 CHAPTER 28 A BROAD I had thought that on my next meeting with Peter I should be shy and embarrassed, but as a matter of fact he turned up when I wasn't expecting him and I forgot all about it. Half an hour later I remembered, but it would have been absurd to have begun to feel shy then. There were a great many practical arrangements to engross our attention. Chloe and Joe had decided to take one more winter in Paris, and Chaz was going with them to study at Colorosses. If Joe had consulted her pocket she would have let the studio, but then what would happen to the changeling and little John? Peter and I could not afford to take them with us, and it was finally settled that glad eyes was to live rent-free at the Hencoupe and look after the two helpless ones, for whose board we were leaving behind as much money as we very well could just then. Edgar Murdoch, who all this time had stayed on the first floor of the house where Peter lodged in the attic, seemed unable to settle to anything, though he talked perpetually of emigrating. When he heard of our plans he announced he would stay on in London for the winter, so as to see us all on our return from France. Also he added he could keep an eye on the family at the Hencoupe, as he did not consider Mrs. Gray should be left with no man to protect her if necessary. I'm afraid I could not help smiling a little, as I recalled the timid femininity of manner which glad eyes, quite unconsciously and by sheer instinct, always adopted with any male thing. But I was glad of the suggestion, for I feared the consequences for Edgar if he were left with no anchorage. Joe and Chloe, escorted by the man about, who really was a quite unworldly person, left town about a week before Peter and I, having settled our family, set off on our travels. It was a blustering kind of day with a hint of wine-pale sunshine that had died by the time the train reached New Haven, and we hurried across the Cay and got on board. For our sins the ship that day was a tiny French one, soon after taken off, to be knocked into scrap-iron, or perhaps puffed gently up rivers, which was about all she was fit for. Outside the harbour a dark yellow sea raged, and the sky was roofed in with slate-grey clouds. My chiffon veil whipped the air viciously. We cast off, and Lirondelle shook her nose and plunged it into the rolling foam of the harbour bar. Peter and I were standing by the rail, and as she shook her whole length and reeled, I caught on to a steel rope and braced myself for the showers of spray that came sweeping over us like hail. A sailor shouted at us to go below, but I shook my head and yelled back in my best French that I preferred drowning on the deck to suffocating below it. He then assisted us to where a seat ran along the side of the after-deck house, on which a few miserable but staunch-hearted Britishers were huddled. Once we too were installed, some sailors proceeded to lash us all in with a rope, and there for the next three or four hours we sat, Peter and I growing hungrier and hungrier. And the other passengers sagging forwards, their pale chins hung over the guarding rope. It was a splendid sea. I have seldom seen a finer. A stormy yellow, the heaving miles of it, were scarred and blotched with livid patches of pale or yellow foam. The only other color, once the pallet green-topped cliffs had slipped away, was the steely gray of the sky. At every lurch to port that the ship gave, we seemed to be wallowing down to a racing lather of foam. And our scuffers filled, only to send the water filming over the narrow strip of deck at us as the ship rolled to starboard. We sat there like a row of little canutes, the baffled water never quite reaching our feet, but since wishing back into the scuffers again at the last moment. After three hours of this kind of work, the aspect of sky and sea underwent change. The waves fell somewhat and assumed a normal gray-green. And though we still rolled almost to the limit, it seemed possible to try and attain food. Accordingly Peter and I wriggled out from under the rope and by a series of calculated dashes succeeded in making the head of the companion way. And once on the lower deck it was comparatively easy to reach the saloon. But at the top of the stairs leading down into it I paused in dismay. True, there were inviting looking white cloths on the table, but on the benches. Rows of human forms lay out along them, prostrate and dumb, with closed eyes and pale green faces. Heavens, the places like a morgue, I exclaimed. A few of the pale green lids were raised, and their owners cast a glare of concentrated dislike at me, which deepened as I called to the waiter to bring us something to eat outside. Then Peter and I staggered towards, and were suddenly violently thrown on to, a seat. And there we attacked the food the waiter brought us, which proved to our disgust to consist of biscuits dubbed Thin Oval Captain and Soda Water. It was dusk by the time we made our very belated arrival at Dieppe. And we were hustled through the customs and into the expectant train. I felt a shock of emotion that was almost physical, as I set my foot on French soil again. Not since Father and I had roamed the world together had I been out of England. Not for three weary years, and I felt the old romantic tingling in my blood. As the train puffed slowly through the streets of Dieppe, I saw the tall old houses with their shutters folded back on their flat white faces, or closed to admit the gleams of tantalizing lamp-light shining through the slats. I leant out of the carriage window, in spite of the Don Chiroux-de-Sepancher-au-Déhor, notice which adorned the ledge in brass characters and three languages. In the streets some fish-wives stood to gaze at us, their hands on their full hips, one young and slim, Warponsnay that glimmered in the light from our carriage as we passed her, and looked oddly out of keeping with her white-folded cap. So we creaked through Dieppe and then, gathering speed, roared out into the dark sleeping country beyond. I sat back in my seat, but Peter stood by the open window with his arms on the ledge and gazed out, little as there was to see, for the young moon was cloud-hidden. He breathed deeply of the keen air, and, like me, felt that it tasted gloriously French. Presently he turned and spoke above the rattle of the train. This is the sort of country that looks sleeping, he said. Do you know what I mean? As though it had turned over a little in its sleep, hunching its shoulder and drawing the coverlet up over it. Not like quite flat country. That's like a corpse laid out. He turned to the window again, and remained staring out till we came to Rouen. Whose myriad lights, pricking through the blue of the night, looked like a giant swarm of fireflies settled over the slope. I think after that we both slept a little, only awaking when our train steamed into the Gar-Lazar some two or three hours late. I flung myself on Joe and Chloe who were standing dejectedly on the damp, gloomy platform, gasping out, feed us, women, feed us. Nothing but a thin oval captain stands between us and breakfast this morning. What I need, opined Peter's voice in its deepest draw, is a square meal in a round stomach. Lead on. Where are you staying? I asked, as we all went rattling over the Paris cobbles in a taxi. You might have dained us a word since your departure. We're in the old appartement in the Rouen-Dassar. We'll go straight there now and dump the luggage, and then sally forth in search of something to eat. We too have a hunger. How the memories of gay student days thronged on me as we went skidding along the wet boulevards and then at length down the familiar dingy Rouen-Dassar. In those old days Father and I had a little appartement in the Rouen-Léopolle-Robère, but Joe and Chloe and another girl, since married, had all clung together in the Rouen-Dassar. And Father and I were round there most days to see them. Joe guessed whom I was thinking of, and squeezed my hand, and just then, as the interior of the cab swam in a big tear, we drew up at the iron-studded door. The little guichet in it opened, and Madame Bignan herself, round, rubicund, and faithless as of yore, appeared at its dark mouth, with the pale triangular face of Anatole, who acted both as porter and chambermaid, peering over her shoulder. Fla les enfants qui sont de retour, said Madame, pressing me to her black cloth chest. She was always prodigal of affection, as a set off to the total lack of any attendance bestowed on us. We tramped in single file down the queer little underground passage, whose whitewashed walls always rubbed off on one's clothes, and whose roof, as one ascended the steps at the end, was liable to knock the unwary brow. And then we found ourselves once more in the familiar courtyard. It is an oblong yard, and all round it the house folds its window-pierced walls, so that only a narrow strip of sky is visible away at the top. The sun hardly ever penetrates to the yard, save for a few minutes when it is practically overhead. But the grey rain visits it, dancing up into the air again from the cobbles. Joes and Chloe's rooms ran down one side of the house. They had no communicating doors, and opened right out onto the yard, so that whatever the weather, one had to go out to pass from one room to the other. At the far end was the sitting-room, and to this we all went now. It struck rather chilly in spite of the wood-fire in the stove, for the floor was of uncarpeted stone. In front of the small-pained window was a plain-deal table. Two or three chairs to match were squeezed round it, and the rest of the room was taken up by a camp-bed. On the bed, busily washing paintbrushes, which he was swirling round on a cake of hallowed yellow soap, set chas, his head was bent over his task, and the lamp-light fell on to his sleekly brushed hair. At the noise of our entrance he looked up, and rammed the brushes into an earthenware jar. The soap he allowed to bound like a triumphant flea over the floor, while he himself leapt to meet us. He was looking, as usual, very well groomed in a pale gray suit, with a silvery bow-tie to match. A great contrast to Peter, who was wearing shocking old tweeds, and a felt hat like a kind of pointed pudding basin, very suggestive of the pied-piper of Hamlin. We've had this bed put up for Peter, said Joe. You share my room. Chas lurks in great state up at the top of the house, where it's so light he always wakes first and comes and calls us, to whom no ray of anything brighter than a pale darkness ever penetrates. He makes awfully good coffee. Then he will have the pleasure of beholding my beautiful pajamas, said I. The peach bloomers being a little shabby, glad eyes actually made me a new pair of a refined lilac, with silken frogs. Chas declared he was thrilled to the bone at the prospect, and after a hasty wash we all set off to a restaurant. On our way we had to pass Kala Rossi's, and Joe paused and said something to Chas in an undertone of which I only caught the word skeleton. He replied, not here. Madame at the cook-door. Her grandpa. And we were going on again, when Chloe exclaimed, There's a croquis on tonight at Kala Rossi's, and it shouldn't be over yet. Let's run down and see. It'll be like old times for Viv. We began to clatter down the stairs, Peter and I last, when a sudden thought struck me. It was, of course, nothing for us painters to see a girl unclothed. But if Peter had never done so, it would be a terrific revelation of beauty for him. I remembered the first time as a child that I had ever worked from the nude. I was so overcome by the beauty of it that I couldn't draw. It seemed sacrilege to try and reproduce that harmony of supple lines and curly tints in crude paint. And now, since Peter had kissed me, I knew I didn't want him to see any girl unless he saw me. I wanted to be the one to give him that shock of keen and personal joy. I put my hand on his arm. Don't come in, Peter, to please me. I'll explain after. Of course not, if you'd rather I didn't, said Peter simply. He went out to the front door again, and I followed the others in. How the old days came sweeping back on me as I saw the model. A dark haired, Egyptian-looking creature, lying elbow-propped and chin on hands upon the semi-circular green bay's model throne. That made the flesh-tints seem so pink by contrast. There was not a face I knew among the crowd of students busy over their sketchbooks. But Chas, who had already been studying there a few weeks, nodded to several of them. As we were going out again, I heard a mysterious interchange of words, this time between him and a fat German student. At the skeleton, said the latter, the grandpa to madame at the coke-door. We're going there now, replied Chas. The skeleton, grandpa. This is very intriguing, thought I, to myself. End of Chapter 28 Chapter 29 A skeleton out of the cupboard. We found the coke-door swept and tidied for the night, but a white man was still looking at the glass. He was looking at the glass, and he was looking at the glass. At the end of the meal the waiter approached Chas and beckoned, saying in a portentous whisper, madame de zirou parlais, a cause de somme bon papa, vous avez? And Chas, who was the one who was looking at the glass, was looking at the glass. He was looking at the glass. He was looking at the glass. He was looking at the glass. He was looking at the glass. The cause de somme bon papa was avez, and Chas, apparently quite understanding, followed him out. When we all reassembled on the pavement, Chas was carrying a long, oddly irregular package wrapped in an old blackened red tablecloth. At sight of it Joe exclaimed, Good, you've got grand papa, and proceeded to take hold of one end of the bundle. Where are Shondarms whispered Chas in a thrilling kind of stage aside? There's one coming. I hear his horny-handed tread. With mock horror Chloe sprang in front of the roll of red tablecloth, which was now sagging limply between Joe and Chas, like the body of a dead man, and her action caught the attention of the passerby, who was not, after all, a Shondarme, but one of those lean, wiry, long-haired individuals who might be student or apache. He slouched forward with a swift, panther-like movement, and on the instant Joe and Chas quickened into a run, Peter, Chloe, and I acting as escort. There was no question of a race, for not only were two of us burdened, but were shrieking with laughter as well. And the newcomer circled round us for a moment, then broke into the best Maumart lingo. As far as I could make out, he imagined we were trying to conceal some nefarious deed, and was expressing his willingness not to give us away if we let him go shares in the profits. Chas stopped and proceeded, apparently, to consider the proposition, then shook his head. The apache, like individual, grew excited, argued, threatened, and finally announcing that he was going to tell the police, patted off to do so. Chas picked up the bundle, which this time he carried as though it were an overgrown baby, and we went on. We had only gone about twenty paces when we heard the turning feet of our friend, followed by those of a gendarm. We nipped round into a doorway, and Chas stood leaning forward with the bundle in front of him. As the footsteps reached the corner, he tore the tablecloth off and thrust a dancing, clattering skeleton into the faces of our pursuers. I shall never forget the effect it had. The apache gave a yell and fled off through the night as though the skeleton were pursuing him. The gendarm jumped, cried out, and then swore long and picturesquely. It was an awkward moment, and I, who had once, over some lost property, been involved in the intricacies of a prosaver ball, had no wish to be hailed off to the police station. As I seemed the only one of us to whom French came easily, I stepped into the breach. This was rendered all the more difficult for me by the fact that I knew nothing about the matter myself. Luckily it did not need much intelligence to tell that, like all new students, Chas was in the throes of anatomy and had yearned after a skeleton from which to gain first-hand knowledge. Where the grandfather of the patron of the Koch door came in I couldn't for the life of me see, and so I had to do my best from imagination. That is my grand-papa, I explained to the gendarm. Your grand-papa, but name of a name, do people carry their grand-papas about the streets at night in nothing but their bones? It is the only wearer for the best grand-papas. Besides, you see, it is that we are artists and want to draw him. See his beautiful legs? Must he not have been a fine figure of a man? A peaceable citizen should not flaunt skeletons in other people's faces in the middle of the night, persisted the gendarm obstinately. Ah, we have been of a stupidity, I admitted. But what would you? We are English and new to Paris. English, ah, mad English, exclaimed the gendarm as though that explained much. Also, I added cunningly, we did not know that you, monsieur, were with that son of a fool who has been annoying us. If my grand-papa has inconvenience due, I assure you he would be the first to apologize if he only could. As it is he would be charmed if you would drink his soul's health and a chink which was not that of dry bones sounded on the night air. And Bob or the bon-papa said the gendarm as he took his departure. When we were back home, bon-papa and all, I took the others severely to task, pointing out how trying a night at the police station had been to people who had such a protracted crossing as Peter and myself. Chaz, who took all responsibility, was duly penitent between his shrieks of mirth. You see, he explained, I've been wanting a good skeleton and happen to say so at the coque d'or. Madame said they'd had a beauty there for years and it was no good to them. In fact, it languished in the cellar. She seemed vague as to how it got there. But it had been in the house for such ages and it was always called her grand-papa. I think she'd quite a family feeling for it. But she sold it to me. And here it is. Yes, I echoed. Here it is. Joe, I think I want to go to bed. Come along, then. I am indeed ashamed of Chaz. But you've no idea how nice he can be when he's good. After we were in bed and the light was out, Chaz banged at our door on his way up to his attic. What is it, we yelled? Only that I can't settle to sleep for excitement at thought of Vib's lilac pajamas, he called back. It was a tight fit for Joe and myself in the musty walnut bed, but I should have slept soundly enough had it not been for thoughts of bon papa. I did not know whether it was that I was absurdly sensitive on the subject, but the fact remained that I couldn't bear to see a human skeleton flung about and treated as a joke. The skeleton was an excellent thing to teach one anatomy, but surely it ought to be treated with reverence, even so. I had felt ashamed to say anything to the others, because I knew that nicer-minded people of finer and truer perceptions one could not wish to meet, and they seemed to feel no misgivings. It occurred to me that Peter had been very silent since the disrobing of bon papa, and I wondered if perhaps he shared my feelings. When I looked at a skeleton I could not help realizing how it had formed the core of a living body of flesh and blood and had been animated by a living soul, how it had lain down and risen up and walked the earth, and been shaken by passions, and it seemed to me that the reverence due to a dead body belonged to this most essential and enduring part of it. At last thoughts of bon papa and Chaz and Joe and Peter all flowed together in my brain, and I slept. I was awakened by a sound of clanking metal, and opening my eyes I peeped cautiously over the somnolent Joe. It was a cold gray morning, and through the flimsy muslin curtains I could see the steady glimmering downpour of the rain. The door was open, and against it the form of Chaz clad in a berbery and a deerstalker cap showed dark. He was engaged in emptying the bath, which Joe and I had used the preceding night, and he did so by the simple expedient of tipping it over the step into the yard. He then picked it up and noiselessly withdrew with it. About half an hour later he reappeared, this time with coffee, which he had made himself and crisp new rolls. These he dealt out to Joe and me as we sat up in bed to receive them, and himself sat on the foot and ate his own breakfast. Did I not say demanded Joe with justifiable pride that he had all the domestic virtues? He certainly looked very nice as he sat there, his pleasant boyish face beaming with good nature and delight in his Josephine. He delighted also in my pajamas, though as I pointed out to him the more exciting half was of necessity still hidden. He, Joe, and Chloe all went off to Colorosses, and Peter and I pottered round Paris ending up with half an hour in front of the new Rodin. And it was as we went back to the Rue d'Assas that Peter broke in on the subject of bon papa. It gave me a thrill of intense pleasure somehow to realize that Peter and I had felt the same about it. His ideas were so often more rarified than mine, just as his nature was less prosaic and practical that I sometimes recognized, sadly, that there were flights of his on which I could not hope to follow. We found we were the first to arrive home, and we went up the stairs to the large room under the roof that Chaz was using as a studio. There was no one there but bon papa, looming fairly from a hook on which he had been hung. A lay figure crouched in a heap below him. For a moment he stood at gaze, then Peter caught my arm. The rugs, Viv, he ejaculated. What rugs? What do you mean? Why, we're going by the rapide tonight. We'll take bon papa with us. We'll roll him up in our rugs and take him to Provence and give him decent burial on a clean, windy mountainside. The rape of the skeleton, a Viv. He unhooked bon papa as he spoke. But Peter, isn't it dishonest? It doesn't belong to us, but to Chaz. Belong, snorted Peter, how can one human being belong to another? I thought you understood he was a human being. He belongs to himself, and he has a right to six feet of good country earth, and he shall have it. We'll pray for his soul over it. We rolled bon papa up in two coats and a rug and strapped him round. And when we had finished, Joe and Chloe came trooping in to take us out to dinner before seeing us off. Chaz hoped to get to the station, but wanted to put in half an hour or so at work. Hoping it was not bon papa whom he wished to work at, we gathered that personage up, grasped our bags, and all set off for a restaurant. At the Garde de Lyon there was no sign of Chaz, and Joe and Chloe bought us papers, and installed us in a carriage with three fat Frenchmen and one thin French woman. Peter put bon papa on the rack. Oh, you will want your rug, said Joe. I think not, said Peter, and at the thought of unrolling bon papa before those comfortable-looking members of the bourgeoisie, I could not resist a gurgle of laughter. Just as the train was beginning to pull itself together, preparatory to departure, Chaz rushed up the platform. His hair was not so well brushed as usual, and his tie was disorganized. There you are, just in time to say good-bye to them, cried Joe. Chaz only shrieked grand papa, grand papa, as he panted alongside the moving carriage. What about him, we shrieked back hypocritically. He's gone, all by himself. Madame Bignan swears she hasn't touched him. And he's clean gone. And so are we, thank goodness, murmured Peter, as he sank back on the seat. All night long the train ran on through inundated country, where the floods lay almost level with the rails, and the roofs of little houses peeped through it like strange fungi that had sprung up at a touch. All night long the water chuckled in the foot warmers, and over the faces of the sleeping Frenchman opposite, the shadow of the swinging lamp-tassle passed back and forth like a ghostly pendulum. And all night I alternately slept and woke with my head on Peter's shoulder, with his thin, strong arm round me, while bon papa lay rug-hidden in the rack. Next day we alighted at an insignificant little station between Antibes and Nice, and leaving our luggage to follow by Diligeance, we shouldered bon papa and a modest bag, and started on foot to go up to our destination, a little walled town high in the mountains. Seeing a promising young path, we branched off among the olive terraces, and at last found a stretch of wilder hillside, where in the sun we buried bon papa beneath some myrtle bushes dislodged for the purpose, and then planted again. We piled small limestone crags round their roots and made a cross of them at his head, then set a prayer for his soul. But we never told Chas or Joe or Chloe how it was that he had taken to himself wings, and deserted the attic in the rude da-sa. CHAPTER XXXIII I get me to a nunnery. On looking back at the time we spent in the Alp Maratim, it seems to fall into as definite an atmosphere as though it were enclosed in a magic bubble. It is even distinct from the rest of the Provençal period, which we spent wandering through the sunny, faintly colored land that stretches from Marseille to Avignon, though that too was wonderful. But everyone is either mountain lover or plane lover, and Peter and I discovered we were both of the former. In this magic bubble, until memory peers into it in detail, a few impressions stand out more vividly than others, or rather are nearer to the surface. Queer little impressions, some of them, yet all things trivial in themselves that went to make up life that winter. The smell of the smoldering fur cones that came from the glossy, green-tiled stove in the dining-room. The more pricking odor that blew in gusts on to me in my bedroom when my wood-fire was lighted of an evening. And here I may mention in passing that wood-fires have helped no charm for me since. Turn your back for a moment and they go out, leaving you to wrestle with inadequate bellows and the fur cones, which are the only things the nuns grudge as though they were hearts blood. A wood-fire is very pleasant at its best, but it's one woman's work to keep it up to the mark. The sight of the nuns out in the long walled garden with wide black straw hats put on over their flowing veils, so that they looked oddly like ebb and cardinals. The glimpse I once had of Sir Isabelle coming towards me down the path, the sun behind her so that her face framed in its white gimp, and her long, slim neck, where the linen was closely swathed, showed darker than her black veil, the fall of which from crown to shoulders on either side was rendered transparent by the sunlight, a thin, vibrant half-tone between the solid shadow made by her graceful head and neck, and the brilliant brightness of the sun-baved garden. I never saw anything that was at once so lovely and so paintable. The lovely things are often untranslatable in paint. The flickering of the dusty brown lizards over the paths, the glitter of the olive foliage as it caught wind and sun, the feel of the loose stones on the wilder mountainsides, slipping and crunching under one's feet, and the two curiously distinct effects of the Alp Maratim, the effect of little medieval towns with dim brown roofs fluted by rain-stained purple, with shutter-winged windows and towers and turrets pricked against the sky, and the effect almost as fascinating in its way of the little modern villas set in their prim gardens of cacti and mimosa, their white-washed walls decorated with a freeze of painted flowers, and their gaudy doorways flanked by enormous dragons in turquoise China. These are the things with an impression of sunshine over all which go to make up the memory of that time in the mountains. There was a bad spell, of course, when for one dreadful week the snow lay even in the valleys, and all day long a frozen sleep beat past the window, whilst I nearly congealed in my little north room with its stone floor, for I could only afford to light my fire at night. During the day I sat wrapped up in my coat and the iderdown, my feet on a shofarette, and my blue fingers guiding a quivering brush as I sheaked illustrations from the sketches done in sunnier moments. Yet I have to gaze very deep into my bubble to find that week. It has no place in the prevailing atmosphere. From my window I saw the old walled garden where the convent linen swayed back and forth from the fruit trees, through a sidling checkerwork of shadow and rounds of sun, and on clear days I could catch a gleam of sea miles away and below, beyond the descending ranges. Peter lurked at a grubby little inn called the Caffe de Lunavera de Portugal. Why, Portugal was thus dragged in by the heels I never could imagine. And he looked across the market square, through the penciled silver of the naked plain-tree vows, to where the mountains rose beyond the roofs, fold on fold, and peak on peak, till their tawny rock and scrub of myrtle gave way to bleaker peaks still, while highest and furthest of all gleamed the snow peaks. Yes, it was a wonderful little town, but even their life was not entirely lyrical. Humour is never the highest poetry, though it is the salt of life, and of humour I think a convent produces its fair share. The nuns themselves were charming. They were simple-minded, without that aggressive cheeriness and readiness to be bright at trifles, which one finds in an English convent. They were childlike, but not in the least childish. The borders, however, were of a different breed. Like myself they were unattached spinsters with slender purses, and they consisted of a couple of Americans, three French, and besides myself, two English women. We all had a deadly likeness to each other. I used to feel the sameness growing more and more pervading, and it took long tramps over the mountains, with sound sleeps among the friendly myrtle bushes, to keep me at all free of it. There is a type of woman, not of any one nationality, who flocks with those of her own feather, both by instinct and circumstances, the type of the elderly spinster. And here let me hasten to say that I do not necessarily mean by this an unmarried woman. The true elderly spinster is born so. She can be of either sex and married or single. It is a cast of mind, and to it nearly all of us borders conformed. In all the more frequented of the hill towns that lie behind the fashionable seaboard, there is a convent poncion where the wandering woman rests for a while at as few francs a day as possible, for she is seldom well off, generally possessing that incompetency spoken of by her male relatives as quite a nice income for a woman. Of the English women one alone did not fall into this type, and she was charming. The kind of English woman who has iron gray hair, humorous eyes, and an appreciation of beauty that makes her travel in discomfort sooner than not at all. She lent me a rubber bath, but that is another story. Next to her at the head of the table sat the other specimen of our race, a gaunt spectacled female with oily hair and a dark stuffed dress with a tucker in the unyielding collar of it. She had a genius for crushing all conversation by remarking simply and heavily, you cannot possibly mean what you say, a thing she invariably said to me, whom she detested. A gloomy soul she never admired anything, and on those wonderful days of southern spring, when the clear pale sky seems literally to sparkle with light, she would murmur, it's not what I call blue, I expected the sky to be wreckets blue. It ought to be wreckets blue. And she called it rickets at that. Conversation with her was apt to take the form of an Allendorf exercise, do what one would. You have a room due south, haven't you? I would venture. Yes, but the stove burns badly, so I am never warm. But you haven't caught cold, have you? No, I have not caught a cold, but I have the rheumatism. On the left opposite the nice English woman and next to me sat one of the French ladies. She was dowdy with that triumphant dowdiness it takes a French woman to attain. She had an egg-shaped bust and arranged her sleekly watered hair over her forehead in what is, I believe, known as a Piccadilly dip. She was chiefly remarkable for having a nephew, a bullet-headed young soldier with pale hair so closely shorn that the pink of his skull showed through. Sometimes this youth was allowed to come and lunch, but though there was an empty seat at table he was not allowed to grace it. No, he was put at a little side-table with his back to us and ate his déjeuner in solitary state while we could only gaze in regretful admiration at his blue coat and his beautiful red trousers. Apart from her nephew, no particular interest attached to this lady. She was above everything in that room of lone, lorn females and aunt. On my other side, for my sins, sat one of the Americans. The other American was as charming as the nice English woman. Alarmingly cultured it is true, with a little notebook in which she put down anything that struck her, but with the ease and polish and true kindness that the best Americans have, perhaps more strongly than the members of any other nation. But alas, she who sat next to me was not of that kind, and she added to a habit of sucking her false teeth till they clicked, another habit which she called saving up for the next course. This consisted of piling up remnants of the last dish upon her bread and then transferring them in a congealed state to her next plate, no matter what it contained. I can make most anything go together, she would say placently, spreading cold fried carrots on her cheese. And when I rashly suggested she should try wine over the lot, she tipped her red van ordinaire on to the plate and consumed the concoction with relish. I think we all felt the limit had come when she saved Mayonnaise sauce on her bread in limp creamy festoons, and finally with an anticipatory click of her ghoulish teeth transferred it to a baked apple. The two remaining French women were old darlings, though they took some knowing, but having once admitted me to their hearts they spoiled me thoroughly. However they did not unbend all at once, and Christmas was an ordeal over which I still laugh. On the eve I was late for dinner, having stopped on my way back from a tramp in the mountains at the forest shop. There in the damp coolness of it, with the girls busily packing at the long tables, and the air filled with the bitter sweet smell of newly cut rose stems, I bought seven bunches of violets and an armful of the tightly furrowed little red rose buds that look more like bundles of radishes than anything else until they open into velvety sweetness. The roses were for the nuns to put in the chapel, but the violets I destined for my fellow-borders. Being late I leapt straight into the dining-room as I was, with my hat and coat, and my face tingling from my walk, the violets heaped in my arms. In the midst of a ghastly silence I began to go round the table, laying an offering by each plate. I deposited the first bunch with an appropriate little speech by the lady of the Piccadilly dip, who was too overcome by surprise, or some other emotion to utter a word, and her example must have been infectious. The flowers were received in silence, saved for an inarticulate gurgle of hysteria from my nice English woman, whose eye I dared not catch. That table seemed miles long, and I worked down one side of it in stony embarrassment. But by the time I had progressed up the other and reached at the spectacle one, I was quite enjoying it, and she nearly joked with spleen at having to accept anything from so frivolous a person as myself. And at last, when somewhat flushed but considerably less agonized than the rest of the company, I sank back in my own seat. I realized I wouldn't have missed the affair for anything. By twelfth night we all knew each other better, and with the exception of the spectacled one and she of the movable teeth, kept up an animated chatter at mealtimes. Yet somehow, on that day, the depression of the thing, of these drifting women, their aimless lives and futility, caught at me and would not let go. The Dejeuner began gaily because it was a feast day, and that meant coffee. And besides that there was the excitement of the gâteau d'etroir. We were all worked up over this because each of us hoped to find in her slice one of the little china figures. Why, it is called the cake of the three kings, I don't know, except of course to celebrate the epiphany. For the little figures consist of a many bearded man, a woman with flowing hair, and a baby. One of my two dear old French ladies, the one who was fabulously ancient, had a bristling white beard and a bosom on which the large jet buttons lay like plates on a shelf, nearly swallowed the baby. She retrieved it by a method admirably simple and direct, and made a little throne for it in her bread. The baby was quite naked and welded as one soul with a bright green tree-trunk. The king and queen fell to the Americans, one of whom at once remarked that she must make a note in her journal of such a curious custom. While the other opined it was a pity the figures weren't made of sugar. And then, why I don't know, the futility and horror of the whole crowd of us bore down on me. You do not eat. You cannot be well, Mise-vive, cried one of the old French ladies. You must come to my room after Déjeuner, and I will give you a tonic and some biscuits. One would say you were her mother the way you fuss over her, grumbled the fabulously old lady. So I am her mother, declared the first dauntlessly. No more than am I, snapped the aged one. You are both my mothers, and I adore you, said I hastily. But I could not escape the tonic which took the form of a secret bottle of benedictine from a cupboard. And not to be behindhand the very old lady called me into her room, and insisted on pouring a lot of quinine hair-restorer on to the top of my head. That will make you feel better, she cooed, stirring it round on my crown with a fat white finger. In her cupboard too was a secret store of eatables, and I had to refuse a strange assortment of them, ranging from licorice drops to potted meat. I began to see that these stores made part of the life of a lone woman. That when unhappy or bored, she held a private orgy of sweet biscuits and throat pastils. And this was the crowning touch to my depression. I fled to my own room, where a tiny square of sun made a glowing patch on the red-tiled floor. Outside the sky showed a clear vibrant blue, and a young soft wind met my heated cheeks. A knock at the door and the little shiny-faced bright-eyed lay-sister who waited on us peeped in to inform me that Monsieur Monami had arrived to take me out. I crammed on the jaunty little leather hat that was the admiration of the nuns, cast my painting things into my rucksack, and in another moment was through the house where the smell of dinner still held the air, and in the sweet scented out-of-doors with Peter. CHAPTER XXXI We were bound for some ruins that crusted one of the mountain crags far up behind the town. The ruins of a Templar's fortress, where the knights used to wage war upon the pirates who came up from the seaboard. Peter slung my painting things over his shoulder, and we set off up the winding mountain road, leaving our little ringed city below, passing the gay, modern painted villas set back among semi-tropical foliage. Then higher up, past occasional little typical Provençal farmhouses, washed a faded ochre with a dusty brown fluted roof and narrow piercings for windows, sometimes with a naked vine sprawling like a net over the poles that made a kind of airy loge in front, the pattern of it exactly repeated in shadow over the hard-stamped earth. Beneath the loge there was always a yellow-eyed, black-and-white dog that barked itself sideways as we passed. Still higher we went, till mile upon mile of mountain ranges laid below us, sloping away to the line of blue, soft as a bird's wing, which told of the distant Mediterranean. Leaving the road we climbed up the slippery turf, clutching at bare young thorn and almond trees, till we reached the Templars. The ruined walls were mostly only a couple of feet in height, so that they made a kind of ground plan of what the fortress must have been. Only here and there, as on a jutting crag several feet below us, the shell of a turret stood up against the sky, the old stonework of it, a light golden buff in the sunshine. Having unpacked my painting things, Peter ensconced himself in one of the little rooms where the grass made a post-fitting carpet, his writing pad on his knee, and for a couple of hours we worked in silence. There is nothing like sweat. By the end of the first half hour the excitement of work was thrilling me to the exclusion of that terrible convent atmosphere, and by the time the sun had moved so far that it was no longer possible to pursue my effect, I felt enough at peace to pour out the fare to Peter. The oppression of it's been growing on me, of course, I ended. Today at Dejeuner it somehow came to a head, but each night's been pretty bad. The dining-rooms badly lit and that green stove is chilsome, and under every one's plate lies a pool of shadow. And we're all en masse, so footling, and today it all seemed awful when I looked round at us. And I thought if any of us died tomorrow we might just as well not have lived. If any one of these hide-bound, prim, good, rather catty souls but only produce an infant that she didn't ought to have had, I should say all the rest of us ought to go down on our knees to her. At least she'd have had courage. Oh, oh, oh, the grayness of it! Have an apple, advised Peter, burrowing in his pocket. Don't talk to me of food. Those cupboards were the last straw, the finishing touch. All that secret food it seemed positively obscene. Well, it does smell rather good. If you'll have it with me. I enjoyed the juicy scrunch with which my teeth sank into my half of the apple. It's no good, I said. I never shall be able to refuse food. That's the penalty you pay for ever not having had enough of it. I know, replied Peter, it alters your whole point of view. If you've ever been starving. I never have, but for a long stretch together I've not had enough to eat. The mental effect is the same. It's such a tremendous indictment of civilization, such an upsetting and readjusting the standards. One never, no matter how wealthy one may become, can look at food in the same way again. It has become sacred. Some day I'm going to write a paper called On Common Food as a Sacrament. I've learned a lot out of the way things about it. One is that its filling capacity comes before nourishment. If you're really hungry you'll stuff on biscuits sooner than eat concentrated meat tablets. Yes, and the funny thing is that no matter if you know your tomorrow's dinner is absolutely assured to you, you still can't do away with the insistent little feeling. I must eat all I can in case I don't get any more, and so one lives in a state of overeating. Whenever I get the chance I eat till I get that bulgy, stiff feeling. One never trusts food, so to speak, when once one has learned not to. Trust is just what we want over money, too, declared Peter, sitting upright in excitement and sending his apple-core hurtling over the abyss at our feet. The way people look at money is so immoral. Very few things are immoral. Just as very few things are moral. Because most things are beautiful and then such a question doesn't enter in. But you can treat money in a most immoral way, I'm sure of it. I listened in respectful silence because I had known for some time now that Peter had inherited a fixed income, with which he declined to have anything to do. When he had first told me I thought it must be because the money came from paté de foie gras or industries, but I found it was that he considered the whole idea of a settled, unearned income immoral. It's the strongest line of demarcation in the world, he now said, that between the people who earn their whole income, however large, and those who have a certain income, no matter how small, to fall back on, it's a far stronger line than that between upper and lower classes, or between rich and poor, or even educated and uneducated, because it means the difference of the whole point of view. The one class cultivates the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, the second is agreeably conscious that it has no need to. But I objected. People who have nothing but their own exertions to look forward to don't think about it like that at all. They insure and save up and invest, and the thought of the future is a nightmare to them. Oh, that's just the pity of it. They are the heirs of all the ages if they only knew. Once you can realize it and not worry any more, you are the only perfectly free creature. A man with money can't be free. That stands to reason. And I don't see how one can justify making investments. One can't, except that as other people are doing it, one must do it too. If only everyone worked hard just the same. But no one invested, but gave the money round as they went on. No one would ever starve, or need work houses. I suppose it's one of those things that can't be done because it would need everybody. And yet it would be an absolutely practical solution if they only would. You could live on the fat of the land and yet save your soul alive, replied Peter. I wonder if most people wouldn't think it rather absurd to say salvation lies in having no assured income I'm used. Absurd? Of course it is absurd. All councils of perfection are absurd. The Sermon on the Mount's absurd. That's why it's divine. Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect. That's not only absurd, but impossible. And he knew it when he said it. In its impossibility, in its divine absurdity, it's the utterance of a God to men who should be gods. It doesn't matter a bit that they can't, as long as they want to be. But they never will be, you know, I objected. No one except a few isolated religious here and there will ever act literally upon the Sermon on the Mount. And even religious don't, because they build convents and monasteries. Perhaps no one ever will. Perhaps it's even certain that the whole world never will. But that's no reason for denying the perfection of it. And, of course, economically and actually, it would revolutionize the world. There's no denying that. Oh, what I'll write some day. For it's wonderful what a good ink necessity is, to put it on the lowest grounds. But you see, I want to make the other people who only earn from day to day realize there's nothing to worry about. Of course no one would worry for themselves. It's only for their wives and children they worry. And they needn't. When we're all pulling together, no one will be allowed to starve. And if you're a Christian at all, you are bound to get it. Not only the beauty, but the inevitable rightness of it. A fresh breeze side past my ear and I stretched my arms wide, wide, to breathe it in. And as my muscles relaxed again I felt myself fit into the curves of the earth and felt it bear me up. It was a good feeling and good too was the sight of the slim young oak saplings growing among the rubber ruins, the coppery last year's leaves still on their twigs, seeming in the sunlight to burn against the blue of the sky. All these things were gifts to us and worth the whole length of the glaring Riviera at the horizon. There's so much, I exclaimed, elliptically. And one is so free and at large in it. Don't you feel much freer without your money, Peter? Don't I. It's like having wings. You remember when I first met you, Peter, that evening on the chuff? Rather, you gave me a pasty. Food again, you see. Well, the afternoon before, when I watched the chuff coming in, I had only one heartfelt wish in the world and that was for a hundred a year settled and immutable of my own. And now I have grown to be glad I haven't. It does make one trust less having money because there's less need to trust. We lay for a while longer till the valleys filled with dust and the mountain peaks stood up into the fiery glamour that holds the southern world for a few enchanted minutes before the cold steel blue of night. And when the glow that filled the air and refracted from leaf and stone and the blown hair about our eyes fell suddenly into that chill blueness, we shouldered our traps and set off down the mountain, swinging home along the winding road that glimmered pale at us through the deepening dusk. The sweet breath of violets and stocks mingling with the faint smell of dust as we went. Peter filled my pockets with pines he had collected for my fire and I went into my convent with the whole golden afternoon in my mind. There had been a treat prepared for me in my absence and when I learned what it was I fell on Le Chermere's nicely starched gimp in my joy. It appeared that my supposed indisposition had been confided to the nuns by my mothers and they had all consulted as to what would give me most pleasure. As with one voice they had all exclaimed, the bath. This matter of a bath is no simple thing at a convent and I had wrestled with more difficulties than the other borders because the majority seemed to regard a bath as a perilous undertaking before which one should make one's will and bid farewell to one's relations. I had nearly caught my young death by leaping through the garden every morning clad in a yellow silk kimono all over dragons which I consider was a liberal education for the gardener to take a cold plunge in the outdoor Saldaban. For the evenings my nice English woman had charitably lent me her rubber bath, a limp boneless thing that was quite apt to collapse suddenly and allow one's hard-earned hot water to escape in three different directions at once. Yet what a boon it was if only to see the maid wrestling with it of a morning. You folded up like a cocked hat I would inform her peering over the bedclothes and let the water escape at one corner. But the unfortunate Lisette was always worsted, the bath doubling up and opening out and dimpling in wherever her hands were not and the water flowing profusely over the floor while Lisette never failed to keep up a little litany of Mondu, Kelmizer, Kelmizer, oh Mondu, Mondu, Kelmizer. Then at the New Year the construction of the outdoor Saldaban was brought to a triumphant conclusion amid the odd admiration of nuns and boarders. It only remained to find someone willing to risk her life in it like St. Lawrence and his gridiron the thing was apparently heated from below in a manner that threatened to boil the intrepid bather alive. Eventually La Chermaire in tones befitting the leader of a forlorn hope announced that she herself would try it which she did with much aplomb and the bathing season was thus formally declared open. But alas it cost two francs fifty a time to dally with this bath and hence it was not for me. Now I found it all heated and ready. I was to have it as a treat absolutely for nothing. I rushed into that Saldaban sponge in hand to find the little lay sister arranging a large sheet-like garment ready for my occupation of it in the bath a garment that wraps you round like a wet shroud and prevents you using any soap whilst fulfilling its office of hiding from the Almighty the indecent spectacle he has created. She stood with it in her hands gazing at me for a moment then her shiny cheeks rounded themselves in a smile. You will perhaps not use this, she queried. The English, I believe, do not care about it. You have guessed it in one, I informed her. But as I lay water-clad only in the imposing copper bath I felt I loved the whole world. The nuns, of course, but even more or less though less rather than more the lady who wanted the sky to be rickets blue such is the effect of unexpected luxury after a day of high thinking. Bidding farewell to the Alp Maratim to the Café de l'Univers et de Portugal and the Villa Lamartine not that we had stayed in those abodes for the whole of our time for being unable to afford motors we had had to tramp on foot to the remotor wonder towns and then still without scandalizing those nice-minded nuns Il Fallu Cajadecuchasse Peter was by no means making an ordinary travel-book of in King Rene's country and I fear the conscientious tourist might have found great gaps in the information contained therein. But on the other hand he gleaned the nicest things from heaven knows where. To those who possess the well-regulated mind of the tourist it may be of interest to know that the Château de Caire at Tourette belongs successively to Masséna and Maréchal Real that Vance had been the stronghold both of knights and pirates and has given a bishop to the Sea of Rome but for the casual wanderer of no fixed born the vagrant of a light heart and purse it is a far more illuminating truth that he should shun all people whose eyebrows meet in a thick bar because they are of the blood of the Loup Garou. From the purely material point of view Saint Genet is famous for its grapes and along the roadside hang the serried bunches swaddled in paper bags and looking curiously like rows of plucked pigeons. But to the eye of memory Saint Genet is the little town with a little manuscript in concrete form. The fortifications of Saint Paul are considered by architects to be even more perfect than those of Carcassonne or Nuremberg but better than the actual technical knowledge though that too is good for technique understood is one of the deepest of pleasures is the expectation of meeting at each turn the long-legged hose-clad boys and steel-breasted man-at-arms which old illuminations show as manning just such walls as these. Peter had a theory that Tourette, Saint Genet, Carreau, Gatière, the magic of the names of them was each a fairy city fallen on bad days it is true but holding its breath so to speak in the husk of dirt and ashes and discover itself to a world grown simple-minded once again and it is true that even now the boys who whistle their careless way round corners and down the slopes are of another age brown-necked and bold-eyed with the definitely mottled cheekbones small chins and pointed teeth that suggest the fawn Peter the fawn-like was indeed in his element here and sometimes I had queer little moments when I felt almost jealous of the country's comprehension of him the night before my last at the convent Peter and I spent at a little inn in a town overhanging the vaar we rose early and went out into the dawning strong and stout the sweeping ramparts this town reared up from the projecting crags and past them raged the relentless wind that blows down the vaar as down a tunnel we clung to the battlements for a minute staring down through the glimmering dawn-light at the bed of the river where only a few streamlets with here and there an agitated patch of shallower water tortured by wind and currents patterned the gray of the pebbly bed with brightness the snows had not yet melted when they did the vaar would rush full and blue along her beautiful winding course Peter holding his pudding-basin hat down over his ears like a poke-bonnet led the way to the more sheltered mountainside and we scrambled up it climbing from terrace to terrace where the twisted olives paled and whispered and when these gave place to a wilder slope covered with myrtle we sat ourselves down listen said Peter suddenly holding up his hand the pipes of a satyr do you hear them? thin and faint at first then rounder and fuller came a plaintive little air accompanied by a sound as of a heavy rainfall I knew that noise well having often heard it behind the convent wall it was the noise made by the hoofs of many sheep pattering along the road Peter and I pushed through the bushes till we came to where they leaned over a steep curve of road and there we saw pouring down it a flock of the deep golden brown sheep of the country mirrored dark shadows at that colorless hour and followed by the piping satyr as you see observed Peter he has hidden his cloven hoofs in heavy shoes and tucked his tail neatly away in a blue blouse but that's only part of the great conspiracy that's the fun of this country it's keeping a secret biding its time it doesn't matter how reverent and receptive you are you can only see the surface of things here and if you're intuitive enough make a guess at the rest those people, these dark, sleek-haired women and bright-eyed boys and these burnt-out old men they've got a heritage of romance that amounts to an added soul they may know it themselves and be laughing in their sleeves or they may think they've forgotten it doesn't matter the great thing is that a wonderful spirit will ferry something is here there's an old legend in Cornwall, said I which tells of some magic eye-sav which if you can only get hold of it enables you to see the spirit cities you see delicate palaces booths piled with jewels knights and ladies in lovely attire but if you're discovered one of the little people touches your eye and you see nothing but wilted thorns and leaves that eddy on the moor oh, for that eye-sav, said Peter what mightn't we see here, Viv? just think perhaps all these fields of violets stalks and those tangles of roses may be the fairy-folk of Provence in disguise old Andrew Marvel would have thought so anyway and thought them the better for the change doesn't he say something to that effect? Apollo haunted Daphne so only that she might laurel grow and Pan did after searing speed not as a nymph but for a reed I quoted sticking a sprig of myrtle in my buttonhole just so Viv, do you realize that tomorrow we want more move on that we leave the Alp Mara team twitch our Harris Tweed mantles and set off for pastures new? I do let us sit down again and desecrate the dawn with a cigarette it is our form of incense none the worse for being modern shall you be sorry to leave? of course for some things I replied but I'm so looking forward to tramping up to Avignon oh, think of it, Peter with mistral in our knapsacks for perusal of an evening and refab in our hands to refer to a thousand times as we go do you think we shall hap on a bandit of pyra or trace the tit-mouse to its haunts? perhaps I'm not sorry to be going because I'm so glad to have had all this and what one has once had one has for always besides I should itch if I stayed in one place if Providence, like some Titanic and ghostly policeman didn't always move me on, I replied I should never have budged I'm one of those who always prefer the ills I have to flying to good I know not of not that there've been any ills here tonight the nuns are providing coffee in my honour although it's a jour magre which means we shall dine off a boiled egg and a couple of ice wafers with H and P imprinted on their fair young faces such a feeling of homesickness that gave me when I first saw it don't talk, said Peter, look we were sitting, our legs dangling at the edge of an overhanging spur of cliff at our backs rose a wood of larches and young oaks far below us the Vars mazy inter-threadings were growing ever brighter at a distant curve one of those magnificent viaducts only the French build showed like a flung cobweb through a faint haze of mist as we watched the grey and silver of the Vars in its bed the soft blue of the woody shadows on the further side and the very air itself became suffused with the merest breath of a more vital hue the whole of the grey-blue world that here and there had a steely glimmer as though under water began to flush at the approach of day I could have wrung my hands in my desire to stop that growing rose colour which would soon turn to gold and flood everything for though I'd been talking of this and that to Peter the half-light which had seemed to call into being a half-world was the most glamorous, enchanted all to oneself and to one other thing ever created I sprang to my feet and ran off through the wood the wood still held the steel blueness of an incredible strength a colour as chill and piercing as a sword-blade the distances between the slim tree-trunks were opaque with it the larches which from their thousands of fine downward-hanging filaments always gave an effect of mist seemed like ghost-trees and from a dark blur of undergrowth I disturbed an owl that sailed out in the way noiselessly on its down-edged wings the exquisite quietness of that dawn-filled wood I ran on and suddenly came through a thinner growth of trees to where a hollow cupped a big and dimly bright still pool I was standing gazing down at it when Peter caught up with me and slipping a friendly arm round my shoulders stood quietly also I have heard that long staring at any bright object acts hypnotically on the brain and all I can say is if it is always as productive of clearness of vision as my gazing at the pool that morning it is a thing we should all indulge in occasionally for the first time I felt Peter it was not only that I realized suddenly that Peter was indispensable to me that no one else could ever fill such a big place in my life it was not even that I felt for him and with him more acutely than ever before I was so fused with him as actually to be him himself for one dizzying moment mental vision triumphed over physical as in the effort to be in his mind I imagined the pool, the gray lava slopes beyond and a drooping curve of young sapling with the slight difference they would all take on from his point of view he would see more of that cluster of purplish fungi to the far side of the sapling than I it was intimacy in its keenest and though the intensity of it could not last and indeed at that moment began to drop into a quiet content yet as Peter had said what one has once had, one had for always it was much the same as the flight of a field lark the bird soars up and up singing then at the outermost edge of ecstasy drops to the nest yet the pattern of the air currents is changed the vibrations made by his wings and the notes of his song go on and on in waves invisible and soundless or at least I imagined them doing so oh Peter I said at last how clean it all is, how clean it's a sort of end of the world where everything is clean and quiet and cold I must bathe in the pool you bathe too I slipped out of my clothes among the trees but quick as I was a splash told me Peter was ahead of me leaving my garments in a ferry ring as they fell off me I swung myself down a boulder and touched the water with a tentative foot over which the ripples made by Peter's strong swimming eddied up then I too slid into the water deeper and deeper till I felt the cold circle of it around my neck I swam to the far side of the pool because I wanted to get away from the trees for on this other side were no tricks of light and shade or mistiness of foliage but bare wide slopes of ridged lava great rounded tongues of it coming down to the pool above them only the sky and in the coldness and purity of the place and hour this bathing in a dawn pool had the quality of sacramental cleansing which called for the austerity of the open we swam side by side and as we went quivering flakes of brightness broke and rippled away in an arrowy flight on either hand and when I drew myself up onto a lava slope I saw the drops fall off me in a pearly shower oh Viv it's the loveliest thing in the world said Peter you always told me it was and it is you're a little ghost Viv you glimmer so white hush a moment I whispered lifting a warning finger for from my higher position I could see the fiery rim of the sun growing up behind the range on the far bank of the river the blueness sank into the earth like moisture and the brightening air turned faintly but surely gold a minute more and I saw the curve of my double knees that had shown pale against the gray lava as I sat sideways on the slope become rose colored oh the sun's good too cried Peter stretching so that the water flew from off him do you know what I've discovered Viv know what that beauty is the loveliest thing in the world I've discovered that it's most frightfully cold here said I with a prosaic shiver I will do a dance to the sun all the way to my clothe and I ran round the pool leaping to dry myself but Peter stood still for a moment a slim pale bronze figure stretching himself towards the glow of the sunrise when I was ready even to the tying of my tie and I ran out to find him he was dressed but his hair was sticking straight up with wetness like the horn of a unicorn I pressed it firmly down and tried to part it in the way it should go then Peter I do love you I said and how odd it all is and how different from what one always imagined in what way asked Peter rubbing his cheek against the top of my head a proceeding which forced me to speak into his chest well there are no thrills I don't know that I've ever formulated to myself what thrills are but I know that I always vaguely but firmly considered them inseparable from caring for anyone as much as I do for you Peter turned my face up by taking my chin between his finger and thumb for instance I elaborated I don't want you to kiss me a bit I wouldn't mind but it seems so superfluous and unnecessary that's because unlike most people who begin at the trimmings and work up to the essentials you begin at the essentials and work outward to the trimmings explained Peter why? I wonder everything always seems to happen in steps so to speak it's like improving in one's work one doesn't go up a gradual slope of progress but quite suddenly after a long sticking in one place finds one is up another step well I've gone up a step with you this morning I couldn't ever be embarrassed about anything with you anything that wasn't ugly because I feel so much you not with you or for you but you as though the word I ought to be split in two for us it seems absurd to say you to you if you see what I mean yes I know and I won't kiss you but don't you think perhaps you might kiss me I flung my arms round his neck and kissed him in the middle of one cheek and it felt quite natural and ordinary so to do which showed me I had indeed gone up a step oh Peter you want shaving I exclaimed and I want my breakfast I'm so dreadfully hungry poor little beast said Peter sympathetically here catch hold and we'll run for it we stayed ourselves with coffee and rolls at the inn and then set out for home on the heels of the new day end of chapter 32