The Tower of Oblivion Part 37

THE LONG SPLICE

I

As the little vedette approached Dinard Cale--I had got quickly through the Customs and come across with the hampers of that morning's fish--an Alec Aird out of a Men's Summer Catalogue waved his hand to George Coverham out of a flea-bag and called out a cheery good morning. It was hardly yet half-past seven, so Alec must have been up betimes. He seized the two bags I pushed ash.o.r.e and gesticulated to the driver of a nondescript sort of carosse. Then he looked me up and down and grinned.

"Ready for breakfast?"

"I'm ready for some hot water and clean clothes," I replied. "No, it wasn't so bad."

"And is this all the stuff you've brought? I asked you to come and stay with us, not just to drop in to lunch. Well, up you get. I don't suppose you'll see Madge and Jennie till midday. That d.a.m.ned Casino; three a.m.

again last night. But it's no good talking to Madge. It always ends in her doing just as she likes. Why, when I was Jennie's age I didn't know there was such a thing as a roulette-table.... I say, have you brought any English tobacco?"

I had not been in Dinard, nor indeed in France at all, since before the war; but the long steep street where the little dark cafes were opening seemed very friendly and familiar. We rumbled past the English Club into the Rue Lavava.s.seur, and instinctively my head turned to the right. Each short descending street gave the same remembered glimpse, of white casino or hotel at the bottom and the bright emerald beyond. We clattered down to the Place, and then slackened again to the ascent of dark tree-planted avenues. "Gauche--droit, I mean--starboard a couple of points," directed Alec, whose French bears no very great strain; and after ten minutes or so the sound of our wheels suddenly ceased. We were on the soft sandy drive that ended at the gate of Ker Annic.

Alec Aird hates the Casino, partly because they won't let him smoke his pipe there, partly because he doesn't like his life strung up to concert-pitch all the time. But Madge loves these vast vestibules of shining mahogany and cut and bevelled gla.s.s, these palms that brush the electric chandeliers, these broad terraces, all this bright restlessness of hotels and shops and plage. So they had split the difference in the villa they had rented. It stood high-perched among ilex and Spanish-chestnut, looking out over the rocks and islands that make of that bay a jaw full of cruel black splintered teeth. It had little broken lawns set with hydrangeas and beds and borders of blood-red begonias and montbretia and geraniums and marguerites, the whole tilted up as if it would have spilled over the rough cliff-top to the rocks below. The plage itself was hidden, but a little way out the translucent greens began, dappled with a fairy-like refraction that brought the purply shoals almost up to the surface. After that away northwards spread the wide sea--serene yet curiously wistful, tender yet never gay, dreamily lovely but unflashing, unglittering--the pensive aspect of a sea that has its back to the sun.

"Here we are," said Alec as we pulled up in front of a chromo-lithograph from a toybox lid, the villa of dove-grey with shutters of a chalky greeny-white and slender ironwork everywhere--grilles of ironwork over the glazing of the double doors, scrolled balcony railings, and iron pa.s.s.e.m.e.nterie along the ridge of the mansard-roof. "Now look here, if you want to go to bed say so, and we'll all be Sleeping Beauties--confound those rotten late hours for that kid----"

I a.s.sured him that I had no wish to go to bed.

"Right. Then come along upstairs, and sing out if there's anything you want. You'll find me somewhere about when you come down. And you might give me that tobacco----"

And, showing me up a staircase of waxed boards into my room, he left me to my toilet.

The pergola in which I found him three quarters of an hour later was at the bottom of the garden. Its roof was latticed, so that over the floor, over the garden chairs and tables, over our shoulders and hands and white flannels, lay an intricate shepherd's-plaid of gay shadow that crept like a net over us whenever we moved. A _bonne_ followed me with coffee and rolls, and we sat down to talk and to watch the flat untwinkling sea.

We, or rather Alec, talked of Boche rolling-stock on French lines (did I tell you my friend was by way of being a consulting engineer?), of coasting boats building at St Malo, of France's prospects of recovery from the devastation of the war. He thought they might pick up quickly, applauded the way they were putting their backs into it. And it may have been my fancy or the force of former a.s.sociations, but already I was conscious of a different atmosphere. There seemed to thrill in the very air the push of a logical, practical, unsentimental people. I had felt it in the bustle of the porters and camionneurs on St Malo quay, in the unyielding Breton eyes of the fishwives in the vedette, in the ten francs that that scoundrel of a cocher had overcharged Alec. It began to be impossible to look over that sunny emerald water and to say to yourself, "A man with two memories is bathing in that," to sit in the warm cage of that pergola and to remember a man who clung to false middles and had extraordinary things happen to him in the night. Beyond the point a couple of fishing-boats and a brown-sailed bisquine appeared. Out toward St Cast crept an early pleasure steamer, its smoke trailing behind it like a smudge of brown worsted. From somewhere behind that toybox of a villa came rapid exchanges in French--the day's provisions were arriving.

Suddenly Alec looked at his watch. "I say, what about having a look in at the Stade? I expect there are a few of them there by now."

"Anything you like; what's on?"

"These elimination-trials for Antwerp next month," Alec replied, who was a Fettes man and an International in his day, and is still a familiar figure at Twickenham and Blackheath. "Haven't you seen the posters?

'Debout les Athletes'--'Sons of the Patrie'--they've been all over the place for months. All out they are too, and some dashed good athletes among 'em. There's one fellow I've heard of called Arnaud--haven't seen him--in fact he's a bit of a mystery ... but look here, we've only just time for the tram. Come along----"

The filthy little tram took us to the Stade in ten minutes. It was an open field, with tracks and hurdles and a small white-painted Grand Stand at one end of it, and already _les athletes_ had got down to work.

There were perhaps a dozen of them, in zephyrs and shorts and sweaters, leaping, practising short bursts off the mark, doggedly covering the outer track or resting in twos and threes on the gra.s.s. Several of them wore little more clothing than a pair of shoes and a waist-sash. They flaunted their glossy sunburnt backs, stood with arms folded over uplifted chests, heads erect, eyes flashing, and never a smile. No Briton would have dared to display such physical navete. They might have been grimly training, not for a sporting contest, but for a duel to the death.

We watched them for an hour, and then the whooping of that horrible little tram was heard in the distance. It hurtled up to the Halte, fouling the air with the smoke of the dust and slate and slack that served it for coal, and we sat with our backs to the engine and took what care of our flannels we might.

The sluggards had descended by the time we reached the house again.

Among the harlequin shadows of the pergola Madge advanced to me with both hands outstretched.

"Monsieur! Sois le bienvenu!" Then, standing back to look at me, "What nice flannels, George! Some of the Frenchmen here, quite nice men, go about in the most extraordinary cheesecloth arrangements, and as for their shoes----! Yes, I think I can be seen with you. You can take me shopping this afternoon. I saw it in a window yesterday but hadn't time to go in. ('It's' a hat, if you must know, Alec.) And this is Jennie, in case she's grown so much you don't remember her."

There was a time when I used to kiss little Jennie Aird, but I should not have dared to kiss the young woman who stood before me now.

Take-aboutable, by Jove!... Jennie had her father's colouring, golden-red hair over a tea-rose-petal complexion lightly freckled; and if her eyebrows were faint, that somehow merely seemed to enhance the steady clear pebble-grey of the gaze beneath. She was six inches taller than her mother, and whether it was the smallness of her short-featured face that made full her beautiful throat, or whether it was the other way round, I will not attempt to say. Nor do I remember whether her hair was up or down that day. I have an idea that at that time it was sometimes the one and sometimes the other. Her gesture as she offered me her hand had the proper condescension of such a creature for a battered old piece of goods life myself. I wondered whether I ought to call her Miss Aird. These things come over one with rather a shock sometimes.

We lunched in a shining little salon, the exact centre of which, whether you measured sideways, lengthwise or up-and-down, was occupied by an enormous gilt Ganymede and Eagle lamp slung by heavy chains from the ceiling--for the lighting was either oil or candles at Ker Annic. Then back to the pergola for coffee. The tide had receded, and the rocks and the stakes that marked the channels stuck up everywhere menacingly--the Fort, Les Herbiers, Cezembre. The warm air was laden with the smell of genets, the sky was brightly blue over our white lattice. I saw Alec preparing to doze.

"Well, what about Dinard?" I said to Madge.

"Sure you wouldn't rather follow Alec's example? Very well, we'll drop Jennie at the tennis-place and you and I'll go off on the prowl. I'll be ready in five minutes. Jennie!"

She ran up to the house, and I waited for her on the sandy drive.

We walked into Dinard. The magasin that enshrined "It" was near the Casino, and there, in an impermanent little white-screened and gilt-chaired shop that had hardly been open a fortnight and would close down again the moment the season was over, I had a soothing half-hour while Alec's money took wing.

"Mais tiens, Madame"--the saleswoman's witty fingers touched, hovered, b.u.t.terflied, while the hat became half a dozen different things under the diablerie--"pose comme ca, en effet sur l'oreille--Claire, la voile verte--legerment--oh, m'sieu!" A delectable gesture of admiration of everything and everybody concerned, the hat, the veil, Madge, herself, as unabashed as the att.i.tudinising of the sunbrowned young athletes. "On dirait un sourire sur la tete de Madame!"

So, on a purely hypothetical rate of exchange, Madge bought three, and we sought the teashop and Jennie.

All English-speaking Dinard meets at that teashop in the afternoon. From four o'clock onwards it is a mob of youths in the blazers of Eton and Charterhouse and the Old Merchant Taylors, forking gateaux from the gla.s.s counters for themselves, their sisters, other fellows' sisters, their sisters' friends. Their days sped in tennis, bathing, tennis, a hurried dejeuner between the sets, tennis, watching tennis as they waited for a partner or a court, a sudden flocking to the Le Bras for tea, tennis, dancing, chocolates, and the programme for the tennis for the next day. They filled the ground-floor of the shop, made a continual coming and going on the staircase that led to the room upstairs. I steered Madge towards the table where Jennie was already seated, and found myself with young Rugby on my right, his shirt open at the neck, flannels. .h.i.tched up over his white-socked ankles. About me buzzed the whirl of talk.

"He saw him at Ambleteuse, and he did it in ten in his walking-boots on gra.s.s----"

"Rot! It's run in metres, not yards, and the record's ten and seventh-tenths----"

"American----"

"I bet you----"

"Well, it's nearly the same, and in his boots on gra.s.s----"

"Oh, put your head in a bag! Jennie, we've got Number Four Court for five-thirty, remember----"

"But I tell you this chap Arnaud----"

"Do let me get you one of those strawberry things, Mrs Aird----"

"My brother saw him--he just threw off his coat and waistcoat and ran as he was----"

"Mademoiselle, trois thes, s'il vous plait----"

I spoke in Madge's ear.

"She's a very beautiful child."

"Jennie?" said proud Madge. "Rather a young queen, isn't she? But Alec's perfectly absurd about her. Thinks young people to-day are the same as we were. She shall have the best time I can give her."

"Any----?" I looked the question.

"No. Quite asleep. She's perfectly happy dancing and dreaming and talking sport with these boys."

"Who are they?"

She told me. She knew half Dinard, and the printed Visitors' List gave her the rest.