“I can see the boat, Vere,” said Hermione, when the girl came back, her
eyes still gleaming with memories of the fun of the cigarette game with
Ruffo.
“Where, Madre?”
She sat down quickly beside her mother on the window-seat, leaning
against her confidentially and looking out over the sea. Hermione put
her arm round the girl’s shoulder.
“There! Don’t you see!” She pointed. “It has passed Casa Pantano.”
“I see! Yes, that is Gaspare, and Monsieur Emile in the stern. They
won’t be late for lunch. I almost wish they would, Madre.”
“Why?”
“I’m not a bit hungry. Ruffo wouldn’t eat the dolce, so I did.”
“Ruffo! You seem to have made great friends with that boy.”
She did not speak rebukingly, but with a sort of tender amusement.
“I really have,” returned Vere.
She put her head against her mother’s shoulder.
“Isn’t this odd, Madre? Twice in the short time I’ve known Ruffo, he’s
obeyed me. The first time he was in the boat. I called out to him to
dive in, and he did it instantly. The second time he was under water,
at the very bottom of the sea. He looked as if he were dead, and for a
minute I felt frightened. So I called out to him to come up, and he came
up directly.”
“But that only shows that he’s a polite boy and does what you wish.”
“No, no. He didn’t hear me either time. He had no idea I had called. But
each time I did, without hearing me he had the sudden wish to do what I
wanted. Now, isn’t that curious?”
She paused.
“Madre?” she added.
“You think you influenced him?”
“Don’t you think I did?”
“Perhaps so. There’s a sympathetic link of youth between you. You
are gloriously young, both of you, little daughter. And youth turns
naturally to youth, though I’m afraid old age doesn’t always turn
naturally to old age.”
“What do you know about old age, Madre? You haven’t a gray hair.”
She spoke with anxious encouragement.
“It’s true. My hair declines to get gray.”
“I don’t believe you’ll ever be gray.”
“Probably not. But there’s another grayness--Life behind one instead of
before; the emotional--”
She stopped herself. This was not for Vere.
“They’re close in,” she said, looking out of the window.
She waved her hand. The big man in the stern of the boat took off
his hat in reply, and waved his hand, too. The rower pulled with the
vivacity that comes to men near the end of a task, and the boat shot
into the Pool of the Saint, where Ruffo was at that moment enjoying his
third cigarette.
“I’ll run down and meet Monsieur Emile,” said Vere.
And she disappeared as swiftly as she had come.
The big man who got out of the boat could not claim Hermione’s immunity
from gray hairs. His beard was lightly powdered with them, and though
much of the still thick hair on his head was brown, and his figure was
erect, and looked strong and athletic--he seemed what he was, a man of
middle age, who had lived, and thought, and observed much. His eyes
had the peculiar expression of eyes that have seen very many and very
various sights. It was difficult to imagine them not looking keenly
intelligent. The vivacity of youth was no longer in them, but the
vividness of intellect, of an intellect almost fiercely alive and
tenacious of its life, was never absent from them.
As Artois got out, the boat’s prow was being held by the Sicilian,
Gaspare, now a man of thirty-five, but still young-looking. Many
Sicilians grow old quickly--hard life wears them out. But Gaspare’s fate
had been easier than that of most of his contemporaries and friends of
Marechiaro. Ever since the tragic death of the beloved master, whom he
still always spoke of as “mio Padrone,” he had been Hermione’s faithful
attendant and devoted friend. Yes, she knew him to be that--she wished
him to be that. Their stations in life might be different, but they had
come to sorrow together. They had suffered together and been in sympathy
while they suffered. He had loved what she had loved, lost it when she
had lost it, wept for it when she had wept.
And he had been with her when she had waited for the coming of the
child.
Hermione really cared for three people: Gaspare was one of them. He knew
it. The other two were Vere and Emile Artois.
“Vere,” said Artois, taking her two hands closely in his large hands,
and gazing into her face with the kind, even affectionate directness
that she loved in him: “do you know that to-day you are looking
insolent?”
“Insolent!” said the girl. “How dare you!”
She tried to take her hands away.
“Insolently young,” he said, keeping them authoritatively.
“But I am young. What do you mean, Monsieur Emile?”
“I? It is your meaning I am searching for.”
“I sha’n’t let you find it. You are much too curious about people.
But--I’ve been having a game this morning.”
“A game! Who was your playmate?”
“Never mind.”
But her bright eyes went for the fraction of a second to Ruffo, who
close by in the boat was lying at his ease, his head thrown back, and
one of the cigarettes between his lips.
“What! That boy there?”
“Nonsense! Come along! Madre has been sitting at the window for ages
looking out for the boat. Couldn’t you sail at all Gaspare?”
Artois had let go her hands, and now she turned to the Sicilian.
“To Naples, Signorina, and nearly to the Antico Giuseppone coming back.”
“But we had to do a lot of tacking,” said Artois. “Mon Dieu! That boy is
smoking one of my cigarettes! You sacrilegious little creature! You have
been robbing my box!”
Gaspare’s eyes followed Artois’ to Ruffo, who was watching them
attentively, but who now looked suddenly sleepy.
“It belongs to Madre.”
“It was bought for me.”
“I like you better with a pipe. You are too big for cigarettes. And
besides, artists always smoke pipes.”
“Allow me to forget that I try to be an artist when I come to the
island, Vere.”
“Yes, yes, I will,” she said, with a pretty air of relenting. “You
poor thing, here you are a king incognito, and we all treat you quite
familiarly. I’ll even go first, regardless of etiquette.” And she went
off to the steps that led upward to the house.
Artois followed her. As he went he said to Ruffo in the Neapolitan
dialect:
“It’s a good cigarette, isn’t it? You are in luck this morning.”
“Si, Signore,” said the boy, smiling. “The Signorina gave me ten.”
And he blew out a happy cloud.
There was something in his welcoming readiness of response, something
in his look and voice, that seemed to stir within the tenacious mind of
Artois a quivering chord of memory.
“I wonder if I have spoken to that boy in Naples?” he thought, as he
mounted the steps behind Vere.
Hermione met him at the door of her room, and they went in almost
directly to lunch with Vere. When the meal was over Vere disappeared,
without saying why, and Hermione and Artois returned to Hermione’s room
to have coffee. By this time the day was absolutely windless, the sky
had become nearly white, and the sea was a pale gray, flecked here and
there with patches of white.
“This is like a June day of scirocco,” said Artois, as he lit his pipe
with the air of a man thoroughly at home. “I wonder if it will succeed
in affecting Vere’s spirits. This morning, when I arrived, she looked
wildly young. But the day held still some blue then.”
Hermione was settling herself slowly in a low chair near the window that
faced Capri. The curious, rather ghastly light from the sea fell over
her.
“Vere is very sensitive to almost all influences,” she said. “You know
that, Emile.”
“Yes,” he said, throwing away the match he had been using; “and the
influence of this morning roused her to joy. What was it?”
“She was very excited watching a diver for _frutti di mare_.”
“A boy about seventeen or eighteen, black hair, Arab eyes, bronze
skin, a smile difficult to refuse, and a figure almost as perfect as a
Nubian’s, but rather squarer about the shoulders?”
“You have seen him, then?”
“Smoking ten of my special Khali Targa cigarettes, with his bare toes
cocked up, and one hand drooping into the Saint’s Pool.”
Hermione smiled.
“My cigarettes! They’re common property here,” she said.
“That boy can’t be a pure-bred Neapolitan, surely. And yet he speaks the
language. There’s no mistaking the blow he gives to the last syllable of
a sentence.”
“He’s a Sicilian, Vere says.”
“Pure bred?”
“I don’t know.”
“I fancy I must have run across him somewhere in or about Naples. It is
he who made Vere, as I told her, look so insolently young this morning.”
“Ah, you noticed! I, too, thought I had never seen her so full of the
inner spirit of youth--almost as he was in Sicily.”
“Yes,” Artois said, gravely. “In some things she is very much his
daughter.”
“In some things only?” asked Hermione.
“Don’t you think so? Don’t you think she has much of you in her also? I
do.”
“Has she? I don’t know that I see it. I don’t know that I want to see
it. I always look for him in Vere. You see, I dreamed of having a boy.
Vere is instead of the boy I dreamed of, the boy--who never came, who
will never come.”
“My friend,” said Artois, very seriously and gently, “are you still
allowing your mind to dwell upon that old imagination? And with Vere
before you, can you regard her merely as a substitute, an understudy?”
An energy that was not free from passion suddenly flamed up in Hermione.
“I love Vere,” she said. “She is very close to me. She knows it. She
does not doubt me or my love.”
“But,” he quietly persisted, “you still allow your mind to rove
ungoverned among those dangerous ways of the past?”
“Emile,” she said, still speaking with vehemence, “it may be very easy
to a strong man like you to direct his thoughts, to keep them out of one
path and guide them along another. It may be--I don’t know whether it
is; but I don’t pretend to such strength. I don’t believe it is ever
given to women. Perhaps even strength has its sex--I sometimes think
so. I have my strength, believe me. But don’t require of me the peculiar
strength that is male.”
“The truth is that you love living in the past as the Bedouin loves
living in the desert.”
“It was my oasis,” she answered, simply.
“And all these years--they have made no difference?”
“Did you think they would? Did you think they had?”
“I hoped so. I thought--I had begun to think that you lived again in
Vere.”
“Emile, you can always stand the truth, can’t you? Don’t say you can’t.
That would hurt me horribly. Perhaps you do not know how sometimes I
mentally lean on you. And I like to feel that if you knew the
absolute truth of me you would still look upon me with the same kind,
understanding eyes as now. Perhaps no one else would. Would you, do you
think?”
“I hope and believe I could,” he said. “You do not live in Vere. Is that
it?”
“I know it is considered the right, the perfectly natural thing that a
mother, stricken as I have been, should find in time perfect peace and
contentment in her child. Even you--you spoke of ‘living again.’ It’s
the consecrated phrase, Emile, isn’t it? I ought to be living again in
Vere. Well, I’m not doing that. With my nature I could never do that. Is
that horrible?”
“Ma pauvre amie!” he said.
He bent down and touched her hand.
“I don’t know,” she said, more calmly, as if relieved, but still with an
undercurrent of passion, “whether I could ever live again in the life of
another. But if I did it would be in the life of a man. I am not made to
live in a woman’s life, really to live, giving out the force that is
in me. I know I’m a middle-aged woman--to these Italians here more than
that, an old woman. But I’m not a finished woman, and I never shall
be till I die. Vere is my child. I love her tenderly; more than
that--passionately. She has always been close to me, as you know. But
no, Emile, my relation to Vere, hers to me, does not satisfy all my need
of love, my power to love. No, no, it doesn’t. There’s something in me
that wants more, much more than that. There’s something in me that--I
think only a son of his could have satisfied my yearning. A son might
have been Maurice come back to me, come back in a different, beautiful,
wonderfully pure relation. I prayed for a son. I needed a son. Don’t
misunderstand me, Emile; in a way a son could never have been so close
to me as Vere is,--but I could have lived in him as I can never live in
Vere. I could have lived in him almost as once I lived in Maurice. And
to-day I--”
She got up suddenly from her chair, put her arms on the window-frame,
and leaned out to the strange, white day.
“Emile,” she said, in a moment, turning round to him, “I want to get
away, on to the sea. Will you row me out, into the Grotto of Virgil?[*]
It’s so dreadfully white here, white and ghastly. I can’t talk naturally
here. And I should like to go on a little farther, now I’ve begun. It
would do me good to make a clean breast of it, dear brother confessor.
Shall we take the little boat and go?”
[*] The grotto described in this book is not really the
Grotto of Virgil, but it is often called so by the fishermen
along the coast.
“Of course,” he said.
“I’ll get a hat.”
She was away for two or three minutes. During that time Artois stood
by the window that looked towards Ischia. The stillness of the day was
intense, and gave to his mind a sensation of dream. Far off across the
gray-and-white waters, partially muffled in clouds that almost resembled
mist, the mountains of Ischia were rather suggested, mysteriously
indicated, than clearly seen. The gray cliffs towards Bagnoli went
down into motionless water gray as they were, but of a different, more
pathetic shade.
There was a luminous whiteness in the sky that affected the eyes, as
snow does.
Artois, as he looked, thought this world looked very old, a world
arranged for the elderly to dwell in. Was it not, therefore, an
appropriate setting for him and for Hermione? As this idea came into his
mind it sent a rather bitter smile to his lips, and Hermione, coming in
just then, saw the smile and said,--
“What is it, Emile? Why are you smiling?”
“Perhaps I will tell you when we are on the sea,” he answered.
He looked at her. She had on a black hat, over which a white veil was
fastened. It was tied beneath her chin, and hung down in a cloud over
her breast. It made him think of the strange misty clouds which brooded
about the breasts of the mountains of Ischia.
“Shall we go?” she said.
“Yes. What is Vere doing?”
“She is in her room.”
“What is she doing there?”
“Reading, I suppose. She often shuts herself up. She loves reading
almost more than I do.”
“Well?”
Hermione led the way down-stairs. When they were outside, on the crest
of the islet, the peculiar sickliness of the weather struck them both
more forcibly.
“This is the strangest scirocco effect I think I have ever seen,” said
Artois. “It is as if nature were under the influence of a drug, and had
fallen into a morbid dream, with eyes wide open, and pale, inert and
folded hands. I should like to see Naples to-day, and notice if this
weather has any effect upon that amazing population. I wonder if my
young friend, Marchese Isidoro Panacci--By-the-way, I haven’t told you
about him?”
“No.”
“I must. But not now. We will continue our former conversation. Where
shall we find the boat, the small one?”
“Gaspare will bring it--Gaspare! Gaspare!”
“Signora!” cried a strong voice below.
“La piccola barca!”
“Va bene, Signora!”
They descended slowly. It would have been almost impossible to do
anything quickly on such a day. The smallest movement, indeed, seemed
almost an outrage, likely to disturb the great white dreamer of the sea.
When they reached the foot of the cliff Gaspare was there, holding the
little craft in which Vere had gone out with Ruffo.
“Do you want me, Signora?”
“No, thank you, Gaspare. Don Emilio will row me. We are only going a
very little way.”
She stepped in. As Artois followed her he said to Gaspare:
“Those fishermen have gone?”
“Five minutes ago, Signore. There they are!”
He pointed to a boat at some distance, moving slowly in the direction of
Posilipo.
“I have been talking with them. One says he is of my country, a
Sicilian.”
“The boy?”
“Si, Signore, the giovinotto. But he cannot speak Sicilian, and he has
never been in Sicily, poveretto!”
Gaspare spoke with an accent of pity in which there was almost a hint of
contempt.
“A rivederci, Signore,” he added, pushing off the little boat.
“A rivederci, Gaspare.”
Artois took the oars and paddled very gently out, keeping near to the
cliffs of the opposite shore.
“Even San Francesco looks weary to-day,” he said, glancing across the
pool at the Saint on his pedestal. “I should not be surprised if, when
we return, we find that he has laid down his cross and is reclining like
the tired fishermen who come here in the night. Where shall we go?”
“To the Grotto of Virgil.”
“I wonder if Virgil was ever in his grotto? I wonder if he ever came
here on such a day of scirocco as this, and felt that the world was very
old, and he was even older than the world?”
“Do you feel like that to-day?”
“I feel that this is a world suitable for the old, for those who have
white hairs to accord with the white waters, and whose nights are the
white nights of age.”
“Was that why you were smiling so strangely just now when I came in?”
“Yes.”
He rowed on softly. The boat slipped out of the Pool of the Saint, and
then they saw the Capo Coroglio and the Island of Nisida with its
fort. On their right, and close to them, rose the weary-looking cliffs,
honey-combed with caverns, and seamed with fissures as an old and
haggard face is seamed with wrinkles that tell of many cares.
“Here is the grotto,” said Hermione, almost directly. “Row in gently.”
He obeyed her and turned the boat, sending it in under the mighty roof
of rock.
A darkness fell upon them. They had a safe, enclosed sensation in
escaping for a moment from the white day, almost as if they had escaped
from a white enemy.
Artois let the oars lie still in the water, keeping his hands lightly
upon them, and both Hermione and he were silent for a few minutes,
listening to the tiny sounds made now and then by drops of moisture
which fell from the cavern roof softly into the almost silent sea. At
last Artois said:
“You are out of the whiteness now. This is a shadowed place like a
confessional, where murmuring lips tell to strangers the stories of
their lives. I am not a stranger, but tell me, my friend, about yourself
and Vere. Perhaps you scarcely know how deeply the mother and child
problem interests me--that is, when mother and child are two real
forces, as you and Vere are.”
“Then you think Vere has force?”
“Do not you?”
“What kind of force?”
“You mean physical, intellectual, or moral? Suppose I say she has the
force of charm!”
“Indeed she has that, as he had. That is one of the attributes she
derives from Maurice.”
“Yes. He had a wonderful charm. And then, Vere has passion.”
“You think so?”
“I am sure of it. Where does she get that from?”
“He was full of the passion of the South.”
“I think Vere has a touch of Northern passion in her, too, combined
perhaps with the other. And that, I think, she derives from you. Then I
discern in Vere intellectual force, immature, embryonic if you like, but
unmistakable.”
“That does not come from me,” Hermione said, suddenly, almost with
bitterness.
“Why--why will you be unnecessarily humiliated?” Artois exclaimed.
His voice was confusedly echoed by the cavern, which broke into faint,
but deep mutterings. Hermione looked up quickly to the mysterious vault
which brooded above them, and listened till the chaotic noises died
away. Then she said:
“Do you know what they remind me of?”
“Of what?”
“My efforts. Those efforts I made long ago to live again in work.”
“When you wrote?”
“Yes, when I tried to throw my mind and my heart down upon paper. How
strange it was! I had Vere--but she wasn’t enough to still the ache. And
I knew what work can be, what a consolation, because I knew you. And
I stretched out my hands to it--I stretched out my soul. And it was no
use; I wasn’t made to be a successful writer. When I spoke from my heart
to try and move men and save myself, my words were seized, as yours were
just now by the rock--seized, and broken, and flung back in confusion.
They struck my heart like stones. Emile, I’m one of those people who can
only do one thing: I can only feel.”
“It is true that you could never be an artist. Perhaps you were made to
be an inspiration.”
“But that’s not enough. The role of starter to those who race--I haven’t
the temperament to reconcile myself to that. It’s not that I have in me
a conceit which demands to be fed. But I have in me a force that clamors
to exercise itself. Only when I was living on Monte Amato with Maurice
did I feel that the force was being used as God meant it to be used.”
“In loving?”
“In loving passionately something that was utterly worthy to be loved.”
Artois was silent. He knew Hermione’s mistake. He knew what had never
been told him: that Maurice had been false to her for the love of the
peasant girl Maddalena. He knew that Maurice had been done to death by
the betrayed girl’s father, Salvatore. And Gaspare knew these things,
too. But through all these years these two men had so respected silence,
the nobility of it, the grand necessity of it in certain circumstances
of life, that they had never spoken to each other of the black truth
known to them both. Indeed, Artois believed that even now, after more
than sixteen years, if he ventured one word against the dead man Gaspare
would be ready to fly at his throat in defence of the loved Padrone. For
this divined and persistent loyalty Artois had a sensation of absolute
love. Between him and Gaspare there must always be the barrier of a
great and mutual reserve. Yet that very reserve, because there was
something truly delicate, and truly noble in it, was as a link of steel
between them. They were watchdogs of Hermione. They had been watchdogs
through all these years, guarding her from the knowledge of a truth. And
so well had they done her service that now to-day she was able to say,
with clasped hands and the light of passion in her eyes:
“Something that was utterly worthy to be loved.”
When Artois spoke again he said:
“And that force cannot be fully used in loving Vere?”
“No, Emile. Is that very horrible, very unnatural?”
“Why should it be?”
“I have tried--I have tried for years, Emile, to make Vere enough. I
have even been false with myself. I have said to myself that she was
enough. I did that after I knew that I could never produce work of any
value. When Vere was a baby I lived only for her. Again, when she was
beginning to grow up, I tried to live, I did live only for her. And I
remember I used to say, I kept on saying to myself, ‘This is enough for
me. I do not need any more than this. I have had my life. I am now
a middle-aged woman. I must live in my child. This will be my
satisfaction. This is my satisfaction. This is using rightly and
naturally all that force I feel within me.’ I kept on saying this. But
there is something within one which rises up and defies a lie--however
beautiful the lie is, however noble it is. And I think even a lie can
sometimes be both. Don’t you, Emile?”
It almost seemed to him for a moment that she knew his lie and
Gaspare’s.
“Yes,” he said. “I do think so.”
“Well, that lie of mine--it was defied. And it had no more courage.”
“I want you to tell me something,” he said, quietly. “I want you to tell
me what has happened to-day.”
“To-day?”
“Yes. Something has happened either to-day or very recently--I am
sure of it--that has stirred up within you this feeling of acute
dissatisfaction. It was always there. But something has called it into
the open. What has done that?”
Hermione hesitated.
“Perhaps you don’t know,” he said.
“I was wondering--yes, I do know. I must be truthful with myself--with
you. I do know. But it seems so strange, so almost inexplicable, and
even rather absurd.”
“Truth often seems absurd.”
“It was that boy, that diver for _frutti di mare_--Ruffo.”
“The boy with the Arab eyes?”
“Yes. Of course I have seen many boys full of life and gayety and music.
There are so many in Italy. But--well, I don’t know--perhaps it was
partly Vere.”
“How do you mean?”
“Vere was so interested in him. It may have been that. Or perhaps it
was something in his look and in his voice when he was singing. I don’t
really know what it was. But that boy made me feel--more horribly than
I have ever felt before--that Vere is not enough. Emile, there is some
hunger, so persistent, so peculiar, so intense, that one feels as if it
must be satisfied eventually, as if it were impossible for it not to be
satisfied. I think that human hunger for immortal life is like that, and
I think my hunger for a son is like that. I know my hunger can never
be satisfied. And yet it lives on in me just as if it knew more than
I know, as if it knew that it could and must. After all these years I
can’t, no, I can’t reconcile myself to the fact that Maurice was taken
from me so utterly, that he died without stamping himself upon a son. It
seems as if it couldn’t be. And I feel to-day that I cannot bear that it
is.”
There were tears standing in her eyes. She had spoken with a force of
feeling, with a depth of sincerity, that startled Artois, intimately as
he knew her. Till this moment he had not quite realized the wonderful
persistence of love in the hearts of certain women, and not only the
persistence of love’s existence, but of its existence undiminished,
unabated by time.
“How am I to bear it?” she said, as he did not speak.
“I cannot tell. I am not worthy to know. And besides, I must say to you,
Hermione, that one of the greatest mysteries in human life, at any rate
to me, is this: how some human beings do bear the burdens laid upon
them. Christ bore His cross. But there has only been, since the
beginning of things, one Christ, and it is unthinkable that there can
ever be another. But all those who are not Christ, how is it they bear
what they do bear? It is easy to talk of bravery, the necessity for it
in life. It is always very easy to talk. The thing that is impossible
is to understand. How can you come to me to help you, my friend? And
suppose I were to try. How could I try, except by saying that I think
Vere is very worthy to be loved with all your love?”
“You love Vere, don’t you, Emile?”
“Yes.”
“And I do. You don’t doubt that?”
“Never.”
“After all I have said, the way I have spoken, you might.”
“I do not doubt it for a moment.”
“I wonder if there is any mother who would not, if I spoke to her as I
have spoken to you to-day?”
“I think there is a great deal of untruth spoken of mother’s love,
a great deal of misconception about it, as there is about most very
strange, and very wonderful and beautiful things. But are you so sure
that if your husband had stamped himself upon a boy this force within
you could have been satisfied?”
“I have believed so.”
She was silent. Then she added, quietly, “I do believe so.”
He did not speak, but sat looking down at the sea, which was full of dim
color in the cave.
“I think you are doubting that it would have been so?” she said, at
last.
“Yes, that is true. I am doubting.”
“I wonder why?”
“I cannot help feeling that there is passion in you, such passion as
could not be satisfied in any strict, maternal relationship.”
“But I am old, dear Emile,” she said, very simply.
“When I was standing by that window, looking at the mountains of Ischia,
I was saying to myself, ‘This is an old, tired world, suitable for
me--and for you. We are in our right environment to-day.’ I was saying
that, Hermione, but was I believing it, really? I don’t think I was. And
I am ten years older than you, and I have been given a nature that was,
I think, always older than yours could ever be.”
“I wonder if that is so.”
She looked at him very directly, even searchingly, not with eager
curiosity, but with deep inquiry.
“You know, Emile,” she added, “I tell you very much, but you tell me
very little. Not that I wish to ask anything--no. I respect all your
reserve. And about your work: you tell me all that. It is a great thing
in my life, your work. Perhaps you don’t realize how sometimes I live in
the book that you are doing, almost as if I were writing it myself. But
your inner life--”
“But I have been frankness itself with you,” said Artois. “To no one
have I ever said so much as to you.”
“Yes, I know, about many things. But about emotion, love,--not
friendship, the other love--do you get on without that? When you say
your nature has always been older than mine, do you mean that it has
always been harder to move by love, that it has had less need of love?”
“I think so. For many years in my life I think that work has filled the
place love occupies in many, perhaps in most men’s lives. Everything
comes second to work. I know that, because if any one attempts to
interfere with my work, or to usurp any of the time that should be
given to it, any regard I may have for that person turns at once to
irritation, almost to hatred.”
“I have never done that?”
“You--no. Of course, I have been like other men. When I was young--well,
Hermione, after all I am a Frenchman, and though I am of Normandy, still
I passed many years in Paris, as you know.”
“All that I understand. But the real thing? Such as I have known?”
“I have never broken my heart for any one, though I have known
agitations. But even those were long ago. And since I was thirty-five
I have never felt really dominated by any one. Before that time I
occasionally passed under the yoke, I believe, like other men. Why do
you fix your eyes on me like that?”
“I was wondering if you could ever pass under the yoke again.”
“Honestly, I do not think so. I am not sure. When can one be certain
that one will never be, or do, this or that? Surely,”--he smiled,--“you
are not afraid for me?”
“I do not say that. But I think you have forces in you not fully
exercised even by your work.”
“Possibly. But there the years do really step in and count for
something, even for much. There is no doubt that as the years increase,
the man who cares at all for intellectual pleasures is able to care
for them more, is able to substitute them, without keen regret, without
wailing and gnashing of teeth, for certain other pleasures, to which,
perhaps, formerly he clung. That is why the man who is mentally and
bodily--you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Has such an immense advantage in years of decline over the man who is
merely a bodily man.”
“I am sure that is true. But--”
“What is it?”
“The heart? What about that?”
“Perhaps there are some hearts that can fulfil themselves sufficiently
in friendship.”
As Artois said this his eyes rested upon Hermione with an expression in
them that revealed much that he never spoke in words. She put out her
hand, and took his, and pressed it, holding hers over it upon the oar.
“Emile,” she said, “sometimes you make me feel unworthy and ungrateful
because--because I still need, I dare to need more than I have been
given. Without you I don’t know how I should have faced it.”
“Without me you would never have had to face it.”
That was the cry that rose up perpetually in the heart of Artois, the
cry that Hermione must never hear. He said to her now:
“Without you, Hermione, I should be dust in the dust of Africa!”
“Perhaps we each owe something to the other,” she said. “It is blessed
to have a debt to a friend.”
“Would to God that I could pay all my debt to you!” Artois exclaimed.
Again the cavern took up his voice and threw it back to the sea in
confused and hollow mutterings. They both looked up, as if some one were
above them, warning them or rebuking them. At that instant they had the
feeling that they were being watched. But there was only the empty gray
sea about them, and over their heads the rugged, weary rock that had
leaned over the sea for countless years.
“Hark!” said Artois, “it is telling me that my debt to you can never be
paid: only in one way could it be partially discharged. If I could
show you a path to happiness, the happiness you long for, and need, the
passionate happiness of the heart that is giving where it rejoices to
give--for your happiness must always be in generosity--I should have
partially paid my debt to you. But that is impossible.”
“I’ve made you sad to-day by my complaining,” she said, with
self-rebuke; “I’m sorry. You didn’t realize?”
“How it was with you? No, not quite--I thought you were more at peace
than you are.”
“Till to-day I believe I was half deceived too.”
“That singing boy, that--what is his name?”
“Ruffo.”
“That Ruffo, I should like to run a knife into him under the left
shoulder-blade. How dare he, a ragamuffin from some hovel of Naples,
make you know that you are unhappy?”
“How strange it is what outside things, or people who have no connection
with us or with our lives, can do to us unconsciously!” she said. “I
have heard a hundred boys sing on the Bay, seen a hundred rowing their
boats into the Pool--and just this one touches some chord, and all the
strings of my soul quiver.”
“Some people act upon us somewhat as nature does sometimes. And Vere
paid the boy. There is another irony of unconsciousness. Vere, bone of
your bone, flesh of your flesh, rewards your pain-giver. How we hide
ourselves from those we love best and live with most intimately! You,
her mother, are a stranger to Vere. Does not to-day prove it?”
“Ah, but Vere is not a stranger to me. That is where the mother has the
advantage of the child.”
Artois did not make any response to this remark. To cover his silence,
perhaps, he grasped the oars more firmly and began to back the boat out
of the cave. Both felt that it was no longer necessary to stay in this
confessional of the rock.
As they came out under the grayness of the sky, Hermione, with a change
of tone, said:
“And your friend? The Marchese--what is his name?”
“Isidoro Panacci.”
“Tell me about him.”
“He is a very perfect type of a complete Neapolitan of his class. He has
scarcely travelled at all, except in Italy. Once he has been in Paris,
where I met him, and once to Lucerne for a fortnight. Both his
father and mother are Neapolitans. He is a charming fellow, utterly
unintellectual, but quite clever; shrewd, sharp at reading character,
marvellously able to take care of himself, and hold his own with
anybody. A cat to fall on his feet! He is apparently born without any
sense of fear, and with a profound belief in destiny. He can drive
four-in-hand, swim for any number of hours without tiring, ride--well,
as an Italian cavalry officer can ride, and that is not badly. His
accomplishments? He can speak French--abominably, and pick out all
imaginable tunes on the piano, putting instinctively quite tolerable
basses. I don’t think he ever reads anything, except the _Giorno_
and the _Mattino_. He doesn’t care for politics, and likes cards, but
apparently not too much. They’re no craze with him. He knows Naples
inside out, and is as frank as a child that has never been punished.”
“I should think he must be decidedly attractive?”
“Oh, he is. One great attraction he has--he appears to have no sense
at all that difference of age can be a barrier between two men. He is
twenty-four, and I am what I am. He is quite unaware that there is any
gulf between us. In every way he treats me as if I were twenty-four.”
“Is that refreshing or embarrassing?”
“I find it generally refreshing. His family accepts the situation with
perfect naivete. I am welcomed as Doro’s chum with all the good-will in
the world.”
Hermione could not help laughing, and Artois echoed her laugh.
“Merely talking about him has made you look years younger,” she
declared. “The influence of the day has lifted from you.”
“It would not have fallen upon Isidoro, I think. And yet he is full
of sentiment. He is a curious instance of a very common Neapolitan
obsession.”
“What is that?”
“He is entirely obsessed by woman. His life centres round woman. You
observe I use the singular. I do that because it is so much more plural
than the plural in this case. His life is passed in love-affairs, in a
sort of chaos of amours.”
“How strange that is!”
“You think so, my friend?”
“Yes. I never can understand how human beings can pass from love to
love, as many of them do. I never could understand it, even before
I--even before Sicily.”
“You are not made to understand such a thing.”
“But you do?”
“I? Well, perhaps. But the loves of men are not as your love.”
“Yet his was,” she answered. “And he was a true Southerner, despite his
father.
“Yes, he was a true Southerner,” Artois replied.
For once he was off his guard with her, and uttered his real thought
of Maurice, not without a touch of the irony that was characteristic of
him.
Immediately he had spoken he was aware of his indiscretion. But Hermione
had not noticed it. He saw by her eyes that she was far away in Sicily.
And when the boat slipped into the Saint’s Pool, and Gaspare came to the
water’s edge to hold the prow while they got out, she rose from her seat
slowly, and almost reluctantly, like one disturbed in a dream that she
would fain continue.
“Have you seen the Signorina, Gaspare?” she asked him. “Has she been
out?”
“No, Signora. She is still in the house.”
“Still reading!” said Artois. “Vere must be quite a book-worm!”
“Will you stay to dinner, Emile?”
“Alas, I have promised the Marchesino Isidoro to dine with him. Give
me a cup of tea _a la Russe_, and one of Ruffo’s cigarettes, and then
I must bid you adieu. I’ll take the boat to the Antico Giuseppone, and
then get another there as far as the gardens.”
“One of Ruffo’s cigarettes!” Hermione echoed, as they went up the steps.
“That boy seems to have made himself one of the family already.”
“Yet I wish, as I said in the cave, that I had put a knife into him
under the left shoulder-blade--before this morning.”
They spoke lightly. It seemed as if each desired for the moment to get
away from their mood in the confessional of Virgil’s Grotto, and from
the sadness of the white and silent day.
As to Ruffo, about whom they jested, he was in sight of Naples, and not
far from Mergellina, still rowing with tireless young arms, and singing
to “Bella Napoli,” with a strong resolve in his heart to return to the
Saint’s Pool on the first opportunity and dive for more cigarettes.