CLASSIC GRIEF
Nancy was lost at first in the _pensione_ to which Kenrick had
entrusted her. The bareness of it seemed to reflect the bareness of
her own mind amid the unmeaning sounds of a strange tongue. During
the first week she felt that she should never, stayed she in Naples
for years, acquire a single word of Italian, and the week after she
was convinced that she should never be able to say anything more than
the Italian for “yes,” “no,” “please,” “thanks,” “good night,” “good
morning,” and “bread.” For a fortnight she was so completely stunned
by the swarming rackety city that she spent all her spare time in the
aquarium, contemplating the sea-anemones. The stories of great singers
with which Signor Arcucci was to have entertained her leisure seemed
indefinitely postponed at her present rate of progress with Italian.
She should have to become proficient indeed to follow the rapid
hoarseness of that faded voice. Meanwhile, she must wrestle with an
unreasonable upside down language in which _aqua calda_ meant hot water
and not, as one might suppose, cold. Nancy cursed her lack of education
a hundred times a day, and an equal number of times she thanked Heaven
that Letizia already knew twenty-two Italian words and could say the
present indicative of the verb “to be.” Signora Arcucci was a plump
waxen-faced Neapolitan housewife who followed the English tradition
of supposing that a foreigner would understand her more easily if she
shouted everything she had to say about four times as loud as she spoke
ordinarily. She used to heap up Nancy’s plate with spaghetti; and,
as Nancy could not politely excuse herself from eating any more, she
simply had to work her way through the slithery pyramid until she felt
as if she must burst.
Nor did Maestro Gambone do anything to make up for the state of
discouragement into which her unfamiliar surroundings and her inability
to talk had plunged her. Nancy found his little apartment at the top
of a tall tumbledown yellow house that was clinging to the side of
the almost sheer Vomero. He was a tiny man with snow-white hair and
imperial and jet-black eyebrows and moustache. With his glittering
eyes he reminded her of a much polished five of dominos, and when he
wanted anything in a hurry (and he always did want things in a hurry)
he seemed to slide about the room with the rattle of a shuffled domino.
Although his apartment stood so high, it was in a perpetual green
twilight on account of the creepers growing in rusty petrol tins that
covered all the windows.
“You speaka _italiano_, madama?” he asked abruptly when Nancy presented
herself.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“_Allora come canta?_ How you singa, madama?”
“I only sing in English at present.”
“What musica you havva?”
Nancy produced the stock-in-trade of ballads, which the maestro
fingered like noxious reptiles.
“_E questo?_ Anna Lowrie _o qualche nome indiavolato. Probiamolo.
Avanti!_”
The little man sat down at the piano and was off with the accompaniment
on an instrument of the most outrageously tinny timbre before Nancy
had finished deciding that he was not so much like a domino as a
five-finger exercise.
“_Eh, avanti!_” he turned round and shouted angrily. “What for you
waita, madama? _Di nuovo!_”
In the green twilight of this little room hanging over the precipitous
cliff above the distant jangling of Naples Nancy could not feel that
Maxwellton Braes had ever existed. She made a desperate effort to
achieve an effect with the last lines.
“And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I would lay me down and dee.”
There was a silence.
Then the _maestro_ grunted, twirled his moustache, rose from the piano,
and sat down at his desk.
“Here I writa when you come,” he said. “_A rivederla e buon giorno._”
He thrust the paper into Nancy’s hand and with the same gesture almost
pushed her out of his apartment. The next thing of which she was
conscious was walking slowly down the Vomero in the honey-coloured
November sunshine and staring at the hours and days written down upon
the half-sheet of notepaper she held in her hand.
So the lessons began, and for a month she wondered why she or anybody
else should ever have suffered from a momentary delusion that she could
sing. She knew enough Italian by that time to understand well enough
that Maestro Gambone had nothing but faults to find with her voice.
“Have I made any progress?” she found the courage to stammer out one
morning.
“_Progresso? Ma che progresso? Non sa encora camminare._”
Certainly if she did not yet know how to walk she could not progress.
But when should she know how to walk? In her halting Italian Nancy
tried to extract from the _maestro_ an answer to this.
“_Quanda camminerà? Chi sa? Forse domani, forse giovedì, ma forse mai._”
Perhaps to-morrow, perhaps on Thursday, but perhaps never!
Nancy sighed.
When she got back to the _pensione_ she sat down and wrote to her
patron.
Pensione Arcucci,
Via Virgilio 49.
Napoli.
Dec. 8.
Dear Mr. Kenrick,
I really don’t think it’s worth your while to go on paying for these
singing lessons. Maestro Gambone told me to-day that I might never
know how to sing. I’m sure he’s disgusted at my slowness. I’ve been
having lessons for a month now, and he has had ample time to judge
whether I’m worth his trouble. He evidently thinks I’m not. It’s a
great disappointment, and I feel a terrible fraud. But I’m not going
to reproach myself too bitterly, because, after all, I would never
have thought of becoming a singer if you hadn’t put it into my head.
So, next week I shall return to England. I’m afraid your kindness has
been....
Nancy put down her pen. Her struggles with Italian seemed to have
deprived her of the use of her own tongue. She could not express her
appreciation of what he had done for her except in a bread-and-butter
way that would be worse than writing nothing. For all the sunlight
flickering on the pink and yellow houses opposite she felt overwhelmed
by a wintry loneliness and frost. And then she heard coming up from the
street below the sound of bagpipes. She went to the window and looked
out. Two men in heavy blue cloaks and steeple-crowned felt hats, two
shaggy men cross-gartered, were playing before the little shrine of
the Blessed Virgin at the corner of the Via Virgilio an ancient tune,
a tune as ancient as the hills whence every year they came down for
the feast of the Immaculate Conception to play their seasonable carols
and grave melodies until Christmas-tide. Nancy had been told about
them, and here they were, these—she could not remember their name,
but it began with “z”—these _zamp_ something or other. And while she
stood listening by the window she heard far and wide the pipes of
other pious mountaineers piping their holy ancient tunes. Their bourdon
sounded above the noise of the traffic, above the harsh cries of the
street-vendors, above the chattering of people and the clattering of
carts and the cracking of whips, above the tinkling of mandolins in the
barber-shops, sounded remote and near and far and wide as the bourdon
of bees in summer.
The playing of these pipers calmed the fever of Nancy’s dissatisfaction
and seemed to give her an assurance that her failure was not yet the
sad fact she was imagining. She decided to postpone for a little
while her ultimatum to Kenrick and, tearing up the unfinished letter,
threw the pieces on the open brazier, over which for so many hours of
the wintry days Signor Arcucci used to huddle, slowly stirring the
charcoal embers with an iron fork and musing upon the days when he
sang this or that famous part. He was out of the room for a moment,
but presently he and his Signora, as he called her, came in much
excited to say that the _zampognieri_ were going to play for them.
The pipers in the gimcrack room looked like two great boulders from
their own mountains, and the droning throbbed almost unbearably in the
constricted space. When everybody in turn had given them a lira or two,
they acknowledged the offerings by presenting Nancy as the guest and
stranger with a large wooden spoon. She was taken aback for the moment
by what would have been in England the implication of such a gift.
Even when she had realised that it was intended as a compliment the
omen remained. She could not help wondering if this wooden spoon might
not prove to be the only gift she should ever take home from Italy.
Nevertheless, the _zampognieri_ with their grave carols healed her fear
of discouragement, and during the next fortnight Maestro Gambone on
more than one occasion actually praised her singing and found that at
last she was beginning to place her voice somewhat more approximately
where it ought to be placed. It was as if the fierce little black
and white man had been softened by the spirit of Christmas, of which
those blue-cloaked pipers were at once the heralds and the ambassadors
with their bourdon rising and falling upon the mandarin-scented air.
Absence from home at this season did not fill Nancy with sentimental
regrets. Since Bram died Christmas had not been a happy time for her,
so intimately was its festivity associated with that dreadful night
at Greenwich four years ago. She welcomed and enjoyed the different
atmosphere of _Natale_, and after so many grimy northern winters these
days of turquoise, these dusks of pearl and rose, these swift and
scintillating nights.
On the anniversary of Bram’s death she drove out to Posilipo and sat
on a rock by the shore, gazing out across the milky cerulean waters of
the bay. For all the beauty of this classic view she was only aware of
it as one is aware of a landscape by Poussin or Claude, about whose
vales and groves and gleaming temples no living creature will ever
wander. The dove-coloured water that lapped the rock on which she sat,
the colonnade of dark-domed pines along the brow of the cliff, Ischia
and Capri like distant castles of chalcedony, Vesuvius in a swoon of
limpid golden air—all without Bram was but a vanity of form and colour.
The thought of how easily he might have been preserved from death
afflicted her with a madness of rage. Indifference to the beauty of her
surroundings was succeeded by a wild hatred of that beauty, so well
composed, so clear, so bland, and so serene. But for the folly of one
incompetent and unimaginative fellow man he might have been sitting
beside her on this rock, sitting here in this murmurous placidity of
earth and sea and sky, gazing out across this crystalline expanse, his
hand in hers, their hearts beating together where now only his watch
ticked dryly. Nancy longed to weep; but she could not weep in this
brightness. Yet she must either weep or fling herself from this rock
and sink down into the water at her feet, into that tender water with
the hue and the voice and the softness of a dove. She let a loose stone
drop from her hand and watched it sink to the enamelled floor of the
bay. How shallow it was! She should never drown here. She must seek
another rock round which the water swirled deep and indigo-dark, water
in which a stone would flicker for a few moments in pale blue fire and
be lost to sight long before it reached the bottom. Nancy left the rock
where she had been sitting and tried to climb upward along the cliff’s
edge in search of deep water at its base. And while she climbed her
clothes became scented by the thickets of rosemary. There appeared to
her distraught mind the image of Bram as Laertes and of the actress
who had played Ophelia saying to him, “_There’s rosemary, that’s for
remembrance._” She herself had been understudying the Queen and had
been standing in the wings to watch how the mad-scene was taken. She
could see the expression of mingled horror and pity on Bram’s face,
as he took the sprig of rosemary from his sister’s hand. _Pray, love,
remember._
“Bram,” she cried aloud in an agony of repentance. “I didn’t mean it.
I’m not really mad. I won’t drown myself. I won’t really.”
Then she flung herself face downward among the bushes of rosemary and
wept. For an hour she lay hidden from the sun in that bitter-sweet
grey-green gloom of the cliff’s undergrowth until at last her tears
ceased to flow and she could stand up bravely to face again the
future. More lovely now was the long sweep of the Parthenopean shore,
more lucid the wash of golden air, richer and more profound the warm
wintry Southern peace; and she standing there among the rosemary was
transmuted by the timelessness of her grief into a timeless figure that
might haunt for ever that calm and classic scene.
The last sunset stain had faded from the cloudy cap of Vesuvius,
and the street-lamps were already twinkling when Nancy got back to
Naples. She went into a church, and there in a dark corner prayed to
be forgiven for that brief madness when she had wished to take her
life. She sat for a long while, thinking of happy times with Bram,
soothed by the continuous coming and going of poor people to visit the
Crib, all lit up at the other end of the church. She knelt once more
to beg that all that was lost of Bram’s life might be found again in
his daughter’s; and her ultimate prayer was as always for strength to
devote herself entirely to Letizia’s happiness.
Thus passed the fourth anniversary of the Clown’s death.