I'll Never Be Young Again

by Daphne Du Maurier

  It was only then that I remembered Jake. I clung with one hand to the davit, I searched for his face amongst the pale idiot faces of the men pressed against me.

  And ‘Jake,’ I called, and ‘Jake’ I called again.

  He did not answer me, he was not there. I struggled to loose myself from the tossing arms that dragged me down; I did not want to be in the boat any more, I wanted to find Jake - he was not there, I had to find him.

  ‘Jake,’ I called, ‘Jake . . . Jake . . .’ and now I could not get away, and now the boat was swinging down from the davits into the sea, and I was fighting, cursing, tearing at the eyes of the men who clung to me - possessed by horror, stricken and insane.

  ‘Jake . . . Jake . . .’ I saw him for a moment, I saw his head flung back and his smile. I heard his voice call to me, a message of beauty never lost and never forgotten - ‘You’ll be all right, Dick,’ and one swift vision of his splendour, unbroken and immortal.

  Then we were gone from him, and there was no more after that but the sudden churn of water under us, the shock of the sea in my lungs, and my heart, and I tossed like a dead thing in the shattering roar of the white breakers, sinking down, down into the blackness of eternity, swept beyond him to some shore where he would never follow me, outcast and alone. And I was clinging with numb fingers to a ledge of rock, rising out of the water, and then I was swept past this, my hands above my head, in the suction of a breaking sea, and cast like a stone, into the face of stones, bleeding, broken, the surge of sand beneath my body. And stretching out my hands and he was not there. And calling to him, and he was not there.

  And ‘Jake . . . Jake . . . Jake . . .’ like a soul lost in the wilderness, with nothing but the mist and the rain, and the sound of the breakers on the shore. And later, when the mist had lifted, I saw there were high cliffs about me, encompassing a wide bay.

  The tide was gone out to meet the wreckage we had brought for her, while stark and naked on the black rocks the Romanie held her broken face to the sky.

  I sat there alone, and I saw the waves shatter themselves upon her, and I watched the rain fall into the sea, and I watched the grey dawn breaking.

  PART TWO:

  HESTA

  1

  At first it was like living in a dream, an existence made up of shadows, where places and persons held no substance. Nor did it matter much where I went nor how I lived. Night followed the day, and there was the sun in the sky, or it would rain, or it would blow; there were barren stretches of land where no tree stood, there were stone villages, and little churches beaten by the wind.

  There was a peasant woman washing her linen in a pool, there was a dog stretched lazily on the doorstep of a cottage flicking his tail at the flies. These things went on inevitable and undisturbed, but I did not see how I should have part in them again. It was as though the hum and the emotion of life continued around me, close, breathing and touching me not, so that I stood aloof in my own channel of existence, holding no communication with the great stream that would have passed me by. I did not matter, I was of no importance. Once I had stood upon a bridge with the certainty of death before me, and at that moment the call of living and the glamour of adventure had seemed stronger to me than they had ever been. I had looked down from a gateway and seen that the earth was good. Something within me had struggled for release, and cried for fulfilment. The air blowing upon my face, the stray dust beneath my feet, the murmur in passing of men and women, so dear, so familiar, the very sweat of their bodies and the smell of their clothes, these had drawn out to me in one last definite appeal. The tumult of living, the glory and the pain. The precious intimacy of little things. I wanted so much and so much. But that had all happened a long while ago, those old longings and those desires. I had lived them and they had not lasted. I looked about me now to see some trace of their departure, but they had vanished.

  I did not care for them any more, not the sun, not the sea, nor the sky, nor the touch of earth, nor the warmth of humanity, nor anything at all.

  I had my life before me and I did not want it.

  I was a dumb stupid thing, a mass of senseless clay having no meaning, weary and lost. I was someone with no limbs and no flesh, not possessing the consolation of a mind nor the fortitude of a sorrowful heart. I was without courage. Hope was a word belonging to another language which I did not try to understand. There was nothing but two eyes that framed a picture, haunting, mournful, a picture where every detail was clear and minute, drawn with a thin dark brush, escaping no shadow, no reflection of light. My picture was one of a grey morning after the mist had gone, and a wild, desolate stretch of beach frowned upon by cliffs of granite.

  The tide was gone out and the sea broke upon the Romanie, she lying on a ledge of rock, weird and ghastly, lifted from the water. Her sides were smashed, her davits fallen, twisted and caught in a mesh of stay and cable. Pools were beginning to form on the sloping deck, and the sea ran in and out of the hold with an odd sucking gurgle. A bar had slipped from somewhere down to the main hatch, torn open and disclosed, and this bar kept banging against the iron sides of the ship, sounding with a strange hollow clamour. A ladder hung over the bows, broken and aslant; it must have been cast there in the panic and then left. Outside the galley the white cloth of the cook still hung upon its nail, fluttering in the morning breeze, oddly alive. Inside the galley the saucepans and the mugs would be undisturbed. The figures of the women in white chalk, they would still be there, grotesque and absurd, mocking the silence. On the surface of the water the wreckage floated placidly, drifting with the tide, torn timbers and iron plates, part of the propeller, a loose arm of a davit.

  There were barrels, too, and broken bottles, cases of tinned meat, a cracked basin, a sack of peanuts - they rolled sluggishly backwards and forwards on the crest of a wave.

  The smashed boat lay like a gaping shell tossed high and dry upon the higher beach.

  Between two rocks there was a little pool of water, warm in the morning sun. A broken dish lay here and a cake of soap, while farther away was the brightly coloured magazine that once had lain upon the fo’c’sle floor.

  Now that the wind had gone and the mist, the sea sounded hushed and still. Away to the left the high jagged cliffs ran sudden and sheer, grey boulders of rock, massive and impregnable. They stretched to a sharp definable point, like the edge of a razor, and before this the sea twisted and broke, as though crashing upon unseen things. A lighthouse stood upon a rock, and another lighthouse beyond. The sea at this point would never be still, would never be silenced, but would break for ever in a turmoil of hate and exultation, leaping, shouting, wave meeting wave in a sterile embrace, horrible and cold.

  To the right swept a wide clear bay, and here the water was no longer bewildered, but ran in white breakers upon a stretch of yellow sand. It seemed as though this bay should be a refuge from the wild seas that crashed beyond the point, and there should be peace here and rest.The Romanie leant towards it on her ledge of rock as though she cried for the touch of sand. But there was no peace and no rest, for the bay was a wilderness and a desolation, where nothing lived and nothing cried.

  And the sea left other relics strewn on the wet sand with the wreckage. Gently the tide relinquished them, regretfully, with a whisper and a sigh and the water streamed from them as tears stream at the sorrow of parting. They lay on the beach separated from one another, dark and motionless, with the sun warm on their pale faces and their soft glistening hair.They lay like sleepers weary from the day’s toil, and now were happy and consoled, their heads pillowed in their hands.

  This was my picture, and I wanted to become part of it too, to sleep there with the others on the shore, but they would not let me. I had to go away and live my life. I had no business to remain there lost in a dream. I had to break my mind away from it, I had to cover it, sadly, reverently, hide it in the shadowed untouched places of my memory.

  I would never forget. I would never permit my picture to become dusty and
worn. After all that had been and all that was to come, I should still see it, the rugged cliffs, the little lighthouse standing beyond the razor edge of the Pointe du Raz, the broken Romanie desolate, alone, and lastly, beautiful and forlorn, the sleeping figures in the Baie des Trépassés.

  There were so many things to do. They kept me from thinking, after that first dumb stupor. To begin with, each fresh incident was a moment of horror and torture; there were people who clothed me and gave me food, there were questions to answer, and excited shouting faces coming upon me, one after the other, people touching me, stroking me, and I with my bad French not understanding what they said to me, being dragged away, sitting in some corner of a room - and a car rattling along a dusty road, a village, and more people and more questions. I suppose now that they meant to be kind. I suppose now that they were sorry for me. But I did not want pity, I only asked to be left alone, and this they would not do.

  First they took me to a village called Plogoff. There was a pastor here. He could do nothing for me. I was not ill, I did not want to be helped. There was a peasant, too; he was kind, gentle, an old man, and he let me sleep in his cottage. He tried to keep the officials and the questioners away from me; he ordered the curious, straying people to go, who pointed at me and stared.

  I was still dazed and uncomprehending; I heard the snatches of their conversation, their expressions of pity and dismay.

  ‘Ils sont tous mort,’ was one line that hammered itself into my head - ‘Ils sont tous mort,’ and they brought back to me in a flash, vivid and strong, the picture of my sleeping figures in the Baie des Trépassés. That was the name, they told me, the Baie des Trépassés, and the lighthouse and the headland was the Pointe du Raz. So Jake had been right after all. Jake . . . I had not got to think about that, though; I had not got to give way to the knowledge that he was gone. He had said to me: ‘You’ll be all right.’ And I would not disturb him with my sorrow wherever he should be, his arms outstretched above his head on the wet sand, his eyes closed, no smile on his face.

  I would only think of Jake as he had been - long ago on the mountains above Laardel, astride his horse, standing against the background of the setting sun. I would think of him walking by my side, laughing, whistling, kicking a stone as he went.

  I would think of him with a tree behind him, and the wood fire casting a reflection on his face, and his grave eyes turned upon me, a cigarette between his lips.

  All of that belonged to me; the sea could not take it from me.

  Now there was the continuation of my own life. There were dull, necessary formalities to be gone through, these endless questions which must be answered for the satisfaction of people I did not know. I stayed two nights in Plogoff with the Breton fisherman, and then I had to go to Nantes and give an account of the wreck and how it had happened. All this fell upon me because I was the sole survivor. It did not bear thinking about too closely. I do not know why I alone should have been chosen out of ten men to carry on this business of living. It was supreme irony on the part of someone. I, swept to safety, broken, bleeding, but alive, carried by the sea to the bay after the boat had swamped, and the others - they came later, one by one, their arms above their heads . . . There was no need to go into all that.

  So I went to Nantes, where there were questions to answer, and after this there was no more I could do to help them; but, to my surprise, I was given some money and some clothes as a small compensation. This was kind of them, I thought; I do not think that they were obliged to do it. I was free now of the entanglement of the whole concern, the Romanie would have no further claim on me.

  I went to see the British Vice-Consul in Nantes. Here there were further questions to answer, further documents to sign. The worry of these little matters kept me from thinking. They gave me something to do. I was confused and inefficient in a strange country without Jake. He had managed things in Scandinavia; when we had landed there it had been as sailors before the mast. There had not been the necessity of passports and officialism. Now I had to go into this. I was an alien, I had not any means of support. The Consul advised me to return to England. From my point of view, this was out of the question. What would I do in England? I could not go home. I could not settle down anywhere. I should always be a wanderer, I knew that. Only now it would have to be alone.

  On the road to Otta Jake had told me to take a pull on myself. I had never quite known what he meant. Anyway, there had been the flick of a coin, and my choice, and Stockholm, and then the Romanie. This was all because of me. And he was dead. Much he cared what happened to me now. I should never see him or talk to him again. There was no other thing to do but to go on with life somehow, taking what came and accepting it, not minding very much.

  I had to get away from Brittany. The sea was no good to me, nor the wild rocks, nor the fields and the dusty roads.The huddled cottages, the grave burnt peasant faces, the chapels with their worn stones, their quiet simplicity, the villages sleepy in the midday sun: they were too silent and too pure for me.

  At first I had wanted it, this peace and quietude, so as to be able to shut myself up with a blind stupor of grief, but now I felt that thinking was a bad thing. I thought perhaps that if there was noise around me and the movement of many people it would be better. I should not be so much alone if I were doing things all the time. I had to keep myself in some way, too. That was part of the stupidity of living. I had to eat and drink and have a roof over my head. It hurt me that I should have to do these things, that after eating or sleeping I should feel changed and easier in mind and body. I despised myself for being able to eat, for being able to lose consciousness in sleep. It was wrong to look up at the sky in the morning and be pleased to see the sun. It was wrong to buy a packet of cigarettes, to sit on a wall yawning after food, to smile in spite of myself because the sun was warm.

  It looked as though I were not caring about Jake.

  I was really very lucky. Things might have been so much more desperate. I ought to be grateful for small mercies. Both the British Consul and the agent from the Romanie’s company had been helpful and provided me with everything I needed; I had sufficient money therefore to last me for a little while if I was careful in the spending of it.

  That was good enough for me. I would live from day to day. I had one idea in my mind, and that was to get to Paris. I said good-bye at the Consulate, thanking them for all their kindness; people whose faces I did not know came up and shook me warmly by the hand, a little reporter from a local newspaper even took a snap of me - me, ‘the ship-wrecked mariner’, and I was put on the centre page alongside a picture of the Romanie, with half a column devoted to my personal sufferings. Yes, they were all very kind to me. Then I went to the station and bought a third-class ticket to Paris, and so away from Nantes and the taint of the Romanie, and what was gone from me, and into the start of a new life and new interests, forgetting the hell that had been.

  The train was packed with sailors going home on leave, and we were all crammed together in the hard wooden carriage like animals herded in a truck. They were nearly all of them young, and in tremendous spirits, laughing and singing, hanging out of the window when we came to stations, calling out to girls, whistling, chaffing one another.

  It was good to see them. I did not join in with them though; I had a paper which I pretended to read. I watched the country flash past, scattered villages and woods, hills and fields, till my eyes grew fixed on the pane of glass and it all seemed alike and I was not taking anything in, and then I grew tired of it and propped my head against my fist at the side of the carriage, trying to sleep, and the chatter and laughter of the sailors coming and going in a wave of sound.

  We arrived in Paris about eight o’clock in the evening.

  The name of the station was the Gare Montparnasse. I got out of the train and was swept down to the entrance with the rest of the crowd; there seemed to be a riot of noise and confusion, and everyone in a hurry, and a strange excitement and clatter, and I stood ou
tside on the wide boulevard where there were trams and taxis rattling over the cobbled stones, and there were cafés everywhere, and people, and lights just beginning, and a good food smell, warm air, and dust, a gay screech of taxi hooters, somebody laughing, a flash of scent, and men and women being happy with one another, and it was Paris.

  I found a room in the Rue Vaugirard.There was a street leading off the Boulevard Montparnasse. The room was stuffy and not very clean. It was cheap, though. It looked down on to the street below, and opposite was a wall with hoardings and posters. If I craned out of the window I could see the end of the street, and the red and white striped blind of the tabac at the corner where it led on to the boulevard. I looked round the room, at the cracked jug and basin, the red lamp-shade, the fat bed with a dent in the middle, and I tried to feel as though it were mine and I knew about it.

  Then I went out and had something to eat at a small restaurant in the Boulevard Montparnasse, where there was a large menu written in mauve pencil that I could not be bothered to read, and remains of other people’s bread on the table-cloth, but the food was good for all that - I had a tournedos, red and juicy, and some Gruyère cheese - and then some brandy, so as not to mind about things, and I leant back smoking Camel cigarettes, thankful for a tired body and a mind drugged by drinking too much, and I watched a fat Jew fumble about with a girl’s breasts at the next table, she with silly goggle eyes and a greasy skin hot under make-up. I remember being glad that I did not have to go to bed with her, and then I got up and walked rather unsteadily out of the restaurant, blinking at the lights and the passing people as though they belonged to another world, and so back to my stuffy room, dead weary and a little sick, neither thinking nor caring very much.