The Third Hour

by Geoffrey Household

  When Valérie de Courcelles, the daughter of a French trade delegate, came straight from an expensive Touraine convent to join her parents, Toby fell in love with her. She was a type completely new to him, an innocent little pink and white beauty to whom her mother would undoubtedly have to speak seriously on the eve of her marriage; a survival from the pre-war world possible only in France. Yet she was not bad company. She spoke English and Italian and could prattle pleasantly on art, literature or politics without making a fool of herself. Toby adored her and became unreal in her presence. He did not desire nor expect her to understand him.

  His attentions were received cordially enough by her parents and Valérie was quite ready to fall in love with him as soon as her mother said the word go. M. de Courcelles invited him to dinner and brought out his best Armagnac when Madame and Mademoiselle had left them alone with the cigars. He talked with infinite delicacy, and as if discussing a hypothetical third person, of the qualities he would expect in a son-in-law. They were precisely those which Toby had. It was very flattering and the Armagnac was very good. M. de Courcelles passed the bottle and droned on in a pleasantly modulated voice, developing his theories as to an intimate friend of the older generation. The cigar ash on his well-filled waistcoat and his round, untroubled face with its long grey moustache suggested to Toby a placid and civilised Mr Thrupp. Order, M. Manning would understand, was what the world needed. There was a lack of respect for the very foundations of the state and for those whom a Wise Providence had set in authority over it. The ties of decent family life were being loosened. It was the duty of all sane men to support that most steadying of influences, the Church. He would expect his son-in-law—in the improbable case of his being a foreigner baptized in one of the so-called reformed churches—to become a Roman Catholic.

  Toby had the utmost respect for the Church. He considered it the last stronghold of paganism in Europe, and as such to be jealously preserved. He had no objection to becoming a catholic, believing that there was some purpose in the world and that all forms of life need not necessarily be solid and visible. As much as that could be fitted into Catholic allegories or any others. But M. de Courcelles, who for all his liking of Toby had an obstinate distrust of le perfide Albion, made it plain in later interviews that he expected Toby to be converted first and to propose to Valérie afterwards. This was a nuisance. To be received into the Church after the announcement of the engagement but before the marriage was reasonable; it could be taken in one’s stride as easily as buying the ring or furnishing the house. But to be bothered, even discreetly, by a lot of priests when the reward was not yet certain seemed too public and serious a business. It could not be considered a mere convention. It would be swearing to a faith that he did not hold.

  Toby worried over the question for weeks. He told himself that it was utterly ridiculous for a worldly and ambitious banker to refuse to pay lip service to any creed that suited him, especially when he had none of his own. Yet conscience rose up and called it treachery. Treachery to what, he asked himself, and could find no answer. He was behaving like a high-minded martyr for no reason at all. He was perfectly aware that if Irma had asked him to become a Catholic or Hindu or Seventh-Day Adventist he would have done so. Irma herself had been an ideal to which all others were subordinate. Valérie was not. He began to question his love for her, and could only see that it was strong enough to hurt but not strong enough to be a spiritual end in itself. He questioned his ambitions—the cellar, the cook and even the board of the Danube & Ottoman. It was inexplicable that the man he imagined himself to be should jib at taking a practical move towards the wife and future that he wanted.

  He could only conclude that he was not the man he imagined. What then did he want? If comfort, good living, an assured future, cheerful friends of all nationalities and a solid background were not enough to satisfy him, he might as well, he said, be a blasted poet. He began to refuse invitations and to avoid his club. He disappeared from Valérie’s family and circle. When he and de Courcelles met, they expressed their regret by warm handshakes and trite remarks tenderly spoken, like two friends at a funeral who think it improper to let their full affection for each other be seen. The habit of vain introspection steadily grew on him; and, since he was an easy-going and unconstipated character, discontent seemed to him a serious evil and not the normal state of the majority of mankind. Not knowing in the least what he wanted, but disgusted with what he had, he threw up his job and returned to England.

  Toby had, as he then thought, an anxious month, for his contemporaries were scattered over the face of the earth and after four years abroad it took time to re-establish connections in the world of influence. He accepted the first post offered to him, though it carried little more than half the salary he had earned with the Danube & Ottoman and led him right away from the normal occupations of men of his education. He became a banana salesman.

  The international selling organisation of Payne & Edwards Ltd. was staffed by men drawn from all the fruit markets of western Europe; plain, hard-drinking, early-rising souls bound together by an esprit de corps that any army might have envied. Their loyalty was not so much to Payne & Edwards as to the fruit. Warehouses might be full, wholesalers panicky, dockers on strike or ships’ holds overheated, but still they fought for the inexorably ripening bananas, bullying railways, cajoling retailers and manipulating prices with a daring that Payne & Edwards never discouraged even when a gamble was lost. All that the firm asked was that a branch manager should love his fruit, speak something resembling the language of his market fluently and profanely, and account for his cash and his bunches by a complex mass of papers.

  Toby learned the elements of the trade at Paris. He was refreshed by the honesty of it and the loyalty between man and man and branch and branch, all of them in close communication and willing to come to the rescue if his market should collapse under some unfortunate manager. The Danube & Ottoman was wont to drive on its majestic course through a mist of petty intrigue, and he had observed that most of its managers, whenever their honesty could not be called in question, would put their own interests before those of the bank. It was a shock to be hurled straight from Viennese drawing rooms into the fruit-huckstering roar of Les Halles, but a shock as stimulating as a cold bath.

  When they had trained him, Payne & Edwards sent him to preach the gospel of cheap bananas in Madrid. Spain was the only country left in western Europe where they were still the food of the wealthy. Toby was far from falling in love with the country at first sight. Madrid was damnably expensive to a man just out of France where the pound was worth 220 francs, and 40 francs would buy the best meal in civilisation with wines to match. Moreover the dirt and poverty in the market of the Plaza de la Cebada prejudiced him against the people. He was in the mood to describe them as dagos.

  After six seventy-hour weeks on end, he spent a day at Toledo to report on its prospects as a banana market. An hour was enough to prove that it had none. His first idle day stretched its welcome length before him. He wandered in and out of the Cathedral and strolled at random, relaxed and humorous, through the packed lanes of the city, savouring the heard speech, the scents, the buying and selling, rather than any static beauty. For the first time he realised that he was in a country that had an intensely individual civilisation of its own. It was not backward, in the sense that Balkan capitals were backward, for it did not seek to imitate the normal pattern of continental life. It was as separate from the rest of Europe as England. The donkeys, the tiny shops, the handicrafts, the taverns, the narrow street, the Roman house built around the life of its own patio, were not evidence of ignorance; they were signs of a continuous and agreeable civilisation that suited Spain. A Roman gentleman, he felt, could have lived in Toledo and adjusted himself in a day to such modern conveniences as electric light and the automobile.

  Toby lunched in a wine shop, for he had already learned that in Spain the more expensive the restaurant, the wor
se the food. Across the tablecloth, spotted by wine, oil and flies, was a pock-marked cattle drover busily stuffing cocido down his bull neck. He was, he said, a friend to all Englishmen, for he had done his service in the Spanish navy and his ship had spent a day at Posmoz—did the caballero know Posmoz? Toby, guessing at Portsmouth, did. And the Englishmen had made him drunk—but of a stupendous drunkenness! Vaya! And he had never met another Englishman since. In his village they only saw women, with cameras and soldiers’ boots.

  Toby called for more wine and settled down. The drover was witty and intelligent as a prosperous West Country farmer, but had a deal more independence in his views. He was a socialist—in so far as he had no use for the Church or the Monarchy and wished his country to be governed by the common sense of Castilian small holders—but he had a sporting admiration for the courage of Don Alfonso and the humour of Primo de Rivera. He hoped they would get out before tempers were lost.

  The drover rose from the table at three, pleading a long ride back to the village. Toby sat another half hour with his thoughts and the jug of Valdepeñas before calling for the bill. It was paid; nor would the waiter accept even a tip from him. The drover had unobtrusively settled the score, as honour demanded, for the stranger within his gates.

  He had three hours to pass before his train. Crossing the gorge of the Tagus, he climbed up the hillside beyond. The arid ranges approached Toledo like brown and forbidding waves, with dusty villages hiding in the curves of their crests from the bitter winds of the plateau. The sun was low, painting purple and rose on yellow with the garishness, if any one second of the changing colour could have been caught, of bedroom lithographs at two for sixpence. The sun vanished into clouds and the hills turned olive green, embracing golden Toledo in their midst.

  He was conscious of an odd sense of declared destiny. This was his country, his people; collective object of a love more tender than his love for England because demanding, like some generous and difficult woman, an effort of understanding. Reason insisted that the finding of his destiny in Spain was ridiculous and an idea conceived in wine, but his imagination soared, as if set free by the music of a great symphony, over the hills where had thudded the tramp of martyrs to Christ and Mohammed, and still echoed those visionary trumpets that had called a thousand Quixotes to Morocco and Mexico, to Rome and to Moscow.

  To live and prosper in Spain—that might be his only destiny. Yet he had no desire to spend his life in so tiny a peninsula of the world. Had he, he wondered, entered upon a stern peninsula of the spirit? He understood at last the reason for his discontent in Vienna. He had been so intent on success that he had lived on a single plane of society, adjusting himself, as blindly as any communist, to the conventions of one class only, mixing and drinking with a variety of men, yet not convinced that he had much in common with any but the prosperous. He had tacitly assumed that the man with money was a more useful member of society than the man with none. There had been a sense of caste in his head, whether or not it showed in his acts.

  Spain was displaying for him the richness of humanity. His love of its literature had suddenly mated with his observation of its life. The Spaniards, except perhaps for a handful of grandees, had not this sense of caste. In spite of the Church, in spite of capitalism, they had never lost sight of the ideals of Islam. Dignity and discretion—the qualities, God help him, on which he had set the highest value!—they assumed to be the natural birth right of man, and advanced from this intense respect for the individual to sympathy with him. It was so hard for one Spaniard to be contemptuous of another that when two ideals clashed he was compelled to violence.

  The Madrid office established, Toby was sent to carry his gospel of bananas throughout the centre and north of Spain. After months of trains and hotels, he made his headquarters at Bilbao and opened a new branch of Payne & Edwards. The life of the Basque port suited him. His friends were drawn from the docks, the railways and the markets; Basques and Riojanos of powerful physique and tireless energy. They considered themselves the true rulers of Spain, wore what they pleased and larded their clipped Spanish with magnificent oaths. Their character had been in part formed by the dry, velvety wine of Rioja. All the best was consumed in the Basque Provinces, the rest of Spain having to put up with what it could get. It gave a man appetite, made him generous, inspired him to song and drove him to vigorous action, frequently eccentric. It heightened his contempt for precept and his love of his fellows. Toby saw little of the Anglo-Saxon colony; they seemed by contrast to be ghosts twittering among the shades of their own respectability.

  Again it was a woman that unsettled him. In Spain he missed the passing adventures that in Vienna he had come to consider as the natural right of man. Virgins were virgins and wives were faithful, and an intermediate class did not exist. He was compelled to choose between continence and prostitutes, and he disliked them both about equally. He was thus in a state to be unduly susceptible to any pretty face.

  It was in September 1928 that on one of his weekly visits to San Sebastian Toby dropped into the Hotel María Cristina for tea. He loathed tea, especially Spanish tea, but wanted to look over the visitors. In a corner of the lounge was a girl of trim but astonishing beauty. A broad serene brow kept watch over classic features, saved from too standardised severity by an adorable mouth of which the fullness was rather in the upper lip than the lower; a crushed flower of a mouth, luscious, desirable, but neither sensual nor very sensitive. She looked at Toby with impersonal appreciation as if he had been a prize bull at a cattle show. She was unmistakeably born, bred and dressed in the United States.

  He heard her ask the waiter for cigarettes and boldly presented one of his own meanwhile. She left him on his feet to pass the two minutes’ inspection that decency demanded and then asked him to sit down. It appeared that she had been decanted into the hotel by a tourist agency who assured her that San Sebastían had the glittering romance of Spain and the gaiety of cosmopolitan Europe on holiday. She found the casino closed, the vast hotels inhabited by a sprinkling of retired English colonels and their weather-beaten wives, and the beach a museum of the shapeless swimming suits of the nineties. Toby agreed that it was the dowdiest seaside resort outside England, but praised it as a little Basque town and the centre for other Basque towns lovelier than itself. To show her in what a fairyland she was, he took her to dine at Pasajes.

  The water of the landlocked bay washed the foot of the terrace on which they sat. The lights of the fishing village and its anchored launches drew trails of gold across the narrow passage to the sea, gently broken by the Atlantic swell that humped itself through the windless night. Ruth Beverley sighed with content and surrendered herself to the deliciously childish sport of fishing for shellfish in the two white-tiled wells where the restaurant imprisoned them. The vine-covered parra that roofed the terrace formed a green arch of peace over her spirit.

  Ruth was a perfect companion, appreciative and self-possessed. His compliments were graciously received; his advances smiled upon and no less graciously checked. He returned to Bilbao feeling extraordinarily satisfied with himself and giving her full credit for having produced that effect. He doubted whether he would ever seen her again. She had a curious faith in international tourist agencies and carefully followed the orders of their clerks, imagining that they possessed first-hand knowledge of the journeys that they recommended or discouraged.

  Three days later she called him up at his office to say that she was in Bilbao and would like to be invited to lunch. They lazed away the afternoon on the smooth, deserted sands between Bilbao and Plencia, and returned, their bodies tingling with sun, salt and desire for each other, to Toby’s flat for an impromptu supper. The next morning Ruth sent to the hotel for her baggage and settled in the flat with the clear conscience of a woman who knew that there was not the remotest prospect of her liaison being discovered by anyone who mattered to her.

  She was a new type to Toby. He had known wome
n who gave themselves for love, for money, from curiosity and from a sense that they would be cowards if they didn’t. He had not known a woman to decide so frankly that a few weeks of his company was exactly what she wanted. In her presence, he was drunk on her beauty; out of it, he boasted to himself of his good fortune and was convinced that Ruth could never make him suffer. She seemed too straightforward and hygienic to drown an adorer in the dark flow of love. One could dip into romance and step out again at will.

  Ruth was not as predatory as he supposed. She had had, at college and as a New York debutante, two affairs of some importance and three of none, and she had promised herself a really romantic sixth affair in Europe. It had not turned up; and she was exceedingly weary of the bankrupt counts, professional holiday makers and misunderstood compatriots who presented themselves for her attention. At their first dinner she had got from Toby the desired illusion of being entertained by a true European straight out of the shipping company’s advertisements. For half an hour she was disappointed that he was an Englishman. A Russian prince or an Austrian baron had been the chosen lover of her dreams. But it was soon evident that as a delicate flatterer of women Toby was fully up to specifications; and it was comforting to think that he earned his living just like any American.

  The conscious intentions of her descent upon Bilbao were simply to see him again and visit in his company the coast that he so enthusiastically praised. That this bold move would probably end some evening in his bed she knew, but she had not the faintest idea that she would actually and at once go to live with him. That was the joint work of Toby and the ghost of Irma.