“We must not give way to asperity.”
The Marchesa uttered this gently, so that it rather took the wind out of his sails.
“That’s very true,” he said.
“Although I now realise, Mr. Craine, that you and your wife have every reason to reproach us bitterly. And my own fault is very great. For it was my instinct from the first that Nino is utterly unreliable. And now, too late, we know the truth. He has cheated and betrayed us all.” She paused, and he was suddenly sure that she was indeed moved and shaken. Yet it was with a steady hand that she took his cup and poured more tea. “But not, after all, too late,” she went on. “Or not if your beliefs are as I take them to be. I suspect that there has been a guardian angel at work.” For the first time, Marchesa Forni smiled. “A wholly pagan guardian angel.”
“I don’t think I understand you.”
“A guardian angel that controlled my pen, and made me invent a child where there is no child. Return to your wife, Mr. Craine – for she is that, according to your secular persuasions. Make suitable explanations. You have seen the boy, and discussed his future with me. He is happy in his Italian surroundings, and it would be a mistake to think of any drastic change. I am arranging for his care and education. All that will be proper is the payment, through me or through some lawyer, of a small annual sum.”
There was again silence, in which he heard the tiny hiss of her silver kettle. Just how to take her proposal, in what terms to answer this counsel offered to the jungle, he seemed for a moment not to have an idea. When he did speak, it was like somebody in a play – somebody more concerned to screw out a few extra lines of effective dialogue than to get on with the business of the piece. “It would hardly work,” he said. “Jill’s a woman, after all, and humanly curious. She’d hardly consent to return to England without taking a look at John Arnander’s child.”
This time the Marchesa didn’t smile. She was wholly serious. “There is no difficulty,” she said. “I can find a suitable child in ten minutes. And as for Nino, you and I can arrange matters.”
Craine at this point was glad to pick up a minute cake and make a business of biting into it. Marchesa Forni as an ally took quite as much coping with as did Marchesa Forni as an adversary. And now she improved upon his silence by pointing out – unemphatically, as one might do with a self-evident proposition – that it was his duty to protect his wife from a dilemma which might well prove intolerable to her. Happily, in so acting he would also be protecting his own rights, which was something a gentleman was bound in honour to do.
He finished his cake – with nothing better occurring to him than certain unprofitable reflections on the nature of Italians in general. What, he asked himself, are you to do with such people? Mendacity is their element. The Marchesa, who only a few minutes before had been sincerely distressed, was perking up as she invented for him this proposed course of monstrous deception. How she could logically reprobate John Arnander for his lie was something he couldn’t penetrate to. But it remained true that he was coming to find the Marchesa rather a sympathetic character, and he didn’t want inconveniently to indulge an outburst of Anglo-Saxon rectitude. So he said, very gently, that John Arnander had rights too. In fact, he felt it was just there that it was necessary to begin.
The Marchesa didn’t resist this way of regarding the matter. Her position – he was beginning to see – was delicate. When she had believed that he and Jill had built their life in deliberate disregard of Arnander’s continued existence she had been against them – as her brusque cable and her first reception of him had made clear. Now that she could see their conduct as having been, in intention, innocent and legitimate, she had swung round for the moment, and was prepared to approve, or tolerate, a future course for them that wouldn’t be innocent or legitimate at all. It wouldn’t be kind to drive such an amiably prompted confusion to expose itself. And he mustn’t be impatient with her. For she knew things he wanted to know, and which there might be no other means of his knowing. So he began by asking her about Arnander’s blindness. What was its nature, and for how long had it afflicted him?
On the first point the Marchesa wasn’t precise. Amaurosi was the only technical-sounding word her explanation ran to, and Craine supposed it merely to describe that sort of malady in which the organ has suffered no visible damage. But certainly the trouble was incurable; this had been the pronouncement of a family doctor for whom the late Marchese had owned the highest regard. And its origin was no doubt in Nino’s wartime experiences. Its effects, as Craine must have been able to observe, had penetrated to the roots of his being, so that his whole personality was transformed.
Craine agreed that this was no doubt so. He had never known the earlier Arnander – the painter of the Maremma and the La Verna – but presumably he had been distinctly unlike the withdrawn being who wove baskets in the Marchesa’s turret chamber. She had earlier remarked that Nino never said much. But did he ever, in fact, say enough to make it appear assured that his mental processes were approximately the same as other people’s?
The Marchesa replied emphatically that Nino was sane. Her own life had given her certain standards of comparison in the matter. Nino existed in a dejected condition. But it wasn’t a pathological dejection that spun itself outward from within. It was a state one might readily imagine for oneself if one had a single passion and a single power – and if that passion and power had been rendered functionless at a stroke. No one could face such a deprivation uncrushed who was unable to find repose in a conviction of the infinite mercy of God.
Craine could produce nothing to say to this. No doubt – he was thinking – she had set priests at the poor devil. Indeed, from her own standpoint, she would very imperfectly have discharged her duty if she had not. But Arnander, it could be guessed, knew only one priesthood: Piero’s and Giorgione’s and Vermeer’s – or call it Amico di Sandro’s. The pious Italian voices, subtle or urgent, would have come to him without effect through his latter darkness; it might have been while he listened to them that he fingered out on paper those arabesques that he would never see. There was no question that the Marchesa knew all about this, and it puzzled him that her compassion could accommodate itself to planning a course by which Arnander would be cheated. Arnander hadn’t played fair by his wife – but he would be cheated if his wife weren’t given the opportunity of deciding what, now, would constitute playing fair by him. And fortunately there wasn’t for Craine, at present, any need to decide just where. fairness to Arnander stopped. That lay all in the future. It lay equally with Jill and himself – and as the Marchesa didn’t come into it there was no need to hold any debate with her now. But he still wanted information. “Is there any absolute reason,” he asked, “for his remaining dead?”
“I don’t know. My husband had formed an opinion on the matter, but it may not have been well founded. And I have scarcely known where I might safely go to find out.” The Marchesa raised her head and looked at the portrait of the royal personage which did its best to dominate the room. “We are not, you understand, quite where we were.”
“But at one time, certainly, the law would have been after him?”
“That was our belief. But it may have been some sort of impermanent military law. I spoke of my husband’s having come to a conclusion on the matter. He believed that Nino’s affair had been so buried beneath the chaos into which our country fell that there was little likelihood of any authority’s wishing to dig it up again.” The old lady paused. “Would that be your own opinion?”
“I’d be less unable to reply, Marchesa, if I had any clear notion of what his affair was.”
“You know nothing?”
“I know that he wasn’t simply reported missing, believed killed. His death was accepted by the International Red Cross. Well, there are several possibilities. He may simply have decided, for reasons of his own, to profit by a chance mistake that had been made. But that doesn’t sound to me a likely explanation. I suspect that the mistake wa
s a consequence of – well, call it some decisive evasive action of his own. I know what he’s supposed to have attempted – and to have been killed attempting. Perhaps his nerve failed him.”
“Would you blame him if it did?”
“No, I wouldn’t. But sometimes a man who loses his nerve goes on to do things that won’t – from a soldier’s point of view – at all do.”
“Nino was not a soldier.”
“I understand that.” Craine looked at the Marchesa curiously. She might be prepared to abet Jill and himself in sidestepping the consequences of their situation, but she had sheltered Arnander for too long not to have an instinct to continue to do so. “A commission like that,” he said, “is, of course, no more than a quasi-military affair – and, even so, Arnander was only very loosely attached to it”
“You know about the bridge?”
“Yes, I know about the bridge – in a general way.”
“It was already mined – and at the same time it was the only link for any effective communication with the enemy. But it was known that the German commandant had an excellent record in such matters, and some sort of contact was established by wireless. There seemed hope of a parley on the bridge itself at midnight. A staff captain was sent. But Nino was sent too – indeed, there can be little doubt he volunteered to go. He was sent, you may say”—and the Marchesa paused—”as representing what was above the battle. It was a responsibility.”
“It was certainly a responsibility.” If Craine’s tone was grim, it was without irony. “Particularly for a man who had, perhaps, his unreliable side. It’s a fair guess that he parted company with the captain and made himself scarce. But that doesn’t quite account for his being subsequently so definitely declared dead.”
“The bridge was destroyed. It was blown into a thousand fragments. That is one fact. And another is this: Nino is extremely intelligent. He was no doubt much more intelligent than anybody else who was making calculations and taking chances that night.” The Marchesa’s voice was harsh, but somewhere in it Craine thought he heard lurking admiration. The old lady, he saw, relished intelligence, even when it was allied to reprehensible courses. “And I think that – perhaps quite suddenly – he knew. The captain had penetrated to the farther bridgehead; Nino himself was in the middle, alone. And he suddenly knew, I say, that the gamble was hopeless. At any moment the bridge was going to go sky-high. And at that realisation, although he kept his intelligence, he lost his head. I believe it had something to do with vanity.”
The Marchesa paused again, and there was complete silence. The silver kettle had ceased to hiss. Craine found that he didn’t want to stir. It was as if this silence were echoing another silence – silence in a velvet Italian night, with men striving to catch some tiny indication of death crouching in a crater, crawling on a belly. “Vanity?” he forced himself to say.
“Vanity, certainly. We can scarcely, I’m afraid, call honour into court. Indeed, I don’t suppose that Nino’s traditions much allowed for anything of the sort.” The Marchesa, who had lately been proposing so large a deceitfulness, threw this in with a passing arrogance that Craine found engaging. “He could, no doubt, simply have walked away or crawled away – have returned to barracks, as you say. One can’t believe that anything very terrible would have happened to him. His cleverness would have had no difficulty in spinning an admirable story – a story, it might be, quite worth a medal. An American or English medal, if not an Italian one.”
Craine didn’t say anything. He took this mild insolence to be a sign that the Marchesa was now, in some odd fashion, enjoying herself. But whether she was giving him actual information perhaps acquired from Arnander himself, or whether she had simply embarked on speculation, was something that didn’t appear. Perhaps it didn’t matter. In all this, indeed, it was going to be something to hold on to that the past didn’t very much matter at all; that there was going to be a sufficient job of work in addressing oneself to the future. “I don’t imagine,” he said, “that Arnander would much think about medals. Not even Italian ones. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t see the point about vanity.”
“But now there comes another fact about Nino. He is an artist. That, I may say, was the basis of my husband’s admiration for him. I do not admire artists myself.”
“I don’t think I’d have supposed you to.” Craine was looking at the large portrait. It made a shocking business of a not unattractive seventeen-year-old boy. “Which renders the more admirable all you’ve done for the unfortunate man upstairs,” he added.
He thought that the old lady flushed. Certainly it was with some haste that she resumed her theme. “Nino’s intelligence remained serviceable, but his imagination took control. It dramatised his plight. He couldn’t stay; he couldn’t stay another five minutes in that dreadful spot. At the same time the bridge was a symbol. And he was on the bridge in a representative character. You follow me?”
Craine had no difficulty in following her. And he was reflecting that she was quite as intelligent as John Arnander could be. She was contriving all this tolerably precise communication with a due regard to the limitations of his Italian. “You suppose,” he said, “that he saw himself humiliated?”
“Indeed he did. And he wanted to die. But at the same time he wanted not to die. If he hadn’t so much wanted the second, he wouldn’t so much have wanted the first. It was a dilemma. Fortunately—shall we call it that?—there were several bodies on the bridge.”
The Marchesa’s dislike of artists, Craine thought, didn’t inhibit her from playing for a certain amount of artistic effect. But he needn’t go out of his way to encourage it. “Civilian bodies?” he asked prosaically. “Peasants caught on the road?”
“I see that you understand what followed. And one sees two facts about Nino’s deed. It wasn’t exactly sane. The bridge might not have been blown up. And, even if it was blown up, a body in his uniform, and with his papers and so on, might still have been recognisably not his body. I don’t know enough about high explosives to make a calculation myself.”
“Probably he didn’t either. But it was, at the least, a risky bet.”
“So I should have supposed. And the other fact one sees about Nino’s proceeding must be called, I think, its spiritually conclusive character. To do just that, to make that exchange of clothes with a dead body, in the dark, and listening perhaps for the return of a companion with whom one had set out on a dangerous and honourable enterprise . . . “
“Quite so.” Craine felt that this was all a matter on which one should keep to the bare bones. “But it came off?”
“It came off. Once away from the bridge, he had only to make his way to us.”
Craine waited for a moment. But the story appeared to be concluded. “I can understand,” he said, “that the Marchese had little difficulty in sheltering him at the time. But didn’t it become a problem later?”
“Certainly. When things settled down, and we gained a Government of sorts, a nameless Englishman without papers was an anomaly to some minds. There is a great deal of impertinence in the world nowadays. But, as I said before, my husband had only to assert his position and Nino was left discreetly alone. It was no doubt acknowledged that a blind man was scarcely likely to be a dangerous monarchist agent.”
“A blind man?” Craine was startled. “It happened as long ago as that?”
“Yes. Nino was already in distress about his sight when he reached us.”
“And his coming to you was final? He never put himself in communication with the outer world again?”
“Yes, he did. He had a friend called Morrison, an American painter who had managed to remain in Rome throughout the war. Nino sent for him, and he came two or three times to Castelarbia. It was through this Mr. Morrison that Nino claimed to have communicated with his wife, and to have settled matters with her. But when Mr. Morrison died, Nino seemed to feel that his last link with what you call the outer world was indeed broken.”
Craine nodd
ed. “It appears to be our business,” he said a shade grimly, “to forge it again. And at least I can’t see that we are dealing with a fugitive. I take it he told the story of the bridge to your late husband?”
“He told it to me, Mr. Craine.”
“Thank you.” He glanced swiftly at the Marchesa. She had spoken with sharp pride, so that he wondered why she was proposing to disburden herself of Arnander at all. Probably the marching orders she had received were pretty stiff, and the mode of living that lay ahead of her quite as straitened as she had represented. “And he must have told it,” he went on, “to this man Morrison?”
“No doubt he did. Mr. Morrison was devoted to him.”
“Then it appears to me, Marchesa, that Arnander can come publicly alive – or be brought publicly alive – with little risk to himself or anybody else.”
“I am relieved that you should think so. But it is not, of course, a fear of legal consequences that has – well, ingrained itself in Nino’s mind. Nor is it the point of honour – of vanity, as I think we were agreed in calling it. What he has not reconciled himself to is simply his affliction.”
“I’m very clear as to that.” Craine got to his feet. He had no impulse to linger at Castelarbia, or to do anything other than carry straight to Jill the cold fact they must confront together. The one issue he didn’t want – it queerly came to him for a moment – was to get himself killed on the road back to Arezzo. If that befell him, there would be things about himself that he would never know. And to know pretty fully about himself represented the scope of his ambition and the twitch of his tether. Other people weren’t for him. He wondered, he admired, but he didn’t – he was sure he didn’t – penetrate. What was it like to be John Arnander – now, at this very moment, up there in the turret room? He couldn’t do more than touch the rim of that darkness. Whereas there were men who would know. And no gift, it seemed to him, could be more wonderful than that.
A Use of Riches Page 8