“Are you all right?” he said; “are you sure you don’t mind?”
“No,” I said, smiling. “I’m all right. I shall sleep. I don’t want to stay anywhere on the road. It’s much better to do this and get home. We’ll be at Manderley long before sunrise.”
He got in in front and switched on the engine. I shut my eyes. The car drew away and I felt the slight jolting of the springs under my body. I pressed my face against the cushion. The motion of the car was rhythmic, steady, and the pulse of my mind beat with it. A hundred images came to me when I closed my eyes, things seen, things known, and things forgotten. They were jumbled together in a senseless pattern. The quill of Mrs. Van Hopper’s hat, the hard straight-backed chairs in Frank’s dining room, the wide window in the west wing at Manderley, the salmon-colored frock of the smiling lady at the fancy dress ball, a peasant-girl in a road near Monte Carlo.
Sometimes I saw Jasper chasing butterflies across the lawns; sometimes I saw Doctor Baker’s Scotch terrier scratching his ear beside a deck chair. There was the postman who had pointed out the house to us today, and there was Clarice’s mother wiping a chair for me in the back parlor. Ben smiled at me, holding winkles in his hands, and the bishop’s wife asked me if I would stay to tea. I could feel the cold comfort of my sheets in my own bed, and the gritty shingle in the cove. I could smell the bracken in the woods, the wet moss, and the dead azalea petals. I fell into a strange broken sleep, waking now and again to the reality of my narrow cramped position and the sight of Maxim’s back in front of me. The dusk had turned to darkness. There were the lights of passing cars upon the road. There were villages with drawn curtains and little lights behind them. And I would move, and turn upon my back, and sleep again.
I saw the staircase at Manderley, and Mrs. Danvers standing at the top in her black dress, waiting for me to go to her. As I climbed the stairs she backed under the archway and disappeared. I looked for her and I could not find her. Then her face looked at me through a hollow door and I cried out and she had gone again.
“What’s the time?” I called. “What’s the time?”
Maxim turned round to me, his face pale and ghostly in the darkness of the car. “It’s half past eleven,” he said. “We’re over halfway already. Try and sleep again.”
“I’m thirsty,” I said.
He stopped at the next town. The man at the garage said his wife had not gone to bed and she would make us some tea. We got out of the car and stood inside the garage. I stamped up and down to bring the blood back to my hands and feet. Maxim smoked a cigarette. It was cold. A bitter wind blew in through the open garage door, and rattled the corrugated roof. I shivered, and buttoned up my coat.
“Yes, it’s nippy tonight,” said the garage man, as he wound the petrol pump. “The weather seemed to break this afternoon. It’s the last of the heat waves for this summer. We shall be thinking of fires soon.”
“It was hot in London,” I said.
“Was it?” he said. “Well, they always have the extremes up there, don’t they? We get the first of the bad weather down here. It will blow hard on the coast before morning.”
His wife brought us the tea. It tasted of bitter wood, but it was hot. I drank it greedily, thankfully. Already Maxim was glancing at his watch.
“We ought to be going,” he said. “It’s ten minutes to twelve.” I left the shelter of the garage reluctantly. The cold wind blew in my face. The stars raced across the sky. There were threads of cloud too. “Yes,” said the garage man, “summer’s over for this year.”
We climbed back into the car. I settled myself once more under the rug. The car went on. I shut my eyes. There was the man with the wooden leg winding his barrel organ, and the tune of “Roses in Picardy” hummed in my head against the jolting of the car. Frith and Robert carried the tea into the library. The woman at the lodge nodded to me abruptly, and called her child into the house. I saw the model boats in the cottage in the cove, and the feathery dust. I saw the cobwebs stretching from the little masts. I heard the rain upon the roof and the sound of the sea. I wanted to get to the Happy Valley and it was not there. There were woods about me, there was no Happy Valley. Only the dark trees and the young bracken. The owls hooted. The moon was shining in the windows of Manderley. There were nettles in the garden, ten foot, twenty foot high.
“Maxim!” I cried. “Maxim!”