THE REFUGE
Shelley was charmed with Casa Magni. He liked the wild solitude of the
place, the forest behind the house, the rocky and wooded bays and the
fisherman’s poor villages.
But Mary felt lost and unhappy. Again pregnant, anxious, irritable, she
would have much preferred to live in a city near a good doctor. She
thought the peasantry uncouth and hateful, their _Genovese_ jargon
disgusted her as much as the dialect of Tuscany had pleased her. The
presence of Jane Williams, so appreciated by her at Pisa, began to get
on her nerves. Housekeeping in common is for women the acid test. There
were stupid quarrels over servants and frying pans. Shelley spoke too
warmly of Jane’s perfection, and wrote her too divine serenades.
To all Mary’s grumblings he replied with his usual sweetness. With the
utmost tenderness he caressed and consoled her. “Poor Mary,” he said of
her, “it is the curse of Tantalus to be endowed with such fine
qualities, and yet unable to excite the sympathy indispensable to their
application to domestic life.”
He knew he could not change her, that her physical condition explained a
good deal of her peevishness, which he bore with patient affection. What
she constantly reproached him with was his complete indifference to the
things that other men thought worth while. She still admired him as much
as ever, in him alone she found the strength on which to lean. But why
could he never use this strength to his own advantage? He seemed to have
no notion of his own interests. His personality was not in his own eyes
what theirs is for men in general, something strictly limited by
definite boundaries; no, his poured outwards in a sort of luminous
fringe melting into that of his friends, and even into that of perfect
strangers. As to the customs and cares of human societies he continued
to ignore them.
Every month he went to Leghorn to draw his allowance. He brought back a
bagful of _scudi_ which he emptied out upon the floor. Then with the
fire-shovel he gathered the coins together in a heap, which he flattened
out into a sort of cake with his foot. Always with the shovel he cut the
cake into two parts. One was for Mary: rent and housekeeping. The other
half was again divided into two, of which one went to Mary as pin-money,
and the other remained for Percy. But Mary knew what was meant by “for
Percy”: it was for Godwin despite all vows, for Claire, for the
Hunts. . . .
One day Captain Roberts was expected over to luncheon from Genoa.
Conscious that their anchorite way of living would not suit ordinary
mortals, there was considerable commotion at the villa, but
notwithstanding the bother and turmoil the three women, as is woman’s
wont, seemed to enjoy it. The visitor came and he was most anxious to
see the Poet of whom he had heard so much, but Shelley had disappeared.
They sat down to table without him. Suddenly one of the trio of ladies
cried out, “Oh my gracious!” and Mary, turning round, saw Shelley
completely naked crossing the room, and trying to hide behind the
maid-servant.
“Percy, how dare you!” she cried, which was imprudent, for Shelley,
considering himself unjustly attacked, abandoned his refuge and came up
to the table to explain. The ladies covered their faces with their
hands. Yet he was good to look at, his hair full of seaweed, his slender
body wet and scented with the salt of the sea.
But the daughter of William Godwin had a horror of such unconventional
happenings.
* * *
Shelley and Williams waited for their boat with the impatience of
schoolboys, and the moment a strange sail, coming from the direction of
Leghorn, doubled the point of Lerici, they rushed down to the beach.
After Allegra’s death Shelley had written to Roberts to change the name
of his boat from the _Don Juan_ to the _Ariel_. Everything which
reminded him of Byron was now hateful to him. Great therefore was his
surprise and anger, when on the arrival of his little yacht, he saw
painted in enormous letters in the middle of the mainsail: _Don Juan_.
Byron, told of the change of name, had forced Roberts, in spite of
Shelley’s orders, to print the sign of the Devil upon the Platonic bark.
Armed with hot water, soap and brushes, Shelley and Williams set to work
to wash out the infamy from their poor boat. They had no success. They
tried turpentine, which failed equally. Then they consulted specialists,
who were of opinion that a bit of sail would have to be cut clean out
and a new piece inserted; nothing short of this could mend the case.
Shelley had the operation performed at once.
The Genoese captain who had sailed the boat to Lerici, said that she
sailed and worked well, but was a ticklish boat to manage. Shelley and
Williams, enthusiastic but incompetent yachtsmen, had insisted on having
her built to a design made by a naval officer for Williams, before he
left England. The lovely sweeping lines of the model enchanted them, but
the boat when built to plan required a couple of tons of iron ballast to
bring her down to her bearings, and even then was very crank in a
breeze.
The two owners of the _Ariel_ determined to man her themselves, with the
help of Charles Vivian, a young sailor. Shelley was awkward as a woman
in all things appertaining to boats, but full of good intentions. He
tangled himself up in the rigging, read Sophocles while trying to steer,
and several times just missed falling overboard. But never in his life
had he been so happy. When Trelawny saw his seamanship, he took Williams
by the arm and advised him to add to the crew a Genoese accustomed to
the coast. Williams was hurt . . . three seasoned sailors such as they
. . . and was he not Captain? And had he not Shelley?
“Shelley! You’ll never do any good with him until you shear the wisps of
hair that hang over his eyes, heave his Greek Poets overboard, and
plunge his arms up to the elbow in a tar-bucket.”
The _Ariel_ drew too much water to be run on shore at Casa Magni, so
Williams with the aid of a carpenter built a tiny dinghy of basketwork,
covered with tarred canvas. It was a fragile toy which upset at a touch.
The Poet was delighted with it, although it capsized continually, and
gave him many a ducking.
One evening, as he dragged the skiff out from the house, he saw Jane and
her two children on the sands. He invited her to bring them for a row.
“With careful stowage,” said he, “there is room for us all in my barge.”
She squatted in the bottom of the frail skiff with her babies, and the
gunwale sank to within six inches of the water; a puff of wind, the
smallest movement of any one of them, and it must cant over, fill, and
glide from under them.
Jane understood that Percy intended to float on the water near the
shore, but he, proud to show a lovely woman how well he sculled, bent to
his oars, and they were soon out on the blue waters of the bay. Then,
shipping the oars, he fell into a deep reverie. Jane was seized with the
most awful terror. There was no eye watching them, no boat within a
mile, the shore was fast receding, the water deepening, and the Poet
dreaming. She made several remarks, but they met with no response.
Suddenly he raised his head, his face brightened as with a bright
thought, and he exclaimed, joyfully, “Now let us together solve the
great mystery!”
Had Jane uttered a cry, her children were lost. Shelley might made a
sudden movement, the bark would capsize, the waters wrap them round as a
winding-sheet. . . . Suppressing her terror, she answered promptly, “No,
thank you, not now, I should like my dinner first and so would the
children. . . . And look, there is Edward coming on shore with Trelawny
. . . they’ll be so surprised at our being out at this time, and Edward
says this boat is not safe.”
“Safe!” cried the Poet, “I’d go to Leghorn or anywhere in her.”
Jane felt that the Angel of Death, who always attended the Poet on the
water, now spread his wings and vanished.
“You haven’t yet written the words for the Indian air,” she said
carelessly.
“Yes, I have,” he answered, “but you must play me the air again, and
I’ll try and make the thing better.”
Meanwhile he had paddled his cockleshell into shallow water; as soon as
Jane saw the sandy bottom, she snatched up her babies, and clambered out
so hurriedly that the punt was turned over and the Poet pinned down
underneath it. He rose with it on his back, like a hermit-crab in any
old empty shell.
“Jane, are you mad?” cried her husband, surprised at her lubberly way of
getting out of a boat. “Had you waited a moment, we would have hauled
the boat up.”
“No, thank you. Oh, I have escaped the most dreadful fate! Never will I
put my foot in that horrid coffin again. ‘Solve the great mystery!’
. . . Why, he is the greatest of all mysteries! Who can predict what he
will do? . . . He is seeking after what we all avoid—death. I wish we
were away. I shall always be in terror.”
But the Poet’s boyish face wore its accustomed innocent and radiant
expression. During this glorious summer, nothing seemed able to mar his
joy. Of an evening he liked to go sailing in the _Ariel_ by moonlight.
Mary sitting at his feet, her head against his knees, remembered how she
had sat thus on the stormy cross-channel journey ten years ago. Ten
years . . . what quantities of things had happened in ten years. How
much subtler, crueller, and more treacherous Life had been, than either
of them had then imagined.
Sitting in the stern, Jane sang an Indian serenade, accompanying it on
the guitar, while Shelley gazed up into the dark blue sky of June, where
the moon burned inextinguishably beautiful, suffusing the
mountain-clouds with intolerable brilliancy. His mind was emptied of
thought, his senses annihilated in a delicious ecstasy, his soul clipt
in a net woven of dew-beams, seemed to be floating on waves of love and
odour and deep melody. He walked again among the splendid visions, the
crystalline palaces, the iridescent vapours, which during so long a time
had appeared to him the sole reality. He knew to-day that there existed
another universe, a harsh and inflexible one but in these higher
regions, only animated by the liquid and undulating sweetness of song,
by the invisible movement of luminous spheres, in these regions the
jealousy of women, money-worries, political quarrels, appeared so
infinitely petty that they could hot touch his wild, sweet,
incommunicable happiness. He would have liked to swoon away in
ravishment while saying with Faust to the passing moment, “Verweile
doch! Du bist so schön.”