‘He’s not a bad man, really he’s not,’ she protested. ‘You don’t understand, Florence. He meant no harm. He thought that if it wasn’t him it would be somebody else.’
‘Tony! How can you?’
‘Well, that’s the way he looked at it. You don’t understand the way things have been in our family. He thought it might as well be him as Lewis, or anybody else staying here …’
‘Lewis!’
‘Of course it wouldn’t be Lewis, as a matter of fact, because he’s different; I mean we’ve known him so long he’s almost like our brother. But what I mean to say is, that Jacob is no worse than heaps of other people.’
‘Yes, I should have thought Lewis Dodd was different,’ mused Florence in a low voice.
‘It’s Tessa he belongs to,’ Tony informed her vaguely. ‘And, of course, Tessa’s too young really to have a lover. At least, she’s only just grown up, you know.’
Florence smiled to hear the infantile Teresa described as only just grown up. The halo which, for her, illumined the name of Lewis Dodd glowed a little brighter at this artless testimony. Antonia continued, by way of explanation:
‘Linda tried to get him once. We all saw. And when he wouldn’t have her she was so spiteful. I think he despises love, though of course …’
She checked herself, which was, perhaps, a pity, for Florence was left with the impression that this young St Anthony, despising love as it was known at the Karindehütte, had eschewed it: a regrettable error. Antonia had been about to outline his sentimental career, so far as she knew it, when a most ill-timed discretion shut her mouth. She had not meant to praise him when she said that he despised love; friend though he was she considered such an attitude to be very shocking. She was convinced, though she could not put it into words, that no sort of love ought to be despised, since, in spite of its rude beginnings, it is the first source of civility. But then, civility was, to Florence, a commonplace; while to Antonia it was a thing rare and admired, so beautiful as to cast a radiance upon its own base and humble origins. Only she could not explain herself.
And Florence, for her part, could not have understood. She had for the shortcomings of humanity that universal, almost scientific toleration which is based upon wide reading. No previous experience helped her to understand Antonia’s point of view. She listened with growing bewilderment to an unskilful account of the visit to Munich, the quarrel, and the reconciliation. Being herself temperamentally chaste, she had no rancour against people who were not, and regarded them with a sort of uncomprehending pity. But this affair implied an equation which was outside her knowledge. It was with a gesture of puzzled resignation that she yielded at last, when Charles telegraphed his consent to the marriage,
She could, in any case, spare little time to Antonia’s problems, for her own life was proceeding at such a pace that she could scarcely keep up with it. One or two attempts she had made to ignore the thing that was happening to her, or to give it a rational interpretation. It was possibly the mountain Spring which had invested the world with this new glory and freshness. It was the escape from a life which had begun to confine her. It was anything but the company of Lewis Dodd. So she reasoned until, suddenly, he took his departure. For three days he went away, flying to Innsbruck in a final attempt to break the disastrous spell which had bewitched him.
Florence, who thought for sixty hours that he had gone for good, found that all the beauty round her had become, in the twinkling of an eye, most intolerably sad. She was astonished, humiliated almost, at her own pain, and unable, any longer, to blind herself as to its cause. She was in love; her happiness was gone with him, and she would leave the Tyrol with a wounded heart.
Then, as suddenly, he reappeared. He had not found it possible to remain away and so came back with the single intention of possessing her at any cost. She was amused at her own joy and relief; amused, too, when she reflected that for a year or more she had quite earnestly wished to feel all the pains and anxieties of a serious love affair. Her only care now was to drill herself into the thought that he might not, after all, have returned to woo her. Yet she knew not how otherwise to interpret the absent-minded persistence with which he followed her about. Sternly she forbade to herself the pleasure of romances woven for the future; hourly she broke her resolution. It was so impossible not to make plans. Because, of course, she had determined to marry him.
He belonged, probably, to a different class. But she could put up with that, and if her family minded it they must learn better. Like her Aunt Evelyn, she was very democratic He was a great genius and that ought, surely, to be enough for them. His manners, though primitive, were simple. She tried to imagine him in dress clothes; he would look odd, but not like a waiter. Charles would have to see that she could not be expected to marry anybody ordinary. And for him, if she could but bring him to her views, so much might be accomplished. She had a feeling that he might at first be restive, he was so wild and shy. She believed that he loved her, but she had an idea that the thought of marriage had not, so far, entered his vague head. She would have to put it there. Later on, when his music had been heard rather more, he would need a wife with a certain social standing. She had influence; she knew people. Married to her, he also would know people.
Only one person at the Karindehütte was in the least aware of the state of things between these two. The household, for the most part, was entirely absorbed by the undetermined fate of Antonia. But Tessa, at this time, grew very pale and melancholy. She feared that her friend meant to entangle himself with the English cousin, a piece of folly in itself, and likely, as she thought, to involve them all in the most serious consequences. It would be a climax of the disasters which had befallen them since Sanger’s death. She unburdened her mind to Paulina one day, as they lay out in the forest. They had been discussing Antonia’s marriage and Paulina was saying:
‘I think it’s an excellent idea. Couldn’t we all marry somebody and then we needn’t go to England?’
‘Sebastian couldn’t.’
‘No, but if we were married women, he could come and live with us. Let’s get married, Tessa! I’ll marry Roberto. I’m sure he’d be quite pleased. He’s very obliging.’
‘Twelve is too young.’
‘Soon I’ll be thirteen. Juliet was thirteen. She was married.’
‘She was Italian.’
‘So would I be Italian if I married Roberto. People always take their husbands’ nationalities.’
‘Imbecile that you are! That’s got nothing to do with it.’
‘Don’t be a wet blanket! We’d much better both get married. I’ll ask Roberto and you ask Lewis. What have you gone so red for? He’s very nice; I’d ask him myself only he loves you best.’
‘I’m too young.’
‘Not a bit. You can ask him anyhow.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t! I’m too old.’
‘Too old! I thought you said you were too young!’
‘So I did. Dear me! I’m both. I’m at a perfectly horrid age. I’m too old to say what I think. And I’m too young for anybody to want to marry me.’
‘There now, you’re blushing again! You’ll be worse than Kate soon. She used at least to blush regularly; I mean always at the same sorts of things. But you’ve taken to blushing at nothing at all. You’re dreadful.’
‘You wait till you are my age. You will too.’
‘Still I can’t see why you should think you are too young for Lewis. You’d suit him much better than an ordinary woman that expected him always to be bothering about her …’
‘Would I? Look!’
They were sitting at the edge of the forest, near the bottom of the mountain. Teresa pointed to the field below them where two figures were strolling intimately. Paulina took them in and asked anxiously:
‘Do you think he wants her?’
Teresa nodded.
‘But he wouldn’t marry her!’ protested Paulina.
‘Yes, he will She’ll make him.’
&nbs
p; ‘He’s never married anybody before.’
‘Yes, but she’s a lady. If it’s anybody like Florence, they have to marry them. Look at Sanger and our mother.’
‘But she won’t have him,’ persisted Paulina hopefully. ‘Why should she? Think of all the grand people she knows. She’s just being nice to him, like she is to everybody.’
‘I wouldn’t mind his getting her,’ said Teresa sadly, ‘if that was all there was to it But that will only be the beginning, you see! She’ll want to take him off and live at that place in England where she comes from, Cambridge. He won’t be happy.’
‘I think it’ll be a shame if he gets her. She can’t have seen him drunk.’
‘Of course she hasn’t. He’s not been drunk since she came.’
‘And she can’t have seen him in a temper. Really in lots of ways he’s worse than Sanger. He’s not so good-natured, for one thing. Tessa, do you think we ought to tell her?’
‘Tell her what?’
‘That it wouldn’t do at all. There are heaps of things …’
‘I can’t,’ said Teresa, who had gone very pale.
‘Why not? If she knew …’
‘I don’t know why not. But I couldn’t.’
‘Well, it would be rather like telling tales. He belongs to us, really, more than she does. Perhaps she’ll find out herself.’
This was said in a very low voice for the pair were quite close to them. They were picking flowers of different sorts and saying at intervals that they had got enough, and then crying out over a good one that must be picked.
‘Oh,’ cried Florence, flinging herself down on the grass beside the girls, ‘did you ever see such flowers? They beat even the Academy pictures of “Spring in the Austrian Tyrol”.’
‘What are you going to do with these little things?’ asked Lewis, dropping gentians into her lap, one by one.
‘Put them in a dish of moss on the hall table.’
‘Very tasteful! Tessa! Why have we never put dishes of gentians on the hall table before?’
‘Because we don’t want them,’ said Teresa coldly.
‘And,’ Florence was saying, ‘I must take a lot of roots home. Why is that cow bell sometimes A and sometimes A flat?’
‘It isn’t the same cow,’ he told her. ‘There are two cows on that little hill, but you can’t see one because it’s behind a rock. If you’ll move a little this way I’ll point it out to you.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ she declared lightly, moving a fraction of an inch further away from him. ‘How lovely the cow bells are! I love waking in the morning very early and hearing them all round the house, don’t you?’
Lewis was about to agree fervently when he caught Paulina’s eye and remembered that he had in her presence expressed himself very freely about the cow bells which woke him early in the morning. He subsided and lay back, flat on the grass, staring up into the sky and smiling. Florence continued to talk. She said how the silent nights impressed her. A distant waterfall was the only thing to be heard in the hushed spaces round the Karindehütte after the cows had been shut up.
‘And running water is an enchanting sound,’ she said. ‘The most beautiful in the world, don’t you think?’
‘When I was a boy,’ said Lewis abruptly, ‘I used to sleep out on some cliffs in Cornwall. And there were some birds, whole flocks of them, I d—don’t know what they were, used to fly out to sea just before it got light. I remember I woke up once, when the moon had set and it was quite d—dark, and all the air was full of them. I couldn’t see them. I heard wings …’
Teresa, on the grass at his side, stirred a little in response to the excitement behind his hesitating, drowsy voice. She knew that some impulse had prompted him to tell them of a supreme moment, one of those instants, rare and indescribable, when the quickened imagination stores up an impression which may become a secret key to beauty, the inspiration of a lifetime. Her mind swung back to meet the mind of that lost boy who had lain awake upon a high mysterious cliff, beside a whispering sea. She, too, heard wings.
Florence was interested, also, and asked if he had lived in Cornwall. No. He had gone there in the holidays. Did he live in the country?
‘N—no. In Bayswater.’
He got up. It was evident that he did not like being asked about his childhood, so she desisted. She rose too, and they made their way up the hill towards the house. The girls remained sitting on the grass, occupied with rather gloomy thoughts. At last Paulina looked sharply at her sister and said:
‘There’s no use crying about it.’
‘No use,’ agreed Teresa.
But the tears poured down her face, whether she would or no, until she conceived the happy idea of trying to water a primula with them. Immediately the flood was dried, after the manner of tears when a practical use has been found for them.
‘And it would have been interesting,’ said Paulina sorrowfully, ‘to see if it would have made any difference to the primula.’
11
It was discovered that Jacob and Antonia would have to be married in Vienna, owing to their complicated nationalities, and they would have to stay there at least a fortnight before all the preliminaries could be got through. Robert Churchill considered that it was his business to escort them,
‘Though it will be very disagreeable,’ he said gloomily to Florence. ‘But I feel I must go. I don’t altogether trust that young Jew. I must make sure that he really does marry the girl this time. But it keeps us here so long; that’s the worst of it. And I don’t like leaving you here alone. When is that fellow Dodd going to take himself off? I wish Caryl would give him a hint.’
‘He’s quite harmless.’
‘I don’t know so much about that. Personally, I’ve taken a great dislike to him. A very great dislike. He’s the worst of the ragtag and bobtail we found hanging round here. The other two, the Russian and the Jew, I can place. They aren’t Englishmen, and they aren’t gentlemen, and I don’t particularly take to either of them, but they are types I can recognise, and it takes all sorts to make a world. Now what I can’t stand in this Dodd is that he fits in nowhere. He’s got no ties … no laws. A disagreeable brute! What’s an Englishman want with this sort of life?’
Florence smiled. It was so typical of Robert to despise a man because he resembled nobody else. She felt that it was perhaps time that she should break a lance in her lover’s defence.
‘I find him very interesting,’ she said. ‘He’s strange. I’ve been wondering about his origin. He speaks like a … like an educated man. I’m inclined to think that he’s of humble birth, a peasant, perhaps, but that he’s mixed a good deal with cultivated people all his life. He must have raised himself….’
‘Raised,’ said Robert. ‘He looks like a scarecrow! What on earth do you see in him that you could call raised?’
‘Well … there are his wonderful gifts …’
‘Presumably he had those to start with. I should have said that they didn’t seem to have raised him at all. You can’t be serious, Florence! The fellow is a most terrible boor …’
‘In a way … he’s an ascetic.’
‘Humph!’
‘Asceticism and Bohemianism are very much alike,’ she told him with energy. ‘St Francis of Assisi was a true Bohemian. Great simplicity of mind is almost incompatible, in a way, with a high degree of civilisation. I was thinking, only last night, of that story about Shelley, I think it was Shelley, walking stark naked into a house and through a room with a dinner party in it, because he had lost his clothes out bathing.’
‘Well,’ said Robert, ‘from the point of view of the dinner party I can’t see that it mattered whether Bohemianism or asceticism prompted Shelley to do that.’
Florence was so sure that he never made a joke that she failed to catch the gleam in his eye when she told him that, from the point of view of literature, it mattered a great deal.
‘Maybe!’ he said. ‘But even if Mr Dodd does resemble Shelley
in that respect, I doubt if my nieces will be any the better for his acquaintance. However, I’m taking Antonia with me, and she is our heaviest charge.’
She could not help being sorry for him, foreseeing an uncongenial fortnight in Vienna. The party set off next day and were accompanied by the whole family as far as Innsbruck. The children, with misplaced cheerfulness, had taken it into their heads that this was an occasion for rejoicing; as Sebastian put it, the Sangers did not often have weddings. They insisted upon all kinds of hilarious celebrations and the day had a sort of opera-bouffe atmosphere which made it particularly trying to their uncle, who saw nothing festive in this tardy removal of a blot from their scutcheon. They began by narrowly missing their train down to Erfurt, owing to a scene with Teresa and Paulina over their toilets. They had discovered a number of black garments, inexplicably left behind by Linda, and had thought that they might as well go into mourning for their father. They appeared, after everyone else was ready, dressed like little widows, with skirts down to their toes and long crape veils floating from their hats. They were immensely pleased with themselves, twirling this way and that, to exhibit their draperies, but the rest of the company did not receive them kindly. At length they were forced into other clothes and the whole party ran irritably down the hill to Weissau.
By the time that they were sitting at lunch in Innsbruck Florence felt that the expedition had already lasted a week. Her heart sank when she contemplated all the hours of noisy junketing still before them, for they were to see the travellers into the Vienna train at two o’clock, and their own return to Erfurt was timed for six. She could not imagine how they were to spend the intervening hours; the day was scorching and the change from the upland air oppressed her. Glancing at her companions and aware of the wild effect they all produced, she wondered whether her own father would have recognised her, meeting her thus. But she need not have been alarmed. There was nothing of the travelling circus in her own appearance. She was, as always, neat and charming. Her dress was admirably chosen to stand the exposures of such a day, being plain, cool, and of a soft cream colour which showed no dust. To Lewis, staring at her furtively between each mouthful of soup, this trim freshness was a mystery. He did not trace it to her clothes, but only knew that she looked as different as possible from the Sanger girls. Tony, for all her unquenchable beauty, looked bedizened and outlandish. Her silk frock was much crushed and her hair hung down in wisps under a magnificent new hat. As for her little sisters, they might have been pulled through a hedge backwards.
The Constant Nymph Page 14