Miss Raby's first novel, "The Eternal Moment," was written round the
idea that man does not live by time alone, that an evening gone may
become like a thousand ages in the courts of heaven--the idea that was
afterwards expounded more philosophically by Maeterlinck. She herself
now declared that it was a tiresome, affected book, and that the title
suggested the dentist's chair. But she had written it when she was
feeling young and happy; and that, rather than maturity, is the hour in
which to formulate a creed. As years pass, the conception may become
more solid, but the desire and the power to impart it to others are
alike weakened. It did not altogether displease her that her earliest
work had been her most ambitious.
By a strange fate, the book made a great sensation, especially in
unimaginative circles. Idle people interpreted it to mean that there
was no harm in wasting time, vulgar people that there was no harm in
being fickle, pious people interpreted it as an attack upon morality.
The authoress became well known in society, where her enthusiasm for
the lower classes only lent her an additional charm. That very year
Lady Anstey, Mrs. Heriot, the Marquis of Bamburgh, and many others,
penetrated to Vorta, where the scene of the book was laid. They
returned enthusiastic. Lady Anstey exhibited her water-colour drawings;
Mrs. Heriot, who photographed, wrote an article in _The Strand_; while
_The Nineteenth Century_ published a long description of the place
by the Marquis of Bamburgh, entitled "The Modern Peasant, and his
Relations with Roman Catholicism."
Thanks to these efforts, Vorta became a rising place, and people who
liked being off the beaten track went there, and pointed out the way
to others. Miss Raby, by a series of trivial accidents, had never
returned to the village whose rise was so intimately connected with
her own. She had heard from time to time of its progress. It had also
been whispered that an inferior class of tourist was finding it out,
and, fearing to find something spoilt, she had at last a certain
diffidence in returning to scenes which once had given her so much
pleasure. Colonel Leyland persuaded her; he wanted a cool healthy spot
for the summer, where he could read and talk and find walks suitable
for an athletic invalid. Their friends laughed; their acquaintances
gossiped; their relatives were furious. But he was courageous and she
was indifferent. They had accomplished the expedition under the scanty
ægis of Elizabeth.
Her arrival was saddening. It displeased her to see the great hotels in
a great circle, standing away from the village where all life should
have centred. Their illuminated titles, branded on the tranquil evening
slopes, still danced in her eyes. And the monstrous _Hôtel des Alpes_
haunted her like a nightmare. In her dreams she recalled the portico,
the ostentatious lounge, the polished walnut bureau, the vast rack for
the bedroom keys, the panoramic bedroom crockery, the uniforms of the
officials, and the smell of smart people--which is to some nostrils
quite as depressing as the smell of poor ones. She was not enthusiastic
over the progress of civilisation, knowing by Eastern experiences that
civilisation rarely puts her best foot foremost, and is apt to make
the barbarians immoral and vicious before her compensating qualities
arrive. And here there was no question of progress: the world had more
to learn from the village than the village from the world.
At the _Biscione_, indeed, she had found little change--only the
pathos of a survival. The old landlord had died, and the old landlady
was ill in bed, but the antique spirit had not yet departed. On the
timbered front was still painted the dragon swallowing the child--the
arms of the Milanese Visconti, from whom the Cantùs might well be
descended. For there was something about the little hotel which
compelled a sympathetic guest to believe, for the time at all events,
in aristocracy. The great manner, only to be obtained without effort,
ruled throughout. In each bedroom were three or four beautiful
things--a little piece of silk tapestry, a fragment of rococo carving,
some blue tiles, framed and hung upon the whitewashed wall. There were
pictures in the sitting-rooms and on the stairs--eighteenth-century
pictures in the style of Carlo Dolce and the Caracci--a blue-robed
Mater Dolorosa, a fluttering saint, a magnanimous Alexander with
a receding chin. A debased style--so the superior person and the
textbooks say. Yet, at times, it may have more freshness and
significance than a newly-purchased Fra Angelico. Miss Raby, who had
visited dukes in their residences without a perceptible tremor, felt
herself blatant and modern when she entered the _Albergo Biscione_.
The most trivial things--the sofa cushions, the table cloths, the
cases for the pillows--though they might be made of poor materials and
be æsthetically incorrect, inspired her with reverence and humility.
Through this cleanly, gracious dwelling there had once moved Signor
Cantù with his china-bowled pipe, Signora Cantù in her snuff-coloured
shawl, and Bartolommeo Cantù, now proprietor of the _Grand Hôtel des
Alpes_.
She sat down to breakfast next morning in a mood which she tried to
attribute to her bad night and her increasing age. Never, she thought,
had she seen people more unattractive and more unworthy than her
fellow-guests. A black-browed woman was holding forth on patriotism and
the duty of English tourists to present an undivided front to foreign
nations. Another woman kept up a feeble lament, like a dribbling tap
which never gathers flow yet never quite ceases, complaining of the
food, the charges, the noise, the clouds, the dust. She liked coming
here herself, she said; but she hardly liked to recommend it to her
friends: it was the kind of hotel one felt like that about. Males were
rare, and in great demand; a young one was describing, amid fits of
laughter, the steps he had taken to astonish the natives.
Miss Raby was sitting opposite the famous fresco, which formed the only
decoration of the room. It had been discovered during some repairs;
and, though the surface had been injured in places, the colours were
still bright. Signora Cantù attributed it now to Titian, now to Giotto,
and declared that no one could interpret its meaning; professors and
artists had puzzled themselves in vain. This she said because it
pleased her to say it; the meaning was perfectly clear, and had been
frequently explained to her. Those four figures were sibyls, holding
prophecies of the Nativity. It was uncertain for what original reason
they had been painted high up in the mountains, at the extreme boundary
of Italian art. Now, at all events, they were an invaluable source of
conversation; and many an acquaintance had been opened, and argument
averted, by their timely presence on the wall.
"Aren't those saints cunning!" said an American lady, following Miss
Raby's glance.
The lady's father muttered something about superstition. They were
a lugubrious couple, lately returned from the Holy Land, where they
had been cheated shamefully, and their attitude towards religion had
suffered in consequence.
Miss Raby said, rather sharply, that the saints were sibyls.
"But I don't recall sibyls," said the lady, "either in the N.T. or the
O."
"Inventions of the priests to deceive the peasantry," said the father
sadly. "Same as their churches; tinsel pretending to be gold, cotton
pretending to be silk, stucco pretending to be marble; same as their
processions, same as their--(he swore)--campaniles."
"My father," said the lady, bending forward, "he does suffer so from
insomnia. Fancy a bell every morning at six!"
"Yes, ma'am; you profit. We've stopped it."
"Stopped the early bell ringing?" cried Miss Raby.
People looked up to see who she was. Some one whispered that she wrote.
He replied that he had come up all these feet for rest, and that if he
did not get it he would move on to another centre. The English and
American visitors had co-operated, and forced the hotel-keepers to
take action. Now the priests rang a dinner bell, which was endurable.
He believed that "corperation" would do anything: it had been the same
with the peasants.
"How did the tourists interfere with the peasants?" asked Miss Raby,
getting very hot, and trembling all over.
"We said the same; we had come for rest, and we would have it. Every
week they got drunk and sang till two. Is that a proper way to go on,
anyhow?"
"I remember," said Miss Raby, "that some of them did get drunk. But I
also remember how they sang."
"Quite so. Till two," he retorted.
They parted in mutual irritation. She left him holding forth on the
necessity of a new universal religion of the open air. Over his head
stood the four sibyls, gracious for all their clumsiness and crudity,
each proffering a tablet inscribed with concise promise of redemption.
If the old religions had indeed become insufficient for humanity, it
did not seem probable that an adequate substitute would be produced in
America.
It was too early to pay her promised visit to Signora Cantù. Nor was
Elizabeth, who had been rude overnight and was now tiresomely penitent,
a possible companion. There were a few tables outside the inn, at which
some women sat, drinking beer. Pollarded chestnuts shaded them; and a
low wooden balustrade fenced them off from the village street. On this
balustrade Miss Raby perched, for it gave her a view of the campanile.
A critical eye could discover plenty of faults in its architecture. But
she looked at it all with increasing pleasure, in which was mingled a
certain gratitude.
The German waitress came out and suggested very civilly that she should
find a more comfortable seat. This was the place where the lower
classes ate; would she not go to the drawing-room?
"Thank you, no; for how many years have you classified your guests
according to their birth?"
"For many years. It was necessary," replied the admirable woman. She
returned to the house full of meat and common sense, one of the many
signs that the Teuton was gaining on the Latin in this debatable valley.
A grey-haired lady came out next, shading her eyes from the sun, and
crackling _The Morning Post_. She glanced at Miss Raby pleasantly, blew
her nose, apologized for speaking, and spoke as follows:
"This evening, I wonder if you know, there is a concert in aid of the
stained-glass window for the English Church. Might I persuade you to
take tickets? As has been said, it is so important that English people
should have a rallying point, is it not?"
"Most important," said Miss Raby; "but I wish the rallying point could
be in England."
The grey-haired lady smiled. Then she looked puzzled. Then she realized
that she had been insulted, and, crackling _The Morning Post_,
departed.
"I have been rude," thought Miss Raby dejectedly. "Rude to a lady as
silly and as grey-haired as myself. This is not a day on which I ought
to talk to people."
Her life had been successful, and on the whole happy. She was
unaccustomed to that mood, which is termed depressed, but which
certainly gives visions of wider, if greyer, horizons. That morning
her outlook altered. She walked through the village, scarcely noticing
the mountains by which it was still surrounded, or the unaltered
radiance of its sun. But she was fully conscious of something new; of
the indefinable corruption which is produced by the passage of a large
number of people.
Even at that time the air was heavy with meat and drink, to which were
added dust and tobacco smoke and the smell of tired horses. Carriages
were huddled against the church, and underneath the campanile a
woman was guarding a stack of bicycles. The season had been bad for
climbing; and groups of young men in smart Norfolk suits were idling
up and down, waiting to be hired as guides. Two large inexpensive
hotels stood opposite the post office; and in front of them innumerable
little tables surged out into the street. Here, from an early hour in
the morning, eating had gone on, and would continue till a late hour
at night. The customers, chiefly German, refreshed themselves with
cries and with laughter, passing their arms round the waists of their
wives. Then, rising heavily, they departed in single file towards some
view-point, whereon a red flag indicated the possibility of another
meal. The whole population was employed, even down to the little girls,
who worried the guests to buy picture postcards and edelweiss. Vorta
had taken to the tourist trade.
A village must have some trade; and this village had always been full
of virility and power. Obscure and happy, its splendid energies had
found employment in wresting a livelihood out of the earth, whence
had come a certain dignity, and kindliness, and love for other men.
Civilisation did not relax these energies, but it had diverted them;
and all the precious qualities, which might have helped to heal the
world, had been destroyed. The family affection, the affection for
the commune, the sane pastoral virtues--all had perished while the
campanile which was to embody them was being built. No villain had
done this thing: it was the work of ladies and gentlemen who were good
and rich and often clever--who, if they thought about the matter at
all, thought that they were conferring a benefit, moral as well as
commercial, on any place in which they chose to stop.
Never before had Miss Raby been conscious of such universal misdoing.
She returned to the _Biscione_ shattered and exhausted, remembering
that terrible text in which there is much semblance of justice: "But
woe to him through whom the offence cometh."
Signora Cantù, somewhat over-excited, was lying in a dark room on the
ground floor. The walls were bare; for all the beautiful things were
in the rooms of her guests whom she loved as a good queen might love
her subjects--and the walls were dirty also, for this was Signora
Cantù's own room. But no palace had so fair a ceiling; for from the
wooden beams were suspended a whole dowry of copper vessels--pails,
cauldrons, water pots, of every colour from lustrous black to the
palest pink. It pleased the old lady to look up at these tokens of
prosperity. An American lady had lately departed without them, more
puzzled than angry.
The two women had little in common; for Signora Cantù was an inflexible
aristocrat. Had she been a great lady of the great century, she
would have gone speedily to the guillotine, and Miss Raby would have
howled approval. Now, with her scanty hair in curl-papers, and the
snuff-coloured shawl spread over her, she entertained the distinguished
authoress with accounts of other distinguished people who had
stopped, and might again stop, at the _Biscione_. At first her tone
was dignified. But before long she proceeded to village news, and a
certain bitterness began to show itself. She chronicled deaths with
a kind of melancholy pride. Being old herself, she liked to meditate
on the fairness of Fate, which had not spared her contemporaries, and
often had not spared her juniors. Miss Raby was unaccustomed to extract
such consolation. She too was growing old, but it would have pleased
her better if others could have remained young. She remembered few of
these people well, but deaths were symbolical, just as the death of a
flower may symbolize the passing of all the spring.
Signora Cantù then went on to her own misfortunes, beginning with an
account of a landslip, which had destroyed her little farm. A landslip,
in that valley, never hurried. Under the green coat of turf water
would collect, just as an abscess is formed under the skin. There
would be a lump on the sloping meadow, then the lump would break and
discharge a slowly-moving stream of mud and stones. Then the whole area
seemed to be corrupted; on every side the grass cracked and doubled
into fantastic creases, the trees grew awry, the barns and cottages
collapsed, all the beauty turned gradually to indistinguishable pulp,
which slid downwards till it was washed away by some stream.
From the farm they proceeded to other grievances, over which Miss Raby
became almost too depressed to sympathize. It was a bad season; the
guests did not understand the ways of the hotel; the servants did not
understand the guests; she was told she ought to have a concierge. But
what was the good of a concierge?
"I have no idea," said Miss Raby, feeling that no concierge would ever
restore the fortunes of the _Biscione_.
"They say he would meet the diligence and entrap the new arrivals. What
pleasure should I have from guests I entrapped?"
"The other hotels do it," said Miss Raby, sadly.
"Exactly. Every day a man comes down from the _Alpes_."
There was an awkward silence. Hitherto they had avoided mentioning that
name.
"He takes them all," she continued, in a burst of passion. "My son
takes all my guests. He has taken all the English nobility, and the
best Americans, and all my old Milanese friends. He slanders me up and
down the valley, saying that the drains are bad. The hotel-keepers
will not recommend me; they send on their guests to him, because he
pays them five per cent. for every one they send. He pays the drivers,
he pays the porters, he pays the guides. He pays the band, so that it
hardly ever plays down in the village. He even pays the little children
to say my drains are bad. He and his wife and his concierge, they mean
to ruin me, they would like to see me die."
"Don't--don't say these things, Signora Cantù." Miss Raby began to walk
about the room, speaking, as was her habit, what was true rather than
what was intelligible. "Try not to be so angry with your son. You don't
know what he had to contend with. You don't know who led him into it.
Some one else may be to blame. And whoever it may be--you will remember
them in your prayers."
"Of course I am a Christian!" exclaimed the angry old lady. "But he
will not ruin me. I seem poor, but he has borrowed--too much. That
hotel will fail!"
"And perhaps," continued Miss Raby, "there is not much wickedness in
the world. Most of the evil we see is the result of little faults--of
stupidity or vanity."
"And I even know who led him into it--his wife, and the man who is now
his concierge."
"This habit of talking, of self-expression--it seems so pleasant and
necessary--yet it does harm----"
They were both interrupted by an uproar in the street. Miss Raby opened
the window; and a cloud of dust, heavy with petrol, entered. A passing
motor car had twitched over a table. Much beer had been spilt, and a
little blood.
Signora Cantù sighed peevishly at the noise. Her ill-temper had
exhausted her, and she lay motionless, with closed eyes. Over her head
two copper vases clinked gently in the sudden gust of wind. Miss Raby
had been on the point of a great dramatic confession, of a touching
appeal for forgiveness. Her words were ready; her words always were
ready. But she looked at those closed eyes, that suffering enfeebled
frame, and she knew that she had no right to claim the luxury of pardon.
It seemed to her that with this interview her life had ended. She had
done all that was possible. She had done much evil. It only remained
for her to fold her hands and to wait, till her ugliness and her
incompetence went the way of beauty and strength. Before her eyes
there arose the pleasant face of Colonel Leyland, with whom she might
harmlessly conclude her days. He would not be stimulating, but it did
not seem desirable that she should be stimulated. It would be better if
her faculties did close, if the senseless activity of her brain and
her tongue were gradually numbed. For the first time in her life, she
was tempted to become old.
Signora Cantù was still speaking of her son's wife and concierge; of
the vulgarity of the former and the ingratitude of the latter, whom
she had been kind to long ago, when he first wandered up from Italy,
an obscure boy. Now he had sided against her. Such was the reward of
charity.
"And what is his name?" asked Miss Raby absently.
"Feo Ginori," she replied. "You would not remember him. He used to
carry----"
From the new campanile there burst a flood of sound to which the copper
vessels vibrated responsively. Miss Raby lifted her hands, not to her
ears but to her eyes. In her enfeebled state, the throbbing note of the
bell had the curious effect of blood returning into frozen veins.
"I remember that man perfectly," she said at last; "and I shall see him
this afternoon."