«Good morning,» replied Mr. Topes, allowing his hand to be shaken. He resented this interruption of his thoughts.
«She swims very well, Miss Buzzacott.»
«Very,» assented Mr. Topes, and smiled to himself to think what beautiful, poetical things he might have said, if he had chosen.
«Well, so, so,» said the marquis, too colloquial by half. He shook hands again, and the two men went their respective ways.
Barbara was still a hundred yards from the shore when she heard the crescendo and dying boom of the gong floating out from the villa. Damn! she’d be late again. She quickened her stroke and came splashing out through the shallows, flushed and breathless.
She’d be ten minutes late, she calculated; it would take her at least that to do her hair and dress. Mrs. Topes would be on the war-path again; though what business that old woman had to lecture her as she did, goodness only knew. She always succeeded in making herself horribly offensive and unpleasant.
The beach was quite deserted as she trotted, panting, across it, empty to right and left as far as she could see. If only she had a horse to go galloping at the water’s edge, miles and miles. Right away down to Bocca d’Arno she’d go, swim the river—she saw herself crouching on the horse’s back, as he swam, with legs tucked up on the saddle, trying not to get her feet wet—and gallop on again, goodness only knew where.
In front of the cabin she suddenly halted. There in the ruffled sand she had seen a writing. Big letters, faintly legible, sprawled across her path.
O CLARA D’ELLÉBEUSE.
She pieced the dim letters together. They hadn’t been there when she started out to bathe. Who?… She looked round. The beach was quite empty. And what was the meaning? «O Clara d’Ellébeuse.» She took her bath-gown from the cabin, slipped on her sandals, and ran back towards the house as fast as she could. She felt most horribly frightened.
It was a sultry, headachey sort of morning, with a hot sirocco that stirred the bunting on the flagstaffs.
By midday the thunderclouds had covered half the sky. The sun still blazed on the sea, but over the mountains all was black and indigo. The storm broke noisily overhead just as they were drinking their after-luncheon coffee.
«Arthur,» said Mrs. Topes, painfully calm, «shut the shutters, please.»
She was not frightened, no. But she preferred not to see the lightning. When the room was darkened, she began to talk, suavely and incessantly.
Lying back in her deep arm-chair, Barbara was thinking of Clara d’Ellébeuse. What did it mean and who was Clara d’Ellébeuse? And why had he written it there for her to see? He—for there could be no doubt who had written it. The flash of teeth and eyes, the military salute; she knew she oughtn’t to have waved to him. He had written it there while she was swimming out. Written it and then run away. She rather liked that—just an extraordinary word on the sand, like the footprint in Robinson Crusoe.
«Personally,» Mrs. Topes was saying, «I prefer Harrod’s.»
The thunder crashed and rattled. It was rather exhilarating, Barbara thought; one felt, at any rate, that something was happening for a change. She remembered the little room half-way up the stairs at Lady Thingumy’s house, with the bookshelves and the green curtains and the orange shade on the light; and that awful young man like a white slug who had tried to kiss her there, at the dance last year. But that was different—not at all serious; and the young man had been so horribly ugly.
She saw the marquis running up the beach, quick and alert. Copper coloured all over, with black hair. He was certainly very handsome. But as for being in love, well … what did that exactly mean? Perhaps when she knew him better. Even now she fancied she detected something. O Clara d’Ellébeuse. What an extraordinary thing it was.
With his long fingers Mr. Buzzacott combed his beard. This winter, he was thinking, he would put another thousand into Italian money when the exchange was favourable. In the spring it always seemed to drop back again. One could clear three hundred pounds on one’s capital if the exchange went down to seventy.
The income on three hundred was fifteen pounds a year, and fifteen pounds was now fifteen hundred lire. And fifteen hundred lire, when you came to think of it, was really sixty pounds. That was to say that one would make an addition of more than one pound a week to one’s income by this simple little speculation. He became aware that Mrs. Topes had asked him a question.
«Yes, yes, perfectly,» he said.
Mrs. Topes talked on; she was keeping up her morale. Was she right in believing that the thunder sounded a little less alarmingly loud and near?
Mr. Topes sat, polishing his spectacles with a white silk handkerchief. Vague and myopic between their puckered lids, his eyes seemed lost, homeless, unhappy. He was thinking about beauty. There were certain relations between the eyelids and the temples, between the breast and the shoulder; there were certain successions of sounds. But what about them? Ah, that was the problem—that was the problem. And there was youth, there was innocence.
But it was all very obscure, and there were so many phrases, so many remembered pictures and melodies; he seemed to get himself entangled among them. And he was after all so old and so ineffective. He put on his spectacles again, and definition came into the foggy world beyond his eyes.
The shuttered room was very dark. He could distinguish the Renaissance profile of Mr. Buzzacott, bearded and delicately featured. In her deep arm-chair Barbara appeared, faintly white, in an attitude relaxed and brooding. And Mrs. Topes was nothing more than a voice in the darkness. She had got on to the marriage of the Prince of Wales. Who would they eventually find for him?
Clara d’Ellébeuse, Clara d’Ellébeuse. She saw herself so clearly as the marchesa. They would have a house in Rome, a palace. She saw herself in the Palazzo Spada—it had such a lovely vaulted passage leading from the courtyard to the gardens at the back. «MARCHESA PRAMPOLINI, PALAZZO SPADA, ROMA»—a great big visiting-card beautifully engraved. And she would go riding every day in the Pincio. «Mi porta il mio cavallo» she would say to the footman, who answered the bell.
Porta? Would that be quite correct? Hardly. She’d have to take some proper Italian lessons to talk to the servants. One must never be ridiculous before servants. «Voglio il mio cavallo. Haughtily one would say it sitting at one’s writing-table in a riding-habit, without turning round. It would be a green riding-habit, with a black tricorne hat, braided with silver.
«Prendero la mia collazzione al letto.» Was that right for breakfast in bed? Because she would have breakfast in bed, always. And when she got up there would be lovely looking glasses with three panels where one could see oneself sideface. She saw herself leaning forward, powdering her nose, carefully, scientifically. With the monkey creeping up behind? Ooh. Horrible! Ho paura di questa scimmia, questo scimmione.
She would come back to lunch after her ride. Perhaps Prampolini would be there; she had rather left him out of the picture so far. «Dov’ è il Marchese?» «Nella sala di pranza, signora.» I began without you, I was so hungry. Pasta asciutta. Where have you been, my love? Riding, my dove. She supposed they’d get into the habit of saying that sort of thing. Everyone seemed to. And you? I have been out with the Fascisti.
Oh, these Fascisti! Would life be worth living when he was always going out with pistols and bombs and things? They would bring him back one day on a stretcher. She saw it. Pale, pale, with blood on him. Il signore è ferito. Nel petto. Gruvamente. E morto.
How could she bear it? It was too awful; too, too terrible. Her breath came in a kind of sob; she shuddered as though she had been hurt. E morto, E morto. The tears came into her eyes.
She was roused suddenly by a dazzling light. The storm had receded far enough into the distance to permit of Mrs. Topes’s opening the shutters.
«It’s quite stopped raining.»
To be disturbed in one’s intimate sorrow and self-abandonment at a death-bed by a stranger’s intrusion, an alien voice…. Barbara turned her face away from the light and surreptitiously wiped her eyes. They might see and ask her why she had been crying. She hated Mrs. Topes for opening the shutters; at the inrush of the light something beautiful had flown, an emotion had vanished, irrecoverably. It was a sacrilege.
Mr. Buzzacott looked at his watch. «Too late, I fear, for a siesta now,» he said. «Suppose we ring for an early tea.»
«An endless succession of meals,» said Mr. Topes, with a tremolo and a sigh. «That’s what life seems to be—real life.»
«I have been calculating»—Mr. Buzzacott turned his pale green eyes towards his guest—»that I may be able to afford that pretty little cinque cassone, after all. It would be a bit of a squeeze.» He played with his beard. «But still….»
After tea, Barbara and Mr. Topes went for a walk along the beach. She didn’t much want to go, but Mrs. Topes thought it would be good for her; so she had to. The storm had passed and the sky over the sea was clear. But the waves were still breaking with an incessant clamour on the outer shallows, driving wide sheets of water high up the beach, twenty or thirty yards
