Robin managed to remain silent and still for perhaps another twenty
seconds. Then he seized Guido by the arm, shouting, “Vieni, Guido!
Soldiers. Soldati. Vieni giuocare soldati.”
It was then, for the first time, that I saw Guido impatient. “Vai!”
he whispered angrily, slapped at Robin’s clutching hand and pushed
him roughly away. And he leaned a little closer to the instrument, as
though to make up by yet intenser listening for what the interruption
had caused him to miss.
Robin looked at him, astonished. Such a thing had never happened
before. Then he burst out crying and came to me for consolation.
When the quarrel was made up--and Guido was sincerely repentant, was as
nice as he knew how to be when the music had stopped and his mind was
free to think of Robin once more--I asked him how he liked the music.
He said he thought it was beautiful. But _bello_ in Italian is too
vague a word, too easily and frequently uttered, to mean very much.
“What did you like best?” I insisted. For he had seemed to enjoy it so
much that I was curious to find out what had really impressed him.
He was silent for a moment, pensively frowning. “Well,” he said at
last, “I liked the bit that went like this.” And he hummed a long
phrase. “And then there’s the other thing singing at the same
time--but what are those things,” he interrupted himself, “that sing
like that?”
“They’re called violins,” I said.
“Violins.” He nodded. “Well, the other violin goes like this.” He
hummed again. “Why can’t one sing both at once? And what is in that
box? What makes it make that noise?” The child poured out his questions.
I answered him as best I could, showing him the little spirals on the
disk, the needle, the diaphragm. I told him to remember how the string
of the guitar trembled when one plucked it; sound is a shaking in the
air, I told him, and I tried to explain how those shakings get printed
on the black disk. Guido listened to me very gravely, nodding from
time to time. I had the impression that he understood perfectly well
everything I was saying.
By this time, however, poor Robin was so dreadfully bored that in pity
for him I had to send the two children out into the garden to play.
Guido went obediently; but I could see that he would have preferred
to stay indoors and listen to more music. A little while later, when
I looked out, he was hiding in the dark recesses of the big bay tree,
roaring like a lion, and Robin, laughing, but a little nervously, as
though he were afraid that the horrible noise might possibly turn out,
after all, to be the roaring of a real lion, was beating the bush with
a stick, and shouting, “Come out, come out! I want to shoot you.”
After lunch, when Robin had gone upstairs for his afternoon sleep, he
re-appeared. “May I listen to the music now?” he asked. And for an hour
he sat there in front of the instrument, his head cocked slightly on
one side, listening while I put on one disk after another.
Thenceforward he came every afternoon. Very soon he knew all my library
of records, had his preferences and dislikes, and could ask for what he
wanted by humming the principal theme.
“I don’t like that one,” he said of Strauss’s “Till Eulen Spiegel.”
“It’s like what we sing in our house. Not really like, you know. But
somehow rather like, all the same. You understand?” He looked at us
perplexedly and appealingly, as though begging us to understand what he
meant and so save him from going on explaining. We nodded. Guido went
on. “And then,” he said, “the end doesn’t seem to come properly out of
the beginning. It’s not like the one you played the first time.” He
hummed a bar or two from the slow movement of Bach’s D Minor Concerto.
“It isn’t,” I suggested, “like saying: All little boys like playing.
Guido is a little boy. Therefore Guido likes playing.”
He frowned. “Yes, perhaps that’s it,” he said at last. “The one you
played first is more like that. But, you know,” he added, with an
excessive regard for truth, “I don’t like playing as much as Robin
does.”
Wagner was among his dislikes; so was Debussy. When I played the record
of one of Debussy’s Arabesques, he said, “Why does he say the same
thing over and over again? He ought to say something new, or go on, or
make the thing grow. Can’t he think of anything different?” But he was
less censorious about the “Après-Midi d’un Faune.” “The things have
beautiful voices,” he said.
Mozart overwhelmed him with delight. The duet from _Don Giovanni_,
which his father had found insufficiently palpitating, enchanted Guido.
But he preferred the quartets and the orchestral pieces.
“I like music,” he said, “better than singing.”
Most people, I reflected, like singing better than music; are more
interested in the executant than in what he executes, and find the
impersonal orchestra less moving than the soloist. The touch of the
pianist is the human touch, and the soprano’s high C is the personal
note. It is for the sake of this touch, that note, that audiences fill
the concert halls.
Guido, however, preferred music. True, he liked “La ci darem”; he liked
“Deh vieni alla finestra”; he thought “Che soave zefiretto” so lovely
that almost all our concerts had to begin with it. But he preferred the
other things. The _Figaro_ overture was one of his favourites. There
is a passage not far from the beginning of the piece, where the first
violins suddenly go rocketing up into the heights of loveliness; as the
music approached that point, I used always to see a smile developing
and gradually brightening on Guido’s face, and when, punctually, the
thing happened, he clapped his hands and laughed aloud with pleasure.
On the other side of the same disk, it happened, was recorded
Beethoven’s _Egmont_ overture. He liked that almost better than
_Figaro_.
“It has more voices,” he explained. And I was delighted by the
acuteness of the criticism; for it is precisely in the richness of its
orchestration that _Egmont_ goes beyond _Figaro_.
But what stirred him almost more than anything was the _Coriolan_
overture. The third movement of the Fifth Symphony, the second movement
of the Seventh, the slow movement of the Emperor Concerto--all these
things ran it pretty close. But none excited him so much as _Coriolan_.
One day he made me play it three or four times in succession; then he
put it away.
“I don’t think I want to hear that any more,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It’s too ... too ...” he hesitated, “too big,” he said at last. “I
don’t really understand it. Play me the one that goes like this.” He
hummed the phrase from the D Minor Concerto.
“Do you like that one better?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, it’s not that exactly. But it’s easier.”
“Easier?” It seemed to me rather a queer word to apply to Bach.
“I understand it better.”
One afternoon, while we were in the middle of our concert, Signora
Bondi was ushered in. She began at once to be overwhelmingly
affectionate towards the child; kissed him, patted his head, paid him
the most outrageous compliments on his appearance. Guido edged away
from her.
“And do you like music?” she asked.
The child nodded.
“I think he has a gift,” I said. “At any rate, he has a wonderful ear
and a power of listening and criticising such as I’ve never met with in
a child of that age. We’re thinking of hiring a piano for him to learn
on.”
A moment later I was cursing myself for my undue frankness in praising
the boy. For Signora Bondi began immediately to protest that, if
she could have the upbringing of the child, she would give him the
best masters, bring out his talent, make an accomplished maestro of
him--and, on the way, an infant prodigy. And at that moment, I am sure,
she saw herself sitting maternally, in pearls and black satin, in the
lea of the huge Steinway, while an angelic Guido, dressed like little
Lord Fauntleroy, rattled out Liszt and Chopin, to the loud delight of a
thronged auditorium. She saw the bouquets and all the elaborate floral
tributes, heard the clapping and the few well-chosen words with which
the veteran maestri, touched almost to tears, would hail the coming
of the little genius. It became more than ever important for her to
acquire the child.
“You’ve sent her away fairly ravening,” said Elizabeth, when Signora
Bondi had gone. “Better tell her next time that you made a mistake, and
that the boy’s got no musical talent whatever.”
In due course, the piano arrived. After giving him the minimum of
preliminary instruction, I let Guido loose on it. He began by picking
out for himself the melodies he had heard, reconstructing the harmonies
in which they were embedded. After a few lessons, he understood the
rudiments of musical notation and could read a simple passage at
sight, albeit very slowly. The whole process of reading was still
strange to him; he had picked up his letters somehow, but nobody had
yet taught him to read whole words and sentences.
I took occasion, next time I saw Signora Bondi, to assure her that
Guido had disappointed me. There was nothing in his musical talent,
really. She professed to be very sorry to hear it; but I could see
that she didn’t for a moment believe me. Probably she thought that we
were after the child too, and wanted to bag the infant prodigy for
ourselves, before she could get in her claim, thus depriving her of
what she regarded almost as her feudal right. For, after all, weren’t
they her peasants? If any one was to profit by adopting the child it
ought to be herself.
Tactfully, diplomatically, she renewed her negotiations with Carlo.
The boy, she put it to him, had genius. It was the foreign gentleman
who had told her so, and he was the sort of man, clearly, who knew
about such things. If Carlo would let her adopt the child, she’d
have him trained. He’d become a great maestro and get engagements
in the Argentine and the United States, in Paris and London. He’d
earn millions and millions. Think of Caruso, for example. Part of the
millions, she explained, would of course come to Carlo. But before they
began to roll in, those millions, the boy would have to be trained.
But training was very expensive. In his own interest, as well as in
that of his son, he ought to let her take charge of the child. Carlo
said he would think it over, and again applied to us for advice. We
suggested that it would be best in any case to wait a little and see
what progress the boy made.
He made, in spite of my assertions to Signora Bondi, excellent
progress. Every afternoon, while Robin was asleep, he came for his
concert and his lesson. He was getting along famously with his reading;
his small fingers were acquiring strength and agility. But what to me
was more interesting was that he had begun to make up little pieces
on his own account. A few of them I took down as he played them and I
have them still. Most of them, strangely enough, as I thought then,
are canons. He had a passion for canons. When I explained to him the
principles of the form he was enchanted.
“It is beautiful,” he said, with admiration. “Beautiful, beautiful. And
so easy!”
Again the word surprised me. The canon is not, after all, so
conspicuously simple. Thenceforward he spent most of his time at the
piano in working out little canons for his own amusement. They were
often remarkably ingenious. But in the invention of other kinds of
music he did not show himself so fertile as I had hoped. He composed
and harmonised one or two solemn little airs like hymn tunes, with a
few sprightlier pieces in the spirit of the military march. They were
extraordinary, of course, as being the inventions of a child. But a
great many children can do extraordinary things; we are all geniuses
up to the age of ten. But I had hoped that Guido was a child who was
going to be a genius at forty; in which case what was extraordinary for
an ordinary child was not extraordinary enough for him. “He’s hardly a
Mozart,” we agreed, as we played his little pieces over. I felt, it
must be confessed, almost aggrieved. Anything less than a Mozart, it
seemed to me, was hardly worth thinking about.
He was not a Mozart. No. But he was somebody, as I was to find out,
quite as extraordinary. It was one morning in the early summer
that I made the discovery. I was sitting in the warm shade of our
westward-facing balcony, working. Guido and Robin were playing in the
little enclosed garden below. Absorbed in my work, it was only, I
suppose, after the silence had prolonged itself a considerable time
that I became aware that the children were making remarkably little
noise. There was no shouting, no running about; only a quiet talking.
Knowing by experience that when children are quiet it generally means
that they are absorbed in some delicious mischief, I got up from my
chair and looked over the balustrade to see what they were doing. I
expected to catch them dabbling in water, making a bonfire, covering
themselves with tar. But what I actually saw was Guido, with a burnt
stick in his hand, demonstrating on the smooth paving-stones of the
path, that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is
equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.
Kneeling on the floor, he was drawing with the point of his blackened
stick on the flagstones. And Robin, kneeling imitatively beside him,
was growing, I could see, rather impatient with this very slow game.
“Guido,” he said. But Guido paid no attention. Pensively frowning, he
went on with his diagram. “Guido!” The younger child bent down and then
craned round his neck so as to look up into Guido’s face. “Why don’t
you draw a train?”
“Afterwards,” said Guido. “But I just want to show you this first. It’s
so beautiful,” he added cajolingly.
“But I want a train,” Robin persisted.
“In a moment. Do just wait a moment.” The tone was almost imploring.
Robin armed himself with renewed patience. A minute later Guido had
finished both his diagrams.
“There!” he said triumphantly, and straightened himself up to look at
them. “Now I’ll explain.”
And he proceeded to prove the theorem of Pythagoras--not in Euclid’s
way, but by the simpler and more satisfying method which was, in all
probability, employed by Pythagoras himself. He had drawn a square and
dissected it, by a pair of crossed perpendiculars, into two squares
and two equal rectangles. The equal rectangles he divided up by their
diagonals into four equal right-angled triangles. The two squares
are then seen to be the squares on the two sides of any one of these
triangles other than the hypotenuse. So much for the first diagram.
In the next he took the four right-angled triangles into which the
rectangles had been divided and re-arranged them round the original
square so that their right angles filled the corners of the square,
the hypotenuses looked inwards, and the greater and less sides of the
triangles were in continuation along the sides of the square (which are
each equal to the sum of these sides). In this way the original square
is redissected into four right-angled triangles and the square on the
hypotenuse. The four triangles are equal to the two rectangles of the
original dissection. Therefore the square on the hypotenuse is equal to
the sum of the two squares--the squares on the other two sides--into
which, with the rectangles, the original square was first dissected.
In very untechnical language, but clearly and with a relentless logic,
Guido expounded his proof. Robin listened, with an expression on his
bright, freckled face of perfect incomprehension.
“Treno,” he repeated from time to time. “Treno. Make a train.”
“In a moment,” Guido implored. “Wait a moment. But do just look at
this. _Do._” He coaxed and cajoled. “It’s so beautiful. It’s so easy.”
So easy.... The theorem of Pythagoras seemed to explain for me Guido’s
musical predilections. It was not an infant Mozart we had been
cherishing; it was a little Archimedes with, like most of his kind, an
incidental musical twist.
“Treno, treno!” shouted Robin, growing more and more restless as the
exposition went on. And when Guido insisted on going on with his proof,
he lost his temper. “Cattivo Guido,” he shouted, and began to hit out
at him with his fists.
“All right,” said Guido resignedly. “I’ll make a train.” And with his
stick of charcoal he began to scribble on the stones.
I looked on for a moment in silence. It was not a very good train.
Guido might be able to invent for himself and prove the theorem of
Pythagoras; but he was not much of a draughtsman.
“Guido!” I called. The two children turned and looked up. “Who taught
you to draw those squares?” It was conceivable, of course, that
somebody might have taught him.
“Nobody.” He shook his head. Then, rather anxiously, as though he were
afraid there might be something wrong about drawing squares, he went
on to apologise and explain. “You see,” he said, “it seemed to me so
beautiful. Because those squares”--he pointed at the two small squares
in the first figure--“are just as big as this one.” And, indicating the
square on the hypotenuse in the second diagram, he looked up at me with
a deprecating smile.
I nodded. “Yes, it’s very beautiful,” I said--“it’s very beautiful
indeed.”
An expression of delighted relief appeared on his face; he laughed
with pleasure. “You see, it’s like this,” he went on, eager to initiate
me into the glorious secret he had discovered. “You cut these two long
squares”--he meant the rectangles--“into two slices. And then there
are four slices, all just the same, because, because--oh, I ought to
have said that before--because these long squares are the same, because
those lines, you see....”
“But I want a train,” protested Robin.
Leaning on the rail of the balcony, I watched the children below. I
thought of the extraordinary thing I had just seen and of what it meant.
I thought of the vast differences between human beings. We classify men
by the colour of their eyes and hair, the shape of their skulls. Would
it not be more sensible to divide them up into intellectual species?
There would be even wider gulfs between the extreme mental types than
between a Bushman and a Scandinavian. This child, I thought, when he
grows up, will be to me, intellectually, what a man is to a dog. And
there are other men and women who are, perhaps, almost as dogs to me.
Perhaps the men of genius are the only true men. In all the history of
the race there have been only a few thousand real men. And the rest of
us--what are we? Teachable animals. Without the help of the real men,
we should have found out almost nothing at all. Almost all the ideas
with which we are familiar could never have occurred to minds like
ours. Plant the seeds there and they will grow; but our minds could
never spontaneously have generated them.
There have been whole nations of dogs, I thought; whole epochs in
which no Man was born. From the dull Egyptians the Greeks took crude
experience and rules of thumb and made sciences. More than a thousand
years passed before Archimedes had a comparable successor. There has
been only one Buddha, one Jesus, only one Bach that we know of, one
Michelangelo.
Is it by a mere chance, I wondered, that a Man is born from
time to time? What causes a whole constellation of them to come
contemporaneously into being and from out of a single people? Taine
thought that Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were born when they
were because the time was ripe for great painters and the Italian scene
congenial. In the mouth of a rationalising nineteenth-century Frenchman
the doctrine is strangely mystical; it may be none the less true for
that. But what of those born out of time? Blake, for example. What of
those?
This child, I thought, has had the fortune to be born at a time when he
will be able to make good use of his capacities. He will find the most
elaborate analytical methods lying ready to his hand; he will have a
prodigious experience behind him. Suppose him born while Stone Henge
was building; he might have spent a lifetime discovering the rudiments,
guessing darkly where now he might have had a chance of proving. Born
at the time of the Norman Conquest, he would have had to wrestle with
all the preliminary difficulties created by an inadequate symbolism;
it would have taken him long years, for example, to learn the art of
dividing MMMCCCCLXXXVIII by MCMXIX. In five years, nowadays, he will
learn what it took generations of Men to discover.
And I thought of the fate of all the Men born so hopelessly out of
time that they could achieve little or nothing of value. Beethoven
born in Greece, I thought, would have had to be content to play thin
melodies on the flute or lyre; in those intellectual surroundings
it would hardly have been possible for him to imagine the nature of
harmony.
From drawing trains, the children in the garden below had gone on to
playing trains. They were trotting round and round; with blown round
cheeks and pouting mouth, like the cherubic symbol of a wind, Robin
puff-puffed, and Guido, holding the skirt of his smock, shuffled
behind him, tooting. They ran forward, backed, stopped at imaginary
stations, shunted, roared over bridges, crashed through tunnels, met
with occasional collisions and derailments. The young Archimedes
seemed to be just as happy as the little tow-headed barbarian. A few
minutes ago he had been busy with the theorem of Pythagoras. Now,
tooting indefatigably along imaginary rails, he was perfectly content
to shuffle backwards and forwards among the flower-beds, between the
pillars of the loggia, in and out of the dark tunnels of the laurel
tree. The fact that one is going to be Archimedes does not prevent
one from being an ordinary cheerful child meanwhile. I thought of
this strange talent distinct and separate from the rest of the mind,
independent, almost, of experience. The typical child-prodigies are
musical and mathematical; the other talents ripen slowly under the
influence of emotional experience and growth. Till he was thirty Balzac
gave proof of nothing but ineptitude; but at four the young Mozart was
already a musician, and some of Pascal’s most brilliant work was done
before he was out of his teens.
In the weeks that followed, I alternated the daily piano lessons
with lessons in mathematics. Hints rather than lessons they were;
for I only made suggestions, indicated methods, and left the child,
himself to work out the ideas in detail. Thus I introduced him to
algebra by showing him another proof of the theorem of Pythagoras.
In this proof one drops a perpendicular from the right angle on to
the hypotenuse, and arguing from the fact that the two triangles thus
created are similar to one another and to the original triangle, and
that the proportions which their corresponding sides bear to one
another are therefore equal, one can show in algebraical form that
_c² + d²_ (the squares on the other two sides) are equal to _a² + b²_
(the squares on the two segments of the hypotenuse) + 2_ab_;
which last, it is easy to show geometrically, is equal to (_a + b_)²,
or the square on the hypotenuse. Guido was as much enchanted
by the rudiments of algebra as he would have been if I had given him
an engine worked by steam, with a methylated spirit lamp to heat the
boiler; more enchanted, perhaps--for the engine would have got broken,
and, remaining always itself, would in any case have lost its charm,
while the rudiments of algebra continued to grow and blossom in his
mind with an unfailing luxuriance. Every day he made the discovery of
something which seemed to him exquisitely beautiful; the new toy was
inexhaustible in its potentialities.
In the intervals of applying algebra to the second book of Euclid, we
experimented with circles; we stuck bamboos into the parched earth,
measured their shadows at different hours of the day, and drew exciting
conclusions from our observations. Sometimes, for fun, we cut and
folded sheets of paper so as to make cubes and pyramids. One afternoon
Guido arrived carrying carefully between his small and rather grubby
hands a flimsy dodecahedron.
“È tanto bello!” he said, as he showed us his paper crystal; and when I
asked him how he had managed to make it, he merely smiled and said it
had been so easy. I looked at Elizabeth and laughed. But it would have
been more symbolically to the point, I felt, if I had gone down on all
fours, wagged the spiritual outgrowth of my os coccyx, and barked my
astonished admiration.
It was an uncommonly hot summer. By the beginning of July our little
Robin, unaccustomed to these high temperatures, began to look pale and
tired; he was listless, had lost his appetite and energy. The doctor
advised mountain air. We decided to spend the next ten or twelve weeks
in Switzerland. My parting gift to Guido was the first six books of
Euclid in Italian. He turned over the pages, looking ecstatically at
the figures.
“If only I knew how to read properly,” he said. “I’m so stupid. But now
I shall really try to learn.”
From our hotel near Grindelwald we sent the child, in Robin’s name,
various post cards of cows, Alp-horns, Swiss chalets, edelweiss, and
the like. We received no answers to these cards; but then we did
not expect answers. Guido could not write, and there was no reason
why his father or his sisters should take the trouble to write for
him. No news, we took it, was good news. And then one day, early in
September, there arrived at the hotel a strange letter. The manager
had it stuck up on the glass-fronted notice-board in the hall, so that
all the guests might see it, and whoever conscientiously thought that
it belonged to him might claim it. Passing the board on the way into
lunch, Elizabeth stopped to look at it.
“But it must be from Guido,” she said.
I came and looked at the envelope over her shoulder. It was unstamped
and black with postmarks. Traced out in pencil, the big uncertain
capital letters sprawled across its face. In the first line was
written: AL BABBO DI ROBIN, and there followed a travestied version
of the name of the hotel and the place. Round the address bewildered
postal officials had scrawled suggested emendations. The letter had
wandered for a fortnight at least, back and forth across the face of
Europe.
“Al Babbo di Robin. To Robin’s father.” I laughed. “Pretty smart of the
postmen to have got it here at all.” I went to the manager’s office,
set forth the justice of my claim to the letter and, having paid the
fifty-centime surcharge for the missing stamp, had the case unlocked
and the letter given me. We went in to lunch.
“The writing’s magnificent,” we agreed, laughing, as we examined the
address at close quarters. “Thanks to Euclid,” I added. “That’s what
comes of pandering to the ruling passion.”
But when I opened the envelope and looked at its contents I no longer
laughed. The letter was brief and almost telegraphical in style. “SONO
DALLA PADRONA,” it ran, “NON MI PIACE HA RUBATO IL MIO LIBRO NON VOGLIO
SUONARE PIU VOGLIO TORNARE A CASA VENGA SUBITO GUIDO.”
“What is it?”
I handed Elizabeth the letter. “That blasted woman’s got hold of him,”
I said.
* * * * *
Busts of men in Homburg hats, angels bathed in marble tears
extinguishing torches, statues of little girls, cherubs, veiled
figures, allegories and ruthless realisms--the strangest and most
diverse idols beckoned and gesticulated as we passed. Printed indelibly
on tin and embedded in the living rock, the brown photographs looked
out, under glass, from the humbler crosses, headstones, and broken
pillars. Dead ladies in the cubistic geometrical fashions of thirty
years ago--two cones of black satin meeting point to point at the
waist, and the arms: a sphere to the elbow, a polished cylinder
below--smiled mournfully out of their marble frames; the smiling faces,
the white hands, were the only recognisably human things that emerged
from the solid geometry of their clothes. Men with black moustaches,
men with white beards, young clean-shaven men, stared or averted their
gaze to show a Roman profile. Children in their stiff best opened
wide their eyes, smiled hopefully in anticipation of the little bird
that was to issue from the camera’s muzzle, smiled sceptically in the
knowledge that it wouldn’t, smiled laboriously and obediently because
they had been told to. In spiky Gothic cottages of marble the richer
dead privately reposed; through grilled doors one caught a glimpse of
pale Inconsolables weeping, of distraught Geniuses guarding the secret
of the tomb. The less prosperous sections of the majority slept in
communities, close-crowded but elegantly housed under smooth continuous
marble floors, whose every flagstone was the mouth of a separate grave.
These continental cemeteries, I thought, as Carlo and I made our way
among the dead, are more frightful than ours, because these people
pay more attention to their dead than we do. That primordial cult
of corpses, that tender solicitude for their material well-being,
which led the ancients to house their dead in stone, while they
themselves lived between wattles and under thatch, still lingers here;
persists, I thought, more vigorously than with us. There are a hundred
gesticulating statues here for every one in an English graveyard. There
are more family vaults, more “luxuriously appointed” (as they say of
liners and hotels) than one would find at home. And embedded in every
tombstone there are photographs to remind the powdered bones within
what form they will have to resume on the Day of Judgment; beside each
are little hanging lamps to burn optimistically on All Souls’ Day. To
the Man who built the Pyramids they are nearer, I thought, than we.
“If I had known,” Carlo kept repeating, “if only I had known.” His
voice came to me through my reflections as though from a distance. “At
the time he didn’t mind at all. How should I have known that he would
take it so much to heart afterwards? And she deceived me, she lied to
me.”
I assured him yet once more that it wasn’t his fault. Though, of
course, it was, in part. It was mine too, in part; I ought to have
thought of the possibility and somehow guarded against it. And he
shouldn’t have let the child go, even temporarily and on trial, even
though the woman was bringing pressure to bear on him. And the pressure
had been considerable. They had worked on the same holding for more
than a hundred years, the men of Carlo’s family; and now she had made
the old man threaten to turn him out. It would be a dreadful thing to
leave the place; and besides, another place wasn’t so easy to find. It
was made quite plain, however, that he could stay if he let her have
the child. Only for a little to begin with; just to see how he got on.
There would be no compulsion whatever on him to stay if he didn’t like
it. And it would be all to Guido’s advantage; and to his father’s, too,
in the end. All that the Englishman had said about his not being such
a good musician as he had thought at first was obviously untrue--mere
jealousy and little-mindedness: the man wanted to take credit for Guido
himself, that was all. And the boy, it was obvious, would learn nothing
from him. What he needed was a real good professional master.
All the energy that, if the physicists had known their business,
would have been driving dynamos, went into this campaign. It began
the moment we were out of the house, intensively. She would have more
chance of success, the Signora doubtless thought, if we weren’t there.
And besides, it was essential to take the opportunity when it offered
itself and get hold of the child before we could make our bid--for it
was obvious to her that we wanted Guido just as much as she did.
Day after day she renewed the assault. At the end of a week she sent
her husband to complain about the state of the vines: they were in a
shocking condition; he had decided, or very nearly decided, to give
Carlo notice. Meekly, shamefacedly, in obedience to higher orders, the
old gentleman uttered his threats. Next day Signora Bondi returned to
the attack. The padrone, she declared, had been in a towering passion;
but she’d do her best, her very best, to mollify him. And after a
significant pause she went on to talk about Guido.
In the end Carlo gave in. The woman was too persistent and she held
too many trump cards. The child could go and stay with her for a month
or two on trial. After that, if he really expressed a desire to remain
with her, she could formally adopt him.
At the idea of going for a holiday to the seaside--and it was to the
seaside, Signora Bondi told him, that they were going--Guido was
pleased and excited. He had heard a lot about the sea from Robin.
“Tanta acqua!” It had sounded almost too good to be true. And now he
was actually to go and see this marvel. It was very cheerfully that he
parted from his family.
But after the holiday by the sea was over, and Signora Bondi had
brought him back to her town house in Florence, he began to be
homesick. The Signora, it was true, treated him exceedingly kindly,
bought him new clothes, took him out to tea in the Via Tornabuoni and
filled him up with cakes, iced strawberry-ade, whipped cream, and
chocolates. But she made him practise the piano more than he liked, and
what was worse, she took away his Euclid, on the score that he wasted
too much time with it. And when he said that he wanted to go home, she
put him off with promises and excuses and downright lies. She told him
that she couldn’t take him at once, but that next week, if he were good
and worked hard at his piano meanwhile, next week.... And when the
time came she told him that his father didn’t want him back. And she
redoubled her petting, gave him expensive presents, and stuffed him
with yet unhealthier foods. To no purpose. Guido didn’t like his new
life, didn’t want to practise scales, pined for his book, and longed
to be back with his brothers and sisters. Signora Bondi, meanwhile,
continued to hope that time and chocolates would eventually make the
child hers; and to keep his family at a distance, she wrote to Carlo
every few days letters which still purported to come from the seaside
(she took the trouble to send them to a friend, who posted them back
again to Florence), and in which she painted the most charming picture
of Guido’s happiness.
It was then that Guido wrote his letter to me. Abandoned, as he
supposed, by his family--for that they shouldn’t take the trouble to
come to see him when they were so near was only to be explained on the
hypothesis that they really had given him up--he must have looked to me
as his last and only hope. And the letter, with its fantastic address,
had been nearly a fortnight on its way. A fortnight--it must have
seemed hundreds of years; and as the centuries succeeded one another,
gradually, no doubt, the poor child became convinced that I too had
abandoned him. There was no hope left.
“Here we are,” said Carlo.
I looked up and found myself confronted by an enormous monument. In a
kind of grotto hollowed in the flanks of a monolith of grey sandstone,
Sacred Love, in bronze, was embracing a funerary urn. And in bronze
letters riveted into the stone was a long legend to the effect that
the inconsolable Ernesto Bondi had raised this monument to the memory
of his beloved wife, Annunziata, as a token of his undying love for
one whom, snatched from him by a premature death, he hoped very soon
to join beneath this stone. The first Signora Bondi had died in 1912.
I thought of the old man leashed to his white dog; he must always, I
reflected, have been a most uxorious husband.
“They buried him here.”
We stood there for a long time in silence. I felt the tears coming
into my eyes as I thought of the poor child lying there underground. I
thought of those luminous grave eyes, and the curve of that beautiful
forehead, the droop of the melancholy mouth, of the expression of
delight which illumined his face when he learned of some new idea that
pleased him, when he heard a piece of music that he liked. And this
beautiful small being was dead; and the spirit that inhabited this
form, the amazing spirit, that too had been destroyed almost before it
had begun to exist.
And the unhappiness that must have preceded the final act, the child’s
despair, the conviction of his utter abandonment--those were terrible
to think of, terrible.
“I think we had better come away now,” I said at last, and touched
Carlo on the arm. He was standing there like a blind man, his eyes
shut, his face slightly lifted towards the light; from between his
closed eyelids the tears welled out, hung for a moment, and trickled
down his cheeks. His lips trembled and I could see that he was making
an effort to keep them still. “Come away,” I repeated.
The face which had been still in its sorrow, was suddenly convulsed; he
opened his eyes, and through the tears they were bright with a violent
anger. “I shall kill her,” he said, “I shall kill her. When I think of
him throwing himself out, falling through the air....” With his two
hands he made a violent gesture, bringing them down from over his head
and arresting them with a sudden jerk when they were on a level with
his breast. “And then crash.” He shuddered. “She’s as much responsible
as though she had pushed him down herself. I shall kill her.” He
clenched his teeth.
To be angry is easier than to be sad, less painful. It is comforting to
think of revenge. “Don’t talk like that,” I said. “It’s no good. It’s
stupid. And what would be the point?” He had had those fits before,
when grief became too painful and he had tried to escape from it. Anger
had been the easiest way of escape. I had had, before this, to persuade
him back into the harder path of grief. “It’s stupid to talk like
that,” I repeated, and I led him away through the ghastly labyrinth of
tombs, where death seemed more terrible even than it is.
By the time we had left the cemetery, and were walking down from San
Miniato towards the Piazzale Michelangelo below, he had become calmer.
His anger had subsided again into the sorrow from which it had derived
all its strength and its bitterness. In the Piazzale we halted for
a moment to look down at the city in the valley below us. It was a
day of floating clouds--great shapes, white, golden, and grey; and
between them patches of a thin, transparent blue. Its lantern level,
almost, with our eyes, the dome of the cathedral revealed itself in
all its grandiose lightness, its vastness and aerial strength. On the
innumerable brown and rosy roofs of the city the afternoon sunlight
lay softly, sumptuously, and the towers were as though varnished and
enamelled with an old gold. I thought of all the Men who had lived here
and left the visible traces of their spirit and conceived extraordinary
things. I thought of the dead child.
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