A Legacy (26 page)

"Not fault."

"You are generous."

"Life is very difficult," he said.

"It is what we make it."

"You do not know the dangers," said Jules.

"Oh dangers. . . ."

"You are not afraid."

She brought her attention to him. "You are?"

"There is always reason," he said.

She considered this. "You know—I will try to bring you luck. As I cannot exactly make you happy, I can at least try that."

"You do not want to leave me?"

"I was thinking of you."

"Of me?"

"For once."

"Oh no."

"In that case," Caroline said, "in that case I'll tell you what we'll do, we'll have one more summer in Andalusia and get ready to move over to North Africa next winter. I daresay on our way to Persia.

One evening in the spring (Jules had already left for the South to get their house in order) Caroline came home and found Mr. Symington sitting in the dismantled gallery in the twilight rustling newspapers.

"Oh, Symie," she said, "have they been looking after you?"

"For the last few hours. Always so instructive, seeing the local Press. You know who's here? They call him El Ilustre Sabio Ingles, in two columns, look—" he handed her El Madrileno. "No one at the Embassy had the slightest idea."

"Here?" she said.

"Do you see the French are giving a reception for him— typical."

"In Madrid?"

"Madrid is not Somaliland."

Of what happened next Caroline once spoke herself. We
met. At once. I don't know how. I must have got rid of Symie ... I must have sent a note ... I don't remember. I who cannot bear to wait, who cannot manage suspense. I wasn't there at all. / was suspended.

Then he was there.

A most extraordinary thing happened, the thing one had always heard being said. It was as if we had never been apart for a day. No search, nothing aside, no double thought, no lag—it was he, it was I, it was us: it was all right. Flowed into place as when the lights have just gone up. . . . An instant easy Tightness, oh absolute rightness; and immense, immense relief. One breathed again and whatever still might happen, one knew it could not touch one. He was there—all as before—quick like a simple miracle.

And of course everything he did went right. He had a carriage waiting at the door, he was living in a house someone had lent him, we were in the country the same evening. We did not leave each other during these first hours. It was inevitable, it had the touch of the prodigious one sees in skaters on the ice, in birds—

Then something else happened. Again it was unexpected and undeniable. It was as if for the second time in forty-eight hours we had been brought before the presence of something we, ourselves, had given shape to at some point of the past. A confrontation— The next day it was different. Time had passed between us; we had been separate. We weighed, we watched, we waited. We felt the past, we had to include the future. It was no longer the same: in fact it was over. It was still the best that could have happened, but it had happened. I had walked in as into an open garden; one does not enter that way twice.

I knew more about myself, about needs, about life in time. I realized the high impersonal pitch between us— his lack, the voluntary, cultivated lack, of possessiveness— and saw that it was not maintainable for me. I was no longer as civilized. And I knew the gap that comes later
between admiration and sustenance. I saw that if it did not end here it must change, and what the change must be. For a week we saw each other every day, all the day. We did not speak of it. I had learnt that too. We were gentle; like ghosts. I often thought of Jules—of his more naive attachment; I thought of him with more than gratitude, and I was very sorry. For it was clear that the end of Francis also meant the end of Jules.

At the end of the week she left. She took a train out of Madrid. He was staying on for a few more days. She left in sadness; she felt flat, chilled, emptied; she was alone. But she was also free. And she was upheld by the clean sweep, a quiet grim sense of being alive still, stripped for a new existence. She knew precisely what was to come, and what she had to do. She looked at her actions of the last past year, at the impasse she had forced her way into, and it was not flattering. She saw the use she had made of Jules, and where it would have led them; and she was struck by the narrowness of the escape. She looked at it all most coldly, amazed by her own disregard of the realities, and it appeared folly, pigheaded, childish and absurd, but already her view was tinged with impatience; she could no longer understand, and she turned away.

Caroline's Spanish friends had seen to it that she and her maid had two compartments in a special carriage attached to the fitful southbound train, and so for her the long slow journey was eventless and secluded. During the first night she did not go to bed; she sat up, her lights turned off, the windows down to the streaming air. She sat—looking out, looking out, drinking in the night air with full lungs. The night was milky, shot through with sudden lights; the countryside but outline. The train ran in and out of patches of darkness, charged walls sharp-angled as backdrops rearing near in relief and shadow, flew across a clearing: the sectioned, linear planes of a station yard. Now and then, two posts, a stanchion, the
tracings of a girder, flashed into sight, stood detached, postulated a shape, luminous and concrete, rose, slid and were passed. They had also passed through her. She and the night were the medium and the motion and these shapes— these signals—this permanence—were of them. Quicksilver lengths of rail streaked out beside her, spread, flowed forward, converged, ran on, were sucked into darkness. The trains swished by an empty lamplit platform, she knew that her father and mother were dead, she had a flash of nonexistence. They died with strangers, before their time: it had reached her; she took the loss and her own, and then she was weeping for her parents' death with fresh first grief. When she had wept she was calm; as the night wore on serenity filled her, she was exalted by a sense of gaining distance, of moving swiftly towards the future. There came a point when her actual destination already seemed to lie behind her, when she asked herself what she was doing here, and her errand in the South (the tidying-up action, she had called it) a shell and repetition. Might it not be long— She thought of herself once more in England. The empty ship . . . And there opened a sudden joyful hunger for mere return. The West—! Paris first, foretaste, itself fulfilment, lingering—and then, and then, she would see and walk and sniff the streets of London. She saw an old man in a clearing bent over a switch, he was tapping something, now he straightened up, he had seen her. She smiled to him, she felt the smile he could not see, it bound them. She took her purse from beside her on the seat and opened it out of the window; the golden sovereigns, taken short by the wind, settled, unheard, upon the tracks, paler than the clinkers, disappeared. . . . The old man was already out of sight. Someone will find them, she said. And then she thought her wish.

Jules was not at the station. As nobody seemed to be certain whether their train had been seven hours late or a day early, it was not surprising. Leaving Marie to collect

some vanished boxes, she went on in a hired eab. Pedro opened the door. She went through the house, from room to room, looking at everything with careful interest. So one might visit a villa at Pompeii. She was still in her travelling clothes when Jules came in.

"I was just thinking what a lovely house this is," she said.

He kissed her hand.

"How warm it is already. Let me look at you."

"I'm afraid," he said, "I've been gambling rather a lot while you were away."

"A tiresome male habit. Have you lost very much?"

"How did you know?" said Jules. "You see— But first you must have some lunch."

"Oh yes, lunch first," said Caroline.

It was then that they brought her the telegram.

She flushed.

"It came yesterday," Jules said, "I signed for you."

She felt chiefly anger. "How messy it looks," she said, staring at stamp marks and erasures on the envelope.

Then she saw that it had been addressed to her care of the German Embassy in Madrid, and forwarded. She ripped it open. It appeared to be in English; some of the words were run into others, and most of them were misspelt, but after a few seconds a message became intelligible.

JULES BROTHER SHOT BY ACCIDENT URGENTLY ADVISE IMMEDIATE RETURN SARAH

Caroline's special carriage (and Marie) were still in the station, and the guard found it the most natural thing that they should occupy it. Jules lay down as soon as they had started. Caroline sat opposite with a novel by Edith Wharton still fresh from her travelling bag. Towards evening Pedro, who was lodged somewhere in the bowels of the train, produced some sherry for them and a sandwich

meal, and Jules began to speak. Before he had only said two things.

"Gustavus— Oh, the poor man."

And then:

"You will come with me?"

After that he had left everything, down to his own packing, to Caroline and Pedro. Now he talked and talked. Caroline, who knew little about such things, wondered rather uncomfortably whether he could be ill.

"My father—I am sure you would have liked him. He would have liked you—

"The winters were not nearly as cold as they say now. We had fires lit in our bedrooms before we got up shooting—but that was more because it was so pleasant—

"When Jean danced with the bear, the bear loved it. They do not usually—

"Poor Gustavus. I don't think he can have been very happy—

"Now there is no one left. Only I, and Jean. Caroline— I must see him now. Do you think he would see me?" And again he said, "You will come with me?"

Presently he said, "I went once—after—when that thing had happened to Gabriel."

"Jules," Caroline said, "you must not distress yourself."

He leaned back.

"All a long time ago, wasn't it?"

"Not really," he said.

And presently, "We had everything we wanted— When you came into the hall you could smell the bees' wax—

"When I came back I brought a lemur—

"They did not know what that place was like. I knew. He told me."

"Jules."

"I don't think Gustavus ever minded. When he was sent back— He was sent back."

"Jules!"

"Caroline?"

"You'll bring on your asthma."

"What will it be like seeing him now? Tell me?"

"My dear," she said, "you don't realize that I know hardly anything about it. You never told me."

"What it was like there— And the men who came— Papa did not know— You are so like Gabriel. I will tell you."

Caroline sat on the seat opposite, numb, tired out.

"You do not know what he looked like— You do not know—"

Once Pedro was at the door and she slipped out. She had wired to Madrid, now there had been a stop and arrangements were confirmed; an official had boarded to tell her that they were going to be coupled on directly to the San Sebastian Express. Changes at the border, and again at Bayonne, then straight through—Angouleme—Poitiers— Paris—Liege—Aix-la-Chapelle—Cologne. "You will be in Germany the day after the next day, if God so wishes."

Before midnight Pedro again turned up bringing a bottle of medicine he had borrowed from a lady fellow passenger. Valerian, Caroline said, she knew the smell. Together they measured out a few drops. Jules kept hold of her hand.

"Even if he has changed it will be best to see him, won't it? We will see him. We will go as soon—as soon as we can go— Papa never let anyone touch the trees—how you would have liked them—and wax, wax for polishing, wax from our own bees—"

When at last he had dropped off, Caroline left him and crept into the compartment she now shared with Marie. She pulled off her clothes without turning on a light, got into the bunk and was asleep at once. Some hours later she waked with a start. It was not quite daybreak, the train was standing still. Two things leapt to her mind. The wording of the telegram was most peculiar. She was probably going to have a child.

-Lt was again morning when two days later they were across the German frontier. At a stop Caroline heard something being called outside, up and down the platform below curtained windows, vaguely disturbing. When they pulled out she knew what it had been.

Fel-den. . . . Fel-den. . . .

She got up, and dressed. Presently a sheaf of telegrams was brought to her. They were all for Jules; he was, she hoped, still asleep, and she put them aside.

When they drew into the first large station, she was with him. Jules had just waked up, Pedro was fussing about him with a spirit lamp; it was raining, and Jules said so. Again she thought she heard his name. They did not expect to see anyone they knew before Berlin. She leaned out. Some men came up and asked for Baron Felden. Who are you? she meant to say, then she knew they were reporters. "My husband is not well." She tried to fill the casement. "What do you want?" But Caroline spoke no real German then, and her sentences did not command attention. They crowded under the window. "There he is," one of them said.

"What is it?" Jules called from his bed in French.

"Please go away," she said; "I will come out and talk to you."

"Is she the French or the Jewish lady?"

Caroline caught this. Intent on nouns and grammar, she said, "I am the English wife."

"The one who didn't have the wedding—"

Pedro came up to raise the window; she stopped him. "What do you want?" she said.

But one man was already in the corridor. The door opened behind her, he stepped in. "So, you people think you can have it all your own way forever—"

"Good morning," said Jules. He was wearing a dressing gown and holding a cup of china tea on a light silver tray. The compartment smelt of cuir de russie and fresh air.

"Dona Caroline, do I throw him out?" said Pedro.

He had kept a lighted cigar. "Sorry to trouble you."

"Is there any need for you to speak to us like this?" said Caroline.