Txt rabeca rabeca

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The notion that more brands should embrace SMS without fear of bothering customers is shared by a number of other brands that are seeing success with texts. Never for a moment did he interrupt or glance at his watch; it was as though he had set himself a standard of behaviour, since the original lapse when he had made a fool of her in front of me, and clung to It grimly rather than ofFend again.

It was a page- boy in the end who released him, with the news that a dressmaker awaited Mrs. Van Hopper in the suite. You must come and have a drink some time in the suite. I may have one or two people coming in to- morrow evening.

Why not join us? Your valet has unpacked for you, I suppose? He looked down at us, mocking, faintly sardonic, a ghost of a smile on his lips. He travels the fastest who travels alone. Per- haps you have not heard of it. Van Hopper, as we went upstairs in the lift. Men do such extraordinary things. I remember a well-known writer once who used to dart down the Service staircase whenever he saw me coming. However, I was younger then.

We arrived at our floor. The page-boy flung open the gates. Your efforts to monopolise the conversation quite embarrassed me, and Tm sure it did him. Men loathe that sort of thing. There seemed no possible reply. Eh bien, Blaize, je viens. I knelt on the window seat and looked out upon the after- noon. The sun shone very brightly still, and there was a gay high wind.

In half-an-hour we should be sitting to our bridge, the windows tightly closed, the central heating turned to the full.

I thought of the ash-trays I would have to clear, and how the squashed stubs, stained with lipstick, would sprawl in company with discarded chocolate creams. Bridge does not come easily to a mind brought up on Snap and Happy Families; besides, it bored her friends to play with me.

I felt my youtliful presence put a curb upon their con- versation, much as a parlour-maid does until the arrival of dessert, and they could not fling themselves so easily into the melting-pot of scandal and insinuation. I sighed, and turned away from the window. The sun was so full of promise, and the sea was whipped white with a meny wind.

High up in the tumbled roof there was a window, narrow as a slit. It might have held a presence medieval; and, reaching to the desk for pencil and paper, I sketched in fancy with an absent mind a profile, pale and aquiline. A sombre eye, a high-bridged nose, a scornful upper lip. And I added a pointed beard and lace at the throat, as the painter had done, long ago in a dif- ferent time. Someone knocked at the door, and the lift-boy came in with a note in his hand.

I opened it, and found a single sheet of note-paper inside, with a few words written in an unfahiiliar hand. I was very rude this afternoon. No signature, and no beginning. But my name was on the envelope, and spelt correctly, an unusual thing.

I looked up from the scrawled words. Van Hopper woke with a sore throat and a temperature of a hundred and two. I rang up her doctor, who came round at once and diagnosed the usual influenza. Van Hopper had a trained nurse. You can t possibly lift her. It will only be for a fortnight or so. I think she enjoyed the fuss it would create, the sympathy of people, the visits and mes- sages from friends, and the arrival of flowers.

Monte Carlo had begun to bore her, and this little illness would make a distraction. The nurse would give her injections, and a light massage, and she would have a diet. I left her quite happy after the arrival of the nurse, propped up on pillows with a falling temperature, her best bed-jacket round her shoulders and be-ribboned boudoir cap upon her head.

Rather ashamed of my light heart, I telephoned her friends, putting off the small party she had arranged for the evening, and went down to the restaurant for lunch, a good half hour before our usual time.

I expected the room to be empty, nobody lunched generally before one o'clock. It was empty, except for the table next to ours. This was a contingency for which I was unprepared. I thought he had gone to Sospel. No doubt he was lunching early because he hoped to avoid us at one o'clock. I was already half-way across the room and could not go back.

I had not seen him since we dis- appeared in the lift the day before, for wisely he had avoided dinner in the restaurant, possibly for the same reason that he lunched early now. It was a situation for which I was ill-trained, I wished I was older, different. I went to our table, looking straight before me, and immediately paid the penalty of gaucherie by knocking over the vase of stif anemones as I unfolded my napkin.

The water soaked the cloth, and ran down on to my lap. The waiter was at the other end of the room, nor had he seen. In a second though my neighbour was by my side, dry napkin in hand. Get out of tbe way.

Mademoiselle will bave luncheon with me. I tried to think of an excuse. I knew be did not want to lunch with me. It was bis form of courtesy. I should ruin bis meal. I determined to be bold and speak tbe truth. It's very kind of you but I shall be quite all right if tbe waiter just wipes tbe cloth. Even if you had not knocked over that vase so clumsily I should bave asked you. We needn't talk to each other unless we feel bke it. His quality of detachment was pecubar to himself, and I knew that we might continue thus, without speaking, throughout the meal and it would not matter.

There would be no sense of strain. He would not ask me questions on history. I told him about the influenza. I felt very much ashamed of myself. My manners were atrocious. That curiosity of hers— she does not mean to he offensive, hut she does it to everyone. That is, everyone of importance. He did not answer, and I was aware again of that feeling of discomfort, as though I had trespassed on forbidden ground. I wondered why it was that this home of his, known to so many people by hearsay, even to me, should so in- evitably silence him, making as it were a barrier between him and others.

We ate for a while without talking, and I thought of a picture post-card I had bought once at a village shop, when on holiday as a child in the west country. It was the painting of a house, crudely done of course and highly coloured, but even those faults could not destroy the symmetry of the building, the wide stone steps before the terrace, the green lawns stretching to the sea.

I paid twopence for the painting —half my weekly pocket money— and then asked the wrinkled shop woman what it was meant to be. She looked astonished at my ignorance. Perhaps it was the memory of this post-card, lost long ago in some forgotten book, that made me sympathise with his defensive attitude. He resented Mrs. Van Hopper and her hke with their intruding questions.

Maybe there was some- thing inviolate about Manderley that made it a place apart; it would not bear discussion. I could imagine her tramping through the rooms, perhaps paying sixpence for admission, nppmg the quietude with her sharp, staccato laugh.

Is she a relation? Have you known her long? Rather like the eastern slave market. He laughed, looking quite different, younger somehow and less detached. I looked at him over my glass of citronade. It was notr easy to explain my father, and usually I never talked about him. He was my secret property. Preserved for me alone, much as Manderley was preserved for my neighbour.

I had no wish to introduce him casually over a table in a Monte Carlo restaurant. There was a strange air of unreality about that luncheon, and looking back upon it now it is invested for me with a curious glamour.

There was I, so much of a schoolgirl still, who only the day before had sat with Mrs. Van Hopper, prim, silent and subdued, and twenty-four hours afterwards my family history was mine no longer, I shared it with a man I did not know. For some reason I felt impelled to speak, because his eyes followed me in sympathy like the Gentleman Unknown.

It seemed to me as ithough he understood, from my poor description, something of the vibrant personality that had been my father's, and something too of the love my mother had for him, making it a vital, living force, with a spark of divinity about it, so much that when he died that desperate winter, struck down by pneumonia, she lingered behind him for five short weeks and stayed no more.

I remember pausing, a little breathless, a Httle dazed. The restaurant was filled now with people who chatted and laughed to an orchestral background and a clatter of plates, and glancing at the clock above the door I saw that it was two o'clock. We had been sitting there an hour and a half, and the conversation had been mine alone.

I tumbled down into reality, hot-handed and self-conscious, with my face aflame, and began to stammer my apologies. He would not listen to me. I've enjoyed this hour with you more than I have enjoyed anything for a very long time. You've taken me out of myself, out of despondency and introspection, both of which have been my devils for a year.

We are both alone in the world. Oh, I've got a sister, though we don't see much of each other, and an ancient grandmother whom I pay duty visits to three times a year, but neither of them makes for companionship. I shall have to congratulate Mrs.

You're cheap at ninety pounds a year," You forget, I said, you have a home and I have none. He bent his head to light a cigarette, and did not reply immediately. I remembered Mrs. It was so blatantly the type of thing that she would do herself, and I did not want him to bracket us together. My companion accepted it as natural, of course, he knew nothing of the ill-carved ham of yesterday. I found the change depressing, it made me despise myself.

I remem- bered my father and his scorn of superficial snobbery. The attentions of the maltre d'hdtel had opened up a train of thought, and as we drank our coffee I told him about Blaize, the dressmaker. She had been so pleased when Mrs.

Van Hopper had bought three frocks, and I, taking her to the lift afterwards, had pictured her working upon them in her own small salon, behind the stuffy litde shop, with a consumptive son wasting upon her sofa.

I could see her, with tired eyes, threading needles, and the floor covered with snippets of material. Perhaps you would rather have a frock. Come along to the shop some- time without Madame and I will fix you up without charging you a sou. The vision of the consumptive son faded, and in its stead arose the picture of myself had I been different, pocketing that greasy note with an understanding smile, and perhaps slipping round to Blaize s shop on this my free afternoon and coming away with a frock I had not paid for.

I expected him to laugh. It was a stupid story, I don't know why I told him, but he looked at me thoughtfully as he stirred his coffee. I think you ve made a mistake in coming here, in joining forces with Mrs. Van Hopper, You are not made for that sort of job.

YouYe too young, for one thing, and too soft. Blaize and her commission, that's nothing. The first of many simi- lar incidents from other Blaizes.

You will either have to give in, and become a sort of Blaize yourself, or stay as you are and be broken. Who suggested you take on this thing in the first place? It was as ihough we had known one an- other for a long time, and had met again after a lapse of years. Supposing Mrs. Van Hopper gets tired of her Tiiend of the bosom,' what then?

There would be other Mrs. Van Hoppers, and I was young, and confident, and strong. But even as he spoke I remem- bered those advertisements seen often in good class maga- zines where a friendly society demands succour for young women in reduced circumstances; I thought of the type of boarding-house that answers the advertisement and gives temporary shelter, and then I saw myself, useless sketch- book in hand, without quahfications of any kind, stammer- ing replies to stern employment agents.

Perhaps I should have accepted Blaize's ten per cent. A pity we can't change over. Go upstairs and put your hat on, and I'll have the car brought round. Van Hopper's chattering tongue, and his cold courtesy. I can feel again the wind on my face, and hear my laugh, and his that echoed it. It was not the Monte Carlo I had known, or perhaps the truth was that it pleased me better.

There was a glamour about it that had not been there before. I must have seen it before with dull eyes. The harbour was a dancing thing, with fluttering paper boats, and the sailors on the quay were jovial, smiling fellows, merry as the wind.

We passed the yacht, beloved of Mrs. Van Hopper because of its ducal owner, and snapped our fingers at die glistening brass, and looked at one another and laughed again. I can remember as though I wore it still my comfortable, ill-fitting flannel suit, and how the skirt was lighter than the coat through harder wear. My shabby hat, too broad about the brim, and my low-heeled shoes, fastened with a single strap. A pair of gauntlet gloves clutched in a grubby band.

I bad never looked more youthful, I had never felt so old. Van Hopper and her influenza did not exist for me. The bridge and the cocktail parties were forgotten, and with them my own humble status. I was a person of importance, I was grown up at last.

That girl, who, tortured by shyness, would stand outside the sitting-room door twisting a handkerchief in her hands, while from within came that babble of confused chatter so unnerv- ing to the intruder—she had gone with the wind that after- noon.

She was a poor creature, and I thought of her with scorn if I considered her at all. The wind was too high for sketching, it tore in cheerful gusts around the comer of my cobbled square, and back to the car we went and drove I know not where. The long road climbed the hills, and the car climbed with it, and we circled in the heights like a bird in the air. How different his car to Mrs. Van Hopper's hireling for the season, a square old- fashioned Daimler that took us to Mentone on placid after- noons, when I, sitting on the little seat with my back to die driver, must crane my neck to see the view.

I remember laughing aloud, and the laugh being carried by the wind away from me; and, looking at him, I realised he laughed no longer, he was once more silent and detached, the man of yesterday wrapped in his secret selE. I realised, too, that the car could climb no more, we had reached the summit, and below us stretched the way that we had come, precipitous and hollow. He stopped the car, and I could see that the edge of the road bordered a vertical slope that crumbled into vacancy, a fall of perhaps two thou- sand feet.

We got out of the car and looked beneath us. This sobered me at last. I knew that but half the cars length had lain between us and the fall.

The sea, like a crinkled chart, spread to the horizon, and lapped the sharp outline of the coast, while the houses were white shells in a rounded grotto, pricked here and there by a great orange sun. We knew another sunlight on our hill, and the silence made it harder, more austere.

A change had come upon our afternoon, it was not the thing of gossamer it had been. The wind dropped, and it suddenly grew cold. When I spoke my voice was far too casual, the silly, nerv- ous voice of someone ill at ease. He had the face of one who walks in his sleep, and for a wild moment the idea came to me that perhaps he was not normal, not altogether sane. Perhaps he was one of them, and here "we were within six feet of death.

REBECCA 32 I laad misjudged him, of course, there was nothing wrong after all, for as soon as I spoke this second time he came clear of his dream and began to apologise. I had gone white, I suppose, and he had noticed it.

Wliat gulf of years stretched between him and that other time, what deed of thought and action, what difference in tem- perament? I did not want to know. I wished I had not come. Down the twisting road we went without a check, with- out a word.

A great ridge of clouds stretched above the set- ting sun, and the air was cold and clean. Suddenly he began to talk about Manderley, He said nothing of his life there, no word about himself, but he told me how the sun set there, on a spring afternoon, leaving a glow upon the headland. The sea would look like slate, cold still from the long winter, and from the terrace you could hear the ripple of the coming tide washing in the little bay.

The daffodils were in bloom, stirring in the evening breeze, golden heads cupped upon lean stalks, and however many you might pick there would be no thinning of the ranks, they were massed like an army, shoulder to shoulder. On a bank below the lawns, crocuses were planted, golden, pink, and mauve, hut by this time they would be past their best, dropping and fading, like the pallid REBECCA 33 snowdrops.

The primrose was more vulgar, a homely pleasant creature who appeared in every cranny like a weed. Too early yet for bluebells, their heads were stiU hidden beneath last year s leaves, but when they came, dwarfing the more humble violet, they choked the very bracken in the woods, and with their colour made a challenge to the sky. He never would have them in the house, he said. They had a smoky, rather bitter smell, as though a wild sap ran in their stalks, pungent and juicy.

People who plucked bluebells from the woods were vandals, he had forbidden it at Manderley. Sometimes, driving in the country, he had seen bicyclists with huge bunches strapped before them on the handles, the bloom already fading from the dying heads, the ravaged stalks stragghng naked and unclean.

The primrose did not mind it quite so much. No wild flowers came in the house at Manderley. He had special cultivated flowers, grown for the house alone, in the walled garden. A rose was one of the few flowers, he said, that looked better picked than growing. A bowl of roses in a drawing-room had a depth of colour and scent they had not possessed in the open.

There was something rather blowsy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair. In the house they became mysterious and subtle. He had roses in the house at Mander- ley for eight months in the year. Did I like syringa?

There was a tree on the edge of the lawn he could smell from his bedroom window. His sister, who was a hard, rather practical person, used to complain that there were too many scents at Manderley, they made her drunk. Perhaps she was right. He did not care. It was the only form of in- toxication that appealed to him.

His earliest recollection was REBECCA 34 of great brandies of lilac, standing in white jars, and they filled the house with a wistful, poignant smell.

You could stoop down and pick a fallen petal, crash 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 val- ley, heady and rather dazed, to the hard white shingle of the beach and the still water.

A curious, perhaps too sudden con- trast. The clat- ter jagged on my nerves, and the lights were far too bril- liant, far too yellow. It was a swift, unwelcome anti-climax. 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 poetiy. I peered. I felt I wanted some possession of his, now that the day was fin- ished. I shan't see you in the restaurant this evening as Fm dining out.

But thank you for to-day. My afternoon had spoilt me for the hours that still remained, and I thought how long they would seem until my bed-time, how empty too my sup- per all alone.

Somehow I could not face the bright enquiries of the nurse upstairs, or the possibilities of Mrs. 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 leant 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. Up visfaed slopes I sped And shot, precipitated 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 expres- sion 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. I picked up the book again, and this time it opened at the title-page, and I read the dedication.

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 dien, 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 near-by chair, I took up an old copy of Ulllustration 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 neighbouring table, her fork, heaped high with ravioH, pausing in mid-air. They say he never talks about it, never mentions her name. She was drowned you know, in a bay near Manderley. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. Is your name is Rabeca or If you known people on Rabeca name then add it to the list. Add Peoples on Rabeca name.

Need any help or having any feedback? Please Inform Us. Delivered by follow. Art, Knowledgeul, Freedom Lover. Voice Pronunciation: Click and hear the audio pronunciation multiple times and learn how to pronounce the name Rabeca.

Record Pronunciation. Note: Please try to record the pronunciation within 3 seconds. Start Recording Preview:. Generate new! Person Name. Cursed be every one who curses you, and blessed be every one who blesses you!

For he has supplanted me these two times. He took away my birthright; and behold, now he has taken away my blessing. What then can I do for you, my son?

Bless me, even me also, O my father. Why should I be bereft of you both in one day? If Jacob marries one of the Hittite women such as these, one of the women of the land, what good will my life be to me? The Jewish Bride, Rembrandt.