‘They’re as finished as they’re going to be,’ she answered. ‘I guess that seeing a thing’s all there is to it. There isn’t much to do after that.’
‘I’ve sometimes wished I could draw,’ he said at random.
‘Then learn to see,’ she answered, he thought rather rudely. And suddenly she asked him, ‘You’ve been in a good many places, haven’t you?’
‘A good many this last six months.’
‘Around this old Mediterranean?’
‘By the time I’ve finished I shall have done most of it.’
Almost the most startling thing about Amalia’s next words was the ordinary conversational tone in which she said them.
‘Then wouldn’t you say these gods of theirs are just about as good a proposition as the next?’
He stared. – ‘What do you mean?’
‘I should think it took all sorts of gods to make this corner of the world. If you’ve been to all those places you ought to know more about it than I do.’ And she added, ‘I guess I’m one of those religious people who hasn’t got any particular belief; but when a type jumps straight up at you and hits you in the eye after all those stretches of time – ’ she shrugged her shoulders, which were thin.
He thought for a moment. – ‘I wish I knew what you meant, Miss Sherren.’
‘You’d better call me Amalia like other folk. And when you’re through with your British beating about the bush –’
‘Why did you say I shouldn’t be asked over there?’ His eyebrows indicated the corner where Xena and Mrs Van Necker sat. ‘What made you think I wanted to be asked over there?’
‘When did you see her last?’ Amalia asked in return.
‘In Cairo, three months ago.’
‘I never set eyes on her till yesterday.’
‘Well?’
‘But I saw her yesterday with her father. You’d have thought she was being sent to a convent instead of on a trip. She just sat there in a corner holding his hand. She couldn’t even say Bo to a goose like Margaret Van Necker. And look at them now. Which of them’s going to be the goods before the curtain goes down, should you say?’
He made no reply. Amalia went on.
‘Her father’s Umberto Francavilla. They bring out all the incense and let off all the fire-crackers when she comes in. There’s a car coming for her from Constantine tomorrow. She’s so rich she could travel around this little old Sea for nothing – we have them like that in the States too. And who’s Margaret Van Necker? She’s just a lazy old thing that likes to travel around and have a good time. She never left her cabin in the boat – I know because I was with her. Maybe people do lie down in the afternoons here, but she would if nobody else did. And off goes Mollie this afternoon with a Frenchman she picked up on the boat, and off you go with Xena Francavilla. Well – what about it?’
There seemed all the more about it that she did not once lift her eyes from the sketch book in her hand. She continued to turn its pages.
‘Then I saw her yesterday morning as the boat came in. She’d gotten on a wonderful purple peignoir with silver appliqué. That peignoir was like her – it belonged right here. That’s from Paris, that green frock she’s wearing now. But she’s as much Paris as these African sheep you can’t tell from the goats . . . Say, that’s good, I guess, about the sheep and the goats. It hits it just about middle. It isn’t her that puzzles me. It’s you.’
‘Why me?’
‘To see what you’re going to do.’
‘What’s all this got to do with Mediterranean gods?’
‘She knows,’ Amalia replied. ‘She’s sizing it up while Momma Van Necker’s talking. Look.’
Indeed Xena did not appear to be listening to the florid, fardée woman by her side. She was not even looking at Verney. She sat in the curve of the sofa gazing straight in front of her, under a fillet of green ribbon that further accentuated her temporal breadth. Amalia had glanced up and down again.
‘I guess nobody looks all that saintly without there being a bit of sediment left over somewhere,’ she said. ‘Momma Van’s up against it in baby-eyes there. Don’t you bother about me. I’m an artist, and they’re all clean crazy. It would take a philosophy to explain me. But as for you’ – she turned her wan look on him as she closed the sketch book – ‘well, brother, I guess you’re headed for about as plumb-gorgeous an adventure as anybody need want. Now go to her if you like.’
But he did not go to her. He sat looking at the carpet for a moment. Then he rose and walked thoughtfully out of the room.
He wondered what he ought to do. He could stay on here. On the other hand there was something to be said for packing up and getting on to Algiers and Gib.
7
By mid-morning the next day the car from Constantine had not arrived. A telephone-call was put through by the direction. The reply was that the car had left Constantine on the previous afternoon. Mrs Van Necker and her brood were gathered by the hotel bookstall.
‘Well, there’s plenty to see, and it’s a heavenly morning,’ she said. ‘What about that Museum place? Is our young man coming, Xena?’
But the concierge informed them that Verney Arden had gone out more than an hour ago.
‘Well, don’t let’s waste any more of this beautiful morning. We can squeeze three apiece into those little horse-carriages.’
The carosses were just across the road. Into two of them the party climbed, Mrs Van Necker and the English girls into the first, Amalia, Mollie and Xena following.
There were unwonted signs that Xena had got up out of the wrong side of the bed. The blue eyes looked moodily at the gay and multitudinous life about her. The carriage was driven by a brown young gaillard of a Frenchman, who seemed to have a greeting for quite half the people who thronged the pavements – his friends the Arabs in burnous, his friends the Chasseurs d’Afrique, his friends the red-coated soldiers of the Bey, and above all for his friends the Jewish women in the high curved balconies, who dressed, undressed, and waved their hands in return to the salute of his flourishing whip. He used the whip rather a lot, and the soft-hearted Mollie asked Xena to tell him not to flog the horses so. Xena made no reply, and Mollie asked her again.
‘He isn’t hurting them,’ said Xena.
‘He is – look, he’s doing it again.’
‘It’s all noise, and we’re late, and we shan’t get there,’ said Xena.
For reply Mollie leaned forward and herself took the whip from the hands of the much-friended young man, who immediately fell into the sulks. The unwhipped horses dropped straightway to a crawl.
‘Now you see,’ said Xena, pushing out her lips.
Mollie laughed and gave Xena’s arm a little push.
‘Just because he can’t give you every moment of his time!’ she scolded softly.
‘It isn’t that at all!’ said Xena with a little shake of her body.
‘Anyway that’s why I think it’s always such a good plan to have two,’ Mollie answered, her eyes on the crowded pavements.
They issued by the Bab Bou Saadoun and passed under the Viaduct.
Xena was still naughty when they arrived at the plateau that forms the courtyard of the Musée Alaoui. Mrs Van Necker had been waiting for nearly a quarter of an hour, and wanted to know where they had been. Half the morning had gone – they had only about an hour and a quarter to see everything there was
‘All right, mother,’ said the peace-loving Mollie as she led her into the vestibule. ‘Nobody but you and Amalia wants to see the stupid things anyway –’
And she looked from the frigid plinths and slabs and potsherds to the only human thing in sight – the grave white-bearded Arab attendant.
‘So why not just see the Greek things you’re so mad about and let’s get back into the world again?’ Mollie sugg
ested.
By leaving the ground-floor alone there was plenty of time. They mounted the bleak staircase, and Mrs Van Necker sailed ahead, guide book in hand.
Xena still felt as if she wanted to put out her tongue at somebody. She wore a red hat and a sheeny half-open coat of coloured blazer-like stripes, and at her breast was a bunch of violets she had bought on the pavement opposite the hotel. She had put the frock on because it was different from the one Verney had seen her in yesterday, and now he had gone out early. He had sat for half an hour last night with Amalia Sherren too, looking at her sketches, and then had suddenly got up and walked out without a word. And worst of all, Mollie had made a joke about it. She had said that he couldn’t give her every minute of his time, and that that was why she liked to have two. What business was it of Mollie’s? She had her own French officer. Nothing seemed to be going right. She wished she was somewhere else. This bare place with its cold top-lighting was like being in a vault. She didn’t want to be with the others. She wanted to be by herself. She fancied she heard Mollie’s compassionate whisper to Cicely Bruce-Harries as she turned away.
‘Her first boy –’
She passed through several rooms, all empty save for the attendants. She wondered the attendants did not die, waiting about in a place like that all day. They were dressed exactly like Hayoun, who had given them coffee in his carpet-shop, in a tight-necked frock coat and red fez. It was beastly of Verney to have sat talking to Amalia, and then to go out this morning without seeing her. She hadn’t thought he would behave like that. But all the time she knew she was being very naughty, and that she ought to forgive Verney. Nobody would really fall in love with Amalia. He had his work to do. Perhaps he simply hadn’t come up because of Mrs Van Necker, asking her all those questions about her father, and his yacht, and how many houses he had, and making her feel all fussy and fretful. She wanted to love Verney. It had been lovely, sitting there in Hayoun’s little shop, ever so prim on the edge of his divan, waiting for him to kiss her. No wonder people thought such a lot about kissing. It made everything simple and beautiful. And to hear him say that he had loved her even in Cairo when all that she had noticed of him was that he had nice hair –
She almost felt his arms drawing her down to the sofa again, her face side by side with his, his lips –
And then she saw the object looking at her.
Before her was the portal of another Salle, and it stood facing her just past the opening. It was looking at her from under a frontlet that seemed to be fruits, with eyes full of an infinite sadness and beauty. She took a step towards it.
It was the Hermes of Boethos, and strictly speaking it is not a statue at all. It is a six-foot stylè or terminal in greenish bronze, a pedestal with a braided and bearded head on it, archaic and grave. The whole is no more than an empty shell, with a large portion of the lower part missing entirely, and to look at it disturbs. It is the eyes. The eyes of English sculpture are commonly dotted or incised, to give a look of spurious life, but these eyes are not eyes at all. They are holes in a mask. Only at a little distance do they look at one with that expression of profundity and unutterable grief. Boethos, they say, was a Chalcedonian. He lived three centuries before Christ. And he made and signed this thing before which stood a blue-eyed girl in a red hat and sheeny blazer-striped coat, with a bunch of violets at her breast.
She took a step nearer, and suddenly the eyes ceased to look. How can holes look without living eyes behind them? And what eyes look after a two-thousand-years immersion in the sea?
For it was the Dionysos that the Mahdia sponge-fishers had found, and it mourned its own lost eyes.
Trembling, Xena looked at the imbricated fruits of the statue’s brow, at the plaited abacus of a beard. A vague deep sense of contrition had come over her, as if she had been to blame for something and deserved to be scolded. And as she gazed into the sea-eaten holes she thought she knew why she was to be blamed. She had been a naughty girl and a truant. This poor god who had looked so sorrowfully at her through the doorway had reproached her because she had left him, and had been elsewhere when she should have been amongst his girls, the girls who came with the sticks rustling with leaves, and pomegranates, and the jingling sistra and the instruments made of animals’ bones. She felt that she ought to have been there when they had brought the garlanded kid for the offering, watching the priest with his knife and basin, and glad that a holy thing was being done. She ought to have been there among the noble virgins with the little golden baskets, when the ceremony of anointing had been performed and the sacred rites with the unseen symbols. She ought to have been there with those other girls of his, who had stained their faces with bruised berries, and there had been antics and dancing and wine.
But she had been somewhere else, a long way off, and he wasn’t even angry with her, but only very, very sad.
The strong calves seemed a little unsteady as she took a faltering step forward. The hand as brown as the baked sea-sand moved to the bunch of violets at her breast. And the next moment the violets fell to the floor. She gave a little stifled cry and covered her face with her hands. She knew now – all, all of her knew – that the hour of her ordeal had come. And it was well that the Salle was empty, for she fell suddenly on her knees before the Dionysos, praying. But not to the Dionysos. That was the terrible thing – that her soul should be fought for like this, as two men might fight for a woman’s body. With her hands over her eyes to shut out the sad and beautiful god, she was praying to Santa Rosalia, the Virgin of Pellegrino’s grotto.
It was all the fault of this darkly-brilliant. All the pious lessons she had been taught seemed somehow to have fallen away from her the moment she had set foot off the boat. Before she had been an hour in the place she had made bold forward eyes at a young man, not even waiting for him to begin, but making him begin, just like a horrid girl. In the same way she had put all the blame of the kissing on him, just sitting still there on Hayoun’s sofa with her lids dropped, knowing all the time what he was going to do. She was not a scrap better than those prancing creatures into whose eyes this thing of bronze had laughed.
Here she caught her breath and pressed the hands more tightly over her eyes.
‘Gloriosissima Vergine ed elevatissima Sposa di Christi – ’ she prayed.
For all that it was lovely being loved, and she was going to try to love him too –
And it was beastly of Amalia to take him away like that, and as for Mollie Van Necker
‘Bella Pellegrina Angioletlo di celeste amore,’ – she prayed – as for Mollie Van Necker, it was disgusting of her to talk about having two boys when Xena only wanted Verney – she and her pitying ‘Her first boy –’
‘Dall’ alto seggio di gloria che vi meritaste per tanta purità – ’ she prayed.
Besides, girls got old, like Mrs Van Necker. They hadn’t as much time before them as men. Unless one made up one’s mind never to look at a young man at all one had to learn their ways without showing too much of one’s own. Of course girls had the advantage in some ways. They could get themselves kissed by just dropping their eyes. But they did get old, and everybody wanted youth and joy and beauty, and they worshipped the god who gave it to them. While it was very wrong, one could still understand those girls who came with their dribbles of flowers and the berry-juice trickling down their faces, all capering and playing antics, trying to make the god laugh, making sure he didn’t overlook them –
All at once she remembered that she was on her knees in a public place and that anybody might come in at any moment. She uncovered her eyes and looked up. High above her towered the bronze abacus of beard. and, glancing past the broken hole in the statue’s pedestal, she saw that she was being watched by Amalia Sherren.
At least she thought she was being watched; she couldn’t be sure, because Amalia was in the room beyond, and when Xena looked again she was pretending
to examine one of the four cratères in marble that occupied each a corner of the apartment. On its plinth it stood half as tall again as she, and its flanged and beaded rim overhung Amalia like an eaves, and round its bowl a faun supported a drunken Silenus and satyrs and maenads chased one another.
8
If Amalia had seen her she made no sign as Xena walked up. She just went on looking at the vase.
‘It’s a copy,’ she said. ‘It’s the Borghese Vase, I saw it in Rome. There’s another in the Louvre.’ And she added, ‘I guess those people made the most of life.’
‘These on the vase?’
‘They enjoyed it in Pompeii too. Even more than the Greeks I should say. I could spend six months in that Naples Museum. And I’ve got to go back to the United States.’
‘Don’t you want to go back to the United States?’
For reply Amalia said, ‘Have you seen these?’ and led her to a glass-fronted case in the middle of the room. In it were the poor scraps of planking of the ancient ship herself. In other cases were her anchors, her trenails, her nails of bronze.
‘That was before Christopher Columbus,’ said Amalia with a detached air.
Looking at the exhibits Xena felt a little as she had felt before the Dionysos. One fragment under flat glass was one of the vessel’s lamps, a morsel of terracotta with the wick still in it. It seemed so sad, so forlorn, so useless now. Tears came into Xena’s eyes. One of the tears fell on the glass.
‘I’m terribly, terribly sorry,’ she gulped.
‘What for?’ Amalia asked.
‘I don’t know. I expect they were drowned. It’s dreadfully sad. I don’t think I can bear it. Let’s go.’
The Dead of Night Page 36