An evening light was being sifted through a high thin cloud, and the bleached colours of the buildings, flint and chalk and ash and the crumbling white of old bone, made their case strongly, like a full palette. The end wall of La Belle Julie was no longer a blank stare but showed its history in modulations of plaster, creamy hollows and slopes where a glisten of river sand lay in the folds of joins between two areas of work separated perhaps by decades. A milky gleam strengthened—and the sun was back and the wall again an undifferentiated glare.
The dress rehearsal was set for seven-thirty, which was still daylight. The lighting of the piece had always been a difficulty. The first scenes were by lamplight in the sitting room in Martinique, but the late sun was glowing on the wires of a harp that stood on boards laid over pink dust. The programme said: Martinique. 1882. Evening.
There was a worse difficulty. Three hundred chairs were disposed in the audience space, and these were expected to be part filled by invited guests, mostly from the French side of the production. There could not be the customary audience for a dress rehearsal, the friends of performers and management, for they were not French. Yet all the seats were occupied an hour before the play began, and crowds of onlookers had made their way up from the town and now stood among the trees, waiting. These were French and, too, many tourists, mostly English and American. No one had expected this kind of success for Julie Vairon, except Mary Ford, who could be observed not saying, I told you so!—and yet now that it was happening, nothing could be more plain than that it had to happen. Jean-Pierre kissed Mary’s hand, and then her cheeks, many times. They went waltzing around together among the rocks, a victory dance, while Henry and Stephen and Sarah and the cast applauded them. There were no seats left for Sarah and the two Croesuses. Chairs were brought up from the town and fitted in among the trees.
There were discontented murmurs from the crowd. How could the authorities—that is to say, themselves—have been so short-sighted as not to allow for the inevitable interest? Three hundred seats—absurd! Affreux…stupide…une absurdité…lamentable…and so it went on. Then and there a meeting to discuss the popularity of Julie Vairon was arranged for breakfast time tomorrow. Meanwhile the curtain, so to speak, was due to rise. Sitting where she did, next to Henry, Sarah felt his anguish vibrate from him to her. He had confessed he had been sick all night and that was why she had found him sitting by the waterfall. He told her this in a theatrical mutter, a parody of gloom, but his eyes were darkened by the anguish of it all. He attempted a smile, failed, grabbed her hand, and kissed it. His lips left a burning place.
The musicians, who stood with the singers on their little stone platform, began a conventional introduction, for the music was a drawing-room ballad brought to Martinique with the sheet music and the pretty dresses and the fashion magazines on the insistence of Sylvie Vairon, who had made it clear from the beginning, that is to say, from Julie’s conception, that if the girl was not going to be legitimate, then at least she must be equipped to get a good husband.
Molly appeared out of the trees. Her white gown left shoulders and neck bare, and her black tresses were braided, coiled, looped, and held with a white frangipani flower. She sat by the harp and played. Or pretended to: the viola made appropriate sounds. She was in fact singing: she had a pretty light voice, just right for a drawing-room young lady. Madame Vairon stepped forward to stand by her daughter, the large black woman magnificent in scarlet velvet. Then a group of young officers—George White and four young men supplied by Jean-Pierre, who did not have to say anything, had only to stand about and react—all dazzling in their uniforms, came forward one by one to bend over Madame Vairon’s hand. Paul came last. He straightened, turned, saw Julie—the piece had begun.
Unable to bear it, Henry sprang up and off through the crowd and into the trees. He could be observed—Sarah observed him—striding up and down, and then he whirled about to return to his seat, but he was too late, for it was occupied by Benjamin, who had come back from a quick tour of the region accompanied by Bill’s friend Jack Greene.
The sentimental ballad ended, and now the music that accompanied the love scenes between Paul and Julie was without words. Haunting…yes, you could call this music haunting, a word as trite as the love scenes that were being enacted, where not one movement, one phrase, one glance, was new or could be new. Everyone here—there were a good thousand people now, and more were pressing in to watch—had seen similar scenes or taken part in them. It was the music that struck straight to the heart, or the senses. The crowd was silent. They watched Julie as intently as the citizens of Belles Rivières had watched her a hundred years ago. As for the townspeople rehearsed that morning by Roy, they were unnecessary, for nothing could be more powerful than this silent staring crowd. Then, as the light slowly went, a twenty-foot-high projection of Julie the young woman appeared on a screen behind and above her house. It was at first a faint image, for the light had not gone, but it gathered substance, and changed: Julie aged on that screen, until she was the comfortable lady Philippe had wooed, and then she was a small child, her own daughter, or herself. Stephen said into Sarah’s ear, ‘I’m off. I’ll walk. Do me good. I’m going to telephone Elizabeth and tell her what is happening here and ask her what chance there is of a decent run. We have been thinking of three or four days—but just look.’ For people still approached through the trees, coming to a dead stop when the music enveloped them. As Stephen left his chair (Sarah thought that he showed all the signs of a man escaping), Henry took it. He put his lips to her ear and said, ‘Sarah, Sarah, life’s a bitch, Sarah…it’s a bitch, I love you.’ He said this in time with the music, so he was theatrical and absurd, they both had to laugh. But his lips were tremulous. All the appropriate thoughts clicked through her mind: But this is obviously nonsense, it’s all the fault of the theatre, of show business, so don’t take any notice. But at the same time she thought, This is Julie’s country: anything can happen. Old women can seem like young ones, and a blue-eyed Irish girl with plump freckled shoulders can become a girl as slender and bright and tigerish as a bee, just like the fairy tales. She was shaken, oh yes, but managed to offer Henry, who was leaning as close as he could, a gently amused smile. What a hypocrite.
The scenes in Martinique were coming to an end. The sun had gone, but reflected rays arbitrarily picked out a buckle on Paul’s belt, or the handkerchief Madame Vairon was sobbing into, while the golden hair of one of the singers seemed to be on fire. Julie and Paul walked away from weeping Maman into patterns of dusky forest light and shade, appropriately, since the next scene was in the forest, was in fact here. A large window frame stood up behind the actors, to show that the scene was inside the house and not—as it must appear to the literal eye—outside it. And now here was a tiny living room, where there was not only the harp but a lute, a recorder, a viola, while flutes and a clarinet lay on a rack. An easel, on which was a large self-portrait in pastels, and a table where Julie wrote her journals were carried on by the four youths who a moment ago had been officers.
The end with Paul, inevitable and perhaps not the most interesting part of the tale, came quickly, while the singers sang, most hauntingly, words that were all Julie’s, if from different years and about two different men, but arranged by Sarah, who, just like Julie, half believed she heard the music of those musicians of nearly a thousand years ago and knew the words they might have sung.
Why did you not tell me what love means to you
Before begging me to love you, for so I lost
Whatever I could have had, poor girl, of hope
For a life girls of the usual sort
—Your sisters?—know they will live.
No, not for me the kindness of a simple love.
Doubly my blood denies me that. Never for me kind love,
You think it too, I can see it in your eyes,
So now I may not say, ‘Tell me what love means to you.’
Never for me the kindness of a simple love,
br /> Never for me kind love.
There was an interval, a long one, while Henry talked to the players and the singers. Words and song had been pitched for a crowd of three hundred, not for many hundreds. It must be discussed tomorrow morning whether amplifiers must be used, at the meeting which they knew must take this modest production a step up into something more ambitious. And the first night was tomorrow, with so much to be done.
During this first interval people were humming Julie’s songs, and Henry made a foray into the crowd to report success, and again during Act Two, when he could return to say, with satisfaction, that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Meanwhile on her other side Benjamin sometimes engaged her attention with this or that comment, made in the hope they would not be found inappropriate from this theatre innocent. They weren’t. All were to the point, and Henry took note of them. Benjamin was pleased, and, too, that he had a golden finger in this pie.
The second interval was brief, but long enough for the company to work up a fine head of anxiety.
What were they, the audience, going to make of Julie’s ‘second-period’ music, the impersonal music so much a contrast to the sorrowful songs that had gone before? Yet, if unemotional, why did it bring tears to the eyes? Did that mean it acted on some unnamed part of the organism, such as a disembodied heart or liver? And the third act asked so much of an audience: Julie alone, mourning for her child. Julie ostracized. The programme did say this was for the sake of dramatic simplicity, and in fact the little girl had been two years old when she died of ‘brain fever’—whatever that was. And then there was the so satisfactory suitor, and the prospect of happiness—rejected, and many sound and sensible citizens must always find this a confirmation that there was something really wrong with the woman.
As the curve of a low hill finally absorbed the last rays, so they were all steeped in a hot twilight, the music ended with the chilly octaves of Julie’s death, the chanting of a flute, and the long groaning under-note of the shawm. At once the evening was noisy with cicadas, their din signalling applause, at first sporadic, and then prolonged. The seated people stood up to clap wildly, and while the crowd dispersed they clapped and cheered and shouted.
Some enterprising firm, hearing of the big audience up in the hills that would need transportation, had caused three coaches to stand waiting, which was all that would fit into the space.
There were limousines for the company: Bill got in by Sarah, Benjamin on her other side.
‘What a wonderful success,’ said Benjamin.
‘You must be so pleased,’ said Bill, and kissed her cheek with suggestive lips. Furious, she turned and kissed him on the lips, a real kiss, which he took with a smile half shocked, half delighted, while he glanced, embarrassed, at Benjamin, who was staring straight ahead, apparently to listen while the engaging young driver assured them that tout le monde adored Julie, she must be a veritable pin-up, and he couldn’t wait to see the show. The habitual bestowers of compliments and flattery slowly acquire a sated, complacent look, as if fed on honeyed larks’ tongues.
When the car reached the hotel it was still not eleven. Stephen had left a note for Sarah to say he had spoken to Elizabeth. The news was good. There could be at least two weeks’ run at Queen’s Gift.
The company settled around the pavement tables, absorbing into itself tourists and townspeople who had been at the theatre and who were demanding autographs with that calm determination to get their rights, that is to say, a piece of the action, or the pie, or the property, which characterizes autograph hunters from one end of the world to the other. The players were restless, full of suspense. For even a successful dress rehearsal is still not a first night, when all the strings go snap, snap.
Molly came from the hotel, later than the others, and found an empty chair near Bill. He at once bent down to kiss her. She did not respond. The moment the kiss was over, Bill lifted his chair over to a place near Sarah’s and murmured, ‘You look beautiful tonight.’
Sally appeared, looking for a chair. Bill pulled one forward and Sally slid into it, while her eyes searched for Richard Service. Sally still vibrated with all the emotions of having been Julie’s mother, and her black skin glistened with heat against the red of her dress. Bill smiled warmly at her and kissed her, but she turned her head so her lips were out of reach. She laughed, an all-tolerant laugh, and directed to Sarah something not far off a wink. Her smile was satirical, regretful. Then she shrewdly examined Molly, who sat suffering, but then she turned away, out of delicacy.
Then she drank off Sarah’s glass of citron pressé, said, ‘Sorry, my darling, but I had to have that,’ and announced, ‘And now I must ring my children and get my beauty sleep.’ Up she got again. The flood of vitality subsided in her because she was becoming the mother of her real children. As she left, Richard Service arrived, and the two eye-lines made shallow arcs that intersected on an agreement. She departed like a sailing ship in full moonlight.
Roy Strether, Mary Ford, Henry, and Jean-Pierre were all so buoyant with success they could not bear to sit down but stood hovering near the seated ones, and then, as Benjamin arrived, they suggested a trip to the delights of night-time Marseilles. Benjamin’s eyes enquired of Sarah’s, but she said she too needed to sleep. She reminded them they were meeting at eight—very well, then, nine. She walked firmly away.
She saw Bill move into the chair near Molly. If I were Molly, she thought, I would simply go across to his hotel, open his door, and get into his bed. He would certainly say, I am expecting my girlfriend, oh dear, I am so sorry. Would I then go quietly away? I’m damned if I would.
She sat by the window. She would have liked to go up and talk with Stephen, gently unwinding, as one does with a friend. Yesterday she would have gone.
She went to look in her glass. The ichors that flooded her body created behind the face of Sarah, the face she and everyone knew, a younger face, that shone out, smiling. Her body was alive and vibrant, but also painful. Her breasts burned, and the lower part of her abdomen ached. Her mouth threatened to seek kisses—like a baby’s mouth turning and turning to find the nipple.
I’m sick, she said to herself. ‘You’re sick.’ I’m sick with love, and that is all there is to it. How could such a thing have happened? What does Nature think it is up to? (Eyeball to eyeball with Nature, elderly people often accuse it—her?—of ineptitude, of sheer incompetence.) I simply can’t wait to go back to my cool elderly self, all passion spent. I suppose I’m not trapped in this hell for ever? I’m going to be really ill if I can’t stop this…and she watched her reflection, which was that of a woman in love, and not a dry old woman.
She said, ‘Enough of this,’ undressed quickly, and got into bed, where she murmured, as at some point she was bound to do, ‘Christ that my love were in my arms…’
She did sleep. She woke to ghostly kisses of such sweetness they were like Julie’s music, but surprisingly, the sounds that whispered in her head were not the ‘troubadour’ music, like blues or like fados, but the late music, cool, transparent, a summons to somewhere else. Perhaps the paradise we dream of when in love is the one we were ejected from, where all embraces are innocent.
Again she was up early. She dressed before it was light outside, thinking, Thank God there’s that meeting and I’ll be working hard all day. And I won’t be with Bill; I’ll be with Henry.
On the pavement, Stephen sat outside the still-closed café. He looked absently at Sarah, for his eyes were clouded with his preoccupation, looked again and said, ‘You have been crying.’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘What can I say? I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’
Now this was the moment she could put things right. ‘Stephen, you are wrong. It’s not like that.’
He wanted so much to believe her, but looked grumpy and cross.
‘Stephen, this is an absolutely ridiculous situation. Really, I promise you…’
He looked away, because he was so uncomfortable. His
face was red. So was hers.
Communal life was rescuing them. While the players still slept, the managerial side were all up, in spite of their having jaunted around the coast so late. Here came Mary Ford, calm and fresh in white. After her came Henry, who at once took a chair near Sarah. He appeared to have staggered from some battlefront. Then Benjamin, impeccable in pale linen. He sat opposite Sarah, studying her from under serious brows. Here was Roy Strether, yawning, and with him Sandy Grears. The proprietor of Les Collines Rouges was opening his doors, and the aromas of coffee began their insinuations.