The little pathway down the valley to the bay had clumps of azalea and rhododendron planted to the left of it, and if you wandered down it on a May evening after dinner it was just as though the shrubs had sweated in the air. You could stoop down and pick a fallen petal, crush it between your fingers, and you had there, in the hollow of your hand, the essence of a thousand scents, unbearable and sweet. All from a curled and crumpled petal. And you came out of the valley, heady and rather dazed, to the hard white shingle of the beach and the still water. A curious, perhaps too sudden contrast…
As he spoke the car became one of many once again, dusk had fallen without my noticing it, and we were in the midst of light and sound in the streets of Monte Carlo. The clatter jagged on my nerves, and the lights were far too brilliant, far too yellow. It was a swift, unwelcome anticlimax.
Soon we would come to the hotel, and I felt for my gloves in the pocket of the car. I found them, and my fingers closed upon a book as well, whose slim covers told of poetry. I peered to read the title as the car slowed down before the door of the hotel. “You can take it and read it if you like,” he said, his voice casual and indifferent now that the drive was over, and we were back again, and Manderley was many hundreds of miles distant.
I was glad, and held it tightly with my gloves. I felt I wanted some possession of his, now that the day was finished.
“Hop out,” he said. “I must go and put the car away. I shan’t see you in the restaurant this evening as I’m dining out. But thank you for today.”
I went up the hotel steps alone, with all the despondency of a child whose treat is over. My afternoon had spoiled me for the hours that still remained, and I thought how long they would seem until my bedtime, how empty too my supper all alone. Somehow I could not face the bright inquiries of the nurse upstairs, or the possibilities of Mrs. Van Hopper’s husky interrogation, so I sat down in the corner of the lounge behind a pillar and ordered tea.
The waiter appeared bored; seeing me alone there was no need for him to press, and anyway it was that dragging time of day, a few minutes after half past five, when the normal tea is finished and the hour for drinks remote.
Rather forlorn, more than a little dissatisfied, I leaned back in my chair and took up the book of poems. The volume was well worn, well thumbed, falling open automatically at what must be a much-frequented page.
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed slopes I sped
And shot, precipited
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong feet that followed, followed after.
I felt rather like someone peering through the keyhole of a locked door, and a little furtively I laid the book aside. What hound of heaven had driven him to the high hills this afternoon? I thought of his car, with half a length between it and that drop of two thousand feet, and the blank expression on his face. What footsteps echoed in his mind, what whispers, and what memories, and why, of all poems, must he keep this one in the pocket of his car? I wished he were less remote; and I anything but the creature that I was in my shabby coat and skirt, my broad-brimmed schoolgirl hat.
The sulky waiter brought my tea, and while I ate bread and butter dull as sawdust I thought of the pathway through the valley he had described to me this afternoon, the smell of the azaleas, and the white shingle of the bay. If he loved it all so much why did he seek the superficial froth of Monte Carlo? He had told Mrs. Van Hopper he had made no plans, he came away in rather a hurry. And I pictured him running down that pathway in the valley with his own hound of heaven at his heels.
I picked up the book again, and this time it opened at the title page, and I read the dedication. “Max—from Rebecca. 17 May,” written in a curious slanting hand. A little blob of ink marred the white page opposite, as though the writer, in impatience, had shaken her pen to make the ink flow freely. And then as it bubbled through the nib, it came a little thick, so that the name Rebecca stood out black and strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters.
I shut the book with a snap, and put it away under my gloves; and stretching to a nearby chair, I took up an old copy of L’Illustration and turned the pages. There were some fine photographs of the chateaux of the Loire, and an article as well. I read it carefully, referring to the photographs, but when I finished I knew I had not understood a word. It was not Blois with its thin turrets and its spires that stared up at me from the printed page. It was the face of Mrs. Van Hopper in the restaurant the day before, her small pig’s eyes darting to the neighboring table, her fork, heaped high with ravioli, pausing in mid-air.