on the southern terrace of the Belvedere, with a rug tucked round her
and a parasol over her head. She was happy. Her mother had just brought
her a letter from Nancy. Her little niece Nancy, waiting in
Italy--waiting just for a short time until Edith should be quite well
again--wrote a letter of love and longing, and told Edith to get well
quickly. Life without Edith, she wrote, was a horrid nightmare. Italy
without Edith was a green splash and a name on the map, but did not
really exist at all. Aunt Carlotta and Cousin Adele were very kind
people with loud voices, but she did not understand them, and did not
want to understand them. All she wanted was to be with Edith again. She
had written two poems in Italian, which her mother said were better than
anything she had ever written before. And good-bye--and oh! let Edith
get well quickly, and let them be together in England again. There was a
tender postscript from Valeria telling her to be good and get well
quickly.
Yes, yes; Edith felt that she would get well quickly. Her temperature
was up, and the slight prickle of fever in her blood gave her a
sensation of eagerness, almost of hurry, as if she were hastening
through illness to health, and she felt gladly and intensely alive. She
pressed little Nancy's letter to her lips, and lay back in her chair.
Hers was the last but one of a long row of couches on the southern
terrace of the Belvedere. On either side of her were other reclining
figures. Next to her on the right was a Russian girl, a few years older
than herself, with a pinched and hectic face. On her left was Fritz
Klasen, a German, twenty-four years old, ruddy and broad-shouldered. His
blue eyes were open when Edith turned her face towards him.
"How do you like Davos?" he said.
Edith answered: "Very much," and the young man nodded and smiled.
The Russian girl opened her black eyes and looked at Edith. "Have you
just come up?" she asked.
Edith said: "Yes; we arrived three days ago. How long have you been
here?"
"Four years," said the girl, and shut her eyes again.
Edith turned her head to the young German, and exchanged with him a
pitying glance.
"And you?" she asked him.
"I have been here eight months. I am quite well. I am going home in
May."
The Russian opened her dark eyes again, but did not speak.
"Are you going to the dance to-night?" said the young man after a while.
"A dance? Where?" asked Edith.
"Here, in the hotel--in the big ball-room. We have a dance here every
Wednesday, and the Grand Hotel has one every Saturday. Great fun." And
he cleared his throat and hummed "La Valse Bleue."
Edith went into the ball-room that evening, and although she did not
dance, she enjoyed herself very much. Mrs. Avory repeatedly asked her if
she was tired. "No, mother--no." There was a wild feverish excitement
all round her that she felt and shared without understanding it--the
excitement of the _danse macabre_.
Fritz Klasen came to where she sat, and, striking his heels together,
introduced himself to her and to her mother.
"I had no idea Davos was so gay," said Mrs. Avory, raising her light
gentle eyes to the young man's face.
"Gayest place in the world," he said. "No time to mope."
A girl in strawberry silk came rushing to him. "Lancers," she said, and
took his arm. They went off hurriedly, sliding like children on the
polished floor.
"He does not look ill," said Mrs. Avory.
"Nor does she," said Edith.
"No one does." And the mother gazed at the laughing, dancing crowd, and
wondered if they all had within them the gnawing horror that she knew
was shut in her daughter's fragile breast.
"Have you noticed," she said, "that nobody coughs?"
"It is true," said Edith. "Nobody coughs."
After a short silence Mrs. Avory said: "Probably most of them are here
for the winter sports."
For a long time she believed this. Young faces with pink cheeks and
vivid eyes, and laughter, much laughter, surrounded her. There were
balls and concerts, routs and bazaars, and everywhere the vivid eyes,
and the pink cheeks, and the laughter. The only strange thing that Mrs.
Avory noticed about her new friends was that when she said good-night to
them, and shook hands with them, their hands were strange to the touch,
and gave her a little shock.
They were not like the hands of other people that one clasps and thinks
not of. "Good-night," to one. "What a hot hand!" she would think.
"Good-night," to another. "What a cold, moist hand!" Hands of fire, and
hands of ice; arid hands, that felt brittle to the touch; humid hands,
which made her palms creep; weak, wet hands, from which her own
recoiled. Each told their tragic tale. But the faces laughed, and the
feet danced, and nobody coughed.
Edith soon stopped coughing, too. The doctor had forbidden it. She
coughed in the night, when no one except her mother heard. The months
swung past, promising and not fulfilling, but promising again, and Edith
went to her fate submissive, with light tread.
One thing only tore at her soul--the longing to see Nancy. Nancy, Nancy,
Nancy! She would say the name to herself a hundred times a day, and
close her eyes to try and picture the little face, and the tuft of black
curls on the top of the buoyant head. Her feverish hands felt vacant and
aching for the touch of the soft, warm fingers she had held. Mrs. Avory
comforted her. In the spring, or at latest in the summer, Edith should
see Nancy again. Edith would be quite well in a month or two if she ate
many raw eggs and was brave.
So Edith ate raw eggs and was brave.
* * * * *
Spring climbed up the five thousand feet and reached Davos at the end of
May. Fritz Klasen was leaving. He was going back to Leipzig.
"Good-bye, good-bye."
He walked round the verandah at the resting-hour, shaking hands with
everyone, saying, "Gute Besserung," and "Auf wiedersehen in
Deutschland," to two or three Germans.
When he reached the Russian girl she was asleep. But Edith said:
"Good-bye; I am so glad--I am so glad for you!"
When he had passed she saw that the Russian girl's eyes were open, and
fixed on her.
"Did you speak?" said Edith.
"No," said the Russian in her strange, empty voice; "I thought."
Edith smiled. "What did you think?"
"I thought, why do you lie?"
Edith sat up, flushing, and her breath went a little shorter. "What?"
she said.
Rosalia Antonowa kept her deep eyes on Edith's face.
"You said you were glad that he was going. Perhaps you meant it," she
said. "You are here so short a time; but in a year, in two years, or
four years, your lips will not be able to say that, and your heart will
turn sick when another goes away, and you know that you will never
go--never." Her bistre lids closed.
Edith tried to find something comforting to say to her.
"Davos is so beautiful, one ought not to mind. Surely you must love all
this blue and white loveliness--the mountains, and the snow, and the
sun."
"Oh, the mountains!" murmured Rosalia, with clenched teeth. "The
mountains, weighing on my breast, and the snow freezing and choking me,
and the sun blazing and blinding me. Oh!"--she raised her thin fist to
the towering immensity round her--"oh, this unspeakable, this monstrous
prison of death!"
Just then a Belgian girl passed, with pale lips and a tiny waist. She
stopped to ask Antonowa how she was.
"Ill," said the Russian curtly.
When the girl had passed she spoke again to Edith. "And you will know
what they mean when they ask you how you are. It is not the '_comment ca
va_?' of the rest of the world. No; here they mean it. They want to
know. 'How are you? Are you better? Are you getting better more quickly
than I am? Surely you are worse than I am! What! no haemorrhage for a
month? No temperature? That is good.' And then you see the hatred
looking out of their eyes."
"Oh, I don't think so," said Edith.
The Russian kept silent for a while; then she said: "Klasen will come
back again. He is not cured. The doctor told him not to go. He will soon
come back again."
He came back four months later. Edith was pained to see how grey and
dull his face looked. Now he would have to stay two or three years more.
But he said he did not mind; he was happy.
He had been married a month, and his wife was with him. He introduced
his girl-wife to Edith and to Mrs. Avory on the day following his
arrival. She was a gentle blonde of nineteen, a blue-blooded flower of
German aristocracy, who had married Klasen against her parents' will.
"I shall cure him," she said.
The summer was magnificent. She went out a great deal for long walks and
steep climbs, and she sang at all parties and concerts, for she had a
lovely young voice, all trills and runs like a lark's. She would sit on
the verandah at resting-time beside her husband, and near Edith, for he
had his old place again, and then after a while she would kiss his
forehead and run off to pay calls, or to practise, or to drive down to
Klosters.
Klasen's bright blue eyes would follow her. The Russian from her couch
looked at him and read his thoughts. She read: "I married that I might
not be alone--alone with my ill and my terror in the night and in the
day--but I am still alone. When my wife is with me, and I cough, she
says: 'Poor darling!' When in the night I choke and perspire, she turns
in her sleep, and says: 'Poor darling!' and goes to sleep again. And I
am alone with my ill and my terror."
The Russian girl thought that Klasen's blue eyes burned with something
that was not all love.
After a time the girl-wife practised less, and paid fewer calls. She
said she had lost weight, and one day with her husband she went to see
the doctor.
Yes, there was something--oh, very slight, very slight!--at the apex of
the left lung. So a couch was brought out for her on the terrace near
her husband, and she rested in the afternoons with a rug tucked round
her and a parasol over her head.
Fritz held the little hand with the new wedding-ring still bright upon
it. When she coughed he said: "Poor darling!" And he was no more alone.
In the day-time they laughed, and were very cheerful; in the night
Fritz slept better; but his wife lay awake, and thought of her sister
and her two little brothers safely at home with her father and mother in
Berlin.
Sometimes holiday-makers and sport-lovers came up to Davos for a
fortnight or a month, especially in the winter. Mrs. Avory noticed that
they laughed much less than the invalids did. When they hurried through
the lounge with their skates and skis, Klasen would say:
"See how they overdo things. They wear themselves out skiing, skating,
curling, bobsleighing. Yes," he would add, nodding to his wife and to
Edith, "almost everyone who comes here as a sportsman returns here as an
invalid."
His little laugh made Edith shiver. Sometimes the girl-wife would bend
forward. "See, Fritz; two more have arrived to-day!"
"Do you think they are tourists?"
"Oh no, no; they are ill." And in the young eyes that gazed upon the
new-comers was no sorrow.
* * * * *
The months and the years swung round, and Edith passed along them with
light and ever lighter tread. And still and always the longing for Nancy
tore at her heart with poisoned teeth. Every hour of her day was bitter
with longing for the sound of the childish voice, the touch of the soft,
warm hand. She sometimes thought: "If I were dying, Valeria would let
Nancy come here to say good-bye." Then again she thought:
"If Nancy came I should recover. I cannot eat enough now to get strong
because I am so often near to crying; but if Nancy were here I should
not cry. I should eat much more; I should not feel so sad; I should go
out for walks with her. I know I should recover...."
But Nancy was in Italy in the house of Aunt Carlotta and Cousin Adele,
and Edith's letters were not given to her, lest the paper over which
Edith had bent should carry poison in its love-laden pages.
Nancy now spoke Italian and wrote Italian poems. She went out for walks
with Adele, and Adele held the soft, warm hand and heard the sweet
treble voice. Adele kept the house quiet and the meals waiting when
Nancy was writing; and when Nancy frowned and passed her hand across her
forehead with the little quick gesture she often used, Adele laughed her
loud Milanese laugh that drove all the butterfly-thoughts away. Adele
tidied Nancy's things and threw away the dried primroses Edith had
picked with her in the Hertfordshire woods, and gave the string of blue
beads Edith had put round Nancy's neck the day she left for Davos to the
hall-porter's child, and she tore up all the poems Nancy had written in
England, because they were old things that nobody could understand.
Thus, as the months and the years swung round, Edith went from Nancy's
memory. Softly, slowly, with light tread, the girl-figure passed from
her recollection and was gone; for children and poets are forgetful and
selfish, and a child who is a poet is doubly selfish, and doubly
forgetful.
* * * * *
When Nancy was fifteen, Zardo, the Milan publisher, accepted her first
book--"A Cycle of Lyrics." By the post that brought the first proofs to
the little poet came also a letter, black-edged, from Switzerland, for
her mother.
"Mother, mother!" cried Nancy, drawing the printed pages from the large
envelope, and shaking them out before her, "Look, the proofs, the
proofs! This is my book, my own book!"
And she lifted all the rough sheets to her face and kissed them.
But Valeria had opened the black-edged letter, and was gazing at it,
pale, with tears in her eyes.
"Nancy," she said, "Edith is dead."
"Oh, mother dear!" exclaimed Nancy, "I am so sorry!" And she bent over
her mother and kissed her. Then she went back to her proofs and turned
over the first page.
"She died on Thursday morning," sobbed Valeria. "And oh, Nancy, she
loved you so!"
But Nancy had not heard. Before her lay her first printed poem. The
narrow verses on the wide white sheet looked to her like a slender
pathway.
And along this pathway went Nancy with starry matutinal eyes, beyond the
reach of love and the call of Death, leading her dreams far out past the
brief arch of Fame, into the shining plains of Immortality.
XII
So Valeria had her wish. Her child was a genius, and a genius recognized
and glorified as only Latin countries glorify and recognize their own.
Nancy stepped from the twilight of the nursery into the blinding uproar
of celebrity, and her young feet walked dizzily on the heights. She was
interviewed and quoted, imitated and translated, envied and adored. She
had as many enemies as a Cabinet Minister, and as many inamorati as a
_premiere danseuse_.
To the Signora Carlotta's tidy apartment in Corso Venezia came all the
poets of Italy. They sat round Nancy and read their verses to her, and
the criticisms of their verses, and their answers to the criticisms.
There were tempestuous poets with pointed beards, and successful poets
with turned-up moustaches; there were lonely, unprinted poets, and
careless, unwashed poets; there was also a poet who stole an umbrella
and an overcoat from the hall. Aunt Carlotta said it was the Futurist,
but Adele felt sure it was the Singer of the Verb of Magnificent
Sterility, the one with the red and evil eyes.
Soon came a letter from Rome bearing the arms of the royal house. Her
Majesty the Queen desired to hear Giovanna Desiderata read her poems at
the Quirinal at half-past four o'clock of next Friday afternoon.
The house was in a flutter. Everywhere and at all hours, in the
intervals of packing trunks, Aunt Carlotta, Adele, Valeria, and Nancy
practised deep curtseying and kissing of hand, and wondered if they had
to say "Your Majesty" every time they spoke, or only casually once or
twice. They started for Rome at once. A gorgeous dress and plumed hat
was bought for Nancy, a white veil was tied for the first time over her
childish face, and in very tight white gloves, holding the small volume
of her poems, she went with trembling heart--accompanied by Valeria,
Carlotta, and Adele in large feather boas--to the Quirinal.
A gentle-voiced, simply-gowned lady-in-waiting received them, and smiled
a little as she explained that only Nancy was expected and could be
received. Nancy was then told to remove her veil and her right-hand
glove. Carlotta, Valeria, and Adele embraced her as if she were leaving
them for a week, and made the sign of the cross on her forehead; then
the lady-in-waiting conducted her through a succession of yellow rooms,
of blue rooms, of red rooms, into the white and gold room where the
Queen awaited her.
More gentle-voiced and more simply gowned than her lady-in-waiting, the
Queen, standing beside a table laden with flowers, moved to meet the
little figure in the huge plumed hat. Nancy forgot the practised curtsey
and the rehearsed salute. She clasped and held the gracious hand
extended to her, and suddenly, as the awed, childish eyes filled with
tears, the Queen bent forward and kissed her....
It was late and almost dark when Nancy returned, dream-like, with pale
lips, to her mother, her aunt, and her cousin, who were having a nervous
meal of sandwiches and wines with a gentleman in uniform standing
beside them, and two powdered footmen waiting on them. They all three
hurriedly put on their boas as soon as Nancy appeared, and they left,
escorted and bowed out by the gentleman in uniform. "Probably the Duke
of Aosta," said Aunt Carlotta vaguely. Another powdered footman
conducted them to the royal automobile in which they returned to the
hotel.
Nancy was disappointing in her description of everything. She sat in the
dusky carriage with her eyes shut, holding her mother's hand. She could
not tell Aunt Carlotta what she had eaten. Tea? Yes, tea. And cakes?
Yes, cakes. But what kind of cakes, and what else? She did not remember.
And she could not tell Adele how the Queen was dressed. In white? No,
not in white. Was it silk? She did not know. What rings did the Queen
wear, and what brooch? Nancy could not remember. And had she said "Your
Majesty" to her, or "Signora"? Nancy did not know. Neither, she thought.
Then her mother asked timidly: "Did she like your poems?" And Nancy
tightened the clasp on her mother's hand and said, "Yes."
Carlotta and Adele were convinced that Nancy had made a fiasco of the
visit and of the reading. She had blundered over the greeting, and had
forgotten to say "Maesta." But they talked to everybody in the hotel
about their afternoon at the Quirinal, and pretended not to be surprised
when the hall-porter brought to them at the luncheon-table a packet
containing three pictures of the Queen with her signature, one for each;
and for Nancy a jewel-case, with crown and monogram, containing a brooch
of blue enamel with the royal initial in diamonds.
Nancy bought a diary, and wrote on the first page the date and a
name--the name of a flower, the name of the Queen.
* * * * *
They returned to Milan in a dream. A crowd of friends awaited them at
the station, foremost among them Zio Giacomo, shorter of breath and
quicker of temper than ever, and beside him the returned prodigal, Nino,
who had never been seen and seldom been heard of for the past eight
years. Adele turned crimson, and Valeria turned white as the
well-remembered dark eyes smiled at them from the handsome, sunburnt
face; and Nino turned up his moustache and helped them to alight from
the train, and kissed them all loudly on both cheeks. Nancy did not
remember him at all. She looked at him gravely while he rapidly
described to her a pink pinafore she used to wear in England eight years
ago, and a Punch-and-Judy show, stage-managed by a Fraeulein Something or
other, and a dimple just like her mother's that she then possessed.
Immediately the dimple reappeared, dipping sweetly in the young curved
cheek, and Valeria smiled with tears in her eyes and kissed Nancy. Then
Nino kissed Valeria and kissed Nancy, and then he kissed Adele, too, who
was acidly looking on. At last Zio Giacomo, growing very impatient,
hurried them off the crowded platform and into cabs and carriages. They
drove home, Nino crushing in at the last moment with Valeria, Carlotta,
and Nancy. He did not ask about the Queen, nor did he tell them anything
about his own long absence; but he quoted Baudelaire and Mallarme to
them all the way home in a low resonant voice broken by the jolts of the
carriage. He did not quote Nancy's poems. "They are sacrosanct," he
said. "My lips are unworthy." Then he drifted into Richepin:
"Voici mon sang et ma chair,
Bois et mange!"
he said, looking straight before him at Valeria. And Valeria turned pale
again, uselessly, hopelessly; for the eyes that looked at her did not
see her.
Zio Giacomo and Nino stayed with them to dinner, and two of the poets, a
successful one and an unwashed one, came later in the evening.
"What do you think of D'Annunzio?" asked Nino of Nancy, when the poets
had stopped a moment to take breath.
"I have not read him. I have read nobody and nothing," said Nancy.
"That is right," cried Marvasi, the unwashed, nodding his rusty head and
clapping his dusty fingers. "Read nothing, and retain your originality."
"Read everything," cried Cesare Raffaelli, "and cultivate form."
During the discussion that followed, the din of the two poets' voices
built a wall of solitude round Nino and Nancy.
"How old are you?" asked Nino, looking at her mild forehead, where the
dark eyebrows lay over her light grey eyes like quiet wings.
"Sixteen," said Nancy; and the dimple dipped.
Nino did not return her smile. "Sixteen!" he said. And because his eyes
were used to the line of a fading cheek and the bitterness of a tired
mouth, his heart fell, love-struck and conquered, before Nancy's cool
and innocent youth. It was inevitable.
"Sixteen!" he repeated, looking at her, grave and wondering. "Is anybody
in the world sixteen?"
And it was not the inspired author of the poems over which half Italy
raved, but the little girl with the wing-like eyebrows, that his wonder
went to; and it was the chilly little hand of the maiden, not the pulse
of the poet, that shook his heart loose from those other white,
well-remembered hands, where the blue veins, soft and slightly turgid,
marked the slower course of the blood--those sad blue veins which moved
his pity and strangled his desire.
"May I call you by your right name?" he asked. "'Nancy' seems
so--geographical."
Nancy laughed. "Call me as you will."
"_Desiderata_" he said slowly, and the colour left his face as he
pronounced it.
That evening Nancy wrote on the second page of her diary the date, and a
name; then she scratched the name out again, and the Queen remained in
the book alone.
Every morning since the visit to the Quirinal Nancy's chocolate and her
letters were brought in to her at eight o'clock by Adele herself, who
regarded it now as an office of honour to wait on the little Sappho of
Italy. She came in, in dressing-gown and slippers, with her long black
hair in a plait, and placed the dainty tray by Nancy's bed; then she
opened the shutters and came back to sit beside Nancy, and open her
correspondence for her. Nancy the while, like a lazy princess, sipped
her chocolate, with her little finger in the air. Newspaper cuttings
about Nancy were read first; requests for autographs were carefully put
aside for Adele to answer. Adele said that she could write Nancy's
autograph more like Nancy than Nancy herself. Then poems and
love-letters were read and commented upon with peals of laughter--and
business letters were put aside and not read at all.
So many people came and spoke to Nancy of what she had written that she
had no time to write anything new. But her brain was stimulated by all
the modernists and symbolists and futurists who recited their works to
her; and in the long lamp-lit evenings, while Aunt Carlotta was playing
briscola with Zio Giacomo, Nino read Carducci's "Odi Barbare" to the
three listening women--Valeria, Adele, and Nancy--who sat in their large
armchairs with drooping lids and folded hands, like a triptichi of the
seasons of love.
Valeria always sat a little apart in the shadow, and if anyone spoke to
her she replied softly and smiled wanly. Valeria's dimple had slipped
into a little line on her cheek. Valeria herself was not Valeria any
more. She was Nancy's mother. She had moved back into the shadow, where
mothers sit with kind eyes that no one gazes into, and sweet mouths that
no one kisses, and white hands that bless and renunciate. The baby had
pushed her there. Gently, inexorably, with the first outstretching of
the tiny fist, with the first soft pressure of the pink fragile fingers
against the maternal breast, the child had pushed the mother from her
place in the sunlight--gently, inexorably, out of love, out of joy, out
of life--into the shadow where mothers sit with eyes whose tears no one
kisses away, with heart-beats that no one counts. Nancy sooner than
others had taken her own high place in the sun; for if most children are
like robin redbreasts, slayers of their old, Genius, the devourer, is
like an eagle that springs full-fledged, with careless, devastating
wings, from the nest of a dove.
* * * * *
"Nancy," cried Adele, bursting into her cousin's room one afternoon,
"here is an Englishman to see you. Come quickly. I cannot understand a
word he says."
"Oh, send mother to him," said Nancy. "I have forgotten all my English.
Besides, I must read this noxious Gabriele to the end."
"Your mother has gone out. Do come!" And Adele gave Nancy's hair a
little pull on each side and a pat on the top, and hurried her to the
drawing-room, where the Englishman was waiting. He rose, a
stern-looking, clean-shaven man, with friendly eyes in a hard face.
Nancy put out her hand and said: "Buon giorno."
He answered: "How do you do? My Italian is very poor. May I speak
English?"
Nancy dimpled. "You may speak it, but I may not understand it," she
said.
But she understood him. He had written a critical essay on her book,
with prose translations of some of the lyrics, and wished to close the
article with an _apercu_ of her literary aims and intentions. What work
was she doing at present! What message----?
"Nothing," said Nancy, with a little helpless Latin gesture of her
hands. "I am doing nothing."
"_Peccato!_" said the Englishman. And he added: "I mean your Italian
word in both senses--a pity and a sin."
Nancy nodded, and looked wistful.
"Why are you not working?" asked her visitor severely.
Nancy repeated the little helpless gesture. "I don't know," she said;
then she smiled. "In Italy we talk so much. We say all the beautiful
things we might write. That is why Italian literature is so poor, and
Italian cafes so interesting. As for our thoughts, when we have said
them they are gone--blown away like the fluff of the dandelions I used
to tell the time by when I was a little girl in England."
That childish reminiscence brought her very near to him, and he told her
about his mother and his younger sister, who lived in Kent, in an
old-fashioned house in the midst of a great garden.
"You make me homesick for England," said Nancy.
Mr. Kingsley looked pleased. "Do you remember England?" he asked.
"No," said Nancy; "I am always homesick for things that I have
forgotten, or for things that I never have known." And she smiled, but
in her eyes wavered the nostalgic loneliness of the dreamer's soul.
The Englishman cleared his throat, and said in a practical voice: "I
hope that you will work very hard, and do great things."
* * * * *
She tried to. She got up early the next morning, and wrote in her diary,
"_Incipit vita nova!_" and she made an elaborate time-table for every
hour of the day; then she made a list of the things she intended to
write--subjects and ideas that had stirred in her mind for months past,
but had been scattered by distracting visits, dispersed in futile
conversations. She felt impatient and happy and eager. On the large
white sheet of paper which lay before her, like a wonderful unexplored
country full of resplendent possibilities, she traced with reverent
forefinger the sign of the cross.
Some one knocked at the door. It was Clarissa della Rocca, Nino's
married sister, tall, trim, and sleek in magnificent clothes.
"_Mes amours!_" she exclaimed, embracing Nancy, and pressing her long
chin quickly against Nancy's cheek. "Do put on your hat and come for a
drive with me. Aldo has come from America. He is downstairs in the
stanhope. He is trying my husband's new sorrels, and so, of course, I
insisted on going with him. Now I am frightened, and I have nobody to
scream to and to catch hold of."
"Catch hold of Aldo, whoever he may be," said Nancy, laughing.
"He is my brother-in-law. But I can't," said Clarissa, waving
explanatory mauve-gloved hands; "he is driving. Besides, he is horribly
cross. Have you never seen him? He is Carlo's youngest brother. Do come.
He will be much nicer if you are there."
"But he does not know me," said Nancy, still with her pen in her hand.
"That's why. He is always nice to people he does not know. Come quickly,
_ma cherie_. He is _ravissant_. He has been to America on a wild and
lonely ranch in Texas. He speaks English and German, and he sings like
an angel. Make yourself beautiful, _mon chou aime_."
Nancy slipped into a long coat, and pinned a large hat on her head
without looking in the glass.
Clarissa watched her from out of her long careful eyelids, and said:
"Mon Dieu!" Then she asked suddenly: "How young are you?"
"Nearly seventeen," said Nancy, looking for her gloves.
"What luck!" sighed Clarissa. "And you are sure you won't mind if I
pinch you? I must! The near horse rears."
Then they ran downstairs together, where Aldo della Rocca sat, holding
the two impatient sorrels in with shortened reins. He was flicking at
their ears and making them plunge with curved, angry necks and frothing
mouths. He was certainly _ravissant_. His profile, as Nancy saw it
against the blue June sky, was like Praxiteles' Hermes. His glossy hair
gleamed blue-black as he raised his hat with a sweeping gesture that
made Nancy smile. Then they were seated behind him, and the puissant
horses shot off down the Corso and towards the Bastioni at a magnificent
pace. Clarissa shrieked a little now and then when she remembered to,
but Aldo did not seem to hear her, so she soon desisted.
"Is he not seraphically beautiful?" she said to Nancy, pointing an
ecstatic forefinger at her brother-in-law's slim back. "I often say to
Carlo: 'Why, why did I meet you first, and not your Apolline brother?'"
Nancy smiled. "But surely he is rather young."
"He is twenty-four, you little stinging-nettle," said Clarissa; "and he
has been so much petted and adored by all the women of Naples that he
might be a thousand."
"How horrid!" said Nancy, looking disdainfully at the unwitting back
before her, at the shining black hair above the high white collar, and
at the irreproachable hat sitting correctly on the top of it all.
"Oh yes, he is horrid," said Clarissa; "but how visually delectable!"
Aldo della Rocca turned his profile towards them. "I shall take you
along the Monza road," he said.
"Oh," cried Clarissa, "such an ugly old road, where no one will see us."
"I am driving the horses out to-day," said her brother-in-law, "not your
Paris frocks." And he turned away again, and took the road towards
Monza at a spanking gait.
"Il est si spirituel!" laughed Clarissa, who bubbled over into French at
the slightest provocation. The straight, white, dusty road, bordered
with poplars, stretched its narrowing line before them, and the sorrels
went like the wind. Suddenly, as they were nearing the first
ugly-looking houses of Sesto, the driver checked suddenly, and the
ladies bent forward to see why. A hundred paces before them, struggling
and swaying, now on the side-walk, now almost in the middle of the road,
were two women and a man. Some children standing near a door shrieked,
but the struggling, scuffling group uttered no sound. Nancy stood up.
The man, whose hat had fallen in the road--one could see his dishevelled
hair and red face--had wrenched one arm loose from the clutch of the
women, and with a quick gesture drew from his pocket something that the
sun glanced on.
"He has a knife or a pistol!" gasped Nancy.
The struggling women had seen it, too, and now they shrieked, clutching
and grappling with him, and screaming for help.
Nancy thrust her small, strong hands forward. "I can hold the horses,"
she said, and seized the reins from Della Rocca's fingers.
He turned and looked at her in surprise. "Why, what----?" And he
stopped.
She read the doubt in his face, and read it wrong.
"I can--I can!" she cried. "Go quickly! We shall be all right!"
He twisted his mouth in curious fashion; then he jumped from his seat,
and ran in light leaps across the road. The man was holding the
revolver high out of the women's reach, while they clung to him and held
him frantically, convulsively, crying: "Help! Madonna! Help!"
Della Rocca reached him in an instant, and wrenched the short revolver
away. With a quick gesture he opened the barrel and shook the cartridges
out upon the ground. He tossed the weapon to one of a dozen men who had
now come hurrying out of a neighbouring wine-shop, and, running lightly
across the dusty road, he was back at the side of the carriage in an
instant. He glanced up at Nancy, and raised his hat again with the
exaggerated sweep that had caused her to smile before.
"Pardon me for keeping you waiting," he said.
"Ah, _quel poseur!_" cried Clarissa, who had sat with her eyes shut,
holding her ears during the excitement.
Della Rocca smiled, and, jumping into his place, took the reins from
Nancy's strained and trembling hands. She dropped back in her seat
feeling faint and excited. The horses plunged and started forward again.
"What courage!" said Clarissa, taking Nancy's fingers in her own.
"Yes," said Nancy, looking with approval at the straight, slim shoulders
and the black hair and the irreproachable hat. "I like a brave man."
Clarissa gave one of her little Parisian shrieks.
"_Ouiche!_ it is not Aldo--it is you who are brave! Aldo is as cautious
as a hare, but, being a preposterous _poseur_, he would not miss an
effect for worlds!" And Clarissa flourished an imaginary hat in the
Della Rocca style.
Nancy laughed, and believed not a word about the hare.
When they left her at her door she answered his sweeping salutation with
a serious little nod; she ran up the stairs hurriedly, and into her
room. On her writing-table lay an unopened letter from Nino; he wrote to
her every morning and called on her every afternoon.
Nancy did not glance at it. She ran out on to the balcony. But the
stanhope had already turned out of sight.
Nancy stepped back into her room and slowly drew off her gloves. For
some unexplained reason she was glad that her wrists still ached, and
that her fingers were bruised by the dragging of the hard, stiff reins.
From the open balcony the wind blew into the room, and scattered the
papers on her writing-table. It blew away Nino's letter; it blew away
the elaborate time-table she had drawn up and the lists of the work she
was to do; it blew away the large white sheet of paper--the fair sheet
full of resplendent possibilities--on which she had traced with reverent
finger the sign of the cross.
XIII
When the Englishman called again to bring her a copy of the
_Fortnightly_ with the article on "An Italian Lyrist," he found that she
had not worked at all; she looked as sweet and helpless and idle as
ever, and the room was full of visitors. He was introduced to her
mother, whom he found gentle and subdued, and to the vigorous,
loud-voiced Aunt Carlotta, and to all the poets.
"I am afraid, mother dear," said Nancy, leaning her billowy head against
her mother's arm and looking up at her new friend with May-morning eyes,
"that Mr. Kingsley will think I have no character."
"You have a complexion," interposed Aunt Carlotta. "That is enough for a
girl."
Valeria laughed. "It is true. Italian girls must not have characters
until they marry. Then their husbands make it for them, according to
their own tastes."
Mr. Kingsley smiled down at Nancy. "Why should I think you have no
character?"
"Because you told me to work. And I promised; and I have not," said
Nancy.
"Have you done nothing at all since I saw you?" he asked.
Nancy shook her head.
"And have you no thoughts, no ideas that urge for expression?"
"Oh yes!" said Nancy, waving eloquent, impatient fingers. "Ideas
and thoughts grow and bloom and blow in my mind like flowers in a
garden. Then all these people come and talk to me.... Alas," she sighed,
looking round the murmuring, laughing room, "in the evening my garden is
barren, for I have cut all my flowers and given them away."
The Englishman forgot that he was English, and said what he thought:
"I wish I could carry you off, and lock you up for a year, with nothing
but books and a table and an inkstand," he said.
"I wish you could," laughed Nancy, clasping eager hands. "I should love
it. Not a soul would be allowed to speak to me. And I should have my
meals passed in through the window."
The Englishman laughed the sudden laugh of one who laughs seldom. "And I
should walk up and down outside with a gun."
Nancy looked at him, and a quick, shy thought, like a bird darting into
an open window, entered her mind for an instant. Surely it would be good
to have this strong, kind sentinel between herself and the world; to
feel the light firmness of his touch on her shoulder keeping her to her
work--to the work she loved, and yet was willing to neglect at the call
of every passing voice. This stern, fair countenance would face the
world for her; these strong shoulders would carry her burdens; these
candid eyes would look into her soul and keep it clear and bright.
Then the bird-thought flew out of the window of her mind, for the door
opened and love and destiny came in. It was Aldo della Rocca, more than
ever visually delectable.
With him came his sister-in-law Clarissa, and Nino. Nino looked
depressed and dreary; La Villari was writing to him; his conscience was
harassing him; Aldo della Rocca's self-confident beauty irritated him.
"What, Nino! Here again?" said Nancy, with a laugh. "You said last night
that henceforward you would never come to see us more than twice a
week."
"That's right," said Nino. "Yesterday was the last visit of last week,
and this is the first visit of this week. Besides, Della Rocca told me
he was coming, so I felt that I had to come too. Of course, I did all I
could to shake him off, but he is as persistent and adhesive as one of
his compatriot cab-drivers in Santa Lucia. So that is why I could not
come alone."
"How confusing!" said Nancy, turning to greet Della Rocca.
Della Rocca smiled; and his smile was sudden and brilliant, as if a row
of lights had been lit at the back of his eyes.
He bent over Nancy's proffered hand. "Signora--your slave!" he said in
ceremonious Southern fashion.
Clarissa's high voice rang out. "He has been reading your poems day and
night, Nancy. And he has put them to music. Glorious! Quite a la Richard
Strauss or Tosti or Hugo Wolff! He must sing them to you."
Then she sailed round, greeting the poets, many of whom she knew. The
Englishman was introduced as the Signor Kingsley, and Clarissa asked him
many questions about London, and did not wait to hear what he answered,
but went off with Adele and Aunt Carlotta to a French lecture on
"Napoleon et les Femmes." The poets, as soon as they had had vermouth
and biscottini di Novara, also went away.
Then Della Rocca seated himself at the piano, and, preluding softly,
strayed from harmony to harmony into the songs he had composed for
Nancy. He played with his head bent forward and his soft hair falling
darkly over half his face, making him look like a younger brother of
Velasquez's Christ. He had the musical talent of a Neapolitan street-boy
and the voice of an angel who had studied singing in Germany. Nancy felt
happy tears welling into her eyes, and Della Rocca's clear-cut,
down-curving profile wavered before her gaze.
The Signor Kingsley sat silent in his corner near the window. Valeria
was in the shadow with some quiet work in her hand, and Nino, who was
sulky and bored, smoked cigarette after cigarette and yawned.
Nancy bent forward with clasped hands, listening to her own words, the
lovelier for their garb of music as children are more lovely when
clothed in shimmering robes and crowned with roses. She had sent her
thoughts out into the world, in their innocent and passionate
immaturity, bare and wild. And, behold, he brought them back to her
veiled in silver minor keys, borne on palanquins of rhythmic harmonies,
regal, measured, stately, like the young sisters of a queen.
Mr. Kingsley's mouth tightened as he watched the back of the singer's
black head nodding to the music, and listened to the soft tenor voice
rolling over the "r's" and broadening on the mellow "a's" of the tender
Italian words. He felt his own good English baritone contracting in his
throat, and he wondered what made "these Latin idiots" sing as they did.
Then he glanced at Nancy, who had closed her eyes, and at Nino, who was
in the rocking-chair staring at the ceiling; and suddenly he felt that
he must take his leave. He rose at the end of the cycle of songs, and
Nancy turned to him with vague eyes to say good-bye. His kind clear gaze
rested on her face.
"Do not cut all your flowers," he said.
Nancy shook her head. "No, no!" she said. "I won't. I really won't."
"Remember that your masterpiece is before you, and the little poems are
done with. Lock your doors. Shut out the world, and start on a new work
to-morrow."
Nancy said, "Yes, yes, I will." Then an absent look stole over her light
eyes. "Ah! _der Musikant!_" she cried, turning to Della Rocca, who was
singing in German, and pronouncing as if it were Genovese. "I remember
that. Is it not Eichendorff?"
"'Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts,'" said Della Rocca.
"Oh, do you really speak German? I love people who speak German," cried
Nancy, on whom the German poet's spell still rested.
"I learned it at Goettingen," said Della Rocca, with his illuminating
smile.
"Ach, de Stadt die am schoensten ist wenn man sie mit dem Ruecken
ansieht," quoted Nancy, laughing.
Della Rocca laughed too, although he did not understand what she had
said; then he turned to the piano again.
Nancy felt happy and inclined to kindness. "Do not go yet," she said to
Mr. Kingsley. "Sit down and talk to me."
But Mr. Kingsley knew better. Della Rocca's melting notes were drawing
the girl's thoughts away again, and he could notice the little shiver
creep round her face, leaving it slightly paler, as the silver tenor
voice took a high A in falsetto and held it long and pianissimo.
"I will come again some day, if I may," he said. "But I almost hope that
I shall find your doors locked."
Again the bird-thought came fluttering into the window of Nancy's mind,
as the Englishman's strong hand closed firm and warm round hers.
Then the door was shut on Mr. Paul Kingsley, and the thought flew away
and was gone.
"Who is that conceited fool of an Englishman?" said Nino, who felt cross
and liked to show it.
Nancy flushed. "Please don't speak like that about Englishmen. My father
was English." Then she added, with a little toss of her head: "And he
was not a bit of a conceited fool."
"I never said he was," said Nino.
"Oh!" gasped Nancy, "you did!"
"I said nothing of the kind," declared Nino. "Your father was a good and
noble man."
"You know I was not talking of my father," said Nancy.
"No more was I," said Nino.
Nancy turned to Della Rocca, who was preluding carelessly with smooth
fingers and all his smiles alight.
"Nino always cavils and confuses until one does not know what one is
talking about!"
Della Rocca nodded. "That is just what his celebrated friend, Nunziata
Villari, said about him when I saw her in Naples. By the way, Nino,"--he
ran up a quick scale of fourths and let them fall in a minor arpeggio
like tumbling water--"they say La Villari tried to commit suicide last
month. Locked herself up with a brazier of coke, like a love-sick
grisette. Did you hear about it?"
"No," said Nino, "I did not." Then he looked long, mildly, fixedly at
Della Rocca, who after a moment got up and said good-bye.
When he had left, Nancy said to Nino: "Who is La Villari? And why did
she try to kill herself? La Villari! I thought that was an actress who
had died a hundred years ago."
Nino took her hand. "You don't know anything, Nancy," he said. "You
don't even know that you are a vulture and a shark."
Nancy laughed. "Yes, but who is La Villari?"
"She is someone you have devoured," said Nino.
And, remembering the brazier of coke, he left for Naples by the next
train; for, though he had a nose of putty, he had a heart of gold.
XIV
During the long, dreary journey in an empty carriage of the slow train
Nino fought his battles and chastened his soul. He set his conscience on
the empty seat before him and looked it in the face. The desires of his
heart sat near him, and took his part. His conscience had a dirty face
that irritated him; his desires were fair as lilies and had high treble
voices that spoke loud. His conscience said nothing, only sat there
showing its dirty face and irritating him.
By the time Bologna was reached the lilies had it all their own way.
After all he was young--well, comparatively young; thirty-one is young
for a man--and he had his life before him, while Nunziata--well, she had
lived her life. And she had had eight years of his: the eight best
years, for after all at thirty-one a man is not young--well, not so
young. His conscience was staring at him, so he changed argument.
Nunziata did not really love him any more, she had told him so a hundred
times during the last two years; it was a burden, a chain of misery to
them both. She had herself begged him to leave her after one of those
well-remembered, never-ending scenes that were always occurring since
she had finally abandoned the theatre for his sake.
She had said: "Go! I implore you to go! I cannot live like this any
longer! For my sake, go!" So it was really in order to please her that
he had gone.
The face of his conscience opposite him was looking dirtier than ever.
But the treble voices of his desires rang shrill: "He must not forget
his duties to himself and to others. He had a duty to his father, who
longed to have him near him, settled happily and normally; he had a duty
to Valeria, who----" Here he quickly changed argument again. "He had a
duty to Nancy, to little, innocent, wonderful Nancy, who understood
nothing of the world; she must be saved from designing knaves, from
struggling _litterateurs_ and poets who would like to marry her and use
her vogue in order to scramble up to a reputation, from the professional
_beau jeune homme_ like Aldo, who would break her heart.... It really
was his duty----" The train slowed, shivered, and stopped. He was glad
to get out, and rush to a hurried supper in the buffet, because the ugly
face opposite him was more than he could stand.
All through the night in the slow train to Rome he fought his battles
and chastened his soul, and the little ugly face said not a word, but
looked at him.
When day dawned he had broken the lilies, and they lay, whiter than
before, at his feet. And the face of his conscience was clean. When Rome
was reached, where he had three hours to wait for the Naples express, he
hurried into the telegraph-office and sent a message to Nunziata:
"Arriving this evening at nine. Forgive. Yours for ever, NINO."
Then, just as he was getting into the hotel omnibus, he learned that a
special excursion train was leaving for Naples at once. He could arrive
four hours sooner. He hastened back into the station, caught the train,
and was already approaching Naples when La Villari received his
telegram.
La Villari had just begun her luncheon, and the _spaghetti al burro e
formaggio_ lay in a goodly heap of pale gold on her plate. She had just
put her fork into them and begun to turn it round and round, when Teresa
came in excitedly.
"A telegram, Illustrissima," she said.
La Villari opened the telegram. "Misericordia!" she said. "He is coming
back."
Teresa cleaned her hands on her apron. What? The Signorino? He was
returning?
"Yes, to-night. At nine o'clock," sighed La Villari.
Well, let the Illustrissima not allow the spaghetti to get cold. And
Teresa sighed also, as she left the room and hustled the telegraph-boy
off without giving him a tip.
They had been so happy without the Signorino. They had had such quiet,
comfortable meals. The Illustrissima had had no nerves, no convulsions,
but a good appetite and a pleasant temper. Now it would all begin again:
the excitements, the tempers of the Illustrissima; the dinner left to
get cold while the Illustrissima and the Signorino quarrelled; the
rushings out of the Signorino; the tears of the Illustrissima; the
telephone messages; the visitors and relations to argue with and console
the Illustrissima; then the returnings of the Signorino; and supper for
everybody in the middle of the night. It was not a life.
Teresa brought in the auburn cutlet a la Milanese. There! already it was
beginning. The Illustrissima had not eaten the spaghetti!
"Do not bother me with the spaghetti," said the Illustrissima, who
already had the nerves. "Let us think about this evening."
"Yes," said Teresa. "Shall we have vol-au-vent that His Excellency
likes?"
"Oh, do not bother me with vol-au-vent!" cried the Illustrissima. "Do
you not understand that he must not find us like this?"
"Vossignoria will put on the blue crepe-de-chine gown," said Teresa;
"and I will order the coiffeuse for six o'clock."
Yes, yes; but that was not sufficient. Nino must not find her sitting
there waiting for him, as if she had no one in the world but him.
"Go away, Teresa, go away! I must think," she said. And Teresa went to
her kitchen grumbling.
La Villari's views of life and her manner of dealing with situations
were according to Sardou, Dumas, or D'Annunzio. Nino must either find
her supine in a darkened room, with etiolated cheeks and blue shadows
under her spent eyes; or then, after his arrival, she must enter, coming
from some brilliant banquet, rose-crowned and laughing. She sees him!
She vacillates. Her jewelled hand clutches at her heart. "_Nino!_"--and
he is at her feet.... Then he makes her a scene of jealousy. Where has
she been? With whom? Where was she when his telegram arrived? Who sends
her all these flowers? Pah! He throws them out of the window--and all is
as it should be.
As it happened, there were no flowers in the room. So La Villari rang
the bell and told Teresa to order fifty francs worth of white roses and
tuberoses from the florist, to be brought as soon as possible, and the
hair-dresser for six o'clock, and the brougham for seven.
"And, Teresa!..."
Teresa turned back with a dreary face.
"Remember that it was you who opened the telegram. I was out. I am
always out. With many people, you understand."
Yes, Teresa understood. And with callous back and shuffling shoes she
went away to order the flowers, and the brougham, and the hair-dresser.
La Villari unpinned her hair, put the greater part of it neatly on the
dressing-table in readiness for the coiffeuse, rubbed a little lanoline
round her eyes, and settled herself with Matilde Serao's "Indomani" to
one more peaceful afternoon.
Love was not peaceful, it was agitating and uncomfortable; and keeping
up the pretence of being twenty-eight when one is forty-five is a labour
and a toil. Of course, she adored Nino; the mere thought of his ever
tiring of her, or leaving her, brought visions of despair and vengeance,
of vitriol and dagger to her mind. But oh! how she envied those placid
women who surrender their youth submissively, and slip serenely into
gentle middle-age as a ship glides into quiet waters. With her, because
her lover was young, she must grasp and grapple with the engulfing
years. She must clutch at her youth as a child clutches a wild bird
fluttering to escape. Alas! when the child opens its fingers the
prisoner is dead. Better let it fly when it will.
So thought Nunziata Villari. The feathers and the wings still lay in her
hand, but youth, the bird, was dead.
She took up the book, and stifled thought under the blanket of Matilde
Serao's warm prose.
The excursion train ran into Naples at five o'clock, just as a florist
in the Strada Caracciolo was threading a wire into the green throat of
the last white rose for the Illustrissima. Fifty francs worth of roses
in Naples in the month of June are enough to consummate the perfumed
death in Freiligrath's "Blumenrache," and then enough to cover the
maiden's coffin from wider to narrowest end. It took two men to carry
them, tied in huge bunches, along the Strada Caracciolo to the Palazzo
Imparato.
Nino from his cab saw two men bearing white flowers far ahead of him,
and wondered vaguely for whom they might be.
Then he thought of Nunziata's face as he had last seen it--pallid, with
a tortured smile, as she said good-bye. But now he would see her smile
again, that pretty tilted smile that was still young....
(The men with the flowers had turned a corner. Nino's cab turned it,
too, and there were the men again, marching before him.)
He had been a brute and a hound, but he would atone. He would do the
right thing. Nunziata should not be left in tears again, nor again be
driven to the little brazier of coke, like a love-sick grisette....
(The men with the white flowers were alongside. Now they were left
behind.)
And now the carriage stopped at the door of the Palazzo Imparato. The
driver handed the luggage down, and a waiting lazzarone grabbed and
shouldered it. While Nino was paying the fare the men with the flowers
came up, and Nino turned to glance at them as they passed. _But they did
not pass._ They turned into the Palazzo Imparato and vanished in the
shadow of the gateway.
Nino's heart leaped up, and stood still. The lazzarone, watching him,
saw tragedy in his face, and was satisfied that the tip would be a large
one; for the lazzarone knew that despair is as generous as happiness.
Nino ran, blind with his terrors, up the wide flights of stairs. On
Nunziata's landing the men with the flowers stood waiting.
Teresa opened the door, and saw behind the roses Nino's wild, white
face.
"The Signorino! Santa Vergine!"
In an instantaneous vision she thought of the Illustrissima, unpowdered,
unprepared, reading Matilde Serao, her tresses lying on the
dressing-room table. The servant's stupefied, stricken face confirmed
Nino's fears. He stumbled forward, and, dropping into a seat in the
hall, covered his face with his hands.
The Illustrissima, who had heard the noise, opened the drawing-room
door. At a glance she saw it all, and quietly closed the door again.
When, an instant later, Nino rushed in, the room was darkened, the
shutters closed; Nunziata lay on the couch with etiolated face, a soft
shimmering scarf was wound becomingly round her head, but no blue
shadows were under her eyes, for there had been no time to make them.
Then all began over again; for although she was peaceful and comfortable
when Nino was away, as soon as he was present she felt that all things
depended upon his love, and that his absence would end her life. Tighter
and tighter she grasped the little dead bird in her white, ringed hands,
and louder and louder she told her tired heart that youth was living and
singing still.
Nino was kind and considerate. He also wrote letters to the Italian
Consulates in Rio and Buenos Ayres, asking them to make sure that
Eduardo Villari was really dead--as his cook, who had returned with a
good deal of money and had married a baron, declared he was.
If the thought of Nancy knocked with light fingers at Nino's heart, he
never opened the door.
XV
Clarissa in her villa on Lake Maggiore was bored, so she wrote to Nancy
to come and stay with her.
"I am weary of my sweet blue lake and of my sour blue husband. Come and
stay with me a month. You shall have a large room at the top of the
house, with a huge table and an inkstand large enough to drown in, and
before you the view that inspired Manzoni. Come and write your
masterpiece."
By the same post she sent a note to her brother-in-law:
"Aldo, _mon joli_, do come. Carlo is insufferable. He growls all day and
snores all night. Why did I marry him? This is the fourth time I invite
you this year, and you never come. Last year it was different.
"Yours,
"CLARISSA.
"P.S.--The little _poetessa_ is going to stay here for a month."
He arrived next day. After greetings, he asked: "Where is Sappho, the
violet-haired?" Clarissa explained that Nancy had not arrived, and he
sulked and played the piano all the evening, while Carlo on the sofa
snored. Clarissa looked from one to the other, uncertain which of the
two was insulting her most.
Nancy arrived the following day. She had brought her notebooks with her
and a broken ivory pen that she always wrote with; she was full of the
masterpiece. She was going to work immediately.
Driving up from the landing-place to the Villa Solitudine she told her
plans to Clarissa, who nodded and smiled as she whipped up the fat cob.
She was going to write a book--_The Book!_--a great, noble piece of
work, not a little volume of flyaway poems that one reads and forgets in
a day. She was going to think of and dream of The Book; to live for The
Book; to breathe and walk for it, to eat and sleep for it. In Milan,
with people always round her, talking and distracting, it was
impossible; but here in the large bare room at the top of the
house----How sweet and dear of Clarissa to think of it! Never, never
could Nancy thank her enough.... Clarissa nodded and smiled, and the fat
cob turned into the chestnut drive of Villa Solitudine.
Down the steps, with a couple of dogs barking and leaping at his heels,
came Aldo to meet them, clad in Neapolitan fashion in white flannels and
scarlet sash. His uncovered head gleamed darkly in the sun.
"Behold Endymion awakened!" said Clarissa, laughing, to Nancy.
"Charmides, Adonais, Narcissus! The gods have cast upon him all the
beauty of the world!" As Nancy did not answer, Clarissa turned to look
at her. "Oh, what a stern face, _ma cherie!_ You are quite white. What
are you thinking of?"
"The Book," said Nancy; and she felt as if it were a child of hers that
was to die unborn.
"You shall write it, _mon ange!_ Aldo shall not disturb you." And she
threw the reins to the little stiff groom; then, daintily raising her
fluffy skirts, she alighted in Aldo's uplifted arms. Nancy put her foot
on the step, but Aldo raised her lightly and lifted her down. His red,
smiling mouth was close to her face. She thanked him, and he kissed her
hand with the ceremonious Southern salute, "Signora, I am your slave."
Nancy went to her room--the large, bare room with the beautiful
view--and stayed there all the afternoon. She put her notes in order;
she placed the large sheets of paper before her; and she dipped the
broken ivory pen into the huge inkstand. Then she sat and looked out of
the window. She could hear the dogs barking in the garden and Clarissa's
trilling laugh. On the sweet blue lake a tiny sail, like a pocket
handkerchief, dipped and curtseyed away, and through the open windows of
the drawing-room Aldo could be heard playing a Valse Triste. Nancy
dipped the pen into the inkstand again--and looked at the view.
Now she heard the music wander off in modulating chords which resolved
themselves into the rippling accompaniment of Hugo Wolff's "Musikant."
"Wenn wir zwei zusammen waeren
Wuerd' das Singen mir vergeh'n."
She could hear the soft tenor voice, and felt it drawing at her heart.
She closed the window and sat down again. She dipped the ivory pen into
the inkstand, and wrote at the top of the white sheet, "Villa
Solitudine," and the date. Under it, as she had not thought of a title
yet, she wrote in large letters:
"THE BOOK."
Then she jumped up and ran downstairs.
At sunset they went out in a sailing-boat. Clarissa held the rudder, and
Aldo stood in easy attitudes of beauty at the sail. The glow of the west
was on his pure young face, and the wind of the _tramontana_ raised his
waved hair and blew it lightly across his forehead. He was silent,
satisfied to know that the two women could see him, and that the
red-gold sky was a good background for his profile. Clarissa talked and
laughed, twittered and purred; but Aldo never spoke. And it was his
silence that enraptured Nancy.
"Ed io che intesi cio che non dicevi,
M'innamorai di te perche tacevi."
Stecchetti's words sang in her brain with new meaning, and in the days
that followed the two smooth lines were always in her mind.
Aldo knew little, but he knew the value of silence. He knew the lure of
the _hortus conclusus_--the Closed Garden into which one has not
stepped. Nancy stood outside its gates and dreamed of its unseen roses,
of fountains and shadowy paths and water-lilied lakes. For Aldo was a
closed garden.
Aldo also knew the value of his eyes--deep, passion-lit eyes, that
looked, Clarissa said, as if he had rubbed the lids with burnt cork to
darken them. When he raised them suddenly, and looked straight at Nancy,
she felt a little shock of pleasure that took her breath away. Little by
little, day by day, those eyes drew Nancy's spirit to their depths--she
leaned over them as over an abyss. In them she sunk and drowned her
soul.... Then, when from his eyes her own passionate purity gazed back
at her, she thought she saw his soul and not her own.
The Book cried in her now and then, but she stifled its voice and
whispered: "Wait!"
And The Book waited.
One day in the garden Aldo spoke to Clarissa. She was in the hammock
pretending to read.
"Clarissa, I am twenty-five years old."
"Vlan! ca y est!" said Clarissa, dropping her book. Then she drew a deep
breath, and her nostrils turned a little pale; but the superposed roses
of her cheeks bloomed on, independent of her ebbing blood and sickening
heart.
"I am penniless," continued Aldo, picking a piece of grass and chewing
it; "and Carlo has given me to understand that he can exist without me
if he tries very hard."
Clarissa sat up. "When? What did he say? Does he ... has he ... did he
mean anything?"
Aldo shook his comely head. "Carlo never means anything. But I shall
have to go back to--to the Texas ranch, or marry."
The Texas ranch was a romantic invention of Clarissa's, the only
foundation for which was a three weeks' holiday which Aldo had once
spent in the city of New York.
Clarissa bit her red, narrow lips. "Yes," she said.
During the long pause that followed Aldo picked another piece of grass
and chewed it.
"I suppose," said Clarissa, looking at him sideways through her long
lids, "you will marry some affectionate old thing with money."
"No. I know them," said Aldo. "They demand the affection, and keep the
money."
After a pause, in which he felt Clarissa's angry eyes on his face, he
said: "I am going to marry the little Sappho."
Clarissa laughed suddenly and loud. "You do that for your pleasure!
_Farceur, va!_" Aldo lifted his perfect eyebrows and did not reply. "She
has nothing, not a little black sou!" And Clarissa stuck her long
pointed thumbnail behind her long pointed teeth and jerked it forward.
"Oh! I dare say she has something," said Aldo, pretending to yawn
carelessly. "Besides, she is a genius, and can earn what she will."
"You are the perfect Neapolitan pig," said Clarissa, and closed her
eyes.
The perfect Neapolitan pig rose with an offended air and left her. He
strolled into the house and took his hat and stick, then he strolled out
again and through the garden into the hot street and down to the
landing-place. A boat was leaving for Intra, so he went on board, and at
Intra took the train for Milan. He dined at Biffi's, feeling happy.
"They will be miserable," he said. "That will teach them." Then he went
to his furnished rooms on the Corso, and slept well.
In Villa Solitudine they were miserable, and it taught them.
It taught Nancy that the Closed Garden she had had a glimpse of for so
brief an hour was the only garden in the world that she ever wanted to
enter; and that all the words Aldo had not said were the only words she
ever wanted to hear; that perfect goodness and unwavering strength must
lie behind his portentous beauty, white and immovable like marble lions
at a palace gate.
It taught Clarissa that one must accept the inevitable--that half a loaf
was better than no bread, and that a married Aldo was better than no
Aldo at all. It made her look at Nancy with closer eyes, and say to
herself that she was a little creature one would easily tire of, in
spite of--or because of--her intellectuality. Aldo was not a closed
garden for Clarissa; she knew the feeble flowers that bowed behind its
gates.
A hot, dreary week passed with no news from Aldo. Then Clarissa
telegraphed to him at Milan. She said she had told Carlo about their
conversation regarding his wish to marry Nancy, and Carlo approved.
Would he come back?
Yes; Aldo would come back. He waited another day or two, and at the
close of a sultry afternoon he sauntered in, just as he had sauntered
out, across the sleepy, bee-droning lawns of the Villa Solitudine. He
stopped at the entrance of the summer-house, where Nancy sat reading a
letter--a long letter. Already two of the blue sheets had fallen at her
side. Before her on the table was the inkstand and the ivory pen and The
Book. As his shadow passed the threshold she looked up; she drew a
quick breath, and her face turned milky white, with a pallor that
gripped at Aldo's nerves.
Once more, and for the last time, he bent his head over her hand.
"Signora, I am your slave," he said. But as he raised his eyes she knew
that he had said: "Nancy, I am your master."
"Who writes to you?" he asked.
She drooped submissive lashes, and the colour ran into her cheeks. "Mr.
Kingsley, the English friend," she said. "Do you remember him?"
Aldo took her hand and with it the letter in his own.
"What does he want?"
Her dimples fluttered. "He wants me to be good," she said, laughing,
with wistful eyes. "And to write."
Aldo pressed the little fist with the crumpled blue letter in it to his
lips. "Well, write," he said. "Write at once."
He took the ivory pen and dipped it in the ink and put it in her hand;
then he pulled the sheet of white paper which was to be The Book before
her.
"Write: 'Dear Englishman, I am going to marry Aldo della Rocca. He
adores me.'"
And Nancy, with her hair almost touching the paper, wrote: "Dear
Englishman, I am going to marry Aldo della Rocca. I adore him."
The Englishman never got the letter. But he heard of it afterwards; and
his English fists closed tight.
XVI
Nancy walked among asphodels and morning glory; and her soul was plunged
in happiness and her eyes were washed with light.
The Book waited.
They went out in the little boat at sunset. Aldo stood at the sail, and
the red sky was a background for his profile.
"Oh," sighed Nancy, looking at him and clasping puerile hands, "your
beauty _aches_ me!"
Aldo quite understood it, and was pleased.
They went for long walks to Premeno and San Salvatore; as Clarissa
refused to accompany them, Carlo chaperoned them, blandly bored.
Soon Valeria arrived. Nancy went down to meet her at the landing-place,
looking ethereal and pink as a spray of apple-blossom. Valeria kissed
her with hot tears. "Oh! my baby, my baby!" she said, and wished that
the seventeen years were a dream, and that her child's small head were
still safely nestling at her breast. In Nancy's young love she lived the
days of her own betrothal over again, and Tom arose in her memory and
was with her day and night. On this same silky blue lake Tom had so
often rowed her with Zio Giacomo, in a little boat called _Luisa_. She
tearfully begged Nancy and Aldo to come with her and see if they could
not find that very self-same boat.
They found, indeed, three _Luisas_, but Valeria could not recognize
them; still, all three of the boatmen declared that they remembered her
perfectly, and got the expected tip.
"Of course," said Valeria, deeply moved, "it cannot have been all three
of them."
And Aldo said: "You should not have given them anything. They were none
of them more than twenty-five years old." Whereupon Valeria sighed
deeply.
Then it was decided that they should go in reverent pilgrimage to the
Madonna del Monte, where Nancy's father had asked Nancy's mother to
marry him. The road was lined with beggars: shouting cripples,
exhibiting sores and stumps.
"Some of these are very old," sighed Valeria. "I am sure they were here
that day, and must have seen me."
"I shall give a franc to every one of them," said Nancy, taking out her
small fat purse, as the first one-armed mendicant held out his greasy
hat.
"My dear Nancy, what nonsense!" said Aldo. "There are about a hundred of
them!"
"Well?" and Nancy raised clear, questioning eyes to his.
"Oh, _I_ don't mind," said Aldo, with a little Neapolitan shrug.
Valeria looked at the handsome figure and impeccable profile of her
future son-in-law, as he strolled beside them up the steep wide road.
Her heart was heavy with recollections. Up this road she had walked in
her blue dress and scarlet tie with Tom beside her--Tom, broad and
careless in his slouchy brown suit, who had given the beggars all his
coppers and silver, just as Tom's daughter was doing to-day. Again she
looked at Aldo's slim, straight shoulders and sighed. "I wish it had
been an Englishman!" she thought. Then, as her memory took her to
England, she saw someone else. "Or, then, poor dear Nino." And she
sighed again; but not altogether for Nancy's sake.
She wrote to Nino that evening, and, almost without knowing it, began
her letter, "Poor dear Nino!"
Nino was out interviewing Consuls about the presumably deceased Eduardo
Villari when the letter arrived. So Nunziata opened the letter.
In it Valeria told Nino that Nancy, "our little Nancy," was betrothed
to Aldo della Rocca, and could Nino not do anything to prevent it? And
why, oh why, had his sister Clarissa invited them both to stay at the
Villa Solitudine, so that, as Fraeulein Mueller or was it Heine?--used to
say, "Wie koennte es anders sein," for how could anyone see Nancy in the
resplendency of her seventeen Aprils and not fall in love with her? And
oh, she was so sorry for poor, dear Nino, for she knew the secret of his
heart. And how true it was what he had said about Nancy's eyes being so
pure that they seemed never to have gazed at aught but the sky; and she
understood him and his sufferings, for had she not herself suffered
dreadfully through him, years ago--but never mind, that was nothing. And
it had never been dear, dear Nino's fault at all; it was her own foolish
fault and Fate.... And she hoped Nino did not think that she had really
suffered, for she had not, and now she never, never thought of it any
more! And if he came quickly he might still be in time; and oh, she knew
he must be heart-broken, but he was not to mind, because it could not be
helped. And she was ever his unhappy Valeria.
Nunziata read the rambling letter three times before she understood it.
The letter opened her eyes.
When her eyes were open Nunziata saw well. She saw the chain of desire
stretching out ring on ring: from Valeria's heart to Nino; from Nino's
heart to Nancy; from Nancy's heart to Aldo, as in a children's game; and
Love passing down from one to the other, stopping before each with gift
of passion, of pain, of joy. She saw that her years placed her behind
Valeria--far back, far back, out of the game; and she knew that Love had
passed her, and would not stop before her any more. Then she remembered
that she had had her gifts; that Love had heaped roses at her feet, and
that she had moved through passions as through a field of flowers.
Nunziata decided that she would play the game.
She went with her newly-opened eyes to her room and threw the shutters
back. She looked at her tired pink face in the glass, at her crimson
lips and complicated hair. She went on her knees beside her bed and said
three _Paters_ and three Aves. Then she opened her reluctant hands and
gave her dead youth back to God.
She washed her face with warm water and soap, and unpinned her elaborate
curls. She wound her own soft hair round her head, and put on a plain
black gown. Then, looking, although she did not think so, twenty years
younger and twenty times sweeter than she did before, she went
downstairs to wait for Nino.
* * * * *
That same evening she sent him back to his father. His luggage was
packed and the brougham was waiting for him at the door, and still he
declared he would not go. He would not leave her. Her face was whiter
than any _poudre de lys_ could ever make it as she kissed his forehead,
and blessed it with the sign of the cross, and told him that he must
indeed go, and not return again.
At last, before his stubborn refusal, she took the weapon that hurt her
most, and used it to pierce her own heart. "Think of Nancy!" she said.
"You may still be in time to prevent her from marrying an adventurer."
Nino looked into the pale, kind face, from which every trace of
triviality had been washed by the warm water and the tears. And, being a
man, he did not wait, and refuse, and then catch a later train; but with
candid cruelty he said: "You are right. You are an angel. May the saints
bless you!"
... She stood on the balcony and watched the carriage drive away into
the night; it turned up Corso Umberto and was gone. With it the lights
went out in Nunziata Villari's life.
Youth, love, hope, desire--Fate blew all the candles out, and left her
in the dark.
XVII
Aldo's curved red lips under his very young moustache opened to words as
well as to kisses under Nancy's impelling, eager love. During the long
hours they spent together she spoke and he must answer. His splendid,
silent eyes urged her to quick questionings, and his kisses did not
still the thirst of her soul for his soul. Little by little she pushed
back the gates of the Closed Garden; gently, day by day, she ventured a
step farther adown the mysterious paths. Where are the arbours of roses?
Where the fountains and the deep, water-lilied lakes? She tiptoed down
the narrow paths that Clarissa and many others had trodden before her,
and when she had come to the end she said: "I am mistaken. I have not
entered the Garden yet."
They were to be married almost at once. Aldo was impatient, and Nancy
was in love; and The Book was waiting. So Valeria left for Milan to
prepare the trousseau, and Nancy must follow a week later. On the eve of
her journey Clarissa went up to say good-night to Nancy in her room--the
large, bare room in which the masterpiece had not been written. Nancy's
trunks were packed. The ivory pen and The Book were put away. The large
inkstand stood alone on the large table.
Nancy was leaning out of the window looking at the stars. Clarissa came
and stood behind her and looked up into the cobalt depths.
"I hate the stars," said Nancy; "I am afraid of them."
"Why?" said Clarissa, to whom a star was a star.
"Oh, I want to be sure that somewhere they leave off," said Nancy. "It
terrifies me to think of fabulous nothingness behind unending space, of
perpetual neverness beyond unceasing time. I should like a wall built
round the universe, a wall that would shut me safely in, away from the
terrible infinity."
Clarissa laughed. "Perhaps when you are married you will feel less
little and lonely."
"Perhaps," said Nancy. And she added: "Aldo must be the wall."
"Oh, my dear," said Clarissa, "Don't try to make poor Aldo anything that
he isn't. He is sweet; he is lovely; he is full of talent. But he is no
more a wall than this is." And she waved her filmy gossamer scarf that
blew lightly in the air.
That evening Carlo said to his wife: "I feel like a brute, letting that
good-for-nothing brother of mine marry the nice little girl. He will
make her miserable."
"Not at all," said Clarissa, putting out the candle with her book, a
thing Carlo could not bear. "She will write poems on his profile and be
perfectly happy, until she gets tired of him for not being something
that he isn't."
"Oh, well," growled Carlo. "I suppose you know her best. Women are
cackling cats."
"Mixed metaphor," murmured Clarissa, and went to sleep comfortably,
feeling that Carlo was a wall.
* * * * *
Nancy was married in Rome. All the poets of Italy came with poems, and
Nino brought a necklet of pearls. From the Quirinal came a pendant, with
a picture of a boy's face set in diamonds.
After the wedding-breakfast all the guests left, passing to their
carriages down the red carpet that stretched from the door to the edge
of the pavement. Then Nancy, in her mouse-grey travelling-gown, kissed
Valeria, and wept and said good-bye. And kissed Nino, and wept and said
good-bye. And she went with her husband down the red carpet to the
carriage. Carlo and Clarissa, Aunt Carlotta and Adele followed to the
station, where there were great crowds waiting to see them off.
Valeria and Nino remained alone in the desolate room. Valeria's face was
hidden in her hands. She was looking down the days of the future, and
saw them lonely, dark and desolate. Nino gazed through tear-blurred eyes
at the bowed figure before him, and his thoughts went back through the
years. Bending forward, he took her hand and kissed it. She smiled
wanly.
"What are you thinking of?" she said.
"I was thinking of Nancy, and of the past," said Nino. "Of her father,
poor Tom, who died so suddenly----"
"It was to save Nancy," said Valeria.
"And of the old grandfather who died alone on the hill-side----"
"We had to find Nancy," said Valeria.
"And of little Edith and her poor mother, forsaken in their darkest hour
by those they loved----"
"But it was to safeguard Nancy," said Valeria.
Hearing her words, he realized the puissance of all-conquering, maternal
love. Nothing mattered but Nancy, though Nancy herself, with gentle,
unconscious hands, had taken all things from her. Had not he himself,
the lover of Valeria's girlhood, turned from her, heart-stricken for
Nancy?
There was a pause.
"And I am thinking of you, Valeria, over whose heart I have
trampled,..." said Nino, with a break in his voice.
"You could not help it. You loved Nancy," said Valeria. "And now"--her
pitying eyes filled with tears--"your hope is shipwrecked and your heart
broken, too."
Nino did not answer. He turned away and gazed out of the window. He was
thinking of Nancy, so mild and sweet-voiced, with eyes like blue
hyacinths under the dark drift of her hair. And once more he realized
how Nancy in her dove-like innocence had absorbed and submerged the
existence of those around her. Her sweet helplessness itself had wrecked
and shattered, had devastated and destroyed. The lives of all those who
loved her had gone to nourish the clear flame of her genius, the white
fire of her youth.
Nino gazed down at the red wedding-carpet that stretched its scarlet
line to the pavement's edge like a narrow path of blood.
"Behold," he said, "the trail of the dear devourer--the course of the
dove of prey!"
* * * * *
As the train glided out of the station, and shook and ran, and the
cheers and the waving handkerchiefs were left behind, Nancy raised her
eyes, tender and tear-lit, to Aldo's face. Her white wedded hand was to
open the gates of the Closed Garden.
Now the bowers of roses, and the fountains, and the water-lilied lakes!
XVIII
They had chosen to go to Paris, because Aldo said he had had enough of
landscapes to last him a lifetime. Also Clarissa had remarked to Nancy:
"If you want to have a clear vision of life, and a well-balanced brain,
always be properly dressed. And you cannot be dressed at all unless you
are dressed by Paquin."
"But I have my work to think about," said Nancy. "I do not mind much
about clothes."
"Very well," said Clarissa, "if you want to be a dowdy genius and
quarrel with your husband before you have been married two months, go
your own way, and wear coats and skirts."
So they went to Paris, and soon Paquin's gibble-gabbling demoiselles
were busy sewing cloudy blues and faint mauves to save Nancy from
quarrelling with Aldo two months afterwards.
At Aldo's suggestion they took rooms in a small hotel in Rue Lafayette,
for, as he said, they were not millionaires, and one could use one's
money better than in spending it at grand hotels. Nancy said he was
quite right, and wondered at his wisdom. Indeed, he knew many things. He
knew the prices of everything one ate, and he pounced on the waiters as
soon as there was any attempt at overcharging, or if they
absent-mindedly reckoned in the date written at the top of the bill in a
line with the francs.
Nancy rather dreaded that moment in the brilliant restaurant when Aldo
opened and inspected the neatly-folded bill, while the solemn-nosed
waiter looked down sarcastically at his smooth, well-brushed head.
Nancy noticed that, whenever they entered a place, everyone ran to meet
them, opening doors for them with obsequious bows, showing them places
with flourish of arm and of table-napkin. Aldo's hat was taken from him
with reverential hand, and her cloak was carried tenderly from her. But
when, after settling the bill, they got up to go, nobody seemed to pay
much attention to them. Aldo had to fetch his own hat and look for the
cloak, and even to open the heavy glass doors himself, for the small boy
would be absent, or looking another way and making faces at the
head-waiter. Cabs also had a way of being all smiles and hat-touchings
and little jokes when they were hailed, and all sullenness and loud
monologue when they were dismissed.
"They think that because we are on our honeymoon we must be fools. Money
is money," said Aldo.
He had learnt the phrase from his grandfather, who had kept a shop in
Via Caracciolo. The grandfather's wife--who in her radiant girlhood in
Piedigrotta had sat for English and German painters--had said: "Yes; but
education is education," and had sent her three sons to school in Modena
and Milan. The eldest son, who was the father of Carlo and Aldo, had
then learnt to say: "A gentleman is a gentleman." And on the strength of
this he would have nothing more to do with his shopkeeping parents in
Naples. When he died Carlo, who was twenty, went and hunted up the old
people. They did not need him, and were afraid of him, and called him
"Eccellenza." But Aldo, who was thirteen, and unverisimilarly beautiful,
they called "l'Amorino"; they petted and spoiled him, and let him count
the money in the till. And he liked them and their shop. And he learnt
that money was money. The phrase always struck Nancy mute. Aldo,
strolling beside her along the boulevard, continued: "It is people like
Carlo that spoil things. Carlo is a perfect idiot with his money."
"Oh, but he is very kind," said Nancy; and Aldo wondered whether she
knew that Carlo was paying all their expenses--made out with fanciful
additions by Aldo--and had promised to do so for a year after their
marriage.
"After that, not one penny. Never as long as I live," Carlo had said to
his young brother a week before the wedding. "So hustle and do something
useful."
But Aldo did not intend to hustle. Rude, unaesthetic word! A man with his
physique could not hustle. Carlo lacked all sense of the fitness of
things. Clarissa said so, too. But on this occasion Aldo did not consult
Clarissa, because she had once said: "I understand adoring a man, but I
do not understand paying his debts."
Nancy soon found that Aldo's knowledge extended further than accounts
and prices. He knew places in Paris, and he knew people--such places and
such people as she had never heard of, read of, or dreamt of. He always
said to Nancy: "Now you shall see things that will make you laugh." But
Nancy laughed little, then less; until one day she could not laugh at
all. She felt as if she would never laugh any more. Everything was
horrible, everything made her shrink and weep.
"It is life, my dear," said Aldo, with his habitual little gesture of
both hands outwards and upwards. "How can you write books if you do not
know what is life?"
Oh, but she did not want to know what is life. She could write books
without knowing. And oh, she wished that Aldo did not know either. And
let them go away quickly, and forget, and never, never remember it any
more.
So Aldo, who was not unkind, and who had not found the enlightening of
Nancy as amusing as he had expected, called for the hotel bill, said it
was preposterous, got the proprietor to deduct twelve per cent., and
then told him they were leaving the next day.
The next day they left. They went to the Villa Solitudine, which
Clarissa and Carlo were not using, and for which it was arranged that
Aldo should pay rent to Clarissa. Clarissa let him off the rent; and
Carlo, not knowing, paid it back to him. So that, on the whole, it was
not an unprofitable arrangement for Aldo.
Nancy tried to forget what life was, and smiled and blossomed in tenuous
sunrise beauty. And because of all she knew, and was trying to forget,
and because she wore trailing Parisian gowns and large, plumed hats,
Aldo burned with volcanic meridional love for her.
The Book waited.
One evening, when Aldo was at the piano, improvising music and words on
Nancy's loveliness, and she sat on a stool beside him, she asked
suddenly: "When shall we begin to work?"
"Oh, never!" said Aldo, putting his right arm round her neck without
interrupting the chords he was playing with his left hand.
Nancy laughed, and laid her head against his arm.
"Oh, but we must, Aldo. I want to write my book. It is to be a great
book."
Aldo nodded, and went on playing.
"And you, Aldo. You cannot pass your life saying that you adore me."
"Oh yes, I can," said Aldo.
Nancy laughed softly and kissed his sleeve. Then suddenly a strange
feeling came over her--a feeling of loneliness and fear. She felt as if
she were alone in the world, and small and helpless, with no one to take
care of her. She felt as if Aldo were younger and weaker and more
helpless than she. And the terror of the Infinite fell upon her soul.
Aldo was singing softly, meltingly, with his head bent forward and his
dark hair falling over his face. Suddenly Nancy thought that it would be
good to be safely locked in a large light room with nothing but books
and an inkstand, and someone walking up and down outside with a gun.
"The wall!" she said to herself as the Englishman's light eyes and
stalwart figure came before her mind. Then she said: "Work shall be my
wall." And she went to her room and unpacked her ivory pen.
XIX
Four months before the year of Carlo's bounty was up, Aldo made up his
mind that he must hustle after all. They had settled in Milan; then
nothing had happened. Carlo would never change his mind. Valeria had
shown him her banking account, and proved to him that there was nothing
Nancy could have beyond her skimpy forty thousand francs; Lady
Sainsborough, the elderly English person in Naples who had taken such a
fancy to him, had not answered his last two letters, and had probably
altered her will; so there was nothing to do or to hope for. He must
hustle.
He did so. He wrote a third letter to Lady Sainsborough. Then he decided
to ask Carlo to make room for him in his silk mills, which Carlo refused
to do.
Then he looked up Nancy's publishers, and asked them if they would
advance a substantial sum on the unwritten book, which they also refused
to do. So having done all he could, he decided not to hustle any more,
but to let events take their course.
Nancy did not help him at all. She was selfishly engrossed in her book,
and sat in her room all day, with hair pinned tightly back and wild and
lucent eyes. Whenever he came into the room she put up her hand without
turning round--a gesture he could not bear--and went on with her
writing. If he disregarded the gesture, she looked up at him with those
wild, light eyes, and he felt hurried, and forgot what he wanted to say.
So he muddled along with her forty thousand francs, and read the papers,
played the piano, and went out to the Caffe Biffi every evening until it
was time to go to the Patriottica for a game of billiards.
There he frequently saw Nino sitting glumly with the corners of his
mouth turned down; and they turned down further when Aldo came in, so
that Aldo positively hated the sight of him. Besides, Carlo, who had
refused to do anything for Aldo, had actually taken Nino into
partnership; and, just to irritate and show off, Nino was working
vulgarly, like a nigger, twelve or fourteen hours a day. The gratified
Carlo was to be seen with Nino in the evenings walking through the
Galleria arm-in-arm with him as if they were brothers, with that absurd
Zio Giacomo trotting alongside, grinning like an old hen, while he,
Aldo, Carlo's own brother, had to mooch about alone, smoking cheap
cigarettes, or else to run alongside of Giacomo like an outsider, and
listen for the thousandth time to the recital of the prodigal Nino's
reform and rehabilitation.
He went to Clarissa and complained; but she was unsympathetic. She
rubbed her left-hand nails against her right-hand palm and looked out of
the window. He had expected her to pass a white, jewelled hand lightly
over his bowed head and say, "_Povero bello!_ Poor beauteous one!" as
she had sometimes done a year or so ago; but when he bowed his head she
continued rubbing the nails of her left hand against her right-hand palm
and looking out of the window.
He felt that a great deal depended upon her friendship, and it was
almost out of a sense of duty to Nancy that he grasped her hand and
kissed it in his best and softest manner. "Oh, don't be a snail, Aldo,"
said Clarissa, taking her hand away. Then she looked down at him and
shook her head: "I _am_ thankful I married Carlo."
This was untrue, of course, said Aldo to himself; but, added to the
other things, it rankled. When he left her he understood that Clarissa
considered him as much Nancy's property as the pair of antique silver
candle-sticks she had given to Nancy for a wedding-present, and that
never would she take them back or light the candles in them again.
Nancy had written one-third of The Book. It was a great book--a book the
world would speak of. Like the portent of Jeanne of Orleans, a vision
had fallen upon her young, white heart and set it aflame. She felt
genius like an eagle beating great wings against her temples.
Inspiration, nebulous and wan, stretched thin arms to her, and young
ideas went shouting through her brain. Then the phrase, like a
black-and-white flower, rolled back its thundering petals, and the
masterpiece was born.
XX
Aldo was not allowed to play the piano any more, because it disturbed
Nancy's thoughts. He also stayed at home to see anyone who called, so
that Nancy should not be interrupted. He himself brought her meals into
her room when she did not wish to break her train of thought by going to
table, and when the loud-footed, cheerful servant annoyed and distracted
her.
A reverential hush was on the house.
The Rome publisher, Servetti, heard of The Book, and came to Milan to
ask if he could have it. Zardo, the publisher of the "Cycle of Lyrics,"
who had omitted to pay for the last two editions of that distinguished
and fortunate volume, sent, unasked, an unverisimilarly large cheque;
and suggested for her new work a special _edition de luxe_. Nancy
replied to no one, heeded no one. The Book held her soul.
It was a winter evening, and the lamps were lit, when Nancy wrote at the
summit of a candid page, "Chapter XVII." She wrote the heading
carefully, reverentially, painting over the Roman numbers with loving
pen. This was the culminating chapter of The Book. It had been worked up
to in steep and audacious ascent, and after it and from it the story
would flow down in rushing, inevitable stream to its portentous close.
But this chapter was the climax and the crown.
Nancy passed a quick hand across her forehead and pushed back her
ruffled hair. Then she looked across at Aldo. He was sitting at the
opposite side of the table with some sheets of music-paper before him.
The shine of the lamp fell blandly on his narrow head. He looked
dejected and dull.
"What is it, Aldo?" she asked, stretching her hand affectionately across
the table to him. In the joy and the overflowing ease of inspiration she
felt kind and compassionate.
"Oh, nothing," sighed Aldo. "I was thinking of writing a symphony; but I
cannot do anything without trying it at the piano. And that disturbs
you. Never mind! Don't worry about me."
"Oh, but I do worry," said Nancy, getting up and going round to his
side. She bent over him with her arm on his shoulder. Before him on the
sheet was half a line of breves and semibreves, which Nancy remembered
from her childhood as little men getting over stiles.
"You know," said Aldo, with his pen going over and over the face of one
of the little men and making it blacker and larger than the others,
"Ricordi is publishing those songs of mine; but I believe it is only
because they have your words. So I thought I would try a symphony which
will be all my own. But I ought to be able to try it at the piano."
"I know, dear," said Nancy, smoothing his soft, thick hair. "I know I am
a horrid, selfish thing, upsetting everything and everybody. But never
mind!" And she glanced across to the large "Chapter XVII" at the top of
the fair sheet, and the wet ink of the "XVII" glistened and beckoned to
her upside down at the other side of the table. "Wait till I have
finished my book. Then you shall do all you want; and we shall go and
pass blue days in the country and be as happy as sandboys, and"--she
added for him--"as rich as Cr[oe]sus."
He raised his dark eyes to her, and she thought that he looked like
Murillo's Saint Sebastian.
"Your writing has swallowed up all your love for me," he said.
"Oh no!" said Nancy, and she caressed the beautiful brow. "It is you,
your presence, your beauty, that inspires me and helps me to write."
Aldo sighed. "I suppose I am a nonentity. And I must be grateful if the
fact of my having a straight nose has helped you to write your book."
Nancy felt conscience-stricken. "Don't be bitter, dear heart," she said.
"I must be selfish! If I do not sit there and write, I feel as if I had
a maniac shut up in my brain, beating and shrieking to get out. And oh,
Aldo, when I do write, coolly and quickly and smoothly, I feel like a
mountain-spring gushing out my life in glad, scintillant waters."
Aldo drew her face down and kissed her. "Nothing shall interfere with
your book," he said.
"No, nothing," said Nancy--"nothing!"
As she spoke a strange, quivering sensation passed over her, a quick
throb shook her heart, and the roots of her hair prickled. Then it was
past and gone. She stepped back to her place at the table and stood
looking down at Chapter XVII. The wet ink still glistened on it. She was
waiting.... She knew she was waiting for that strange throb to clutch at
her heart again. She looked across at Aldo. He was thoughtfully painting
the face of another semibreve and making it large and black. She sat
down and dipped the ivory pen into the gaping mouth of the inkstand.
Ah, _again!_ the throb! the throb! like a soft hand striking at her
heart. And now a flutter as of an imprisoned bird!
"Aldo! Aldo!" she cried, falling forward with her face hidden on her
arm. And her waving hair trailed over Chapter XVII, and blurred the
waiting page.
XXI
NANCY stirred, sighed, and awoke.
In the room adjoining, Valeria was sobbing in Zio Giacomo's arms, and
Aunt Carlotta was kissing Adele, and Aldo was shaking hands with
everybody.
Nancy could hear the whispering voices through the half-open door, and
they pleased her. Then another sound fell on her ear, like the ticking
of a slow clock--click, click, a gentle, peaceful, regular noise that
soothed her. She turned her head and looked. It was the cradle. The
Sister sat near it, dozing, with one elbow on the back of the chair and
her hand supporting her head; the other hand was on the edge of the
cradle. With gentle mechanical gesture, in her half sleep, she rocked it
to and fro. Nancy smiled to herself, and the gentle clicking noise
lulled her near to sleep again.
She felt utterly at peace--utterly happy. The waiting was over; the fear
was over. Life opened wider portals over wider, shining lands. All
longings were stilled; all empty places filled. Then with a soft tremor
of joy she remembered her book. It was waiting for her where she had
left it that evening when futurity had pulsed within her heart. The
masterpiece that was to live called softly and the folded wings of the
eagle stirred.
* * * * *
In the gently-rocking twilight of the cradle the baby opened its eyes
and said: "I am hungry."