Let Me Alone Page 19

  Time passed in a sort of dream. She lived from moment to moment, the life of trivial things, quiet, vague, uneventful, with no thought of what was to come.

  She would not think of Sidney at all. She had closed a shutter in her mind, closing out all that incident, shutting Sidney into the dead past. She would not remember her, or grieve for her. The thing she remembered most clearly, for some reason, was Drummond’s dark, rather impertinent muzzle. She often caught herself thinking of Drummond at first. She wondered whether he thought about her at all. Then, abruptly, she forgot all about him.

  Her luggage was sent on from River House with a stiff little note from Mrs. Kavan hoping that she would find everything packed correctly. Anna smiled as she read the stilted phrases, imagining the disapproval that lay behind. She saw in her mind Mrs. Kavan’s blue, piercing stare of suspicion and inquisitiveness. Well, that too was all over and done with.

  Anna wanted to go abroad immediately. And that was what Matthew, too, wanted now. He wanted to get away quickly with Anna, to get her safely out of the country before she had time to repudiate him entirely. He was very afraid of losing her; and at the same time perfectly determined that he would not lose her. He wanted to have her alone with him.

  They decided to go to Marseilles and pick up the boat there. They would have about a week to wait. In the early morning they were at Victoria, ready to depart, in all the fuss and bustle of the continental train. Mrs. Kavan was there, having insisted on seeing them off. She had spent the previous night in town so as to be on the spot in time. She straggled up the platform beside them. Matthew had taken first-class tickets. They had ten minutes to wait. Anna sat down in her reserved seat, not in the pullman, but in an ordinary first-class carriage. Matthew was busy, rather flustered under his wooden appearance, ordering people about. He hurried up and down the platform, talking to the stolidly indifferent porters – his voice sounded foolish and loud – while his mother strayed anxiously behind. Anna sat in her corner, looking out, rather unhappy and disapproving. If only it were not Matthew with whom she was travelling! Or if only he would behave differently. She hated the sound of his fussy, stupid voice, as it came to her through the din of the station. She turned aside so that she might not see his meaningless, stiff, ineffectual movements.

  Finally, Mrs. Kavan came into the carriage to say goodbye. She pecked at Anna’s cheek and put a magazine in her lap. Now that she was leaving, Anna was to be treated with a sort of angelic forbearance. But the mother was almost entirely occupied with her son, talking to him, without listening to his replies, while he beamed at her with his strange, fixed smile, rather strained-looking, enjoying her distress in his pasha way, and yet genuinely upset himself.

  At last it was time to start. Mrs. Kavan peered at Anna through the window, and murmured something that sounded like:

  ‘No ill-feeling – you modern girls –’ Anna did not catch any more.

  Then Mrs. Kavan embraced Matthew. He leaned out of the window and kissed her, while she clutched him with strange eagerness. Strange, this intensity of feeling between the two strange creatures. The train began to move. Mrs. Kavan walked beside the door for a few steps, holding Matthew’s hand, and staring with profound meaning into his face, while he smiled at her fixedly, somewhat inane.

  The speed of the train increased. Mrs. Kavan still scurried alongside, holding Matthew’s hand. Other people got in the way, and she had to fall back, waving and calling out half-audible messages. Matthew stood at the window, nodding and smiling, and waving his large, brown, hairless paw till she was out of sight. Anna sat watching him, curiously, as though he had been some partially humanized animal. It was raining, everything was grey and glistening with wet. The signals gesticulated stiffly through the rain.

  So they were off on their travels. And so, with an interim of wintry sea, the wearisome journey continued across France. Matthew was quite lost in the foreign train. His aplomb seemed to desert him. He felt insignificant and lonely. For him there were two worlds: the East, where he had his place as a cog in the machine of government, even a certain importance and power as a member of the ruling race; and England – home – which meant to him River House and the attentions of his womenfolk. Now, among all these foreigners, and the foreign advertisements, and the incomprehensible language, he felt in a sort of half-world, a purgatory, suspended between the two worlds which he knew, and which were intelligible to him. He felt angry with Anna for bringing him to this nameless, unfamiliar world where he was of no account.

  And also, he was jealous of Anna. On Anna’s face was an excited look, and in her eyes there seemed to be a light of gaiety and subtle rejoicing. Indeed, for her, this was almost a home-coming. With a bright look of pleasure Anna watched the foreign countryside. She was triumphant, and it seemed to Matthew that in her pride and contentment she triumphed over him.

  He sat in his corner, or stood stiffly in the corridor, as if he suffered some insult. His brown, neat, small-featured face wore an angry, humiliated look. But he held his head high in a kind of strutting defiance. He would not let the foreigners see that he was at all subdued.

  At Marseilles he would have liked to go to one of the big hotels where the English people stayed. He was willing, for once, to pay exorbitantly for the reassuring presence of his fellow-countrymen. But Anna would not have it. And now it was she who made the arrangements. Matthew, a stranger in this strange world, had to stand in the background, looking on. He didn’t like it at all. He didn’t like to hear Anna chattering in the strange language while he understood nothing.

  He stood in the background feeling sulky and stiff, while Anna asked questions and talked. People scrutinized him, with contempt it seemed; but nobody paid him any attention. He was simply Anna’s appendage. At last they were settled in a queer, rambling old hotel not far from the quays. There was a glimpse of prussian-blue sea from the top windows, and a great rattling and screeching of trams.

  They went to eat at a tiny restuarant with lobsters painted on the walls, and a barrow of shell-fish – mussels and sea-urchins – at the door. Anna was very happy. She was almost oblivious of Matthew. He had no power to trouble her. She felt that she had returned home. After a long experience of the smallness, the neatness, the cultivated soullessness of England, where everything seems tame and vulgar and devitalized, she rejoiced to feel the world bigger, and untidier, more natural and live, around her. More of a living world, and less of an industrial machine. The horrible, mechanical middle-classness of England! The small grey uglinesses, and the meanness and the coldness – as though machine-oil ran in its veins instead of the good red blood of humanity. You have to make your escape sometimes to the nobler places – or lose your soul altogether. Anna was happy, feeling the power and bigness of the unseen mountains not far away. The potency of the mountains made itself felt.

  They walked in the crowded streets, looking at the shops which were so like English shops and yet so unmistakably different. They sat in cafés, and were jostled by the noisy, cheerful crowd. Anna was very happy. It was like an intoxication to her, the feeling of freedom and escape. She was quite quiet, perfectly self-contained, with the bright light of excitement in her eyes, like a personal flame. Perfectly free she felt, centred in herself beyond all troubling, and triumphantly alive. She was unaware of Matthew. And he followed her about with a sullen expression, rather forlorn, which might have touched her if she had noticed it. He looked curiously like Winifred now and then.

  They took a car and drove out into the country. It was a beautiful day, springlike, with a gold sun pouring out of the sky. Up they climbed, up a great curving ascent to a desolate roof of earth and rock and patches of stunted trees. It was all rockily bare and mountainous. Anna thought of the Old Testament. It was like Mount Sinai. It was barren and grim, but the sun was bright, hot even, and she loved it. She loved being in the high, bare, lonely place.

  The car began to rattle down towards Cassis. And now there were vineyards – everywhere the
striped, yellowish vineyards, and terracing of vines on the mountain slopes, right down from the dazzling white stone crags, down to the edges of the road. And houses were appearing. White houses with brownish roofs and olive trees growing about. The brownish-silver olives, dusty looking, and the tall poplars still shaking their yellow leaves: a blur of dark pine-woods on the spurs of the mountains, and always the white road looping between the vineyards and the high rocks.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful!’ cried Anna, in strange, calling tones. She seemed to be in a little ecstasy.

  Suddenly, swirling round a curve of the descent, a great blueness confronted them, the sea was vivid blue like a bolt of blue electric fire, vibrating with flamy waves of brilliance, upon the eastern boundaries of the world, a blinding, crystalline blaze of blue water.

  ‘Wonderful! Wonderful!’ Anna cried. And she leaned forward in the keen rush of air, ecstatic.

  But Matthew would not acknowledge it. To him, beauty was the soft, safe beauty of the English spring, all dim and delicate and confined, and deep, lush greenery in the tranquil valleys, and birds singing. Not this dazzling glitter of hard limpidity, this vast, unfriendly glare of burning light. He felt himself exposed, there between the in-closing mountains and the vibrant, flashing water.

  ‘I love it!’ said Anna, in a low, clear voice. ‘I love it!’

  He saw her face bright and hard in the sun, and he heard her voice, clear and cold, like the small waves breaking on the shore. He understood nothing. But now she challenged him, she wanted to force him to submit to her mood.

  ‘Don’t you think it beautiful?’ she asked him, in a cold voice, like a small wave breaking. There was a touch of devilment in it.

  ‘Not so beautiful as England,’ he answered, hostile and rather spiteful.

  ‘Oh – England!’ she cried, with a careless derision that stung him. ‘You and your England!’

  It enraged him to hear her sneer like that, at the things that were precious to him. It was as if she stripped the clothes from his back, leaving him ridiculous and shamed.

  ‘England is beautiful,’ he answered, with heat. The foolish blind look of anger was on his face, like a vicious animal that would hurt if it knew how to reach its tormentor. But Anna was safely out of reach, behind the bars.

  ‘Perhaps it is. But where can you find it? It’s all covered up with hideous towns, and main-roads, and squalid little villas, and petrol-pumps and machines. And I hate the horrible, unhealthy people everywhere, with their tinned food and wireless sets and newspapers and cinemas and cheap cars. All so ugly. And drab and paltry. I hate them all. Sham people in an imitation country.’

  Her eyes stared at him coldly, he felt almost afraid. Just for a moment he saw her coldness, he saw the unyielding hardness that was in her, the unchanging remoteness; even cruelty. Not a personal, deliberate cruelty, but that much more devastating cruelty that comes from indifference, from sheer, absolute, deadly carelessness, the ultimate affront. But then his preserving insentience came back to stupify him, make him stupid. He saw nothing any more. Anna was his wife, his enviable possession, a graceful girl who attracted him, and whom he meant to keep to himself, for his own personal enjoyment. That was all he wished to see.

  And Anna saw what was in his mind. The bright complacency of possession showed in his eyes. She turned away from him in disgust to the sun and the vineyards and the blue sea. She disregarded him entirely, thrusting him out of her way.

  They left the car and walked about in the village. It was brown and dirty-looking, the streets were narrow and rather squalid with fish-nets and the debris of fishing everywhere. There was a strong smell of fish. And the coloured boats were lying in close to the quay. The sun was in the sky and on the water, the air was sparkling. Fishermen stood loungingly, indolently about, boys with bare feet, or coloured, tattered espadrilles, like bedroom slippers, ran and shouted and stared. The people were brown-skinned southerners.

  Anna found it delicious, and she was happy. But the thing that pleased her most was when, climbing up a little above the village, she saw the vineyards and the olives and the mountain slopes behind all swimming and golden and fantastic in the sunshine, expanded under the deep blue sky.

  She felt that she would like to stay there for ever.

  ‘I wish we were going to live here,’ she said, her face glowing and open. ‘It is so lovely.’

  A shaft of resentment penetrated Matthew’s heart. She seemed to ignore him and all his world. He wanted to assert himself.

  ‘The East is more wonderful,’ he said. And added, rather plaintive: ‘You will like that, too, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I shall like to see it,’ she answered. ‘But this is a place to live in.’

  That was how she thought of the East; as a place to visit. But when she thought of settling down there, of living there permanently, her mind went blank and would not function. She simply could not think of it in that way.

  At last it was time to go. The sun was falling towards the sea, shadows were creeping on the mountain slopes. Anna slipped off alone. She could not leave the place just yet. It was friendly and delightful to her. She could not understand how Matthew saw only the squalor and the fishes’ heads lying about. To her there was beauty in the steep houses, unevenly roofed, against the hillsides, very subtle and appealing.

  She came to a path, steep, stony, and narrow, a sort of mule-track, between stone walls. One wall was in deep shadow, but the other still caught the sun and glowed yellowly. Small brown lizards were flicking and darting between the stones. On one side were houses, falling below the level of the track; above the other wall the grey heads of olives were appearing.

  Anna climbed on the stones, and looked over at the olive grove. It was still and lovely, with the ancient, knotted trunks, weird-looking, standing strangely in their own purplish twilight, like old ghosts upon earth. The pale, dry grass grew up close to the exposed, gnarled roots of the trees. And there were the leaves up above, so dry and delicate, hanging in ashen showers, light as ashes, and much brighter, and silvery, tarnished-silvery like a dissolving storm-cloud, making a mysterious, pale cloudiness of their own in the upper air. The beautiful, ancient olive trees, mysterious and age-old, they had stood there for ever and ever. Nothing could be more poignant, like an apparition from Genesis.

  She saw a young man sketching under the trees, sitting on a stone, half-turned from her, dipping and poising his brush. He looked intent, and seemed to be working quickly. The light changed from moment to moment.

  Anna’s clear eyes, lingering on him, watched his profile tilted above the paper. The young man was thin, and looked elegant and rather well-bred and intelligent. He had the look of a certain type of young artist – careless, engaging, with a touch of the poseur, but amiable, very. Anna took him all in, even to the tip of his rather high, rather fine nose. But he was out of the picture. Resenting the intrusion of a human figure upon the solitary perfection of the place, Anna moved off to Matthew and the waiting car.

  On subsequent days they drove also, to Bandol and Sanary, and places farther down the coast: La Ciotat with the strange, stark hulls of half-built ships sheering up in the curved harbour. But to Cassis they did not go again.

  It was Anna who wanted the drives. Matthew really disliked them. He was so unutterably opposed to everything – opposed to the vineyards, the mountains, opposed to Anna’s self-sufficient enjoyment. He hated the spruce little Frenchman who drove the car: the way he jumped out so assiduously to open the door for Anna, and the way he sometimes turned round while they were driving, turning his sunburnt, plump cheeks and his small black moustache to smile at Anna, confidentially, as though they were in league together. Poor Matthew felt horribly out of it. And he hated the French people, the peasants and the little townspeople, whom he saw about. He couldn’t abide their casual, unhurried way of living. It roused a subterranean anger in him to watch them sauntering and lounging and sitting round little tables in the sun. They had no right to tak
e life so easily. Even when they appeared to be busy or working hard in the fields, it was all a sort of game – just playing at work. So it seemed to Matthew. And at the bottom of his heart an angry resentment came; because these people seemed so ‘happy,’ in a way which he and his conscientious kind could never, never understand.

  The day before the boat sailed, he met in the Cannebière some acquaintances, a Mr. and Mrs. Brett, who were also going to travel on the Henzada. It was an enormous relief to him to see them. It was really rather pathetic the way he cottoned to the quite insignificant pair, and the way all three of them clung together like drowning swimmers in this sea of foreignness. They seemed to unite at once in a triangular bond of opposition – with Anna standing outside. The Bretts were kindly disposed towards her. They wanted to include her in the bond. But when they saw that she would not be included, they disapproved. They went their own way – with Matthew – and Anna went hers. She turned away from the uninteresting, middle-aged couple and went out alone.

  She walked to the garage and found the trim little driver. And set out with him in the snub-nosed Renault to have a last look at Cassis.

  It was fine, with the lightest, most delicate sunshine, like early summer, and a haze over the mountains. But the breeze came cold from the sea, to the pine-trees and the changing, cloud-pale olives. The olives were always changing. In stillness they were all grey shadow, but quickly the sharp breath of the sea wind came to blow them into tremulous, smoky, silver fires.

  Anna sat in the jolting car and looked about. It pleased her to be sitting there by herself behind the little French driver. From the back of his head, a sort of light-hearted French gallantry seemed to extend towards her; as though in an admiring, deferential, quite respectful, but not very serious way, he had made himself responsible for her welfare. She smiled to herself, feeling this.