On the north shore Lord Hovenden asked again. Cortona and Montepulciano presided at the asking.
‘I don’t see why I should be bullied,’ said Irene. Lord Hovenden found the answer more promising than those which had gone before.
‘But you’re not being bullied.’
‘I am,’ she insisted. ‘You’re trying to force me to answer all at once, without thinking.’
‘Now really,’ said Hovenden, ‘I call vat a bit fick. Forcing you to answer all at once! But vat’s exactly what I’m not doing. I’m giving you time. We’ll go round ve lake all night, if you like.’
A quarter of a mile from the forking of the road, he put the question yet once more.
‘You’re a beast,’ said Irene.
‘Vat’s not an answer.’
‘I don’t want to answer.’
‘You needn’t answer definitely if you don’t want to,’ he conceded. ‘I only want you to say vat you’ll fink of it. Just say perhaps.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Irene insisted. They were very close, now, to the dividing of ways.
‘Just perhaps. Just say you’ll fink of it.’
‘Well, I’ll think,’ said Irene. ‘But mind, it doesn’t commit . . .’
She did not finish her sentence; for the car, which had been heading towards the left, swerved suddenly to the right with such violence that Irene had to clutch at the arm of her seat to prevent herself from being thrown sideways bodily out of the machine. ‘Goodness!’
‘It’s all right,’ said Lord Hovenden. They were running smoothly now along the right-hand road. Ten minutes later, from the crest of a little pass, they saw Perugia on its mountain, glittering in the sunlight. They found, when they reached the hotel, that the rest of the party had long since arrived.
‘We took ve wrong turning,’ Lord Hovenden explained. ‘By ve way,’ he added, turning to Mr. Cardan, ‘about vat lake we passed—wasn’t it Hannibal or some one . . .’
‘Such a lot of lakes,’ Miss Elver was telling Mrs. Chelifer. ‘Such a lot!’
‘Only one, surely, my dear,’ Mrs. Chelifer mildly insisted.
But Miss Elver wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Lots and lots.’
Mrs. Chelifer sighed compassionately.
Before dinner Irene and Lord Hovenden went for a stroll in the town. The huge stone palaces lowered down at them as they passed. The sun was so low that only their highest windows, their roofs and cornices took the light. The world’s grey shadow was creeping up their flanks; but their crests were tipped with coral and ruddy gold.
‘I like vis place,’ said Lord Hovenden. In the circumstances he would have liked Wigan or Pittsburg.
‘So do I,’ said Irene. Through the window in her thick hair her face looked smiling out, merry in its childishness.
Leaving the stately part of the town, they plunged into the labyrinth of steep alleys, of winding passage-ways and staircases behind the cathedral. Built confusedly on the hill-side, the tall houses seemed to grow into one another, as though they were the component parts of one immense and fantastical building, in which the alleys served as corridors. The road would burrow through the houses in a long dark tunnel, to widen out into a little well-like courtyard, open to the sky. Through open doors, at the head of an outside staircase, one saw in the bright electric light a family sitting round the soup tureen. The road turned into a flight of stairs, dipped into another tunnel, made cheerful by the lights of a subterranean wine shop opening into it. From the mouth of the bright cavern came up the smell of liquor, the sound of loud voices and reverberated laughter.
And then, suddenly emerging from under the high houses, they found themselves standing on the edge of an escarped slope, looking out on to a huge expanse of pale evening sky, scalloped at its fringes by the blue shapes of mountains, with the round moon, already bright, hanging serene and solemn in the midst. Leaning over the parapet, they looked down at the roofs of another quarter of the city, a hundred feet below. The colours of the world still struggled against the encroaching darkness; but a lavish municipality had already beaded the streets with yellow lights. A faint smell of wood-smoke and frying came up through the thin pure air. The silence of the sky was so capacious, so high and wide, that the noises of the town—like so many small, distinctly seen objects in the midst of an immense blank prairie—served but to intensify the quiet, to make the listener more conscious of its immensity in comparison with the trivial clatter at its heart.
‘I like vis place,’ Lord Hovenden repeated.
They stood for a long time, leaning their elbows on the parapet, saying nothing.
‘I say,’ said Hovenden suddenly, turning towards his companion a face on which all the shyness, the pedestrian’s self-deprecation had reappeared, ‘I’m most awfully sorry about vat silly business of going round vat beastly lake.’ The young giant who sat at the wheel of the Vauxhall Velox had retired with the machine into the garage, leaving a much less formidable Hovenden to prosecute the campaign which he had so masterfully begun. The moon, the enchanting beauty of the face that looked out so pensively through its tress-framed window, the enormous silence with the little irrelevant noises at its heart, the smell of wood-smoke and fried veal cutlets—all these influences had conspired to mollify Lord Hovenden’s joyous elation into a soft and sugary melancholy. His actions of this afternoon seemed to him now, in his changed mood, reprehensibly violent. He was afraid that his brutality might have ruined his cause. Could she ever forgive him for such behaviour? He was overwhelmed by self-reproach. To beg forgiveness seemed to be his only hope. ‘I’m awfully sorry.’
‘Are you?’ Irene turned and smiled at him. Her small white teeth showed beneath the lifted lip; in the wide-set, childish eyes there was a shining happiness. ‘I’m not. I didn’t mind a bit.’
Lord Hovenden took her hand. ‘You didn’t mind? Not at all?’
She shook her head. ‘You remember that day under the olive trees?’
‘I was a beast,’ he whispered remorsefully.
‘I was a goose,’ said Irene. ‘But I feel different now.’
‘You don’t mean . . .’
She nodded. They walked back to their hotel hand in hand. Hovenden never stopped talking and laughing all the way. Irene was silent. The kiss had made her happy too, but in a different way.
CHAPTER II
Time and space, matter and mind, subject, object—how inextricably they got mixed, next day, on the road to Rome! The simple-minded traveller who imagines himself to be driving quietly through Umbria and Latium finds himself at the same time dizzily switchbacking up and down the periods of history, rolling on top gear through systems of political economy, scaling heights of philosophy and religion, whizzing from aesthetic to aesthetic. Dimensions are bewilderingly multiplied, and the machine which seems to be rolling so smoothly over the roads is travelling, in reality, as fast as forty horses and the human minds on board can take it, down a score of other roads, simultaneously, in all directions.
The morning was bright when they left Perugia. In the blue sky above Subasio floated a few large white clouds. Silently they rolled away down the winding hill. At the foot of the mountain, secure from the sunlight in the delicious cool of their family vault, the obese Volumni reclined along the lids of their marble ashbins, as though on couches round the dinner-table. In an eternal anticipation of the next succulent course they smiled and for ever went on smiling. We enjoyed life, they seemed to say, and considered death without horror. The thought of death was the seasoning which made our five and twenty thousand dinners upon this earth yet more appetizing.
A few miles further on, at Assisi, the mummy of a she-saint lies in a glass case, brilliantly illumined by concealed electric lights. Think of death, says the she-saint, ponder incessantly on the decay of all things, the transience of this sublunary life. Think, think; and in the end life itself will lose all its savour; death will corrupt it; the flesh will seem a shame and a disgustfulness. Think of death hard enough and you will come to deny the beauty and the holiness of life; and, in point of fact, the mummy was once a nun.
‘When Goethe came to Assisi,’ said Mr. Cardan, as they emerged from the vaults of St. Clare, ‘the only thing he looked at was the portico of a second-rate Roman temple. Perhaps he wasn’t such a fool as we think him.’
‘An admirable place for playing halma,’ said Chelifer, as they entered the Teatro Metastasio.
Upon that rococo stage art was intended to worship itself. Everywhere now, for the last two hundred years and more, it has been worshipping itself.
But in the upper and the lower churches of St. Francis, Giotto and Cimabue showed that art had once worshipped something other than itself. Art there is the handmaid of religion—or, as the psycho-analysts would say, more scientifically, anal-erotism is a frequent concomitant of incestuous homosexuality.
‘I wonder,’ said Mr. Cardan pensively, ‘if St. Francis really managed to make poverty seem so dignified, charming and attractive as they make out. I know very few poor people nowadays who cut a particularly graceful figure.’ He looked at Miss Elver, who was waddling along the road like a water-bird on land, a few yards ahead. The end of one of Lord Hovenden’s bright bandanas trailed behind her in the dust; it was tied by one corner to her wrist and
