Colin

by E. F. Benson

It was this garden of young faces that occupied Philip more than the fireworks, these shifting groups that formed and reformed, smiling and talking to each other in the intervals of darkness. The bubbling ferment of intimate companionship frothed round him, and suddenly he seemed to himself to be incapsulated, an insoluble fragment floating or sinking in this heady liquor of life. There came upon him sharp and unexpected as a blow dealt from behind, a sense of complete loneliness.

Every one else had his companion: here was a group of chattering boys, there of laughing girls, here the sexes were mingled. Elder men and women had a quieter comradeship: they had passed through the fermenting stage, it might be, but the wine of companionship with who knew what memories were in solution there, was theirs still. All these rapturous days he had been alone, and had not noticed it; now his solitariness crystallised into loneliness.

With a final sheaf of rockets the display came to an end, and the crowd began to disperse homewards. The withdrawal took the acuteness from Philip’s ache, for he had no longer in front of his eyes the example of what he missed, his hunger was not whetted by the spectacle of food.

The steps of the last loiterers died away, and soon he was left alone looking out over the vine-clad slope of the steep hill down to the Marina. Warm buffets of air wandered up from the land that had lain all day in its bath of sunlight, rippling round him like the edge of some spent wave; but already the dew, moistening the drought of day, was instilling into the air some nameless fragrance of damp earth and herbs refreshed. Beyond lay the bay, conjectured rather than seen, and, twenty miles away, a thin necklet of light showed where Naples lay stretched and smouldering along the margin of the sea. If a wish could have transported Philip there, he would have left the empty terrace to see with what errands and adventures the city teemed, even as the brain teems with thoughts and imaginings.

Into the impersonal seduction of the summer night some human element of longing had entered, born of the upturned faces of boys and girls watching the rockets, and sinking back, bright-eyed and eager, into the cover of darkness, even as the sword slips into its sheath again. Youth, in the matter of years, was already past for him, but in his heart until now youth had not yet been born. No individual face among them all had flown a signal for him, but collectively they beckoned; it was among such that he would find the lights of his heart’s harbour shining across the barren water, and kindling desire in his eyes.

It was not intellectual companionship that he sought nor the unity and absorption of love, for Philip was true Stanier and had no use for love; but he craved for youth, for beauty, for the Southern gaiety and friendliness, for the upleap and the assuagement of individual desire. Till middle-age he had lived without the instincts of youth; his tree was barren of the golden fruits of youth’s delight. Now, sudden as his change of life, his belated springtime flooded him.

It was in Naples that he found her, in the studio of an acquaintance he had made when he was there first, and before midsummer Rosina Viagi was established in the villa. She was half English by birth, and in her gold hair, heavy as the metal and her blue eyes, she shewed her mother’s origin. But her temperament was of the South—fierce and merry, easily moved to laughter, and as easily to squalls of anger that passed as swiftly as an April shower, and melted into sunlight again. She so enthralled his senses that he scarcely noticed, for those first months, the garish commonness of her mind: it scarcely mattered; he scarcely heeded what she said so long as it was those full lips which formed the silly syllables. She was greedy, and he knew it, in the matter of money, but his generosity quite contented her, and he had got just what he had desired, one who entirely satisfied his passion and left his mind altogether unseduced.

Then with the fulfillment of desire came the leanness that follows, a swift inevitable Nemesis on the heels of the accomplishment of an unworthy purpose. He had dreamed of the gleam of romance in those readings of his at Stanier, and awoke to find but a smouldering wick. And before the summer was dead, he knew he was to become a father.

In the autumn the island emptied of its visitors, and Rosina could no longer spend her evenings at the café or on the piazza, with her countrywomen casting envious glances at her toilettes, and the men boldly staring at her beauty. She was genuinely fond of Philip, but her native gaiety demanded the distraction of crowds, and she yawned in the long evenings when the squalls battered at the shutters and the panes streamed with the fretful rain.

“But are we going to stop here all the winter?” she asked one evening as she gathered up the piquet cards. “It gets very melancholy. You go for your great walks, but I hate walking; you sit there over your book, but I hate reading.”