Selected Stories (9781440673832) (30 page)

‘It is a sin you should not be out, Elizabeth. Find your friend if you can, and make her go with you. If you see Colonel Leyland, tell him I am here.'

‘Is that all, ma'am?' Elizabeth was fond of her eccentric mistress, and her heart had been softened by the ice. She saw that Miss Raby did not look well. Possibly the course of love was running roughly. And indeed gentlemen must be treated with tact, especially when both parties are getting on.

‘Don't give pennies to the children: that is the only other thing.'

The guests had disappeared, and the number of officials visibly diminished. From the hall behind came the genteel sniggers of those two most vile creatures, a young lady behind the bureau and a young man in a frock coat who shows new arrivals to their rooms. Some of the porters joined them, standing at a suitable distance. At last only Miss Raby, the Russian Prince, and the concierge were left in the lounge.

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 anyone 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 the 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 halfway 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 someone 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 behaviour and lady-like display, she had been in love with Feo, and she had never loved so greatly again. A presumptuous boy had taken her to the gates of heaven; and, though she would not enter with him, the eternal remembrance of the vision had made life seem endurable and good.

Colonel Leyland, by her side, babbled respectabilities, trying to pass the situation off as normal. He was saving her, for he liked her very much, and it pained him when she was foolish. But her last remark to Feo had frightened him; and he began to feel that he must save himself. They were no longer alone. The bureau lady and the young gentleman were listening breathlessly, and the porters were tittering at the discomfiture of their superior. A French lady had spread amongst the guests the agreeable news that an Englishman had surprised his wife making love to the concierge. On the terrace outside, a mother waved away her daughters. The bishop was preparing, very leisurely, for a walk.

But Miss Raby was oblivious. ‘How little I know!' she said. ‘I never knew till now that I had loved him and that it was a mere chance—a little catch, a kink—that I never told him so.'

It was her habit to speak out; and there was no present passion to disturb or prevent her. She was still detached, looking back at a fire upon the mountains, marvelling at its increased radiance, but too far off to feel its heat. And by speaking out she believed, pathetically enough, that she was making herself intelligible. Her remark seemed inexpressibly coarse to Colonel Leyland.