Thirteen Such Years

by Alec Waugh

  “And now,” she said. “I think I must be going.”

  For there must be surely something more to it than that; all men could not be the same. There must be some men that were not mice, she decided, resolutely rather than hopefully, as the Blue Train ran into Villefranche station, and she saw from the carriage window the little landlocked harbour, with the white yachts at anchor and the boats moored against the quay.

  “There must be,” she said, as that evening after dinner she strolled through the narrow mounting streets, under the green, flower-hung verandahs past the lovely Italian urchins who sprawled at hazard in the gutters about the feet of the comely Italian women who sat on their doorsteps knitting, or gossiping together in the shadowed arches. Every third house in the main alley was a café; through the open doorways she could see men sitting forward over the tables in blue trousers and sleeveless tricots playing at cards or dice. In some of them gramophones were playing. From one came the sound of laughter and a voice, ringing and full and coloured.

  She paused and looked. At a table in the centre of the room a man, dressed shabbily but expensively, was seated, a glass of wine in his hand, declaiming a mock oration. He was tall, his hair was silvered, his nose long and curved, his mouth well-shaped and sensitive. At the other tables the men were listening and laughing. A waitress with black hair high piled upon her head leant forward across the zinc-covered bar, forgetful of the clients who were waiting to be served, themselves forgetful of their needs. As he spoke the man turned halfway towards the door. At the sight of Marda he lifted his arm above his head with a gesture of surprised delight, stopped speaking, came across to her, stretched out his hand, took hers, led her into the room, and with one hand holding her, the other stretched out in declamation, he proceeded with his speech.

  He spoke in the local patois, a mingling of French and Italian argot that Marda could follow only sufficiently to realise that she herself was the subject of his speech, that he was apostrophising her as some rare enrapturing mingling of the earthly and divine. His remarks were addressed half to Marda, half to the remainder of the room. It needed all Marda’s self composure to conceal the steadily rising tide of her embarrassment. Her composure was adequate, however. She stood in the centre of the room, her blue-black head tilted backwards, her eyes smiling, her hand resting unresistingly in his, till on a last wild note of peroration he dropped her hand and strode dramatically through the door, leaving her standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by a group of sailors, workmen and their feminine associates. It was a moment that required poise. Marda possessed poise.

  “Now I do think,” she said, “that having brought me here, he might have given me a drink.”

  In a rush they hastened to explain. They were simple, unpretentious, friendly people. They were distressed sincerely that a stranger should have been ill-used. He was drunk, they said, he was often drunk. But he was a friend, a good friend. He was a painter. He often came there. He was called Grim Starling. The name conveyed nothing to Marda. There were many painters. Very few of them were good; the majority of them drank.

  “Well,” she said, “now I’m here, I suppose I’d better have a gin and ginger. What’s everybody else having?” And with the greatest naturalness she sat down at the rough deal table, and clinked the glasses that were proffered to her by warted, begrimed and broken finger-nails, and she told them her name, and they told her theirs. And when finally she said it was time she went to bed, they all shook her hand, and begged her to come back next night, and she said she would. And within twenty minutes, wearied with sun and travel, she was asleep.

  She did not wake till the sun was high over the bay, and the market in front of the hotel was noisy with its crowd of fruit and flower and fig sellers. The life of the little town had been vibrant with three hours of animation before she sat at her verandah table under the tented canopy, dipping her croissant in dark brown coffee, breaking the skin of the full ripe figs.

  Looking out over the port the first person that she saw, seated at an easel surrounded by a crowd of picturesquely grubby urchins, was her acquaintance of the night before. The moment she had finished her breakfast she walked across to him.

  “Now don’t pretend,” she said, “that you’ve never met me.”

  His eyes twinkled. They were fine brown eyes.

  “I was hoping,” he said, “that you’d forgotten.”

  “You might have forgotten,” she said, “not I.”

  “In that case, there’s nothing for me to do but apologise, rather humbly.”

  “There’s no need,” she answered, “I didn’t come down with the last shower of rain.”

  As she spoke she had moved round behind his easel. It was such a surprise to her that at first she could not speak. She could scarcely believe what she was seeing. She felt that she was seeing water for the first time, she felt that something which she had always been conscious of but had never recognised was being set before her.

  “But you’re a terribly good painter,” she said.

  He accepted her compliment with the indifference of one who has come to terms with his own personality and talents.

  “There are those who think so,” he replied.

  For a minute she looked at his picture, then turned away.

  “I’m not going to interrupt your work,” she said. “But perhaps you’ll take a cocktail with me before lunch.”

  Over that cocktail a friendship started. Through the following sun-scorched days that friendship deepened. It was the first time that Marda had been brought in touch with a liberated intelligence of the first order. She had met artists before; a good many of them—but in the sophisticated atmosphere of London, California and Paris their talents had seemed accessory to their personalities. She had been surprised by the contrast between the broad outlines of an artist’s work and the petty objectives of his life. Grim Starling was the first artist she had ever met who lived completely in and for his work, who was indifferent utterly to the world’s opinion of it.

  “I daresay most people would tell you,” he once said, “that I was ruining my life down here drinking among sailors and working men. And by their standards I am. But I love the sun. My work needs the sun. And who am I to go about with here if not these fishermen? You can’t expect me to spend my time among Riviera wasters. And among the fishermen, what else is there to do but drink? And I love drink. When all’s said and done, no doubt I’ll kill myself that way. But my work gets done. And it’s all very well for people to say, ‘You’d have done better if you hadn’t drunk.’ You can’t be sure of that. There is the work. Anyhow it’ll stand wind and weather.”

  He was the most stimulating companion she had ever had. He talked as she had known no one talk; of art, of life, of the history and character of the towns and people through which, afternoon after afternoon, they motored, driving out past Cannes, through the hills of Mouqine towards Grasse: past the grey-green olive-covered terraces. She had never met a man whose life was too filled with impersonal interests to be fettered by the personal animosities, prejudices, ambitions that make life narrow and egocentric for the vast majority of mankind.

  “He’s like no man I’ve ever met,” she thought. And went on thinking it, till one night, when the moon was high over the bay, and they sat after dinner on the verandah of the hotel, watching the phosphorous break round the ropes of the anchored boats, and he began to talk of himself; sentimentally, and of his future, and of how different things would have been for him had he met her earlier.

  “If I had I shouldn’t be wasting life down here,” he said. “I may delude myself into thinking I’ve done better work by cutting adrift as I have done. But that’s only the sop that one flings to one’s unhappiness. If I’d met you earlier… and even now perhaps it’s not too late, not really too late: though I am all these years older than you are. We could still make such a fine thing of life together.”

  It was the old record playing the old tune. And she sighed, and sat a l
ong time that evening on her balcony, looking out over the moon-filled bay, wondering what strange property it was that love possessed that it should turn the most different-seeming men into the same man; that the most diverse characters, the moment they fall in love, would think of nothing but the most trite, the most ordinary things to say. Was love after all the illusion of youth, as Santa Claus was the illusion of childhood? Was it that love was too trite, too ordinary to have anything that was not ordinary said about it?

  Perhaps that was it, and perhaps she had been a fool not to accept five months back in San Francisco the genial-friendliness of Edgar Mountain. It might be that was all love ever did amount to. It might be. But in spite of her apathy she could not quite believe that yet. There must be something more to it than that. There must be, she thought, despondently rather than confidently, as three days later the long liner drew slowly out of the bay and steamed westwards towards the green Antilles. There must be, she thought. But she was not really very hopeful as she rode a fortnight later on mule-back over the green mountain tracks of Dominica, at the side of the planter whose acquaintance she had made upon the ship.

  He was tall, sun-tanned, broad-shouldered. The typical pioneer living on the soil and for the soil, ignorant of all that made up the sum of civilised society. He was like a figure out of a film, out of a Wild West film. And he looked magnificent as he stood on the verandah of his bungalow, showing how he had planted this strip of land and added that, telling her how his plantation had been ruined by a hurricane, how half his home had been broken in a gale. He was strong and manly in the pride of life, and he was in love with her, there was no doubt. And if this were a film, she thought, I should never leave this island. I should let my ship sail on without me, and linger on here in this far island ministering to this strong man’s comfort, breeding strong-armed children to carry on his work. And she wished she could feel like a film heroine. She wished that he could make her want to cancel her passage, disembark her trunks and stay for ever in this green valley.

  But instead of saying the winged words that would have made it easy for her to let that ship sail on, he called her his little woman and told her that life was difficult for such as she, that she needed looking after, that she needed a man to fend for her. And it was sorrowfully that she shook her head as the steamer drew away from Roseau and the great green outline of Dominica faded into the tropic twilight.

  “Men are mice,” she thought. They are all the same, running after one another’s tail. It was tragic: but that was all there was to it, and it was in a subdued mournful state of mind that she added up the number of days that divided her from San Francisco. Five days in the Caribbean, two in Panama, a fortnight of drifting along the western coast, La Union, Manzanillo, Mazatlan, Los Angeles. Her interest in the journey evaporated. She could no longer enter wholeheartedly into the fun of a shipboard life, its deck games, bridge and dances. She preferred to sit apart reading, in a quiet corner of the deck. Very often she would take her deck-chair down into the bows and stay there through the long sundrenched hours, brooding and watching through inattentive eyes the coloured, varying life of the steerage passengers, those strange derelicts of birth and fortune who lay about under the awning in strange garb, eating out of strange dishes such strange foods as their strange faiths prescribed.

  It was while she was in the bows that she became conscious, among that crowd of coloured and half-caste people, of a white-skinned, handsome man in the early twenties. He wore shorts, bare legs, a sleeveless tricot. He took a great deal of exercise, walking for at least a couple of hours every day backwards and forwards along the confined space of the narrow deck. He seemed very popular. He was always surrounded by a group of laughing people. He had a gramophone which he played continuously. He seemed equally at ease with Mexican half-castes, niggers from the Southern States, and “gone natives” from God knew where. She listened carefully when he spoke. His voice had the singing Barbadian pitch of those families whose children have been nursed for generations by coal-black mammies.

  “I wonder who he is,” she thought.

  Marda was not a person who allowed herself to be fretted by curiosity. That evening there was a meeting of the ship’s committee to decide on the fancy dress dance. Marda had been put on the committee during the early days of the voyage because she was the only attractive woman who was not below deck being seasick. She had taken such little part in the proceedings that her first serious expression of opinion had the shattering effect of assault from an unexpected quarter.

  “It shall be a masked ball,” she said. “All classes shall be admitted, and for the first quarter of the programme it shall be the women who shall select their partners.”

  The suggestion was so unusual, so surprising and was expressed with such confidence of acceptance that no concentrated opposition was presented. To everyone’s surprise except Marda’s, the proposition was carried.

  “And now,” Marda thought, “And now.”

  She came dressed as a Russian to the dance, in a long white skirt with a bright red tunic trimmed with fur. A little fur cap sat lightly on her head; thin brocade and lace fell from her mask upon her cheeks. Leaning against the taffrail she scanned the group of darkened and masqueraded figures. Some of them had not bothered to change. Others had attempted humour with blackened faces, spectacles, wigs and beards; others were self-consciously elegant in genuine fancy dresses. At them Marda did not bother to look twice. She could not picture the young man whom she had seen patrolling the lower deck, chatting to steerage passengers, disfiguring himself with burnt cork. Nor did she think that a mask could disguise that proud-set head, the broad shoulders, the firm-lined back. One glance would be sufficient. While the other passengers laughed and simpered and the women coyly invited the men to dance, she stood apart, leaning against the taffrail, waiting. She had not long to wait. And she had not long to look. He was dressed as she had expected him to dress, in long sailor’s trousers and a sailor’s tricot, striped and sleeveless. His arms were dead white to the elbow, ruddily bronzed below.

  “He’s lovely,” she thought, “lovely.” And with that utter absence of embarrassment that was her charm and strength, she walked across the deck to him.

  “I think,” she said, “that I’d like you to dance this with me.” Though it’s too much to suppose, she added to herself, that he dances anything but atrociously.

  He didn’t though. He danced divinely, in a slow, smooth rhythm; a rhythm to which she could surrender, letting her feet follow his.

  “You dance well,” she said when the music stopped. “I’m going to avail myself of your usurped prerogative, and book you for each of the first five dances.”

  And he laughed back, and in the soft singing Barbadian accent, “I was just beginning to think,” he said, “how maddening it was going to be to have to wait five dances before I’d be allowed be ask you for another.”

  And so for five dances they waltzed, fox-trotted and tangoed on the throbbing swaying deck, under a sky velvet-black and starred, on whose eastern edge was quivering the faint lightness of a waning moon, and as they danced he talked in his soft singing voice and she in his arms, her mind adream, built a dream slowly round this new strange man whose fingers were firm upon her shoulder, whose voice was soft upon her ears. Who was he? she asked herself. What was he, that he with these looks, that voice, that manner, should be travelling steerage third, the associate of negroes and white trash? Who was he that he should be travelling in this way? The younger son, was he, of some old Barbadian family come upon bad days in the sugar slump, deciding just as his ancestors had done years back to sail for a new field, adventuring penniless to a new continent? Was that what he was, this brave straight figure who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of romance, whose masked face bending over her seemed to symbolise all mystery, all adventure?

  And there was the fifth dance finished and, “Now my prerogative’s restored,” he said. “I can book you for the next five dances, and
ask you to sit out the first.”

  Slowly they walked away from the lighted deck, down the ladderway towards the bows. Leaning forward over the taffrail they watched the silver coins of phosphorous float through the churning foam. Over the sea’s eastern rim the moon was silvering the grey-black waters, and: “Don’t you think we might take our masks off now?” he said. And a moment later, “You’re even lovelier than I dared to dream.”

  The arm on her elbow lifted along her shoulder so that it was easier than not for her head to lean back against it, and with that young handsome face bending over hers, “Why not, on a night like this?” she thought. “Why not?”

  The first thing that she saw next morning as she came on deck was the steward staggering up the ladder under the weight of a bulky cabin trunk. He was followed by a tall, good-looking, well-dressed young man, whom at first Marda did not recognise. When she did she gave a gasp.

  “What on earth are you doing?” she said.

  “Changing to first class. You didn’t think, did you, that I was going to waste any more time with that riff-raff. I’ve got all I wanted out of them too. I’m a journalist,” he explained. “I was just travelling like that for copy.”

  In dismay she stared at him. A West Indian journalist travelling steerage third for copy. And he was wearing a well-cut lounge suit, with padded shoulders, and a Hawes & Curtis shirt, and a Spitalfield silk tie, and a crepe de Chine handkerchief in his breast-pocket; and he looked just like every other good-looking, well-dressed young man that she had ever met. “He too,” she thought, “he too.”