South Wind

by Norman Douglas

  “These people live gaily,” he said to himself. “Why not? A funeral is supposed to be nothing but a friendly leave-taking. Why not be cheerful about it? We are all going to see each other again, sometime, somewhere. I suppose….”

  The problem gave him no trouble whatever.

  He found himself walking side by side with Mr. Eames who ventured to remark, in a seemly whisper, that he attended the funeral not so much out of respect for the lamented lady—every cloud, he fancied, had a silver lining—as because he hoped to gather, from among so representative a concourse of natives and foreigners, the “popular impression” of yesterday’s eruption, with a view to utilizing it in this appendix on RECENT VOLCANIC PHENOMENA OF NEPENTHE.

  “Really?” replied the bishop. “A chapter on Volcanic Phenomena? It is sure to be interesting.”

  Mr. Eames warmed to his subject.

  It might be made interesting, he agreed, but for his own ignorance of geology. As it was the business gave him a vast deal of trouble. Monsignor Perrelli had dealt with geological matters in a fashion far too summary for present-day requirements. The old scholar was not to blame, of course, seeing that geology was quite a modern science; but he might at least have been a little more painstaking in his record of those showers of ashes and lapilli which were known to have covered the island from time to time. His account of them was lamentably defective. It was literally bristling with—with—with lacunae, which had to be filled up by means of laborious references to contemporary chronicles. Altogether one of the most unsatisfactory sections of an otherwise admirable work….

  “I wish I could help you,” said Mr. Heard.

  “I wish you could. I wish anyone could. There was that young Jew, Marten, who understood more about these things than most people. A coarse little fellow, but quite a specialist. He promised to supply me with an up-to-date statement, accompanied by a map of the geological structure of the island. I said to myself: Just what I wanted! Well, this confounded statement has never reached my hands. Now I fear he has left the place. Gone away altogether. Didn’t have the decency to say good-bye or leave his address. Too bad. Who knows when the next mineralogist will turn up? These fellows are not as common as blackbirds. Meanwhile I have to rely on my own efforts. It’s wonderful, by the way, how much a person can pick up of odds and ends of information when forced, by a hobby of this kind, to delve into recondite departments of knowledge which he would otherwise not have dreamt of exploring. One grows quite encyclopaedic! Minerals, medicine, strategy, heraldry, navigation, palaeography, statistics, politics, botany—what did I know or care about all these things before I stumbled on old Perrelli? Have you ever tried to annotate a classic, Mr. Heard? I assure you it opens up new vistas, new realms of delight. It gives one a genuine zest in life. Enthralling!”

  And thereupon the bibliographer fell silent, all at once. He had succumbed, yet again, to his besetting sin: talking too enthusiastically to outsiders of what was nearest his heart. Why on earth should a globe-trotting bishop be bothered about the mineralogy of Nepenthe? It was absurd: tactless of him.

  He tried to atone for the blunder by some mundane trivialities.

  “What are you doing afterwards?”

  “Going up to see Mrs. Meadows.”

  “Are you? Do remember me very kindly! Or perhaps—no. Better not. Fact is, she cut me dead two days ago. At least, it looked uncommonly like it. I confess I was rather upset, because I’m not conscious of having done anything to annoy her. Indeed, I’ve always felt a kind of weakness for Mrs. Meadows; there is something so fine and womanly about her. Will you try to find out what it’s all about? Thanks. Perhaps she may not have noticed me. She was walking very fast. And I must say she was not looking herself at all. Not at all. White and scared. Looked as if she had seen a ghost.”

  The bishop was troubled by these words.

  “Is that so?” he asked. “You alarm me. I think I’ll be off this minute. She is my cousin, you know; and I’ve been rather concerned about her lately. Yes; I won’t wait for the end of this funeral; I’ll be off! Perhaps we shall meet this evening. Then I can tell you her news. As to deliberately cutting you—don’t you believe that for a minute.”

  “I shall be down here about seven o’clock….”

  “People like her,” thought Mr. Heard, as he fell out of the procession. He would make a point of having a good long chat, and perhaps stay to luncheon.

  He dreaded the coming heat of midday. It was quite warm enough already, as he climbed slowly upward by the short cuts that intersected the driving road, availing himself of every little patch of shade that fell from trees or cottages athwart the pathway.

  The country seemed deserted, the funeral ceremony having attracted all the natives from far and near. Yet one figure was moving rapidly up the road in front of him. Muhlen! Even at this distance he was recognizable; he looked, as usual, overdressed. What was he doing there, at this hour? Mr. Heard remembered seeing him go up, once before, at the same time of the day.

  He called to mind what he had heard from Keith in the boat. He was quite prepared to believe that this man lived on blackmail and women; that was precisely what he looked like. A villainous personality, masquerading under an assumed name. The sight of the fellow annoyed him. What business had he to transact up there? Retlow! Once more he began to puzzle where he had heard that name. It conjured up, dimly, some unpleasant connotation. Where? Long ago; so much was clear. For a brief moment he felt on the verge of remembering. Then his mind became blank as before; the revelation had slipped away, past recall.

  He was glad to enter the shady garden of the villa Mon Repos. Old Caterina sat, sphinx-like, on the stones at the house entrance. There was some knitting-work on her lap, with brown wool and curiously shaped needles; one foot rested on the base of the cradle, which she rocked from time to time. At his approach she rose up, stark and hieratic, without a trace of a friendly smile on her countenance. Was the lady indoors? No, she was out. Out! Where? There was a definite but enigmatical movement of her withered brown arm; it appeared to embrace the universe. And when would she be back? No reply whatever. Only a slight upward movement of the eyes, as much as to say: God knows!

  “I’ll wait,” thought Mr. Heard.

  He walked past the forbidding hag who seemed to exhale a positive hostility towards him, and entered his cousin’s sitting-room. He would wait. He waited. He glanced through a pile of illustrated newspapers that lay about. And still he waited. The room looked different somehow; almost untidy. There were no rouses about. An hour passed. And still no sign of his cousin.

  Out. Always out. What could this mean? Where could she be? It was all rather mysterious and unsatisfactory.

  At last he took out his watch. Ten minutes to one! No use waiting any longer. He scribbled a hasty note, left it on the writing-table, and walked into the garden past the impenetrable Caterina, who barely deigned to glance up from her knitting. He would look for a carriage, and give himself the luxury of a drive down. It was too hot to walk at that hour.

  Strolling along he espied a familiar courtyard that gave upon the street; Count Caloveglia’s place. On an impulse he entered the massive portal which stood invitingly ajar. Two elderly gentlemen sat discoursing in the shade of the fig tree; there was no difficulty in recognizing the stranger as Mr. van Koppen, the American millionaire, a frequent visitor, they said, of Count Caloveglia.

  A bronze statuette, green with age, stood on a pedestal before them.

  “How kind of you to come and see me!” said the Italian. “Pray make yourself as comfortable as you can, though these chairs, I fear, are not of the latest design. You are going to do me the honour, are you not, of sharing my simple luncheon? Mr. van Koppen is staying too.”

  “Very good of you!”

  “Delighted to make your acquaintance,” said the millionaire. “Keith was talking about you only yesterday—such nice things! Do stay. Count Caloveglia has been touching on most interesting subjects—I would come
from the other end of the world to listen to him.”

  The Count, manifestly shy of these praises, interrupted by asking:

  “What do you think of that bronze, Mr. Heard?”

  It was an exquisite little thing.

  Perfect to the finger-tips and glowing in a lustrous patina of golden-green, the Locri Faun—so-called from the place of its discovery—was declared to be stamped with the hall-mark of individual distinction which the artificers of old Hellas contrived to impress upon every one of the rare surviving bronzes of its period. It was perhaps the finest of the whole group. No wonder the statue had created wild excitement among the few, the very few, discreet amateurs who had been permitted to inspect the relic prior to its clandestine departure from the country. And much as they might deplore the fact that it was probably going to adorn the museum of Mr. Cornelius van Koppen, an alien millionaire, not one of them found it in his heart to disapprove Count Caloveglia’s action. For they all liked him. Every one liked him. They all understood his position. He was a necessitous widower with a marriageable daughter on his hands, a girl whom everybody admired for her beauty and charm of character.

  Mr. van Koppen, like all the rest, knew what hard times he had gone through; how, born of an ancient and wealthy family, he had not hesitated to sell his wonderful collection of antiques together with all but a shred of his ancestral estates, in order to redeem the gambling debts of a brother. That amounted to quixotism, they declared. They little realized what anguish of mind this step had cost him, for he concealed his true feelings under a cloak of playful worldliness. Excess of grief, he held, is an unlovely thing—not meet to be displayed before men. All excess is unlovely. That was Count Caloveglia’s classic point of view. Measure! Measure in everything.

  People revered him, above all else, for his knowledge in matters of art. His connoisseurship was not one of mere learning; it was intuitional. Astonishing tales were told of him. By the sense of touch alone, and in the dark, he could appraise correctly any piece of plastic work you liked. He had a natural affinity with such things. They held it quite likely that the blood of Praxiteles or his compeers may still have flowed through his veins—certain at all events, that there hung about his person the traditions of the versatile colonists on the shores of Magna Graecia who, freed by legions of slaves from the trivial vexations which beset modern lives, were able to create in their golden leisure those monuments of beauty which are the envy and despair of our generation. On all that concerned the history and technique of ancient bronzes, more especially, he was FACILE PRINCEPS in the land, and it was hinted, after the sale of his property, that Count Caloveglia would not be low to retrieve the fortunes of his family by putting into exercise those talents for metal-working of which, as a gifted boy, he had already shown himself to be possessed.

  In this they were disappointed. He spoke of these things as “sins of his youth,” professing an invincible distaste, in these later years, for the drudgery of work. He called himself an old dreamer. There was a shed, it is true, attached to the house, a shed which went by the name of a studio. All visitors were taken to see this atelier. It was smothered in dust and cobwebs. Clearly, as the Count himself would explain with a honeyed smile, it had not been in use for twenty years or more.

  Mr. van Koppen knew all this.

  He knew about that strip of land which the old man had reserved for himself at the sale of his ancestral domain. It lay among the hills, some twenty or thirty miles above the classic site of Locri. On this spot, people were given to understand, fragments of old marbles and vases had been picked up by the peasantry within the last years. Things of small worth—pottery mostly; they lay about Count Caloveglia’s Nepenthe courtyard and were given by him, as keepsakes, to any visitor who showed an interest in them. He attached no value to these trifles.

  “From my little place on the hills,” he would say. “Pray take it as a memento of the pleasure which your visit has given me! Oh, it is quite a small property, you know; just a few acres, with a meager soil; in good years it produces a little oil and a barrel or two of wine. And that is all. I only kept back this morsel from the general ruin of my property—well, for sentimental reasons. One likes to feel that one is still tied—by a slender thread, it is true—to the land of one’s ancestors. There is certainly no wealth to be obtained above ground. But it is quite possible that something might emerge from below, given the energy and the means to make systematic excavations. The whole country is so rich in remains of Hellenic life! The countrymen, ploughing my few fields, often stumble upon some odd trifle of this kind. There was that Demeter you may have heard about; sadly mutilated, alas!”

  Before the discovery of the Locri Faun on this site the only find of any value had been a battered head—a Demeter, presumably. It was sold to a Paris collection for a few thousand francs, and had thereafter attracted no further attention. It was not worth talking about.

  Now, when this dazzling Faun came to light and Mr. van Koppen announced his intention of purchasing the masterpiece for his collection, his art-expert, Sir Herbert Street—the eminent connoisseur whom he had filched form the South Kensington Museum with the bribe of a Cabinet Minister’s salary—thought it his duty to compare the disfigured Demeter with this new and marvelous thing. Sir Herbert Street was an inordinately vain man, but conscientious at the same time and, in matters of art-criticism, sufficiently reliable. Not every art-expert would have done what he did. In the interests of his employer he took the trouble of journeying to Paris and carefully examining the poor Demeter fragment. Then, viewing the Locri Faun at Nepenthe in the presence of Count Caloveglia, he made rather a subtle remark.

  “Does it not strike you, Count, that there is a curious, an evasive kind of resemblance between this Faun and the Demeter?”

  The old man beamed with joy at these words.

  “My dear Sir Herbert, allow me to congratulate you on your keen artistic perception! I believe you are the only person, besides myself, who has hitherto been struck by those definite but undefinable traits of similarity. Mr. van Koppen may well be proud of your penetration—”

  “Thank you,” said the other, immensely flattered. “That is what I am paid for, you know. But now, how do you account for the likeness?”

  “I will tell you my own hypothesis. I hold, to be brief, that they both came from the same workshop.”

  “The same workshop! You amaze me.”

  “Yes, or at all events from the same school of craftsmen, or some common fountain of inspiration. We know lamentably little of the art history of even a great center like Locri, but, judging by the hints of Pindar and Demosthenes, I think there may well have been—there must have been—consummate local masters, now forgotten, who propagated certain methods of work, certain fashions in form and feeling and treatment which ended, naturally enough, in a kind of fixed tradition. This would suffice to explain the resemblance which your sagacity has enabled you to detect between these two pieces. That is what I mean by saying that they came from the same workshop. What do you think of my theory?”

  “I think it accounts for the fact in a most satisfactory manner,” the expert had replied, thoroughly convinced.

  Mr. van Koppen knew all this.

  But he only believed half of it….

  “You were saying, Count?”

  The Italian shifted his glance from the dainty outlines of the Locri Faun and smiled upon his interlocutor and then upon Mr. Heard, who had at last taken a seat, after walking approvingly round and round the statuette.

  “I was going to tell you of another point which occurred later on to Sir Herbert; a man, by the way, of unusual acumen. We agreed that Locri was the indubitable place of origin both of the Demeter and of the Faun. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘granting this—how came they to be unearthed up in the hills, on your property, twenty-five miles away?’ I confess I was at first nonplussed by this question. For, to the best of my knowledge, there are no indications of any large Hellenic settlement up there. But it st
ruck me that there may well have been a villa or two—indeed, there must have been, to judge by the miscellaneous ancient material found on my little place. This is what makes me think that these two relics were deliberately carried there.”

  “Carried?”

  “Carried. For although the summer season at Locri was undoubtedly more endurable then than it now is, yet the town must have been sufficiently hot in the dog-days; whereas my vineyard is situated among the cool uplands—”

  “A kind of climatic station, you mean?”

  “Precisely. Don’t you think that richer people had domiciles in both places? The ancients, you know, were so sensitive in the matter of temperatures that in summer time they traveled only by night and some of their toughest generals had underground chambers built for them during their campaigns. I can imagine, for instance, some young and ardent lover of art, in the days when Pythagoras taught under those glittering colonnades of Croton, when the fleets of Metapontum swept the blue Ionian and Sybaris taught the world how to live a life of ease—I can almost see this youth,” he pursued enthusiastically, “flitting from a hot palace on the plain towards those breezy heights and, inflamed with an all-absorbing passion for the beautiful, carrying up with him one or two, just one or two, of those beloved bronzes from which he could not, and would not, be parted—no, not even for a short summer month—to be a joy to his eyes and an inspiration to h is soul among the mountain solitudes. These men, I take it, had a sense in which we their descendants are wholly deficient—the sense of the solace, of the pleasurable companionship, to be derived from works of art. That sense has been destroyed. The Japanese alone, of all moderns, still foster an ingenuous affection which prompts them to cling closely to these things of beauty, to press them to their hearts as loving friends; the rest of us, surrounded by a world of sordid ugliness, have become positively afraid of their fair but reproachful shapes. Ah, Mr. van Koppen, that was the age of true refinement, the age of gold! Nowadays—nowadays we only carry our troubles about with us.”