Frontier Passage

by Ann Bridge

  “So you haven’t seen or spoken to him for over two years?”

  “No—it is so.”

  “Nor had letters from him?”

  “Except the notes you brought me, no.”

  He paused, thinking how to make her understand what she had got to understand, if she was to accept the situation as he saw it.

  “Did you ever read the Confessions of Saint Augustine?” he asked her.

  She stared at him. “No—at least I don’t remember it. Why?”

  “Or the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi, then?”

  “Yes—we had all the lives of the Saints read to us at the Convent, of course, but I forget them rather.”

  “Perhaps they didn’t tell you their early lives in great detail, in the Convent,” said James, with his grim smile. “But surely you must remember that both Saint Augustine and Saint Francis were frightfully wild as young men, drinking and sleeping around and all the rest—they say Saint Francis was put in prison at least once. Did they tell you that?”

  “That they began as rather wicked, yes—at least Saint Augustine.”

  “And then you know what happened—in each case, something came along that changed their direction, as it were, and opened their eyes to a reality that they had never seen, and they turned and followed that reality, and became Saints.”

  “Yes. And so?”

  “That is what has happened to Pascual, that’s all.”

  “To Pascual? But you are being funny, no?” she said, staring at him.

  “Indeed I am not. I wish, God forgive me, it weren’t true. But it is. Pascual has changed his direction, while he’s been in prison, as completely as Saint Francis and Saint Augustine changed theirs. If he isn’t a Saint yet, he’s well on the road to it.”

  “It seems impossible,” she said slowly, staring out to sea.

  “You promised to believe me, remember,” he said.

  “I do—I try. But I simply cannot understand it. Could you explain a little more?—why you think this, I mean? Pascual” she said again, with that note of utter incredulity in her voice.

  “Now look here, Raquel darling,” James said, “we have never discussed your husband, and I’ve loved you for not telling me anything about him. But I want you to understand that I haven’t lived in Spain for so long without getting a very fair idea of what he used to be like. I know that he was constantly unfaithful to you, that he spent your money as well as his own, that he entertained his mistresses in your houses, and gave them your family jewels, and that altogether after the first he treated you about as badly as a man could. That he was ever actively cruel to you I doubt; but that he caused you all the pain possible by the moral cruelty of neglect and humiliation, I am sure. Is that about right?”

  “Yes. It was so. I did not know that you knew all this.”

  “Everybody knew it—that was what I couldn’t forgive him,” James said savagely. “You can’t have any conception of how I hated having to go and see him the first time, feeling as I did about you.”

  “I did not know,” she murmured—“dear one, I did not know.”

  “I know—it didn’t matter. But now you understand what a shock it was when I did see him, and found him all set for turning into a saint.”

  “But how can this have happened?—that I cannot comprehend,” she said.

  “Well, to begin with, I believe that for the first time in his life, he began to think. He’d never given himself time to do that before; he just rushed around with women, and fished and raced and shot. But in prison, with nothing on earth to do but chip away at fruit-stones, you have a hell of a lot of time for thinking. I don’t fancy that Pascual is particularly intelligent”—James observed candidly; and even in her distress and deepening anxiety, Raquel laughed—“but such mind as he had, he used, for the first time in his life, on something beyond how to gratify his next desire.”

  “But you might have known him!” she exclaimed.

  “I do know him. And the next thing,” James went on, “was that he was boxed up day and night with a lot of poor toads from the bottom of society, not the top—the sort of people he’d never noticed before, except to kick them out of his way or give them a peseta for holding his horse. And they taught him a lot, too—and he was humble enough to learn from them and to like them.”

  “It is extraordinary,” she murmured.

  “That’s what I tell you. It is, most extraordinary. And then there was the book. He decided to try to learn English, or go on with it, in prison, and he got the gaoler to bring him an English book. And of all things, the gaoler fetched him Jude the Obscure. Do you know it?”

  “No. What sort of book is it?”

  “It’s a novel by Thomas Hardy, one of our greatest writers.”

  “Who wrote a book called Tessa Something?”

  “That’s the man. If you’ve read Tess, you know a bit of his really frightening penetration, of his remorselessness about human life, and his power. It’s amazing,” James said, leaning back against the bank and tilting his hat over his eyes, “that it should have been that one novel, of the hundreds that must have been kicking about in Almadera, that he got hold of. Think!—it might have been a Ouida or a W. J. Locke! Much effect that would have had!”

  “And what is it about, this book?”

  “It’s the story of a poor boy, quite du peuple, who had a passion for books and learning, and for Oxford, the heart and centre of English learning. He gets there, after great struggles, and begins to learn—and then he falls in love with a girl called Sue, a schoolteacher, poor like himself, and they live together and have children; and that destroys his chances of studying, and it all ends in tragedy. Oh, it’s no good trying to tell you about it in a few words,” said James impatiently, “but the main point for Pascual, I think, was Sue’s character; and Jude’s. The whole thing is described with a sort of terrible faithfulness—the combination of reality and tragic poetic sense that was Hardy’s strong suit. Anyhow Pascual has been reading this book over and over again, studying it, line by line and word by word, and—plus his bus-driver fellow prisoners, of course—it has opened his eyes to the reality of life in classes other than his own, and to the beauty and terror of love.”

  “It is extraordinary,” Raquel said again. She sat very still. “Go on, please, James.”

  “Naturally, as he had begun to think at last, Pascual started comparing his own life with the lives of Jude and Sue—and his own love, too. And he saw then what a poor wretched thing, judged by any ultimate standards, his life was compared with theirs.”

  “He didn’t tell you this?” Raquel interjected, staring at him wide-eyed.

  “Most certainly he did. He used the words, ‘a poor, mean life’ about himself.”

  She sat back. “I can’t understand it.”

  “Yes, but darling, you’ve got to take it. It is so. He has seen a lot more, too,” James went on, his voice becoming strained. “He sees quite clearly at last how atrociously he has behaved to you, and he wants to—to repair that injury.”

  “How?” Her voice was very small indeed.

  “By living with you again and treating you decently; loving you, actually, now that he has learned what love means. His whole soul—the soul he has just found—is set on that. He knows nothing about us, remember. He’s extraordinarily humble about it, but he wants to try.”

  “You mean”—her voice was hardly more than a whisper—“that possibly I should go back to him again, and live with him as his wife, and give up—you?”

  “Just exactly that,” he said doggedly, his face set. He did not look at her as he spoke; he looked away at the sea, where a small white sail had crept into the blue triangle between the green walls of the combe. “He ought to have his chance,” he said.

  Suddenly, she did a thing that in all those months of danger, strain and distress he had never seen her do. She burst into loud and violent sobbing.

  “Oh no no no!” she cried out, in a voice terribly loud; the sy
llables were cut by the sobs into a series of horrible staccatos—“oh no no no!” She sprang to her feet and ran away down the slope towards the edge of the cliff, still sobbing and calling out “No”; she stumbled as she ran, a pitiful black figure, in flight from the unendurable.

  James leapt up and rushed after her. He caught her just at the edge, where the cliff fell away, and held her close. “My darling, my darling!” he said in agony. “Don’t. Stop crying. Don’t”—he hardly knew what he was saying.

  She turned her face up to his; it was quite wild.

  “You can’t ask that of me!” she said, speaking very fast, and in Spanish. “He can’t ask that of me! No one can ask that of me!”

  “Come back, my darling,” he said, drawing her away from the edge of the cliff. He began to lead her up the hill again, speaking all the while. “Come and sit down and talk about it quietly.” They went a few steps. “Oh, God!” he groaned; the sweat was pouring down his face—“Oh my dear love.”

  The absolute agony in his voice seemed to rouse her. She stopped, and put her hand up to his cheek with a gesture like a child’s. “My love,” she said, and went quietly on with him. They sat down again on his coat; James was quite exhausted. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face.

  “I am sorry,” she said then, in English. “Dearest heart, I am sorry. Forgive me.” She took his hand.

  “We’ve got to,” he said, stupidly.

  “Why?” she asked quickly, in a low voice. “Why should it not be he who makes the sacrifice, if he is become so saintly? Why should he not divorce, and we be together?”

  James pondered this. That solution, with its Latin common sense, had never occurred to him. Why not? He sat silent for a long time, watching the white sail of the little boat moving slowly across the blue triangle of sea at their feet. Oh why not? Why on earth not? But this battle, he found now, when he came to it, had been fought out before. It had first been joined when he had had that vision of the landscape of the future, sitting with Pascual on a soapbox in the prison at Almadera; it had gone on through those exhausting days in Barcelona, when he had moved, however reluctantly, step by step towards this end and no other; it had been continued even yesterday, on his day of make-believe, when spiritual and physical conflict had actually brought him to fall asleep, by daylight, in Raquel’s arms. The battle was now won, in him—at least so far, that he could no longer surrender. Last night—well, that had been simply a gust of physical passion, a thing he knew about. And that accident had dealt with that. But his soul, through a thousand small motions, long-continued, had taken its position. (Which is how the soul does in fact move, more often than not.)

  He had to say this, somehow.

  “If he could, I couldn’t,” he said at last, very low.

  “Could not what?”

  “Couldn’t accept the sacrifice, if he made it.” He turned and took her in his arms, holding her and turning her face up to his with the other hand. “Oh, my dearest love, you must understand this,” he said, “or take it from me if you can’t. I’ve seen him and you haven’t. You don’t know what he is now. He has died and been born again. Are we going to knock him on the head now?” He stared almost fiercely into her eyes, at once forcing and beseeching her to understand, to agree.

  She dropped her eyelids—she couldn’t drop her head, because of his hand—and two tears slowly slid out from under them. She knew then that she was beaten—beaten in her fight, her fight for her love and her happiness. In her heart she had known it before—known it two nights ago, out by the harbour, when he had said he was too tired to be her lover; known it all yesterday—only the heart is so unwilling to accept defeat. And this was more than losing James—much more, and much worse. But after that one involuntary act of almost physical revolt, when she ran away down the hill, she would do no more. Schooled all her life to graceful acceptance, this also behind her dropped lids, she accepted; those two slow tears were her only protest. Her face still held in his hand, she steadied her lips and said at last, very low—“Very well.”

  She put up her hand, then, and gently freed her chin; turned her head away and wiped her eyes.

  “Then what do I do?” she asked after a moment.

  “You ought to go back to Spain, I think,” he said slowly, as if each word were being drawn out of him on a rope. “He can’t see you out here. To San Sebastián, I suppose—there’s so little room in Burgos.”

  “You have’ thought it all out!” she murmured almost bitterly.

  “Naturally I have—what do you suppose I’ve been thinking of, night and day, since I heard that he was coming out, since I understood what has happened to him?” he asked almost angrily. “Do you suppose I could think of anything else?”

  “When shall I go, then?” she asked.

  “I should say the sooner the better,” he said flatly. “I must go back myself, and Pascual may get there at any time. And if he rejoins, he won’t have long before he goes to the front. You’ll have to see about a salvo conducto, of course.”

  “Olivia will be able to arrange that,” she said dully.

  “No doubt.” (He thought—like Hell she will!) “But you will have to get an exit permit.”

  “What is that?”

  “A permit from the French authorities to return to Spain—you get them in Bayonne as a rule. It takes some time, too. We’d better go in and see about that this afternoon.”

  “But since I am Spanish, what have the French to do with it?”

  “They control their own frontier. You can’t expect anything else, with war just over the border—a war in which their deadliest enemies are taking an active part,” he answered. “France is only just not at war with White Spain, remember.”

  She sighed. “I see. Yes. We had better go.” She got up, and he rose too. Then suddenly she flung herself on him, in a passion of weeping.

  “Oh, my love,” she murmured in Spanish; “my soul, my treasure! Oh, I love you so!” She clung to him, murmuring wild endearments; the soft syllables beat round James’s heart and head like a cloud of tender moths.

  “Must I?” she asked at last, turning up her white tear-stained face to his. “Must we? Can’t we?”

  “Oh, my heart’s love, no!” he groaned. “We can’t. I should feel like a thief. You must—O God, why does it have to be so much worse for you?” He stared out to sea again for a moment. The little white sail had nearly crossed the blue wedge of sea now, he noticed. He turned back to her. “You can—and you will, I know. Come on!” he said, and dragged her up the hill towards the road.

  Rosemary, as she had expected, got back very late for lunch—she refused to stay and take a meal with the de Barrials, on the score of having work to do. A car was standing in front of the Grande Bretagne, and as she went in, Milcom and the Condesa came out. The Condesa’s face was pale, with remote eyes—Milcom looked exhausted, and more like his Spanish nick-name than ever.

  “Oh,” the girl said. “How do you do?” she said to Milcom, with a certain embarrassment. “Are you going out to lunch?” she asked the Condesa, talking at random.

  “No, we have lunched—we are going to Bayonne,” the Condesa said. They got into the car and drove off, leaving the girl staring after them.

  “So it was,” she said under her breath, and turned and went indoors.

  Sailing along below the cliffs between Hendaye and St.-Jean that morning with the Count, Rosemary had frequently glanced shorewards, admiring the beige, creamy, and pinkish cliffs and rocks, and trying to identify from the sea the places that she knew on land. She had seen a car, shiny in the sun, drawn up on the road; and some distance off, on the side of one of the combes, she had observed a spot of black and bluish-green which her long-sighted eyes presently recognised as being composed of two people sitting on the ground. Even then, she wondered if it could be Milcom’s well-known suit of Lovat tweed and the Condesa’s invariable black. Naturally, she kept on glancing that way, and at one point she saw the black figure run
ning downhill towards the cliffs, a tiny speck of motion on the immobility of the slopes, followed by the blue-green one; just at the cliff’s edge the two specks merged again, and then, very slowly, returned up the hill. Even at that distance, there had been something agitated and unusual, to her eyes, about these movements; she felt certain that it must be Milcom and the Condesa, then, and wondered what was wrong. That something was badly wrong she felt sure, and that was her real reason for refusing to stay and lunch with the de Barrials—she wanted, vaguely, to get back and find out.

  Now, eating her own belated meal in the stuffy dining-room of the Grande Bretagne, she reflected on their expressions at the hotel door—her unseeing eyes, his air of exhaustion and misery. And why Bayonne? She was completely foxed this time, she said to herself.

  Except for the Executioner, who was eating his lunch with his usual expression of sadistie pleasure—“as if he was eating Reds” she privately phrased it—she was the only person in the dining-room; but presently the door opened and two of the Non-Intervention Commission couriers came in. These young men, mostly Scandinavians, drove their Peugeot cars almost daily between St.-Jean and Burgos, keeping up a regular service of mails between the two places; sleeping now at one, now at the other, and sometimes doing the double trip in the day. Rosemary knew them slightly; they were the opposite numbers of the two who had been involved in the accident the night before. While one sat down at the big Non-Interveners’ table in the middle of the room, the other came over to her.

  “Do you know where the Condesa is?” he asked.

  “She’s gone to Bayonne,” Rosemary said.

  “How long ago?”

  “Just now—about ten minutes ago.”

  “How awkward—bother!”

  “Why?”

  “I had a letter for her—and I must start back in an hour; there’s another bag to go.”

  “Give it to Rex,” said Rosemary.

  “Rex is off—and anyhow, I was to give it into her hands,” the young man said. “Could you give it to her?” he asked.