At the Gate of Samaria

by William John Locke

“I shan't allow you to flirt with any and everybody, if you mean that,” he replied, showing his white teeth as he smiled.

“I didn't mean that—for the simple reason that I have a certain amount of brains.”

“There have been many coquettes with magnificent intellects.”

She made no reply. Then, seeing that he had ruffled her, he adroitly turned their talk into less dangerous channels.

They stayed in Paris a couple of days and then continued their journey to the Riviera. It was Clytie's own desire. In the first flush of his passion all places were alike to Thornton, provided she were with him. But she longed to get away from England, to cut herself adrift for a while from all old associations, to surround herself with new conditions, so that nothing should disturb the wonder of this new love. And when, with a lover's hyperbole, he had bidden her choose any spot on the whole terrestrial globe for the passing of their honeymoon, she had selected the Mediterranean.

They went to the little Italian town of Bordighera, hidden away at the foot of the mountains amidst its palms and olive trees. Besides being one of the most beautiful spots on that beautiful coast, it has the charm of quiet. There is no casino at Bordighera, no public garden, no municipal band. It holds out to visitors no attractions but its own loveliness—hence the absence of the banal, the rococo. A few villas are dotted round it, away from the sea. One long, straggling street of shops, narrowing gradually, leads up to the old, picturesque, evil-smelling town on the hill. And this with its narrow sunless streets flanked by high, dingy, gray houses, between which the sky above seems a narrow strip of Prussian blue ribbon, its crooked byways and basement loggie of cool malodour, its cobble pavements on which great entrance gateways gape like dark, noisome caverns, offers few attractions other than those of quaintness and curiosity to any but its own inhabitants. It is a quiet place, devoid of the cosmopolitan tohubohu of Mentone or Cannes. An index of this is the fact that, save the commoner qualities of the Italian regie, cigarettes are not to be bought for love or money in Bordighera, and these in the greasiest ramshackle shop imaginable. If you want civilised shops you must go to San Remo.

Thornton and Clytie spent the earlier portion of their honeymoon here in unbroken happiness. Beyond casual gossip with their table d'hôte neighbours they held intercourse with no one. All fears, doubts, flutterings of regret, vanished from Clytie's heart, together with all sense of subjective life. She was tasting the physical joy of existence as it came to her in the passion, sunlight, colour, warmth, and scents of the south. She had chosen with unconscious wisdom. The intensity of the beauty of the Mediterranean, its positivism, its splendid denial of the melancholic and mysterious, held her being in tone with the love with which Thornton had inspired her. It intoxicated her with a complementary passion.

They drove one day from Bordighera through Ventimiglia to Mentone. Halfway they stopped at a wayside inn, and breakfasted under a trellis of grape-vine. On the one side was the dazzling white road, flanked by the terraced hill of olive-trees, the white underparts of their leaves flashing like silver; on the other, below, the gold sand and the purple sea. And the sun streamed through the vine, checkering the table and their hands and faces. The fare was poor and the Asti none of the best, but the wine sparkled and bubbled in the thick tumbler they used in common, and brought a keener sparkle into Clytie's eyes, and a more joyous abandonment into her laugh. When they had resumed their drive, and a turn of the road brought them into sight of Mentone, her heart leaped at the suddenness with which the blaze of colour was revealed. Below, over a declining foreground of olive and orange gardens, lay the white town in a setting of bright green foliage, stretching from horn to horn of the bay. Behind the eastern horn projected dark and bold the promontory of Monaco with the flashing white of its castle. Behind the town rose the two bare peaks of the Berceau standing out in deep blue-gray against the intense violet sky. Before it swept the broad belt of yellow sand, on which lapped, in little idle waves whose ebb left a delicate fringe of white, a still, unbroken sea of lapis lazuli, melting through infinite gradations of blue streaked with arbitrary purples into the deep ultramarine that met the paler sky far away on the horizon. The burst of intense colour of sky and sea and land, glowing as far as the eye could sweep, drowned Clytie's being in a sensuous flood. It was, as it were, the projection of physical passion into something visible, thus baring to the eyes its wonderful beauty. She uttered a little inarticulate gasp, a catching of the breath. They were quite alone, the coachman half asleep in the sun on his box. Thornton put his arm round her and drew her to him. She turned, closed her eyes. All creation, from the world of wonder before her to the tiniest quivering fibre within her, vibrated with an intoxicating thrill of delight. She caught his hand, drew his arm tighter, and lifted her lips to his in a long, long kiss.

Thenceforward her stay on the Riviera was one uninterrupted delight. It was a dream in which the mind lay subject to the sense. She was in a blue mist, which hid impenetrably past and future, and informed the visible area about her feet with unutterable sweetness. “Don't expect me to write letters,” she said in a hastily scribbled note to Caroline. “This is a land in which words have no part. You might as well expect me to talk the 'Moonlight Sonata' to you.” And Caroline, being a wise woman, smiled. Yet, after all, her wisdom had nothing to do with it—for anything feminine would have divined. The days flew on wings of fire. She never read, never worked; her sketch-book remained empty. Often they sat at their sitting-room window, looking out on to the Strada Romana, hand in hand, without speaking, save for a murmured caress, for an hour together. Or they walked up between the olives, past the famous high wall with its gorgeous coat of mesembryanthemum, through the narrow, crooked town, down the rugged descent to the surf-beaten shore, where the great white solitary casa stands, and there sat down in the shade of the big rocks and watched the glowing “countless laughter” of the sea. Often they rambled through the cool, sunless olive gardens, rising terrace after terrace apparently into the deep violet sky. The scent of the rosemary and wild thyme beneath their feet rose penetrating and filled the blood, and Thornton would pick a handful, and laughingly hold it between them above their lips as he kissed her. And when they reached the top of the hill they sat under a tree, and Clytie rested her head on his shoulder, and let her eye wander over the low-lying ridges of the Maritime Alps rising in endless soft-rounded undulations, like the many-breasted mother of men, in each bosom nestling a compact white townlet gathered around the slated cupola of its church; and the soft sunlight lay over all, transfused through the blue atmosphere. Then she would say: “Don't let us talk, Thornton,” but there was a different meaning to the words from that which they had when she uttered them in the train as it left Croydon.

Sometimes they went away from Bordighera for two or three days; visited Nice, Cannes, Monte Carlo. At Monte Carlo Clytie won three or four hundred francs at the roulette tables. Gambling had never come before within her experience of things. She plunged into it with childish recklessness, looking round with glowing face and laughter in her eyes at her husband when she won, and drawing a short little breath of dismay when the croupier raked in her stake. The game, the intensity of the strange faces, seen nowhere else,—faces which bore the stamp of combinations of the seven deadly sins taken from two to half a dozen together,—the subtle working in that great, glittering room of all the passions under heaven, attracted her, fascinated her. The artistic temperament caught the impressions, instinctively, unconsciously registered them, thus widening and deepening her conception of life. It was a luxury of sense to leave the babel passion of the Casino and to walk arm in arm on the terrace or in the grounds. There the music came faintly and mingled with the far-off splash of the sea away below them and the rustle of the palms and drachinas. On the right stretched out Monaco, clustering like a group of fireflies below the white bastioned castle. Behind them rose the black mass of the Maritime Alps with the Mont Agel towering distinct above. The air was soft and warm, recovering from the sudden shock of sundown. What they said to one another matters little. He saw that she was beautiful and filled with the sense of his love, and he was happy. To Clytie life meant unutterable things.