South Wind

by Norman Douglas

  Another wreath, from Count Caloveglia—an uncommonly pretty one, with a simple but heartfelt inscription—created legitimate surprise. Those white camellias, people reckoned, could not have cost less than twenty francs, and everybody knew that the dear old boy was as poor as a church mouse and that, moreover, he had enjoyed nothing but a bowing acquaintance with the deceased lady. He had indeed only spoken to her once in his life. But her face—her face had left an indelible impression on his sensitive and artistic mind.

  There was something Greek about Count Caloveglia. His pedigree, uncontaminated by Moor or Spaniard, went back to hoariest antiquity. Many people said he was a reincarnation of old Hellas. Elbowing his way through crowded cities or chatting with sunburnt peasant-lads among the vineyards, he received thrills of pleasurable inspiration—thrills to which grosser natures are inaccessible. He loved to watch the bodily movements of his fellow-creatures and all the eloquent gestures of Southern life—the lingering smile, the sullen stare of anger, the firm or flaccid step. Within this world of humdrum happenings he created a world of his own, a sculptor’s paradise. Colour said little to him. He was enamoured of form, the lively passion of the flesh, the tremulous play of nerve and muscle. A connoisseur of pose and expression, he looked at mankind from the plastic point of view, peering through accidentals into what was spiritual, pre-ordained, inevitable; striving to interpret—to waylay and hold fast—that divinity, fair or foul, which resides within one and all of us. How would this one look, divested of ephemeral appurtenances and standing there, in bronze or marble; what were the essential qualities of those features—their aesthetic mission to men like himself; to what type or relic of the classic age might they be assimilated? He was for ever disentangling the eternal from mundane accessories. And there was an element of the eternal, he used to declare, in every creature of earth.

  His was an enviable life. He dwelt among masterpieces. They were his beacons, his comrades, his realities. As for other things—the social accidents of time and place, his cares and his poverty—he wore them lightly; they sat upon his shoulders with easy grace, like his own threadbare coat. When he walked among men he could not help contriving imaginary statuary in his head, historical portraits or legendary groups; the faces and attitudes of those he encountered—each one found a place in the teeming realm of his creative phantasy, each one beckoned to him, from afar, as a joyous and necessary revelation.

  An enviable life; and never more enviable than on the occasion when he was introduced, at some absurd tea-party to the lady known as the Commissioner’s stepsister. The face! It took possession of him. It haunted his artistic dreamings from the same day onwards. He had always cherished ambitious designs—none more ambitious than a certain piece of work conceived in the bold Pergamese manner, a noble cluster of women to be entitled “The Eumenides.” … Her face! That wonderful face proclaimed itself the keynote of the group. If he lived a thousand years he would never behold its like again. What would he not have given to model the lady, then and there!

  But modeling was out of the question for the present. It must never be known that he was still capable of such an effort; it might spoil all his chances for the business in hand. He must continue to pose as heretofore for a harmless antiquarian, a dreamer. Nobody, save old Andrea the servant, must know the secret of his life. Yet he was not without hopes of being able to reveal himself ere long in his true character of creator. The day was perhaps not far distant when a pecuniary transaction between himself and his respected American friend, Mr. van Koppen, would ease the burdensome poverty of his life. Then—then he would return to the gold projects of his youth; to the “Eumenides,” first of all. Light-hearted with bright expectancy, he saw the financial deal well-nigh concluded; the cheque might be in his pocket within a week; and now already he saw himself, in imagination, donning his faded frock-coat and wending his way down to the Residency to lay the foundations of his heart’s desire. He would broach the subject with that insinuating Southern graciousness which was part and parcel of his nature; the lady’s vanity could be trusted to do the rest. He knew of old that no woman, however chaste and winsome, can resist the temptation of sitting as model to a genuine Count—and such a handsome old Count, into the bargain.

  And now suddenly she had died—died, it might be, only a few days too soon. That face, that peerless face, was lost for ever to the world of art—his ideal snatched away by the relentless hand of fate. He mourned as only a sculptor can mourn. Thus it came about that something stronger than himself impelled him to manifest his grief. Despite Andrea’s respectful but insistent remonstrances as to the appalling outlay, the wreath of camellias was ordered and dispatched. An artist’s tribute….

  It created both surprise and a most excellent impression. What a gentleman he was! Always doing the right thing. How splendid of him. So they reasoned, though the wiser ones added that if he had known the deceased lady a little better he might have hit upon a more sensible way of spending his money.

  The fact that there was a good deal of social gossip like this, that appointments for picnics and other functions were being made, would go alone to prove the advantages of a funeral of this kind, quite apart from the universal relief experienced when the coffin was lowered into the earth, and bystanders realized that the lady was at last definitely transferred into Abraham’s bosom.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  All Nepenthe had stood by the side of the grave—all, save only Mr. Keith. He remained at home. And this was rather odd, for it is the right thing to attend people’s funerals, and Mr. Keith prided himself upon always doing the right thing. It was his boast to pass for a typical Anglo-Saxon, the finest race on earth, when all is said and done; and he used to point out that you could not be a typical Anglo-Saxon unless you respected yourself, and you could not respect yourself unless you respected simultaneously your neighbours and their habits, however perverse they might sometimes appear. Now a funeral, being unavoidable, cannot by an prestidigitations of logic be called perverse. All the more reason for being present. But for a strange twist or kink in his nature, therefore, he would have been on the spot. He would have turned up in the market-place to the minute, since he prided himself likewise upon his love of punctuality, declaring that it was one of the many virtues he possessed in common with Her Majesty Queen Victoria.

  He disliked funerals. For all his open mind and open bowels, Mr. Keith displayed an unreasoning hatred of death and, what was still more remarkable, not the least shame in confessing it.

  “The next interment I purpose to attend,” he would say, “will be my own. May if be far off! No; I don’t care about funerals and the suggestion they convey. A cowardly attitude? I think not. The coward refuses to face a fact. Death is a fact. I have often faced him. He is not a pretty fellow. Most men only give him a shy glance out of a corner of their eye. It scares them out of their wits and makes them say all sorts of snobbishly respectful things about him. Sheer flummery! It is with Death as it is with God—we call them good because we are afraid of what they can do to us. That accounts for our politeness. Death, universal and inevitable, is none the less a villainous institution. Every other antagonist can be ignored or bribed or circumvented or crushed outright. But here is a damnable spectre who knocks at the door and does not wait to hear you say, ‘Come in.’ Hateful! If other people think differently it is because they live differently. How do they live? Like a cow that has stumbled into a dark hole, and now spends its time wondering how it managed to get such a sore behind. Such persons may well be gladdened by the approach of death. It is the best thing they can do—to depart from world which they call a dark hole, a world which was obviously not made for them, seeing that they are always feeling uncomfortable about one thing or another. Good riddance to them and their moral stomach-aches.”

  Mr. Keith professed never to feel uncomfortable. Oh, no! He had no moral stomach-aches. Unlike other folks, he “reacted to external stimuli in appropriate fashion,” he cultivated the “functio
n of the real,” he always knew how to “dominate his reflexes.” His neural currents were “duly co-ordinated.” Mr. Keith was in love with life. It dealt fairly with him. It made him loth to bid farewell to this gracious earth and the blue sky overhead, to his cooks and his books, his gardeners and roses and flaming cannas; loth to exchange these things of love, these tangible delights, for a hideous and everlasting annihilation.

  That was why, having got rid of the committee of exasperating buffoons, he was now prolonging breakfast far beyond the usual hour. The meal was over at last; and still he felt disinclined to move. Those people had disquieted his composure with their mephitic rant about philanthropy; they had almost succeeded in spoiling his morning. And now this funeral! Would he go into the house and do some reading or write a few letters? No. He could not write letters just them. He was not feeling sufficiently Rabelaisian. Epicurus was his God for the moment. In a mood of heathen wistfulness he lit a cigar and leaned back in the chair trying to recapture his serenity.

  It was his favourite corner of the domain—a kind of projecting spur or platform shaded by a few grandiose umbrella pines. Near at hand, on a slightly lower level, rose a group of flame—like cypresses whose shapely outlines stood out against the sea, shining far below like a lake of pearl. The milky sheen of morning, soon to be dispelled by the breeze, still hung about the water and distant continent—it trembled upon the horizon in bands of translucent opal. His eye roved round the undulating garden, full of sunlight and flowers and buzzing insects. From a verbena hard by came the liquid song of a blackcap. It gave him pleasure; he encouraged the blackcaps, delighting in their music and because they destroyed the spiders whose troublesome webs were apt to come in contact with his spectacles. The gardeners had severest instructions not to approach their nests. It was one of the minor griefs of his life that, being so short-sighted, he could never discover a bird’s nest; no, not even as a child. Memories of boyhood began to flit through his mind; they curled upwards in the scented wreaths of his Havana….

  The golden oriole’s flute-like whistle poured down from some leafy summit in a sudden stream of melody. A hurried note, he thought; expressed without much feeling—from duty rather than inclination; not like the full-throated ease of other orioles in other lands he knew. And so were the nightingales. They profited by his hospitality for a day or two and then, uttering a perfunctory little tune, some breathless and insincere word of thanks—just like any human visitor—betook themselves elsewhere, northwards.

  Northwards!

  He glanced into the mazy foliage of the pine tree overhead, out of which a shower of aromatic fragrance was descending to mingle with the harsher perfume of the cypress. How they changed their faces, the conifers—so fervent and friendly at this hour, so forbidding at nighttime! Rifts of blue sky now gleamed through its network of branches; drenched in the sunny rays, the tree seemed to shudder and crackle with warmth. He listened. There was silence among those coralline articulations. Soon it would be broken. Soon the cicada would strike up its note in the labyrinth of needles—annual signal for his own departure from Nepenthe. He always waited for the first cicada.

  Northwards!

  To his little place in the Highlands, at first. The meager soil and parsimonious culture, the reasonable discourse of the people, their wholesome disputatiousness, acted as a kind of purge or tonic after all this Southern exuberance. Scotland chastened him; its rocks and tawny glinting waters and bleak purple uplands rectified his perspective. He called to mind the sensuous melancholy of the birches, the foxgloves, the hedgerows smothered in dog-roses; he remembered the nights, full of fairy-like suggestion and odours of earth and budding leaves—those wonderful nights with their silvery radiance, calm and benignant, streaming upwards form the luminous North.

  Then, after strolling aimlessly elsewhere, on sea or land, visiting friends—no matter whom or where—he would return to Nepenthe to indulge his genius to the full in the vintage bacchanals. He owned a small plantation that lay high up, among the easterly cliffs of the island. It produced that mountain wine which was held to be the best on Nepenthe. The vines grew upon a natural platform, surrounded by rugged lava crags that overhung the sea.

  Hither he was wont to repair with certain of his domestic staff and three or four friends from out of his “inner circle,” to superintend the pressing of the grapes. There was a rude structure of masonry on the spot—a vaulted chamber containing winepress and vats and hoes and other implements of the husbandman’s time-honoured craft; a few chairs and a table completed the furniture. Nobody knew exactly what happened up here. People talked of wild and shameless carousals; the rocks were said to resound with ribald laughter while Mr. Keith, oozing paganism at every pore, danced faun-like measures to the sound of rustic flutes. Certain it was that the party often got riotously tipsy.

  So tipsy that sometimes their host was unable to be moved down to his villa. On such days he was put to bed on the floor between two wine barrels, and the chef hastily advised to come up with some food and a portable kitchen range. In earliest morning he would insist upon tottering forth to watch the sun as it rose behind the peaks of the distant mainland, flooding the sea with golden radiance and causing the precipices to glitter like burnished bronze. He loved the sunrise—he saw it so seldom. Then breakfast; a rather simple breakfast by way of a change. It was on one of these occasions that the chef made a mistake which his master was slow to forgive. He prepared for that critical meal a dish of poached eggs, the sight of which threw Mr. Keith into an incomprehensible fit of rage.

  “Take those damned things away, quickly!” he commanded. It was the celebrated artist’s one and only LACHE.

  As a rule, however, he did not sleep on the spot. Peasants, climbing to their work on the hillsides in the twilit hour of dawn, were wont to encounter that staggering procession headed by Mr. Keith who, with spectacles all awry and crooning softly to himself, was carried round the more perilous turnings by a contingent of his devoted retainers.

  He found it pleasant to live like this. And now another spring was nearing to its end. For how many more years, he wondered…. That confounded funeral….

  There was a rustle at his back. The southerly breeze had struck Nepenthe on its morning ripple over the Tyrrhenian, setting things astir; it searched a passage through those mighty canes which sprouted in a dank hollow where the rains of winter commingled their waters. The leaves grew vocal with a sound like the splash of a rivulet. Often had he listened joyfully to that melody which compensated, to some small degree, for the lack of the old Duke’s twenty-four fountains. Legendary music! Now it made him sad. What was its burden? MIDAS HAD ASSES’ EARS. Midas, the fabled king, whose touch turned everything to gold. And gold, and jewels—of what avail were these against the spectre?

  The gardeners, moving with bare feet among the sinuous paths, were quick to perceive that a cloud had fallen upon his spirit. They divined his moods with the tactfulness of natural sympathy. On some horticultural pretext one of them drew near and craftily engaged his thoughts and conversation. At last he said something that made him smile. One or two more appeared upon the scene, as if by accident. It was evident that the master needed cheering up. They began to tell him the fairy-tales he loved; tales of robbers and witches and pirates—grand old tales that never wearied him. To arouse his interest they joked among themselves, as though unaware of his existence. One of them, and then another, sang some wild song of love and war which he had picked up while wandering with his flocks among the craggy hills of yonder mainland. He was laughing now; outdoing their songs and stories. It kept him young—to unbend, to play the fool in company such as theirs and relax the fibres stiffened by conventionality; it refreshed him to exchange the ephemeral for the eternal, the tomfoolery of social life for Theocritus and his deathless creatures. How fair it was, this smiling earth! How blithely the young voices went aloft!

  They failed to drown those other strains, vagrant wraiths that now floated upwards over fie
lds and houses on the tepid wings of the sirocco—fragmentary snatches, torn from the brazen measure of the municipal band as it marched with the funeral procession. He cursed the sounds from the bottom of his heart. They reminded him of that infamous apparition, of all he most ardently desired to forget. His laughter died down. Wanly he looked at his mirthful pagans, the embodiment of joys. Yes; these were his distractions, his playmates, his elixir of life, his antidote against the only disease, the only sin, crime, vice which he recognized on earth—a vice none the less, because it happened to be the inevitable—the vice of old age. And all the time that pallid swarm came crowding on: messengers from the inexorable spectre. He felt them creeping about with ghostly tread, blighting the radiance of his life, tainting the very air he breathed. Hateful intruders! They wailed among his lilies. The garden was full of their horrid footsteps.

  In their presence Mr. Keith began to experience an uncomfortable sensation, a kind of chill—as though something evil had stepped between himself and the brave light of the sun. It was a fleeting feeling which he would have diagnosed, in other people, as perilously akin to a moral stomach-ache.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  Only one other person on Nepenthe found cause to complain of the municipal music. It was Mr. Heard. Altogether, he was not greatly edified by this, the first funeral of its kind he had ever witnessed. A rowdy-dowdy business, he called it. The music was too lively and blatant for so solemn an occasion; the gorgeous vestments of the clergy, the loud chattering among the mourners, the violent gestures that accompanied Torquemada’s well-meant and carefully prepared oration (Don Francesco, a born speaker, would have done it better, but the defunct was no friend or even client of his)—all these things savoured slightly of irreverence. Everyone was talking and laughing as they marched along. It was more like a polonaise than a funeral. In his African period the sight of such a burial would have affected him unpleasantly. But Mr. Heard was changing, widening out.