Illyrian Spring

by Ann Bridge

  ‘Good morning,’ he replied, with that curious gravity of his. The boat was a few minutes late, and as she manoeuvred into port they stood in the door of the lounge, staring through the rain at the town. ‘There it is,’ Grace murmured, half to herself, thus saluting the palace front, which even at that unpromising and chilly hour appeared both noble and splendid to her.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ Nicholas asked, as they stood on the quay, watching the luggage come ashore, and feeling the rain filtering down their necks. The Ritz-Splendide, she told him. Mr Humphries, too, it appeared, was staying at the Ritz-Splendide, and thither, with two featureless Czech passengers, a motorbus, bearing these impressive names along its sides, presently bore them.

  When Lady Kilmichael descended in search of breakfast she found Nicholas Humphries in the dining room; he beckoned her urgently to his table.

  ‘I’ve ordered coffee for you,’ he said. ‘This is not really a good hotel,’ he went on. ‘There’s nowhere to sit but there’ – he indicated a sort of loggia outside the windows, full of wicker chairs, onto whose concrete floor puddles were seeping from the adjoining pavement – ‘and the water won’t be bath-hot for another two hours, I’m told.’ However, the young man said, one could always paint – and he asked if he might go through her things and get together what he needed. He was evidently feverishly eager to begin at once. Of course he could, Grace told him; but she for her part had no intention of attempting to begin work till it was fine enough to sit out of doors – she was going to look at Spalato. And then she asked him to let her have back that volume of Graham Jackson, to use as a guidebook. He sprang up and went off to his room to fetch it; he returned presently with a profoundly crestfallen expression.

  ‘I haven’t got it,’ he said. ‘I’ve been through everything. I must have left it on the boat.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Humphries, you haven’t!’ Grace felt ready to cry at this contretemps. Through her fatigue, the discomfort of the hotel and the disappointment of the cheerless weather, she had supported herself with the thought of a quiet morning in the Duomo or the Baptistery, sitting in a corner with the book on her knee, studying with its help all the details of doors, font or pulpit – the sort of morning she had so often, and so contentedly, spent lately in Venice with Mr Ruskin. She looked therefore at the young man with large and lamentable eyes.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘I am most terribly sorry. I remember putting it down in that lounge place before dinner, and then afterwards we got talking, and I forgot all about it. I say, don’t look at me like that!’ he exclaimed, putting out his hand and touching her arm. ‘I know it wasn’t so good, but I didn’t mean to, you know. Are you really angry?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Grace, recovering herself. ‘I can get it back, I expect. Only it’s rather a bore not to have it here. But don’t worry – I know it was an accident,’ she said.

  ‘It was abysmally stupid of me,’ he said, ‘only I got so keen on the painting idea last night that I forgot everything else.’ He crumbled a roll, embarrassed. ‘I couldn’t go to sleep for thinking of it – that’s why I was so late this morning,’ he brought out. ‘But you won’t go back on that, because I’ve been such an owl?’

  ‘No, no – don’t be absurd,’ said Grace, rather touched by this. ‘I’ll go and telegraph for it,’ she said, getting up.

  He rose too. ‘I say—’ he said, on a detaining inflection.

  ‘Yes?’ said Grace, turning back.

  ‘I know I deserve anything, but must you call me Mr Humphries?’ he asked, as they stood by the table. Grace had to laugh at his expression, it was so quaint a mixture of the comical and the remorseful.

  ‘No – you shall go on being Nicholas,’ she said, gaily and good-naturedly, with a smile. Lady Kilmichael sometimes smiled with her eyes, and when she did, partly because her eyes were very beautiful, and partly because then some part of herself – her simplicity, her generosity, her real goodness – appeared in them, her smile at such moments was of quite astonishing sweetness. Across the table, she so smiled at Nicholas Humphries now. To her surprise he did not smile back – the comical expression left his face, and he stood looking gravely at her. She could not be expected to know the effect that her smile, coming on top of the episode of the lost book, produced on him. It reduced the young man, as he himself would have said, to pulp. He left the chilly dining room of the Hotel Ritz-Splendide definitely in the first stages of a subjugation.

  Lady Kilmichael had already learned that on the Eastern shores of the Adriatic the traveller will find the Yugo-Slavia Express Agency his most present help in trouble, and it was accordingly to their office that she applied for help about her lost book. The matter, it appeared, was not so disastrous. The boat would reach Dubrovnik at two-thirty that day, and would be back at Spalato about midnight. Yes, the Agency would catch the commander with a telegram at Dubrovnik, the book would be preserved, and returned to her by breakfast time the day after. Young Humphries, who had come with her, insisted on paying for the telegram, and then, shrouded in mackintoshes, they proceeded to explore the town, their only guide that red handbook which treats also of the Ionian Islands.

  It was a day, definitely, as Nicholas said, for indoor sightseeing, and they splashed through the dripping Piazza straight to the Duomo. This lovely octagonal building, certainly the temple of Jupiter, possibly also the mausoleum of Diocletian, and indubitably pagan, has been turned, by the simple method of applying, in appropriate positions, an altar, a pulpit and a campanile, into a very fair Christian church. But still it remains utterly Roman in spirit and conception. The little fat boys who drive chariots and bestride horses in the frieze are Loves, not cherubs; and from two medallions above the altar stare out, half-seen in the bluish gloom, the grim faces of, it is alleged, Diocletian and his consort.

  All these things Nicholas and Lady Kilmichael studied with interest. Rather to her surprise, she found that Nicholas really knew a great deal about classical architecture; and what he knew he put intelligently and well, making the various points of departure from the normal Roman type of building clear, without being either heavy or technical. He led her eagerly from one thing to the next, talking much more rapidly and confidently than she had heard him do hitherto. At last they turned to the wonderful thirteenth-century doors, with Guvina’s panels in carved wood, and here Lady Kilmichael made the discovery that the scroll-work of the main cross-framing showed a pattern rather like the foliage on some of her West Highland stones; identical it was not, but like it was – like enough to arouse her curiosity. Then they turned up their collars, crossed the Piazza again, and made their way to the little temple of Aesculapius, now the Baptistery. As they went in through that great doorway, whose architraves are carved so richly with flowers and foliage and curious little animals that it is as if the whole life of a spring meadow were concentrated there in stone, Nicholas halted suddenly, his eye caught by something. In a moment he called to Grace, who had gone in – ‘Lady Kilmichael! Come and look at this.’

  She went back. ‘Look here – here’s that pattern again,’ he said, pointing to the architrave. ‘It’s almost exactly like the Duomo doors – do you think old Guvina copied this?’

  Grace examined it, frowning a little, as she did when she was puzzled or interested. Was he sure it was exactly like? It certainly resembled it.

  ‘Well, we’ll soon see,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and draw the other, and bring it back to compare’ – and off he went before she could stop him, his yellow head shining down the dark rainy little street. Grace went into the Baptistery again. There was a lot of carving on the altar, and here also she found scroll-work tantalisingly like her familiar designs. If only she had got Graham Jackson, to find out the date! How very tiresome to be without it. But she could not find it in her heart to feel seriously impatient with Nicholas, who was joining in her pattern-hunt with such zest and intelligence, and had so readily gone off to get wetter than ever in that cause. She sat on the floor
and drew one of the likelier pieces, and then the barrel-vaulted stone roof of the little temple – perfectly content, thinking happily of how she and Nigel would later go over her notes and sketches, till Nicholas returned.

  ‘There you are,’ he said, handing her his sketchbook with another of his beautifully precise and careful drawings of two sections of the cross-frame. They went out to the doorway and compared it. There could be no doubt about it – the master carver of the thirteenth century had drawn his inspiration from the Roman work of nine hundred years earlier. This, from Lady Kilmichael’s point of view, only made the resemblance to the Highland stones more puzzling than ever. Thirteenth-century work might be almost contemporary with some of them – fourth-century work was not.

  ‘Anyhow, it isn’t precisely the same pattern,’ she said. ‘I wish I’d got some photographs with me, and I could show you.’

  ‘Why don’t you write to your son – Nigel, is he? – and ask him to send you some?’ young Humphries most reasonably asked.

  ‘Oh’ – Lady Kilmichael, embarrassed, blushed, while she sought for some excuse for not writing to Nigel. There came into her mind a sudden certainty, a sort of determination imposed from without, that to this boy with the honest face she could not and would not lie again. He was staring at her now – fascinated, though she didn’t know it, by the phenomenon of the blush – with a clear-eyed attention that embarrassed her more than ever.

  ‘No – I’m not going to tell him anything about it till I’ve got more evidence,’ she said firmly. ‘He might think it was just a hare I was starting; Nigel is very accurate and careful himself.’

  ‘Are you afraid of him?’ Nicholas asked, looking amused.

  Goodness, how sharp the creature was! She was a little afraid of Nigel – he was far more like Walter than either Teddy or Linnet.

  ‘I don’t like not to do things thoroughly for him,’ she temporised.

  ‘You might easily have been afraid of him – my Mamma is terrified of Celia,’ the young man observed calmly.

  Grace had it on the tip of her tongue to ask why Mrs Humphries was afraid of her daughter – it might help her with her own problems to know, she thought. But time was getting on, and she wanted to find the little chapel of St. Martin, hollowed out in the thickness of the Palace wall, of which she had already read before Nicholas had carried off the book. So she let it go for the time being, and they studied the Ionian Islands together, till they made out roughly where the Martins-Kapelle was, somewhere near the Porta Ferrea. But in the warren of small alleys and closes it was almost impossible to find one’s way, and they were reduced to asking an old man in a little dark dirty shop full of sausages and spaghetti. Nicholas tackled him in Italian, but he merely looked blank and vague. Lady Kilmichael then tried him in German, and this succeeded. Yes, he knew the Martins-Kapelle, and would take her to it; but, he said, looking rather sourly at Nicholas, it was no good the Herr Sohn coming, because the chapel now belonged to a sisterhood, and the nuns wouldn’t let him in. Lady Kilmichael conveyed this information to Nicholas, who knew no German, and they arranged to meet for lunch later at the restaurant in the Piazza; then the young man went off, and Lady Kilmichael followed her guide.

  Certainly she would never have found the Martins-Kapelle alone. They wandered in and out of passages and alleys, climbed up flights of steps which brought them out on the open top of the Palace wall, walked along it, and descended again – what an extraordinary place it was! Eventually Lady Kilmichael found herself standing before a door in a whitewashed corridor, which might well have been part of the interior of a house, but apparently wasn’t; here, after ringing a bell, the old man left her. Lady Kilmichael waited – no one came – she rang again. At length the door was opened by a white-coiffed nun; Lady Kilmichael this time addressed her in German, but the nun merely looked blank and vague. Along the coast of Dalmatia there is always this extreme uncertainty as to whether the person one addresses will answer to German or Italian, if indeed to either. As a rule, men who were of an age to do military service before the War speak some German, which they picked up during their enforced term in the Austrian army, when Dalmatia was still a province of the Dual Monarchy. But the age-long tradition of Italian influence and Italian culture all along the coast is still persistent, and numbers of both men and women speak Italian as readily as their native Serbo-Croat. In spite of successive waves of invasion and colonisation by Slavonic tribes – Serbs, Slovenes, Croats – the old Roman cities of the coast have always clung tenaciously to their Latin heritage of blood, speech, laws and culture; the coin of the country today is the dinar, lineal descendant of the Latin denarius; the boats which bring wine in from the islands bear a strong resemblance to Roman galleys, with their low waists, their high poops and prows; the faces of the old women who sit selling lettuces and spring onions in the morning vegetable market in the Piazza delle Erbe at Ragusa are like Roman cameos of the best period, with their hawk-like profiles, close-lipped chiselled mouths, arched eyebrows and boldly set eyeballs. Strong as Jugo-Slav nationalist feeling may be today, the traveller cannot but feel himself, here, upon a classic shore.

  Lady Kilmichael, unaware of all this, nevertheless tried the nun with Italian, with success. She was admitted, and led through more whitewashed corridors till, opening a small door, the nun ushered her into the chapel itself.

  Lady Kilmichael’s first thought was that if dolls’ houses were ever fitted with private chapels, they would be rather like this one. Hollowed out of the thickness of the wall, the whole place was no bigger than a section of a fair-sized passage. Against each wall, in which one or two little windows were pierced, was a row of prayer desks, at the further end a small altar; the space before the altar was railed off from the desks by a rood screen or iconostasis of carved grey stone. The whole thing was minute, complete, ancient, and somehow touching, in the same way that a child’s dress of two or three centuries ago is touching. But this tiny sanctuary had enshrined human prayers and human worship, not for a couple of centuries, but for a thousand years, and enshrined it still – the little lamp yet burned before the altar, incense hung faintly on the air, and when Grace presently asked permission to remain for some time and sketch, the calm-faced nun, having acceded to her request, knelt down quietly at one of the desks and prayed, with folded hands and bent head.

  Lady Kilmichael’s desire to sketch the Martins-Kapelle did not arise from its age, its holiness or its minute size, sensitive though she was to all these. In fact she did not really want to sketch the chapel itself at all. What she wanted was to make a drawing of the iconostasis. For carved in the hard closely grained grey stone she had found, precise, exact and indubitable, one of the best-known patterns of West Highland tomb slabs – the serpentine stem, with the three-lobed leaf fitting so elegantly into each curve of the loops. This is one of the most characteristic designs of all; used sometimes singly, more often doubled to form a series of circles with an object like a fig leaf in each, it occurs in lonely churchyards from Stornoway to Kintyre, from Barra in the Hebrides to Loch Awe. And here, beyond the possibility of mistake, it was, in a chapel of the ninth or tenth century in Spalato. Thrilled by this discovery, she sat down and drew it, with care and precision, thinking as she worked that she must somehow find out the actual date of the iconostasis, and must also try to get some light thrown on the puzzle of how that pattern came to be there. Who could she ask? Of course! – the curator of the Museum, the venerable Abbé B—, of whom the German on the boat had spoken. To the Museum she would go, that very afternoon, and try to get hold of him.

  She finished her sketch, and then sat on for a few minutes in that quiet place, reluctant to leave it. Lady Kilmichael was one of those people who in a strange church are always prompted to pray. This wish came over her now; and as it did so she remembered the last time she had sat in a church, at Torcello. Then fear and unhappiness had been too strong in her for her to think, she supposed, of praying – anyhow she had not prayed, but had fle
d from the great Madonna. Now it was different; she had a feeling, unformulated but nevertheless strong, that she was learning something, getting somewhere; learning about freedom, learning about herself – not merely selfishly throwing her hand in, in resentment and despair. She felt – irrationally perhaps – hopeful. She slipped to her knees. Her darling Linnet, her darling boys, Walter – they were after all her own, her dearest and her best. Her thought just brushed that other child, with the yellow head and the unhappy eyes, to whose troubles she had so curiously been made a party. But she put it aside – he was not, so to speak, hers. No foreknowledge touched her then of a day when she would pray for Nicholas. One on each side of the tiny chapel aisle, in the thickness of a Roman palace wall, the nun and the Englishwoman prayed together.

  EIGHT

  For those whose imaginations can be touched at all by the sense of the past, there are few greater pleasures than to make an historical discovery for themselves, and on the spot. To know too much about a place beforehand may actually be a mistake, since it robs the traveller of this particular thrill of exploration and discovery – a thrill much keener than the satisfaction which the well-primed sightseer derives merely from recognising anticipated objects one by one. For Lady Kilmichael the loss of her book was really a blessing in disguise; owing to its absence, Spalato afforded her precisely this pleasure, this thrill.