girl, you have married him; you must submit to him as he is. Marriages
wouldn't last two days if, just because the man yawned, the woman ran
away. Men always yawn when they are alone with their wives. Hitherto,
all San Zenone's faults appear to consist in the very pardonable fact
that, being an Italian, he is not alive to the charms of bucolic
England in rainy weather, and that, being a young man, he wants to
see his Paris again. Neither of these seem to me irreparable crimes.
Go to Paris and try to enjoy yourself. After all, if his profile be
so beautiful, you ought to be sufficiently happy in gazing at it
from the back of a _baignoir_. I grant that it is not the highest
amatory ideal--to rush about the boulevards in a daument, and eat
delicious little dinners in the cafés, and laugh at naughty little
plays afterwards; but _l'amour peut se nicher_ anywhere. And Love
won't be any the worse for having his digestion studied by good
cooks, and his possible _ennui_ exorcised by good players. You see
for yourself that the great passion yawns after a time. Turn back to
what you call my cynical letter, and re-read my remarks upon Nature.
By the way, I entirely deny that they are cynical. On the contrary,
I inculcate on you patience, sweetness of temper, and adaptability
to circumstances; three most amiable qualities. If I were a cynic, I
should say to you that Marriage is a Mistake, and two capital letters
could hardly emphasise this melancholy truth sufficiently. But, as
there are men and women, and, as I before observed, property in the
world, nothing better for the consolidation of rents and freeholds has,
as yet, been discovered. I daresay some Anarchist in his prison could
devise something better, but they are afraid of trying Anarchism. So
we all jog on in the old routine, vaguely conscious that we are all
blunderers, but indisposed for such a drastic remedy as would alone
cure us. Just you remark to any lawyer that marriage is a mistake, as I
have said before, and see what answer you will get. He will certainly
reply to you that there is no other way of securing the transmission
of property safely. I confess that this view of wealth makes me, for
one, a most desperate Radical. Only think, if there were no property we
should all be frisking about in our happy valleys as free and as merry
as little kids. I shouldn't now be obliged to put on all my war-paint
and beads, like a savage, and go out to a dreadful Court dinner, four
hours long, because George has a "career," and thinks my suffering
advances it. Oh, you happy child, to have nothing worse to do than to
rattle down the Bois in a _milord_, and sup off a _matelote_ by the
lake with your Romeo!'
_From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady
Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._
'We are to leave for Paris and Trouville to-morrow. I have yielded--as
you and Mamma seemed to think it was my _duty_ to do. But my life is
over. I shall say farewell to all happiness when the gates of Coombe
Bysset close upon me. Henceforth we shall be like everybody else.
However, you cannot reproach me any longer with being selfish, nor can
he. There is a great friend of his, the Duchess of Aquila Fulva, at
Trouville. She writes to him very often, I know. He never offers to
show me her letters. _I believe the choice of Trouville is her doing._
Write to me at Paris, at the Windsor.'
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
Principessa di San Zenone, Hotel Windsor, Paris._
'MY POOR CHILD,--Has the green-eyed monster already invaded your
gentle soul because he doesn't show you his own letters? My dear, no
man who was not born a _cur_ would show a woman's letters to his wife.
Surely you wish your hero to know the A B C of gentle manners? I am
delighted you are going into the world; but if you only go as "a duty,"
I am afraid the results won't be sunshiny. "Duty" is such a _very_
disagreeable thing. It always rolls itself up like a hedgehog with all
its prickles out, turning for ever round and round on the axle of its
own self-admiration. If you go to Trouville (and wherever else you do
go) as a martyr, my dear, you will give the mischievous Duchess, if
she be mischievous, a terrible advantage over you at starting. If you
mean to be silent, unpleasant, and enwrapped in a gloomy contemplation
of your own merits and wrongs, don't blame _him_ if he spend his time
at the Casino with his friend, or somebody worse. I am quite sure you
_mean_ to be unselfish, and you fancy you are so, and all the rest of
it, quite honestly; but, in real truth, as I told you before, you are
only an egotist. You would rather keep this unhappy Piero on thorns
beside you, than see him enjoy himself with other people. Now, I call
that shockingly selfish, and if you go in that spirit to Trouville,
he will soon begin to wish, my dear child, that he had never had a
fancy to come over to a London season. I can see you so exactly! Too
dignified to be cross, too offended to be companionable; silent,
reproachful, terrible!'
_From the Lady Mary Bruton, Roches Noires, Trouville, to Mrs
d'Arcy, British Embassy, Berlin._
_'15th July._
'... Amongst the new arrivals here are the San Zenone. You remember my
telling you of their marriage some six weeks ago. It was quite _the_
marriage of the season. They really were immensely in love with each
other, but that stupid month down in the country has done its usual
work. In a rainy June, too! Of course, any poor Cupid would emerge
from his captivity bedraggled, dripping and disenchanted. She is
really very pretty, quite lovely, indeed; but she looks fretful and
dull; her handsome husband, on the contrary, is as gay as a lark which
has found the door of its cage wide open one morning. There is here
a great friend of his, a Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva. _She_ is very
gay, too; she is always perfectly dressed, and chattering from morning
to night in shrill Italian or voluble French. She is the cynosure of
all eyes as she goes to swim in a rose-coloured _maillot_, with an
orange and gold eastern burnous flung about her artistically. She has
that wonderful Venetian colouring, which can stand a contrast and glow
of colour which would simply kill any other woman. She is very tall,
and magnificently made, and yet uncommonly graceful. Last night she
was persuaded to dance a _salterello_ with San Zenone at the Maison
Persane, and it was marvellous. They are both such handsome people, and
threw such wonderful _brio_, as they would call it, into the affair.
The poor, little, pretty Princess, looking as fair and as dull as a
primrose in a shower, sat looking on dismally. Stupid little thing!--as
if _that_ would do her any good! A few days ago Lord Hampshire arrived
off here in his yacht. He was present at the _salterello_, and as I
saw him out in the gardens afterwards with the neglected one, sitting
beside her in the moonlight, I presume he was offering her sympathy and
consolation. He is a heavy young fellow, but exceedingly good-humoured
and kind-hearted. _He_ would have been in Heaven in the wet June at
Coombe Bysset--but she refused him, silly little thing! I am quite
angry with her; she has had her own way and she won't make the best of
that. I met her, and her rejected admirer, riding together this morning
towards Villerville, while the beautiful Prince was splashing about
in the water with his Venetian friend. I see a great many eventual
complications ahead. Well, they will all be the fault of that Rainy
June!'
DON GESUALDO
DON GESUALDO
I
It was a day in June.
The crickets were chirping, the lizards were gliding, the butterflies
were flying above the ripe corn, the reapers were out amongst the
wheat, and the tall stalks were swaying and falling under the sickle.
Through the little windows of his sacristy, Don Gesualdo, the young
vicar of San Bartolo, in the village of Marca, looked with wistful eyes
at the hill-side which rose up in front of him, seen through a frame of
cherry-boughs in full fruit. The hill-side was covered with corn, with
vines, with mulberry trees; the men and women were at work amongst the
trees (it was the first day of harvest); there was a blue, happy sky
above them all; their voices, chattering and calling to one another
over the sea of grain, came to his ears gaily and softened by air and
distance. He sighed as he looked and as he heard. Yet, interrogated, he
would have said that he was happy and wanted for nothing.
He was a slight, pale man, still almost a youth, with a delicate
face, without colour and beardless, his eyes were brown and tender
and serious, his mouth was sensitive and sweet. He was the son of a
fisherman away by Bocca d'Arno, where the river meets the sea, amidst
the cane and cactus brakes which Costa loves to paint. But who could
say what fine, time-filtered, pure Etruscan, or Latin, blood might not
run in his veins? There is so much of the classic features and the
classic forms amongst the peasants of Tyrrhene seashores, of Cimbrian
oak woods, of Roman grass plains, of Maremana marshes.
It was the last day of peace which he was destined to know in Marca.
He turned from the window with reluctance and regret, as the old woman,
who served him as housekeeper and church-cleaner in one, summoned him
to his frugal supper. He could have supped at any hour he had chosen;
there were none to say him nay, but it was the custom at Marca to sup
at the twenty-third hour, and he was not a person to violate custom;
he would as soon have thought of spitting on the blessed bread itself.
Habit is a masterful ruler in all Italian communities. It has always
been so. It is a formula which excuses all things and sanctifies all
things, and to none did it do so more than to Don Gesualdo. Often he
was not in the least hungry at sunset, often he grudged sorely the
hours spent in breaking black bread, and eating poor soup, when Nature
was at her fairest, and the skies giving their finest spectacle to a
thankless earth. Yet never did he fail to meekly answer old Candida's
summons to the humble repast. To have altered the hour of eating would
have seemed to him irreligious, revolutionary, altogether impossible.
Candida was a little old woman, burnt black by the sun, with a whisp
of grey hair fastened on the crown of her head, and a neater look
about her kerchief and her gown than was usual in Marca, for she was a
woman originally from a northern city. She had always been a servant
in priests' houses, and, if the sacristan were ill or away, knew as
well as he where every book, bell, and candle were kept, and could
have said the offices herself had her sex allowed her. In tongue she
was very sharp, and in secret was proud of the power she possessed of
making the Vice-Regent of God afraid of her. The priest was the first
man in this parish of poor folks, and the priest would shrink like a
chidden child if she found out that he had given his best shirt to a
beggar, or had inadvertently come in with wet boots over the brick
floor, which she had just washed and sanded. It was the old story of so
many sovereignties. He had power, no doubt, to bind and loose, to bless
and curse, to cleanse, or refuse to cleanse, the sinful souls of men;
but for all that he was only a stupid, forgetful baby of a man in his
servant's eyes, and she made him feel the scorn she had for him, mixed
up with a half-motherly, half-scolding admiration, which saw in him
half a child, half a fool, and maybe she would add in her own thoughts,
a kind of angel.
Don Gesualdo was not wise or learned in any way; he had barely been
able to acquire enough knowledge to pass through the examinations
necessary for entrance into the priesthood. That slender amount of
scholarship was his all; but he was clever enough for Marca, which had
very little brains of its own, and he did his duty most faithfully, as
far as he saw it, at all times. As for doubts of any sort as to what
that duty was, such scepticism never could possibly assail him. His
creed appeared as plain and sure to him as the sun which shone in the
heavens, and his faith was as single-hearted and unswerving as the
devoted soul of a docile sheep dog.
He was of a poetic and retiring nature; religion had taken entire
possession of his life, and he was as unworldly, as visionary, and as
simple as anyone of the _peccarelle di Dio_ who dwelt around Francesco
d'Assissi. His mother had been a German servant girl, married out
of a small inn in Pisa, and some qualities of the dreamy, slow, and
serious Teutonic temperament were in him, all Italian of the western
coast as he was. On such a dual mind the spiritual side of his creed
had obtained intense power, and the office he filled was to him a
Heaven-given mission which compelled him to incessant sacrifice of
every earthly appetite and every selfish thought.
'He is too good to live,' said his old housekeeper.
It was a very simple and monotonous existence which was led by him in
his charge. There was no kind of change in it for anybody, unless they
went away, and few people born in Marca ever did that. They were not
forced by climate to be nomads, like the mountaineers of the Apennines,
nor like the men of the sea-coast and ague-haunted plains. Marca was
a healthy, homely place on the slope of a hill in a pastoral country,
where its sons and daughters could stay and work all the year round, if
they chose, without risk of fever worse than such as might be brought
on by too much new wine at close of autumn.
Marca was not pretty, or historical, or picturesque, or uncommon in any
way; there are five hundred, five thousand villages like it, standing
amongst corn lands and maize fields and mulberry trees, with its little
dark church, and its white-washed presbytery, and its dusky, red-tiled
houses, and its one great, silent, empty villa that used to be a
fortified and stately palace, and now is given over to the rats and the
spiders and the scorpions. A very quiet, little place, far away from
cities and railways, dusty and uncomely in itself, but blessed in the
abundant light and the divine landscape which are around it, and of
which no one in it ever thought, except this simple young priest, Don
Gesualdo Brasailo.
Of all natural gifts, a love of natural beauty surely brings most
happiness to the possessor of it; happiness altogether unalloyed and
unpurchasable, and created by the mere rustle of green leaves, the
mere ripple of brown waters. It is not an Italian gift at all, nor an
Italian feeling. To an Italian, gas is more beautiful than sunshine,
and a cambric flower more beautiful than a real one; he usually thinks
the mountains hateful and a city divine; he detests trees and adores
crowds. But there are exceptions to all rules; there are poetic natures
everywhere, though everywhere they are rare. Don Gesualdo was the
exception in Marca and its neighbourhood, and evening after evening saw
him in the summer weather strolling through the fields, his breviary
in his hand, but his heart with the dancing fire-flies, the quivering
poplar leaves, the tall green canes, the little silvery fish darting
over the white stones of the shallow river-waters. He could not have
told why he loved to watch these things; he thought it was because they
reminded him of Bocca d'Arno and the sand-beach and the cane-brakes;
but he did love them, and they filled him with a vague emotion; half
pleasure and half pain.
His supper over, he went into his church; a little red-bricked,
white-washed passage connected it with his parlour. The church was
small, and dark, and old; it had an altar-piece, said to be old, and by
a Sienese master, and of some value, but Gesualdo knew nothing of these
matters. A Raphael might have hung there and he would have been none
the wiser. He loved the church, ugly and simple as it was, as a mother
loves a plain child or a dull one because it is hers; and now and then
he preached strange, passionate, pathetic sermons in it, which none of
his people understood, and which he barely understood himself. He had a
sweet, full, far-reaching voice, with an accent of singular melancholy
in it, and as his mystical, romantic, involved phrases passed far
over the heads of his hearers, like a flight of birds flying high up
against the clouds, the pathos and music in his tones stirred their
hearts vaguely. He was certainly, they thought, a man whom the saints
loved. Candida, sitting near the altar with her head bowed and her
hands feeling her rosary, would think as she heard the unintelligible
eloquence: 'Dear Lord, all that power of words, all that skill of the
tongue, and he would put his shirt on bottom upwards were it not for
me!'
There was no office in his church that evening, but he lingered about
it, touching this thing and the other with tender fingers. There was
always a sweet scent in the little place; its door usually stood
open to the fields amidst which it was planted, and the smell of the
incense, which century after century had been burned in it, blended
with the fragrance from primroses, or dog-roses, or new-mown hay, or
crushed ripe grapes, which, according to the season, came into it from
without. Candida kept it very clean, and the scorpions and spiders were
left so little peace there by her ever-active broom, that they betook
themselves elsewhere, dear as the wooden benches and the crannied
stones had been to them for ages.
Since he had come to Marca, nothing of any kind had happened in it.
There had been some marriages, a great many births, not a few burials;
but that was all. The people who came to confession at Easter confessed
very common sins; they had stolen this or that, cheated here, there,
and everywhere; got drunk and quarrelled, nothing more. He would give
them clean bills of spiritual health, and bid them go in peace and sin
no more, quite sure, as they were sure themselves, that they would have
the self-same sins to tell of the next time that they should come there.
Everybody in Marca thought a great deal of their religion, that is,
they trusted to it in a helpless but confident kind of way as a fetish,
which, being duly and carefully propitiated, would make things all
right for them after death. They would not have missed a mass to save
their lives; that they dozed through it, and cracked nuts, or took a
suck at their pipe stems when they woke, did not affect their awed
and unchangeable belief in its miraculous and saving powers. If they
had been asked what they believed, or why they believed, they would
have scratched their heads and felt puzzled. Their minds dwelt in a
twilight in which nothing had any distinct form. The clearest idea ever
presented to them was that of the Madonna: they thought of her as of
some universal mother who wanted to do them good in the present and
future if they only observed her ceremonials: just as in the ages gone
by, upon these same hill-sides, the Latin peasant had thought of the
great Demeter.
Don Gesualdo himself, despite all the doctrine which had been instilled
into him in his novitiate, did not know much more than they; he
repeated the words of his offices without any distinct notion of all
that they meant; he had a vague feeling that all self-denial and
self-sacrifice were thrice blessed, and he tried his best to save his
own soul and the souls of others; but there he ceased to think; outside
that, speculation lay, and speculation was a thrice damnable offence.
Yet he, being imaginative and intelligent in a humble and dog-like
way, was at times infinitely distressed to see how little effect this
religion, which he taught and which they professed, had upon the lives
of his people. His own life was altogether guided by it. Why could not
theirs be the same? Why did they go on, all through the year, swearing,
cursing, drinking, quarrelling, lying, stealing? He could not but
perceive that they came to him to confess their peccadilloes, only that
they might pursue them more completely at their ease. He could not
flatter himself that his ministrations in Marca, which were now of six
years' duration, had made the village a whit different to what it had
been when he had entered it.
Thinking of this, as he did think of it continually night and day,
being a man of singularly sensitive conscience, he sat down on a marble
bench near the door and opened his breviary. The sun was setting behind
the pines on the crest of the hills; the warm orange light poured
across the paved way in front of the church, through the stems of the
cypresses, which stood before the door, and found its way over the
uneven slates of the stone floor to his feet. Nightingales were singing
somewhere in the dog-rose hedge beyond the cypress trees. Lizards ran
from crack to crack in the pavement. A tendril of honeysuckle came
through a hole in the wall, thrusting its delicate curled horns of
perfume towards him. The whole entrance was bathed in golden warmth and
light; the body of the church behind him was quite dark.
He had opened his breviary from habit, but he did not read; he sat and
gazed at the evening clouds, at the blue hills, at the radiant air,
and listened to the songs of the nightingales in that dreamy trance
which made him look so stupid in the eyes of his housekeeper and his
parishioners, but which were only the meditations of a poetic temper,
cramped and cooped up in a narrow and uncongenial existence, and not
educated or free enough to be able even to analyse what it felt.
'The nightingale's song in June is altogether unlike its songs of
April and May,' thought this poor priest, whom Nature had made a poet,
and to whom she had given the eyes which see and the ears which hear.
'The very phrases are wholly different; the very accent is not the
same; in spring it is all a canticle, like the songs of Solomon; in
midsummer--what is it he is singing? Is he lamenting the summer? or is
it he is only teaching his young ones how they should sing next year?'
And he fell again to listening to the sweetest bird that gladdens
earth. One nightingale was patiently repeating his song again and
again, sometimes more slowly, sometimes more quickly, seeming to lay
stress on some phrases more than on others, and another voice, fainter
and feebler than his own, repeated the trills and roulades after him
fitfully, and often breaking down altogether. It was plain that there
in the wild-rose hedge he was teaching his son. Anyone who will may
hear these sweet lessons given under bays and myrtle, under arbutus and
pomegranate, through all the month of June.
Nightingales in Marca were only regarded as creatures to be trapped,
shot, caged, eaten, sold for a centime like any other small bird;
but about the church no one touched them; the people knew that their
_parocco_ cared to hear their songs coming sweetly through the
pauses in the recitatives of the office. Absorbed, as he was now, in
hearkening to the music lesson amongst the white dog-roses, he started
violently as a shadow fell across the threshold, and a voice called to
him, 'Good evening, Don Gesualdo!'
He looked up and saw a woman whom he knew well, a young woman scarcely
indeed eighteen years old; very handsome, with a face full of warmth,
and colour, and fire, and tenderness, great flashing eyes which could
at times be as soft as a dog's, and a beautiful ruddy mouth with teeth
as white as a dog's are also. She was by name Generosa Fè; she was the
wife of Tasso Tassilo, the miller.
In Marca, most of the women by toil and sun were black as berries by
the time they were twenty, and looked old almost before they were
young; with rough hair and loose forms and wrinkled skins, and children
dragging at their breasts all the year through. Generosa was not like
them; she did little work; she had the form of a goddess; she took
care of her beauty, and she had no children, though she had married at
fifteen. She was friends with Don Gesualdo; they had both come from the
Bocca d'Arno, and it was a link of common memory and mutual attachment.
They liked to recall how they had each run through the tall canes and
cactus, and waded in the surf, and slept in the hot sand, and hidden
themselves for fright when the king's camels had come towards them,
throwing their huge mis-shapen shadows over the seas of flowering reeds
and rushes and grey spiked aloes.
He remembered her a small child, jumping about on the sand and laughing
at him, a youth, when he was going to college to study for entrance
into the Church. 'Gesualdino! Gesualdino!' she had cried. 'A fine
priest he will make for us all to confess to!' And she had screamed
with mirth, her handsome little face rippling all over with gaiety,
like the waves of the sea with the sunshine.