OLIVE SAID TO Peter, “The town’s cracking. It’s very jumpy now, like this,” teetering her hand from the wrist. “They’re breaking into some places on the main street.”
“Hemingway doesn’t know beans about Spain,” said Peter.
“Oh, Hemingway was all right,” answered Olive. “Who won, you or England?”
The German stopped, waiting to look at the three of them. He had deep brown eyes, or black. It was night now. He had a dark face, darker than his hair. As he passed under a light, it was plain. Sunburned dark. It had a carved rigor, the snub nose and wide peasant mouth, with keen lines on either side. Like carved wood, Helen thought, a Brueghel face, with active living, philosophic eyes.
“Rule, Britannia,” Peter was mocking. “Britannia keeps the rules.”
Olive and Peter went over the question of English sportsmanship, their mechanical answers echoing in the dark.
Helen felt that, at any other time, the quarrel would have been real, the issues plain. But that set of habits fell behind. Here there were only the weird scenes: the church, the man on the hill, the plane, following so swiftly and inconsequently that there was no way to stop and set them in place, no way for the speeding mind to arrange them.
Nightfall. That was real. Black and physical upon her, the only thing known.
Not that it was a matter of real scenes, real feelings, as it was with Olive, who felt most strongly and looked most moved during fear. It was all absorbed, immediately, too soon, in the way that the danger from the unknown plane had been accepted by the time the plane had reached its position, able to let fall its bombs. The gun-cars could pass now: one had passed behind them as they criticized the fruit that morning, it had passed tooting, and they had not turned to face the guns. It was perhaps that there was no imaginable future. They had by common consent stopped saying, “If we reach . . .” and everyone said, “When we reach Barcelona,” but without conviction, without belief in their own imagining.
The street was dark and furiously real, Helen thought: the night was, all unidentified objects were real: the pregnant woman on the platform, the boy in the camión, nameless emotions, Peter’s wish for a child, her own turning toward the lady, the anonymous German walking so powerfully before her. And the fear with which they were already familiar, the conventions which they had already adopted, so that they were unbearably aroused by mention of the captain’s bravery. Criminal bravery, Peter was saying, and Helen thought how weak she was to let everyone talk on so, and to enjoy hearing them, to think always that if she had the poetic genius that produced the clue, she could find them, hear the real sound that could be spoken only at a moment like this, during such a night.
There were hidden causes.
The armies covered the world.
Let them win, let them only win, and we can bother about this later, she thought, helplessly.
All the moments flew, colored and clear. Now is my life, she thought. It comes to this night.
Only wait.
THEY WERE IN back of the main street, on an easy incline. The bitches had stopped, uncertainly. Peter called out to them, “There’s a little tunnel, to the left,” and hurried ahead. The black street grew tense and alert. When they entered the tunnel, there was a shiver behind them in the roadway and the women seized their children’s shoulders, snatching them into the houses. There was a tremor of heavy wheels approaching.
The restaurant faced the little tunnel. They opened the thick door; a burst of heat met them like a host, and drew them inside.
“Shut the door, and come in!” said the woman, not waiting, pushing the door too. “The machine guns are coming.”
“Oh, Peter,” said Olive, “let’s not stay. Let’s go back to the train.” The room was almost empty. Under the radio, a man leaned back, his mouth half-shut, pouring water into it from an earthen pitcher held at arm’s length. The bar was shiny with empty glasses, lemonade bottles, spilled wine. In the next room, at a large table, sat the German family with two of the Spaniards from the train. The father, with his head down, concentrated on a loaf of bread crooked in his elbow, distributing slices, sawing and pulling. At a smaller table, three soldiers balanced on their chairs, sitting back on two legs. Their braided collars stood open, and the strong veins of their necks were distended purple as they drank and laughed. Their guns were in a thin pyramid beside the table.
“You don’t want to go,” Peter answered in a hard voice. “You don’t want to be out on the street for the next few minutes.”
The woman said she was crowded, she could not serve them for a few minutes, would they care to rest inside or in the back room?
“I’m very thirsty,” said Helen, in a lost voice, ordering lemonade.
The German looked narrowly at her.
SHE AND OLIVE stood at the bar and drank, while the others went to say hello to the train people. Olive spoke to the waitress. Yes, the machine guns would probably come down the street. Fascists were hiding in that street. No, there was no danger here, they would keep the restaurant open, there were three soldiers in the front room, there might be a little shooting, but how could there be any danger?
“There’s a garden in back,” said Olive suddenly. “I’d like to be in the garden.” She looked at Helen. Her face, with its wide dark cheeks and immense eyes, was at its most beautiful in such a smoky light.
“I like you,” said Helen. She finished the warm pale soda. “I like your attitude toward machine guns.”
“Yes,” answered Olive, moving away with her, “It’s a nice attitude, isn’t it?”
One of the soldiers leaned forward listening.
“I won’t have this danger. It subjects us so to fear, when we are not allowed to have a part in it. I care, it makes all the difference to me. Peter would give his life for it, I think; and we’re foreign nationals, and we were that in France.” Olive spoke in an extremity of grief. “Here we are, and the machine guns are coming, and we have nothing to do with it, nothing at all.”
Europe, cracking wide apart, the split going down to the families, the trains, and to be engulfed, not cast up, not assimilated in the struggle!
Only wait.
Only we cannot be lost in the waitings, while the guns bear down! While Europe is the dark Leviathan, raging!
THE LITTLE GARDEN, where the others sat, was walled and leafy, under leaves like shallow water. A cicada made a tiny shrill sound. There was an arbor in the center of the garden, and cards were scattered on an iron table. The German came over to Helen, as she picked them up one by one. The exotic yellow stamping was a curiosity. He recited their names.
“Here, the three of gold, and the five of gold, and the queen of cups, and the prince of gold, that’s for good luck . . .”
A line from The Waste Land85 flashed across her.
“No, I’m not sure,” he was saying. “And the games are different, also, bezique . . . Do you know any of the games?”
Helen fumbled in German. Oh no, she thought, trying, the others can speak to him. They changed to French; both were confined, but it would do.
One of the women jumped up. “I thought it was a soldier,” she said as she started. It was the man with the square gray beard, who with the sallow friend was looking at two blue birds in a cage. He greeted them in his polite French; he believed that the woman was prepared to serve them instantly. They filed into the back room, looking through the doors vacantly for seats. There was no room in the front. Peter and Olive sat at one end of the long, white-covered table, and the others crowded near them at the corner, close. The German looked at Helen.
“Isn’t there any way we can shut the door?” asked one of the bitches in open nervousness. The garden door was nothing but a square cut in the house-wall.
Peter looked down the long, half-empty table, receding in white perspective. “It’s a table for the Last Supper.”
Helen turned to the vacant place beside her, stretching her arm along the cloth. “Where is Jesus?”
; There was a splatter of gunfire in the street that wiped out the words.
“Is it a woodpecker?” Olive began, facetiously.
“Did you hear that?” Peter was still listening, sitting attentive. Wine and vegetables were on the table, and soup. “I heard a shot, and a child crying.”
Nobody answered.
“I heard a shot, and a child crying!”
Everyone went on eating. There were vegetables.
“It’s all right for you,” said one of the bitches, viciously. “You’re at the end of the table, not right in front of the open door, where I’m sitting!”
They looked at her with a morbid spectator’s stare, as if they were an audience who had watched a tight-rope artist’s fall to the stage before their eyes and could not stop staring at the accident.
*From Aaron’s Rod (1922) by D. H. Lawrence.
*From Aaron’s Rod (1922) by D. H. Lawrence.
*A phrase from the “Internationale.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane,
Bent axle of devotion along companion ways
That beat, continuous, to hourless days—
One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.
—Hart Crane86
The German was pouring wine with a flat elastic gesture of the wrist that was fascinating them all; he was master of the group, and poured the wine into all the glasses, now pulled close together before them, huddled at one end of the long white table. None of the Americans dared speak much after the catastrophe. The bitch refused to recognize her fall; but they saw that she was shaken with fright and the humiliation which she was choking back.
The shooting had somehow stopped; and the radio was playing Spanish dance-music that, with the strong dark wine, swayed slowly along their veins.
And, now that the room was warmer than ever, the sensual night walked through the open doors, from the garden, the room with the radio, the wine, the deliberate talk of the German.
He was describing Barcelona, its waterfront, its green wide promenades, workers’ centers, a gay and tortured history of brilliance and wars for freedom. He outlined the city for them with the impersonal accurate strokes of a stranger who has listened to stories and studied maps, who has wished all during his youth to visit a place, and summed up accurately, in a passionate memory, the details of a city to which he has never been, a life he has never known.
He spoke almost directly to Helen, refilling her glass.
She wished she could answer him. She watched the rhythmic muscles as he poured, and glanced at Peter’s face, where a soft twitch near the mouth betrayed his anxiety and effort. The German was controlled, he went on speaking, centering the attention of the entire group, making them see the immense city on its coast, although his head too was stiffened up and fixed to listen for any street-sound.
They were rubbing the paper-thin almond skins, laughing at his story of the Catalan sailor, when the radio snapped off the music. He pushed his chair back. They could hear the chairs inside all pushed back. “Come and hear the announcement,” he said to Helen.
She was suddenly satisfied. It was enough that she understood what he said, could respond to the smallest inflection of his voice. With a roll of relief, she was freed from her need to speak, which had weighed on her since she crossed the frontier.
THE RADIO WAS speaking of the frontier, and of towns between it and Barcelona. All the restaurant listened. With the breakdown of the Fascist forces, the huge voice warned, the roads, the railway line, the hills, would be dangerous; isolated rebels, attempting to escape to France, would swarm along the short way to the border. A workers’ militia had been organized at Barcelona; but, in the outlying towns, citizens were needed now to guard the roads, to watch among the hills. A government plane was searching for groups of Fascists. Many had been intercepted. But the remainder were fighting as individuals, desperate, defeated, single . . . In an hour another bulletin would be issued. The voice stopped abruptly, and the phonograph resumed, distant and receding in the heat . . .
Two of the men who had been eating were leaving with the three soldiers, walking noiselessly, their sandals passing with animal silence.
The bitches looked after them. The green-faced woman exclaimed: “And they’re the ones who guard us!”
“What chance have we?” the sickly bitch put in. “Directly on the railway line—”
Peter cut them short. “Come on back to the train,” he said roughly.
Helen remembered, with a shock of terror. “I’ve left my suitcase at the school!”
“You’re not going to sleep there, are you?” Olive asked her.
“No,” she said. “The station—”
“Come along then,” the German said, at her side. “We’ll get it and take it to the train.”
He looked after the Catalans, at the heavy door.
THE STREET WAS not hot, as she had imagined from the heat of the restaurant, but frozen with wind running down the mountain spur, and with the million lights of white gigantic stars.
They separated after going silently through the tunnel. The street remained empty, the four Americans turned off toward the station, and the German and Helen went on down to the crossing. The cold night shivered against her, rousing the senses, storm and exhilaration after the soaking heat.
The German took her arm. He was speaking of the men who had left the restaurant immediately and with their blazing look of belief, when the radio-call came. “The whole legend is on their faces,” he was saying, “our whole belief, freedom, this war . . .”
A bulb turned down over the schoolhouse door lit the heavy body of the pock-marked Swiss, sitting straight on a stool. He stared out across the lot, into the blackness from which they emerged.
He nodded to Helen, and moved his hand on the air. “Fine night. Streams down, like water.”
“Has the truck come?” she asked.
Nothing had come. But the Hungarians were waiting inside. They thought they would wait a little longer. Everyone else was going to sleep, envying the gunnysacks of the English.
The German went indoors to look for her suitcase. They had all been taken in to be lined up in the hall or used as beds.
The guard looked up at Helen from his low stool.
“Will you stay here all night?” she asked tenderly.
“It’s the least—” he shrugged. “During this bravery, the magnificence around here—” he could not finish. The wind swept across his thick lonely body, passed the door, the bulb wavering, and gave way, returning the night to its sensual pleasure, its warmth, the blackness, the rocking secret valley.
And now the German was coming out in the bright, half circle, holding the heavy suitcase. He swung it easily and high, to his shoulder, setting his head on one side as prop.
“Compañero,” he said naturally to the Swiss, and took Helen’s arm again.
“Good night,” she added over her shoulder. “Good watch.”
She walked with long safe strides beside him. He was not at all impeded by the load. The suitcase leaned against his strong thick neck, bending his head with its peasant broadness to one side; he was very tall, in the easy sweater and corduroys, looking high in shadow. The strained muscle in his neck stood out to the weight; it was fine and taut, symptom of his body. His walk was as balanced as before, he was master. The identification struck her. He was an athlete; a member of the Games! She did not have to ask. They hardly spoke on the way to the train.
Up the street a cock crowed, a syllabled call. The night was changed by it, split like a black unearthly melon, opened, revealed, and utterly dark.
SHE BEGAN TO know what was to happen. The knowledge turned her thought, irrationally, to her country. America, she thought, far, far, vivid, asleep. This Europe, boundaried, immense in meaning now, throwing its signals brilliantly ahead.
She was pulled back by the sight of his face, brown and intent, Asiatic because of the set, half-smiling mouth. He took over le
adership, his strength was open in his body and his walk; the curious wide peasant’s face with the philosophic eyes pulled all attention to itself and to his meaning.
They climbed up the steps of the nearest car. His following face caught the filtered trainlight on its austere planes, the rough leather of the suitcase bulked on his shoulder. They started down the train, silent and moving slowly, stopping at each door, in search of a compartment.
The train was asleep. Through cracks at the drawn shades they could see the long bodies of sleepers, on all benches, at length tonight because now there was more room. Half of the train was at the schoolhouse; but the first-class compartments were all filled.
They reached Peter and Olive, who were almost asleep, and yawned luxuriously. “Come in—sleep here,” invited Peter.
Helen spoke levelly, as if she had known she would say this. “I’m going to look for a compartment, you should have the room—But will you keep the suitcase for me?
The German slung the bag up the shelf.
Helen went on. “When I find a place, I’ll call for it.”
“I’ll come,” said the German.
They said their good nights, and were in the corridor, in the night simplicity. The German looked quietly at Helen.
“Good,” he remarked.
The compartment next to Peter’s was empty. From the lamp over the town’s name, blocked on the platform-sign, a ray fell over the upholstery.
A wind carrying perfume and cold ran down the Pyrenees.
His face was cut wood. He stood aside to let her go into the compartment, and came after, sliding the door to.
She had walked across to the window, and half turned as he shut the door. Her hand came up toward the light-switch.
He met it, raised in air, and his other hand covered her breast. He swung her to him in a quick decisive motion, pivoting her through the small, black room to reach his mouth.
THE TORRENT, MOUNTAINS demand, steaming night, marvel-black, daring to sweep away, daring to answer, to announce, to find. A radio promulgation, night-manifesto. And the fierce country, blazed across the brain: urgent and cypressed, the granitic cliff, the shock of parent sea. The mouth, strong summer on the mouth.
Savage Coast Page 14
