He saw her at the feast, however, when they were all sitting round a fire of vine-cuttings, with the flames ghostly in the whiteness of the sun and the snails hissing, bubbling and dribbling on the embers at the edge, and he was amazed – a girl like a dark peach. There were no glasses except one for the curé, and they used the spouted pots of the region called pourous, passing them from hand to hand; and when he saw her take the pourou and tilt back her head and pour a long curved scarlet jet of wine from a height into her open mouth, her long curved throat and her pretty breasts held up, his heart fainted – there was an emptiness for a moment, as if it were not there, or had died.
But he was a modest creature then, and he did not suppose that he could ever presume so high; and in his simplicity he did not even notice that she was unattached, that the lads of the village were either clustered round the girls with bad reputations or chained to their public loves. He climbed back into the bus for the next long lap, melancholy and low in his spirits.
The blazing dusty miles went by; his head ached from too much wine; Fifine still read the names of all the villages they passed and all the shops, but with declining zeal. Apart from the reviving burst of jollity at the necessary halts it was a party chastened by the heat, best clothes, holiday wine and food and fatigue, that trundled over the jolting landscape of bare rocks, rosemary and scrubby trees that separates the Languedoc from the Roussillon, and so down the hilly roads to the sea.
He had once heard that the great object of travelling was to see the shores of the Mediterranean, and he had formed some vague notion of a liquid pearl; but as he staggered out of the suffocating bus into the pitiless glare of three o’clock it seemed to him that these sterile shores were commonplace indeed. The hot wind blew eddies of dust and paper along the beach; the shallow, waveless water, all flattened by the wind, had no grandeur, magnitude or shape. This corner of the village was organised for the exploitation of trippers, and strong inimical women shook paper hats, pea-nuts, dying-pig balloons: the traders, a little more in touch with the world than the peasants, were anxious, uneasy and obscurely hostile.
The village stood on a rocky bay, with a huge castle jutting out into the middle, and a path led round underneath this castle to a farther beach and farther rocks; Fifine and most of the elders stayed to paddle their tormented feet in the nearest water, but she urged him to go with the others – to enjoy himself, to profit by the occasion; he was only young once. The rest of the bus-load hurried along this path to join the other trippers (three other buses had already arrived) in their search for crabs, winkles, mussels, anything living within reach of the shore or among the pools; the curé had brought a rod, but the others contented themselves with throwing stones at the gulls and the uncomplicated murder of what few moving creatures the holiday had left up to this time – someone found a small octopus.
Most of the recesses in the baking rock were filled with excrement; the shallow waters of the bay were covered with the débris of many picnics. Children howled on the dirty pebbles of the beach, and their parents, exasperated by heat, tiredness and holiday, bullied them with automatic threats; old women stood shin-deep in the water and comic groups changed hats to be photographed; soldiers in the castle shrieked and whistled, and knots of plain girls all clinging together with their shoulders hunched, shrieked back in a state of sweating excitement. The wind had no freshness, and it was filled with dust. He saw Mireille quite suddenly, walking back to the bus alone: she did not repulse his tentative, easily-retracted smile – there was nothing haughty or unkind about Mireille.
A jetty ran out at the far end of the second beach, and as he handed her up the steps he noticed the extraordinary clarity of the air; and as he walked along the jetty with her scent in the drawing of his breath he took in a host of vivid impressions – the brilliance of the open sea, white horses, the violet shadows of the clouds. From the end of the jetty the whole village could be seen, arranged in two curves; the sun had softened the colour of the tiled roofs to a more or less uniform pale strawberry, but all the flat-fronted houses were washed or painted different colours, and they might all have been chosen by an angel of the Lord. There was a blood-red house far over on the other side, with chocolate shutters (the colours of an old German lithograph) but by a particular dispensation of grace its neighbour was of a faded blue and peeling rose – the happiest result. The high-prowed open fishing-boats were also painted with astonishing and successful colours: they lay in two rows that repeated the curves of the bay, and their long, arched, archaic lateen yards crossed their short leaning masts like a complexity of wings.
At the reassembly by the bus Richard’s shining face, his animation and Mireille’s conscious looks required no great degree of penetration, and Fifine, willing to do her friend the friendliest office, adroitly set them down together in her former seat and went to join her cousin Fabre with the car-sick baby.
The backward journey began – a journey (as far as Richard was concerned) towards a letter that told him that his days in France were done and that assignations were in vain – and on this road the bus no longer jolted and the heat no longer beat on his head: presently the sun set, and he found that by bracing his right foot against the seat in front and leaning over sideways he could put his hand upon Mireille’s without appearing to do so and without being seen; and in this ridiculous, cramped and painful attitude he travelled until one in the morning, when the bus put Fifine and him down alone at a remote and doubtful crossroads.
From those early days in Chelsea when he was a student at the Reynolds he recalled – what? A confused jumble of impressions: parties, keen but unreal poverty (an allowance stood between him and the world): a variety of living places: but over all there floated a general feeling of impatience and dissatisfaction. The period was nearer to him, as far as anything could be near to this strangely isolated present, which scarcely had the ordinary dimensions – but it was the part of his life that he had revisited the least; the person he met there was sometimes barely recognisable, and although he did feel a kind of impatient pity for him sometimes, it was difficult as well as humiliating even at this distance to be identified with that person’s more embarrassing excesses.
However, that young stupid man’s maladies of growth were perhaps not so much worse than those of the general run: at any rate they should be looked at impartially; and in an attempt at putting order into his thoughts he tried to recall the sequence of his rooms, from that first enchanted den with a window on the Thames to the house with the pigeon-loft on the King’s Road which saw the last days of his protracted adolescence. He remembered leather-aproned Hare, the removing man, who lived with Burke, his little horse, in a green triangular place, a hay- and stable-scented vestige of the rural village, near the sad walls of the workhouse, and how he had walked so many times by Hare’s van: Dovehouse Street; Smith Terrace with its monstrous bugs, immune to sulphur-fumes; the World’s End; the lower end of Redcliffe Road.
At the lower end of Redcliffe Road there was a cat-haunted landing: in front of him there was a cupboard and directly to his right the door of a room with a tea-party going on in it. There came back to him the nature of the dim, filtered light on the landing,