Why Sophia Jervis went to Sant' Ambrogio she herself could not have
told; to all outward seeming she merely drifted there, influenced by the
many little urgencies of travel--the name seen casually in a guide-book
and all unnoticed stamping itself on her brain; a chance mention of the
place caught from some fellow-traveller, aided by the fact that the
time-table had happened to open at the words "Sant' Ambrogio"--these
were the trifles by which the power stronger than herself guided Sophia,
with such cunning manipulation, such a fine lack of insistence even on
the trifles, that she was unaware of any power at work. Also she was in
that numbed condition which mercifully follows any great straining of
emotion; even pain lay quiescent, though rather in a swoon than a
sleep--a mere blankness from which it would struggle up more insistent
than before.
When Sophia alighted from the train at the nearest station for Sant'
Ambrogio, and found the carriage she had ordered awaiting her, she was
not in the mood to take joy in anything she saw; and yet, as the wiry
little Tuscan horse trotted swiftly along she found herself, though not
actually responding, at least offering no blank wall of resistance to
the country around. To say country, as though a landscape consisted of
mere earth and vegetation, is to make an incomplete statement; the
quality of the light, the harmony or discordance where man's work meets
Nature; and, above all, the intangible atmosphere, rarer and more vital
than the actual enveloping air, that is the soul of a country--all these
are of more potency than the position of a clump of trees or the
existence of a particular crop. And nowhere is this atmosphere more
elusive but more compelling than in Tuscany at spring time. Sophia was
too deadened to respond, but she felt the echo of the thing, as it were,
in much the same way that a stone-deaf person feels vibrations run
through the floor and up his chair to his spine when certain chords are
played on an organ.
It is a drive of about five miles from the railway station to Sant'
Ambrogio, and the road winds across the plain, sometimes rising and
falling, always leading towards the rim of interfolding hills. In the
vineyards the vines, naked at first glance, were just beginning to
flower, and the rows of pollarded planes from which they were festooned
showed a glory of young leaf. The maize was a couple of feet in height,
and where the sun shone through the blades of it they looked like thin
green flames. The heat was intense, and the air seemed stifled with the
subtle smell of the dust that lay thickly over the road and powdered the
grassy edges. The whole plain of Tuscany, apparently empty of human
life, and consequently filled with a sense of utter peace, seemed a vast
green platter brimming with a divine ether and held up towards the
heavens by the steady hands of genii. Only Sophia's carriage showed like
a black insect winging a course fast enough to itself but slow to the
gaze of any being who, looking down on this dish held for the gods,
could see the whole expanse of it at once.
Everywhere was a sense of light--light steeping the sky, drenching the
earth, and vibrating in the spaces between; light that gave a gracious
blur to edges, that refracted from each subtle difference of plane and
angle; light that permeated the very shadows so that they seemed
semi-transparent. One with this sense of light, as body is one with
soul, was the sense of colour--tender greens, at once pure and delicate;
blues that paled to the merest breath or merged in a soft purple. The
wideness of the view gave full value to the exquisitely fine curves
which composed it--the curves of outline where hills and long sweeping
slopes came against the sky, and the curves of surfaces, which
inter-folded and led into each other like the waters of a vast lake
where Time has stayed his foot and the spellbound water holds for ever
the slopes and gradations blown into being by an arrested wind.
Something--an emotion impersonal in itself yet arousing the personality
in her--began to stir at Sophia's heart; then, as the carriage rounded a
curve in the road and she received the shock of Sant' Ambrogio against
the distant arch of the sky, sudden tears burned in her eyelids. Leaning
back as well as she could against the uncompromising cushions, she gazed
from between lids half-closed so as to narrow her vision on the one
thing.
Sant' Ambrogio is a little city of towers, some twenty of them, varying
in height, all clustered together within the circling walls and pricking
the sky like a group of tall-stemmed flowers in a garden. The town
seems to have grown rather than been built on the crest of the only
great hill for miles, but the ripples of the plain all converge towards
it, leading the eye naturally up to this little crown of Tuscany. When
they considered a tower a reminder of God, the ancients were not without
a deeper spiritual foundation than they knew of; there is nothing of
more direct psychological significance than line, and the many
upward-springing lines of Sant' Ambrogio made it seem a thing so lightly
poised as almost to be hanging from the heavens. A sense of something
winged, which, though just resting on the earth, yet had plumes ready
pricked for flight, impressed itself on Sophia's brain as she gazed.
"This might have been beautiful for me if only I could still feel," was
her swift thought, and she closed her eyes to let the gleam of light
thus evoked sink into her mind. As she lay with her consciousness turned
inwards, the deadened fibres of her began to stir; pain moved in its
swoon, and, waking, took the keenest form of all--remembrance. Quite
suddenly there flashed before her mental vision the loggia at the top of
the old palace in Florence where she and Richard had said good-bye. She,
who was to see the cords of passion grow slack, had there seen them
stretched at their tensest, and the memory of it clutched at her heart
with that pity for him which had kept her calm for his comfort. Now,
mingled with it, was her own pain, which, at the time, her thought for
him had overwhelmed. She saw again his face as she had seen it then--his
thin, hawk-like profile dark and sharply-cut against the evening sky.
With the memory of the pain that had gone through her at that moment,
the power to feel stirred again, and it was that moment which struck at
her anew. Her hands fastened suddenly on the hot sides of the carriage.
"Oh, oh!" she said in the low voice that overwhelming sorrow can wring
from the tongue, a soliloquy terrible in its unself-consciousness: "oh,
oh! I can't bear it; I can't bear it!"
As the horse slowed down at the beginning of the hill, the first
poignancy of Sophia's reawakened feeling passed off, and she lay back,
her hands laying palm upwards in her lap. With entry into the town came
coolness; the ancient architects of the South knew better than to favour
the broad streets planned by their descendants, and the narrow ways
threaded so cunningly between the tall cliffs of houses were cool as
shadowed streams. The greyness of the paved street fell like a
suggestion of peace on Sophia after the searching sunlight of the plain,
and the acuteness of her mental trouble subsided in response to the
sense of physical ease; she had regained her grip of herself when the
carriage drew up at the door of the Albergo Santo Spirito.
The Albergo is a whitewashed building set round a courtyard; clean,
unfretted by detail, full of dim, sweet spaces and gay domestic sounds.
Sophia, aware of its charm, yet realized, on looking back afterwards,
that she had also been aware that the inn was for her but the
ante-chamber to some other place or state, as yet unrevealed. At the
time she was only conscious that a sense of waiting held the calm air,
though, if she had thought to ask herself the question, she would have
said that life held nothing for which it could be worth her while to
wait.
After she had washed her face and hands in the bare little whitewashed
room assigned to her, she went out to wander about the town till dinner.
Motorists have not yet spoiled the population of Sant' Ambrogio, and,
unmolested by any clamour for alms, Sophia passed along the shady
street, where the black-haired, kerchiefed women, with their fine,
rock-hewn faces and deep-set eyes, were knitting at their house doors.
In the big, cool church, whose walls of banded black and white marble
were quieted by the dim light, which just showed the dark gargoyles
writhing like things of a dream over cornice and capital, Sophia knelt
down, more to wrap herself in the peace of it than to pray. The very
keenness of her cry for peace made her fail, and rising she wandered
round the church till she came to the little chapel on whose walls the
life of the town's saint, Beata, has been painted by some "Ignoto" who
must have had a touch of genius. Sophia stood and gazed at the various
scenes. Santa Beata, a child with corn-coloured hair lying along her
back, running away from her resentful playmates, a set of curly-headed,
sly, pinching, clear-eyed ragamuffins, such as those who quarrel and
play in the streets of Sant' Ambrogio to this day. Santa Beata, wrapped
in a cloud, conversing with the Beloved, while the children search the
field vainly for her--the Beloved Himself being naively expressed by
what looked like a small bonfire, but proved, in a strange medley of
legend and Old Testament story, to be a burning bush. Santa Beata vowing
herself to virginity and lying down on the narrow maiden bed she never
left again; Santa Beata being visited by cherubim--little burning heads
with awful eyes and folded wings--blown in at the door, while through
the window showed the plain of Tuscany, pale silvery greens and blues,
and in the distance Sant' Ambrogio himself, wafted on a cloud,
approached the town to bear the saint away. By her side crouched her old
mother, a knotted burnt-out woman with long wrists, just a literal
transcript of many a prematurely old peasant mother before and since,
her patient eyes seeing no one but her daughter.
The more she looked at Santa Beata the more Sophia, who without thinking
much about it had a realization of her own type, was struck by the
resemblance between them. The red-brown hair folded about Sophia's head
was darker than the locks that lay combed out over the saint's pillow,
but the long oval of the faces, the girlish thinness of modelling and
the narrow eyes set in heavily folded lids over rather prominent
cheekbones, were the same; and the same, too, were the pointed chins and
the delicately full lips tucked in at the corners like those of a child.
Santa Beata had only been sixteen at the time of her death and Sophia
was twenty-two, but the earlier ripening of the South made the apparent
years swing level. Suddenly Sophia turned away, fierce envy of this
untroubled girl who had finished long ago with the business of life
surging in her heart. The memory of the past weeks seemed shameful and
she herself not fit to hold intercourse with other girls--girls to whom
things had not happened. In that moment Sophia knew she had lost her
girlhood none the less surely for having saved her virginity, which
three things had helped to guard--a clarity of pre-vision which bade her
not give Richard even what he most desired, because it showed her that
it must inevitably work him misery; the knowledge that he did not love
her finely enough for such a gift to be fitting; and thirdly, the
strongest thing of all--that no one who is accustomed, however
imperfectly, to walk in the spiritual world, can lightly forgo the
privilege. "I should have been afraid of losing touch," Sophia said long
after, when she saw how that fear had constrained her. Now, looking at
Santa Beata and realizing more vividly than ever before the power which
virginity, as an idea, has always swayed, she felt she had forfeited, by
her gain in experience, communion with those who were still virginal in
soul as well as in body. On the steps of the church she passed some
children playing--children still at the age when their heads are very
big and round--and she remembered how, in a half-ruined castle Richard
and she had visited together, two little peasant girls, clear-eyed,
freckled young creatures, had taken them for husband and wife; and how
one demanded shyly whether she had a baby at home. "No, I have no baby,"
Sophia had said quietly, and the child replied: "What a pity! He would
be sweet, your baby. . . ."
"He would be sweet . . . my baby," thought Sophia, staring at the big
round heads and little necks with that pang of yearning pity without
which she could never look on children. It is a great truth that no
woman has ever loved a man unless she has wanted to bear him a child,
and the knowledge that she would never make this greatest of all
offerings to Richard pressed on Sophia's heart. She was not one of those
women who desire children as an end in themselves, to whom they would
mean more than the husband; she was of those who long to bear them to
the loved man because for him the utmost must be suffered and given;
but for any other man it would be a thing unspeakable. Therefore she saw
the best put out of life for her, and she hurried away from the children
on the steps. Turning down a narrow lane she came to a door in the wall,
and pushing it open she looked into what seemed a lake of green light,
flecked with swaying rounds of sun and chequered with deeper green
shadows--a garden run luxuriantly wild. Sophia stepped inside, and on
her right, built half against and half on the wall, she saw a little
ochre-washed house with faded blue shutters. Wandering on, she came to
some lilacs in hard, red bud that hung over a well, and passing under
the arch they made she found the further end of the garden. There a
flight of uneven old steps led to the top of the wall, and she went up
them. At the head of the steps, the wall--which was the outer
fortification of the town--widened into a circle some twenty feet
across, with a stone seat inset in the parapet that ran round it, and a
sundial without a hand in the middle. Sophia stood still and drew a long
breath--the place, in its look of eld and aloofness, was so exactly like
some enchanted spot in a fairy-story. Crossing the flagstones she looked
out over the miles of plain lying below her; here and there were patches
of olive-trees, not growing in masses like a grey-green sea as they did
further north where he and she had seen them, but planted far apart;
from where Sophia stood they looked like nothing so much as clouds of
dust puffing up from the ground.
Sophia stretched herself long and slowly; then throwing off her hat, she
laid her arms along the parapet and her sleek head down upon them.
"Oh, I wish I hadn't come," she moaned. "I'm going to feel again. . . ."
Her hand went out to the little hanging bag she carried and drew back
again, then setting her mouth, she made herself unfasten the clasp and
take out a bundle of letters which she laid on the seat beside her. As
her eyes lit on the familiar writing a deadly nausea took hold of her,
she felt physically sick and put her hand up to her throat to check its
contraction. A letter from him always affected her in that way, so that
she sat, sick and faint, unable to open it, and now these oft-read
letters were as potent as ever. She noted with a vague, impersonal
surprise that her hands were shaking, and folding them in her lap she
sat still, forcing her thoughts, in spite of the pain it stirred in her,
to go back over the past two weeks.