They mounted a wide stairway, their hostess leading the way, the porter following, their combined footsteps making a great clatter on the marble treads. At the top of the stairs their paths divided. The Scottish lady told the porter to show the gentleman to a certain room to the left, while she conducted Charlotte to a door straight ahead. The door opened into a suite consisting of a vestibule, bedroom, and bath.
“I do hope you’ll rest well,” the bird-like little woman chirruped. “You’d better take a good hot bath before you get into bed. If you’d like breakfast in bed, just ring for the maid when you want it. Now have a goodnight.”
She was nothing like a hotel proprietress. Far more like some kind little lady in her own home, solicitous for her guest. Charlotte closed and locked the vestibule door with a sigh of relief.
The bedroom was of generous proportions, high and square, with long, faded, figured draperies at the windows. There was a corner fireplace in which glowed a nest of coals; on each side of the fireplace two worn willow armchairs, and a chaise longue facing the coals. The double bed was also of generous proportions. One corner of the bedclothes was turned down, and an enormous maroon-colored puff was stretched over its wide expanse.
After Charlotte was ready for bed, she turned out all the lights and drew back the draperies. Behind them were long windows opening onto covered balconies. She slipped on her tweed coat and stepped out onto one of the balconies.
The moon had gone behind a cloud. The darkness into which she peered was like a sheet of carbon copying-paper, blue-black with tiny pinpricks in it. She didn’t know whether the pinpricks were stars or the lights of some far-distant town at first.
There was one pin prick larger and redder than the others. As outlines began to appear, it looked to her as if the larger pin prick might be a light attached to a wall of the palace projecting out at right angles. As she stared, the moon broke through a slit in the clouds. The larger spark was the glow of J.D.’s cigarette! He was standing on a balcony similar to her own about twelve feet away.
He wore a long loose robe drawn in below his waist. His head was bare. His silhouette suggested a priest. His hands were folded on the balustrade in front of him, his chin raised, as if he were contemplating the mysteries of the heavens. The Gothic arch above him completed the resemblance.
Charlotte stepped backward quickly, but at her first motion of withdrawal he said, in a low tone, “Don’t go.”
She stopped short. “Step back to where you were.”
She obeyed as if she had no will of her own.
He made no further comment. While the silence became prolonged, she glanced over at him. The cigarette spark had disappeared! So also had he! Suddenly she heard a step behind her. She drew in her breath with an audible gasp.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to frighten you! I’m sorry.” He was standing close beside her! He rested his elbows on the balustrade beside her. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“How did you get here?”
“Through the hall window which is just outside my door. There’s only one small light way down at the end of the hall. Everyone has gone to bed.”
“So must I.”
“Please! Not yet.” He reached and took her hand. “Let’s talk a little while.”
She tried to pull her hand way. His fingers tightened. “Well, I’m certainly not going to wrestle with you,” she said.
“That’s right,” coolly he replied. “No telling what sort of brute qualities you might arouse! Are those the lights of Minori or Maijori down there? Can’t tell which is land, which sky, and which sea. Makes me feel woozy. By the way,” he broke off, “you’re still very puzzling to me.”
“I’m not surprised. Any woman of my ripe age and inexperience must be quite a curiosity, I should think.”
“If what you say is true about your inexperience anyone would think you’d be chock-full of fears and inhibitions, but you’re one of the most fearless, unsqueamish women I ever met. And I’d say you were anything but ignorant about the facts of life.”
“Oh, well, naturally I’ve read a few novels. And then, too,” she went on, “there are broad plays and musical shows and moving pictures for giving information to inexperienced but curious spinsters like me.” She tried to withdraw her hand.
“Don’t talk that way about yourself. I don’t like it.” There was a long pause when her hand again had given up its struggle apparently. “Thank you for letting me come to Ravello with you,” J.D. said gently. “It was glorious of you.”
With a sudden turn and twist she jerked her hand free. “Glorious! You’re surprised! You mean I should have raised an objection. You expected me to.”
“No! No! You shouldn’t! You did the simple, natural thing. It’s wonderful to find a woman of anywhere near my era, and a New England woman at that, who is so independent and fearless. Most of them are bound by their own local set of rules even if marooned in the jungle in South Africa.”
“You’re just saying that to be charitable. This isn’t a jungle in South Africa.”
“It’s the nearest I’ll ever be to one! The farthest I’ll ever get from my local set of rules, and from the tyranny of duty,” he added with an exaggerated sigh.
“Don’t you believe one should be governed by duty?”
“Yes. Governed by it, but not reduced to submission by it, like the victims of a dictator. I heard about somebody who let her duty to her mother assume such power over her that she had no life of her own at all. Couldn’t indulge any of her own inclinations, interests, or ambitions. A great pity, I thought.” He leaned toward her and added in a lower tone, “Deb told me a lot about you.”
“Deb told me a lot about you, too,” she retorted.
“What did Deb tell you?”
“Oh, various things about your inclinations, interests, and ambitions. People who live in glass houses, you know!”
“I know Deb’s opinion of me. I suppose she told you I was a poor, spiritless, faint-hearted creature.”
“Chicken-hearted I think was her word.”
The tang of her reply sent another sharp sensation of delight in her company tingling through him. “You’re wonderful!” And again he possessed himself of her hand.
“I must go. It’s disgracefully late.”
“Not by your Boston clocks. Let’s see, it’s only a little before dinnertime in Boston. Let’s not say anything for a little while, close our eyes, listen, and be aware, the way we did in that little garden.”
For several minutes they neither spoke nor stirred. Opening his eyes, gazing at the vastness above, below, and all around, J.D. inquired, “Do you believe in immortality?” as casually as if inquiring if she believed in free trade.
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“I don’t know either. I want terribly to believe that there’s a chance for such happiness as this to be carried on somehow, somewhere, if not in this life, then in the next.”
“Are you so happy, then?”
“Well, not completely happy, but close to it. ‘Getting warmer and warmer,’ as we used to say when I was a kid, and you got near to the hidden prize. Remember?”
“‘Look out or it will burn you,’ we used to say,” she remarked dryly.
“Are you afraid you may get burned if you and I get too close to happiness?”
“Mercy, no! I’m immune to happiness, therefore safe from burns.”
“I think I can prove you aren’t immune to happiness.”
“You certainly flatter yourself.”
“You weren’t immune last night!”
“Oh, last night! So that’s what you mean by happiness!”
“No. Only part of what I mean. There are other parts of happiness we’ve sampled, and you aren’t immune to those either.”
“Such as?”
“Having fun together, getting a kick out of simple little things as well as out of beauty like this, sharing confidences we wouldn’t with anybody else in the world, exchanging our honest-to-goodness
feelings, too, without soft pedaling them. Like last night.” His tone was wistful. He pulled her hand through his arm and slipped his fingers up to the bare hollow of her elbow. She made no motion of withdrawal. “You did respond to those few kisses last night! Won’t you be honest enough now to tell me that you feel the happiness, too?”
She was unable to speak. It wasn’t only what he had said, but the quality of his voice that sent her defenses flying. Her only answer was to press her shoulder harder against him. His fingers began stroking her arm, and he went on speaking in the same caressing tone.
“You fascinated me the first day I met you. Your sarcasm and self-ridicule didn’t frighten me off, as you meant them to. Simply egged me on. And they do still. I can’t get you out of my mind. Nor out of my heart either.” There was a long pause. “Last night when I kissed you, it was no sudden impulse, Charlotte. You know that already. But what you don’t know and what I want you to know is, that if I were free there’d be just one thing I’d want to do—prove that you’re not immune to happiness. To the whole of it. Everything.” Her underlip was clenched beneath her teeth. “Would you want me to prove it, Charlotte? Tell me you would, then I’ll go. Speak to me. Why, darling, you’re crying!”
His arms were around her instantly. It was the “darling” that finished her. No one had ever called her “darling” before. She buried her face in the merciful refuge of the thick folds of his bath-towel robe.
“Oh, I am such a fool! I am such an old fool!” she said at last when she was able to speak, and grasping frantically at anything shocking in a way of self-ridicule. “These are only tears of gratitude! An old maid’s gratitude.”
“Stop talking like that.”
“An old maid’s gratitude for the crumbs offered,” she went right on.
“I told you that sort of talk always egged me on,” he said, and he kissed her on the lips.
She fought against it at first, but it was useless to resist. Gradually she relaxed, became supple, limp, and returned his kiss. Whether from her own desire, or submission to his, he wasn’t sure. Nor was she.
“Let me go,” she whispered finally. He dropped his arms. She stepped away from him, and without a word turned, sped swiftly into her room, closed and locked the windows, and drew the draperies tight.
13
THE LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS
She sank down on the nearest chair at hand and pressed her fingertips hard against her closed lids. This must stop! No woman of refinement allowed a man such intimacies on so short an acquaintance. Far less allowed herself to respond to them! Men felt little respect for such women. That which is easily attained soon loses its desirability. Familiarity breeds contempt.
These and other similar bugaboos of her Victorian upbringing appeared in the shifting moats behind her pressed eyelids, like a nest of enraged hobgoblins suddenly waked up from their long sleep. And presently behind the bugaboos appeared the two figures she had seen in her dream—the knitting woman and the child sitting cross-legged on the ground beside her. Yes, it must positively stop! Not only because of Isobel, but for the sake of Tina, that other unwanted child of an old age. The Scottish lady had suggested that she breakfast in her room. She would send J.D. a brief note in the morning saying she was ill and bidding him goodbye.
She slipped off the tweed coat and climbed into the big double bed. She lay wrapt in deep dreamless unconsciousness for over eight hours. The hands of her clock were pointing to 9:45 when she woke up. Bells were ringing. It was Sunday. She remembered now.
The bells were of different tones and qualities and came from different directions and distances, as if answering each other. They reminded her of foghorns in a crowded harbor. She lay flat on her back, head and shoulders sunk deep in the pillows, listening to the medley with a faint smile on her lips, tranquil in both body and mind. Sunlight lay across the maroon-colored puff. The bugaboos had disappeared. The picture of the knitting woman and cross-legged child had become dim and indistinct.
Wouldn’t it be making too much of the situation to write a note and remain in her room all day pretending illness when she was feeling fit enough to climb a mountain? She had been seeing things all out of proportion last night. Up to her old trick again of disassociating an event from its setting in the general scheme of things. That was how people made mountains out of molehills, Doctor Jaquith said. Remove a molehill from its surroundings, place it on a dinner plate, and of course it looks enormous. Look at a pimple through a magnifying glass and nine times out of ten it will make you press it. Another of his similes. Most situations if left alone will take care of themselves, like most pimples. Doctor Jaquith would be proud of her this morning. Here she was alone, making her own decisions, her own mistakes too, perhaps, but afraid of nobody. She leaned and rang for her breakfast tray.
Tucked underneath the plate of fluted butter curls there was a sealed letter addressed Miss Vale. If there had been no daylight, no eight hours’ refreshing sleep, that letter would have been enough to lay all her ghosts. J.D. certainly possessed what Doctor Jaquith had tried so hard to teach her to acquire, “the light touch.” The smile widened, lifting the corners of her mouth, spreading to her eyes as she read the letter, between frequent swallows of coffee and bites of crisp crescent rolls:
Dear Camille,
Precious grains of time are running away fast. Please hurry. We’ve got a lot to do today and ought to get started.
I’ve been in consultation with Mrs. Scottie and she suggests the Rufolo palace and the something Cimbrone this morning, thinks we’d enjoy a walk to the little town of Scala this afternoon. She says that I can easily run over by car from here some afternoon to Vava and see my Abbey and the ruins of Paestum too. Therefore, please may I follow her excellent advice and make Ravello my headquarters? I am on tenterhooks till I hear you say, “I’ll see.”
You will find me on the terrace underneath one of your balconies—the corner one with the tightly drawn curtains and locked door. You needn’t have locked it! That hurt, until I wondered if possibly it might have been just instinctive, because I frightened you pink. I promise not to lose control of my temper again, and do any more caveman stunts. For even a chickenhearted worm may turn.
Penitently, Jerry.
Anger? Had he kissed her last night because he was angry? Egged him on? Had she egged him on? Perhaps that had been as instinctive as locking her door.
The part of the letter that touched her feelings on the quick was the signature, Jerry, the despised, discarded name of his boyhood. It had for her something of the same young joyous quality of the bells which were still intermittently ringing.
A half hour later they set out on their first tour of inspection of the town. The sunshine was blindingly bright on the muskmelon-colored walls, the shadows like silhouettes cut out of ink-black paper. Apple blossoms were blooming on gnarled old trees. Voices of bells, clear and full-throated, were issuing from disintegrating campaniles. Tiny leaves, pink as the fingers of a newborn baby, were sprouting on the brittle skeletons of ancient grapevines. Even the garden statues were showing signs of life, J.D. pointed out to Charlotte, laying his hand on the thigh of a broken-nosed, armless lady standing in the sunshine.
“It’s as warm as human flesh,” he remarked. “And as for this old fossil,” he added, tapping himself, “it doesn’t feel a day over twenty-one.”
THEY WANDERED AROUND and about Ravello for six days, studying the road map, laying out their route each morning and tramping to various little towns in the vicinity. Sometimes they picnicked in an olive grove, sometimes had a snack to eat in a shop along the route, often stopped at humble back doors to ask directions, or to beg the privilege of sitting beneath an arbor or against a wall to eat their bread and wine—white Capri the first day, red Chianti the next, sweet muscatel and Asti spumante the third and fourth. Occasionally the chauffeur met them and brought them back to the hotel, weary-bodied and ravenously hungry.
On one afternoon they made a pilgrimage to
the abbey; on another, walked down many flights of steps to Minori and called upon an artist from whom Charlotte bought an oil painting of a crumbling Ravello arch. In a shadow behind a pillar of the arch, J.D. had drawn her to him that first Sunday morning and kissed her, because, as he naïvely explained, “he had to.”
No Mrs. Grundy appeared upon the scene. No questions were asked. No eyebrows were lifted. Each day’s program was unrestricted by discretion, untainted by suspicion. Each evening after dinner they joined the other hotel guests in the main reception room; played bridge with an elderly couple from Glasgow one evening; another evening drank their coffee and smoked their cigarettes with a Harvard professor spending his sabbatical in Europe.
Each night, if later J.D. stood with Charlotte on her balcony, or even sat before her glowing nest of coals in the willow armchair, or in the chaise lounge, no one knew it. Nor observed at what hour he returned to his own room via the balcony. To all appearances they were merely a couple of travelers whom an unfortunate accident had thrown together temporarily. In a few days they were departing in opposite directions.
Both agreed that the fast approaching separation must be final and complete. This agreement was as solemnly made as vows before a witness. It did much to dispel Charlotte’s inner vision the haunting picture of Isobel and Tina, and dull her twinges of guilty conscience. There was to follow no exchange of letters, even. Therefore there would be no involving consequence. Their home-settings were separated by three hundred miles of space, and circumstances were such that there was practically no danger of unexpected encounters. Neither had had experience with a relationship requiring secrecy, and recoiled from the constant deceit it must involve. It was evident to Charlotte that J.D. had never carried on a clandestine relationship. He was unfamiliar with it devices as presented in fiction. A needy cousin of his wife’s was his stenographer. She presided over his office mail. On Charlotte’s side her mother presided over all her mail.
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