Frontier Passage

by Ann Bridge

  “What a surly brute,” Mr. Oldhead said, disgustedly.

  “Lousy,” Rosemary agreed from the end of the line.

  At length the guide announced that they were now under Spain—which was easy to believe, for they seemed to have been walking for at least twenty-five minutes—and presently he led them to the most curious sight of all, the “Arbre de Noël” as he called it. This was certainly a most singular object. In the centre of a vertical circular hollow in the rock, like the inside of a factory chimney, and perhaps as much as eighty feet high rose a tall slender rock column, plastered all over with limy deposit, and grooved with flat rings or ridges, a foot or more wide, for the whole of its height, which was the same as that of the enclosing chimney; it did indeed strikingly resemble those toy wooden trees which used sometimes to be sold with Noah’s Arks. The space between the stone tree and its enclosing chimney was so narrow that the visitors could only just edge past in single file; the guide pointed out that by craning their necks and looking up, they could see the sky overhead. While Crossman and Mr. Oldhead began to discuss exactly how this geological phenomenon had been formed, presumably by stones and water cutting down through the softer rock round a hard core, Rosemary, who still carried her candle, began to climb the stone tree; standing on the ledges and pressing with her free hand against the corresponding bulges and grooves of the chimney wall, she found it quite easy to get up, and reached a height of several feet. Here she paused, and as usual began to look about her; she was on the opposite side of the pillar to the guide, who did not see what she was doing till she suddenly called out—“Daddy! Mummie! This is most extraordinary! People go up and down here—there are nail-marks on the stone.”

  They all crowded round then, as well as they could, to see what she was up to—the guide with them; when he saw her on her perch, he called furiously to her to come down, come down at once.

  “But it is very interesting,” she called back to him in French—“One goes up and one comes down by here—one sees the traces on the rock.”

  Rudely, he shouted back that it was ridiculous, what she said—no one passed that way. She must descend instantly—to climb about in the Grotte was forbidden. And he made as if to climb up after her and pull her down.

  Mr. Oldhead, at last exasperated, intervened.

  “Here, here, here!” he said, pushing the young man aside with surprising vigour, “we’ve had about enough of your temper, my friend. Assez, assez!” he went on, recollecting his French; “leave Mademoiselle alone; she will come down. She has done no harm. Keep still!”—as the Basque, after the first astonished recoil, made a step forward again; he said this so threateningly that for the second time the guide stood back. “Come on down, Rosemary,” he said—and then turned and examined the ledges on a level with his face. “You see well that there are here the marks of feet,” he said to the guide, pointing to unmistakable scratches on the slippery calcareous surface.

  “Mademoiselle has made them herself,” said the boy sulkily.

  “Mademoiselle, as you can very well see, is wearing shoes with soles of rubber,” Crossman put in. “Such make no marks. Why all this fuss?”

  Scowling, the guide shrugged and gave it up; when Rosemary had got down he led the way out of the chimney, and took them back through the cavern, by a much shorter route than the one by which they had come.

  “Funny, that,” Crossman remarked to Mr. Oldhead as they went along—“Someone certainly has been going up and down that thing, but I don’t see why this guide chap should get into such a stew about it.”

  “Don’t you?” replied Oldhead, laconically.

  “Smuggling, I suppose,” put in Mrs. Oldhead.

  “By Jove, yes—and this young fellow or the old boy outside are the receleurs,” said Crossman, delighted.

  “What’s a receleur?” asked Mrs. Oldhead.

  “Mummie! surely you know that! It’s a receiver of stolen goods.”

  “He looked rather a nice old man—much nicer than this horrible sour creature,” said Mrs. Oldhead, who always passed these little judgements on people to whom she had spoken twice.

  “His breath wasn’t nice,” said her husband, who was invariably irritated by the said judgements.

  “Shall we tip him, think?” Crossman asked, as a faint glimmer of light ahead showed that they were nearing the mouth of the cave.

  “I shall, yes—after all, he did take us round, if he made a fool of himself,” said Mr. Oldhead, whose Liberal ideas had given him a passion for justice even in small things. And when they reached the spacious chamber inside the entrance, which now seemed bright to them, he offered some coins to the guide. Surly to the last—“Give it to the vieillard; he needs it most,” the young man said, switched off the lights, and shepherded them out past the pool and the half-sunken punt, onto the open space where their car waited for them.

  To the old man, accordingly, they gave the tip; he was still hanging about outside, and the young one said something curtly to him in Basque before he disappeared. The old man led them to Pierre Loti’s tea-garden, a peculiar spot just beyond the entrance to the grotto; little tables of stone in curious shapes, and rustic seats of stone or wood, were set among young fruit trees—it was very “Ye Olde” as Rosemary said, and actually rather ugly, with the ugly fantasy of a gnomes’ paradise in a Teutonic fairytale; but at that hour it had a certain charm. The sun had gone down behind the line of hill which stood close above them, and mist was rising from the stream—a diffused golden light filtered through the mist and between the late yellow leaves of the young fruit trees, a thin moon hung in the sky above the tawny ridge. The old man, who was as friendly as the young one was unamiable, chattered freely; he told Mrs. Oldhead all about his cancer of the stomach, and gave Mr. Oldhead and Crossman his views on the Spanish War—eventually he pointed out where the frontier ran, not two hundred metres from where they stood, and volunteered to take the party “a few steps” to where they could see the sentries guarding it. Crossman and the two Oldheads, still talking, went with him, but Rosemary remained behind, unnoticed. She was suddenly invaded by an overwhelming longing for Milcom; she had just been under Spain, and he was in Spain! And in that misty orchard, in the tender uncertain light, she felt that for a moment or two she simply must allow herself to think about him, to recall his face, with the deep-set eyes and the corrugated forehead, the grim mouth that was yet so amazingly sweet when he smiled—and to remember his voice, uttering his brief appropriate sentences and penetrating, illuminating comments.

  Since that meeting with him on the path below the little Phare, when she first realised that Milcom and the Condesa loved one another, the young girl had travelled a long way. The sudden discovery that she herself cared for h m had taken her completely by surprise, as much so as if an earthquake or some other natural disaster had overtaken her. Indeed it was rather as a disaster that she regarded it. She loved him, of course, and must always love him; but he could never compete with the Condesa, beautiful and gifted with every charm—it was a life sentence that she was contemplating. And in this knowledge—none the less desolating because time might at length prove it false—she had passed one of the hardest weeks of her life. The Condesa, her other idol, was by this time very fond of her, and liked to have her about—all unwitting, she treated her as a small and convenient third, an innocent gooseberry, to chaperone a number of minor meetings. And Rosemary, unable to refuse anything that her adored Condesa asked of her, and drawn irresistibly by the enchantment of seeing and hearing Milcom, had sat with the pair at the Bar Basque, at Gaston’s, at the little restaurant at Guéthary, in such a mixture of rapture and pain as left her quite exhausted. Now that Milcom had gone, that pain had taken on a different shape—less of a spear, more of a burden, a heavy treasure that she carried about through the long hours of each day, feeling its weight without, usually, pausing to examine it. Now, in that misty golden orchard, she did as it were undo the parcel—sitting on one of the rustic seats, half-hidde
n by a low bushy tree, she gave herself up to dreaming of him; without hope, but in a stillness that was like music.

  She was sitting so, gazing idly before her in the direction of the grotto, when she saw a man emerge from the depths of the cave and appear in the entrance. He started to walk along the small path beside the pool, till he came within sight of the car, standing waiting on the parking-place; she saw him check, hesitate, and then turn and go back into the cave. The oddity of this behaviour roused her attention, and brought her thoughts back to earth. It was not the sulky young guide—she had seen that much; but if there was another man in the cave, why had they not seen him? Before she had done more than ask herself this question, the man appeared again, this time to the left of the pool; he must have waded across, for the legs of his rough trousers were dripping. Glancing cautiously round, he nipped out of the cave, and slipped in among the trees of the little orchard.

  All Rosemary’s faculties sprang to attention at once. He didn’t want to be seen, that was clear. Perhaps he was a smuggler, and had come in by the chimney! Then was that why the guide had been so cross when she had found the nail-marks? Her mind leapt from point to point. The guide must be in league with him—perhaps had been expecting him to-day; that would explain his evident reluctance to show them round the cave. But if he was a smuggler, it must be currency, for he carried no bundle. While her thoughts raced, her eyes were watching the man as he moved through the trees. He sat down on one of Loti’s fungoid seats, and wrung the water out of his trousers; he had not seen her. Then he walked a few steps forward again, stood, looked and listened. He must be wondering where the people from the car had got to, she thought. He was still not near enough for her to see his face clearly, but in spite of his rough clothes he did not walk like a peasant. Now he moved forward again, in her direction—sitting quite still, half-hidden by the tree, in that faint light she was practically invisible, till in a moment he stood before her.

  Even then he did not actually start—it was more that every muscle in his body became almost visibly tense, and his right hand half-moved towards his left arm in a gesture that American films have made familiar to the whole world; then dropped again. He was tall, slight, rather graceful, with black hair and grey eyes; the skin much tanned, but with an athlete’s clear brown rather than the weathered roughened mahogany of the peasant; his hands were long and fine, she noticed, with beautiful though grimed nails, narrow as filberts. This was no peasant. His face was long too, with a long high-bridged nose and a shapely sensitive mouth; the forehead magnificent, and about the whole face an appearance of vigour, intelligence and resolution, with just that touch of reserve, of withdrawnness, that sculpture gives to a face—a look that Rosemary was coming to think of as typically Spanish. Beyond all doubt, as he stood there in his shabby jacket, rough shirt, and torn wet trousers, he was one of the most splendid human beings she had ever seen.

  For a moment or two they remained, staring at one another. Then Rosemary spoke—she had the advantage of him, she felt; he could not know how much she had seen.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur,” she said civilly.

  He bowed, but did not return her salutation; then suddenly he smiled at her.

  “Where do you come from, Mademoiselle?” he asked in French.

  “From the grotto—my friends have just gone up to look at the frontier,” she answered—she felt a curious wish to put him at his ease. Her heart was beating rather violently—this was no common smuggler, anyhow.

  “And you remained here?” he asked.

  “I remained here. Je rêvais,” she said.

  She saw him give a half-glance over his shoulder, and knew that he was trying to see how much she could have seen of his movements. Then he turned back and studied her face.

  “It is beautiful here,” she said casually, still under that curious impulse to put him at ease, to make him relax that tenseness that she felt, rather than saw. “Do you live here?”

  That did it. His voice was quite different as he answered—“Near here—a little way down the road.”

  She didn’t believe it for a moment, though she was glad that he accepted her pretence. For what should such a glorious creature do, living in this out-of-the-way valley?

  “And you, Mademoiselle?” he asked her then; “where do you live?”

  “Oh, we are staying at St.-Jean-de-Luz,” she said.

  “Tiens, St.-Jean. In a hotel?”

  “Yes—the Grande Bretagne.”

  He looked at her curiously.

  “You find it comfortable?” he asked.

  “Oh yes—perfectly. It’s a little old-fashioned, but very nice.”

  “The nourishment good?”

  “Oh yes—the best food in St.-Jean, as hotels go. Why, do you know it?”

  “It is well spoken of,” he said. He put a foot up on one of the seats, leaned his elbow on it, and spoke now with a sort of casual ease. “It is very full?” he asked.

  “Fairly.”

  “There are any Spanish people there? Refugees?”

  “One or two—ladies mostly,” Rosemary said, a little surprised at these questions.

  “And you know them?”

  “One I do, quite well,” she replied, her thoughts flying back to Milcom and the Condesa.

  “And they seem cheerful, well? One wonders if they are in good spirits, leaving the beloved hearts behind,” he said thoughtfully.

  “She is,” the girl said, recalling the Condesa’s brilliant face of joy all the past week.

  “It is well, that. The poor ones!” he said. Then he took his foot down off the seat, straightened up, and looked her full in the face.

  “You are English, I expect, Mademoiselle. Ah, what good fortune you have in England, rich and at peace, compared with poor Spain!”

  “But France is all right,” the girl said, looking as straight at him.

  “Ah, France!” the young man said with a shrug. “No one ever knows how it is with France, well or ill. Au revoir, Mademoiselle.”

  “Au revoir,” she said.

  He walked out through the trees, crossed behind the cottage, and disappeared. A moment later she saw him come out onto the road and walk down it, till a bend hid his figure from view. There was something odd, something almost vaguely familiar about his walk, but she could not think of what it reminded her.

  She was unusually silent on the drive home, her Mother noticed. She was thinking intently about the man from the cave, going over all the facts, again and again, piecing them together, as her habit was. He might of course have been in there all the time, lurking in some side gallery beyond the lights, and have come out when he expected them to be gone; or he might have come in down the stone ladder formed by the Arbre de Noël after they had left it. In either case, when he did come out, he had been checked by the sight of the car; that was certain; and he was sufficiently anxious to avoid being seen to wade across the pool, wetting himself to the knees. That closed all possibility of his being just a peasant, living close by, idling about the cave, for such would have no objection to meeting people. Then there was his brief gesture when he saw her. She was sure she was not mistaken about that. She did not imagine that he had meant to shoot her, at any point—but it was the instinctive movement of a man who goes armed, and is accustomed to use his weapon. Peasants in the Pays Basque did not do either of these things. It threw a rather lurid light on him. Smugglers, even currency smugglers, seldom shot, Crumpaun had told her; that movement was the gesture of the spy, who carried his life and more than his life in his hand. And everything about him, bar his clothes, pointed to his being a man of education and of birth. Argue it as she would, minimise as she would, her mind could not resist the fantastic conclusion that she had probably seen and spoken to a real spy. Perhaps even the famous Number 17 himself! She remembered the journalists’ talk of him that morning at the Bar Basque, after she had met the Condesa in the flower market. “One of their best men,” someone pretty smart, who crossed the frontier at t
he Irún end and made direct for Biarritz. Well, if that glorious young man was not one of their best men, she would like to meet the ones who were, Rosemary thought. He was heavenly!

  While Rosemary thus meditated, on the drive home, her elders discussed the nail marks on the Arbre de Noël and the behaviour of the guide. It was all very peculiar, Crossman said.

  “Very suspicious, if you ask me,” Mr. Oldhead observed. Rosemary, catching the drift of these remarks, put in her oar.

  “Silly bat-wit of a guide!” she said breezily. “Of course the smugglers use it. But if he had kept his stupid mouth shut, we should never have paid any particular attention to it.” She had already decided to keep her own mouth shut about the man from the cave for the present.

  But Mr. Oldhead was not so easily satisfied. He was worried and anxious about the Republican cause at this time, and angry with the British Government for closing its eyes to the frequent and flagrant German and Italian breaches of the Non-intervention agreement; the sabotage stories were still upsetting him, and he was not blind to the other use to which that stone staircase could be put. Later that evening Rosemary heard him discussing the whole thing with Crumpaun, and found that he was meditating a second trip to Bayonne. This she determined to prevent, if she could. She said nothing to her Father, but she sought out Crossman on her own account, and begged him not to encourage the idea. “They’ll really think him utterly potty if he goes on reporting every rabbit-run he sees near the frontier! There’s no evidence this time, bar the nail marks—and those were probably smugglers, or even just ‘boy meets girl.’”