“Certainly. We must see Garth’s father. He may be less cryptic about the Piazzale Michelangelo this time.”
“Possibly so.” Sir Charles again took a turn about the room, and even paused to dispose to his better satisfaction a group of small archaic bronzes on a bookcase. “Suppose that under one title or another an unknown novel by your father does exist. We should, of course, have to consider the question of publication. And until we had an opportunity to do that, the utmost discretion would be essential.”
“Discretion?” Anthea considered the word. “You mean that the mere fact of the thing should be kept dark?”
“Assuredly. The copyright is, of course, in my own control as your father’s surviving literary executor and trustee. That, as you will realise, is a substantial safeguard. But if word of such a thing’s having been discovered got about there would be great pressure upon us at least to give some account of it.”
“Would there be any harm in that, sir?” Garth ventured this question with all proper respect.
“Probably not – almost certainly not. And yet on your own showing, Garth, there is obvious need for caution. The book – if there be a book, which I repeat I don’t believe – remained unpublished not, it would seem, because it failed to satisfy poor Mark artistically, but because of some obscure personal consideration. That consideration may be valid still at this moment.”
“It may indeed.” Anthea had got to her feet. “What Garth’s father had to say was very vague, but it did seem conceivably to point to things that would not be altogether edifying. Garth and I are not such asses as to be unaware of that aspect of the matter. If we do discover anything, we promise that you two, and Miss Bave, will be our only confidants.”
“Miss Bave is thoroughly reliable?” Hermione Shaxby, who perhaps credited learned ladies with an itch for publication, asked this as she too rose from her chair.
Anthea laughed. “That is one point, at least, about which there need be no apprehension. Miss Bave is as discreet as the grave. There could be nobody better for sitting tight on a deadly secret.”
“I am glad to think that it is not at all likely to be quite that. Indeed, I am not sure that Charles is not a little alarmist in his views.” Miss Shaxby lightly touched her brother on the shoulder as she firmly took this independent line. “The book – which I agree with him is most unlikely to exist – may still be implicated with impossibly delicate or embarrassing matters. But it can scarcely be an infernal machine. It will be safe enough in, say, the British Museum.”
“That is very true.” Sir Charles evidently found this consideration heartening. “The B.M. might be the very thing. Such a manuscript could quite properly be deposited there, under seal of secrecy for fifty or a hundred years. And I think I can undertake that neither the director nor the trustees would make any difficulty. An excellent plan.”
“Very well.” Anthea gave Garth a glance indicating her persuasion that the moment for a propitious departure had come. “We shall find the manuscript, peep inside, and tip it straight into the Museum’s darkest cellar if it proves unfit for present daylight. So there will be no harm done.”
“Sure – not a scrap.” Garth, standing before Miss Shaxby to take his leave, was cheerfully emphatic. “But later—”
“But a hundred years later”—it appeared to come to Anthea like an inspiration—”there will be a bicentenary. They can publish then. Mark Lambert’s supper will come out of the Museum’s deep freeze, and the world can partake with a clear conscience. For there will be nobody left whom any of the ingredients could offend.”
It had been one of those lengthened tea-parties which leave, in an augustly ordered household like the Shaxbys’, no more than comfortable time for the rituals which must precede dinner. This being so, Sir Charles had no sooner waved his young visitors courteously down the drive than he turned to seek his own apartments. But on the staircase his sister intercepted him – a proceeding of an effect sufficiently unusual to testify to some perturbation of mind. “Charles, dear – whatever is one to think?”
“About those impetuous children and their proposed research? Decidedly that they will not find what they are looking for. By that, I mean, of course, what they are looking for in combination, or as a team. What they are looking for severally and reciprocally is a different matter, and one on which I turn to you for enlightenment. You had a little talk with Anthea in the garden? Dear girl – how beautiful she was.”
“I certainly had a little talk. She was, after all, virtually our ward for a time, and we must acknowledge a responsibility. I was as tactful as I could be.”
“The young man has declared himself to be in love with her?”
“Yes. Either directly or by implication he has certainly done so – and at uncommonly short notice.”
“You’d say he’s honest about it?”
“I am sure he is, Charles.”
“So far, so good, I suppose we ought to say. At least I should not like him to have the appearance of being after Anthea when he was really only after his damned, mythical manuscript.” Sir Charles was unusually forthright. “And she? Is she after him?”
“That is what I got snubbed for seeking light on. But she was, as you have remarked, in quite exceptionally good looks. And one will often learn more from that than from what a girl acknowledges.”
“Is that so?” Sir Charles seemed to accept this as a belated accession to his stock of worldly wisdom. “I don’t know that he’s much of a parti.”
“I entirely disagree. He winked at me.”
“Winked at you, Hermione?” Sir Charles displayed understandable astonishment at this inconsequence. “And the action prompted your approval?”
“Certainly. I have never been winked at before, except by Lord Scattergood – and he is as old as the hills. If a young man can wink at an elderly woman in her own drawing-room without being inexpressibly vulgar it must be admitted at once that he is thoroughly well-bred. I was a little startled, I am ashamed to say. But I like Garth Dauncey. And as he is making his way in a respectable profession and is to all appearances reliable, I would approve the match.”
“I don’t disagree with you. My point was merely that there would decidedly be nothing glittering about it.” Sir Charles sighed. “Think of his father – such a dim fellow, and without an ounce of the real thing.”
“I would rather think along more practical lines, Charles – for instance, as to whether there be any action that it would be prudent for us to take.”
“You are perfectly right, Hermione. I will write to Miss Bave. If she is really disposed to keep an eye on the precious investigation, it will be an excellent thing. I apprehend no sensational disclosures, much less the recovery of a masterpiece. But it would be well that there should be a mature judgment on the spot.” Sir Charles hesitated. “In some ways, you know, the Pastorelli was a queer place.”
“Yes, Charles. I have my own memories of it.”
“I can imagine the old creature, if once launched, giving what might positively be an alarming account of the life there.”
“The old creature?” Miss Shaxby appeared to find some difficulty in accommodating herself to the more colloquial vein upon which her brother had entered.
“Wendell Dauncey. It’s a little hard to remember, perhaps, that he is that now. It’s a thing not easy to remember about ourselves, my dear. But consider. Mark, if alive today, would be a hundred – amazing though it seems. That means that Anthea’s mother – poor, dear Mary Lambert – would be nearly seventy; and it follows that Wendell Dauncey must be about seventy-five. During his domestication at the Pastorelli, you know, he and Mary were like brother and sister, and one might have taken Mark to be the father of both of them. It was part, that, of the certain effect of queerness which, as I’ve said, the place could give. But my point is that old Dauncey, although still as a general rule uncommonly mum, does at times apparently produce some very odd talk. I should not like our young people to get – wheth
er from him or from any other picturesque survival that they may dig up – a view of things distorted to the extent of – well, positive alarm. 1 repeat that I don’t fear any distressing discovery; but I am a little troubled about possible misapprehension and uncertainty.”
“On the part, you mean, of Anthea and Garth? But they are competent and level-headed, surely?”
“I gladly agree. It is true that they are not, in fact, children. However they may appear to us, their absolute juvenility is behind them. But they are both at a quite unusual remove from the generation of their parents. And that, to my mind, makes it the more undesirable that they should go hunting after that vanished life. They may have foisted upon them a picture of it which they have little power to assess, and which may be irresponsibly or viciously drawn.”
“By Wendell Dauncey – the young man’s own father?”
Sir Charles shook his head. “Dauncey would not be vicious, I am sure – even in absolute senility. But there are other possibilities. Think of Raymond Lambert.”
Miss Shaxby obeyed this injunction for a moment in silence, and apparently to some effect. “Write to Miss Bave,” she said. “Do it after dinner.”
Part Two
ITALY
ONE
On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe;
And what the hills suddennes resists, winne so . . .
Miss Rachel Bave recalls the lines not at all as apposite to her own present situation. It is true that she is looking down on the summit of Mont Blanc and that she has only to turn her head to look down on the summit of Monte Rosa. But no honest sweat has gone to the attaining of this lofty station, since the familiar world has simply abased itself until there is little left to hob-nob with, and the process has been as effortless as that by which an adequately noble youth might be elevated to a bench of bishops or a college of cardinals. It is a pity, Miss Bave reflects, that territorial grandeur is no longer much the go. The aeroplane provides a matchless means of taking one’s provinces and duchies at a coup d’oeil. A flying monarch could indulge deliriously his sense of property. And the Prince of the Air, correspondingly, need never be without the broadest grounds for covetousness and envy.
Miss Bave picks up her book – and then wilfully continues in unprofitable speculation. Much that is exalted in human feeling seems ill-accommodated to heights. One cannot look down upon a dozen English counties and feel the least patriotic. Surveying all Lake Leman and a whole camp of mountains beyond it furthers no sense of relationship with Calvin or Gibbon or Voltaire. Nor decidedly are feelings of awe and sublimity to be commanded here with the facility attaching to barley-sugar, route-maps, untaxed drinks, and light refreshment on neatly compartmented trays. For the spectacle, like the price of drinks, has been drastically reduced; it is a scale model that is exhibited; were Hannibal’s elephants to appear suddenly upon the Alps beneath, dun amid the snows, their great bodies would jam the passes, whole glaciers would crumple under their feet, and the lonely tarns, deeply green or glinting like scattered foil, vanish on the instant at a whisk of their syphoning trunks.
Miss Bave is again aware that she has abandoned her book for irresponsible fantasy. No doubt this is because the book displeases her. Indeed it is the book that has called Donne’s verses into her mind. On a huge hill, cragged and steep . . . Rupert Poyle strikes her as having very little sense of truth’s habitual station at the end of a stiff and circuitous climb. For him the austere divinity is no virgin of the farther snows; rather she is a wench behind a haystack, and a sufficiently smart feint will bring him within reach of her smock. Or at best she is an Atalanta and Poyle’s pockets are stuffed with apples – toffee-apples, Miss Bave opines – by which her bright speed may be checked, the race won, the zone loosed. But either figure is fallacious. The goddess neither runs nor dodges, but stays put. What mainly characterises her is the generous cut of her black robe, and Poyle’s skill is in running his head into it every time.
The plane banks – having decided that Italy lies not precisely in the quarter it had supposed. In consequence Mont Blanc, a crumpled white cowl incongruously tipped with a saucy feather of cloud, rises up and makes Miss Bave a bob; and Miss Bave is thus conveniently provided with something to scowl at. She scowls – but only because her mental processes displease her. She must have a bad head for heights. Another couple of thousand feet, and she will be spinning images as industriously as her colleague Miss Chipchase.
Miss Bave curbs her fancy – and finds that, when considered without metaphor, Poyle becomes even more distasteful to her. He is neither a scholar nor one who attends to scholars. He builds airily upon impossible chronologies. He considers “Victorian” a useful descriptive term and he spells “judgment” with two e’s: both horrid errors to Miss Bave’s way of thinking. Anybody twenty years older than himself he assumes to be dated, and anybody thirty years older than himself he concludes to be dead. This last is the only characteristic of Poyle’s writing that Miss Bave regards with some satisfaction. It may get him into trouble one day.
There is a horridly gleeful essay on Gissing. Miss Bave reads it through doggedly and then, on a deep breath, allows herself another glance through the window. The prospect, if inhospitable, strikes her as amazingly clean. For the moment it consists, as far as the eye can see, of bare black fangs of rock islanded in a tormented ocean of foaming cloud. No bird can ever soar here, not the hardiest seed quicken amid these frightful clefts. It looks very silent; certainly it is too remote from the busy hum of men ever to attract the notice of Rupert Poyle. Detecting herself as taking satisfaction in this inconsequent thought, Miss Bave realises that she is a fanatical old woman, who has come to attach excessive sanctity to that among the several means of human communication which consists in contriving conventional signs on paper. To use the printing press with any other end than the exploration of reality and the furtherance of knowledge is the sin against the Holy Ghost: this is the bleak and unorthodox theology that – humourless wretch – she waddles and wheezes along with on the painful last stages of her journey through a variously beautiful world.
Contriving to view herself in this unsympathetic light puts Miss Bave in better humour, and she turns back to Poyle’s new volume of essays with the resolve to be tolerant, to be charitable, even to try to be amused. For Poyle is clearly resolved that his readers shall be a moment merry; and this is an ambition wholly laudable in itself. So Miss Bave turns to the first essay in the book. It is the one with which she has some immediate reason to be concerned, and she has been lamentably weak, she feels, in shirking it so far. The title – Distraction at Settignano – is uninformative, although it probably embodies some sort of quip or pun. Miss Bave guesses that the essay is unlikely to gratify Mark Lambert’s admirers, or to concur in that recent movement of critical opinion which has so favourably revalued his work. But this is of very little moment. It is another expectation that is causing her some anxiety.
In the Settignano Memorandum Book – to which Poyle may or may not have gained access – there is a single paragraph committed to it upon a mildly surprising occasion: that of the birth of the writer’s only daughter, Anthea, an event which took place in his own seventieth year. Miss Bave considers the printing of this paragraph to have been an unwonted indiscretion on the part of Sir Charles Shaxby. Lambert is abundantly aware that the small pink object just exhibited to him is indeed the child of genius as well as of old age. And he has been led by this consideration – the expressing of which in a private notebook is decent enough – to certain brief but large speculations on the pink object’s future. They are, indeed, speculations decidedly romantic in cast. Miss Bave fears that if they have come under Poyle’s eye they will not have passed unexploited, and that an impertinent irony will have been extracted from the fact that the pink object’s veritable subsequent path has been through the soundless sightless scentless universe of the hig
her physics.
But neither – Miss Bave reflects – is all this very serious. For some time Anthea Lambert has had an increasing grip on her job. And now she has what may be baldly described as an increasing grip on Garth Dauncey as well. It is extremely unlikely that Rupert Poyle has the power to perturb her.
Miss Bave reads. While she does so, her exalted conveyance proceeds steadily across the Alps towards Milan. She will be in Florence by dinner-time.
TWO
DISTRACTION AT SETTIGNANO
Towards the close of the present century’s first lustre the friends of Mark Lambert noticed an interesting change in the appearance of that indefatigable novelist. It has long been a commonplace that Lambert’s expression, like his talk, proclaimed the largest inspiration. Little else indeed seems to be recalled of the man in his habit as he lived. The curious phase of his ten years’ bewilderment – for the change was to nothing less than that – has passed unrecorded. And yet there is one circumstance attaching to it which would appear to invite the liveliest speculation. It was as Lambert grew steadily more bewildered that his books became progressively less bewildering.
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