The Desire of Life

by Matilde Serao

"Always, mamma," he replied, trembling with emotion at the recollection of the beautiful, fresh girl.

But new papers arrived and again his mind was disturbed with anger and sorrow. He would have liked to reply to them all, with denials, with violent words, with actions against those people of bad faith, against the villains who had published the news, who had printed the articles and paragraphs full of gall: he would have liked to have picked a quarrel with the paper, cuffed the journalist and fought a duel with him; he wished to fight a dozen duels, make a noisy scandal, and then reduce to silence those chroniclers of slander and calumny by giving true light to the truth of deeds. Then he hesitated and repented of it. He tore up the letter he had begun and exercised over himself a pacifying control. Was he right to reply to malignity, lies, and insinuations? Was it not better to shrug the shoulders, and let them talk and print, and smile at it all; laugh at the journalists and despise the journals? Would not Mabel Clarke, if she had been with him, have thought and decided so, the American girl without prejudices, free in ideas and sentiments, incapable of allowing herself to be conquered by conventionality and social hypocrisy? Then he repressed and controlled himself. But in the depth of his spirit now and then arose a second reason for silence: with increasing bitterness he told himself that some and many of the things had the appearance of truth, and that some of them, moreover, were true. He loved Mabel Clarke sincerely, but it was undeniable that it was a magnificent match for whomsoever married her, even if he were rich, and he instead was absolutely poor. Mabel loved him loyally, but she was the daughter of an American merchant and he was the heir of a great name, a descendant of a great family. Love was there, but barter in one way or another had all the appearance of existing, and did exist. The rest, it is true, was the malignity, insinuation, and calumny of journalists; but the barter was undeniable, even sanctioned by ardent sympathy. What was the use of writing, of lawsuits, of cuffing and provoking duels? It were better to be silent and pretend to smile and laugh; in fact, in a fury of pretence to smile and really laugh at all papers and journalists.

On reaching Rome during the first ten days of January he was consoled by a single thought against such infamies; that Mabel on the other side might know little or nothing of them. Letters and telegrams continued to be always very affectionate: the marriage ought to take place in the middle of April, but John Clarke had been unwilling to fix a precise date. That exalted his heart and rendered him strong against everything that was printed about the nuptials: gradually now the papers became silent. But at home, where his aggressors repaired more than ever, to ask whatever they could ask from a man immensely rich, even they in the middle of their discourses, would let slip a phrase or an allusion, that they had read something and had been scandalised by it: how could rascals on papers nowadays be allowed to insult such a gentleman as he was—Don Vittorio Lante, Prince of Santalena as they knew him to be?

At each of these allusions which wounded him, even in the midst of the adulations and flatteries of his interlocutors, he trembled and his face became clouded: he noted that everyone knew them and everyone had read them, that the calumnies had been spread broadcast in every set. Even at the club, now and then, someone with the most natural disingenuousness would ask him if he had read such and such a Berlin paper; someone else, more friendly, would tell him frankly how he had grieved to read an entre-filet of a Parisian paper. Sometimes he would smile or jest or shrug his shoulders, and sometimes he showed his secret anger. His well-balanced, always courteous mood changed; sometimes he treated petitioners badly and dismissed them brusquely. Such would leave annoyed, murmuring on the stairs that as a matter of fact the European papers had not been wrong to treat Don Vittorio Lante della Scala as a very noble and fashionable adventurer, but still an adventurer. He passed ten restless days in which only Mabel's letters and telegrams came to calm him a little.

But he experienced the deepest shock when complete packets of American papers arrived for him, voluminous, and all marked with red and blue pencil, since each contained something about his engagement, his marriage, his nobility, and his family. In long columns of small type were spread out the most unlikely stories, most offensive in their falseness; therein were inserted the most vulgar and grotesque things at his expense, or at the expense of Italy or Italians. It was a regular avalanche of fantastic information, of extravagant news, of lying declarations, of interviews invented purposely, of fictitious correspondence from Rome, and in addition to all this the most brutal comments on this capture of an American girl and her millions by another poor European gentleman, in order to carry away the girl and her money, and make her unhappy, to waste her money on other women as did all sprigs of European nobility, not only in Italy, but wherever they had managed to ensnare an American girl. Other marriages between rich American women and aristocratic but poor Europeans were quoted, with their often sad lot, conjugal separations, with their divorces, fortunes squandered in Europe, with their souls alienated from mother and father, and every American paper concluded that their daughters were mad and foolish again to attempt an experience which had always succeeded ill with them; that this miserable vanity of becoming the wife of an English Duke, a Hungarian magnate, a French marquis or Italian Prince should be suppressed. They should put it away: American women should wed American men and not throw away their fresh persons and abundant money on corrupt and cynical old Europe.

When he had read all this, Vittorio Lante was thoroughly unhappy. The papers were old, but there were some recent ones; the latest, those of ten or twelve days previously, breathed an even more poisonous bitterness. By now he had learned to speak English much better, and understood it perfectly; none of that perfidy, none of that brutality escaped him, and all his moral sensibility grieved insupportably, all his nerves were on edge with spasms, as he thought that Mabel Clarke, his beloved, his wife to be, had read those infamies from America, and had absorbed all that poison. He would have liked to telegraph her a hundred or a thousand words, to swear to her that they were all nauseating lies; but he repented of it and tore up the telegram, striving to reassure himself, as he thought that a direct and independent creature like Mabel Clarke, that a loyal and honest friend like the American girl would laugh at and despise the horrid things.

But by a mysterious coincidence, which made him secretly throb with anguish, a week passed by without a letter or note, or a single word by telegram, reaching him from New York; Vittorio passed a fortnight of complete silence between anguish and despair. Instead, a very broad and voluminous letter, under cover and registered, reached him from New York, containing a long article about his indiscretions, dated from Rome, in which it was narrated, with the most exaggerated particulars, how Miss Mabel Clarke's fiancé in Italy had seduced a cousin two or three years ago, how she had had a son by him, and how he had deserted her and her little one in a district of Lazio. Vittorio Lante, who in three weeks of silence had written Mabel Clarke four letters, and sent three telegrams without obtaining a reply, dying with impatience and anxiety, and hiding it from people, felt as if a dart were passing through his heart, from side to side, felt as if all his blood were ebbing away, and he remained exhausted and bloodless, unable to live or die.

So that morning at the end of February all those whom Giovanna, the faithful servant, gradually announced, since her master, pale and taciturn, consented to receive them with an automatic nod, found a man who received them with a silent and fleeting smile, with a rare word as he listened but scarcely replied to them, when they had finished expounding their ideas and propositions, as if he had understood nothing, and perhaps had heard nothing of them. For four or five days, with a great effort of the will, Vittorio kept up appearances, driving back his anguish to the depths of his heart, knowing that profound dissimulation is necessary in the world, and that the world must see little of our joy and none of our sorrow.

That morning there filed before him a traveller for a motor-car company who wished to make him buy three cars, of forty, sixty, and eighty horse-power respectively, to be paid for, naturally, after the marriage, but consignable a month previously with, of course, a fixed contract; a kind of tatterdemalion, all anointed, who offered him a Raphael, an authentic Raphael, for two hundred thousand lire, and who ended by asking for two francs to get something to eat; a gentleman of high society, who lived by the sale of old pictures, tapestry, bronzes, and ivories, who took them from the antiquaries and re-sold them, gaining a little or a big commission, a friend who proposed increasing the prices, since Mabel Clarke was to pay, and that they should both divide the difference, proposing to him, in fact, that he should rob his future wife; a littérateur who came to seek from him the funds to launch a review in three languages, and who proposed to insert therein his own articles which Vittorio Lante should sign with his name; an agent of a bankrupt exchange, known to be unable to go on 'change, who proposed some mining affairs in Africa for John Clarke to take up, offering him a stiff commission so that he should transfer these uncertain shares to his father-in-law. And, more or less, in all demands, proposals, and requests which were made to him that morning, he perceived the intention to mock and cheat him, but still more he discovered in many of them the conception that he was a man of greed, who could for more or less money deceive his wife and father-in-law, cheat and rob them, like a sponger or society thief. Even more sorrowfully than at other times, he trembled when he noticed the expression of lack of esteem in which the people in his presence held him, people who dared in his own house to propose crooked bargains, equivocal business, as they offered him his own price!