Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (24 page)

I translate fairly literally:

‘A boat tossing alone on the Gulf of Guinea has written another chapter in the tumultuous history of Mme Barbara Peigneret, English-born widow of soap-millionaire Marcel Peigneret, whose mysterious death of four years ago so much embroiled the discreet police of Lyons. Undeterred by her narrow escape from charges following her husband’s fall from a third-floor window, Mme Barbara became a noted solicitress of the French Law. At one time scarcely a month passed without the Courts being cheered and electrified by a stage in her innumerable processes against the relatives of her late husband. At length however the triumphs of the witness-box began to pall and the beautiful protagonist made a poignant declaration to the Press. “Modern life is corrupt. I have determined to quit it, alone with a few other sympathetic spirits.” On further inquiry it appeared that, employing a fortune already sufficiently large before she began to assert her rights, she had leased from the Portuguese Government the uninhabited island of Sao Onofrio in the Bissagos Group just off the Guinea coast. “I plan to settle there”, she said, “and found the perfect democratic society. I shall be Queen and my subjects will have completely free access to me.”

‘The last at any rate seems to have been true, for the new paradise had not been instituted for more than six months before representations were made by the Catholic Church in Lisbon to abolish it on the grounds that a public desecration of morals was taking place on Portuguese territory. Evidently this lady had her own interpretation of democracy. If it permitted a Queen, how could a Court be forbidden? When the chartered vessel,
Secours de Sainte Anne
, set out from Marseilles in November
1934
it carried not only five families of ordinary colonists, about whom one could say that they sought nothing more than to change very moderate gifts of fortune, but also the direct entourage and inner council of Mme Peigneret. The latter, who happened to be all males, consisted of: M. Jean-Raymond Manitou who acted in several films until his conviction for harbouring narcotics; M. Edmond Sameuil, twice-divorced international Rugby-footballer; M. Robert Conte, business man, who in
1934
adroitly dissociated himself from the scandal of Blum-Stavisky; and finally a mysterious character, Stefan Tourdieff, ex-Polish miner and mystagogue who was reputed to instruct his paymistress in the arts of Yoga.

‘A fair landing was made on the chosen island. Thereafter no more was heard from Sao Onofrio until M. André Ledoux, a French journalist who had occasion to visit Bolama, decided to extend his journey so as to obtain a glimpse of the new settlement. His visit was not altogether welcome, but before ejection he managed to obtain certain details of Mme Peigneret’s social experiment. Tragedy, alas, had already struck the little community. Whilst the worthy plebeians set about producing quarters from the jungle which prevailed over most of the island, Mme Peigneret and her friends were already pursuing an active social life. It appears that, at first, M. Manitou was most favoured with the intimate confidences of the leading lady; but that after a while his position began to be sapped by the spiritual machinations of M. Tourdieff, who expressed doubts not only whether M. Manitou’s etheric vibrations were suited to his position but also whether he had satisfactorily recovered from a certain disability which he had contracted round the film studios.

‘Sequel—both men went off on a bathing-trip to talk over the situation. Neither returned, but four days later the body of M. Manitou was washed ashore covered with the stabs of a small knife. Query—M. Tourdieff, had he suffered a mutual fate, or had he perhaps dematerialized himself in order to avoid hurtful gossip?

‘M. Conte succeeded to the status of consort, but his tenure was a short one, for he was swept away in convulsions by a mysterious fever. Remained only the athletic M. Sameuil who endured for more than a year. Unhappily his experience among the scrums and mêlées had given him a taste for variety and quick movement and he began simultaneously to pay addresses to the most attractive wife among the commoners. No harm would perhaps have ensued if he had not tripped and accidentally split his skull on an axe with which the husband happened to be following him.

‘Too late Sao Onofrio came to regret the high marital standards of the avenger. In agricultural terms one says that the balance of nature has been upset when the removal of one pest leads to new ravages by creatures on which it formerly preyed. Queen Barbara, being now entirely deprived of high-class satisfactions, began to look towards lower sources. The quiet sunbaked air of the island was continually rent with hideous rows and altercations [
rixes et bagarres
] and the perpetual booming of the surf was almost drowned by the cries of outraged womanhood. Finally the men themselves, reduced to a simple taste for peace, conspired with their wives to rid the island of its turbulent ruler. Mme Peigneret was seized whilst she slept and thrown into a small row-boat which had been equipped with a few provisions and a keg of water. In true pirate fashion she was cast adrift and the current rapidly bore her out of sight of her relieved subjects.

‘This one must admit, Mme Peigneret has never lacked resolution or courage. For eleven days, long after her food was exhausted, she floated over a little-known expanse of the Atlantic. Her water too had just given out when she was saved from certain death by a chance sighting of the Greek vessel,
Louloudhi.

‘Tanned to the colour of old bronze she stood once more on the quay at Marseilles being interviewed by our representative. “Life is a pilgrimage,” she said, “and Sao Onofrio was not the most curious place to which it has taken me. I spent much of my early life in the Far East where I was adored by the natives and learnt resignation.” Asked where next she proposed to direct her pilgrim footsteps Mme Peigneret drew up her magnificent frame to its full six feet and said: “Towards the fulfilment of my essential destiny. I find that I am pregnant.” ’

What is the betting on this identification? Varvara might easily have anglicized her name, and also married a Frenchman. If she did the second, I should be willing to stake a great deal against the success of the union. Amidst a French family circle she would have been like a lioness in a formal garden. The physique and the claim to Eastern experience are suggestive but hardly more. I say nothing about the husband’s briefly hinted fate.

Personally I hope Varvara never became Mme Peigneret nor ruled over her self-devouring flock on Sao Onofrio. Even allowing for a high percentage of malicious exaggeration in the presentment of the story, one has to admit that it is not only comic but also brutal and sordid. To my mind the features which point most strongly to Varvara are not the atmosphere of nymphomania and homicide—for neither of which have I any substantial grounds to indict her—but the way in which the heroine, even when seen through the eye of a debunking journalist, contrived to invest her adventures with a kind of grotesque dignity.

The second of these oblique and doubtful glimpses I owe to my own experience. In the summer of
1943
I was returning from a leave spent in the West of England. The train was ambling gently along a branch line not far from Weymouth. It happened to be unusually empty, and I and another Army officer had a first-class carriage to ourselves. He was a small, brisk man who opened a conversation in a fashion difficult to repel—by producing half a bottle of Scotch and two paper cups.

For a while we talked casually. Somehow we came on to the subject of the large houses which could be seen at intervals along the track, standing out preternaturally white against the scarves of woodland. I ventured on the usual speculation about what would happen to them after the war.

‘Don’t know,’ said my companion. ‘Some’ll go for schools and hotels, I suppose. They may knock others down for the materials.’ He began to laugh to himself. ‘If you’ll wait another five minutes I’ll show you one that’s bloody lucky to be still standing.’

‘You know the neighbourhood?’

‘I was stationed here for a bit in
1940
.’

‘Was this some place where you were billeted?’

I suppose the suggestion connected unfortunately with his earlier remark. At any rate he looked at me rather coldly before replying:

‘Not in the house itself. In the grounds.’

Evidently, I thought, the story of some stray bomb. But the memory seemed to give him a surprising pleasure, for he had glued himself against the window, scanning the landscape and uttering short chuckles.

‘There,’ he said suddenly, ‘there, between those two copses, with the hill behind.’

It looked a very decent Georgian mansion with a double bay front and a flat roof, large and handsome but not remarkable for sheer size or beauty.

‘Yes?’ I said, knowing that, even if I wished to, I could not stop so cherished an anecdote.

‘That’s where I saw my only active service so far in this war! Serbright Manor. I shan’t forget that night in a hurry. We’d been in camp at the village just over the hill. Then, about the end of June
1940
, after France had packed up, there was a flood of refugee soldiery and two of our companies were told to move out to tents in the Manor grounds. Some of our officers were a bit fed up and thought the authorities ought to have taken over the house for them. But there wasn’t really anything to complain about, particularly as the weather that summer was so good. At least it was until the day of the move. But that morning the hell of a thunderstorm blew up, and by the time it was over the temperature had dropped nearly fifteen degrees.’

He paused, poured another drink, glancing at me anxiously to see if he was doing his story justice.

‘There’s a point there, old boy. I’m not just nattering. If it hadn’t turned quite cold, Clara would never have put on her leopard-skin coat. Clara was my C.O.’s wife—not bad but rather a bitch, really. Frankly I never thought she was quite worthy of old Colin. He was a magnificent chap. I suppose she caught him.

‘Anyway Clara had some keen ideas about etiquette and doing things properly. So she’d made up her mind to call on the lady of Serbright Manor. We’d heard one or two things about her and frankly she sounded pretty peculiar. The villagers never mentioned her without sniggering in a scared sort of way. But none of us knew anything positive about her except that she was a widow and as rich as hell.

‘I don’t think Clara was really paying the call in a very friendly spirit. She was the leader of the school of thought which held that the Manor ought to have been requisitioned for the battalion. But she had every chance to get into a charitable state of mind because, outside the gates of the lodge, she met a couple of nuns from the convent at Ossington who were going up to the house to visit a sick R.C. servant. Clara was a R.C. herself and she knew these two good women, so naturally she got off her bicycle and they all proceeded together.

‘Well, they’d just rounded a bend in the drive when something went whee-ee over their heads. You can’t expect nuns to know much about bullets, and the first time Clara probably thought it was some kind of flying beetle. But beetles don’t bust bicycles—and that’s what happened. Whilst she was still wheeling it the hub-cap was knocked out of the front wheel. That made them look at the house and what they saw so staggered them that they could hardly run away. There on the roof, dancing about and waving a rifle, was a ruddy great woman. She was shouting and making signs at them, but they were too far off to make out what she was saying. They’d ducked into the woods at the side of the drive and were lying low when an awful suspicion came over Clara; she was practically sure that the words had been German.

‘I don’t need to tell you, old boy, what a state everybody was in at that time: or how many stories of Jerry tricks were going round—including the one about using Hitler Youth Maidens as parachutists in Holland and Belgium. So naturally Clara who was never backward in jumping to conclusions thought that she’d discovered at least a raid and probably the first wave of invasion. She and the nuns bashed their way out through the undergrowth, then she leapt on to her bicycle and shot straight down to our lines. Colin was out when she arrived, and I happened to be in charge, God help me! Clara was soon in a towering rage. She went straight through the roof when I suggested that before doing anything drastic we should ring up the Manor and see whether they could explain the incident. I stuck to my point, but unfortunately when I tried to ’phone I couldn’t get through. The exchange said the wires must have been damaged in the storm, but of course for Clara that simply meant they’d been cut.

‘It was beginning to look as if I should have to do something on my own when, thank God, Colin turned up. He ticked Clara off for being in the camp, but he couldn’t shake her story or put it down to imagination. He tried to get through to Brigade H.Q. to see if they had any information about raids or subversive activity by fifth columnists; but that bloody line was down too. So he told me to take Sergeant Dewes with half a platoon and carry out an armed reconnaissance. Then, at the last moment, he decided that as the situation was so peculiar, he’d come along as well. He could never bear to be left out of any uproar.’

‘What did you say?’

‘—any uproar. Well, we set off and when I got to the Manor grounds I fanned the men out in battle order—still feeling a bit of a fool. But, sure enough, we hadn’t been in sight of the house for more than a minute before we heard “ping”, “ping”, “ping”. It was fire all right from some kind of light rifle and it came out of an upper window. I thought, hell, the balloon really has gone up! By this time we were all flat on our faces. Colin crawled up to me and said that he was going to take half the men round to the back and try to break in that way. My orders were to stay put with the other half and keep up a slow rate of answering fire. “Don’t try to hit anyone,” he said. “If this lot are what they seem, they’re worth more in the bag than dead.”

‘It was just as well he said that and I got the word round; because, when he’d been gone a few minutes, we saw the woman strolling about on the roof. She was a dead target, particularly when she stood still fixing something to one of the chimney-pots. I nearly collapsed when I saw what it was—a bloody Union Jack! It seemed a bit optimistic to think they were going to fox us that way after trying to blow our heads off. But you can’t tell with Jerries.