South Wind Part 15

"Is it true that you gave the plumpest of them to the Sultan of Colambang in exchange for the recipe of some wonderful sauce? Is it true that you used to be known as the Lightning Lover? Is it true that you used to say, in your London days, that no season was complete without a ruined home?"

"She exaggerates a good deal, that lady."

"Is it true that you once got so drunk that you mistook one of those red-coated Chelsea pensioners for a pillar-box and tried to post a letter in his stomach?"

"I'm very short-sighted, Don Francesco. Besides, all that was in a previous incarnation. Do come and listen to the music! May I offer you my arm, d.u.c.h.ess? I have a surprise for you."

"You have a surprise for us every year, you bad man," she said. "Now do try and see if you can't get married. It makes one feel so good."

Keith had a peculiar habit of vanishing for a day or two to the mainland, and returning with some rare orchid from the hills, a piece of Greek statuary, a new gardener, or something. Sowing his wild oats, he called it. During this last visit he had come across the tracks of an almost extinct tribe of gipsies that roamed up and down the glens of those mysterious mountains whose purple summits were visible, on clear days, from his own windows. After complex and costly negotiations they had allowed themselves to be embarked, for this one night only, in a capacious sailing boat to Nepenthe, in order to pleasure Mr. Keith's guests. And here they sat, huddled together in dignified repose and abashed, as it seemed, by the strangeness of their surroundings; a bizarre group stained to an almost negro tint by exposure to sun and winds and rain.

Here they sat--gnarled old men and sinewy fathers of families, with streaming black hair, golden earrings, hooded cloaks of wood and sandals bound with leathern thongs. Mothers were there, shapeless bundles of rags, nursing infants at the breast. The girls were draped in gaudy hues, and ablaze with metal charms and ornaments on forehead and arms and ankles. They showed their flashing teeth and smiled from time to time in frank wonder, whereas the boys, superbly savage, like young panthers caught in a trap, kept their eyes downcast or threw distrustful, defiant glances round them. Here they sat in silence, smoking tobacco and taking deep draughts out of a pitcher of milk which was handed round from one to the other. Occasionally the older people would pick up their instruments--bagpipes of sheepskin, small drums and gourd-like mandolines--and draw from them strange dronings, gurglings, thrummings, tw.a.n.gings; soon a group of youngsters would rise gravely from the ground and, without any preconcerted signal, begin to move in a dance--a formal and intricate measure, such as had never yet been witnessed on Nepenthe.

Something inhuman and yet troublingly personal lay in the performance; it invaded the onlookers with a sense of disquietude. There was primeval ecstasy in those strains and gestures. Giant moths, meanwhile, fluttered overhead, rattling their frail wings against the framework of the paper lanterns; the south wind pa.s.sed through the garden like the breath of a friend, bearing the aromatic burden of a thousand night-blooming shrubs and flowers. Young people, meeting here, would greet one another shyly, with unfamiliar ceremoniousness, and then, after listening awhile to the music and exchanging a few awkward phrases, wander away as if by common consent--further away from this crowd and garish brilliance, far away, into some fragrant cell, where the light was dim.

"What do you make of it?" asked Keith of Madame Steynlin, who was listening intently. "Is this music? If so, I begin to understand its laws. They are physical. I seem to feel the effect of it in the lower part of my chest. Perhaps that is the region which musical people call their ear. Tell me, Madame Steynlin, what is music?"

"That's a puzzle," said the bishop, greatly interested.

"How can I explain it to you? It is so complicated, and you have so many guests this evening. You are coming to my picnic after the festival of Saint Eulalia? Yes? Well, I will try to explain it then"--and her eye turned, with a kind of maternal solicitude, down the pathway to where, in that patch of bright moonshine, her young friend Krasnojabkin, gloriously indifferent to gipsies and everything else, was astounding people by the audacity of his terpsich.o.r.ean antics.

"Let that be a promise," Keith replied. "Ah, Count Caloveglia! How good of you to come. I would not have asked you to such a worldly function had I not thought that this dancing might interest you."

"It does, it does!" said the old aristocrat, thoughtfully sipping champagne out of an enormous goblet which he carried in his hand. "It makes me dream of that East which it has never been my fortune, alas, to behold. What a flawless group! There is something archaic, Oriental, in their att.i.tudes; they seem to be fraught with all the mystery, the sadness, of life that is past--of things remote from ourselves."

"My gipsies," said Keith, "are not everybody's gipsies."

"I think they despise us! And this austere regularity in the steps of the dancers, this vibrating accompaniment that dwells persistently on one note--how primitive, how scornfully unintellectual! It is like a pa.s.sionate lover knocking to gain an entrance into our hearts. And he succeeds. He breaks down the barrier by the oldest and best of lovers'

expedients--sheer reiteration of monotony. A lover who reasons is no lover."

"How true that is," remarked Madame Steynlin.

"Sheer monotony," repeated the Count. "And it is the same with their pictorial art. We blame the Orientals for their chill cult of geometric designs, their purely stylistic decoration, their endless repet.i.tions, as opposed to our variety and love of floral, human, or other naturalistic motives. But by this simple means they attain their end--a direct appeal. Their art, like their music, goes straight to the senses; it is not deflected or disturbed by any intervening medium.

Colour plays its part; the sombre, throbbing sounds of these instruments--the glowing tints of their carpets and tapestries. Talking of gipsies, do you know whether our friend van Koppen has arrived?"

"Koppen? A very up-to-date nomad, who takes the whole world for his camping-ground. No, not yet. But he'll turn up in a day or two."

Count Caloveglia was concerned, just then, about Mr. van Koppen. He had a little business to transact with him--he fervently hoped that the millionaire would not forgo his annual visit to Nepenthe.

"I shall be glad to meet him again," he remarked carelessly. Then looking up he saw Denis, who moved under the trees alone. Observing that he seemed rather disconsolate, he walked up to him and said in a fatherly tone: "Will you confer a favour, Mr. Denis, on an old man who lives much alone? Will you come and see me, as you promised? My daughter is away just now and will not be back till midsummer. I wish you could have met her. Meanwhile, I am a little solitary. I have also a few antiquities that might interest you."

While Denis, slightly embarra.s.sed, was uttering some appropriate words, the bishop suddenly asked:

"Where is Mrs. Meadows? Wasn't she coming down to-night?"

"Of course she was," said Keith. "Isn't she here? What can this mean?

Your cousin is a particular friend of mine, Heard, though I have not seen her for the last six days or so. Something must be wrong. That baby, I expect."

"I missed her once already," said Heard. "I'll write and make an appointment, or go up again. By the way, Count--you remember our conversation? Wel, I have thought of an insuperable objection to your Mediterranean theory. The sirocco. You will never change the sirocco.

The Elect of the Earth will never endure it all their lives."

"I think we can change the sirocco," replied the Count, meditatively.

"We can tame it, at all events. I do not know much about its history; you must ask Mr. Eames--"

"Who is at home," interrupted Keith, "closeted with his Perrelli."

"What has been, may be," continued the old man, oracularly. "I question whether the sirocco was as obnoxious in olden days as now, otherwise the ancients, who had absurdly sensitive skins, would have complained of it more frequently. The deforestation of Northern Africa, I suspect, has much to do with it. Frenchmen are now trying to revive those prosperous conditions which Mohammedanism has destroyed. Oh, yes! I don't despair of muzzling the sirocco, even as we are muzzling that often Mediterranean pest, the malaria."

Keith observed:

"Petronius, I remember, speaks of the North wind being the mistress of the Tyrrhenian. He would not use such language nowadays, unless alluding to its violence rather than its prevalence. Once I thought of translating Petronius. But I discovered certain pa.s.sages in the book which are almost improper. I don't think the public ought to be put into possession of such stuff. I am rather sorry; I like Petronius--the poetical fragments, I mean; they make me regret that I was not born under the Roman Empire. People are leaving," he added. "I have said good-bye to about fifty. I shall be able to get a drink soon."

"So you were born out of time and out of place, like many of us,"

laughed the Bishop.

Count Caloveglia said:

"It is an academic problem, and therefore a problem which does not exist for me, and therefore a problem dear to your own metaphysical heart, to enquire whether a man is ever born at an inopportune moment.

We use the phrase. If we took thought we would discard it. For what is the truth of the matter? The truth is that a man, of whom we say this, is born at exactly the right moment; that those with whose customs and aspirations he seems to be in discord have urgent need of him at that particular time. No great man is ever born too soon or too late. When we say that the time is not ripe for this or that celebrity, we confess by implication that this very man, and no other, is required. Was Giordano Bruno, or Edgar Poe, born out of time? Surely no generation needed them more imperiously than their own. Only fools are born out of time. And yet--no; not even they. For where should we be without them?"

He smiles suavely, as though some pleasant thought was pa.s.sing through his mind.

"At any rate a good many people die too soon or too late," said Mr.

Edgar Marten who, after doing full justice to the food and drinks, had suddenly appeared on the scene. "Often too late," he added.

Keith, despite his professions of sanity and reason, had an inexplicable, invincible horror of death; he quailed at the mere mention of the black phantom. The subject being not at all to his taste, he promptly remarked:

"The scholar Grosseteste was unquestionably born too soon. And I know one man who is born too late. Who? Yourself, Count. You were made for the Periclean epoch."

"Thank you," said that gentleman with a gracious wave of his hand. "But forgive me for disagreeing with you. Had I lived in that age, I should be lacking in reverence for what it accomplished. I should be too near to its life; unable, as you say, to see the forest for the trees. I should be like Thucydides, a most sensible person who, if I recollect aright, barely mentions Ictinus and the rest of them. How came it about? This admirable writer imagined they were building a temple for Greece; he lacked the interval of centuries which has allowed mankind to see their work in its true perspective. He possessed traditional moral standards whereby to judge the actions of historical contemporaries; he could praise or blame his politicians with a good conscience. For the Parthenon creators he had no sure norm. The standards were not yet evolved. Pheidias was a talented fellow-citizen--a hewer in stone by profession: what could he know of the relations of Pheidias to posterity? Great things can only be seen at a proper distance. Pheidias, to him, may have been little more than an amateur, struggling with brute material in the infancy of his trade or calling. No, my friend! I am glad not to be coeval with Pericles. I am glad to recognize h.e.l.lenic achievements at their true worth. I am glad to profit by that wedge of time which has enabled me to reverence things fair and eternal."

"Things fair and eternal," echoed Keith, who was getting too thirsty and restless to discuss art-matters. "Come with me! I will show you things fair and eternal."

He led the way to a distant arbour, overhung with a canopy of blood-red pa.s.sion-flowers and girt about by design dangled from the cl.u.s.tering foliage in its roof. Within, directly under the beams, all by itself, on an upright chair beside a small table, sat an incongruous, startling, awe-inspiring apparition--a grimy old man of Mongolian aspect. He might have been frozen to stone, so immobile, so lifeless were his features. Belated visitors pa.s.sed near the entrance of the shrine, peered within as at some outlandish and sinister freak of nature, and moved on with jocular words. n.o.body ventured to overstep the threshold, whether from religious fear or because of something repellent, something almost putrescent, which radiated from his person.

A contingent of Little White Cows, a kind of bodyguard, stood at a respectful distance beyond, intent upon his every movement. The Master never stirred. He sat there to be looked at--accustomed to homage almost divine; beatifically inane. Like the Christians of old, he wore no hat.

The head was nearly bald. A long cloak, glistening with grease stains, swathed his limbs and portly belly, on which one suspected mult.i.tudinous wrinkles of fat. Two filmy lidless eyes, bulging on a level with his forehead, stared into vacuity; his snub nose grew out of a flattened face whose pallor was accentuated by the reflection of the glittering leaves--it looked faded and sodden, like blotting-paper that has been left out all night in the rain. Sporadic greenish-grey hairs were scattered about his chin. The mouth was agape.

On Mr. Keith's appearance he made no sign of recognition. Presently, however, his lips seemed to get out of control. They moved; they began to chatter and to mumble, in childish fashion, the inarticulate yearnings of eld. Keith said, as though displaying some museum curiosity:

"Mine is the only house on Nepenthe which the Master still deigns to enter. I'm afraid he has grown very groggy on his pins of late; if he sat on any by a straight-backed chair they would never get him up again. To think that was once a pretty little boy.... Poor old fellow! I know what he wants. They've been neglecting him, those young idiots."

He departed, and soon returned with a tumbler full of raw whisky which he placed on the table within reach of the arm. A flaccid, unwholesome-looking hand was raised slowly, in a kind of deprecatory gesture; then allowed to fall again upon the belly where it lay, with the five fingers, round and chalky-white, extended like the rays of a starfish. Nothing more happened.

"We must go away for a while," said Keith, "or else he won't touch it.

He does not object to alcohol, you know. Whisky has not come out of a warm-blooded beast. But it's going into one. A kind of Asiatic Socrates, don't you think?"

"A Buddha," suggested the Count. "A Buddha in second-rate alabaster. A Chinese Buddha of a bad, realistic period."

"It's odd," remarked Mr. Heard. "He reminds me of a dead fish.