Illyrian Spring

by Ann Bridge

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s the Professor!’ she said, astonished. ‘What can he be doing here?’

  Nicholas looked round. Sure enough, down the road towards them came their fellow traveller from the steamer. He was dressed in a cool-looking suit of a peculiar buff shade of alpaca, and wore a panama hat – he looked more German than ever. As he approached it was clear that he had already seen them – he came straight up to their table, but even before he reached it, a premonition of the truth flashed into Grace’s mind. He raised his hat, squared his heels and bowed to her. ‘Since we meet again, gnädige Frau,’ he said, ‘allow me to introduce myself – Dr Julius Halther.’ And then, rather more formally, he turned to Nicholas. ‘My young friend Mr Humphries, of Vienna, I presume?’

  FIFTEEN

  Nicholas had risen when the Professor approached their table, with a look of pleasure; his expression changed to one of almost laughable dismay on hearing the name Halther. Lady Kilmichael sat wondering how on earth he would extricate himself from this situation. When directly addressed, she saw his face somehow harden into resolution; then with a gravity and formality equal to the older man’s, and at the same time with a sort of respectful firmness he bowed and said:

  ‘Yes, sir. A rather futuristic conception, but I hope a true one. Will you take a glass of wine?’

  The Professor gave him one of his keen looks. Grace had an impression that he was searching for impertinence and failed to find it, for after a moment he broke into a laugh, and patted the young man on the shoulder.

  ‘Ausgezeichnet! Na ja, I am prepared to hope so too! Thanks,’ he said, sitting down in the chair which Nicholas drew out for him – then he sat looking from one to the other, with a sardonic amusement in his rugged face.

  ‘So you like Komolac enough to stay here, gnädige Frau?’ he said, as Nicholas went to call for another glass.

  ‘Yes, I love it – it’s so quiet,’ she said. Lady Kilmichael was if anything more embarrassed than Nicholas by this encounter. This was exactly what she had foreseen! No one ever went to Greece who said they were going there, she thought, almost resentfully. And now what was she to say to this strange Austrian, into whose house Nicholas has inserted himself on false pretences? With the grave courtesy which was the one invulnerable part of her rather inadequate technique for living she said – ‘I am so very sorry about this; I am afraid it is most inconvenient for you that Mr Humphries should have come to the villa. But he can go back at once to Ragusa – there is a bus at eight-thirty.’

  Dr Halther continued to look sardonic, but he made no direct reply to her statement. ‘Let him explain, gnädige Frau – he is old enough,’ he said.

  And Nicholas, at this moment returning with the landlord and more wine, proceeded to justify this assumption. Raising his glass politely to the Doctor – ‘Prost!’ he said. Now this is a rather characteristic Viennese formula for health-drinking, and Dr Halther’s expression relaxed. ‘Ah, so you know Vienna at least?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir – a little.’ Then he plunged into it. ‘I must ask your pardon for my intrusion. The fact is that Lady Kilmichael is helping me with my painting, and when she came out here there wasn’t room for me at the Orlandos’, and I wanted to be nearby, so I looked round for somewhere to stay, and your house seemed to be the only place.’ He paused – the Doctor said nothing, and he went on – ‘I do apologise, sir, for taking your name in vain. It was a gross untruth, really. But I thought that if your house was empty anyhow, I should do you no harm by fibbing about you.’

  ‘What is this, fibbing?’ the Doctor interjected.

  ‘Saying what isn’t true,’ Nicholas explained, with the utmost candour. ‘You see I wanted to come very much,’ he pursued. ‘I’m doing a portrait of Lady Kilmichael. But of course I’ll clear out at once, now. And I do hope, sir, that you will accept my apologies.’

  He made this explanation very simply and nicely; Dr Halther listened to it with the expression of one who reserves judgement till he has heard all the evidence. When Nicholas had finished:

  ‘This portrait – where is it?’ he said.

  ‘At the Tete Mare – I’m doing it in the garden there.’

  ‘May one see?’ Dr Halther asked, turning to Lady Kilmichael.

  ‘Certainly, if Mr Humphries doesn’t mind,’ said Grace. So presently they all trooped down to the Tete Mare, and Nicholas brought out his canvas. The Doctor studied it for a long time in silence, looking now and then at Lady Kilmichael, and turning back to the half-finished portrait again. Nicholas had painted her sitting sideways at one of the little tables, with a cup of coffee in front of her; the shadows of the vine leaves in the trellis fell over her dress – behind, one of the flower beds glowed in full sunlight. Lady Kilmichael, who like many slender women with long backs never stood if she could possibly sit, had dropped into a chair for the inspection, and sat now, unconsciously, in an attitude very much like her pose in the picture – one elbow on the table, her head tilted slightly back, showing the beautiful relation of jaw to throat, one of the subtlest forms of human beauty – watching the two men with an expression of rather meditative enquiry. It was a common look of hers – she spent so much of her life watching people and wondering about them; and already Nicholas had caught some hint of it in his portrait.

  ‘This shall be good,’ Dr Halther at last pronounced, emphatically. ‘It is remarkable already. With whom do you study?’

  ‘I had six months with Zarini, sir.’ Nicholas brought out Zarini’s name with his usual complacency at having studied with so great a man; Dr Halther’s reaction to it, however, was unexpected.

  ‘Zarini? Bah!’ he said, tapping the edge of the canvas. ‘He has never painted such a picture, and never shall – nicht im Leben! He is all tricks – the knife, the point of the brush! Tricks – they make no picture. Here too are some tricks’ – he tapped the canvas again – ‘but here also is a picture.’

  Grace was surprised by his authoritative manner. He spoke as if he took painting seriously. The next moment he turned with an air of finality to the young man, who stood looking faintly bewildered, between this rough handling of one of his idols, and the praise of his own work.

  ‘This must be finished,’ he said, sharply, as if it was an order. ‘Till it is complete at least, you stay with me. Einverstanden?’

  ‘Thank you very much, sir. I ask nothing better,’ said Nicholas. And when the two men presently walked back to the villa together, Grace was left marvelling at the capacity of people of Nicholas’s age for pulling off the most impossible situations. Once again, in his own phrase, Nicholas had ‘got away with it completely’; whilst she had wasted a considerable amount of worry over a contingency which, when it finally arose, he had handled without the smallest trouble.

  Rather to her surprise, Nicholas informed her during their sitting next morning of his host’s intention of calling on her in the afternoon. Nicholas was in considerable spirits; he painted fast, and not in his usual silence – a little trickle of cheerful remarks punctuated his work. Dr Halther, Grace learned, was rather a card; he was a terrific talker, they had talked half the night; he knew a lot about painting, and had some first-rate pictures – he was altogether good value. Clearly they had got on well together; Grace was pleased. She awaited her visitor that afternoon with a little stir of interest and anticipation.

  Dr Halther arrived at about four o’clock, in his yellow suit and his panama hat; he refused coffee, saying that he never took it before five-thirty; and after a few minutes, with his usual abrupt definiteness, he suggested that they should take a walk. Grace agreed, and they set out up the valley, towards a small hill which rose steep and isolated among the level fields, its gentler slopes covered with cypresses, growing in open groups of all ages and sizes, from hoary ancestral trees with huge silvery trunks to delicate slips of seedlings only a few feet high – they reminded her of patriarchal families, where several generations kept house together. Among the trees
the rocky soil was covered with a pale wiry turf, set here and there with great clumps of the silver phlomis and a big spurge, with greenish-silver leaves and coral-red stalks, carrying enormous flower heads of primrose yellow – there was something almost unnaturally pictorial about this pale background of buff and silver, set with the spectacular darkness and formality of the cypresses. Asking if she minded a climb, Dr Halther led Lady Kilmichael up among them. He walked, as he apparently did everything, with immense energy, moving so fast that Grace found it all she could do to keep up with him. The summit of the little hill was crowned with a small battered-looking chapel, and here, to her relief, Dr Halther suggested a pause to look at the view. Sitting on the stone steps of the platform before the door, the whole of Komolac was spread out below them, river, street and houses, neat and small in the afternoon sunshine; Dr Halther pointed out the villa, dominated by the uncouth and unmistakeable shape of the monkey tree. ‘But for the hedge, one might almost see Mr Humphries at work,’ he said, with a short chuckle. And added ‘That is a very nice young man.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t he?’ replied Grace.

  ‘He paints remarkably well,’ the Doctor went on – ‘he tells me that you teach him now?’

  ‘Yes – I have been helping him as much as I could these last three weeks – in fact all the time since we last saw you,’ said Grace.

  ‘Ah, yes – you told me then that you did not travel together, but now you do?’ he said, looking at her keenly, with a hint of amusement.

  ‘Yes – it all happened rather oddly,’ said Grace. For some reason she was not ruffled by his amusement, nor embarrassed by his obvious curiosity as to why she and Nicholas were still together; she found herself quite willing to tell him how it had come about, and did so; the boy’s accidental discovery that she painted, his difficulties with his family, and her sudden resolve to let him show what he could do. ‘He was so unhappy, I felt I must do something about it,’ she said, turning her clear gaze to Dr Halther.

  ‘Do you always feel you must do something about it, if people are unhappy?’ he asked, with that mixture of benevolence and irony in his expression.

  ‘Generally – don’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘I am apt to ask myself first if I shall not in the end do as much harm as good,’ he said drily. ‘You, I expect, do not ask yourself this.’

  ‘I did quite soon, that time,’ said Grace, and described her dilemma, in view of his promise to his parents to give up painting, when she discovered that Nicholas’s talent was a thing which must be taken seriously.

  ‘No doubt – one sees at once that he has a great gift. Well, and then you did what? Decided to let him sacrifice his parents to his art?’

  ‘Not exactly. But you see there was something besides his art,’ said Grace earnestly. ‘When I met him first he was more than unhappy – he was all at odds with everything.’

  ‘What is this – at odds?’ the Doctor interjected.

  ‘Well – how can I explain? He was like a piece of knotted string then, all taut and tangled; and in the first week that he was painting he became different – as if half the knots had been undone. I felt – I find it hard to explain – that being able to paint was doing something to him, inside, that really needed doing, and that probably his parents didn’t realise it. We don’t realise a great many things. His art is important, but this was more important than his art.’

  ‘I see you are something of a psychologist,’ the Doctor observed.

  ‘I? Good heavens, no! I hardly know anything about psychology, and most of it seems to me really rather silly,’ said Grace frankly.

  He laughed. ‘We shall discuss psychology another day. In every case, I think you make an accurate deduction about this young man. Well, what did you do about his parents?’

  ‘I said he must write and tell his Mother that he was working with me.’

  ‘And his Frau Mamma says what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Grace, startled. It suddenly occurred to her that she had never asked Nicholas what Mrs Humphries’ reactions had been to his letter from Spalato. The episode of the Deputy Commandant and her subsequent discovery about Nicholas’s state of mind had put the other matter entirely out of her head. ‘I forgot to ask him,’ she said. ‘I will.’

  The Doctor smiled – if such a sarcastic grimace could be called a smile. ‘Na, jedenfalls for three weeks now he paints, and you teach him. And he is better, happier, with fewer knots? You find him unhappy, and you do something about it, and now it is all much better? You have done him good? Yes?’

  Dr Halther put this machine-gun fire of questions, all the time peering at her from under his eyebrows with a certain insistence which, coupled with that hint of amusement, began to disconcert Lady Kilmichael a little. She answered with a slight hesitation.

  ‘Yes – I think so. Oh yes, he is much happier and more easy in himself than he was.’

  ‘H’m,’ said the Doctor. ‘As to that, I think you are right. You have resolved a conflict for him, and given him a liberation. But it is on your responsibility, not on his. So it is perhaps not so valid.’ He took out a cheroot, and saying ‘You permit?’ lit it. To Grace, watching the puffs of blue smoke curling up between her and the panorama of the sunlit fields, came the thought that the effect of this rather odd conversation was, curiously enough, to make the whole question of Nicholas and his difficulties much clearer to herself than it had been yet, though the Professor – why couldn’t she stop thinking of him as the Professor? – asked questions rather than expounded. He did ask questions! The next moment, having got his cheroot going, he turned to her again, and went on, as if there had been no pause – ‘But it can happen sometimes that one shall only exchange one conflict for another. Is he now in love with you, this young man?’

  Lady Kilmichael hesitated again. She did not want to give Nicholas away to a person who was almost a stranger, but under the scrutiny of those remorseless eyes she felt the futility of lying.

  ‘I have occasionally thought so – but I may be mistaken,’ she said evasively. ‘Young men do sometimes get these sort of attachments, but they don’t amount to anything.’

  Dr Halther’s ironic grin appeared again.

  ‘Of course he is! I have seen this already. I wanted only to find out if you know – and if you are honest!’

  ‘Yes – well, he is,’ she said.

  ‘Much?’

  ‘I really don’t know how much. It seems so strange that he should be at all,’ she said simply, now returning the Doctor’s look steadily.

  ‘Strange? Um Gottes Willen, why is it strange?’ Dr Halther burst out. ‘He is young, he is sensitive, he is unhappy – and he spends now several weeks with a woman like you! What shall he do but fall in love? You did not foresee this? But, meine gnädigste, what then did you expect?’

  ‘Not that,’ said Grace, startled by this outburst. ‘I did not expect it in the least.’ She hesitated an instant and then said, with a directness which had a certain dignity – ‘Compared to him, I am so old.’

  ‘So old!’ The Doctor looked at her, and gave a sort of yelp of impatient laughter. ‘Gnädige Frau, if you think you shall not still be fallen in love with, your great age has not brought you much wisdom!’

  ‘No, I am afraid that is true,’ said Grace, still with that disarming directness. ‘I am in a muddle about a great many things, besides Mr Humphries. I don’t think I am at all clever about people. But I am still rather surprised that anyone so young as he should fall in love with me. After all, I am old enough to be his mother.’

  Dr Halther looked thoughtfully at her, at this; when he spoke again, it was rather more gently.

  ‘Pardon!’ he said, still abruptly. ‘I think you will be insincere with me – I am wrong. All women are insincere, but some will be, and some will not! I think you will not. But to be sincere one must first think clearly – nicht wahr?’

  ‘Of course. But I’m not very good at it,’ said Grace, unresentfully. She was vaguely surpri
sed at her own lack of resentment at the Doctor’s methods; but something about him – some purity of intention, some detachment from ordinary social values – seemed to preclude resentment. She was even aware of a certain relief at having the question of Nicholas treated with such drastic precision, after her own confused meditations; and by someone whom she felt instinctively to be trustworthy.

  ‘Look then,’ said the Doctor, spreading out before him a large square hand with blunt-tipped fingers, as if it were a diagram of young men in love, and tapping it with his cheroot – ‘why must you be surprised that a young man shall fall in love with a woman much older than he? You know very well that in love there are always two elements, the romantic, the ideal, as well as the physical – and for young people it is usually the former that is the most important. From type to type this varies, which element shall predominate, but im allgemein this is true; the heart and mind will worship first, and afterwards only the body, when one is young. This is clear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very well. And in an older woman there is more for the heart, the mind, to enjoy and love, than in a young girl; and because of her age, her position, the senses are longer left at peace – they do not intrude and interrupt so soon. So the love of the Karakter can expand fully. However such a relationship shall develop later, it is thus in the beginning. But this is very satisfying to a young man, with his mind wide like a nest bird’s mouth for knowledge, for experience! Why then is it strange?’