South Wind Part 9

"And what Latin, Marten!" laughed Denis. "No wonder they understand.

I'm coming to you on Thursday morning. Don't forget."

"I have not had your public school advantages. But I manage to get what I want out of them, generally speaking," and he cast a fiery glance in the direction of Angelina, who returned it over her shoulder, unabashed. Denis, fortunately, was looking the other way.

"I wish I had enjoyed all your chances," observed the d.u.c.h.ess, with a little mock-sigh. "We were so carelessly brought up. I learnt practically nothing at school. It is a pity. Ah, Bishop! I forgot to tell you. Such a charming note from your cousin. She cannot come. The baby is teething and troublesome in this heat. You will have to drive up, I'm afraid.... Mr. Keith, I have not yet thanked you for those flowers and the book you sent. The flowers are quite too lovely. Look at them! You are spoiling me--you really are! But I don't think I shall like the book. Lady Cecilia and her maid and that man, I forget his name--they do all sorts of things. They don't seem to be very nice people."

"You have nothing but nice people round you, d.u.c.h.ess. Why should you want to read about them? There is so much goodness in real life. Do let us keep it out of our books."

"That sounds a dreadful doctrine. I see the PARROCO is about to take his departure. Why does everybody leave so soon?"

She wandered away.

"The English are supposed to be bad linguists," said Don Francesco. "It is one of those curious international fallacies, like saying the French are a polite nation--"

"Or that home-made marmalade tastes better than the stuff you buy in shops," added Denis. "I must help the d.u.c.h.ess to say good-bye to those people. She likes to have some one handy on such occasions. She needs an echo. I am becoming quite a good echo."

"You are," said Keith, rather sharply. "Quite a pretty echo. And you ought to be a voice. Follow my prescription, Denis. The Cave of Mercury."

Count Caloveglia remarked:

"What a pity that Latin, as scholars' language, for the definition and registration of ideas, was ever abandoned! It has the incalculable advantage that the meanings of words are irrevocably fixed by authority. New ones could be coined as occasion required. Knowledge would gain by leaps and bounds. There would be a cross-fertilization of cultures. As things now stand, half the intellectuals of this world are writing about matters which, unbeknown to themselves, have already been treated by the other half. One would think that Commerce, which has broken down geographical barriers, might have done the same to political ones. Far from it! In sharpening men's l.u.s.t for gold, it has demarcated our frontiers with a bitterness. .h.i.therto unknown. The world of thought has not expanded; it has contracted and grown provincial.

Men have lost sight of distant horizons. n.o.body writes for humanity, for civilization; they write for their country, their sect; to amuse their friends or annoy their enemies. Pliny or Linneus or Humboldt--they sat on mountain-tops; they surveyed the landscape at their feet, and if some little valley lay shrouded in mist, the main outlines of the land yet lay clearly distended before them. You will say that it is impossible, nowadays, to gather up the threads of learning as did these men; they are too multifarious, too divergent. A greater mistake could not be imagined. For there is a contrary tendency at work--a tendency towards unification. The threads converge. Medieval minds knew many truths, hostile to one another. All truths are now seen to be interdependent; never was synthesis easier of attainment. Conflict of nationality and language hinders the movement. Mankind at large is the loser. The adoption of a universal scholars' tongue would do much to remove the obstacle. When these Southern races coalesce to form the great alliance which I foresee, when the Mediterranean basin is once more the centre of human activity as it deserves to be, some such plan will doubtless be adopted."

"Your notion would suit me down to the ground," said the bishop, who was a good Latinist. "I would love to converse in the old style with a student from Salamanca or Bergen or Khieff or Padua or--"

Don Francesco gave utterance to some wholly unintelligible speech. Then he observed:

"The student might not be able to catch your meaning, Mr. Heard. I was only talking Latin! You see, we would be obliged to standardize our p.r.o.nunciation. I wonder, by the way, why the old scholars' language was ever discarded?"

"Patriotism destroyed it," replied the Count. "That narrow modern patriotism of the c.o.c.k-on-the-dung-hill type."

Mr. Keith began:

"It is an atavistic and altogether discreditable phenomenon--this recent recrudescence of monarchical principles--"

"What did you promise about long words?" playfully enquired the d.u.c.h.ess, who had just returned.

"I cannot help it, dear lady. It is my mother's fault. She was so very precise. I was carefully brought up."

"That is a pity, Mr. Keith."

"Northern people are very precise," said Don Francesco, folding his gown around his ample limbs. "Particularly in love affairs. We down here, who live in this sirocco, are supposed to be calculating and mercenary in matters of the heart. We want dowries for our daughters--they say we are always coming to the point: money, money! The capacity of an English girl for coming to the point will take some beating. She paralyses you with directness. I will tell you a true story. There was a young Italian whom I knew--yes, I knew him well. He had just arrived in London; very handsome in the face, though perhaps a little too fat. He fell in love with an elegant young lady who was employed in the establishment of Madame Elise in Bond Street. He used to wait for her to come out at six o'clock and follow her like a dog, not daring to speak. He carried a costly bracelet for her in his pocket, and every day fresh flowers, which he was always too shy and too deeply enamoured to present. She was his angel, his ideal. He dreamt of her by day and night, wondering whether he would ever have the courage to address so tall and queenly a creature. It was his first English love affair, you understand; he learnt the proper technique later on. For five or six weeks this unhappy state of things continued, till one day, when he was running after her as usual, she turned round furiously and said: 'What do you mean, sir, by following me about it this disgusting fashion? How day you? I shall call the police, if it occurs again.' He was deprived of speech at first: he could only gaze in what you call dumb amazement. Then he managed to stammer out something about his heart and his love, and to show her the flowers and the bracelet. She said: 'So that's it, is it? Well of all the funny boys. Why couldn't you speak up sooner? D'you know of a place round here--'"

"Ha, ha, ha!"

It was a formidable explosion on the part of the Commissioner, in an adjoining room.

He was talking to some friends about Napoleon.

They wanted a fellow like that on Nepenthe--a fellow who got things done. Napoleon would have made no bones about the Wilberforce woman over there. It was a scandalous state of affairs. What was the use of a Committee for trying to keep her in order and getting her locked up in a sanatorium? Everybody knew what a Committee meant. Committee! It was a preposterous word. Committees were the same all the world over.

Committee! He was in charge of that particular one; they were dong all they could, but what did it amount to? Nothing. To begin with, there was not enough money coming in, unless somebody could wheedle a cheque out of that rich old Koppen sensualist whose yacht might be arriving at any moment. And then her own pig-headedness! She refused to be talked over into doing what was in her own interests. Napoleon, he reckoned, might have talked her over--ha, ha, ha!

The lady in question, all unaware of these humanitarian designs, had taken up a strategic position in the neighbourhood of the drinks, and was glancing shyly round the room in search of a likely male who would fetch her a stiff gla.s.s of something from the buffet, and that soon.

She was groggy, but not sufficiently primed to go there herself; she knew that everybody's eye would be fixed upon her; she had been much talked about of late. Drunk, she was impossible; dead sober, almost as bad--haughty, sullen, logical, with a grieved and surprised air suggestive of wounded dignity.

People avoided Miss Wilberforce. And yet you could not help liking her in those rare moments when she was just a little disguised. She had a pretty wit, then; a residue of gentle nurture; tender instincts and a winsomeness of manner that captivated you. Nor were appearances against her. That frail, arrowy figure was invariably clothed in black. She wore the colour by instinct. They said she had lost her sailor fiance who was drowned, poor lad, in the Mediterranean; and that now she wandered about at night looking for him, or trying to forget him and seeking oblivion in tipple.

The story happened to be true, for a wonder. She had received a twist for life. The death of this young lover gave to her impressionable being a shock which never pa.s.sed off again. The world was turned inside out for Amy Wilberforce. She seldom spoke of his fate. But she was always talking about the sea. She tried to drown herself, once or twice. Then, gradually, she put on a new character altogether and relapsed into queer ancestral traits, stripping off, like so many worthless rags, the layers of laboriously acquired civilization. The refined and bashful girl became brusque, supercilious, equivocal. When sympathizing friends said that they had also lost lovers, she laughed and told them to look for new ones. There were better fish in the sea, etc., etc.

Soon she found herself abandoned, in spite of a full banking account.

People had dropped her, right and left.

The years went by.

Calmly, without misgivings and without fervour, she took to the bottle.

Something drew her to Nepenthe--dim Mediterranean memories. Arrived there, she used to engulf three pints of Martell and Hennessey, one after the other, and then "wash them out"--such was her phraseology--with a magnum of Perrier Jouet; a proceeding which, while it heightened her complexion and gave a sparkle to her poor fl.u.s.tered eye, was not conducive to the preservation of equilibrium in the lower limbs. There resulted those periodical "nervous breakdowns" which necessitated seclusion and sometimes medical treatment. The collapses had become distressingly frequent with the last year or two. One of her many drawbacks was that she courted publicity in her cups. She was perfectly reckless as to what she then said, and had been known to bring a blush to the seasoned cheek of Don Francesco himself who, unaware of her condition at one particular moment, politely ventured to enquire why she always wore black and was told that she was in mourning, as everybody ought to mourn, for his lost innocence. Being an Englishwoman, she was a thorn in the side of her moral compatriot the Commissioner.

Her noctambulous habits often brought her into contact with the local police and sometimes with His Worship Signor Malipizzo. Greatly to the surprise of Mr. Parker, the magistrate was observed to take a lenient view of the case. None the less, she had pa.s.sed several nights in the local gaol. Staggering about the lanes of Nepenthe in the silent hours before dawn, she was liable to be driven, at the bidding of some dark primeval impulse, to divest herself of her raiment--a singularity which perturbed even the hardiest of social night-birds who had the misfortune to encounter her. Taxed with this freakish behaviour, she would refer to the example of St. Francis of a.s.sisi who did the same, and brazenly ask whether he wasn't good enough for them? Whether she couldn't give her last shirt to a beggar, as well as anybody else? In short, there was nothing to be done with her.

The dear lady, as Keith often called her, was becoming a real problem.

And now her eye, roving round the room, fixed itself with the drunkard's divine unerring instinct upon Denis. What a nice, modest, gentlemanly-looking boy! Just what she wanted.

"This sirocco!" she sighed, groping dramatically for a chair. "It makes me feel so funny. Oh, dear! I shall go off in a faint. Ah, do be a kind young man and fetch me some brandy and soda. A large tumbler. Ah, do!

And very little soda, please--on account of my heart. Only the smallest drop!"

She took two or three sips, paused awhile as though undecided whether she could possibly swallow such nasty stuff and then, with a fine show of reluctance, gulped it all down. Denis was spell-bound; the dose, he artlessly imagined, was enough to kill a horse. Far from being damaged, Miss Wilberforce took a chair beside him, and began to converse.

Charmingly she talked; all about England. As he listened he grew delighted, entranced. She was different, somehow, from all the other ladies he had lately met on the Continent. She was altogether different. Whence came it, he wondered?

Then, as the discourse proceeded, he began to realize what was the matter with them. It was odd, he thought, that he had not noticed it before. Miss Wilberforce made him realize wherein the difference lay.

They spoke English, it was true; but they had all taken on a Continental outlook; alien phrases, expressions, affectations; cosmopolitan airs and graces that jarred on his frank, untarnished English nature. This one was otherwise. She was old England, through and through. The conversation cheered him to an unusual degree--among all those foreign people he felt strangely drawn towards this wistful lady who could talk so naturally and conjure up, by the mere power of words, a breath of his own homestead in the Midlands. He might have been sitting with an elder sister just then, eating strawberries and cream and watching a tennis match on some shady green lawn. He was happy; happier still when Angelina once more floated into his ken and, noticing Miss Wilberforce, raised her eyebrows mischievously and gave him something that looked like a real smile, for a change.

She had another smile, however, for Mr. Edgar Marten; and yet another one for Don Francesco who, as she pa.s.sed near him, profited by the occasion to give her a paternal semi-proprietary chuck under the chin, accompanying the indecorous movement with an almost audible wink.

Mr. Heard had noticed everything. He frowned at first. It gave him a little twinge, and some food for thought. He was absurdly sensitive about women.

"A frolicsome child," he mused. "LASCIVA PUELLA. Possibly wanton."

What were this young man's relations with the girl? That contact of hand and chin--what did it imply? Was the action quasi-paternal, or pseudo-paternal? Regretfully he decided that it was only pseudo-paternal.

And yet--it was all so confoundedly natural!

"n.o.body but our PARROCO could keep his hands off that girl," blithely remarked the priest.

Another little twinge....