Chapter 5
Anthony held Patapouf, who, flattered by their attentions, and unsuspicious of their ulterior aim, submitted quietly, while Susanna adjusted the collar to his neck. They had to stand rather close together during this process; I am not sure that sometimes their fingers did n't touch. From Susanna's garments--from her hair?--rose never so faint a perfume, like the perfume of violets. I am quite sure that Anthony's heart was in a commotion.
"There," she remarked, finishing the collar with a bow, and bestowing upon the bow a little tap of approbation; "red and black--it's very becoming to him, is n't it?"
Then she tied Patapouf to the tree, leaving him, in charity, perhaps twice his own length of tether free, and resumed possession of her book and beads.
An instant later, she had slightly inclined her head, smiled a good-bye into Anthony's eyes, and was moving briskly away, in the direction of Craford New Manor.
VII
Adrian, pink with the livelier pink of Adrian freshly tubbed and razored, and shedding a cheerful aroma of bay-rum, regarded Anthony, across the bowlful of roses that occupied the centre of the breakfast table, with a show of perplexity.
In the end, thrusting forward his chin, and dropping his eyelids, whereby his expression became remote and superior, "The state of mind of a person like you," he announced, "is a thing I am totally unable to conceive."
And he plunged his spoon into his first egg.
"It is inexplicable, it is downright uncanny," Anthony was thinking, as he munched his toast, "the effect she produces upon a man; the way she pursues one, persists with one. I see her, I hear her voice, her laughter, as clearly as if she were still present. I can't get rid of her, I can't shut her out."
Adrian, his announcement provoking no response, spoke up.
"I am utterly unable," he repeated, "to conceive the state of mind of a person like you."
"Of course you are," said Anthony, with affability.
"I suppose," he thought, "it's because she is what they call a pronounced personality,--though that does n't seem a very flattering description. I suppose it's her odylic force."
Adrian selected a second egg, and placed it in his egg-cup.
"You live, you move, you have a sort of being," he said, as he operated upon the egg-shell; "and, apparently, you live contented. Yet, be apprised by me, you live in the manner of the beasts that perish. For the whole excuse, warrant, purpose, and business of life, you treat as alien to your equation."
"The business of life I entrust to my eminently competent man of business," said Anthony, with a bow.
"She 's so magnificently vivid," he thought. "That white skin of hers, and the red lips, and the white teeth; that cloud of black hair, and the sweep of it as it leaves her brow; and then those luminous, lucid, glowing, glowing eyes--that last smile of them, before she went away! She gives one such a sense of intense vitality, of withheld power, of unknown possibilities."
Adrian, with some expenditure of pains, extracted the spine from a grilled sardine.
"These children of the inconstant wave," he mused, "these captives from the inscrutable depths of ocean--the cook ought to bone them before she sends them to table, ought n't she? _Labor et amor_. The warrant for life is labour, and the business of life is love."
"You should address your complaints to the cook in person," said Anthony.
"That's it--unknown possibilities," he thought. "She 's vivid, but she is n't obvious. It's a vividness that is all reserves--that hints, but does n't tell. It's the vividness of the South, of the Italy that produced her,--'Italy, whose work still serves the world for miracle.' She's vivid, but not in primary colours. I defy you, for example, to find the word for her--the word that would make her visible to one who had never seen her."
"They 're immensely improved by a drop or two of Worcester sauce," said Adrian, with his mouth full. "Observe how, in the labyrinth of destiny, journeys end in the most romantic and improbable conjunctions. These fishlets from a southern sea--this sauce from a northern manufacturing town."
"And then her figure," thought Anthony; "that superb, tall, pliant figure,--the flow of it, the spring of it,--the lines it takes when she moves, when she walks,--its extraordinary union of strength with fineness."
"The longest night," said Adrian, "is followed by a dawn." He dropped three lumps of sugar into his tea-cup. "There 's a paragraph in this week's _Beaux and Belles_ which says that sugar in tea is quite the correct thing again. Thank mercy. Tongue can never tell the hankerings my sweet-tooth has suffered during the years that sugar has been unfashionable.
"Nearest neighbours though they dwell, Neighbour Tongue can never tell What Neighbour Tooth has had to dree, Nearest neighbours though they be,"
he softly hummed. "But that's really from a poem about toothache, and does n't perhaps apply. Do _you_ labour? Do _you_ love?" he enquired.
"Love is such an ambiguous term," said Anthony, with languor.
"Yes--strength and fineness: those are her insistent notes," he was thinking. "She is strong, strong. She is strong as a perfect young animal is strong. Yet she is fine. She is fine as only, of all created beings, a fine woman can be fine--a woman delicate, sensitive, high-bred, fine in herself, and with all her belongings fine."
"Life," said Adrian, "is a thing a man should come by honestly; a thing the possession of which a man should justify; a thing a man should earn."
"Some favoured individuals, I have heard, inherit it from their forebears," said Anthony, as one loth to dogmatise, on the tone of a mere suggestion.
"Pish," answered Adrian, with absoluteness. "Our forebears affect my thesis only in so far as they did not forbear. At most, they touched the button. The rest--the adventurous, uncertain, interesting rest--we must do ourselves. We must _earn_ our life; and then we should _spend_ it--lavishly, like noble, freehanded gentlemen. Well, we earn our life by labour; and then, if we spend as the gods design, we spend our life in love. I could quote Browning, I could quote Byron, I could even quote What's-his-name, the celebrated German."
"You could--but you won't," interposed Anthony, with haste. "It is excellent to have a giant's strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant."
"The puzzling thing, however," he reflected, "is that I can't in the least realise her as what she is. She is a widow, she has been married. I can't in the least think of her as a woman who has been married. Not that she strikes one exactly as a young girl, either,--she exhibits too plentiful a lack of young-girlish rawness and insipidity,--she 's a woman, she 's a _femme faite_. But I can't think of her as a woman who has passed through marriage. One feels a freshness, a bloom, a something untouched, intact. One feels the presence of certain inexperiences. And yet--well, by the card, one's feeling is mistaken."
Adrian sprinkled sugar and poured cream over a plateful of big red strawberries.
"All this--and Heaven too," he piously murmured.
Then, rosy face and blue eyes bright with anticipation, he tasted one. Slowly the brightness faded.
"Deceivers!" he cried, falling back in his seat, and shaking his fist at the tall glass dish from which he had helped himself. "Fair as Hyperion, false as dicers' oaths. Acid and watery--a mere sour bath. You may have them all." He pushed the dish towards Anthony. "I suppose it's too early in the season to hope for good ones. But this"--he charged a plate with bread, butter, and marmalade--"this honest, homely Scottish marmalade, this can always be depended upon to fill the crannies." And therewith he broke into song.
"To fill the crannies, The mannie's crannies,
Then hey for the sweeties of bonny Dundee!" he carolled lustily. "Let me see--I was saying?" he resumed. "Ah, yes, I was saying that the state of mind of a man like you is a thing I am utterly unable to conceive. And that 's funny, because it is generally true that the larger comprehends the less. But I look at you, and I think to myself, thinks I, 'There is a man--or at least the semblance of a man,--a breathing thing at least, with anthropoid features and dimensions,--who is never, never, never tormented by the feeling--'Now, tell me, what feeling do you conjecture I mean?"
"Don't know, I 'm sure," said Anthony, without much animation.
"'By the feeling that he ought to be bending over a sheet of paper, ruled in pretty parallels of fives, trying to embellish the same with semi-breves and crotchets.' That is what I think to myself, thinks I; and the thought leaves me gasping. I am utterly unable to conceive your state of mind."
"I shan't--barring happy accidents--see her again till Sunday; and to-day is only Friday," Anthony was brooding.
"Apropos," he said to Adrian, "I remember your telling me that Friday was unlucky."
"Tut," said Adrian. "That is n't apropos in the slightest degree. The difference that baffles me, I expect, is that I 've the positive, you 've the negative, temperament; I 've the active, you 've the passive; I 've the fertile, you 've the sterile. It's the difference between Yea and Nay, between Willy and Nilly. Serenely, serenely, you will drift to your grave, and never once know what it is to be consumed, harried, driven by a deep, inextinguishable, unassuageable craving to write a song. You 'll never know the heartburn, the unrest, the conscience-sickness, the self-abasement that I know when I 'm not writing one, nor the glorious anguish of exhilaration when I am. I can get no conception of your state of mind--any more than a nightingale could conceive the state of mind of a sparrow. In a sparrowish way, it must be rather blissful--no? We artists are the salt of the earth, of course; but every art knows its own bitterness, and--_il faut souffrir pour être sel_."
"It's the difference between egotism rampant and modesty regardant," Anthony, with some grimness, returned. "I am content to sit in my place, and watch the pantomime. You long to get upon the stage. Your unassuageable craving to write a song is, in its essence, just an unassuageable craving to make yourself an object of attention. And that's the whole truth about you artists. I recollect your telling me that Friday was unlucky."
"Oh, how superficial you are," Adrian plaintively protested. "A man like me, you should understand, is meant for the world--for the world's delight, for mankind's wonder. And here unfortunate circumstances--my poverty and not my will--constrain me to stint the world of its due: to languish in this lost corner of Nowhere, like Wamba the son of Witless, the mere professed buffoon of a merer franklin. Well, my unassuageable craving to write a song is, in its essence, just a great, splendid, generous desire to indemnify the world. The world needs me--the world has me not--but the world _shall_ have me. For the world's behoof, I will translate myself into semi-breves and crotchets. So _there_! Besides, to be entirely frank, I can't help it. Nothing human is perfect that does not exhibit somewhere a fine inconsequence. Thus I exhibit mine. I make music from a high sense of duty, to enrich the world; but at the same time I make it because I can't help making it. I make it as the bee makes honey, as the Jew makes money, spontaneously, inevitably. It is my nature to,--just as it 's the nature of fire to burn, and of dairy-maids to churn. It is the inherent, ineradicable impulse of my bounteous soul."
"You told me in so many words that Friday was unlucky," said Anthony.
"Well, and so it is," said Adrian.
"I don't agree with you. Friday, in my experience, is the luckiest day of the seven. All sorts of pleasant things have happened to me on Friday."
"That's merely because your sponsors in baptism happened to name you Tony," Adrian explained. "Friday, and the still more dread thirteen, are both lucky for people who happen to be named Tony. Because why? Because the blessed St. Anthony of Padua was born on a Friday, and went to his reward on a thirteenth--the thirteenth of June, this very month, no less." He allowed Anthony's muttered "_A qui le dites-vous_?" to pass unnoticed, and, making his voice grave, continued, "But for those of us who don't happen to be named Tony--_unberufen_! Take a man like me, for instance, an intellectual young fellow, with work to do, but delicate, and dependent for his strength upon the regular administration of sustaining nourishment. Well, Friday comes, and there he is, for twenty-four hours by the clock, obliged to keep up, as best he may, on fish and vegetables and suchlike kickshaws, when every fibre of his frame is crying out for meat, red meat. And now"--he pushed back his chair--"and now, dear heart, be brave. Steel yourself to meet adversity. A sorrow stoically borne is already half a sorrow vanquished. I must absent thee from thy felicity a while---I must be stepping." He rose, and moved, with that dancing gait of his, to the door. From the threshold he remarked, "If you will come to my business-room about half an hour before luncheon, I shall hope to have the last bars polished off, and I 'll sing you something sweeter than ever plummet sounded. _Lebe wohl_."
"Yes," thought Anthony, left to himself, "barring happy accidents, I must wait till Sunday."
And he went into the park.
"The nuisance," he said to Patapouf, as he released him, "the nuisance of things happening early is that they 're just so much the less likely to happen late. The grudge I bear the Past is based upon the circumstance that it has taken just so much from the Future. Meanwhile, suggest the unthinking, let's enjoy the present. But virtually, as I need n't remind _you_, there is no such thing as the present. The present is an infinitesimal between two infinites. 'T is a line (a thing without breadth or thickness) moving across the surface of Eternity. The present is no more, by the time you have said, This is present. So, then, it were inordinate to hope to fall in with her again to-day, and you and I must face an anti-climax. Be thankful we have the memories of the morning to feed upon. And, if you desire a subject for meditation, observe how appetites are created. If we had not met her at all, we should not hunger and thirst in this way for another meeting."
He left the red collar round Patapouf's neck. The rest of the torn ribbon he carefully gathered up and put in his pocket-book.
VIII
"One should, however, give happy accidents a certain encouragement," he reflected, as he woke next morning. "She said it was her habit. We will seek her again in the hours immaculate."
He sought her far and near. He wandered the park till breakfast time. The appropriate scene was set: the familiar sheep were there, the trees, the birds, the dewy swards, the sunshine and the shadows: but--though, at each new turning, as each new prospect opened, expectancy anew looked eagerly from his eyes--the lady of the piece was ever missing.
"And yet you boasted it was your habit," bitterly he reproached his vision of her.
All day he held out to happy accidents what encouragement he might. All day he roamed the park, and, as the day dragged on, became a deeply dejected man. Even the certitude of seeing her to-morrow was of small comfort.
"Two minutes before Mass, and three minutes after--what is that?" he grumbled.
Towards five o'clock he took a resolution.
"There are such things as accidents, but there is also," he argued, "such a thing as design. Why is man endowed with free-will? I don't care how it may look, nor what they may think. I 'm going to call upon her, I 'm going to ask myself to tea."
In this, however, he reckoned without the keeper of her door.
"The ladies er _ait_, sir," announced that prim-lipped functionary.
"Now farewell hope," he mourned, as the door closed in his face. "There's nothing left for me to do but to go for a thundering long walk, and tire myself into oblivion. I will walk to Wetherleigh."
Head bent, eyes downcast, sternly resolved to banish her from his thought, he set forwards, with rapid, dogged steps. He had gone, it may be, a hundred yards, when a voice stopped him.
"Sh--sh! Please--please!" it whispered.
IX
The grounds immediately appertaining to Craford New Manor are traversed by a brook. Springing from amidst a thicket of creepers up the hillside, it comes tumbling and winding, a series of miniature cascades, over brown rocks, between mossy banks shadowed by ferns and eglantine, through the sun-shot dimness of a grove of pine-trees, to fling itself with a final leap and flash (such light-hearted self-immolation) into the ornamental pond at the bottom of the lawn. It is a pretty brook, and pleasing to the ear, with its purl and tinkle of crisp water.
And now, as Anthony, heading for the Wetherleigh-wards exit of the park, approached the brook, to cross it,--"Sh, sh--please, please,"--a whisper stopped him.
There by the bank, under the tall pines, where sun and shadow chequered the russet carpet of pine-needles, there, white-robed, sat Susanna: white-robed, hatless, gloveless. She was waving her hand, softly, in a gesture invocative of caution; but her eyes smiled a welcome to him.
Anthony halted, waited,--his heart, I think, high-bearing.
"It is a blue tit," she explained, under her breath, eagerly. "The rarest bird that ever comes. He is bathing--there--see." She pointed.
Sure enough, in a little rock-formed pool a couple of yards up-stream, a tiny blue titmouse was vigorously enjoying his bath--ducking, fluttering, preening his plumage, ducking again, and sending off shooting-stars of spray, prismatic stars where they crossed the sunbeams.
"That is the delight of this bit of water," Susanna said, always with bated breath. "The birds for miles about come here to drink and bathe. All the rarer and timider birds, that one never sees anywhere else."
"Ah, yes. Very jolly, very interesting," said Anthony, not quite knowing what he said, perhaps, for his faculties, I hope, were singing a _Te Deum_. But--with that high nose of his, that cool grey eye, with that high collar too, and the general self-assurance of his toilet--no one could have appeared more composed or more collected.
"You speak without conviction," said Susanna. "Don't you care for birds?"
("Come! You must get yourself in hand," his will admonished his wit.)
"I beg your pardon," he said, "I care for them very much. They 're an indispensable feature of the landscape, and immensely serviceable to the agriculturist. But one cares for other things as well. And I had always fancied that the crowning virtue of this bit of water (since you mention it) was its amenability to the caprice of man."
"Men _have_ caprices?" questioned she, surprise in her upward glance.
"At any rate," he answered, with allowance for her point, "your Scottish gardener has. At his caprice, he turns this torrent on or off, with a tap. For all its air of naturalness and frank impetuosity, it is an entirely artificial torrent; and your Scottish gardener turns it on and off with a tap."
"He sways the elements," murmured Susanna, as with awe. "Portentous being." Then, changing her note to one of gaiety, "_Ecco_," she cried, "Signor Cinciallegra has completed his ablutions--and _ecco_, he flies away. Won't you--won't you sit down?" she asked, as her eyes came back from the departing bird; and a motion of her hand made him free of the pine-needles.
"Thank you," responded Anthony, taking a place opposite her. "I 'm not sure," he added, "whether in honesty I ought n't to confess that I have just been calling upon you."
"Oh," she said, with the politest smile and bow. "I am so sorry to have missed your visit."
"You are very good." He bowed in his turn. "I wanted to consult you about a trifling matter of business," he informed her.
"A matter of business--?" she wondered; and her face became all attention.
"Exactly," said he. "I wanted to ask what you meant by stating that it was your habit always to be abroad in the hours immaculate? I happened by the merest chance to be abroad in them myself this morning. I examined every nook and cranny of them, I turned them inside out; but not one jot or tittle of you could I discover."
Susanna's eyes were pensive.
"I was speaking of Italy, was I not?" she replied. "I said, I think, that it was the habit of the people in my part of Italy. But, anyhow, one sometimes varies one's habits. And, after all, one sometimes makes statements that are rash."
"And one is always free to repudiate one's responsibilities," suggestively supplemented our young man.
"Fortunately," she agreed. "Moreover," she changed her ground, "one should not be too exclusive in one's sympathies, one should not be unfair to other hours. This present hour here now--is it not immaculate also? With its pure sky, and its odour of warm pines, its deep cool shadows, its patines of bright gold where the sun penetrates, and then, plashing through it, this curling, dimpling, artificial torrent? It is not the hour's fault if it happens to arrive somewhat late in the day--it had to wait its turn. Besides, if one can believe what one reads in books, it will be the very earliest of early hours--down there," (with the tip of a vertical finger she touched the earth), "at the Antipodes."
"To this present hour," said Anthony, with impressive slowness, "I personally owe so great a debt of thankfulness, it would be churlish of me even to hint a criticism. And yet--and yet--how shall I express it? _Eppur' si muove_. It moves, it hastes away;--while I could wish it to remain forever, fixed as the Northern Star. Do they know, in your part of Italy, any means by which the sparkling minutes can be prevailed upon to stay their flight?"
"That is a sort of knowledge," Susanna answered, with a movement of the head, "for which, I fear, one would have to go to a meta-physical and thrifty land like Germany. We are not in the least metaphysical or thrifty in my part of Italy. We allow the sparkling minutes to slip between our fingers, like gold between the fingers of a spendthrift. But--but we rather enjoy the feeling, as they slip."
"I wonder," Anthony hazarded, "whether you would take it very much amiss if--if I should make a remark?"
Susanna's eyes lighted, dangerously.
"I wonder," she said, on a key of dubious meditation.
"I am not easily put off," said he, with firmness. "I am moved to remark upon the astonishing facility with which you speak English. Now--do your worst."
Susanna smiled.
"It would take more than that to provoke me to do my worst," she said. "English is as natural to me as my mother-tongue. I always had English governesses. Everyone has English governesses in Italy nowadays, you know."
"Yes," he said, "I know; and they are generally Irish, are they not? Of course you 've lived a great deal in England?" he surmised.
"On the contrary," she set him right, "this is my first visit here."
"Is it possible?" he marvelled. "I thought the true Oxford accent could only be acquired on the spot."
"Have I the true Oxford accent?" Susanna brightly doubted, eye-brows raised.
"Thank heaven," he gravely charged her, "thank heaven, kneeling, that you have n't the true Oxford manner. Does England," he asked, "seem very rum?"
"Yes," she answered, with immediate candour, "England seems very rum--but not so rum as it might, perhaps, if I had n't read so many English novels. English novels are the only novels you 're allowed to read, in my part of Italy, when you 're young."