PART II
ITHE MAKER OF RUINS
OF all the lakes of Lombardy Orta is the least frequented. It is lost in the reputation of the Lago Maggiore like a small boat in the wake of a vessel.
From the train which runs along its border the voyager is content to regard it negligently and does not deign to stop. He sees the clearly drawn lines of the wooded mountains that shut it in, and the hollows of the valleys where the white villages half hide themselves like a flock of sheep in a pasture. He catches a hasty glimpse of a little hill planted with trees thrust forth on a promontory into the waters, of a straggling town on the bank, of an island all built up, and in this rapid flight he imagines he has culled the smiling delicacy of this landscape, which indeed stores up and epitomises the whole charm of the Lombardy country: a mixture of grace and harshness. The shore of the lake rounds itself off lazily, but the contours of the hills against the horizon are crisp and well marked, not soft and vaporous as under the paler skies of Switzerland and Savoy. In the evening they seem to sink deep into the clear background. The almost symmetrical undulations of the hills repeat the same forms, exaggerating themselves accordingly as one looks toward the north, so that one feels almost as if they could be measured by the clearly marked stages with which the Novare plain comes up at last against the formidable barrier of the Alps.
Orta Novarese is not yet equipped for the reception of travellers, and on that account enjoys its fortunate neglect. A single hotel on the side of the Sacred Mount—Orta is crowned by a little mountain, where twenty chapels, scattered among the trees, illustrate the life and miracles of St. Francis of Assisi—the Hotel Belvedere, from spring until the beginning of winter, receives a limited number of lodgers. But all through the green of the woods, along the lake’s edge, one discovers country houses, where the aristocracy of the province come for rest and recreation. The iron gates are left open, and from well-kept gardens comes a perfume of flowers that is quite delicious after the musty smell of table-d’hôte that vitiates one’s stay at Pollanza or Baveno.
Fleeing from the large towns where they had spent the stormy months of winter, Mrs. Frasne and Maurice Roquevillard had installed themselves at the Belvedere in May. They had been tempted to stay on there because they were tired of change, as well as by the moderate prices, so that they found themselves still there at the end of October. An exceptional autumn followed almost slyly in the steps of summer, and but for the shorter days, and a little freshness in the air, or the timid gold that began to touch the foliage, the sun would have inspired unlimited confidence in good weather.
This morning, in the sitting-room of their suite at the hotel, the young man was occupied with the translating of a little Italian book,Vita dei SS.Jiulio e Giuliano, a history of those two apostles who came from the Ægean Sea in the fourth century to preach the gospel in Orta. A passage taken from Lamartine, and left there in the original text, held him longer than the obscurest phrase. In a reverie he lifted his head from the prospect near the window. His eyes disdained the bouquet of trees which finished off the peninsula below him, the calm and transparent lake, the little island, a place where enchantments were performed in ancient days, which the poetic author of the biography compared to a camellia on a silver plate. Spontaneously they sought the ridge of the mountains which barred the horizon, as if he would pierce them and look beyond. While he was thus absorbed, a white form glided into the room and bent over his shoulder to glance at the open book. From among the foreign phrases the passage from Lamartine detached itself in italics:
The predestined fate of the child is the house in which it was born: his spirit is made up above all else of impressions there received. The look of our mother’s eyes is a part of our soul, entering through our oxen eyes into our inmost parts.
The predestined fate of the child is the house in which it was born: his spirit is made up above all else of impressions there received. The look of our mother’s eyes is a part of our soul, entering through our oxen eyes into our inmost parts.
Mrs. Frasne quietly closed the book; and her lover, who had not heard her come in, started at the movement. Between them passed a look full of those things which lovers hardly dare to speak or even think.
“What day of the month is it?” she asked indifferently.
Reassured, he replied:
“The twenty-fifth of October.”
Then all at once she made him anxious once more:
“A year ago, do you remember, we met each other at the Calvary of Lemenc. It was there we made up our minds to flee together. Only a year, and already my love is no longer enough for you.”
“Edith!”
“No, it’s no longer enough for you.”
And with a sad smile she added simply:
“See, how you work.”
“Edith, must we not think of the future?”
“No, not yet. What do we need?”
He took umbrage at her question:
“My resources are used up. The money we’re spending now is yours. I can’t forget that.”
“But all is the same between us. Am I not your wife?”
He wrinkled his eyebrows with a purposed look.
“I want your dot to remain intact. I’ve asked one of my friends, who is a political writer in Paris, to find me a place with the newspapers. Can’t I send them some review from the foreign journals? I learned English at college, and later German for my doctor’s thesis. And I speak Italian already. This side work and a place in a lawyer’s office will give us enough to live on.”
She listened to him with an enigmatic smile, while she stroked his face with that gesture of adoration so familiar to him.
“To-morrow we’ll talk about the future. To-morrow, not to-day,” she said.
“Why should we wait a day? On the contrary, we ought to decide at once on the date of our departure.”
“Our departure?”
“Yes, for Paris.”
She could not conceal her discontent.
“Always Paris. You talk about it all the time. You are obsessed by it.”
“It’s in Paris that I must earn my daily bread,” he replied, in a melancholy voice.
Supply and fawningly she slid into his arms, and sought the red of his lips beneath his moustache, murmuring close to him:
“I asked you for one year of your life. To live one year with neither past nor future, to breathe in our tenderness every day, to have you forget all the rest of the world for me. Don’t you remember?”
“Have I not done all this for you, and much more, too?”
“There’s one day due me. To-morrow is our anniversary.”
“To-morrow, Edith,” he repeated, with some emotion.
All trembling with her memories she stood erect again.
“Don’t spoil this day that’s left us. Since it’s the last, let’s have it the most beautiful of our year that has run away drop by drop. Don’t let us talk of the future before to-morrow. Will you promise me?”
He smiled at so much ecstasy.
“I’ll do as you wish.”
“Then I’ll go and dress. It won’t take long. And we’ll go out together. We’ll have lunch on the island.”
She disappeared, and during her absence he tried to begin again at his work on the translation. But for the second time he began the phrase from Lamartine:
“The predestined fate of the child is the home in which it was born——” And again he paused.
Edith was right. The present did not suffice him any more, had never sufficed him. By tacit consent they had both of them brushed aside the future, but into the past, of which they dared not speak, their minds looked when their mouths were mute. Silence, for him, became a supplication. Beyond those nearer mountains there, at this hour, what weretheydoing, those dear ones from whom he had no news?
Edith reappeared on the threshold, soliciting his approval.
“Don’t you think I look nice this morning?”
She wore a summer dress of white serge, which, without fitting too closely, outlined her flexible form, and a hat surmounted by white wings, which gave her whole person a finishing touch of light and slender grace. This year had rejuvenated her. Her eyes of fire could not have flashed more brilliantly than before, but her cheeks were rounder and less pale. Her thin body had taken on an appearance of weight, and through her whole person was diffused an indefinable and pervasive air of love.
He admired her, but did not put in words the compliment for which she waited.
They went down to the port of Orta by a steeply inclined path, paved with round stones, so little used that grass was growing in the crevices. In the square, before the bank where the boats were moored, they came upon a young girl in a red bonnet, whom they had already encountered several times in their walks and who must have lived somewhere near. The little foreigner stared at them, especially Maurice, without timidity.
“She is pretty,” remarked Maurice, after they had passed.
His companion made a little grimace of sadness, which for a moment brought back all her age.
“Don’t look at her,” she said. “I am jealous.”
“Jealous? And can’t I be, too?” he asked, teasing her for her severity.
“Of whom, good heavens!”
“Why, of that black and moustachioed Italian at the hotel. He forgets his mistress during meals and makes bold eyes at you.”
She burst into laughter.
“Lorenzo!”
“You know his name?”
“He told me. He made me a declaration, rolling up the whites of his eyes. It was too funny!”
He forced himself to laugh in his turn. But when they were installed in their boat, and two or three strokes of the oars had carried them from the shore, he was conscious of the same feeling of uneasiness. This present that they were managing with so much art, from which they set aside all memories and consequences, so that they might extract its essence in all its force, here was the least little incident tainting it. What barriers must be built for love to give it shelter from the world even for a year! This love, for which they had sacrificed everything, was pressed upon from every side by life and by the impulses of their own hearts, even as the shores of the little island that lay before them were laved by the waters of the lake.
She was the first to feel the consciousness of their misery. She leant from the thwart and drew nearer to him. But instead of divining what she meant, he began and told her the legend of St. Jules, for whom they neither of them cared a rap.
“This island in olden times,” he recited, “was infested with snakes. When St. Jules wanted to go to Orta the fishermen all refused to lend him their boats, whereupon he spread his mantle on the water for a boat and used his staff for an oar.”
She was vexed, and murmured sardonically:
“How much you know!”
“I’ve just been reading about this miracle.”
“I detest your book.”
He guessed her reason for detesting it. In this last day of their first year of love, that was to sum up all its sweetness, everything hurt them, everything turned sad for them, even the most innocent words.
They got out at the foot of a staircase that led up from the beach, and fastened their boat to an iron ring fixed in the gravel for that purpose. They went into the old Roman basilica, which contained some Byzantine frescoes, recently discovered under a thick coat of rough-cast, a chair of black marble, a sarcophagus and some frescoes by Ferrari and Luino. Because they had seen these at other times together, they visited them now without pleasure. Lovers must always have new sights, so much do they shrink from blunted sensations, for fear instinctively of wearying each other. Maurice and Edith preferred to explore this morning a narrow passageway that was quite new to them. The whole summit of this precipitous little island is covered with the buildings of a seminary that looks as if it were a fortress. The little road turned presently and led them abruptly up to a closed door. Their progress was blocked, and they found themselves face to face in the most utter isolation, shut in by two high walls and on an island. There could not have been a completer effect of isolation for them, of having no one besides themselves in the whole world. Surely this is the professed desire of lovers. One year ago they would have welcomed for all their lives an isolation like this. To-day, without a word, they turned and fled back to the beach.
An old man was fishing with his line in the midday sun. Under a willow tree near the strand two barefooted children were playing ducks and drakes. Along the shore country houses appeared among the trees, whose leaves autumn was slowly garnishing with colour, and Orta, a mass of white, was reflected in the motionless lake. The spectacle of this calm and normal life in the midday stillness helped to restore their spirits.
They ate their lunch on the steps of the stairway that led up to the basilica. Afterwards they floated here and there over the water for a part of the afternoon, seeking some place unknown to them in which they might revivify sensation. Finally they went back to the port, and once on shore again, still sought some new use to make of time.
“Shall we go back to the hotel?” he asked, as they stood in the little square.
But she protested against the idea of shutting themselves up in the house.
“Oh, no! The sun is still high above the mountain. Let’s go back by the long way, and not hurry.”
The road, after crossing through the town, which was quite destitute of sidewalks, ran along the shore of the lake, rising little by little from its level, and following the contours of the Sacred Mount, whose trees and chapels dominated the peninsula, past the iron gates or walls of villas, with ornamental palms and orange trees at their entrances. In front of one of these villas, a quite modest and shabby one, which they could see at the end of a short avenue through the open portals, Edith caught the smell of roses.
“Wait,” she said to her lover. “They are so sweet, and they must be the last.”
“Let’s go in,” he said. “I’ll beg some for you.”
They went in together, and discovered in the inner garden a strange assemblage of statues—small truncated columns, little stuccoed towers with their coating half peeled off, unfinished porches, all the devastation of a miniature art city, but regular and organised as with a decorative motive. In the midst of this symmetrical group of stones, all symbolising with factitious grace the injuries of time, a little marble Cupid stood on his pedestal, with roses all around him, bending his bow with a smile upon his lips.
The young woman saw only Love among the roses.
“He is charming, and the day caresses him.”
“Isn’t it bizarre?” observed Maurice. “We must be in the grounds of some collector of monuments. They’ve no objection to such things in Italy.”
An elderly man with a white blouse put on over his clothes, and a sculptor’s chisel in his hand, came forward to meet them, and greeted them quite solemnly, with a mixture of obsequiousness and nobility. He entered into conversation with Maurice in Italian, while Edith, with his permission, gathered some flowers. She rejoined the two men presently with a sheaf of them in her hands.
“Here is my bouquet. I’ll give you each a rose,” she said.
The despoiled proprietor stumbled through some half intelligible form of thanks and greeting. Maurice introduced him:
“Mr. Antonio Siccardi, a maker of artificial ruins. It’s a fine occupation.”
Edith raised inquiring eyes to her lover.
“I’ll explain,” he added for her benefit.
When they were on the road again, after having taken leave of their host of the moment, Edith made game of this very unusual and unheard-of occupation, and repeated in a jesting tone:
“A manufacturer of artificial ruins?”
“Exactly,” said Maurice, “for decorating parks. In the shrubbery, or near a garden bench, you put a broken column, or an unfinished archway or some clever rock work: it’s quite effective. I knew a good man in the Latin Quarter who made cobwebs for old wine bottles, and people bought them that very evening for their grand dinners.”
“And could he make much money at such work?”
“A good deal.”
“It doesn’t seem possible.”
“He told me, as a matter of fact, that all the newly rich, and there are a great many of them, people who have made money at finance or trade, were mad about his art. Their houses are brand new, and they themselves have just risen from the soil, but they must have ruins for beauty.”
“Fancy! But Cupid? What is Love doing in the midst of those dreadful ruins? Roses would be enough for him.”
“I asked the good man that question, too.”
“And what did he tell you?”
“‘He delights in ruins,’ he assured me, with a mysterious smile, a Mona Lisa smile that merchants can put on at will, I’ve noticed.”
“Yes, it’s funny,” she concluded. “The Italians put marble groups in city clothes in their cemeteries, making them look like dressmakers’ parlors, and they select the emblems of death to decorate their gardens....”
Slowly they climbed the Sacred Mountain, which rose about a hundred yards above the town. When they reached the summit they found evening there, and a new secret sweetness in the great woods of firs, larches, chestnuts and parasol pines, in the midst of which, here and there under the declining sun, were scattered the twenty sanctuaries of St. Francis. These little chapels, built between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, are all of different styles of architecture, round or square, with or without peristyles, Gothic or Romanesque, Byzantine effects prevailing. Each of them encloses, instead of an altar, some scene from the saint’s life, done in life-size terracotta images, a motionless Oberammergau. A naïve and candid art had presided over the installation of this pilgrim’s goal. The stigmata of the saint are the ends of the wires that raise his hands to the gold rays in the ceiling that denote God’s presence there.
Since they had come to Orta Edith and Maurice had never let many days go by without visiting the Sacred Mountain. You could reach it from the Belvedere Hotel in a few steps. Among all the chapels they had elected the fifteenth, which, according to tradition, had been designed by Michelangelo, as their special favourite. It was circular in form, with a cupola, and had a peristyle supported by slender little granite columns. It reminded them of the Calvary of Lemenc, where their flight had been decided on. Along its gallery, which rose a few steps from the ground, the graceful vaulted arches framed successively the various perspectives of the woods: sometimes a view of other chapels among the foliage, sometimes the outlines of a well-curb, and sometimes, between the branches, a panel of sky, a corner of the lake, or the island of St. Jiulio, with its campanile at its front, looking like some big ironclad run aground in the tiny water.
They made their way instinctively toward their special chapel, and climbed its steps. The pine trunks near them stood out against the reddening background of the sky, and here and there one of the other sanctuaries gleamed among the trees like a friendly dwelling.
She held her roses in one hand and rested the other on the shoulder of her lover.
“It was a beautiful evening, like this,” she sighed.
“When?”
“A year ago. You are not sorry?”
He turned away his eyes.
“No.”
“You aren’t going to be sorry for anything?”
As she pressed him for an answer he replied, almost sternly:
“No, never.”
She leant nearer to him to reach his lips, and in his eyes she caught a distant look that frightened her. The something that had been separating them all day, all this last day of their year of tenderness, showed there now with more distinctness than ever. She said at last something that prudence should have counselled her to leave unsaid:
“Maurice, where is Chambéry?”
“Down there.”
His reply came so quickly, and with a gesture so certain, that she was all upset by it. He took his bearings often, then, from that quarter of the sky. Even in his love he had forgotten nothing. Tears started in the young woman’s eyes. He did not ask her the reason of them, but tried to console her with caresses.
“Edith, I love you so.”
She made a little face to show that she was not deceived.
“More than everything?”
“More than everything.”
“Enough to die for me?”
“Yes.”
“Not more than that?”
“It would not be possible.”
With insatiable ardour she cried out:
“But I don’t want to die, I want to live. Shall you love me as much to-morrow?”
“Why not to-morrow?”
“Because I’m afraid. Don’t you see that we can’t go on like this?”
“Oh, you see it, too, then. No, we can’t any more. The future, the past, the world, we can’t suppress them. Each day you have been putting off the final reckoning.”
“Keep still, Maurice—keep still.”
She put her hand against his mouth to stop him, and for a second time she begged him:
“To-morrow, to-morrow, I promise you. I’ll do as you wish to-morrow. You shall decide our fate. But not this evening. This last evening is mine.”
And she put her lips to his, where her hand had been.
The day was waning swiftly. Among the trees the red streak that edged the mountain grew softer, and the waters of the lake took on a uniform tint of grey, barely streaked and lightened here and there by the last reflections from the setting sun.
It was he who first moved down the steps of the peristyle. He walked, unheeding what he did, in the direction that he had just pointed out to her with his hand. When he turned back again he saw his companion motionless there between two columns. So she had waited for him that other time before the Calvary of Lemenc. Her white figure stood out against the greyer wall.
“How beautiful she is,” he reflected, defeated a second time.
She was smelling of her flowers, watching the evening light, and he recalled their queer visit of the afternoon: “Love and his roses.”
He called to her:
“Edith, aren’t you coming? It’s getting chilly, and you have no wrap.”
As she came over toward him he gazed still toward that point in the horizon that marked his native land for him, and thought:
“The ruin is down there.”
Had not the artist in Orta assured them, with his engaging smile, that Love took delight in ruins?