Chapter VI

‘Nor is it Fate directs the waves,
Or dominates the wind:
They are God’s servants, not His slaves,
And they surmise His mind.
If the planets walk aright
Though the dim and trackless night,
Nor their true pathway ever miss,
Know ye it is because their Will is one with His!‘

An hour or so later, just as mountain and main began to exchange the resplendent garments of sundown for twilight’s more sober mantle, Veronica leaned forward, and, pointing to a motionless figure that with dark flowing plumes and glittering bayonet stood out silhouetted against the sky, exclaimed:

‘See, Lamia! You are in Italy.’

LAMIA’S WINTER-QUARTERS

‘I wonder,’ said Lamia, ‘who invented the phrase, “the sunny South”?‘

‘A poet, no doubt,’ I answered, with perhaps a slight touch of malice; ‘one who, in Bacon’s phrase, accommodates the shows of things to the affections of the mind.‘

‘That is all very well when you are not in immediate contact with the things themselves. But here we have been for forty-eight hours, and we have not seen the sun yet. Tuscany could hardly have behaved worse.’

‘All of us, even the most prosaic,’ said the Poet, ‘are makers of phrases only approximately true; but even to-morrow perhaps you will have to own that this southward-sloping coast is not undeserving of its fame.’

He proved to be right. The following sunrise rebuked Lamia’s lament; and, when we assembled at breakfast in our English fashion, she declared she could have dressed before the open window, had Veronica but permitted it.

Still let it be confessed that ‘the sunny South’ is a phrase that partakes of some exaggeration. The South is sunnier, much sunnier, than the North; but it, too, can have its days of gloom, and even its weeks of capricious temper. Moreover, there is South, and South; and, despite Lamia’s somewhat hazardous assertion that Tuscany could hardly have been more inclement than it had been in our new quarters for the first two days after our arrival, there is, as the rest of us well knew, a vast difference between its winter climate and that of the favoured region where, for Lamia’s sake, we awhile were halting.

‘Veronica, you grow more wonderful every day,’ she exclaimed, under the influence of all-glorifying sunlight. ‘You have discovered a paradise, by sheer intuition.’

It is not the first time allusion has been made to Veronica’s executive talents. They are so much greater than the rest of us possess, that, when anything serviceable has to be done, she reduces us all to insignificance. Without counsel or assistance from any one, and entirely by correspondence, she had procured for us, for three months, a home that we all, with enthusiastic sincerity, declared to be enchanting. If you think that an easy matter, I can only say, ‘Try for yourselves.’ It is this special difficulty that drives so many people who spend the winter months in the South of Europe to pass them in hotels. One and all we had avowed that we would sooner a thousand times remain at home than resort to that depressing expedient. Yet pretentious, trim, and conventional villas, with their cut-and-combed lawns, their formal palm-trees and dracænas, and their beds of dubious-coloured cinerarias, are the alternative that, for the most part, remains; and I imagine you know that would have consorted but little better with our tastes.

‘I knew what you all wanted,’ said Veronica; ‘but let us,’ she added modestly, ‘give thanks to Fortune, who has had far more to do with it than I.’

I verily believe that something, moreover, should be ascribed to the comparative slenderness of our purse and to the simplicity of our tastes; nor do I pretend that what Lamia flatteringly called a paradise regained would have been much short of a purgatory to many splendidly-fastidious people. Our new abode had neither architectural design nor internal pretension; but the taste of man, in partnership with time, had given it charm without and refinement within. Do you remember how, in that search which finally planted us in the Garden that we Love, we kept recalling the words of Tacitus as applied to the race whose preferences run so strongly in our own blood: _Suam quisque domum spatio circumdat_? I hope we have nothing to conceal, but is not a sense of seclusion necessary to felicity? Unlike folk of Northern blood, the Latin race, and the Italian race more especially, have little taste for privacy, and none for solitude. To lean out of the open window onto the street or highway below, to sit on door-steps whence they can see and accost chance passers-by, to talk, to sing, to dance, this is their idea of such happiness as life permits. But the very spaciousness of their hills, their plains, their valleys, affords to the more meditative children of the mist even larger facilities than our own land for gratifying the passion for that ‘life removed’ which the Duke in _Measure for Measure_, probably expressing Shakespeare’s own personal taste, says he had ‘ever loved.’ Veronica had found it for us here. The spurs of the Maritime Alps, as they decline and dwindle towards the sea, enclose a series of gorges and ravines of various forms and dimensions. Some are narrow, gloomy, and precipitous, others gradual, well open to the sun, not too deep-bosomed, and gladdened by streams that have their source in remoter mountain-sheds. It was in one of the latter we had discovered the shelter and seclusion we desired. No wind could visit us roughly; for, if it blew from the north, we were curtained by the hills, and, should it rage from the sea, we were just sufficiently away from the shore, and protected enough in that direction by olive-slopes and orange-groves to be apprised of its displeasure only by an unusual rustling of leaves.

‘But what do you propose to do in this ravine of rest?’ Lamia inquired of me somewhat mockingly. ‘Veronica is never without occupation; and here she will be abundantly employed in scouring the neighbouring hamlets for fowls that have not become all bone and sinew by constant mountaineering, in checking the washing-book, and in raising the moral tone of the young people along the entire countryside. As for me, a determination to master the Tuscan tongue will give me rest from the fatigue of too much idleness; and my new tutor, the young ecclesiastic, whom Veronica has enticed from the Sacristy for my benefit, is quite charming, and makes me willing, as he also seems to be, to prolong indefinitely the time nominally allotted to the most fascinating of studies. But you? You cannot “garden” here, for the ground seems to do that of itself; nor, in any case, will you have time to pique yourself on the result of your labours, which, I have observed, is the main motive power of those persons who are supposed to love flowers for themselves.‘

Wishing to divert her playful arrows from myself, I replied that I was indeed rather gravelled for lack of employment, and so intended to try if sitting in the sun and doing nothing would supply the deficiency; and I then added that she had forgotten to include the Poet in the catalogue of the unemployed.

‘O, the Poet?’ she replied. ‘That is _un altro paio di maniche_,—you see my devoted subdeacon is teaching me the proverbs of his lovely language,—for he abides in a lofty ether whither I fear my shafts would never reach him. For anything I can tell, he may be writing an adorable sonnet when he is tapping the top of an egg-shell at the breakfast table; and I often suspect he is, in reality, in a fine frenzy, when he appears to be listening deferentially to one of my shallowest disquisitions.’

‘Would you marry a poet?’ I asked. I should have half liked to make the inquiry more definite; but for that I had not the courage.

‘Marry a poet!’ she exclaimed, ‘I should think not indeed. Poor Veronica! She manages tolerably well with hers, thanks to her good sense and infinite patience; and perhaps she is not as sorely tried as she deserves to be for the irreparable experiment to which she has committed herself. For us women marriage is necessarily the chief mercantile transaction of our lives; and, if one marries a peer, one becomes a peeress; if one weds a millionaire, one may hope to be a million-heiress. But the wife of a poet does not become a poetess. She cannot share with him his only valuable asset; and the supposed romantic nature of his disposition, which is usually a sheer fiction, not unoften diverts from her the curiosity to which every woman is entitled, and which every woman who marries reasonably invariably gets.’

‘But if you happen to love a poet?’ I persisted.

She quickly made me repent my question. ‘You are unteachable. Love is a terminable annuity, that ends long before death, leaving one’s declining days to abject poverty.‘

At this juncture I saw Veronica and the Poet coming along the rose _pergola_, for January roses were pretty abundant with us, and I inwardly wished they had come sooner, for Lamia would not have dared to say such things in their presence; reserving, as she seems to do, her most outrageous utterances for my private benefit. But then, it is true, I should not in that case have put my useless interrogatories.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘I am going to burn some incense before the Poet.’

‘You know he loathes it,’ I observed.

‘Do you think I should proffer it so liberally if he liked it? We were talking,’ she said, addressing him, as he joined us, ‘of how we are to occupy ourselves in the quiet and unexciting quarters Veronica has provided for us. You, of course, can write a long poem, and I should think this is just the place for doing so, though I observe that people nowadays deprecate the writing of long poems as being out of date.’

‘I trust,’ he replied, ‘that will have no influence on their being written or not being written. Novel reading, I fear, has proved somewhat injurious to the more serious side of the imagination, and prose fiction has created a distaste for sustained works in verse. If Milton lived to-day, _L’Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ would perhaps still be more or less appreciated; but _Paradise Lost_ would of a certainty be condemned as tedious. Even in his own day it had only fit audience but few, and few are always enough, if fit.‘

‘I hope,’ said Lamia, ‘that we who are here would answer to that description; yet you never read what you are writing either to Veronica or to me. I have often wondered what is the reason.’

‘The reason is very simple,’ he replied. ‘Veronica is rather difficult, you are somewhat easy, to please; and, while she might make me too distrustful, you, dear Lamia, would, I fear, render me too enamoured of my work. It is best, I think, oneself to be its critic, and as searching and severe a one as possible; and then to leave it with all its imperfections on its head, which are sure to be very numerous, but are at least one’s own.‘

‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘how poetry is written.’

‘If I could tell you that,’ he answered, ‘you might conceivably take advantage of the information to become a formidable rival. But, as far as I can help you, I should say poetry is a natural and indeed inevitable form of expression, as I suppose music also is, in a certain mood or state.’

‘And how is the state brought about?’ she asked.

A smile came over his face as he replied: ‘I wish I knew. Perhaps by consorting with Lamias, when they are not too inquisitive.’

Veronica remained seated beside us, while he resumed his walk under the roses. When he had passed out of hearing, Veronica turned to Lamia a little austerely, and said:

‘There are some persons—usually you are not one of them—who are perpetually trying to invade the sanctuary of one’s soul, with the result that one double-locks the doors. Only those who come to worship, not to scrutinise, are admitted. Have we not already been told,—

‘What is it rules thy singing season?
Instinct, that diviner Reason,
To which the wish to know seemeth a sort of treason.’

‘And again,—

‘Why dost thou ever cease to sing?
Singing is such sweet comfort, who,
If he could sing the whole year through,
Would barter it for anything?’

‘Would you like him to sing the whole year through?’ asked Lamia.

Veronica made no reply; for, though the question was put with an air of perfect seriousness, it might have been interpreted otherwise. So Lamia went on:

‘I suppose I do not understand, because I am not married, and still less have the felicity to be married to a poet. But, if I were, I fear I should be exacting enough to wish to be even sweeter comfort to him than his singing. He paid you a great compliment, Veronica, the other day, when you were not present; for at the end of an interesting discussion,—interesting, at least, to me,—he said: “The sum of the matter is, bad wives are as rare as good husbands.” Yet I confess it seems to me the worst husband in the world would be one who could find consolation in perpetual carolling. I would rather he beat me.‘ I need scarcely say that I heartily sympathised, though without having the courage to say so, with these sentiments of Lamia, albeit it is not easy to decide if they were really hers or not. She has a fine Socratic talent for eliciting information; and she was as successful on this occasion as usual, for, much to my surprise, Veronica, after a brief silence, rendered necessary perhaps by the violence of Lamia’s closing observation, said very quietly:

‘I should like, if I may, to recite some lines he wrote the other day, which seem to bear on your misgivings, if but indirectly, and may perhaps help to diminish them.’ Thereupon she recited, much better, I thought, than the Poet himself, the following apology:—

I

The lark confinèd in his cage,
And captive in his wing,
Though fluttering with imprisoned rage,
Forbeareth not to sing.

II

But still the strain, though loud and long,
Is but the mock of mirth,
Not that dawn-dewy nuptial song
That weddeth Heaven with Earth.

III

Voice that in freedom seems so soft,
Fettered, sounds harsh and rough.
Listen! He shrilleth far too oft,
Nor faltereth half enough.

IV

And I, still feebler if not free,
Do hourly more and more
Grow silent in captivity,
And, if I sing, must soar.

V

And as the lark’s free carol floats
High on a sea of sound,
So let me fling my random notes
To ripple round and round.

VI

Hark! now he shakes the towering skies,
A carillon of light,
Then dwindleth to a faint surmise,
Still singing out of sight.

VII

And, though in clearest light arrayed
The Poet’s song should shine,
Sometimes his far-off voice will fade
Into the dim divine.

VIII

Then we with following ear and heart
Should listen to the end,
Though we descry may but in part,
And dimly apprehend.

IX

Lo! soon he quits his heavenly quest,
Slow-carolling into sight,
Then, quavering downward, strikes his nest,
Earthward aerolite.