Illyrian Spring Page 7

  The young man, however, was deflected from his main theme by her last words. ‘I don’t see how painting can be a side issue, if you care about it at all,’ he said firmly.

  ‘It may have to be, if you’ve got other things to do,’ said Grace.

  ‘What sort of things?’ he asked, with his usual pertinacity in questioning.

  ‘Oh, a family, and a house and all that,’ she said, on a rather weary inflection that was almost a sigh. ‘Il faut du temps pour être femme,’ she quoted gaily, to cover up the sigh.

  But apparently it did not escape the boy – he was very quick about some things. ‘Oh, is that the care you wanted to leave behind?’ he asked. ‘Is it all that you want freedom from?’

  For a second Grace was tempted to use his own words of the afternoon – ‘Do you mind if we don’t talk about that?’ But that wasn’t fair – one must be gentle with the young, however awkward their questions were.

  ‘Of course I should like to have more time for painting,’ she said evasively. ‘But go on about your work – have you actually begun to be an architect?’

  ‘No – I start in the autumn at the Institute,’ he said. ‘And then go into Lothbury’s office. I’m keeping this term free to look round here and Greece – the Institute doesn’t think much of it, but Lothbury is rather keen on people taking an intelligent interest in the past.’

  ‘And there’s no chance of getting out of it?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Do you know my Father?’ the boy said. His tone was an answer in itself.

  Grace’s mind leapt back to Lady Roseneath’s remarks that very morning about her brother-in-law – together with the boy’s words they summoned up for her an uncomfortably vivid picture of the retired soldier, devoting his superabundant leisure to leading his family a life. She made no attempt to answer such an obviously rhetorical question. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all she found to say.

  ‘If it was only my Mother, it would be easy enough,’ said the young man, with an attempt at casualness that was almost painful to listen to, ‘and again, if it weren’t for my Mother, I think I should have forced it through, very likely. But as it is, I’ve had to let it go. However.’

  That word ‘however,’ the one philosophical utterance of the generation to which the creatures she loved best in the world belonged, struck on Lady Kilmichael’s ear with a familiarity which made it at once comic and pathetic. The boys always used it in cheerful resignation. Linnet was constantly saying it on those many and bitter occasions when she had proved, by a lengthy argument, how utterly unreasonable and even unpleasant her Mother was. Hearing it now on Nicholas’s lips, a wave of pity swept over Lady Kilmichael – pity for the boy beside her, pity for the thwarted Linnet in the past; the pity she always felt so keenly even when holding conscientiously and tenaciously to some righteous point of her own. Always, then, much sharper than her personal hurt at Linnet’s bitter words, was the pain of the child’s unhappy disappointed face. And here was another unhappy child. Somehow or other she must try to comfort him.

  ‘How does your Mother make it more difficult, exactly?’ she asked.

  ‘Because it all comes back on her, one way or another, if I have a showdown with my Father,’ he said. ‘I oughtn’t to bore you with all this, but if you know Aunt Lucia you must know most of what there is to know about my parents already, so it isn’t giving anything away. And it’s rather a help to talk about it to someone who understands; as you paint yourself – even as a side issue!’ – she could hear his grin again – ‘I’m sure you do understand.’ He paused, and drummed thoughtfully with his fingers on the rail. Grace waited – she liked him for his hesitation to discuss his family troubles with a stranger, even in what she realised to be his rather dire need.

  ‘My Father and I are rather a mess,’ he brought out presently. ‘I daresay it’s partly my fault, but not altogether. You see he lives in a world of his own; but the trouble is, he tries to make everyone else live in it too. And I don’t fit into it. So we don’t get on too brilliantly.’ He paused, and Grace tried, irrationally, to remember the very odd word Walter always used for the modern habit of understatement. What was it? – ‘my’ – something.

  ‘My Mother and I do get on,’ the boy pursued, ‘and left to herself she’d have been perfectly all right about this. But she gives in to him in the most absurd way; she simply can’t stand up to him. You see he thinks her a fool, which she isn’t; anyhow she wasn’t born one. But he’s told her she was for so long that she’s really come to believe she is, and she acts accordingly; she never will oppose his judgement in anything. It’s too silly. Especially as the money is nearly all hers.’

  It was the last remark which struck Grace most. She had had a passing wonder, as she listened, whether she herself was really less foolish than Walter thought, and whether her own intelligence might not have been weakened by the constant weight of suggestion. But that little remark about the money fairly hit her, it showed so clearly the difference between her own youth and youth today. Like most of the boy’s statements, it was made quite detachedly. But she and her brothers and sisters had never argued things out in that coldly clearsighted way – indeed, till her marriage settlements were drawn up she had never known where such money as there was in her family came from. Did her own children, she wondered, the boys and Linnet, see her and Walter with equal clearness, and argue out their respective incomes, intelligence and merits? A little uncomfortably, she had to suppose that they did.

  Aloud, ‘Is money much of a difficulty?’ she asked, anxious, since they had got so far, to grasp the problem thoroughly.

  ‘Not really, in the least – only with my Father. He has all sorts of ideas about it, even if there’s plenty,’ said the boy. ‘That’s why it’s a pity I couldn’t have got a bit farther on. If I could have made enough to keep myself, or done enough to show that I really could bring it off, it’s just possible it might have been all right. As it is, it’s too late, without a row that would break my Mother up. She’s not at all strong.’

  ‘I see,’ said Grace thoughtfully. She did indeed see it all, clearly, and she was considerably moved by the way the boy spoke of his mother, impersonal though it was. He was a good unselfish child in some ways, anyhow. ‘It’s all very difficult,’ she said. And then suddenly she laughed. She had let that sentence slip out, without remembering how the children had picked on it as one of her characteristic phrases – they always quoted it at her, now, whenever she displayed any irresolution. The young man turned his head towards her, surprised at her laughter; she hastened to explain. Nicholas Humphries, hearing how ‘it’s all very difficult’ had become a family slogan, laughed too. ‘I shouldn’t think your family had much trouble with you,’ he said.

  But Grace Kilmichael had taken a sudden resolution. She would at least see his stuff, and try to judge it for herself.

  ‘I should like to see some of your work,’ she said. ‘Have you got anything here?’

  ‘That’s very good of you,’ he said, ‘but actually I’ve nothing with me. I’ve really only been photographing – I’ve tried to put the other thing out of my head, as it wasn’t any good.’

  Nothing at all, Grace asked, no sketches, even? Yes, there were one or two sketches he hadn’t been able to resist doing at Chioggia, but that was all. Well, let her see those, Grace said. Eager and nervous, he went below to fetch them.

  Grace remained on deck. She was thinking of what she had heard. Here was another family where there was, as the boy said, ‘a mess.’ She and Linnet, she supposed, were a mess too; perhaps Linnet called it that. And yet she did love the child so! How was it? Did she too try to make everyone round her live in her own world? She couldn’t quite think that. And the boy had said she couldn’t be much trouble to her family. What a point of view! Grace thought, smiling in the dark. But he was young, too; he ought to know.

  But while Lady Kilmichael stood at the rail of a steamer in the Adriatic, thinking about the young, and Nicholas Humphries routed feveri
shly in a suitcase below for his sketches, to show to the strange woman who painted so well and understood so much, Linnet was again writing to her best friend.

  Aunt Gina and I had a prize row today – all about James. She said he’d only had three hours sleep per night, for a fortnight. Poor James! So I gave him my autographed copy of Brave New World, and I believe he’d sit up all night for a month on the strength of that. ‘Eoh Miss!’ he kept on saying, ‘that’s a prize, that is.’

  You know the funny thing is I don’t mind having rows with Aunt Gina a bit. She blackguards me, and I blackguard her back (as much as I think suitable in a p.g.!) and then we reach a modus, and that’s that. But it doesn’t fray one. Neither of us minds. Whereas rows with Mums are simply frightful, because though she doesn’t say half what Aunt G. does, she minds the existence of a row so terribly. At least I suppose that’s it. Anyhow it’s awful. And when I tell Aunt G. why I did X or Y, she takes it in, and just says, well I’m not to again – and that is also that. Whereas Mums always begins to think about my moral character and latent tendencies to evil, and is simply blinded by fuss over all that to the plain good reason I had then for doing so. Which makes it all so complicated. Do you suppose it’s the fact of being a parent which makes people so hopeless at understanding things, or was Mums specially born like it? Because she’s really rather a lamb in some ways.

  Poppy by the way is in a proper fever over Mums. He keeps asking if I’ve heard from her, which I haven’t. Gags wrote that she believed she was in Venice, or going to be – but it all seems pretty vague.

  Standing at the rail, waiting for the boy, Lady Kilmichael noticed all at once how sweet the air was. The wind had fallen light, and it was warmer; she guessed that in the dark they had entered some sheltered channel between the innumerable islands of that coast and were near the land, for the delicate breath of land scents, aromatic, flowery, faint, came to her as she stood. But she could see nothing. And then Nicholas Humphries was beside her again.

  ‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘But come for’ard a moment, on the other side; there are lights ahead – I believe we’re going into some harbour.’

  Lady Kilmichael followed him round to the port side, where they leant on the forward rail. Sure enough, a twinkle of lights showed ahead, low down by the water, but nothing else. And then, suddenly, a miracle happened. From above their heads the ship’s searchlight sprang out, and drew up out of the darkness before them a picture of a town, as if some vast creative hand had raised up a great painted canvas from the floor of the night. There was a quay, thronged with people – behind it a white square, a white church, a tall white campanile with a red spire, and white houses running up the hill behind. An immense plane tree stood at one side of the square, throwing its shadow across the ivory whiteness of the houses and the rich façade of the church. In the strong white light the whole scene was beautiful with a strange theatrical beauty – the green of the great tree, even the brightly coloured clothes of the people on the quay were clearly visible, but with a certain quality of unreality about them; the shadows were dead black, lacking the daylight hint of purple or blue. It was so startling, so lovely, that Lady Kilmichael was speechless. Nor did the boy say anything – he merely waved his hand at it, with that musical gesture which was becoming familiar to her. Slowly they steamed in, while the incredible picture, framed in the surrounding blackness, became more and more detailed and clear. At last the boy spoke.

  ‘If one could paint that – really paint it – you’d have done something, wouldn’t you?’ he said slowly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Grace. As they got nearer still – ‘Let’s go!’ he said abruptly. ‘It’s changing.’

  They went into the lounge. It was almost deserted by this time. The boy put down a little heap of sketches on a table, and then sat looking on while Lady Kilmichael examined them. She went through them slowly and carefully. Most were of buildings; these were accurate, delicate, very good of their rather pedestrian sort – what she called ‘French exercises.’ But at the bottom of the pile she came on two or three which really startled her. One was of a group of women under the apse of the church at Chioggia, their long black shawls brilliant against the pinkish buff of the building, laughing over a funny story told by one of them – the vivid self-satisfied face of the teller, the abandonment to mirth of the rest, were brilliantly, astonishingly done, even in the slight watercolour. There was another of an old man asleep in a moored boat, as immobile as his vessel, and a little boy, intensely awake, looking longingly at the fruit stalls on the fondamento behind. Over these two she lingered a long time. Yes – they were most unusual; gesture, colour, grouping, all showed a vitality, combined with a sense of form, which was really astonishing in a beginner. But could he get it across in a bigger picture, in oils? That was the question. She looked up, about to speak, and saw his eyes fixed on her with an intensity which was almost painful. She spoke quickly, to chase away that eager anxiety.

  ‘They’re good, Mr Humphries,’ she said.

  ‘They’re only sketches,’ he said with evident relief. ‘I wish you could see some of my bigger things.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Grace. She sat thinking, weighing a question in her mind; through the window, as the steamer moved, she caught a momentary distorted glimpse of the white campanile, still illuminated. It recalled the boy’s words as they stood together outside, and somehow that memory clinched her resolution.

  ‘How long are you going to be in Spalato?’ she asked.

  ‘As long as I like. Why?’

  ‘I mean to stay there at least a week,’ she said, ‘and a lot of the time I shall be making drawings, not painting. I wondered if you would care to use my things and do a small picture or two while I’m there. I could tell better from something in oil, with more purpose in it; something that worked out a definite scheme.’

  The boy stared at her. ‘Do you mean that? Of course I’d like to – better than anything. You really think they’re good enough to make it worthwhile to see more?’

  ‘To see that much more, anyhow,’ said Grace. ‘I can’t really tell from these.’

  ‘That’s good of you,’ he said – ‘really frightfully good. I will – I’ll begin tomorrow.’

  ‘Then you’d better go to bed now – it’s after eleven,’ she said, handing him back the sketches. ‘I must, anyhow.’ She rose, and held out her hand. ‘Good night, Mr Humphries,’ she said.

  He took her hand. ‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Nicholas. I wish you’d use it.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I will. Good night.’ And went off to bed. As she lay down in her little white stateroom and switched off the light, a curious thought visited her. She had only wanted to comfort an unhappy child; but what she had actually done, by her offer of help to Nicholas, was to range herself on the side of the young against their parents. How very odd. Still thinking how odd it was, Lady Kilmichael fell asleep.

  SEVEN

  The city of Spalato has one feature in common with, strangely enough, the village of Avebury in Wiltshire. That hamlet presents the unusual spectacle, not of an ancient monument in a village, but of a village in an ancient monument, lying as it does enclosed in its huge prehistoric circle. In the same way the old town of Spalato is enclosed complete within the four walls of the palace which the Emperor Diocletian, the slave’s son who became master of the world, built for the years of his retirement on the seashore of his native province. There it stands, this country residence of sixteen hundred years ago – its great walls still rising to a height of four storeys; its two temples, smothered in carving of a spring-like freshness and grace of design, still roofed and weatherproof; its streets and squares still ennobled with the tall and graceful colonnades which spring so airily from the pavement; its great gateways still looking down on the incomings and outgoings of its occupants. But in and through and round and over this Roman structure, stuck, gummed and crammed like the work of a mason bee against the old stonework, are the shops, the houses and
the churches of its more recent inhabitants; along the peristyle, now the Piazza, shop signs peer out between the arches of the colonnades; on the long façade which looks out over the sea the green shutters of private residents are flung back against the pillars, now embedded in masonry, of the old cryptoporticus, the great loggia’ed gallery which was the glory of the place at the time of its building, the exciting innovation of the imperial owner. Whole dwellings, and even a chapel, have been tunnelled out in the mighty thickness of the walls themselves, like rabbit burrows in a turf dyke; they say the place now holds three thousand souls. But in this extraordinary huddle of buildings, the accretion of thirteen hundred years, the original palace remains as it were fossilised, like a winged insect in amber or some strange fish in stone; preserved as no other structure of its age or size has been in Europe, save the buried buildings of Herculaneum and Pompeii. When in the seventh century the scattered inhabitants of Salona crept back from their starved exile in the islands to seek a livelihood on the mainland, and took shelter, not among the ruins of their city, but within the unshakeable walls of that great four-square structure which dominated the shore, they were, all unconsciously, initiating a work of preservation on a scale unknown to the Commission on Ancient Monuments.

  Today the city of Spalato has overflowed its ancient boundaries. Outside Diocletian’s walls, mainly to the west, a modern town has sprung up, with broad streets and large whitish buildings resembling the newer parts of Munich, where charabancs and motors carry the tourist to and fro, and petrol fumes and the ping of telephone bells are on the air. But still the traveller, arriving by sea, is arrested on the very quay by the sight of that great stretch of palace façade, rising over the masts of the inner harbour in a splendid unity, a single mighty completeness of design dominating the whole town.

  The morning of Lady Kilmichael’s arrival at Spalato was wet, and the steamer threaded its way in among the islands through grey streams of rain falling on low grey shores and a still grey sea. She herself was packed and dressed by six – but seeing no sign of Nicholas Humphries among the few sleepy-eyed passengers in the lounge and saloon, mindful of Lady Roseneath’s injunctions she sent a steward to dig him out, with an amused sense of familiarity – it was so usual to be seeing that the young really managed to do what they intended to do! At six-twenty-nine he appeared, sleepy, manifestly unshaven, hatless as usual, accompanied by several rather distended valises, a number of loose coats and a knapsack from which various objects protruded untidily – the very model of the incompetent traveller. His appearance moved her to a smile as she said ‘Good morning, Nicholas.’