CHAPTER XXI
CLASSIC GRIEF
Nancy was lost at first in thepensioneto which Kenrick had entrusted her. The bareness of it seemed to reflect the bareness of her own mind amid the unmeaning sounds of a strange tongue. During the first week she felt that she should never, stayed she in Naples for years, acquire a single word of Italian, and the week after she was convinced that she should never be able to say anything more than the Italian for “yes,” “no,” “please,” “thanks,” “good night,” “good morning,” and “bread.” For a fortnight she was so completely stunned by the swarming rackety city that she spent all her spare time in the aquarium, contemplating the sea-anemones. The stories of great singers with which Signor Arcucci was to have entertained her leisure seemed indefinitely postponed at her present rate of progress with Italian. She should have to become proficient indeed to follow the rapid hoarseness of that faded voice. Meanwhile, she must wrestle with an unreasonable upside down language in whichaqua caldameant hot water and not, as one might suppose, cold. Nancy cursed her lack of education a hundred times a day, and an equal number of times she thanked Heaven that Letizia already knew twenty-two Italian words and could say the present indicative of the verb “to be.” Signora Arcucci was a plump waxen-faced Neapolitan housewife who followed the English tradition of supposing that a foreigner would understand her more easily if she shouted everything she had to say about four times as loud as she spoke ordinarily. She used to heap up Nancy’s plate with spaghetti; and,as Nancy could not politely excuse herself from eating any more, she simply had to work her way through the slithery pyramid until she felt as if she must burst.
Nor did Maestro Gambone do anything to make up for the state of discouragement into which her unfamiliar surroundings and her inability to talk had plunged her. Nancy found his little apartment at the top of a tall tumbledown yellow house that was clinging to the side of the almost sheer Vomero. He was a tiny man with snow-white hair and imperial and jet-black eyebrows and moustache. With his glittering eyes he reminded her of a much polished five of dominos, and when he wanted anything in a hurry (and he always did want things in a hurry) he seemed to slide about the room with the rattle of a shuffled domino. Although his apartment stood so high, it was in a perpetual green twilight on account of the creepers growing in rusty petrol tins that covered all the windows.
“You speakaitaliano, madama?” he asked abruptly when Nancy presented herself.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Allora come canta?How you singa, madama?”
“I only sing in English at present.”
“What musica you havva?”
Nancy produced the stock-in-trade of ballads, which the maestro fingered like noxious reptiles.
“E questo?Anna Lowrieo qualche nome indiavolato. Probiamolo. Avanti!”
The little man sat down at the piano and was off with the accompaniment on an instrument of the most outrageously tinny timbre before Nancy had finished deciding that he was not so much like a domino as a five-finger exercise.
“Eh, avanti!” he turned round and shouted angrily. “What for you waita, madama?Di nuovo!”
In the green twilight of this little room hanging over the precipitous cliff above the distant jangling of NaplesNancy could not feel that Maxwellton Braes had ever existed. She made a desperate effort to achieve an effect with the last lines.
“And for bonnie Annie LaurieI would lay me down and dee.”
There was a silence.
Then themaestrogrunted, twirled his moustache, rose from the piano, and sat down at his desk.
“Here I writa when you come,” he said. “A rivederla e buon giorno.”
He thrust the paper into Nancy’s hand and with the same gesture almost pushed her out of his apartment. The next thing of which she was conscious was walking slowly down the Vomero in the honey-coloured November sunshine and staring at the hours and days written down upon the half-sheet of notepaper she held in her hand.
So the lessons began, and for a month she wondered why she or anybody else should ever have suffered from a momentary delusion that she could sing. She knew enough Italian by that time to understand well enough that Maestro Gambone had nothing but faults to find with her voice.
“Have I made any progress?” she found the courage to stammer out one morning.
“Progresso? Ma che progresso? Non sa encora camminare.”
Certainly if she did not yet know how to walk she could not progress. But when should she know how to walk? In her halting Italian Nancy tried to extract from themaestroan answer to this.
“Quanda camminerà? Chi sa? Forse domani, forse giovedì, ma forse mai.”
Perhaps to-morrow, perhaps on Thursday, but perhaps never!
Nancy sighed.
When she got back to thepensioneshe sat down and wrote to her patron.
Pensione Arcucci,Via Virgilio 49.Napoli.Dec. 8.Dear Mr. Kenrick,I really don’t think it’s worth your while to go on paying for these singing lessons. Maestro Gambone told me to-day that I might never know how to sing. I’m sure he’s disgusted at my slowness. I’ve been having lessons for a month now, and he has had ample time to judge whether I’m worth his trouble. He evidently thinks I’m not. It’s a great disappointment, and I feel a terrible fraud. But I’m not going to reproach myself too bitterly, because, after all, I would never have thought of becoming a singer if you hadn’t put it into my head. So, next week I shall return to England. I’m afraid your kindness has been....
Pensione Arcucci,Via Virgilio 49.Napoli.Dec. 8.
Pensione Arcucci,Via Virgilio 49.Napoli.Dec. 8.
Pensione Arcucci,
Via Virgilio 49.
Napoli.
Dec. 8.
Dear Mr. Kenrick,
I really don’t think it’s worth your while to go on paying for these singing lessons. Maestro Gambone told me to-day that I might never know how to sing. I’m sure he’s disgusted at my slowness. I’ve been having lessons for a month now, and he has had ample time to judge whether I’m worth his trouble. He evidently thinks I’m not. It’s a great disappointment, and I feel a terrible fraud. But I’m not going to reproach myself too bitterly, because, after all, I would never have thought of becoming a singer if you hadn’t put it into my head. So, next week I shall return to England. I’m afraid your kindness has been....
Nancy put down her pen. Her struggles with Italian seemed to have deprived her of the use of her own tongue. She could not express her appreciation of what he had done for her except in a bread-and-butter way that would be worse than writing nothing. For all the sunlight flickering on the pink and yellow houses opposite she felt overwhelmed by a wintry loneliness and frost. And then she heard coming up from the street below the sound of bagpipes. She went to the window and looked out. Two men in heavy blue cloaks and steeple-crowned felt hats, two shaggy men cross-gartered, were playing before the little shrine of the Blessed Virgin at the corner of the Via Virgilio an ancient tune, a tune as ancient as the hills whence every year they came down for the feast of the Immaculate Conception to play their seasonable carols and grave melodies until Christmas-tide. Nancy had been told about them, and here they were, these—she could not remember their name, but it began with “z”—thesezampsomething or other. And while she stood listening by the window she heard farand wide the pipes of other pious mountaineers piping their holy ancient tunes. Their bourdon sounded above the noise of the traffic, above the harsh cries of the street-vendors, above the chattering of people and the clattering of carts and the cracking of whips, above the tinkling of mandolins in the barber-shops, sounded remote and near and far and wide as the bourdon of bees in summer.
The playing of these pipers calmed the fever of Nancy’s dissatisfaction and seemed to give her an assurance that her failure was not yet the sad fact she was imagining. She decided to postpone for a little while her ultimatum to Kenrick and, tearing up the unfinished letter, threw the pieces on the open brazier, over which for so many hours of the wintry days Signor Arcucci used to huddle, slowly stirring the charcoal embers with an iron fork and musing upon the days when he sang this or that famous part. He was out of the room for a moment, but presently he and his Signora, as he called her, came in much excited to say that thezampognieriwere going to play for them. The pipers in the gimcrack room looked like two great boulders from their own mountains, and the droning throbbed almost unbearably in the constricted space. When everybody in turn had given them a lira or two, they acknowledged the offerings by presenting Nancy as the guest and stranger with a large wooden spoon. She was taken aback for the moment by what would have been in England the implication of such a gift. Even when she had realised that it was intended as a compliment the omen remained. She could not help wondering if this wooden spoon might not prove to be the only gift she should ever take home from Italy. Nevertheless, thezampognieriwith their grave carols healed her fear of discouragement, and during the next fortnight Maestro Gambone on more than one occasion actually praised her singing and found that at last she was beginning to place her voice somewhat more approximately where it ought to beplaced. It was as if the fierce little black and white man had been softened by the spirit of Christmas, of which those blue-cloaked pipers were at once the heralds and the ambassadors with their bourdon rising and falling upon the mandarin-scented air. Absence from home at this season did not fill Nancy with sentimental regrets. Since Bram died Christmas had not been a happy time for her, so intimately was its festivity associated with that dreadful night at Greenwich four years ago. She welcomed and enjoyed the different atmosphere ofNatale, and after so many grimy northern winters these days of turquoise, these dusks of pearl and rose, these swift and scintillating nights.
On the anniversary of Bram’s death she drove out to Posilipo and sat on a rock by the shore, gazing out across the milky cerulean waters of the bay. For all the beauty of this classic view she was only aware of it as one is aware of a landscape by Poussin or Claude, about whose vales and groves and gleaming temples no living creature will ever wander. The dove-coloured water that lapped the rock on which she sat, the colonnade of dark-domed pines along the brow of the cliff, Ischia and Capri like distant castles of chalcedony, Vesuvius in a swoon of limpid golden air—all without Bram was but a vanity of form and colour. The thought of how easily he might have been preserved from death afflicted her with a madness of rage. Indifference to the beauty of her surroundings was succeeded by a wild hatred of that beauty, so well composed, so clear, so bland, and so serene. But for the folly of one incompetent and unimaginative fellow man he might have been sitting beside her on this rock, sitting here in this murmurous placidity of earth and sea and sky, gazing out across this crystalline expanse, his hand in hers, their hearts beating together where now only his watch ticked dryly. Nancy longed to weep; but she could not weep in this brightness. Yet she must either weep or fling herself from this rock and sink down into the water at her feet, into that tenderwater with the hue and the voice and the softness of a dove. She let a loose stone drop from her hand and watched it sink to the enamelled floor of the bay. How shallow it was! She should never drown here. She must seek another rock round which the water swirled deep and indigo-dark, water in which a stone would flicker for a few moments in pale blue fire and be lost to sight long before it reached the bottom. Nancy left the rock where she had been sitting and tried to climb upward along the cliff’s edge in search of deep water at its base. And while she climbed her clothes became scented by the thickets of rosemary. There appeared to her distraught mind the image of Bram as Laertes and of the actress who had played Ophelia saying to him, “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.” She herself had been understudying the Queen and had been standing in the wings to watch how the mad-scene was taken. She could see the expression of mingled horror and pity on Bram’s face, as he took the sprig of rosemary from his sister’s hand.Pray, love, remember.
“Bram,” she cried aloud in an agony of repentance. “I didn’t mean it. I’m not really mad. I won’t drown myself. I won’t really.”
Then she flung herself face downward among the bushes of rosemary and wept. For an hour she lay hidden from the sun in that bitter-sweet grey-green gloom of the cliff’s undergrowth until at last her tears ceased to flow and she could stand up bravely to face again the future. More lovely now was the long sweep of the Parthenopean shore, more lucid the wash of golden air, richer and more profound the warm wintry Southern peace; and she standing there among the rosemary was transmuted by the timelessness of her grief into a timeless figure that might haunt for ever that calm and classic scene.
The last sunset stain had faded from the cloudy cap of Vesuvius, and the street-lamps were already twinkling when Nancy got back to Naples. She went into a church,and there in a dark corner prayed to be forgiven for that brief madness when she had wished to take her life. She sat for a long while, thinking of happy times with Bram, soothed by the continuous coming and going of poor people to visit the Crib, all lit up at the other end of the church. She knelt once more to beg that all that was lost of Bram’s life might be found again in his daughter’s; and her ultimate prayer was as always for strength to devote herself entirely to Letizia’s happiness.
Thus passed the fourth anniversary of the Clown’s death.