Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Dennis Parry

I went from a London hospital to a sanatorium which specialized in my disease. There, for months, I was allowed no visitors except my aunt and no correspondence at all. The effect of this, combined with illness, was strange: the external world sank like a coin dropped in clear water: you can still see it shimmering and distorted on the bottom, so that it does not entirely cease to be an object of interest and regret to you, but you no longer count it in any way amongst your possessions.

  I heard nothing from Varvara during this period. Possibly she tried to send messages but they were stopped in my own supposed interests. Anyhow it never occurred to me to feel resentment at her silence. She was so many light-years away that silence seemed the only natural condition.

  When I improved somewhat and they sent me to Arosa in Switzerland, it began to be different. They tell you that consumptives are optimistic and amorous; but these amiable qualities are the products of an abnormal emotional quickness, which also gives rise to easy suspicions and grudges. I spent a long time lying in my bed looking out over the shining snowfields and holding imaginary scenes with Varvara, somewhat on the Dr. Johnson–Lord Chesterfield lines. That is to say, at some undefined point in the future she would again seek my company; but I would turn away with a few, or not so few, apt words about the value of fair-weather friendship.

  Of course the proof or remedy was in my own hands. I could have written, and wherever she was, my letter would no doubt have reached her in the end. But that would have invited the blow hardest to bear in my morbid condition: a sensible cool explanation of her silence—unlikely as such a thing seems from Varvara. Nevertheless my conduct was so perverse that I cannot put it down entirely to self-pity and despair. In it there may well have been a subconscious recognition that, faced with death or chronic invalidism, I was morally bound to avoid involvement.

  I touched the nadir of uncharity during my third year at Arosa. Aunt Edna came out to see me and I put to her a question which had been bothering me for some time. Who was paying for my long stay in an expensive sanatorium? My uncle was now retired and I knew that he had very little beyond his pension. I hoped that he and my aunt were not making desperate sacrifices on my behalf—even though, if they were, they both looked pretty well on it.

  When I asked Aunt Edna she dabbed her lips delicately and put on the saintly expression which many of her generation wore when speaking about money.

  ‘We didn’t like to tell you before . . . in case your pride made you interfere with the arrangements.’

  ‘I’d be just as quick to refuse charity as a lion would a lump of meat.’

  ‘Now you’re being cynical. And anyway there’s no such thing as charity between friends. . . . You made a very good friend, David. I don’t know how you did it, considering the difference of your ages and so on.’

  ‘Let’s come to the point,’ I said. ‘Who did what?’

  ‘Mrs. Ellison, whom you stayed with that summer, heard that you were very ill and had got to live out of England. She sent me a cheque for £5,000 to be used on your behalf. She said that anyway she was going to leave it to you in her will.’

  Suddenly there rose up before me an enormously magnified simulacrum of that will: ravaged and cracked and torn like a battlefield by the march and counter-march of rival armies: bearing in its corner what might seem to be a great rough seal until one perceived that it was composed not of wax but clotted blood. At the same time I felt a gratitude so intense that the tears came into my eyes. Old, sick, mentally weakened Mrs. Ellison had still been able to take thought for the misery of a chance acquaintance. Thank God, I thought, I really liked her when I had no cause, beyond a little hospitality, for doing so: otherwise it would be unbearable now.

  ‘You’ve put me in a very false position,’ I said to my aunt with unnecessary harshness. ‘All this time I’ve been enjoying her money with never a word of thanks. I must write immediately.’

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t. You see, Mrs. Ellison died about a year after you were taken ill.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘You may be sure,’ said my aunt, ‘that she knows what’s in your heart at this minute far better than you could put it in any letter.’

  Aunt Edna was a clergyman’s daughter, and, I think, a concealed agnostic of the deepest dye. The concealment covered herself but not anybody who had had opportunities of noting the absolute spiritual indifference behind her distribution of religious clichés. It contrasted oddly with the sincere piety in her every reference to social matters.

  After a pause I said:

  ‘What became of the granddaughter who lived with her?’

  ‘I saw her at the funeral. A striking girl, but too outrée for my taste. She married somebody a few months later.’

  ‘Can you remember his name?’

  My aunt thought for a moment, then shook her head.

  ‘It was someone rather queer. Not exactly unsuitable, but queer. Like a foreigner or an artist or a person who’d been in the papers.’

  Even if I had pressed her I don’t think she could have told me more.

  The injustice to which I referred earlier grew gradually out of this conversation. I chose to believe that Varvara was angry with me because of her grandmother’s generosity, and I reminded myself of the fanatical proprietary sense which she had shown towards her family inheritance. A girl who thought it quite natural that she should be suspected of murder in defence of her rights would not take kindly to an interloper who walked off with even the smallest sums. So I told myself. But really it was too nonsensical even for my inflamed mind. Varvara was no more mean than those medieval barons who fought to the death for a few fields: most of them were not interested in rental values but they all regarded property as an adjunct of their personalities, and if it was diminished against their will, so were the latter. But no such disparagement applied to free gifts and they would hand over to charity the thing for which they had slaughtered their neighbours.

  From this time a reaction began in my feelings about Varvara. It coincided with an improvement in my health. The rest of my personal story, so far as it is relevant, can be told in a few words.

  I left Arosa cured after five years, and I have never had any recurrence of the disease. Whilst I was in the sanatorium one of my fellow-patients and a close friend happened to be a boy of my own age whose father was an English solicitor settled in Paris where he carried on a profitable practice among the English community. The son died, and his father offered me the place which he would have taken in the firm, partly out of sentiment and partly because it was essential in his business to have someone who not only possessed legal knowledge but could also speak first-class German and French. When I had served my articles and passed my exams I became a partner, and with the interruption of the war I have held that position ever since.

  For present purposes the point is that the break in my life which occurred at Christmas 1928 was prolonged by the nature of my career. I lived entirely in Paris, seldom visiting England more than three or four times in one year. All the cracks of separation widened, first into ravines and then canyons. Twice on my brief trips I went back and looked at Aynho Terrace. The first time the front badly wanted painting but there was a Rolls Royce outside. The next, the façade had been done up but there was a board attached to it advertising flats to let. All down the road the great monsters of the late Victorian age were being chopped up into more usable forms: and the once quiet air was full of dust and loud with the whistling of labourers as they slammed matchboard partitions into the enormous rooms.

  I don’t know what practical object these visits served. Certainly if I wanted to learn about Varvara they were completely useless, and I ought to have made inquiries by means which by that time I knew only too well. A competent firm of private detectives would soon have tracked her down. The more remarkable her history, the simpler the task. But I never even toyed with the idea because in my heart I felt that a contact deliberately and artificially renewed would be somehow vitiated.


  This may have been a way of disguising from myself the warnings of common sense: there was at least a chance that Varvara would have grown into an unpleasant woman, and a fair certainty that her gift for disorganizing people’s lives would have matured along with her other traits.

  But inaction is not resignation. One may take no physical steps and yet the mind may be full of the patter of their inner equivalents. I often thought about Varvara—not in the earlier jaundiced way but with affectionate speculation: indeed I still do so. Under this treatment the ghost of her personality began to develop as its real presence might have, choosing certain definite lines of progression out of all those which had been possible at the time when we parted.

  This seemed to happen without any assistance from my mind. Not that I entirely excluded my own conscious conclusions. For instance I saw in retrospect that, during her early days in England, I had much overestimated her confidence in herself. She was in reality very lost, and at times probably frightened. But the ferocious tradition in which she had been bred caused her to react to threats like a wild animal, with bared teeth and tense muscles: whereas a creature with a more civilized background would have tried to slide through her troubles.

  Apart from this, it was easy to exaggerate the influence of her pre-English environment. Doljuk accentuated and adorned the oddities of her character, but it did not create them. If she had been brought up in Brighton she would still have been a somewhat ferocious young woman: nor would regular attendance at Sunday School have killed her capacity for self-dramatization against a religious background. But take away one or the other of her parents, and the result would certainly have been different, whatever part of the world she had inhabited. She was born at a point of confluence where strong currents of valour, brutality, and practical intelligence poured into a steamy lake surrounded by rather theatrical scenery.

  Curiously enough, the material circumstance which now seems to attach to her most firmly is not one to which, in the days of our acquaintance, she had any real title. Then—whatever the future might hold in store—she was certainly not rich. Nor do I know what happened afterwards. If I assume that, with Cedric removed, Mrs. Ellison divided her fortune between her two granddaughters, it is not so much because that would have been the natural thing to do, as because I totally fail to envisage Varvara as anything but a very wealthy woman. Her personality needed a large income for its expansion, and by one or another means, inheritance or marriage or both, I am convinced that she obtained it. She was not a person who would submit to any cramping of her destiny.

  It seems perhaps a little fatuous to lay down conditions of life for somebody whose actual history remains unknown. Here I must plead guilty to playing a sort of private game. Ignorance of facts can be an advantage in that it gives one a freer hand. Years ago I realized that, so long as I did not burden myself with the narrow truth, I could give Varvara any career I liked, or indeed the choice of several. If I had had stronger creative powers, I should probably have simply made up a series of fantasies about her. But being, as it were, tied by one foot to earth I fell back on ready-made material, merely using my imagination to establish identity. In concrete terms, I have for many years been picking out items from the newspapers and other sources about women who might be the present Varvara. It is a little like the Eton Wall Game in which goals are scored only at long intervals, for, if it is to be played fairly, not only does the story have to ring psychologically true, but the details, such as names, initials, ages, etc., have to avoid contradicting any known facts. Hence it is that, though I have come across a good many cases where identification at first seems possible, there are only three to which I would accord a diploma of spiritual truth.

  The first, dated 1936, comes from the columns of a French weekly paper which has now been extinguished for the part which it played before and during the German Occupation. In its day it was a most disreputable rag, far exceeding in scurrility anything which would be tolerated from the British Press. Still, on occasions when only its routine malice, not its political passions, were aroused it could produce some amusing snippets. That, however, is perhaps the wrong word, for the editor devoted considerable space to any story which pleased him.

  I translate fairly literally:

  ‘A boat tossing alone on the Gulf of Guinea has written another chapter in the tumultuous history of Mme Barbara Peigneret, English-born widow of soap-millionaire Marcel Peigneret, whose mysterious death of four years ago so much embroiled the discreet police of Lyons. Undeterred by her narrow escape from charges following her husband’s fall from a third-floor window, Mme Barbara became a noted solicitress of the French Law. At one time scarcely a month passed without the Courts being cheered and electrified by a stage in her innumerable processes against the relatives of her late husband. At length however the triumphs of the witness-box began to pall and the beautiful protagonist made a poignant declaration to the Press. “Modern life is corrupt. I have determined to quit it, alone with a few other sympathetic spirits.” On further inquiry it appeared that, employing a fortune already sufficiently large before she began to assert her rights, she had leased from the Portuguese Government the uninhabited island of Sao Onofrio in the Bissagos Group just off the Guinea coast. “I plan to settle there”, she said, “and found the perfect democratic society. I shall be Queen and my subjects will have completely free access to me.”

  ‘The last at any rate seems to have been true, for the new paradise had not been instituted for more than six months before representations were made by the Catholic Church in Lisbon to abolish it on the grounds that a public desecration of morals was taking place on Portuguese territory. Evidently this lady had her own interpretation of democracy. If it permitted a Queen, how could a Court be forbidden? When the chartered vessel, Secours de Sainte Anne, set out from Marseilles in November 1934 it carried not only five families of ordinary colonists, about whom one could say that they sought nothing more than to change very moderate gifts of fortune, but also the direct entourage and inner council of Mme Peigneret. The latter, who happened to be all males, consisted of: M. Jean-Raymond Manitou who acted in several films until his conviction for harbouring narcotics; M. Edmond Sameuil, twice-divorced international Rugby-footballer; M. Robert Conte, business man, who in 1934 adroitly dissociated himself from the scandal of Blum-Stavisky; and finally a mysterious character, Stefan Tourdieff, ex-Polish miner and mystagogue who was reputed to instruct his paymistress in the arts of Yoga.

  ‘A fair landing was made on the chosen island. Thereafter no more was heard from Sao Onofrio until M. André Ledoux, a French journalist who had occasion to visit Bolama, decided to extend his journey so as to obtain a glimpse of the new settlement. His visit was not altogether welcome, but before ejection he managed to obtain certain details of Mme Peigneret’s social experiment. Tragedy, alas, had already struck the little community. Whilst the worthy plebeians set about producing quarters from the jungle which prevailed over most of the island, Mme Peigneret and her friends were already pursuing an active social life. It appears that, at first, M. Manitou was most favoured with the intimate confidences of the leading lady; but that after a while his position began to be sapped by the spiritual machinations of M. Tourdieff, who expressed doubts not only whether M. Manitou’s etheric vibrations were suited to his position but also whether he had satisfactorily recovered from a certain disability which he had contracted round the film studios.

  ‘Sequel—both men went off on a bathing-trip to talk over the situation. Neither returned, but four days later the body of M. Manitou was washed ashore covered with the stabs of a small knife. Query—M. Tourdieff, had he suffered a mutual fate, or had he perhaps dematerialized himself in order to avoid hurtful gossip?

  ‘M. Conte succeeded to the status of consort, but his tenure was a short one, for he was swept away in convulsions by a mysterious fever. Remained only the athletic M. Sameuil who endured for more than a year. Unhappily his experience among the scrums and mêlées h
ad given him a taste for variety and quick movement and he began simultaneously to pay addresses to the most attractive wife among the commoners. No harm would perhaps have ensued if he had not tripped and accidentally split his skull on an axe with which the husband happened to be following him.

  ‘Too late Sao Onofrio came to regret the high marital standards of the avenger. In agricultural terms one says that the balance of nature has been upset when the removal of one pest leads to new ravages by creatures on which it formerly preyed. Queen Barbara, being now entirely deprived of high-class satisfactions, began to look towards lower sources. The quiet sunbaked air of the island was continually rent with hideous rows and altercations [rixes et bagarres] and the perpetual booming of the surf was almost drowned by the cries of outraged womanhood. Finally the men themselves, reduced to a simple taste for peace, conspired with their wives to rid the island of its turbulent ruler. Mme Peigneret was seized whilst she slept and thrown into a small row-boat which had been equipped with a few provisions and a keg of water. In true pirate fashion she was cast adrift and the current rapidly bore her out of sight of her relieved subjects.

  ‘This one must admit, Mme Peigneret has never lacked resolution or courage. For eleven days, long after her food was exhausted, she floated over a little-known expanse of the Atlantic. Her water too had just given out when she was saved from certain death by a chance sighting of the Greek vessel, Louloudhi.

  ‘Tanned to the colour of old bronze she stood once more on the quay at Marseilles being interviewed by our representative. “Life is a pilgrimage,” she said, “and Sao Onofrio was not the most curious place to which it has taken me. I spent much of my early life in the Far East where I was adored by the natives and learnt resignation.” Asked where next she proposed to direct her pilgrim footsteps Mme Peigneret drew up her magnificent frame to its full six feet and said: “Towards the fulfilment of my essential destiny. I find that I am pregnant.” ’