lips he saw why. His pattern was supposed to repeat the first cross, and certainly crosses were there, receding into infinity: but they were the reflection, the repetition, of something that did not appear in the first place – the first cross itself was wrong. The beautifully painted martyr and his cross were in the wrong place. In a moment he abolished the patient craftsmanship, and in another moment the martyrdom was re-enacting in another focus, in another shape.
As far as he was conscious of himself he felt a tightness in his stomach, a trembling; and as he bent over his palette mixing he heard the sound of his own breath in his throat. He could not work fast enough and he had a furious need to go faster, although in fact his hand was working with a greater speed and happiness and ability than it ever had done before. He was not thinking: he directed his hand and the paint by an urgent spiritual pressure, and he not only prolonged his being beyond his hand to the brush but actually into the paint itself as it curled – he was himself the surface, the junction of the resilient brush and the unyielding wood: there were no ordinary limits to his being. The light increased to the impartial glare of noon: very slowly in the afternoon it declined; and in the evening it began to go in little pulsing beats lower every ten minutes, every five.
At the bottom right-hand corner where the crossbow men had been he drew the last firm curve and stepped away. As he fumbled with his brushes and the paint-rag, blindly cleaning them, he began to smile: the tension was dying, and it was being replaced by a remarkable happiness. He was quite limp, and this happiness was of the passive kind: it kept flooding in, quite filling him. This was the picture that he had meant to paint, and whether it was good or bad it was the most complete thing he had ever done. It was probably very good, he thought; but that was a little beside the point: it was the wholeness that was the base of his satisfaction.
It was not an experience that often repeated itself: indeed, throughout the year that followed he had scarcely more than one or two hints of it, but they were enough to tinge all the great long stretches of grey routine (life at the Durands’ was lived en grisaille) with lapis lazuli and gold; and it remained the most significant thing that happened to him in France, even including his acquaintance with the power of love.
It was strange how late he came to this: Madame Durand’s ascetic diet may have helped, but it had not prevented his beard from growing, and it had never kept any other pupil from romance, far less from fornication.
One of the few favourable conditions of Fifine’s servitude, if not the only one, was that she was let out for the saint’s day of her native village: the fête included a pilgrimage, a feast of snails and a visit to the sea, and in this last year of his she invited Richard to accompany her. He had leave to go, for although Monsieur Durand was a tyrant in the matter of holidays, which he hated, Richard had recently met him in the little local brothel, and although Monsieur Durand had carried it off pretty well, with high and distant formality – a remark upon the likelihood of rain – his Roman authority had cracked. They set out at four in the morning to catch a train that would intercept the village bus in its course, and when they arrived at the station a brisk shower overtook them. Fifine thought this an excellent sign, and with her best skirt tucked well up she strode about among the deserted railway shrubs catching the snails that the rain called forth, and called out in her strong voice to the dim forms among the churns, telling them (by way of feast-day merriment) not to piss in the milk and asking them for continual reassurance about the train. Richard, cold and wan without his breakfast, thought her excessively Gothic for a railway-station: but in the bus, which was conducted in the spirit of a mediæval wagon, she was much more in place. It was crammed with the inhabitants of Saint-Modeste in their Sunday clothes and with their provisions; they had no intention of buying food from any untrustworthy strange shops and they carried everything, including a huge quantity of bread and four barrels of wine. The snails were on the roof for the benefit of the air during the early hours of the journey, but as the sun climbed to its strength they were brought down, the younger men being sent up to make room for them. Fifine knew everybody there – she was related, more or less, to all of them except the curé and the new baker – and she shouted to them all in turn and they all shouted to her in the highest good humour, although they had been travelling since dawn and although at this time most of France and the western world as well as the whole of America was looking with horror upon the undoing of society – the dissolution of its wealth. This was the time when millionaires were killing themselves in Wall Street and the shape of the slump and the depression was beginning to be clear to all but the simplest of the land, among them Fifine and Richard. He did not see Mireille as he got in, for she was stuffed in at the back behind a big spotty girl who would be leaning forward to shriek out of the window; he did not see her at the pilgrimage either, because Fifine took him in hand and explained everything to him, in an unusual, didactic and particularly loud voice, as if his Protestantism would make him deaf and stubborn for this occasion and blind him to the virtue of the miraculous water that dripped from a Gallo-Roman sarcophagus – the fairly miraculous water, for the Church was half-hearted about it and it owed its bottled reputation to Fifine and her kind. The true object of the pilgrimage was a splendid black Romanesque Madonna, as tender as a she-wolf; but Fifine was more interested in filling a bottle for the family – she had a duty to the Durand household.
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
