Thunder On The Right

Gavarnie is a real place, and the Gave and Gave d'Ossoue are real rivers. But the Vallee des Orages, with the convent and all its inmates, is entirely imaginary. So, too, are those people of Gavamie and Luz who come into this tale. If I have by mischance used the names of actual inhabitants of the district, I hope they will accept my apology and forgive me my error.

M.S.

To

My Parents-in-law Frederick and Hester Stewart

The Hotel du Pimené, Gavarnie, takes its name from the great peak of the High Pyrenees in whose shadow, at early morning, it lies. Beyond the palisade of trees shading its front courtyard runs the road from Lourdes; behind the hotel and below it, in a gorge of the rock on which it is built, roars and tumbles the River Gave, on its way from the high corrie of the Cirque to the slow, winding courses of the Low Pyrenees. The dining-room windows give on to this little gorge, so that anyone sitting at table may look straight down on to the damp slabs of the bridge that leads to the skirts of the Pic du Pimené.

At one of these windows, on a blazing fifth of July, sat Miss Jennifer Silver, aged twenty-two, eating an excellent lunch. This was not her first visit to France, and she was savoring that heady sense of rediscovery which that country wakes perpetually in her lovers. And the little dining room, with its chattering cosmopolitan crowd, its exotic smell of good food and wine, and the staggering view from its windows, presented a cry quite astonishingly far from Oxford, which was Jennifer's home. . . .

Perhaps, however, not such a very far cry after all; for, from the next table, where sat two middle-aged women, tweeded and brogued in defiance of the lovely southern morning, came snatches of a conversation which smacked decidedly of the newer alchemy.

"My dear Miss Moon"—a morsel of
truite maison
, exquisitely cooked, waved in admonition on the end of a fork—"gravity separation of light and heavy constituents, as you know, is believed to be essential to the production of such banding. That shown by these particular rocks appears to be of the rhythmic type, the small-scale rhythmic type."

"I quite agree with you, Miss Shell-Pratt." Miss Moon dug into her trout with the dogged efficiency and artistic appreciation of a bulldozer. "Indeed, as Steinbascher and Blitzstein have it in their admirable
Einfuhring in die Ursprunge der
Magmatiten durch Differenziationen,
the troctolites ..."

But here the waitress, a pretty dark-haired Bordelaise without a word of English, brought the
croquettes de ris de veau a la Parmentier
, the
pommes de terre
sautees
, and the
petits pois en beurre
, and Jennifer, not unnaturally, missed the remainder of fascinating exchange. She was making again the wonderful discovery that simple greed is one of the purest of human pleasures. The food on the journey had been pleasant and adequate, but little more; this, she thought, helping down the sweetbreads with a mouthful of topaz-colored wine, was a sufficiently promising start to a holiday somewhat oddly conceived. . . . She remembered Gillian's letter in her pocket, and the slightest of frowns crossed her face. That could wait: she had resolutely refused to worry during the ten days since she had left Oxford, and she was not going to begin now that she would soon be seeing Gillian herself.

But, all the same, as the
meringue Chantilly
succeeded the sweetbreads at her table, and the hypersthene gabbros succeeded the troctolites at the next, her mind began, in spite of herself, to turn over the events which had led up to her arrival this morning in the little Pyrenean hotel.

Jennifer, whose father was the Bullen Professor of Music at Oxford, had lived most of her life at Cherry Close, the lovely old house whose high-walled garden backs on to St. Aldate's, right under the bells of Christ Church. She was an only child, but any loneliness she might have felt came to an end when she was seven, for then her half-French cousin Gillian, who lived in Northumberland, came, on the sudden death of her parents in one of the first air raids of the war, to live with the Silvers. She was with them for almost six years, a welcome answer to Mrs. Silver's problem of finding what she would have called "a suitable companion" for Jennifer. At the end of the war Gillian married one Jacques Lamartine, who had been stationed with the Free French near Oxford, and soon after left England behind for the headier climate of Bordeaux, her husband's home.

So Jennifer at thirteen was once more alone at Cherry Close. She attended, daily, a small expensive private school near her home, and was sent for a final year to an even more expensive finishing school in Switzerland. This latter adventure beyond the walls was the only one which Mrs. Silver, with her unswerving devotion to the standards of a fading age, would have tolerated. One was "finished," one came home, one was brought out, one was suitably married . . . this had always happened in Mrs. Silver's world and she had never thought beyond it. If Jennifer herself had any ideas about her own future she never mentioned them. She had always been a quiet child, with a poised reserve that her mother mistook for shyness, and a habit of accepting life as it came, happily and with a characteristic serenity that Mrs. Silver (herself voluble and highly strung) found insipid. Mother and daughter got on very well indeed, with a deep affection founded on almost complete misunderstanding.

Professor Silver knew his daughter rather better. It was he who at length insisted (emerging briefly from a Bartokian abstraction to do so) that since she was coming home to live in Oxford she might as well pursue some form of study. Mrs. Silver, abandoning her delightful—and, she knew, impossible—dreams of drawing rooms, was brought finally to agree, finding some consolation in the fact that Jennifer chose to study art rather than one of the more unwomanly of the sciences.

So Jennifer came home again to attend art school and live at Cherry Close. It was not to be supposed that those high walls would be left long unstormed, for Jennifer at eighteen was growing very lovely indeed. She had been a plainish child, with the promise of beauty in the fine bones of the face, and the silken texture of the straight, pale-gold hair. Now the promise had been fulfilled, and Mrs. Silver anxiously girded herself for battle against the impecunious and ineligible hordes of students with whom Professor Silver thoughtlessly filled the house. But she need not have worried.

Jennifer was as unconscious of—or indifferent to—their admiration as even her mother could have wished.

That is, until she met Stephen Masefield.

He had come up a little late, having already done his National Service, and having had the ill fortune to do part of it in Korea, where he had been wounded. It was a full year after his return to an English hospital before he was reckoned fit to take up the life so brutally interrupted. He was twenty-one, and full of a bitter sense of time wasted, and power perhaps atrophied with the laming of his body.

He flung himself at his music as if it were a beloved enemy, and over his spasmodic, almost savage brilliance, Professor Silver alternately nodded and swore.

From the first Stephen monopolized Jennifer. There seemed to be nothing remotely loverlike about the relationship that Mrs. Silver 'watched with an anxious eye; Stephen seemed to have neither the time nor the energy to waste in love-making, and the idea did not appear to have entered Jennifer's head. What none of them realized was that the serenity of Cherry Close, and the unruffled sweetness that was Jennifer's main characteristic, were both acting on Stephen like powerful drugs. He himself, immersed in his all-other-excluding music, was only dimly conscious of his need for her; Mrs. Silver, her fears allayed both by her daughter's silence and Stephen's preoccupation, dreamed of a more eligible future and stopped worrying.

Until the night of the Commencement Ball, when Mrs. Silver, hurrying down at the sound of the taxi—it would never have occurred to her to give Jennifer a key—opened the door upon a tableau that sent her heart down into her fur-trimmed slippers.

There was Jennifer, a lovely ghost in silver-white, with one foot on the bottom step, and her head turned back toward Stephen, whose hand was on her arm, detaining her. Mrs. Silver could not see Jennifer's face, but she could see Stephen's, and what she saw there made her open the door wide and gather her daughter with a pretty show of ceremony into the lighted safety of the hallway. Stephen, declining with rather less ceremony her invitation to come in and drink coffee
d trois
, turned on bis heel and walked away down the dark street.

Next day he was gone—gone with a brilliant First in his pocket, off to Vienna for a further two years' study, while Mrs. Silver hurriedly replanted the briars around her sleeping princess, and Cherry Close, emptied of Stephen's disturbing presence, gradually sank back into its old bell-haunted peace. Two years ago. . . .

Jennifer was brought sharply back to the present as the waitress whisked away her empty plate. At the next table, she could hear, the hypersthene gabbros had given way to the olivine gabbros, the orthopyroxene to olivine and clinopyroxene; at her own, the
meringue Chantilly
was replaced by grapes, peaches, and five kinds of cheese. Jennifersighed, shook her head in genuine regret, and asked for coffee.

"Have it with me," suggested a voice.

She looked up in surprise. A man who, from his table in a corner remote from hers, had been steadily watching her throughout the meal, had now risen and approached.

He was perhaps some twenty-six years old, tall and brown-haired, with a thin face and sensitive mouth. His eyes were of a vivid, long-lashed hazel. There was about his movements an odd loose-jointed abruptness that seemed to hint at some intense nervous drive within, but for all that he moved well, with a certain grace that his slight limp did nothing to mar. He was a singularly attractive young man; more than that, he looked like a man who would someday matter. There was nothing of success-hunting ruthlessness in his face; the impression was due to some expression in the brilliant hazel eyes which belied the gentleness of the mouth.

Jennifer's eyes lifted, and widened on him, while a wave of color ran up into her cheeks, and then receded, leaving her marble-pale.

She said, on a note of unbelief, "Stephen!"

He smiled down at her, and pulled out a chair. "Jenny . . . may I?" He held out his cigarette case and if it was a trifle unsteady she was in no condition to notice.

"But—
Stephen!
What in the wide world are you doing here?"

"Holidaying. I've been here for a few days already."

"But—
here?
"

He misunderstood her deliberately. "Oh, not at this hotel. In Gavarnie. I'm lodging rather more humbly than this at the Epée de Roland, but I sometimes eat here."

She took a cigarette almost dazedly. "Stephen, what an extraordinary coincidence!"

"Isn't it?" His tone was so smooth that she glanced at him warily, to see him watching her with amusement—and something else—in his eyes.

She said uncertainly, "Well, isn't it?"

"Of course it's not. I thought it was time I saw you again, that's all. I've come straight from Oxford."

"Did Mother—did they know you were coming here?" A smile touched his mouth.

"I made it fairly clear, I think."

She said irrelevantly, "You've changed."

The smile deepened. "You mean I'm not so easily frightened away as I was?"

Color stained her cheeks again. "No, of course not! How silly! But------"

He prompted her gently. "But?"

"I did think you might have called to say good-by that time," she said, not looking at him.

"I did."

Her eyes lifted. "
Did
you? When?"

"Fairly early, on the morning after the ball. Your mother said you were still in bed so I had to go without seeing you. I sent you good-by. Weren't you told?"

She shook her head without speaking, and at the bleak look that touched her face he felt anger lick through him again as it had done that morning two years ago, when he had gone impulsively back to Cherry Close, hoping for he didn't quite know what.

Perhaps a short half hour with Jennifer before his train left....

But it was Mrs. Silver who came to him in the big music room, and proceeded to explain exactly why it was undesirable for him to see Jennifer that morning—or, in fact, ever again. She did it unanswerably, charmingly, cruelly . . . she dealt in the kindest possible way with his lack of means, uncertain prospects and, finally, with the undoubted instability of the musical temperament. . . . Stephen was too unhappy and too angry to appreciate the delicacy with which this last was touched on by the professor's wife, with one hand resting gracefully on her husband's big Steinway grand, and one eye, figuratively speaking, on his study door. . . .

There was no fighting back. There was too much truth in what she was saying, and besides, Stephen was not himself fully aware of what it was he wanted. He only knew that last night the realization that he would not see Jennifer again for two years had overwhelmed him like the wave of a bitter sea. The promised years in Vienna, till then a golden dream, presented themselves all at once as years of exile, years of drifting alone on the tossing waters of uncertainty, away from the still and quiet center of his life. But if he was only just aware of his own feeling in the matter, he was miserably unsure of Jennifer's. The revelation last night should have been a beginning; it had come, instead, at the end. . . . So, because he had to—and because he had a train to catch—Stephen accepted the plain, killing common sense of what she said to him, went to Vienna, and wrote once a week to Jennifer—long, sprawling, conversational letters, mostly about his work—letters that an elder brother might have written, and that Mrs. Silver certainly might have read....