Danyers afterwards liked to fancy that he had recognized Mrs. Anerton at
once; but that, of course, was absurd, since he had seen no portrait of
her--she affected a strict anonymity, refusing even her photograph
to the most privileged--and from Mrs. Memorall, whom he revered and
cultivated as her friend, he had extracted but the one impressionist
phrase: “Oh, well, she’s like one of those old prints where the lines
have the value of color.”
He was almost certain, at all events, that he had been thinking of Mrs.
Anerton as he sat over his breakfast in the empty hotel restaurant, and
that, looking up on the approach of the lady who seated herself at the
table near the window, he had said to himself, “_That might be she_.”
Ever since his Harvard days--he was still young enough to think of them
as immensely remote--Danyers had dreamed of Mrs. Anerton, the Silvia
of Vincent Rendle’s immortal sonnet-cycle, the Mrs. A. of the _Life and
Letters_. Her name was enshrined in some of the noblest English verse of
the nineteenth century--and of all past or future centuries, as Danyers,
from the stand-point of a maturer judgment, still believed. The first
reading of certain poems--of the _Antinous_, the _Pia Tolomei_, the
_Sonnets to Silvia_,--had been epochs in Danyers’s growth, and the verse
seemed to gain in mellowness, in amplitude, in meaning as one brought
to its interpretation more experience of life, a finer emotional sense.
Where, in his boyhood, he had felt only the perfect, the almost austere
beauty of form, the subtle interplay of vowel-sounds, the rush
and fulness of lyric emotion, he now thrilled to the close-packed
significance of each line, the allusiveness of each word--his
imagination lured hither and thither on fresh trails of thought, and
perpetually spurred by the sense that, beyond what he had already
discovered, more marvellous regions lay waiting to be explored. Danyers
had written, at college, the prize essay on Rendle’s poetry (it chanced
to be the moment of the great man’s death); he had fashioned the
fugitive verse of his own storm-and-stress period on the forms which
Rendle had first given to English metre; and when two years later
the _Life and Letters_ appeared, and the Silvia of the sonnets took
substance as Mrs. A., he had included in his worship of Rendle the woman
who had inspired not only such divine verse but such playful, tender,
incomparable prose.
Danyers never forgot the day when Mrs. Memorall happened to mention that
she knew Mrs. Anerton. He had known Mrs. Memorall for a year or more,
and had somewhat contemptuously classified her as the kind of woman who
runs cheap excursions to celebrities; when one afternoon she remarked,
as she put a second lump of sugar in his tea:
“Is it right this time? You’re almost as particular as Mary Anerton.”
“Mary Anerton?”
“Yes, I never _can_ remember how she likes her tea. Either it’s lemon
_with_ sugar, or lemon without sugar, or cream without either, and
whichever it is must be put into the cup before the tea is poured in;
and if one hasn’t remembered, one must begin all over again. I suppose
it was Vincent Rendle’s way of taking his tea and has become a sacred
rite.”
“Do you _know_ Mrs. Anerton?” cried Danyers, disturbed by this careless
familiarity with the habits of his divinity.
“‘And did I once see Shelley plain?’ Mercy, yes! She and I were at
school together--she’s an American, you know. We were at a _pension_
near Tours for nearly a year; then she went back to New York, and I
didn’t see her again till after her marriage. She and Anerton spent a
winter in Rome while my husband was attached to our Legation there,
and she used to be with us a great deal.” Mrs. Memorall smiled
reminiscently. “It was _the_ winter.”
“The winter they first met?”
“Precisely--but unluckily I left Rome just before the meeting took
place. Wasn’t it too bad? I might have been in the _Life and Letters_.
You know he mentions that stupid Madame Vodki, at whose house he first
saw her.”
“And did you see much of her after that?”
“Not during Rendle’s life. You know she has lived in Europe almost
entirely, and though I used to see her off and on when I went abroad,
she was always so engrossed, so preoccupied, that one felt one wasn’t
wanted. The fact is, she cared only about his friends--she separated
herself gradually from all her own people. Now, of course, it’s
different; she’s desperately lonely; she’s taken to writing to me now
and then; and last year, when she heard I was going abroad, she asked me
to meet her in Venice, and I spent a week with her there.”
“And Rendle?”
Mrs. Memorall smiled and shook her head. “Oh, I never was allowed a
peep at _him_; none of her old friends met him, except by accident.
Ill-natured people say that was the reason she kept him so long. If one
happened in while he was there, he was hustled into Anerton’s study,
and the husband mounted guard till the inopportune visitor had departed.
Anerton, you know, was really much more ridiculous about it than his
wife. Mary was too clever to lose her head, or at least to show she’d
lost it--but Anerton couldn’t conceal his pride in the conquest. I’ve
seen Mary shiver when he spoke of Rendle as _our poet_. Rendle always
had to have a certain seat at the dinner-table, away from the draught
and not too near the fire, and a box of cigars that no one else
was allowed to touch, and a writing-table of his own in Mary’s
sitting-room--and Anerton was always telling one of the great man’s
idiosyncrasies: how he never would cut the ends of his cigars, though
Anerton himself had given him a gold cutter set with a star-sapphire,
and how untidy his writing-table was, and how the house-maid had orders
always to bring the waste-paper basket to her mistress before emptying
it, lest some immortal verse should be thrown into the dust-bin.”
“The Anertons never separated, did they?”
“Separated? Bless you, no. He never would have left Rendle! And besides,
he was very fond of his wife.”
“And she?”
“Oh, she saw he was the kind of man who was fated to make himself
ridiculous, and she never interfered with his natural tendencies.”
From Mrs. Memorall, Danyers further learned that Mrs. Anerton, whose
husband had died some years before her poet, now divided her life
between Rome, where she had a small apartment, and England, where
she occasionally went to stay with those of her friends who had been
Rendle’s. She had been engaged, for some time after his death, in
editing some juvenilia which he had bequeathed to her care; but that
task being accomplished, she had been left without definite occupation,
and Mrs. Memorall, on the occasion of their last meeting, had found her
listless and out of spirits.
“She misses him too much--her life is too empty. I told her so--I told
her she ought to marry.”
“Oh!”
“Why not, pray? She’s a young woman still--what many people would call
young,” Mrs. Memorall interjected, with a parenthetic glance at the
mirror. “Why not accept the inevitable and begin over again? All the
King’s horses and all the King’s men won’t bring Rendle to life-and
besides, she didn’t marry _him_ when she had the chance.”
Danyers winced slightly at this rude fingering of his idol. Was it
possible that Mrs. Memorall did not see what an anti-climax such a
marriage would have been? Fancy Rendle “making an honest woman” of
Silvia; for so society would have viewed it! How such a reparation
would have vulgarized their past--it would have been like “restoring”
a masterpiece; and how exquisite must have been the perceptions of the
woman who, in defiance of appearances, and perhaps of her own secret
inclination, chose to go down to posterity as Silvia rather than as Mrs.
Vincent Rendle!
Mrs. Memorall, from this day forth, acquired an interest in Danyers’s
eyes. She was like a volume of unindexed and discursive memoirs, through
which he patiently plodded in the hope of finding embedded amid layers
of dusty twaddle some precious allusion to the subject of his thought.
When, some months later, he brought out his first slim volume, in which
the remodelled college essay on Rendle figured among a dozen, somewhat
overstudied “appreciations,” he offered a copy to Mrs. Memorall; who
surprised him, the next time they met, with the announcement that she
had sent the book to Mrs. Anerton.
Mrs. Anerton in due time wrote to thank her friend. Danyers was
privileged to read the few lines in which, in terms that suggested the
habit of “acknowledging” similar tributes, she spoke of the author’s
“feeling and insight,” and was “so glad of the opportunity,” etc.
He went away disappointed, without clearly knowing what else he had
expected.
The following spring, when he went abroad, Mrs. Memorall offered him
letters to everybody, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Louise
Michel. She did not include Mrs. Anerton, however, and Danyers knew,
from a previous conversation, that Silvia objected to people who
“brought letters.” He knew also that she travelled during the summer,
and was unlikely to return to Rome before the term of his holiday should
be reached, and the hope of meeting her was not included among his
anticipations.
The lady whose entrance broke upon his solitary repast in the restaurant
of the Hotel Villa d’Este had seated herself in such a way that her
profile was detached against the window; and thus viewed, her domed
forehead, small arched nose, and fastidious lip suggested a silhouette
of Marie Antoinette. In the lady’s dress and movements--in the very turn
of her wrist as she poured out her coffee--Danyers thought he detected
the same fastidiousness, the same air of tacitly excluding the obvious
and unexceptional. Here was a woman who had been much bored and keenly
interested. The waiter brought her a _Secolo,_ and as she bent above it
Danyers noticed that the hair rolled back from her forehead was
turning gray; but her figure was straight and slender, and she had the
invaluable gift of a girlish back.
The rush of Anglo-Saxon travel had not set toward the lakes, and with
the exception of an Italian family or two, and a hump-backed youth with
an _abbé_, Danyers and the lady had the marble halls of the Villa d’Este
to themselves.
When he returned from his morning ramble among the hills he saw her
sitting at one of the little tables at the edge of the lake. She was
writing, and a heap of books and newspapers lay on the table at her
side. That evening they met again in the garden. He had strolled out to
smoke a last cigarette before dinner, and under the black vaulting of
ilexes, near the steps leading down to the boat-landing, he found her
leaning on the parapet above the lake. At the sound of his approach she
turned and looked at him. She had thrown a black lace scarf over her
head, and in this sombre setting her face seemed thin and unhappy. He
remembered afterwards that her eyes, as they met his, expressed not so
much sorrow as profound discontent.
To his surprise she stepped toward him with a detaining gesture.
“Mr. Lewis Danyers, I believe?”
He bowed.
“I am Mrs. Anerton. I saw your name on the visitors’ list and wished to
thank you for an essay on Mr. Rendle’s poetry--or rather to tell you
how much I appreciated it. The book was sent to me last winter by Mrs.
Memorall.”
She spoke in even melancholy tones, as though the habit of perfunctory
utterance had robbed her voice of more spontaneous accents; but her
smile was charming. They sat down on a stone bench under the ilexes, and
she told him how much pleasure his essay had given her. She thought it
the best in the book--she was sure he had put more of himself into it
than into any other; was she not right in conjecturing that he had been
very deeply influenced by Mr. Rendle’s poetry? _Pour comprendre il faut
aimer_, and it seemed to her that, in some ways, he had penetrated the
poet’s inner meaning more completely than any other critic. There were
certain problems, of course, that he had left untouched; certain aspects
of that many-sided mind that he had perhaps failed to seize--
“But then you are young,” she concluded gently, “and one could not wish
you, as yet, the experience that a fuller understanding would imply.”