Chapter Thirty Four.
At Bordighera.
Bordighera, that charming, well-sheltered little town which, lying well back in its picturesque bay on the Italian Riviera, has during the past year or so come quickly into fashionable prominence, is at its best towards the end of February. It is not by any means a large place. The quaint old town is perched upon a conical hill with queer ladder-like streets, so narrow that no vehicles can pass up them. There are strong stone arches to support the houses against possible earthquakes. The streets are dark, sometimes mere tunnels, as is so frequent in those neighbouring rock villages, Sasso, Dolceacqua, Apricale, and the rest, the reason being that they were built in the days when the Moorish pirates made constant raids along that coast, and the houses were clustered together for mutual protection against those dreaded raiders.
But below the ancient town, Bordighera has spread along the seashore and into the olive-woods. In February, when in England all is bare and cheerless, the gardens of the handsome hotels and the big white villas on the hillsides are ablaze with flowers, the air is heavy with the perfume of the heliotrope, growing in great bushes, and the sweet scent of the carnations, grown in fields for Covent Garden and the flower-market outside the Madeleine.
The tourist in knickerbockers, with his camera over his shoulder, never goes to Bordighera, for to the uninitiated it is far too dull. There is no casino, as at Nice, no jetty, no cafés with al-fresco music, no tables out upon the pavement; and, truth to tell, such attractions are not required. The people who winter at Bordighera represent the most distinguished coterie in Europe. They are not of the snobbish crowd who frequent San Remo, and they do their best to avoid attracting into their midst the undesirable crowd from Monte Carlo, or the Cookites from Nice. Life in Bordighera from November until the end of April is essentially charming. The people who winter there regularly—English, Germans, Russians, Belgians, and Italians—all know each other, and nearly every evening there are brilliant entertainments, at which princes, dukes, marquesses, and counts attend as thickly as blackberries grace the hedgeside in autumn. The big hotels give dances weekly, to which everyone in Society is welcome. In fact, life in Bordighera is very similar to that in a pleasant country town in England, but with the difference that it is purely cosmopolitan, without any distinction of caste. Emperors, kings, grand-dukes, and reigning princes are all patrons of the place, and it certainly stands unique in the whole world both for its natural beauties and for its unpretentiousness. There is no artificial charm, as at Nice, San Remo, Monte Carlo, or Cannes. The easy-going people of Bordighera are well aware that the charm of their clean, white little town lies in its natural beauty and quaint old-world picturesqueness; hence, although the health and comfort of their foreign visitors are studied, no attempt is made to give it a false air of garishness and gaiety.
When at noon, two days after the Princess’s visit to me, I stepped from the sleeping-car that had brought me down from Paris, and, entering a fiacre, drove up to the Hôtel Angst, I turned back and saw before me a sunny panorama of turquoise sea and purple mountains, which compelled me to pause in rapt admiration. The grey-green of the olives, the brighter foliage of the oranges with the yellow fruit gleaming in the green, the high feathery palms waving in the zephyr, the flowers of every hue, the dazzlingly white town, and its background of grey inaccessible crags, snow-tipped here and there, behind Apricale, combined to make up a picture unique and superb.
I had been in Bordighera once before, but this second impression in no way destroyed the former. On several previous occasions I had spent a month or so in the South at Monte Carlo, Mentone, and Nice, but I must admit that I preferred King’s Road at Brighton to the Promenade des Anglais at Nice. Mentone I disliked because of its bath-chair invalids, San Remo because of its snobbery; and Monte Carlo, with all its jargon of the play, the eternal Casino, the band outside the Café de Paris, the clatter at Ciro’s, and the various pasteboard attractions, was to me only tolerable for a week. Bordighera, with better climate and a native population exceedingly well-disposed towards the English, possesses distinct advantages over them all, although it never advertises itself on railway-station hoardings, like Nice or San Remo, by means of posters in which the sea is the colour of washing-blue.
As I had not advised Edith of my coming, it being my intention to surprise her, it was not until after the dressing-bell had rung for dinner that evening that I went below. I watched her descend the staircase, a neat figure in cream, with corsage slightly décolleté, and with pink carnations in her hair. Then I approached her in the great hall and held out my hand.