Last Tales (24 page)

As now she did not answer a word, her silence stemmed his own speech. For a moment he stood dead still and closed his eyes.

“Once,” he then cried out, “I thought that I should die if
I were to leave you. Now I know that I should die if I went back to you.”

She stood as still as he, for in this long wail of farewell, and of doom, his voice had rung out as it should ring when at last she had made it what it was meant to be. It was Dido’s lament, Alceste’s heroic sacrifice, in Pellegrina Leoni’s voice.

The boy again opened his eyes and stared at her. Up where he stood he could get no farther. For the steps were here barred by a stone fence with a gate to it. For a minute he was immovable, a wild animal at bay; then he fumbled among the stones of the fence by him, heaved a stone from it and pressed it to his breast.

“If you do not stay where you are,” he cried, “I shall throw the stone at you.”

She, however, would not or could not stay where she was. In a wild and blind hope that the struggle might still be turned into an embrace, with two fingers she lifted up her skirt in front and, as in a dance, took a light step upwards.

As she moved, Emanuele hurled the stone. She had seen him throw stones before, very accurately. It must be his terrible tumult of mind which now made his hand unsteady or made him misjudge the distance. The stone brushed her head, and her thick hair somewhat warded off the blow. Yet she staggered under it and came down on one knee, and she felt the warm dampness of her blood as it trickled over her forehead and her left eye.

Before she got up, a second stone whirled past her ear.

Then she became furious. She had not been angry during the thirteen empty years of her flight; now in a second she was thrown back twice that length of time. She sent her indignation upwards in the dialect of her native village, as eager for battle as a small wench with a boy using unfair means of fighting.

“You clod!” she cried. “You stumpy peasant boy! So you are throwing stones, are you! So you will be biting too, will you, when I get hold of you!

“Do you know at whom you are throwing stones!” she went on. “A thousand men, a Pope, an Emperor, Princes, gondolieri and beggars, if I but lift my voice, will be here to avenge me on you, you fool.”

She fetched her breath. “Yes, I am a witch,” she cried. “A great witch, a vampire with bat’s wings. But what are you, who dare not come down to play with a witch? What is a coward’s soul worth? Must you sit on that soul of yours as a young miss on her maidenhood, with all your wooden, squinting friends sitting round you, praying that it may be preserved! The one amongst them who knew what a soul is, you sent away. I tell you, you are being poisoned by your soul. It is a bad tooth, have it out!”

She would have gone on, and would have been happy to go on, now that she had got her strength back and her blood up. But she stopped short, for her ear had caught her own voice. What should have been the roar of a lioness was the hissing of a gander and a pain in her throat and chest. For a minute she steadied herself with a hand against the wall beside her; then she turned and walked down.

On the second step down her foot struck the stone that had been thrown at her. She took it up, rubbed it into the scratch on her forehead and turning once more flung it up lightly, so that it fell at the feet of the boy who had thrown it.

“Keep it, you!” she said. “Pellegrina Leoni’s blood is upon it.”

She began to walk back through the streets and her mind was as dumb as her breast. On the way she fumbled at her hair and wiped the blood off her face with it. At last she stood still. She gazed round her to recognize the street, then crossed it to where, on a corner, there stood a low stone trough for watering donkeys and cattle, and sat down. The leaden sky once more had closed over the town, a thin, chill wind came running along.

Pellegrina sat on her trough for a long time and let many reflections run through her head.

She first thought:

“I was right. I was right when I told Niccolo that joy was my element. The people of this earth who have it in them to suffer so deeply, and to fear, will get the better of me every time. I cannot hold my own against them.” She called up before her the faces of the townspeople, one by one. Here was Eudoxia’s face, furrowed with care and worry, here were the faces of Eudoxia’s neighbors, strained and anxious, and the tallow-colored face of the parish priest, blunt and stolid, as if blind. “Joy may come to them,” she told herself, “as a surprise, for an hour or two, but none of them feels at home in it.” The idea of the overwhelming majority of unhappy people in the world closed in upon her from all sides. “I cannot stand up against all of them,” she told herself. “Not against all.”

She next thought:

“Emanuele was mistaken; he was all wrong. But one cannot blame him for that. I myself have been told about the mingling of blood between two people. But he has never heard of such things. To him the mingling of blood will mean the drinking of it. He saw me sucking his blood from my handkerchief, and he ran away before me in fear of his life. But it is difficult to tell, in a mingling of blood like ours, who gives and who receives. You ought to have known, Emanuele, that I should not have brought the drops of your blood to my mouth if it had not been that I was longing to give all my own blood to you.”

She again thought:

“And then, maybe, he was not as much mistaken as all that. Or can you honestly vow, Pellegrina, that you yourself, who have so often been begged to stay on, who have been held back and have been pursued, did not, today, take pleasure in being the pursuer?”

She here became conscious of people passing her or coming toward her in the street, and it seemed to her that they looked at her with grief or in fear. She remembered that she
had on her forehead the mark of Cain. She also remembered Niccolo’s words: that if people knew what she was thinking they would throw stones at her. She dipped her long tresses in the water of the trough and washed her face with them.

“But it will still be there,” she reflected, “and I shall have to get up and away from here. For it must be a sorry thing to be stoned.” She called to mind how, on the evening of her coming to town, she had told herself that this was a place in which one might stay on. “But there I was wrong,” she thought.

She wanted, before rising and going away, to think once more of Emanuele. It would, she knew, be the last time, for on parting from him she must again give up remembering. She sat gazing down in the water of the trough, but she saw his face as he had lifted it to tell her that if she died he must die too, and as he had lowered it like a small angry bull-calf when he had thrown the stone. “Must pity of human beings,” she cried in her heart, “forever be sucking the marrow out of my bones?”

She thought at last:

“Oh, my child, dear Brother and Lover. Be not unhappy, and fear not. It is all over between you and me. I can do you no good and I shall do you no harm. I have been too bold, venturing to play with human hands on an Aeolian harp. I beg pardon from the north wind and the south wind, from the east and west wind. But you are young. You will live to weigh more than I do, half as much again, and to prove yourself the Chosen and Elect; you may live to give to your town a priest-saint of her own. You will sing too. Only, dear heart, you will have to work hard to unlearn what you have learned from me. You will have to take great care so as not, when you are singing the Gospel, to introduce
portamento
effects.

“And the voice of Pellegrina Leoni,” she concluded her long course of thought, “will not be heard again.”

As she got up from the trough and stood on her feet she asked herself: “Shall I go to the right or to the left?”

She bethought herself of Niccolo, who had taken trouble to give her his advice on the matter, and reflected that she ought to follow the advice once more, and go into the church. For in a church, she remembered having been told, people will not stone anybody.

She again had to look round to find the way to the church, then walked along to it.

She had expected to find the church empty. But the day happened to be a Sunday, as had been the day of her first visit there, and when she lifted the heavy leather curtain of the porch she saw that there were people in the room behind it. It was the latest Mass of the day, a silent Low Mass. Without making any noise she sat down close to the door, and she soon came to feel that she was already on the road again, and that the quiet in which she sat was but a pause.

In a while the communicants, who had been up by the altar, came back and again took their seats. She cast a glance at the face of her neighbor, a very old woman, to see if there she would find any fear of her. The face had no expression at all, but she saw that the wrinkled lips and toothless gums were still moving and munching a little with the consummation of the Host.

“You too, Niccolo,” she thought, “spoke the truth on that evening when we talked together. One can. take many liberties with God which one cannot take with men. One may allow oneself many things toward Him which one cannot allow oneself toward man. And, because He is God, in doing so one will even be honoring Him.”

New Winter’s Tales

COUNTRY TALE

T
here was a wood path running along the stone fence at the western edge of a wood. Outside the fence the open landscape lay calm and golden, already marked by the hand of autumn. The large fields were empty, the harvest was gathered in and only the rakings were left, set up here and there in low stacks. Some way off, on a field road, a last cartload was rolling toward the barn in a cloud of golden dust. The distant woods to the north and south were brownish-green, gently and gravely gilt or rusted by the sun of long summer days. The woods to the west were deep blue; from time to time a faint blue tinged the fields as well, where a flight of wood-pigeons rose from the stubble. Along the fence the last honeysuckle, upon limp stalks, was giving out its farewell fragrance, and the bramble already had scarlet
leaves and black, ripe berries. But the depth of the forest was still green, a summer vault, and where the beams of the afternoon sun fell through the verdure it became luminous and filled with promise, like May foliage. The path wound in and out, and up and down, the forest slopes. It swerved toward the fence, as if it meant to unite the wood world with the open country, then shrank back again as if in fear of giving away a secret.

A young man, bareheaded, in a riding coat, and a young lady in a white summer frock came walking along the path. Her frock, Greek in drapery like that of a dryad, with the belt just below the breasts, trailed lightly on the ground and, as she walked on, rolled a dry beechnut of last year along, as a wavelet plays with a pebble on the beach. She let her dark eyes under long lashes glide lovingly and happily over the forest scenery, like a young housewife going through her house and finding everything in good order.

They walked along slowly and easily; they were at home in the wood and belonged to it. Their clothes and carriage told that they were a young squire and squire’s lady of the fair, rich green isle.

Where the path took off and ran over the fence toward the fields she stood still and gazed out into the distance. To her companion, who stopped with her, it was as if he did not himself see the landscape before them, but only through her knew that it existed, and what it meant. It became infinitely lovely within her eyes and mind, lovelier than itself, a silent poem. She did not turn toward him; she rarely did so, and very rarely on her own offered a caress. Her form and color, the fall of her rich dark hair and the lines of her shoulders, her long hands and slim knees, in themselves were caresses; her entire being and nature was to enchant, and she craved for nothing else in life. On his way to the wood he had pondered the problem of the vocation of man; now he thought: “The vocation of a rose is to exhale scent; for that reason do we plant roses in our garden. But a rose on
its own exhales a sweeter scent than we could ever demand of it. It craves for nothing else in life.”

“What are you thinking of now that you tell me not?” she asked.

He did not answer at once, and she did not repeat her question, but, climbing the smooth-worn path across the fence, for a moment shaded her eyes with her hand against the light, then seated herself where she stood, her hands folded round her knees. From far away her frock, catching the sun, would now be visible like a golden-white flower in the green. He sat down in the shade of the trees, where his eyes could rest on her form. The air here at the edge of the wood was clear and warm, the light full and timeless, the stubble fields breathed a generous sweetness. A pale-blue moth came and settled upon a sun-baked stone beside her.

He did not want to break up their happy hour in the wood, and remained silent for a while.

“I was thinking,” he said at last, “of the old people who lived here before us, and who cleared and broke and plowed this land. They will have had to begin their work over and over again. In very old days they had bears and wolves to fight, then Wendish pirates and invaders and then, later again, hard and unsparing masters. But were they to rise from their graves, on a harvest day like this, and to look out over the fields and meadows before us, they might still consider that it had been worth their while.”

“Oh, yes,” she said and looked up toward the blue sky and the clouds. “And they will,” she added, “have had real fine hunting, with those bears and those wolves.” Her voice was as clear as a bird’s, with a faint ring of the island dialect, like a melody, to it. She talked as if she played.

“And they might then, today,” he said, “forget the wrongs done them.”

“Oh, yes,” she said once more. “It is all a long time ago.” She smiled a little to herself. “Now you are thinking of a peasant,” she said, “since you talk of wrongs.”

“Yes,” said he, “I was thinking of a peasant.”

“And why,” she asked, “are you digging your old peasants out of the mold to bring them with us into the wood today?”