Illyrian Spring Page 14

  Nicholas turned up soon after two, slung off into a corner a miscellaneous load of canvases and equipment, and sat down at the table. ‘It’s hot,’ he said, mopping his face.

  ‘How did you get on?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Oh, not too badly. Would you like to see?’ There was a certain effort in his manner – it was clear that he wanted to resume normal relations, and found the initial steps embarrassing.

  ‘Yes, rather. Signor Antonio!’ Grace called, as Nicholas began to undo his canvas. The patron appeared at the hovel door, saw Nicholas, and crying ‘Subito!’ withdrew again. Nicholas propped his picture on a chair in front of Grace – she studied it carefully.

  ‘You’ve been using the knife a lot,’ she said at length.

  ‘Yes – I thought I’d try that out. What do you think?’

  ‘Rather good, really. You’ve got a good deal more light into it. That figure is frightfully good.’

  ‘Yes, I liked him myself. He came and sat down outside the café, and he was such fun I put him in. Mercifully he stayed for ages. Hullo, here’s the food.’

  This interchange lightened the atmosphere considerably. Presently Nicholas asked how Grace had got on.

  ‘I left off – it was so hot.’

  ‘You’re tired,’ he said, looking at her.

  ‘Not really – only a bit of a headache. It’s the sun, I think.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said he, abruptly. He began to crumble his bread, in that nervous fashion she had come to know. ‘Lady K.,’ he said then, without looking up, ‘I’m sorry. I was a brute and a fool to let you go alone last night. But you’re’ – he paused, and looked up at her with something like misery in his eyes – ‘you’re all right, aren’t you?’

  Lady Kilmichael’s winged instinct told her a number of things in that one instant, but as usual she dealt first with the immediate need.

  ‘Goodness yes,’ she said lightly. ‘He only got tipsy and tried to kiss me. Luckily he was so tipsy that it was fairly easy to hide. But by the time he’d gone, the tram had gone too.’ She paused. ‘You were quite right,’ she went on, with a slight effort, ‘but I wish you’d been there, all the same.’

  ‘Don’t!’ he said. Then, without looking up – ‘If you could forgive me for what I – said, when you came in – I should feel better. But I don’t know that I could, if I were you.’

  ‘Please don’t worry about that, Nicholas,’ said Grace, easily. (Easy does it – to be easy was the thing.) ‘You were worried and upset; I know you didn’t mean it. Very well’ – as he opened his mouth to speak – ‘Yes, I forgive you. There – is that plain enough?’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and for some time they ate in silence, though Grace trembled for the effect on Nicholas’s inside of mouthfuls swallowed in such circumstances. At last he spoke again, in a manner that was less strained.

  ‘I don’t suppose you realise how hard I find it to behave properly to you,’ he said, with a curious meditative candour. ‘You see I know really that I ought to treat you with tremendous respect, because you’re so much older and so on – but actually when you’re with me I forget about all that, and only think of you as someone about five years older than me. So I rather forget myself. That’s no excuse, of course,’ he finished.

  Nothing he could have said at that moment could have surprised Grace more. The truth was dawning on her – and with it a quite violent sense of the improbability, the fantastic absurdity of such a thing happening to anyone of her age.

  ‘That’s very curious,’ was all she found to say.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Nicholas simply. ‘When I first saw you at Torcello,’ he pursued, ‘I remember how astounded I was when you told me that Nigel was at Cambridge, in that trattoria place.’ He looked across at her. ‘You look rather the same now,’ he said, ‘with those shadows on your dress. That’s the same frock, isn’t it?’

  Grace looked, almost with surprise, at her dress. It was the same. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘But I began to forget, even then, rowing back to Venice,’ he went on. ‘When you were so shy about Ruskin. I didn’t know then how shy you are!’ And his grin, irrepressibly, peeped out again.

  ‘Was I shy about Ruskin?’ Grace asked, interested in spite of herself.

  ‘Oh yes. You read it beautifully, but you were as shy over it as a person at school. That intrigued me rather. So did your being so knowing about your stones – people of your age, women, I mean, don’t generally go in for archaeology. And then your wanting that rather peculiar inscription for your epitaph – that was very intriguing too. In fact altogether you were a puzzle.’

  ‘I should have thought I was a very simple person,’ said Grace, who was not accustomed to being regarded as an enigma.

  ‘So you are, in one way. That’s the greatest puzzle of the lot,’ said Nicholas firmly. ‘I was bored,’ he went on – ‘when I thought I should never see you again and learn any of the answers.’

  Grace was surprised by the acuteness of her curiosity to know what answers, if any, he had learned; but some feeling which was not shyness restrained her from asking. ‘You must have a very speculative mind,’ she said lightly.

  ‘Don’t you ever speculate about people you meet?’

  ‘I did a little about you,’ she answered, feeling her present incurious attitude to be faintly dishonest.

  ‘Oh, what did you think of me?’ he asked, with an eager confiding interest which was somehow an extreme gesture of intimacy.

  ‘I thought you very offhand,’ said Grace, ‘and rather unhappy.’ She smiled, remembering Torcello. ‘You were gloomy that day,’ she said.

  ‘Was I completely awful?’ Nicholas asked.

  ‘Not completely,’ said Lady Kilmichael.

  TWELVE

  That conversation with Nicholas in the little restaurant in the Via del Levante gave Grace Kilmichael a good deal to think about. It left her convinced of the rather embarrassing fact of Nicholas being mildly in love with her. Even more than his temper, his distress and his apology, what carried conviction to her was the way he had talked about their first meeting at Torcello. Lady Kilmichael had once been young; she had been – as indeed she still was – pretty; Walter Kilmichael had been the successful last-comer in a very considerable train of adorers. She had not forgotten all the symptoms of the disease – she knew quite well what it meant when people began to recall first impressions. There is a particular tone and way of doing that – a tender curiosity, an artless self-revelation, an amused anxiety about the past combined with present security – for now it is all right, now we are safe, now we can give ourselves away, fearlessly – which belongs, unmistakably, to the early, serene and unconscious stage of love; and in just that tone and that way Nicholas had talked. There could be no mistake about it; ludicrous as it seemed, there it was.

  There is a distinct tendency among Englishwomen of a very normal type rather to shy away from the emotion of love when directed towards themselves, unless they happen to have fallen in love on their own account first. Once married, to shy becomes a duty as well as, so to speak, a pleasure; it is what society expects of them. Only, curiously enough, an exception is ordinarily made in favour of the devotions of young men to older married women: these are regarded as an arrangement socially sound, formative to the young man and innocuous to the married woman, who has other fish – a husband and a family – to fry. The frying of the family is supposed to keep her out of harm’s way. On the whole this view is a sane one; and Grace, aware of it, though she might be surprised, did not feel called upon to be shocked by Nicholas’s state, accustomed as she was to regulate her life and even her thoughts by conventional standards. But the married woman, if she is a person of any sensibility, may be somewhat embarrassed by such a situation. She may feel rather a fool. Grace felt a fool. In so far as she thought about herself at all, she was very profoundly embarrassed. She remembered all the things that Linnet and the boys were wont to say about older women who went in for baby-snatch
ing, and they made her blush. She was so old; she was old enough to be his mother! It really was ridiculous – only she felt that it was she who was ridiculous, not Nicholas. Dear child, there was nothing in the least ridiculous about him. But she would have to do something about it, somehow.

  She argued it all out with herself that evening, on her balcony at the Imperial. It was a warm night, with no moon; prodigious southern stars burned over the sea; she could hear a little noise of waves from the rocks round the foot of the fortress of San Lorenzo, whose bulk stood up into the stars, except when the trams from Gruz clanged past, their brakes screaming down the hill. The air was sweet with flowers from the garden below, where the fronds of the great palms curved, black or golden, as the light from the street lamps struck them; away to the left, by the Porta Pile, the city walls glimmered shadowily from the same illumination. Sitting by the balustrade, her chin on her hand, she thought of Nicholas. It was very slight, she thought, and would soon pass off; probably he didn’t realise it himself – in fact she was pretty sure he didn’t; he would hardly have talked just like that about Torcello if he had. It was not in the least a serious matter; the only important thing was to deal with it lightly enough, cleverly enough, for it not to become serious. It would not be a bad plan, though, for them to separate fairly soon, if that could be managed without what Grace called ‘making a business of it.’ To make a business of it would be fatal. Only she didn’t quite see how to get away from Nicholas without some form of business-making. He was perfectly free, for weeks to come, to go wherever he chose; and she felt pretty sure that he would choose to go wherever she went, unless formally notified that his presence was undesired. It was, in fact, all very difficult! And at that quotation from herself she laughed – softly, but aloud.

  The laugh brought Nicholas out onto his balcony next door; he looked very childish in his pyjamas, with his hair all standing up on end after his bath.

  ‘What’s funny?’ he asked.

  ‘Something was very difficult,’ said Grace gaily.

  ‘You on the horns of a dilemma?’ he said. ‘What is it? Can I help? I’m full of ideas.’

  ‘No, I don’t think you can, my dear child. It’s nothing vital.’

  ‘I often have admirable ideas on un-vital subjects,’ he said, sitting on the balustrade and swinging his legs over, so that his feet dangled above the lamp-lit roses and oleanders below. ‘You’d better come clean, Lady K. – I’m sure I can help.’

  ‘Nicholas, you’ll catch cold if you sit out there after your bath. You ought to go to bed,’ said Grace.

  ‘You’re talking exactly like my Mamma,’ he said, turning round and grinning at her. ‘Maternal strategy! Send the child off if he starts asking awkward questions!’

  ‘Well, if we’re going to Ombla tomorrow I shall go to bed, anyhow,’ said Grace, and went. Oh no, it wasn’t a bit serious, she said to herself; and the only thing was to go on – just as easily as that! – till something turned up and gave her a chance to withdraw.

  The Ombla is one of those Dalmatian rivers which, like so many other features of that strange coast, startles the traveller into a sense of enchanted unbelief. It appears just beyond the entrance to the harbour at Gruz as a broad estuary between white tree-flecked hills, and curves up a valley, southwards, till it reaches a point almost behind Ragusa itself. From this point the valley continues, stretching away to the south-east, but the astonished visitor presently realises that the river does not – except for a few small streams, the valley is dry. Out from under a white limestone cliff on the north side, through a jungle of wild figs and pomegranates, the river issues in a torrent, ice-cold, green and clear as glass, and within a hundred yards of its source broadening out to the width of the Thames at Oxford. It swings out into the middle of the valley floor and then flows gently between the broad fondamento of the village of Komolac – usually, but mistakenly, referred to by foreigners as Ombla; divides to embrace the low island opposite the deserted bathing establishment, and then, once more a single stream, takes its short and beautiful course to the sea. But the sudden appearance of this great mass of clear water out of the solid hillside fills the stranger with an Arabian-Nights sense of illusion, made all the stronger by the peaceable village activity which so soon encloses it – the wine boats from the islands moored to the quay opposite Pavlé Burié’s famous cellars, the restaurant with its tables and cheerful loiterers, the little skiffs, which replace a bridge in the communal life of the place, passing across from side to side, casually oared by schoolchildren, monks, market women or anyone else whose business takes him from one half of Komolac to the other.

  There are various ways of getting to Ombla. Participators in cruises are herded thither in a launch; the inhabitants go in a small bus from Gruz, which bumps and rattles along the road on the south bank; the discerning and fortunate charter a rowboat, also at Gruz, for a derisory sum, and go by water, in solitude, able to land wherever the whim takes them, and to float down on the swift current in the evening. Lady Kilmichael and Nicholas took this last way. Nicholas, again displaying his uncanny resource about means of transport, unearthed in the harbour at Gruz an old Italian-speaking boatman whose skiff was stepped for a mast, and who vowed that he was expert in the manipulation of a sail. This proved to be an overstatement: both mast and sail were unspeakably one-horse affairs, and Nicholas had to do the lion’s share in getting them rigged; once the sail was up and had caught the breeze, and the little craft began to move out across the sunny harbour, the ancient mariner quietly handed the tiller to Lady Kilmichael and the sheet to Nicholas, asked for a cigarette, and retired to the bows, where he sat, smoking, spitting and humming to himself, leaving his passengers to manage their navigation as they chose.

  It was delicious on the water. The sun was hot, but not too hot; and after they had rounded the blunt angle of the land and were fairly in the estuary, the boat skimmed along with a beam wind. To Grace Kilmichael, whose sailing had been done mostly in Hebridean waters, past rather featureless shores coloured in the dim duns, greens and buffs of that moisture-shadowed climate, it was strange to see under the arch of a sail white sun-bleached hills, vivid at the base with olives and cypresses and rich evergreen shrubs; and instead of the uniform stone-and-slate buildings of the Highlands, gleaming white or yellow houses with glowing pink roofs. In the strong sunlight, everything gleamed and glowed with a hot brilliance, as if enamelled. At the bend of the river the breeze, cut off by the hills, failed them, and they had to row. The current was strong, and though Nicholas took an oar their progress was slow and arduous. Some distance below the island, where the stream, in its narrowed bed, flows with particular violence, the boatman startled them by suddenly remarking ‘River ’ere run bloody fast,’ in clear English. And he suggested – now in Italian – a landing on the north bank. Then they could walk round to the source of the river, and follow the road back to Komolac, whither he would take the unladen boat to meet them for the return journey. So they put in near a small steep hill covered with trees and surmounted by a campanile, and, still leaving the boatman’s sudden burst into Anglo-Saxon unexplained, they landed; the boat pushed off again, and they were left with their afternoon to themselves.

  They found their way up to the road, and walked along it; it soon left the river, and led them through a green country, with olive trees everywhere, and here and there a thicket of pomegranates, whose fierce scarlet flowers flamed among their pale leaves. It was hot, and presently they halted to make tea, early though it was, on a bank shaded by a group of arbutus, the small waxy white flowers dangling like bell-shaped pearls among the dark foliage and the green and scarlet berries, with their fine granulated surface. Not less remarkable than the arbutus, however, were the flowers on that bank. There were, as Nicholas pointed out to Grace, three kinds of sage alone – one of a blue as deep as indigo, one pale and clear like a forget-me-not, a third with very large flowers the colour of apple blossom – and all with thick silver-white foliage. Where
the soil was thinner, the pink-and-silver convolvulus sprawled everywhere; the little meadow at their feet was thick with the delicate puce flowers of the wild gladiolus; and the air was sweet with a strong fragrance which they traced at last to the rocks above the bank, which were smothered in tufts of a bushy white thyme with flowers twice as large as the English variety.

  Nicholas became so absorbed in the flowers that Grace had some difficulty in dragging him on to find the source of the Ombla; he made her empty the tea out of the kettle, curtailing her last cup or two, in order that he might use it as a vasculum in which to carry his finds. Drag him on, however, at last she did, up the dusty white road, with the hills growing higher and nearer above them, till at last they were close in under the cliff-like heights. Grace had expected to be warned at a distance of the presence of the river by a roaring of waters, but they came on the source almost unawares; for it is in a singular silence that the Ombla issues from its subterranean bed. They stood on the bridge which here crosses it, watching the water swelling and twisting past below them, smooth and solid as glass, and with a glass-like quality about the recurrent shapes of its curves and eddies, perpetually dissolving, perpetually renewed in the same design. The overhanging masses of wild fig trees masked the actual exit – but there, a few yards away, was the living rock, and here the river; a conjunction dramatic enough to satisfy Lady Kilmichael’s most eager expectations. It was not exactly beautiful, but it was almost incredible; and as she watched it she tasted that very deep-seated human satisfaction of beholding a portent.