Читать книгу Richard Temple - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 8

Yet quite suddenly and with no clear warning his life went bad: in those days he could not see why it was so nor tell exactly how it began, yet now as he looked backwards the division was as sharp as that between light and dark.

The first, the most obvious but by far the least important cause was that by mere seniority he was moved up into the headmaster’s form. Old Mott had the usual schoolmaster’s perversion and he was an ugly man with a cane; Richard was a fine juicy boy, which was provocation enough, but his ignorance of Latin was also a real, almost legitimate, offence to Mott, who, with a dirty gleam in his eye, began to call him out almost every day. There had always been a great deal of beating at Easton school, but up to that time Richard had escaped: he would have gone on escaping, however much he excited Mott, if the man, who was very close to the shopkeeping gossip of the town, had not heard things that made him sure that Richard would have no protectors to resent this treatment, and that in any case he would not be staying long.

When it became clear that Richard was to be this year’s scapegoat, there was a movement away from him, as from one who attracted ill-luck. One or two of his friends continued to sympathise with him, and to the very end Ham would whisper him the word; but few of the boys were really on his side, and as Mott beat to an audience, being sensitive in his own way to public opinion, this meant that he was beaten more often and more viciously. Before this time he had been neither particularly liked nor disliked in the school, but now he became unpopular. He was aware that he was cut off from the support of the class: it is a wretched thing to learn that the unfortunate are often disliked, but this was almost the only thing that he did learn in this school, apart from the fact that he had much more fortitude of a passive kind than he had known, and that the limits of endurance were a great deal farther off than seemed likely.

The dark stagnant air of the cell vibrated with a tremor so deep that it lay somewhere between feeling and sound, a huge explosion far away. Three times it was repeated, with intervals of great solemnity; and while Richard Temple was still poised up on the echo of the third there was a burst of fire much closer to – not quite so close as the usual firing-squad perhaps, but he put it down to that until it grew ragged, no longer volleys but an almost continuous firing that went on for several minutes. Nothing but percussive noises ever came down here from the outside and when the firing stopped it stopped without any explanatory shouting or the stamp of troops: the rare intrusions from the other world were generally inexplicable and as they were always irrelevant to Temple’s own battle in principle he did not try to account for them – he had little more curiosity left than he had humour, and what curiosity he had he dared not indulge: a dispersion of energy. But today the case was altered: he wondered, surmised, brought up ingenious explanations; but if he had hit upon the truth he would have run mad with mingled joy and even greater apprehension.

The Allied armies were deep in France: the French forces of the interior had risen and they were attacking from within, disrupting the Germans’ communications and harassing their retreat. In this region their initial attack had been very successful and the Germans were in a state of confusion: in some places they were withdrawing without a shot, abandoning everything; in others they were systematically destroying their fortifications, stores and records and killing their prisoners before pulling out; in others they retreated with lorry-loads of paper and as many hostages as they could lay their hands on; and in others again the different commands acted without any attempt at co-ordination, some following one policy and some another. The situation was worst wherever there were large numbers of those armed French collaborators called Miliciens; they were vicious, stupid people in any case, and now they were quite desperate, out of hand, panic-stricken, and dangerous. Here in Villefranche, a strategically unimportant town, the garrison was largely made up of these creatures, together with a half-company of Vlassov’s Russians and a few Mongols; they were in a state of frantic disorder; for a small local group of maquisards, over-excited by the blowing-up of the ammunition-dump at Combray, had begun a totally unexpected attack. Even the Germans were infected by this feeling of being trapped: only half an hour earlier they had been at peace, at a sort of back-line peace; the war had been a hundred and seventy kilometres away and even if the worst should happen the road to the north was perfectly secure: now everything was turned upside down. There was no order any more.

Richard did not divine this, however; his final answer was army exercises, and some time after the noise had died away he returned. That is to say, he sank back to the edge of the place where he had been interrupted; but he stayed for a long time on this edge alone, without advancing. For although in this course of identification, or re-identification, he was dealing only with the truth, not with apology nor scarcely with comment even, and although he was no longer moved by old shame and humiliation (the last things to die in recollection) being so far removed, yet still there was this unbearably painful area. With him remembrance was largely a matter of images which followed one another with a logic of their own (not unlike dreams) and although many of them were vague enough, filled out with words and exposition, some were extraordinarily brilliant – the sudden sight, from a darkened place, of a person, or a head, or a whole series of incidents that would go on, outside his control and in a wonderfully vivid light, so that every colour and detail was there unblurred; and in the case of his mother he could not permit this undisciplined recall. The most he could do, even now, with all his removal and all his adult experience and nearer comprehension, was to state the facts, in an impersonal, almost statistical manner, with no dwelling upon them and above all no seeing the things he talked about – no true recall, indeed.

It had been an unsavoury nine days’ wonder in Easton Colborough and it had caused a great deal of talk; but it was not really very rare or extraordinary and if Mrs Temple had not been a clergyman’s widow she would have been quietly shut up with very little of the noise that in fact occurred. Briefly, when she reached her critical years she took to drunkenness, and from drunkenness to promiscuity: her mind, her nature, even her heart became estranged.

Everything had been against poor Mrs Temple; everything, her frustrated married years and her restless widowhood; and she had retired from life too young. The cottage that her brother-in-law had found for her was dark, poky and damp, and it did not have a single one of the amenities of civilised life – but Canon Harler had not been concerned with her convenience: only with getting her firmly anchored at such a distance from his own home that she could not be a burden nor her poverty a reproach to him. (On the same reasoning he had refused to let her touch the capital of her little trustfund to send Richard to a better school: besides, he had never approved of her marriage and would lend its results no countenance.) It is ludicrous to cite earth-closets, well-water and paraffin-lamps; but they were not without their effect, particularly as Mrs Temple was a pretty woman. She felt that this incessant, ineffectual charring (for however she worked the place could never be anything but a rural slum) was adding, as indeed it was, to the irreparable insults of time; and this caused one resentment more.

And she was unfortunate in her neighbours. She and Richard now lived on the other side of Easton Colborough, nearly twenty miles from Plimpton, and in a sparsely inhabited region. The big house belonged to a man who only came down for the shooting, with expensive parties of City friends; and the distant parsonage contained a hard-faced celibate who trailed incense and the smell of candles and required her to call him Father. Otherwise, there was only the one very large farm, run by a sharp, efficient businessman, and the labourers’ cottages, in the immediate vicinity. The hearse-like Daimler from Plimpton Hall came winding through the narrow lanes from time to time, and a few women came to see her from Easton Colborough, but on the whole she was very lonely and when Richard began to spend all his free time at the studio she felt that she was giving away her last beautiful years for nothing. She suffered much from his preoccupation with Mr Atherton, and in her moments of depression Richard seemed to her a selfish boy, taking with both hands and giving nothing.

He had of course no conception of the extent or even the nature of her sacrifices: but equally she had no idea of the degree to which she was the centre of his universe. You do not praise the daily sun nor say thank you for your daily bread, unless they seem precarious. She did not know how he regarded her as a fixed principle (although in fact she was changing almost as much as himself, even before the disaster occurred), nor that almost his whole way of life was an attempt to come over so firmly, so recognisably on to her side that she could never throw him off as she had thrown off his father.

Laura Temple was a woman who really needed a husband, a proper husband; and when the people of Easton Colborough had said she would marry again it was their way of saying that she was an eminently feminine woman, that in no bad sense she was particularly fitted for marriage (being incomplete alone), and that she was likely to attract a husband. The most censorious mind could not at that time have accused her of the least impropriety, but a naturally warm temperament is clearly different from a flaccid indifference, and they said, ‘Mrs Temple will marry again.’

Later it was, ‘It would be nice if she were to marry again and settle down,’ or even, ‘Somebody ought to find a husband for Mrs Temple.’ Then there was a silence about her, the significant silence of the high-principled, which was soon broken, however, by whisperings, at first indignant and incredulous, then stern and angry and more and more medical in their nature.

She was terribly open to her body’s betrayal: she suffered very much from headaches and turmoil of spirits whose nature she could not determine, and once casting about for some relief from her migraine and depression she tried a glass of cooking-sherry. It was not very good to taste, but it worked. She had no head for alcohol, and she never acquired much of a tolerance, so that even on her income she was able to become an alcoholic – rows and rows of South African sherry (it was two shillings a bottle then) hidden in cupboards, behind bushes, clanking on the outhouse shelves. Her progress was unbelievably rapid, and the dissolution of her personality was a matter of weeks, not of years. Sometimes it was replaced by an extraordinary ‘modern’ substitute, hard, brassy and confident; sometimes it was replaced by nothing but a fog with no one behind it, an impersonal body of suffering; and sometimes, though rarely, she would reappear, herself whole and gentle, and it was inexpressibly painful.

The disease ran fast; yet although he did not see or know the half of it, this period seemed to Richard a boundless everlasting state, in which anxious misery became the normal condition – grey apprehension at the best, in the intervals between crises. It went on and on, from the time when he first found her incapable, her words a slurred mixture of incoherent dignity, lachrymose precepts and weird jollity, until the last day when they took her off in a terrible drugged-sober state, quite withdrawn, yellow-faced, huddled in an old black dress with her peroxide hair straggling its dead colour over the dusty lightless cloth.

The course was rapid indeed; but not so break-neck that each gradation did not prepare him for the next. In some ways the very beginning was the most difficult time, for then he could not tell how remote from normality this was – was his feeling that everything was hideously astray quite justified? The bald policeman, shining on the cottage step without his helmet and standing there to tell him that ‘she was taken poorly at the bus stop’ said it with an appearance of normality. Everybody was still polite: the world continued, apparently unmoved.

But there is external and internal normality, and here too it was the beginning that was the most difficult: his inner world cracked irreparably when first he heard her singing a dirty song. It was more destructive than many of the later stages; more wounding, for example, than the lewd accusation about Mr Atherton, which came to him prepared. Besides, they were shouted out by an enemy, a queer rakish manifestation of another self that seemed to possess her, invade her, from time to time, an intruder from another, later generation and another, unknown, class: the same which caused her to dye her hair. This being was openly hostile: shrieked ‘Prig’ at him and smashed things: but it lacked authority and even its most evilly calculated words – dirty little Welshman or Liverpool guttersnipe – caused no more than a dull wound; and some of the time it was afraid of him.

Later he realised that he had not seen or understood many aspects: the odd bookie or bookie’s clerk, the vague men hanging about the shadows, they never meant anything. He was protected by his own ignorance (forty-five was old age for him) and by people’s kindness – a kindness which had at one time puzzled him. Very early he had noticed that the occasional invitations to proper Easton Colborough houses had stopped, invitations that had always been very irksome to him, by the way; but in the town he still sometimes met the people, and they would speak to him with a particular earnestness, trying to inject an unusual degree of sympathy or benevolence into words that of course remained utterly commonplace.

It was a very difficult case for interference – no family doctor, no near relatives who could be spoken to and no one with the authority to write to them. Mrs Temple had no close friends in the town, and those of her acquaintances who might have come forward in any other circumstances could not in these. There were eccentrics by the dozen in Easton Colborough and certifiable lunatics like Miss Hodson, who sometimes ran about in her nightgown with her long hair trailing down her back, and they were all very kindly treated – perfectly acceptable. But the good women would not tolerate the least unchastity: a hint of riggishness with labourers wiped Mrs Temple’s name out of the list of human beings. The nightmare ran on, therefore, a longer time than would be thought credible: yet it had its end – ignominious and violent, but still an end, as far as anything can have an end.

By the kindness of his friends, Richard was sent almost directly away to France, to live as a resident pupil in the house of a Monsieur Durand, a respectable and conscientious person long known to Mr Atherton. He was the only pupil; no one in the house spoke a word of English, and the change could hardly have been more complete. His window looked out not on to the lush green of Grimmond’s meadow, but on to a stark plain of vines: the light that surrounded him, the air he breathed, the food, drink, language, smells, manners – all these were entirely different. And yet it is possible that even without this immense assistance he would have recovered fairly soon: one of the most striking sights upon a sheep-farm is the castration of the ram-lambs; they undergo their mutilation with a few little inward groans and stand as it were amazed for one or two minutes; then they start to graze again. And although they do not play that day, nor the next, after some time they do, almost as if the thing had never been done to them. In any case, after the mingled shock of travel and exhaustion was over, Richard found himself as much at home in this new house as ever he was likely to be, familiar with its hours, the arrangement of his room and the distance from this place to that, and he was not without taking pleasure from it.

During his life there, other pupils appeared from time to time – once there were as many as four together – but they usually stayed only a few months, to cram for a Beaux Arts examination; and the regular inhabitants were Monsieur and Madame Durand, Fifine the maid, and himself. It was difficult to believe that the desiccated, fussy, pedantic Monsieur Durand could ever have been a boon-companion of Mr Atherton’s youth, an habitué of the Lapin Agile and a friend of some of the best, most hopelessly disreputable painters in Paris before the ’14 war; and looking at his competent, frigid, official pictures it was difficult to believe that he had ever seen any painting since Puvis de Chavannes – difficult, that is, for one who had no experience of the chilling force of virtue. Monsieur Durand was nine parts dead from self-imposed rectitude and conscience; but he was a capable teacher of official art, and in his dry, pompous manner he was not unkind. (He looked like a piano-tuner.) Madame was less amiable, a big, strong, moustachioed woman with too great a love for economy; she was an ardent church-goer, and there were several others who looked just like her in the local charitable society. The sight of a congregation of them made one wonder how the Church had lasted so long. Both Monsieur and Madame Durand avoided any close contact with the pupils: they cultivated the high degree of formality usual in bourgeois circles in the France of that time, and Richard remained Monsieur Temple to the end.

The other permanent face in the household was that of Fifine, the maid. It was a pale, bald, waxy face with a nose, a Gothic face, a universal peasant face, shrewd and ignorant. She was employed for all duties, and Madame Durand’s all meant everything; fortunately, Fifine had been brought up in a mountain village of the dry Corbières, a little to the south, where they work fourteen hours a day to keep alive, and she was constitutionally very strong. She was not only willing but also able to clean the house, wash and iron all the laundry, prepare the food and then take a heavy two-pronged mattock and labour the kitchen-garden before dealing with the poultry and cutting the wood for the next day’s fires. She was of some age between thirty and fifty, and she spoke the harsh patois of her region more easily than French. She was a deeply pious woman: her earthy and often superficially irreverent religion informed her whole life: it was an immensely practical religion, and yet it was lit with a fine unselfconscious mysticism. She answered the question that her mistress raised, for a church of Fifines was likely to outlast time.

It was a pity that she was no better a cook, however: though indeed a high degree of talent would have been wasted on the penitential fare that passed through the Durand kitchen – haricots, stockfish, blood-pudding and chick peas, for the most part. She did not take to Richard for some time: it needed weeks and even months for her kindness to overcome her suspicion of anything new, above all foreign as well as new; but after that she became his frequent companion, and she was certainly the best friend he made in France, the most interesting and agreeable person in that house.

The house itself was built of glazed purple bricks, and it had a high-pitched slate roof; it stood in a vineyard about a mile outside the town, a striking contrast to the usual houses of the neighbourhood, with their white walls, low pink-tiled roofs and small grilled windows. Madame Durand always referred to it as ‘my house’, just as she spoke of ‘my garden’ and ‘my vineyard’. The vineyard was a broad flat expanse of some twelve acres, although it looked larger because there were no hedges to prevent it seeming to merge with the precisely similar vineyards beyond it and to either side: it was planted with seventy-five thousand vines in hundreds and hundreds of perfectly regular rows, an industrial exploitation of the unwilling earth for the manufacture of the lowest grade of common wine. The vineyard came right up to the house on three sides – the house swam naked in the field – and it was let on the usual share-cropping basis. Cheating was a major occupation both on the Durands’ and the tenant’s side; but the tenant, although he had less courage and less tenacity than Madame Durand, always came out on top; for every year, just at the crucial season of the vintage, the family was obliged to go up to Paris for three months. Monsieur Durand sat on two official juries and several ministerial committees; he also conducted a course of appreciation and the history of art at the Institute, and he renewed his contacts with the official world, the galleries and the auction rooms; it was a necessary and a profitable voyage, but the leer on the tenant’s face was a flood of gall in Madame’s heart, and the certainty that she was being rolled embittered her existence. On the fourth side of the house there was a kitchen-garden, maintained by Fifine; and this garden, too, came right up to the very wall of the house, taking away nothing of its naked irrelevance. It was a harsh house and it stood jaggedly in a harsh and arid landscape, unrelated to it and indifferent.

The landscape was an indefinite repetition of the vineyard – field after flat field of vines going on and on to the vague horizon, or on the south to the remote line of the Corbières, the division between the Languedoc and the Roussillon – and he remembered it under two aspects only, summer and winter. In summer it was a sea of coarse, dusty, sulphured and sulphated leaves drooping under the weight of the heat while an infinity of cicadas filled the quivering air with an omnipresent metallic din that seemed to emanate from the sun or the brilliant sky: and its winter aspect was that of a naked plain with rows upon rows of twisted amputated black stumps that bowed under the shrieking assault of the wind from the north – dust whirling under a pale and cloudless sky. It was an uncompromising landscape and an uncompromising house – both equally devoid of comfort. Yet Richard was not unhappy there. He either did not notice or did not mind the absence of country (in the English sense), books, comfort, bathroom, decent food or intelligent companionship: in many ways his values were essentially those of a painter and curiously enough of a modern painter – he was already indifferent to the picturesque, and where a young man of a predominantly literary cast might have deplored a howling desert, he saw order and a world of light. And indifferent though the house was, to be sure, it was here that he had his cardinal experience.

He had been there a year and more – they had been up to Paris twice – and all this time he had worked according to Monsieur Durand’s rigid and exacting plan: it must have been the winter of his second year when he decided to paint a picture as a first-communion present for Fifine’s nephew Sebastien – a martyrdom of the saint. He had always heard a great deal about this nephew, who was chez les Frères, and he had been told every stage in the poor child’s long drawn out agony with the multiplication table, but his primary object was to give pleasure to Fifine and therefore his intention was to paint a perfectly direct saint undergoing a really painful martyrdom, with the arrows sticking into him right up to their feathers, and those feathers wet with scarlet blood. But for some time before this his mind had also been haunted by a curious formal pattern, and he determined to include it in the picture.

The Durand’s house stood within the range of the last of the municipality’s lights, a swan-necked, cast-iron brute that stood in charming incongruity among the vines and shone a beam through Richard’s window in the night. The shadow that it projected on the ceiling was the pattern in question, and it was a very subtle pattern, being composed not only of the crosses of the casement and two fortuitous diagonals made by hanging cables, but doubled and trebled by reflections whose origin he could not determine, and multiplied, at certain times, by the moon: these crosses and planes lay upon one another in different intensities of grey, and not only did they present a singular and to him fascinating technical exercise, but they seemed to him ominously important – he had an obscure feeling that it was necessary for him to acknowledge them. The notion of luck, possibly of religion, entered into this, and there was some indefinite association between the pattern and his love of the kind darkness – that darkness which his most private fantasies represented as containing a hundred unknown nameless colours of marvellous intensity.

When he came to it he found it much more difficult than he had supposed. He was using a thin wooden panel, and in the bottom right-hand corner he had already painted three crossbow men, very close to the observer and crowded together, pointing their bows at the saint, who was tied to a low cross on the left of the picture and who had already received a great many arrows, or bolts: he was a little farther away than is usual in such a case – at the back of the foreground rather than in the middle of it. The light came from the bottom left-hand corner, the strong cold light of a declining January day in the south, and it lit the intent, crowded bowmen side-face, and their gleaming horizontal metal bows. The saint stared back at them with a harsh fortitude and in the pale space between, parched by winter, the ground was spotted with crimson flowers that showed the arrows’ path: the bowmen, their pointing, the flowers and the cross formed a right to left diagonal in the lower half of the picture, and he intended to fill the top right-hand part with his pattern, which in its main axis would form the other diagonal, pinning and suspending the martyr at the crossing of the two lines. The picture was lit from the bottom left-hand, and the pattern (which was essentially one of crosses) would start with the shadow of the saint’s gibbet stretching up towards the right-hand top; from this shadow others would arise, multiply, and superimposed fill the receding air.

He had already painted the crossbow men, a villainous set of brutes, all with faces that Fifine would recognise (he was clever with likenesses), and he had already done the saint, a painstaking anatomical study: so far the picture was a competent piece of work that he had worked over with great industry in his spare time during the past few weeks – it was a little dull, even rather laborious, and it showed the uncertainty of his literal taste, for whereas the bowmen derived ultimately from Bosch, the saint had a faint air of Géricault, and they existed in different kinds of reality, in different states of mind. But now he was to attack the upper part of the picture: this pattern, which preoccupied his mind, was to provide the force of counterpoise and contrast that would draw the cross into the centre of the picture and make it rise and glow – give it a far greater significance and perhaps harmonise the incongruity that he sensed but could not see.

He had the whole of the day – it was a Thursday – and he hoped to finish this piece and with it the whole picture before the evening. Yet it was far more difficult than he had supposed: he had made a few sketches, but he had not really related them to the whole picture; and now, having painted the hard shadow of the upright, he paused. He had meant to work directly from his palette on to the picture but suddenly he felt a waning of his confidence – doubted his own dexterity. This whole series of planes was to be based on straight lines and an impure edge at any point would be disastrous. He hooked his brush into the fingers of his left hand, and taking a piece of charcoal he drew in the uprights. It was easy enough, he thought, standing back to look at them – it was easy enough to get them perfectly exact, one behind the other, when it was only strokes of charcoal that he could blow off in a moment: and indeed they did look very well. He was excited by the prospect and yet he was afraid of it; he wanted to be at it, and yet he was unwilling to begin. He felt a strong temptation to fiddle about and he yielded to it for half an hour, until a recklessness that came from a mixture of guilt and shame drove him to mix his colour and to sweep it on with a stroke that had the good luck to fall between arrogance and caution. It needed a sure and disciplined hand: apart from the rigid precision of the drawing he was obliged to make a continuous gradation from umber to a high blue grey and from a moderately rich texture of paint to the flatness of a gouache, each stage imperceptible. He became quite absorbed in the technical problem: he rattled his easel down to breast level, upright, and worked with his nose almost touching the paint. Every few minutes he lunged backwards and stared, a disembodied pair of eyes, a hand.

Unknown excitement began to rise in him, and on the wooden panel a complex series of planes came into a dream-like existence. From these planes rose others, ruled by a logic that was clear to him; and suddenly with a strong dark line, a receding parabola that he would presently touch with vermilion, he gave them a unity that they had never possessed in his idea before. It was a vital line, one that had never physically existed in the pattern, although his mind must have postulated it, and it did wonders; but he was not content, and standing back with narrowed eyes and screwed-up lips he saw why. His pattern was supposed to repeat the first cross, and certainly crosses were there, receding into infinity: but they were the reflection, the repetition, of something that did not appear in the first place – the first cross itself was wrong. The beautifully painted martyr and his cross were in the wrong place. In a moment he abolished the patient craftsmanship, and in another moment the martyrdom was re-enacting in another focus, in another shape.

As far as he was conscious of himself he felt a tightness in his stomach, a trembling; and as he bent over his palette mixing he heard the sound of his own breath in his throat. He could not work fast enough and he had a furious need to go faster, although in fact his hand was working with a greater speed and happiness and ability than it ever had done before. He was not thinking: he directed his hand and the paint by an urgent spiritual pressure, and he not only prolonged his being beyond his hand to the brush but actually into the paint itself as it curled – he was himself the surface, the junction of the resilient brush and the unyielding wood: there were no ordinary limits to his being. The light increased to the impartial glare of noon: very slowly in the afternoon it declined; and in the evening it began to go in little pulsing beats lower every ten minutes, every five.

At the bottom right-hand corner where the crossbow men had been he drew the last firm curve and stepped away. As he fumbled with his brushes and the paint-rag, blindly cleaning them, he began to smile: the tension was dying, and it was being replaced by a remarkable happiness. He was quite limp, and this happiness was of the passive kind: it kept flooding in, quite filling him. This was the picture that he had meant to paint, and whether it was good or bad it was the most complete thing he had ever done. It was probably very good, he thought; but that was a little beside the point: it was the wholeness that was the base of his satisfaction.

It was not an experience that often repeated itself: indeed, throughout the year that followed he had scarcely more than one or two hints of it, but they were enough to tinge all the great long stretches of grey routine (life at the Durands’ was lived en grisaille) with lapis lazuli and gold; and it remained the most significant thing that happened to him in France, even including his acquaintance with the power of love.

It was strange how late he came to this: Madame Durand’s ascetic diet may have helped, but it had not prevented his beard from growing, and it had never kept any other pupil from romance, far less from fornication.

One of the few favourable conditions of Fifine’s servitude, if not the only one, was that she was let out for the saint’s day of her native village: the fête included a pilgrimage, a feast of snails and a visit to the sea, and in this last year of his she invited Richard to accompany her. He had leave to go, for although Monsieur Durand was a tyrant in the matter of holidays, which he hated, Richard had recently met him in the little local brothel, and although Monsieur Durand had carried it off pretty well, with high and distant formality – a remark upon the likelihood of rain – his Roman authority had cracked. They set out at four in the morning to catch a train that would intercept the village bus in its course, and when they arrived at the station a brisk shower overtook them. Fifine thought this an excellent sign, and with her best skirt tucked well up she strode about among the deserted railway shrubs catching the snails that the rain called forth, and called out in her strong voice to the dim forms among the churns, telling them (by way of feast-day merriment) not to piss in the milk and asking them for continual reassurance about the train. Richard, cold and wan without his breakfast, thought her excessively Gothic for a railway-station: but in the bus, which was conducted in the spirit of a mediæval wagon, she was much more in place. It was crammed with the inhabitants of Saint-Modeste in their Sunday clothes and with their provisions; they had no intention of buying food from any untrustworthy strange shops and they carried everything, including a huge quantity of bread and four barrels of wine. The snails were on the roof for the benefit of the air during the early hours of the journey, but as the sun climbed to its strength they were brought down, the younger men being sent up to make room for them. Fifine knew everybody there – she was related, more or less, to all of them except the curé and the new baker – and she shouted to them all in turn and they all shouted to her in the highest good humour, although they had been travelling since dawn and although at this time most of France and the western world as well as the whole of America was looking with horror upon the undoing of society – the dissolution of its wealth. This was the time when millionaires were killing themselves in Wall Street and the shape of the slump and the depression was beginning to be clear to all but the simplest of the land, among them Fifine and Richard. He did not see Mireille as he got in, for she was stuffed in at the back behind a big spotty girl who would be leaning forward to shriek out of the window; he did not see her at the pilgrimage either, because Fifine took him in hand and explained everything to him, in an unusual, didactic and particularly loud voice, as if his Protestantism would make him deaf and stubborn for this occasion and blind him to the virtue of the miraculous water that dripped from a Gallo-Roman sarcophagus – the fairly miraculous water, for the Church was half-hearted about it and it owed its bottled reputation to Fifine and her kind. The true object of the pilgrimage was a splendid black Romanesque Madonna, as tender as a she-wolf; but Fifine was more interested in filling a bottle for the family – she had a duty to the Durand household.

He saw her at the feast, however, when they were all sitting round a fire of vine-cuttings, with the flames ghostly in the whiteness of the sun and the snails hissing, bubbling and dribbling on the embers at the edge, and he was amazed – a girl like a dark peach. There were no glasses except one for the curé, and they used the spouted pots of the region called pourous, passing them from hand to hand; and when he saw her take the pourou and tilt back her head and pour a long curved scarlet jet of wine from a height into her open mouth, her long curved throat and her pretty breasts held up, his heart fainted – there was an emptiness for a moment, as if it were not there, or had died.

But he was a modest creature then, and he did not suppose that he could ever presume so high; and in his simplicity he did not even notice that she was unattached, that the lads of the village were either clustered round the girls with bad reputations or chained to their public loves. He climbed back into the bus for the next long lap, melancholy and low in his spirits.

The blazing dusty miles went by; his head ached from too much wine; Fifine still read the names of all the villages they passed and all the shops, but with declining zeal. Apart from the reviving burst of jollity at the necessary halts it was a party chastened by the heat, best clothes, holiday wine and food and fatigue, that trundled over the jolting landscape of bare rocks, rosemary and scrubby trees that separates the Languedoc from the Roussillon, and so down the hilly roads to the sea.

He had once heard that the great object of travelling was to see the shores of the Mediterranean, and he had formed some vague notion of a liquid pearl; but as he staggered out of the suffocating bus into the pitiless glare of three o’clock it seemed to him that these sterile shores were commonplace indeed. The hot wind blew eddies of dust and paper along the beach; the shallow, waveless water, all flattened by the wind, had no grandeur, magnitude or shape. This corner of the village was organised for the exploitation of trippers, and strong inimical women shook paper hats, pea-nuts, dying-pig balloons: the traders, a little more in touch with the world than the peasants, were anxious, uneasy and obscurely hostile.

The village stood on a rocky bay, with a huge castle jutting out into the middle, and a path led round underneath this castle to a farther beach and farther rocks; Fifine and most of the elders stayed to paddle their tormented feet in the nearest water, but she urged him to go with the others – to enjoy himself, to profit by the occasion; he was only young once. The rest of the bus-load hurried along this path to join the other trippers (three other buses had already arrived) in their search for crabs, winkles, mussels, anything living within reach of the shore or among the pools; the curé had brought a rod, but the others contented themselves with throwing stones at the gulls and the uncomplicated murder of what few moving creatures the holiday had left up to this time – someone found a small octopus.

Most of the recesses in the baking rock were filled with excrement; the shallow waters of the bay were covered with the débris of many picnics. Children howled on the dirty pebbles of the beach, and their parents, exasperated by heat, tiredness and holiday, bullied them with automatic threats; old women stood shin-deep in the water and comic groups changed hats to be photographed; soldiers in the castle shrieked and whistled, and knots of plain girls all clinging together with their shoulders hunched, shrieked back in a state of sweating excitement. The wind had no freshness, and it was filled with dust. He saw Mireille quite suddenly, walking back to the bus alone: she did not repulse his tentative, easily-retracted smile – there was nothing haughty or unkind about Mireille.

A jetty ran out at the far end of the second beach, and as he handed her up the steps he noticed the extraordinary clarity of the air; and as he walked along the jetty with her scent in the drawing of his breath he took in a host of vivid impressions – the brilliance of the open sea, white horses, the violet shadows of the clouds. From the end of the jetty the whole village could be seen, arranged in two curves; the sun had softened the colour of the tiled roofs to a more or less uniform pale strawberry, but all the flat-fronted houses were washed or painted different colours, and they might all have been chosen by an angel of the Lord. There was a blood-red house far over on the other side, with chocolate shutters (the colours of an old German lithograph) but by a particular dispensation of grace its neighbour was of a faded blue and peeling rose – the happiest result. The high-prowed open fishing-boats were also painted with astonishing and successful colours: they lay in two rows that repeated the curves of the bay, and their long, arched, archaic lateen yards crossed their short leaning masts like a complexity of wings.

At the reassembly by the bus Richard’s shining face, his animation and Mireille’s conscious looks required no great degree of penetration, and Fifine, willing to do her friend the friendliest office, adroitly set them down together in her former seat and went to join her cousin Fabre with the car-sick baby.

The backward journey began – a journey (as far as Richard was concerned) towards a letter that told him that his days in France were done and that assignations were in vain – and on this road the bus no longer jolted and the heat no longer beat on his head: presently the sun set, and he found that by bracing his right foot against the seat in front and leaning over sideways he could put his hand upon Mireille’s without appearing to do so and without being seen; and in this ridiculous, cramped and painful attitude he travelled until one in the morning, when the bus put Fifine and him down alone at a remote and doubtful crossroads.