Frontier Passage

by Ann Bridge

  When he got back to the hotel and went to his room to change James found an envelope with a scrawled note from Crumpaun on the outside: “Sorry—this was enclosed in one for me.” He opened it. Inside was a letter from Raquel. Still in his wet clothes, James sat heavily down on the one chair with the letter in his hand; his heart was pounding. Why was she writing to him? They had agreed not to write. It wasn’t like her to break an agreement. The thing was over—why open it all up again? Then an idea struck him—had something happened to the Conde? The Navarrese Division had been in heavy fighting. He tore open the letter.

  But it was not about the Conde.

  “I beg you to forgive me that I write to you,” Raquel wrote from Santander—“but I am in great distress about Juanito. He has not come back, as you said he would; he has not been heard of at Burgos, and Pascual writes that he has not rejoined the regiment. I greatly fear that by some accident he was prevented from returning before all this began, and that he is still where he was, you understand. Or that something has happened to him. And as you will be in a better position than we to find out, since you will certainly be on the spot, I beg you to make every enquiry and try to find him for me. I send this by the good Crumpaun, as I have the opportunity to send it by a safe hand, and he will see that you get it, I know. Oh my dear friend, do find him and let me hear. But for this, I should not have written. I pray that you are well and safe. I am quite well. Raquel.

  “P.S. Here is a photograph of him. It is not very good, but it is the only one I have.”

  James read this through twice, and then groaned. Oh Lord, this would have to happen, he thought. During all these weeks of separation and misery he had stayed himself on the thought of her being with Juanito again, and of their joy at recovering one another, brief as it must probably have been; he had held at bay the insistent and intruding pictures of her reunion with the Conde, which his mind thrust ceaselessly before him, with willed pictures of her and Juanito together, laughing, talking, teasing and understanding, as she had so often described their intercourse to him. And now all that was gone—his defence against his own tormented curiosity, her defence against an intolerable situation and her own loss.

  And what the devil had happened to Juanito? Had he been discovered and shot, as La Paquita was shot? Probably not—if he had been, the chances were that he, James, would have heard some mention of it. No, Raquel’s guess was much the most likely thing: that something had delayed his return so long that the offensive had caught him still on the Red side. If that had happened, he would almost certainly have found it impossible to get back. The passage across country from Red into White Spain had been difficult and dangerous enough across a fluid and shifting internal frontier; across a roaring battle-line it would be hopeless. So what? James lit a cigarette and thought. So he would just have to stay with the Red armies and stick it out, trusting to luck to get into France and then somehow manage his return. Or he might be wounded—he might be one of those miliciens they had seen that morning, limping along the street at Le Boulou towards the improvised internment camp beyond the station, or one of the men the pseudo-Quakers had been tending up at Le Perthus. And with that name a horror that made him sweat broke over James—he, Raquel’s Juanito, might have been one of the thousands that stood packed in that roaring mob up behind the wire rope there. God, why hadn’t that lazy old ass Crumpaun opened his mail that morning? Then he could at least have set enquiries on foot, asked. Anyhow, it was a hopeless job; the Prefect had said that there were a hundred thousand of them, and they were pouring in all along the frontier, according to the Lieutenant of the Gardes Mobiles. Of course if Juanito were on the staff, as his job rather suggested, he might come out later—if they came out, the Brass Hats—but even so he might be hard to find; and he would more probably try to separate himself from them, lose himself, if necessary, before crossing the frontier. Yes, he would be sure, if he could, to try to cross the frontier alone, and work his way back either to Biarritz, through France, or else to recross the frontier into White Spain further along. If he could—but could he? He might not succeed, in which case he might be among any of the miliciens in this region.

  It all came back to that—a hopeless hunt; but he would have to do his best. It was at least something to do for her again, after these terrible, detached weeks. That would be an infinite comfort. He took up the letter and read it over slowly, three or four times, studying each word, trying to extract every shade of meaning from the simple phrases, that futile task to which lovers, inevitably, find themselves compelled. “I am well”—how little that told him! Well in body, yes, and even that was something; but what of her mind and her heart; Nothing—except that she prayed for his health and his safety, loving him then still. And turned to him in her need, still sure of him, of his instant help. Her apology, twice made, touched him deeply; the tears sprang into his eyes as he read it the third time. “Oh, my darling, as if I minded your writing! As if I minded being asked,” he said aloud. Presently he took the photograph out of the envelope and studied it. Raquel was right; it was not much good—for identification purposes it was almost useless. It was an old snap, rather faded, of a girl and a young man on horseback—the horses, superb creatures, came out magnificently, of course, but the two human beings were just two graceful figures with good seats and grins. James would hardly have recognised Raquel, with her hair done in that funny way—he supposed that she was about eighteen when it was taken, her face had so much less form and character; as for the young man, even with a magnifying glass there was little to make out but the youthfulness and the grin. No, that gave nothing to go on—but there was Raquel’s description of him. James went over that in his mind, carefully. Like her—well, that was something; with the same grey eyes, but dark hair. Not an unknown combination in Spain by any means, but with Raquel’s nose it was still something. And Juanito had her very individual walk, she had said. Alone in his nasty little room, James laughed out loud, a harsh grim sort of laugh, at the thought of going round camps and fortresses and warehouses, saying to interned miliciens—“Please get up and walk a few steps.” What a hope!

  He didn’t attempt to answer Raquel’s letter that night; he was tired and chilled, and churned up emotionally by the spectacle of mass flight and human misery in bulk that he had been witnessing. If he were to start writing, he thought as he changed, words would flow; too fast, and the wrong things, tenderness or bitterness—forbidden tenderness for Raquel, useless bitterness about man’s inhumanity to man, and Spaniard’s inhumanity to Spaniard. He must take his time and write a proper letter, that wouldn’t upset her. Though how he, James, could write a proper letter to her, God knew! “Don’t make me laugh,” grumbled James to the fly-spotted walls of his noisy unventilated room, and went down to dinner.

  Next day they went to look at Cerbère, the frontier post on the coast road beyond Port Vendres and Banyuls. Crumpaun had caught a bad cold from his wetting of the previous day, but insisted on coming too. It was still pouring with rain. They splashed at speed across the flat plain through Elne, and then slowed down to negotiate the dangerous twists and bends of the section beyond, where the narrow highway crawls across the steep face of the seaward end of the Pyrenees. They passed through Port Vendres, which presented just the same aspect as forty-eight hours before; the oranges still rotting in crates on the quay, the sodden refugees still sitting in the rain on pavements, eating them—only the destroyer had gone. James insisted on going round to the warehouse on the wharf to make enquiries about Juanito; no, they had no miliciens there, they said, only civils—the miliciens were being dealt with at Cerbère. They went on again. For James the brick of excitement, of wondering what was coming next, of being a participator in unwonted and stirring events which even newspaper men feel was now weightened to a painful tension by his quest.

  Beyond Banyuls they had a curious encounter. As the car wound round the slope of a ravine to cross the narrow stone bridge at its head they saw, stumbling down a ston
y path between the vineyards and dripping shrubs on the opposite slope, five men in grey uniforms.

  “Hullo, there are some of them,” Hever said.

  “Let’s stop and talk to them,” said Crumpaun. James needed no urging—he wanted to scan the face of every Spaniard he saw, now. The car accordingly slowed down on the far side of the bridge; seeing this, the miliciens began to wave and shout, and increased their stumbling pace to an unsteady run. Milcom stuck his head out of the car window and called to them in Spanish not to hurry—“We wait for you.”

  When they reached the car, they crowded round the windows, asking questions, “Was this France?” was the first.

  Yes, Milcom told them, they were in France, and safe.

  “We shall not be sent back?”

  “No—interned here.”

  The white, drawn, unshaven faces relaxed into an expression of glorious relief.

  “Where are we?” the one who seemed to be the leader asked.

  “Between Banyuls and Cerbère.”

  “And how far?”

  “Banyuls is four kilometres, Cerbère about two.”

  They nodded at the mention of the distances.

  “Where have you come from?” Milcom asked in his turn. He had been studying their faces during this interchange. No—every one of them had brown eyes.

  “From Figueras—but possibly we took the wrong way; we have been walking for thirty-seven hours.”

  “Food?”

  “No food, no.”

  James asked them if they had heard anything of the Teniente Manuel Jereda?—but they had not. Crumpaun and Hever, whose Spanish was limited, were beginning to ask impatiently what this conversation was all about. James turned to them.

  “They’ve been walking for thirty-seven hours without food, and as the crow flies they’ve come about sixty kilometres—over the mountains. God knows how far they’ve actually walked.” While Crumpaun muttered “Good God!” he turned to the Spaniards again.

  “I recommend you to go to Cerbère,” he said—“in this direction—as we are going. There you will be fed, and put into a train and sent somewhere in France.” They moved him to an immense pity—they looked so white and frail; and their relief at being out of the hell of retreat and pursuit was so evident and so profound. As he spoke, they thanked him, all shaking his hand. One of the men felt inside his soaked and tattered tunic and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, which he proffered to Milcom. “For you,” he said. “You have given us good news.”

  Milcom tried to refuse the gift—he knew what cigarettes meant to the Republican soldiers; foodless, their one support and comfort.

  “Keep them,” he said; “I thank you, but we have plenty”—and he signalled to the chauffeur to drive on. As the car started—“Hombre!” the Spaniard cried in a great voice, and tossed the packet in through the window of the car. Milcom stooped, as they drove away, his throat contracting, and picked it up off the floor. It was a cheap make of near-Virginia cigarette—on the packet was the picture of a ship in full sail, and the name “Homeward Bound.” He put it in his pocket.

  They drove on into Cerbère, through the steep narrow streets, and pulled up at a railway station. Here the usual immense confusion reigned. The first thing that caught their eyes was two ambulances, into which Spanish wounded were being loaded out of lorries by French hospital orderlies and nurses, under the supervision of a French Lieutenant. Hever spoke to this officer. He was almost blind with fury. “Do you know where we got these?”—he indicated the ambulances. “They are, as you see, Spanish. That unutterable—” he used an unprintable French word, and named a well-known member of the Republican Cabinet—“was bringing them out, filled with his own effects! Up there on the pass.”

  “Was he really?” Hever asked—this was a story.

  “But assuredly. I threw them out, his effects, and told him we had other uses for ambulances, we.”

  They went into the station. One corner of the entrance hall was occupied by a pile of loaves of bread, at least seven feet high, which a corporal and a railway porter were cutting in halves and doling cut to the swarming refugees, who were being packed into trains and shipped off, much more efficiently than at Le Boulou the day before. Milcom sought out an official, showed his pass, gave his name and address, and caused the name of Lieutenant Manuel Jereda to be written down, with a request for information if he should turn up. It was all he could do. In return he listened to an account of the problems which reigned at Cerbère. Chief among these was “the sacred tunnel,” as the official bitterly called it, which carries the railway through under the pass from France into Spain. This tunel was now, it appeared, blocked with miliciens who, to escape bombing by the Savoias at Port Bou, at the Spanish end, had swarmed into it, thus stopping all rail traffic through, and forcing the refugees to go over the pass. “They say there are ten thousand of them in there,” he said; “but it is being déblayé—the Senegalese have gone in to push them out at the other end.”

  “Why not bring them out at this end?” Milcom asked.

  “Ah, but they may not enter—not the miliciens. All who cross the frontier are to be sent back,” the official said.

  Milcom was horror-struck, remembering those five cold frail figures on the road to Banyuls, to whom he had just given the assurance of food and safety in France.

  “But how?” he said. “Only last night the Préfet at Perpignan told me that now they are to be let in.”

  “Ah, but that was yesterday,” said the official with a shrug—“this morning we had fresh orders. Now they are all to go back. The government sends us fifty thousand troops to hold the frontier against them. We have enough to do with ces autres”—he indicated the teeming refugees. “To feed them is going to cost milliards.”

  Heartsick at this fresh change of policy, Milcom collected his two companions, and they drove on up to the pass. The road climbed over high open slopes, grassy like downs; an icy wind drove the rain savagely across the bleak country, and whipped up the leaden sea below—it was bitterly cold even in the car. All down the loops of road came a straggling procession of refugees, with quilts and blankets over their heads and shoulders, laden with the dismal burdens of cooking-pots, bundles, and bits of luggage, which were becoming so familiar; slithering along in the mud, beaten by the driving rain. Some distance below the pass a Garde Mobile stopped the car, and they got out and squelched up on foot towards the frontier; walking in the deep clayey mud, lashed by wind and rain, was difficult and tiring even for a few paces—Milcom thought of the exhaustion of those who were even now passing him, who had been doing it for hours. Here and there open suitcases lay on the ground, their contents trodden into the mud—cheap flimsy cardboard things, they had disintegrated in the rain and come to bits, after being dragged God knew how far, and the cherished possessions, chosen in haste before a desperate flight—imagine that choice!—were lost after all. James turned the contents of several over with his stick—clothes, children’s shoes, a little frock, some shirts; the very poverty of the things added to the pathos of their final abandoning.

  There was a small wooden hut beside the wire rope which here, as at Le Perthus, marked the frontier, in which French officials were examining papers; there was a small crowd of journalists, sightseers, and Spaniards waiting to cross, but nothing to compare with the roaring mob at Le Perthus the day before. There were hardly any miliciens—they had mostly taken to the hills, an officer said, or chosen the tunnel route, whence they were even now being pushed out by the black troops. James made the usual enquiries of the frontier officials, and left Manuel Jereda’s name and his own address. Then they passed the rope and walked down the road on the further side till they reached a projecting point which commanded a view down the valley for several miles. The road stretched away into Spain like a long shiny serpent, glistening with the wet roofs of the automobiles which stood jammed nose to tail as far as the eye could reach. Most of the owners were sitting inside the cars, but a few were walkin
g restlessly up to the pass to enquire about their chances of proceeding; one such man, who spoke to Milcom, said that they had been there for forty-eight hours. Past the cars, in a thin but never-ending stream, plodded the carless refugees, on foot.

  Several other people hailed Milcom out of the windows of their motors, asking him how soon they would be allowed to go on; nearly all of them tried to sell him a typewriter for francs. One or two women even offered him jewels. They all wanted, at any sacrifice, a few French francs—enough to buy a cup of coffee and a piece of bread, at least, after fasting in the rain for two days. If they ever got on to Port Vendres, he reflected grimly, they would be able to eat oranges. On his way back to the rope, soaked through, he came on Hever and Crumpaun in conversation with a smartly-dressed chauffeur—Hever called him over to translate. The chauffeur was trying to sell them a new seven-seater Packard car; the price he asked was two thousand francs—about £25, or one hundred dollars. James actually had papers which would have enabled him to bring the car in—his own was left in Spain. But he wanted something smaller in any case, and the idea of profiting by distress on this scale was repugnant to him. He gave the chauffeur a hundred francs for himself, and turned down the offer.

  They got back in good time that afternoon, and after he had changed his wet clothes James went out to the café over the river, ordered a brandy with his coffee, and sat down to compose his letter to Raquel. He began as she had done, with no opening—because there wasn’t any opening that he dared now set down that could meet the needs of either his heart or hers.