Let Me Alone

CHAPTER 11

ANNA wept as she walked away from Sidney, through the deserted village, past the inn with the wrought-iron sign. How dismal the place had become! She was cold and tired. The sun was almost gone. The hills crouched like animals, dark and unfriendly, the sky had a bleak, forbidding emptiness, the very houses looked desolate. She wished she could cease to exist.

And in a way, her existence had come to an end. She felt so numb, so aimless. What was she to do? The world seemed vast and dreary. And there was no place for her in it. Of what avail to go hastening from point to point across the surface of the world, when everywhere was the same dreariness, the same vacancy! She thought of Matthew, and it seemed like the thought of some strange nonentity, not of a man at all. She thought of Blue Hills, and of River House, and a distant shudder went through her blood, under the chilly numbness.

She could not bear to think of the world in which she must live. She could not bear to think of going back to Matthew, or to Lauretta, or even to London. She could not believe that she would be obliged to do one of these things.

Nevertheless, it was necessary to make a move in some direction.

A train arrived, after a long wait, and carried her away — whither was quite unimportant. With the surface of her mind she knew the train’s destination, knew that she would have to change at such and such a station. But the knowledge was quite external: she did not appreciate it.

She sat quite motionless in the cold, empty carriage, her hands clasped together on her lap. On her face was a grave, thoughtful look. But she continued to be at a loss. She continued to feel dazed, as though she could not appreciate her circumstances. The cold numbness was upon her, like a prolonged hypnosis. And through this deadening heaviness she perceived vaguely the moving countryside, the coming and going of stations, the figures of men like trees walking.

Then suddenly she woke up. With one gesture she threw off the numbness, some sort of feeling came back to her. She realized that she had been in the train a long time. She wanted to get out of the train. She wanted to come back to life.

A station was approaching. She looked out of the window and saw that it was Oxford.

In a flourish of renewed vitality she collected her things and descended to the cold, noisy, lighted platform. Darkness had quite fallen. Possibly it was late. The lights appeared flaring and unsteady.

All was now simple and straightforward to Anna. It was night, a brightly-lighted Oxford, and stars frostily shining, and people going about the streets. She took a taxi and drove through the frequented streets in the lamplight, and was deposited at Catherine’s abode.

And the first person to open the door was Catherine, with a dark cloak over her evening dress. She was just going out somewhere, and had a brilliant, by-gone look. Like a beauty of some by-gone century she looked, in her long, dark velvet cloak with a gold gleam beneath. Her large, heavy eyes were dilated, staring at Anna. Her mouth made a scarlet, crooked line on her face. Her skin was cleverly painted, and she was really brilliant, in a dashing, slightly disreputable, masquerading style. Some of the artificiality and the decorative recklessness of old Venice about her; and also the modern defiant hardness. She greeted Anna effusively and put her arm round her, there in the cold street, speaking in a clear, penetrating voice that made people look round. A young man who seemed to be with her watched without surprise.

‘I’ve just been thinking about you; and now you appear on my doorstep. Anna-Marie, you amazing person! What are you doing here? You must come to the party with me!’ cried Catherine, and her eyes flashed in the darkness.

‘I’ve no clothes with me.’

‘You shall wear one of my dresses, Annik.’

‘Are you sure you want me? Do you want me to come?’

‘Yes, Annik, you must come. I want you.’

‘Do you really — really?’ said Anna. But she was already inside, she followed Catherine up the stairs into her room.

‘Choose your dress. Choose!’ cried Catherine, throwing dresses on to the bed. Anna looked on in bewilderment till she became still again. Then the two girls laughed.

‘How attractive you are!’ said Catherine, with a sudden seriousness, standing in front of Anna. ‘You make me think of Byron as a young man. My clothes are not severe enough for you.’ She turned over the dresses abstractedly, considering.

Anna felt rather strange in the presence of this brilliant girl, bewildered, as if she were in the wrong element. She was not used to this unconventional behaviour. But she was flattered.

‘This is the one,’ said Catherine, looking at Anna as if she were a child. ‘This is the one you must wear.’

She presented her with a garment of supple black, cut in a simple, slender fashion, with a touch of white, like the jabot of an eighteenth-century beau.

‘It will make you look like a young poet. A little bit precious and a little bit decadent in spite of that unearthly freshness of yours. That’s how I want you to look.’

Anna was in a state of bewilderment. She was very flattered — oh, extremely flattered by Catherine’s attentions. She liked being treated with this sort of eccentric intimacy, being flattered and favoured and a little bit patronized by the other girl’s affection and interest. She felt excited, a bit bewildered, and not quite sure of her own feelings. She was a trifle nervous as Catherine smiled at her out of her bright face, so large-eyed and beautiful with a strange, by-gone beauty, mysterious. Anna had an impulse to run away from the unknown mysteriousness. But a stronger impulse urged her to stay and explore the secret, to sink herself in the mystery till it was mystery no longer, but part of the tissue of her own experience. She felt a kind of intrinsic sympathy with the mystery, whatever it was; a leaning towards it. Nevertheless, Catherine’s personality seemed dubious and unsettling, coming into her quite different mental atmosphere. She was not sure that she liked it, altogether.

Certainly Catherine was distinctly dubious, in the Kavan sense of the word. Anna could imagine Matthew’s verdict of her: ‘Fast, shady-looking, rakish’ — and the rest.

There really was something disturbing about the tall, handsome girl, wrapped in the dark cloak, and flashing her red smile like a sword. Queer, how sinister she managed to look, in spite of her young beauty. She had the beauty of clandestine things, things hidden behind everyday life, inauspicious.

Anna was attracted by her brilliant, Venetian look. Yet she was convinced that behind it lay something sinister. Catherine was the first person in whom she had ever encountered this peculiar suggestion of fundamental dangerousness. She watched her warily, somewhat repelled, yet with a strange, inevitable fascination, attracted by her. Attracted by what — to what?

That night the guests at the party had the entertainment of a new combination: Catherine, in her clinging, gold dress, with her great dark eyes, so bold and yet so secret-looking, her odd look of heaviness that had nothing to do with her slim body, the dangerous heavy look, brilliant and proud; and Anna, straight and severely-dressed, with a sort of half-nervous reticence about her, and an indifference that was miles away from Catherine’s haughty nonchalance. There was a great difference between the two girls; and yet, strangest thing of all, a sort of resemblance. It was difficult to say what they had in common. But some similarity there was. Perhaps it was the coldness in both of them, and then the hardness, and the suggestion of something unknown that set them, each in her different way, apart. Anyhow, there it was. The same brush had touched them both.

Anna enjoyed the party. Coming with Catherine, she was an important guest. She received a good deal of attention and was treated with respect, as a friend of Catherine’s, and, in her own right, as an effective type. She was happy in the unconventional, casually intellectual atmosphere. She liked it. Usually, in collections of people, she was lost. She was too much an individualist to shine in a crowd or take kindly to social gatherings. People overshadowed her: made her ineffectual: cancelled her out. Even people she knew well had the power to make her feel unimportant, almost obliterated. She could not hold her own with them.

But this night was otherwise. She was out of herself. As she moved, the dark stuff of her dress — it was a very soft silk, flexible — ran over her limbs like a black fluid concealing her. She liked the feel of the silk flowing so softly dark about her body. She felt herself disguised. This night was not in her life. It was a moment isolated and unmarked. While she talked, she did not feel any self-consciousness, only excitement.

The reaction came in the morning. Then the realization of her own loneliness came over her, she knew herself among strangers. What strangers they were to her, Catherine and the rest! She was so far away from them, with their bold, showy, shallow intellectualism, that seemed simply an affectation. She had not learnt the patter. She did not know how to work the trick. So she felt at a disadvantage. She had committed unpardonable offences of stupidity, bad taste and Philistinism, according to their code. She was married to a nonentity: she was about to go and live in an uncivilized land. She was outside the pale. Even with Catherine, who admired her and treated her as a person of importance, she felt inferior, almost ashamed. She had disgraced herself by Catherine’s standards. So she was in a hurry to get away.

She was up early, and ready to depart. It was a cold, grey morning, threatening rain. Anna went to say goodbye to Catherine, who was sitting over some books near the fire. There was a feeling of anti-climax.

Catherine did not move from her chair. She was paler and quieter, much less dangerous, in her morning clothes, than she seemed in the evening. She looked up at Anna, smiling slightly.

‘Are you going now?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ Anna fingered a book abstractedly. Catherine watched her gravely absent face. What distant, spiritual aloofness there was in Anna. She opened the book and looked at it unseeingly, then turned it between her hands, and finally laid it down on the table.

‘Back to Matthew?’ Catherine asked.

Anna stirred, fidgeting with her hands, and smoothing the fingers of her gloves. She felt awkward and unhappy. Her sense of inferiority made her resentful.

‘Yes, I suppose I shall,’ she said, looking down at the book again. ‘It seems the only thing to do.’

Catherine’s lips curled in a faint ironic smile.

‘The prospect doesn’t enthral you?’

‘No,’ said Anna, coldly admitting the cold fact.

‘But it’s not such a bad prospect,’ said Catherine, who was watching with her great eyes that were like two black holes in her face. Catherine had her private thoughts, and was following them up. ‘It will be amusing for you to travel — to go to a new continent. I rather envy you, in a way.’

‘Do you?’ said Anna, looking at her. ‘Well, I wish I wasn’t going. It’s too much like dying for my fancy: cutting myself off from everything.’

‘Yes. I wish you weren’t going so far away.’

Catherine took Anna’s hand, and suddenly smiled at her, intimately, with her slightly crooked mouth. There was a sudden emotional stress. Anna felt herself flushing.

‘That’s nice of you,’ she said, uncertain.

Catherine continued to hold her hand.

‘It’s true,’ she insisted, strangely emphatic, gazing with a relentless, fixed intensity, significant.

Anna lingered uncomfortably. She glanced at Catherine, but found nothing to say.

‘You must write to me,’ Catherine said. She sat looking at Anna with fixed, dark eyes.

Anna’s discomfort increased under this heavy regard, which made her somewhat abashed. She drew her hand away.

‘Very well,’ she agreed, her voice rather constrained, a half-bashful smile on her mouth.

‘You don’t ask me to write,’ said Catherine, half playful, half heavy, holding her with portentous eyes.

Anna made an impatient movement.

‘Of course I shall be glad if you will. I shall like to get letters.’

The words meant nothing particular to her. She now wished to be gone, embarrassed by the fixed look, which was also starting to irritate her. She retreated into her distant reserve.

‘Shall we ever meet again, do you think?’ asked Catherine.

‘Come out East and pay me a visit,’ Anna answered, with a mocking smile of faint irritation.

‘Perhaps I will,’ said Catherine. She smiled a very different, slow smile of latent purpose.

Anna was surprised.

‘Do you mean that?’ she asked.

‘Why not? New worlds to conquer —’ a slow, hidden significance was in Catherine’s tone. She smiled at Anna slightly, her eyes darkly dilated with some unknown intention, watching her steadily, her face seeming secretly to smile.

‘I shall invite you,’ said Anna, going to the door.

‘I shall come. Good-bye!’ said Catherine, and without moving her eyes, she sat motionless, till Anna was outside and the door closed behind her.

Anna walked quickly through the cold streets. She wanted to get away as soon as possible. She did not belong here. The interlude had been stimulating, but now it was finished. Ordinary life was beginning again — it must not catch her loitering. She was rather glad to be leaving Catherine. She knew that Catherine was pulling her in some way, establishing some sort of claim upon her which she was not prepared to admit. Catherine’s intimacy was dangerous, and Anna was glad to escape.

She walked towards the station, and all at once saw a vaguely familiar figure approaching. It was Drummond, the publisher, with a book under his arm. She hurriedly glanced round to see if there was any chance of avoiding him. There was not. Drummond was a well-built, energetic young fellow. He had seen her already, and came striding up, a smile on his face and the book under his arm. He looked carefully at Anna. Her grey eyes, unsmiling and faintly troubled, watched his approach. For some reason the encounter was distasteful to her. He was smiling a trifle uncertainly, recognizing her, but not quite sure. She looked different in her winter clothes.

‘Miss Forrester?’ he said, smiling and halting before her. He seemed to search her face with his eyes. She wondered what it was that made his eyes appear so bright, so unusually bright. He waited, and she forced herself to speak.

‘My name is Kavan now,’ she said, forcing, with difficulty, a slight smile. The words sounded foolish as they came out of her mouth.

‘You are married, then?’ he said, not taking his eyes off her. ‘Congratulations!’ His smile suddenly and unexpectedly became vivid.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured, looking away at the grey buildings and the sky.

She watched the people going past. It was chill and colourless, with the grey houses and the blank, blanched sky, and neutral looking figures moving about. He stared at her pale, quiet face. He seemed to block up the pavement; she felt she would never get past him.

‘So I was right,’ he said to her.

She turned her eyes slowly to look at him. She felt absent, not exactly preoccupied, but far off. She could not quite make him out. It was as if he spoke in a foreign language.

‘How — right?’ she asked him, vaguely.

‘I said you would not need to write for your living. You see, it was not necessary.’

She noticed the same precise way of speaking, the same apparently affected intonation that had irritated her on the previous occasion. She winced as the young man’s careful, supercilious tones assailed her, making her feel foolish and confused.

‘Was I not right?’ he insisted, his bright eyes shining.

She felt out of her depth for the moment.

‘Yes,’ she assented mechanically.

She wanted to go her way. But Drummond’s firm, purposeful bulk was still in front of her, as it might be a barrier. He was moving his hands. She did not look at him. She stood looking aside, and feeling embarrassed and shamed.

At length, out of nothing, he said to her surprisingly:

‘I should like to give you a present.’

‘Why should you?’ she asked.

She was startled. Without understanding, she felt foolish before him. He seemed to condescend towards her. But his manner was warm enough. She did not want to take anything from him.

‘Is it necessary to find pretexts for giving a present?’ he asked, smiling.

No, she supposed not. But she did not want his gift. Yet she did not seem able to refuse. It was something that had to be thrust upon her, whether she would or no.

‘What shall I give you?’ he persisted.

His voice sounded so superior, it sent a sharp irritation through her. Yet she could not altogether refuse him.

‘Give me that book, if you must give me something,’ she cried irritably, indicating the book he carried.

He glanced at it sharply, as if astonished.

‘This? But it’s only an old thing — of no value — of no special interest —’ He seemed rather disconcerted.

‘I won’t take anything else,’ said Anna firmly. She felt that she had got the upper hand all at once.

He held out the book reluctantly to her. Without examining it, she tucked it away with her bag under her arm. She seemed to have won. He did not know what to do.

‘A very inadequate wedding present,’ he said finally, darting his bright eyes.

‘I don’t like wedding presents,’ she said. ‘Why must you give me anything?’

He looked at her, and heard her cold tones, which sounded rather rude. And he knew that she had got the better of him in some way.

‘Have I annoyed you?’ he asked, in a falsely-humble voice.

‘No,’ she said, in the same cold, hostile tone. ‘But I must go now. Good-bye.’

He was angry. Her rudeness twitched at his pride.

‘Good-bye,’ he said, looking her in the face, opposing her departure.

But she was already on the move. He stood stock still, barring her way. She made a little detour to avoid him, and passed on. With her bag and the book under her arm, she began to recede from him. He watched her walk down the street.

She did not look at the book till she was in the train. It was a life of Luther, not very interesting. She intended to leave it in the carriage. But when, from the midst of the printed page, there suddenly sprang out at her these words: ‘Here I stand; I can no other,’ a great enlightenment came to her, a sudden illumination. In a moment, everything was made plain to her. She felt instantly that she understood the meaning of life — as far as it concerned her. Amazing to see clearly for the first time. Now everything was explained. How simple it was for her to realize that she herself was the centre of her own universe. How easy and simple to face life from the single basis of her own undeniable individuality. She was what she was: herself. No need for compromise or apology or modification or defence.

Again she went to the Kensington hotel. But this time she sent a telegram to Matthew. She no longer dreaded the meeting with him. She sat down quietly to await his arrival. She felt strengthened, securely in charge of her own fate. The momentary illumination would fade, of course; but she would never be quite the same again. She had achieved some new emancipation.

She waited calmly for Matthew. She was curious to see how he would behave. Some days still remained before they were due to sail. How would he propose to occupy them? One thing she knew, without very much feeling, and that was, she would never go back to River House.

At about four o’clock Matthew arrived. Anna was in her bedroom, sewing a button on a glove. She called to him to come in. She looked at him curiously. He was like an effigy. He stood with the curious blank stiffness which always astonished her. As if he were waiting to be set in motion. He wore his navy-blue suit. She could not bring herself to see him as a man. He was an effigy, an automaton, a cunning imitation of a human being.

He saw her sitting across the room, a pale girl with her hands pale on her lap, and between them the limp leather glove and the needle flashing in and out. He was very nervous. He waited for her to give him a lead.

She smiled at him, with an expressionless face, as she pulled the needle up at the end of the thread.

‘Why did you go away?’ he asked her, simply, as if it were a commonplace question.

She thrust the needle into the soft leather glove and laid it aside. She was glad he was quiet.

‘I didn’t like being at River House,’ she said, and her clear, indifferent, introspective eyes rested on him for a moment with faint interest, and then fell away, inattentive.

His heart went hot with grief and humiliation. A shameful bitterness rose up in him at her neglect. He could not even make her notice him.

‘You might have told me — you might have let me know where you were. I’ve been worried to death.’ His voice was hot and querulous.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. But he could tell she didn’t care in the least. She didn’t attempt to make the words sound sincere.

He heard her indifferent voice. And his pride was painfully, coldly debased. Yet he could do nothing. He could not gain her attention. He could not even break out in one of his black, raging explosions against her. Even the incontinent spirit of his anger was cowed, for the moment, by her indifference. Only for the moment, of course. Temporarily, she had shamed him. But within he was hot and violent against her. His violence was suppressed, it could not come up to the surface: it was no match for her coldness as yet. Outwardly he was neat and obliterated. He was like a dumb person, a mute, who could not answer or argue or plead or threaten. But his ultimate will never wavered. His will was set fast to possess her.

Anna remained at the hotel alone. When she told Matthew that she did not intend to return to River House, he seemed submissive. He did not oppose her in any way, or try to force his wishes upon her. He went about stiffly, making his arrangements, as if nothing had happened. He seemed wooden and dazed, as though she had stunned him.

He left her in London, and went back to River House alone, to make his arrangements there. He would not be long away, however. His unsatisfied will was all the time yearning to her. He could not bear to leave her alone.

Meanwhile, Anna stayed quietly at her hotel. She had no desire to see anybody, or to go anywhere in particular. It was as if she had used up all her energy. In herself she was content. She seemed to have found the key to her own personality. But she had no energy left.

Time passed in a sort of dream. She lived from moment to moment, the life of trivial things, quiet, vague, uneventful, with no thought of what was to come.

She would not think of Sidney at all. She had closed a shutter in her mind, closing out all that incident, shutting Sidney into the dead past. She would not remember her, or grieve for her. The thing she remembered most clearly, for some reason, was Drummond’s dark, rather impertinent muzzle. She often caught herself thinking of Drummond at first. She wondered whether he thought about her at all. Then, abruptly, she forgot all about him.

Her luggage was sent on from River House with a stiff little note from Mrs. Kavan hoping that she would find everything packed correctly. Anna smiled as she read the stilted phrases, imagining the disapproval that lay behind. She saw in her mind Mrs. Kavan’s blue, piercing stare of suspicion and inquisitiveness. Well, that too was all over and done with.

Anna wanted to go abroad immediately. And that was what Matthew, too, wanted now. He wanted to get away quickly with Anna, to get her safely out of the country before she had time to repudiate him entirely. He was very afraid of losing her; and at the same time perfectly determined that he would not lose her. He wanted to have her alone with him.

They decided to go to Marseilles and pick up the boat there. They would have about a week to wait. In the early morning they were at Victoria, ready to depart, in all the fuss and bustle of the continental train. Mrs. Kavan was there, having insisted on seeing them off. She had spent the previous night in town so as to be on the spot in time. She straggled up the platform beside them. Matthew had taken first-class tickets. They had ten minutes to wait. Anna sat down in her reserved seat, not in the pullman, but in an ordinary first-class carriage. Matthew was busy, rather flustered under his wooden appearance, ordering people about. He hurried up and down the platform, talking to the stolidly indifferent porters — his voice sounded foolish and loud — while his mother strayed anxiously behind. Anna sat in her corner, looking out, rather unhappy and disapproving. If only it were not Matthew with whom she was travelling! Or if only he would behave differently. She hated the sound of his fussy, stupid voice, as it came to her through the din of the station. She turned aside so that she might not see his meaningless, stiff, ineffectual movements.

Finally, Mrs. Kavan came into the carriage to say goodbye. She pecked at Anna’s cheek and put a magazine in her lap. Now that she was leaving, Anna was to be treated with a sort of angelic forbearance. But the mother was almost entirely occupied with her son, talking to him, without listening to his replies, while he beamed at her with his strange, fixed smile, rather strained-looking, enjoying her distress in his pasha way, and yet genuinely upset himself.

At last it was time to start. Mrs. Kavan peered at Anna through the window, and murmured something that sounded like:

‘No ill-feeling — you modern girls —’ Anna did not catch any more.

Then Mrs. Kavan embraced Matthew. He leaned out of the window and kissed her, while she clutched him with strange eagerness. Strange, this intensity of feeling between the two strange creatures. The train began to move. Mrs. Kavan walked beside the door for a few steps, holding Matthew’s hand, and staring with profound meaning into his face, while he smiled at her fixedly, somewhat inane.

The speed of the train increased. Mrs. Kavan still scurried alongside, holding Matthew’s hand. Other people got in the way, and she had to fall back, waving and calling out half-audible messages. Matthew stood at the window, nodding and smiling, and waving his large, brown, hairless paw till she was out of sight. Anna sat watching him, curiously, as though he had been some partially humanized animal. It was raining, everything was grey and glistening with wet. The signals gesticulated stiffly through the rain.

So they were off on their travels. And so, with an interim of wintry sea, the wearisome journey continued across France. Matthew was quite lost in the foreign train. His aplomb seemed to desert him. He felt insignificant and lonely. For him there were two worlds: the East, where he had his place as a cog in the machine of government, even a certain importance and power as a member of the ruling race; and England — home — which meant to him River House and the attentions of his womenfolk. Now, among all these foreigners, and the foreign advertisements, and the incomprehensible language, he felt in a sort of half-world, a purgatory, suspended between the two worlds which he knew, and which were intelligible to him. He felt angry with Anna for bringing him to this nameless, unfamiliar world where he was of no account.

And also, he was jealous of Anna. On Anna’s face was an excited look, and in her eyes there seemed to be a light of gaiety and subtle rejoicing. Indeed, for her, this was almost a home-coming. With a bright look of pleasure Anna watched the foreign countryside. She was triumphant, and it seemed to Matthew that in her pride and contentment she triumphed over him.

He sat in his corner, or stood stiffly in the corridor, as if he suffered some insult. His brown, neat, small-featured face wore an angry, humiliated look. But he held his head high in a kind of strutting defiance. He would not let the foreigners see that he was at all subdued.

At Marseilles he would have liked to go to one of the big hotels where the English people stayed. He was willing, for once, to pay exorbitantly for the reassuring presence of his fellow-countrymen. But Anna would not have it. And now it was she who made the arrangements. Matthew, a stranger in this strange world, had to stand in the background, looking on. He didn’t like it at all. He didn’t like to hear Anna chattering in the strange language while he understood nothing.

He stood in the background feeling sulky and stiff, while Anna asked questions and talked. People scrutinized him, with contempt it seemed; but nobody paid him any attention. He was simply Anna’s appendage. At last they were settled in a queer, rambling old hotel not far from the quays. There was a glimpse of prussian-blue sea from the top windows, and a great rattling and screeching of trams.

They went to eat at a tiny restuarant with lobsters painted on the walls, and a barrow of shell-fish — mussels and sea-urchins — at the door. Anna was very happy. She was almost oblivious of Matthew. He had no power to trouble her. She felt that she had returned home. After a long experience of the smallness, the neatness, the cultivated soullessness of England, where everything seems tame and vulgar and devitalized, she rejoiced to feel the world bigger, and untidier, more natural and live, around her. More of a living world, and less of an industrial machine. The horrible, mechanical middle-classness of England! The small grey uglinesses, and the meanness and the coldness — as though machine-oil ran in its veins instead of the good red blood of humanity. You have to make your escape sometimes to the nobler places — or lose your soul altogether. Anna was happy, feeling the power and bigness of the unseen mountains not far away. The potency of the mountains made itself felt.

They walked in the crowded streets, looking at the shops which were so like English shops and yet so unmistakably different. They sat in cafés, and were jostled by the noisy, cheerful crowd. Anna was very happy. It was like an intoxication to her, the feeling of freedom and escape. She was quite quiet, perfectly self-contained, with the bright light of excitement in her eyes, like a personal flame. Perfectly free she felt, centred in herself beyond all troubling, and triumphantly alive. She was unaware of Matthew. And he followed her about with a sullen expression, rather forlorn, which might have touched her if she had noticed it. He looked curiously like Winifred now and then.

They took a car and drove out into the country. It was a beautiful day, springlike, with a gold sun pouring out of the sky. Up they climbed, up a great curving ascent to a desolate roof of earth and rock and patches of stunted trees. It was all rockily bare and mountainous. Anna thought of the Old Testament. It was like Mount Sinai. It was barren and grim, but the sun was bright, hot even, and she loved it. She loved being in the high, bare, lonely place.

The car began to rattle down towards Cassis. And now there were vineyards — everywhere the striped, yellowish vineyards, and terracing of vines on the mountain slopes, right down from the dazzling white stone crags, down to the edges of the road. And houses were appearing. White houses with brownish roofs and olive trees growing about. The brownish-silver olives, dusty looking, and the tall poplars still shaking their yellow leaves: a blur of dark pine-woods on the spurs of the mountains, and always the white road looping between the vineyards and the high rocks.

‘Isn’t it beautiful!’ cried Anna, in strange, calling tones. She seemed to be in a little ecstasy.

Suddenly, swirling round a curve of the descent, a great blueness confronted them, the sea was vivid blue like a bolt of blue electric fire, vibrating with flamy waves of brilliance, upon the eastern boundaries of the world, a blinding, crystalline blaze of blue water.

‘Wonderful! Wonderful!’ Anna cried. And she leaned forward in the keen rush of air, ecstatic.

But Matthew would not acknowledge it. To him, beauty was the soft, safe beauty of the English spring, all dim and delicate and confined, and deep, lush greenery in the tranquil valleys, and birds singing. Not this dazzling glitter of hard limpidity, this vast, unfriendly glare of burning light. He felt himself exposed, there between the in-closing mountains and the vibrant, flashing water.

‘I love it!’ said Anna, in a low, clear voice. ‘I love it!’

He saw her face bright and hard in the sun, and he heard her voice, clear and cold, like the small waves breaking on the shore. He understood nothing. But now she challenged him, she wanted to force him to submit to her mood.

‘Don’t you think it beautiful?’ she asked him, in a cold voice, like a small wave breaking. There was a touch of devilment in it.

‘Not so beautiful as England,’ he answered, hostile and rather spiteful.

‘Oh — England!’ she cried, with a careless derision that stung him. ‘You and your England!’

It enraged him to hear her sneer like that, at the things that were precious to him. It was as if she stripped the clothes from his back, leaving him ridiculous and shamed.

‘England is beautiful,’ he answered, with heat. The foolish blind look of anger was on his face, like a vicious animal that would hurt if it knew how to reach its tormentor. But Anna was safely out of reach, behind the bars.

‘Perhaps it is. But where can you find it? It’s all covered up with hideous towns, and main-roads, and squalid little villas, and petrol-pumps and machines. And I hate the horrible, unhealthy people everywhere, with their tinned food and wireless sets and newspapers and cinemas and cheap cars. All so ugly. And drab and paltry. I hate them all. Sham people in an imitation country.’

Her eyes stared at him coldly, he felt almost afraid. Just for a moment he saw her coldness, he saw the unyielding hardness that was in her, the unchanging remoteness; even cruelty. Not a personal, deliberate cruelty, but that much more devastating cruelty that comes from indifference, from sheer, absolute, deadly carelessness, the ultimate affront. But then his preserving insentience came back to stupify him, make him stupid. He saw nothing any more. Anna was his wife, his enviable possession, a graceful girl who attracted him, and whom he meant to keep to himself, for his own personal enjoyment. That was all he wished to see.

And Anna saw what was in his mind. The bright complacency of possession showed in his eyes. She turned away from him in disgust to the sun and the vineyards and the blue sea. She disregarded him entirely, thrusting him out of her way.

They left the car and walked about in the village. It was brown and dirty-looking, the streets were narrow and rather squalid with fish-nets and the debris of fishing everywhere. There was a strong smell of fish. And the coloured boats were lying in close to the quay. The sun was in the sky and on the water, the air was sparkling. Fishermen stood loungingly, indolently about, boys with bare feet, or coloured, tattered espadrilles, like bedroom slippers, ran and shouted and stared. The people were brown-skinned southerners.

Anna found it delicious, and she was happy. But the thing that pleased her most was when, climbing up a little above the village, she saw the vineyards and the olives and the mountain slopes behind all swimming and golden and fantastic in the sunshine, expanded under the deep blue sky.

She felt that she would like to stay there for ever.

‘I wish we were going to live here,’ she said, her face glowing and open. ‘It is so lovely.’

A shaft of resentment penetrated Matthew’s heart. She seemed to ignore him and all his world. He wanted to assert himself.

‘The East is more wonderful,’ he said. And added, rather plaintive: ‘You will like that, too, won’t you?’

‘Yes, I shall like to see it,’ she answered. ‘But this is a place to live in.’

That was how she thought of the East; as a place to visit. But when she thought of settling down there, of living there permanently, her mind went blank and would not function. She simply could not think of it in that way.

At last it was time to go. The sun was falling towards the sea, shadows were creeping on the mountain slopes. Anna slipped off alone. She could not leave the place just yet. It was friendly and delightful to her. She could not understand how Matthew saw only the squalor and the fishes’ heads lying about. To her there was beauty in the steep houses, unevenly roofed, against the hillsides, very subtle and appealing.

She came to a path, steep, stony, and narrow, a sort of mule-track, between stone walls. One wall was in deep shadow, but the other still caught the sun and glowed yellowly. Small brown lizards were flicking and darting between the stones. On one side were houses, falling below the level of the track; above the other wall the grey heads of olives were appearing.

Anna climbed on the stones, and looked over at the olive grove. It was still and lovely, with the ancient, knotted trunks, weird-looking, standing strangely in their own purplish twilight, like old ghosts upon earth. The pale, dry grass grew up close to the exposed, gnarled roots of the trees. And there were the leaves up above, so dry and delicate, hanging in ashen showers, light as ashes, and much brighter, and silvery, tarnished-silvery like a dissolving storm-cloud, making a mysterious, pale cloudiness of their own in the upper air. The beautiful, ancient olive trees, mysterious and age-old, they had stood there for ever and ever. Nothing could be more poignant, like an apparition from Genesis.

She saw a young man sketching under the trees, sitting on a stone, half-turned from her, dipping and poising his brush. He looked intent, and seemed to be working quickly. The light changed from moment to moment.

Anna’s clear eyes, lingering on him, watched his profile tilted above the paper. The young man was thin, and looked elegant and rather well-bred and intelligent. He had the look of a certain type of young artist — careless, engaging, with a touch of the poseur, but amiable, very. Anna took him all in, even to the tip of his rather high, rather fine nose. But he was out of the picture. Resenting the intrusion of a human figure upon the solitary perfection of the place, Anna moved off to Matthew and the waiting car.

On subsequent days they drove also, to Bandol and Sanary, and places farther down the coast: La Ciotat with the strange, stark hulls of half-built ships sheering up in the curved harbour. But to Cassis they did not go again.

It was Anna who wanted the drives. Matthew really disliked them. He was so unutterably opposed to everything — opposed to the vineyards, the mountains, opposed to Anna’s self-sufficient enjoyment. He hated the spruce little Frenchman who drove the car: the way he jumped out so assiduously to open the door for Anna, and the way he sometimes turned round while they were driving, turning his sunburnt, plump cheeks and his small black moustache to smile at Anna, confidentially, as though they were in league together. Poor Matthew felt horribly out of it. And he hated the French people, the peasants and the little townspeople, whom he saw about. He couldn’t abide their casual, unhurried way of living. It roused a subterranean anger in him to watch them sauntering and lounging and sitting round little tables in the sun. They had no right to take life so easily. Even when they appeared to be busy or working hard in the fields, it was all a sort of game — just playing at work. So it seemed to Matthew. And at the bottom of his heart an angry resentment came; because these people seemed so ‘happy,’ in a way which he and his conscientious kind could never, never understand.

The day before the boat sailed, he met in the Cannebière some acquaintances, a Mr. and Mrs. Brett, who were also going to travel on the Henzada. It was an enormous relief to him to see them. It was really rather pathetic the way he cottoned to the quite insignificant pair, and the way all three of them clung together like drowning swimmers in this sea of foreignness. They seemed to unite at once in a triangular bond of opposition — with Anna standing outside. The Bretts were kindly disposed towards her. They wanted to include her in the bond. But when they saw that she would not be included, they disapproved. They went their own way — with Matthew — and Anna went hers. She turned away from the uninteresting, middle-aged couple and went out alone.

She walked to the garage and found the trim little driver. And set out with him in the snub-nosed Renault to have a last look at Cassis.

It was fine, with the lightest, most delicate sunshine, like early summer, and a haze over the mountains. But the breeze came cold from the sea, to the pine-trees and the changing, cloud-pale olives. The olives were always changing. In stillness they were all grey shadow, but quickly the sharp breath of the sea wind came to blow them into tremulous, smoky, silver fires.

Anna sat in the jolting car and looked about. It pleased her to be sitting there by herself behind the little French driver. From the back of his head, a sort of light-hearted French gallantry seemed to extend towards her; as though in an admiring, deferential, quite respectful, but not very serious way, he had made himself responsible for her welfare. She smiled to herself, feeling this.

At Cassis he skipped out with alacrity to open the door, and smiled at her with the rather precocious, rather impudent admiration that always amused her. His smallish black eyes rolling gaily, and an exaggerated, comic-opera devotion on his plump face, as though he would die for her. But she left him at the cafe and walked up to the olive grove alone.

She would not admit that she was thinking of the young artist; but when she saw him under the trees she was not very surprised. She looked down the vista of tree boles and dim grass, and saw him sitting on a stone against the wall, bare-headed and in a cardigan, dabbing away with his pointed brush. She knew him at once by his high, thin nose. And, although she could not see him very distinctly because of the leaves and the branches, she saw something that attracted her in him. His elegance, his youthfulness, something careless and a trifle thrilling. She was glad to get this second glimpse of him.

She walked towards him, over the short, dry grass. He looked up and saw her. She smiled in a shining, subtle fashion, changing her remote, coldly observant face.

‘May I see the picture?’ she asked, in French.

He curved his rather pale lips in an answering smile, and held out the sketch at arm’s length, so that she might look at it.

‘Is it finished?’ said Anna.

The young man looked up at her, and nodded, smiling. He was a handsome fellow, with a rather aristocratic, narrow face, and with a well-balanced appearance, graceful and debonair, and rather informal. Anna was pleased by the gay, mischievous look in his large, bold eyes. The pale, flexible curve of his mouth made him seem like a satyr to her. She looked at him inquiringly, waiting for his voice. But he only went on smiling his odd, wide, satyr’s smile.

She looked away at the sketch, which was somewhat wild and extravagant, with a great singing of blues and yellows. Anna knew nothing of painting. But he seemed to have caught a little of the day’s spirit in the strong tones.

‘I don’t know if it’s good. But I like it,’ she said.

Still he did not speak until her eyes compelled him. Then:

‘It is not very good,’ he said, rather stiltedly, to answer her.

‘You’re English!’ she cried, a little shrill with astonishment. And she watched the remarkable, pale smile growing on his mouth. It rather thrilled her to see it. His eyes twinkled with mischievous, wayward warmth, engaging: but his mouth was somehow thrilling to her.

‘Aren’t you?’ she persisted.

His eyes were joining now in the irresponsible, satiric smile. He tilted his face in a strange way, all glimmering in the pale grin.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘How extraordinary!’ she cried.

He swung his body from the waist, so lithe and shapely in the close-fitting woollen cardigan.

‘Why?’ he asked, looking up to her.

‘I should never have taken you for an Englishman,’ she said.

She intended a compliment; and so he seemed to understand, for his white teeth flashed in a grin of acknowledgement, sensitive and quick. Exciting to be understood, for a change.

Anna felt as though she were standing on the edge of time. Here she was in the silent, peaceful olive grove, under the shadowy trees. And to-morrow she would be utterly gone. Into this sequestered timelessness, where even the ancient olive trees merged unobtrusive shadows in a general shade, no worldly responsibility or consequence could penetrate. There was no future.

‘This is my last day on earth,’ she said slowly.

‘Mine too,’ he answered.

She looked at him, startled. How could he be so quick to understand her mood? It was uncanny.

‘And which is your next destination? Heaven — or the other one?’ He dropped his eyes suggestively to the ground in his careless, amused fashion.

‘Decidedly not heaven,’ she laughed. ‘A much hotter region. The tropics, in fact.’

‘Really? That is most intriguing.’ His supple body swung forward from the hips, towards her, his face peered at her intently, in a flicker of eager interest, saturnine. ‘I’m going to the tropics, too. To Ceylon. Sailing tomorrow.’ His eyes twinkled and dilated like an animal’s.

‘Are you — really? To-morrow?’ Anna half-closed her eyes and looked at him vaguely, as if she were not quite sure he was actually there.

‘Yes. On the Henzada,’ he said, standing up, and tilting his face with strange, suggestive mischievousness at her.

‘The Henzada is my boat —’ her voice was full of remote wonder.

He came closer and smiled his disturbing smile, under the fine, arched nose.

‘I knew it! I knew we had to know each other.’

He flashed a little look of mocking triumph, standing with head drawn back, a trifle affected, very blithe and winsome in his casual style.

The sun was setting. A slow red fume was blowing across the west, a fiery smoke against the duskier smoke-blue of the darkening sky. Anna was excited and gay. She knew that the young man found her attractive. His name, he told her, was Rex Findlay.