The eternal moment, and other stories
The concierge was a competent European of forty or so, who spoke
all languages fluently, and some well. He was still active, and had
evidently once been muscular. But either his life or his time of life
had been unkind to his figure: in a few years he would certainly
be fat. His face was less easy to decipher. He was engaged in the
unquestioning performance of his duty, and that is not a moment for
self-revelation. He opened the windows, he filled the match-boxes, he
flicked the little tables with a duster, always keeping an eye on the
door in case any one arrived without luggage, or left without paying.
He touched an electric bell, and a waiter flew up and cleared away
Miss Raby's tea things. He touched another bell, and sent an underling
to tidy up some fragments of paper which had fallen out of a bedroom
window. Then "Excuse me, madam!" and he had picked up Miss Raby's
handkerchief with a slight bow. He seemed to bear her no grudge for her
abrupt departure of the preceding evening. Perhaps it was into his hand
that she had dropped a tip. Perhaps he did not remember she had been
there.
The gesture with which he returned the handkerchief troubled her
with vague memories. Before she could thank him he was back in the
doorway, standing sideways, so that the slight curve of his stomach was
outlined against the view. He was speaking to a youth of athletic but
melancholy appearance, who was fidgeting in the portico without. "I
told you the percentage," she heard. "If you had agreed to it, I would
have recommended you. Now it is too late. I have enough guides."
Our generosity benefits more people than we suppose. We tip the
cabman, and something goes to the man who whistled for him. We tip
the man who lights up the stalactite grotto with magnesium wire, and
something goes to the boatman who brought us there. We tip the waiter
in the restaurant, and something goes off the waiter's wages. A vast
machinery, whose existence we seldom realize, promotes the distribution
of our wealth. When the concierge returned, Miss Raby asked: "And what
is the percentage?"
She asked with the definite intention of disconcerting him, not because
she was unkind, but because she wished to discover what qualities, if
any, lurked beneath that civil, efficient exterior. And the spirit of
her inquiry was sentimental rather than scientific.
With an educated man she would have succeeded. In attempting to reply
to her question, he would have revealed something. But the concierge
had no reason to pay even lip service to logic. He replied: "Yes,
madam! this is perfect weather, both for our visitors and for the hay,"
and hurried to help a bishop, who was selecting a picture postcard.
Miss Raby, instead of moralizing on the inferior resources of the
lower classes, acknowledged a defeat. She watched the man spreading
out the postcards, helpful yet not obtrusive, alert yet deferential.
She watched him make the bishop buy more than he wanted. This was the
man who had talked of love to her upon the mountain. But hitherto
he had only revealed his identity by chance gestures bequeathed to
him at birth. Intercourse with the gentle classes had required new
qualities--civility, omniscience, imperturbability. It was the old
answer: the gentle classes were responsible for him. It is inevitable,
as well as desirable, that we should bear each other's burdens.
It was absurd to blame Feo for his worldliness--for his essential
vulgarity. He had not made himself. It was even absurd to regret
his transformation from an athlete: his greasy stoutness, his big
black kiss-curl, his waxed moustache, his chin which was dividing
and propagating itself like some primitive form of life. In England,
nearly twenty years before, she had altered his figure as well as his
character. He was one of the products of "The Eternal Moment."
A great tenderness overcame her--the sadness of an unskilful demiurge,
who makes a world and beholds that it is bad. She desired to ask pardon
of her creatures, even though they were too poorly formed to grant it.
The longing to confess, which she had suppressed that morning beside
the bed of Signora Cantù, broke out again with the violence of a
physical desire. When the bishop had gone she renewed the conversation,
though on different lines, saying: "Yes, it is beautiful weather. I
have just been enjoying a walk up from the _Biscione_. I am stopping
there!"
He saw that she was willing to talk, and replied pleasantly: "The
_Biscione_ must be a very nice hotel: many people speak well of it.
The fresco is very beautiful." He was too shrewd to object to a little
charity.
"What lots of new hotels there are!" She lowered her voice in order not
to rouse the Prince, whose presence weighed on her curiously.
"Oh, madam! I should indeed think so. When I was a lad--Excuse me one
moment."
An American girl, who was new to the country, came up with her hand
full of coins, and asked him hopelessly "whatever they were worth." He
explained, and gave her change: Miss Raby was not sure that he gave her
right change.
"When I was a lad----" He was again interrupted, to speed two parting
guests. One of them tipped him; he said, "Thank you." The other did not
tip him; he said, "Thank you," all the same but not in the same way.
Obviously he had as yet no recollections of Miss Raby.
"When I was a lad, Vorta was a poor little place."
"But a pleasant place?"
"Very pleasant, madam."
"Kouf!" said the Russian Prince, suddenly waking up and startling
them both. He clapped on a felt hat, and departed at full speed for a
constitutional. Miss Raby and Feo were left together.
It was then that she ceased to hesitate, and determined to remind him
that they had met before. All day she had sought for a spark of life,
and it might be summoned by pointing to that other fire which she
discerned, far back in the travelled distance, high up in the mountains
of youth. What he would do, if he also discerned it, she did not know;
but she hoped that he would become alive, that he at all events would
escape the general doom which she had prepared for the place and the
people. And what she would do, during their joint contemplation, she
did not even consider.
She would hardly have ventured if the sufferings of the day had not
hardened her. After much pain, respectability becomes ludicrous. And
she had only to overcome the difficulty of Feo's being a man, not the
difficulty of his being a concierge. She had never observed that
spiritual reticence towards social inferiors which is usual at the
present day.
"This is my second visit," she said boldly. "I stayed at the _Biscione_
twenty years ago."
He showed the first sign of emotion: _that_ reference to the _Biscione_
annoyed him.
"I was told I should find you up here," continued Miss Raby. "I
remember you very well. You used to take us over the passes."
She watched his face intently. She did not expect it to relax into an
expansive smile. "Ah!" he said, taking off his peaked cap, "I remember
you perfectly, madam. What a pleasure, if I may say so, to meet you
again!"
"I am pleased, too," said the lady, looking at him doubtfully.
"You and another lady, madam, was it not? Miss----"
"Mrs. Harbottle."
"To be sure; I carried your luggage. I often remember your kindness."
She looked up. He was standing near an open window, and the whole
of fairyland stretched behind him. Her sanity forsook her, and she
said gently: "Will you misunderstand me, if I say that I have never
forgotten your kindness either?"
He replied: "The kindness was yours, madam; I only did my duty."
"Duty?" she cried; "what about duty?"
"You and Miss Harbottle were such generous ladies. I well remember how
grateful I was: you always paid me above the tariff fare----"
Then she realized that he had forgotten everything; forgotten her,
forgotten what had happened, even forgotten what he was like when he
was young.
"Stop being polite," she said coldly. "You were not polite when I saw
you last."
"I am very sorry," he exclaimed, suddenly alarmed.
"Turn round. Look at the mountains."
"Yes, yes." His fishy eyes blinked nervously. He fiddled with his watch
chain which lay in a furrow of his waistcoat. He ran away to warn some
poorly dressed children off the view-terrace. When he returned she
still insisted.
"I must tell you," she said, in calm, business-like tones. "Look at
that great mountain, round which the road goes south. Look half-way up,
on its eastern side--where the flowers are. It was there that you once
gave yourself away."
He gaped at her in horror. He remembered. He was inexpressibly shocked.
It was at that moment that Colonel Leyland returned.
She walked up to him, saying, "This is the man I spoke of yesterday."
"Good afternoon; what man?" said Colonel Leyland fussily. He saw that
she was flushed, and concluded that some one had been rude to her.
Since their relations were somewhat anomalous, he was all the more
particular that she should be treated with respect.
"The man who fell in love with me when I was young."
"It is untrue!" cried the wretched Feo, seeing at once the trap that
had been laid for him. "The lady imagined it. I swear, sir--I meant
nothing. I was a lad. It was before I learnt behaviour. I had even
forgotten it. She reminded me. She has disturbed me."
"Good Lord!" said Colonel Leyland. "Good Lord!"
"I shall lose my place, sir; and I have a wife and children. I shall be
ruined."
"Sufficient!" cried Colonel Leyland. "Whatever Miss Raby's intentions
may be, she does not intend to ruin you."
"You have misunderstood me, Feo," said Miss Raby gently.
"How unlucky we have been missing each other," said Colonel Leyland, in
trembling tones that were meant to be nonchalant. "Shall we go a little
walk before dinner? I hope that you are stopping."
She did not attend. She was watching Feo. His alarm had subsided; and
he revealed a new emotion, even less agreeable to her. His shoulders
straightened, he developed an irresistible smile, and, when he saw that
she was looking and that Colonel Leyland was not, he winked at her.
It was a ghastly sight, perhaps the most hopelessly depressing of all
the things she had seen at Vorta. But its effect on her was memorable.
It evoked a complete vision of that same man as he had been twenty
years before. She could see him to the smallest detail of his clothes
or his hair, the flowers in his hand, the graze on his wrist, the heavy
bundle that he had loosed from his back, so that he might speak as a
freeman. She could hear his voice, neither insolent nor diffident,
never threatening, never apologizing, urging her first in the studied
phrases he had learnt from books, then, as his passion grew, becoming
incoherent, crying that she must believe him, that she must love him
in return, that she must fly with him to Italy, where they would live
for ever, always happy, always young. She had cried out then, as a
young lady should, and had thanked him not to insult her. And now, in
her middle age, she cried out again, because the sudden shock and the
contrast had worked a revelation. "Don't think I'm in love with you
now!" she cried.
For she realized that only now was she not in love with him: that the
incident upon the mountain had been one of the great moments of her
life--perhaps the greatest, certainly the most enduring: that she had
drawn unacknowledged power and inspiration from it, just as trees draw
vigour from a subterranean spring. Never again could she think of it
as a half-humorous episode in her development. There was more reality
in it than in all the years of success and varied achievement which
had followed, and which it had rendered possible. For all her correct