CHAPTER XXII
SORRENTO
Two days after her visit to Posilipo Nancy came back from her singing-lesson to discover John Kenrick at thepensione.
“I found that I could get away from England for a few days,” he announced. “And I thought I’d come and ascertain for myself how you really were getting on.”
“Very badly,” Nancy told him.
“So your last letter implied. But Gambone always errs on the side of discouragement. I’m going to have a chat with him on the way back to Bertolini’s. Will you dine with me there to-night? Or, no, wait a minute. I’ll come down and fetch you, and we’ll eat at a more native restaurant and go to the opera, or are you tired of the opera?”
Nancy had to confess that she had not yet been to San Carlo.
Kenrick was astonished.
“I couldn’t very well go alone, and I haven’t had anybody I could ask to go with me,” she explained.
“You’ve been feeling lonely,” he said quickly. “And you’re looking a bit overstrained. Has Gambone been working you too hard?”
“I doubt if he thinks I’m worth working very hard,” said Nancy.
“Nonsense! I’m going to find out exactly what he does think about your voice and your prospects. I wager you’ll be pleasantly surprised to hear what a great opinion he has of you.”
Kenrick left her soon after this, and then Nancy realised how terribly lonely she had been ever since she cameto Naples. A few weeks ago she would have been vexed by the arrival of her patron. It would have embarrassed her. It might even have made her suspect him of ulterior motives. But his arrival now was a genuine pleasure, and if only he came away from Maestro Gambone with good news of her progress, she should be happier than she had been for months. Even an unfavourable report would be something definite, and in that case she could return to England immediately. Loneliness in beautiful surroundings was much harder to bear than fellowship in ugliness. To go back to playing adventuresses in the black country would have its compensations.
When Kenrick returned to take her out to dinner, there was a smile on his sombre face. He put up his monocle and looked at Nancy quizzically.
“You’re a nice one!”
“What’s the matter? What have I done?”
“I thought you told me you weren’t getting on?”
“I didn’t think I was.”
“Well, Gambone says you’re a splendid pupil, that you work very hard, that you have a glorious natural voice, and that if he can keep you another six months he’ll guarantee you an engagement at San Carlo next autumn. What more do you want?”
Nancy caught her breath.
“You’re joking!”
“I’m not indeed. I was never more serious.”
“But why didn’t he say something to me?”
“Gambone is a Neapolitan. Gambone is a realist. About women he has no illusions. He thinks that the more he beats them the better they’ll be. He only told me all this after exacting a promise not to repeat it to you for fear you would be spoilt and give up working as well as you’re working at present. I reproached him with not having looked after you socially, and he nearly jumped through the ceiling of his apartment.”
“‘She is here to work,’ he shouted. ‘She is not here to amuse herself.’ ‘But you might at least have managedto find her an escort for the opera.’ And I told him that you had not yet visited San Carlo. ‘Meno male!’ he squealed. I presume your Italian has at least got as far as knowing thatmeno malemeans the less harm done. ‘Meno malethat she has not filled her head with other people’s singing. She has enough to do with her practising, enough to do to learn how to speak and pronounce the only civilised tongue that exists for a singer.’ I told him that you had been lonely, and what do you think he replied? ‘If she’s lonely, let her cultivate carnations.Garofani!’ he yelled at the top of his voice. ‘Believe me, my good sir, carnations are a thousand times more worth while than men and ten thousand times more worth while than women.’ ‘Even good contraltos?’ I laughed. ‘Sicuro!Or sopranos, either,’ the old villain chuckled.”
“Well, in some moods I would agree with him,” Nancy said.
“Anyway, whatever the old cynic may say, he has a profound belief in your future. When he was ushering me out of his apartment ...”
“Oh, he ushered you out?” Nancy laughed. “He always pushes me out.”
“He would! But listen, he took my arm and said, with a twinkle in his bright black eyes, ‘So you heard her sing and knew she had a voice?’ I bowed. ‘Siete un conoscente, caro. Felicitazioni.’”
The opera played at San Carlo that night wasLa Traviata. Nancy, not oppressed by the sound and sight of a contralto singing and acting far better than she could ever hope to sing and act, thoroughly enjoyed it. The Violetta was a delicate and lovely creature so that, even if hercoloraturadid lack something of the finest quality and ease, her death was almost intolerably moving. Alfredo was played by an elderly tenor into whose voice thevibratoof age had already insinuated itself. He was, however, such a master of all the graces that neither his appearance nor the fading of his voice seemedto matter a great deal. In compensation for an elderly tenor, the heavy father was played by a very young barytone with a voice of glorious roundness and sonority. Kenrick was much excited by this performance and prophesied for this new singer a success all over Europe as round and sonorous as his voice. He declared that he had never heard Germont’s great aria “Di Provenza” given so well.
After the performance they went to supper at one of the popular restaurants near the opera house, where Kenrick discoursed upon the æsthetic value ofLa Traviata.
“It’s the fashion to decry it as a piece of tawdry and melodramatic sensationalism, but to my mind it fulfills perfectly Aristotle’s catharsis.”
“That sounds reassuring,” Nancy laughed. “But I’m afraid I don’t in the least understand what it means.”
“Aristotle found an æsthetic value in the purging of the emotions. Well, at the end ofTraviatawe are left with the feeling that music could not express more completely the particular set of emotions that are stirred by the story of Alfredo, Violetta, and Germont. No critic has ever done justice to the younger Dumas’sDame aux Caméliaseither as a novel or as a play. Yet both they and the opera founded upon them have a perennial vitality so marked as almost to tempt me to claim for them an eternal vitality. The actuality ofTraviatais so tremendous that on the first night of its production in Venice it was a failure because the soprano playing Violetta was so fat as to revolt the audience’s sense of fact. This seems to me highly significant. You cannot imagine an operatic version of, let us say,Wuthering Heightsbeing hissed off the stage because the Heathcliff revolted any audience’s sense of fact. NowWuthering Heightsmuch more nearly approximates to melodrama thanLa Dame aux Camélias. The pretentious spiritualism with which a sordid tale of cruelty, revenge, and lust is decked out cannot hide from the sane observer the foolish parodyof human nature presented therein. It has been acclaimed as a work of tragic grandeur and sublime imagination as if forsooth grandeur of imagination were to be measured by the remoteness of protagonists or plot from recognisable life. Let us grant thatTraviataexhibits a low form of life——”
“Or a form of low life,” Nancy interposed.
“No, no, don’t make a joke of it! I feel seriously and strongly on this subject,” Kenrick averred. “But a live jelly-fish is a great deal more marvellous and much more beautiful than a stuffed lion. Nothing really matters in a work of art if it lacks vitality. I would not say thatWuthering Heightslacked all vitality, but its vitality is slight, indeed it is almost imperceptible except to the precious and microscopic taste of the literary connoisseur. The vitality ofLa Dame aux Caméliasis startling, so startling indeed as to repel the fastidious and academic mind just as a don would be embarrassed were his attentions solicited by a gay lady outside the St. James’s Restaurant. The trouble is that the standards of criticism are nearly always set up by the middle-aged.La Dame aux Caméliasis a book for youth. We have most of us lived not wisely and not well in our youth, and middle-age is not the time to judge that early behaviour. Let it be remembered that the follies of our youth are usually repeated when we are old—not always actually, but certainly in imagination. An old man should be the best judge ofLa Dame aux Camélias. Well, if that is a vital book, and just because of its amazing vitality, a great book,Traviatais a great opera, because, unlike that much inferior operaAïda, it is impossible to imagine any other music for it. All that could be expressed by that foolish dead love, all the sentimental dreams of it, all the cruelty of it, and the sweetness and the remorse, all is there. We may tire of its barrel-organ tunes, but we tire in middle-age of all youth’s facile emotions. We can scarcely imagine ourselves, let us say, waiting two hours in the rain for any woman. We should bebored by having to find the chocolates that Cleopatra preferred, and we would not escort even Helen of Troy to the nearest railway station. But fatigue is not necessarily wisdom, and so much that we reject in middle-age is due to loss of resiliency. We cannot react as we once could to the demands of the obvious excitement. We are, in a word, blasé.”
Nancy felt that she was rushing in like a fool, but she could not sit here and watch Kenrick blow away all argument in the wreaths of his cigarette smoke. She had to point out one flaw in his remarks.
“But when I said that I would never love again and implied that I knew what I was talking about, because I was twenty-eight, you warned me that a woman’s most susceptible age was thirty-three.”
“Thirty-three is hardly middle-age,” said Kenrick. “I was thinking of the chilly forties. Besides, you can’t compare women with men in this matter. The old saw about a woman being as old as she looks and a man as old as he feels is always used by women as an illustration of the advantage of being a man. As a matter of fact, the advantage lies all the other way. It is so much easier to look young than to feel young. A woman is never too old to be loved. You can hardly maintain that a man is never to old to love. I doubt if a man over thirty ever knows what love means.”
“Och, I never heard such a preposterous statement,” Nancy declared. “Why, think of the men who cherish hopeless passions all their lives.”
“For my part I can never understand a man’s cherishing a hopeless passion,” he declared. “I should feel so utterly humiliated by a woman’s refusal of her love that my own passion would be killed by it instantly. And the humiliation would be deepened by my knowledge of woman’s facility for falling in love, which is, of course, much greater than a man’s, as much greater as her fastidiousness and sensitiveness are less. To be refused by a woman, when one sees on what monstrous objects sheis prepared to lavish her affection, seems to me terrible. Equally I do not understand why a woman, who after her childhood so rarely cherishes a hopeless passion that will never be returned, is always prepared to cherish the much more hopeless passion of continuing to love a man after he has ceased to love her. I suppose it’s because women are such sensualists. They always regard love as a gratification of self too long postponed, and they continue to want it as children want broken toys and men fail to give up smoking. The famous women who have held men have held them by their infinite variety. Yet the one quality in a lover that a woman finds it hardest to forgive is his variety.”
“Och, I don’t agree at all,” Nancy declared breathlessly. “In fact I don’t agree with anything you’ve said about love or men or women. I think it’s a great pity that you have let yourself grow middle-aged. You wouldn’t be able to have all these ideas if you were still capable of feeling genuine emotion. I’m not clever enough to argue with you properly. No woman ever can argue, because either she feels so strongly about a subject that all her reasons fly to the wind, or, if she doesn’t feel strongly, she doesn’t think it worth while to argue and, in fact, finds it a boring waste of time. But I feel that you are utterly wrong. I know you are. You’re just wrong. And that’s all there is to be said. My husband had more variety than any man I ever knew, and I loved his variety as much as I loved every other single one of his qualities.”
There were tears in her big deep-blue eyes, the tears that always came to them when she spoke of Bram, and flashing tears of exasperation as well, at being unable to defeat her companion’s cynicism, for all his observations seemed to her to be the fruit of a detestable and worldly-wise cynicism, the observations of a man who has never known what it was to suffer or to lose anything in the battle of life.
“Forgive me if I spoke thoughtlessly,” said Kenrick.“I get carried away by my tongue whenever I go to an opera. Operas stimulate me. They are thereductio ad absurdumof art. I seem always to get down to the bedrock of the æsthetic impulse at the opera. We are deluded by a tragedy of Æschylus into supposing that art is something greater than it is, something more than a sublimation of childhood’s games, something comparable in its importance to science. In opera we see what a joke art really is. We know that in the scroll of eternity the bottle-washer of a great chemist is a more conspicuous minuscule than the greatest artist who ever shall be.”
“I think I’m too tired to listen to you any longer,” Nancy said. “I really don’t understand anything you’re talking about now, and even if I did I feel sure I wouldn’t agree with you.”
Kenrick laughed.
“I plead guilty to being a chatterbox to-night. But it was partly your fault. You shouldn’t have sat there looking as if you were listening with such intelligence. But let’s leave generalisations and come to particulars. Gambone says a little holiday will do you good.”
“I don’t believe you,” Nancy laughed. “Maestro Gambone never indulged in theories about his pupils’ well-being. I simply don’t believe you.”
“Yes, really he did. I asked him if he did not think that you would be all the better for a short rest, and he agreed with me. Now, why don’t you come to Sorrento with me and see in this New Year that is going to be yourannus mirabilis?”
Nancy looked at him quickly.
“You’re thinking of the proprieties? There are no proprieties at Sorrento. You want a change of air. I promise not to talk about art. We’ll just take some good walks. Now don’t be missish. Treat me as a friend.”
Yet Nancy still hesitated to accept this invitation. She had no reason that she could express to herself, still less put into words. It was merely an irrational presentiment that she should regret going to Sorrento.
“Why don’t you answer?” he pressed.
“I was only wondering if it was wise to interrupt my lessons,” she told him lamely.
“But you wouldn’t lose more than a couple. We shan’t be away more than five days. I’ve got to be back in London by the fifth of January.”
“All right. I’d really love to come if Gambone won’t think I’m being lazy.”
Kenrick drove her back to the Via Virgilio, and next morning they took the boat for Sorrento.
They stayed in an old sun-crumbledalbergobuilt on one of the promontories, the sheer cliff of which had been reinforced by immense brick arches raised one above another against its face, so that the soft tufaceous rock, which rather resembled rotten cheese, should not collapse and plungealbergo, tangled garden, and pine-dark promontory into the inky blue water two hundred feet below. Sorrento looks north, and the proprietor of thealbergo, a toad-faced little man with sandy hair and a food-stained frock coat much too large for him, suggested that his new guests would be more comfortable at this season in rooms with an aspect away from the sea. The south aspect of thealbergoformed three sides of an oblong, and the doors of all the rooms opened on a balcony paved with blue and green porcelain tiles and covered with the naked grey stems of wistaria, the convolutions of which resembled the throes of huge pythons. The view looked away over orange groves to the Sorrentine hills, and particularly to one conical bosky peak on which the wooden cross of a Camaldolese congregation was silhouetted against the sky. In the garden below the balcony tazetta narcissus and China roses were in bloom. There were not many other guests in thealbergo, and these were mostly elderly English and American women, all suffering from the delusion that Italy was the cheapest country on earth and from a delusion of the natives that all English and Americans were extremely wealthy.
Kenrick apologised for bringing Nancy to theAlbergodel Solerather than taking her to one of the two fashionable hotels.
“But we can always go and feed at the Tramontano or the Victoria,” he pointed out. “And there’s a charm about this tumbledown old place. I was here once ten years ago and always promised myself a return visit. Of course, Winter is not the time to be in Sorrento. It’s not till the oranges come into their glory, about Easter, that one understands the raptures of the great men who have visited this place. The fascination of Sorrento is a stock subject with all the letter-writers of our century.”
“Och, but I would much rather be staying here,” Nancy assured him. “I think this place is so attractive.”
“It would be more attractive in Spring when the creamy Banksia roses are in blossom and hung with necklaces of wistaria. It is a little melancholy now. Yet the sun strikes warm at midday. I’ve told them to make up a roaring fire of chestnut logs in your room.”
“They’ve certainly done so, and it’s as cosy as it can be.”
“I only hope the weather stays fine for our holiday,” said Kenrick, putting up his monocle and staring an appeal to the tender azure of the December sky.
And the weather did stay fine, so that they were able to drive or walk all day and escape from the narrow walled alleys of Sorrento, alleys designed for summer heats, when their ferns and mosses would refresh the sun-tired eye, but in Winter damp and depressing, soggy with dead leaves.
On the last day of the old year they climbed up through the olives until they reached an open grassy space starred thick with the tigered buff and mauve blooms of a myriad crocuses, the saffron stamens of which burned like little tongues of fire in the sunlight.
“Forgive the melancholy platitude,” said Kenrick, “but I am oppressed by the thought of our transience here, and not only our transience, but the transience of allthe tourists who sojourn for a while on this magic coast. The song of a poet here is already less than the warble of a passing bird; the moonlight is more powerful than all the vows of all who have ever loved in Sorrento; no music can endure beside the murmur of the Tyrrhenian. ‘Here could I live,’ one protests, and in a day or two the railway-guide is pulled out, and one is discussing with the hotel porter how to fit in Pompeii on the way back to Naples. Ugh! What is it that forbids man to be happy?”
“Well, obviously most of the people who visit Sorrento couldn’t afford to stay here indefinitely,” said Nancy, who always felt extremely matter-of-fact when her companion began to talk in this strain.
“Yes, but there must be many people like myself who could.”
“Some do.”
“Ah, but not in the right way. They dig out a house-agent and inspect eligible villas and behave exactly as if they were moving from Bayswater to Hampstead, which in fact they are. I don’t want to adjust these surroundings to myself. I want to become an integral part of them. I should like to stay on in theAlbergo del Solewithout writing letters or getting letters. I should like to be sitting here when these crocuses have faded, and the grass is wine-stained by anemones or silvery with asphodels. I should like to watch the cistus petals fluttering to the hot earth, and to lie for hours listening to the cicali, lie and dream all through the Summer as still and hot as a terra-cotta shard, lie and dream until the black sirocco whips the orchards and spits into my face the first drops of autumn rain. But if I had to make arrangements for my business and explain that my nerves required a long rest, all the savour would be taken out of my whim. Oh,dio, I am as full to-day of yearnings for theau delàas a French symbolist, or a callow German who sees the end of hisWanderjahrelooming.”
All the way back to the town Kenrick walked along besideNancy in a moody silence. She felt that perhaps she had been too discouraging, and just before they emerged from the last of the olives she put a hand on his arm and said:
“Will it do anything to console you if I tell you how perfectly I have enjoyed these days here? I’m not an eloquent person, Mr. Kenrick.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake call me John. Haven’t you noticed I’ve been calling you Nancy all this time?”
“I’ll try to call you John,” she promised. “But it’s terribly hard for me to call people by their Christian names. I’m not an eloquent person ... John. In fact, I’m sort of tongue-tied. But surely you must realise what you’ve done for me.”
He stopped abruptly and looked into her eyes.
“Have I really done much?”
“Why, you know you have. You know you have. I was a touring actress without an idea of ever being anything else, and you’ve given me the chance to be something much more than that.”
“That’s all I’ve managed to do?” Kenrick asked.
“Isn’t it enough?”
He seemed to be striving either to say something or not to say something, Nancy did not know which. Then he shivered.
“Come along, it’s beginning to turn chilly as the sun gets behind the hills. Let’s go and have a fashionable tea at the Victoria, and book a table for to-night.”
After dinner they sat in the lounge and watched the sophisticatedtarantellathat was splashed on the tourists three times a week as from a paint-pot of gaudy local colour. Followed luscious songs and mandolinades, and shortly before midnight thecapo d’annoprocession arrived to sing the song of the New Year. It was accompanied by a band of queer primitive instruments; but the most important feature of the celebration was a bay-tree, which was banged on the floor to mark the time of the rhythmical refrain throughout the song’s many verses.Everybody drank everybody’s else health; the elderly English and American women twinkled at the inspiration of an extra glass of vermouth; all was music and jollity.
The moonlight was dazzling when Kenrick and Nancy left the hotel, the air coldly spiced with the scent of mandarins. He proposed a walk to shake off the fumes, and, though she was feeling sleepy after a long day in the open air followed by the long evening’s merrymaking, Nancy had not the heart to say that she would rather go home to bed. They wandered through the alleys now in darkness, now in a vaporous sheen of grey light, now full in the sharp and glittering eye of the moon. The naked arms of the walnut-trees and figs shimmered ashen-pale. Here and there a gust of perfume from the orange-groves waylaid them to hang upon its sweetness like greedy moths. After twenty minutes of meandering through these austere blazonries of argent and sable they turned back toward thealbergoand followed their shadows away from the soaring moon, their little shadows that hung round their feet like black velvet, so rich seemed they and so substantial upon the dusty silver of the path.
All was still when they reached thealbergo, and the porcelain tiles of the balcony were sparkling in the moonshine like aquamarines.
“Good night,” said Nancy, pausing in the doorway of her room. “And once more a happy New Year!”
Kenrick stood motionless for an instant. Then he stepped forward quickly into the doorway and caught Nancy to him.
“You can’t say good night like this,” he gasped.
She struggled to free herself from the kiss he had forced upon her. In her physical revolt against him the lips pressed to hers felt like the dry hot hide of some animal.
“Let me go! Let me go!” she choked. “Och, why are you doing this and spoiling everything?”
In escaping from his arms Nancy had gone right intoher room. Kenrick followed her in and, shutting the door behind him, began to plead with her.
“Let me come and sit in here for a while. I won’t try to kiss you again. Let’s pull up a couple of chairs to the fire and talk.”
“Och, do go away,” Nancy begged. “There’s nothing to talk about now, and it’s late, and I feel so unhappy about this.”
All the time she was talking she was searching everywhere for the matches to light the lamp and illuminate with its common sense this mad situation created by moonshine and shadows and flickering logs.
“You’ve surely realised that I’ve been madly in love with you ever since I saw you at Bristol?” he demanded.
Nancy found the matches and lit the lamp. Then she turned to face Kenrick.
“Of course I didn’t realise it. Do you suppose I would have let you pay for my singing-lessons and all this, if I’d thought you were in love with me? I see it now, and I could kill myself for being so dense. And me supposing it was all on account of my fine voice! Och, it’s too humiliating. Just an arrangement between you and Gambone, and me to be so mad as to believe in you.”
“Now don’t be too unjust, Nancy,” he said. “You have a fine voice, and even if you turn me down as a lover I’m still willing to see you through with your training.”
“I thought you knew so much about women,” she stabbed. “You don’t really suppose that I’d accept another penny from you now?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Well, I won’t ever be your mistress, and since it was the hope of getting me for your mistress that made you send me out here—you can’t deny that, now, can you?—well, since it was that and I can’t oblige, you don’t suppose I’ll accept your charity?”
“But I tell you I do think you have a fine voice, andso does Gambone. I swear to you he does. This hasn’t been a trick to get you out to Italy, and nothing else; though it would be absurd to pretend that I’d have done what I did for you for any woman with a fine voice.”
“Why couldn’t you have told me there was a price attached? It wasn’t fair of you to let me come out here without knowing that.”
Nancy was on the verge of breaking down; but she knew that if she cried Kenrick would take the opportunity of such weakness to attempt a reconciliation, and she was determined to finish with him for ever to-night.
“I suppose it wasn’t,” he admitted. “But you must remember that I didn’t know you then as I know you now, and perhaps I assumed that you were like most women, for I swear most women would have realised that I was in love.”
“But it’s such a damnable way of being in love!” Nancy exclaimed. “If you loved me, how could you think that I’d pretend such innocence? To make myself more interesting? Well, I suppose if you go through life judging women by your own ideas about them, youwouldhave discovered by now that all of them were frauds.”
“Listen, Nancy,” Kenrick said. “Is it because you don’t love me that you refuse me as a lover? Or is it because of the conventions? Would you marry me, if I could marry you?”
“Do you mean if I weren’t an actress?” she said, blazing.
“No, no,” he replied impatiently. “For God’s sake don’t talk like that. What on earth difference could that conceivably make? I can’t marry you, because I’m married already, and because my wife would die rather than divorce me. But would you marry me?”
“No, never in this world! I won’t be your mistress, because I don’t love you, and even if I did love you a little, I wouldn’t be your mistress, because I could never love you as much as I loved my husband and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt his child and mine.”
“Are you sure you don’t love me? Are you sure the second and more sentimental reason isn’t the true one?”
“I’m so far from loving you,” she declared, “that I couldn’t even hate you. Now perhaps you’ll go away and leave me alone? Remember what you said the other night in Naples about cherishing hopeless passions? Or was that just all nothing but beautiful talk?”
“Why don’t you love me?” he asked.
“I told you once that I could never love anybody again. You had a theory about that, I remember. Now do go away, and leave me alone.”
“Forgive me, Nancy.”
“I’ll forgive you if you let me know to a farthing what you’ve paid for me from the moment I left London.”
“That’s not forgiveness,” he said. “You needn’t be cruel. After all, it’s not unforgivable to love a woman. I loved you from the beginning. I haven’t just taken advantage of moonlight to indulge myself. At least, let me continue paying for your lessons. I’m going back to England at once; I’ll promise not to worry you any more. Do, Nancy, please do let me see you through!”
She shook her head.
“I couldn’t.”
“You’re sacrificing yourself for pride.”
“It’s not entirely pride,” she said. “There’s pride in it, but it’s—oh, I can’t explain things as you can. Please tell me what I’ve cost you. I have enough, I think, to pay you back.”
“I won’t accept it,” he declared. “And for no reason whatever can you prove to me that I ought to accept repayment. I persuaded you to leave your engagement. You believed in my sincerity. And I was sincere. I think it’s wrong of you to give up your singing. But I know it’s useless to argue about that with you. What I have paid is quite another matter, and I simply refuse to accept repayment. If you can’t even succeed in hatingme, you’ve no right to ask me to do something for which I must hate myself.”
“Yes, but you only used my voice as an excuse for the rest,” Nancy argued. “Your main thought in getting me out to Italy was to make me your mistress. Apparently I must have given you the impression that your trouble was worth while. Yet when you invited me to come with you to Sorrento on this holiday, why did you ask me to treat you as a friend? As a matter of fact, the idea that you wanted to make love to me did pass through my mind, but you drove away the fancy by the way you spoke, as if you knew that I suspected your reasons and wanted to reproach me for my nasty mind. Did you or did you not expect that I would give myself to you here?”
“It was here that I first thought that you were growing fond of me,” Kenrick said evasively. “I can tell you the exact moment. It was yesterday afternoon when you put your hand on my arm.”
“Iwasgrowing fond of you. But not in that kind of way,” she said. “Naturally I was growing fond of you. You had, as I thought, done a great deal for me. I was grateful; and when you seemed depressed I wanted to comfort you.”
“Nancy, let’s cut out to-night and blame the moon.”
She shook her head.
“I can’t. I know myself too well. Just to give you pleasure because I owe you a great deal, I would like beyond anything to cut out to-night and go on with my singing. But the moment I was alone I’d begin to fret. I haven’t enough confidence in my success as a singer. For one thing, now that you’ve told me that you were attracted to me personally at Bristol I feel that you’ve thought my voice better than it is. Suppose at the end of another five or six months Gambone shouldn’t consider me worthy of being pushed along? I’d have nothing to fall back upon. I’d have failed myself and my daughterand you, artistically, and I’d have failed you in the only way that might compensate you for that failure.”
“But if the risk is mine and I’m willing to accept it, why must you worry?”
“It’s no good. I know myself. I know that I couldn’t endure taking your money under those conditions.”
“But you aren’t seriously proposing to give up your lessons and leave Naples simply because I’ve told you that I’m in love with you?”
“Yes, yes, I am. I’m going back to-morrow.”
“But how will you explain your sudden return to your friends?”
“I haven’t so very many friends to bother about. But I shall tell those I have that my voice wasn’t good enough to make it worth while going on.”
Kenrick flung himself into a chair and poked the logs savagely.
“You make me feel such a clumsy brute,” he groaned. “Can’t I find any argument that will make you change your mind?”
“None.”
“But at any rate you aren’t serious about paying me back the trifling sum I’ve spent on you?”
“I am indeed.”
“Nancy, I’ve taken my disappointment fairly well; you can’t deny that. I beg you to be kind and not insist on this repayment. I promise not to inflict myself or my hopes upon you. I’ll do anything you tell me, if only you’ll be generous over this. Your only motive for repaying me can be pride. Use your imagination and try to realise what it will mean for me if you insist. I do love you. I might have pretended that the magic of this night had turned my senses for a moment, but by being sincere I’ve ruined any hope I had for the future. My dream is shattered. Be generous.”
He looked so miserable, hunched up over the fire, that Nancy fought down her pride and agreed to accept asa present what he had already done. She was inclined to regret her weakness a moment later, when she saw that her surrender went far to restore Kenrick’s optimism about their future relations. He began to talk about the beauty of Italy in the Spring, of the peach blossoms in March and the orange-groves in April. The mistake was in having sent her out in Winter. In Spring she must think over everything and come out again. And so on, and so on until Nancy could have screamed with exasperation at his inability to comprehend the finality of her decision.
It was nearly two o’clock before Kenrick left Nancy’s room. The stress of argument had chased away her fatigue; but in Kenrick’s new mood she did not dare stand on the balcony and pore upon the hills of Sorrento floating like islands in that sea of moonshine. He was capable of supposing that she had changed her mind and of expecting the fulfilment of his passion. The fire had died down to a heap of glowing ashes. The room was heavy with the smoke of Kenrick’s incessant Macedonian cigarettes. So this was the end of Italy. Yet she did not feel more than a twinge or two of sentimental regret for the loveliness of earth and sea and sky that she was deliberately abandoning. She had the happiness of knowing that she had been true to herself. A dull, a bourgeois virtue perhaps for a rogue and a vagabond; but Nancy, knowing all that she now wanted from life, did not feel sorry for that self to which she had been true.
Three days later Italy seemed as far away as paradise, when the cliffs of England loomed through a driving mist of dirty southerly weather.