Frontier Passage

by Ann Bridge

  Ah, and he had never dreamed then, either, of how far his love would lead him, though he had hesitated, jibbed, and feared. He remembered, with a sort of wonder, his doubts then as to whether she did or ever would love him too, recalling her passionate tenderness of his last visit to St.-Jean. It had still been in the shadows, that time at Perpignan—and then the sun had come, breaking out and illuminating his whole life with an undreamed-of radiance and glory. And now that had got to go, too.

  He couldn’t give Juanito away, of course. He owed his present knowledge to the trust of a woman about to die, and to that same woman he had given his word to tell no one but Raquel. But the mere possession of that knowledge made him unutterably wretched during those days in Barcelona, days of tense forboding, feverish and despairing preparations, and fierce resolution.

  He learned on December the tenth from the Embassy that the Conde’s transfer had been arranged, and that he was to go to Burgos almost immediately, through Spain itself—so the smoothfaced young secretary at Caldetas assured him. How amusing they were—and yet how efficient—these young men, with their baby faces and their pontifical manners, James thought, thanking him. He went and left a little money for the Conde’s expenses with the cousin, and then sent Raquel a telegram—GOOD NEWS OF BOTH COMING ST.-JEAN ABOUT SIXTEENTH. He had decided to go at once, and get it over, and to hurry back before the offensive broke, if it could be done. Anyhow he must go, and give her his two pieces of news as soon as possible. But he had an interview with del Vayo fixed for the twelfth, so he could not leave till after that. He filled in the interval by working on one of those long dispatches, reasoned and yet somehow glowing with restrained passion, which the Epoch valued so highly from him—giving a picture of the mental tone in Barcelona on the eve of the offensive, and assessing, as well as he could, the chances of the Republicans. He would air-mail it from Perpignan. It was delaying to post dispatches from Spain. He had his interview, and on the thirteenth, heavy-hearted, he set out for St.-Jean-de-Luz.

  Chapter Nine

  This Side—St.-Jean-de-Luz

  During Milcom’s absence the Condesa and Rosemary had seen a great deal of one another. Adolescent girls in love are rarely jealous, and the instinctive sympathy and liking which had grown up between them was if anything nourished by the fact of their both loving the same man. It may be doubted whether Raquel de Verdura in fact realised that Rosemary was in love with Milcom, though she was certainly sensitive enough to have taken such a feeling seriously if she had realised it. But they liked being together, they liked talking about him—and did, a great deal; and Rosemary had a boundless appetite for hearing about the Condesa’s own life: her girlhood in Spain, her parents, her married life, Pilar’s childhood, her experiences in Madrid, and above all and woven through it all, Juanito, Juantio, Juanito. The girl prompted these confidences, partly out of a perfectly spontaneous interest in other people’s lives, which made her an ideally sympathetic listener, partly out of a self-protective instinct, half unconscious, to build a sort of ring-fence of other interests with which to defend herself against too many thoughts of Milcom.

  This self-protectiveness led her in other directions beside the Condesa—made her in fact snatch at any occupation which would rescue her, if only for a time, from her own pain; and one of the things at which she so snatched was the Count de Barrial and his boats.

  The Count de Barrial was one of those French residents at St.-Jean-de-Luz whose social circle overlapped with that of the permanent British colony, into which Mrs. Oldhead had penetrated; she met him and his pretty intelligent literary wife at a number of those little lunches, little cocktail parties—and she introduced him to Rosemary one day at the cinema. Talking afterwards, her Mother—with a slight envy of the child’s extraordinary ease and skill in personal contacts—heard Rosemary eliciting from him the fact that he was a passionate amateur yachtsman; that he had a thirty-ton cutter with an auxiliary engine in which he sailed to England, to Portugal, and to Morocco, as well as a speed-boat and a tiny sailing-boat. And the next thing was that Rosemary and the Count—for all that the official sailing season was over—were scooting about the bay in the speed-boat, and sailing down to Hendaye in the small sailing-boat. The de Barrials had a pretty old villa with thick walls and vaulted ceilings out at Socoa, quite near the yacht-club, and after an afternoon’s sailing the girl often went in for a meal, before being driven back to the Grande Bretagne in the Count’s Chevrolet. Those days at sea were the best alleviation for a sick heart that could have been devised; and between the Count’s boats and the Condesa’s past life, Rosemary did herself pretty well in the way of a ring-fence against grief.

  It was of course natural that she should have been almost the first person to whom the Condesa showed Milcom’s telegram.

  “See—he says ‘Good news of both’; that must mean that he has news of Juanito too. At last!” she said, her lovely face alight. “And he is coming to tell me. It might not be wise to telegraph it. I wonder if he got it from Pascual.”

  “What do you suppose the good news of the Conde is?” Rosemary asked.

  “That he is well, I hope—I expect it is that,” Raquel said. “Think—in five days I shall hear.”

  Rosemary rejoiced with her, sincerely—but what her own heart said was “in five days I shall see him.” The idea brought an absurd gladness that nothing could repress. Sitting in her bedroom, looking out past the small tiled cupola of the old Casino at the bright picture of the bay, she argued vigorously with herself. “You’re nuts to be so braced, you silly owl; you’ll only have to stick around and watch him worshipping her—naturally. And then you’ll be wretched. And serve you right.” But it was no good. As an addict craves for his drug, and the more after being deprived of it, so Rosemary craved for the mere sight of Milcom; just his presence, his face and hands and tall figure, the sound of his voice, fed her secret hunger. And this she would have—in five days.

  Milcom wired again from Toulouse giving the time of his train, and at nine in the evening the Condesa went down to the station to meet him. She had wound about her head a little black lace scarf, such as women in the Pays Basque, in this hatless age, carry in their handbag to put on when they go into Church; she stood on the windy platform, watching the polished lines of rails shining under the arc-lights, up towards Bayonne, down towards Irún. Then the train came roaring in; Milcom, from the coach door, saw her standing there, her copper-coloured hair gleaming through the black lace, and his heart seemed to turn over. Was it really possible that there was a place in the landscape of his future in which she would stand and bid him farewell?

  “Have you dined?” she asked him at once, when they had greeted one another.

  “No—and you?”

  “Not yet—I thought we might go somewhere quiet, and talk.”

  “Excellent idea,” James said. He gave his bag to a porter to be taken up to the hotel, and they walked across the windy Place under the cropped leafless plane-trees, towards the harbour. In a dark angle between houses he stopped and drew her to him. “Oh, my darling!” Holding her in his arms again, after so long, with hands and lips and breath declaring their oneness, he felt afresh a sick surge of revolt at the thought of what he had come to do, and must do.

  They dined at Gaston’s. It was too cold for sitting outside, but they had a corner table, and the place was nearly empty, so that they could talk in peace.

  “Yes, I have found out about him,” James said in a low voice, in answer to her question. “He is safe enough, so far. He is ‘working’—as a Republican officer, it seems, and sending his information back. He is being very valuable, I was told. So that is why you didn’t hear.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I wondered sometimes if it was that. And yet it seems odd that we should not have heard a word, Olivia and I. After all, others have worked, and one has known it.”

  His work was particularly important, James reminded her. He was not going to tell her of his private suspicions that the
precious Olivia had known, all along; nor of the probability that Juanito had actually been crossing the frontier—it would only disturb her. “I gathered that it will soon be over, this job,” he went on. “They told me he had one or two more particularly big things to do, and that then he would go back.”

  “How soon?” she asked.

  His heart warmed to her for never once referring to the danger of the task on which Juanito was engaged.

  “Two or three weeks,” he said.

  “That was when?”

  “On the second.”

  She counted. “Then in a week he should be out of it. Thank God! How did you manage to learn all this?” she asked. “Not from Pascual?”

  “No,” he said, “not from him. It was La Paquita who put me in the way of hearing it.”

  “Ah, the dear child! So you saw her. How delightful! How is she? Didn’t you find her charming?”

  “I thought she was the most gallant creature I have ever seen,” James answered gravely. “But, my darling, I see you haven’t heard.”

  “Heard what?” she said, very agitated. “Heard what, James? What have they done to her?”

  “They shot her,” he said. “On the twenty-ninth. I was just in time to see her.”

  “Please tell me,” she said, in a small voice.

  “I will. I was there,” James said—and he told her the story, and how the girl had sent her love to Raquel and bid him tell her that she was happy. “And she was,” he said. “She was absolutely calm. And so courteous and gay to me.” He went on to the end. When she heard about the carnations Raquel sat up very straight.

  “Valiente! That is just like her. I am glad.” She dabbed at her eyes with one of James’s handkerchiefs. “So then you went and saw this barber person in Barcelona?” she went on, turning away from a subject that she could see distressed him.

  Yes, James told her. He made rather a funny story of his conversation with Pablo, blowing his questions through clouds of lather at the suspicious grumpy old man—Raquel laughed.

  “I wish I had seen you—I wonder he did not cut your throat! And I wonder that he would tell you,” she said thoughtfully, “not knowing you.”

  La Paquita had given him a password, James said. (He was not going to mention the figure seventeen either—she must certainly have heard about that.) “And also she had told me under what name to ask for him. Oh by the way, yes—you ought to know that. It is Manuel Jereda.”

  She repeated the name, softly and carefully.

  “They do that,” she said. “Turn the names round, family name and baptismal name, using the same initials.” She sighed, lightly. “Ah, how I thank you for finding out all this. And for staying with that darling Francisca. Now tell me about Pascual. Does he know about her?”

  “Oh yes. He was there. They had them all out to watch,” said James rather bitterly.

  She looked at him thoughtfully. “Spaniards are a cruel people,” she said slowly—“that is a fact. I believe it is partly their courage that makes them so.”

  “I have sometimes thought that myself,” said James. But he wanted now, wretchedly, to tell her Pascual’s news and get that at least over. He used the beads as an introduction. He felt in his overcoat pocket and pulled out a small package, which he handed to her. “A present from Pascual,” he said.

  “From Pascual?” she looked at him in surprise. Then she undid the package, and took out the necklace of carved peach stones. James had duly had them strung on a silken cord with a proper snap. It was, by any standards, a pretty thing.

  “Pascual made this?” She looked astonished. “But it is lovely. How did he do it? He could not carve at all, that I know of.”

  “I told you before that he was doing it. They all sit for hours, chipping away with bits of glass.”

  “It is lovely,” she said again, and he saw the tears come into her eyes. “Poor Pascual,” she said. “He is well?” she asked then.

  Now for it! James thought. Aloud——

  “Yes,” he said. “And Raquel, he is going to be released almost at once.”

  There—it was out. His hands were cold, he found, and yet he was sweating.

  “Released?” she said. “But how?” She spoke incredulously, as if it were impossible, her eyes fixed on his face. The news made her cold too, he could see; after she had spoken she shivered, though it was warm in the stuffy low-lighted little restaurant.

  “Exchanged,” he answered her question. “It was all settled when I wired you from Barcelona. He will be back in Burgos any day now—he may be there already. He promised to send word as soon as he could.”

  She sat very still—she was always rather a still person, but this was a sort of concentrated immobility.

  “This, too, you did for him?” she asked at last.

  “Not much,” James answered. “I think it was pretty well settled already. I saw your cousin Rodrigo about it in Barcelona, and our Embassy, and just gave the thing a push—that was all.”

  Does she blame me for doing that? he thought—does she think I wouldn’t have done it if I had loved her enough? Oh, God, if she only knew how I love her! He watched her face; she was looking at him with an expression that he could not fathom, except that there was certainly love in it—and for some time was silent.

  “I am glad for him,” she said at last. James said nothing. “He goes back to Burgos, you say?” James said yes. She stirred her coffee, but did not drink it.

  “He will rejoin his regiment, I suppose,” she said. James agreed that Pascual had in fact hoped to do this. Then they were both silent again. By now they were the only people left in the small restaurant, and a waiter was hovering round them uneasily—some of the lights had already been put out.

  “Let’s go, shall we?” James said. He called for the bill, paid it, put her into her coat, and put on his own. They went out in silence.

  They walked across to the edge of the quay, where the blue and green sardine boats danced gently on the heaving water under the high arc-lights, as they had seen them dance the first time that they dined at Gaston’s, more than two months before. Both were thinking of that other night, but neither spoke of it. That had been the beginning—this, James at least knew, was near the end. Did that knowledge brush her, too, with its wing? Her face, under the high lights, didn’t tell him; it had that strange, almost alarming remoteness, partly Spanish, partly hers. Still without speaking, they turned and walked along past the House of the Infanta to the harbour entrance, and stood as they had stood on that other night, watching the waves surging high, one after another, down the narrow stone channel. It was a very dark night, and overcast—the white mushrooms out on the mole were invisible, but the noise of the waves on the breakwater under the Phare travelled across the bay to them, like muffled thunder. For a long time neither spoke. At last Raquel gave a little shiver.

  “Cold?” he asked, putting his arm round her. It was in fact very cold. He thought—does she realise, too? Is that why she is shivering?

  “No,” she answered—“not really.” Then—“This makes it all rather difficult for us, dear love,” she said.

  “Oh, my darling, don’t I know it!” he groaned. He realised as she spoke that she was going to put up a fight for her love, for her happiness, and that he would have to oppose not only his heart, but her.

  She put up her hand and took his. “I think,” she said, speaking in a very soft level voice, “that we have wasted a good deal of time. Do you not think that we should waste no more?”

  “Oh, my dearest”—He gripped her hand tightly, crushing the fingers together. “How can we?” he jerked out—the words were propelled out of him by some inner force, by that terrible Irish sense of right and righteousness out of which such countless fanatics and martyrs have been made.

  Her voice was soft and level as ever. “Very easily, we can. We have the right—our love gives us the right,” she said.

  Those softly-spoken words shook James to his foundations, Suddenly he s
aw them together, that night, that very night, in her room—and everything that he had learned to be and learned no longer to fear to be rose in him to grasp that vision, craved for it, clamoured for it. He put his other hand out, trembling, and touched her hair; he couldn’t see her face in the thick muffling darkness, but he was intensely aware of it, watching his silence. That silence was prolonged. What could he say? At last, out of a convulsion such as he had not known that a person could endure and yet live, he heard his own voice, wavering and small, temporising.