The Innocent Moon (48 page)

The train stopped at every station. At one halt the narrow wooden carriages were besieged by hundreds of women and girls in black clothes and shawls. With them entered some of the Customs officers, or soldiers, wearing capes and those curious hats covered by patent leather. The train clanked on. The engine had been puffing harsh invisible steam for a few minutes when a fusillade of shots came from in front. People began to shout, the train shuddered to a standstill.

“Bandits?” suggested Phillip. “Seeking ransom from Rowley Meek, the famous wit of the ‘Sundowner’ column——”

“Hush, boy!” roared Rowley. “No shop, if you please!” as he got up and bowed to every woman in turn. It transpired that a drunk man had fallen off the train, and the shots were part of the signalling system.

The train emptied itself at the next stop and they had the carriage to themselves again. Rowley began to tear at a long fish-shaped loaf with hands and teeth while holding a black bottle of raw red wine between his knees. The journey went on and on, between rocky wooded hills over which burned the hues of sunset. Then they were sitting in twilight, dozing or looking out of the window, and sometimes talking about the dinner they would eat at Pamplona—except Rowley, who was once more objecting to everything.

Phillip could see that his vision of Spain, inspired by filial love of Belloc who had wandered there in a past age, was being
wrecked by reality. Also he seemed to have no liking at all for his cousin, who often spoke of the famous people he had met at the Bath Club, to which he had recently been elected.

At last Pamplona. Arguments about where they should go. Rowley scoffed at the idea of eating in an hotel. “Why didn’t you stay in London if you wanted the Carlton or the Ritz?”

“Dammit, we only want to wash and eat!”

They went into the railway restaurant. It was closed. A guide took them up a dark street to the town’s centre, and left them. All was strangely dark. People passed like wingless bats. In the distance a torchlight procession moved. The murmuring black-dressed crowd moved nearer, in its centre men carrying a platform on which was a blood-stained corpse illuminated by scores of agitated candle-flames. Of course, it was Good Friday, and this was a waxen effigy of Jesus immediately after criminal execution for blasphemy. When it had passed the velvet blackness of a quiet town enclosed them. They went down a narrow street, coming to a square in darkness except for the lighted windows of a restaurant. They entered to the protests of Rowley Meek, who with his three days’ beard, tangled hair, neckerchief, dusty shoes and grease-stained breeches, created a mild stir among the diners. Seated at a table, he took one sip of the soup and dashed the spoon into the plate.

“Utter filth!” he shouted. “Out of an American can, of course! How long are you fellows going to remain in this accursed hole?”

It was plain to Phillip by this time that Rowley Meek was completely exhausted, having driven himself beyond the limits of ordinary living. Even the genial Bevan’s patience was at an end. “Shut up, Rowley! You’re becoming an unbearable bore.”

“Of course I’m a bore! You niminypiminy little hogs, why didn’t you go on a conducted tour with sun-glasses and sterilised paper pocket handkerchiefs?”

The waiter brought a dish of grey stringy stuff. Rowley gazed at it with assumed horror. “Poison!” he roared. “Trash! The guts of goats slopped down before me! Bloody beastliness; unutterable, unspeakable loathsomeness! Is this a Christian meal? Was this once the Holy Roman Empire? Am I to continue sitting here and watching you absorb that abominable frapponbulière?”

“D-don’t behave like a n-n-nincompoop,” replied Bevan, now stuttering with discomposure. “Other p-p-people here can hear you!”

“Of course they can hear me, unless they’re deaf!” retorted Rowley. “I wish they understood English, they don’t unfortunately, being a gang of bellycramming dagos! Look at their pale and beastly faces!” He swung his arm. “Degenerates! Modernity! Pah!” Another dish arrived. “What’s this poison, this fungus, this filth?” He shoved back his chair, seized pack and staff, and went out of the room. The other three tried to eat the food, which certainly wasn’t exactly appetising.

“He’s quite m-m-mad, of course,” stuttered Bevan. “A m-mumbling m-malkin of a f-f-fellow.”

In the quietness of the room they heard an English voice from the next table. Then another English voice. The pale-faced diners were all English people, on an Easter Cook’s Tour. Someone said that the dish rejected by “your friend” was stewed celery, “possibly imported from England for our benefit.”

They saw Rowley Meek outside. Raspingly he declared they must walk: only degenerates slept in hotels. Also the moon was rising. His voice became happier as he spoke of Roncesvalles, and pointed to the mountains to the north. It lay twelve hours’ walk away. Phillip hitched up his pack, and felt the bite of his nailed boots on the dusty road. By all means he would walk through the night. But Bevan and Rowley’s cousin were for motoring to the highest point and then walking down into France, reaching St. Jean Pied-de-Port for breakfast.

“Breakfast!” cried Rowley. “What is that? Only beastly bourgeois have breakfast! And what fast are you gluttons going to break, may I ask?”

The driver of the black Hispano-Suiza had been in the tavern that night. He drove off with a jerk and scream of gears. They were thrown against one another. They began to laugh, and then to sing. Bevan banged on the glass, and Rowley yelled for the driver to go slower. The driver waved his hand, yelled
Pronto!
and the car went faster. Uphill now, and the second gear threatening to rip out of its box. They were thrown against first one door then the other door as the vehicle skidded round hairpin bends. Deciding it would be wiser to leave a drunken driver alone they sat silent while it seemed inevitable that the car must plunge over the curving lip of the next corner into the precipice below.

*

About midnight they were standing in unreal moonlight on the crest of the pass, hearing the noise of the Hispano-Suiza
engine receding into Spain. Far below lay the valley where Roland, “the temples of his brains broken”, blew his horn for help that never came. The three friends were standing together, endeavouring to feel as they imagined they would feel when at last they stood side by side above heroic Roland fighting the Saracens while awaiting help from mighty Charlemagne. Phillip stood appropriately a little apart from them, and silent. From far below floated the noises of torrents and swift waters. He did not share their passion, knowing nothing of Charlemagne and being vague about Roland; but he could feel it. There they stood, their shadows slanting short on the white road as they faced the North Star.

They set off down the winding road. Soon walking was unreal in the white and timeless night. At first no one spoke; each man walked with his own thoughts. Trees were tall and gloomy beside the road. In his ignorance Phillip set out to descend a hairpin bend direct, and nearly fell into a ravine. Hastily he climbed up again, and followed the others. Alas, the spectral silence did not last. There were arguments, there were shouts. Apparently a mild remark about something or other had detonated the mental figments of Rowley Meek.

“Why in heaven’s name didn’t you bring your Rolls-Royces, your white spats, and your loathesome silk hats with you? Why did you come if you didn’t intend to walk like ordinary, normal, natural men? Your little pots of caviare and foie-gras, oh, what will you do without them? And who will bring you your electrically-sterilised and hermetically-sealed platinum pots of hot shaving water at eleven o’clock in the morning, as you snore in your silken pyjamas and wallow under your oil-painted bedding?

“Shut up, you coxcomb, you preposterous fribble!”

“Chuck it, Rowley! It’s not amusing after the first twelve hours.”

Rowley Meek strode ahead by himself. It was his third night without sleep. Phillip, too, was irritable-weary, but kept silence, glad to grind away the wastage of frustration in the chiaroscuro of the night.

Between three and four o’clock he suggested that they go into the woods which stretched above the ever-down-winding road, to make a wood fire and sleep round it until sunrise. Surprisingly the mediaevalists spoke of trespass, policemen, and other civilised objections. By now he was thinking only of the blessing of sleep, sleep, sleep. It was the sensible, or natural, thing to do. Wolves
were probably extinct, but the wild boar and the little bear still lived in the forests; let them lift their snouts to flair the smoke of a fire. He urged the delights of warmth, of sleep in the torrent-haunted night. It was too risky, decided the admirers of
Chanson
de
Roland.

At last, after descending a winding road for some hours, they came to a wooden shack where Spanish soldiers slept, guarded by a sentry with curious musket, broken boots, and creased uniform. The guard turned out, yawning and scratching, and for ten minutes their passports were peered at by the light of a lanthorn, while slow and incomprehensible questions were asked out of suspicious tallowy faces before they were allowed to go on down the winding road.

They walked now in mist, through a tenuous vapour of torrents and declining moonlight; and the cry of water in their ears was louder, and strangely like the chuckling of Saracen devils, said Bevan. Or were they human voices echoing among the trees and the rocks? Phillip was too tired to share a Catholic fancy.

The sky was growing grey, the moon, sinking to the distant Mediterranean, a mere shell of light. The night was over; but not the walk. They slogged on, Rowley striding chin-out in front; his cousin, admirer and literary disciple of Leonard Merrick, walking reflective, blear-eyed; Phillip following, longing for sleep, feeling wan and weak; Bevan padding along behind.

At last they were trailing into St. Jean Pied-de-Port; hesitating before a small
pension
filled with minor Anglo-Indians on leave or retired from administrative posts in the British
raj.
There was a further controversy over methods of eating; Bevan favouring breakfast at a table, after washing and shaving, Rowley urging the fitness of gulping from a bottle and tearing a loaf with the teeth while walking on.

“What’s the sense of it, Rowley? Tell us that!”

“Bah! I’ve come here to walk, not to loll about talking anaemically of literary criticism, folk dancing, nature lovery, and artful crafty movements!” Swinging his staff, and giving them a “So long, cretins!” over his shoulder, Rowley Meek strode away up the road which now lay mist-white in the risen sun.

Feeling some of Rowley’s personality upon him, Phillip looked distastefully at a breakfast plate of undersized trout scarcely bigger than sardines, which had been netted from the river
outside. But he ate the sprats and then three rolls with butter and plum jam washed down with coffee.

All day they lounged about the village. Bevan wore the beret he had bought at Hendaye, and already had the look of a native Basque. They drank many
bocks,
sitting outside various little
estaminets.
Espalier plane trees were thick with sap, knotted with Samson-muscles, about to burst their buds with the sun’s power. Two of the nails in Phillip’s boots, which had given him blisters, were removed at the shoemaker’s shop, and the holes neatly plugged with wooden pegs. They wondered what Rowley was doing, missing his tyranny; and that night, each in his small room, they slept luxuriously between cool clean sheets.

*

Bright and powerful overhead was the sun as they walked along the white roads under the enormous incult foothills of the Pyrénées. They drank wine and ate bread and cheese in the midday estaminets, thankfully sitting on stool and bench, sweat-soaked and burnt of face and hands. Phillip swam in the swirling grey-green water of the Gave de Mauléon, while the others sat on the bank in the shade of alder and ash. They stayed at night in hotels almost empty, for ten, and sometimes five francs a room. Food was equally cheap—the exchange rate was one hundred and twenty francs to the pound. They drank
bocks
—pale beer with a mountain goat on the bottle-label—in one another’s bedrooms, talked and laughed in freedom, slept sound and awoke to the lowing of cows in the market place. They were amused to see everywhere large hoarding advertisements of Igharra, that liqueur which Rowley Meek, faithful matrix of Belloc, had declared was made only in one small secret mountain inn.

They came to another valley, where the heavy snow-water of the Oloron drove against the stone piers of the bridge they crossed, and Atlantic salmon showed their backs in the great eddies. They watched Basques playing pelota, a sort of long-distance fives played against a wall with a long-bouncing ball. They had fun with a native sponger who advised them to drink a wonderful drink which tasted like aniseed and liquorice in hot water—admirable for mules suffering from colic, said Phillip—and invited him to lunch. He smilingly acknowledged their insults delivered in raw and bawdy English as though they were the most flowery compliments exchanged between Allied generals during the War. And only when they were on the road again,
feeling the sunshine to be a little uncertain, did they realise that the drink which appeared to be so childish was in fact the sinister absinthe of Fleetway House fiction.

The walk had now progressed during the sunlight of four days. By the fifth Phillip felt fine and taut, eager after breakfast to set out into bright daylight for his stint of thirty-five to forty kilometres. Sometimes they rode in steam-trams, with bottles of red wine, costing two francs, sticking out of their pockets. Once they sat opposite a child whose face Phillip stared at, brown-eyed innocence, while he imagined such a child coming from love with Annabelle. In broken French he tried to pay the child’s mother a compliment, saying, “J’aime bien les filles”, and her expression, hitherto amiable, became austere; even when Bevan hastened to explain that milord anglais meant
les
jeunes
filles.

“Filles,” he explained, “means tarts, you preposterous British foxhunting eccentric in Oxford bags!”