Of Time and the River (122 page)
Rather, she chatted gaily to Eugene, she kept up a witty and high- spirited discourse with everyone around her, she had never been more mercurial, quick, gay and charming than she was that evening. And announcing gaily that she was the hostess that was “giving the party,” she ordered lavishly—a delicious meal, with champagne from the celebrated cellars of the establishment. And everyone, spurred to hunger by the cold air and their long journey, ate heartily— everyone save Ann, who ate little and sat in angry silence, with one arm round Starwick’s shoulders, and Starwick, who could not be roused from his deep stupor to eat anything.
It was after nine o’clock before they got up to go. Elinor paid the bill, and still chatting as gaily and as lightly as if the whole wretched expedition had brought nothing but unqualified joy to all her guests, started for the door. Starwick had to be half- carried, half-dragged out by Ann and Eugene, under the prayerful guidance of several deeply troubled waiters. They put him in the car and got in themselves. Elinor, looking round lightly and crying out cheerfully, “Are we ready, children?” started the motor for the long drive back to Paris.
That was a hideous and unforgettable journey. Before they were done with it, they thought that it would never end. Under the protraction of its ghastly horror, time lengthened out interminably, unbelievably, into centuries. It seemed to them at last that they would never arrive, that they were rolling through a spaceless vacancy without progression, that they were hung there in the horrible ethers of some planetary emptiness where their wheels spun futilely and for ever in moveless movement, unsilent silence, changeless change.
From the very beginning they did not know where they were going. By the time they got out of Rheims they were completely lost. It was a cold night, late in February; a thick fog-like mist that grew steadily more impenetrable as the night wore on, had come down and blanketed the earth in white invisibility. And through this mist there were diffused two elements: the weird radiance of a submerged moon which gave to the sea of fog through which they groped the appearance of an endless sea of milk, and the bitter clutch of a stealthy, raw, and cruelly penetrating cold which crept into man’s flesh and numbed him to the bone of misery.
All through that ghastly and interminable night they groped their way across France in the milky ocean of antarctic fog. It seemed to them that they had travelled hundreds of miles, that Paris had long since been passed, lost, forgotten in the fog, that they were approaching the outer suburbs of Lyons or Bordeaux, that presently they would see the comforting lights of the English Channel or that they had turned northwards, had crossed Belgium, and soon would strike the Rhine.
From time to time the road wound through the ghostly street of some old village; the white walls of village houses rose sheer and blank beside the road, sheeted in phantasmal mist like ghosts, and with no sound within. Then they would be groping their way out through the open countryside again—but where or in what country, no one knew, none dared to say—and suddenly, low and level, beside them to the left, they would see the moon. It would suddenly emerge in some blind hole that opened in that wall of fog, and it was such a moon as no man living ever saw before. It was an old, mad, ruined crater of a moon, an ancient, worn, and demented thing that smouldered red like an expiring coal, and that was like the old ruined moon of a fantastic dream. It hung there on their left, just at the edge of a low ridge of hills, and it was so low, so level, and so ghostly-near, it seemed to them that they could touch it.
Towards midnight they groped their way into a whited ghostly phantom of a town which Elinor at length, with the sudden recognition of a person who revisits some old scene of childhood, discovered to be Soissons. She had known the town well during the War: the ambulance unit, in which she had been for eighteen months a driver, had been stationed here. Starwick was half conscious, huddled into Ann’s shoulder on the dark rear seat. He groaned pitiably and said that he could go no farther, that they must stop. They found a hotel café that was still open and half-carried, half- dragged him in. They got brandy for him, they tried to revive him; he looked like a dead man and said that he could go no farther, that they must leave him there. And for the first time Elinor’s grave tone showed concern and sharp anxiety, for the first time her hard eye softened into care. She remained firm; gently, obdurately, she refused him. He collapsed again into unconsciousness; she turned her worried eyes upon the others and said quietly:
“We can’t leave him here. We’ve got to get him back to Paris somehow.”
After two ghastly hours in which they tried to revive him, persuade him to gird up his fainting limbs for final effort, they got him back into the car. Ann covered him with blankets and held him to her for the remainder of the night, as a mother might hold a child. In the faint ghost-gleam of light her face shone dark and sombre, her eyes were dark, moveless, looking straight ahead.
Armed with instructions from an anxious waiter, they set out again on the presumptive road to Paris. The interminable night wore on; the white blanket of the fog grew thicker, they passed through more ghost-villages, sheer and sudden as a dream, sheeted in the strange numb silence of that ghostly nightmare of a fog. The old red crater of the moon vanished in a ruined helve at length behind a rise of earth. They could no longer see anything, the road before was utterly blotted out, the car-lights burned against an impenetrable white wall, they groped their way in utter blindness, they crawled at a snail’s pace.
Finally, they felt their way along, inch by inch and foot by foot. Eugene stood on the running-board of the car, peering blindly into that blank wall of fog, trying only to define the edges of the road. The bitter penetration of raw cold struck through the fog and pierced them like a nail. From time to time Elinor stopped the car, while he stepped down and stamped numb feet upon the road, swung frozen arms and lustily blew warmth back into numb fingers. Then that infinite groping patience of snail’s progress would begin again.
Somewhere, somehow, through that blind sea of fog, there was a sense of morning in the air. The ghosts of towns and villages grew more frequent—the towns were larger now, occasionally Elinor bumped over phantom curbs before the warning shouts of her look-out could prevent her. Twice they banged into trees along unknown pavements. There was a car-track now, the bump of cobbles, the sense of greater complications in the world about them.
Suddenly they heard the most thrilling and evocative of all earth’s sounds at morning—the lonely clopping of shod hooves upon the cobbles. In the dim and ghostly sheeting of that light they saw the horse, the market cart balanced between its two high creaking wheels, laden with sweet clean green-and-gold of carrot bunches, each neatly trimmed as a bouquet.
They could discern the faint ghost-glimmer of the driver’s face, the big slow-footed animal, dappled grey, and clopping steadily towards the central markets.
They were entering Paris and the fog was lifting. In its huge shroud of mist dispersing, the old buildings of the city emerged ghostly haggard, pallidly nascent in the dim grey light. A man was walking rapidly along a terraced pavement, with bent head, hands thrust in pockets—the figure of the worker since the world began. They saw at morning, in grey waking light, a waiter, his apron-ends tucked up, lifting racked chairs from the tables of a café, and on light mapled fronts of bars and shops, the signs Bičre—Pâtisserie— Tabac. Suddenly, the huge winged masses of the Louvre swept upon them, and it was grey light now, and Eugene heard Elinor’s low, fervent “Thank God!”
And now the bridge, the Seine again, the frontal blank of the old buildings on the quays, faced haggardly towards light, the narrow lane of the Rue Bonaparte, and in the silent empty street at length, his own hotel.
They said good-bye quickly, hurriedly, abstractedly, as he got out; and drove away. The women were thinking of nothing, no one now, but Starwick, life’s fortunate darling, the rare, the precious, the all-favoured one. In the grey light, unconscious, completely swaddled in the heavy rugs, Starwick still lay pillowed on Ann’s shoulder.
LXXXIV
All day Eugene slept the dreamless, soundless sleep of a man who has been drugged. When he awoke, night had come again. And this concatenation of night to night, of dreamless and exhausted sleep upon the strange terrific nightmare of the night before, the swift kaleidoscope of moving action which had filled his life for the past two days, now gave to that recent period a haunting and disturbing distance, and to the events that had gone before the sad finality of irrevocable time. Suddenly he felt as if his life with Ann, Elinor, and Starwick was finished, done; for some strangely troubling reason he could not define, he felt that he would never see them again.
He got up, dressed, and went downstairs. He saw old Gely and his wife, his daughters, Marie the maid, and the little concierge: it seemed to him that they looked at him strangely, curiously, with some sorrowful sad knowledge in their eyes, and a nameless numb excitement gripped him, dulled his heart. He felt the nameless apprehension that he always felt—that perhaps all men feel—when they have been away a day or two. It was a premonition of bad news, of some unknown misfortune: he wanted to ask them if someone had come for him—without knowing who could come—if they had a message for him—not knowing who might send him one—an almost feverish energy to demand that they tell him at once what unknown calamity had befallen him in his absence. But he said nothing, but still haunted by what he thought was the strange and troubling look in their eyes—a look he had often thought he observed in people, which seemed to tell of a secret knowledge, an inhuman chemistry, a communion in men’s lives to which his own life was a stranger—he hurried out into the street.
Outside the streets were wet with mist, the old cobbles shone with a dull wet gleam, through the mist the lamps burned dimly, and through the fog he heard the swift and unseen passing of the taxi- cabs, the shrill tooting of their little horns.
Yet everything was ghost-like and phantasmal—the streets of Paris had the unfamiliar reality of streets that one revisits after many years of absence, or walks again after the confinement of a long and serious illness.
He ate at a little restaurant in the Rue de la Seine, and troubled by the dismal lights, the high old houses, and the empty streets of the Latin Quarter sounding only with the brief passage of some furious little taxi drilling through those narrow lanes towards the bridge of the Seine and the great blaze and gaiety of night, he finally forsook that dark quarter, which seemed to be the image of the unquiet loneliness that beset him, and crossing the bridge, he spent the remainder of the evening reading in one of the cafés near Les Magasins du Louvre.
The next morning, when he awoke, a pneumatique was waiting for him. It was from Elinor, and read:
“Darling, where are you? Are you still recovering from the great debauch, or have you given us the go-by, or what? The suspense is awful—won’t you say it ain’t so, and come to lunch with us today at half-past twelve? We’ll be waiting for you at the studio.— ELINOR”—Below this in a round and almost childish hand, was written: “We want to see you. We missed you yesterday.—ANN.”
He read this brief and casual little note over again and again, he laughed exultantly, and smote his fist into the air and read again. All of the old impossible joy was revived in him. He went to the window and looked out: a lemony sunlight was falling on the old pale walls and roofs and chimney-pots of Paris: everything sparkled with health and hope and work and morning—and all because two girls from Boston in New England had written him a note.
He held the flimsy paper of the pneumatique tenderly, as if it were a sacred parchment too old and precious for rough handling; he even lifted it to his nose and smelled it. It seemed to him that all the subtle, sensuous femininity of the two women was in it—the seductive and thrilling fragrance, impalpable and glorious as the fragrance of a flower, which their lives seemed to irradiate and to give to everything, to everyone they touched, a sense of triumph, joy and tenderness. He read the one blunt line that Ann had written him as if it were poetry of haunting magic: the level, blunt and toneless inflexibility of her voice sounded in the line as if she had spoken; he read into her simple words a thousand buried meanings—the tenderness of a profound, simple and inarticulate spirit, whose feelings were too deep for language, who had no words for them.
When he got to the studio he found the two women waiting, but Starwick was not there. Ann was quietly, bluntly matter of fact as usual; Elinor almost hilariously gay, but beneath her gaiety he sensed at once a deep and worried perturbation, a worn anxiety that shone nakedly from her troubled eyes.
They told him that on their return from Rheims, Starwick had left the studio to meet Alec and had not been seen since. No word from him had they had that night or the day before, and now, on the second day since his disappearance, their anxiety was evident.
But during lunch—they ate at a small restaurant in the neighbourhood, near the Montparnasse railway station—Elinor kept up a gay and rapid conversation, and persisted in speaking of Starwick’s disappearance as a great lark—the kind of thing to be expected from him.
“PERFECTLY insane, of course!” she cried, with a gay laugh. “But then, it’s typical of him: it’s just the kind of thing that kind would do. Oh, he’ll turn up, of course,” she said, with quiet confidence, “—he’ll turn up in a day or two, after some wild adventure that no one in the world but Francis Starwick could have had. . . . I MEAN!” she cried, “picking that Frenchman—Alec—up the way he did the other night. UTTERLY mad, of course!” she said gaily. “—But then, there you ARE! It wouldn’t be Frank if he didn’t!”
“I see nothing very funny about it,” said Ann bluntly. “It looks like a pretty rotten mess to me. We know nothing at all about that Frenchman—who he is, what he does; we don’t even know his name. For all you know he may be one of the worst thugs or criminals in Paris.”