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FUGITIVE PIECES

A TALE FROM THE BORDERLAND

“Well, it is a story to take or to leave. I tell it you as it happened to me. Think what you like about it.”

The speaker was a spare man of middle height; an Anglican priest, whose long black coat and white band set off a face that might have belonged to a seer of old: pallid yet not bloodless, with delicately cut mobile nostrils and grey eyes now piercingly bright, now losing themselves in far-off mystery. The few grey hairs combed across the ample brow seemed instinct with the life beneath them. In moments of great spiritual excitement, when the eyes kindled and the nostrils worked, they would appear to rise as into a halo above the inspired pallor of the face. And the cypresses were around us, gloomily aspiring; while the ground on which we sat was alive and gay with the most delicious little pink cyclamens: sweet, everyday human thoughts that come like a smile across the over-strained soul.

“I was in England then, working in a large Northern parish in the midst of dirt, misery and ignorance; and would often come home exhausted by the sufferings I had seen and could do so little to alleviate. One pouring wet evening I got in very late, soaked to the skin, faint with hunger, oppressed by the thought of the preparation needed for an early communion service I was to celebrate on the morrow. I told Janet to admit no one: that for no reason would I go out again that night; and sat down to dinner.

“I had hardly begun when the door bell rang, and voices reached me from the hall – that of a woman, evidently a lady, pleading, and Janet’s, repeating my order.

“‘But,’ the strange voice insisted, ‘he would surely come if he knew. It is to see a dying man. Tell him it is to see a dying man. To save a passing soul.’

“The woman’s distress and anxiety were so evident that I could remain passive no longer. I called Janet and told her to show the lady in. She was tall, graceful, dressed in black, with a long veil which she kept lowered, so that I could see the features but indistinctly. With every sign of agitation she repeated to me what she had said in the hall. ‘Would I come with her? It was to see a person who must die this night, and all unprepared.’

“I had no heart to refuse; and we sallied forth together, she leading, I following. After some time I found myself in a better part of the town, where the rows of squalid houses had given place to detached residences, each in its garden. At one of these we stopped, ascended the steps, and I rang.

“The door was opened by a butler, who had the air of being an old, confidential servant. I asked to see the person who was dying.

“The man looked at me in amazement. ‘No one is even ill here; much less dying. You must have the wrong address.’

“I looked around for my mysterious guide. I was alone.

“‘But,’ said I to the butler, ‘I assure you that a lady came to me this evening, asked me to follow her to a house where a man must die this night, and led me here. Are you certain there is no one ill?’

“‘Not only my master, but all the servants are perfectly well,’ was the reply.

“Just then a door opened and the master of the house appeared: a young, florid man, easy and good-natured, with a certain air of distinction about him. I introduced myself and repeated my story.

“‘Well, come in out of the rain now, at any rate,’ said he. ‘I am just sitting down to dinner. You will not refuse to join me?’

“I accepted the invitation and found my host bright, well-read, well-travelled: a most agreeable companion.

“As we were smoking after the meal, he said, hesitatingly: —

“‘Do you know I have been wanting to make your acquaintance for a long time past? I have had an instinctive feeling that I could confide in you as in no one else: a strange sympathy going out to you while you were personally unknown to me. And now I feel it stronger than ever. I cannot shake it off. May I make a father confessor of you? I am sick of this life. I want to be at something real.’

“I encouraged him to speak, and promised him all the help my experience should enable me to give him.

“‘Well, I will leave you for a little to collect my thoughts,’ said he. ‘Be so kind as to remain here.’

“While he was away I looked about the room, and found myself attracted by a picture, evidently a portrait, of a lady. I considered it attentively, and to my utter surprise recognised my mysterious visitor and guide.

“‘Who is that?’ I asked my host on his return.

“‘That? My mother. She died when I was a child. Yet’ – with a hesitancy that was almost shamefacedness – ‘yet, I feel somehow as though she were still caring for me.’

“We had a long talk in which he recounted his life, that of a young man about town; and the upshot of it was that he promised to come to the communion service on the following morning.

“I was at the church very early, waiting anxiously for his appearance.

“‘Do you really suppose he will come?’ said the friend who was to help me celebrate, and to whom I had related the strange experience. ‘You had better give up any hope of seeing him. It was probably nothing but a fit of the sentimentality that follows a comfortable dinner. It took that form because you happened to be with him. I have seen dozens of such cases.’

“Still I had faith in my convert; and as the service went on and he did not appear, I felt my heart grow big with sorrowful disappointment.

“I walked home sadly enough.

“In the hall I found the butler of the previous evening. He looked white and scared. He was trembling.

“‘Sir, sir,’ he stammered, ‘come with me. Come quickly. My master is dead. I found him dead this morning.’”

A silence fell upon us. The cypresses waved mysteriously towards the heavens – my friend’s face, with the awe-struck eyes, showing white amid the gloom.

“A mother’s love,” he murmured. “Why should it not compel the forces of material being? A mother’s love. Is it not ‘the last relay and ultimate outpost of Eternity?’”

THE PHANTOM BRIDE

There were three of us: men between youth and middle age who had gone through school and college together, had walked the hospitals and worked in the dissecting room without a break in our friendship; and, separated by the exigencies of our practice, had still, as though by some occult sympathy, kept in touch with each other across long stretches of absence and silence. We were sitting with our coffee and cigarettes on the public walk above Florence. Before us lay the great square with the colossal David: the bronze giant that looks ever to the hills beyond the town, with his sling ready to defend her from assault; while behind us rose the church from which the creator of that giant really had protected the city against the strange-speaking North-men who had poured over those very hills for her destruction. The last gleam of sunshine was, as we knew, making the gold of the mosaic glitter over the church-door there above us. It lay too on the town at our feet, lighting up the captivating grace of the bell-tower, the chastened glow of whose marbles seemed actually before our eyes; bringing out the unsurpassable curves of the cathedral dome, and the squatter lines of that of St. Lorenzo, where the Medici moulder in their marble tombs; lingering on the graceful sturdiness of the Palazzo Vecchio; touching the spires of the church of St. Croce and of the Bargello where prisoners once pined. It was that hour before the actual sunset when the city, lying languidly amid the encircling hills, seems consciously to breathe out the suavity by which she captures her lovers and holds them to her in life-long thraldom. And two of us had been long away from our mistress; the spirit of the time and the place was upon us; confidences of loves and sorrows rose naturally to our lips.

Conti flung away his cigarette and threw himself back in his chair. I glanced at his small nervous hands as he folded his arms; remembering their quick, sure movements in the most delicate operations; and then I looked into his blue eyes, whose bright sparkle the deadly habit of morphine-taking, the future ruin of that bright career, was already changing into dreaminess.

“Decidedly, Neri,” exclaimed he, “you are the most changed of the three. There you sit smoking your cigarette as quietly as though we came here every day of our lives. With a line between your brows, too! You look as though you were obliged to take a wife to-morrow. What has happened? Has someone got drowned in such a way that you cannot tell whether it was a homicide or a suicide, and are afraid of misleading justice? Has a supposed corpse come to life again and objected to being dissected?”

A smile flickered across Neri’s gravity. He was the handsomest of the three: one of the best made men in the town. He wore a thick, pointed beard, and the mouth under the moustache was of quite exceptional firmness and delicacy. In fact he was what the women call a bell’uomo; and but for his thorough-going solidity of character and immense variety of interests, would infallibly have had his head turned by their admiration. As it was he simply had no time to give them very much attention. And lately, so we were told, he had taken less notice of them than ever; but had gone about his work with the line between his brows, and lips that rarely relaxed except to smile encouragement to some poor patient on whom he had operated.

He breathed out the smoke slowly, luxuriously, from his mouth and nostrils – he was a confirmed cigarette smoker – and answered: —

“No, I am not going to be married to-morrow; and I was thinking of a post-mortem, but not of such an one as Conti imagines. I will tell you the story; but keep it to yourselves. There’s a woman in the case, of course,” he added, with a short nervous laugh. Then he hesitated again, and at last began.

“Just a year ago to-day I had to make a post-mortem, and a report to the police, on the body of the one woman who has entered profoundly into my life. She was a rising operatic singer with a singular power of vivid dramatic intensity, though I do not think her impersonations were ever a full expression of her innermost powers. Her interests were extremely varied, her mind exceptionally mobile – her occupation fostering this mobility, and increasing that power of quick sympathy, of putting herself into touch with the people with whom she came into contact, which was one of her distinguishing features. She was not beautiful; but she had fine large dark eyes that looked straight at you; and she was so lithe and girl-like in all her movements (she was rather older than myself in reality) that you felt inclined just to take her in your arms and hold her fast against all the troubles of the world – and she had her share, I warrant you.”

“H’m,” said Conti. “And you did it, I suppose. You seem to have been hard hit.”

“No, I did not do it; although I was more than hard hit. Her position was so difficult that I had no heart to make it worse; and she had a certain dignity about her, even in her moments of most childlike abandon in talking with me, that prevented any light advances. You felt as though you must help her even against herself, for her nature was evidently passionate; and that made your feeling for her all the more profound. She had married unfortunately; a man who had ill-treated and neglected her in every possible way. After a couple of years she fled from her husband, left the stage, and changing her name, lived by giving singing lessons; and, when I first knew her, was making a brave struggle not only to support herself and her boy, but to obtain and hold such a position in the world as should enable her to launch him in his career. Then she fell ill; more from exhaustion of vital force than anything else; and I never saw anything like the spirit with which she bore up. She was almost too weak to teach, and held her pupils together with the greatest difficulty; yet she managed always to wear a bright smile, and she refused absolutely to give up hope. ‘Why, it is the most stimulating of medicines,’ she would say. ‘If I give up that, I shall collapse immediately. I consider that, given the conditions in which I live, self-deception, on the right side of course, is a distinct duty.’

“Towards the end of the summer she left town for a fortnight, and I went out to see her. She insisted on our having a little picnic together, and took me to the top of a hill hard by. There was a small pine wood up there, with a stretch of grass and ling. Opposite rose Castel di Poggio. The hills were round us ridge on ridge, and fold on fold; their bosoms veiled by draperies of mist, for it was still early. We might have been hundreds of miles away from any town: yet Florence was close at our feet. I had left it only a couple of hours ago, and should be down there again breathing the phenic acid of the hospital that same afternoon. Never shall I forget the morning of chat and reading (I had taken up a volume of poems – her gift), with the bees booming in the ling, the gorgeous green of the pine needles, intense unchangeable, against the brilliant sky, and the mingled scents of pine, cypress, honey-flowers, and aromatic herbs. As we were starting to go down she stopped. ‘We must keep vivid the remembrance of this, Neri,’ she said, and caught my hand. I turned and looked into her eyes, whose deep earnest gaze remains with me yet. We clasped hands, and so parted.

“Well, when she came back to Florence she began to lose her spirit. Money matters worried her, I fancy, though she would never trouble me with them. Then her husband accidentally found and began to trouble her, threatening that unless she went back to live with him he would take the boy (now nearly seven years old) from her. She sent the child to her people in Switzerland. ‘It would so much simplify matters if I were to die,’ she wrote me once. ‘My people would never let him go then; and my husband could urge me no longer. The struggle is too great. Only I do not want you to have to make the post mortem on me when I have said good-bye to this life: it would be too painful for you.’ Still I did not think she would ever really commit suicide; not because she had any fear of death, but because I knew she looked on the proceeding as cowardly; and also because she had a power of the most intense enjoyment and interest in all the beauties of life, whether physical or intellectual. Hers was the most elastic nature I have known. I said what one could say, and it’s precious little, in such circumstances: and she seemed to recover tone.

“Then I left Florence for nearly a month. I was obliged to return unexpectedly to the hospital; and was just leaving it to call upon her when I was told there was a post-mortem waiting for me. I went into the room. It was she; lying there on the table…

“Well, I got through somehow. It did not take very long, for I knew her well enough to guess what she had used, and had only to verify a suspicion. And while I was working it seemed as though she were looking at me, looking at me with a pitifully pleading look as though supplicating forgiveness for the horror of my position. I remember I kept her covered as religiously as though she had been alive; and I remember I arranged everything when all was over and carried her in my own arms to the bier which was to take her away. Then, I believe, Paoletti found me, got me into a cab, and drove me home in a high fever. The second evening I came to myself. I was without fever and fell quietly asleep. Towards morning I awoke. She was there standing by my bed with the same pitifully pleading expression I had felt in the hospital. She caressed my cheek, then bent over me and touched my lips.

“Oh yes, I know. Optical hallucination, subjective sensation, and all the rest of it. Hallucination; subjective as much as you like; but I saw her; and I feel her about me now just as plainly as I felt her then. I suppose the impression will fade as time goes on. I may take a wife and have children as other men do. Still (with a repetition of the little nervous laugh) it has not begun to fade yet; and I feel as though I should see her once more: on my death bed.”

✴✴✴✴✴

“Decidedly,” said Conti, breaking the silence. “Nature’s irony is more scathing than man’s. It is just Neri, – Neri who never philandered, who never sentimentalised, who would have nothing to do with what was not downright brutally real – it is just Neri whom the Fates have wedded to a phantom bride.”

“Come,” said Neri, shaking himself, “it’s nearly dark; we can see neither dome nor bell-tower any longer. Shall we go to the Arena? Tina di Lorenzo is acting. And then we will finish up at the Gambrinus Halle.”

CYPRESSES AND OLIVES: AN INTERLUDE

Amice, quisquis es, dummodo honestum, vitae taedet.

The road was parched and burning. I was sad, so sad, at my heart’s heart. The sun seemed to laugh me to scorn, and the passers to sneer as they went by. My soul was sore, sore to its inmost fibres, and I hated the very beauty of Nature.

So I turned aside among the cypresses. They will calm me, I thought. Their whisperings are so grave. They flaunt not their joy at the sun’s kisses, like the shameless trees along the roadside. They keep their hearts unmoved in sun and in storm; they are the true stoics of Nature. And their calm is sympathetic; it comes not of a soul immovable; it comes of strength in trial.

And the cypresses wrapped me round in their scent – the grave, penetrating odour in which the battered spirit folds its wings to rest, and the heart-beats grow quieter, and the brow smooths itself out in peace. In long, long lines they stretched away before me, and I walked under their guidance, conversing with them familiarly, searching the height and depth of their thoughts. And I was no longer sore with my fellow-men. I could tolerate the thought of the flaunting trees and flowers, of the exuberant life evermore renewing itself away out there along the road I had left. But still I walked among the cypresses, and with them I held communion.

And lo! they took leave of me. At the edge of a grassy path they left me. And beyond the path I saw freshly-ploughed brown earth, and the quiver and strain of a yoke of white oxen as they pulled the plough through some harder spot; and two workers with brown aprons, arms and faces like glowing bronze, and soft felt hats weather-stained into harmony with the earth and the tree-trunks. They bent to their labour; and the soil laid bare its breast, rich in promise, before their eyes; and the vines around whose roots the plough passed encompassed them with luxuriant clusters, purple and white; and the olives bent close down around their heads, embowering them under a low roof of silver. So I passed through the toil of those workers, toil calm and regular, blest in its fulfilling and in its ending; and I carried in my heart the picture of those bending men, the slow-moving oxen, the rich soil and the embracing trees.

Suddenly a spell was woven round me; a spell as of moonbeams. I was in a wood of olive trees. Their sharp, narrow leaves, of a sheen like frosted silver, pointed with rigid grace into the luminous grey of the sky. No shadow, no darker spot of black or green fruit broke the wondrous diffused splendour. The very branches, as they spread and bent outwards from the low trunks, had softened the harshness of their scaly bark and were as softly radiant as the foliage and the sky above them. Only the trunks and the under-sides of the branches were in shadow; rugged and brown, they were like a rough shell which had opened to give life to an Aphrodite of new and chastened beauty. No flowers jarred with bright tints the harmonious hush of colour; but here and there delicate campions raised slender stems that bent with the weight of grey-green calyx and pallid, wide-eyed blossom.

And I walked, in the exquisite suavity of the wood. Surely, I thought, the moonbeams have become tangible. Surely I am in an enchanted land and should meet its mistress; a maiden slim and grave, with wealth of olive-black hair, with deep dark eyes, with clinging gown of grey girdled with a zone of cold blue-green. How sweet to stay here for ever with soul attuned to the melody that mutely breathes from the living silver of boughs and leaves, and falls graciously from the pearl-like sky.

But onward and ever onward must I go; and the olives left me as the cypresses had done.

They left me at the edge of the highway; and I passed out again into the glare of the sunshine, the gaze of the passers, the laughter, the bustle, the pushing, on the parched and burning road.

And behold! a change had come over my soul. The stoicism of the cypresses, the calm of the toilers, the suave quiet strength of that harmonious olive wood – these things had permeated the fibres of my being. The indifference of the passers-by found no way open to my heart; the unheeding joy of trees and flowers no longer jarred me. I was clothed upon with a vesture woven of the enduring calm that broods ever at the unchanging heart of Nature; like armour it encompassed me about, and I possessed my soul in peace.