Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Naple’?” Bastoni said in the same tone of commonplace inquiry. “Liana tell you I go to Naple’?”

  “Yes. Don’t you?” she asked, a little surprised; and he misinterpreted the slight widening of her eyes — it seemed to him that she was laughing at him secretly. As Eugene Rennie had told his friend in the hotel garden, the Bastoni sometimes sold a ring or a brooch or a necklace to the foreign ladies with whom they danced. The jewel was always represented as an unobtainable antique, a Bastoni heirloom, and after an adroit temptation, the sale was made with the air of indulgent protest. Moreover, the two brothers had hoped to interest Miss Ambler and her mother in the possession of several such heirlooms, though they had even greater hopes than this; but the baron knew that the Neapolitan origin of the jewellery was no longer wholly a secret between him and his brother — the Raonese are devoted gossips, and the truth concerning the Bastoni heirlooms was something of a joke in their cafés. Familiars in Raona, especially Italians, like Liana, might easily know all about it; and the baron guessed that Arturo, for his own purposes, had betrayed him and had warned the American girl. In the morning, evidently, he had begged her not to go to the Salone; then he had come there himself and told her that the brothers dealt in spurious antique jewellery, made in Naples. Arturo was objectionably dangerous politically; but this personal interference was too much.

  “Nossing to see in Naple’,” Bastoni said, placidly gliding in the tango. “I sink Tunis more interessing. You been Tunis? Not? Zis fine floor for dance on. You sink so?”

  Claire nodded gayly, unaware that she had come in contact with one of the undercurrents Arturo had mentioned. All the while, this afternoon, beneath the surface of her thoughts, she was engaged with an undercurrent of her own; and whatever she said to Arturo or to the Bastoni was but inconsequent prattle, wholly without any fruitful significance, she would have sworn. What preoccupied her, happily, and with the forerunning excitement of the approach to an adventure, was that idea she had so merrily charged her mother with putting into her head. In the most picturesque place in the world an intelligent girl oughtn’t to find it difficult to arrange a picturesque way of meeting a disabled gentleman, she thought.

  XII

  WITHOUT A DEFINITE plan for converting her idea into action Claire Ambler left everything to the spur of the moment; but she had determined to spur the moment. She therefore made herself befittingly picturesque for dinner that evening, in a beaded dress as shining as pale blue armour, and almost as heavy in spite of its scantness; and she added to this the splendid faded gorgeousness of a fine old Spanish shawl. Thus, when she came into the ancient refectory with Arturo and her mother, she was at least as vivid as she could have cared to be. “Like a florist’s window,” said Eugene Rennie, who was dining with his English friends. “Flowers, too, can carry that much colour and only make you glad to look at them.”

  Then, as she reached her table close by, Claire paused before she seated herself and, instead of merely nodding, she prettily made him an odd little curtsy. “Extraordinary child!” he murmured to his two companions. “I think I join you, Charles, in wondering what goes on in ‘that young head.’ Something charming evidently. Certainly that impulsive little curtsy was charming.”

  Claire, also, thought it was charming, and with good reason. Not ten minutes earlier she had made this same impulsive little curtsy — the last of a series — to the mirror in her own room; but she had not reproduced it for Mr. Eugene Rennie’s benefit. “Well, did you like it?” she was saying mentally to Orbison, as she began to talk vivaciously to Arturo Liana. “If you didn’t, what’s the matter with it! Anyhow, though I don’t know just what it’ll be, I’m going to do something you will like, pretty soon!” But the opportunity her mother had prophesied she would make was obviously not to be contrived during the hour she sat at dinner; picturesque conjunctions are not easily available at such times. Moreover, when she and Mrs. Ambler and Arturo came out into the long corridor afterward, for coffee, she was disturbed to see nothing of the trio who had occupied the next table and preceded them, by a few minutes, from the refectory. She looked about her blankly; but a little later, when coffee had been brought and Arturo was presenting a lighted match to the end of her cigarette, she caught sight of Orbison at the other end of the corridor. He was wrapped in a long ulster, with a heavy woollen muffler about his throat, and with his American friend beside him he was hobbling toward the passage that led to the cloister and the great outer gates. This was the first time the invalid had gone forth in the evening, and Claire jumped to a conclusion.

  She stared, neglecting the match, though Arturo held it for her until it scorched his fingers. “They must be — they’re going up to the Greek theatre!” she said under her breath.

  “Who?” her mother inquired.

  “What?” Claire said hazily.

  “I understood you to say somebody was going up to the Greek theatre.”

  “Yes,” the girl returned quickly. “Everybody is. There’s a concert and it’s a glorious night — the most wonderful full moon — I saw it from my window even before dinner. Mother, you wouldn’t mind, would you?”

  “Mind what?” Mrs. Ambler asked, surprised by the unusual stress her daughter put upon this petition. “What do you mean?”

  For a moment Claire looked slightly confused, and she glanced hastily at Arturo. “Mother, I know I ought to stay here with you; of course I practically promised to—”

  “Why, no,” Mrs. Ambler said. “When did you?”

  “This afternoon. I really did mean to spend the evening here with you; but Arturo asked me, and I know he’d like to go. Would you mind if we went to that concert at the Greek theatre?”

  “Why, certainly not,” the mystified lady returned. “Why should I?”

  Claire jumped up instantly. “Get your hat and coat,” she said to Arturo. “I won’t need more than this shawl. It’s the most heavenly night!”

  “Heavenly” was a word she repeated as they walked through the stone streets of the old town, and she said it again as they began the ascent of the great ruins of the theatre. “We must go clear up to the top,” she said. “Oh, this heavenly place and this heavenly night!”

  Other figures were climbing with them, shadowy and murmuring, no one speaking loudly among these gigantic and august relics. “The people are like ghosts of the ancients,” Arturo said in a low voice. “They climb so quietly and they are all so dim, they might be the shades of those old, old audiences who came here on such a night two thousand years ago. How still and mysterious it is! There could be thousands of people here in these tremendous shadows and we would not know it.”

  “It’s heavenly!” she sighed again; and at last they came out upon the stone platform of the huge gallery the Romans had superimposed upon the Greek structure. Here they were at the top of the theatre — upon its crest and upon the crest of precipices, with an incredible world about them, and the sea, shining and soundless, far, far below. Claire looked across the classic strait to the mountains shimmering there in luminous haze, then to left and right at the unending crescents of coastline based with white, twinkling surf and crowned with the diamond-point lights of mountain villages; but, nearer and seeming so close at hand that it was startling, the vast triangular symmetry of the volcano reposed, ivory-coloured, in the sky; and when Claire saw above its snows a faint rosy glow upon the rising masses of smoke, she found her sighing not eloquent enough. “I must do one of two things,” she said. “I must either sing or I must cry!”

  She said it in a whisper, for although vague groupings of motionless people could be seen here and there among the antique tiers of seats, and upon the heights of the ruinous gallery corridor, there was a silence over the place. Deep in the shadow, far below, upon the ancient stage where the sonorous measures of Euripides had once been spoken by masked lips, there was a cluster of tiny golden lights, the lamps of the orchestra; and presently these native musicians began to play.

  As Arturo
said, what they played was sentimental; but it was pure, and they knew how. They were of a race that has music in its heart and art in its fingers; so now this orchestra of a dozen violins and mandolins with half as many ‘cellos and guitars and a flute, played old moonlight themes, sonatas, serenades, and gentle nocturnes, but played them so that a listener who had long since tired of them might well have thought he had never heard them played before. The brilliant night was still, save for this music floating up to the motionless, shadowy groups of people on the lofty platform of the open gallery; no other sound could they hear in all the endless space of land and sea revealed to them from that height; and thus the whole world seemed to have been hushed into a spellbound listening.

  Claire stood leaning upon a massive and rugged cube of fallen masonry. “I’ve never known anything like this before — never!” she whispered to Arturo. “I never thought there could be a moonlight night when the moon wasn’t the most beautiful thing in it. To-night it’s just a lamp to give illumination. Do you suppose they’ll play the Pastorale? I’ve learned it, and if they play it I’m afraid I couldn’t help singing it. I honestly believe I couldn’t keep it under!”

  She had been in earnest when she said that she must either sing or weep; a song was in her throat, and like those Raonese musicians down by the small golden sparks, she “knew how.” Somewhere among the mysterious, still figures of the listeners was the man of whom she so continually found herself thinking — because, perhaps, he thought of her; but just for this while she had forgotten that she deliberately intended a picturesque meeting with him. An overpowering sense of beauty was upon her; wings seemed to flutter ineffably in her breast; and almost unbearably she wanted to sing with the music that came lifting and lifting to the height where she stood.

  She was trembling.

  “It will be beautiful if you sing,” Arturo said. “There is no reason you should not.”

  Down in the deep semicircular shadow of the amphitheatre they began to play the Pastorale; and then — at first almost without the listeners’ being aware of it — a lovely sound came from no one could say where; it grew clearer, and was heard over all the great space of the theatre, yet was never loud. It seemed a natural part of the beauty of that night — this voice out of the silvered heavens overhead, singing the melody of the Pastorale.

  No one except Arturo Liana and the singer herself knew who sang; least of all was she guessed by the man to whom she sang; but she had in store for her the stirring experience of hearing him describe what she had done.

  XIII

  SHE SAT BY her open window, breakfasting languidly, when she discovered that he was just below her. His long chair had been placed in the sunshine of the upper terrace beneath the window, though she did not know this until she heard his sister giving him a morning greeting there.

  “You don’t think you were indiscreet to venture out into the night air, Charles?” Miss Orbison said; and a scraping upon the gravel indicated that she dragged one of the iron chairs with her, and came to sit beside him. “You don’t look the worse, I’m sure.”

  “No. “What difference would it make if I did?” he returned, with a short laugh. “When one’s certain to be worse before long in any event, what difference is it if one’s worse a day or two sooner?”

  Miss Orbison protested gently. “Ah, don’t say that, Charles!”

  “No. Perhaps it’s just as well unsaid. It’s better to leave the most of what we know about some things unsaid, of course; so forgive me. At any rate, last night made me glad I’d hung on at least till then. I was no end sorry you hadn’t overlooked your cold and come with us.”

  “Really! It was quite what Mr. Rennie said it would be, then?”

  “Quite! You could add something to that, if you cared to.”

  “Really! What was it like, Charles?”

  “I couldn’t possibly tell you,” he said. “It was one of those things you have to see and hear yourself; you’ll get only a feeble water colour of it from me. I think a chap like Beethoven might have put it into music; but I doubt if Robert Browning could have done it in verse.”

  “Really! It was as impressive as all that?”

  “‘Impressive,’” he said, and laughed again briefly, in his discontent with her word. “Would you say that of the volcano yonder? Last night I thought it was the tent of Zeus and that the god himself was in bivouac there. We sat where Cicero had sat, I think; and long before him, Plato. It seemed to me I could see processions of all the dead Greeks who had sat in that theatre; they came sweeping up out of the sea and down out of the sky on the shafts of moon-shine. They were shaped of that light, themselves, and they took their old places in the theatre they must have dearly loved, since they built it upon the most magnificent site in the world. You’d have thought then that only a great chant should have come up to us from the stage; that anything less wouldn’t have been bearable. No, it wasn’t so. The music was transfigured, translated out of itself into something almost intolerably beautiful. And then, when they played the Pastorale, there came a sweet, carolling voice from the air — a woman’s voice singing as a nightingale sings, not singing to be heard, but just out of its own heart — and sang the Pastorale with them. You couldn’t tell where she sat or stood, or in what part of the theatre she was; and you didn’t want to know: she was doing simply the loveliest thing a human being ever did, and you had no wish to see her or even to learn who she was. What she did, itself, was enough. For me—”

  “Yes? For you, Charles?” his sister asked, as he paused.

  “For me,” he answered, “it was the final loveliness in the hour of greatest sheer beauty I’ve ever known in my life. One doesn’t want to touch such a thing at all.”

  “No,” Miss Orbison said sympathetically. “Of course not, Charles.”

  But the girl near the window above them held to a different way of thinking; she was not of the age when such a thing is to be left untouched. She sat for a little while, breathing rapidly, her eyes brilliant and her colour deep, in her delight; then, as the sister and brother fell silent, devoting their attention to the landscape, or to reverie, she moved silently out of her chair, and stole to the mirror across the room. Smiling rapturously upon it she let her finger tips rest upon their reflected fellows; “You certainly did something!” she whispered to her counterpart. Then she let her green Chinese wrapper slide down from her, and began to dress.

  Before she had quite finished she heard Miss Orbison speaking again, but not from beneath the window; evidently she was at a little distance.

  “I’ll be back before lunch, Charles,” she said. “You can call to one of the gardeners to fetch Agostino if you need anything. You’re sure you—”

  “Of course,” her brother interrupted a little irritably. “I sha’n’t need you. I’m not flat on my back, yet. Do go along!”

  Miss Orbison went, and Claire stepped noiselessly to the window. Orbison was reclining just below in the warm full sunshine, with his heavy rug pulled close about him; and no one else was upon the upper terrace or in the pergola that bordered it. Gardeners were at work among the flower beds beyond the terrace; and a group of German travellers stood talking by the railing above the precipice; but at that distance their voices were not heard more loudly here than the droning of the bees among the flowering vines that grew upon the old stone walls of the hotel. Smoke massed itself placidly upon the shoulders of the volcano; hazy cliffs of lilac rose from a pale-blue sea, and the air seemed gilded with the southern morning sunlight. No young heroine of a romantic drama could have wished a stage better set for her entrance.

  Claire selected the prettiest pair of patent-leather slippers that she owned, and, seated upon a stool before her dressing table, thoughtfully put them on. “Now where you going to take me?” she whispered excitedly to her feet, when they were thus becomingly encased.

  But, as she well knew they would, they took her to the pergola upon the upper terrace. She appeared there a few minutes later, bright
-eyed, high-coloured, altogether charming, with a small red book in her hand; and, after a musing and impersonal glance about her, which appeared to reveal nothing to detain her interest, she seated herself upon a bench beneath the shading vines. She sat in profile to the Englishman, and only a few paces distant from him; she had no doubt of his attention, nor that he knew she was conscious of it. Her lively heart made her aware of its beating; but she turned over the pages of her book with a steady, graceful little hand; and then, with her downcast eyes upon the turning pages, she began to sing the Pastorale in a low, sweet voice, as if little more than humming the melody to herself. Yet she made it clear enough, she was sure.

  When she had sung it through, her colour was even higher than before, and she held her book so near to her eyes that she seemed almost to bury her blushing face in it. This was something she had not expected — a moment of fluttering panic — but she bravely lowered the book and slowly turned her head to face him.

  Orbison was looking at her intently, with that eagerness in his haggard eyes her mother had said was “as if he knew he couldn’t get much out of life but did hope to get that little.”

  For a long moment they looked at each other; then she rose and went slowly toward him until she stood at his feet.

  “I’m glad you liked it, Mr. Orbison,” she said. “It was meant for you.”

  XIV

  HE MADE A movement to rid himself of his rug and rise; but she stepped forward quickly. “No — please! May I sit here a little while?”

  “Yes — you may,” he said, with his short laugh. “On the whole, I think you may!” Then he added, as she took the chair his sister had left beside him, “What were you glad I liked?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “You were humming the Pastorale. Did you mean that?”