Mrs. Aldwinkle pointed at the monolith. ‘Imagine what Michelangelo could have made out of that,’ she said. Then, noticing that her pointing hand still grasped the silver flask, she became very solicitous. ‘You’re sure you wouldn’t like a sip of this?’ she asked, leaning forward. The twin blue danger signals glittered in my face. Her garments exhaled a scent in which there was ambergris. Her breath smelt of heliotrope cachous. But even now I did not take fright; I made no effort to escape. Guided by their invincible stupidity, the white oxen had behaved more sensibly than I.
We rolled on. The hills came nearer. The far-away peaks of bare limestone were hidden by the glowing mass of the tilled and wooded foot-hills. Happily I looked at those huge hilly forms. ‘How beautiful!’ I said. Mrs. Aldwinkle seemed to take my words as a personal compliment.
‘I’m so glad you think so. So awfully . . .’ she replied in the tone of an author to whom you have just said that you enjoyed his last book so much.
We drew nearer; the hills towered up, they opposed themselves like a huge wall. But the barrier parted before us; we passed through the gates of a valley that wound up into the mountain. Our road now ran parallel with the bed of a torrent. In the flanks of the hill to our right a marble quarry made a huge bare scar, hundreds of feet long. The crest of the hill was fringed with a growth of umbrella pines. The straight slender tree trunks jetted up thirty feet without a branch; their wide-spreading flattened domes of foliage formed a thin continuous silhouette, between which and the dark mass of the hill one could see a band of sky, thinly barred by the bare stems. It was as though, to emphasize the outlines of his hills, an artist had drawn a fine and supple brush stroke parallel with the edge of the silhouette and a little apart from it.
We rolled on. The high road narrowed into the squalid street of a little town. The car crept along, hooting as it went.
‘Vezza,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle explained. ‘Michelangelo used to come here for his marbles.’
‘Indeed?’ I was charmed to hear it.
Over the windows of a large shop filled with white crosses, broken columns and statues, I read the legend: ‘Anglo-American Tombstone Company.’ We emerged from the narrow street on to an embankment running along the edge of a river. From the opposite bank the ground rose steeply.
‘There,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle on a note of triumph as we crossed the bridge, ‘that’s my house.’ She pointed up. From the hill-top a long façade stared down through twenty windows; a tall tower pricked the sky. ‘The palace was built in 1630,’ she began. I even enjoyed the history lesson.
We had crossed the bridge, we were climbing by a steep and winding road through what was almost a forest of olive trees. The abrupt grassy slope had been built up into innumerable little terraces on which the trees were planted. Here and there, in the grey luminous shadow beneath the trees, little flocks of sheep were grazing. The barefooted children who attended them came running to the side of the road to watch us passing.
‘I like to think of these old princely courts,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying. ‘Like abbeys of . . . abbeys of . . .’ She shook her brandy flask impatiently. ‘You know . . . in Thingumy.’
‘Abbeys of Thelema,’ I suggested.
‘That’s it,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘Sort of retiring-places where people were free to live intelligently. That’s what I want to make this house. I’m so delighted to have met you like this. You’re exactly the sort of person I want.’ She leaned forward, smiling and glittering. But even at the prospect of entering the Abbey of Thelema I did not blench.
At this moment the car passed through a huge gateway. I caught a glimpse of a great flight of steps, set between cypresses, mounting up past a series of terraced landings to a carved doorway in the centre of the long façade. The road turned, the car swung round and the vista was closed. By an ilex avenue that wound round the flank of the hill we climbed more gradually towards the house, which we approached from the side. The road landed us finally in a large square court opposite a shorter reproduction of the great façade. At the head of a double flight of steps, curving horse-shoe fashion from the landing at its threshold, a tall pompous doorway surmounted by a coat of arms cavernously invited. The car drew up.
And about time too, as I notice on re-reading what I have written. Few things are more profoundly boring and unprofitable than literary descriptions. For the writer, it is true, there is a certain amusement to be derived from the hunt for apt expressive words. Carried away by the excitement of the chase he dashes on, regardless of the poor readers who follow toilsomely through his stiff and clayey pages like the runners at the tail of a hunt, seeing nothing of the fun. All writers are also readers—though perhaps I should make exceptions in favour of a few of my colleagues who make a speciality of native wood-notes—and must therefore know how dreary description is. But that does not prevent them from inflicting upon others all that they themselves have suffered. Indeed I sometimes think that some authors must write as they do purely out of a desire for revenge.
Mrs. Aldwinkle’s other guests had arrived and were waiting for us. I was introduced and found them all equally charming. The little niece rushed to Mrs. Aldwinkle’s assistance; the young man who had rowed the patino rushed in his turn to the little niece’s and insisted on carrying all the things of which she had relieved her aunt. The old man with the red face, who had talked about the clouds, looked on benevolently at this little scene. But another elderly gentleman with a white beard, whom I had not seen before, seemed to view it with a certain disapproval. The young lady who had talked about the whiteness of her legs and who turned out to be my distinguished colleague, Miss Mary Thriplow, was now dressed in a little green frock with a white turned-down collar, white cuffs and buttons, which made her look like a schoolgirl in a comic opera by Offenbach. The brown young man stood near her.
I got out of the car, refused all proffered assistance and contrived, a little wamblingly, it is true, to mount the steps.
‘You must be very careful for a little,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle with a maternal solicitude. ‘These,’ she added, waving her hand in the direction of a vista of empty saloons, the entrance to which we were just then passing, ‘these are the apartments of the Princesses.’
We walked right through the house into a great quadrangle surrounded on three sides by buildings and on the fourth, towards the rising hill, by an arcade. On a pedestal in the centre of the court stood a more than life-sized marble statue, representing, my hostess informed me, the penultimate Prince of Massa Carrara, wearing a very curly full-bottomed wig, Roman kilts, buskins, and one of those handsome classical breastplates which have the head of a Gorgon embossed in the middle of the chest and a little dimple to indicate the position of the navel in the middle of the round and polished belly. With the expression of one who is about to reveal a delightful secret and who can hardly wait until the moment of revelation comes to give vent to his pleasure, Mrs. Aldwinkle, smiling as it were below the surface of her face, led me to the foot of the statue. ‘Look!’ she said. It was one of those pretty peep-shows on which, for the sake of five minutes’ amusement and titillation of the eye, Grand Monarchs used to spend the value of a rich province. From the central arch of the arcade a flight of marble steps climbed up to where, set against a semi-circle of cypresses, at the crest of the hill, a little round temple played gracefully at paganism, just as the buskined and corseleted statue in the court below played heroically at Plutarch.
‘And now look here!’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle; and taking me round to the other side of the statue, she led me towards a great door in the centre of the long range of buildings opposite the arcade. It was open; a vaulted corridor, like a tunnel, led clean through the house. Through it I could see the blue sky and the remote horizon of the sea. We walked along it; from the further threshold I found myself looking down the flight of steps which I had seen from below, at the entrance gate. It was a stage scene, but made of solid marble and with growing trees.
‘What do you think of that?’ asked Mrs. Aldwinkle.
‘Magnificent,’ I answered, with an enthusiasm that was beginning to be tempered by a growing physical weariness.
‘Such a view,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, poking at it with the tip of her sunshade. ‘The contrast between
