But how could he? He was in the middle of some work that. Some work
that. Damn it all. All right, he'd go.
I begged him before he went to come to dinner with me once when the
Princess would be present. No, no. Anything but that. I, in turn, became
angry. I analyzed the different kinds of fool he was. An hour later I
was saying that the mere fact of being loved so, whether one could
return it or not, put one under an obligation. More than an obligation
to be merely kind, an obligation to be grateful. Blair did not
understand, but consented at last on the difficult condition that I was
not to reveal to the Princess that he was leaving for Spain on the very
night of the dinner.
Of course, the Princess arrived early, so enchantingly dressed that I
fairly floundered in admitting her. She held tickets for the opera; one
no longer cared to hear _Salome_, but _Petrushka_ was being danced after
it, at ten-thirty. Blair's train left at eleven. He arrived and played
his most gracious. We were really very happy, all of us, as we sat by
the open window, smoking and talking long over Ottima's excellent
_zabiglione_ and harsh Trasteverine coffee.
It was a continual surprise to me to see that in Blair's presence she
was always a proud detached aristocrat. Even her faintly caressing
remarks were such as would not be noticed if one had let them fall to
someone with whom one was not secretly in love. Her fastidious pride
even drove her to exaggerating her impersonality; she teased him, she
pretended she did not hear when he addressed her, she pretended she was
in love with me. It was only when he was not present that she became
humble, even servile; only then could she even imagine calling on him
unasked. At last she rose: It's time to go to the Russian Ballet, she
said.
Blair excused himself: I'm sorry I must go back and work.
She looked as though a sword had gone through her. But surely,
three-quarters of an hour with Stravinsky is a part of your work. My
car's right here.
He remained firm. He too had a ticket for that night.
For a moment she looked blank. She had never met obstinacy under such
conditions and did not know what to do next. After a moment she bent her
head and pushed back her coffee-cup. Very well, she said lightly. If you
can't, you can't. Samuele and I shall go.
Their parting was grim. During the drive to the Constanzi she remained
silent, fingering the folds of her coat; during the ballet she sat at
the back of the box thinking, thinking, thinking, with staring dry eyes.
At the dose scores of friends pressed about her in the corridor. She
became gay: Let's go to the cabaret run by the Russian refugees, she
said. At the door of the cabaret she dismissed her chauffeur, telling
him that her maid need not sit up for her. We danced for a long time in
silence, her depression stealing back upon her.
When we left the hall the unfriendliest moonlight in the world was
flooding the street. We found a carriage and started towards her home.
But falling into the most earnest conversation in all our acquaintance
we failed to notice that the carriage had reached her door and had been
standing there for some time.
Look, Samuele, do not make me go to bed now. Let me go in and change my
clothes quickly. Then let us drive about and watch the sun come up over
the Campagna. Would that make you angry with me?
I assured her that it was just what I wanted and she hurried into the
house. I paid off the driver who was drunk and quarrelsome and when she
rejoined me we strolled through the streets talking and gradually
inviting a resigned drowsiness. We had experimented with vodka at the
cabaret and the alcohol conferred upon our minds the same mood that the
moonlight was shedding upon the icy bubble of the Pantheon. We strayed
into the courtyard of the Cancelleria and criticized the arches. We
returned to my rooms for cigarettes.
Last night I wasn't at all brave, she said, lying back in the darkness
on the sofa. I was desperate. That was before I received your
invitation. Could I go to see him or couldn't I? A week had gone by. I
asked myself would he feel ... well, insulted, if a lady knocked on his
door at ten o'clock. It was about ten o'clock. Really, there's nothing
peculiar about a lady's paying a perfectly impersonal call at about
nine-thirty. There's nothing self-conscious, Samuele, about my being
here now, for instance. Besides I had a perfectly good reason for going.
He asked me what I thought of La Villegiatura, and since then I had
read it. Now tell, my dear friend, would it have been ridiculous from
the American point of view if I had...?
Beautiful Alix, you are never ridiculous. But wasn't your meeting with
him tonight all the fresher, all the happier, just because you hadn't
seen him for so long?
Oh, how wise you are! she cried. God has sent you to me in my trouble.
Come by me and let me hold your hand. Are you ashamed of me when you
have seen me suffer so? I suppose I should be ashamed. You see me
without any dignity. You have kind eyes and I am not ashamed in front of
you. I think you must have loved too, for you take all my foolishness as
a matter of course. Oh, my dear Samuele, every now and then the thought
comes over me that he despises me. I have all the faults that he hasn't.
When I have this nightmare that he not only dislikes me but laughs at
me, yes, laughs at me, my heart stops beating and I blush for hours at a
time. The only way I can save myself then is by remembering that he has
said many kind things to me; that he sent me that book; that he has
asked after me. And then I pray God very simply to put into his mind
just a bit of regard for me. Just a bit of respect for those things ...
those things that other people seem to like in me.
We sat in silence for a time, her feverish hand plunged deep into mine
and her bright eyes gazing into the darkness. At last she began speaking
again in a lower voice:
He is good. He is reasonable. When I am analytical this way I unfit
myself for his loving me. I must learn to be simple. Yes. Look, you have
done so much for me, may I ask for one more favor. Play to me. I must
get out of my mind that wonderful music where Petrushka wrestles with
himself.
I felt ashamed of playing before her who played far better than any of
us, but I drew out my folios and started right through Gluck's _Armide_.
I had hoped that the inept performance would awaken an æsthetic
annoyance and so shake her out of her dejection, but I presently saw
that she had fallen asleep. After a long and adroit diminuendo I left
the piano, turned on a shaded light near her, and stole off into my own
room. I changed my clothes and lay down ready for the walk in which we
were to see the sun rise. I was trembling with a strange happy
excitement, made up partly of my love and pity for her, and partly from
the mere experience of eavesdropping on a beautiful spirit in the last
reaches of its pride and suffering. I was lying thus, proud and happy in
the role of guardian, when my heart suddenly stopped beating. She was
weeping in her sleep. Sighs welled up from the depths of her slumber,
hoarse protests, obstinate denials and moans followed one upon another.
Suddenly her broken breathing ceased and I knew she was awake. There was
a half-minute of silence; then a low call: Samuele.
Hardly had I appeared at the door before she cried: I know he despises
me. He runs away from me. He thinks me a foolish woman who pursues him.
He tells the servant to tell me he is out, but he stands behind the door
and hears me go away. What shall I do? I'd better not live. I'd better
not live any more. It's best, dear Samuele, that I go out right now, in
my own way, and stop all this mistaken, this, this, futile suffering of
mine. Do you see?
She had arisen and was groping for her hat. I really have courage enough
tonight, she muttered. He is too good and too simple for me to worry him
as I do. I'll just slip out ...
But Alix, I cried. We love you so. So many people love you.
You can't say that people love me. They like to greet me on the stairs.
They like to listen and smile. But no one has ever watched under my
window. No one has secretly learned what I do every hour of the day. No
one has ...
She lay back on the sofa, her cheeks flushed and wet. I talked to her
for a long time. I said that her genius was social, that she was made
for the delight of company, that she relieved others of the weight of
their own boredom, their disguised self-hatred. I promised her that she
could find happiness in the exercise of her gift. I could see by a
glimpse of her wet cheek turned away, that it calmed her to be told so,
for she possessed the one form of genius that is almost never praised to
its face. She grew more tranquil. After a pause she began talking in a
dreamy tone:
I will leave him alone. I will never see him again, she began. When I
was a girl and we lived on the mountains, Samuele, I had a pet goat
named Tertullien that I loved very much. One day Tertullien died. I
would not be comforted. I was hateful and obstinate. The nuns with whom
I went to school could do nothing with me and when it was my turn to
recite I refused to speak. At last my dear Mother Superior called me
into her room and at first I was very bad, even with her. But when she
began to tell me of her losses I flung my arms about her and wept for
the first time. As a punishment she made me stop everyone I met and say
to them twice: _God is sufficient_! _God is sufficient_!
After a pause she added: I know that it can be true for other people,
but I still wanted Tertullien. When is your patience with me coming to
an aid, Samuele?
Never, I said.
The windows were beginning to show the first light of dawn. Suddenly a
little bell rang out near by, a tinkle of purest silver.
Hush, she said. That's the earliest mass at some church.
Santa Maria in Trastevere is just around the corner.
Hurry!
We let ourselves out of the palace and breathed the cold gray air. A
mist seemed to hang low about the street; puffs of blue smoke lay in the
corners. A cat passed us. Shivering but elated we entered the church
joining two old women in wadded clothes and a laborer. The basilica
loomed above, the candles of our side-chapel picking out reflections in
the curious marbles and the gold of the mosaics in the vast black cave.
The service of the Mass was enrolled with expedition and accuracy. When
we came out a milky light had begun to fill the square. The shutters of
several shops were being lowered; drowsy passers-by made the diagonals
staggering; a woman was lowering her chickens in a basket from the fifth
story for a long day's scratching.
We walked over to the Aventine, crossing the Tiber which twisted like a
great yellow rope under a delicate fume. We stopped for a glass of sour
blue-black wine and a paper bag of peaches.
For the time at least the Princess seemed to herself to have forever
closed her mind to even the remotest hope that she would ever see Blair
again. Sitting on a stone bench on the gloomy Aventine while the sun
shouldered its way up through plunging orange clouds, we mused. She
seemed for a time to have fallen back into her old despondency; I
resumed the arguments that spoke more glowingly of her gifts.
Suddenly she straightened up. All right. I will try it for you. I must
do something. Where are you going today?
I murmured that Mme. Agaropoulos was giving a sort of a musicale: that
she was introducing a young compatriot who claimed to have discovered
the secret of ancient Greek music.
Write her a note. Telephone her. Ask her if I may come. I too shall
learn about ancient Greek music. I shall be introduced to everyone
there. I shall be asked to everyone's house. Listen, Samuele, since you
say it is my talent I shall get to know everyone in Rome. I shall die of
social engagements: Here lies the woman who never refused an invitation.
I shall meet two thousand people in ten days. I shall lay myself out to
please anybody on earth. And mind you, Samuele, if that does not nourish
me, we shall have to finish trying, you know....
Mme. Agaropoulos was staggered with joy when she discovered that the
unhoped for the unprocurable Princess was coming to her house. Mme.
Agaropoulos was not the slave of social categories, but she longed to
frequent the Cabala, as some long for the next world. She assumed that
in that company all was wit and love and peace. There one would find no
silly people, none envious, none quarrelsome. She had met the Princess
d'Espoli once and had ever since taken her as the type of person she
would herself have been if she had been better-looking, thinner and had
had more time to read, little realizing that all these had been more in
her power than in Alix, and that she had spoiled her own progress by
a lazy kindliness, great kindliness but lazy.
The Princess called for me in her car at five o'clock. It would be
impossible for me to describe her clothes; it is enough to say that she
had the most incredible power of supplying new angles, shades, lines,
that interpreted her character. This aptitude received added éclat from
her residence in Italy, for Italian women, though often more beautiful,
lack both figure and judgment. They anxiously spend enormous sums in
Paris and achieve nothing but bundles of rich stuffs that bulge or trail
or blow about them in effects they half guess to be unsuccessful, and
seek to repair with a display of stones.
We pursued the Via Po for a mile or two and alighted at the ugliest of
its houses, an example of that modern German architecture that has done
so much for factories. As we mounted the stairs she kept muttering:
Watch me! Watch me! In the hall we found a host of latecomers standing
with their fingers on their lip while from the drawing rooms there
issued the sound of passionate declamation accompanied by the plucking
of a lyre, the desolate _moto perpetuo_ of an oriental flute and a
rhythmic clapping of hands. In other words we had arrived too early; our
campaign for meeting two thousand souls in ten days was being balked at
the outset. Fretted we pushed on into the garden behind the house.
Sitting down on a stone bench, with the tragic ode still faintly
sounding in our ears we gave our attention to the spectacle in the
middle distance of a white-haired gentleman in a wheel-chair overflowing
with brightly-colored shawls. This was Jean Perraye; I told the Princess
of how Mme. Agaropoulos had found the saintly old French poet at the
point of death, wrapt in shawls in a wretched little hotel at Pisa, and
how by supplying him with tender interest, whole milk and a group of pet
animals she had restored his muse, comforted his last years and effected
his entrance into the French Academy. At this moment he was engaged in
addressing a circle of attentive cats. These six cats, intermittently
licking the fine silk of their shoulders, and casting polite glances at
their patron, were gray angoras, the color of cigarette ash. We had read
the poet's latest book and knew their names: six queens of France. We
practically dozed on the bench--the hot sunlight, the choruses of the
_Antigone_ behind and Jean Perraye's exordium to the queens of France
and Persia before, would have made drowsy even those who had not passed
a night of confession and tears.
When we came to ourselves the audition was over and the company, doubly
noisy after music, was shouting its appreciation. We re-entered the
house, hungry for pastry and encounters. A sea of hats, with scores of
self-conscious eyes staring about in perpetual search of new
salutations, marking down the Princess for their own; occasionally the
large stomach of a senator or an ambassador swathed in serge and bound
with a golden chain.
Who's the lady in the black hat? whispered Alix.
Signora Daveni, the great engineer's wife.
Fancy! Will you bring her to me or should you take me to her. No, I'll
go to her. Take me.
Signora Daveni was a plain little woman presenting the high lifted
forehead and fresh eyes of an idealistic boy. Her husband was one of
Italy's foremost engineers, an inventor of many tremendous trifles in
airplane construction and a bulwark of conservative methods in the
rising storm of labor agitation. The Signora was on every philanthropic
committee of any importance in the whole country and during the War had
directed incalculable labors. The consciousness of her responsibilities
combined with a touch of brusqueness from her humble extraction had
brought her into many a short triumphant struggle with cabinets and
senates and there are stories of her having sharply rebuked the vague,
well-intentioned interferences of the royal ladies of Savoy. Yet these
distinctions had only made her manners the simpler and her quick
cordiality was continually deflating the deference that was paid to her.
She dressed badly; she walked badly, her large feet pushing before her
like those of some jar-carrier in an upland village. It had been rather
fine in uniform, but now that she must return to hats and gowns and
rings the consciousness of her lack of grace caused her much depression.
Her home was in Turin, but she lived a great deal in Rome out among the
open lots of the Via Nomentana and knew everyone. The Princess with the
unexpectedness that lies in the very definition of genius turned the
conversation upon the use of sphagnum moss as a surgical dressing. The
diverse excellence of the two women glimpsed one another; the Princess
was astonished to find such quiet mastery in a woman without a _de_ and
the Signora was amazed to find the same quality in a noblewoman.
I drifted off, but presently the Princess rejoined me. She is real, that
woman. I am going to dinner with her Friday; so are you. Find me some
more. Who is that blonde with the voice?
You don't want to know her, Princess.
She must be important with that voice; who is she?
She is the woman in the whole world who is most your opposite.
Then I must know her. Will she give me tea and introduce me to a dozen
people?
Oh, yes, she'll do that. But you haven't a thing in common. She is a
narrow British woman, Princess. Her only interest is in the Protestant
Church. She lives in a little British hotel....
But where does she get that _authority_--and the Princess made a gesture
of perfect mimicry.
Well, I admitted, she has received the highest honors an Englishwoman
can receive. She wrote a hymn and they made her a Dame of the British
Empire.
You see I must be caught out of myself. I must meet her right now.
So I led her up to Dame Edith Steuert, Mrs. Edith Foster Prichard
Steuert, author of Far From Thy Ways, I Strayed, the greatest hymn since
Newman's. Daughter, wife, sister, what not, of clergymen, she lived in
the most exciting currents of Anglicanism. Her conversation ran on
vacant livings and promising young men from Shropshire, and on the
editorials in the latest _St. Georges Banner_ and _The Anglican Cry_.
She sat on platforms and raised subscriptions and got names. She seemed
to be forever surrounded by a ballet of curates and widows who at her
word, rose and swayed and passed the scones. For she was the author of
the greatest hymn of modern times and gazing at her one wondered when
the mood could have struck this loud conceited woman, the mood that had
prompted those eight verses of despair and humility. The hymn could have
been written by Cowper, that gentle soul exposed to the flame of an
evangelism too hot even for negroes. For one minute in her troubled
girlhood all the intermittent sincerity of generations of clergymen must
have combined in her, and late at night, full of dejections she could
not understand, she must have committed to her diary that heartbroken
confession. Then the fit was over, and over for ever. It was a telling
example of that great mystery in religious and artistic experience: the
occasional profundity of nobodies. Dame Edith Steuert on being
presented, straightened visibly to show that she was not impressed by
the title. With a candor that was another surprise, Alix asked her if
she might use her name as reference on her nephew's application for
entrance into Eton College. To be sure the nephew was in Lyons, but if
Dame Edith would permit the Princess to call upon her some afternoon she
would bring some of the boy's letters, photographs and sufficient
apparatus to convince her that he was a student recommendable. Friday
afternoon was agreed upon, and the Princess rejoined me for new
introductions.
So it went on for an hour. The Princess had no method; each new
encounter was a new problem. Within three minutes the meeting became an
acquaintance, and the acquaintance a friendship. Little did the new
friends guess how strange it was to her. She kept asking me what their
husbands "did." It delighted her to think that their husbands did
anything; she had never guessed that one could meet such people and
smiled amazedly like a girl about to meet a real printed poet. A
doctor's wife, the wife of a man in rubber, fancy.... Toward the end of
the afternoon her enthusiasm waned. I feel a little dusty, she
whispered. I feel very Bovary. To think that all this has been going on
in Rome without my knowing it. I'll go and say goodbye to Mme.
Agaropoulos,--_tiens_, who is that beautiful lady. That is an American,
isn't it? Quick.
For the only time in my life I saw the beautiful and unhappy Mrs. Darrell
who had come to take leave of her Roman friends. As she entered the room
a silence fell upon the company; there was something antique, something
Plato would have seized upon in the effect of her beauty. She made much
of it, with that touch of conceit that we allow to a great musician
listening exaggeratedly to his own perfect phrasing, or to the actor who
sets aside author, fellow-players and the fable itself, in order to
improvise the last excessive moments of a death scene. She dressed, she
glanced, she moved and spoke as only uncontested beauties may: she too
revived a lost fine art. To this virtuosity of appearing, her illness
and suffering had added a quality even she could not estimate, a magic
of implied melancholy. But all this perfection of hers was
unapproachable; none of her dearest friends, not even Miss Morrow, dared
to kiss her. She was like a statue in a solitude. She presuffered her
death, and her spirit was set in defiance. She hated every atom of a
creation where such things were possible. The next week she was to
retire to her villa at Capri with her collection of Mantegnas and
Bellinis and to live through four months with their treacherous
love-affair and to die. But this day in the serenity of the selfishness
that was her perfection and the selfishness that was her illness she
effaced the room.
He would have loved me if I had looked like that, breathed Alix into my
ear, and sinking into a retired chair covered her mouth with her hand.
Mme. Agaropoulos took Helen Darrell's fingertips a little timidly and
led her to the finest chair. No one seemed able to say anything. Luigi
and Vittorio, sons of the house, went up and kissed her hand; the
American ambassador approached to compliment her.
She is beautiful. She is beautiful, muttered Alix to herself. The world
is hers. She will never have to suffer as I must. She is beautiful.
It would not have consoled the Princess if I had explained to her that
Helen Darrell, having been admired extravagantly from the cradle had
never been obliged to cultivate her intelligence to retain her friends
and that, if I may say it respectfully, her mind was still that of a
school-girl.
Fortunately the flautist was still there to play and during the
performance of the Paradise music from Orpheus scarcely a pair of eyes
in the room left the newcomer's face. She sat perfectly straight,
allowing herself none of the becoming attitudes which music suggests to
her kind, no ardent attention, no starry-eyed revery. I remember
thinking she marked too deliberately the anti-sentimental. When the
music was over she asked to be taken to say goodbye, for the present,
to Jean Perraye. From the window I could see them alone together, with
the gray cats, queens of France, moving meaninglessly about them. One
wonders what they said to one another as she knelt beside his chair: as
he said later, they loved one another because they were ill.
Alix d'Espoli would not stir until she knew that Mrs. Darrell had left
the house and garden. All her suffering had rushed back upon her. She
pretended to be sipping a cup of tea while she gathered herself
together. I understand now, she murmured hoarsely. God has never meant
me to be happy. Others may be happy with one another. But I shall never
be. I know that now. Let us go.
Then began what was ever after known to the Cabala as Alix aux Enfers.
She would lunch at a tiny pension with some English spinsters; stop in
at some studio in the Via Margutta; pass through a reception at an
Embassy; dance till seven at the Hotel Russie as the guest of some
cosmetic manufacturer's wife; dine with the Queen Mother; hear the last
two acts of the Opera in Marconi's box. Even after that she might feel
the need of finishing the day at the Russian cabaret, perhaps
contributing herself a monologue to the program. She no longer had any
time to see the Cabala and it watched her progress with terror. They
begged her to come back to them, but she only laughed at them with her
bright febrile eyes and dashed off into her new-found whirlpools. Long
after when some Roman name arose in their conversation they would all
cry: Alix knows them! To which she would reply coolly: Of course I know
them, and a roar would arise from the table. The acquaintances she was
now pursuing for distraction, I had long since pursued for study or from
simple liking; but she soon outstripped me by the hundreds. I went to a
few engagements with her, but often enough we would come upon one
another in ludicrous situations; whereupon we would retire behind a door
and compare notes as to how we got there. Did Commendatore Boni ask a
few people to the Palatine? she was there. Did Benedetto Croce give a
private reading of a paper on George Sand? we glimpsed one another
gravely in that solemn air. She lost a comb in defence of Reality at the
stormy opening of Pirandello's Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore; at
Casella's party for Mengelberg, who had been surpassing himself at the
Augusteo, dear old Bossi stood on her train and the sound of ripping
satin caught the enraptured ear of a dozen organists.
When the bourgeoisie discovered that she was accepting invitations there
was a tumult as of many waters. Most of her hostesses assumed that she
would not have come to them were it not for the fact that better doors
were beginning to be closed against her, but fair or foul they would
accept her. And they had her at her best; the faint touch of frenzy that
was driving her on only rendered her gift the more dazzling. People who
had spent their lives laughing at tiresome jokes were now given
something to laugh at. She would be begged to do this or that "bit"
which had become famous. Have you heard Alix do the Talking Horse? No,
but she did the Kronprinz in Frascati for us last Friday. Oh, aren't you
lucky!
For the first time she was seeing something of artists and among them
she was enjoying her liveliest successes. The underpainting of her
misery which especially these days rendered her wit so magical was much
clearer to them than to the manufacturers. They never failed to mention
it and their love led them to paying her the strangest tributes which at
the time she was in too great a daze to stop and value.
For a while I thought she was enjoying all this. She would laugh so
naturally over some of the accidents of the days. Moreover I noticed
that she was forming some very rare attachments and I hoped that the
friendship of Signora Daveni or of Duse or of Besnard would be able to
comfort and finally reconcile her. But one evening I was suddenly shown
how utterly ineffectual this plunging about the jungle was.
After a month's absence James Blair wrote me from Spain that he had to
come back to Rome, even if it were only for a week. He promised to see
no one, to keep up side-streets and to get out as soon as it was
possible.
I wrote him back in the strongest profanity that it was impossible. Go
anywhere else. Don't fool with such things.
He replied, no less angry, that he could move about the earth as freely
as everybody else. Whether I liked it or not he was coming to Rome the
following Wednesday and nothing would stop him. He was on the traces of
the Alchemists. He wanted to know all that was left of the old secret
societies and his search was leading to Rome. Since I could do nothing
to prevent his coming I could at least devote my energies to concealing
it. I took almost ridiculous precautions. I even saw to it that Mlle de
Morfontaine had Alix in Tivoli over the week-end and that Besnard had
her sitting for a portrait most of the mornings. But there is a certain
spiritual law that requires our tragic coincidences. Which of us has not
felt it? Take no precautions.
The seer whom Blair had returned to visit, Sareptor Basilis, lived in
three rooms on the top floor of an old palace in the Via Fontanella di
Borghese. Rumor had it that he could make lightning play about his left
hand and that when his meditations approached ecstacy he could be seen
sitting among the broken arcs of a dozen rainbows; and that as you
mounted the dark stairs you fought your way through the welcoming ghosts
as through a swarm of bees. In the front room where the meetings were
held (Wednesdays for adepts, Saturdays for beginners) one was awed by
discovering a circular hole in the roof that was never closed. Under it
had been laid a zinc-lined depression that carried off the rain water
and in this depression stood the master's chair.
Long meditation and ecstatic trances had certainly beautified his face.
His blue-green eyes, not incapable of sudden acuteness, drifted vaguely
about under a smooth pink forehead; he had the bushy white eyebrows and
beard of Blake's Creator. Except for his long walks he seemed to have no
private life, but sat all day and night under the hole in the roof,
lending an ear to a whispering visitor, writing slowly with his left
hand, or gazing up into the sky. A host of people from every walk of
life sought him out and held him in reverence. He gave no thought to
practical necessities, for his admirers, spiritually prompted, were
continually leaving significant looking envelopes beside him on the
zinc-lined depression. Some left bottles of wine and bars of bread, and
brown silk shirts. The only human occupation that arrested his attention
was music, and it is said that he would stand by the door of the
Augusteo on the afternoon of a symphony concert and wait for some
passerby, spiritually prompted, to buy him a ticket. If none came, he
would continue on his way without bitterness. He composed music himself,
hymns for unaccompanied voices which he affirmed he had heard in dream.
They were written in a notation resembling our own, but not sufficiently
so to allow of transcription. I have puzzled for hours over the score of
a certain _Lo, where the rose of dispersion empurples the dawn_. This
motet for ten voices, a chorus of angels on the last day, began plainly
enough with the treble clef on five staves, but how was one to interpret
a sudden shrinkage of the horizontal lines to two in all parts? I humbly
approached the master on this subject. He replied that the effect of the
music at that point could only be expressed by a radical departure from
standard notation; that the economy of staves denoted an acuity of
pitch; that the note on which my thumb was reposing was an E, a violet
E, an E of the quality of a lately-warmed amethyst ... music powerless
to express ... ah ... the rose of dispersion empurples. At first the
nonsense in which he moved and thought enraged me. I invented
opportunities for provoking his absurdity. I improvised a story about a
pilgrim who had come up to me in the nave of the Lateran and told me it
was God's will that I should return with him to a leper colony in
Australia. Dear Master, I cried, how shall I know if this be my real
vocation? His answer was not clear. I was told that destiny herself was
the mother of decision, and that my vocation would be settled by events
not by consideration. In the next breath I was bidden to do nothing
rashly; to lay my ear over the lute of eternity and to plan my life in
harmony with the cosmic overtones. During the course of a year thousands
of women visited him, of every rank, and in every sort of perplexity,
and to each one he offered the comforts of metaphor. They came away from
him with shining faces; these phrases were beautiful and profound to
them; they wrote them in their diaries and murmured them over to
themselves when they were tired.
Basilis was attended by two homely sisters, the Adolfini girls. Lise
must have been thirty and Vanna about twenty-eight. They say that he ran
across them in the Italian quarter of London where they were serving as
attendants in a ballet school. Penury and abuse had left them scarcely
the human semblance. Every evening at eleven when they had unlaced the
last slipper of the night class, treated the floor with tallow, polished
the bars and tied up the chandelier, they went around the corner to the
Café Roma for a thimbleful of coffee to sip with their bread. Here
Basilis was to be found, a photographer's assistant with grandiose
pretensions. He was vice-president of the Rosicrucian Mysteries, Soho
Chapter, a group of clerks, waiters and idealistic barbers who found
compensation for the humiliations they underwent by day in the glories
they ascribed to themselves by night. They met in darkened rooms, took
oaths with one hand resting on the works of Swedenborg, read papers on
the fabrication of gold and its metaphysical implications, and elected
one another with great earnestness to the offices of arch-adept and
_magister hieraticorum_. They corresponded with similar societies in
Birmingham, Paris and Sydney, and sent sums of money to the last of the
magi, Orzinda-Mazda of Mount Sinai. Basilis first discovered his power
over the minds of women when he fell into the habit of talking to the
two mute sisters in the café. They listened wide-eyed to his stories of
how some workmen near Rome, breaking by chance into the tomb of Cicero's
daughter, Tulliola, discovered an ever-burning lamp suspended in
mid-air, its wick feeding on Perpetual Principle; of how Cleopatra's son
Cæsarion was preserved in a translucent liquid "oil of gold," and could
be still seen in an underground shrine at Vienna; and of how Virgil
never died, but was alive still on the Island of Patmos, eating the
leaves of a peculiar tree. The wonder-stories, the narrator's
apocalyptic eyes, the excitement of being spoken to without anger, and
the occasional offer of Vermouth bewitched the sisters. They became his
unquestioning slaves; with the money they had saved up he opened a
Temple where his gift met extraordinary success. The girls left the
ballet school and became doorkeepers in the house of their lord. The new
leisure into which they entered, the sufficient food, the privilege of
serving Basilis, his confidence and his love, combined to constitute a
burden of happiness almost too great to be borne. Happiness is in
proportion to humility: the humility of the Adolfini girls was so
profound that there was in it no room for the expression of gratitude or
surprise; in the face of it food could not fatten them nor love soften
their bony features; not even when after some altercation with the
London police Basilis and his handmaidens removed to their native Rome.
To be sure the master in turn never confessed his indebtedness to the
girls for their silent and skillful ministration. Even in love he was
impersonal; they merely provided him with that mood of gentle satiety of
the senses which is an indispensable element of the philosopher's
meditation.
It was under this skylight then that Blair and I sat at about
eleven-thirty, waiting for the public séance to begin. We were early,
and leaning back against the wall we watched the little group of
visitors that one by one moved up to the unboxed confessional that was
the master's ear. A clerk with watery eyes and trembling hands; a stout
lady of the middle class, gripping a large shopping purse and talking
with great rapidity about her _nepote_; a trim little professional
woman, probably a lady's maid, stuffing a tiny handkerchief into her
mouth as she sobbed. Basilis' eyes seldom strayed to his visitors'
faces, while he dismissed them with a few measured grave sentences his
glance revealed nothing but its serene abstraction. Presently a younger
woman, heavily veiled, crossed the floor swiftly to the empty chair
beside him. She must have been there before, for she lost no time in
greetings. Under deep emotion she pleaded with him. A little surprised
by her vehemence he interrupted her several times with the words _Mia
figlia_. The reproaches only increased her energy, and brushing back her
veil with her hand in order to thrust her face into the sage's she
revealed herself as Alix d'Espoli. Terror went through me; I seized
Blair's arm and made signs that we were to escape. But at that moment
the Princess with a gesture of anger, as though she had come, not so
much to ask the sage's counsel, as to announce a determination, rose and
turned to the door. Unerringly her eyes met ours, and the rebellious
light died out, to be replaced by fear. For a moment the three of us
hung suspended on one cord of horror. Then the Princess collected
herself long enough to tincture the despairing contraction of her mouth
with a smile; she bowed to us deliberately in turn and passed almost
majestically from the room.
At once I returned home and wrote her a long letter, using the whole
truth as a surgeon in an extremity would resort to a wholesale guesswork
with the knife. I never received an answer. And our friendship was over.
I had often to meet her again, and we even came finally to have
agreeable conversations together, but we never mentioned the affair and
there was a glaze of impersonality over her eyes.
From the night she had seen us in Basilis' rooms the Princess gave up
her social researches as abruptly as she had begun them. Nor did she
ever go to the Rosicrucian again. I heard that she was attempting the
few remaining consolations that lie open to affliction: she took to the
fine arts; she climbed up ladders respectfully placed for her in the
Sistine Chapel and stared at the frescos through magnifying glasses; she
resumed the culture of her voice and even sang a little in public. She
started off on a trip to Greece, but came back without any explanations
a week later. There was a hospital phase during which she cut off her
hair and tiptoed about among the wards.
At last the beating of the wings, the darting about the cage, subsided.
She had come to the second stage of convalescence: the mental pain that
had been so great that it had to be passed into the physical and that
expressed itself in movement, had now sufficiently abated to permit her
to think. All her vivacity left her and she sat about in her friends'
homes listening to their visitors.
Little by little then her old graces began to reappear. First a few wry
sarcasms, gently slipping off her tongue; then some rueful narratives in
which she appeared in a poor light; then ever so gradually the wit, the
energy, and last of all the humor.
The whole Cabala trembled with joy, but pretended to have noticed
nothing. Only one night when for the first time at table she had
returned to her gorgeous habit of teasing the Cardinal on his Chinese
habits, only once on leaving the table did he take her two hands and
gaze deep into her eyes with a significant smile that both reproached
her for her long absence and welcomed her back. She blushed slightly and
kissed the sapphire.
I, who know nothing about such things, assumed that the grand passion
was over and dreaded any moment seeing her interesting herself in some
new Northerner. But one little incident taught me how deep a wound may
be.
One afternoon at the villa in Tivoli we were standing on the balcony
overlooking the falls. Whenever she was left alone with me her charm
abated; she seemed to be fearing that I might attempt a confidence; the
muscles at the corners of her mouth would tighten. We were joined from
the house by a well-known Danish archaeologist who began to discourse
upon the waterfall and its classical associations. Suddenly he stopped
and turning to me, cried:
Oh, I have a message for you. How could I have forgotten that! I met a
friend of yours in Paris. A young American named Blair--let me see, was
it Blair?
Yes, Doctor.
What a young man! How many of you Americans are like that? I suppose you
never met him, Princess? ...
Yes, replied Alix, I knew him too.
Such intelligence! He is surely the greatest instinctive scholar I have
ever met, and, believe me, perhaps he is all the greater for never
putting anything down on paper. And such modesty, Princess,--the modesty
of the great scholar that knows that all the learning one human head can
hold is but a grain of dust. I spent two whole nights over his notebooks
and I honestly felt as though I had brushed against a Leonardo, really,
a Leonardo.
We both stood rapt, listening to the waves of happy praise when suddenly
I became aware that the Princess had fainted beside me with a happy
smile upon her face.