Lions and Shadows, Page 3

  He didn’t fail us. Chalmers got a sixty-pound scholarship, I got an exhibition worth forty pounds, and Browne, the school’s prize history scholar, got the best scholarship of his year. Chalmers left at the end of the term, to go to a pension at Rouen and learn French. I had to stay on another whole year at a school, because I was so young. It seemed an unattractive prospect.

  Seven months later, on August 3rd, 1922, I woke up on board a cross-channel steamer from Southampton, to find that Le Havre was already in sight. It was my first unforgettable view of anywhere abroad. The boat stole in towards the land across a flat grey sea, spreading heavy whitish ripples, as if through milk. The coast rose solemn behind the town. The tall houses were like shabby wings of stage scenery which had been left out of doors all night, propped against the cliffs. As we approached the quay, we heard the faint vigorous shouting of the inhabitants, the crowing of cocks and the clanging of the bells of trams. Bolsters were hung out from the windows to air in the pale sunshine. It seemed to me that the people here got up very early.

  Mr Holmes was beside me at the rail, and Queensbridge, another member of the History Sixth, a freckled jolly boy with a bright red nose. Mr Holmes had arranged this trip; we were on our way to a walking tour in the French Alps. He wore a cloth cap which made him look more than ever like a Renaissance cardinal on holiday, and a surprisingly loud suit of pepper-and-salt tweeds.

  We crossed Havre in a tram, crushed together with crowds of workmen going to their daily jobs, and found ourselves in the great gloomy shabby platformless station, where grass grew between the rails and the grimy locomotives looked so rusty and ancient that one expected them at any moment to blow themselves to bits. Havre had not yet been tidied up after the War. I was duly shocked and remarked on all this to Mr Holmes, who retorted that every European country looked like that just now, except England, where a lot of money was wasted on coats of paint, most uneconomical, since we were every bit as much in debt as the others. We sat down in the waiting-room and ordered coffee and brioches. Mr Holmes was enthusiastic about the prospect of eating brioches again. I thought they tasted of cardboard and cheese, and the coffee was dirty water full of floating wisps of skin. But I was not disappointed, for I had never for a moment expected that I should like French food. I was very pink and young and English; and quite prepared for a Continent complete with poisonous drains, roast frogs, bed-bugs and vice.

  Our train stopped at Rouen, where Chalmers, it had been arranged, would join us. It was strange to see him standing there, puffing at his pipe, placid and vague as usual, and seeming perfectly at home amidst these alien porters and advertisements. He had grown a small moustache and looked exactly my idea of a young Montmartre poet, more French than the French. Now he caught sight of us, and greeted me with a slight wave of the hand, so very typical of him, tentative, diffident, semi-ironical, like a parody of itself. Chalmers expressed himself habitually in fragments of gestures, abortive movements, half-spoken sentences; and if he did occasionally do something decisive—take off his hat to a lady, buy a tin of tobacco, tell a stranger the correct time—he would immediately have to cover it with a sarcasm or a little joke. Getting into the carriage, he was received by Queensbridge and Mr Holmes with congratulations and witticisms on the moustache. Mr Holmes was, of course, delighted, and only sorry, I think, that Chalmers wasn’t also wearing a velvet jacket, corduroy trousers and a floppy tie. Meanwhile, Chalmers glanced at me with a faint mysterious smile and I had the feeling, as so often, that we were conspirators.

  In Paris it was terrifically hot. We visited Les Invalides; I was secretly very much impressed by the coloured lighting, but I wasn’t going to show it. Chalmers had denounced the building in advance—a shrine to war! And, of course, one couldn’t admit that a shrine to war was anything but vulgar and ugly. As we leaned on the parapet, looking down at Napoleon’s shiny tomb, we reminded each other of H. G. Wells’ verdict in the Outline of History:

  Against this stormy and tremendous dawn appears this dark little archaic personage, hard, compact, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vulgar.

  Chalmers suggested that the only adequate comment was to spit. Mentally, we spat.

  The Sainte-Chapelle I privately thought hideous, but Mr Holmes told us that it is one of the wonders of Europe, so I dutifully noted in my diary (needless to say, I was keeping a diary of our tour; how I wish I had put down in it one interesting, one sincere, one genuinely spiteful remark): ‘a marvellous example of the colouring of medieval cathedrals.’ Finally, after a glance at Notre-Dame and a brisk trot through the Louvre, we sat down at a café on the Place de l’Opéra and watched the people. They were amazing—never had we seen such costumes, such make-up, such wigs; and, strangest of all, the wearers didn’t seem in the least conscious of how funny they looked. Many of them even stared at us and smiled, as though we had been the oddities, and not they. Mr Holmes no doubt found it amusing to see that pageant of prostitution, poverty and fashion reflected in our callow faces and wide-open eyes.

  We were to travel all night, third class, on wood. The Gare du Lyon was crammed with yelling porters and frantically jostling travellers, like a station in a nightmare. Mr Holmes hired a pillow for each of us. People were settling into the compartments as though they meant to inhabit them for a month: fathers of families were heating up food on stoves, a baby had been slung in a miniature hammock, everybody had changed into shirt-sleeves and bedroom slippers. One man was preparing to sleep in the corridor, on a mattress, with sheets and blankets complete. We got a carriage to ourselves and dozed uneasily while the train dashed screaming through the darkness, towards the Alps. As its speed increased, the jolts lengthened out into jumps, until we seemed to leave the rails altogether for seconds at a time. Chalmers murmured sleepily that his people at the Rouen pension had told him P.L.M. stood for ‘Pour les Morts.’

  But in the morning we were still alive; we changed at Aix-les-Bains and by breakfast time we were in Annecy. The sun was shining on the lake. The mountains rose, steep and wooded, sheer out of the bluish-green water; high above, they were black and veined with snow. It was the most beautiful place I had seen in my whole life. I wrote in my diary: ‘There is an impressive château and a clerical school, with a long stone staircase approaching it, where Rousseau was educated for a time.’

  During the afternoon we made a trip round the lake in a steamer. As we passed Sévrier, Menthon, Talloires, Duingt, with their white vine-covered houses and gay crowds waving from the little piers, Chalmers told me, in bits of sentences and with silent ambiguous gestures toward the shore, how he had discovered Les Fleurs du Mal: ‘… it’s the very greatest … I shall never forget the first time I … you see, he exposes once and for all, the tremendous sham … the thing we never realized while we were at school …’ His suppressed excitement set me, as always, instantly on fire. We got back late, and I had to run through the streets to buy my first copy of Baudelaire before the bookshops closed. Without it, that night, I should not have slept a wink.

  The stay at Rouen was, as I was to discover later, one of the most important periods of Chalmers’ life. His pension was nothing out of the ordinary—a typical coaching establishment kept by a typical Lycée professor, pedantic, underpaid, a martinet on the irregular verbs, with a high starched collar and a beard which smelt of cheese. But Chalmers was in the city of Flaubert and de Maupassant; his imagination supplied everything that was lacking. He strolled along the quays and bicycled through the forest, thinking of the murder of La Petite Roque and of Madame Bovary being seduced in the closed black cab. The Pension Dubois provided him with an interior setting for all those anecdotes of frustrated bourgeois longings, adulteries and illicit loves: the tea-urn, the coloured sliding glass doors, the tiny greenhouse which was used as a study, the little garden on the ramparts and the sham marble pillars which supported the slippery polished staircase composed into a romantic vision of late nineteenth-century France. Chalmers, like many of the English writers whom he th
en most admired, felt a strong natural sympathy with everything French. At Rouen he imagined himself as having escaped into a world in which it was possible to speak openly and unaffectedly of all those subjects which in England must be introduced by an apology or guarded with a sneer—poetry, metaphysics, romantic love. Like all shy people, he enjoyed a freedom from his inhibitions in speaking a foreign language; and his French was already fluent. I heard later that Madame Dubois and her friends had found him charming.

  Next morning, the walking tour started. We took the steam-tram, with its enormous funnel, to Thônes; and then set off on foot, up the road which led to the Col des Aravis. Mr Holmes and Queensbridge stopped frequently to take photographs; they were both experts.

  Chalmers and I refused to look at the view at all, much less to admire it; we had passed a resolution that morning consigning mountains to the great rubbish-heap of objects and ideas admired by our adversaries, ‘the other side,’ and therefore automatically condemned. ‘Not that we dislike mountains as mountains,’ Chalmers was careful to add, ‘but we decline to subscribe to the loathsome alpine blague.’ (‘Blague’ was a prominent word in the new Rouen vocabulary, we had used it several hundred times already during the last forty-eight hours.) Mr Holmes, without being in a position to appreciate these fine shades of disapproval, was delighted. As usual, he asked nothing better than that we should behave with the maximum of eccentricity.

  Presently the mountains disappeared into the clouds; it began to drizzle. We stopped at a chalet where drinks were sold. Queensbridge tried to order beer and was given byrrh instead, an opportunity for Mr Holmes to read us a little lecture on the correct pronunciation of the two words. We were learning all the time. A few kilometres higher, we sat down on a fence which broke, tipping us over backwards into a field of potatoes. Mr Holmes pretended to be afraid that the farmer would claim damages, and hurried us on for the next twenty minutes. Actually, I think, he saw that we were tired and wanted to create a diversion by providing some bogus adventure. He was endlessly considerate and sly.

  From the Col des Aravis, in fine weather, the tourist gets his first view of Mont Blanc. But now, as we climbed the last loop of the road to the summit, we were enveloped suddenly in a clammy mist. When we reached the chalet at the top there was nothing to be seen—not even the cows, whose clanging bells were moving invisibly all around us. This, as far as I remember, was the only one of Mr Holmes’ effects which failed to come off. However, we none of us much cared; we were glad of our supper. Mr Holmes, I read in my diary, ‘was very gay at the expense of Queensbridge, who stared too hard at the waitress.’

  Next morning the sunshine woke us early. Chalmers, with whom I shared a room, was the first out of bed; yawning, stretching himself, he hobbled over to the window, started back in mock horror: ‘Good God! It’s arrived!’

  Mont Blanc confronted us, dazzling, immense, cut sharp out of the blue sky; more preposterous than the most baroque wedding cake, more convincing than the best photograph. It fairly took my breath away. It made me want to laugh.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  After breakfast we started off down the pass. The cows were being driven out to pasture; their bells made a continuous jangle, pretty and metallic, like a musical-box. Peasants were cutting hay in the steep upland meadows. There was a village called Giettaz with a gaudy toy church, whose golden weather-vane sparkled in the sun. In front of the dark pinewood chalets grew ash trees with thick gnarled oak-like trunks; on top of one of the trees stood a little windmill. Here and there, on the gigantic mountain-side, clearings had been made in the forest; the felled trees lay scattered like a box of matches. Long rays of light struck downwards through the tall solemn conifers, as if through cathedral windows, exploring the darkness of the gorge below. Chalmers quoted: ‘… des pins qui ferment leur pays.’

  The gorge grew narrower and deeper. Cables from a slate quarry spanned the ravine, high above our heads. Waterfalls sprayed the ruins of the precipice; we remembered how Tennyson had described them as ‘downward smoke.’ Charabancs came tearing round the corkscrew corners, missing death by inches, and girls waved their handkerchiefs to us and screamed. Mr Holmes waved back, encouraging us to do likewise. Throughout the trip he lost no opportunity for facetiousness, even skittishness, where the opposite sex was concerned. This naughtiness seemed rather forced, it didn’t suit him. No doubt he was trying to continue our education in yet another direction. If so, his problem was certainly a difficult one; he couldn’t, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a masterpiece of tact; it might well have speeded up our development by a good five years. As it was, he merely joked and giggled, unsure of his ground, and we, reflecting that Mr Holmes belonged, after all, to an older and more innocent generation, felt superior and amused and slightly pained. For Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about l’affreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire. Sexual love was the torture-chamber, the loathsome charnel-house, the bottomless abyss. The one valid sexual pleasure was to be found in the consciousness of doing evil. Its natural and honourable conclusion was in general paralysis of the insane. Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, in every possible meaning of the word.

  The rest of the tour is best described by a series of snapshots. I see our little party at Chamonix, on the terrace of a café beside the shallow mountain river. The snow-peaks have turned green, then crimson, then orange; now they are black against the stars. A few yards from where we sit, Saussure’s statue points towards the ice-fields of Mont Blanc—or, as Mr Holmes insists, towards the servants’ bedroom windows of the Hotel de la Poste. We are arguing about the public school system: Chalmers and myself on one side, Mr Holmes on the other, Queensbridge neutral, egging us on. Chalmers pauses in the middle of a sentence to light his pipe. I only wish that mine would go out. It is my very first pipe, large and light brown and highly varnished, bought that morning, together with a lilac bow-tie and a copy of La Dame aux Caméllias. I am perspiring freely and my mouth is unnaturally full of saliva. Chalmers says: ‘All institutions are bad.’ And Mr Holmes retorts: ‘That depends, doesn’t it, on how you define an institution?’ I do not hear Chalmers’ definition because I have to return to the hotel in order to be sick.

  Here we are at La Flégère, a chalet high up the mountain side opposite the Mont Blanc range. We have walked up here from Chamonix for lunch, and on the way Mr Holmes has told us stories about Oscar Browning, whose lectures he attended in his Cambridge days. We look through telescopes at the aiguilles and are thrilled to see two men perched on the very top of the Dru. Just below us, a party of French boy scouts is eating sandwiches. Somebody loosens a small stone with his foot, it gathers momentum, becomes a deadly missile, all but hits a scout on the back of the head. The boys look up furiously; they decide, quite unjustly, that we are the culprits. There are murmurs against the dirty English. We are indignant, our tentative internationalism withdraws aggrieved into its shell. Very well, we are English. We will be very English indeed. We return from our walk in an isolationist mood.

  The next picture is out of focus, because I am rather drunk. We are having supper at a little hamlet called Les Chapieux; it has been a long day, we have walked over the Col du Bonhomme, from Les Contamines, where the Feast of the Assumption was being celebrated and we had to sleep on the floor. Crossing the Col was quite an adventure: the guidebook describes it as being dangerous in bad weather—we feel like mountaineers. To celebrate the achievement, Mr Holmes has ordered Asti Spumanti. What a marvellous drink! Here, at last, is something alcoholic which I don’t merely have to pretend to like, it is nicer, even, than the best lemonade; so cool and fizzy and sweet. It makes me wonderfully happy and full of love and romantically sad. That young officer over there in the corner, for instance—how utterly I understand e
verything he is feeling! He is dreadfully bored up here, in this tiny mountain barracks; he is thinking of his girl, down in Bourg-St.-Maurice, and wondering if she is thinking of him, and if she really loves him at all. Well, I am clairvoyant this evening, and I know that she is thinking of him; she loves him very much. Later, perhaps, I will give him a message from her which I have just telepathically received. But now I find that we are all wandering along the edge of a lake, in the dark. I try to tell Chalmers about the officer, but I can’t get him to stop reciting the Voyage à Cythère. Mr Holmes says it is time to go to bed.

  Now comes the most vivid scene in my collection. Chalmers and I are sitting on the edge of a small grassy cliff overlooking the village of Val d’Isère and the steep fertile valley leading up to the Col du Mont-Iseran, which we shall cross next day. We have chosen this spot with care; trees and bushes protect us from all sides. There is nobody to hide from—Mr Holmes and Queensbridge have gone out for a walk and will not be back till supper—but a certain air of conspiracy is fitting to the occasion. Chalmers is going to read me the poem on which he has been working since he left Rouen, and which he finished last night. It is the longest and most ambitious thing he has so far written. He talks about it first, deprecating, making excuses in advance, then getting excited: ‘There’re one or two bits, perhaps, which come off … you’ll see … my idea really was to …’ He loses confidence again, his voice drops, he mumbles: ‘Oh well …’ At length he clears his throat, grins apologetically: ‘It’s called Stranger in Spring …’