Enchanter's Nightshade Page 3

  Down at the great arched doorway, through which a coach could be—and often had been—driven into the inner courtyard, he met the Countess Livia emerging from her apartment on the ground floor. Though Livia di Castellone had been a widow for six years, her tall slight figure was still perpetually clothed in sweeping black, with hints of crepe here and there; her face, once beautiful, now rather pinched and worn, looked out from the austere backward-sweeping lines of a widow’s bonnet; there was a curious mixture of resignation and discontent about the expression of her eyes and mouth, a sort of rigid refinement breathed from her whole person. She greeted her nephew with a conscientious show of affection. Giulio kissed her hand perfunctorily, and said “Good morning, Zia Livia. Are you going to Mass?” (It was usually a safe assumption that Zia Livia, when seen issuing from her house, was going either to Mass, or to Benediction, or to hear the Rosary). He did not want to know, he wished he had not met her, but one had to say something to people. It was not that Giulio particularly objected to his Aunt Livia, but when he was about to go anywhere or do anything he had a nervous dislike of meeting anyone, for fear of being hindered or stopped. People talked to you, involved you—he never could think quickly enough of the decided word which would set him free; and was liable to get carried off, from sheer irresolution and incompetence, on some horrible enterprise of other people’s. Or they asked you questions, to which he never knew the answers! Giulio never ceased to marvel at the things which people seemed to be interested in. What did it matter, any of it?

  This morning, as usual, he failed at the questionnaire.

  “How unfortunate about your father’s waggons,” Countess Livia began. “How many is it that are broken?”

  “Waggons?” Giulio stared at her blankly. “What waggons?”

  His aunt explained about the tragedy, and Fräulein Gelsicher’s note.

  “I am afraid I know nothing about them,” said Giulio, bored and embarrassed.

  “And dear Elena’s dress. Will Joséphine really have it ready for tonight?” the Countess went on, laying a detaining hand, delicate and small in its black kid glove, on his arm. “Dear child—it would be such a pity for her to be disappointed, would it not?”

  Giulio ran his free hand through his hair. “Zia Livia, Elena has already too many dresses!” he said, his voice harsh with nervousness. “I cannot keep up with them! Pardon me—I must leave you” —and he bent over her hand again, to kiss it in farewell.

  “Your hat! Giulio, you are not going out without a hat!” the Countess exclaimed, as he straightened himself and took a step towards the doorway.

  “Dio Mio! What does it matter? Scusa, Zia Livia,” he jerked out, and fairly ran through the great arch and out into the street. Oh, Holy Virgin, what a world to live in! “Waggons!” “Dresses!” “Hats!” he exclaimed loudly, as he passed with his rapid stride out of the Via Vittoria and into the broad boulevard, with its clipped avenues of horse chestnuts on either side, which led out of the town towards the North. “Dresses!” “Hats!” he muttered again furiously, skipping aside to avoid a pair of nurses, promenading slowly with their charges in the full fashionable panoply of brightly-coloured tartan print dresses, quilled caps, and long floating ribbons. What a world to live in! he thought again —when there was the clear world of formal thought to enter into, the hard clean shapeliness of truth to be apprehended, pursued and at last understood. A steady devotion to that search was surely the only way of living, for a rational creature. And time was of value—the days, precious as jewels, should be spent in that pilgrimage, not frittered away on dresses and hats! His face dark with irritation at human irrationality, he walked faster and faster, a thin, hurrying, figure, black hair blowing round his bent head; he only became once more aware of his surroundings when he was well outside the town.

  The Province of Gardone forms part of the great plain of North Italy which stretches, roughly, from the Gulf of Genoa to the Adriatic, under the mighty rampart of the Alps. But that northern mountain wall is not a straight line; it rather resembles a piece of coast—spurs project from it like headlands, wide bays eat back into it. And in one such bay lies the Province of Gardone. On either side lesser mountain chains stand out into the plain, half-enclosing it; only to the South does a soft horizon spread away into the dark heavy haze of a warm climate; to West, to North, to East the eye is checked, well within its range of vision, by a sea of tossing crests, standing up into the sky like the waves of a cardboard ocean. Most of the province, like the rest of the plain, is flat as a board; but a few kilometres north of Gardone the earth, approaching the mountains, begins to ruffle and crumple, as water ruffles and breaks near the shore, into small hills and eminences, with wide spaces between. Out in this direction lay Odredo, Castellone and Vill’ Alta, each with its formality of white walls, ilexes and cypresses crowning some dominating ridge; but Giulio, striding out of the town that morning, still only found himself in the characteristic flatness of the plain, when he at last checked his pace and began to look about him.

  He sauntered on, more quietly now; the fit of acute nervous irritation engendered by the impact of Countess Livia’s world on Croce’s had worn off, and he was able to enjoy what he saw. The flat road stretched away ahead of him, white and straight, bordered on either side by low mulberry-trees clipped into a sort of fan-shape, and planted at intervals; from tree to tree vines were trained in long loops. The mulberry-trees were in fresh leaf, a strong clear green, but along the loops of the vines the little buds and tendrils stood out, delicate and fine as goldsmiths’ work in their faint burnished copper-colour, their minute perfection of design. In the fields beside the road the pale spear-like leaves of the maize were beginning to thrust up through the rich black soil; frogs uttered their musical note in the ditches; a swift screamed overhead. The monotonous simplicity and familiarity of the landscape soothed Giulio—he knew this road so well, it was one of his constant winter walks. It was pleasant to see it in this Spring dress. But it had, also, for Giulio, this road, its special associated idea, such as roads near our homes tend to acquire, linked to it by months of solitary musings on its straight stretches; and this idea entered his mind now, unsummoned, as he walked along. It was essential that he should go away and study seriously somewhere, for a couple of years. This reading alone was not enough—at his age one needed lectures, criticism, teaching, the disciplined life of thought. Somehow his Father must be made to see the necessity of it.

  It was not at all easy to make Count Carlo see the necessity for things. The Province of Gardone was not exactly a hot-bed of advanced ideas, nor was the Count, viticulture apart, in the least modern in his outlook. He himself had been brought up in the position of a figlio di famiglia, the son of his family, comfortably supported under the parental roof, but given no such allowance as would enable him to exercise any sort of independence elsewhere until his marriage. This singular arrangement, almost peculiar to Italian society, which embittered Leopardi’s youth a century ago, still seemed to Count Carlo both natural and sensible; and though the name had become out of date even in Gardone, Giulio’s actual status remained very much what his Father’s had been. He had received a fairly good education, thanks largely to Fräulein Gelsicher’s influence; but once this was regarded as complete he had remained at home, spending the little money that he had on books, and his abundant leisure on reading.

  At first he had been fairly content, but as time went on, and his increased knowledge showed him more and more clearly his own limitations, his need for a proper course at a University had become an obsession with him. A couple of years at the Sorbonne, or three years at Oxford—that was what he wanted, he thought again now. It would not cost much; he could manage on a very small allowance—less than a third of what would gladly be allotted him the moment he decided to marry. Marriage! He jerked back his head, in a sort of angry disgust—yes, that his Father would think perfectly sensible, that would seem to him well worth while, for his son to marry and breed yet more Castel
lones! “Spawning!” he muttered, casting a contemptuous eye on the blinking and vociferous frogs in the roadside ditches. “As if there weren’t enough of us already, swarming all over the province!” he thought, with a sort of bitter repulsion. “Hasn’t Ernest enough children?” But to feed the mind, to breed ideas, to train himself to think, to school his thought into words, something more than his ephemeral sketches of a mood, all that to his Father would seem nothing. He decided that he must talk to Gelosia about it again—she could do more with the Count than anyone.

  If only his English were better, he thought, pursuing his idea in the faint encouragement which the thought of Gelosia’s help gave him, Oxford would really be the best. He could read English easily enough; but speaking it, and understanding it when spoken—that was difficult. How those two young Englishmen, Roffredo’s friends, who had stayed at Castellone last year, had laughed at his English when he tried to talk to them—laughed in fits! He had stuck to it, he had talked to them as much as he possibly could; their amusement was perfectly good-tempered, and he didn’t care! But that had shown him how difficult the business of lectures would be, if he were to go to Oxford.

  Roffredo’s name, coming into his mind, again deflected the current of his thoughts. Roffredo was his cousin, Countess Livia’s only child, and some five years older than himself— and with his name his image stood up in Giulio’s mind: his broad shoulders, his flaming red head, his good healthy mouth, opened in frequent laughter, the air of careless easy dominance that he carried about with him wherever he went. Giulio’s own face softened curiously as the thought of Roffredo came to him. He had for this cousin of his the devotion, inexplicable but so common, of the complicated intellectual for the athletic and simple-minded type, which is also physically splendid and morally robust. Mentally the two had nothing in common—Roffredo di Castellone never opened a book that was not concerned with engineering, and seldom indulged in the process of thought at all, unless in connection with the internal combustion engine, now in process of considerable development in Italy; his search for truth was confined to such scientific theories as dealt with the best arrangement of multi-cyclinder engines, and the flash points of various types of spirit. On such matters he was no fool; he had had one minor invention accepted by a firm in Milan, and was wrestling with another now. But he accepted with unquestioning readiness and even enjoyment those aspects of everyday life which seemed to Giulio so incomprehensible; and the relative beauty or ugliness of people’s souls troubled him not at all. Of faces and figures, yes!—very much so; but minds didn’t interest him.

  How much better Roffredo had managed his life, Giulio thought now, as he wandered along between the looped vines and the formal mulberry-trees, than he himself. He had, apparently without any particular trouble, forced the Countess Livia to let him become an engineer, and to make him a handsome allowance; he lived a completely independent life, and had just spent the whole winter in Paris studying the latest developments in four-cylinder engines. He had a car —one of the only two cars in the Province; it was only a one-cylinder one, but it had chugged triumphantly about the roads last summer, raising clouds of dust, and terrifying every horse-and bullock-team that it met. Roffredo—how homesick he was for his face and voice, after all these months!—Roffredo was doing the thing he was made for, and doing it well. Though exclusively concerned with matters which seemed to him, Giulio, of little or no importance, Roffredo himself was not unimportant; he was important in the self-existent independent way in which a fact is important—with the unquestioning, vigorous vitality of some splendid animal or tree. Thinking about Roffredo, he began forgetting his personal envy of his cousin’s position, to consider him in relation to what he had been reading that morning. Roffredo belonged in Croce’s third division, the practical sphere of individual action, seeking a particular end, without reference to the universal good or to ultimate standards of right or duty. His activities were what Croce described as “economic”. But to this form of action also Croce allowed spiritual validity—so that was all right. Giulio would have hated to feel that Roffredo was, so to speak, outside Croce’s circle of spiritual values.

  His eye was caught by a group of peasants, sitting under a knot of willows at the edge of a field. There was a woman feeding a baby at the breast; a couple of boys sat beside her, and two or three men lay on the rough grass, eating their midday meal out of coloured handkerchiefs. There was a certain beauty about the group of dark figures, sprawled on the pale ragged winter grass, under the thin green of the budding willows—Giulio sat down on a stone by the roadside and watched them, laughing, eating, and teasing the woman with lively gestures; they looked happy, healthy and contented. He smiled a little sourly, thinking of the Rousseauish idealisation of the simple peasant in some of the books he had read. No one who knew them could put the peasants of Gardone very high in the spiritual scale; they lied, they were sensual, promiscuous, dishonest and idly cruel. Poverty and simplicity they had, but these did not appear to improve them much, for all that the books implied that they were so good for the soul! An idea flicked into Giulio’s head as he watched the peasant group. Was it only the things of which one was conscious that affected the soul? In fact, was it the consciousness that was important? To those handsome creatures under the tree their dishonesty and sensuality were as natural as breath; did they therefore leave their actual souls unaffected—just as the apparent virtues of poverty and simplicity flowed off them, it seemed, like water off a duck’s back? He pulled out a rather bent note-book, and began to scribble away in it, working out this idea, oblivious of time, sitting in the sun on the stone by the roadside.

  When he had written to the end of his thought Giulio put his note-book back in his pocket, and coming out of his absorption, glanced across towards the group that had inspired it. The peasants had gone back to work—the baby alone lay among a heap of coats. He pulled out his watch and looked at it—Roffredo had one of the new watches which you strapped on your wrist, but he, Giulio, had only a heavy old artichoke on a chain! It was past twelve o’clock—then he would be wildly late for colazione, he thought, with irritated resignation. Well, there were more important things than meals. But for all that he set out with hurried strides towards the town.

  Colazione, leisurely meal though it was, was more than half over when Giulio returned. The Count, handsome, urban and urbane in a spring suit of light grey, sat at the head of the table—Fräulein Gelsicher at the foot, Elena on her Father’s right. Giulio coming in stood beside his Father, bowed, made a formal apology to him and to Fräulein Gelsicher, and was waved to his seat by the Count with a fine gesture. Umberto, in a white jacket and white cotton gloves, moved round the table waiting, assisted by Luigi, his nephew, a rather awkward youth of seventeen who divided his time between the kitchen, the pantry and the stables, without being a great success in any of them. When his employers were alone at meals Umberto permitted himself a good deal of confidential conversation with them, in a sort of ecclesiastical monotone—at Giulio’s entrance he now muttered to the Signorina that as the young Count was so late he had better begin with the nudels, so that Anna might make the young Count a fresh omelette; and on getting her assent bustled out of the room. Giulio, eating his nudels, listened to the conversation of his family. The Count, his napkin tucked carefully in under his splendid iron-grey beard, masticating salad, at once resumed a long monologue on a theory of root-pruning of vines which he had culled from the new French volume; Elena saluted this theme with a minute wink at her brother, brilliant and swift as the turn of a diamond in the sun—he did not however make the response she expected, and after enduring the vines for a few moments she interrupted her Father’s scientific flow gaily and brusquely with “Senti, Paparut’, do let the vines grow in peace for one moment! Giulio has not heard one word about Marietta.”

  Elena could take almost any liberties with her Father, especially when she called him by the local dialect word for a father, paparuto; the Count, amused, said b
enignly, “Speak, then, on this great theme!”

  Elena, thus unleashed, bubbled out her news.

  “Dunque, Marietta is to have a governess!”

  “Why?” interrupted Giulio, who was still feeling cross, partly because of his own lateness, partly from his general lack of interest in the concerns of others.

  “Dio mio, but to have lessons with her, and be taken about,” his sister retorted, not in the least dashed by this chilling reception of her news. “And senti, it is an Englishwoman.”

  For the first time Giulio was interested. An Englishwoman in the Province might really help his plans. Zia Suzy, whose mother had been an American, could of course speak English, but one of her more tiresome affectations, to Giulio, was the pretence that she had almost forgotten it. He interrupted Elena’s elaborations on the probable appearance of the governess by asking:

  “When does she come?”

  “Tuesday, they all come on Tuesday to Vill’ Alta.”

  “But the governess?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—soon—perhaps they meet her in Gardone. But in any case very soon. Will it not be nice for Gela?”

  “That depends on whether she is a nice person,” said the Count.