Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  Teresa has been told; we could not keep it from her any longer. Pietro told her. I said to him (he had come into my room, where I was writing, about eleven o’clock at night; he could not sleep, for thinking of Greece, and because of the night heat, and went for a walk in the street, under the large Italian summer moon, and came back at last a little cooler and saw that my light was burning, and came in), I said to him, ‘Do you tell her, Pietro. After all, you are her brother and she has only one brother. Lovers are easily replaced.’

  He sat down in a chair, after setting a few books on the floor, and looked at me humorously. ‘I feel I should give you a little advice,’ he said.

  ‘You may give me as much as you please, if only you tell her.’

  ‘What are you writing there?’ – leaning towards me.

  ‘A letter.’

  ‘And to whom do you write this letter?’

  ‘You are very inquisitive. To an American, who has written me on behalf of his countrymen. He speaks very confidently of their good opinion, and I wish to return it.’

  ‘Oh,’ said he, a little disappointed. ‘I thought you might be composing – verses.’

  ‘Will you tell her?’

  He crossed his legs at the foot and rested his weight on his hands on his thighs. ‘Are you so frightened of her?’ he said at last. ‘I think she is a good quiet girl.’

  ‘I am frightened of – myself. When I was younger (when I was as young as you) I did not much mind giving pain, or disappointment. But I like it less now. I am squeamish in this respect and had rather not see it given.’ After a minute: ‘Will you tell her? I think she knows. I think she is only waiting to be told.’

  ‘Will she mind it so much?’ When I did not answer, he went on, ‘Perhaps you could put it in a poem, you write so prettily.’ Then, in Italian, ‘What is it good for if not for that?’

  ‘She does not like my verses. She thinks they are indecent, so I have stopped writing them – for her. And then she reads so abominably, in English. And in Italian, I write even worse. There would be some misunderstanding.’

  ‘No, she would understand the main.’

  As the night was so warm, I had opened window and shutters and from time to time a breeze blew in. The moonlight fell coldly across the floor. There was also the noise of the cicadas, which seemed very loud in the general stillness, and underneath that noise, distant and quiet but not to be silenced, the noise of the sea. ‘Will you tell her?’ I said again.

  ‘I feel I have not yet given you my advice,’ he replied, his large handsome head leaning a little to one side. ‘But I will tell her.’ He did not move and a moment later added, ‘She is not yet asleep; she has been sleeping very badly. At least, when I came in a moment ago, there was a light in her room. If I tell her, I will tell her now.’

  ‘If you tell her you may tell her when you please.’

  When he left me, to go downstairs, I blew out my own lamp and sat in the darkness, listening. I could hear his footsteps at first on the tiles, and then nothing, and then the various noises I have already accounted for, besides the hundred vague sounds of an old house at night. I do not know what I expected to hear afterwards; I counted the minutes. Perhaps she is already asleep, I thought, when I continued to hear nothing, or he has changed his mind. But I did not think he would change his mind. Eventually I lay down on my bed without undressing. The first time I met her, at the Countess Benzoni’s in Venice (no, it was the second time; I forget, I met her before at the Countess Albrizzi’s – we had all come to the Countess Albrizzi’s to admire her Canova, and I took the arm of the young girl with the long name, and admired), she was but nineteen years old; she is not much older now. She had been married scarcely twelve months then and is now not unmarried. I thought, you are a weak, vain, foolish old man, to let your heart run on like this over a girl; but I had not felt it beat so violently in years. At midnight the bells of Santa Maria rang out, and I sat up and with some difficulty lit the lamp at my table and finished my letter to the American.

  *

  In the morning, Teresa greeted me with the words, ‘You are taking my brother away.’ Sometimes she came to my room before breakfast (at which I eat very little and rarely before noon), and we would talk of the night past and the day to come, and make plans. For these interviews she dressed as if she meant to go out, in dress and corset, and tied her hair in ribbons, and presented herself generally as Madame Guiccioli, which is what I always call her in front of strangers.

  ‘I don’t know who is taking whom,’ I said. ‘He is quite carried away by the idea.’

  ‘Forgive me, if I do not understand what the idea is.’

  ‘Why, a free Greece.’

  She hesitated a moment over the next question; she had sat down at the foot of my bed with her hands in her lap. ‘Does Pietro expect to make himself useful?’ she said at last.

  ‘I don’t know what he expects.’

  ‘I think he expects to fight. He showed me his helmet, which looks very foolish, and when I mocked him for it, he showed me yours. Do you expect it, too?’

  ‘Mostly I mean to give away my money.’

  ‘And when your money is given away, you will come back?’

  ‘Maybe even before it is all given away.’ And I added, sitting up, ‘You take it very calmly.’

  ‘It seems to me I take nothing,’ she said, ‘you make off with it all,’ which made me at last raise my voice: ‘You cannot expect me to continue living this way.’

  ‘Excuse me, I expect nothing’ – this with the natural inflection of the Italian Dama, which they acquire at birth and spend the rest of their lives perfecting; and which even in a twenty-three-year-old girl is something formidable. I had feared a scene, but this was not quite a scene – it got no worse. She left me shortly after, and I dressed and came down. And in the weeks to come (we had only a few weeks left, while the Hercules was fitting; and waited only on a word from Blaquiere, to tell us where to go), she uttered no reproaches beyond the quiet reproach of her manner, which was correct and gentle and only a little cooler than her usual. It may be that she hoped to provoke me, by this insufferable suffering air, into an outburst, which would produce a scene and be followed by tears, reconciliations and capitulations; but in fact I was only glad to be given no occasion for explaining myself further.

  *

  It occurs to me reading over these pages that I appear to be a stupid vacillating creature while Trelawny is a model of good sense; but this is not the case. He likes to boast that he has fought a hundred duels and a dozen sea-battles, and twice escaped imprisonment. Once at the hands of a Turkish sultan, who meant to ‘cut off his head’, for marrying an Arab girl, who died – he was discovered standing over her remains, which he had cast across a pile of burning logs on the beach at Naxos ‘according to custom’. Then he gives himself airs about Shelley, who saw through him clearly enough and tolerated his vanities for the sake of his praise, for Shelley was not above indulging himself in a little flattery. But he could not help himself and mercilessly teased Trelawny (who only sometimes suspected it) by pretending to hold any number of theories, which no man of sense could submit to. I don’t know who attached him first, the Williamses, I believe. Trelawny follows them everywhere, when he is not following me. At least he makes himself useful upon occasion, for which I meant to thank him by the gift from Aspe’s. However, I was a little ashamed when I showed him the helmet, with its ostrich plume three feet high in the air – at which he stared, until I put it away again.

  He is not pleased with the Hercules, which he says is a collier-built tub, and not a boat, and perfectly unsuited to anything but getting drowned in. But the stores have arrived, along with nine thousand pounds in cash and banker’s credits; and there is nothing to keep us here but a south-east wind. There has been a final piece of awkwardness with the Hunts, who reproach me for abandoning Mary. But Mary won’t speak to me or write to me, and accepts my ‘cold charities’ only if they come from Hunt, which I resent
in part because it forces me into more of his negotiations. He takes a special sort of pride in abasing himself for money. Teresa, who visits Mary sometimes (her notion of duty is beautifully Italian), tells me that Hunt has poisoned her against me, and talks of my antipathies, which extend even to Shelley, ‘whose memory I constantly attack’. This is a lie, as I have defended him to Murray, Hobhouse, Moore, etc. repeatedly, even where he is indefensible, that is, in regard to religion, and the inconvenience he made of his first wife. I know what this means, having suffered similarly at the hands of Lady Byron and her mother. But it does not matter. In a week I will be in Greece.

  Teresa is going, too, with her father – to Ravenna. His passport has arrived and he has managed to persuade her to accompany him. He says he is too old to adapt himself and does not want to die ‘looking at the Mar Ligure – his heart is Adriatic’. Teresa at first refused and vowed never to leave the house where we had been happy and the shore from which she had seen me sail; but it was borne upon her at last that the separation might be less painful if she forestalled it, and with this in mind she has been as busy packing her two small cases and one large box as I have been victualling, watering and fitting out with stores and crew a vessel of some hundred tons. But it could not last, her cheerful efficient spirits, and a few nights ago we had tears, in which I joined her, as we really are very attached to each other (by time if nothing else), and to part with her is to part with four years of my life in which I have been reasonably content – more, I have never expected. ‘Let me come with you,’ she said, tearing at my shirt, and when I refused her she promised to stay at the Casa Saluzzo until my return. On her own, if need be. She had a strong premonition that if she once departed for Ravenna she would never see me again. ‘You know me too well to doubt my presagi,’ she said. This shook me, as she knew it would, and we clung to each other passionately enough, which was perhaps the best course, as afterwards we were both calm and she did not mention again her going or my staying.

  At five o’clock on the afternoon of the 13th of July, I kissed her goodbye, with Pietro and their father standing by. It was very hot and she watched us go from the shade of the door; in the passage behind her stood several boxes and cases, some of them open, in preparation for their own journey. Her father walked with us to the harbour, but Teresa stayed behind. Mary had promised to sit with her. I half expected to see Mary myself, and would have been glad of it, I think, as I dislike parting on bad terms, but she did not come until we were gone. On the pier, we met Dr Bruno, Trelawny, Charles Barry, and another gentleman, a Greek by the name of Skilitzy, to whom I had offered a passage. There were also Trelawny’s bulldog (who was called, but did not answer to, Moretto) and Lion, a Newfoundland, which I had accepted as a gift from a sea-officer of slight acquaintance to whom I had once spoken lovingly of Boatswain, now dead these fifteen years and buried in the garden at Newstead. Teresa had given me a silver knife, pearl-handled and engraved with the phrase, in Italian, I kiss your eyes. It was seldom out of my hand. Around my neck I wore a locket, with a few of his hairs in it, that had been given me (a long time ago) by Edleston – who is dead now, and died young, but knew me when I was almost as young as he.

  We slept on board, but in the morning there was a dead calm, so we decided to row to shore. It occurred to me that Teresa might not have left; that I might see her again. She had promised that she would never leave the Casa Saluzzo until I returned to it, but though I had made her afterwards promise other things, she is a woman, and Italian, and might have disobeyed me. But on the way to the house I met Barry, who had just come from it; Teresa and her father were gone, the house was empty, so we proceeded to Sestri, where Lady Blessington and I used to ride, and sat in the garden at Lomellina and ate cheese and figs, which were still a little green. At sunset we returned to the ship, and in the morning, under a freshening breeze, made some way along the coast, as far as Spezia, before becalming again, so we dropped anchor and spent another night. In the night the wind increased; we began rolling, and the horses, in a fright, kicked down the walls of their stable, so that we had to return and make repairs. I slept on board but in the morning ventured ashore again, and giving way to a sudden urge, climbed the hill with Pietro to the Casa Saluzzo. The door was locked, but we found the key where it always is and went inside – where it was at least tolerably cool, though otherwise dispiriting enough. There was nowhere to sit that was not covered in sheets.

  ‘Where shall we be in a year?’ I said to Pietro. He looked at me but did not answer, and I went on, ‘Even now, I might give up on this plan, which is a foolish one, were it not for the fact that Trelawny and Hobhouse and the rest of them would laugh at me.’

  ‘In a year you will be king of Greece,’ Pietro told me.

  We returned to the ship and that same evening, with the breeze blowing steadily against us, set off.

  ***

  When I awoke, I was instantly made aware, by the angle of the bed, of our rapid continual progress and climbed on deck to see Spezia glittering in sunshine a few miles away. The wind had shifted in the night. It now blew against the shore and sent the waves racing. I felt happier than I had in several months. The motion of a ship under sail is incomparably superior to that of a vessel at anchor, and this fact alone produced in me a surge of spirits. I have always liked being at sea, though I pretend to know nothing about such deep matters as stud-sails, lanyards, spanker booms, deadeyes and lignum vitae. It is enough for me to sit where I am not in the way, and to be left alone in turn.

  Our captain was John Scott, engaged by Barry and approved by Trelawny; a large stupid Englishman, who nevertheless knew his business (and nothing else). It was possible to have a certain amount of fun at his expense. He dressed for dinner in a bright scarlet waistcoat, and spoke no Greek and little Italian. Since most of his passengers were conversant in both, we mocked him freely at his own table, but he laughed at what he did not understand good-naturedly. At Leghorn, which we reached in less than a week, we stopped two days, and I went ashore to a very gratifying reception. The news of our intention had preceded us, and we took on, in addition to gunpowder and macaronis, toothpowder from Waite’s and brushes from Smith’s (besides other English goods to be had there), letters of introduction from the Archbishop of Ignatius to several of the revolutionary chiefs, including Prince Mavrocordatos and Marco Botsaris, who was even then engaging the Turks a little north of Missolonghi. Also, two passengers: a Scot named Hamilton Browne and George Vitali, another vague Greek to whom I had promised a passage home.

  Vitali, who was handsome in his way and looked half Albanian, dark-browed and white-toothed, became an object of fascination for Captain Scott – especially as he spoke no English. I told Scott (which may have been true; I certainly had no information to the contrary) that Vitali was addicted to certain horrible propensities, too common in the Levant; and that he (Scott) should keep a weather-eye on his ship’s boy, who was a fair-haired child of some thirteen years. Scott, who was greatly shocked, said to me, ‘I wonder how such a scoundrel can look any honest man in the face,’ which was exactly what Vitali did a great deal of. He had no other means of making himself understood and was, for the same reason, quite incapable of correcting Scott’s impression – of which he had no notion, except such as might be acquired by the following incident.

  It was Vitali’s custom, like most Greeks, to take a short siesta after lunch; and as he had none of our English scruples, he used to strip down to his drawers when the meal was finished and cleared away, and lie on the table. Spying him once through the skylight, Scott could not resist emptying a bucket of dirty water over him. Vitali, who was thoroughly drenched, gave a shout of surprise, but afterwards said nothing; and the captain, who was decent enough in his stupid way, ‘forgave him’ (so he told me) for being the victim of his own joke.

  But Trelawny and I took our revenge upon him. We persuaded the ship’s boy one day, when Scott was taking his own siesta, to bring up the scarlet waistcoat. It was larg
e enough to fit us both, even buttoned up; and putting each of us an arm inside it, I said to Trelawny, ‘Let’s see if we can take the shine out of it,’ and we jumped overboard. We swam until it came loose in the water and dragged it back at last like a dead dog. This was unkind of me, and I was really almost ashamed, for Captain Scott (who had been wakened by this point and greeted us as we climbed up the side) has such a respect for rank that he could only force a laugh at his own expense. Yet he was very much attached to the waistcoat, which had been tailored by Weston of Old Bond Street and was thoroughly ruined.

  In this way we reached the straits of Messina, passing within sight of Elba, Corsica and the Lipari islands. I had hoped to see Stromboli erupting but was disappointed in this; though afterwards, from the shores of Sicily, I saw the clouds of Etna rolling towards us on a sunshiny day, the bright blue of the sea darkening beneath them. In the mornings I fenced with Pietro on deck until we were hot enough to swim; and sometimes, in the afternoons, Trelawny and I boxed together or shot at birds – which, however, I have a horror of eating. I confined myself throughout to a diet of ship’s biscuit, Cheshire cheese and pickled onions. On the 2nd of August, we came in view of Cephalonia, with Zante beside it; the mountains of the Morea stood up faintly against the horizon. It was a sobering sight. Most of us had gathered on the quarterdeck to watch their approach: Pietro and Trelawny; Dr Bruno; Vitali and Hamilton Browne. Browne and I had been thrown a great deal together, as he is a Scotsman, and I was one. He is a sensible man, with some poetry in his compound, sufficient to have him dismissed from service in the Ionian Islands, because he loves Greece – and likes Greeks, which is by no means a corollary of the first.