The July sun enclosed in a ring of fire the ilex grove of a villa in the
hills near Siena.
Below, by the roadside, the long yellow house seemed to waver and
palpitate in the glare; but steep by steep, behind it, the cool
ilex-dusk mounted to the ledge where Ralph Marvell, stretched on his
back in the grass, lay gazing up at a black reticulation of branches
between which bits of sky gleamed with the hardness and brilliancy of
blue enamel.
Up there too the air was thick with heat; but compared with the white
fire below it was a dim and tempered warmth, like that of the churches
in which he and Undine sometimes took refuge at the height of the torrid
days.
Ralph loved the heavy Italian summer, as he had loved the light spring
days leading up to it: the long line of dancing days that had drawn them
on and on ever since they had left their ship at Naples four months
earlier. Four months of beauty, changeful, inexhaustible, weaving itself
about him in shapes of softness and strength; and beside him, hand in
hand with him, embodying that spirit of shifting magic, the radiant
creature through whose eyes he saw it. This was what their hastened
marriage had blessed them with, giving them leisure, before summer came,
to penetrate to remote folds of the southern mountains, to linger in the
shade of Sicilian orange-groves, and finally, travelling by slow stages
to the Adriatic, to reach the central hill-country where even in July
they might hope for a breathable air.
To Ralph the Sienese air was not only breathable but intoxicating. The
sun, treading the earth like a vintager, drew from it heady fragrances,
crushed out of it new colours. All the values of the temperate landscape
were reversed: the noon high-lights were whiter but the shadows had
unimagined colour. On the blackness of cork and ilex and cypress lay the
green and purple lustres, the coppery iridescences, of old bronze; and
night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars.
Ralph said to himself that no one who had not seen Italy thus prostrate
beneath the sun knew what secret treasures she could yield.
As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive
felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface
of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated
impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing
each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of
such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general
life that one felt one's self a mere wave on the wild stream of being,
yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known
within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in
its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words
were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had
but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they
were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the
blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the
wand lie.
He stared up at the pattern they made till his eyes ached with excess of
light; then he changed his position and looked at his wife.
Undine, near by, leaned against a gnarled tree with the slightly
constrained air of a person unused to sylvan abandonments. Her beautiful
back could not adapt itself to the irregularities of the tree-trunk,
and she moved a little now and then in the effort to find an easier
position. But her expression was serene, and Ralph, looking up at her
through drowsy lids, thought her face had never been more exquisite.
"You look as cool as a wave," he said, reaching out for the hand on her
knee. She let him have it, and he drew it closer, scrutinizing it as if
it had been a bit of precious porcelain or ivory. It was small and soft,
a mere featherweight, a puff-ball of a hand--not quick and thrilling,
not a speaking hand, but one to be fondled and dressed in rings, and to
leave a rosy blur in the brain. The fingers were short and tapering,
dimpled at the base, with nails as smooth as rose-leaves. Ralph lifted
them one by one, like a child playing with piano-keys, but they were
inelastic and did not spring back far--only far enough to show the
dimples.
He turned the hand over and traced the course of its blue veins from the
wrist to the rounding of the palm below the fingers; then he put a kiss
in the warm hollow between. The upper world had vanished: his universe
had shrunk to the palm of a hand. But there was no sense of diminution.
In the mystic depths whence his passion sprang, earthly dimensions were
ignored and the curve of beauty was boundless enough to hold whatever
the imagination could pour into it. Ralph had never felt more convinced
of his power to write a great poem; but now it was Undine's hand which
held the magic wand of expression.
She stirred again uneasily, answering his last words with a faint accent
of reproach.
"I don't FEEL cool. You said there'd be a breeze up here.".
He laughed.
"You poor darling! Wasn't it ever as hot as this in Apex?"
She withdrew her hand with a slight grimace.
"Yes--but I didn't marry you to go back to Apex!"
Ralph laughed again; then he lifted himself on his elbow and regained
the hand. "I wonder what you DID marry me for?"
"Mercy! It's too hot for conundrums." She spoke without impatience, but
with a lassitude less joyous than his.
He roused himself. "Do you really mind the heat so much? We'll go, if
you do."