After the opera, there was a late supper and much gayety. With their memories refreshed by the opera, J.D. became Armand, and Mack dubbed himself the rakish old count. Everyone was in the best of spirits. Charlotte entered into the merrymaking as heartily as if she were an old hand at it. Good humor ran high.
CHARLOTTE AND J.D. DIDN’T WAIT on the dock till Mack and Deb’s ocean liner had disappeared.
“Come,” said J.D., slipping an urgent hand beneath Charlotte’s elbow. “Giuseppe is waiting for us. We can’t afford to waste a minute here with the program I’ve laid out.”
He had studied maps, figured mileage, talked to guides, and made his own arrangements with Giuseppe. J.D. had reserved for this last day alone with Charlotte the little town of Ravello, near Amalfi, and an old Benedictine abbey with a twelfth-century cloister near Salerno. Both could be included in a day’s trip from Naples. The route he planned made a loop following an inland road from Pompeii to Salerno, then skirted the sea to Amalfi, detoured up to Ravello, descending to follow the famous road to Sorrento. At Sorrento they would eat their last dinner together in state, returning to Naples in the early evening, in good time for Charlotte’s midnight sailing.
Giuseppe had assured Durrance that he had often been to the old abbey, and “Si-si, oui-oui, okay, Signor,” was familiar with the short cut, which J.D. had read was well worth the roughness of the road because of its marvelous views. But Giuseppe must have had in mind some other abbey, and some other short cut, for though the road he took was certainly rough, it dwindled into a twisting cart path which ended finally on a bare uncultivated hilltop.
Charlotte and J.D. did not dine in state at Sorrento that night. Instead they drank café au lait and munched hard bread beneath a fragment of tiled roof across the corner of a crumbling wall. Not far away their car lay at the foot of a retaining wall. Luckily it wasn’t a high wall, or else when Giuseppe had backed off over its edge, Charlotte and J.D. wouldn’t have been able to crawl out one of its windows unhurt, and survey its plight with emotions that provoked laughter instead of tears.
When the catastrophe occurred, it was mid-afternoon, and they were already so far behind their schedule that they had decided to omit Ravello in favor of the abbey. Soon after leaving Pompeii, something wrong had developed with Giuseppe’s car. It was unable to make over 20 miles an hour on the level, and crawled up hills with the snail’s pace of a tractor.
“Well, at least it’s safe! And who wants speed when the views are so glorious?” Charlotte had rationalized, when J.D. began blaming himself for being such an inexperienced traveler as to engage any car he saw on the street, just because its driver had a friendly grin on his face and a collapsible top on his car. Or, at least, he said it would collapse. The fact of the matter was, neither Giuseppe nor a brawny mechanic at a gasoline station en route could budge it.
Giuseppe was on the verge of hysterics when Charlotte and J.D. first crawled out of the overturned car. Tears streamed down his face, and he leaned his head against one of its upturned tires and sobbed. J.D. patted his round, shaking shoulders in the hope of calming him so he could listen.
As the car had slowly ascended the rough road a thick white cloud slowly descended, shutting out the surrounding landscape, so that they had soon lost all sense of direction. But Giuseppe would know where lay the last town through which they had passed and could descend on foot by the quickest route, once he became sufficiently calm.
Finally J.D.’s pattings were rewarded by Giuseppe’s straightening up, and bursting forth not only into speech, but into action too, his avalanche of words being accompanied by violent gesticulations, by which he conveyed his intention of descending to the valley to get cavallo-e-corda while Signor and Signorina remained with the car. “Cavallo-e-corda, cavallo-e-corda,” he said again and again.
“Horse and rope, of course!” finally Charlotte exclaimed.
“No! No! Giuseppe!” J.D. remonstrated, “not cavallo and corda! Not now. Not first. First, Giuseppe, go get another automobile and chauffeur. Much money for Giuseppe, multo lire—multo! Signorina must go Napoli immediatement. Catch big boat. Giuseppe stay here after Signor and Signorina go Naples and then Giuseppe go get cavallo-e-corda and come Napoli later. Comprehendare?”
Giuseppe shook his head, a pained expression in his eyes. So J.D. resorted to a medium Giuseppe could understand. From an inside pocket he produced a pencil and the black notebook. On one of its blank pages he sketched an automobile, the figure of a chauffeur bent over the driving-wheel and two windblown passengers behind, holding on to hats and flying scarves. On the opposite page the outline of an ocean liner flowed from the magic pencil-tip. Giuseppe stared fascinated. So also Charlotte.
“What’s the word for ‘tonight’?” he inquired, his pencil flashing.
“Stasera,” Charlotte replied.
The face of a clock appeared over the ocean liner, both hands pointing to 12:00. He tapped the hands. “Stasera,” he repeated several times slowly and emphatically. Then tapped the ocean liner. “Big boat go, depart, puff-puff-puff, stasera.”
“Capisco!” Suddenly Giuseppe exclaimed. “Si, si, si, si! Okay! Puff-puff-puff,” he mimicked with the delight of a child. “Giuseppe go quick for altra automobile. Come back quick! Okay! Fine and dandy!” As elated as a dog who at last understands his master’s wishes, he was as eager to be off.
“Presto! Vivo! Allegro!” J.D. shouted as he disappeared in the mist, running down the pebbly road as fast as his stubby legs would carry him. It was the last they ever saw of Giuseppe.
The overturned car did not belong to Giuseppe, and it occurred to him as he hurried down the rough hillside that when its owner discovered what had happened to his automobile he would not pat him on the shoulder, however much he sobbed. The automobile was the property of a Neapolitan who was earning a scant living by purchasing old cars and fitting them out for sightseeing service. Giuseppe had been in his employ only a few days. He had come to Naples to make enough money to buy a truck of his own. He was a good truck driver. He had delivered many loads of wine casks to Bari, and even as far as Gallipoli, for his former employer.
The vision of the overturned car returned to Giuseppe like the ghoulish details of some crime he had committed. The instinct to escape from that automobile lying up there like a dead body gripped him like a vise. All the money he had was now strapped to his body in a worn leather wallet. He felt sure his employer would take it all away from him to pay for the damage to his car. How then would he ever get back to his beloved Alberrobello again? Ever since he’d left it, he’d been homesick for his little beehive-shaped truli hugging the ground, and for Maria and the bambini huddled around the fire in the middle.
Giuseppe decided it would be wise to crawl into some underbrush to wait for darkness to conceal his escape.
“LET’S WALK ALONG THE ROAD and meet Giuseppe,” J.D. suggested to Charlotte at the end of the half hour.
They descended through the dense cloud of mist. They’d gone about a quarter of a mile when they came to a fork in the road. Neither could tell by which prong they’d come.
“If we choose the wrong one, we may land at another cellar hole,” said Charlotte.
“And if Giuseppe finds us gone, what then? I think we’d better go back to the spot where he left us. He is sure to be back in an hour.”
But he wasn’t. At the end of two hours and a half, J.D. proposed that he go in search of help, leaving Charlotte on the hilltop in case Giuseppe arrived in his absence.
“We’ll stick together, if you don’t mind,” said Charlotte. “Even though I may not impress you as the clinging-vine type, I prefer not to be left alone in this God-forsaken spot.”
The mist became rain as the afternoon wore on. It was fortunate that they had even a fragment of roof over their heads. The overturned automobile offered impossible quarters. There was a pile of something soft beneath the roof—old straw of some sort. It smelled of autumn woods. Seated upon it side by side they wer
e as dry, at first, as two birds perched behind the overhanging eaves of a building gazing out through a torrent of water. As their hope of rescue diminished, Charlotte’s cheeriness increased.
“But what if you lose your boat?”
“Well, I’ve no one on board who will lie awake worrying.”
“What if we have to stay here all night?”
“It won’t kill us. There are no man-eating animals up here.”
“You are a darned good sport!”
“Nonsense! This is the first thrilling experience I’ve ever had! Dullness day after day requires a lot more good sportsmanship.”
In spite of the laprobe salvaged from the car, they were far from warm. Every little while they stood up, stamped their feet and waved their arms. J.D. had slipped a flask of whiskey into his overcoat pocket before starting, but he didn’t disturb it. Its warming effect might be needed later.
As the oyster-white shroud enveloping the hilltop turned to slate-gray and night began to fall, J.D. descended to the car to sack it of all it had to offer, calling out to Charlotte, waiting outside, that he felt like a deep-sea diver scuttling a sunken ship. There had followed a variety of articles—rubber floormats, linen seat-covers (the seats themselves wouldn’t go through the window), several pieces of carpet, a bunch of oily waste, a tool kit, a flashlight that worked, and Giuseppe’s lunchpail with a bottle full of café au lait and several hunks of bread. Together they transported their plunder to their shelter. It had sprung a leak in their absence. A steady drizzle was falling onto the center of their straw couch.
“Don’t worry. I can fix it,” said J.D. “I’m a very handy man around the house. Give me one of those rubber mats.”
The roof was low. There was a pile of stones beside it and he easily climbed on top. He had laid the mat over the hole, but the wind was blowing a gale now, and it wouldn’t stay in place. He returned to the car, the tool kit under his arm, and attacked the locked door of its upturned tail-end, prying it open with a screwdriver and hammer. There was a spare tire and a bagful of chains in its dark interior. The combined weight of these would hold down the rubber mat! He carried them up to the roof. Before he had completed his job, Charlotte’s bare head, sleek and wet as a seal’s, appeared at the edge of the tiles.
“Hi!” she shouted, for the wind and rain were making a terrific noise now. “Can I help?”
“No thanks. Nearly finished. How’s the leak?”
“Not a drop now. Here, I’ll hold this edge. She was on top of the roof on her hands and knees beside him now.
“No, no! Get inside and keep dry. Do as I say.”
Meekly she obeyed. He joined her a few minutes later, the water running off him in streams. Before going onto the roof he had removed all but his white shirt and underwear. But he hadn’t stopped to remove his tie. It was sopping wet now. He stepped up in front of Charlotte, lifted up his chin, and said, “See if you can untie this darned thing.”
When she had succeeded, he pulled off his shirt over his head, Charlotte again helping in the process, for it clung to him like a wet handkerchief to a window pane.
“Use this for a towel,” she said, and passed him one of the linen seat-covers.
“Good idea! Say, aren’t we a wonderful pair of Robinson Crusoes?” he grunted as he rubbed. Night had fallen rapidly. He was only a splotch in the sea of shifting darkness. “Where’s that flashlight?”
She passed it to him, snapping the little button on its shaft. It shed a glow hardly brighter than a firefly’s gleam, but strong enough to cast big shadows, and sufficient for J.D. to see his clothes. He pulled on his trousers, tightened his belt, slipped into his coat. It was the first time Charlotte had ever witnessed this automatic series of motions, so familiar to most women, she supposed.
“Supper is on the table,” she announced crisply and turned the flashlight full onto the results of her recent activities.
In front of the straw couch, now covered with a rubber mat and a steamer rug, she had placed her small suitcase. Two handkerchiefs served as doilies, on which she had placed the bread, the bottle of coffee, and four graham crackers each.
“Holy smoke! Where did those crackers come from?”
“I learned at Cascade that a sensation of fatigue can often be quieted with a cracker, like a fussy child. So I slipped them in my suitcase this morning.”
“In case I tired you? Look here, are you cold?” She had given one or two suspicious jerks.
“I’ll be all right when I’ve eaten something.”
“You’d think with a boxful of matches in my pocket and a tankful of gasoline in the car I could think of some way of making a fire, besides burning up the car. If we could only find something in the way of fuel! Hot coffee inside is more warming than cold. Look here! I’ve a thought!” He picked up the tool kit and turned to go.
“You aren’t going to leave me in this place alone, and go hunting for wood, are you?”
“Only as far as the car. Where’s Giuseppe’s tin pail?” She passed it to him. He held it up under one of the streams of water running down from the roof. “Good! It’s tight! At least the bottom. I’ll leave it here on the ground, filling up while I’m gone.”
“When he returned he had several jagged-edged pieces of boards under his arm. One had been a rack for luggage over the spare tire, and he had discovered more wooden construction on the floor and under the seat. He broke up his loot into small pieces while Charlotte held the flashlight.
“Dry as a chip! How full of water is Giuseppe’s pail?”
“As full as it ever will be. It’s got a hole quarter way up.”
“Well, all we need is enough to act as a bottle-heater for Giuseppe’s coffee, so we won’t run the risk of losing the precious stuff in the fire.”
Squatting down, he began fashioning a small nest, no bigger than the inside of a man’s hat, out of the stones near-by. Suddenly the flashlight went out! “Damn!” he muttered. “But our eyes will get used to it. We’ll wait a little.” They both tilted forward on their knees and sat back on their heels.
11
A FLIRTATION, BY DOCTOR’S ORDERS
Were you ever a Boy Scout?” Charlotte’s voice inquired out of the darkness.
“Good Heavens, no! I belong way back in the Christian Endeavor era. Why?”
“You seem to know a lot about making fires and roughing it.”
“Well, Tina and I do a little roughing it once in a while. Tina loves the woods, and is a great kid in such a setting.”
“You seem to be more congenial with Tina than with your other daughters.”
“I’ve seen more of her. I’ve always felt responsible for Tina’s existence, which she never asked for, and which she has found so full of difficulties, poor kid. I look upon Tina as my guilty-conscience child.”
“Something like guilty-conscience flowers, I suppose.”
“Well, possibly. A little. Not exactly, though. You see—”
“I think I understand.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” She had probably jumped to the conclusion that there had been “another woman” in his life, and that Tina was the unexpected result of an act which relieved suspicions. But such were not the facts. There had never been another woman. Only Isobel’s constant fear that there was. And his constant sense of guilt that he aroused such suspicions. He had failed to provide Isobel with either the material or the spiritual things she so desired. Try as he might, he simply couldn’t make himself feel that tender devotion for her which shows itself in countless simple, homely ways, so convincing to a woman that she doesn’t need avowals of love, or periodic renewals of its ultimate expression as reassurance.
That expression had never been anything that Isobel desired, except as reassurance. And to him, finally, its chief satisfaction was its effect as a sop to his conscience. He wasn’t failing Isobel so utterly if he could dispel her suspicions so simply, and make her feel reinstated again. Poor Isobel! He’d been the wrong husband for her.
Good Lord, what a train of thoughts that chance remark about Tina had started! Good thing mind reading was still in the undeveloped stage.
“Tina reminds me a little of myself,” Charlotte commented. “What other things does she like to do besides roughing it?”
“She likes to paint. Has a notion she’s a budding artist. She has rigged up a studio in the attic. Trouble is Tina neglects her home lessons to paint, so she and I have to keep the studio a secret. She also has a passion for animals, but her mother is allergic to fur, so she can’t have as much as a white mouse. However, she usually has several pet worms and a few beetles. Where’s that bunch of oily waste?”
She passed it to him. He placed a few shreds in the bottom of the stone nest, on top of it a stick or two of the wood, whittled like a feather on the edge, and struck a match.
Fifteen minutes later, seated on their low couch before the dying embers, they washed down their bread and graham crackers with piping hot coffee. But there wasn’t enough of the hot liquid to compete long with the chilling effect of the fast-falling temperature. After their supper things were cleared away, the rain turned to hail, pelting down on their tiled roof with a great clatter. When J.D. returned from an inspection of the elements, he reported that they were surrounded by a sea of ice.
“Look here,” he demanded sternly, “is that hail on the roof or your teeth?”
“Hail,” Charlotte replied, through jaws tightly clenched.
He reached out, groped for her face in the dark, and placed his fingers on her lips as lightly as a blind mute. She clenched her teeth tighter, but she couldn’t control her body.
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