worse than he is," said Maxim. "He can talk quite intelligibly if he wants to. He's probably been in and out of the cottage dozens of times, and did not want you to know."
"I don't think so," I answered; "the place looked deserted, quite untouched. There was dust everywhere, and no footmarks. It was terribly damp. I'm afraid those books will be quite spoiled, and the chairs, and that sofa. There are rats there, too; they have eaten away some of the covers."
Maxim did not reply. He walked at a tremendous pace, and the climb up from the beach was steep. It was very different from the Happy Valley. The trees were dark here and close together, there were no azaleas brushing the path. The rain dripped heavily from the thick branches. It splashed on my collar and trickled down my neck. I shivered; it was unpleasant, like a cold finger. My legs ached, after the unaccustomed scramble over the rocks. And Jasper lagged behind, weary from his wild scamper, his tongue hanging from his mouth.
"Come on, Jasper, for God's sake," said Maxim. "Make him walk up, pull at the twine or something, can't you? Beatrice was right. The dog is much too fat."
"It's your fault," I said, "you walk so fast. We can't keep up with you."
"If you had listened to me instead of rushing wildly over those rocks we would have been home by now," said Maxim. "Jasper knew his way back perfectly. I can't think what you wanted to go after him for."
"I thought he might have fallen, and I was afraid of the tide," I said.
"Is it likely I should have left the dog had there been any question of the tide?" said Maxim. "I told you not to go on those rocks, and now you are grumbling because you are tired."
"I'm not grumbling," I said. "Anyone, even if they had legs of iron, would be tired walking at this pace. I thought you would come with me when I went after Jasper anyway, instead of staying behind."
"Why should I exhaust myself careering after the damn dog?" he said.
"It was no more exhausting careering after Jasper on the rocks than it was careering after the driftwood on the beach," I answered. "You just say that because you have not any other excuse."
"My good child, what am I supposed to excuse myself about?"
"Oh, I don't know," I said wearily; "let's stop this."
"Not at all, you began it. What do you mean by saying I was trying to find an excuse? Excuse for what?"
"Excuse for not having come with me over the rocks, I suppose," I said.
"Well, and why do you think I did not want to cross to the other beach?"
"Oh, Maxim, how should I know? I'm not a thought-reader. I know you did not want to, that's all. I could see it in your face."
"See what in my face?"
"I've already told you. I could see you did not want to go. Oh, do let's have an end to it. I'm sick to death of the subject."
"All women say that when they've lost an argument. All right, I did not want to go to the other beach. Will that please you? I never go near the bloody place, or that Goddamned cottage. And if you had my memories you would not want to go there either, or talk about it, or even think about it. There. You can digest that if you like, and I hope it satisfies you."
His face was white, and his eyes strained and wretched with that dark lost look they had had when I first met him. I put out my hand to him, I took hold of his, holding it tight.
"Please, Maxim, please," I said.
"What's the matter?" he said roughly.
"I don't want you to look like that," I said. "It hurts too much. Please, Maxim. Let's forget all we said. A futile silly argument. I'm sorry, darling. I'm sorry. Please let everything be all right."
"We ought to have stayed in Italy," he said. "We ought never to have come back to Manderley. Oh, God, what a fool I was to come back."
He brushed through the trees impatiently, striding even faster than before, and I had to run to keep pace with him, catching at my breath, tears very near the surface, dragging poor Jasper after me on the end of his string.
At last we came to the top of the path, and I saw its fellow branching left to the Happy Valley. We had climbed the path then that Jasper had wished to take at the beginning of the afternoon. I knew now why Jasper had turned to it. It led to the beach he knew best, and the cottage. It was his old routine.
We came out onto the lawns, and went across them to the house without a word. Maxim's face was hard, with no expression. He went straight into the hall and onto the library without looking at me. Frith was in the hall.
"We want tea at once," said Maxim, and he shut the library door.
I fought to keep back my tears. Frith must not see them. He would think we had been quarrelling, and he would go to the servants' hall and say to them all, "Mrs. de Winter was crying in the hall just now. It looks as though things are not going very well." I turned away, so that Frith should not see my face. He came towards me though, he began to help me off with my mackintosh.
"I'll put your raincoat away for you in the flower room, Madam," he said.
"Thank you, Frith," I replied, my face still away from him.
"Not a very pleasant afternoon for a walk, I fear, Madam."
"No," I said. "No, it was not very nice."
"Your handkerchief, Madam?" he said, picking up something that had fallen on the floor. "Thank you," I said, putting it in my pocket.
I was wondering whether to go upstairs or whether to follow Maxim to the library. Frith took the coat to the flower room. I stood there, hesitating, biting my nails. Frith came back again. He looked surprised to see me still there.
"There is a good fire in the library now, Madam."
"Thank you, Frith," I said.
I walked slowly across the hall to the library. I opened the door and went in. Maxim was sitting in his chair, Jasper at his feet, the old dog in her basket. Maxim was not reading the paper, though it lay on the arm of the chair beside him. I went and knelt down by his side and put my face close to his.
"Don't be angry with me anymore," I whispered.
He took my face in his hands, and looked down at me with his tired, strained eyes. "I'm not angry with you," he said.
"Yes," I said. "I've made you unhappy. It's the same as making you angry. You're all wounded and hurt and torn inside. I can't bear to see you like this. I love you so much."
"Do you?" he said. "Do you?" He held me very tight, and his eyes questioned me, dark and uncertain, the eyes of a child in pain, a child in fear.
"What is it, darling?" I said. "Why do you look like that?"
I heard the door open before he could answer, and I sank back on my heels, pretending to reach for a log to throw on the fire, while Frith came into the room followed by Robert, and the ritual of our tea began.
The performance of the day before was repeated, the placing of the table, the laying of the snow-white cloth, the putting down of cakes and crumpets, the silver kettle of hot water placed on its little flame, while Jasper, wagging his tail, his ears stretched back in anticipation, watched my face. Five minutes must have passed before we were alone again, and when I looked at Maxim I saw the color had come back into his face, the tired, lost look was gone, and he was reaching for a sandwich.
"Having all that crowd to lunch was the trouble," he said. "Poor old Beatrice always does rub me up the wrong way. We used to scrap like dogs as children. I'm so fond of her too, bless her. Such a relief though that they don't live too near. Which reminds me, we'll have to go over and see Granny sometime. Pour out my tea, sweetheart, and forgive me for being a bear to you."
It was over then. The episode was finished. We must not speak of it again. He smiled at me over his cup of tea, and then reached for the newspaper on the arm of his chair. The smile was my reward. Like a pat on the head to Jasper. Good dog then, lie down, don't worry me anymore. I was Jasper again. I was back where I had been before. I took a piece of crumpet and divided it between the two dogs. I did not want it myself, I was not hungry. I felt very weary now, very tired in a dull, spent way. I looked at Maxim but he was reading his paper, he had folded it over to another page. My fingers were messy with the butter from the crumpet, and I felt in my pocket for a handkerchief. I drew it out, a tiny scrap of a thing, lace-edged. I stared at it, frowning, for it was not mine. I remembered then that Frith had picked it up from the stone floor of the hall. It must have fallen out of the pocket in the mackintosh. I turned it over in my hand. It was grubby; little bits of fluff from the pocket clung to it. It must have been in the mackintosh pocket for a long time. There was a monogram in the corner. A tall sloping R, with the letters de W interlaced. The R dwarfed the other letters, the tail of it ran down into the cambric, away from the laced edge. It was only a small handkerchief, quite a scrap of a thing. It had been rolled in a ball and put away in the pocket and forgotten.
I must have been the first person to put on that mackintosh since the handkerchief was used. She who had worn the coat then was tall, slim, broader than me about the shoulders, for I had found it big and overlong, and the sleeves had come below my wrist. Some of the buttons were missing. She had not bothered then to do it up. She had thrown it over her shoulders like a cape, or worn it loose, hanging open, her hands deep in the pockets.
There was a pink mark upon the handkerchief. The mark of lipstick. She had rubbed her lips with the handkerchief, and then rolled it in a ball, and left it in the pocket. I wiped my fingers with the handkerchief, and as I did so I noticed that a dull scent clung about it still. A scent I recognized, a scent I knew. I shut my eyes and tried to remember. It was something elusive, something faint and fragrant that I could not name. I had breathed it before, touched it surely, that very afternoon.
And then I knew that the vanished scent upon the handkerchief was the same as the crushed white petals of the azaleas in the Happy Valley.
11
The weather was wet and cold for quite a week, as it often can be in the west country in the early summer, and we did not go down to the beach again. I could see the sea from the terrace, and the lawns. It looked gray and uninviting, great rollers sweeping into the bay past the beacon on the headland. I pictured them surging into the little cove and breaking with a roar upon the rocks, then running swift and strong to the shelving beach. If I stood on the terrace and listened I could hear the murmur of the sea below me, low and sullen. A dull, persistent sound that never ceased. And the gulls flew inland too, driven by the weather. They hovered above the house in circles, wheeling and crying, flapping their spread wings. I began to understand why some people could not bear the clamor of the sea. It has a mournful harping note sometimes, and the very persistence of it, that eternal roll and thunder and hiss, plays a jagged tune upon the nerves. I was glad our rooms were in the east wing and I could lean out of my window and look down upon the rose garden. For sometimes I could not sleep, and getting softly out of bed in the quiet night I would wander to the window, and lean there, my arms upon the sill, and the air would be very peaceful, very still.
I could not hear the restless sea, and because I could not hear it my thoughts would be peaceful too. They would not carry me down that steep path through the woods to the gray cove and the deserted cottage. I did not want to think about the cottage. I remembered it too often in the day. The memory of it nagged at me whenever I saw the sea from the terrace. For I would see once more the blue spots on the china, the spun webs on the little masts of those model ships, and the rat holes on the sofa bed. I would remember the pattering of the rain on the roof. And I thought of Ben, too, with his narrow watery blue eyes, his sly idiot's smile. These things disturbed me, I was not happy about them. I wanted to forget them but at the same time I wanted to know why they disturbed me, why they made me uneasy and unhappy. Somewhere, at the back of my mind, there was a frightened furtive seed of curiosity that grew slowly and stealthily, for all my denial of it, and I knew all the doubt and anxiety of the child who has been told, "these things are not discussed, they are forbidden."
I could not forget the white, lost look in Maxim's eyes when we came up the path through the woods, and I could not forget his words. "Oh, God, what a fool I was to come back." It was all my fault, because I had gone down into the bay. I had opened up a road into the past again. And although Maxim had recovered, and was himself again, and we lived our lives together, sleeping, eating, walking, writing letters, driving to the village, working hour by hour through our day, I knew there was a barrier between us because of it.
He walked alone, on the other side, and I must not come to him. And I became nervous and fearful that some heedless word, some turn in a careless conversation should bring that expression back to his eyes again. I began to dread any mention of the sea, for the sea might lead to boats, to accidents, to drowning... Even Frank Crawley, who came to lunch one day, put me in a little fever of fear when he said something about the sailing races in Kerrith harbor, three miles away. I looked steadily at my plate, a stab of sickness in my heart at once, but Maxim went on talking quite naturally, he did not seem to mind, while I sat in a sweat of uncertainty wondering what would happen and where the conversation would lead us.
It was during cheese, Frith had left the room, and I remember getting up and going to the sideboard, and taking some more cheese, not wanting it, so as not to be at the table with them, listening; humming a little tune to myself so I could not hear. I was wrong of course, morbid, stupid; this was the hypersensitive behavior of a neurotic, not the normal happy self I knew myself to be. But I could not help it. I did not know what to do. My shyness and gaucherie became worse, too, making me stolid and dumb when people came to the house. For we were called upon, I remember, during those first weeks, by people who lived near us in the county, and the receiving of them, and the shaking hands, and the spinning out of the formal half hour became a worse ordeal than I first anticipated, because of this new fear of mine that they would talk about something that must not be discussed. The agony of those wheels on the drive, of that pealing bell, of my own first wild rush for flight to my own room. The scrambled dab of powder on my nose, the hasty comb through my hair, and then the inevitable knock on the door and the entrance of the cards on a silver salver.
"All right. I'll be down immediately." The clap of my heels on the stairs and across the hall, the opening of the library door or, worse still, that long, cold, lifeless drawing room, and the strange woman waiting there, or two of them perhaps, or a husband and a wife.
"How do you do? I'm sorry; Maxim is in the garden somewhere, Frith has gone to find him."
"We felt we must come and pay our respects to the bride."
A little laughter, a little flurry of chat, a pause, a glance round the room.
"Manderley is looking as charming as ever. Don't you love it?"
"Oh, yes, rather..." And in my shyness and anxiety to please, those schoolgirls' phrases would escape from me again, those words I never used except in moments like these, "Oh, ripping"; and "Oh, topping"; and "absolutely"; and "priceless"; even, I think, to one dowager who had carried a lorgnette "cheerio." My relief at Maxim's arrival would be tempered by the fear they might say something indiscreet, and I became dumb at once, a set smile on my lips, my hands in my lap. They would turn to Maxim then, talking of people and places I had not met or did not know, and now and again I would find their eyes upon me, doubtful, rather bewildered.
I could picture them saying to one another as they drove away, "My dear, what a dull girl. She scarcely opened her mouth," and then the sentence I had first heard upon Beatrice's lips, haunting me ever since, a sentence I read in every eye, on every tongue--"She's so different from Rebecca."
Sometimes I would glean little snatches of information to add to my secret store. A word dropped here at random, a question, a passing phrase. And, if Maxim was not with me, the hearing of them would be a furtive, rather painful pleasure, guilty knowledge learned in the dark.
I would return a call perhaps, for Maxim was punctilious in these matters and would not spare me, and if he did not come with me I must brave the formality alone, and there would be a pause in the conversation while I searched for something to say. "Will you be entertaining much at Manderley, Mrs. de Winter?" they would say, and my answer would come, "I don't know, Maxim has not said much about it up to the present." "No, of course not, it's early yet. I believe the house was generally full of people in the old days." Another pause. "People from London, you know. There used to be tremendous parties." "Yes," I would say. "Yes, so I have heard." A further pause, and then the lowered voice that is always used about the dead or in a place of worship, "She was so tremendously popular, you know. Such a personality." "Yes," I would say. "Yes, of course." And after a moment or so I would glance at my watch under cover of my glove, and say, "I'm afraid I ought to be going; it must be after four."
"Won't you stay for tea? We always have it at quarter past."
"No--No, really, thanks most awfully. I promised Maxim..." my sentence would go trailing off into nothing, but the meaning would be understood. We would both rise to our feet, both of us knowing I was not deceived about her offer to tea nor she in my mention of a promise to Maxim. I had sometimes wondered what would happen if convention were denied, if, having got into the car and waved a hand to my hostess on the doorstep, I suddenly opened it again, and said, "I don't think I'll go back after all. Let's go to your drawing room again and sit down. I'll stay to dinner if you like, or stop the night."
I used to wonder if convention and good county manners would brave the surprise, and whether a smile of welcome would be summoned to the frozen face, "But of course! How very delightful of you to suggest it." I used to wish I had the courage to try. But instead the door would slam, the car would go bowling away down the smooth gravel drive, and my late hostess would wander back to her room with a sigh of relief and become herself again. It was the wife of the bishop in the neighboring cathedral town who said to me, "Will your husband revive the Manderley Fancy Dress ball, do you suppose? Such a lovely sight always; I shall never forget it."
I had to smile as though I knew all about it and say, "We have not decided. There have been so many things to do and to discuss."
"Yes, I suppose so. But I