to me, Peter, you never thought of writing. You have such a beautiful
vocabulary." But even that did not daunt him, for he knew as soon as he
had looked on her again, that loving Eunice Goodward was enough of an
occupation.
V
The senior partner of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., was exactly the sort of
man, when his physicians ordered him abroad for two years, with the
intimation that there might even worse happen to him, to make so little
fuss about it that he got four inches of type in a leading paper the
morning of his departure and very little more. Lessing would certainly
have been at the steamer to see him off, except for being so much taken
up with adjustments of the business made necessary by Peter's going out
of it; and his sister Ellen never went out in foggy weather, seldom so
far from the house in any case. Besides, she declared that if she once
saw Peter disappearing down the widening water she should never be able
to rid herself of the notion of his being quite overwhelmed by it,
whereas if he sent on his trunks the day before, and walked quietly out
in the morning with his suitcase, she could persuade herself that he had
merely run down to Bloombury for a few days and would be back on Monday.
And having managed his leave-taking as he did most personal matters, to
please Ellen, who though she had never been credited with an
imagination, seemed likely to develop one in the exigencies of getting
along without Peter, he had no sense of having done anything other than
to please himself. He found a man to carry his suitcase as soon as he
was out of the house, and walked the whole way to the steamer; for if
one has been ordered out of all activity there is still a certain
satisfaction in going out on your own feet.
It was an extremely ill-considered day, wet fog drawn up to the high
shouldering roofs and shrugged off, like a nervous woman's shawl. But
whether it sulked over his departure or smiled on him for remembrance,
would not have made any difference to Peter, who, whatever the papers
said of the reason for his going abroad, knew that there would be
neither shade nor shine for him, nor principalities nor powers until he
had found again the House of the Shining Walls. As soon as he had
bestowed his belongings in his stateroom, he went out on the side of the
deck farthest from the groups of leave-taking, and stood staring down,
as if he considered whether the straightest route might not lie in that
direction, into the greasy, shallow hollows of the harbour water, at the
very moment when the Burton Hendersons, over their very late coffee, had
discovered the item of his departure.
Mrs. Henderson balanced her spoon on the edge of her cup while her
husband read the paragraph aloud to her.
"You don't suppose," she said, as if it might be an interesting even if
regrettable possibility, "that _I_--that our affair--had anything to do
with it?"
"If it did," admitted her husband, with the air of not thinking it
likely, but probably served him right, "it has taken a long time to get
at him. Two years, isn't it, since you threw him over for a better man?"
"Oh, I'm not so sure of your being a better man, Bertie; I liked you
better----"
Mr. Burton Henderson accepted his wife's amendment with complacency.
"I don't believe Weatheral appreciated the distinction. Men like that
have a sort of money crust that prevents the ordinary perceptions from
getting through to them." This illustration appeared on second thoughts
so illuminating that it carried him a little further. "Perhaps that's
the reason it has taken him so long to tumble after he has been hit; it
has just got through to him. It would be interesting to know, though, if
he is still a little in love with you."
There was a fair amount of speculation in Mr. Burton Henderson's tone
that did not appear to have its seat in any apprehension.
"Just as if you rather hoped it," his wife protested.
"Well, I was only wondering if his health is so bad as the papers
say--it seldom is, you know--but if he were to go off all of a sudden
one of these days, whether he mightn't take it into his head now to
leave you a legacy."
"I don't believe it was personal enough with Peter for that. It wasn't
me he wanted so much as just to be married. And, besides, I did come
down on him rather hard." Mrs. Burton Henderson smiled a little
reminiscently as if she still saw herself in the process of coming down
on Peter and thought rather well of it.
"Well, anyway," her husband finished, "we could have managed with a
legacy."
"Yes, we do need money dreadfully, don't we, Bertie?" she sighed. "But I
don't believe I had anything to do with it."
That was all very well for Mrs. Burton Henderson, but Peter's sister
Ellen had a different opinion. "Peter," she had said the evening after
Peter had sent his trunk out of the house and locked up his suitcase to
keep her from putting anything more into it, "you're not thinking of
_her_, are you? You're not going to take that abroad with you."
"No, Ellen, I haven't thought of her for a long time except to wish her
happiness. You mustn't let that worry you."
"Just the same," said Ellen, "if anything happens to you over there--if
you never come back to me, I shall never forgive her."
"I shall come back. I am sorry you should feel so bitter about it."
He could not, especially now that it was gone, very well explain to
Ellen about the House; for all the years that it had stood there just
beyond the edge of dreams with the garden spread around it and a lovely
wood before, she had never heard of it. There had been so many ways to
it once, paths to it began in pictures, great towered gates of music
gave upon its avenues, and if he had not spoken of it, it was because as
he had made himself believe when she did come, that Eunice Goodward
would come into it of first right. He could not have blamed her for not
wishing to live in it--from the first he had never blamed her. He might
have managed even had she pulled it about his ears to rebuild it in
some fashion, but this was the bitterest, that he knew now for a
certainty there had never been any House and the certainty made him
ridiculous.
It had been rather the worse that, with all the suddenness of this
discovery, he had not been able to avoid the habit of setting out for
it, seeking in dreams the relief of desolation in knowing that no dreams
could come. As often as he heard music or saw in the soft turn of a
cheek or the slender line of a wrist, what had moved him so in hers he
felt himself urged forward on old trails, only to be scared from them by
the apparition of himself as Eunice had evoked it from her bright
surpassing surfaces, as a man unaccomplished in passion, unprovocative.
All the gates to the House opened upon dreadful hollows of
self-despising into which Peter fell and floundered, so that he took to
going that way as little as possible, taking wide circuits about it
continually in the way of business, being rather pleased with himself
when at the end of two years he could no longer feel any pang of loss
nor any remembering thrill of what the House had been--until he
discovered that also he could not feel some other things, the pen
between his fingers and the rise of the stairs under him. He forgot
Eunice Goodward, and then one day he forgot to go home after office
hours, and they found him sitting still at his desk in the dark, trying
to remember whether he ought to put down the blotting-pad and the paper
weight on top of that, or if, on the whole, it were not better to put
the paper weight, as being the heavier article, first.
It was after that the doctor told him to go as far away from his
business as possible and keep on staying away.
"But if I am going to die, doctor," Peter carefully explained, "I would
much rather do it in my own country."
"Ah," the doctor warned him, "that's just the difficulty. You won't
die."
And that was how Peter happened to be leaning over the forward rail of
an Atlantic steamer on his way to Italy, which he had chosen because the
date of sailing happened to be convenient. But he knew, as he stood
looking down at the surface of the water, rough-hewn by the wind, that
whatever the doctor said to Lessing, or Ellen surmised, he would get no
good there except as it showed him the way to the House of the Shining
Walls.
He did not remember where in the blind pointless ring through which the
steamer chugged and wallowed as though it were a superior sort of water
beetle and the horizon a circle of its own making, he began to get
sufficiently acquainted with his fellow passengers, to understand that
they were most of them going abroad in the interest of unrealized
estates, and abounded in confidence. To see them forever forward and
agaze at the lit shores of Spain and the Islands of Desire, roused in
him the faint savour of expectation. Which, however, did not prevent him
from finding Naples squalid, and Rome, where he arrived in the middle of
the tourist season, too modern in a cheap, second-rate sort of way. He
could remember when Rome had furnished some excellent company for the
House, and suffered in the places of renown an indeterminable pang like
the ache of an amputated stump. It seemed, on occasion, as if the old
trails might lie down the hollow of the Forum, under the arch of that
broken aqueduct, beside the dark Volsinian mere; but when Peter arrived
at any of these places he found them prepossessed by Germans gabbling
out of _Baedekers_. The Sistine Chapel made the back of his neck ache
and he came no nearer than seven tourists to the noble quietude of the
Vatican can marbles.
"I must remember," said Peter to himself, "that I am a very sick man,
and crowds annoy me."
Then he went into the country and saw the gray of the olives above the
springing grass, like the silver bloom on a green plum, and began to
experience the pangs of recovery. He found Hadrian's Villa and the
garden of the Villa d'Este, and remembered other things. He remembered
the flat malachite-coloured pools, the definite, pointed cypresses and
the fountain's soft incessant rain--as it had been in the House. As it
_was_ in the House. For he understood in Italy what was still the most
bitter to know, that though it might yet be somewhere in the world, he
was never to find it any more. Toward all that once had led him thither,
his sense was locked and sealed. He remembered Eunice Goodward--the
fact of her--how tall she was as she walked beside him--but not how at
the soft brushing of her hair as she turned, his blood had sung to her;
nor all the weeks of their engagement like a morning full of wings. And
he could not yet recall so much as the bare reasons for her break with
him except that they had been unhappy ones.
It had been a part of a long plan that he and Eunice should have seen
Italy together, but for the moment he did not wish her there. He was
sure she would have been in the way of his getting something that
glimmered at him from the coign of castellated walls all awash about
their base with purpled shadow, that strove to say itself in intricate
fine tracery of tower and shrine, and failed and fell away before the
sodden quality of his mind.
So he drifted northward with the spring, and saw the anemones blowing
and the bloomy violet wonder the world, suffering incredible aching
intimations of the recrudescence of desire. Afterward he came to
Florence, where he had heard there were pictures, and hoped to have some
peace; but at Florence they were all too busy being painted or prayed
to, the remote Madonnas, the wounded Saints, the comfortable plump
Venuses; the lean Christs too stupefied with candle smoke to take any
account of an American gentleman in a plain business suit, who looked
homely and ill and competent. Sometimes in Santa Croce or in the long
gallery over the bridge, the noise of the city would remove from him and
the faces would waver and lean out of their frames, as if, had the
occasion allowed, they would have said the word to set him on his way.
But there was always a guard about or a tourist stalking some
uncatalogued prey and it never came to anything.
"What you really want," said a man at his hotel to whom he had half
whimsically complained of their inarticulateness--one of those
remarkable individuals who had done nothing so successfully in so many
cities of Europe that he was supposed to know the exact month for doing
it most delightfully in any one of them--"what you really want is
Venice. It's an off season there; you'll meet nobody but Germans, and if
you go about in your own gondola you needn't mind them."
So Peter went to Venice, and on the way there he met the Girl from Home.
VI
He knew at once that she was from Home, though as she sat opposite him
with the fingers of her mended gloves laced under her chin and her face
turned away to miss no point of the cypresses and warm, illumined walls,
there was nothing to prove that any one of a hundred towns might not
have produced her. Peter remembered what sort of people wore gloves like
that in Bloombury--the minister's wife, the school teacher, his mother
and Ellen--and was instantly sure she would not have been travelling
through Italy first-class except at the instigation of the large,
widowed and distrustful woman with whom she got on at Padua. This lady,
also, Peter understood very well. He thought it likely she sat in
rocking chairs a great deal at home and travelled to improve her mind.
She had, moreover, a general air of proclaiming the unwarrantableness of
railway acquaintances, which alone would have prevented Peter from
asking the girl, as he absurdly wanted to, if they had painted the new
school-house yet, and if there had been much water that year in Miller's
pond.
As she sat so with her round hat pushed askew by the window-glass, there
was some delicate reminder about her that streaked the rich Italian
landscape with vestiges of Bloombury.
He looked out of the window where she looked and saw the white
straight-sided villas change to green-shuttered farmhouses, and fine old
Roman roads lead on to Harmony. It was all there for him in its
unexpectedness, as freshly touching as those reminders of his mother
which he came upon occasionally where Ellen kept them laid by in
lavender; as if the girl had shaken from the folds of her jacket of
unmistakable Bloombury cut, Youth for him--his own--anybody's Youth--no
limp and yellowed keepsake, but all crisply done up and ready for
putting on. So sharp for the moment was his sense of accepting the
invitation to put it on with her as the best possible traveller's guise,
especially for seeing Venice in, that catching the speculative eye of
the large lady turned upon him, he quailed sensibly. She had the air of
having detected him in an attempt to establish a relation with her
companion on the ground of their common youngness, and finding herself
much more a match for him both in years and in respect to their common
origin. Whatever passed between the two women, and something did pass
wordlessly, with hardly so much substance as a look, remained there, not
intrusively, but as proof that what he had been seeking was still going
on in some far but attainable place. It was the first movement of an
accomplished recovery, for Peter to find himself resisting the
implication of his appearance in favour of what was coming to him out of
the retouched, sensitive surfaces of his past.
He knew so well as he looked at the girl, what had produced her. She was
leaning a little from the window in a way that brought more of her face
into view, and though from where he sat Peter could have very little
notion of the points of the nearing landscape, he knew by what he saw of
her, that somewhere across the low runnels in the windy reeds she had
caught sight of the "sea birds' nest."
He did not on that account change his position so that he might have a
glimpse of the dark hills of Arqua or the towers of Venice repeating
themselves in the lustrous, spacious sea. Sitting opposite the girl, he
saw in her following eyes the silver trails of water and the dim
procession down them of old loves, old wars, old splendours, much better
than the thin line of the landscape presented them to his weary sense.
He leaned back as far as the stiff seat allowed, watching the Old World
shine on her face, where the low light, striking obliquely on the water,
turned it white above black shoals of weed. For the first time since his
illness his mind slipped the leash of maimed desire, and as if it parted
for him there beyond the window of the railway carriage, struck into the
trail to the House. The walls of it rose up straight and shining, gilded
purely; the windows arching to summer blueness, let in with them the
smell of the wilding rose at the turn of the road and the evening
clamour of the birds in Bloombury wood.
All this time Peter had been sitting in an Italian railway carriage,
knee to knee with a pirate bearded Austrian Jew who gave him the
greatest possible occasion for wishing the window opened, and when the
jar of the checked train drew him into consciousness again, he was at a
loss to know what had set him off so far until he caught sight of the
girl. She was buttoning on her jacket with fingers that trembled with
excitement as she constrained herself to the recapitulation of the two
suitcases, the hat box and three parcels which her companion in order to
have well in hand, had been alternately picking up and dropping ever
since they sighted the tower of San Georgio dark against the sea
streaked west.
"Two and one is three and three is six and the _'Baedeker'_ and the
umbrellas," said the girl. "No, I don't have to look in the address
book. I have it by heart. Casa Frolli, the Zattera." Then the roar of
the train split into the sharp cries of the _facchinos_ that carried
them forward like an explosion into Venice as it rose statelily from the
rippling lustre. Around it wove the black riders with still,
communicating prows, so buoyant, so mysteriously alive and peering, like
some superior sea creatures risen magically from below the frayed
reflection of the station lights. Much as Peter felt that he owed to the
vivid presence of the girl, his new capacity to see and feel it so as it
burst upon them, he hadn't found the courage to address her. So it was
with a distinct sense of deprivation that he saw her with her companion
grasping the side of the gondola as if by that method to keep it afloat,
disappearing down the dim water lanes in the direction of the Zattera.
VII
It was the evidence of how far he had come on the road to recovery that
he was able, when he woke in his bed at the _Britania_, to allow full
play to the suggestion that he had experienced nothing more than the
natural reversion of age to the bright vividness of the past. "Though I
didn't expect," he admitted as he lay fronting in the wide old mirrors,
interminable reflections of a pillow dinted by his too-early whitened
head, "I really did not expect to have it begin at forty-two." Having
made this concession to his acceptance of himself as a man done with
youngness of any sort, he lay listening to the lip-lapping of the water
and the sounds that came up from the garden just below him, the clink of
cups and the women's easy laughter, and wondered what it could have been
about that girl to set him dreaming of all the women who had ever
interested him.
It did not occur to him then, nor in the interval in which the tang of
his dream intervened between him and the full flavour of Venice, that he
had not thought once of Eunice Goodward, but only of those who had
touched his life without hurting it. He was so far indeed from thinking
of women again as beings from whom hurts were expected to come, that he
blamed himself for not having made an occasion out of their enforced
companionship, for speaking to the girl in the train if he should meet
her again.
"I must be twice her age," he told himself determinedly, "and no doubt
she has been brought up to be respectful to her elders."
He looked out very carefully, therefore, as he drifted about the canals,
for a large, widowed lady and a girl in a round hat who might have come
from Bloombury, but he did not find her that day nor the next, nor the
day after, and in the meantime Venice took him.
The ineffable consolation of its beauty stole upon him like the breath
of its gardens, as it rose delicately from its sea station, murmurous
like a shell with the whisper of joyous adventure. It was, as he told
himself, a part of the sense of renewal which the girl had afforded him,
that he was able to accept its incomparable charm as the evidence of the
continuity of the world of youth and passion. His being able to see it
so was a sort of consolation for having, by the illusive quality of his
dreams, missed them both on his own account.
It was not, however, until the morning of the fourth day that it drew
him as he had known in the beginning it inevitably must, to the core of
Venice, where in the wide piazza full of sleepy light, the great banners
dropped from their staves broad splashes of colour between the slaty
droves of doves. High over the door the gold horses of Lysippus
breasted the gold air made shadowless by the approaching _temporale_. He
was so far then from anything that had to do with his dream that it was
not for some moments after he had turned into St. Mark's, obsessed of
the sense of life unconquerable and pervading, that he began to take
notice of what he saw there in the dim wonder. It was first of all the
smell of stale incense and the mutter of the mass, and then as he bowed
instinctively to the elevated Host, the snare of the intricate mosaic
pavement; so by degrees appreciation cleared to the seductive polish of
the pillars, the rows of starred candles, and beyond that to the clear
gold of the walls, with all the pictures wrought flatly upon them ... as
it had been in the House!
It was some time before he was able to draw up out of his boyhood
memories, so newly made a gift to him, the stray, elucidating fact of
his father's early visit to this spot and the possibility of his dream
having shaped itself about some unremembered account of it. He climbed
up to the galleries to give himself room to that wonder of memory which
had failed to preserve to him any image of how his father looked, and
yet had so furnished all his imagination. Which didn't make any less of
a wonder of his knowing as he stood there, Peter Weatheral, of the firm
of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., Real Estate Brokers, what it was all about.
"It's a picture-book of the heart of man," he concluded, and no sooner
had he shaped this thought in his mind than he heard it uttered for him
on the opposite side of the pillar in a voice made soft by indulgent
tenderness, "Just a great picture-book." He leaned forward at the sound
far enough to have a glimpse of the Girl from Home, and smiled at her.
"So you've found that out, have you?" It was not strange to find himself
addressing her friendlily nor to hear her answer him.
"Just a picture-book," she repeated. "It explains so much. What the
saints were to them, and the Holy Personages. Monkish tales to prey upon
their superstition, we were taught. But you can see here what they
really were, the wonder tales of a people, the fairy wonder and the
blessed happenings come true as they do in dreams. Oh, it must have been
a good time when the saints were on the earth."
"You believe in them, then?"
"Here in San Marco, yes. But not when I am in Bloombury."
"Oh!" cried Peter, "are you really from Bloombury? I knew you were from
up country but I hardly dared to hope--if you will permit me----" He
searched for his card which she accepted without looking at it.
"You are Mr. Peter Weatheral, aren't you? Mrs. Merrithew thought she
recognized you yesterday."
"Is that why she glared at me so? But anyway I am obliged to her, though
I haven't vestige of a recollection of her."
"She didn't suppose you had. Her husband sold you some land once. But of
course everybody in Bloombury knows the Mr. Weatheral who went from
there to the city and made his fortune."
"A sorry one," said Peter. "But if you are really from Bloombury why
don't I remember you? I go there with Ellen every summer, and _she_
knows everybody."
"Yes; she is so kind. Everybody says that. But I'm really from Harmony.
I taught the Bloombury school last year. I am Savilla Dassonville."
"Oh, I knew your father then! Now that I come to think of it, it was he
who laid the foundation of my greatness," Peter smiled whimsically. "And
I knew your mother; she was a very lovely lady."