Part 14
Yesterday the Grandfather of Loki dragged the Grandmother in her bath-chair out into the heart of the moors. It’s a sporting bath-chair this. It has been over as much rough ground as a horse artillery gun-carriage, and nothing in the matter of obstacles stops it unless it is barbed wire; it was chosen as light in make as possible, and now it has a rakish, weather-beaten appearance, like an old mountain mule.
The rare strangers we meet on our wild career regard us with varied sentiments. Some are obviously filled with compassion over the joggling the occupant of the bath-chair must be enduring. “What can that fool of a man be about to expose that wretchedly delicate woman to such suffering?” their expression says to us as they pass. Others, on the other hand, are horror-stricken at the spectacle of the wifely brutality that condemns this weakly, good-natured man to the task of lugging her about. There is a good deal of uphill work, of course, about us, and he goes a good pace. “You ought to get a donkey, Madam,” is their conclusion.
On two or three occasions good Samaritans have rushed to assist him, with glances of scathing rebuke at this new embodiment of woman’s tyranny.
But they are some of our best days, in spite of outside disapproval. And, to go back to yesterday, we started off with all the dogs in a state of “high cockalorum”—Arabella in her most obsequious mood ‹having been scolded the day before for running away›; Loki, the Chinaman, trotting on in determined and splendid isolation as usual, it being quite against Chinese etiquette to speak to any fur-brother _outside_ the garden gates; Betty, and her father Laddie, secretly determined to go hunting, no matter what execrations should be hurled after them. Laddie comes from a neighbouring house, and insists on adopting us as his family. It is very hard to be brutal and say that we won’t be adopted when a pair of the most beautiful cairngorm eyes in all the world are looking up at us out of the dear long, wise, pathetic dog face. In fact, we are not brutal; and Laddie comes and goes as he likes. Only he is occasionally carried back to his cook ‹who, it seems, duly loves him› by Juvenal the tender-hearted.
It is very difficult to reach the moors, with this discursiveness! But, in a sunshine as blazing as that which ever fell from any Italian sky, we did get into the hollow of the heather hills, and there spend an afternoon of perfect dreaminess and pleasure.
[Sidenote: BATH CHAIR AND HEATHER]
Loki’s Grandfather took off his coat and marched up the slippery paths, the bath-chair bumping merrily after him. It is one of his male prerogatives to scorn the idea of sunstroke, and Loki’s Grandmother is filled with apprehensions half the time. But when she saw him stretched on a rug over the heather, smoking his pipe, and the four dogs cast themselves down in attitudes expressive of their different natures, the mental horizon became cloudless. The material skies—if such an adjective can be used in such connexion—the unplumbed dome of mystery above us, were by no means cloudless, and that was part of their wonderful beauty. Huge lazy white clouds, so luminous as to be dazzling, sailed over the rim of the moor and cast shadows of indescribable mauve and purple into the hollows. A day of such intense light it was that every tree in the thick of the woods flung its patch of shadow, purple-dark against the vivid green. And, oh, the colour of the Ling, mixed with Hill Heather, set with islands of Bracken—Bracken in its proper place—silver under the sun rays, against the blue! And the scent of the Heath and the Whin!
One doesn’t know if it is exactly one’s soul that the beauty touches, the appeal is so strongly to the senses. But the soul is of it; for no mere physical joy can give such a serenity, such an airiness as of wings to the spirit. Mr. A. C. Benson says, in some early book of his, that one of the great proofs to him of the existence of God is the feeling which comes at the sight of a very beautiful prospect. We want to give ourselves to it—he says—to be absorbed into it; and that is a movement of the soul, for everything earthly is possessive.
* * * * *
Arabella, who is a very affectionate dog, flung herself down beside her master, taking up a large share of the rug, and pensively chewed gorse half the time, the other half being absorbed in extracting its prickles from her chest. Laddie, of course, slipped off to the chase. The two little dogs, russet brother and little white sister, whiled away a period of inaction: Betty, by circling round the bath-chair, jumping in to assure its occupant that she loved her very much and out again to show that she was a dog of tact; and Loki, panting in his great fur coat ‹in which condition he grins like a Chinese dragon with his roseleaf tongue bent back in the oddest little loop between his white teeth› by seeking cool spots wherein to repose—preferably under the very wheel of the chair, to his Grandmother’s distraction.
An afternoon to remember, when nothing happened but the greatest happenings of all: God’s good gifts of sun and wild moor and balmy air!
XXXI
The really artistic member of the _famiglia_ is Juvenal. He settles all the flowers; and for that alone—for the pleasure he gets from it and the pleasure he gives—he is worth his weight in gold. The little gold and mother-of-pearl tinted Italian drawing-room is always a bower. Yesterday, on the silver table which stands beneath a silver and gold Ikon, he set a vase of white and yellow Roses. It was a touch of genius! We are quite sick of reading how beautiful Primroses look in Benares brass bowls. Personally, we dislike brass bowls for flowers. Glass! Glass! There is nothing as good as glass, especially when you have the luck to possess, as we did, a case of old Dutch moulded bottles. They were made in all kinds of delicious angles—three-cornered, square, hexagonal—with Tulips stamped in the glass: in such as these a couple of long-stemmed Roses or Irises, and especially Tulips and Daffodils, are at their very best.
We have said “they were.” Alas for those Dutch bottles, and for our folly, improvident wretches as we are, in setting them about for our own pleasure, instead of shutting them up in a cabinet! Of what were once eleven perfect irreplaceable treasures ‹the twelfth had a large chip off its neck from the beginning›, there are only five left! Tittums, the splendid savage “smoke Persian,” swept the biggest and best off a chimney-piece with taps of a deliberately evil paw.... And the rest have gone the way of vases!
“Very sorry, Miss” ‹it’s generally to the Signorina they come: she takes the edge off the Padrona’s fury›. “I don’t know how it happened, I’m sure. It came to pieces——”
‹Oh, let us stay our pen! Every owner of precious bric-à-brac knows the awful sound of those words, and the futility of resentment.›
The Master of the Villino had a teapot. Of yellow Cantagalli pottery it was, with quaint adornments like caterpillars all over it; it had a snake handle and a long curving spout. He loved it. He never wanted to have his tea out of any other vessel. One morning a stranger sat in its place. He rang the bell severely. One of the nomad footmen, who appear, and camp, and go away, answered it.
“My teapot.”
‹Yes, it was broken.›
“It came to pieces in your hand, I suppose?” said the master sarcastically.
The injured expression of the misjudged became painted on John’s face:
“No, sir,” he said with much dignity, “it shut itself in the door!”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: MORE PEKINESE WAYS]
Loki has had a bath, out of due season, because his own artist has come down from London to limn his imperial splendours for his own book. We tried to make him understand that it is only smug _nouveaux riches_ who imagine they can patronize art; that, on the contrary, it is Art which condescends to us. He put on his most Chinese face and became a crocodile on the spot. On such occasions his Grandpa calls him a “Crocowog.” ‹This page is only for the pet dog-lover: superior people, please pass on!› He is very nice to kiss after his bath, a process attended on his side by subterranean growls of protest and an alarming curling of the lip. But—dear little gentle creature as he is at heart—it is not in him to bite even the most persistent tormentor.
When his Grandfather amuses himself by what he calls “Squeezing the growls out” every morning, Loki tries vainly to keep up a show of displeasure, but always ends on his back with a windmill waving of pretty prayerful paws.
Loki has his own very marked ideas on the subject of jokes; at least he has one—in fact, an only joke! It took his Grandfather some time to apprehend it; but constant repetition of the incident ‹after the consecrated fashion of the British farce› is beginning to make him see the point of it. The joke is this: at the top, or the bottom, of the garden, as the case may be, coming in from, or going out for, a walk, Loki stands stock still, generally unperceived till you are midway. No coaxing, whistling, or screaming will budge him. He will stand there a quarter of an hour, it may be. And the point of the joke is that you must get behind him and stamp your feet, and say “Naughty Dog!” Then Loki careers up or down in paroxysms of merriment. This may not appeal to some people’s special bump of hilarity; and as it is useless to try to explain a jest, we will leave those to enjoy the spinach story.
XXXII
England is so seldom visited by hot weather such as we now have, that, especially in our little place with its foreign stamp within and without, one keeps thinking of other lands. There was the one hot summer we went visiting in country houses in Italy—two country houses, to be precise, and both of them were “_castelli_.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A CASTELLO IN PIEDMONT]
The first ‹which we preferred vastly› was on a high plateau in the middle of the Piedmontese plain, not far from Turin. From that entrancing spot the view lay over wide undulating stretches of maize fields and vineyards; and the eye could not turn North, West, East or South without resting on a distant panorama of Alps or Apennines.
That was a hot summer with a vengeance! We were met in the dusk of the evening—the soft warm dusk of such days in Italy, when the caress of the air is like the touch of velvet—by a gay little equipage drawn by three mountain horses abreast, each with a collar of bells and a red hussar plume erect on its forehead. It was the most merry vehicle we have ever driven in. How those horses went! How they tossed their heads and how their bells jangled!
A beautiful old French style castello it was, by no means spoilt in our eyes by having been left with rough brick. Now we hear that its ambitious owners have faced it with stone and are themselves charmed with the result. No doubt its original picturesqueness had its disadvantages, for innumerable birds built under the eaves amid those rough bricks. At the approach of any vehicle the air was full of flying wings. The flutter and the sound of them! We thought the place all delightful and characteristic; wonderfully more attractive than the pompous banality of the now renewed mansion, photographs of which we have since had mendaciously to admire.
Inside it was cool and charming; full of old French furniture and irreplaceable family relics. Some of these have recently been sold, to defray, no doubt, part of the cost of the new exterior.
The sedan chair of _Madame la Maréchale_ in pre-Revolution days remains in my memory as a regret; it was a wonder of old Vernis-Martin. We hope they have kept the great flags that used to hang in the hall. The reigning châtelaine did not really care for any of these old things. Her heart was set on the joys of a Roman _appartement_, and its concomitant social gaieties.
[Sidenote: GRANDCHILDREN]
There was a spacious white hall with impossible paintings of a boar hunt on its walls, opening upon an endless series of reception rooms. And through these lofty chambers three little children were running about in little white linen tunics, and nothing on underneath, because of the heat of the weather. Their hair was cut in mediæval fashion, straight across the forehead and straight again across the shoulders. There was also a most adorable baby of eleven months carried about by a soft-eyed _Balia_. Out of the mountains she had come, this creature, to cherish another’s child! And a series of misfortunes had fallen upon her little home since her departure: the death of her own nursling followed by the death of the cow! “_Cara moglie_,” her husband wrote on each occasion, “do not grieve. It is the will of God!”
There were no doubt other very simple reasons for these catastrophes: the pitiable poverty of the family which had made it necessary for the poor woman to sell her mother-rights, and possibly the tainted milk of the sick cow which had poisoned the little mountaineer. But call it fate, or the intolerable economic system of modern Italy, it came round in the end to the same thing. “Do not grieve, _cara moglie_. It is the will of God!”
She had done her best to help her own, and this was her comfort in her sorrow. It was not such a bad comfort; and the most advanced thinker cannot prove after all that it was not the will of God.
It was difficult, too, for the foster-mother to weep long when Baby Maddalena danced on the stone of the terrace with little bare brown feet. She had the bluest eyes and the brownest face that ever we beheld, and laughed and gurgled as she danced, with very high action, upheld by the ends of her sash by the adoring _Balia_, whose own face and neck above her string of gold beads were the colour of a ripe apricot.
It would be difficult to have devised a fortnight of greater interest, amusement, and quaintness than that of this Piedmontese visit. It was a thoroughly foreign household. The handsome white-bearded athletic father of the Chatelaine, tied to his chair by an attack of gout, had his apartments downstairs. And on an upper floor the mother of the Marchese had her own complete establishment, including a wonderful library, all tawny gold. There was a baroque Chapel; and one of our most vivid recollections was our pulling the children down by their sashes as they swung themselves over the tops of the benches, doubled up like golden fleeces till their curly heads and their little shoes touched.
One thing never to be omitted was to watch Monte Rosa at sunset. The night before our departure there was a thunderstorm far, far away in those Alps where Monte Rosa rises in beauty. At every flash, peak beyond peak shone out in distances hitherto wrapped away even from the imagination.
“Why does the sky do like that?” asked the second boy, vigorously blinking his great eyes. With straight black hair and an odd, serious little countenance, square-jawed and long upper-lipped like a Medici out of Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes, he was the most mediæval-looking of all the children. We loved that four-year-old.... He has grown up, we hear, “impossible” and a burden to his family. We cannot help feeling it must be the family’s fault. The elder boy, much handsomer though he was, did not then promise so well. A terribly nervous child; the cry “_Ho paura_,” was always on his lips. It hurt his grandfather’s pride that any son of his race should show such degenerate timidity.
One typical scene we were witness of. The little fellow, in great awe of the peremptory, loud-voiced old sportsman, approached him to say good-night; and, hanging his head after the manner of the frightened child, stammered the requisite “_Bonsoir, Bonpapa_,” almost inaudibly.
Instantly wrath broke out over him. ‹Bonpapa’s temper had not improved with the gout.› “That was not the manner in which to say good-night.”—“A man was to look up: to speak straight.” “What does one say?” he ended, shouting.
“_Pardon!_” cried the poor, terrified imp, with a wail.
This child, over whom were so many head-shakings, doubts and laments, has grown up so brave and fine a boy that it would have rejoiced the heart of the old Vicomte to see him now. His was a stormy heart that wanted much of life, and therefore, of course, knew much bitterness. It is stilled now, alas! this many a year.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A CASTELLO IN LOMBARDY]
From this comparatively modern mansion in the Piedmont we went to an old, old castle in the plains of Lombardy. The chronicles have it that Barbarossa besieged it. It was approached through a considerable village—one of great antiquity, and still retaining the lines of the Roman _castrum_, with all its streets parallel or at right-angles. At the top of the main of these the great machicolated entrance of the Castello, with its faded frescoes across the arch, was very impressive in mediæval strength. The church shouldered one corner of the immense pile of outer wall; and each side of the moat, between the towers, inside and out, peasant houses had crept.
The Castello itself, of extreme antiquity, as has been said, formed two sides of a square, round, and flagged courtyard. The garden ran sheer up the hill, within the tower-flanked walls of the outer bailey. There were vineyards inside; and outside, where the ground fell away, the whole land was likewise covered with vines. They ran up and down long ridges, like petrified waves, as far as the eye could see. And in the far, far distance, almost lost in the horizon, were the Alps.
What a view that was from the loopholes of those half-ruined towers—especially at sunset, when there gathered a rosy mist over that curious, wild-tossing expanse!
Could we go back now to that unique spot, what a vast amount of æsthetic pleasure should we not draw from it? But it must be admitted that we were gross-minded enough at the time to allow material discomfort to overcome all other impressions.
To lodge in a genuine old Lombard Castle, with stone floors and stairs hewn in the immense thickness of the stone; to look out upon one side into the moat, and to see the peasant houses clinging to the massive foundations far below like barnacles to a rock; to look out on the other side upon the odd rise of sunburnt garden up to the vineyard and the towers; to imagine oneself back into the very heart of the Middle Ages may be very inspiring, in theory. But mediæval sensibilities were undoubtedly more blunted than ours. The smell of that moat running with the refuse of the crowded Italian village!... For additional pungency, all the water in the place came from sulphur springs! The reek of it was in one’s nostrils all day from merely washing in it.
The household was composed of peasant women out of the village. The wife of the barber, the mother of the shoemaker, and others, clattered about the stone passages in their _mules_—a style of foot-gear which leaves the foot free from the instep. It was perhaps as well that the heels were high, for their idea of housemaiding ‹a method which appertains in most Italian households to this day› was first to walk about with a pail and to slop water out of it over the flags of the floor; then to sweep the resulting wet mess into a puddle where the stone was worn most hollow or under the carpet!
Some attempts at a housemaid’s sink had been excavated in the stone at the head of the stairs outside our set of rooms; but there was generally a small cataract of soapy water dripping down the steps, for the simple practice of the _donna_ that attended on our apartment was to stand on the landing outside our doors and to shy the contents of her bucket upwards.
* * * * *
The delightful friend with whom we stayed, though not born of the country, had fallen quite resignedly into its ways. And, indeed, the castle was chiefly ruled by the _Princesse Mère_, a châtelaine of the old school, who used to arise in the grey dawn and pull the iron chain of the great bell that hung outside her windows, to call the vassals to their daily work.
“Come, come!” she was frequently heard addressing some dependent or other whose movements were more indolent than she approved of. “Are you here for your comfort or for mine?”
* * * * *
The table was served, copiously, with singular Italian dishes. There was a favourite soup with stewed quails in it: the whole animal, bones and beak and all! It is an unspeakable dish to have set before you on a hot day. Patties filled with cocks’ combs might follow. Even the _Risotto_ was intermingled with such strange mincings of liver and cutlet trimmings that one hesitated before venturing. The _Fritura_, needless to say, was in full force. A lucky dip, that! You may come across yesterday’s cauliflower, a bit of forgotten sweetbread, a slice of sausage, a frizzled artichoke, and half the quail you couldn’t eat the night before—all in one spoonful!
Besides the fierce matutinal summons of the domestic bell, one’s sleep was constantly disturbed by a jangle of chimes from the church: a perfect frenzy of joy-bells it was, so prolonged and insistent that sleep was beaten out of one’s brain as with hammers.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: THE ANGELS’ MASS]
“What,” we asked our younger hostess, the third day of this infliction, “what are these carillons, morning after morning?”
“Oh, that?—That is for the Angels’ Mass,” she answered us indifferently.
“The Angels’ Mass?”
“Yes. A child dead in the village.”
“But every morning?”
“There have been several deaths lately. It is the fever from the rice fields.”
Pleasant hearing for a woman with an only little daughter just recovering from a rather serious illness! Every smell that greeted her nostrils afterwards—and they were of a diversified and poignant description—seemed laden with the germs of death. But the young _Principessa_ had absorbed a good deal of the indolent indifference of her adopted country towards hygiene.
“You, with your English notions!” was all the comfort her visitor got, offered in tones of good-humour not unmixed with contempt. Or else: “What you smell, my dear, is only carbolic; and that is very healthy.”
A few dabs of disinfectant had indeed been distributed about the moat, on much the same principle, and with the same effect, as the red pepper which is served with wild duck, just to heighten the flavour of the dish.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: ENTOMOLOGICAL MYSTERIES]
Perhaps the most lasting impression of that Lombardy sojourn was the morning discovery in a glass of drinking-water which had been placed beside the bed the previous night, of the most extraordinary creature any of us had ever seen. It was like a very large shrimp, perfectly transparent, with such gigantic antennæ and legs that they protruded over the top of the tumbler!
No one else in the castle had ever beheld anything like it either, it appeared; except one old woman, who described it vaguely as “_una bestia del acqua_.” But as it most certainly had not been in the tumbler when the water was put into it, its origin remains for ever a mystery.
A few nights later the little girl of the party of travellers found one of these zoological mysteries in a quite empty tumbler! We might have thought it a practical joke played on the _forestieri_, only that no one could have come into the room without the knowledge of its occupants.
This, and the sudden departure of the “chef” who had been responsible for the little quails in the soup, did upset the equanimity of the pretty hostess.