[_To MARCEL PROUST_]
What a fool he had been to come. These wooden walls creaking at a touch,
and the floors responding like an animal in pain to the lightest
footstep. Not that Marie Aimée had light footsteps--far from it. She
clattered about with the happy noisiness of a good conscience and
perfect health. In her hands the opening of a door became an air-raid
and yet what could you do, confronted with her rosy face beaming with a
child-like confidence in giving pleasure and satisfaction.
No, it was entirely his own fault. Everything was what he might have
expected. The sea was just where he had been told it would be, the air
was relentlessly bracing, the cleanliness of the Hotel Bungalow reminded
you of a shiny soaped face which had never known powder. It was all, he
reflected, quite horrible. The salt-laden wind blowing the sand up from
the dunes, the hard bright sunshine, the effect everything gave you of
having been painted with the six colours of a child's rather cheap
paint-box.
"A different man," she had said he would feel. Well he felt it
already--the lassitude of his body feebly revolting against the
impending bracing, his eyes watering at the glare. Health and
inspiration, Marthe had said, dreamless sleep, an insatiable appetite
and perfect peace in which to finish his novel. "Think how quiet it will
be," she had said. As if the country were ever quiet, crowded as it was
with locos and dogs and sabots. Surely peace meant Paris in August, with
every one away, thick carpets and a noiseless valet.
Maurice imagined himself merging into a huge armchair, just able to see
a square glass vase of Juliette roses--gilt petals lined with deep pink
velvet. Why on earth were there never any flowers in the country? And no
one would disturb him--no one. Privacy is only possible in a big town.
Every detail of life in the Hotel Bungalow was revealed to him in a
series of sights, sounds and smells. And should a fellow lunatic arrive,
how was he to avoid him? At every meal there would be little exchanges
of the banal, after dinner a game of billiards--even possibly, horror of
horrors, potential excursions planned with zest and good fellowship. And
all the time he would be saying "No," more and more ungraciously, or,
worse still--and far more likely--saying "yes."
And then where would his novel be? Not that it was possible any way to
write in a place where the sun was always in your eyes, the wind blew
your paper away and creaking boards made sitting in your bedroom out of
the question.
Marthe was a fool, given up entirely to hygiene and plans for other
people. "You will come back bubbling over with physical fitness, your
dear face all tanned," she had said. "Dear" indeed! It was simply a
bribe. He was being bribed for his own good. And to think that like a
great gaby he had been shoved off to the sea by one term of endearment,
and to a place, too, where there was neither shade nor shadows, simply
miles and miles of bright monotonous sea, three dusty cornflowers, two
bedraggled poppies and the sun all around you.
Tanned, indeed! Why his face would be all blisters and his eyes
bloodshot.
The insensitiveness of women!
If Marthe were here she would bathe before breakfast, feed the hens,
find the eggs, encourage the cook, pat the dog, listen to the story of
Marie Aimée's life, pick the cornflowers, praise the cook, churn the
butter, play with the children, climb on to the hay cart, collect shells
on the beach, lie in the sun, let the sand trickle through her fingers
and explain with perfect sincerity that it was the most delightful place
in the world.
But he didn't like paddling or shrimping or sailing or farmyard life.
He wanted a velvet lawn, a cedar, a rose garden, lavender, a sun dial,
iced lemonade and solitude. Or he wanted his own cool apartment, with
drawn sunblinds, vases full of flowers, his immense writing table, and a
deserted Paris around him.
Women always did to you as they wanted to be done by. That sort of
literal interpretation of Christianity showed such a lack of
imagination. It was no good telling Marthe that you didn't like the sea,
she simply wouldn't believe it.
"Think of the sunset reflected in the wet sand," she would say, and if
you told her that you didn't want to think about it, that it was no fit
subject for an active mind, she would be hurt.
In any case no one had a right to make you do things for your own good.
It was a horrible form of self-sacrifice. If Marthe had said, "_Please_
go to St. Jean-les-Flots and pick me a poppy," he would have been
delighted, but to stay at the Hotel Bungalow in the interests of his own
health was a very different matter.
Marie Aimée was putting a pot with one red geranium in it on his writing
table. It was, she explained, still very early in the season but
Monsieur must not be discouraged. Later it became very gay with dancing
and Japanese lanterns in the garden. The Hotel Bungalow would be quite
full, whereas now there was only Monsieur and a lady.
"A lady?"
"But yes, Monsieur."
"A young lady?"
"A lady of a certain age."
Maurice hoped that it would be an uncertain age. Of course every one
over twenty would seem old to Marie Aimée. Probably the lady was on that
exquisite frontier line, the early thirties, when the bud is already
unfurling its petals, angles have softened into curves, and the
significant is stirring in everything like a quickening child. Thirty,
the age of delicate response, of subtle tasting, divorced equally from
the ignorant impetuosity of youth and the desperate clutchings of middle
age. How he disliked young girls with their sunburn, their manly
strides, their meaningless giggles, their eternal nicknames! And, over
their heads, a warning and a trade mark, that sword of
Damocles--marriage.
Maurice was feeling a little happier. As he walked into lunch he felt a
real twinge of curiosity. Ridiculous it was--why he was getting quite
romantic, imagining an exquisite creature on a holiday from her husband.
That was no doubt the result of the Hotel Bungalow. On the velvet lawn
with the cedar, the rose garden, the sun dial and the iced lemonade, he
would have been enjoying to the full his usual ironic detachment, but
St. Jean-les-Flots would throw any one to romance.
He walked into the dining room. At the far end with her back to him sat
the lady. She wore a white coat embroidered with black, a white skirt, a
white hat with a white lace veil. On the chair beside her lay a Holland
sunshade lined with green. It was he thought, deplorable, and indicated
yellow spectacles. Her feet were very small and gave you the impression
of an insecure foundation to her body. Her back was broad. She was
certainly over forty. Forty, thought Maurice, the dangerous age--the
desperate age. From forty to fifty, the flower in full bloom, the period
of engulfing passions, of urgent transitory satisfactions. For how many
women must it not be a ten years' death struggle.
"What a place," Maurice was disgusted; "it is driving me to melodrama."
The lady got up with a certain waddling stateliness (perhaps after all
she was fifty). Her clothes fell into perfection--she walked slowly and
calmly with appraising steps. The lace veil was over her face. She did
not forget her sunshade, her bag, or her handkerchief. Louis, the
waiter, opened the door for her. She sailed out like a gondola on the
stage, or Lohengrin's swan. Her movements gave an effect of invisible
wheels.
During the afternoon she remained undetectable, which was a tour de
force at St. Jean-les-Flots, where the landscape was a successful
conspiracy against concealment, and a sunshade could be seen for miles.
Maurice had a tiresome feeling that she was lying out somewhere with
that horrible sunshade over her head and a novel by Gyp on her lap. Had
she, he wondered, ever read any of his books? Perhaps when she found out
his name she would come up to him and say: "Are you _the_ Mr. Maurice
Van Trean?" And when he had bowed in the affirmative, she would add that
she liked "Sur les Rives" best of his books--"she had read them all many
times--and especially that marvellous description of Camille's return to
her husband."
Maurice walked for miles down the hard glaring white road. It was the
most uncomfortable thing he could think of doing, and when you are
determined to enjoy nothing there is a certain voluptuous satisfaction
in a maximum of unpleasantness. The air was burning and solid. An
occasional convolvulus drowned in dust straggled in weary clinging grace
by the roadside--a pathetic symbol, he reflected, of the pale refined
irrelevant women who fade ineffectually beside the highways of life. He
thought of Marthe with her urgent pulsating rhythm, the rhythm he
remembered bitterly, that had brought him here. He wished vindictively
that she were beside him, the hard burning surface of the road biting
through the soles of her shoes. He would walk on and on till there were
blisters on her feet and her steps were lagging. His teeth were set in
the grim satisfaction of revenge.
"This is the country," he would say. "Do you feel the health-giving sea
breeze you told me about?"
He stopped suddenly. Walking towards him was the lady. The offensive
sunshade was over her head, but her veil was up. She was, he supposed,
forty-six--no, forty-four. Her eyes were wide apart, dark and indolent
and long--brown or blue they might have been. Her face was wide and so
was her mouth with lips like curtains drawn across the teeth. Her
cheek-bones were high and her skin, like marshmallow, was marbled with
the bright yellow lights and bright blue shadows of early afternoon.
There was a curious grace about her broad solid figure, an unhurried
indifferent grace, as if she said to herself, "I shall please at my own
time." She was not pretty. Her clothes belonged to her as essentially as
her limbs.
Maurice took off his hat.
"Forgive me, Madame, but I think that we are both living at the Hotel
Bungalow."
"I think so, too," she said drily.
He thought that she thought that he was taking a liberty, which made him
suppose that she was not quite a lady, which made him accuse himself of
vulgarity.
And then she laughed, and his accusations, both of her and of himself,
fled.
They walked back together and he explained to her just how much he hated
the sea, the heat, the Hotel Bungalow, the cook, and Marie Aimée's
footsteps. He explained how anxious he had been about her--how he had
longed to see her face--how much her sunshade had depressed him--how her
lace veil had been a personal enemy.
She said that she adored the country....
He told her that only in big towns could you find peace or flowers.