The Enchanted April
Lady Caroline bore it for a time but presently was unable to bear it,
and as he would not go, and she could not tell him to, seeing that he
was engaged in his proper work, once again it was she who had to.
She got off the wall and moved to the other side of the garden, where
in a wooden shed were some comfortable low cane chairs. All she wanted
was to turn one of these round with its back to Domenico and its front
to the sea towards Genoa. Such a little thing to want. One would have
thought she might have been allowed to do that unmolested. But he, who
watched her every movement, when he saw her approaching the chairs
darted after her and seized one and asked to be told where to put it.
Would she never get away from being waited on, being made comfortable,
being asked where she wanted things put, having to say thank you? She
was short with Domenico, who instantly concluded the sun had given her
a headache, and ran in and fetched her a sunshade and a cushion and a
footstool, and was skilful, and was wonderful, and was one of Nature’s
gentlemen.
She shut her eyes in a heavy resignation. She could not be unkind to
Domenico. She could not get up and walk indoors as she would have done
if it had been one of the others. Domenico was intelligent and very
competent. She had at once discovered that it was he who really ran the
house, who really did everything. And his manners were definitely
delightful, and he undoubtedly was a charming person. It was only that
she did so much long to be let alone. If only, only she could be left
quite quiet for this one month, she felt that she might perhaps make
something of herself after all.
She kept her eyes shut, because then he would think she wanted to sleep
and would go away.
Domenico’s romantic Italian soul melted within him at the sight, for
having her eyes shut was extraordinarily becoming to her. He stood
entranced, quite still, and she thought he had stolen away, so she
opened them again.
No; there he was, staring at her. Even he. There was no getting away
from being stared at.
“I have a headache,” she said, shutting them again.
“It is the sun,” said Domenico, “and sitting on the wall without a
hat.”
“I wish to sleep.”
“_Sì signorina_,” he said sympathetically; and went softly away.
She opened her eyes with a sigh of relief. The gentle closing of the
glass doors showed her that he had not only gone quite away but had
shut her out in the garden so that she should be undisturbed. Now
perhaps she would be alone till lunch-time.
It was very curious, and no one in the world could have been more
surprised than she herself, but she wanted to think. She had never
wanted to do that before. Everything else that it is possible to do
without too much inconvenience she had either wanted to do or had done
at one period or another of her life, but not before had she wanted to
think. She had come to San Salvatore with the single intention of lying
comatose for four weeks in the sun, somewhere where her parents and
friends were not, lapped in forgetfulness, stirring herself only to be
fed, and she had not been there more than a few hours when this strange
new desire took hold of her.
There had been wonderful stars the evening before, and she had gone out
into the top garden after dinner, leaving Mrs. Fisher alone over her
nuts and wine, and, sitting on the wall at the place where the lilies
crowded their ghost heads, she had looked out into the gulf of the
night, and it had suddenly seemed as if her life had been a noise all
about nothing.
She had been intensely surprised. She knew stars and darkness did
produce unusual emotions because, in others, she had seen them being
produced, but they had not before done it in herself. A noise all about
nothing. Could she be quite well? She had wondered. For a long while
past she had been aware that her life was a noise, but it had seemed to
be very much about something; a noise, indeed, about so much that she
felt she must get out of earshot for a little or she would be
completely, and perhaps permanently, deafened. But suppose it was only
a noise about nothing?
She had not had a question like that in her mind before. It had made
her feel lonely. She wanted to be alone, but not lonely. That was very
different; that was something that ached and hurt dreadfully right
inside one. It was what one dreaded most. It was what made one go to so
many parties; and lately even the parties had seemed once or twice not
to be a perfectly certain protection. Was it possible that loneliness
had nothing to do with circumstances, but only with the way one met
them? Perhaps, she had thought, she had better go to bed. She couldn’t
be very well.
She went to bed; and in the morning, after she had escaped the fly and
had her breakfast and got out again into the garden, there was this
same feeling again, and in broad daylight. Once more she had that
really rather disgusting suspicion that her life till now had not only
been loud but empty. Well, if that were so, and if her first
twenty-eight years—the best ones—had gone just in meaningless noise,
she had better stop a moment and look round her; pause, as they said in
tiresome novels, and consider. She hadn’t got many sets of twenty-eight
years. One more would see her growing very like Mrs. Fisher. Two more—
She averted her eyes.
Her mother would have been concerned if she had known. Her mother
doted. Her father would have been concerned too, for he also doted.
Everybody doted. And when, melodiously obstinate, she had insisted on
going off to entomb herself in Italy for a whole month with queer
people she had got out of an advertisement, refusing even to take her
maid, the only explanation her friends could imagine was that poor
Scrap—such was her name among them—had overdone it and was feeling a
little nervy.
Her mother had been distressed at her departure. It was such an odd
thing to do, such a sign of disappointment. She encouraged the general
idea of the verge of a nervous breakdown. If she could have seen her
adored Scrap, more delightful to look upon than any other mother’s
daughter had ever yet been, the object of her utmost pride, the source
of all her fondest hopes, sitting staring at the empty noonday
Mediterranean considering her three possible sets of twenty-eight
years, she would have been miserable. To go away alone was bad; to
think was worse. No good could come out of the thinking of a beautiful
young woman. Complications could come out of it in profusion, but no
good. The thinking of the beautiful was bound to result in hesitations,
in reluctances, in unhappiness all round. And here, if she could have
seen her, sat her Scrap thinking quite hard. And such things. Such old
things. Things nobody ever began to think till they were at least
forty.
Chapter 9
That one of the two sitting-rooms which Mrs. Fisher had taken for her
own was a room of charm and character. She surveyed it with
satisfaction on going into it after breakfast, and was glad it was
hers. It had a tiled floor, and walls the colour of pale honey, and
inlaid furniture the colour of amber, and mellow books, many in ivory
or lemon-coloured covers. There was a big window overlooking the sea
towards Genoa, and a glass door through which she could proceed out on
to the battlements and walk along past the quaint and attractive
watch-tower, in itself a room with chairs and a writing table, to where
on the other side of the tower the battlements ended in a marble seat,
and one could see the western bay and the point round which began the
Gulf of Spezia. Her south view, between these two stretches of sea, was
another hill, higher than San Salvatore, the last of the little
peninsula, with the bland turrets of a smaller and uninhabited castle
on the top, on which the setting sun still shone when everything else
was sunk in shadow. Yes, she was very comfortably established here; and
receptacles—Mrs. Fisher did not examine their nature closely, but they
seemed to be small stone troughs, or perhaps little sarcophagi—ringed
round the battlements with flowers.
These battlements, she thought, considering them, would have been a
perfect place for her to pace up and down gently in moments when she
least felt the need of her stick, or to sit in on the marble seat,
having first put a cushion on it, if there had not unfortunately been a
second glass door opening on to them, destroying their complete
privacy, spoiling her feeling that the place was only for her. The
second door belonged to the round drawing-room, which both she and Lady
Caroline had rejected as too dark. That room would probably be sat in
by the women from Hampstead, and she was afraid they would not confine
themselves to sitting in it, but would come out through the glass door
and invade her battlements. This would ruin the battlements. It would
ruin them as far as she was concerned if they were to be overrun; or
even if, not actually overrun, they were liable to be raked by the eyes
of persons inside the room. No one could be perfectly at ease if they
were being watched and knew it. What she wanted, what she surely had a
right to, was privacy. She had no wish to intrude on the others; why
then should they intrude on her? And she could always relax her privacy
if, when she became better acquainted with her companions, she should
think it worth while, but she doubted whether any of the three would so
develop as to make her think it worth while.
Hardly anything was really worth while, reflected Mrs. Fisher, except
the past. It was astonishing, it was simply amazing, the superiority of
the past to the present. Those friends of hers in London, solid persons
of her own age, knew the same past that she knew, could talk about it
with her, could compare it as she did with the tinkling present, and in
remembering great men forget for a moment the trivial and barren young
people who still, in spite of the war, seemed to litter the world in
such numbers. She had not come away from these friends, these
conversable ripe friends, in order to spend her time in Italy chatting
with three persons of another generation and defective experience; she
had come away merely to avoid the treacheries of a London April. It was
true what she had told the two who came to Prince of Wales Terrace,
that all she wished to do at San Salvatore was to sit by herself in the
sun and remember. They knew this, for she had told them. It had been
plainly expressed and clearly understood. Therefore she had a right to
expect them to stay inside the round drawing-room and not to emerge
interruptingly on to her battlements.
But would they? The doubt spoilt her morning. It was only towards
lunch-time that she saw a way to be quite safe, and ringing for
Francesca, bade her, in slow and majestic Italian, shut the shutters of
the glass door of the round drawing-room, and then, going with her into
the room, which had become darker than ever in consequence, but also,
Mrs. Fisher observed to Francesca, who was being voluble, would because
of this very darkness remain agreeably cool, and after all there were
the numerous slit-windows in the walls to let in light and it was
nothing to do with her if they did not let it in, she directed the
placing of a cabinet of curios across the door on its inside.
This would discourage egress.
Then she rang for Domenico, and caused him to move one of the
flower-filled sarcophagi across the door on its outside.
This would discourage ingress.
“No one,” said Domenico, hesitating, “will be able to use the door.”
“No one,” said Mrs. Fisher firmly, “will wish to.”
She then retired to her sitting-room, and from a chair placed where she
could look straight on to them, gazed at her battlements, secured to