‘Oh! if Elizabeth’s friend is there that settles it: we’ll all go.’
‘Very well’m,’ said Elizabeth, studiously avoiding even the appearance of gratitude. Colonel Leyland’s face grew severe over the want of discipline.
‘You spoil her,’ he murmured, when they had all descended to walk up a hill.
‘There speaks the military man.’
‘Certainly I have had too much to do with Tommies to enter into what you call “human relations”. A little sentimentality and the whole army would go to pieces.’
‘I know; but the whole world isn’t an army. So why should I pretend I’m an officer. You remind me of my Anglo-Indian friends, who were so shocked when I would be pleasant to some natives. They proved, quite conclusively, that it would never do for them, and have never seen that the proof didn’t apply. The unlucky people here are always trying to lead the lucky; and it must be stopped. You’ve been unlucky; all your life you’ve had to command men, and exact prompt obedience and other unprofitable virtues. I’m lucky: I needn’t do the same—and I won’t.’
‘Don’t then,’ he said, smiling. ‘But take care that the world isn’t an army after all. And take care, besides, that you aren’t being unjust to the unlucky people: we’re fairly kind to your beloved lower orders, for instance.’
‘Of course,’ she said dreamily, as if he had made her no concession. ‘It’s becoming usual. But they see through it. They, like ourselves, know that only one thing in the world is worth having.’
‘Ah! yes,’ he sighed. ‘It’s a commercial age.’
‘No!’ exclaimed Miss Raby, so irritably that Elizabeth looked back to see what was wrong. ‘You are stupid. Kindness and money are both quite easy to part with. The only thing worth giving away is yourself. Did you ever give yourself away?’
‘Frequently.’
‘I mean, did you ever, intentionally, make a fool of yourself before your inferiors?’
‘Intentionally, never.’ He saw at last what she was driving at. It was her pleasure to pretend that such self-exposure was the only possible basis of true intercourse, the only gate in the spiritual barrier that divided class from class. One of her books had dealt with the subject; and very agreeable reading it made. ‘What about you?’ he added playfully.
‘I’ve never done it properly. Hitherto I’ve never felt a really big fool; but when I do, I hope I shall show it plainly.’
‘May I be there!’
‘You might not like it,’ she replied. ‘I may feel it at any moment and in mixed company. Anything might set me off.’
‘Behold Vorta!’ cried the driver, cutting short the sprightly conversation. He and Elizabeth and the carriage had reached the top of the hill. The black woods ceased; and they emerged into a valley whose sides were emerald lawns, rippling and doubling and merging each into each, yet always with an upward trend, so that it was 2000 feet to where the rock burst out of the grass and made great mountains, whose pinnacles were delicate in the purity of evening.
The driver, who had the gift of repetition, said: ‘Vorta! Vorta!’
Far up the valley was a large white village, tossing on undulating meadows like a ship in the sea, and at its prow, breasting a sharp incline, stood a majestic tower of new grey stone. As they looked at the tower it became vocal and spoke magnificently to the mountains, who replied.
They were again informed that this was Vorta, and that that was the new campanile—like the campanile of Venice, only finer—and that the sound was the sound of the campanile’s new bell.
‘Thank you; exactly,’ said Colonel Leyland while Miss Raby rejoiced that the village had made such use of its prosperity. She had feared to return to the place she had once loved so well, lest she should find something new. It had never occurred to her that the new thing might be beautiful. The architect had indeed gone south for his inspiration, and the tower which stood among the mountains was akin to the tower which had once stood beside the lagoons. But the birthplace of the bell it was impossible to determine, for there is no nationality in sound.
They drove forward into the lovely scene, pleased and silent. Approving tourists took them for a well-matched couple. There was indeed nothing offensively literary in Miss Raby’s kind angular face; and Colonel Leyland’s profession had made him neat rather than aggressive. They did very well for a cultured and refined husband and wife, who had spent their lives admiring the beautiful things with which the world is filled.
As they approached, other churches, hitherto unnoticed, replied—tiny churches, ugly churches, churches painted pink with towers like pumpkins, churches painted white with shingle spires, churches hidden altogether in the glades of a wood or the folds of a meadow—till the evening air was full of little voices, with the great voice singing in their midst. Only the English church, lately built in the Early English style, kept chaste silence.
The bells ceased, and all the little churches receded into darkness. Instead, there was a sound of dressing-gongs, and a vision of tired tourists hurrying back for dinner. A landau, with Pension Atherley-Simon upon it, was trotting to meet the diligence, which was just due. A lady was talking to her mother about an evening dress. Young men with rackets were talking to young men with alpenstocks. Then, across the darkness, a fiery finger wrote Grand Hôtel des Alpes.
‘Behold the electric light!’ said the driver, hearing his passengers exclaim.
Pension Belle Vue started out against a pinewood, and from the brink of the river the Hôtel de Londres replied. Pensions Liebig and Lorelei were announced in green and amber respectively. The Old-England appeared in scarlet. The illuminations covered a large area, for the best hotels stood outside the village, in elevated or romantic situations. This display took place every evening in the season, but only while the diligence arrived. As soon as the last tourist was suited, the lights went out, and the hotel-keepers, cursing or rejoicing, retired to their cigars.
‘Horrible!’ said Miss Raby.
‘Horrible people!’ said Colonel Leyland.
The Hôtel des Alpes was an enormous building, which, being made of wood, suggested a distended chalet. But this impression was corrected by a costly and magnificent view terrace, the squared stones of which were visible for miles, and from which, as from some great reservoir, asphalt paths trickled over the adjacent country. Their carriage, having ascended a private drive, drew up under a vaulted portico of pitch-pine, which opened on to this terrace on one side, and into the covered lounge on the other. There was a whirl of officials—men with gold braid, smarter men with more gold braid, men smarter still with no gold braid. Elizabeth assumed an arrogant air, and carried a small straw basket with difficulty. Colonel Leyland became every inch a soldier. Miss Raby, whom, in spite of long experience, a large hotel always flustered, was hurried into an expensive bedroom, and advised to dress herself immediately if she wished to partake of table d’hôte.
As she came up the staircase, she had seen the dining-room filling with English and Americans and with rich hungry Germans. She liked company, but to-night she was curiously depressed. She seemed to be confronted with an unpleasing vision, the outlines of which were still obscure.
‘I will eat in my room,’ she told Elizabeth. ‘Go to your dinner: I’ll do the unpacking.’
She wandered round, looking at the list of rules, the list of prices, the list of excursions, the red plush sofa, the jugs and basins on which was lithographed a view of the mountains. Where amid such splendour was there a place for Signor Cantù with his china-bowled pipe, and for Signora Cantù with her snuff-coloured shawl?
When the waiter at last brought up her dinner, she asked after her host and hostess.
He replied, in cosmopolitan English, that they were both well.
‘Do they live here, or at the Biscione?’
‘Here, why yes. Only poor tourists go to the Biscione.’
‘Who lives there, then?’
‘The mother of Signor Cantù. She is unconnected,’ he continue
d, like one who has learnt a lesson, ‘she is unconnected absolutely with us. Fifteen years back, yes. But now, where is the Biscione? I beg you contradict if we are spoken about together.’
Miss Raby said quietly: ‘I have made a mistake. Would you kindly give notice that I shall not want my room, and say that the luggage is to be taken, immediately, to the Biscione.’
‘Certainly! certainly!’ said the waiter, who was well trained. He added with a vicious snort, ‘You will have to pay.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Miss Raby.
The elaborate machinery which had so recently sucked her in began to disgorge her. The trunks were carried down, the vehicle in which she had arrived was recalled. Elizabeth, white with indignation, appeared in the hall. She paid for beds in which they had not slept, and for food which they had never eaten. Amidst the whirl of gold-laced officials, who hoped even in that space of time to have established a claim to be tipped, she moved towards the door. The guests in the lounge observed her with amusement, concluding that she had found the hotel too dear.
‘What is it? Whatever is it? Are you not comfortable?’ Colonel Leyland in his evening dress ran after her.
‘Not that; I’ve made a mistake. This hotel belongs to the son; I must go to the Biscione. He’s quarrelled with the old people: I think the father’s dead.’
‘But really—if you are comfortable here—’
‘I must find out to-night whether it is true. And I must also’—her voice quivered—‘find out whether it is my fault.’
‘How in the name of goodness—’
‘I shall bear it if it is,’ she continued gently. ‘I am too old to be a tragedy queen as well as an evil genius.’
‘What does she mean? Whatever does she mean?’ he murmured, as he watched the carriage lights descending the hill. ‘What harm has she done? What harm is there for that matter? Hotel-keepers always quarrel: it’s no business of ours.’ He ate a good dinner in silence. Then his thoughts were turned by the arrival of his letters from the post office.
Dearest Edwin,—It is with the greatest diffidence that I write to you, and I know you will believe me when I say that I do not write from curiosity. I only require an answer to one plain question. Are you engaged to Miss Raby or no? Fashions have altered even since my young days. But, for all that, an engagement is still an engagement, and should be announced at once, to save all parties discomfort. Though your health has broken down and you have abandoned your profession, you can still protect the family honour.
‘Drive!’ exclaimed Colonel Leyland. Acquaintance with Miss Raby had made his sight keener. He recognized in this part of his sister’s letter nothing but an automatic conventionality. He was no more moved by its perusal than she had been by its composition.
As for the maid whom the Bannons mentioned to me, she is not a chaperone—nothing but a sop to throw in the eyes of the world. I am not saying a word against Miss Raby, whose books we always read. Literary people are always unpractical, and we are confident that she does not know. Perhaps I do not think her the wife for you; but that is another matter.
My babes, who all send love (so does Lionel), are at present an unmitigated joy. One’s only anxiety is for the future, when the crushing expenses of good education will have to be taken into account.
Your loving NELLY.
How could he explain the peculiar charm of the relations between himself and Miss Raby? There had never been a word of marriage, and would probably never be a word of love. If, instead of seeing each other frequently, they should come to see each other always it would be as sage companions, familiar with life, not as egoistic lovers, craving for infinities of passion which they had no right to demand and no power to supply. Neither professed to be a virgin soul, or to be ignorant of the other’s limitations and inconsistencies. They scarcely even made allowances for each other. Toleration implies reserve; and the greatest safeguard of unruffled intercourse is knowledge. Colonel Leyland had courage of no mean order: he cared little for the opinion of people whom he understood. Nelly and Lionel and their babes were welcome to be shocked or displeased. Miss Raby was an authoress, a kind of Radical; he a soldier, a kind of aristocrat. But the time for their activities was passing; he was ceasing to fight, she to write. They could pleasantly spend together their autumn. Nor might they prove the worst companions for a winter.
He was too delicate to admit, even to himself, the desirability of marrying two thousand a year. But it lent an unacknowledged perfume to his thoughts. He tore Nelly’s letter into little pieces, and dropped them into the darkness out of the bedroom window.
‘Funny lady!’ he murmured, as he looked towards Vorta, trying to detect the campanile in the growing light of the moon. ‘Why have you gone to be uncomfortable? Why will you interfere in the quarrels of people who can’t understand you, and whom you don’t understand. How silly you are to think you’ve caused them. You think you’ve written a book which has spoilt the place and made the inhabitants corrupt and sordid. I know just how you think. So you will make yourself unhappy, and go about trying to put right what never was right. Funny lady!’
Close below him he could now see the white fragments of his sister’s letter. In the valley the campanile appeared, rising out of wisps of silvery vapour.
‘Dear lady!’ he whispered, making towards the village a little movement with his hands.
II
Miss Raby’s first novel, ‘The Eternal Moment’, was written round the idea that man does not live by time alone, that an evening gone may become like a thousand ages in the courts of heaven—the idea that was afterwards expounded more philosophically by Maeterlinck. She herself now declared that it was a tiresome, affected book, and that the title suggested the dentist’s chair. But she had written it when she was feeling young and happy; and that, rather than maturity, is the hour in which to formulate a creed. As years pass, the conception may become more solid, but the desire and the power to impart it to others are alike weakened. It did not altogether displease her that her earliest work had been her most ambitious.
By a strange fate, the book made a great sensation, especially in unimaginative circles. Idle people interpreted it to mean that there was no harm in wasting time, vulgar people that there was no harm in being fickle, pious people interpreted it as an attack upon morality. The authoress became well known in society, where her enthusiasm for the lower classes only lent her an additional charm. That very year Lady Anstey, Mrs Heriot, the Marquis of Bamburgh, and many others, penetrated to Vorta, where the scene of the book was laid. They returned enthusiastic. Lady Anstey exhibited her water-colour drawings; Mrs Heriot, who photographed, wrote an article in The Strand; while The Nineteenth Century published a long description of the place by the Marquis of Bamburgh, entitled ‘The Modern Peasant and his Relations with Roman Catholicism’.
Thanks to these efforts, Vorta became a rising place, and people who liked being off the beaten track went there, and pointed out the way to others. Miss Raby, by a series of trivial accidents, had never returned to the village whose rise was so intimately connected with her own. She had heard from time to time of its progress. It had also been whispered that an inferior class of tourist was finding it out, and, fearing to find something spoilt, she had at last a certain diffidence in returning to scenes which once had given her so much pleasure. Colonel Leyland persuaded her; he wanted a cool healthy spot for the summer, where he could read and talk and find walks suitable for an athletic invalid. Their friends laughed; their acquaintances gossiped; their relatives were furious. But he was courageous and she was indifferent. They had accomplished the expedition under the scanty aegis of Elizabeth.
Her arrival was saddening. It displeased her to see the great hotels in a great circle, standing away from the village where all life should have centred. Their illuminated titles, branded on the tranquil evening slopes, still danced in her eyes. And the monstrous Hôtel des Alpes haunted her like a nightmare. In her dreams she recalled the portico, the osten
tatious lounge, the polished walnut bureau, the vast rack for the bedroom keys, the panoramic bedroom crockery, the uniforms of the officials, and the smell of smart people—which is to some nostrils quite as depressing as the smell of poor ones. She was not enthusiastic over the progress of civilization, knowing by Eastern experiences that civilization rarely puts her best foot foremost, and is apt to make the barbarians immoral and vicious before her compensating qualities arrive. And here there was no question of progress: the world had more to learn from the village than the village from the world.
At the Biscione, indeed, she had found little change—only the pathos of a survival. The old landlord had died, and the old landlady was ill in bed, but the antique spirit had not yet departed. On the timbered front was still painted the dragon swallowing the child—the arms of the Milanese Visconti, from whom the Cantùs might well be descended. For there was something about the little hotel which compelled a sympathetic guest to believe, for the time at all events, in aristocracy. The great manner, only to be obtained without effort, ruled throughout. In each bedroom were three or four beautiful things—a little piece of silk tapestry, a fragment of rococo carving, some blue tiles, framed and hung upon the white-washed wall. There were pictures in the sitting-rooms and on the stairs-eighteenth-century pictures in the style of Carlo Dolci and the Carracci—a blue-robed Mater Dolorosa, a fluttering saint, a magnanimous Alexander with a receding chin. A debased style—so the superior person and the textbooks say. Yet, at times, it may have more freshness and significance than a newly-purchased Fra Angelico. Miss Raby, who had visited dukes in their residences without a perceptible tremor, felt herself blatant and modern when she entered the Albergo Biscione. The most trivial things—the sofa cushions, the tablecloths, the cases for the pillows—though they might be made of poor materials and be aesthetically incorrect, inspired her with reverence and humility. Through this cleanly, gracious dwelling there had once moved Signor Cantù with his china-bowled pipe, Signora Cantù in her snuff-coloured shawl, and Bartolommeo Cantù, now proprietor of the Grand Hôtel des Alpes.
Selected Stories Page 21
