Of Time and the River (123 page)

“Oh, I know, my dear—but don’t be absurd!” Elinor protested. “The man’s all right—Frank’s always picking up these people—it always turns out all right in the end—oh, but of course!” she cried, as if dispelling a troubling thought from her mind—“Of course it will! It’s too ridiculous to allow yourself to be upset like this!”

But in spite of her vigorous assurance, her eyes were full of care and of something painful and baffled, an almost naked anguish.

He left them after lunch, promising to meet them again for dinner. Starwick had not come back. When they had finished dinner, the two women went back to the studio to wait for Starwick’s possible return, and Eugene went to look for him in Montmartre, promising to let them know at once if he found Starwick or got news of him. When he got to Montmartre, he made a round first of all the resorts which Starwick had liked best and frequented most, as Eugene remembered them, of course; but no one had seen him since they had last been there all together. Finally, he went to the bistro in the Rue Montmartre, where they had first encountered Alec, and asked the soiled barman with the dark mistrustful eye if he had seen either Alec or Starwick in the past three days. The man eyed him suspiciously for a moment before answering. Then he surlily replied that he had seen neither of them. In spite of the man’s denial, he stayed on, drinking one cognac after another at the bar, while it filled up, ebbed and flowed, with the mysterious rout and rabble of the night. He waited until four o’clock in the morning: neither Starwick nor Alec had appeared. He got into a taxi and was driven back across Paris to Montparnasse. When he got to the studio, the two women were still awake, waiting, and he gave them his disappointing news. Then he departed, promising to return at noon.

All through that day they waited: the apprehension of the two women was now painfully evident, and Ann spoke bluntly of calling in the police. Towards six o’clock that evening, while they were engaged in vigorous debate concerning their course of action, there were steps along the alley-way outside, and Starwick entered the studio, followed by the Frenchman, Alec.

Starwick was in excellent spirits, his eyes were clear, his ruddy face looked fresh, and had a healthy glow. In response to all their excited greetings and inquiries, he laughed gleefully, teasingly, and refused to answer. When they tried to find out from Alec where Starwick had been, he too smiled an engaging but malicious smile, shrugged his shoulders politely, and said: “I do not know, I s’ink he tells you if he v’ants—if not!” again he smiled, and shrugged politely. And this moody and secretive silence was never broken. Starwick never told them where he had been. Once or twice, during dinner, which was a hilarious one, he made casual and mysteriously hinting references to Brussels, but, in response to all of Elinor’s deft, ironic cross-examination, he only laughed his burbling laugh, and refused to answer.

And she, finally defeated, laughed suddenly, a laugh of rich astonishment, crying: “PERFECTLY insane, of course! But then, what did I tell you? It’s just the sort of thing that Frank WOULD do!”

But, in spite of all her high light spirits, her gay swift laughter, her distinguished ease, there was in the woman’s eyes something the boy had never seen before: a horrible, baffled anguish of torment and frustration. And although her manner towards the Frenchman, Alec, was gracious, gay, and charming— although she now accepted him as “one of us,” and frequently said with warm enthusiasm that he was “a PER-FECTLY swell person—I like him SO much!” there was often something in her eyes when she looked at him that it was not good to see.

Alec was their guest, and Starwick’s constant companion, everywhere they went thereafter. And everywhere, in every way, he proved himself to be a droll, kind, courteous, witty and urbanely cynical person: a man of charming and engaging qualities and delightful company. They never asked his name, nor inquired about his birth, his family, or his occupation. They seemed to accept his curious fellowship with Starwick as a matter of course: they took him on their daily round of café‘s, restaurants, night-clubs, and resorts, as if he were a lifelong friend of the family. And he accepted all their favours gracefully, politely, with wit and grace and charm, with a natural and distinguished dignity and ease. He, too, never asked disturbing questions; he was a diplomat by nature, a superb tactician from his birth. Nevertheless, the puzzled, doubting and inquiring expression in his eyes grew deeper day by day; his tongue was eloquently silent, but the question in his puzzled eyes could not be hidden, and constantly sought speech.

As for Eugene, he now felt for the first time an ugly, disquieting doubt: suddenly he remembered many things—words and phrases and allusions, swift, casual darts and flashes of memory that went all the way back to the Cambridge years, that had long since been forgotten—but that now returned to fill his mind. And sometimes when he looked at Starwick, he had the weird and unpleasant sensation of looking at someone he had never seen before.

LXXXV

At the last moment, when it seemed that the argosy of their battered friendship was bound to sink, it was Elinor who saved it again. Ann, in a state of sullen fury, had announced that she was sailing for home the next week; Eugene, that he was going South to “some quiet little place where”—so did his mind comfortably phrase it—“he could settle down and write.” As for Starwick, he remained coldly, wearily, sorrowfully impassive; he accepted this bitter dissolution of their plans with a weary resignation at once sad and yet profoundly indifferent; his own plans were more wrapped in a mantle of mysterious and tragic secretiveness than ever before. And seeing the desperate state which their affairs had come to, and that she could not look for help from these three gloomy secessionists, Elinor instantly took charge of things again and became the woman who had driven an ambulance in the war.

“Listen, my darlings,” she said with a sweet, crisp frivolity, that was as fine, as friendly, as comforting, and as instantly authoritative as the words of a capable mother to her contrary children—“no one is going away; no one is going back home; no one is going anywhere except on the wonderful trip we’ve planned from the beginning. We’re going to start out next week, Ann and I will do the driving, you two boys can loaf and invite your souls to your hearts’ content, and when you see a place that looks like a good place to work in, we’ll stop and stay until you’re tired of working. Then we’ll go on again.”

“Where?” said Starwick in a dead and toneless voice. “Go on where?”

“Why, my dear child!” Elinor cried in a gay tone. “Anywhere! Wherever you like! That’s the beauty of it! We’re not going to be bound down by any programme, any schedule: we shall stay where we like and go anywhere our sweet selves desire.

“I thought, however,” she continued in a more matter-of-fact way, “that we would go first to Chartres and then on to Touraine, stopping off at Orléans or Blois or Tours—anywhere we like, and staying as long as we care to. After that, we could do the Pyrenees and all that part of France: we might stop a few days at Biarritz and then strike off into the Basque country. I know INCREDIBLE little places we could stop at.”

“Could we see Spain?” asked Starwick for the first time with a note of interest in his voice.

“But, of COURSE!” she cried. “My dear child, we can see anything, everything, go anywhere your heart desires. That’s the beauty of the whole arrangement. If you feel like writing, if you want to run down to Spain to get a little writing done—why, presto! chango! Alacazam!” she said gaily, snapping her fingers, “—the thing is done! There’s nothing simpler!”

For a moment, no one spoke. They all sat entranced in a kind of unwilling but magical spell of wonder and delight. Elinor, with her power to make everything seem delightfully easy, and magically simple and exciting, had clothed that fantastic programme with all the garments of naturalness and reason. Everything now seemed not only possible, but beautifully, persuasively practicable—even that ludicrous project of “running down to Spain to do a little writing,” that hopeless delusion of “stopping off and working, anywhere you like, until you are ready to go on again”—she gave to the whole impossible adventure not only the thrilling colours of sensuous delight and happiness, but also the conviction of a serious purpose, a reasonable design.

And in a moment, Starwick, rousing himself from his abstracted and fascinated reverie, turned to Eugene and, with the old gleeful burble of laughter in his throat, remarked simply in his strangely fibred voice:

“It sounds swell, doesn’t it?”

And Ann, whose sullen, baffled look had more and more been tempered by an expression of unwilling interest, now laughed her sudden angry laugh, and said:

“It WOULD be swell if everyone would only act like decent human beings for a change!”

In spite of her angry words, her face had a tender, radiant look of joy and happiness as she spoke, and it seemed that all her hope and belief had returned to her.

“But of course!” Elinor answered instantly, and with complete conviction. “And that’s just exactly how everyone IS going to act! Eugene will be all right,” she cried—“the moment that we get out of Paris! You’ll see! We’ve gone at a perfectly KILLING pace this last month or two! No one in the world could stand it! Eugene is tired, our nerves are all on edge, we’re worn out by staying up all night, and drinking, and flying about from one place to another— but a day or two of rest will fix all that. . . . And that, my children, is just exactly what we’re going to do—now—at once!” She spoke firmly, kindly, with authority. “We’re getting out of Paris today!”

“Where?” said Starwick. “Where are we going?”

“We’re all going out to St. Germain-en-Laye to rest up for a day or two before we leave. We’ll stay at your pension, Francis, and you can pack your things while we’re out there, because you won’t be going back again. After that we’ll come back to Paris to spend the night—we won’t stay here over a day at the outside: Ann and I will clear our things out of the studio, and Eugene can get packed up at his hotel—that should mean, let’s see”—she tapped her lips lightly with thoughtful fingers—“we should be packed up and ready to start Monday morning, at the latest.”

“Hadn’t I better stay in town and do my packing now?” Eugene suggested.

“Darling,” said Elinor softly, with a tender and seductive humour, putting her fingers on his arm—“you’ll do nothing of the sort! You’re driving out with us this afternoon! We all love you so much that we’re going to take no chance of losing you at the last minute!”

And for a moment, the strange and almost noble dignity of Elinor’s face was troubled by a faint smile of pleasant, tender radiance, the image of the immensely feminine, gracious, and lovely spirit which almost grotesquely seemed to animate her large and heavy body.

Thus, under the benevolent and comforting dictatorship of this capable woman, hope had been restored to them, and in gay spirits, shouting and laughing and singing, feeling an impossible happiness when they thought of the wonderful adventure before them, they drove out to St. Germain-en-Laye that afternoon. The late sun was slanting rapidly towards evening when they arrived: they left their car before an old café near the railway station, and for an hour walked together through the vast avenues of the forest, the stately, sorrowful design of that great planted forest, so different from anything in America, so different from the rude, wild sweep and savage lyricism of our terrific earth, and so haunted by the spell of time. It was the forest which Henry the Fourth had known so well, and which, in its noble planted colonnades, suggested an architecture of nature that was like a cathedral, evoked a sense of time that was ancient, stately, classical, full of sorrow and a tragical joy, and haunted for ever by the pacings of noble men and women now long dead.

When they came out of the forest at the closing hour—for in this country, in this ancient noble place, even the forests were controlled, and closed and opened by the measurements of mortal time—the old red sun of waning day had almost gone.

For a time they stood on the great sheer butte of St. Germain, and looked across the space that intervened between themselves and Paris. Below them in the valley, the Seine wound snakewise through a series of silvery silent loops, and beyond, across the fields and forests and villages, already melting swiftly into night and twinkling with a diamond dust of lights, they saw the huge and smoking substance that was Paris, a design of elfin towers and ancient buildings and vast inhuman distances, an architecture of enchantment, smoky, lovely as a dream, seeming to be upborne, to be sustained, to float there like the vision of an impossible and unapproachable loveliness, out of a huge opalescent mist. It was a land of far Cockaigne, for ever threaded by the eternity of its silver, silent river; a city of enfabled walls, like Carcassonne, and never to be reached or known.

And while they looked it seemed to them that they heard the huge, seductive, drowsy murmur of that magic and eternal city—a murmur which seemed to resume into itself all of the grief, the joy, the sorrow, the ambitions, hopes, despairs, defeats and loves of humanity. And though all life was mixed and intermingled in that distant, drowsy sound, it was itself detached, remote, eternal and undying as the voice of time. And it hovered there for ever in the timeless skies of that elfin city, and was eternally the same, no matter what men lived or died.

They turned, and went into the old café near the station for an apéritif before dinner. It was one of those old, pleasantly faded cafés that one finds in little French towns. The place had the comfortable look and feel of an old shoe: the old, worn leather cushions, the chairs and tables, the mirrors in their frames of faded gilt, the old stained woods conveyed a general air of use, of peace, of homely shabby comfort, which suggested the schedule of generations of quiet people who had come here as part of the ordered ritual of a day, and which was so different from the feverish pulse, the sensual flash and glitter of the cafés of Paris. The noble peace and dignity of the great forest, and the magic vision of the time-enchanted city in the evening light, the silver, shining loops of its eternal river, still haunted their spirits and filled their hearts with wonder and a tranquil joy. And the old café seemed to possess them, to make them its own, with its homely comfort: it was one of those places that one thinks of at once, instinctively, by a powerful intuition, as being a “good” place, and yet they could not have said why. As they came in, the proprietor smiled and spoke to them in a quiet, casual, and friendly manner as if he had always known them and, in a moment, when they were seated in the comfortable old leathers against the wall, their waiter came and smilingly waited for their order. He was one of those waiters that one often sees abroad: an old man with a sharp, worn face, full of quiet humour and intelligence, an old, thin figure worn in service, but still spry and agile, a decent “family man” with wife and children, a man seasoned in humanity, whose years of service upon thousands of people had given him a character that was wise, good, honest, gentle, and a trifle equivocal. Each ordered an apéritif, the two women a vermouth- cassis, the two young men, Pernod: they talked quietly, happily, and with the weary, friendly understanding that people have when all their passion of desire and grief and conflict is past. The world that they had lived in for the last two months—that world of night and Paris and debauch—seemed like an evil dream, and the way before them now looked clear and plain.