by Ann Bridge
‘One hears of it happening, of course,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But it seemed strange that it should happen to oneself.’
‘That is because you do not think clearly, especially about yourself. People do not willingly think clearly about themselves. It is not strange at all. It happens often – it would happen more often if the opportunity did not lack. How many young men travel for a month, alone with a woman to whom they are no relation? Yet I have known many cases of young men who fall in love even with women who are really old and extremely ugly – which you are not. In this case, it could not well be otherwise.’
Grace was silent. Put like that, it all sounded as inevitable as a mathematical proposition. Apparently she had made as much of a muddle of Nicholas, with whom she had seemed to get on so easily and so well, as she had of her own family. A little discouraged –
‘I see. I suppose I should have foreseen it,’ she said. ‘The last thing I intended was to do him any harm. I am afraid I have been very stupid about him.’
‘It is not stupidity – it is lack of thought. You have not the habit of first asking, ‘If I act thus, what shall the result of my action be?’ But why shall this do young Humphries any harm, to love you? Most probably it will do him a great deal of good. It gives him perhaps a new conflict – I cannot say; he can have already another emotion in his life. But such a relation can be the most important in a whole existence. You remember Benjamin Constant and Madame de Charrière.’
‘Yes – but I’m not very like Zélide,’ said Grace.
He smiled. ‘No, I too think not, though I do not know you yet. But please do not mistake. I have not said that I think the result of your action unfortunate. What is really strange is that, to you, it should have been unforeseen.’
‘But one doesn’t go about asking oneself if people are going to fall in love with one,’ said Grace, in a tone of faint protest, after a moment’s pause.
He gave her an odd look. ‘In your case, I think it would be advisable to ask oneself this,’ he observed, drily. ‘Do you tell me that no one now makes love to you? Apart from young Humphries?’
The unlucky memory of the Deputy Commandant checked the stout denial which Lady Kilmichael would have given a month before. Her blush appeared. ‘Not often,’ she said.
Dr Halther studied her blush. ‘I gather you live in England,’ was all he said. He rose. ‘Shall we return, now?’ he asked.
Grace rose too. ‘Just one thing,’ she said. ‘Doctor Halther, I make so many mistakes; what do you think I ought to do now about Mr Humphries?’
He looked at the view, blew out a cloud of smoke, and then looked back at her.
‘Let him finish his portrait,’ he said. ‘This at least shall be good.’
They talked about flowers on the way back. Passing down through the cypresses Grace picked a piece of the great silver-leaved spurge, in case Nicholas had missed it. He had begun a hortus siccus of Dalmatian flowers – the loose sheets of blotting-paper (procured from Signor Lassi, the photographer) reposed between boards under a pile of weighty objects in her painting room at the Tete Mare; she was always bumping into it, and whenever she did so she was reminded of the twins’ habit of parking the bulkier apparatus of their hobbies either in her morning room or in the studio, instead of in their own sitting room. When she gathered the spray now – ‘Euphorbia dendroides,’ Dr Halther remarked.
‘Oh, is it? Do you know the names of all the flowers here?’ she asked.
‘Most of them’ – and it seemed that he did, for all the way back he told her the name of each flower that they passed. At the villa gate he asked her to come in and take coffee – Grace declined, saying that she must do some work herself; she promised, however, to have tea there on the following day. As she walked back along the fondamento she thought, of course, about the conversation which she had just had with the Professor. He was very abrupt! But it seemed to her also that he was reliable and wise – that was her main impression of him. One could learn a lot from a man like that, who would insist on thinking clearly, who tore away all the veils of reserve and shyness and conventional humility, and left nothing but facts, bleak and gaunt as the figures in an El Greco picture. Why did she think of an El Greco? she wondered. Was there a hint of distortion, too, in his view of life? Anyhow she would like to hear him talk on all sorts of subjects, besides Nicholas. But why wouldn’t he tell her what to do about Nicholas? She was aware of a definite refusal there. Did he not know what she ought to do, or wouldn’t he tell her? It was rather tiresome; she did very much want to know.
There was a sound of rapid feet behind her; a hand was pushed unceremoniously through her arm, and there was Nicholas himself.
‘Why didn’t you come in?’ he said. ‘Why did you bolt off like that?’
‘I didn’t bolt – I want to do some work.’
‘I wanted you to see my picture,’ he said. ‘I’ve started a most priceless one of Maria giving the Professor what-for! She tongues him like anything if he doesn’t eat his food or change his underclothes – she was doing it this morning.’
‘I can see it tomorrow – I’m coming to tea,’ said Grace.
‘Yes, I know. Am I coming to supper tonight?’
‘I think perhaps not; I must work.’ Then a thought struck her. ‘Nicholas, what did your Mother say about the painting when you wrote to her about it? You remember you promised to, at Clissa.’
‘Yes – and I did; I wrote that same night. But the odd thing is that she’s never said a word about it. The Jug Agency forwarded a letter from her from Split yesterday, too, but she never mentioned it. That’s rather funny.’
‘You’re sure you did write?’
‘Of course I’m sure. Why are you so suspicious, Lady K.?’
‘You really wrote the sort of letter I meant you to write – a letter that needed an answer?’
‘Yes – really and truly. It is very odd.’ He paused, and looked down at his suit, with an expression suddenly doubtful. ‘I suppose I posted it,’ he said, and began to feel in his inner pockets. Out came a miscellaneous collection of papers – the bill for his paints and canvases, not paid; a receipt from the Hotel Imperial at Ragusa; a menu from the inn at Spalato, on which Grace had drawn an idle sketch of him one night – and among them, unstamped, rather dirty, the corners bent, a letter with the name of the Ritz-Splendide printed on the flap of the envelope. This he held out to her in silence, with guilty eyes.
‘Nicholas, you are hopeless! No, that really is wrong of you,’ she said, as he put on his coaxing expression, cocking his head on one side. ‘You’ve made me work with you really on false pretences! You know that I should not have done it unless I believed you had written.’ She was surprised herself at the keenness of her vexation at this discovery.
He looked at her in silence, flushing. ‘You know I didn’t mean to hold it up,’ he said at length. ‘I remember now – I hadn’t a stamp, and you’d gone to bed, and I left it till the morning and forgot.’ His expression changed. ‘It is my fault, Lady Kilmichael, and I am very sorry – but I don’t think you ought to use that expression about me. You can hardly believe that I did it intentionally.’ His voice was very cold – the letter shook in his fingers; Grace realised that he was bitterly angry. It was nearly a month since he had called her ‘Lady Kilmichael.’
‘No – I oughtn’t,’ she said at once. ‘I am sorry I said that – I take it back. But you do see that you are exceptionally tiresome, don’t you? That I feel that I’ve been put in a completely false position, even if you didn’t do it intentionally?’ Having apologised, she felt, as people are apt to do, that she was thereby entitled to show her vexation freely.
He looked at her again, and said nothing for some moments. At last – ‘When you really are cross, it isn’t funny,’ he said slowly. ‘But I deserve it. That wasn’t so good. I am very sorry. Good night.’ He turned to go.
‘Good night,’ said Lady Kilmichael, and walked on towards the Orlandos’. Suddenly she
noticed that she was still carrying the piece of spurge which she had picked for Nicholas. Ridiculously, the sight of it brought the tears into her eyes. Really, she was absurd this afternoon, she thought impatiently – the least thing upset her. But she remembered how she had picked it to give him pleasure, and all she had done in the end was to be unfair and unkind to him, to part almost in anger. She glanced back. Nicholas was still standing in the white roadway, looking after her; there was something rather desolate about his solitary figure, with the yellow head. She had a strong impulse to go back, to give him the spurge and heal this small breach. But she resisted it, and went slowly on. She thought that she was making this decision in the light of the Professor’s remarks about weighing the probable result of one’s action, and not because she did not want, for some reason, to confront Nicholas again just then. Perhaps she was right.
SIXTEEN
‘Goodness, what a view!’
‘That big mountain over there is whiter even than Mossor. Lady K., this is rather a place.’
Nicholas and Lady Kilmichael were standing on the crest of the mountainous ridge which overhangs the Ombla valley on the north. Behind, they could look clear over the valley and the low intervening hill to the sea and the islands; but it was the view in front of them which drew forth these exclamations. It was one of the strangest they had ever seen – an upland plateau of greyish-white rock, sloping away very gradually in front of them, and rising again beyond to great bleached mountains, white with the dull whiteness of paper or ashes. Slope beyond slope, range upon arid range, this vast pale landscape stretched away into the furthest distance, as empty and almost as desiccated as a slag heap; near at hand the broken rocks were skinned over in places with a low scrub of rusty dwarf oak and juniper, only three or four feet high; but this scanty shrubby vegetation merely added to the prevailing sense of drought and desolation. There was not a house, an animal or a human being in sight – it was like looking on the skeleton of a world which had perished in a fire. They were in fact seeing for the first time a typical stretch of karst country, the high limestone tract which with a few interruptions stretches all down the hinterland of the Adriatic coast, from Trieste to the Bocche di Cattaro. It was a startling contrast to the cultivated valley behind them, the iris-and-cistus-clad slopes up which they had just climbed; they had passed almost at a stride from a hillside brilliant as a garden to this bleak wilderness. Nevertheless, it had beauty, though of so strange a sort. ‘It’s like being in the moon,’ Nicholas presently remarked – and Lady Kilmichael could only agree.
The climb up had taken them two hours, and they were both hot and thirsty. Nicholas suggested a preliminary lunch where they were, before setting out to explore the plateau, and they sat down to eat it under the crumbling wall of a small ruined building, affording some shelter from the wind, which at this height was keen in spite of the hot sun. Nicholas hazarded the suggestion that the building might at one time have been a frontier post – ‘Halther says that the old frontier between Dalmatia and Herzegovina ran along this ridge, and it was a great place for smugglers.’
‘Then when we go down there we shall be in Herzegovina,’ said Grace, waving her hand vaguely at the sloping plateau in front of her. ‘What fun! But Nicholas, it is a queer place, isn’t it?’
It was queer. It was unnatural to see any tract of country so empty. There was something oppressive about the very solitude. Small paths winding between the rocks and the patches of scrub showed that humanity – or goats – sometimes passed that way, but there was no sign of them now. The whole place gave Lady Kilmichael a feeling of being a survivor on a deserted planet.
This expedition into the interior had been Nicholas’s idea, engendered by some chance remarks of Dr Halther’s about the scenery and vegetation of the plateau; and Grace, faintly remorseful still about her vexation over the business of the letter, had at once agreed to go too, when he suggested it at tea in the villa garden the previous day. That tea had been enlightening in one or two respects. For the first time Lady Kilmichael had seen Nicholas, under no special stress of circumstances, in company other than her own; and she had been struck by how much more mature, more independent and upstanding he showed himself in the society of the older man. More dispassionately than was usual with her, she registered this. After tea, Dr Halther had escorted her back to the Tete Mare, and on the way he said, with his usual abruptness:
‘You have asked me yesterday what you shall now do about young Humphries. I have not told you, because I did not know; also it is better that one should decide for oneself how one shall act. But today I know more. Last night we have spoken about you.’
‘Yes?’ said Grace, rather breathlessly. She was slightly appalled to think of Dr Halther cross-examining Nicholas as he had cross-examined her.
‘Yes. We speak only generally,’ he said. ‘But it is clear to me that he does not at all realise that he loves you. It is what I said yesterday. He thinks that it is your painting, your goodness of heart, your wisdom that he admires.’
‘Not my wisdom, surely?’ said Grace, startled into hitting on the irrelevant with even more accuracy than usual.
Dr Halther gave her a fine smile. ‘He said wisdom. But that is not the point, gnädige Frau. While he does not know, there is little that you can do but display goodness of heart, and wisdom.’ He smiled again. ‘But you cannot hope that he will not presently find out. Sooner or later, something shall show him. And then you will have to decide what you shall do.’
As she sat now, drinking Dr Halther’s lager beer at the edge of the plateau, Grace was thinking about his words. Nothing could have been more easy and unembarrassed than Nicholas’s manner on the walk up, and she wondered if this revelation were really so imminent as he supposed. Actually it was almost upon them. Nicholas had agreed that the place was queer, had rejected a salami sausage of Maria’s providing, and had embarked on some bread and cheese, when suddenly he turned his head rather quickly and said ‘What’s that?’
Grace looked round too. They were on a sort of saddle, and to their left the ridge rose considerably higher; there the oak scrub was thicker too. Up on this slope, almost hidden by the bushes, she caught a glimpse of several figures moving towards them. Owing to the scrub and the distance, it was impossible to see what they were; now they disappeared for a moment, now bobbed up again somewhere else, but their general direction appeared to be downhill and towards the saddle. For some time Grace and Nicholas watched this oddly anonymous approach with a certain intentness; Grace found herself trying to count the newcomers, but their spasmodic movements made this impossible, and presently they vanished entirely. Nicholas stood up to get a better view; she did the same; but nothing was now to be seen but the brownish scrub growing among the uneven white rocks, and the mountains in the distance – the plateau was again as empty as it had been before. There was something vaguely disquieting about this sudden appearance and disappearance of human beings, in that solitude. ‘I wonder where they’ve gone,’ said Grace.
‘They may have got into dead ground – it’s all very broken. I wonder what they are.’
‘Peasants, I suppose.’
Both spoke with a sort of deliberate casualness – neither was willing to admit to anything so obviously ridiculous as fear, or even nervousness, of they knew not what. But both, when they reseated themselves, without a word sat down, not under the wall as they had done before, but on the top of it, where they could see all round them. They went on eating, they talked about the view and the beer, but all the time each noticed, without mentioning it, that the other’s eyes were ranging the scrub, to right, to left, and above all behind them. And a little thread of tension, fine and impalpable but strong, was drawn taut between them.
Presently, out into an open space in front of them emerged a curious procession – first a flock of goats, and following them nine or ten girls, each carrying a distaff in her hand, from which she spun yarn as she walked. The girls had kerchiefed heads and long white c
oats reaching almost to their heels, with a foot of vivid scarlet embroidery at the hem – preceded by their flock, they moved across the landscape with the slow, rather formal grace of figures in an Eastern frieze – beautiful, pastoral, utterly peaceful. And they came from the foot of the slope! At the sight, the little thread of tension broke. Nicholas burst out laughing.
‘That’s all they are,’ he said. ‘Girls and goats!’
‘Oh Nicholas, how lovely their clothes are. Do let’s go and try to talk to them.’
‘They’ll only speak Serbo-Croat’; but he went with her. The girls were as shy as animals – they would stand to stare till the strangers were within a few yards of them, but on any closer approach they moved on, quietly but determinedly, like cows in a field. Lady Kilmichael managed nevertheless to take in the details of their garments – the dress of some dark stuff, the white woollen stockings and string-topped goatskin slippers, the long white homespun coats with that magnificent stretch of embroidery round the bottom, and narrower scarlet bands at the neck and armholes. Pursuing and pursued, goats and humans, the whole company shifted slowly along the ridge, till the girls reached an immense boulder; up this they climbed, and there, perched like cormorants on its summit, they began to sing – a curious monotonous little air in four simple phrases, repeated over and over again, which rose and fell in the clear air, vaguely melancholy as the desolate plateau and the ashen mountains beyond. Nicholas and Lady Kilmichael returned to their interrupted lunch, and this time they again sat under the low wall. Leaning his head against it – ‘Why did you sit on top, after we’d first seen them?’ Nicholas asked.
‘So that I could see behind me. Why did you?’
‘Same reason. Were you frightened?’ he said, looking rather closely at her.
‘Not really – I felt rather uncomfortable,’ she said. ‘No – I was rather frightened, just because I didn’t know what they were. It was frightfully silly.’