The actors were only marionettes. The little lady was somewhat obviously painted, and the little knight stood a trifle stiffly, as if suffering slightly from stage-fright. But the pit sat the scene out in breathless silence, and the row of callow critics sucked their pencil-stumps with renewed vigour, and jammed their hats tighter behind their heads. For in some curious, inexplicable way the thing was quite moving—he was so brutal, the little curly-pated knight in his shirt of maroon-coloured velvet; and she, poor, sobbing, little flaxen-haired lady, pleaded so desperately....
Once before, in my childhood, through a half-closed door, I saw a girl plead with that same tense fragility. She, too, had flaxen hair, and wore a low-necked dress of green satin; and he, the man, stood stiffly, turning his gaze away from her, obdurately. And each scene, as I now compose them, seems to contain a kindred underlying element of grotesque unreality.
POMPEII
It was an old mill. There were white columns of peeling plaster flanking the granary, and stacks of frowsy brushwood blocking the door. Part of it had fallen away; tall, rank grass grew between the rottening rafters of the roof; and remnants of battered frescoes, that had once adorned the walls of the upper rooms, were now spread bare to sun and wind and rain. And the meal-troughs were full of blossoming wild-flowers. Beside the mill stood a small, square Moorish house, roofed with lava, scowling with dirt; and beside the house, guarding a public well, was a gaunt crane of mouldering wood. Across the sleekly rippling mill-stream a ragged peasant family were ranged the length of a strip of powdery soil—the father, the mother, two sons, four daughters, and a toddling child—and beyond them stretched the great dead-grey expanse of roofless walls—the sun-dried corpse of the ruined Roman town. In the twilight the sea lay towards Capri the colour of yellow mud; and Vesuvius, turning a vague, velvety black, was trickling his smoky breath towards the bay.
There was a great immobility in the air—an immobility that seemed born of long ages: and, somehow, more than the ruined town itself—defaced by German tourists and uniformed guides—this corner of the country supplied a bitter sense of shortness of life, the impassive sloth of time....
IN THE BAY OF SALERNO
To gaze across the black sweep of sea, out into the mystery of the night; to hear the restless waves slowly sighing through the darkness, as they beat the rocks a thousand feet beneath; to love a little so, with quiet pressure of hands, and listlessly to ponder on strange meanings of life and love and death.
And so, amid a still serenity of dreamy sadness, to forget the mad turmoil of passion, to grow indifferent to all desire, and to wait, while the heart fills full of grave gratitude towards an unknown God.
And then, once more, to understand how life is but a little thing, and love but a passionate illusion, and to envy the sea her sighing in the days when the end shall have come.