CHAPTER XXXV

THE REFUGE

Shelley was charmed with Casa Magni. He liked the wild solitude of the place, the forest behind the house, the rocky and wooded bays and the fisherman’s poor villages.

But Mary felt lost and unhappy. Again pregnant, anxious, irritable, she would have much preferred to live in a city near a good doctor. She thought the peasantry uncouth and hateful, their _Genovese_ jargon disgusted her as much as the dialect of Tuscany had pleased her. The presence of Jane Williams, so appreciated by her at Pisa, began to get on her nerves. Housekeeping in common is for women the acid test. There were stupid quarrels over servants and frying pans. Shelley spoke too warmly of Jane’s perfection, and wrote her too divine serenades.

To all Mary’s grumblings he replied with his usual sweetness. With the utmost tenderness he caressed and consoled her. “Poor Mary,” he said of her, “it is the curse of Tantalus to be endowed with such fine qualities, and yet unable to excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life.”

He knew he could not change her, that her physical condition explained a good deal of her peevishness, which he bore with patient affection. What she constantly reproached him with was his complete indifference to the things that other men thought worth while. She still admired him as much as ever, in him alone she found the strength on which to lean. But why could he never use this strength to his own advantage? He seemed to have no notion of his own interests. His personality was not in his own eyes what theirs is for men in general, something strictly limited by definite boundaries; no, his poured outwards in a sort of luminous fringe melting into that of his friends, and even into that of perfect strangers. As to the customs and cares of human societies he continued to ignore them.

Every month he went to Leghorn to draw his allowance. He brought back a bagful of _scudi_ which he emptied out upon the floor. Then with the fire-shovel he gathered the coins together in a heap, which he flattened out into a sort of cake with his foot. Always with the shovel he cut the cake into two parts. One was for Mary: rent and housekeeping. The other half was again divided into two, of which one went to Mary as pin-money, and the other remained for Percy. But Mary knew what was meant by “for Percy”: it was for Godwin despite all vows, for Claire, for the Hunts. . . .

One day Captain Roberts was expected over to luncheon from Genoa. Conscious that their anchorite way of living would not suit ordinary mortals, there was considerable commotion at the villa, but notwithstanding the bother and turmoil the three women, as is woman’s wont, seemed to enjoy it. The visitor came and he was most anxious to see the Poet of whom he had heard so much, but Shelley had disappeared. They sat down to table without him. Suddenly one of the trio of ladies cried out, “Oh my gracious!” and Mary, turning round, saw Shelley completely naked crossing the room, and trying to hide behind the maid-servant.

“Percy, how dare you!” she cried, which was imprudent, for Shelley, considering himself unjustly attacked, abandoned his refuge and came up to the table to explain. The ladies covered their faces with their hands. Yet he was good to look at, his hair full of seaweed, his slender body wet and scented with the salt of the sea.

But the daughter of William Godwin had a horror of such unconventional happenings.

* * *

Shelley and Williams waited for their boat with the impatience of schoolboys, and the moment a strange sail, coming from the direction of Leghorn, doubled the point of Lerici, they rushed down to the beach.

After Allegra’s death Shelley had written to Roberts to change the name of his boat from the _Don Juan_ to the _Ariel_. Everything which reminded him of Byron was now hateful to him. Great therefore was his surprise and anger, when on the arrival of his little yacht, he saw painted in enormous letters in the middle of the mainsail: _Don Juan_. Byron, told of the change of name, had forced Roberts, in spite of Shelley’s orders, to print the sign of the Devil upon the Platonic bark. Armed with hot water, soap and brushes, Shelley and Williams set to work to wash out the infamy from their poor boat. They had no success. They tried turpentine, which failed equally. Then they consulted specialists, who were of opinion that a bit of sail would have to be cut clean out and a new piece inserted; nothing short of this could mend the case. Shelley had the operation performed at once.

The Genoese captain who had sailed the boat to Lerici, said that she sailed and worked well, but was a ticklish boat to manage. Shelley and Williams, enthusiastic but incompetent yachtsmen, had insisted on having her built to a design made by a naval officer for Williams, before he left England. The lovely sweeping lines of the model enchanted them, but the boat when built to plan required a couple of tons of iron ballast to bring her down to her bearings, and even then was very crank in a breeze.

The two owners of the _Ariel_ determined to man her themselves, with the help of Charles Vivian, a young sailor. Shelley was awkward as a woman in all things appertaining to boats, but full of good intentions. He tangled himself up in the rigging, read Sophocles while trying to steer, and several times just missed falling overboard. But never in his life had he been so happy. When Trelawny saw his seamanship, he took Williams by the arm and advised him to add to the crew a Genoese accustomed to the coast. Williams was hurt . . . three seasoned sailors such as they . . . and was he not Captain? And had he not Shelley?

“Shelley! You’ll never do any good with him until you shear the wisps of hair that hang over his eyes, heave his Greek Poets overboard, and plunge his arms up to the elbow in a tar-bucket.”

The _Ariel_ drew too much water to be run on shore at Casa Magni, so Williams with the aid of a carpenter built a tiny dinghy of basketwork, covered with tarred canvas. It was a fragile toy which upset at a touch. The Poet was delighted with it, although it capsized continually, and gave him many a ducking.

One evening, as he dragged the skiff out from the house, he saw Jane and her two children on the sands. He invited her to bring them for a row. “With careful stowage,” said he, “there is room for us all in my barge.” She squatted in the bottom of the frail skiff with her babies, and the gunwale sank to within six inches of the water; a puff of wind, the smallest movement of any one of them, and it must cant over, fill, and glide from under them.

Jane understood that Percy intended to float on the water near the shore, but he, proud to show a lovely woman how well he sculled, bent to his oars, and they were soon out on the blue waters of the bay. Then, shipping the oars, he fell into a deep reverie. Jane was seized with the most awful terror. There was no eye watching them, no boat within a mile, the shore was fast receding, the water deepening, and the Poet dreaming. She made several remarks, but they met with no response.

Suddenly he raised his head, his face brightened as with a bright thought, and he exclaimed, joyfully, “Now let us together solve the great mystery!”

Had Jane uttered a cry, her children were lost. Shelley might made a sudden movement, the bark would capsize, the waters wrap them round as a winding-sheet. . . . Suppressing her terror, she answered promptly, “No, thank you, not now, I should like my dinner first and so would the children. . . . And look, there is Edward coming on shore with Trelawny . . . they’ll be so surprised at our being out at this time, and Edward says this boat is not safe.”

“Safe!” cried the Poet, “I’d go to Leghorn or anywhere in her.”

Jane felt that the Angel of Death, who always attended the Poet on the water, now spread his wings and vanished.

“You haven’t yet written the words for the Indian air,” she said carelessly.

“Yes, I have,” he answered, “but you must play me the air again, and I’ll try and make the thing better.”

Meanwhile he had paddled his cockleshell into shallow water; as soon as Jane saw the sandy bottom, she snatched up her babies, and clambered out so hurriedly that the punt was turned over and the Poet pinned down underneath it. He rose with it on his back, like a hermit-crab in any old empty shell.

“Jane, are you mad?” cried her husband, surprised at her lubberly way of getting out of a boat. “Had you waited a moment, we would have hauled the boat up.”

“No, thank you. Oh, I have escaped the most dreadful fate! Never will I put my foot in that horrid coffin again. ‘Solve the great mystery!’ . . . Why, he is the greatest of all mysteries! Who can predict what he will do? . . . He is seeking after what we all avoid—death. I wish we were away. I shall always be in terror.”

But the Poet’s boyish face wore its accustomed innocent and radiant expression. During this glorious summer, nothing seemed able to mar his joy. Of an evening he liked to go sailing in the _Ariel_ by moonlight. Mary sitting at his feet, her head against his knees, remembered how she had sat thus on the stormy cross-channel journey ten years ago. Ten years . . . what quantities of things had happened in ten years. How much subtler, crueller, and more treacherous Life had been, than either of them had then imagined.

Sitting in the stern, Jane sang an Indian serenade, accompanying it on the guitar, while Shelley gazed up into the dark blue sky of June, where the moon burned inextinguishably beautiful, suffusing the mountain-clouds with intolerable brilliancy. His mind was emptied of thought, his senses annihilated in a delicious ecstasy, his soul clipt in a net woven of dew-beams, seemed to be floating on waves of love and odour and deep melody. He walked again among the splendid visions, the crystalline palaces, the iridescent vapours, which during so long a time had appeared to him the sole reality. He knew to-day that there existed another universe, a harsh and inflexible one but in these higher regions, only animated by the liquid and undulating sweetness of song, by the invisible movement of luminous spheres, in these regions the jealousy of women, money-worries, political quarrels, appeared so infinitely petty that they could hot touch his wild, sweet, incommunicable happiness. He would have liked to swoon away in ravishment while saying with Faust to the passing moment, “Verweile doch! Du bist so schön.”