Concetta paid no attention to him. She was used to this sort of thing.
‘The mercy of God,’ she began, shaking her head, ‘where should we be without it? You are young, signorino. You still have time to do much. God has preserved you. I am old. But I lean on the cross.’ And straightening herself up, she lifted her staff. A cross-piece of wood had been nailed near the top of it. Affectionately she kissed it. ‘I love the cross,’ she said. ‘The cross is beautiful, the cross is . . .’ But she was interrupted by a young nurserymaid who came running up to ask for half a kilo of the best grapes. Theology could not be allowed to interfere with business. Concetta took out her little steelyard, put a bunch of grapes in the pan and moved the weight back and forth along the bar in search of equilibrium. The nurserymaid stood by. She had a round face, red cheeks, dimples, black hair and eyes like black buttons. She was as plump as a fruit. The young giant looked up at her in frank admiration. She rolled the buttons towards him—for an instant, then utterly ignored him, and humming nonchalantly to herself as though she were alone on a desert island and wanted to keep her spirits up, she gazed pensively away at the picturesque beauties of nature.
‘Six hundred grammes,’ said Concetta.
The nurserymaid paid for them, and still humming, still on her desert island, she walked off, taking very small steps, undulating rotundly, like a moon among wind-driven clouds. The young giant stopped rubbing my feet and stared after her. With the moon’s beauty and the moon’s soft pace the nurserymaid tottered along, undulating unsteadily on her high heels across the sand.
Rabear, I thought: old Skeat was perfectly right to translate the word as he did.
‘Bella grassa,’ said the doctor, voicing what were obviously the young giant’s sentiments. Mine too; for after all, she was alive, obeyed the laws of her nature, walked in the sun, ate grapes and rabear’d. I shut my eyes again. Pulse, pulse, pulse; the heart beat steadily under my fingers. I felt like Adam, newly created and weak like a butterfly fresh from its chrysalis—the red clay still too wet and limp to allow of my standing upright. But soon, when it had dried to firmness, I should arise and scamper joyously about this span new world, and be myself a young giant, a graceful and majestic thoroughbred, a child, a wondering Bedlamite.
There are some people who contrive to pass their lives in a state of permanent convalescence. They behave at every moment as though they had been miraculously preserved from death the moment before; they live exhilaratedly for the mere sake of living and can be intoxicated with happiness just because they happen not to be dead. For those not born convalescent it may be that the secret of happiness consists in being half-drowned regularly three times a day before meals. I recommend it as a more drastic alternative to my ‘water-shoot-in-every-office’ remedy for ennui.
‘You’re alone here?’ asked the doctor.
I nodded.
‘No relations?’
‘Not at present.’
‘No friends of any kind?’
I shook my head.
‘H’m,’ he said.
He had a wart growing on one side of his nose where it joined the cheek. I found myself studying it intently; it was a most interesting wart, whitish, but a little flushed on its upper surface. It looked like a small unripe cherry. ‘Do you like cherries?’ I asked.
The doctor seemed rather surprised. ‘Yes,’ he said, after a moment’s silence and with great deliberation, as though he had been carefully weighing the matter in his mind.
‘So do I.’ And I burst out laughing. This time, however, my breathing triumphantly stood the strain. ‘So do I. But not unripe ones,’ I added, gasping with mirth. It seemed to me that nothing funnier had ever been said.
And then Mrs. Aldwinkle stepped definitely into my life. For, looking round, still heaving with the after-swell of my storm of laughter, I suddenly saw the Chinese lantern lady of the patino standing before me. Her flame-coloured costume, a little less radiant now that it was wet, still shone among the aquarium shadows of her green parasol, and her face looked as though it were she who had been drowned, not I.
‘They tell me that you’re an Englishman,’ she said in the same ill-controlled, unmusical voice I had heard, not long since, misquoting Shelley.
Still tipsy, still light-headed with convalescence, I laughingly admitted it.
‘I hear you were nearly drowned.’
‘Quite right,’ I said, still laughing; it was such a marvellous joke.
‘I’m most sorry to hear . . .’ She had a way of leaving her sentences unfinished. The words would tail off into a dim inarticulate blur of sound.
‘Don’t mention it,’ I begged her. ‘It isn’t at all disagreeable, you know. Afterwards, at any rate . . .’ I stared at her affectionately and with my convalescent’s boundless curiosity. She stared back at me. Her eyes, I thought, must have the same bulge as those little red lenses one screws to the rear forks of bicycles; they collected all the light diffused around them and reflected it again with a concentrated glitter.
‘I came to ask whether I could be of any assistance,’ said the Chinese lantern lady.
‘Most kind.’
‘You’re alone here?’
‘Quite, for the present.’
‘Then perhaps you might care to come and stay a night or two at my house, until you’re entirely . . .’ She mumbled, made a gesture that implied the missing word and went on. ‘I have a house over there.’ She waved her hand in the direction of the mountainous section of the Shelleian landscape.
Gleefully, in my tipsy mood, I accepted her invitation. ‘Too delightful,’ I said. Everything, this morning, was too delightful. I should have accepted with genuine, unmixed pleasure an invitation to stay with Miss Carruthers or Mr. Brimstone.
‘And your name?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know that yet.’
‘Chelifer.’
‘Chelifer? Not Francis Chelifer?’
‘Francis Chelifer,’ I affirmed.
‘Francis Chelifer!’ Positively, her soul was in my name. ‘But how wonderful! I’ve wanted to meet you for years.’
For the first time since I had risen intoxicated from the dead I had an awful premonition of to-morrow’s sobriety. I remembered for the first time that round the corner, only just round the corner, lay the real world.
‘And what’s your name?’ I asked apprehensively.
‘Lilian Aldwinkle,’ said the Chinese lantern lady; and she shaped her lips into a smile that was positively piercing in its sweetness. The blue lamps that were her eyes glittered with such a focussed intensity that even the colour-blind chauffeurs who see green omnibuses rolling down Piccadilly and in the Green Park blood-coloured grass and vermilion trees would have known them for the danger signals they were.
An hour later I was reclining on cushions in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s Rolls-Royce. There was no escape.
CHAPTER VII
No escape. . . . But I was still tipsy enough not seriously to desire escape. My premonition of sobriety had been no more than a momentary flash. It came and it passed again, almost immediately, as I became once more absorbed in what seemed to me the endless and lovely comedy that was being acted all around me. It was enough for me that I existed and that things were happening to me. I was carried by two or three young giants to the hotel, I was dressed, my clothes were packed for me. In the entrance hall, while I was waiting for Mrs. Aldwinkle to come and fetch me, I made some essays at walking; the feebleness of my legs was a source to me of delighted laughter.
Dressed in pale yellow tussore with a large straw hat on her head, Mrs. Aldwinkle finally appeared. Her guests, she explained, had gone home in another machine; I should be able to lie flat, or very nearly, in her empty car. And in case I felt bad—she shook a silver brandy flask at me. Escape? I did not so much as think of it, I was enchanted.
Luxuriously I reclined among the cushions. Mrs. Aldwinkle tapped the forward-looking window. The chauffeur languidly moved his hand and the machine rolled forward, nosing its way through the crowd of admiring car-fanciers which, in Italy, collects as though by magic round every stationary automobile. And Mrs. Aldwinkle’s was a particularly attractive specimen. Young men called to their friends: ‘Venite. È una Ro-Ro.’ And in awed voices little boys whispered to one another: ‘Una Ro-Ro.’ The crowd reluctantly dispersed before our advance; we glided away from before the Grand Hotel, turned into the main street, crossed the piazza, in the centre of which, stranded high and dry by the receding sea, stood the little pink fort which had been built by the Princes of Massa Carrara to keep watch on a Mediterranean made dangerous by Barbary pirates, and rolled out of the village by the road leading across the plain towards the mountains.
Shuffling along in a slowly moving cloud of dust, a train of white oxen advanced, shambling and zig-zagging along the road to meet us. Eight yoke of them there were, a long procession, with half a dozen drivers shouting and tugging at the leading ropes and cracking their whips. They were dragging a low truck, clamped to which was a huge monolith of flawless white marble. Uneasily, as we crawled past them, the animals shook
