The sun had set. Against a pale green sky the blue and purple mountains
lifted a jagged silhouette. Mr. Cardan found himself alone in the middle
of the flat plain at their feet. He was standing on the bank of a broad
ditch, brimming with gleaming water, that stretched away in a straight
line apparently for miles across the land, to be lost in the vague
twilight distance. Here and there a line of tall thin poplars marked the
position of other dykes, intersecting the plain in all directions. There
was not a house in sight, not a human being, not even a cow or a grazing
donkey. Far away on the slopes of the mountains, whose blue and purple
were rapidly darkening to a uniform deep indigo, little yellow lights
began to appear, singly or in clusters, attesting the presence of a
village or a solitary farm. Mr. Cardan looked at them with irritation;
very pretty, no doubt, but he had seen it done better on many musical
comedy stages. And in any case, what was the good of a light six or
seven miles away, on the hills, when he was standing in the middle of
the plain, with nobody in sight, night coming on, and these horrible
ditches to prevent one from taking the obvious bee-line towards
civilisation? He had been a fool, he reflected, three or four times
over: a fool to refuse Lilian’s offer of the car and go on foot (this
fetish of exercise! still, he would certainly have to cut down his
drinking if he didn’t take it); a fool to have started so late in the
afternoon; a fool to have accepted Italian estimates of distance; and a
fool to have followed directions for finding the way given by people who
mixed up left and right and, when you insisted on knowing which they
meant, told you that either would bring you where you wanted to go. The
path which Mr. Cardan had been following seemed to have come to a sudden
end in the waters of this ditch; perhaps it was a suicides’ path. The
lake of Massaciuccoli should be somewhere on the further side of the
ditch; but where? and how to get across? The twilight rapidly deepened.
In a few minutes the sun would have gone down its full eighteen degrees
below the horizon and it would be wholly dark. Mr. Cardan swore; but
that got him no further. In the end he decided that the best thing to do
would be to walk slowly and cautiously along this ditch, in the hope
that in time one might arrive, at any rate somewhere. Meanwhile, it
would be well to fortify oneself with a bite and a sup. He sat down on
the grass and opening his jacket, dipped into the capacious poacher’s
pockets excavated in its lining, producing first a loaf, then a few
inches of a long polony, then a bottle of red wine; Mr. Cardan was
always prepared against emergencies.
The bread was stale, the sausage rather horsey and spiced with garlic;
but Mr. Cardan, who had had no tea, ate with a relish. Still more
appreciatively he drank. In a little while he felt a little more
cheerful. Such are the little crosses, he reflected philosophically, the
little crosses one has to bear when one sets out to earn money. If he
got through the evening without falling into a ditch, he’d feel that he
had paid lightly for his treasure. The greatest bore was these
mosquitoes; he lighted a cigar and tried to fumigate them to a
respectable distance. Without much success, however. Perhaps the brutes
were malarial, too. There might be a little of the disease still hanging
about in these marshes; one never knew. It would be tiresome to end
one’s days with recurrent fever and an enlarged spleen. It would be
tiresome, for that matter, to end one’s days anyhow, in one’s bed or
out, naturally or unnaturally, by the act of God or of the King’s
enemies. Mr. Cardan’s thoughts took on, all at once, a dismal
complexion. Old age, sickness, decrepitude; the bath-chair, the doctor,
the bright efficient nurse; and the long agony, the struggle for breath,
the thickening darkness, the end, and then—how did that merry little
song go?
More work for the undertaker,
’Nother little job for the coffin-maker.
At the local cemetery they are
Very very busy with a brand new grave.
He’ll keep warm next winter.
Mr. Cardan hummed the tune to himself cheerfully enough. But his tough,
knobbly face became so hard, so strangely still, an expression of such
bitterness, such a profound melancholy, appeared in his winking and his
supercilious eye that it would have startled and frightened a man to
look at him. But there was nobody in that deepening twilight to see him.
He sat there alone.
At the local cemetery they are
Very very busy with a brand new grave....
He went on humming. “If I were to fall sick,” he was thinking, “who
would look after me? Suppose one were to have a stroke. Hemorrhage on
the brain; partial paralysis; mumbling speech; the tongue couldn’t utter
what the brain thought; one was fed like a baby; clysters; such a bright
doctor, rubbing his hands and smelling of disinfectant and
eau-de-Cologne; saw nobody but the nurse; no friends; or once a week,
perhaps, for an hour, out of charity; ‘Poor old Cardan, done for, I’m
afraid; must send the old chap a fiver—hasn’t a penny, you know; get up
a subscription; what a bore; astonishing that he can last so long....’”
He’ll keep warm next winter.
The tune ended on a kind of trumpet call, rising from the dominant to
the tonic—one dominant, three repeated tonics, drop down again to the
dominant and then on the final syllable of “winter” the last tonic.
Finis, and no _da capo_, no second movement.
Mr. Cardan took another swig from his bottle; it was nearly empty now.
Perhaps one ought to have married. Kitty, for example. She would be old
now and fat; or old and thin, like a skeleton very imperfectly
disguised. Still, he had been very much in love with Kitty. Perhaps it
would have been a good thing if he had married her. Pooh! with a burst
of mocking laughter Mr. Cardan laughed aloud savagely. Marry indeed! She
looked very coy, no doubt; but you bet, she was a little tart
underneath, and lascivious as you make them. He remembered her with
hatred and contempt. Portentous obscenities reverberated through the
chambers of his mind.
He thought of arthritis, he thought of gout, of cataract, of
deafness.... And in any case, how many years were left him? Ten,
fifteen, twenty if he were exceptional. And what years, what years!
Mr. Cardan emptied the bottle and replacing the cork threw it into the
black water beneath him. The wine had done nothing to improve his mood.
He wished to God he were back at the palace, with people round him to
talk to. Alone, he was without defence. He tried to think of something
lively and amusing; indoor sports, for example. But instead of indoor
sports he found himself contemplating visions of disease, decrepitude,
death. And it was the same when he tried to think of reasonable, serious
things: what is art, for example? and what was the survival value to a
species of eyes or wings or protective colouring in their rudimentary
state, before they were developed far enough to see, fly or protect? Why
should the individuals having the first and still quite useless
variation in the direction of something useful have survived more
effectively than those who were handicapped by no eccentricity?
Absorbing themes. But Mr. Cardan couldn’t keep his attention fixed on
them. General paralysis of the insane, he reflected, was luckily an
ailment for which he had not qualified in the past; luckily!
miraculously, even! But stone, but neuritis, but fatty degeneration, but
diabetes.... Lord, how he wished he had somebody to talk to!
And all at once, as though in immediate answer to his prayer, he heard
the sound of voices approaching through the now complete darkness.
“Thank the Lord!” said Mr. Cardan, and scrambling to his feet he walked
in the direction from which the voices came. Two black silhouettes, one
tall and masculine, the other, very small, belonging to a woman, loomed
up out of the dark. Mr. Cardan removed the cigar from his mouth, took
off his hat and bowed in their direction.
“_Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_,” he began,
“_mi ritrovai per una selva oscura_,
“_che la diritta via era smarrita_.”
How lucky that Dante should also have lost his way, six hundred and
twenty-four years ago! “In a word,” Mr. Cardan went on, “_ho perso la
mia strada_—though I have my doubts whether that’s very idiomatic.
_Forse potrebbero darmi qualche indicazione._” In the presence of the
strangers and at the sound of his own voice conversing, all Mr. Cardan’s
depression had vanished. He was delighted by the fantastic turn he had
managed to give the conversation at its inception. Perhaps with a little
ingenuity he would be able to find an excuse for treating them to a
little Leopardi. It was so amusing to astonish the natives.
The two silhouettes, meanwhile, had halted at a little distance. When
Mr. Cardan had finished his macaronic self-introduction, the taller of
them answered in a harsh and, for a man’s, a shrill voice: “There’s no
need to talk Italian. We’re English.”
“I’m enchanted to hear it,” Mr. Cardan protested. And he explained at
length and in his mother tongue what had happened to him. It occurred to
him, at the same time, that this was a very odd place to find a couple
of English tourists.
The harsh voice spoke again. “There’s a path to Massarosa through the
fields,” it said. “And there’s another, in the opposite direction, that
joins the Viareggio road. But they’re not very easy to find in the dark,
and there are a lot of ditches.”
“One can but perish in the attempt,” said Mr. Cardan gallantly.
This time it was the woman who spoke. “I think it would be better,” she
said, “if you slept at our house for the night. You’ll never find the
way. I almost tumbled into the ditch myself just now.” She laughed
shrilly and more loudly, Mr. Cardan thought, at greater length, than was
necessary.
“But have we room?” asked the man in a tone which showed that he was
very reluctant to receive a guest.
“But you know we’ve got room,” the feminine voice answered in a tone of
child-like astonishment. “It’s rough, though.”
“That doesn’t matter in the least,” Mr. Cardan assured her. “I’m most
grateful to you for your offer,” he added, making haste to accept the
invitation before the man could take it back. He had no desire to go
wandering at night among these ditches. Moreover, the prospect of having
company, and odd company, he guessed, was alluring. “Most grateful,” he
repeated.
“Well, if you think there’s room,” said the man grudgingly.
“Of course there is,” the feminine voice replied, and laughed again.
“Isn’t it six spare rooms that we’ve got? or is it seven? Come with us,
Mr. ... Mr. ...”
“Cardan.”
“... Mr. Cardan. We’re going straight home. Such fun,” she added and
repeated her excessive laughter.
Mr. Cardan accompanied them, talking as agreeably as he could all the
time. The man listened in a gloomy silence. But his sister—Mr. Cardan
had discovered that they were brother and sister and that their name was
Elver—laughed heartily at the end of each of Mr. Cardan’s sentences, as
though everything he said were a glorious joke; laughed extravagantly
and then made some remark which showed that she could have had no idea
what Mr. Cardan had meant. Mr. Cardan found himself making his
conversation more and more elementary, until as they approached their
destination it was frankly addressed to a child of ten.
“Here we are at last,” she said, as they emerged from the denser night
of a little wood of poplar trees. In front of them rose the large square
mass of a house, utterly black but for a single lighted window.
To the door, when they knocked, came an old woman with a candle. By its
light Mr. Cardan saw his hosts for the first time. That the man was tall
and thin he had seen even without the light; he revealed himself now as
a stooping, hollow-chested creature of about forty, with long spidery
legs and arms and a narrow yellow face, long-nosed, not too powerfully
chinned, and lit by small and furtive grey eyes that looked mostly on
the ground and seemed afraid of encountering other eyes. Mr. Cardan
fancied there was something faintly clerical about his appearance. The
man might be a broken-down clergyman—broken-down and possibly, when one
considered the furtive eyes, unfrocked as well. He was dressed in a
black suit, well cut and not old, but baggy at the knees and bulgy about
the pockets of the coat. The nails of his long bony hands were rather
dirty and his dark brown hair was too long above the ears and at the
back of his neck.
Miss Elver was nearly a foot shorter than her brother; but she looked as
though Nature had originally intended to make her nearly as tall. For
her head was too large for her body and her legs too short. One shoulder
was higher than the other. In face she somewhat resembled her brother.
One saw in it the same long nose, but better shaped, the same weakness
of chin; compensated for, however, by an amiable, ever-smiling mouth and
large hazel eyes, not at all furtive or mistrustful, but on the contrary
exceedingly confiding in their glance, albeit blank and watery in their
brightness and not more expressive than the eyes of a young child. Her
age, Mr. Cardan surmised, was twenty-eight or thirty. She wore a queer
little shapeless dress, like a sack with holes in it for the head and
arms to go through, made of some white material with a large design,
that looked like an inferior version of the willow pattern, printed on
it in bright red. Round her neck she wore two or three sets of gaudy
beads. There were bangles on her wrists, and she carried a little
reticule made of woven gold chains.
Using gesture to supplement his scanty vocabulary, Mr. Elver gave
instructions to the old woman. She left him the candle and went out.
Holding the light high, he led the way from the hall into a large room.
They sat down on hard uncomfortable chairs round the empty hearth.
“Such an uncomfy house!” said Miss Elver. “You know I don’t like Italy
much.”
“Dear, dear,” said Mr. Cardan. “That’s bad. Don’t you even like Venice?
All the boats and gondolas?” And meeting those blank infantile eyes, he
felt that he might almost go on about there being no gee-gees. The cat
is on the mat; the pig in the gig is a big pig; the lass on the ass a
crass lass. And so on.
“Venice?” said Miss Elver. “I’ve not been there.”
“Florence, then. Don’t you like Florence?”
“Nor there, either.”
“Rome? Naples?”
Miss Elver shook her head.
“We’ve only been here,” she said. “All the time.”
Her brother, who had been sitting, bent forward, his elbows on his
knees, his hands clasped in front of him, looking down at the floor,
broke silence. “The fact is,” he said in his harsh high voice, “my
sister has to keep quiet; she’s doing a rest cure.”
“Here?” asked Mr. Cardan. “Doesn’t she find it a bit hot? Rather
relaxing?”
“Yes, it’s awfully hot, isn’t it?” said Miss Elver. “I’m always telling
Philip that.”
“I should have thought you’d have been better at the sea, or in the
mountains,” said Mr. Cardan.
Mr. Elver shook his head. “The doctors,” he said mysteriously, and did
not go on.
“And the risk of malaria?”
“That’s all rot,” said Mr. Elver, with so much violence, such
indignation, that Mr. Cardan could only imagine that he was a landed
proprietor in these parts and meant to develop his estate as a health
resort.
“Oh, of course it’s mostly been got rid of,” he said mollifyingly. “The
Maremma isn’t what it was.”
Mr. Elver said nothing, but scowled at the floor.
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