South Wind Part 25

Girls are different. They are more cynical and less idealistic, they can put up with mothers, they can laugh at them. I am speaking in a general way. Of course there are shining exceptions. Mothers at present can bring children into the world, but this performance is apt to mark the end of their capacities. They can't even attend to the elementary animal requirements of their offspring. It is quite surprising how many children survive in spite of their mothers. Ask any doctor."

"If that is the case there must be something wrong with our social system. You may be sure that the female cat or canary bird is just as efficient in her department as the male in his. Speaking from my own experience among the London poor, I should say that the father is often a mere parasite on his wifo and children--"

"We may both of us be right. But I wish you would take Denis in hand a little. Will you? Perhaps you misread his character. He may be afraid of you."

"Have you any particular reason--?"

"I don't like his looks. There is something tragic about him lately."

Mr. Heard was slightly nettled. After all, he was not on Nepenthe for the purpose of doling out consolations to melancholy undergraduates.

"I should be sorry to think myself singled out for his distrust," he replied. "At the same time, I don't notice that he has much to say to certain other people--to the Commissioner, for instance, or to Mr.

Muhlen."

"Muhlen? He is quite right to leave Muhlen alone. Quite right. It proves his intuition. I have learnt all about that man. A beastly character. He has a bad record. Lives on blackmail and women. His real name is Retlow."

And Mr. Keith lit a cigar, as though to dismiss the subject.

"Retlow, you say? That's queer."

The name sounded familiar to the bishop. Where had he heard it before?

He racked his memory. Where could it have been? Retlow.... It was not a common name. Long ago, obviously. Where?

In African days, or earlier?

His searchings were interrupted by the voice of the old boatman who, relinquishing an oar, pointed to a swart precipice near at hand and said in tolerable English (the older generation of natives all spoke English--their children were learning Russian):

"The suicides' rock, gentlemens. Ah! Many is the poor Christian I have pick up there. He throw down hisself. Him dead. Often in small pieces.

Here blood. Here brain. Here leg and boot. Here finger. Ah! The poor Chiristian. That so, gentlemens."

The bishop scanned with a shudder this frowning cliff of basalt, and turned to address his companion.

"Do people really throw themselves over here?"

"Very few. Not more than three or four in a season, I'm told. The local suicides, as a rule, are not as spectacular as they might be considering the landscape. They shoot themselves or take poison, which shows a certain consideration for other people. It is not a pleasant job, you know, to row to this remote spot and scramble about the cliff at the risk of a broken neck, collecting shattered fragments of humanity into a potato sack."

"Not at all pleasant!"

"As compared with England," Keith pursued, "life here is intense, palpitating, dramatic--a kind of blood-curdling farce full of irresponsible crimes and improbable consequences. The soil is saturated with blood. People are always killing themselves or each other for motives which, to an Englishman, are altogether outside the range of comprehensibility. Shall I tell you about one of our most interesting cases? I happen to be on the island at the time. There was a young fellow here--an agreeable young fellow--an artist; he was rich; he took a villa, and painted. We all liked him. Then, by degrees, he became secretive and moody. Said he was studying mechanics. He told me himself that much as he liked landscape painting he thought an artist--a real artist, he said--ought to be versed in ancillary sciences; in fortification, wood-carving, architecture, and so on. Leonardo da Vinci, you know. Well, one day they could not get into his bedroom.

They broke open his door and discovered that he had constructed a perfectly-formed guillotine; the knife had fallen; his head lay on one side and his body on the other. You may well be surprised. I went carefully into that case. He was in the best of health, with a creditable artistic record behind him. He had no troubles, financial or domestic."

"Then what on earth--?"

"The scenery of Nepenthe. It got on his nerves; it unstrung him. Does that surprise you too? Don't you feel its effect upon yourself? The bland winds, the sea shining in velvety depths as though filled with some electric fluid, the riot of vegetation, these extravagant cliffs that change colour with every hour of the day? Look at that peak yonder--is it not almost transparent, like some crystal of amethyst?

This coast-line alone--the sheer effrontery of its mineral charm--might affect some natures to such an extent as to dislocate their stability.

Northern minds seem to become fluid here, impressionable, unstable, unbalanced--what you please. THere is something in the brightness of this spot which decomposes their old particles and arranges them into fresh and unexpected patterns. That is what people mean when they say that they 'diswcover' themselves here. You discover a mechanism, you know, when you take it to pieces. You catch my meaning?"

"I catch it."

He nodded. He understood perfectly. Some a.n.a.logous process was going on within him at that moment. He, too, was discovering himself.

"Have you discovered yourself, Keith?"

"Yes, by other methods, elsewhere. I am only here for a short time in the Spring and another ten days in September. That is hardly enough, even supposing I were the sort of person to be accessible to these externals. I have pa.s.sed that stage. I am too old, too unemotional. I prefer devouring a partridge EN Ca.s.sEROLE or listening to your conversation ("listening to my conversation!" thought Mr. Heard) to all the scenery in the world But I watch other people; I make it my business to study their condition; I put myself in their places. JE CONSTATE, as the French say. To them, the landscape of Nepenthe is alive, often malignantly alive. They do what you cannot so effectually do in the North; they humanize it, identifying its various aspects with their own moods, its features with their own traditions."

Mr. Heard thought of those tremendous mists he had seen only an hour ago--the daughters of old Ocean.

"They humanize it," he echoed. "The mythopoetic faculty!"

"Perhaps this capacity of Southern scenery to bear a mortal interpretation accounts for the anthropomorphic deities of cla.s.sical days. I often think it does. Even we moderns are unaccountably moved by its varying facets which act sometimes as an aphrodisiac, and sometimes by their very perfection, their discouraging spell, their insolent beauty, suggest the hopelessness of all human endeavour.... Denis! I should think him capable of anything, just now. Do you imagine a person like this could possibly remain insensible to the beguiling influence of these surroundings?"

"I never thought about him."

"Really? You interest me, Heard. If you deny the susceptibility of a temperament like his, you deny the whole operation of externals upon character and action. You deny, for example, the success of the Roman Catholic Church which relies, for its moral effects, upon such optic appeals to the senses, and upon the ease with which transitory feelings can be trans.m.u.ted into axioms of conduct. Do you deny this?"

"Not at all. I have seen enough of their system to realize its extreme simplicity."

"And then think of the peculiar history of this island and its situation as a converging-point for men of every race and every creed.

All these things stimulate to rapid nervous discharges; that is, to inconsidered, foolish actions--"

"All fools!" the boatman interrupted. "All foreigners! We people don't do these things. Only dam-fool foreigners. That so, gentlemens. They have trouble themselves, then they come to this rock and, boom! make trouble for their friends."

"Boom!" echoed his son, who had apparently caught the drift of the old man's speech. Whereat the two Greek genii in the stern laughed immoderately; knowing, as they did, that the boy had not the slightest idea of what his father was talking about.

"Boom!" they repeated, in derisive chorus.

At that moment all the occupants of the boat p.r.i.c.ked up their ears. A sound had reached them, a similar sound--a sound that recalled the distant firing of a big gun. Boom! It reverberated among the rocks. The rowers dropped their oars. Everyone listened.

The sound came again. This time there was no question as to its origin.

It was artillery, beyond a doubt.

The old sailor had grown preternaturally grave.

"IL CANNONE DEL DUCA," he said.

The cannon of the Good Duke Alfred, never used save on urgent or solemn occasions, was being discharged.

Then the boatman made another remark, in Italian, to Keith.

"What does he say?" asked Mr. Heard.

"He thinks they must be calling out the militia."

Something was very wrong, up yonder, on the market-place.