‘Xena speaks five languages, besides having been at school in England,’ Mrs Van Necker informed them.
‘And isn’t that a lovely frock she has on!’
‘And that hat to match her eyes –’
‘Well, don’t let’s talk at her like this –’
‘Suppose we consider the ice broken –’
The chatter continued.
Umberto Francavilla still sat in the far corner, bald and dark-suited, as if the oleander above him had been tied up with a mourning-streamer of black. It was the first time he had been separated from his daughter, and he had not come to his resolution without many prayers to the Saint. For this hotel-lord, who provided glittering halls for the amusement of others and looked on with contempt, was also a man of a deep and superstitious piety. Wherever he was and on whatever business, September always found him back in Palermo, carrying his candle in the procession. Had not the Saint prospered him? Had anything he had undertaken in her name failed him? And had he not still need of her grace for other enterprises? Therefore he saw to it that his daughter’s prayers were added to his own. When she had been no more than a lisping child her ‘O cara Verginella Rosalia’ had never failed to bring the tears to his eyes. He disliked and mistrusted women. For even the small part they played in his life (which the Saint forgive him) he despised himself. In a year or two his daughter – but it was no good thinking of that. It was best she should go. She would be safe in the keeping of that overdone woman with the gummed-down hair. The girls seemed like other girls, and he was terrified of them, but that too would be good for Xena. So let her go. And sweet Rosalia protect her.
His daughter approached him. She did not sit down.
‘They’re going in a few minutes, father,’ she said wistfully.
Yes, he knew with sorrow that the moment was drawing near.
‘Are you coming with us?’
‘First sit down for a minute.’
She did so, leaning slightly towards him, as if they had been lovers.
He found no words; with so much to say, how begin? Enough that he felt the air about them to be a sacred and a prayerful thing at that moment. But it would have been less than natural had Xena not felt some flutter of excitement. This was not like going to school in England. That Xena who had been in England had been a head-and-a-half smaller than herself. Sometimes that seemed a remote Xena, of whom she had dreamed. On Saints’ days she had always dressed in simple white down to her heels. A prim little bouquet and chaplet had been her only adornment. But now she was to be a young woman among young women, flattered for her frocks, her hats, her command of cars. Only a few moments ago Mollie Van Necker, with a ‘Do let us see what’s in your bag!’ had grabbed the bag and opened it, and had exclaimed at finding there no face-powder, no eyebrow-pencil, no stick for the lips. ‘However do you manage!’ Mollie had laughed, and Xena had admired Mollie’s full bosom and the lips that already men looked at. She felt that she had ever So many things to learn.
Suddenly her father spoke.
‘Take your hat off for me, little one.’
Her hands went to the blue Canterbury-bell and removed it. She sat a little back, looking at her father, he at her.
With the removal of the hat the anomaly instantly appeared. Ordinarily the Sicilian woman is slight and dark and vivacious, with a beauty she cannot let alone. She may wear that modest chaplet on Saints’ Days, but let carnival come and she claps a white wig on that dusky hair, and the rest is powdered and pomped out in palest pinks and lightest blues. Even the young men put on sham whiskers of burnt cork, confessing a Spanish strain. And thus far this child of seventeen was Sicilian. Sicilian was the cool honeysuckle brown tint, that, unlike the English sunburn, probably did not vary over her whole young body. The smoky helmet of uncropped and not very long hair, sudden on the low brow, was Sicilian too. But the rest? Those broad temples, their breadth accentuated by the setting of the eyes, as if a hand on either cheek drew them apart? That tapering pointed chin? And above all the eyes themselves? Whence did they come? . . . There is a Sicilian blue. Noble families vaunt it. But it is not that blue. Xena’s eyes were blue as the waters of Sidi-Bou-Said. They had a morning blue, and a blue as if a wind passed over them and ruffled them. And the mouth beneath was a Punic rose, with that serious faintly-hovering smile that always has in it more of tragedy than of mirth. Light blue eyes and grave undying smile, seen it may be across a flower-barrow in a Smyrna street or over a glove-counter in Athens – they are only varyingly submerged, and sometimes come up to within an inch of the surface of the centuries’ flood. And hotels were not the only things about the Mid-World sea that Umberto Francavilla knew. His sad eyes were attentively on the young face.
‘No, not your mother – ’ his lips were murmuring. ‘And she had no lover but me –’
‘What, father?’
He shook his head. She did not catch his muttering.
‘Nor was her mother’s mother so. And it may be forgotten again in her daughter. If she has one. If she has one . . . Say once again “O cara Verginella Rosalia”, little one –’
And under the oleander the young girl in the Paris frock, piously closing those ancient eyes of freshest blue, placed her hands together, dipped her knee dutifully under the table, and repeated, in the musical voice that had always moved him so: ‘O cara Verginella Rosalia, elevatissima Sposa di Cristo, Voi a guisa d’immacolata colomba, che teme macchiarsi l’intatto candore dello sue penne –’
And she added, ‘Gloria al Padre . . . Amen.’
An hour later she stood on the boat’s upper deck, looking out over the stern as the shipping slid slowly by. Among the small knot of people at the quay-head her father was still to be seen, his fluttering handkerchief a white speck, his head a tiny egg. The mountains shut in the town behind, and on her right as she looked back rose Pellegrino, grey, stony and precipitous, the Saint’s chapel not to be seen on his clouded top. Past shipping and factories and lighthouse the steamer slipped, and Umberto Francavilla was no more to be seen.
But as the boat rounded the headland and skirted the sheer cliff the skies broke. From between ragged clouds there poured a glory of sun. It picked out every wrinkle of Pellegrino’s brow, pencilling his visage with a tracery of light. And highest of all the Saint’s huge effigy stood, with her ruins about her and the halo above her head. Xena, on a deck so far below, tried to realise how often she had been up there, and placed tapers in the grotto-chapel, held her breath at the thought of the miracle that had been wrought there. She crossed herself; and, as she did so, as suddenly as it had come, the glory of sun went out. Before her was the grey sea, with Ustica a cloudlet far away. The air was chill.
She felt a little cold. Turning, she went below in search of her new companions.
2
Twin-cabins had been booked on the port side, Mrs Van Necker sharing one of them with the art-student who had been put into her charge at Naples. As for the other two cabins, so far they appeared to be anybody’s. Xena had been given a bunk opposite Mollie Van Necker’s, but the other girls were so in and out, Mollie herself was so in and out, that sometimes they all got jammed together in the narrow passage that rose and sank again on a gentle swell.
‘Out, all of you, and give me air!’ Mollie cried. ‘I want to see Xena’s things!’
But they all wanted to see Xena’s things, and one at least of her trunks had to be opened straightaway.
‘How beautifully she packs!’ Cicely Bruce-Harries admired, looking at the tray of clothing, as neat as a box of paints that has never been used.
In the very smallest things Xena had always been scrupulously truthful. It was wrong to take to oneself the praise due to somebody else.
‘My maid did that,’ she shyly confessed. ‘She’s a very good maid, but father didn’t think I’d need to bring one away.’
‘Her maid! . . . Never mind, I’ll be your maid.’ And Mollie Van Necker, who appeared to be good-natured before everything else, took out the costly garments one by one, tucking them under her chin with one thigh extended in order to admire their draping upon herself. ‘And her father’s a widower! And I always liked them not too young!’
Xena knew what Mollie meant. She did not look upon her father as old. She considered it carefully.
‘I don’t think father would ever marry again,’ she said, and then shrank from the laughter she had caused.
‘I know I’m going to love her! She takes everything so seriously!’
‘Perfectly literally –’
‘Mollie wasn’t really thinking of marrying your father, Frankie!’ the elder of the English sisters informed her.
‘Oh, wasn’t she!’ This from Mollie. ‘Give her a quarter of a chance –’
‘Shut up, Mollie . . . and oh, just look at this embroidery and then think of ours!’ And the English girl with even less eyebrow than the other held up a garment that seemed to be sown with mignonette, and, like mignonette closely examined, broke up into minute glows.
‘And it isn’t a trousseau, mind you. It’s just one of the rags she wears.’ Mollie Van Necker, with a sniff of disdain affected to cast the rag from her.
Xena spoke again. – ‘I haven’t started a trousseau yet. I’ve always been with father.’
Again they talked at her, past her, about her.
‘Isn’t she a pet!’
‘And I was once like that!’
‘That you never were!’
‘And speaking all those languages! What chances I’d make for myself in five languages!’
‘You don’t do badly in one.’
‘Well, I’m open about it, that’s all the difference. – Xena, have you ever had a cocktail?’
‘Oh, yes!’ said Xena promptly, glad to be back in the conversation instead of being the subject of it. ‘Often! I’ve always been about with father, and I’ve often had them with him and his friends.’
‘Well, we’re going to have one presently’; and the chatter moved to other things.
‘I suppose Dear Mamma will do the usual?’
‘Oh, she prepares for the worst the moment she sets foot on a train-ferry!’
‘And always sends her apologies, as if it had never happened before!’
‘Please remember it’s my sainted Mamma you’re talking about –’
‘The way you talk about your sainted Mamma sometimes!’
‘Well, thank God, if I’m lovesick I’m not seasick!’
Xena seemed a little startled that God should be thanked for a thing like that, but after all why not? She had never been seasick, but it must be very unpleasant. As for Mrs Van Necker being sainted, she was sure they oughtn’t to say those things.
‘Is anybody going to change? Or shall we go in as we are?’
‘For dinner? You bet I am!’ said Mollie. ‘Trains aren’t worth it, but boats are.’
Half an hour later, over the cocktails, the prediction about Mrs Van Necker came true. The bearer of the message was the American art-student, Amalia Sherren. She was turned eighteen and the oldest of them, Cicely Bruce-Harries coming next, then Mollie, then Daphne. There was something about Amalia that gave an impression of impoverishment – not of circumstances, since, though she was careless about her dress, she still had money to travel – not of physique, though she was inconspicuous and as unlike the plump and vascular Mollie as she could well be – but a hunger of the eyes for colour, a craving of the heart and brain for the things of others, their passion, their vitality, their secret sacred things. She had been closeted with Mrs Van Necker, and so far Xena had hardly seen her. Amalia exclaimed at the sight of the frock into which Xena had changed.
‘If that isn’t just a won-derful colour!’
The frock was of a curious terracotta scarlet. It was sleeveless, and it showed the honeysuckle brown arms that, like her calves, had a smooth but distinct play of muscle. Amalia was looking Xena up and down.
‘It’s two shades off the colour of a gladiolus. And I guess you’ve exercised a lot. Degas draws legs like yours,’ she said.
‘Father brought it from Paris,’ Xena faltered. Now Amalia was beginning to talk about her
‘And it makes your eyes the colour of a spirit-flame. I guess I could just sit and look at you for a month.’
And the hueless eyes really looked as if they were going to do so.
The sudden clanging of the steward’s bell summoned the passengers to dinner.
The boat was to touch at Trápani, so that this meal was served early. The sun was still at half-height, and his golden shafts burned through the portholes of the dining-saloon and wavered slowly over the floor to the swaying of the ship. They turned the black boots of the waiters to gold, and napery and flowers stood out in vivid relief against spaces of darkness in which the shapes of diners were floatingly divined rather than seen. Once in a while the torrent of gold died out entirely, leaving only the mild chains and clusters of the incandescents. A far less attractive group of girls would have sufficed to let loose a pleasant contagion on the air.
‘He’s looking at you again, Mollie,’ the younger girl without eyebrows whispered.
Mollie’s eyes were on her plate. ‘Do you suppose I don’t know?’ she said. ‘I think he’s rather nice with his little fluffy moustache.’
And then the girl who had said that Xena’s eyes were the colour of spirit-flames spoke.
‘He isn’t looking at Mollie. He’s looking at Xena.’
A sudden wave of misery broke over Xena. It had come back to her all at once – the strangeness, the loneliness, the thought of her father. How she loved and missed him already! She knew that the talk of these girls was all about young men, but what young man could ever take her father’s place? Young men had never seemed quite real to her. She hated being looked at by them; like Amalia they always looked at her legs. She wanted to be like the Saint who bore both the rose and the lily in her name, and for the love of Jesus had turned her back on her father’s palace and had chosen to live a virgin, praying on her knees in a grotto. She wondered when her father intended that this probation of being away from him and in the company of girls of her own age should come to an end. When she was twenty perhaps –
And she was only just turned seventeen –
Three years –
All at once she got up from the table, shaking her napkin to the floor. She knew they were staring at her, but she took no notice. The golden light flooded the calves beneath the scarlet frock as she hurried to the door. She ran up the shallow brassbound stairs and out on to the boat-deck. She wanted to be all by herself for a few minutes.
What business had that girl to say that she had eyes like spirit-flames and dancer’s legs? If it was true that was all the more reason she shouldn’t say it. Uncomfortable things are more uncomfortable than ever when they are true. Xena knew she looked like that. Sometimes it almost made her wish she hadn’t a body. Bodies were only a trouble and a burden. One would be happier with only a soul, like Rosalia. Then one could say one’s prayers and be at rest in the love of Jesus . . .
All at once something seemed to be happening to the ship.
It was merely the fetch-round they were making, with their wake a vast half-circle behind them. Trápani was in sight, a long low sun-flushed coastline with two churches roofed with pale green copper, and an ashen cobweb of masts behind. The four occulting lights were already winking over the pale water, and the men of the round-bellied boats let down the long lateens and took to the stern-oars as they gained the shelter of the mole. Not far from where Xena stood a rattling and commotion had broken out. Steam had been got on the donkey-engine, and they were to drop cattle and take up mules. She had seen the sco
re or so of shaggy unhappy beasts in the well, roped together and lurching. One of them was so roped that its muzzle was jammed between the lower rail and the deck, and she had wished she could unfasten it. Animals were among her spiritual troubles. She thought it terrible that they should suffer. First people were kind to them, and then they killed them. In the Old Testament they had even sacrificed them. Abraham had been going to sacrifice Isaac, his own son, but had found a ram instead and had sacrificed that. And now her father was not going to be with her to answer her questions or else to turn her thoughts to something else. She wondered whether they had loosed that poor cow yet, and walked slowly forward as the custom-houses and the ash-wood of ships’ masts drew nearer over the clear green of the water.
On the pontoon below the mules waited, pressed together, ears twitching, with an occasional snatch of yellow teeth and a smothered kick. After all mules were very bad-tempered. A young man was in charge of them who looked as bad-tempered as they, and he wore spats, and a soft silk collar and a smart hat. A mule had slipped and wasn’t able to get on to its feet again, and the young man was beating it over the nose with a stick. Probably this was his last job of the day, and some girl was waiting for him, and he was in a hurry. He would take her to a cinema or for a walk, the way Xena knew they did. The ways of young men and girls were even more puzzling than people’s ways with animals.
She continued to watch the beasts in the slings, twirling helplessly round in the air, till with a scrape against the fenders they found their feet again on the mule-fouled pontoon.
Suddenly she heard a voice behind her. It was Amalia come to bother her again. Her strained eyes were thirstily drinking in the faded greens and oranges of the lateen-boats and the flush that dyed the roofs along the quay.
‘That would paint,’ she said, ‘but I know what I’d like to paint better.’
‘What?’ Xena asked.
‘You.’ And again she looked at Xena as if she was going to look for a month.
‘I don’t think I want to be painted, thank you,’ said Xena politely.
The Dead of Night Page 32