She pieced the dim letters together. They hadn't been there when she
started out to bathe. Who?... She looked round. The beach was quite
empty. And what was the meaning? "O Clara d'Ellébeuse." She took her
bath-gown from the cabin, slipped on her sandals, and ran back towards
the house as fast as she could. She felt most horribly frightened.
It was a sultry, headachey sort of morning, with a hot sirocco that
stirred the bunting on the flagstaffs. By midday the thunderclouds had
covered half the sky. The sun still blazed on the sea, but over the
mountains all was black and indigo. The storm broke noisily overhead
just as they were drinking their after-luncheon coffee.
"Arthur," said Mrs. Topes, painfully calm, "shut the shutters, please."
She was not frightened, no. But she preferred not to see the lightning.
When the room was darkened, she began to talk, suavely and incessantly.
Lying back in her deep arm-chair, Barbara was thinking of Clara
d'Ellébeuse. What did it mean and who was Clara d'Ellébeuse? And why had
he written it there for her to see? He--for there could be no doubt who
had written it. The flash of teeth and eyes, the military salute; she
knew she oughtn't to have waved to him. He had written it there while
she was swimming out. Written it and then run away. She rather liked
that--just an extraordinary word on the sand, like the footprint in
_Robinson Crusoe._
"Personally," Mrs. Topes was saying, "I prefer Harrod's."
The thunder crashed and rattled. It was rather exhilarating, Barbara
thought; one felt, at any rate, that something was happening for a
change. She remembered the little room half-way up the stairs at Lady
Thingumy's house, with the bookshelves and the green curtains and the
orange shade on the light; and that awful young man like a white slug
who had tried to kiss her there, at the dance last year. But that was
different--not at all serious; and the young man had been so horribly
ugly. She saw the marquis running up the beach, quick and alert. Copper
coloured all over, with black hair. He was certainly very handsome. But
as for being in love, well ... what did that exactly mean? Perhaps when
she knew him better. Even now she fancied she detected something. O
Clara d'Ellébeuse. What an extraordinary thing it was.
With his long fingers Mr. Buzzacott combed his beard. This winter, he
was thinking, he would put another thousand into Italian money when the
exchange was favourable. In the spring it always seemed to drop back
again. One could clear three hundred pounds on one's capital if the
exchange went down to seventy. The income on three hundred was fifteen
pounds a year, and fifteen pounds was now fifteen hundred lire. And
fifteen hundred lire, when you came to think of it, was really sixty
pounds. That was to say that one would make an addition of more than one
pound a week to one's income by this simple little speculation. He
became aware that Mrs. Topes had asked him a question.
"Yes, yes, perfectly," he said.
Mrs. Topes talked on; she was keeping up her morale. Was she right in
believing that the thunder sounded a little less alarmingly loud and
near?
Mr. Topes sat, polishing his spectacles with a white silk handkerchief.
Vague and myopic between their puckered lids, his eyes seemed lost,
homeless, unhappy. He was thinking about beauty. There were certain
relations between the eyelids and the temples, between the breast and
the shoulder; there were certain successions of sounds. But what about
them? Ah, that was the problem--that was the problem. And there was
youth, there was innocence. But it was all very obscure, and there were
so many phrases, so many remembered pictures and melodies; he seemed to
get himself entangled among them. And he was after all so old and so
ineffective. He put on his spectacles again, and definition came into
the foggy world beyond his eyes. The shuttered room was very dark. He
could distinguish the Renaissance profile of Mr. Buzzacott, bearded and
delicately featured. In her deep arm-chair Barbara appeared, faintly
white, in an attitude relaxed and brooding. And Mrs. Topes was nothing
more than a voice in the darkness. She had got on to the marriage of the
Prince of Wales. Who would they eventually find for him?
Clara d'Ellébeuse, Clara d'Ellébeuse. She saw herself so clearly as the
_marchesa_. They would have a house in Rome, a palace. She saw herself
in the Palazzo Spada--it had such a lovely vaulted passage leading from
the courtyard to the gardens at the back. "MARCHESA PRAMPOLINI, PALAZZO
SPADA, ROMA"--a great big visiting-card beautifully engraved. And she
would go riding every day in the Pincio. "_Mi porta il mio cavallo_" she
would say to the footman, who answered the bell. _Porta_? Would that be
quite correct? Hardly. She'd have to take some proper Italian lessons to
talk to the servants. One must never be ridiculous before servants.
"_Voglio il mio cavallo._ Haughtily one would say it sitting at one's
writing-table in a riding-habit, without turning round. It would be a
green riding-habit, with a black tricorne hat, braided with silver.
"_Prendero la mia collazzione al letto."_ Was that right for breakfast
in bed? Because she would have breakfast in bed, always. And when she
got up there would be lovely looking glasses with three panels where one
could see oneself sideface. She saw herself leaning forward, powdering
her nose, carefully, scientifically. With the monkey creeping up behind?
Ooh. Horrible! _Ho paura di questa scimmia, questo scimmione_.
She would come back to lunch after her ride. Perhaps Prampolini would be
there; she had rather left him out of the picture so far. "_Dov' è il
Marchese?_" "_Nella sala di pranza, signora_." I began without you, I
was so hungry. _Pasta asciutta_. Where have you been, my love? Riding,
my dove. She supposed they'd get into the habit of saying that sort of
thing. Everyone seemed to. And you? I have been out with the Fascisti.
Oh, these Fascisti! Would life be worth living when he was always going
out with pistols and bombs and things? They would bring him back one day
on a stretcher. She saw it. Pale, pale, with blood on him. _Il signore
è ferito. Nel petto. Gruvamente. E morto_.
How could she bear it? It was too awful; too, too terrible. Her breath
came in a kind of sob; she shuddered as though she had been hurt. _E
morto, E morto_. The tears came into her eyes.
She was roused suddenly by a dazzling light. The storm had receded far
enough into the distance to permit of Mrs. Topes's opening the shutters.
"It's quite stopped raining."
To be disturbed in one's intimate sorrow and self-abandonment at a
death-bed by a stranger's intrusion, an alien voice.... Barbara turned
her face away from the light and surreptitiously wiped her eyes. They
might see and ask her why she had been crying. She hated Mrs. Topes for
opening the shutters; at the inrush of the light something beautiful had
flown, an emotion had vanished, irrecoverably. It was a sacrilege.
Mr. Buzzacott looked at his watch. "Too late, I fear, for a siesta now,"
he said. "Suppose we ring for an early tea."
"An endless succession of meals," said Mr. Topes, with a tremolo and a
sigh. "That's what life seems to be--real life."
"I have been calculating"--Mr. Buzzacott turned his pale green eyes
towards his guest--"that I may be able to afford that pretty little
_cinque_ cassone, after all. It would be a bit of a squeeze." He played
with his beard. "But still...."
After tea, Barbara and Mr. Topes went for a walk along the beach. She
didn't much want to go, but Mrs. Topes thought it would be good for her;
so she had to. The storm had passed and the sky over the sea was clear.
But the waves were still breaking with an incessant clamour on the outer
shallows, driving wide sheets of water high up the beach, twenty or
thirty yards above the line where, on a day of calm, the ripples
ordinarily expired. Smooth, shining expanses of water advanced and
receded like steel surfaces moved out and back by a huge machine.
Through the rain-washed air the mountains appeared with an incredible
clarity. Above them hung huge masses of cloud.
"Clouds over Carrara," said Mr. Topes, deprecating his remark with a
little shake of the head and a movement of the shoulders. "I like to
fancy sometimes that the spirits of the great sculptors lodge among
these marble hills, and that it is their unseen hands that carve the
clouds into these enormous splendid shapes. I imagine their ghosts"--his
voice trembled--"feeling about among superhuman conceptions, planning
huge groups and friezes and monumental figures with blowing draperies;
planning, conceiving, but never quite achieving. Look, there's something
of Michelangelo in that white cloud with the dark shadows underneath
it." Mr. Topes pointed, and Barbara, nodded and said, "Yes, yes," though
she wasn't quite sure which cloud he meant. "It's like Night on the
Medici tomb; all the power and passion are brooding inside it, pent up.
And there, in that sweeping, gesticulating piece of vapour--you see the
one I mean--there's a Bernini. All the passion's on the surface,
expressed; the gesture's caught at its most violent. And that sleek,
smug white fellow over there, that's a delicious absurd Canova." Mr.
Topes chuckled.
"Why do you always talk about art?" said Barbara. "You bring these dead
people into everything. What do I know about Canova or whoever it is?"
They were none of them alive. She thought of that dark face, bright as a
lamp with life. He at least wasn't dead. She wondered whether the
letters were still there in the sand before the cabin. No, of course
not; the rain and the wind would have blotted them out.
Mr. Topes was silent; he walked with slightly bent knees and his eyes
were fixed on the ground; he wore a speckled black-and-white straw hat.
He always thought of art; that was what was wrong with him. Like an old
tree he was; built up of dead wood, with only a few fibres of life to
keep him from rotting away. They walked on for a long time in silence.
"Here's the river," said Mr. Topes at last.
A few steps more and they were on the bank of a wide stream that came
down slowly through the plain to the sea. Just inland from the beach it
was fringed with pine trees; beyond the trees one could see the plain,
and beyond the plain were the mountains. In this calm light after the
storm everything looked strange. The colours seemed deeper and more
intense than at ordinary times. And though all was so clear, there was a
mysterious air of remoteness about the whole scene. There was no sound
except the continuous breathing of the sea. They stood for a little
while, looking; then turned back.
Far away along the beach two figures were slowly approaching. White
flannel trousers, a pink skirt.
"Nature," Mr. Topes enunciated, with a shake of the head. "One always
comes back to nature. At a moment such as this, in surroundings like
these, one realises it. One lives now--more quietly, perhaps, but more
profoundly. Deep watery. Deep waters...."
The figures drew closer. Wasn't it the marquis? And who was with him?
Barbara strained her eyes to see.
"Most of one's life," Mr. Topes went on, "is one prolonged effort to
prevent oneself thinking. Your father and I, we collect pictures and
read about the dead. Other people achieve the same results by drinking,
or breeding rabbits, or doing amateur carpentry. Anything rather than
think calmly about the important things."
Mr. Topes was silent. He looked about him, at the sea, at the mountains,
at the great clouds, at his companion. A frail Montagna madonna, with
the sea and the westering sun, the mountains and the storm, all eternity
as a background. And he was sixty, with all a life, immensely long and
yet timelessly short, behind him, an empty life. He thought of death and
the miracles of beauty; behind his round, glittering spectacles he felt
inclined to weep.
The approaching couple were quite near now.
"What a funny old walrus," said the lady.
"Walrus? Your natural history is quite wrong." The marquis laughed.
"He's much too dry to be a walrus. I should suggest some sort of an old
cat."
"Well, whatever he is, I'm sorry for that poor little girl. Think of
having nobody better to go about with!"
"Pretty, isn't she?"
"Yes, but too young, of course."
"I like the innocence."
"Innocence? Cher ami! These English girls. Oh, la la! They may look
innocent But, believe me...."
"Sh, sh. They'll hear you."
"Pooh, they don't understand Italian."
The marquis raised his hand. "The old walrus...." he whispered; then
addressed himself loudly and jovially to the newcomers.
"Good evening, signorina. Good evening, Mr. Topes. After a storm the air
is always the purest, don't you find, eh?"
Barbara nodded, leaving Mr. Topes to answer. It wasn't his sister. It
was the Russian woman, the one of whom Mrs. Topes used to say that it
was a disgrace she should be allowed to stay at the hotel. She had
turned away, dissociating herself from the conversation; Barbara looked
at the line of her averted face. Mr. Topes was saying something about
the Pastoral Symphony. Purple face powder in the daylight; it looked
hideous.
"Well, au revoir."
The flash of the marquis's smile was directed at them. The Russian woman
turned back from the sea, slightly bowed, smiled languidly. Her heavy
white eyelids were almost closed; she seemed the prey of an enormous
ennui.
"They jar a little," said Mr. Topes when they were out of earshot--"they
jar on the time, on the place, on the emotion. They haven't the
innocence for this ... this...."--he wriggled and tremoloed out the
just, the all too precious word--"this prelapsarian landscape."
He looked sideways at Barbara and wondered what she was so thoughtfully
frowning over. Oh, lovely and delicate young creature! What could he
adequately say of death and beauty and tenderness? Tenderness....
"All this," he went on desperately, and waved his hand to indicate the
sky, the sea, the mountains, "this scene is like something remembered,
clear and utterly calm; remembered across great gulfs of intervening
time."
But that was not really what he wanted to say.
"You see what I mean?" he asked dubiously. She made no reply. How could
she see? "This scene is so clear and pure and remote; you need the
corresponding emotion. Those people were out of harmony. They weren't
clear and pure enough." He seemed to be getting more muddled than ever.
"It's an emotion of the young and of the old. You could feel it, I could
feel it. Those people couldn't." He was feeling his way through
obscurities. Where would he finally arrive? "Certain poems express it.
You know Francis Jammes? I have thought so much of his work lately. Art
instead of life, as usual; but then I'm made that way. I can't help
thinking of Jammes. Those delicate, exquisite things he wrote about
Clara d'Ellébeuse."
"Clara d'Ellébeuse?" She stopped and stared at him.
"You know the lines?" Mr. Topes smiled delightedly. "This makes me
think, you make me think of them. '_F'aime dans les temps Clara
d'Ellébeuse_....' But, my dear Barbara, what is the matter?"
She had started crying, for no reason whatever.