V.
“Is it you, Galimberti? Pray come in.”
“Am I not disturbing you?” and, as usual, he stumbled over the rug, and then sat down, hat in hand, one glove off and the other on, but unbuttoned.
“You never disturb me.” Her tone was the cold, monotonous one of ill-humour.
“You were thinking?” ventured the dwarf, after a short silence.
“Yes, I was thinking ... but I don’t remember about what.”
“Have you been out to-day? It is a lovely morning.”
“And I’m so cold. I am always cold when the weather is warm, and vice versâ.”
“Strange creature!”
“Eh?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“And about yourself, Galimberti. Have you been to the College to-day to give your lesson?”
“Yes, I went there, although I felt so sad, and so disinclined to teach.”
“Very sad—and why?” But the tone was indifferent.
He stroked his forehead with his ungloved hand. She sat with her back to the window, but the light shone straight on his face, which looked yellow and faded. Occasionally there appeared to be a squint in his eyes.
“Yesterday ...” he began, “yesterday, you did not deign to write to me.”
“Yesterday.... What did I do yesterday...? Oh! I remember. Alberto Sanna came to see me.”
“He ... comes ... often ... to see you ... does he not?”
“He is my cousin,” she replied, coldly.
Another halt in the conversation. He went on, mechanically fingering the gloves he had not put on. Lucia unwound a cord of the silken fringe of the low chair in which, with face upturned, she was lying.
“Shall I give you your history lesson to-day?”
“No. History is useless, like everything else.”
“Are you too sad?”
“I’m not even sad—I’m indifferent. I do not care to think.”
“So that—forgive me for mentioning it—I must not hope for a letter from you to-morrow?”
“I don’t know ... I don’t think I shall be able to write.”
“But those letters were my only consolation,” lamented the dwarf.
“A fleeting consolation.”
“I am unhappy, so unhappy.”
“We’re all unhappy”—sententiously, and without looking at him.
“I fear that they no longer like me at the College,” he went on, as if talking to himself. “I always find myself confronted by such icy faces. That Cherubina Friscia hates me. She is a canting hypocrite, who weighs every word I speak. She makes a note in her handbook when I’m only a little late. I don’t know how it is, but sometimes I forget the hour. My memory is getting so weak.”
“So much the better for you. I can never forget.”
“And besides, the Tricolors of this year are lazy and insolent. They contradict me, refuse to write on the subjects I give them, and interrupt me with the most impertinent questions. Every now and then I lose the thread of my discourse, and then they giggle so that I can never find it again.... I’m done for, Signorina Lucia, I’m done for. I no longer enjoy teaching. I think ... I think there is intrigue at work against me at the College, a frightful, terrible, mysterious conspiracy that will end in my destruction.” He rolled his fierce, scared eyes, injected with blood and bile, as if he were taking stock of the enemies against whom he had to defend himself.
“The remedy, my dear Galimberti, is a simple one,” said Lucia with childlike candour.
“Speak, oh speak, you’re my good angel.... I will obey you in everything.”
“Shake the dust from off your sandals, and leave. Give them due warning.”
Galimberti was so much surprised that he hesitated.
“Is not liberty dear to you?” she continued. “Are you not nauseated by the stifling atmosphere you live in? There is a means of reasserting your independence.”
“True,” he murmured. He did not dare to confess to her that leaving the aristocratic College would mean ruin and starvation to him. Thence he derived the chief part of his income—through them he obtained a few private lessons at the houses of his old pupils, by means of which he augmented the mite on which he lived, he in Naples, and his mother and sister in his native province. Without this, there would only remain to him an evening class for labouring people, by which he gained sixty francs a month: not enough to keep three people from dying of hunger. He was already too much ashamed of appearing to her, ugly, old, and unfortunate, without owning to being poverty-stricken besides.
“True,” he repeated despairingly.
“Why don’t you write to the Directress? If there be a conspiracy, she ought to be informed of it.”
“There is a conspiracy.... I feel it in the air about me.... I will write ... yes ... in a day or two.”
Then there was silence. Lucia stroked the folds of her Turkish wrapper. She took up her favourite album and in it wrote these lines of Boïto:
L’ebete vita
Vita che c’innamora
Lunga che pare un secolo
Breve che pare un ora.
She replaced the album on the table, and the gold pencil-case in her pocket.
“Will you believe in one thing, Signora Lucia?”
“Scarcely....”
“Oh! believe in this sacred truth; the only happy part of my life is the time I pass here.”
“Oh! indeed,” she said, without looking at him.
“I swear it. Before I arrive here, I am overwhelmed with anxiety, I seem to have so many important things to tell you. When I get to the door, I forget them all. I am afraid my brain is getting weak. Then time flies; you speak to me; I hear your voice; I am here with you, in the room in which you live. I am afraid I stay too long; why don’t you send me away? When I leave you, the first puff of wind on the threshold of the street-door takes all my ideas away with it, and empties my brain, without leaving me the power to hold on to my own thoughts.”
“Here is Signor Sanna, Signorina,” announced the maid Giulietta.
“I am going,” said the perturbed Professor, rising to take his leave.
“As you please.” She shrugged her shoulders.
But he did not go, not knowing how to do so, while Alberto Sanna entered. The latter, buttoned up to his chin in his overcoat, with a red silk handkerchief to protect his throat, held a bunch of violets in his hand. Lucia, rising from her seat, placed both her hands in his, and dragged him to the window, that she might see how he looked.
“How are you, Alberto; do you feel well to-day?”
“Always the same,” he said; “an unspeakable weakness in my limbs.”
“Did you sleep, last night?”
“Pretty well.”
“Without any fever?”
“I think so; at least I hadn’t those cold shivers or that horrid suffocation.”
“Let me feel your pulse. It is weak, but regular, sai.”
“I ate a light breakfast.”
“Then you ought to feel well.”
“Che! my stomach can’t digest anything.”
“Like mine, Alberto. What lovely violets!”
“I bought them for you. I think you are fond of them?”
“I hope you didn’t buy them of a flower-girl?”
“If I had, then I should not have offered them to you.”
This dialogue took place in the window, while Galimberti sat alone and forgotten in his armchair. He sat there without raising his eyes, holding an album of photographs in his awkwardly gloved hands. He took a long time turning pages which held the portraits of persons in whom he could not have felt any interest. At last Lucia returned to her rocking-chair, and Alberto dragged a stool close up to her.
“Alberto, you know the Professor?”
“I think I have the honour....”
“We have met before ...” the two then said in unison; the Professor in an undertone, the cousin curtly.
They sat staring at each other, bored by each other’s presence, conscious of being in love with the same woman; Galimberti not less conscious of the necessity of taking his leave. Only he did not know how to get up, or what the occasion demanded that he should say and do. Lucia appeared quite unconscious of what was passing in their minds. She sniffed at her violets, and sometimes vouchsafed a word or two, especially to her cousin. However, conversation did not flow easily. The Professor, when Lucia addressed him, replied in monosyllables, starting with the air of a person who answers by courtesy, without understanding what is said to him. Sanna never addressed Galimberti, so that by degrees the trio once more collapsed into a duet.
“I looked in at your father’s rooms before coming to you. He was going out. He wanted to persuade me to go with him.”
“He is always going out.... And why didn’t you go with him?”
“It rained this morning; and I feel a shrinking in my very bones from the damp. It’s so cosy here, I preferred staying with you.”
“Have you no fireplaces at home?”
“Sai; those Neapolitan fireplaces that are not meant for fire, a cardboard sort of affair. Besides, my servant never manages to make me comfortable. I shiver in my own room, although it is so thickly carpeted.”
“Do you light fires at home, Galimberti?”
“No, Signorina; indeed, I have no fireplace.”
“How can you study in the cold?”
“I don’t feel the cold when I study.”
“You, Alberto, when you have anything to do, bring it here. I will embroider, and you can work.”
“I never have any writing to do, Lucia. You know your father manages all my business. And writing is bad for my chest.”
“You could read.”
“Reading bores me; there’s nothing but rubbish in books.”
“Then we could chat.”
“That we could! You might tell me all your beautiful thoughts, which excite the unbounded admiration of every one who listens to you. Where do you get your strange thoughts from, Lucia?”
“From the land of dreams,” she said, with a smile.
“The land of dreams! A land of your own invention, surely! You ought to write these things, Lucia. You have the making of an authoress.”
“What would be the good of it; I have no vanity, have I, Professor? I never had any.”
“Never! An excessive modesty, united to rare talent....”
“Basta, I was not begging for compliments. I was thinking of how much I suffered from my usual sleeplessness, last night....”
“I hope you took no chloral?”
“I refrained from it to please you. I bore with insomnia for your sake.”
“Thank you, my angel.”
Galimberti sat listening to them, while they exchanged lover-like glances, gazing at the red frame which held Caterina’s portrait.
“I ought to go ... I must go ...” he kept thinking. He felt as if he were nailed to his chair; as if he had no strength to rise from it. He was miserable, for he had just discovered that there was mud on one of his boots. It appeared to him that Lucia was always looking at that boot. It was his martyrdom, yet he dared not withdraw from it.
“And so the thought came to me amid so many others, that you, Alberto, need a woman about you.”
“What sort of a woman—a housekeeper? They are selfish and odious, I can’t abide them.”
“Why, no, I mean a wife.”
“Do you think so...? How strange! I should never have thought of it.”
“But the woman whom you need is not like any other. You need an exceptional woman.”
“True, how true! I want an exceptional wife,” said Alberto, willing to be persuaded.
“An exceptional woman. Don’t you agree with me, Professor?”
He started in the greatest perturbation. What could she be wanting of him, now?
Without awaiting his reply, she continued:
“You are, dear Alberto, in a somewhat precarious state of health; or rather, your age is itself a pitfall, surrounded as you are with all the temptations of youth. What with balls, theatres, supper-parties....”
“I never go anywhere,” he mumbled; “I am too afraid of making myself ill.”
“You do well to be prudent. After all, they are but empty pleasures. But at home, in your cold, lonely house, you do indeed need a sweet affectionate companion, who would never weary of tending you, who would never be bored, never grudge you the most tender care. Think of it! what a flood of light, and love, and sweet friendship, within your own walls! Think of the whole life of such a woman, consecrated to you!”
“And where is such an angel to be met with, Lucia?” he said, in an enthusiasm caught from her words, in despair that no such paragon was within reach.
“Alas! Alberto, we are all straining after an impossible ideal. You, too, are among the multitude of dreamers.”
“I wish I could but meet my ideal,” he persisted, with the obstinacy of his weak, capricious nature.
“Seek,” said Lucia, raising her eyes to the ceiling.
“Lucia, do me a favour.”
“Tell me what it is...? I beg your pardon, Galimberti, would you pass me that peacock fan?”
“Do you feel the heat, Signorina Lucia?”
“It oppresses me; I think I am feverish. Do you know that peacock feathers are unlucky?”
“I never heard it before.”
“Yes, they are iettatrici, just as branches of heather are lucky. Could you get me some?”
“To-morrow....”
“I was about to say, Lucia,” persisted Alberto, holding on to his idea, “that there is a favour you could do me. Why not write me the beautiful thing you have just said down on paper? I listen to you with delight; you talk admirably. If you would but write these things on a scrap of paper, I would put it in this fold of my pocket book, and every time I opened it I should remember that I have to find my ideal—that’s a wife.”
“You are a dear, silly fellow,” said Lucia, in her good-natured manner. “I will give you something better than this fleeting idea; all these things, and more besides, that are quite unknown to you, I will write you in a letter.”
“When, when?”
“To-day, to-night, or to-morrow morning.”
“No, this evening,”
“Well, this evening; but don’t answer me.”
“I shall answer you.”
“No, Alberto, your chest is too weak; it’s bad for you to stoop. Positively I won’t allow it.”
And so the Professor was quite excluded from the intimacy of the little duet; he was evidently in the way.
“What am I doing here, what am I doing here, what am I here for?” he kept repeating to himself. By this time he had succeeded in awkwardly concealing his muddy boot; but he was tormented by a cruel suspicion that his cravat was on one side. He dared not raise his finger to it; and his mind was torn by two conflicting griefs: the letter Lucia was going to write to her cousin, and the possible crookedness of his cravat. The others continued to gaze at each other in silence. On Alberto’s contemptuous face there appeared to be a note of interrogation. He was inquiring tacitly of his cousin: “Is this bore going to stay for ever?” And her eyes made answer: “Patience, he will go some time; he bores me too.”
The strangest part of it all was that Galimberti had a vague consciousness of what was passing in their minds, and wanted to go, but had not the strength to rise. His spine felt as if it were bound to the back of the chair, and there was an unbearable weight in his head.
“Signorina, here is Signor Andrea Lieti,” said Giulietta.
“This is a miracle.”
“If you reproach me,” said Andrea, laughing, “I won’t even sit down. Good-morning, Alberto; good-morning, Galimberti!”
The room seemed to be filled with the strong man’s presence, by his hearty laugh, and his magnificent strength. Beside him, Galimberti, crooked, undersized and yellow; Sanna, meagre, worn, pale, consumptive-looking; Lucia, fragile, thin, and languishing, made up a picture of pitiable humanity. Galimberti shrank in his chair, bowing his head. Alberto Sanna contemplated Andrea from his feet upwards, with profound admiration, making himself as small as possible, like a weak being who craves the protection of a strong one. Lucia, on the contrary, threw herself back in her rocking-chair, attitudinising like a serpent in the folds of rich Turkish stuff, just showing the point of a golden embroidered slipper. The glance that filtered through her lids seemed to emit a spark at the corner of her eyes. All three were visibly impressed by this fine physical type; so admirable in the perfection of its development. The room appeared to have narrowed, and even its furniture to have dwindled to humbler proportions, since he entered it; all the minute bric-à-brac and curios with which Lucia had surrounded herself had become invisible, as if they had been absorbed. Andrea sat down against the piano, and it seemed to disappear behind him. He shook his curly head, and a healthy current leavened the morbid atmosphere of the room; his laugh was almost too hearty for it, it disturbed the melancholy silence, which until his arrival had only been broken by undertones.
“I come here as an ambassador, Signora Lucia. Shall I present my credentials to the reigning powers?”
“Here are your credentials,” she said, pointing to the portrait of Caterina.
“Yes, there’s Nini. My government told me to go and prosper, and be received with the honours due to the representative of a reigning power.”
“Did Caterina say all that?”
“Not all. It’s in honour of your imagination, Signora Lucia, that I embellish my wife’s few words with flowers of rhetoric.”
“So you reproach me with my imagination,” said the girl, in an aggrieved tone, casting a circular glance at her friends, as if in appeal against such injustice.
“By no means; mayn’t one venture a joke? In short, Caterina said to me, 'At three you are to go....’”
“Is it already three?” broke in Galimberti, inopportunely.
“Past three, as your watch will tell you, my dear Professor.”
“Mine has stopped,” he replied mendaciously, not caring to exhibit a huge silver family relic. “I must take my departure.”
“To your lesson, Galimberti?” inquired Lucia, indifferently.
“Indeed, I find the time for it has slipped by. I had no idea that it was so late. After all it’s no great loss to my pupils. Will you have your lesson to-morrow, Signorina?”
“To-morrow! I don’t think I can; I feel too fatigued. Not to-morrow.”
“Wednesday, then?”
“I will let you know,” she replied, bored.
When, with a brick-coloured flush on his yellow cheeks, Galimberti had left them, all three were conscious of a sense of discomfort.
“Poor devil!” exclaimed Andrea, at last.
“Yes, but he is a bore,” added Alberto.
“What’s to be done? These ladies, in their exquisite good-nature, forget that he is only a teacher; and he gets bewildered and forgets it too. He must suffer a good deal when he comes to his senses.”
“Oh! he is an unhappy creature; but when I am sick or sad, the poor thing becomes an incubus: I don’t know how to shake him off.”
“Is he learned in history?” inquired Alberto, with the childish curiosity of ignorance.
“So, so; don’t let us talk about him any more. This morning he has spoilt my day for me. What were you saying when he left, Signor Lieti?”
“What was I saying? I don’t remember....”
“You were saying that your wife had sent you here at three,” suggested Alberto, as if he were repeating a lesson.
“Ecco! Ah, to be sure.... And after breakfast I went to a shooting-gallery, then I had a talk with the Member for Caserta about the local Exhibition in September, and then I came on here, with weighty communications, Signora Lucia.”
“I’m off,” said Alberto.
“What, because of me? As for what I have to say, you may hear every word of it.”
“The reason is that now that the sun has come out, I want to take a turn in the Villa before it sets,” said Alberto, pensively. “It will do me good, I want to get an appetite for dinner.”
“Go, dear Alberto, go and take your walk. I wish I could come too! The sun must be glorious outside; salute it for me.”
“Remember your promise.”
“I remember, and will keep it.”
When he was gone, they looked at each other in silence. Andrea Lieti had an awkward feeling that it would have been right and proper for him to leave with her cousin. Lucia, on the contrary, settled herself more comfortably in her rocking-chair; she had hidden her slippered foot under the Turkish gown, whose heavy folds completely enveloped her person.
“Will you give me that Bible, on the table, Signor Lieti?”
“Has the hour struck for prayer, Signorina?” he asked in a jesting tone.
“No,” replied Lucia; “for I am always praying. But when something unusual, something very unusual happens to me, then I open the Bible haphazard, and I read the first verse that meets my eye. There is always counsel, guidance, presentiment or a fatality in the words.”
She did as she said. She read a verse several times over, under her breath, as if to herself and in amazement.... Then she read aloud: “I love them that love me, and those that seek me early shall find me.”
He listened, surprised. This singular mysticism inspired him with a sort of anger. He held his tongue, with the good breeding of a man who would not willingly hurt a young lady’s feelings, but the episode struck him as a very ridiculous one.
“Did you hear, Signor Lieti?” she added, as if in defiance.
“I heard. It was very fine.... Love is always an interesting topic, whether in the Old or the New Testament, or elsewhere....”
“Signor Lieti!”
“I beg your pardon, I am talking nonsense. I am a rough fellow, Signorina Altimare. We who are in rude health are apt to regard these matters from a different standpoint. You must make allowances.”
“You are indeed the incarnation of health,” she said, sighing. “I shall never, never forget that waltz you made me dance. I shall never do it again.”
“Ma che! winter will come round again; there will be other balls, and we will dance like fun.”
“I have no strength for dancing.”
“If you are ill, it is your own fault. Why do you always keep your windows closed? The weather is mild and the heat of your room is suffocating; I’ll open them.”
“No,” she exclaimed, placing her hand upon his arm: at its light pressure he desisted: she smiled.
“Do you never dream, Signor Lieti?”
“Never. I sleep soundly, for eight hours, with closed fists, like a child.”
“But with open eyes?”
“Never.”
“Just like Caterina, then?”
“Oh! exactly like her.”
“You are two happy people.” Her accent was bitter.
He felt the pain in it. He looked at her, and was troubled. Perhaps, he had after all been hard upon the poor girl. What had she done to him? She was sickly and full of fancies. The more reason for pitying her. She was an ill-cared-for, unloved creature who was losing her way in life.
“Why don’t you marry?” he said, suddenly.
“Why?” ... in astonishment.
“Why? ... yes. Girls ought to marry, it cures them of their vagaries.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Lucia, and she hid her face in her hands.
“Now I suppose I have said something stupid again? I will give you Caterina’s message and be gone, before you turn me out.”
“No, Signor Lieti. Who knows but what your bourgeois common sense is right.”
He understood the hidden meaning of her phrase, and felt hurt by it. That skinny creature, with her ethereal airs and graces, knew how to sting, after all! She suddenly appeared to him under a new aspect. A slight fear of the woman, whose weakness was her only strength, overcame him. He began to feel ill at ease in the perfumed atmosphere; the room was so small that he could not stretch out his arms without coming to fisticuffs with the wall, the air so perfumed that it compressed his lungs; ill at ease with that long, lithe figure draped in a piece of Eastern stuff; a woman who had a mouth like a red rose, and eyes that shone as if they sometimes saw marvellous visions, and at others looked as if they were dying in an ecstasy of unknown longing. He felt a weight in his head like the beginning of a headache. He would like to have let in air by putting his fists through the window-panes, to have knocked down the walls by a push from his shoulders, to have taken up the piano and thrown it into the street; anything to shake off the torpor that was creeping over him. If he could only grasp that lithe figure in his arms, to hurt her, to hear her bones creak, to strangle her! The blood rushed to his head and it was getting heavier every minute. She was looking at him, examining him, while she waved the peacock-feather fan to and fro. Perhaps she divined it all, for without saying a word she rose and went to open the window, standing there a few minutes to watch the passers-by. When she returned, there was a faint flush on her face.
“Well,” she said, as if she were awaiting the end of a discourse.
“Well; your perfumes have given me a headache. It’s a wonder I did not faint; a thing that never yet happened to me, and that I should not like to happen. May I go? May I give you Caterina’s message?”
“I am listening to you. But are you better now?”
“I am quite well. I am not Alberto Sanna.”
“No, you are not Alberto Sanna,” she repeated, softly. “He is ill, I pity him. How do you feel now?”
“Why, very well indeed. It was a passing ailment, walking will set me up again. Caterina....”
“Do you love your wife as much as I love her?”
“Eh! what a question!”
“Don’t take any notice of it; it escaped me. I don’t believe in married love.”
“The worse for you!”
“You are irritated, Signor Lieti?” she said, smiling.
“No! I assure you I am not. Mine was a purely physical discomfort, I am not troubled by any moral qualms. I don’t believe in their existence. My wife....”
“Are you a materialist?”
“Signora Lucia, you will make me lose my temper,” he exclaimed, half in anger, half in jest. “You won’t let me speak.”
“I am listening to you.”
“Caterina wishes you to dine with us next Sunday. Her little cousin Giuditta is coming from school for the day. You two could drive her back in the evening.”
“I don’t know ...” she said, hesitatingly; “I don’t know whether I can....”
“I entreat you to, in Caterina’s name. She sent me here on purpose. Come, we have a capital cook. You won’t get a bad dinner.”
She shrugged her shoulders, and sat pondering as if she were gazing into futurity.
“You look like a sibyl, Signora Lucia. Via, make up your mind. A dinner is no very serious matter. I will order a crême méringue to please you, because it is light and snowy.”
“I will write to Caterina.”
“No, don’t write. Why write so much? She desired me to take no denial.”
“Well, I will come.”
And she placed her hand in his. He bent down chivalrously and imprinted a light kiss on it. She left her hand there and raised her eyes to his. By a singular optical illusion, she appeared to have grown taller than himself.
When he returned home, after a two hours’ walk about Naples, Andrea Lieti told his wife that Lucia Altimare was a false, rhetorical, antipathetic creature; that her house was suffocating enough to give one apoplexy; that she had a court of consumptives and rachitics—Galimberti, Sanna, and the Lord knows whom besides; that he would never put his foot into it again. He had done it to please her, but it had been a great sacrifice; he detested that poseuse, who received men’s visits as if she were a widow; he couldn’t imagine what men and women found to fall in love with, in that packet of bones in the shape of a cross. Of all this and more besides, he unburdened himself. He only stopped when he saw the pain on his wife’s face, who answered not a word and with difficulty restrained her tears. This strong antipathy between two persons she loved was her martyrdom.
“At least,” she stammered, “at least, she said she would dine with us on Sunday?”
“Just fancy, for your sake I had to entreat her as if I were praying to a saint. She wouldn’t, the stupid thing. At last, she accepted. But I give you due warning that on Sunday I shall not dine at home. I shall dine out and not return till midnight. Keep her to yourself, your poseuse.”
This time Caterina did burst into tears.