Ah, those evenings at Lady Giblet’s—I never miss a single one if I can help it. The vulgarity, ignorance and stupidity of the hostess, the incredible second-rateness of her mangy lions—these are surely unique. And then those camp-followers of the arts, those delicious Bohemians who regard their ability to appreciate the paintings of the cubists and the music of Stravinsky as a sufficient justification for helping themselves freely to one another’s wives—nowhere can you see such brilliant specimens of the type as at Lady Giblet’s. And the conversations one hears within those marble halls—nowhere, surely, are pretensions separated from justifying facts by a vaster gulf. Nowhere can you hear the ignorant, the illogical, the incapable of thought talking so glibly about things of which they have not the slightest understanding. And then you should hear them boasting parenthetically, as they express an imbecile’s incoherent opinion, of their own clear-headedness, their modern outlook, their ruthless scientific intelligence. Surely you can find nothing so perfect in its kind as at Lady Giblet’s—I at least know of nothing more complete. At Mrs. Aldwinkle’s one might very likely hear a serious conversation; never by any chance in the salon of my choice.
But that morning in the blue Tyrrhenian was the last of my life to be passed beyond the pale of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s acquaintanceship; it was also as nearly as possible the first of my future life. Fate seemed that morning to be in doubt whether to extinguish me completely or merely to make me acquainted with Mrs. Aldwinkle. Fortunately, as I like to think, it chose the latter alternative. But I anticipate.
I first saw Mrs. Aldwinkle on this particular morning without knowing who she was. From where I was lying on my mattress of blue brine I noticed a heavily laden patino bearing slowly down upon me from the shore. Perched high on the rower’s bench a tall young man was toiling languidly at the oars. His back against the bench, his hairy legs stretched out along the prow of one of the pontoons, sat a thick-set oldish man with a red face and short white hair. The bow of the other pontoon accommodated two women. The elder and larger of them sat in front, trailing her legs in the water; she was dressed in a kilted bathing costume of flame-coloured silk and her hair was tied up in a pink bandana handkerchief. Immediately behind her there squatted, her knees drawn up to her chin, a very youthful slender little creature in a black maillot.
In one of her hands she held a green parasol with which she kept off the sunlight from her elder companion. Within the cylinder of greenish shadow the pink and flame-coloured lady, whom I afterwards learnt to be Mrs. Aldwinkle herself, looked like a Chinese lantern lighted in a conservatory; and when an accidental movement of the young girl’s umbrella allowed the sunlight for a moment to touch her face, one could imagine that the miracle of the raising of Lazarus was being performed before one’s eyes—for the green and corpse-like hue suddenly left the features, the colours of health, a little inflamed by the reflections from the bathing dress, seemed to rush back. The dead lived. But only for an instant; for the solicitous care of the young girl soon reversed the miracle. The sunshade swung back into position, the penumbra of the greenhouse enveloped the glowing lamp and the living face once more became ghastly, as though it belonged to some one who had lain for three days in the tomb.
At the stern, seen clearly only when the ponderous boat was already beginning to pass me, sat another young woman with a pale face and large dark eyes. A tendril of almost black hair escaped from under her bathing cap and fell, like a curling whisker, down her cheek. A handsome young man with a brown face and brown muscular arms and legs sprawled along the stern of the other pontoon, smoking a cigarette.
The voices that faintly came to me from the approaching boat sounded, somehow, more familiar than those I had heard from other patini. I became aware, all at once, that they were speaking English.
‘The clouds,’ I heard the old red-faced gentleman saying (he had just turned round, in obedience to a gesture from the Chinese lantern in the conservatory, to look at the piled-up masses of vapour that hung like another fantastic range above the real mountains), ‘the clouds you so much admire are only made possible by the earth’s excrementitious dust hanging in the air. There are thousands of particles to every cubic centimetre. The water vapour condenses round them in droplets sufficiently large to be visible. Hence the clouds—marvellous and celestial shapes, but with a core of dust. What a symbol of human idealism!’ The melodious voice grew louder and louder as the young man dipped and dipped his oars. ‘Earthy particles transfigured into heavenly forms. The heavenly forms are not self-existent, not absolute. Dust writes these vast characters across the sky.’
Preserve me, I thought. Did I come to Marina di Vezza to listen to this sort of thing?
In a voice loud but indistinct, and strangely unmusical, the Chinese lantern lady began to quote Shelley, incorrectly. ‘ “From peak to peak in a bridge-like . . .” ’ she began, and relapsed into silence, clawing the air in search of the synonym for shape which ought to rhyme with peak. ‘ “Over a something sea.” I think The Cloud is almost the loveliest of all. It’s wonderful to think that Shelley sailed in this sea. And that he was burnt only a little way off, down there.’ She pointed down the coast to where, behind the haze, the interminable sea-front of Viareggio stretched away mile after mile. Faintly now one might discern the ghost of its nearest outskirts. But at evening it would emerge; clear and sharp in the sloping light, as though they had been cut from gems, Palace and Grande Bretagne, Europe (già Aquila Nera) and Savoia would twinkle there, majestic toys, among the innumerable lesser inns and boarding-houses, reduced at this distance to an exquisite loveliness and so pathetically small and delicate that one could almost have wept over them.
At this very moment, on the other side of the curtain of haze, a hundred thousand bathers were thronging the empty beaches where Shelley’s body had been committed to the fire. The pinewoods in which, riding out from Pisa, he hunted lovely thoughts through the silence and the fragrant shadows teemed now with life. Unnumbered country copulatives roamed at this moment through those glades. . . . And so forth. Style pours out of my fountain pen. In every drachm of blue-black ink a thousand mots justes are implicit, like the future characteristics of a man in a piece of chromosome. I apologize.
Youth, then, at the prow and pleasure at the helm—and the flesh was so glossy under the noonday sun, the colours so blazingly bright, that I was really reminded of Etty’s little ravishment—the laden boat passed slowly within a few yards of me. Stretched like a live cross on my mattress of brine I looked at them languidly through half-closed eyes. They looked at me; a blank incuriosity was on their faces—for a glimpse only, then they averted their eyes as though I had been one of those exhausted frogs one sees, after the breeding season, floating belly upwards on the surface of a pond. And yet I was what is technically known as an immortal soul. It struck me that it would have been more reasonable if they had stopped their boat and hailed me across the water. ‘Good morning, stranger. How goes your soul? And what shall we do to be saved?’ But on the other hand, our habit of regarding strangers as being nothing more to us than exhausted frogs probably saves a good deal of trouble.
‘From cape to cape,’ emended the red-faced gentleman, as they receded from me.
And very diffidently, in a soft shy voice, the solicitous young creature suggested that the something sea was a torrent sea.
‘Whatever vat may be,’ said the young rower, whose exertions under the broiling sun entitled him to take the professionally nautical, commonsense view about the matter.
‘But it’s obvious what it is,’ said the Chinese lantern lady, rather contemptuously. The young man at the stern threw away his cigarette and started meditatively whistling the tune of ‘Deh, vieni alla finestra’ from Don Giovanni.
There was a silence; the boat receded, stroke after stroke. The last words I heard were uttered, drawlingly and in a rather childish voice, by the young woman in the stern. ‘I wish I could get brown more quickly,’ she said, lifting one foot out of the water and looking at the white bare leg. ‘One might have been living in a cellar. Such a dreadfully unwholesome
