PART IIICHAPTER I
Latein August Mrs. Wilbur sailed for Europe. When the ship dropped down the bay, and all the cables with the past were cut, a sense of great joy came over her. As the last sultry breeze from the heated land gave place to the deep-sea air, her imagination, which had been torpid for many months, awoke and saluted the future. She was filled with the romantic excitement that usually only the first voyage creates,—never, alas! to be repeated. No other experience in life is comparable to this passing from the actual and seeming vulgar into the spot where the fancy has been wont to play. Europe has lived so long and so passionately, and has gathered to itself such a chain of memories, that it casts a spell over semi-barbarian hearts.
She sat long into the nights brooding, while the powerful, silent beast beneath her feet plunged on into the new world,—brooding sensuously like the gourmand returning from the parched deserts who dreams of the fat in the pleasant valleys beyond. And now that the cables were cut, and she was free like this ship to hasten to her haven, the past troubled her little. These nights on the ocean she let her will relax. Why strive? Shewould gorge and be satisfied and pay the penalty.There, beyond in the soft darkness, was what would satisfy.
Instinctively she had chosen to go to Florence, at least for the present; this spot of passionate delights called her authoritatively. She arrived on a warm, dark night. The gloomy buildings loomed into the black heavens; beneath their walls resounded the staccato note of Florentine life. She slept that night with the rush of the Arno, as it shot the Ponte Trinità, singing in her ears, a tumultuous lullaby. At daybreak the Arno called her to the window while it sang its swift song to the morning. The gentle hills across the river were gilded with floods of warm light. A stately, solitary pine lined the horizon above the Boboli gardens. Up beyond, San Miniato flashed back to her a gleaming message. The city was yet cold and silent in the midst of the bursting loveliness of the day. Her heart beat warmly, intoxicated with the realization of her desires. It was the impossible human dream made real. Towards it she stretched out her hands, hungeringly.
Later she went down into the city, threading her way between the black palace walls to the open fields without the gates, where she could seize the heavens, and the hills, and the glorious full body of light descending to the earth. Yet before long she had wandered back to the Uffizi, ravenous for another sensation. Tremulously she mounted the long flights of the palace stairs and penetrated the outer rooms. At last she had come to her joy,—when patience with subterfuges had ceased, and her soul was eager to worship.
The pictures seemed so peaceful! They had been waiting there quietly all these dreary years of her life, and now they spoke to her calmly, with the clear utterance that comes of removal from things temporal. She abandoned herself to one passion after another, in greedy enjoyment, with mystical sensuousness of feeling; then making a futile effort to remember what she had learned critically four years before, she would try to reason with herself. But all the months of renunciation, of arid living without beauty, took their revenge in a passionate, uncontrollable mastery. The pieces of light and colour before her eyes were not pictures: she was not promenading past dead squares of canvas as she had done so often before. She seized specially upon each shining soul that lay before her, with the delight one has in the discovery of an illuminating thought, or in the still richer consciousness of an expressive person. She remembered Erard’s phrase about pictures,—“documents of old passions.” Not documents, not dead, her soul asserted; but piercingly alive, godlike revelations.
Her eyes filled with tears, and she laughed at her own ecstasy. Two or three pictures were all that she could contain in this abandonment. When these had burned deep into her and the rush of emotion had subsided a little, she left the gallery, content with the knowledge of their presence, of their nearness. Idling along the narrow quais by the Ponte Vecchio she let the minutes slip past savouringly, listening to the human note of the city, and watching the colours of the walls over the river under San Jacopo’s bell-tower.
The afternoons were too precious to spend in the city. The surrounding hilltops from San Miniato to Bello Sguardo, from Fiesole to Cappa Monte, called her. One solitary villa near the brow of Bello Sguardo, with a broad terrace hanging over the valley, took her fancy, and she resolved to rent it. From its lofty terrace under the solemn row of cypresses she would hold Florence in her arms. And across the black-ribboned Arno the hills of Fiesole beckoned her eyes on to the Apennines. While she made arrangements to take possession, she came here in the twilight to brood over the city at her feet. Thus the days passed; she did not know that she was alone.
Bit after bit the past life adjusted itself in her mind, as if fate were arranging inevitably the values. Words out of that past came to mind. She remembered the saying of a shrewd friend, who had dealt much in a service of twenty years with the conscious, striving women of the day. “Why have you earnest, brilliant young women lost the instinct that suppresses the ego? You are terrible egotists. You run about, seeking frantically for entertainment for your restlessness.” Yes, she demanded much; Jennings had said it too. But her heart was full now, and she smiled.
Again she thought of Erard, the “Ishmaelite” as some one had called him. One said in the sanctity of effort “those denationalized, consciously devoted artists find at the end, after all their pains to prepare, that there is nothing to express. Creation comes not that way.” Perhaps not “creation,” but living and satisfaction: in the sanctity of effort one did not understand such matters.She smiled, again, and looked at the purple hill-slope of Setignano.
“You are very beautiful,” the wise friend had also said. “But you do not care! I wish you women who long to be appeased cared for your good looks. A little vanity in a woman is a safe thing.” Yet she was glad to feel that her beauty existed, like the olive below the terrace, like the golden wave of hair in that picture in the Pitti; for it made the earth richer.
And Molly Parker’s last words came back to her. “I had rather you had run off with Erard,” Molly had remarked irritably. “At least they say a great passion is sometimes beyond control, but to slip off this way because you are bored!” Again, later,—“It would be better if you had some ‘vocation,’ as they call it.” She remembered that she had protested: “I have the vocation to be myself.” To-day she laughed at her pompous words. She needed no excuses; the earth smiled at her.
Erard, even, lay outside her soul with the others in that curious world she had forsaken. Sometime she should see him, but not yet. The days sped in peace. She made ready her villa where peace should be perpetuated. A Chicago acquaintance, catching sight of her standing radiant before the frescoes in the chill chapel of the Carmine, wrote home: “Our Mrs. Wilbur seems very happy with herself. You wouldn’t think she was as good as divorced. She hasn’t even a decent gloom.”
An end to this rapt mood came at last. Business necessitated a journey to Paris. Also a letter from theirrepressible Molly gave Mrs. Wilbur warning that she was not to be left to her own devices. “I am going over to join you. You’ve got to have some one to bully and look after you and pet you. I don’t approve of you and never shall, but I can’t let you be foolish all by yourself.... What are your plans—to wander about there with a maid from hotel to pension, or take an apartment and smoke and drink and try to make a man of yourself?” (For Miss Parker’s ideas about the modern woman were still crude.) “Plans!” Mrs. Wilbur exclaimed. That was the futile gabble she had tried to escape. One lived without plans. As she prepared to leave her city of delights she sighed; something warned her that the ecstasy of freedom would never flood so high again.
In the last calm, warm night she sat for hours on the terrace of her villa, fearing to leave her dearly bought peace. When she returned to the hotel, winding down between the walled orchards to the heated city, the Arno was singing under the arches of the Trinità. But the song sounded deep and solemn.