"In the Italian gardens of the thirteenth century...." Mr. Buzzacott
interrupted himself to take another helping of the risotto which was
being offered him. "Excellent risotto this," he observed. "Nobody who
was not born in Milan can make it properly. So they say."
"So they say," Mr. Topes repeated in his sad, apologetic voice, and
helped himself in his turn.
"Personally," said Mrs. Topes, with decision, "I find all Italian
cooking abominable. I don't like the oil--especially hot. No, thank
you." She recoiled from the proffered dish.
After the first mouthful Mr. Buzzacott put down his fork. "In the
Italian gardens of the thirteenth century," he began again, making with
his long, pale hand a curved and flowery gesture that ended with a
clutch at his beard, "a frequent and most felicitous use was made of
green tunnels."
"Green tunnels?" Barbara woke up suddenly from her tranced silence.
"Green tunnels?"
"Yes, my dear," said her father. "Green tunnels. Arched alleys covered
with vines or other creeping plants. Their length was often very
considerable."
But Barbara had once more ceased to pay attention to what he was saying.
Green tunnels--the word had floated down to her, through profound depths
of reverie, across great spaces of abstraction, startling her like the
sound of a strange-voiced bell. Green tunnels--what a wonderful idea.
She would not listen to her father explaining the phrase into dullness.
He made everything dull; an inverted alchemist, turning gold into lead.
She pictured caverns in a great aquarium, long vistas between rocks and
scarcely swaying weeds and pale, discoloured corals; endless dim green
corridors with huge lazy fishes loitering aimlessly along them.
Green-faced monsters with goggling eyes and mouths that slowly opened
and shut. Green tunnels....
"I have seen them illustrated in illuminated manuscripts of the period,"
Mr. Buzzacott went on; once more he clutched his pointed brown
beard--clutched and combed it with his long fingers.
Mr. Topes looked up. The glasses of his round owlish spectacles flashed
as he moved his head. "I know what you mean," he said.
"I have a very good mind to have one, planted in my garden here."
"It will take a long time to grow," said Mr. Topes. "In this sand, so
close to the sea, you will only be able to plant vines. And they come up
very slowly very slowly indeed." He shook his head and the points of
light danced wildly in his spectacles. His voice drooped hopelessly, his
grey moustache drooped, his whole person drooped. Then, suddenly, he
pulled himself up. A shy, apologetic smile appeared on his face. He
wriggled uncomfortably. Then, with a final rapid shake of the head, he
gave vent to a quotation:
_But at my back I always hear_
_Time's winged chariot hurrying near_."
He spoke deliberately, and his voice trembled a little. He always found
it painfully difficult to say something choice and out of the ordinary;
and yet what a wealth of remembered phrase, what apt new coinages were
always surging through his mind!
"They don't grow so slowly as all that," said Mr. Buzzacott confidently.
He was only just over fifty, and looked a handsome thirty-five. He gave
himself at least another forty years; indeed, he had not yet begun to
contemplate the possibility of ever concluding.
"Miss Barbara will enjoy it, perhaps--your green tunnel." Mr. Topes
sighed and looked across the table at his host's daughter.
Barbara was sitting with her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands,
staring in front of her. The sound of her own name reached her faintly.
She turned her head in Mr. Topes's direction and found herself
confronted by the glitter of his round, convex spectacles. At the end of
the green tunnel--she stared at the shining circles--hung the eyes of a
goggling fish. They approached, floating, closer and closer, along the
dim submarine corridor.
Confronted by this fixed regard, Mr. Topes looked away. What thoughtful
eyes! He couldn't remember ever to have seen eyes so full of thought.
There were certain Madonnas of Montagna, he reflected, very like hen
mild little blonde Madonnas with slightly snub noses and very, very
young. But he was old; it would be many years, in spite of Buzzacott,
before the vines grew up into a green tunnel. He took a sip of wine;
then, mechanically, sucked his drooping grey moustache.
"Arthur!"
At the sound of his wife's voice Mr. Topes started, raised his napkin to
his mouth. Mrs. Topes did not permit the sucking of moustaches. It was
only in moments of absent-mindedness that he ever offended, now.
"The Marchese Prampolini is coming here to take coffee," said Mr.
Buzzacott suddenly. "I almost forgot to tell you."
"One of these Italian marquises, I suppose," said Mrs. Topes, who was no
snob, except in England. She raised her chin with a little jerk.
Mr. Buzzacott executed an upward curve of the hand in her direction. "I
assure you, Mrs. Topes, he belongs to a very old and distinguished
family. They are Genoese in origin. You remember their palace, Barbara?
Built by Alessi."
Barbara looked up. "Oh yes," she said vaguely. "Alessi. I know." Alessi:
Aleppo--where a malignant and a turbaned Turk. _And_ a turbaned; that
had always seemed to her very funny.
"Several of his ancestors," Mr. Buzzacott went on, "distinguished
themselves as vice-roys of Corsica. They did good work in the
suppression of rebellion. Strange, isn't it"--he turned parenthetically
to Mr. Topes--"the way in which sympathy is always on the side of
rebels? What a fuss people made of Corsica! That ridiculous book of
Gregorovius, for example. And the Irish, and the Poles, and all the rest
of them. It always seems to me very superfluous and absurd."
"Isn't it, perhaps, a little natural?" Mr. Topes began timorously and
tentatively, but his host went on without listening.
"The present marquis," he said, "is the head of the local Fascisti. They
have done no end of good work in this district in the way of preserving
law and order and keeping the lower classes in their place."
"Ah, the Fascisti," Mrs. Topes repeated approvingly. "One would like to
see something of the kind in England. What with all these strikes...."
"He has asked me for a subscription to the funds of the organisation. I
shall give him one, of course."
"Of course." Mrs. Topes nodded. "My nephew, the one who was a major
during the war, volunteered in the last coal strike. He was sorry, I
know, that it didn't come to a fight. 'Aunt Annie,' he said to me, when
I saw him last, 'if there had been a fight we should have knocked them
out completely--completely.'"
In Aleppo, the Fascisti, malignant _and_ turbaned, were fighting, under
the palm trees. Weren't they palm trees, those tufted green plumes?
"What, no ice to-day? _Niente gelato?_" inquired Mr. Buzzacott as the
maid put down the compote of peaches on the table.
Concetta apologised. The ice-making machine in the village had broken
down. There would be no ice till to-morrow.
"Too bad," said Mr. Buzzacott. "_Troppo male, Concetta_."
Under the palm trees, Barbara saw them: they pranced about, fighting.
They were mounted on big dogs, and in the trees were enormous
many-coloured birds.
"Goodness me, the child's asleep." Mrs. Topes was proffering the dish of
peaches. "How much longer am I to hold this in front of your nose,
Barbara?"
Barbara felt herself blushing. "I'm so sorry," she mumbled, and took the
dish clumsily.
"Day-dreaming. It's a bad habit."
"It's one we all succumb to sometimes," put in Mr. Topes deprecatingly,
with a little nervous tremble of the head.
"You may, my dear," said his wife. "I do not."
Mr. Topes lowered his eyes to his plate and went on eating.
"The marchese should be here at any moment now," said Mr. Buzzacott,
looking at his watch. "I hope he won't be late. I find I suffer so much
from any postponement of my siesta. This Italian heat," he added, with
growing plaintiveness, "one can't be too careful."
"Ah, but when I was with my father in India," began Mrs. Topes in a tone
of superiority: "he was an Indian civilian, you know...."
Aleppo, India--always the palm trees. Cavalcades of big dogs, and tigers
too.
Concetta ushered in the marquis. Delighted. Pleased to meet. Speak
English? Yés, yéss. _Pocchino_. Mrs. Topes: and Mr. Topes, the
distinguished antiquarian. Ah, of course; know his name very well. My
daughter. Charmed. Often seen the signorina bathing. Admired the way she
dives. Beautiful--the hand made a long, caressing gesture. These
athletic English signorine. The teeth flashed astonishingly white in the
brown face, the dark eyes glittered. She felt herself blushing again,
looked away, smiled foolishly. The marquis had already turned back to
Mr. Buzzacott.
"So you have decided to settle in our Carrarese."
Well, not settled exactly; Mr. Buzzacott wouldn't go so far as to say
settled. A villine for the summer months. The winter in Rome. One was
forced to live abroad. Taxation in England.... Soon they were all
talking. Barbara looked at them. Beside the marquis they all seemed half
dead. His face flashed as he talked; he seemed to be boiling with life.
Her father was limp and pale, like something long buried from the light;
and Mr. Topes was all dry and shrivelled; and Mrs. Topes looked more
than ever like something worked by clockwork. They were talking about
Socialism and Fascisti, and all that. Barbara did not listen to what
they were saying; but she looked at them, absorbed.
Good-bye, good-bye. The animated face with its flash of a smile was
turned like a lamp from one to another. Now it was turned on her.
Perhaps one evening she would come, with her father, and the Signora
Topes. He and his sister gave little dances sometimes. Only the
gramophone, of course. But that was better than nothing, and the
signorina must dance divinely--another flash--he could see that. He
pressed her hand again. Good-bye.
It was time for the siesta.
"Don't forget to pull down the mosquito netting, my dear," Mr. Buzzacott
exhorted. "There is always a danger of anophylines."
"All right, father." She moved towards the door without turning round to
answer him. He was always terribly tiresome about mosquito nets. Once
they had driven through the Campagna in a hired cab, completely enclosed
in an improvised tent of netting. The monuments along the Appian Way had
loomed up mistily as through bridal veils. And how everyone had laughed.
But her father, of course, hadn't so much as noticed it. He never
noticed anything.
"Is it at Berlin, that charming little Madonna of Montagna's?" Mr. Topes
abruptly asked. "The one with the Donor kneeling in the left-hand corner
as if about to kiss the foot of the Child." His spectacles flashed in
Mr. Buzzacott's direction.
"Why do you ask?"
"I don't know. I was just thinking of it."
"I think you must mean the one in the Mond Collection."
"Ah yes; very probably. In the Mond...."
Barbara opened the door and walked into the twilight of her shuttered
room. It was hot even here; for another three hours it would hardly be
possible to stir. And that old idiot, Mrs. Topes, always made a fuss if
one came in to lunch with bare legs and one's after-bathing tunic. "In
India we always made a point of being properly and adequately dressed.
An Englishwoman must keep up her position with natives, and to all
intents and purposes Italians _are_ natives." And so she always had to
put on shoes and stockings and a regular frock just at the hottest hour
of the day. What an old ass that woman was! She slipped off her clothes
as fast as she could. That was a little better.
Standing in front of the long mirror in the wardrobe door she came to
the humiliating conclusion that she looked like a piece of badly toasted
bread. Brown face, brown neck and shoulders, brown arms, brown legs from
the knee downwards; but all the rest of her was white, silly,
effeminate, townish white. If only one could run about with no clothes
on till one was like those little coppery children who rolled and
tumbled in the burning sand! Now she was just underdone, half-baked, and
wholly ridiculous. For a long time she looked at her pale image. She saw
herself running, bronzed all over, along the sand; or through a field of
flowers, narcissus and wild tulips; or in soft grass under grey olive
trees. She turned round with a sudden start. There, in the shadows
behind her.... No, of course there was nothing.
It was that awful picture in a magazine she had looked at, so many years
ago, when she was a child. There was a lady sitting at her
dressing-table, doing her hair in front of the glass; and a huge, hairy
black monkey creeping up behind her. She always got the creeps when she
looked at herself in a mirror. It was very silly. But still. She turned
away from the mirror, crossed the room, and, without lowering the
mosquito curtains, lay down on her bed. The flies buzzed about her,
settled incessantly on her face. She shook her head, flapped at them
angrily with her hands. There would be peace if she let down the
netting. But she thought of the Appian Way seen mistily through the
bridal veil and preferred to suffer the flies. In the end she had to
surrender; the brutes were too much for her. But, at any rate, it wasn't
the fear of anophylines that made her lower the netting.
Undisturbed now and motionless, she lay stretched stiffly out under the
transparent bell of gauze. A specimen under a glass case. The fancy
possessed her mind. She saw a huge museum with thousands of glass cases,
full of fossils and butterflies and stuffed birds and mediæval spoons
and armour and Florentine jewellery and mummies and carved ivory and
illuminated manuscripts. But in one of the cases was a human being,
shut up there alive.
All of a sudden she became horribly miserable. "Boring, boring, boring,"
she whispered, formulating the words aloud. Would it never stop being
boring? The tears came into her eyes. How awful everything was! And
perhaps it would go on being as bad as this all her life. Seventeen from
seventy was fifty three. Fifty three years of it. And if she lived to a
hundred there would be more than eighty.
The thought depressed her all the evening. Even her bath after tea did
her no good. Swimming far out, far out, she lay there, floating on the
warm water. Sometimes she looked at the sky, sometimes she turned her
head towards the shore. Framed in their pinewoods, the villas looked as
small and smug as the advertisement of a seaside resort. But behind
them, across the level plain, were the mountains. Sharp, bare peaks of
limestone, green woodland slopes and grey-green expanses of terraced
olive trees--they seemed marvellously close and clear in this evening
light. And beautiful, beautiful beyond words. But that, somehow, only
made things worse. And Shelley had lived a few miles farther up the
coast, there, behind the headland guarding the Gulf of Spezia. Shelley
had been drowned in this milk-warm sea. That made it worse too.
The sun was getting very low and red over the sea. She swam slowly in.
On the beach Mrs. Topes waited, disapprovingly. She had known somebody,
a strong man, who had caught cramp from staying in too long. He sank
like a stone. Like a stone. The queer people Mrs. Topes had known! And
the funny things they did, the odd things that happened to them.
Dinner that evening was duller than ever. Barbara went early to bed. All
night long the same old irritating cicada scraped and scraped among the
pine trees, monotonous and regular as clockwork. Zip zip, zip zip zip.
Boring, boring. Was the animal never bored by its own noise? It seemed
odd that it shouldn't be. But, when she came to think of it, nobody ever
did get bored with their own noise. Mrs. Topes, for example; she never
seemed to get bored. Zip zip, zip zip zip. The cicada went on without
pause.
Concetta knocked at the door at half-past seven. The morning was as
bright and cloudless as all the mornings were. Barbara jumped up, looked
from one window at the mountains, from the other at the sea; all seemed
to be well with them. All was well with her, too, this morning. Seated
at the mirror, she did not so much as think of the big monkey in the far
obscure corner of the room. A bathing dress and a bath-gown, sandals, a
handkerchief round her head, and she was ready. Sleep had left no
recollection of last night's mortal boredom. She ran downstairs.
"Good morning, Mr. Topes."
Mr. Topes was walking in the garden among the vines. He turned round,
took off his hat, smiled a greeting.
"Good morning, Miss Barbara." He paused. Then, with an embarrassed
wriggle of introduction he went on; a queer little falter came into his
voice. "A real Chaucerian morning, Miss Barbara. A May-day morning--only
it happens to be September. Nature is fresh and bright, and there is at
least one specimen in this dream garden"--he wriggled more
uncomfortably than ever, and there was a tremulous glitter in his round
spectacle lenses of the poet's 'yonge fresshe folkes.' He bowed in her
direction, smiled deprecatingly, and was silent. The remark, it seemed
to him, now that he had finished speaking, was somehow not as good as he
had thought it would be.
Barbara laughed. "Chaucer! They used to make us read the _Canterbury
Tales_ at school. But they always bored me. Are you going to bathe?"
"Not before breakfast." Mr. Topes shook his head. "One is getting a
little too old for that."
"Is one?" Why did the silly old man always say 'one' when he meant 'I'?
She couldn't help laughing at him. "Well, I must hurry, or else I shall
be late for breakfast again, and you know how I catch it."
She ran out, through the gate in the garden wall, across the beach, to
the striped red-and-white bathing cabin that stood before the house.
Fifty yards away she saw the Marchese Prampolini, still dripping from
the sea, running up towards his bathing hut. Catching sight of her, he
flashed a smile in her direction, gave a military salute. Barbara waved
her hand, then thought that the gesture had been too familiar--but at
this hour of the morning it was difficult not to have bad jolly
manners--and added the corrective of a stiff bow. After all, she had
only met him yesterday. Soon she was swimming out to sea, and, ugh! what
a lot of horrible huge jelly-fish there were.
Mr. Topes had followed her slowly through the gate and across the sand.
He watched her running down from the cabin, slender as a boy, with
long, bounding strides. He watched her go jumping with great splashes
through the deepening water, then throw herself forward and begin to
swim. He watched her till she was no more than a small dark dot far out.
Emerging from his cabin, the marquis met him walking slowly along the
beach, his head bent down and his lips slightly moving as though he were
repeating something, a prayer or a poem, to himself.
"Good morning, signore." The marquis shook him by the hand with a more
than English cordiality.
"Good morning," replied Mr. Topes, allowing his hand to be shaken. He
resented this interruption of his thoughts.
"She swims very well, Miss Buzzacott."
"Very," assented Mr. Topes, and smiled to himself to think what
beautiful, poetical things he might have said, if he had chosen.
"Well, so, so," said the marquis, too colloquial by half. He shook hands
again, and the two men went their respective ways.
Barbara was still a hundred yards from the shore when she heard the
crescendo and dying boom of the gong floating out from the villa. Damn!
she'd be late again. She quickened her stroke and came splashing out
through the shallows, flushed and breathless.
She'd be ten minutes late, she calculated; it would take her at least
that to do her hair and dress. Mrs. Topes would be on the war-path
again; though what business that old woman had to lecture her as she
did, goodness only knew. She always succeeded in making herself horribly
offensive and unpleasant.
The beach was quite deserted as she trotted, panting, across it, empty
to right and left as far as she could see. If only she had a horse to go
galloping at the water's edge, miles and miles. Right away down to Bocca
d'Arno she'd go, swim the river--she saw herself crouching on the
horse's back, as he swam, with legs tucked up on the saddle, trying not
to get her feet wet--and gallop on again, goodness only knew where.
In front of the cabin she suddenly halted. There in the ruffled sand she
had seen a writing. Big letters, faintly legible, sprawled across her
path.