From the darkening valley there rose up the first strong singing note of the campanile, and she turned from the men towards it with a motion of love. But that day was not to close without the frustration of every hope. The sound inspired Feo to make conversation, and, as the mountains reverberated, he said: ‘Is it not unfortunate, sir? A gentleman went to see our fine new tower this morning and he believes that the land is slipping from underneath, and that it will fall. Of course it will not harm us up here.’
His speech was successful. The stormy scene came to an abrupt and placid conclusion. Before they had realized it, she had taken up her Baedeker and left them, with no tragic gesture. In that moment of final failure, there had been vouchsafed to her a vision of herself, and she saw that she had lived worthily. She was conscious of a triumph over experience and earthly facts, a triumph magnificent, cold, hardly human, whose existence no one but herself would ever surmise. From the view terrace she looked down on the perishing and perishable beauty of the valley, and, though she loved it no less, it seemed to be infinitely distant, like a valley in a star. At that moment, if kind voices had called her from the hotel, she would not have returned. ‘I suppose this is old age,’ she thought. ‘It’s not so very dreadful.’
No one did call her. Colonel Leyland would have liked to do so; for he knew she must be unhappy. But she had hurt him too much; she had exposed her thoughts and desires to a man of another class. Not only she, but he himself and all their equals, were degraded by it. She had discovered their nakedness to the alien.
People came in to dress for dinner and for the concert. From the hall there pressed out a stream of excited servants, filling the lounge as an operatic chorus fills the stage, and announcing the approach of the manager. It was impossible to pretend that nothing had happened. The scandal would be immense, and must be diminished as it best might.
Much as Colonel Leyland disliked touching people he took Feo by the arm, and then quickly raised his finger to his forehead.
‘Exactly, sir,’ whispered the concierge. ‘Of course we understand—Oh, thank you, sir, thank you very much: thank you very much indeed!’
EXPLANATORY NOTES
THE STORY OF A PANIC
1 “Satan finds some mischief still for—.” “Against Idleness and Mischief,” by Isaac Watts (1674-1748).
2 facchino. In Italian, a porter.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HEDGE
1 Lee-Metford. A type of rifle used by the British military in the 1880s, predecessor of the Lee-Enfield.
THE CELESTIAL OMNIBUS
1 Surbiton. The popular characterization of this south London suburb as the epitome of English middlebrow affluence is illustrated not only in “The Celestial Omnibus,” but in The Good Life (also known as Good Neighbours), a BBC situation comedy produced more than half a century later and also set in Surbiton.
2 Browne. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), physician and author of Religio Medici (1635) and Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), among other works.
3 Acheron. The river of woe, one of the five rivers of Hades.
4 ‘ “Standing aloof in giant ignorance ...” ’ “To Homer,” by John Keats (1818).
5 Mrs Gamp and Mrs Harris. Characters, along with Mrs. Prig, in Charles Dickens’s novel The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). Mrs. Harris, a figment of Mrs. Gamp’s imagination, also makes an appearance in chapter 9 of Forster’s A Room with a View: “Poor old man! What was his name?”
“Harris,” said Lucy glibly.
“Let’s hope that Mrs. Harris there warn’t no sich person,”
said her mother.
Cecil nodded intelligently.
6 Telos. In Greek, end or completion.
OTHER KINGDOM
1 Croesus. The prosperous last king of Lydia in Asia Minor (560-546 B.C.), who was defeated and captured by Cyrus the Great of Persia about eleven years into his reign. Later, the name “Croesus” came to denote any wealthy man.
2 Veii. An ancient Etruscan city, located north of Rome, to which it finally succumbed after a ten-year siege in 396 B.C.
THE CURATE’S FRIEND
1 the Pelagians. Pelagius was a British monk convicted of heresy in 417, after he argued against the existence of original sin and the necessity of infant baptism.
THE MACHINE STOPS
1 Lafcadio Hearn, Carlyle, Mirabeau. Although the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) is best remembered for his twelve books about Japan, he also wrote extensively on English and American literature. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the British historian and essayist, was the author of The French Revolution, A History (1837), among many other works. Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791), was a French statesman and aristocrat who attempted to pave the way toward a constitutional monarchy during the early part of the French Revolution. The other names in this list are inventions of Forster’s.
THE POINT OF IT
1 The lines quoted are from Tennyson’s Ulysses (1842).
CO-ORDINATION
1 ‘Ces demoiselles ont un vrai elan vers la gloire.’ “These young ladies have a true impulse toward glory.”
THE STORY OF THE SIREN
1 ... something rich and strange. Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.ii.404.
2 San Biagio, or Saint Blaise, the bishop of Sebaste in Cappadocia, elected to live as a hermit in a cave. Birds fed him and wild animals gathered round him to be blessed. Later, he was captured by soldiers, tortured, imprisoned, and, in 316, beheaded for refusing to worship pagan gods. His spirit is invoked to cure illnesses, specifically of the throat.The bones of San Biagio are said to be located in the Renaissance temple dedicated to his memory near the Tuscan town of Montepulciano; however, there is also a Norman church dedicated to the saint in the Sicilian city of Agrigento, closer to where “The Story of the Siren” takes place.
THE ETERNAL MOMENT
1 ‘But woe to him through whom the offence cometh.’ Matt. 18:7.
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