, could the Duquesa really be so brutal as to keep all knowledge of it from her sister? Yes, he finally decided, easily—she was a tough-minded woman, and a fanatical White; and spies must have no feelings, and no loyalties but one.

  James had not been at St.-Jean-de-Luz when Hever’s sabotage story first broke and gossip about Number 17 was so particularly rife, and on this last visit he had been too taken up with Raquel to have much time to spare for his fellow journalists; but he had, as in duty bound, compared notes with Crumpaun and Crossman—he had heard Number 17 mentioned, and some talk of sabotage in connection with him. And of course he had heard of the various acts of sabotage at the time, in Barcelona itself, where they naturally caused enormous indignation and concern. Latterly they seemed to have slackened somewhat. But his own position was a horrible one. With the White offensive pending, it was vital to the cause he cared for that there should be no more leakages and no more sabotage—and a word from him could have one of the main causes of leakage removed forthwith. Yes, and have Juanito, the being Raquel loved most in the world, stood up against a wall and shot, as he had seen Francisca de Verdura shot a couple of days ago—that would be nice, too. God, what a mess it was! Suddenly angry, almost breaking under the dual strain of these two internal conflicts, he thought how right he had been in Perpignan, two months before when he told himself what a silly business it was for him, James Milcom, to have fallen in love with a White. It was a silly business. His job, his life was with politics, mankind, the world—not with love and spies and Spanish grandees’ souls and what-have-you! He ought to have left her then, cut the thing off and finished with it. He was in love with her then, already—but not as now—not as now! And he had never imagined at the time that it could lead to anything like this, that that gentle helpless creature, his fellow ghost from the city of ghosts would end by involving him in a situation where he must betray the cause he believed in and held just, out of a complex of loyalties, and for her sake. For his silence, his complicity in Juanito’s activities amounted in his own eyes to active betrayal.