Still let it be confessed that ‘the sunny South’ is a phrase that partakes of some exaggeration. The South is sunnier, much sunnier, than the North; but it, too, can have its days of gloom, and even its weeks of capricious temper. Moreover, there is South, and South; and, despite Lamia’s somewhat hazardous assertion that Tuscany could hardly have been more inclement than it had been in our new quarters for the first two days after our arrival, there is, as the rest of us well knew, a vast difference between its winter climate and that of the favoured region where, for Lamia’s sake, we awhile were halting.
‘Veronica, you grow more wonderful every day,’ she exclaimed, under the influence of all-glorifying sunlight. ‘You have discovered a paradise, by sheer intuition.’
It is not the first time allusion has been made to Veronica’s executive talents. They are so much greater than the rest of us possess, that, when anything serviceable has to be done, she reduces us all to insignificance. Without counsel or assistance from any one, and entirely by correspondence, she had procured for us, for three months, a home that we all, with enthusiastic sincerity, declared to be enchanting. If you think that an easy matter, I can only say, ‘Try for yourselves.’ It is this special difficulty that drives so many people who spend the winter months in the South of Europe to pass them in hotels. One and all we had avowed that we would sooner a thousand times remain at home than resort to that depressing expedient. Yet pretentious, trim, and conventional villas, with their cut-and-combed lawns, their formal palm-trees and dracænas, and their beds of dubious-coloured cinerarias, are the alternative that, for the most part, remains; and I imagine you know that would have consorted but little better with our tastes.
‘I knew what you all wanted,’ said Veronica; ‘but let us,’ she added modestly, ‘give thanks to Fortune, who has had far more to do with it than I.’
I verily believe that something, moreover, should be ascribed to the comparative slenderness of our purse and to the simplicity of our tastes; nor do I pretend that what Lamia flatteringly called a paradise regained would have been much short of a purgatory to many splendidly-fastidious people. Our new abode had neither architectural design nor internal pretension; but the taste of man, in partnership with time, had given it charm without and refinement within. Do you remember how, in that search which finally planted us in the Garden that we Love, we kept recalling the words of Tacitus as applied to the race whose preferences run so strongly in our own blood: Suam quisque domum spatio circumdat? I hope we have nothing to conceal, but is not a sense of seclusion necessary to felicity? Unlike folk of Northern blood, the Latin race, and the Italian race more especially, have little taste for privacy, and none for solitude. To lean out of the open window onto the street or highway below, to sit on door-steps whence they can see and accost chance passers-by, to talk, to sing, to dance, this is their idea of such happiness as life permits. But the very spaciousness of their hills, their plains, their valleys, affords to the more meditative children of the mist even larger facilities than our own land for gratifying the passion for that ‘life removed’ which the Duke in Measure for Measure, probably expressing Shakespeare’s own personal taste, says he had ‘ever loved.’ Veronica had found it for us here. The spurs of the Maritime Alps, as they decline and dwindle towards the sea, enclose a series of gorges and ravines of various forms and dimensions. Some are narrow, gloomy, and precipitous, others gradual, well open to the sun, not too deep-bosomed, and gladdened by streams that have their source in remoter mountain-sheds. It was in one of the latter we had discovered the shelter and seclusion we desired. No wind could visit us roughly; for, if it blew from the north, we were curtained by the hills, and, should it rage from the sea, we were just sufficiently away from the shore, and protected enough in that direction by olive-slopes and orange-groves to be apprised of its displeasure only by an unusual rustling of leaves.
‘But what do you propose to do in this ravine of rest?’ Lamia inquired of me somewhat mockingly. ‘Veronica is never without occupation; and here she will be abundantly employed in scouring the neighbouring hamlets for fowls that have not become all bone and sinew by constant mountaineering, in checking the washing-book, and in raising the moral tone of the young people along the entire countryside. As for me, a determination to master the Tuscan tongue will give me rest from the fatigue of too much idleness; and my new tutor, the young ecclesiastic, whom Veronica has enticed from the Sacristy for my benefit, is quite charming, and makes me willing, as he also seems to be, to prolong indefinitely the time nominally allotted to the most fascinating of studies. But you? You cannot “garden” here, for the ground seems to do that of itself; nor, in any case, will you have time to pique yourself on the result of your labours, which, I have observed, is the main motive power of those persons who are supposed to love flowers for themselves.‘
Wishing to divert her playful arrows from myself, I replied that I was indeed rather gravelled for lack of employment, and so intended to try if sitting in the sun and doing nothing would supply the deficiency; and I then added that she had forgotten to include the Poet in the catalogue of the unemployed.
PEAR-BLOSSOM, MARITIME ALPS