Frontier Passage

by Ann Bridge

  “All right—I’ll leave it to you. What else?” he asked.

  “Well, the pudding’s horrible, as usual, and the beef’s tough—also as usual; I should have twice of the trout and then cheese, if it was me. They’ve got some very good Brie. And the red wine is perfectly potable,” she added.

  James ordered in accordance with her suggestions, demanding an immediate apéritif as well. Then he turned to her again. This was just what he needed, to-night, a friendly face and someone to take charge of him; he was aware of a genuine and grateful sense of comfort. “Now tell me, why are you here?” he asked.

  “Oh, for Daddy. It’s supposed to be the place for rheumatism—‘un climat plutôt africain,’ Dr. Gilliard called it. We came about the middle of January.”

  “Oh, so you were here for all the doings,” said James.

  “Yes—but I didn’t see anything of it really,” said Rosemary. “You see I had no one to go about with. I just saw the tables set up in the street, and the townspeople feeding the refugees that came down from Prats by lorry, but that was about all. And of course we had the Embassy here—from Barcelona. That was fun; it stirred up Amelia-the-Baths, no end. Telephone exchange open till midnight instead of closing at eight p.m.—sensation! Poor M. Dupont said to Daddy—‘Monsieur, nous ne sommes pas de mauvaises gens, mais ici nous avons l’habitude de beaucoup de calme.’ But then they went away again. Of course Daddy’s baths make him too feeble to go about much, and Mother can’t leave him. It was sickening,” she went on reminiscently, “to have a really big thing like that happening right on top of you, and not be in it at all. I wanted to go down to Perp. and help nurse with the Quaker Relief, but I wasn’t even allowed to do that.”

  “Can you nurse?” asked James, eating his soup contentedly. She was right—it was quite good.

  “Well, I’ve done the advanced First Aid Course at school, and got all my chits—and anyhow anyone can scrub floors and empty slops,” said Rosemary. She gave a little groan, then visibly pulled herself up and smiled at him again. “Now tell me about you. Have you just got out?”

  “Oh Lord no—I got out at the end of January.”

  “Where to?”

  “To Perp., as you call it.”

  “Oh NO!” Rosemary’s voice was rasied in something like indignation. “Oh, you’re not going to tell me that you’ve been at Perp. for a whole month, and I—we—didn’t know it?”

  “No no—not the whole time. I was in Paris for nearly a fortnight—I’ve just come back from there,” James said soothingly.

  “But you were here at the beginning, going round and seeing things?” Rosemary almost groaned.

  James nearly grinned at her.

  “I’m sorry—yes, I was. Your friend Crumpaun was here too, and Tom Hever.”

  “Oh damn, damn, damn! My darling Crumpet! Is he still here?” the girl asked eagerly. “And Crossey?”

  “No, Crossey never came. They’ve all gone home now,” said James.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Oh well—I’ve nothing else on at the moment, and I’ve got a piece of work to do here on my own, more or less,” he said, choosing his words rather carefully. He did not want to tell the girl about his search for Juanito.

  “Writing work?”

  “Research, more,” said James. “This trout is frightfully good—you were quite right,” he went on, indicating the fish on his plate.

  She took the hint at once. “Yes, aren’t they?” She rose with her usual abruptness. “Well, I must go back. The parents will be wondering what on earth I’m up to.”

  “No, don’t go—stay and talk to me. I haven’t had a soul to speak to for a week,” said James. He suddenly realised what a relief it was to be soothed and amused, to have the pressure of his own wretched thoughts lifted off him for a little while. “Tell me about this place,” he went on. “What’s it like?”

  “The Jadis, or Amelia?” She sat down again.

  “Both.”

  “Well the hotel, as you see, is a sort of silent film of Tchekov,” the girl said. “Golly, they are incredible. Do you see that old man over there sitting with his feet on the hot brick? Oh, he’s gone—but you can see the brick if you lean this way. Half of them have bricks at meals.” James laughed. “And of course there’s never anyone in the bureau, and the chambermaids wear shawls round their shoulders all day long, and the bedside lamps only have five-watt bulbs in them, and the water in your basin makes you smell of sulphur the whole time. But it’s madly cheap and the food is quite good—much better than at that lousy Grande Bretagne, where they smothered everything in sauce to disguise the taste of stale fish. Which building are you in, by the way?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said James, still laughing. “I followed my nose to the restaurant.”

  “Oh—well. There’s not much to choose, any way. We’ve tried all three. In the one across the square you have a bathroom and about three hours sun, and the radio from that restaurant place drives you mad; in this one you have no bath unless you go down to the établissement, and only about two hours sun—and in the middle one you get four and a half hours sun and no bath at all without walking a mile. It’s a matter of choice really. We’re in this one.”

  “Why so little sun?” James asked.

  “Oh, because the whole place is jammed into the mouth of the gorge where the waters come from, and hulking great cliffs keep it off,” Rosemary said. “So much for the African climate! ’Tisn’t so frightfully African anyway—there’s been a tearing East wind the whole time we’ve been here. M. Dupont says there always is, in spring—‘cela balaye toute la côte,’ he says.”

  “And what’s the place like?” James asked, beginning on his cheese.

  “Oh, delicious, I think—I love this rocky shrubby country. If we had a car, or I had anyone to walk with, it would be Heaven. Mummie and I did go in the bus once to Arles-sur-Tech, and once we walked to Palalda—but that’s about all.”

  “I’ve got a car,” said James on an impulse. “We might do some drives together. There are some very good little churches to see—Romanesque. Quite a lot of early ones, too—eleventh century.”

  Her eyes shone at him across the table. Really, she was quite pretty, James thought—he had never noticed before how pretty she was.

  “Would you?” she said. “Oh goodness, that would be marvellous. You can’t think what a difference that would make. There’s not been a soul here. I have so missed”—she checked herself—“Crumpet and everybody.” He knew she had been going to say the Condesa, and warmed to her, in spite of a stab of pain.

  “Well, we’ll do that,” he said. He rose. “Now I’ll come over and pay my respects to your parents, and then I must find my room. I wonder which disadvantage I shall get?”

  The Oldheads greeted him with the warmth that was to be expected from people who have been badly bored for over a month. He took coffee with them in that funereal lounge under the dim lights that made the place, as Mr. Oldhead rightly remarked, look like a morgue. The people would be at home in a morgue, too, he added. Mrs. Oldhead, with wifely inconsequence, inserted the remark that the place was doing him good, all the same. “Agreed, my dear, thank God—but that doesn’t affect its appearance,” said Mr. Oldhead.

  Then James went and found M. Dupont, the proprietor, a courteous old man whose stomach and beard were equally remarkable—for a wonder, he was in the bureau. And by him the weary man was at last escorted to his room. It was in the building across the square—what was wrong with that, according to Rosemary? James tried to remember. Ah yes—the radio. Well, it was silent now. “This was the room of his Excellency the English Ambassador,” M. Dupont said complacently. James glanced round it; it was very bare, with a lot of white mats on such furniture as there was—he wondered a good deal what the Minister (he wasn’t an Ambassador) had made of it, as he soaked thankfully in a hot if odorous sulphur bath. Afterwards, lying in the hardish but still tolerable bed, he reflected, first, that it was muc
h nicer than the Europe, and next, what a blessing it was to find the Oldheads here. They would keep his thoughts quiet in the evenings. And Rosemary would sometimes be company by day. For the first time that night he remembered, then, when he had last seen her, up by the old Phare at St.-Jean-de-Luz, and what had passed between them there. And he was suddenly struck by the fact that she had not shown the smallest embarrassment this evening, as might well have been expected—she had come straight over to him, taken him and his dinner in hand, and soothed and amused him all through it. What an extraordinary child! An encounter with a self-conscious drooping girl would have been the last straw, to-night. “She’s a first-class little thing,” he thought gratefully, and fell asleep.

  Milcom had an immediate objective in the Tech valley itself—to search in the two miliciens’ camps outside Arles-sur-Tech and Prats-de-Mollo for Juanito, or at least for news of him. Accordingly the next morning he set off to see the Sous-Préfet at Arles, to get the necessary permits. While in Paris James had heard from his friend in Hooters of the committee set up in London to arrange for the emigration of suitable Spanish refugees to Mexico and Latin America; he had been at pains to get in touch with the committee by letter, and intended, while enquiring for Juanito, to keep ah eye open for possible emigrants at the same time.

  He found the Sous-Préfet in a big villa a little way up the road from the Hôtel des Glycines. He waited for some time in a large dreary hall—a typist was clattering away at a table under the stairs, and gossiping with the clerks who passed through, and the two or three Gardes Mobiles who hung about—on a bench inside the door four Spaniards sat waiting, two in officers’ uniform. When he was at last shown in James found the Sous-Préfet a charming person, loaned to the overworked Préfecture in Perpignan from one of the Paris ministries; he was most sympathetic to the journalist’s search for Jereda, and as for the emigration scheme, he was enthusiastic about it. He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a large caricature of himself, wittily conceived and admirably drawn.

  “Look at that,” he said. “Is it not good?”

  “But excellent,” said James. “Who has made it?”

  “A poor devil here from the camp. He was political cartoonist to one of the Barcelona papers. But he can never go back to Spain. He should certainly try the New World. And here,” he went on, pulling out another sheet, on which a pair of dancers was brilliantly depicted—“Look at that.”

  “Is he here too?” James asked, examining it.

  “But certainly. If you want any drawings like that, I can put you in touch with him. I like to put them in the way of earning a few francs when I can, poor devils.”

  “I’ll buy the dancers, if it’s for sale,” said James.

  The Sous-Préfet was delighted. He showed James his wrist-watch, on the glass of which was painted a fascinating scene of a bull-fight, microscopically clear and vivid. “Would you like such a decoration?”

  “Another of your protégés?” James asked.

  “Assuredly.”

  “Well, I have some English friends down at Amélie,” said James. “We might arrange something. How can I get hold of these fellows?”

  “Very easily.” He rang a bell on his desk, and gave an order to the clerk who answered it. “They will come, at once. These three and some others I have got here in the town, in lodgings; the artist is with his wife, who expects her child. Meanwhile, I will arrange your permits. You want to go where?”

  To visit both camps, at will, James said—and as far as possible, to move about freely in his car—up towards St.-Laurent-de-Gerdans, for example.

  “Vous voulez parcourir la frontière?” the Frenchman said smiling. “Very well.” He wrote. “When you gentlemen of the Press were here in hundreds a few weeks back, we could not do this; but for one—” he smiled and wrote again; then handed James three small slips.

  “If, when these men come, you find them agreeable,” he said, then, “I could always arrange to send them down in a car to Amélie to see you. It distracts them, you understand, to meet people and have a little conversation. Of course you speak Spanish?”

  James said that he did.

  At this moment the clerk popped in again to say that two of the Messieurs Espagnols were there, and ushered in the two officers whom James had already seen waiting in the hall—they proved to be the cartoonist and the man who painted dancers. After the introductions, James expressed a polite desire not to derange the Sous-Préfet further, and took them off with him to have a cup of coffee. The Hôtel des Glycines was the nearest place, and in the sun and out of the wind, it was warm enough to sit in the open; they sat under the wistaria trellis, bare now save for the small fat silvery tassels which promised bloom to come, and over coffee each told James his story. They were nice intelligent fellows—intellectual Liberals, not Communists, and one a devout Catholic; but both agreed that there would never again be any safety for them in Spain. They would like nothing better than to go to Mexico, they said. James listened with attention and sympathy, and jotted down their names; but half his mind was going back five months, to the day when he had sat under that trellis with another Spanish refugee—a White. Behind their dark Spanish faces and shabby olive-green uniforms he saw a slender, slender figure in a shabby black dress—how shabby war made everyone! both sides alike—with a gothic face and red-gold hair, who twirled a spiral twig in her long fingers, and smiled, and looked contented and at rest. The Spanish men saw his eyes darken and his face twist, and wondered what they had said amiss. They hastened into praise for the kindness of the Sous-Préfet; if there were more like him! they said.

  Of course James asked them about the Teniente Manuel Jereda. The artist looked blank; the cartoonist, whose name was de Novelles, after a pause said—“But yes—surely; wasn’t he wounded up on the Segre, right at the beginning?”

  “No, I didn’t really know him, Señor,” he went on, in response to James’s question; “he was on the divisional staff, I fancy. But I heard him spoken of, I seem to remember, and that he was wounded in the leg, or lost a leg. Something like that.”

  James became interested, eager, at this. The Spaniards noticed how his face changed again. He leaned forward and asked if there was anyone else who had been up on the Segre, who was likely to know, in the camp. The cartoonist was not hopeful—most of the Segre people had got out “further along” he believed—i.e. they would be at Bourg Madame, where James had already drawn a blank. But the possibility of Juanito being wounded had given James a new idea—somehow he had never thought of him as wounded. The hospitals—he would have to try that. And when they had drunk their coffee and an Amer Picon, he went back to the Préfecture, and asked the Sous-Préfet if it would be possible to let him have a list of hospitals where there were Spanish wounded, so that he might circularise them with the name? The préfet said assuredly, and promised to send a list of hospitals later in the day.

  It was by now so late that it was hardly worth going all the way back to Amélie for lunch, James thought, since he wanted to go to the camp at Arles in the afternoon. But then he remembered Rosemary. Poor kid, boxed up there with her parents, and nothing to do—he might as well go back and eat something and bring her up to Arles for the drive.

  Rosemary was delighted. She had been rather dashed to learn that he had gone off alone that morning—though it’s no good expecting that he’ll take you often, owl!—she adjured herself. As they drove up the road, out of the cold shadow and into the sun, he turned to her.

  “I’m afraid it’ll be rather dull for you—I shall have to spend quite a bit of time at the camp; I’ve got a job to do there.” He mentioned the Refugees Committee—it was a good camouflage for his main object. Rosemary was quite unperturbed. “I shall be in the sun, anyhow,” she said.

  The camp at Arles-sur-Tech was a very different proposition from Argéles. It was quite small, containing only about twelve thousand men, for one thing; and its situation was rather agreeable, a large barbed wire enclosure on slop
ing pastures beyond the town, looking south. The miliciens had contrived with great ingenuity to makes themselves a species of wigwams by cutting down the young chestnut growth on the slopes behind, lashing the slender poles together and then either thatching them with wild box, or turfing them over with turves cut from the pasture. It was not very good for the pasture, the officer in charge admitted; but que voulez-vous?—at least they could sleep in shelter. The river was only a couple of hundred yards below the camp, and cold as the water was, it was bright with the naked bodies of men, splashing and sluicing themselves in the shallows, while others were washing their clothes along the bank. Yes, one hundred and fifty at a time, for an hour, all day long, the officer said—it made them more contented to be clean. “They are, after all, human beings.” The peasants complained, he said, about the turf and the chestnut-poles—“and indeed, they are like locusts if you leave them to themselves, these others! Monsieur has seen what they have done near Prats? Whole hillsides stripped! But here we control them. They go in parties, under guard, to get fire-wood, as they go to bathe—and so they do but little harm.”

  Rosemary listened so far with deep interest; then as Milcom showed signs of getting down to business she took herself off, sauntering along the wire, looking at the wigwams, he cooking going on over camp-fires, and exchanging a few phrases of Spanish with those who came up to the fence to talk to her. They all asked for cigarettes, and she made a mental note to get some on her way home, in case they came this way again. She wandered on, and sat down on a boulder beyond the camp, in the late afternoon sunshine, and thought about Milcom. It was wonderful for her, an incredible piece of luck, that he should have turned up like this, and he didn’t seem to be going to hurry away again—this Mexican business might keep him quite a time. Of course she wouldn’t see much of him, but even a little was something. (Rosemary was at the age, and of the unexacting disposition, which will accept love on any terms.) And he hadn’t seemed fussed to meet her last night, as he might well have been, after those things she had said to him the last time! Perhaps he had forgotten, with all that had happened in between. No, she thought, more likely he just hadn’t thought it very important—as indeed it wasn’t, of course, to him. The fatigue and wretchedness of his face the previous evening as he sat in the salle-à-manger, before she spoke to him, had told her a lot—he was no better in his heart, he hadn’t got over Raquel a bit. Well of course not, she thought; who would?—and least of all a person of his type. But she had distracted him; she had made him smile, laugh, eat his dinner; and that she could go on doing as much as he would let her, and as long as he stayed.