by Ann Bridge
And he could not help being touched by the child. She was a little thing of about seven, russet is colouring like her mother, but fairer, and not beautiful; only the same immense blue-grey eyes looked out of her small, pitifully thin face. She sprang up at their entrance, and went towards her mother with an illuminated face of greeting, but without a sound—then checked at the sight of the stranger; when she was introduced she curtsied, and then busied herself in stacking the wood neatly in a pile beside the stove, and in stoking that up with a few small bits. It was bitterly cold in the room. This done, she sat down on the corner of the palliasse and went on knitting at a small sock, which she had put down when they came in. The Condesa sat on the stool and gave Milcom the chair with the imperceptible gracious finality of the accomplished hostess, which it would have been ill-bred to disobey. He did his best to conceal his dismay at their surroundings, and talked as well as he could; most of the time he watched the child. She was unnaturally quiet and discreet in all her actions, it seemed to him—and she looked horribly fragile. Sometimes she raised her eyes and rested them on her mother with a look which went right through Milcom—the look of a person holding to their only life-line, their one security. And they had been living together like that, in that room, for a year!
Before he left he got the name of the Republican brother, who had been killed fighting before Madrid. Milcom was on the best of terms with the Republican authorities, and had some excellent connections in high quarters; being a foreigner, he could befriend even a White, if he chose, without much risk, but the brother’s name would be a help. As he walked away he realised that he had definitely decided to. befriend this pair to some extent—that look in the child’s eyes had clinched the matter.
Food was his first concern. The child looked half starved. He, like most foreigners, had a very small reserve of such things as chocolate, sugar and cigarettes, presents brought in from outside, which came in handy on occasions like the present. He went and talked to one of the relief organisations, explained the situation, and raised a couple of tins of condensed milk; from the proprietor of a restaurant where he had eaten regularly for months he managed to obtain some tinned soup, and, for a vast price, four eggs and a small lump of butter; later he made an expedition to a very shabby indeterminate little back yard down by the Manzanares, from which he emerged with a small and ancient hand-saw wrapped in newspapers, and three more eggs. Milcom had all sorts of odd friends and acquaintances all over the city, who were useful to him for a variety of purposes; the late proprietor of the hand-saw was one of these. But he knew better than to take all these stores at once to the Condesa’s cellar residence; that would merely be to invite trouble. His room contained a wall cupboard, with a good lock, and in this he stowed away all but one tin of milk and two of soup, the four restaurant eggs, the butter and the saw; these he made up into a parcel with some sugar and some chocolate, and again on foot, he set off to carry them to the Condesa. A car outside her door might have excited comment, and anyhow the government requisition chits for petrol were strictly limited, even for journalists. All these activities had taken some time—nothing can be done quickly in Spain—and a harsh coppery glare, interpenetrating the heavy clouds, showed that the day was nearing its end as he strode rapidly through the streets, his hat pulled down over his gloomy face against the savage wind, his coat flapping round his long legs as its ragged garments flaps round the single leg of a scarecrow in a field.
As he went he was thinking, oddly enough, about his mother. She had been in his mind all day, though he had not consciously thought of her for years. She had had the same unusual blue-grey eyes as the Condesa—Irish eyes, he had always imagined them to be; it must be the Condesa’s eyes, and that little child’s, that had brought her back into his mind like this. He rammed his hat farther down over his head, as a gust caught him at a corner, and hurried on.
The fact was that life had always been difficult for him, and tragic; less in the sense that he had any immediate personal tragedy than that he was deeply imbued with what Unamuno calls the Tragic Sense of Life. For this his mother was at least partly responsible. James Milcom was very far from being what a wit has called “no more than the remains of a mother’s meal”; but he had been deeply and sensibly devoted to a beautiful and gifted mother, and on her tragedy had laid its hand. She was Irish, married to a Yorkshireman, the reasonably wealthy owner of a wool mill outside Bradford, and her wit and the sparkling quality of her mind, the queer dancing logic of the Irish mentality had been in perpetual gay conflict with his father’s dour, hard-headed, and wholly unenthusiastic common sense. That in itself didn’t amount to a tragedy, though tragic potentialities are always latent in such a combination; but it was sufficient of itself to produce a certain effect on a child. Too sharply contrasted characters in the parents, however well they may manage to get on, have a very marked effect on the development of their off-spring; the children’s minds are unnaturally sharpened by living in two mental climates simultaneously, their own inherited tendencies force them instinctively to take sides, to move in one atmosphere rather than in the other; they become wary and sensitive. All this had happened to the child James. But this was not all. The elder Milcom was implacably opposed to Home Rule; his youngest brother-in-law, over in Ireland, became an ardent Sinn Feiner, and was eventually shot by the Black-and-Tans in 1922. Between Milcom’s mother and this brother there had existed a very close link of affection and understanding—in her own words, he was the world and all to her; and with his death tragedy had unmistakeably come into that household.
James, then a boy of twenty, had watched his mother’s agony, and his father’s rigid and stubborn refusal to compromise with his political principles even to ease the sorrow of a wife to whom in his own stolid way he was devoted, and on whom he was in fact absurdly dependent. He had seen then, with eyes sharpened by pain, the cruel tyranny which love exercises over duty and compassion, as he watched her struggles to adapt herself to an emotional situation which was really impossible of endurance. That lasted for about a year; then she died—apparently of influenza, really, the desperate boy realised, of a broken heart: a heart broken less by the loss of the brother she adored than by that interior struggle, the attempt at an impossible degree of self-suppression and self-control. At his father’s quite genuine despair at her death he had not known whether to laugh or to rage—within himself he did now the one, now the other.
All this had had a profound effect on him. The wary sensitiveness of the child who is brought up in two conflicting mental climates had been extended and developed into the man’s attitude towards adult personal relationships. It was almost timidity—but not quite; rather a cautious, almost harsh avoidance of what could cause such horrible pain. From love and marriage he had definitely averted his face; the passion that might have gone into them he deflected onto the affairs of mankind at large. Beginning as an instinct, this had turned into a deliberate rule. He had allowed himself a few brief love-affairs, in which the spirit was in no way involved—and thoroughly unsatisfying he had found them, apart from the immediate physical satisfaction. But rule his life as he would, from his sensitiveness there was no escape; any human suffering or distress or generosity or beauty moved him instantly—he was helpless, defenceless in the face of such things. That child in the cellar, to whom he was now hurrying through the windy streets, and her quiet-voiced uncomplaining mother—to such he would always be accessible, would always have to waste the better part of a day on doing something to help them out.
They were sitting quietly at the table when he arrived, under that horrible unshaded bulb; the child still knitting at her little sock, the Condesa mending a small dress. When he undid his parcel, putting down the tin of milk, the two tins of soup, the butter and the eggs beside the graceful vase of wintry flowerheads, the child opened her mouth, silently, while the delicate colour flooded her thin face—then, without a sound, she shut it again. No words, no gesture, could have moved Milcom so much.
To escape from his own emotion, he finally drew out the little handsaw.
At that, the Condesa exclaimed.
“Oh, how clever you are! No, but it is wonderful that you should have thought of that. We needed one so much—but it is so difficult to get them, now.” She looked full at him. “I do thank you—so much.”
Of course she wanted to pay. James had expected this, and prepared for it. He had friends, he said, who were under an obligation to him, and sold to him unreasonably cheaply; the eggs and butter were so much, the saw a loan; the milk, soup, sugar and chocolate were a distribution from Los Quaqueros. He had absolutely no compunction about lying to her about this, and to his relief she accepted his lies. She counted out a few pesetas from a shabby little despatch case, which lived behind the stove, and, gravely thanking her, he took them. There was more milk already given, and more soup, he told her; but he had locked it up at home. “I shall bring it round in a day or so.” The child’s face, as he spoke, caught his eye; she shivered at his words, and then broke into a fit of coughing. The room was still very cold. He glanced at the small heap of wood by the stove, and took his leave. Outside the house, he did not turn homewards, but instead walked rapidly towards the burned-out church where he had met the Condesa that morning. There, in the icy dusk, he spent half an hour grubbing among the ruins, till he had collected a large pile of wood; this he tied into his overcoat, and bore it back to the cellar.
The Condesa raised her delicate dark eyebrows when she opened the door to him a second time within the hour.
“I found some more wood, so I brought it along,” Milcom said apologetically—her face made him feel apologetic. And, awkwardly, he set down his overcoat bundle on the floor, untied the sleeves and the tails, and began to pile the wood on the heap by the stove. She stood watching him, an unfathomable expression on her lovely face; she had risen from the table, where the little Pilar still sat, eating that unwonted treat, bread and butter, and a helping of omelette.
“I’m disturbing you at your supper,” James said, uncomfortably. “But if you would just go on, and eat it while it’s hot, I could saw some of this up for you.” His face and voice were almost appealing.
At that, the Condesa smiled, a brilliant smile.
“That would be very kind,” she said. “I shall—take you at your word; is that how you say it?”
So while the Condesa and the child finished their meal, Milcom, kneeling on the palliasse, sawed up his wood into lengths suitable to the capacity of the stove. Concentrating on his task—it is a job to saw wood without a sawing-horse, when one must hold it steady with the left hand—he was nevertheless aware of what they were doing; the child clearing the table and setting the things aside on the tea-chest, her mother making coffee on the stove. It was all very domestic, and rather charming—poor as the room was, it was a home, and feminine, and pleasant. When he had done, and had re-stoked the stove and stacked a fine pile of wood beside it, she invited him to a cup of coffee; Pilar meanwhile curling herself up on the palliasse. He sat on the stool this time; he took out a packet of cigarettes, and offered one to the Condesa—she took it, and when he had lit it for her, inhaled with an air of profound satisfaction.
“That is wonderful!” she said, with a natural fervour which touched him.
“Do you smoke a great deal?” he asked.
“I used to,” she said. James realised the whole world of deprivation which those three words contained. He wished to God he had thought to bring cigarettes too. Shamefacedly, when he left, he offered her his packet—“I am going straight home, and I have plenty; people bring them to me.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I shall enjoy them.” Then her face changed, the expression seemed to deepen, though her soft voice remained quiet and unemphatic. “And thank you, so very much, more than I can tell you, for all that you have done for us. You are very good.” She held out her hand in farewell.
But the child was, for once, emphatic. “Buenas noches!” little Pilar cried, springing up from the palliasse and running to him. “Oh, muchas muchas gracias!” And she dropped her discreet little curtsey.
“Buenas noches, you little popinjay!” Milcom said, patting her small russet head in an awkward caress—and took his hat and went. As he climbed the dark steps he heard her high voice asking her mother what a “popinjay” was.
During the next few weeks Milcom became a regular visitor at the cellar. Two days seldom passed without his dropping in with something—a tin of milk, a screw of paper with sugar in it, a packet of cigarettes, a spot of butter, some tinned soup or corned beef, one or two precious eggs. Usually he went in the evening, after dark, so that his visits might arouse the least attention from possibly hostile neighbours; he generally sat for a little, talking, while the Condesa sewed and Pilar, small and silent, knitted at her socks, curled up on the palliasse. Their subjects of conversation were rather limited, since Milcom from the outset made no secret of his Republican sympathies; politics were therefore ruled out, and even comment on the latest bombardment was limited to details of how it had affected this street or that shop. Those hearty expressions of detestation or satisfaction, which so nourish a population in time of war were denied to these two. They had no mutual acquaintances to talk about, their lives had no common background—even the background of books and literature was extremely restricted in their case, since the Condesa had read very little in English, and Milcom’s Spanish reading had been chiefly among the modern Liberal philosophers, like Unamuno, whose books were on the Index for Roman Catholics, and in any case were rather outside the Condesa’s intellectual range. He did get some idea of what that was, bit by bit—how, he hardly knew, for she never spoke about herself, her family, her husband or her past life, except in the briefest allusion; sometimes, when James mentioned a place that he had visited in the course of his work she would say—“Oh yes, I know that”; and then would go on to ask if he remembered this bridge or that church or village. On such occasions she would slip back into recollections, very vivid and clear: “There is a little valley, where the river makes a bend, so”—her hands shaped the bend—“below some rocks, and three olive trees are in a very pretty group by the river, and a little chapel, very much ruined. There used to be white goats there. And in autumn the pink cyclamens, the very very little ones, grow on the bank. Did you go there?” Nearly always, flowers figured in these memories of places, he noticed. Or she would tell stories of the peasants, funny things they had said, touching things they had done. And sometimes she would ask the child if she remembered this place or that.
Even out of these slender materials, he managed to form some sort of idea of her as a person—but it was a curiously abstract, disembodied idea, wholly detached from all the externals of her own life; thinking about it once, he was reminded of a friend’s description of Virginia Woolf’s characters—“souls swimming about, waving their tails, in a vessel of crystal prose, like goldfish in a bowl.” Like goldfish too he and this woman, he felt, swam about, not in a bowl of crystal prose, but in the shadowy, cold, hunger-ridden, death-menaced city, a form of existence which had something ghostly about it. He had first met her prowling like a shawled ghost among the ruins; and their continued relationship had this same ghostly quality, as of a foregathering of discarnate spirits. From her speech and voice and aspect he did, in these frequent meetings, inevitably gather some impression. of her character—overshadowed as this was by the shattering fact of her extreme beauty, a thing which tends to dwarf personality; and not only in the beholder. Very beautiful people, he had long since decided, had almost as much of a job to become or remain fully human as great artists. “I sometimes wish people were not so beautiful—it distracts one from the conversation.” That quotation from George Mallory’s private diary was often in his mind as he sat with Raquel de Verdura; the cast of his mind was such that as he grew to know her more, and like her increasingly, he felt her beauty to be almost a disfigurement, a distortion of her real self.
Wha
t was that self? More and more frequently, his mind asked that question. Simplicity ruled by sophistication; naturalness governed by social training; spontaneity allowed by a rigid self-control—of all these he was aware; but she really was simple and natural and spontaneous; she had, he was certain, a nature in itself happy, trained for enjoyment; she was vividly aware of things, gave a quick ready response; she had a seeing eye, as her little verbal sketches of the places she loved showed; and she had an odd shrewdness—though her education and intellectual interests appeared fairly limited, she was not stupid. As to her relation to the child, it was charming; it seemed to him perfect. Pilar brought the one element of human actuality, which could not be suppressed or disguised, into the picture. There was between them a mutality of understanding and tender devotion which, visibly, made every moment together a separate happiness, and every parting, even when she only went to stand in the street to wait for rice and chick peas, a dismay. (For wood the Condesa no longer went searching—by one means or another, he kept the cellar supplied with that.) He found this relationship infinitely touching; as for the child herself, he soon became quite devoted to her. “Es nuestro Meelcomm!” he would hear her little voice say, as he clumped down the cellar steps, with a gladness, a welcome in it that warmed his unattached heart.
Slowly and methodically, too, he busied himself in getting better quarters for them. The cellar was intolerably damp and draughty, and the child’s cough, which got only slightly better under the influence of condensed milk and occasional eggs, worried him continually. He. would have liked to get them into the Telephone Company’s Building, which had central heating, but that was impossible. However he eventually found another and a better room, drier, and with fewer draughts, and persuaded the Condesa to the move.
