I'll Never Be Young Again (21 page)

First they took me to a village called Plogoff. There was a pastor here. He could do nothing for me. I was not ill, I did not want to be helped. There was a peasant, too; he was kind, gentle, an old man, and he let me sleep in his cottage. He tried to keep the officials and the questioners away from me; he ordered the curious, straying people to go, who pointed at me and stared.

I was still dazed and uncomprehending; I heard the snatches of their conversation, their expressions of pity and dismay.

‘
Ils sont tous mort
,’ was one line that hammered itself into my head - ‘
Ils sont tous mort
,’ and they brought back to me in a flash, vivid and strong, the picture of my sleeping figures in the Baie des Trépassés. That was the name, they told me, the Baie des Trépassés, and the lighthouse and the headland was the Pointe du Raz. So Jake had been right after all. Jake . . . I had not got to think about that, though; I had not got to give way to the knowledge that he was gone. He had said to me: ‘You’ll be all right.’ And I would not disturb him with my sorrow wherever he should be, his arms outstretched above his head on the wet sand, his eyes closed, no smile on his face.

I would only think of Jake as he had been - long ago on the mountains above Laardel, astride his horse, standing against the background of the setting sun. I would think of him walking by my side, laughing, whistling, kicking a stone as he went.

I would think of him with a tree behind him, and the wood fire casting a reflection on his face, and his grave eyes turned upon me, a cigarette between his lips.

All of that belonged to me; the sea could not take it from me.

Now there was the continuation of my own life. There were dull, necessary formalities to be gone through, these endless questions which must be answered for the satisfaction of people I did not know. I stayed two nights in Plogoff with the Breton fisherman, and then I had to go to Nantes and give an account of the wreck and how it had happened. All this fell upon me because I was the sole survivor. It did not bear thinking about too closely. I do not know why I alone should have been chosen out of ten men to carry on this business of living. It was supreme irony on the part of someone. I, swept to safety, broken, bleeding, but alive, carried by the sea to the bay after the boat had swamped, and the others - they came later, one by one, their arms above their heads . . . There was no need to go into all that.

So I went to Nantes, where there were questions to answer, and after this there was no more I could do to help them; but, to my surprise, I was given some money and some clothes as a small compensation. This was kind of them, I thought; I do not think that they were obliged to do it. I was free now of the entanglement of the whole concern, the
Romanie
would have no further claim on me.

I went to see the British Vice-Consul in Nantes. Here there were further questions to answer, further documents to sign. The worry of these little matters kept me from thinking. They gave me something to do. I was confused and inefficient in a strange country without Jake. He had managed things in Scandinavia; when we had landed there it had been as sailors before the mast. There had not been the necessity of passports and officialism. Now I had to go into this. I was an alien, I had not any means of support. The Consul advised me to return to England. From my point of view, this was out of the question. What would I do in England? I could not go home. I could not settle down anywhere. I should always be a wanderer, I knew that. Only now it would have to be alone.

On the road to Otta Jake had told me to take a pull on myself. I had never quite known what he meant. Anyway, there had been the flick of a coin, and my choice, and Stockholm, and then the
Romanie
. This was all because of me. And he was dead. Much he cared what happened to me now. I should never see him or talk to him again. There was no other thing to do but to go on with life somehow, taking what came and accepting it, not minding very much.

I had to get away from Brittany. The sea was no good to me, nor the wild rocks, nor the fields and the dusty roads.The huddled cottages, the grave burnt peasant faces, the chapels with their worn stones, their quiet simplicity, the villages sleepy in the midday sun: they were too silent and too pure for me.

At first I had wanted it, this peace and quietude, so as to be able to shut myself up with a blind stupor of grief, but now I felt that thinking was a bad thing. I thought perhaps that if there was noise around me and the movement of many people it would be better. I should not be so much alone if I were doing things all the time. I had to keep myself in some way, too. That was part of the stupidity of living. I had to eat and drink and have a roof over my head. It hurt me that I should have to do these things, that after eating or sleeping I should feel changed and easier in mind and body. I despised myself for being able to eat, for being able to lose consciousness in sleep. It was wrong to look up at the sky in the morning and be pleased to see the sun. It was wrong to buy a packet of cigarettes, to sit on a wall yawning after food, to smile in spite of myself because the sun was warm.

It looked as though I were not caring about Jake.

 

I was really very lucky. Things might have been so much more desperate. I ought to be grateful for small mercies. Both the British Consul and the agent from the
Romanie
’s company had been helpful and provided me with everything I needed; I had sufficient money therefore to last me for a little while if I was careful in the spending of it.

That was good enough for me. I would live from day to day. I had one idea in my mind, and that was to get to Paris. I said good-bye at the Consulate, thanking them for all their kindness; people whose faces I did not know came up and shook me warmly by the hand, a little reporter from a local newspaper even took a snap of me - me, ‘the ship-wrecked mariner’, and I was put on the centre page alongside a picture of the
Romanie
, with half a column devoted to my personal sufferings. Yes, they were all very kind to me. Then I went to the station and bought a third-class ticket to Paris, and so away from Nantes and the taint of the
Romanie
, and what was gone from me, and into the start of a new life and new interests, forgetting the hell that had been.

The train was packed with sailors going home on leave, and we were all crammed together in the hard wooden carriage like animals herded in a truck. They were nearly all of them young, and in tremendous spirits, laughing and singing, hanging out of the window when we came to stations, calling out to girls, whistling, chaffing one another.

It was good to see them. I did not join in with them though; I had a paper which I pretended to read. I watched the country flash past, scattered villages and woods, hills and fields, till my eyes grew fixed on the pane of glass and it all seemed alike and I was not taking anything in, and then I grew tired of it and propped my head against my fist at the side of the carriage, trying to sleep, and the chatter and laughter of the sailors coming and going in a wave of sound.

We arrived in Paris about eight o’clock in the evening.

The name of the station was the Gare Montparnasse. I got out of the train and was swept down to the entrance with the rest of the crowd; there seemed to be a riot of noise and confusion, and everyone in a hurry, and a strange excitement and clatter, and I stood outside on the wide boulevard where there were trams and taxis rattling over the cobbled stones, and there were cafés everywhere, and people, and lights just beginning, and a good food smell, warm air, and dust, a gay screech of taxi hooters, somebody laughing, a flash of scent, and men and women being happy with one another, and it was Paris.

I found a room in the Rue Vaugirard.There was a street leading off the Boulevard Montparnasse. The room was stuffy and not very clean. It was cheap, though. It looked down on to the street below, and opposite was a wall with hoardings and posters. If I craned out of the window I could see the end of the street, and the red and white striped blind of the
tabac
at the corner where it led on to the boulevard. I looked round the room, at the cracked jug and basin, the red lamp-shade, the fat bed with a dent in the middle, and I tried to feel as though it were mine and I knew about it.

Then I went out and had something to eat at a small restaurant in the Boulevard Montparnasse, where there was a large menu written in mauve pencil that I could not be bothered to read, and remains of other people’s bread on the table-cloth, but the food was good for all that - I had a tournedos, red and juicy, and some Gruyère cheese - and then some brandy, so as not to mind about things, and I leant back smoking Camel cigarettes, thankful for a tired body and a mind drugged by drinking too much, and I watched a fat Jew fumble about with a girl’s breasts at the next table, she with silly goggle eyes and a greasy skin hot under make-up. I remember being glad that I did not have to go to bed with her, and then I got up and walked rather unsteadily out of the restaurant, blinking at the lights and the passing people as though they belonged to another world, and so back to my stuffy room, dead weary and a little sick, neither thinking nor caring very much.

 

I was glad I had come to Paris. I wondered about it at first, but after three days I was certain. There was no other place in the world that would have done for me just at this time. It was impossible to be really lonely in Paris. That was the importance of it - that was the whole thing - not to be lonely. There was no conceivable comparison between Paris and London. I leant over a bridge looking down upon the Seine, and I thought of that other time back in London on that other bridge. It could not happen here. There was something in the warm, dusty air that was against it. It was easy to forget myself because of a little tattered book in a collection of books on the side of the quay, because of an ancient man with a long white beard and a wide-brimmed black hat, because of Notre-Dame soft and grey above a network of bridges, with one white cloud in a pink sky; and then gathering these things to me and walking away from the quays in any direction, up the hill again to Montparnasse, rubbing shoulders with people who smiled, coming to a café where the sun-blinds stretched to the pavement, and there would not be an inch of room; somebody waving
L’Intransigeant
in my face, a smell of burnt bread and Camel cigarettes, and the sombre eyes of a bearded man and the red lips of a girl in a yellow scarf.

It seemed to me that there was no finality to these pictures; they were little flashes of life that broke in upon a line of vision and were gone because another came and then another. I went on sitting at my rounded table blocked by a hum of voices and a hundred eager waving hands, and I said to myself that if I was old I would consider these people as an explosion of gas, a waste of air, and energy to no purpose, coming to a crisis over nothing, but being young I wanted to be as passionate as they, and as warm. I wanted to share their enthusiasms and lose myself, too, in some belief, no matter what it should be, only for the zest and fire of the believing. It was not the faith itself that mattered, but the possessing of it. To be stimulated in any way; the rest was a side issue. I wanted to go deeply into things, not ever to stand apart with a half interest. Thus after these three days in Paris I pretended to be blindly interested in the glimpses of life that came my way, in the pictures that people gave of themselves, mirrored in my mind. The old things did not matter to me. I did not stand transfigured before the windows in the Sainte-Chapelle; I did not watch the shadowed arches in Notre-Dame, nor did I lose myself in narrow streets and in dim churches; I was aware only of the life that went on around me, the strange intimacy of a café, the familiarity of faces I did not know, and wondering how they lived - that man and that woman.

This, then, was the Paris of my first few days, an impressionistic study, patches of colour and flashes of gloom, a suggestion of fullness throughout, so that in some strange way I was dragged into the picture, caught up in it and carried along, and there was no time for reflexion, no time for being entirely alone in a room and thinking.

And this was good, for I did not want to be alone in a room and thinking. The sound of Paris took me away from the silence of the Baie des Trépassés, the laughter and clatter of the cafés covered the hollow whisper of the spent tide retreating from the hold of the
Romanie
. There was the fellowship of people who were strangers to me, becoming infinitely precious and dear, the broad back of a man with a straw hat on his knees, the flushed warm face of a woman tired with many parcels dragging at the hand of a child, and I clung to them and the supreme power they possessed of rousing a story in my imagination of what he was thinking, of where she was going, so that this might continue in a chain of stories, and never for one moment would I hesitate, and pause, and turn unconsciously to him who had gone from me and then be shaken in a wave of remembrance, and so be lost once more and alone.

I knew now that this sound and this movement of a breathing, living city were necessary to me, and the contact of people, never to be away from people. In some way I must mingle in their lives, be bound up with them, be recognized as one of them. Not be myself, solitary and absurd, creeping to a quiet corner. I had got to go on living, therefore I must live well, and quickly if possible, seeing much, drinking it all in, making some sort of a business of living, placing a value on everything I did, saying to myself: ‘This is a good moment . . . and this . . . and this. . . .’ Definitely I would stop in Paris, I would not go away from Paris. I was not quite sure how I was going to live. It gave me a thrill of excitement, this, the uncertainty of it - never being sure from day to day. And while I was sitting here in Montparnasse, on the terrace of the Dôme, lounging back with empty pockets, smoking American cigarettes, more than a little drunk, there would come to me the image of my father in England, the long windows opened on to the shadowed lawn, and he sitting there, assured, famous, the memory of me, his son, coming not to trouble the smooth continuity of his life that mattered so much. I could write to him for money, of course. It amused me to play with the thought. The inevitable eight-page letter, whining for assistance, admitting failure - the beaten puppy with his tail between his legs. Or sending a wire, a plain statement of facts, carrying it off with a high hand.