CHAPTER VII
They had been married a week--a tremulous, ecstatic, amazing week.
It seemed to Rose made up of all the laughing colors of the sea.
They were surrounded by the sea, clear and limpid as a shallow pool, the great deep bay gleamed and shone about them.
Out of it the Islands rose like flowers. Capri uneven, wild and blue, Ischia tulip-shaped and tall--Posilippo and its attendant isles like a fallen spray of blossoms; and in Capri itself the whole spring lay bare to the sun.
The South was like Léon--it was beautiful, but it was strange.
On their first evening they had driven swiftly up the hillside; the air was cold and keen; the small mountain ponies galloped through the quick-falling darkness and just for a moment a breath of fear touched the triumphant bride.
She longed for something familiar, something that wasn’t even beautiful, but to which she had grown accustomed. She didn’t put it to herself quite like that--she only wished she hadn’t had to leave her fox terrier at home.
The moment passed and other richer moments took its place.
Love was just--what without expecting it Rose had most desired. No one could have expected any one to be as wonderful as Léon. He spilt his soul into his passion, his ardor filled their hours, there was no way in which he did not color her life. She felt herself like some poor common pebble transformed into purple and rose color by the touch of the sea.
It never occurred to her that when the tide recedes the color goes. She did not know that Léon’s passion was a tide, and she did not believe that it would ever recede.
They explored everything in Capri, the ruins of Tiberius’ villas, the many colored grottos, the little stray paths that led between high walls to the heights of Capri--and everything they saw Rose loved. But best of all she loved their own familiar garden of the Hotel Paradiso, surrounded by violets, where Léon taught her to smoke cigarettes and where the stars swooped down on them in the velvet dark evenings, leaning just over the tops of the little stunted trees.
She had everything she wanted then, but most of all she had Léon, rarer and sweeter than the voilets, more astonishing and limitless than the southern stars.
Of course he had his faults. Rose accepted these limits of natural frailty with eager tenderness.
He was jealous, fierce and a little hard on anything that interfered with his crowning absorption. Rose had heard him speak with cold, incisive sharpness to a waiter who interrupted one of their soft, interminable garden intimacies; and Léon was indifferent, intensely indifferent--to anything or any one but her.
She couldn’t be said to mind it, but she noticed it; it made her hope that nothing would ever happen to her--it would be so awful if it did--for Léon.
Then one day he ran up the outside staircase which led to their rooms with a peculiar, excited expression in his eyes. Rose came out to meet him, and together they leaned over the balcony.
“Such a funny thing has happened,” he explained. “I’ve met an old friend, isn’t it strange?--he is here also on his honeymoon. The wife--I had not met before--you must know them. I have asked them to-morrow to tea.”
Rose hid a moment’s dissatisfaction. “Are they French, Léon?” she asked a little nervously.
“But of course, yes, Parisians of the most Parisian. Do you object to that?” he demanded impatiently.
“Oh no!” she explained. “Only you know, Léon dear, my French is so bad!”
He didn’t say it was adorable, which was what he usually said, though he never allowed her to attempt it when they were together. “It is time you learned French,” he said. “You can’t go on like this.” Then he looked at her with strange critical eyes. “You mustn’t wear that to-morrow,” he said coldly. “What have you got that you can wear? Madame Gérard--dresses.”
Rose flushed. “Dearest,” she answered, “you know everything I’ve got--I thought you liked my clothes--they were all I could get in Rome.”
“They are, nevertheless, extremely poor,” Léon pronounced with an air of finality. “I can’t think why you have no manner of putting on your clothes. There is no character in them, no charm, no unexpectedness. You dress as if you wanted shelter from the cold. Also none of your things have any seduction--they are as dull as boiled eggs. You cannot live in Paris and dress like an English country miss.”
Rose felt as if she would die if Léon would not get that cold look out of his eyes. She lost her head under his impassive scrutiny. “Must I meet them?” she pleaded. “The Gérards, I mean. They don’t sound a bit my kind of people.”
“But of course you must meet them!” said Léon angrily. “Naturally, since you are my wife--you are not my mistress, to be hidden away at such a time!”
“Léon!” Rose exclaimed--his words struck at her like a whip lash. She turned quickly away and went into their room. She felt as if she could not stay any longer with Léon. In five minutes he rejoined her--not the strange, disagreeable man who had spoken to her like that, but her husband Léon. He was full of tender apologies. He couldn’t, he explained, think what had made him so nervous. Perhaps it was because Capri was so quiet, one resented anything that broke into it. But, after all after to-morrow they need see very little of the Gérards--Raoul wasn’t a great friend of his--he was, however, an interesting man--a well-known and very fine singer. He was a good deal thought of in Paris. Perhaps one day he would sing to them. Madame also was musical. She adored her husband’s voice.
Rose said that would be lovely, and she asked Léon how long the Gérards’ honeymoon had lasted. Léon said longer than theirs--a fortnight or three weeks, perhaps.
It was Madame’s idea, Capri. They had taken a villa so that Raoul could practise comfortably. Raoul would naturally have preferred Naples. “She is romantic, however, like you,” Léon murmured, kissing Rose’s soft white throat.
Then he sighed a little and moved restlessly about the room. “For Raoul,” he murmured, “I am not so sure. Capri isn’t very gay.” This was the second time Léon had mentioned the lack of this quality in Capri, and neither time had Rose paid any attention to it. She was not a Frenchwoman, and she had no idea that Léon attached any particular weight to the idea of gaiety.
Léon kissed her again. This time he did it a little remorsefully.
They were to have tea in the garden under the almond blossom trees. Léon was to go into Capri and return early with cakes and roses, but before he went he inspected Rose’s dressing table. He frowned helplessly at her dreadful lack of accessories.
“Before she goes,” he explained to Rose, “Madame will no doubt wish to tidy her hair and readjust her veil. Why is it you have nothing here?”
Rose gazed at him. “But, Léon,” she said gently, “I have pins and brushes.”
Léon exploded suddenly into one of his picturesque whiffs of anger. “Mon Dieu! Are you a woman at all?” he exclaimed. “You have no powder, no rouge, no scent. You have nothing here on your dressing table that a woman should have! Oh, you everlasting creature of soap and fresh air! How can I explain you? How can I explain anything? I shall go mad!”
Afterwards he calmed down. He would, he explained, buy what he could get at Capri. Fortunately Rose did have silver-topped boxes and bottles; these could be filled to look as natural as possible.
Rose agreed; she would have agreed to anything to please him, but she was surprised at the amount of things Léon apparently considered a Frenchwoman would find necessary in order to reassume her veil and tidy her hair after a tea-party. Besides, Rose didn’t like scent.
At half-past four Madame Gérard appeared, her husband strolling a little behind her.
Two impressions flashed simultaneously upon Rose; one was that Madame Gérard, though distinctly smart, wasn’t particularly pretty, and the other, that in spite of her lovely clothes, her new husband, and the romance of Capri, she hadn’t got happy eyes.
Her other impressions of Madame Gérard she formed more slowly.
Monsieur Gérard she instantly and wholly disliked.
He was much older than his wife, and had a bored, conceited air, and rather thick red lips.
He stared a great deal at Rose, and said several times over, when Léon introduced him to her, that he was very much impressed.
Madame was charming; she was charming about the garden, about the tea, about the wonderful English nation, and about Capri; but she was charming in Parisian French. Neither of the Gérards knew a word of English, and Madame spoke in a cascade of little soft, vanishing sounds, the significance of which poor nervous, attentive Rose couldn’t possibly catch.
Monsieur Gérard, on the other hand, made three separate emphatic attempts to talk to Rose. Rose blushed and frowned and didn’t suppose for a single instant that she had understood what he said. She wouldn’t have liked it at all if she had, but of course men couldn’t say such things to ladies to whom they had just been introduced.
What was strange was that she could, she always bewilderingly had been able to understand Léon’s French, however fast or complicated the rush of his talk might be, and what was so odd, so uncomfortable and bewildering was that Léon was saying really dreadful things to Madame Gérard. Not that Madame Gérard minded, on the contrary she seemed particularly stimulated by Léon’s vivid attentions. Nor that Monsieur Gérard minded, either; he gave up his endeavors with Rose, and seemed to resign himself to a silent but perfectly good-tempered peace. He seemed, though the idea was as preposterous as everything else, to feel like a sentry who has just been relieved after a too protracted exposure at a difficult post. He ate heartily, and when he had finished he asked permission to smoke, once or twice he hummed something under his breath.
It was perfectly natural that Léon should not notice Rose, you can’t in public single out your wife for attention, and Madame Gérard made the most valiant efforts to include her.
Expressive, gesticulating, infinitely gay, Madame drew, or strove to draw, the poor dull little English wife into the swift current of their talk, but she did not succeed, partly, no doubt, because Rose was shy, but partly also because Léon markedly wished to keep her out.
Rose kept out. She made herself as busy as she could pouring out tea and handing cake, then she leaned back in her chair and tried to look as if she enjoyed hearing Léon and Madame--what?--you couldn’t call it exactly talk.
That was the difficulty. It was more of a game than a conversation, and a game whose rules Rose had never learnt.
Monsieur Gérard got up after a time, and asked if Madame would excuse him--might he examine the planting of the lemons? He was madly interested in lemons.
Rose gladly excused him. She heard Léon ask Madame Gérard if this statement of her husband’s was true.
“Never in the world!” Madame gaily replied. “He does not know the difference between a lemon and an orange!”
“Then let us,” said Léon, “also go and examine something we do not understand.”
Rose stayed where she was. Something had happened to her little secret lovely garden, it was suddenly vulgarized and spoilt.
The scent of the lemons, delicate and pungent, made her head ache. The pigeons came to her, when the others had gone, and she fed them from the crumbs of her first party. She had always thought it would be so delightful to give a party with Léon, but she had not supposed that the party, as far as she was concerned, would be composed exclusively of pigeons.