Chapter XIX: In England

"And hast thou chosen then? Canst thou endure
The purging change of frost and calenture;
Accept the sick recoil, the weary pain
Of senses heightened, keener nerves and brain--
Suffer and love, love much and suffer long--
And live through all, and at the last be strong?
* * * * *
Thou shall need all the strength that God can give
Simply to live, my friend, simply to live."
_On Art as an Aim in Life_--F. W. H. MYERS.

"_Morning News! Morning News!_ Shocking murder at Mountford!" This cheerful announcement, in the harsh shout of a newspaper boy, awoke Carlo, one morning early in the autumn, to the recollection that he was in England. He started broad awake in a moment from dreams of Francesca and Casa Bella, and with a pang of realization, to which he was now too well accustomed, knew that he was altogether parted from her, and looked with blank, hopeless, miserable depression round the unfamiliar hotel room.

It was one of those narrow, gloomy places often met with in inns; at the foot of his own narrow iron bedstead was a second just as narrow, and though the general impression conveyed was of meagre bareness in respect to the furniture, yet one felt cramped and oppressed by the proportions of the room.

"Soles and whiting! soles and whiting!" sang a nasal-voiced fishwoman in the street. And then, after an interval, came a cry so extremely comic that Carlo burst out laughing.

"Are you awake, San Carlo?" exclaimed Gigi, appearing, with the suddenness of a Jack-in-the-box, from beneath the clothes on the other bed.

"_Giusto Cielo!_ what can the woman be calling?" said Carlo. "Gigi, if you love me, jump out of bed and see!"

Gigi, nothing loth, sprang up and darted to the window.

"It's black things in a basket," he announced. "Oh, now I can hear what she says; it is 'Pickled cockles! pickled cockles!'"

By the time the cry had died away in the distance Carlo was grave and depressed again, he tried to live through his dream once more and to forget the distasteful reality, while all the time he was listlessly watching Gigi in the performance of his toilette, a sight which might well have tickled the gravity of an unaccustomed observer. Necessity had taught the little fellow to be far more handy than most children of his age, and now that Carlo had instilled into his mind the duties of cleanliness and godliness, his business-like way of setting to work was most edifying, beginning sedulously with soap and water, and ending with the paternoster which Carlo had taught him in Italian.

The place seemed to grow less desolate as the child very slowly and deliberately repeated the familiar words, and Carlo's heart grew lighter. True, he had as yet made no way at all with Anita, and the future still looked black and unpromising, but at any rate Gigi was the better for the change of baritones, and what right had he to fear for the result of work which he had begun in obedience to a direct call?

"_Perciocchè tuo è il regno, e la potenza, e la gloria, in sempiterno. Amen_," repeated Gigi; then, springing to his feet, and relapsing into English, "May I go down and play, San Carlo?"

Carlo patted the little brown head.

"Why, yes, to be sure, old man, take your soldiers and play in the coffee-room. I'll be down directly!"

Once up and dressed he began to look at life from his customary cheerful standpoint, and, with a curiosity which was almost boyish, drew up his blind and looked eagerly forth, for this was, in reality, his first glimpse of England, since they had landed quite late on the previous evening, in darkness and confusion indescribable.

"_Capperi!_ what a land of chimney-pots!" was his first exclamation. And in truth the prospect from the window was one which to a Neapolitan would seem most extraordinary. The room was at the back of the hotel, and on the fourth storey; it overlooked a narrow by-street, and thousands of roofs, and from every roof there rose these extraordinary-looking chimneys, stout, red ones, tall and attenuated gray ones, square ones, with blackened tops, and here and there a grisly-looking cowl, whirling and creaking in the most gruesome way. The sky was gray and leaden, a strong west wind was blowing, and Carlo had not stood many minutes at the open window before he found that his linen had suffered severely from the smuts.

"What a melancholy-looking place!" he thought to himself; "if I stay looking at it much longer the blue devils will get the better of me again, and that doesn't pay."

He turned away, whistling "_O dolce Napoli_," and reflecting that he would have some fun with Sardoni over his first impressions of England.

Sardoni was down before him, and was half-way through a substantial breakfast of ham and eggs, which reminded Carlo of the English breakfasts that Captain Britton had always refused to give up.

"You're late," said the tenor, nodding to him. "Had you come down a few minutes ago you would have witnessed a most interesting scene."

"I am late because I have been admiring the beautiful view of chimney-pots from my room," said Carlo; "you should have prepared me for them, they quite took my breath away. What with the chimney-pots, and the pickled-cockles, and the soles and whiting, I'm already quite learned in English life."

"San Carlo, mayn't I have some of that yellow stuff?" pleaded Gigi, who had been watching Sardoni's operations with hungry eyes.

"Yes, if you like; what is it?"

"Man alive!" cried Sardoni, laughing heartily, "do you mean to say that you never saw marmalade! No Englishman dreams of breakfasting without it. There!" he almost emptied the pot on to his friend's plate, "eat and be thankful, and own yourself a convert."

"Delicious stuff!" mumbled Gigi, with his mouth very full, and heaving a sigh of satisfaction. Then, as his elders laughed, he added fervently, "I should like to be alluse eating sweet things."

"What has been happening?" asked Carlo, when the child had finished his breakfast and had gone back to his toys.

"Well, Marioni has been tearing his hair a little, and Merlino has been swearing much. He got out of bed with the wrong foot foremost, and I believe there is something gone amiss with the manager of the theatre here, or the orchestra or something. I really didn't hear the rights of it; all I know is that he ramped and roared a good bit, and that it ended with exit Marioni, left wing, tearing his hair, and exit Merlino, right wing, in a vile temper."

"The fact is he tries to do too much," said Carlo. "A man can't be in himself impresario, singer, and business agent all at once. It's more than human nature can stand."

"Certainly more than human temper can stand," said Sardoni. "However, he is not likely to have more officials than he can help, for he knows well enough that this English tour is a frightful risk. And for the matter of that you are worth ten officials to him: you seem to me to take pleasure in being his slave."

"I have liked him much better since I worked with him," said Carlo. "There is a sort of rough honesty about him, after all. I fancy that with a different education he might have been a fine character."

"There's no denying anyhow that at present he's a fine tyrant," said Sardoni. "It's my belief that you would find excuses for the devil himself, Valentino!"

"Valentino" had become Carlo's nickname with the company. One evening at Naples there had been a discussion in the green-room about an article in some journal on the merits of the new baritone, in which his "Valentino" in particular had called forth the warmest praise, and was termed "a new creation." Gomez, who had never lost an opportunity of making himself disagreeable to the new-comer, had turned to him with his contemptuous smile and said, "I congratulate the Signor Valentino, and it is certainly true that he plays the part as though he were to the manner born."

To Carlo and Sardoni, who were the only ones present who were capable of understanding the speech, a hundred hateful innuendoes were conveyed in look and tone; but the others caught up the idea as though it had been a jest, and Tannini, drawing the sword which he wore in his costume of Ceprano, smote him on the shoulder and, with the most nasal of Yankee twangs, shouted, "Arise, Sir Valentino!"

"Knight-errant," put in Sardoni, seeing that it would be well to let the Spaniard's innuendo pass for jest.

And so, like the "San Carlo" spitefully suggested by Comerio, "Valentino" became a household word among the troupe and lost all bitterness, becoming, indeed, a sort of symbol of the familiar teasing, the playful fondness, which Carlo speedily won from his companions.

It seemed that Sardoni had not exaggerated matters in speaking of Merlino's temper, for at this moment he entered the coffee-room with the ominous double crease in his brow and the dark look about his eyes, which always betokened a stormy day for those in his immediate neighborhood. At such times he was certainly a most repulsive-looking man and at first Carlo had felt that he could not live with him, that the mere sight of him would be intolerable. By this time, however, he had somehow called into existence a sort of fondness for his brother-in-law: he had the rare and enviable gift of seeing people as they might have been under happier circumstances, and the still rarer power of treating them as such; and so the constant society of the Impresario had been quite tolerable to him, or only intolerable at rare moments when his natural impatience overmastered him, and made him feel ready to break with everything and rush back to a peaceful life in his native land.

"So you're down at last," said Merlino, who resented it as a personal injury if any one lay in bed after he did. As he had an inconvenient habit of always waking early, however late he had been the night before, his companions sometimes found this trait in his character rather provoking, particularly as with most people the career of an operatic singer does not tend to promote the virtue of early rising.

"I hear that Marioni has been in already," said Carlo. "What has gone wrong?"

"Everything!" said Merlino, savagely. "I wish to goodness, that instead of lying in bed till this hour, you had been down at the theatre in the place of that blockhead!"

"Well, I will go now if anything can be done," said Carlo, ignoring the rudeness and unreasonableness of the remark.

"_Insomma!_ Much good now! That is so exactly like you, Donati, always ready with patience and cool common-sense over other people's difficulties! I know there would be a cursed difference in your tone if the difficulty were yours and not mine!"

Sardoni was on the point of breaking in with a remonstrance, but Carlo gave him a glance which made him hold his peace; and taking up a paper, he appeared to be reading the leading article, though in reality he was listening to his two companions. He remembered, not without certain twinges of conscience, that Carlo had been helping the baggage men and seeing after all the lost goods of the troupe, when he himself had turned in on the previous night: probably "Valentino," who was always seeing after other people's worries, had been the last of the Company to go to bed.

"I'm sorry I'm late," said Carlo. "How has Marioni managed to put his foot in it?"

"He declares the orchestra is not half ready, and he has been quarrelling with the manager about the rehearsals."

"Ten to one he has made some mistake," said Carlo. "The manager is not likely to speak Italian, and Marioni's English is," with a laugh, "well, asking his pardon, is really grotesque. Just think now, the other day at Gibraltar I heard him talking to an English violinist, and he said, 'What! not are here no lockomoteeves?' The poor fellow could hardly keep his countenance! And then, too, there's no convincing Marioni that a gesture conveys nothing at all to the ordinary Englishman; he expects them to understand just as if they had been born and bred at Naples."

Merlino smiled.

"There's something in that, after all. Perhaps it is not so bad as he makes out."

"If you think it would be any use I will come round there with you now," said Carlo.

"Well, I wish you would," said Merlino, gruffly, "for your English is better than mine. Oh! confound you! Never mind the child! He's well enough here."

"Let me come with you, papa; I'll be so good--so good," said Gigi, who a little while ago would infallibly have burst into tears at the prospect of this disappointment.

Merlino, who really loved his son, was touched by the entreaty, and made no further objection; so the odd-looking trio set off together, and Sardoni, throwing down his paper, stood at the window and watched them down the street with a comical expression about the corners of his mouth.

"It's as good as a play to see how that fellow can turn Merlino round his finger! And all the time the old brute treats him like a dog. I'm hanged if I understand how Valentino does it, and how he keeps his temper, for he's got a pretty hot one for all his sweetness. Jove! I should like just to poke the devil up in him for once and see what he'd do. He's none of your milk-and-water saints or he could never act as he does."

But if to Sardoni, who held the key to the enigma, Carlo's character and life were perplexing, to the rest of the troupe they were altogether incomprehensible. Some of them admired him; others found his unselfishness convenient, and did not scruple to trade on it; others were jealous of his success, and suspected him of trying to curry favor with Merlino; and though before long all, except Gomez, had been so far conquered by the charm of his manner as to treat him with friendly familiarity, not one of them was capable of fathoming the beauty of his character. He was merely in their eyes a pleasant exchange for Comerio,--a youngster who, at present, seemed unspoiled by his success, a good travelling companion, who was always ready to make fun of petty discomforts, and who seemed quite naturally, and with an utter absence of ostentation, to take upon himself the "dirty work" of the Company.

It soon came to be considered just "Valentino's way" to yield the comfortable seat in a railway carriage, or to leave the better room at a hotel to some one else, or with an unconscious air, which was often highly amusing, to act as safety-valve for the Impresario's temper. It was a very convenient way, there was no doubt about that; and his help seemed so spontaneous, and was so free from all suspicion of conceit or superiority, that it was indeed help worth having.

Nevertheless, like the art of an actor, all this seemingly natural and unstudied action was the result of sheer effort and often wearisome consideration; it was merely that Carlo succeeded, as very few do succeed, in veiling the effort and letting people perceive the result only. How hard he found life in Merlino's Company only he himself knew. With Nita his great love helped him to endure patiently, and Merlino came in for a share of this, too. But with the others who were not akin to him, who were many of them positively obnoxious to him, it was otherwise. Nothing but hard struggling with his own temper brought him through each day's difficulties.

Bauer would patronize him in a bland, superior way, pat him on the shoulder in season and out of season, embrace him in his fervent German fashion, and call him "_Mein Junge_." And then, with his sensitive, artistic nature all untuned, Carlo would wonder to himself whether it was pride or a right self-respect which made him inwardly rebel. How far was he bound to submit to the patronizing familiarity of a greedy, conceited, irritating, underbred old German, whose presence jarred on him like a false note? Sometimes he tried to throw a sort of careful coldness into his manner towards old Bauer, but that only worked mischief. Then he tried to carry off all the petty annoyances with a laugh. This answered better, but, after all, the weariest thing on earth is forced merriment, and his own troubles were making him very heavy-hearted.

Again, there was Fasola, the second baritone, with his aggravating habit of reading a bitter meaning into the most innocent remarks, with his contemptible jealousy, with his determination to be aggrieved. Genuinely sorry for the man, and feeling that it must be hard to see a young novice in the place he coveted yet could by no means fill, Carlo went out of his way to help and please him; but Fasola, while accepting help readily enough, was the most touchy and querulous of mortals, and always contrived to be at cross-purposes with the new-comer, and to take offence on every possible occasion.

Then, too, Carlo was always confronted by the difficulty of how to be friendly, yet not intimate, with those who were no better than they should be. Domenica Borelli severely kept to the rule of not being on speaking terms with any one of whom she disapproved; but this way of cutting the Gordian knot did not commend itself to him, and he struggled on in the difficult endeavor to be courteous to those who were altogether distasteful to him, to steer between a weak tolerance and a priggishly expressed disapproval, to be true to his own principles and yet to avoid anything like Pharisaism. Hitherto he had been little accustomed to difficulties of this kind, for he had lived very simply and in a perfectly harmonious atmosphere. He was ashamed to find how the petty vexations chafed him, and often felt inclined to throw up everything and own that he had attempted something beyond his powers. This was generally late at night or early in the morning, when he was fagged and dispirited. But, then, again, he would take heart and begin once more, with hope and courage springing up anew, and a sort of eagerness for the fray of which but a little while before he had been so weary.

Sardoni was the only one who troubled himself to wonder about the new baritone; he could not have told why it was that he had from the very first been so attracted by him, but the attraction only grew more powerful the more he saw of him, and his reckless nonchalance was fast melting away in the deep interest of this half-avowed friendship. He could have laughed at himself for being so absorbed in the study of a fellow-actor that his ordinary pleasures palled upon him; but there was no disputing the fact, and when Carlo was near he was always conscious of a sort of fascination which compelled him to throw off his cold indifference, which roused him into a pleasant warmth of wonder, and made him look and listen, and wait upon Donati's utterances as though they were most remarkable. And this, to tell the truth, they seldom were, for Carlo was not particularly intellectual, neither was he brilliant and witty; it was rather that he was what the Italians call "_Simpatica_," and full of an undefined charm which made him as lovable as he was incomprehensible.

He came in soon after noon looking fagged and much inclined for a peaceful cigar.

"Have you been all this time at the theatre?" asked Sardoni.

"Yes, two mortal hours of altercation, the manager, the local conductor, Merlino, and Marioni, all in battle array."

"With you as a go-between, I suppose, alternately used and abused?"

"Something like it," he replied, laughing at a recollection of the dispute; "the whole affair really rose out of a jealousy between Marioni and the local man. It seems to me that jealousy thrives like a weed in art life,--I shall soon be grudging you your superior parts, _amico mio_."

"You're welcome to the parts," said Sardoni, "if you would make over a little of your superfluous applause to me. However, I intend to be proud of you, and not jealous, for did I not have my finger in the pie? And does not Italian opera owe me a deep debt of gratitude for having secured your services?"

At this moment Merlino entered abruptly. Though the difficulties had been smoothed away by Carlo's mediation the dispute had very much ruffled the manager's temper.

"Where is Anita?" he asked, fiercely.

"I have not seen her this morning," said Carlo, foreseeing a bad time for his sister; "by-the-by, how about those letters?"

But Merlino with a grievance was like a dog with a bone; he would gnaw it, and worry it, and bite first on one side, then on the other, and when at last you thought it was safely buried he would exhume it and begin his operations all over again.

"Not up yet, I'll be bound!" he exclaimed, wrathfully; "it's abominable; she never stirs a finger to help me, and everything gone wrong as usual!"

He strode out of the room, and doubtless opened the vials of his wrath on Nita's head, for she appeared before long looking very much discomposed, but with a resentful light in her eyes which Carlo had learnt to understand too well.

All else would have been bearable enough to him if only he could have won Nita's love; but after the first day or two, when she had really been grateful to him for saving her from what in her better moods she fully recognized as a sin, she had never felt or pretended to feel for him any sort of affection. When alone with him, or when she wanted anything done, she would often be civil and even friendly, but when other people were present she seemed to take pleasure in snubbing him, and never allowed him to forget for a moment that he was her junior. The "elder sisterly" style of treatment is never very congenial to a man, and it was particularly irksome to Carlo, because he and Anita had so very little in common. It was, perhaps, this which made it so hard for him to win his way with her. They had none of the happy associations of childhood which form so strong a bond between most brothers and sisters; they had grown up apart, and when, at rare intervals, Nita had returned from the convent, there had been little love lost between them. At nineteen she had left home forever, and cast in her lot with Merlino, and now, after an interval of five years, the brother and sister were almost strangers to each other, and Carlo, often in despair, struggled to break down the wall of division which seemed to have risen between them. If he had been as indifferent to her as she was to him they might have drifted on without much discomfort, but he loved her, not only as the one specially left to him by his mother on her death-bed, not only with the family love which had first come to his aid in that time of numb grief, but with the divine love which had given him power to sacrifice himself for her sake. It is often harder to understand the characters of those closely related to us than the characters of mere ordinary acquaintances, our very nearness hinders us from taking true and just views, and perhaps Carlo's love blinded him to some extent with regard to Nita. He credited her with virtues which she did not possess, and then was wounded when, in daily life, she was weighed in the balance and found wanting. He would say to himself: "Is she not the child of my father and mother? Then how is it possible that she should not at heart be really loving, really true?" But he did not realize, as a dispassionate spectator would have done, that, although Nita might originally have inherited many good gifts, her life and education had been quite enough to paralyze them.

In fact her character was the natural outcome of a long course of tyranny. Tyranny in the convent had first taught her to be deceitful; deceit had by degrees become ingrained in her nature, she had come to think of lying as a very venial sin, and it did not in the least trouble her to gain the ends she desired by crooked means. Was she not obliged to outwit the tyrants? At her marriage she had escaped into what she had imagined would prove love and liberty, but in three months' time she had learnt that she had made a terrible mistake, and had sold herself into a slavery almost intolerable.

When a woman makes so terrible a discovery there are only two courses open to her, either she must sink or she must swim, there is no idle drifting in such case. Nita never attempted to love her husband, she never tried to bridge over the differences between them; he tyrannized over her as was his nature, and she yielded in miserable, slavish despair, fearing him and hating him with her whole heart. So inevitably she sank, and there was not wanting--there never is wanting--a Comerio to help her. Sardoni considered her heartless and commonplace, and so she was, yet not so heartless as to be insensible to the charm of Comerio's devotion when contrasted with her husband's cruelty, and commonplace enough to fall with the greatest ease into the trap laid for her. Comerio's evil influence increased with a speed which alarmed her, she stood on the very brink of the precipice, but yet at the supreme moment some blind impulse had made her turn and rush back to her mother. Then she had thrown herself upon Carlo's mercy, had confessed all, and begged his help; he had replied by the gift of his life, and now, the danger for the moment tided over, poor Nita felt a sudden reaction, and wished with all her heart that she had acted differently. In her worst moments she hated Carlo for having ousted her lover, in her better moments she tried to goad herself into a sort of gratitude to him for what he had done; while often, in revenge for the humiliation of feeling that he knew her weakness, she delighted in trying his temper, and showing to the troupe that she had not the least intention of joining in the chorus of admiration which the outer world accorded to the new baritone.

Tyranny induces deceit, and it also engenders the desire to tyrannize. Nita, who had been made so miserable by her husband's overbearing nature, retaliated whenever she could on Gigi, or on her luckless dresser, or, strange to say, most frequently of all on Carlo. She was so certain of his love, so sure that he would never fail her, that she was not afraid to do this; and at present the consciousness that she could pain him was rather pleasant than otherwise, it gave her a feeling of power which flattered her pride.

"You seem to have worked up Merlino into a pleasant state," she said, sarcastically, in reply to Carlo's greeting.

He disliked her way of speaking against her husband, and tried to turn the subject.

"There has been a good deal to worry him to-day, but all is straight now. We have been down at the theatre, it seems a better one than I should have expected."

"All is straight, you should say, with the exception of the Impresario's temper," said Nita, sharply. "I wish you would leave him alone and not interfere, you only make it a great deal worse for me."

Nita's unreasonableness was at times enough to madden a man, and Carlo could not help sympathizing a little with Merlino; he knew quite well that if he had not gone to the theatre her reproach would have been, "You never try to put Merlino into a better temper, you never try to smooth matters for me."

He was silent, and Nita, who had hoped to stir up a discussion, finding it impossible to quarrel alone, walked over to the window where Gigi was contentedly playing with his soldiers, and without a word of warning swept the whole of the miniature camp into its box.

"Go away! we can't have your toys all over the place!" she said, giving him a vindictive little push.

Gigi, whose tears were terribly near the surface, burst into a roar, and Carlo, who on principle never interfered between mother and child, had much ado to keep silence while the little fellow was ignominiously turned out of the room.

"It's all your fault," said Nita, returning a little flushed from the contest, "you make a great deal too much of the child, he must be taught his proper place."

She sat down with her writing-case at the vacant table.

"I am going to the post-office directly," said Carlo, by way of breaking the uncomfortable silence; "shall you have any letters?"

"What affair is that of yours?" she asked, angrily. "Is is not enough that my husband is spying on me all day long? If you think I am going to put up with you as spy you are mistaken! It was bad enough before you came!"

And with an impatient gesture she gathered her things together and left the room.

Sardoni, glancing up, saw the pained look on Carlo's face, and was so stung by it that he could no longer keep silence.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed; "if Madame Merlino were not your sister I should give her a piece of my mind."

He was curious to know what Carlo would say.

For a minute he was silent; then, stifling a sigh, he replied lightly, but not altogether without effort, "You see those who cannot flog the horse flog the saddle. Merlino has vexed her, and she uses me as safety-valve."

"And Merlino appears to do the same; you are between two fires."

"But with a good comrade to cheer me when I am down in the mouth. Some day, _amico mio_,"--and as he spoke that bright, sudden, Italian smile seemed to make his whole face shine--"some day I hope to have a chance of giving as well as taking from you."

Sardoni felt choked; for some minutes he sat in deep thought, then looking up quickly, said, in his abrupt English way,--

"I mean to take you at your word. To-morrow is Sunday. Is there any rehearsal?"

"Marioni has arranged to take _Trovatore_, with the orchestra and chorus, but he'll not need us."

"Good; then will you give me your company in the afternoon? I have a disagreeable piece of work to do, and should be glad of your help."

Carlo seemed really pleased by the request, and, in truth, his interest in Sardoni was a capital thing for him, and helped to take him for the time being out of his own troubles.