THE BEACH
The beach was long and smooth and the colour of cream. The woman sitting in the sun stroked the beach with the pink palm of her hand and said to herself, “The beach is perfect, the sun is perfect, the sea is perfect. How pretty the little waves are, curling up the beach. They are perfectly lovely. They are like a lace frill to the beach. And the sea is a perfectly heavenly blue. It is odd to think of how old the beach is and how old the sea is, and how much older that old, old fellow, the fiery sun. The face of the beach is smooth as cream and the sea to-day is a smiling infant, twinkling and dimpling, and the sun is delicious; it is burning hot, like youth itself. It is good to be alive. It is good to be young.” But she could not say this aloud so she said to the man beside her in the wheel chair:
“How many millions of years has it taken to make the beach? How many snails have left their shells behind them, do you think, to make all this fine powdery sand? A million billion?” She let the sand run through her strong white fingers and smiled, blinking in the sun and looked away from the man in the invalid chair beside her toward the horizon.
The man wriggled and hitched himself clumsily up in his chair; an ugly grimace pulled his pale face to one side. He dared not look down over the arm of his wheel chair at the bright head of the woman sitting beside him. Her hair burned in the sunlight; her cheeks were pink. He stole a timid, furtive look. Yes, she was as beautiful as a child. She was perfectly lovely. A groan escaped him, or was it only a sigh?
She looked up quickly. “What is it, darling? Are you in pain? Are you tired? Shall we go back?” Her voice sounded in the immense quiet of the beach like a cricket chirping, but the word “darling” went on sounding and sounding like a little hollow bell while she searched his features, trying to find his old face, the one she knew, trying to work a magic on him, remove and replace the sunken eyes, the pinched nose, the bloodless wry mouth. “He’s not a stranger,” she said to herself. “He’s not.” And she heard the faint mocking echo, “Darling, darling,” ringing far away as if a bell-buoy out on the water were saying “Darling, darling,” to make the little waves laugh.
“It’s only my foot, my left foot. Funny, isn’t it, that it goes on throbbing. They cut it off two months ago.” He jerked a hand backward. “It’s damn queer when you think of it. The old foot begins the old game, then I look down and it’s not there any more, and I’m fooled again.” He laughed. His laughter was such a tiny sound in the great murmur of the morning that it might have been a sand-fly laughing. He was thinking, “What will become of us? She is young and healthy. She is as beautiful as a child. What shall we do about it?” And looking into her eyes he saw the same question, “What shall we do?” and looked quickly away again. So did she.
She looked past him at the row of ugly villas above the beach. Narrow houses, each like a chimney, tightly wedged together, wedges of cheap brick and plaster with battered wooden balconies. They were new and shabby and derelict. All had their shutters up. All the doors were bolted. How stuffy it must be in those deserted villas, in all those abandoned bedrooms and kitchens and parlours. Probably there were sand-shoes and bathing dresses and old towels and saucepans and blankets rotting inside them with the sand drifting in. Probably the window panes behind the shutters were broken and the mirrors cracked. Perhaps when the aeroplanes dropped bombs on the town, pictures fell down and mirrors and the china in the dark china closets cracked inside these pleasure houses. Who had built them?
“Cowards built them,” he said in his new bitter, rasping voice, the voice of a peevish, irritable sandfly. “Built them to make love in, to cuddle in, to sleep in, hide in. Now they’re empty. The blighters have left them to rot there. Rotten, I call it, leaving the swanky plage to go to the bad like that, just because there’s a war on. A little jazz now and a baccarat table would make all the difference, wouldn’t it? It would cheer us up. You’d dance and I’d have a go at the tables. That’s the casino over there, that big thing; that’s not empty, that’s crowded, but I don’t advise you to go there. I don’t think you’d like it. It’s not your kind of a crowd. It’s all right for me, but not for you. No, it wouldn’t do for you—not even on a gala night.
“They’ve a gala night in our casino whenever there’s a battle. Funny sort of place. You should watch the motors drive up then. The rush begins about ten in the evening and goes on till morning. Quite like Deauville the night of the Grand Prix. You never saw such a crowd. They all rush there from the front, you know—the way they do from the race-course—though, to be sure, it is not quite the real thing—not a really smart crowd. No, not precisely, though the wasters in Deauville weren’t much to look at, were they? Still, our crowd here aren’t precisely wasters. Gamblers, of course, down and outs, wrecks—all gone to pieces, parts of ’em missing, you know, tops of their heads gone, or one of their legs. When they take their places at the tables, the croupiers—that is to say, the doctors—look them over. Come closer, I’ll whisper it. Some of them have no faces.”
“Darling, don’t.” She covered her own face, closed her ears to his tiny voice and listened desperately with all her minute will to the large tranquil murmur of the sea. “Darling, darling,” far out the bell-buoy was sounding.
“Bless you,” said the thin, sharp, exasperated sandfly voice beside her. “Little things like that don’t keep us away. If we can’t walk in we get carried in. All that’s needed is a ticket. It’s tied to you like a luggage label. It has your name on it in case you don’t remember your name. You needn’t have a face, but a ticket you must have to get into our casino.”
“Stop, darling—darling, stop!”
“It’s a funny place. There’s a skating rink. You ought to see it. You go through the baccarat rooms and the dance hall to get to it. They’re all full of beds. Rows of beds under the big crystal chandeliers, rows of beds under the big gilt mirrors, and the skating rink is full of beds, too. The sun blazes down through the glass roof. It’s like a hot-house in Kew Gardens. There’s that dank smell of a rotting swamp, the smell of gas gangrene. Men with gas gangrene turn green, you know, like rotting plants.” He laughed. Then he was silent. He looked at her cowering in the sand, her hands covering her face, and looked away again.
He wondered why he had told her these things. He loved her. He hated her. He was afraid of her. He did not want her to be kind to him. He could never touch her again and he was tied to her. He was rotting and he was tied to her perfection. He had no power over her any more but the power of infecting her with his corruption. He could never make her happy. He could only make her suffer. His one luxury now was jealousy of her perfection, and his one delight would be to give in to the temptation to make her suffer. He could only reach her that way. It would be his revenge on the war.
He was not aware of these thoughts. He was too busy with other little false thoughts. He was saying to himself, “I will let her go. I will send her away. Once we are at home again, I will say good-bye to her.” But he knew that he was incapable of letting her go.
He closed his eyes. He said to himself “The smell of the sea is good, but the odour that oozes from the windows of the casino is bad. I can smell it from here. I can’t get the smell of it out of my nose. It is my own smell,” and his wasted greenish face twitched in disgust.
She looked at him. “I love him,” she said to herself. “I love him,” she repeated. “But can I go on loving him?” She whispered, “Can I? I must.” She said, “I must love him, now more than ever, but where is he?”
She looked round her as if to find the man he once had been. There were other women on the beach, women in black and old men and children with buckets and spades, people of the town. They seemed to be glad to be alive. No one seemed to be thinking of the war.
The beach was long and smooth and the colour of cream. The beach was perfect; the sun perfectly delicious; the sea was perfectly calm. The man in the wheel chair and the woman beside him were no bigger than flies on the sand. The women and children and old men were specks.
Far out on the sea there was an object; there were two objects. The people on the beach could scarcely distinguish them. They peered through the sunshine while the children rolled in the sand, and they heard the sound of a distant hammer tapping.
“They are firing out at sea,” said someone to someone.
How perfect the beach is. The sea is a perfectly heavenly blue. Behind the windows of the casino, under the great crystal chandeliers, men lie in narrow beds. They lie in queer postures with their greenish faces turned up. Their white bandages are reflected in the sombre gilt mirrors. There is no sound anywhere but the murmur of the sea and the whispering of the waves on the sand, and the tap tap of a hammer coming from a great distance across the water, and the bell-buoy that seems to say, “Darling, darling.”