“Spy!” she answered, without a moment’s hesitation. She was standing by the little Gothic window as she spoke — the hotel had been a palace once — and with her finger she was following the curves of the moulding as if they might feel beautiful and strange. “Spy,” she repeated, for Philip was bewildered at learning her guilt so easily, and could not answer a word. “Your mother has behaved dishonourably all through. She never wanted the child; no harm in that; but she is too proud to let it come to me. She has done all she could to wreck things; she did not tell you everything; she has told Harriet nothing at all; she has lied or acted lies everywhere. I cannot trust your mother. So I have come here alone — all across Europe; no one knows it; my father thinks I am in Normandy — to spy on Mrs. Herriton. Don’t let’s argue!” for he had begun, almost mechanically, to rebuke her for impertinence. “If you are here to get the child, I will help you; if you are here to fail, I shall get it instead of you.”
“It is hopeless to expect you to believe me,” he stammered. “But I can assert that we are here to get the child, even if it costs us all we’ve got. My mother has fixed no money limit whatever. I am here to carry out her instructions. I think that you will approve of them, as you have practically dictated them. I do not approve of them. They are absurd.”
She nodded carelessly. She did not mind what he said. All she wanted was to get the baby out of Monteriano.
“Harriet also carries out your instructions,” he continued. “She, however, approves of them, and does not know that they proceed from you. I think, Miss Abbott, you had better take entire charge of the rescue party. I have asked for an interview with Signor Carella tomorrow morning. Do you acquiesce?”
She nodded again.
“Might I ask for details of your interview with him? They might be helpful to me.”
He had spoken at random. To his delight she suddenly collapsed. Her hand fell from the window. Her face was red with more than the reflection of evening.
“My interview — how do you know of it?”
“From Perfetta, if it interests you.”
“Who ever is Perfetta?”
“The woman who must have let you in.”
“In where?”
“Into Signor Carella’s house.”
“Mr. Herriton!” she exclaimed. “How could you believe her? Do you suppose that I would have entered that man’s house, knowing about him all that I do? I think you have very odd ideas of what is possible for a lady. I hear you wanted Harriet to go. Very properly she refused. Eighteen months ago I might have done such a thing. But I trust I have learnt how to behave by now.”
Philip began to see that there were two Miss Abbotts — the Miss Abbott who could travel alone to Monteriano, and the Miss Abbott who could not enter Gino’s house when she got there. It was an amusing discovery. Which of them would respond to his next move?
“I suppose I misunderstood Perfetta. Where did you have your interview, then?”
“Not an interview — an accident — I am very sorry — I meant you to have the chance of seeing him first. Though it is your fault. You are a day late. You were due here yesterday. So I came yesterday, and, not finding you, went up to the Rocca — you know that kitchen-garden where they let you in, and there is a ladder up to a broken tower, where you can stand and see all the other towers below you and the plain and all the other hills?”
“Yes, yes. I know the Rocca; I told you of it.”
“So I went up in the evening for the sunset: I had nothing to do. He was in the garden: it belongs to a friend of his.”
“And you talked.”
“It was very awkward for me. But I had to talk: he seemed to make me. You see he thought I was here as a tourist; he thinks so still. He intended to be civil, and I judged it better to be civil also.”
“And of what did you talk?”
“The weather — there will be rain, he says, by tomorrow evening — the other towns, England, myself, about you a little, and he actually mentioned Lilia. He was perfectly disgusting; he pretended he loved her; he offered to show me her grave — the grave of the woman he has murdered!”
“My dear Miss Abbott, he is not a murderer. I have just been driving that into Harriet. And when you know the Italians as well as I do, you will realize that in all that he said to you he was perfectly sincere. The Italians are essentially dramatic; they look on death and love as spectacles. I don’t doubt that he persuaded himself, for the moment, that he had behaved admirably, both as husband and widower.”
“You may be right,” said Miss Abbott, impressed for the first time. “When I tried to pave the way, so to speak — to hint that he had not behaved as he ought — well, it was no good at all. He couldn’t or wouldn’t understand.”
There was something very humorous in the idea of Miss Abbott approaching Gino, on the Rocca, in the spirit of a district visitor. Philip, whose temper was returning, laughed.
“Harriet would say he has no sense of sin.”
“Harriet may be right, I am afraid.”
“If so, perhaps he isn’t sinful!”
Miss Abbott was not one to encourage levity. “I know what he has done,” she said. “What he says and what he thinks is of very little importance.”
Philip smiled at her crudity. “I should like to hear, though, what he said about me. Is he preparing a warm reception?”
“Oh, no, not that. I never told him that you and Harriet were coming. You could have taken him by surprise if you liked. He only asked for you, and wished he hadn’t been so rude to you eighteen months ago.”
“What a memory the fellow has for little things!” He turned away as he spoke, for he did not want her to see his face. It was suffused with pleasure. For an apology, which would have been intolerable eighteen months ago, was gracious and agreeable now.
She would not let this pass. “You did not think it a little thing at the time. You told me he had assaulted you.”
“I lost my temper,” said Philip lightly. His vanity had been appeased, and he knew it. This tiny piece of civility had changed his mood. “Did he really — what exactly did he say?”
“He said he was sorry — pleasantly, as Italians do say such things. But he never mentioned the baby once.”
What did the baby matter when the world was suddenly right way up? Philip smiled, and was shocked at himself for smiling, and smiled again. For romance had come back to Italy; there were no cads in her; she was beautiful, courteous, lovable, as of old. And Miss Abbott — she, too, was beautiful in her way, for all her gaucheness and conventionality. She really cared about life, and tried to live it properly. And Harriet — even Harriet tried.
This admirable change in Philip proceeds from nothing admirable, and may therefore provoke the gibes of the cynical. But angels and other practical people will accept it reverently, and write it down as good.
“The view from the Rocca (small gratuity) is finest at sunset,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.
“And he never mentioned the baby once,” Miss Abbott repeated. But she had returned to the window, and again her finger pursued the delicate curves. He watched her in silence, and was more attracted to her than he had ever been before. She really was the strangest mixture.
“The view from the Rocca — wasn’t it fine?”
“What isn’t fine here?” she answered gently, and then added, “I wish I was Harriet,” throwing an extraordinary meaning into the words.
“Because Harriet — ?”
She would not go further, but he believed that she had paid homage to the complexity of life. For her, at all events, the expedition was neither easy nor jolly. Beauty, evil, charm, vulgarity, mystery — she also acknowledged this tangle, in spite of herself. And her voice thrilled him when she broke silence with “Mr. Herriton — come here — look at this!”
She removed a pile of plates from the Gothic window, and they leant out of it. Close opposite, wedged between mean houses, there rose up one of the great towers. It is y
our tower: you stretch a barricade between it and the hotel, and the traffic is blocked in a moment. Farther up, where the street empties out by the church, your connections, the Merli and the Capocchi, do likewise. They command the Piazza, you the Siena gate. No one can move in either but he shall be instantly slain, either by bows or by crossbows, or by Greek fire. Beware, however, of the back bedroom windows. For they are menaced by the tower of the Aldobrandeschi, and before now arrows have stuck quivering over the washstand. Guard these windows well, lest there be a repetition of the events of February 1338, when the hotel was surprised from the rear, and your dearest friend — you could just make out that it was he — was thrown at you over the stairs.
“It reaches up to heaven,” said Philip, “and down to the other place.” The summit of the tower was radiant in the sun, while its base was in shadow and pasted over with advertisements. “Is it to be a symbol of the town?”
She gave no hint that she understood him. But they remained together at the window because it was a little cooler and so pleasant. Philip found a certain grace and lightness in his companion which he had never noticed in England. She was appallingly narrow, but her consciousness of wider things gave to her narrowness a pathetic charm. He did not suspect that he was more graceful too. For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.
Citizens came out for a little stroll before dinner. Some of them stood and gazed at the advertisements on the tower.
“Surely that isn’t an opera-bill?” said Miss Abbott.
Philip put on his pince-nez. “‘Lucia di Lammermoor. By the Master Donizetti. Unique representation. This evening.’
“But is there an opera? Right up here?”
“Why, yes. These people know how to live. They would sooner have a thing bad than not have it at all. That is why they have got to have so much that is good. However bad the performance is tonight, it will be alive. Italians don’t love music silently, like the beastly Germans. The audience takes its share — sometimes more.”
“Can’t we go?”
He turned on her, but not unkindly. “But we’re here to rescue a child!”
He cursed himself for the remark. All the pleasure and the light went out of her face, and she became again Miss Abbott of Sawston — good, oh, most undoubtedly good, but most appallingly dull. Dull and remorseful: it is a deadly combination, and he strove against it in vain till he was interrupted by the opening of the dining-room door.
They started as guiltily as if they had been flirting. Their interview had taken such an unexpected course. Anger, cynicism, stubborn morality — all had ended in a feeling of good-will towards each other and towards the city which had received them. And now Harriet was here — acrid, indissoluble, large; the same in Italy as in England — changing her disposition never, and her atmosphere under protest.
Yet even Harriet was human, and the better for a little tea. She did not scold Philip for finding Gino out, as she might reasonably have done. She showered civilities on Miss Abbott, exclaiming again and again that Caroline’s visit was one of the most fortunate coincidences in the world. Caroline did not contradict her.
“You see him tomorrow at ten, Philip. Well, don’t forget the blank cheque. Say an hour for the business. No, Italians are so slow; say two. Twelve o’clock. Lunch. Well — then it’s no good going till the evening train. I can manage the baby as far as Florence— “
“My dear sister, you can’t run on like that. You don’t buy a pair of gloves in two hours, much less a baby.”
“Three hours, then, or four; or make him learn English ways. At Florence we get a nurse— “
“But, Harriet,” said Miss Abbott, “what if at first he was to refuse?”
“I don’t know the meaning of the word,” said Harriet impressively. “I’ve told the landlady that Philip and I only want our rooms one night, and we shall keep to it.”
“I dare say it will be all right. But, as I told you, I thought the man I met on the Rocca a strange, difficult man.”
“He’s insolent to ladies, we know. But my brother can be trusted to bring him to his senses. That woman, Philip, whom you saw will carry the baby to the hotel. Of course you must tip her for it. And try, if you can, to get poor Lilia’s silver bangles. They were nice quiet things, and will do for Irma. And there is an inlaid box I lent her — lent, not gave — to keep her handkerchiefs in. It’s of no real value; but this is our only chance. Don’t ask for it; but if you see it lying about, just say— “
“No, Harriet; I’ll try for the baby, but for nothing else. I promise to do that tomorrow, and to do it in the way you wish. But tonight, as we’re all tired, we want a change of topic. We want relaxation. We want to go to the theatre.”
“Theatres here? And at such a moment?”
“We should hardly enjoy it, with the great interview impending,” said Miss Abbott, with an anxious glance at Philip.
He did not betray her, but said, “Don’t you think it’s better than sitting in all the evening and getting nervous?”
His sister shook her head. “Mother wouldn’t like it. It would be most unsuitable — almost irreverent. Besides all that, foreign theatres are notorious. Don’t you remember those letters in the ‘Church Family Newspaper’?”
“But this is an opera— ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ — Sir Walter Scott — classical, you know.”
Harriet’s face grew resigned. “Certainly one has so few opportunities of hearing music. It is sure to be very bad. But it might be better than sitting idle all the evening. We have no book, and I lost my crochet at Florence.”
“Good. Miss Abbott, you are coming too?”
“It is very kind of you, Mr. Herriton. In some ways I should enjoy it; but — excuse the suggestion — I don’t think we ought to go to cheap seats.”
“Good gracious me!” cried Harriet, “I should never have thought of that. As likely as not, we should have tried to save money and sat among the most awful people. One keeps on forgetting this is Italy.”
“Unfortunately I have no evening dress; and if the seats— “
“Oh, that’ll be all right,” said Philip, smiling at his timorous, scrupulous women-kind. “We’ll go as we are, and buy the best we can get. Monteriano is not formal.”
So this strenuous day of resolutions, plans, alarms, battles, victories, defeats, truces, ended at the opera. Miss Abbott and Harriet were both a little shame-faced. They thought of their friends at Sawston, who were supposing them to be now tilting against the powers of evil. What would Mrs. Herriton, or Irma, or the curates at the Back Kitchen say if they could see the rescue party at a place of amusement on the very first day of its mission? Philip, too, marvelled at his wish to go. He began to see that he was enjoying his time in Monteriano, in spite of the tiresomeness of his companions and the occasional contrariness of himself.
He had been to this theatre many years before, on the occasion of a performance of “La Zia di Carlo.” Since then it had been thoroughly done up, in the tints of the beet-root and the tomato, and was in many other ways a credit to the little town. The orchestra had been enlarged, some of the boxes had terra-cotta draperies, and over each box was now suspended an enormous tablet, neatly framed, bearing upon it the number of that box. There was also a drop-scene, representing a pink and purple landscape, wherein sported many a lady lightly clad, and two more ladies lay along the top of the proscenium to steady a large and pallid clock. So rich and so appalling was the effect, that Philip could scarcely suppress a cry. There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy; it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany. It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by. But it attains to beauty’s confidence. This tiny theatre of Monteriano spraddled and swaggered with the best of them, and these ladies with their clock would have nodded to the young men on the ceiling of the Sistine.
“We do all right,” said Philip, amused at her unwonted vanity.
“Yes, I know; but pretty things pack as easily as ugly ones. We had no need to come to Italy like guys.”
This time he did not reply, “But we’re here to rescue a baby.” For he saw a charming picture, as charming a picture as he had seen for years — the hot red theatre; outside the theatre, towers and dark gates and mediaeval walls; beyond the walls olive-trees in the starlight and white winding roads and fireflies and untroubled dust; and here in the middle of it all, Miss Abbott, wishing she had not come looking like a guy. She had made the right remark. Most undoubtedly she had made the right remark. This stiff suburban woman was unbending before the shrine.
“Don’t you like it at all?” he asked her.
“Most awfully.” And by this bald interchange they convinced each other that Romance was here.
Harriet, meanwhile, had been coughing ominously at the drop-scene, which presently rose on the grounds of Ravenswood, and the chorus of Scotch retainers burst into cry. The audience accompanied with tappings and drummings, swaying in the melody like corn in the wind. Harriet, though she did not care for music, knew how to listen to it. She uttered an acid “Shish!”
“Shut it,” whispered her brother.
“We must make a stand from the beginning. They’re talking.”
“It is tiresome,” murmured Miss Abbott; “but perhaps it isn’t for us to interfere.”
Harriet shook her head and shished again. The people were quiet, not because it is wrong to talk during a chorus, but because it is natural to be civil to a visitor. For a little time she kept the whole house in order, and could smile at her brother complacently.
Works of E M Forster Page 10