Balloons — Villegiatura
[_To MARCEL PROUST_] What a fool he had been to come.
These wooden walls creaking at a touch, and the floors responding like an animal in pain to the lightest footstep.
Not that Marie Aimée had light footsteps--far from it.
She clattered about with the happy noisiness of a good conscience and perfect health.
In her hands the opening of a door became an air-raid and yet what could you do, confronted with her rosy face beaming with a child-like confidence in giving pleasure and satisfaction.
No, it was entirely his own fault.
Everything was what he might have expected.
The sea was just where he had been told it would be, the air was relentlessly bracing, the cleanliness of the Hotel Bungalow reminded you of a shiny soaped face which had never known powder.
It was all, he reflected, quite horrible.
The salt-laden wind blowing the sand up from the dunes, the hard bright sunshine, the effect everything gave you of having been painted with the six colours of a child's rather cheap paint-box.
"A different man," she had said he would feel.
Well he felt it already--the lassitude of his body feebly revolting against the impending bracing, his eyes watering at the glare.
Health and inspiration, Marthe had said, dreamless sleep, an insatiable appetite and perfect peace in which to finish his novel.
"Think how quiet it will be," she had said.
As if the country were ever quiet, crowded as it was with locos and dogs and sabots.
Surely peace meant Paris in August, with every one away, thick carpets and a noiseless valet.
Maurice imagined himself merging into a huge armchair, just able to see a square glass vase of Juliette roses--gilt petals lined with deep pink velvet.
Why on earth were there never any flowers in the country?
And no one would disturb him--no one.
Privacy is only possible in a big town.
Every detail of life in the Hotel Bungalow was revealed to him in a series of sights, sounds and smells.
And should a fellow lunatic arrive, how was he to avoid him?
At every meal there would be little exchanges of the banal, after dinner a game of billiards--even possibly, horror of horrors, potential excursions planned with zest and good fellowship.
And all the time he would be saying "No," more and more ungraciously, or, worse still--and far more likely--saying "yes."
And then where would his novel be?
Not that it was possible any way to write in a place where the sun was always in your eyes, the wind blew your paper away and creaking boards made sitting in your bedroom out of the question.
Marthe was a fool, given up entirely to hygiene and plans for other people.
"You will come back bubbling over with physical fitness, your dear face all tanned," she had said.
"Dear" indeed!
It was simply a bribe.
He was being bribed for his own good.
And to think that like a great gaby he had been shoved off to the sea by one term of endearment, and to a place, too, where there was neither shade nor shadows, simply miles and miles of bright monotonous sea, three dusty cornflowers, two bedraggled poppies and the sun all around you.
Tanned, indeed!
Why his face would be all blisters and his eyes bloodshot.
The insensitiveness of women!
If Marthe were here she would bathe before breakfast, feed the hens, find the eggs, encourage the cook, pat the dog, listen to the story of Marie Aimée's life, pick the cornflowers, praise the cook, churn the butter, play with the children, climb on to the hay cart, collect shells on the beach, lie in the sun, let the sand trickle through her fingers and explain with perfect sincerity that it was the most delightful place in the world.
But he didn't like paddling or shrimping or sailing or farmyard life.
He wanted a velvet lawn, a cedar, a rose garden, lavender, a sun dial, iced lemonade and solitude.
Or he wanted his own cool apartment, with drawn sunblinds, vases full of flowers, his immense writing table, and a deserted Paris around him.
Women always did to you as they wanted to be done by.
That sort of literal interpretation of Christianity showed such a lack of imagination.
It was no good telling Marthe that you didn't like the sea, she simply wouldn't believe it.
"Think of the sunset reflected in the wet sand," she would say, and if you told her that you didn't want to think about it, that it was no fit subject for an active mind, she would be hurt.
In any case no one had a right to make you do things for your own good.
It was a horrible form of self-sacrifice.
If Marthe had said, "_Please_ go to St. Jean-les-Flots and pick me a poppy," he would have been delighted, but to stay at the Hotel Bungalow in the interests of his own health was a very different matter.
Marie Aimée was putting a pot with one red geranium in it on his writing table.
It was, she explained, still very early in the season but Monsieur must not be discouraged.
Later it became very gay with dancing and Japanese lanterns in the garden.
The Hotel Bungalow would be quite full, whereas now there was only Monsieur and a lady.
"A lady?"
"But yes, Monsieur."
"A young lady?"
"A lady of a certain age."
Maurice hoped that it would be an uncertain age.
Of course every one over twenty would seem old to Marie Aimée. Probably the lady was on that exquisite frontier line, the early thirties, when the bud is already unfurling its petals, angles have softened into curves, and the significant is stirring in everything like a quickening child.
Thirty, the age of delicate response, of subtle tasting, divorced equally from the ignorant impetuosity of youth and the desperate clutchings of middle age.
How he disliked young girls with their sunburn, their manly strides, their meaningless giggles, their eternal nicknames!
And, over their heads, a warning and a trade mark, that sword of Damocles--marriage.
Maurice was feeling a little happier.
As he walked into lunch he felt a real twinge of curiosity.
Ridiculous it was--why he was getting quite romantic, imagining an exquisite creature on a holiday from her husband.
That was no doubt the result of the Hotel Bungalow.
On the velvet lawn with the cedar, the rose garden, the sun dial and the iced lemonade, he would have been enjoying to the full his usual ironic detachment, but St. Jean-les-Flots would throw any one to romance.
He walked into the dining room.
At the far end with her back to him sat the lady.
She wore a white coat embroidered with black, a white skirt, a white hat with a white lace veil.
On the chair beside her lay a Holland sunshade lined with green.
It was he thought, deplorable, and indicated yellow spectacles.
Her feet were very small and gave you the impression of an insecure foundation to her body.
Her back was broad.
She was certainly over forty.
Forty, thought Maurice, the dangerous age--the desperate age.
From forty to fifty, the flower in full bloom, the period of engulfing passions, of urgent transitory satisfactions.
For how many women must it not be a ten years' death struggle.
"What a place," Maurice was disgusted; "it is driving me to melodrama."
The lady got up with a certain waddling stateliness (perhaps after all she was fifty).
Her clothes fell into perfection--she walked slowly and calmly with appraising steps.
The lace veil was over her face.
She did not forget her sunshade, her bag, or her handkerchief.
Louis, the waiter, opened the door for her.
She sailed out like a gondola on the stage, or Lohengrin's swan.
Her movements gave an effect of invisible wheels.
During the afternoon she remained undetectable, which was a tour de force at St. Jean-les-Flots, where the landscape was a successful conspiracy against concealment, and a sunshade could be seen for miles.
Maurice had a tiresome feeling that she was lying out somewhere with that horrible sunshade over her head and a novel by Gyp on her lap.
Had she, he wondered, ever read any of his books?
Perhaps when she found out his name she would come up to him and say: "Are you _the_ Mr. Maurice Van Trean?"
And when he had bowed in the affirmative, she would add that she liked "Sur les Rives" best of his books--"she had read them all many times--and especially that marvellous description of Camille's return to her husband."
Maurice walked for miles down the hard glaring white road.
It was the most uncomfortable thing he could think of doing, and when you are determined to enjoy nothing there is a certain voluptuous satisfaction in a maximum of unpleasantness.
The air was burning and solid.
An occasional convolvulus drowned in dust straggled in weary clinging grace by the roadside--a pathetic symbol, he reflected, of the pale refined irrelevant women who fade ineffectually beside the highways of life.
He thought of Marthe with her urgent pulsating rhythm, the rhythm he remembered bitterly, that had brought him here.
He wished vindictively that she were beside him, the hard burning surface of the road biting through the soles of her shoes.
He would walk on and on till there were blisters on her feet and her steps were lagging.
His teeth were set in the grim satisfaction of revenge.
"This is the country," he would say.
"Do you feel the health-giving sea breeze you told me about?"
He stopped suddenly.
Walking towards him was the lady.
The offensive sunshade was over her head, but her veil was up.
She was, he supposed, forty-six--no, forty-four.
Her eyes were wide apart, dark and indolent and long--brown or blue they might have been.
Her face was wide and so was her mouth with lips like curtains drawn across the teeth.
Her cheek-bones were high and her skin, like marshmallow, was marbled with the bright yellow lights and bright blue shadows of early afternoon.
There was a curious grace about her broad solid figure, an unhurried indifferent grace, as if she said to herself, "I shall please at my own time."
She was not pretty.
Her clothes belonged to her as essentially as her limbs.
Maurice took off his hat.
"Forgive me, Madame, but I think that we are both living at the Hotel Bungalow."
"I think so, too," she said drily.
He thought that she thought that he was taking a liberty, which made him suppose that she was not quite a lady, which made him accuse himself of vulgarity.
And then she laughed, and his accusations, both of her and of himself, fled.
They walked back together and he explained to her just how much he hated the sea, the heat, the Hotel Bungalow, the cook, and Marie Aimée's footsteps.
He explained how anxious he had been about her--how he had longed to see her face--how much her sunshade had depressed him--how her lace veil had been a personal enemy.
She said that she adored the country....
He told her that only in big towns could you find peace or flowers.
She said the Hotel Bungalow had "un caractère assez spècial...."
He did not listen to her comments--they were mere breathing places.
On the subject of the sea he was, he thought, almost witty, with a touch of real indignation.
She said the sea was her passion....
He decided that she was an obstinate woman--entêtée. How ridiculous to love the sea--especially for some one who pretended to like the country.
The two were practically incompatible.
Could she explain her point of view?
The sea, she said, was such a wonderful escape....
He was thrilled.
A thousand explanations of her presence at the Hotel Bungalow jostled one another in his mind.
Of course he quite understood what she meant about the sea.
It had a certain spaciousness and it did, so to speak, quarantine you from life.
For instance, in a rowing boat, it was impossible to feel the importance of being a snob.
That was not, she said, exactly what she meant....
Maurice was annoyed.
He was accustomed to people who were proud to share his meanings.
Madame would perhaps be able to explain....
It was not, Madame murmured, a question of being able to explain, but of being able to interrupt....
Maurice flushed and relapsed into sulky silence.
He watched his companion trotting by his side, taking three little steps to each one of his.
He took a childish pleasure in making his strides as wide as possible, upsetting the rhythm of her walk.
The brim of her hat hid her eyes.
He felt that his uncertainty as to their expression gave the matter an interest that it did not intrinsically possess.
Even if she were smiling, what did it matter?
Suddenly she turned to him.
"Has Monsieur anything more to conceal from me?"
she asked.
Maurice capitulated.
It was a delightful formula.
He wished that he had thought of it himself.
It was she, he said, who had been hiding things from him.
Her eyes, for instance.
All this time he had been wondering about the expression of her eyes.
"And yet you deny the potency of the country," she sighed, "the miracle-working country, which compels a young man of twenty-seven to wonder about the expression of an old woman of forty-four."
"Madame," he said, "I am very old.
I have ceased to take myself seriously.
You are very young, for you can force others to treat you with curiosity and respect."
She reminded him that eight minutes ago he had taken himself seriously.
"It was you who made me," he retorted, "you have given me back my youth."
They went on like that for quite a long time--gallant lawn-tennis--long base line rallies with an occasional smash.
And then he said that he must be indiscreet--specifically so.
Why had she come to St. Jean-les-Flots?
It was, she explained meditatively, an escape (he noticed that it was the second time that she had used that word).
The Hotel Bungalow was very clean, the food was good, the air was marvellous....
She pulled herself together.
When you took a holiday, she said, you had to make a careful choice between old acquaintances and new ones.
Which was likely to be the more tiring?
She herself always went to new places at the wrong time of year.
Then it was a case of friendship, or nothing.
The people who visited watering places out of season were always either impossible or enchanting.
Very often amusingly impossible and temporarily enchanting, but so much the better.
There is a certain safety in the transitory.
Is Madame married?
Maurice asked abruptly.
It was the sort of question that had to be asked brusquely, or not at all.
"Yes--No--Yes.
That is to say, I have a husband.
He will probably come here for a day or two later.
He is très comme il faut."
"Surely you do not blame him for coming to see you."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"It is magnificent, but it is not life.
One is not always young enough to permit oneself these phantasies.
At fifty-six it is silly to waste two days visiting some one you don't want to see.
But there, Edmond is like that.
Oh!
the stability when he says 'my wife.'
It is superb.
It must be grand, too, when he says 'ma maitresse'; he has the property sense.
And how he adores women, woman, all women, any woman.
Even sometimes me.
And when he doesn't, he keeps the habits.
Toujours des petits soins.
He never goes out of training, even at home."
"He sounds charming to live with."
"Ah, yes.
That is it.
He is charming.
One cannot bear it.
To have the five-finger exercises of his irresistibility played on one.
To be the stiff piano on which he practises but never plays.
It is too much.
And one remembers the days when one was the concert grand.
Pouf.
It is not agreeable."
There was a pause.
Maurice knew that she was going to say a great many other things.
But they had reached the Hotel Bungalow.
Regretfully they parted.
He thought that she was a very remarkable woman indeed.
She thought how like her husband he was.
Her husband twenty-five years ago.
At dinner she still was in black and white.
Black covered with filmy laces, soft and shadowy and mysterious.
After dinner they sat on the terrace and looked out at the inky relentless sea.
"Being sensible is no good at all," she said with sudden passion.
"Courage is the only helpful virtue; when I married I was young and very pretty and I had thought about life a lot.
I knew that in men fidelity had the importance that they gave to it.
To a few--very few--it matters--but in most cases unfaithfulness is not a psychological thing at all; it is simply a temporary excess like getting drunk--squalid, if you like--but not touching your real relationships.
Women bluff a lot on the subject and many are fools.
They believe in the same law for both sexes.
It is a ridiculous fallacy.
Only Edmond was different.
He loved women--_psychologically_.
He was therefore inconstant, which is the real sin against marriage.
He was a great lover, an artist.
Every woman was to him what a canvas is to a painter, a violin to a violinist.
The colours and the sounds he got were marvellous.
Sometimes he would try impossible subjects--for fun--but always he could bring some sort of harmony out of everything.
Ma foi, it amuses me to watch him now--now that it is difficult, and he is fifty-six and I don't love him--but then, when everything was easy and he was twenty-seven and I cared--then it was--well, it was different."
The way that her voice opened and shut reminded him of a sea anemone.
"It is not the way to talk to a stranger, is it?"
she said abruptly, "but I feel as if I had known you for a long time.
For twenty-five years, to be exact," she added.
Maurice felt curiously tongue-tied.
He longed to tell her about Marthe.
For the first time in his life he was finding a confidence difficult to make.
He wondered why.
"Bon soir, Monsieur," she said, and she walked up to bed with a characteristic lack of pause or hesitation.
Maurice woke up--was woken up--knowing that he had something to look forward to.
Sleepily he wondered what it was while patterns spread over his semi-consciousness--dreamily he saw Marthe in a filmy lace dress over black and he felt himself trying to play on a grand piano, every note of which was a sea anemone.
Then he woke up completely, and with a delightful rush he remembered Madame and all of the marvellous things that she had told him and all of the significant things he had not yet said to her.
He walked down to breakfast whistling.
In the courtyard he patted the dog and lifted the patron's son on to his shoulder, then he asked the patronne if the cook had a name and whether he might some day come and watch her churn butter.
In the dining room he praised the coffee, and admired the geraniums.
St. Jean-les-Flots must have a particularly fine soil for geraniums, and what air!
Why, he felt a different man already.
Madame Marly--he had discovered her name--did not appear till lunch.
They bowed to one another, and each talked a little to the waiter.
It was delightful to keep their pleasure at arm's length.
Coffee on the terrace brought them together.
"You are right," she said, "the country is an impossible place.
It makes one talk."
"I love the country," he said.
"And then the sea.
It is always going on without you."
"I have a passion for the sea," he murmured.
"I would like to wring the neck of the cook, chloroform the dog, buy Marie Aimée some lawn tennis shoes, and have a daily box of flowers from Paris."
"They shall be ordered at once."
"I should also like," she was looking out to sea, "to fill the hotel with people."
"You flatter me," he murmured.
"Perhaps," she added, "it would be simpler to go away."
"Simpler but impossible."
"Why impossible?"
"The air is unique.
The Hotel Bungalow...."
"Please don't," she begged.
"Besides, for the first time in my life I am becoming discreet."
"Ah, no, my friend, believe me.
It was merely that you, too, found it difficult to interrupt."
"I did not want to interrupt."
"There you had an advantage over me.
I was longing to bring your remarks about the sea to an untimely end."
Her laugh was the most confidential thing in the world.
You felt as if she had given you an unlimited credit of intimacy.
He thought that she was looking ten years younger in her creamy crêpe de Chine dress, with her big straw hat, which seemed to have conquered, without an effort, the perfection and simplicity of the absolute.
"What is it called?"
he asked fingering it.
"Crêpe surprise."
He asked her to describe its lines, but she refused.
"Ne parlons pas robes," she said.
They decided to go for a drive.
The cocher explained that he had lost his wife, but that "Lisette était un très bon petit cheval."
They laughed--at him, at one another, at the sun, at the sea, at everything.
He told her about the convolvuluses, and she said he ought to write a book.
He told her his name.
She puckered her forehead a little, and looked to him for help.
He explained rather stiffly that he had written three novels, a book of short sketches, a book of light verse, and a phantasy on Algeria.
She asked what they were called.
He told her.
She asked which was the best.
He said that "Sur les Rives" had the best things in it.
Perhaps it was less finished than some of the others, but it was on a bigger scale, the conception was more interesting.
She asked what the conception was.
He told her that it was about a woman who, out of affection for her husband, and deep intrinsical virtue, refuses to become the mistress of the man she passionately adores.
He goes away and she gives herself to the first person she meets with a look of him.
Her original great struggle has exhausted all her powers of resistance.
Madame Marly was silent.
"It is true," she said, "for big things we have big resistances, and for little things little resistances.
And so we live our lives in small weak lapses--not driven by hate or love, but by pique or boredom, lowering our flag to salute a pleasure boat, not a battleship.
Pouf," she made a little gesture of disgust that he was beginning to know.
"We occupy the places that other people make for us.
We curl on their divans, we sprawl in their gutters, we sit proudly on the pedestals they put for us, we occupy their altars, and when we are alone, what happens to us?
