They were walking, Alix between them, to the car outside and he could glance at her. Rather than the constraint he had guessed at it was now the cold dignity of complete self-mastery her profile showed him. He knew that she had smiled at him—and had it not been with her old sweetness?—when he had greeted her; but he felt, as they went thus together, he, she, and André, that chasms lay between him and Alix. Seas lay between them; race and tongue. Her voice came back to him as she had said, last year when he had found her again, “But I am French.” Only it was so much more now just that old difference. Her calm could not hide from him how much more it was that lay between them. And what did it hide from André? How was it possible, if deep instinct or the new knowledge of her mother’s life had not armed her against him, that she should not love him? Jerry was a boy beside him; beside the power of André’s beautifully possessed, beautifully balanced experience, Jerry would always seem a boy. He remembered, snatching still at hope, that Alix had found such completeness agaçant; but then she might not really like him even now. It might be some helpless hereditary strain that had brought her, her young heart proudly pruned of its first happy buddings, under the spell of the love that monsieur de Maubert had defined on the distant Summer day; the love that burns itself out and that may have nothing to do with liking.
She had said no word as yet, but as they emerged into the sunny place she remarked that she had to buy a baba-au-rhum for tea and asked André to drive them across to the pâtissier’s.
“Alix is sad,” André observed when she had disappeared into the little shop, where cakes blandly masked in chocolate, cakes touched with rosettes of pistachio, cakes crusted over their glitter with crisp nuts, were placed enticingly on crystal stands in the window. “Her cat was run over yesterday by a motor. The very ugly cat;—you know him well, of course. It was an instantaneous death, but her mother says that she takes it much to heart. Elle a un gros chagrin,” said André.
“Poor Blaise dead.—Oh, I’m sorry,” said Giles. But he drew a dim comfort from the news. There might be other and more childish reasons for Alix’s aloofness. He knew how remote and stern she could look when controlling tears.
Now that Alix was grown up, now that she was so obviously a beautiful young girl, he noted that André made no comments on her appearance, though it was hardly likely that he would remark it less. It was courageous of madame Vervier to have them there together; though, in spite of the fear he had seen so plainly in her, it might well be that the special fear had never occurred to her. Sitting there in the French sunlight, Giles felt again his old sense of astonishment that such computations should, so inevitably, on this soil, occur to him; that he should feel himself, with whatever moral bitterness, accepting situations that could hardly, in England, present themselves to his imagination. He felt himself immersed in madame Vervier’s milieu; he felt himself implicated, for was one not implicated when one still felt all its members charming? But one could not pretend to understand the French unless one recognized in such situations the workings of a drama to them commonplace. That special terrible roman-à-trois of mother, lover, and daughter, might not arise among the bien pensants of the nation; but the bien pensants themselves would accept it as a commonplace. They all accepted love as a devastating natural force, overriding, where no barriers of creed were there to withstand it, the scruples and inhibitions of taste and principle. They all saw love, unless it were the duly stamped and docketed love of the Church, as Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.
And with this moral difference there went the difference in everything;—the sunlight and the shadows, the streets, the houses, and the people. Sunlight and shadows were blue-and-gold, strong and deep, and the forms they defined revealed, under their spell, a classic harmony. The people passing, intent on business, or sitting in front of the cafés, at ease in idleness, saw idleness and work as two quite different things, not to be confused; each yielding its own savour, its own satisfaction. The sense of savour, of satisfaction everywhere; of life as its own justification. The very smell, warm, golden, balmy, wafted towards him from the pâtissier’s was such as no pastry-cook’s shop in England could ever yield; a dank surmise of suet and strong tea would there hang about it and none of the cakes would give one the same confidence of tasting as good as they looked. Why was it, Giles wondered, as Alix came out with her flat-bottomed, cone-shaped, snowy little parcel, saying as she stepped in beside him: “It is in honour of your arrival, Giles, the baba. Maman remembered that you liked them last summer.”—For no girl in England would look like Alix.
It was not only that she spoke and moved as they did not and that her clothes were differently adjusted. These signs were only the expression of a deeper divergence. Her face, still almost the face of a child, had, notwithstanding, an almost alarming maturity. It was at once more primitive and more civilized than English faces, but the primitiveness was nothing shapeless or unpredictable; it was preserved and used; it was, perhaps, only a deeper layer of civilization. Druidess or Roman virgin, who could tell which underlay the something resistant, enduring, in the structure of her head, sweet in glance as an Alpine flower, remote and inaccessible as the mountain?—and, glancing at her as she sat beside him, Giles could gauge something of the change in his own feeling towards her by the fact that he was afraid of Alix. Not only that; France had already done more to him; for it was as if he were afraid of himself, too. As they sped out into the radiant landscape and he felt the breeze blow strong and sweet from the sea, he was aware of currents of strange feeling in the tide which bore him; bitter, dark, delicious, and tumultuous.
“I am dreadfully sorry about Blaise,” he said—“André was telling me.”
“Yes,” said Alix, looking down at her parcel, “it is sad.”
“The comfort is that he had a very happy life,” said Giles, feeling foolish, for indeed he was not thinking of poor Blaise.