The mountains lay far behind, lost long since beyond the hills and rivers and plains of the southwest, the clouds and weathers of the journey. The Southwestern Post was climbing into the hills of the Molsen Province, uncultivated, dull gold under a blue-grey August sky. “Five more miles to Fontanasfaray,” said the handsome, swagbellied driver. “The grand duchess comes to Fontanasfaray every August to take the waters.”
“How far is it from the city?” asked the young provincial gentleman on the box.
“Sixteen miles, eight with the brakes on. We won’t see West Gate much before nightfall.”
The horses, heavy, gleaming greys, pulled effortlessly; a slow mile went by. Itale pulled his hat over his eyes against the warm morning sun and dozed. The horses pulled, the high coach creaked and swayed.
“Village of Kolpera,” the coachman pointed out. Kolpera was a humble cluster of huts off the road on a high slope.
“Looks like sheep country,” Itale said.
“I wouldn’t know,” the coachman replied with disdain; I am from the city, I know nothing and care nothing about sheep, said his manner; and Itale, rebuked, stretched out his legs and gazed at the great lonely hills where, sure enough, far away and like a cloud-shadow on the tawny slope, he made out a flock of sheep.
Fontanasfaray was a cool, rich town high up in the hills. The inside passengers took lunch in the Park-Restaurant; Itale, who had refused to borrow money from his uncle or to take more than twenty kruner from the estate cashbox, and that as a loan, bought a roll at a bakery and ate it by himself in the park in the shade of the elms, watching the fancy rigs go by on Gulhelm Street. He finished his roll and was hungry. Through summery leaf-dappled light he saw a low foreign chaise coming, drawn by matched bays. In the chaise was a parasol and in the warm white shadow of the parasol a face was turned towards a long bored face with heavy lips and tired eyes, so familiar that Itale expected her to speak to him, which cousin was she?—The chaise passed, the parasol became a white blot down the dappled street. Itale brushed crumbs off his waistcoat. “Well, so that’s the grand duchess,” he said to himself, and felt unspeakably mournful and insignificant.
The coach set off with new horses and several new passengers. One of these Itale had seen on Gulhelm Street, bowing to the grand duchess’ chaise, a young man elegantly dressed, with a pale, handsome, heavy face. He sat up outside with Itale and made conversation, chattering along so amiably that Itale soon forgot to act sophisticated, and began to enjoy himself. A little cautious, for he was not used to talking with strangers, he listened more than he spoke; this pleased his companion, who was not much in demand as a talker among his own associates. In their mutual appreciation they introduced themselves: Sorde, Paludeskar. As soon as the names were spoken each must perform a little silent guesswork and assessment, Itale wondering which rank of the nobility his new friend might belong to, Paludeskar deciding that although the young provincial was a commoner and had a hat which looked as though he had gone fishing with it, he was quite safely a gentleman. And it was very pleasant to talk to someone who knew so little about everything, and never set him straight. He talked on, and Itale listened, and each was grateful to the other.
The coach came at five o’clock to the summit of the hills, and Itale saw for the first time the broad sweep of the river valley to the distant eastern range, the shining curve of the Molsen through it, and, hazy and glimmering in the low warm light, the city on the river’s bend. They were some miles from its outskirts. The pale hills behind them were silent, a pale sky arched overhead. The city slept in its wide valley in the afternoon sunlight, indistinct, beautiful, unutterably calm. Paludeskar smiled with proprietary pleasure, glancing at Itale’s intent gazing face.
“Is that the Roukh?”
He pointed to a building that bulked large in bluish shadow over the vague surrounding streets, in the southwest quarter of the city.
“Right. There’s the Sinalya, at the edge of that green bit, that must be the park, the Eleynaprade.”
The Sinalya Palace was the residence of the reigning grand-ducal family; the kings of Orsinia had lived in the Roukh Palace.
“That must be the cathedral,” Itale said, and his voice caught, for the spires rising above the golden mass and shadow of the city were its center both in place and in the passage of centuries. “Right,” said Paludeskar, “and south of it there, that’s River Quarter, nobody lives there; north of it the Old Quarter, that’s where everybody lives. Is that my house? Can’t be sure. There’s the opera house, see the dome by the river?” But the coach, descending, entered a pass between high hills, and the view was lost.
It reappeared at intervals, each time nearer and more complex, as the road wound down. Their last sight of the city as a whole was when the valley was vague, the eastern hills had dimmed away, and lights were beginning to glimmer through the grey haze. They changed horses at Kolonnarmana, supped there, and in the warm dusk set off again, rolling easily on a smooth road, the glow of the city under its haze brightening always in the sky before them. Exalted by the darkness and warmth, the wind and movement of the ride, the great presence of the city awaiting them, the two young men talked from their souls.
“The important thing,” Itale said, “is a force inside you, that belongs to you alone. It is yourself, actually, all that makes you a self, a man. Once you’ve found it, that force or will or need, whatever it is, then all you have to do is obey it—stay on the road it takes you.”
“But if you can’t find the road…”
“You can if you want to.”
“How many people really want to?”
“To find their destiny? To be themselves? Surely everyone does?”
“Takes work,” said Paludeskar.
“Well, it does. And it’s true most people don’t even seem to try. They do what comes next, or what’s expected of them, and get lost in a meaningless tangle of—of desires, frivolities, contingencies,” said Itale with an abolishing wave of his hand. “Why don’t they simply do what’s necessary?”
“Easier not to.”
“But how stupid it is. Even if you sit in a chair for ten years still the years go by. So why not get up and walk, make it a journey? I used to envy adults when I was a boy, I thought they were all going somewhere, but now I see most of them not really going anywhere, never getting home, lost in eating and sleeping and talking and visiting and meaningless work—not the poor of course, I mean people free to do as they please—they do nothing, they lose their souls out of sheer carelessness!”
“Civilisation’s wasted on humanity,” said Paludeskar. “If I had it to hand out I’d give it to the bees. Industrious little bastards.”
“I don’t know if it’s wasted on us, but most of us seem to waste it.”
“I used to think I’d like to add my bit. But I don’t know. I suppose I really haven’t anything to add.”
“You do,” Itale said, and Paludeskar replied with equal simplicity, “I know. But it’s getting away from me. I’m not religious, you know, and all that, but I’m going to be twenty-five in November—I’d like to—You know, to think that I was going to do something worth doing—Before the end.”
“That’s it, that’s it,” Itale said.
“Come and stay the night, I want to talk more about this,” Paludeskar said earnestly, and Itale agreed. The coach was among the suburbs of Krasnoy, and in ten minutes more it came to a halt inside the West Gate. Stiff, bemused, disjointed, its passengers descended into the coachyard of Tiypontiy Street under the dark looming inn buildings. Glare and shadow, neighing of horses and clatter of ironshod hoofs on stone, clatter of voices, moths swarming at smoking lamps, smells of leather, horsedung, sweat, hot stone, the streets of stone.
In the cab both regretted the invitation which had seemed so natural on the coach. They said no more about destiny and civilisation; each looked out his window. The cab stopped before a handsome house on a wide, quiet street. As Paludeskar took him up the steps Itale heard a great bell striking the hour across the dark roofs and streets, a deep, quiet voice in the restless air of the city night.
He was handed over to a servant, taken up imposing stairs and down a long passage to a room with a curtained bed, marble fireplace, Turkish carpet, red-draped windows, and a very large painting of a racehorse with a fat round body and tiny head and feet. As the one servant departed a second one arrived, carrying his valise. “Thank you,” Itale said, relieved to see the familiar object, an anchor in a sea of strangeness. His effort to get the valise away from the man was foiled with skill, courtesy, and ease; after that defeat there was no hope of making the man go away. He was French and middle-aged; as he unpacked Itale’s valise he intimated that his name was Robert, that he was M le baron’s man, that Itale must change into his other coat, that a clean shirt was also desirable, that a gentleman did not put on his own shirt, that Robert was perfectly aware that Itale was young, poor, provincial, and possessed no articles of toilet besides a hairbrush, but did not hold it against him—some of this in words, some by other means. “If monsieur permit,” he said, circling behind Itale at the looking glass, and in five hypnotic motions transformed Itale’s cravat into a model of austere symmetry. “It is the best knot, but not every man wear it so, it requires the long face,” he said, admiring his handiwork so honestly that Itale warmed to him at last and let him help him into his coat without a struggle.
Then he had to go downstairs alone.
The long, bright drawing-room was a confusion of people, light-coated men, light-gowned women. He did not see Paludeskar anywhere. A tall, fair woman glanced at him frowning. He dared not move farther forward, he dared not go back. There he stood, like a rock. Near him a group broke out laughing at the end of a story, and he smiled too, until he found he was smiling. Another tall, fair woman in violet was approaching him, or was it the same one? She was coming straight at him. He looked away. He began to edge backwards towards the hall.
“Mr Sorde?”
He bowed.
“I am Luisa Paludeskar.”
He bowed.
She looked at him coolly; made up her mind; and took him to present him to her mother.
The young baroness was robust and handsome like her brother; the old baroness, sitting near a gold-encrusted Erard piano with two other ladies, looked pinched, sick, and sour. She said how do you do to Itale and had no more to say to him. Baroness Luisa took him on to a side room, where to his relief he found Paludeskar devouring cold chicken and champagne, and was invited to do the same. While he ate he managed to shake off the paralysis of total self-consciousness and make some observation of other people. He found that nobody was wearing trousers at all like his, and that conversation with these people was very difficult, as they all spoke quickly and bounced on from one subject to the next like rabbits. “Will you be long in Krasnoy, Mr Sorde?” asked a man to whom he had just been introduced and whose name he had instantly mislaid, and before he had decided how to answer the other bounced on, “Absolutely dead just now, few remaining fragments of civilisation are gathered in this room. And the opera’s not opening until November.”
“I hope to see the opera,” said Itale, and was able to take a deep breath, having produced a comprehensible if not dazzling sentence.
“You’re musical?” asked the other man—was his name Hacheskar? Harreskar?—“It’s not precisely Paris, as you can imagine, and old Montini lost his high A last season, but it does very well.”
“Paolina,” Itale brought out, the name of a local diva whom he had heard praised at Solariy. “Aha,” said Helleskar—that was it, Helleskar, but baron? count? prince?—“have you heard Paolina? is it she that brings you here?”
Itale stared at him. What was he to say—“No, I am here to subvert the government”? He said, flatly, “No.”
Helleskar smiled. He was pale, like Paludeskar, but his figure was slight and his face fine-drawn. “I’m sorry, I’m always boring people with music,” he said, and though Itale appreciated that goodnatured courtesy he was unable to respond to it.
“Luisa,” said Helleskar, a little later in the other room, “who is your brother’s new friend?”
“I have no idea, George.”
“Literary,” Helleskar proposed.
Luisa Paludeskar shrugged.
“Epic poems…Or, no; I know. He is planning to found a clandestine journal, full of long quotations from Schiller.”
“No idea at all.”
“He was simply found on the coach, like someone else’s hat? He might be a spy for Gentz, he might steal the silver. I had no idea Enrike was so rash. But then, no spy could possibly tie his cravat that well; at least not a spy for Austria. It must be Schiller after all.”
“Introduce him to Amadey, then.”
“Is he here? How is he?”
“Wretched, of course. I don’t know why he doesn’t leave that woman. There’s your friend, take him over to Amadey. Mr Sorde!”
Itale, startled, looked round. His eyes met Luisa Paluderskar’s, and for an instant she too looked startled, taken off guard; then her face closed and looked bored, even rancorous.
“Count Helleskar has been speculating that your propensities are literary,” she said, drawling, and Helleskar broke in: “I leave speculation to bankers, baronina, I never go further than entertaining fancies. I have a bad habit of deciding what people ought to do without consulting them; I had rather decided you ought to publish.”
“Defend yourself, Mr Sorde.”
“Is it an accusation?” Itale asked naively.
Helleskar laughed. “We’ll have to consult Estenskar. Is literature a crime, a fault, or merely a misfortune? The—”
“Estenskar? Amadey Estenskar?”
“You stand self-accused, Mr Sorde,” Helleskar said. “He’s here tonight; may I introduce you?”
“He has no—that is, there’s no—I don’t—”
“Come along,” the count said, and Itale meekly came, obeying Helleskar’s flawless self-assurance. But halfway across the room his protest became audible again. “Count,” he said earnestly, “I can’t intrude on Mr. Estenskar—”
“You set him higher than the rest of us,” Helleskar said, with his ironic smile. “Quite right. Come on.” He led on. “He’ll be in here no doubt, the mausoleum, library I mean. Refurbished catacomb. There he is.” And bringing Itale to a wiry, red-haired, white-faced man who stood reading in a corner of the bookcases, he introduced them. “A fellow exile, Amadey,” he said.
Estenskar had gained his fame with the publication of The Torrents of Karesha, when he was nineteen. His Odes and a novel had confirmed his reputation; at the age of twenty-four he was the best-known writer in his country, passionately reviled and praised, a stormbringer, one of those after whose passing things are not the same. “Very glad,” he said in a dry voice. There was a pause. “You’re from my part of the country?”
“From the Montayna.”
“I see.”
“What are you reading, Amadey? Herder. Weh ’st mir! Literature is a vast slough of German poets.”
Estenskar shrugged. Itale observed the shrug with awe, and burned to go reread Herder as soon as possible; but as Helleskar continued to make conversation and Estenskar to cut it short, the talk did not grow more interesting. Of course there was no reason why a genius should converse with a flippant worldling like Count Helleskar. The genius’ manners were disagreeable, but that was because he was so far above his company. All these people did was gossip; Itale had listened now to a dozen conversations of gossip—as a matter of fact Estenskar was now embarked on some gossip, and apparently enjoying it. “A year in Paris couldn’t civilise that ass,” he was ending his tale, with an artificial, unpleasant tenor laugh, “nothing could.” And Helleskar laughed and said, “Civilisation is wasted on humanity,” and Itale struggled desperately to swallow a yawn. He looked up from the struggle to find Estenskar’s cold gaze on him.
“Did you know about Adanskar’s new literary magazine, Amadey? To which only noblemen may contribute?”
Estenskar laughed his high, loud ha-ha-ha. “What next?”
“The name—that’s the beauty of it. He discussed it with me at length. Pegasus, Aurora, all nine muses, couldn’t use them; Greek, low connotations. Tried French: Revue du Haut monde. Aha, I say, that’ll put that new Revue des deux mondes in its place. No, no, can’t have that, low connotations again. Then the divine afflatus swept into him before my very eyes, and he said, ‘I shall call it The Journal of Nobility and Genius!’”
“My God, what a fool the man is.”
“He’ll do it, too, you know. You must contribute.”
“I’d do it in order to lose him his Censor’s permit.”
“It’s not that bad, surely,” Helleskar said, with a very slight change of tone. Estenskar shrugged and was silent. “You still haven’t got the printing permit for the new book?” Helleskar said, and again Estenskar shrugged; he stuck Herder back on the bookshelf, looked at his fingernails, turned away, then swung back and burst out shrilly, “I’ve been trying to get it for six weeks now. They want changes. One of the poems cannot be published at all. Why? Why not? It’s about listening to music, what in the name of God is political about that, because it’s music does it have to be the Marseillaise? Oh, no, Mr. Estenskar, you don’t understand—I don’t understand my own work, but they do—it’s not the subject of the poem that is undesirable, but the meter. The meter! The meter! By the bowels of Christ what is radical about iambic tetrameter? Do you know? Can you imagine what he said? It’s a national meter—common in songs, popular—dangerous—and then my ode, the bad one, you know, ‘To the Youth of My Country,’ you know—it was, by God, it’s in iambic tetrameter, and I can’t go around reminding people of it. So this poem can’t be published, the book can’t have the Censor’s permit so long as it’s there. And my friend at the Bureau, my good friend Censor Goyne, who can’t spell ‘recommend,’ Goyne takes the trouble to recommend improvements. All I have to do is add an extra foot to each line, just a word or two, he showed me how to do it, really very simple, he said. They burned what I’ve written, now they rewrite what I write!”
The eyes in the white face were round, yellowish, gluing. Itale thought of the half-grown hawks he had tamed, their rage and resistance that only exhaustion could control; and even in defeat they would cry out in their shrill terrible voices, defeated, not tamed.
“You have endured six years of this,” Helleskar said. “How do you have the courage to go through it all again!”
“I don’t. When I get this book in press, I’m done. Going home. I can’t fight to try to get it distributed. It won’t be. I will stay just long enough to be sure the text isn’t changed, to keep Goyne’s improvements out of it. I don’t know why I bother even with that. What difference it make?”
“A great deal, Mr Estenskar,” Itale said, stammering. “Because the book will be printed by the clandestine press—I’ve never seen your books but in the clandestine editions—”
“Victory without profit,” the poet said drily.
“No man, not even a genius, can win this kind of battle unsupported. If there were a group, a real group, with a publication, a journal, ready to come up against the Bureau of Censorship every day, for every word, a steady united pressure—And if the Estates are convened, censorship will be an issue—”
“I see it’s true you’ve only been here two hours,” Estenskar said, turning back to the bookcase. He scanned it as if seeking a title while he spoke. “A group?…Literary men are afraid of jail, as a rule…As for getting help from the politicians, I suppose you’re joking.”
Itale was paralysed; Helleskar said, as easily as ever, “Why so, Amadey? If the Estates meet, there will be some new men in town.”
“You’re in an optimistic fit tonight?”
“I am an optimistic man. I merely keep it to myself so that I won’t get laughed at. As ‘To the Youth of My Country’ got laughed at, for example.”
“And rightly. It’s the stupidest thing I ever wrote. I suppose Mr Sorde disagrees.”
Perhaps it was invitation, but Itale took it as reproof, understanding only that his enthusiasm had been gall to Estenskar. “How can I argue with you?” he said almost inaudibly.
Helleskar frowned. “You wrote it; let us read it, Amadey. Allow us our little privileges. They don’t encroach on yours. I believe we need a change of muse. Luisa’s in a vile mood tonight, she always plays well in a vile mood, shall we go demand some Mozart?”
Though enmeshed in self-castigation, Itale was vaguely aware that Helleskar had come to his defense, and in an equally vague persuasion of obligation followed the two back into the salon, though what he wanted was to get away from Estenskar before he antagonised his hero any further. Luisa Paludeskar agreed to play; he stood with the group around the piano. It was past midnight. He was worn out. The radiant music passed him by as so much noise. Helleskar and Baron Paludeskar talked beside him; he did not listen, and he would not open his mouth again, not if he were damned for it. Why am I here, he thought, what am I doing here? Why did I leave home?
When she had played what was asked of her, Luisa Paludeskar sat on at the piano listening to the others talk. Every now and then she glanced up at the tall, stiff, speechless young man. There he stood with his chin stuck into his collar; the epitome of boorish, provincial, male complacency. She would have liked to kick him.
“Who is that fellow, baronina?”
“Enrike found it on the coach. I don’t plan to keep it around long.”
Estenskar smiled disagreeably. “He hardly seemed to partake of the ton,” he said. He was on the attack again. Luisa, who loved battles, rose to the challenge, and performed a rapid outflanking manoeuvre: she smiled straight at him, and said, “You’re not really going off east, are you, Amadey?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“What is there to decide? Is there anything in the Polana besides the east wind and sheep? Will the sheep listen to you? I know we’re sheep, to you, but we are attentive sheep—adoring sheep—your own woolly flock—”
“Sheep’s clothing.”
“That’s you, the wolf. The Polana wolf. Don’t run away, Amadey; not now.”
“I’m not running away. I’m going home.”
“‘Home!’” She played a light derisive arpeggio. “We have a ‘home’ too, you know, up in the Sovena. I know all about rain and wind and mud and sheep and the neighbors’ visits. They tell you hunting stories. How they shot the wolf. How they bagged three poets in the marsh last winter…”
“I’ll come back for your wedding.”
“Oh indeed! My wedding with whom?”
“George, of course.”
“How silly you are. I can’t marry an old shoe.”
“If the shoe fits…”
“Always twist the knife a little before you remove it. No, I think I shall marry a total stranger, someone found on a coach.”
“Why?”
“Because there would be a few weeks before he knew how to hurt me very much—before he learned where the nerves are. Unless he was a poet, of course. But you mustn’t leave Krasnoy, Amadey. What shall I do without you? Without my daily anti-opium?”
“I wish I had fallen in love with you, Luisa.”
“Yes, but you didn’t.”
She looked up into the man’s unhappy face, and smiled again.
When he got to bed at two-thirty, Itale could not sleep. The Mozart sonata to which he had not listened rang note for note in his head, the red-curtained bed swayed like a coach at the trot, his ears were full of voices and his eyes of faces; he lay and twitched and turned. The deep, soft bell told the quarters and the hours, three o’clock, over the dark roofs, the dark streets, the endless houses where two hundred thousand people slept and he among them awake, a prisoner.
Robert the man-servant waked him, late in the morning; he could not elude assistance in getting dressed. He found his way through the huge, cold house to the breakfast room. The baron was already there, and the sister soon arrived. The two young men were stiff and shy with each other. Itale remarked that it was hot, Enrike that it was damned foggy, and they got no further. Luisa, dressed very plainly in brown, seemed to have set aside her arrogant manner with her evening dress. She was pleasant and gracious, without affectations, and within a few minutes Itale found himself almost at ease talking with her. But she was beautiful, more beautiful than he had realised last night, more beautiful than any woman he had ever spoken to; and he realised as they talked that she was younger than he, twenty at most, which by adding youth to her opulence of beauty, wealth, and wit cowed him, making him feel a hopeless clod. And the brother glowered across the table. It was a relief when the meal was done at last.
Frenin had been living in the city for a month, and had sent Itale his address. Itale asked Enrike where the street was. “What? Never heard of it,” the baron growled. “Going off, are you? Can’t stay? No? Well. Glad, very glad.”
When Itale had escaped, the baron followed his sister up to the music room. “You hear that, Lulu? He’s going to some damned street in the river, Somebody’s Tears Street, now what the devil, coming all the way from the damned mountains. I thought he was a gentleman, yesterday.”
“He is, don’t be stupid, Harry.”
“But nobody lives in a place like that?”
“Students—”
“Students! Exactly!”
She knew what was upsetting her brother. Through boredom and a dim sense of shame at his uselessness, Enrike was trying to secure a minor diplomatic post. He had decided that his new acquaintance was politically suspect, therefore not to be cultivated; but he was ashamed of his own motives, and preferred to act the snob. All this was clear to Luisa. Her boredom was far more drastic than her brother’s, her ambitions clearer, and she set herself up as a conscious enemy of hypocrisy in all its forms.
“You’re afraid you’ve entertained Robespierre unawares,” she said, “poor Harry!”
“But you can see that I can’t afford to associate with these patriot fellows. I made a mistake. I own up to it. So all I’m asking is that you don’t…take him up—make a pet of him out of curiosity the way you do—”
“Make a pet of him! A bit like making a pet of a cart-horse.”
“Yes, well, exactly, he’s just not quite our sort. It seemed all right on the coach. But he doesn’t belong here. So that’s all right, we just won’t see him again.”
“But of course I asked him to dinner tonight.”
Enrike breathed heavily, defeated once again.
“He hasn’t anywhere to stay; and if he stays here of course we have to feed him; but I’m sure it will do no harm. No one is coming except Raskayneskar.”
“Oh my God!” Enrike cried. “You can’t—you can’t have him here with Raskayneskar! Luisa!” But he knew as he spoke that she would do just as she pleased, just as she always did, and that whether he fretted or shouted, it would make no difference at all.
Meanwhile Itale had set off at random into the warm morning. Sunlight breaking through the mist of the river valley gilded the housefronts, the roofs, the double spire of the Cathedral of St. Theodora, only a few streets away. He made for the cathedral. It was not as easy to get to as it looked. Though rarely losing sight of the spires he involved himself in the crisscross of broad, similar avenues of the Old Quarter, took a wrong turning into Sorden Street and wandered down it between palaces of the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries rearing their elegant arrogant façades one against the other. From that sunless, silent grandeur he emerged into the glare and bustle of the Great Market. Men bent double, hauling carts, yelled at him to make way, heavy-shouldered horses pulled their wagons across his path, women selling leeks and cabbages shouted at him to buy leeks and cabbages, young women lugging sacks of gleaming vegetables jostled him with the sacks, old women lunged past him to make a bargain, fishmongers waved eels in his face and to avoid the eels he backed into beef carcases hung round the butchers’ stalls amidst shrilling swarms of flies. Portacheyka’s weekly market would not have filled a corner of it, it went on for blocks, sprawling, displaying, hauling, carrying, bargaining, arguing, selling, buying, stinking, shining, shouting in the young heat of the August sun, and over it all, against the large, quiet morning sky, rose the dun spires of the cathedral.
He made it safe to Cathedral Square at last. A few old people sat on benches on the west side under plane trees thick with summer dust. He stopped in the middle of the square, letting desultory cabs and purposeful walkers pass round him, and gawked at the cathedral of Krasnoy, the heavy, complex towers, the leap of the spires, the triple portal of carven saints and kings, the great bulk buoyant and serene as a ship under sail. He stood and looked, and the old men on the benches looked at him; they had seen the cathedral before. At last he went forward and entered the church under the north portal, under St Roch, auxiliary patron of the city of Krasnoy, smiling in the ogived shadow his stiff, kind, four-hundred-year-old smile.
As soon as he came inside the cathedral he felt himself at home. It was home. His family, his people, had lived there for eight or nine centuries. Like the churches of the Montayna the cathedral was dark, bare, its high barrel vaults leaving a great deal of room for God. It was as simple and purposeful as a fort. Low mass was in progress. Lost in the airy darkness of the nave a few people, faceless, separate, similar, knelt on the bare patterned pavement. Itale joined them. The priest droned, like the old priest of St. Anthony of Malafrena, “Credo in unoom Deoom,” and the little old women in black shawls whispered, “Omni-potentem,” and like an unheeding angel or thunder among mountains the organ whispered on above them, rehearsing the high mass to be sung on St Roch’s day.
Itale did not stay long. Reassured, yet restless, he went back out into the sun’s heat and brightness as the great bell struck ten, vibrating in the stone and in the blood. There was the city, the traffic, the faces of strangers, the streets of stone. He put on his hat and set off striding into River Quarter, without the least idea where he was going.
Few cities in 1825 had much of a sewer system; this oldest quarter of Krasnoy had none at all, beyond paved or unpaved trenches in the middle of the narrow streets that wound down towards the river. The stench of River Quarter was a mighty presence in itself, more impressive even than the steep darkness of the streets between houses toppling their upper stories across the way as if in conspiracy against the sky, and the noise of voices and the constant press and passage of people around the tenements. Out of these choked alleys shot up the fragile towers of old churches; from the noisy crowding at a ragged street-market one came suddenly into a silent square, to a covered fountain brimming with cool water and typhoid fever, and looked up to see on one hand the cathedral spires, on the other the pointed windows of the university on its hill, another world. In such a square Itale stopped. He was frightened. He was lost, had lost himself in the streets, the crowding houses, the dank archways leading to brawling courtyards, the voices, the smells, the swarms of children, women, men all nameless, so that he was nameless, knowing none of them, lost. He stood there holding onto his left wrist with his right hand, combatting panic. He sat down on the stone seat by the wellhead and gazed persistently at the pavement at his feet. On one stone was a smear and curl of human excrement. He gazed at it; at the stones beneath and around it, square bluish cobbles grained, and glazed with dirt; at the thread of water gleaming in the jointure between two of them. This is all here, he thought; I am here; I cannot be lost. At last he looked up, looking slowly round him, and discovered, that he shared the bench with another man.
This one wore broken shoes without stockings and some kind of coat or cape, shapeless and colorless, wrapped carefully around him despite the warmth. He was old, the skull showing in his face. Out of webbed sockets his eyes stared straight at Itale, a terrible stare, until Itale realised he was blind.
“Hello, granddad,” he said huskily.
The old man munched and stared. Abruptly he spoke; Itale did not understand the wheezing voice and the strong dialect. “A long way from home,” he seemed to have said.
“That’s true. Do you know of a street called Magdalen’s Tears, granddad?”
The old man went on staring, muttering, “Eya, eya, eya, eya…” He stood up, gathering the decrepit coat around him. “Come on!” he said.
“Is it nearby?”
“Mallenastrada, how can I tell you, come on!” Wheezing and muttering but moving fairly quickly he set off down an alley, and Itale followed. Children screamed, playing or fighting in a courtyard as they passed. The old man cursed at them and waved his hand muttering, “Had a stick, had a stick…Eya, eya, eya…” Evidently he had some sight, for he picked his way without hesitation, and kept closer to Itale’s side than was agreeable to Itale, for he stank. He talked as they went, and Itale understood about half of it: he had been a tailor, till his eyes went bad and they turned him out of the shop, there was a brother-in-law who had done him wrong, a story about costs rising and shop rents; his voice cracked and grated, he chopped his rigid hands in the air and screamed, “Dirty Jews! Dirty Jews!” He felt or saw Itale sheering off from him and hurried his gait pathetically. “Almost there, young sir, almost there. That big church that’s Sankestefan, the basilisk, now this way, young sir.” They were at the base of the Hill of the University; streets shot up the hill in crazy angles and flights of steps. “Thought I was blind, eh, thought I was blind, eh!” The hobbling guide stopped. “This is it, Mallenastrada, this is it.” The street name Frenin had sent was the Street of the Tears of St Magdalen; Itale could see no sign or token along the narrow way or at the corner, but he was ready to get free of the old man. He gave him a quarter-krune, putting it into the rigid hand; trying to get it into some pocket or hidingplace in his ragged coat, the old man dropped it, and Itale picked it, up for him, for he stood blind and groping, unable to bend down to the pavement, and his hand was too arthritic to close on the little coin.
Number 9, opposite the pawnshop, Frenin had written. There were no numbers, but there were two pawnshops. He tried across the way from the first one. A fat woman met him in the dark hall, which had a rich, sharp, feral stink of its own. She sent him up the stairs, which were alive with thin, scabby cats, all of them more or less white. He knocked on the door of the first landing, and Frenin opened it.
The square, hard face, the familiar voice saying his name, were a tremendous relief and pleasure. They embraced like brothers. “It’s good to see you, it’s good to see you, Givan!”
“Come on in.” Frenin began to repress his own pleasure. “Don’t let those damn cats in. Why didn’t you write you were coming?”
“I came on the same coach the letter would have come on. Last night.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Fellow I met on the coach. Paludeskar.”
“In Roches Street? The rutabaga baron?”
“I don’t know—”
“Well, you’re certainly coming in at the top.”
“I don’t really know who they are. On the coach—”
“They’re in Brelavay’s scandal-sheet every issue.”
“Brelavay’s what?” Frenin’s manner irritated Itale a little; like everybody here, he seemed to know everything.
“He’s working for a weekly society tattler, the Krasnoy Scurrility he calls it. Money, mistress, our Tomas is doing well.”
Frenin’s tone was unpleasant.
“Big place you have here,” Itale said. The room was low but long, and the almost complete lack of furniture made it seem vast.
“Four of these rooms. Dirt cheap, even for the River. It’s too big, I’m getting out end of the month. Try this chair. The back falls off that one.”
“What are you doing?”
“Odd jobs for a Catholic monthly, and reading proof for Rochoy, the publishers. I get by. What are your plans?”
“Find work, first.”
“Work? What for?”
It seemed to Itale, perhaps unfairly, that Frenin’s question was disingenuous.
“What does one generally work for?”
“Depends who one is.”
“I have twenty-two kruner. That’s who I am.”
He felt himself to be disingenuous. But it was not easy to talk about not having money. He got up and wandered around the shabby room, looking out the windows. “Your windows could use a wash.”
“No help from home, eh?”
“No.”
Frenin, the son of a wealthy Solariy merchant, was as used to having cash in his pocket as Itale was, but he was also used to talking about money, both the having and the wanting, and that gave him now the advantage he always sought over his friend, and seldom gained.
“Your father doesn’t approve of your coming here, I take it.”
“Right.”
“Is he an Austrianiser?”
“Not in the least.”
“Family quarrel, eh?”
“It’s immaterial, Givan.”
“Twenty-two kruner, eh. About two weeks’ worth. Well, what can you do?”
“What anybody else can do—how do I know?” Itale said. His anger satisfied Frenin, who dropped his cool superiority of manner and said with a grin, “All right, all right. Are you looking for a place to live, or have you settled down with the rutabaga queen?”
“I don’t know—my bag’s there—I don’t want to stay there.”
“Why not? It’s free.”
“I can’t…” Itale waved his hands. “Footmen at breakfast.”
“How’s the young baroness at breakfast?”
“I don’t know. Very polite. It’s—” He waved his hands again. “I shouldn’t be there.”
Frenin grinned again. “Well, come here, if you like. It’s not Roches Street, or an estate on Lake Malafrena; but then it only costs fifteen kruner a quarter. We can share for a bit.”
“That is very good of you, Givan,” Itale said with warmth and gratitude. His deafness to Frenin’s gibes exasperated the latter and at the same time disarmed him. He had never succeeded in establishing between Itale and himself the social barrier that his jealousy asserted to be there. At the same time a barrier did exist between them, despite all Frenin’s efforts to break through it: that of Itale’s careless, impervious personal reserve. Itale would not allow him to humiliate either of them; his flashes of anger were not followed by any grudge or punishment; he offered a simple, steady friendship. Frenin wanted more of him, though he did not know what more. What good was friendship? He wanted to get at defenseless man, understand him, change him, and could not do it. It was perhaps for Itale’s sake, to keep in touch with Itale, that Frenin had conceived the plan of coming to Krasnoy.
“We’ll settle it with the Catwoman. She was downstairs, wasn’t she? Mrs Rosa she calls herself. Listen, Itale. I’ve been here two months and nothing has happened—nothing is happening. There is no radical movement here.”
Itale sat down at the table which, with three decrepit chairs, constituted the furniture of the room. “There has to be,” he said.
“I haven’t found it.”
“But the Cafe Illyrica—”
“Old men and fifth-rate poets. And Austrian agents.”
“There are secret societies—”
“There were; they’re dead. Years dead. The Friends of the Constitution, yes, that’s still going, a lot of retired army men in the east, in the Kesena and Sovena, but not here. Nothing here. Unless you count Amiktiya.”
“Well, then it’s up to us! A publication—what we talked about in Solariy.”
“What’s the good? A literary monthly—”
“Who won our bet concerning the power of the written word?”
“Who got put under house arrest?”
“Look here, 1789 didn’t rise unpremeditated from the breast of the people, it was the writers—”
“All right, but we haven’t got any Rousseaus here.”
“How do we know? Besides, we do have Rousseau, and Desmoulins, and all the French and English and American writing of the last hundred years to draw on. Why else is the government so afraid of print? Listen, I found something Gentz said recently, I’ve taken it for my guide, my inspiration—he said, ‘As a preventive measure against the abuses of the press, absolutely nothing should be printed for years. With this maxim as a rule we should soon get back to God and the Truth.’”
“God and the Truth,” Frenin related softly in awed disgust, and they were both silent a minute. The opinion of the Chief of the Austrian Imperial Police was undeniably impressive.
“All right,” said Frenin. “Assume a journal is the thing. How do we finance it, first, and who’ll dare print it, second?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out.”
“All right. Let’s go meet some people…”
Itale got back to the Paludeskar house at six, having spent the afternoon with Frenin at the Cafe Illyrica, which despite Frenin’s strictures was still, and would be for twenty-five years more, a meetingplace for radicals of all degrees. There they had met their friend Veyeskar from Solariy, a dark young man named Karantay who wrote stories, a pair of Greek refugees, a ranting alcoholic old poet who talked of his mistress Liberty, a group of students; the talk had been of Greece. As Itale walked up Roches Street he was telling himself that if nothing could be done here he would go to Greece, as Lord Byron had gone, to the plains of Marathon where they still laid down their lives for freedom. He was drunk with Greece and strong coffee and strong ideas, and was not sobered even by entering the large, rich, cold house. He strode up the marble staircase as if he owned the place, and hearing music in the room at the top of the stairs stopped a moment to listen, as if the music was for him.
“Mr Sorde,” said Luisa Paludeskar at the piano, another splendid piece of gold and rosewood like the one downstairs, the evening sunlight striking gold through the long windows across her hair, music rippling under her long hands.
“Baronina,” he said with untroubled resolution, “I must be leaving. May I thank you for your kindness, and hope that I will have the privilege of making some return for it.” The formal provincial turns of speech came ready to his tongue and he never wondered what conceivable return of hospitality he could make from a cat-haunted tenement in the River Quarter; he still spoke with his feet planted on the shores of Malafrena.
“But you’re not leaving, Mr Sorde? We thought you would make our house yours for a few days at least!”
She seemed dismayed, disappointed; he grew embarrassed. “It’s very good of you, baronina. An old friend of mine is here, he wants to put me up—”
“But you can’t always desert new friends for old ones, and Enrike will be very disappointed.”
“It’s very good of you—”
“We know people, quantities of people, I had thought we really might be of some use to you.”
“It’s very—” He had said it was very good of her twice already. “You’re very kind, baronina, but I—” He did not know what to say; his resolution dissolved like wet sugar.
“At least you dine with us tonight? I do claim that much!”
“Of course, with great pleasure.” Damn the woman! As he went down the hall the house resounded to the abrupt brilliant harmonies, played very deftly, of a Mozart presto.
After her talk of quantities of people, he had expected another large party, and was surprised when he went down to dinner (in his black coat well brushed by Robert) to find a partie carrée: himself, Luisa and Enrike Paludeskar, and a Count Raskayneskar. Baroness Paludeskar, a lady in waiting to the grand duchess, was dining at the palace. This dinner was, presumably, in Luisa’s style: intimate, elegant. The four French doors of the dining room stood open to the August night. Stars hung thick in the black sky, an intermittent wind moved in the shrubbery of the walled garden; the murmur of a fountain, the stir of leaves, the smell of damp earth and roses, the unease and subtle darkness of a summer night all entered and mixed strangely with the conversation at the candle-lit table. Luisa, at the head of the table, was so beautiful, so much more beautiful even than she had appeared last night or in the morning, that Itale was afraid of her; he vaguely felt himself to be in the presence of a dangerous force of nature, a forest fire or a maelstrom; it occurred to him that when poets called a woman a goddess sometimes they meant exactly what they said. Enrike wore an anxious, surly look and said very little, and Luisa and Raskayneskar ignored him.
Raskayna was one of the great holdings in Val Altesma, thirty miles southwest from Malafrena. Itale knew the name well. He knew nothing about the landholder, and it was evident that if Raskayneskar had ever visited his estate it had been as no more than a visitor. He was entirely urbane. He was a well-kept man of forty or so, with long, liver-colored lips, a high forehead, and fine dark eyes.
“So!” he said, leaning back a little, when they had come to the sweet wines. “It’s quite certain the Estates will meet.”
“Lot of talk,” Enrike growled.
“Not at all—unless you’re referring to the meetings themselves, in which case I agree with you! But they will be convened. Cornelius will announce it next month, I fancy, and the great event will come off in the autumn of ’27. Ha, ha, ha! Do you know what the emperor said about these diets and assemblies? It rather puts them into perspective. He said, ‘I have my Estates, and if they go too far I snap my fingers at them and send them home…’”
“Just as Louis XVI did,” said Itale to his plate.
“Oh, come,” the count said, genial, “the Estates General of France are one thing, our little Assembly is quite another. Its convention is merely an act of courtesy on the emperor’s part.”
“If the Assembly is rude to him, will he snap his fingers?” Luisa asked.
“Yes, of course; that is, Cornelius will do it for him, he needn’t be bothered himself.”
“Has Cornelius that authority?” asked Itale.
“As the prime minister of the head of the state, the grand duchess, I should think so. Possibly she’d have to do it herself.”
“Under the Charter of 1412 the Assembly is subject only to the king. There’s nothing that subjects them to the orders of a duchess or her minister.”
“Nothing but the Austrian army,” Raskayneskar said mildly.
“If the grand duchess called in the Austrian army to close the National Assembly, that would constitute invasion. We are an ally and protectorate of the Empire, we are not an Austrian province.”
“Paper truths, Mr Sorde. The Austrian army is here, now, controlling our provincial militias; no Assembly is going to try to lead us into a revolt; or a war if you prefer, against the most powerful state in Europe. The idea is laughable.”
“That depends on one’s sense of humor,” Luisa observed.
“True, very true,” said Raskayneskar, who never contradicted directly, but went at it round about. “When the balance of peace is so delicate, when there is the possibility of intervention by one of the great states, Russia perhaps—it’s not so much laughable as terrifying. The war years all over again. One can only respect Metternich for having, in these past ten years, made such a chance remote, a fantasy, rather than an imminent threat. An incredible man, Metternich! He bears the weight of Europe on his shoulders.”
“If he put it down it might turn out to be able to walk by itself,” Itale said, with a slight tremor in his voice, but clearly. Enrike, whose sense of humor was simple, gave a snort of laughter, and then shut his eyes and turned red.
“To walk straight into war, I fear,” Raskayneskar said.
“I’d prefer to walk into war than to be carried into slavery.”
“My dear young man,” said Raskayneskar, who had no desire to quarrel at Luisa Paludeskar’s table, “I don’t think you know much about war; and I fear slavery has become a fashionable word and so lost its significance. I suppose a black African on a plantation in the Carolinas is a slave, poor brute, but his situation has very little in common with yours or mine.”
“I don’t know,” Itale said innocently; “the American slave can’t vote, has no representative in the government, and must get his owner’s permission to learn to read or write, or publish, or speak in public, doesn’t he? If he does any of that without permission he can be locked up for life without trial. I’m not sure how far our situations differ in those respects; of course we are allowed to wear frock coats.”
There was only the slightest pause before Count Raskayneskar added, “And to read Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
“If we can find a clandestine edition.”
The count laughed, indulgently, the laugh of a statesman addressing enthusiastic youth. Enrike shut his eyes again. Luisa laughed very softly, watching Itale. Then she turned to Raskayneskar and said, with all the manner of a hostess easing over a difficult moment, “Which reminds me, count, I am relying upon you for the Paris journals, you must not let me down!”—to which Raskayneskar replied courteously as ever, with a somewhat pinched smile. He cared nothing at all for Itale’s opinions, but he cared a good deal for Luisa’s opinion; and he knew now that he had lost a battle that he had not thought worth fighting.
The next day he told a fellow bureaucrat in the Ministry of Finance that the convocation of the Estates was not entirely an empty gesture, since certain fashionable salons were openly cultivating patriotic sentiments. “Silly fads,” the colleague said, but Raskayneskar, pinching his long lips together significantly, murmured, “National pride…” as if it were the name of a horse he thought of backing.
Itale left the Paludeskars as early as he could decently do so, and found his way past the cathedral, around the Hill of the University, behind the basilica of St Stephen, through the frightening crowds and more frightening emptinesses of the River Quarter, to the narrow street where he was to live. He went to bed, and lay there on the pallet they had fixed up, his eyes on a crack of light under the door; Frenin was up, writing, in the front room. The night was warm and filled with voices and inexplicable sounds, the swarming city atmosphere. There was no silence. Itale thought of the garden of the Paludeskar house, roses in the dark, the fountain, the golden light on Luisa’s throat, and these images changed to yet more tormenting ones: vivid, unbearable: the roofs of Portacheyka, the neat, mountain-shadowed yard of Emanuel’s house, the lake, the window of his room above the lake. Never had he felt such anguish of homesickness. And among those glimpses of the lost beloved there were faces, all the faces he had seen in the streets, the sweating carriers, old women praying, the endless faces of the city, of the poor, and a rednosed, greyhaired man crying, “My mistress, Liberty!” and the bony, swollen bare legs of the old blind man who had guided him.
“By the assistance of the Dog, man was ennerbled—”
“Enabled.”
“Enabled to hunt such animals as were neces-sary to preserve his own extents—”
“Existence.”
“Existence and to destroy those which were no-shows and the greatest enemies of his race.”
“Noxious. Very good. Vasten, go on please.”
Itale stood leaning his arms on the lectern, watching the three copies of Buffon pass from hand to hand, the fifteen serious faces. The youngest pupil was twelve; the eldest, Isaber the pupil-teacher, was sixteen. As each boy read, Isaber looked at him with fierce and pleading eyes. The bell of a nearby church struck noon, little Parroy gabbled through his reading, and Itale dismissed them. As the others left, Isaber came up to him.
“Don’t look so worried, Agostin. They’re doing very well.”
“It’s Vasten, sir, he won’t apply himself…”
Itale watched the boy with patient affection, his long thin throat in which the adams-apple bobbed up and down as he spoke, his big, red hands and clear eyes. Isaber never laughed, and smiled only when he thought Itale wanted to smile.
Another teacher looked in. “Hold on, Brunoy, I’m coming,” Itale said, and soon joined them. “Poor Isaber, what a conscience the boy has! Come on, I’m hungry. Oh God, how I am coming to hate the noble Buffon as translated by the noble Prudeven as executed by aspiring youth…” They left the gloomy halls of the derelict grain storehouse, now occupied by the Ereynin School, where Itale had been employed as a teacher for six weeks. Someone at the Cafe Illyrica had mentioned the place, he had investigated, and found himself hired to teach Reading, Composition, and History five mornings a week before he had ever heard of the Lancaster system or Pestalozzi’s works on education. Ereynin, a philanthropical grain-speculator, had founded the school; fifty boys, sons of day laborers and artisans, were enrolled in it, some paying a low tuition, some none. It was the only lay school in the city where a poor man’s son might learn to read and write. In hiring Itale, Ereynin had given him a three-hour lecture on education, but that was the last anyone had seen of him: the rumor was that he had found a new hobbyhorse to ride. So far, by nagging Ereynin’s secretary, the three teachers had managed to draw their salary, but there was no money for books, chalk, coal, and so forth. Brunoy, who taught the younger boys, was philosophical. “It’s lasted over a year,” he said, “I never thought it would last so long.”
As they came out into the sweet air of the October noon Brunoy coughed and laughed. “You like Isaber, do you?”
“Of course.”
“He worships you.”
“That’s his age. You have to make a hero out of somebody, at sixteen. If there’s any purpose in this education business, it’s enlarging their world enough so that they find proper heroes, real ones, instead of makeshift and tinsel.”
“Why shouldn’t you be his hero?”
“Because my heroism consists, first, in my educated accent—he thinks it’s educated, you think it’s provincial—and second, in the fact that I stand six feet tall. Discrimination,” Itale said, waving his arm, “discrimination is the purpose of education!”
Brunoy smiled; they walked on a little way, and Itale broke out afresh, “I admire your patience so much, Egen,—I get cross with them—How do you stay patient?”
“I have nothing but patience to fill the gap between my old ideals and my actual achievement.”
“That gap—that gap between what we want to do and what we do—you call it patience, I call it waiting for God. It’s in that gap, that gulf, that creation occurs. But I haven’t the strength to wait, I leap in and try to play God. And spoil everything.”
“Eleven,” Brunoy said to a short, dark, spectacled man walking briskly past them.
“Thirteen,” Itale added.
The man nodded, said, “Seventeen,” and went on past. When he was around the corner Itale released a stifled snort and said, “This life is crazy!”
The short man in spectacles was the third teacher in the Ereynin School, a mathematician who believed that the secret of human destiny was written, codelike, in the sequence of the prime numbers. An atheist, he was offended by Brunoy’s and Itale’s inert Catholicism, and did his best to convert them to the mystery of the primes. The salutation they had just exchanged gave him a good deal of pleasure.
“You don’t belong in it,” Brunoy said gently.
He was a thin, brown-haired man in his early thirties, with a look of ill health and a mild manner. At first Itale had seen in him the signs of disillusion, enthusiasm soured, which he had learnt to expect from men of the generation before his who had given themselves to hopeless efforts of reform or innovation in education, economics, or politics in the century’s first two decades: old liberals, old radicals, still haunting the Illyrica, still breaking out with gusts of defeated passion, honest ineffectual ghosts. Very soon he realised that Brunoy was not this sort at all. A watchmaker’s son who had gone through the university on scholarship, unmarried, solitary, poor, Brunoy had not turned sour or cynical; he had merely accepted silence as his lot, silence until the end. Yet he had let Itale break that silence.
“Nor do you,” Itale said as they went into the workmen’s tavern where they took their midday dinner.
“All I ever wanted was to teach.”
Itale brought their mugs of beer to the table. “Listen, you said you’d written something once, a theory of education.”
Brunoy nodded.
“Can I see it?”
“I burned it.”
“Burned it?” Itale said, shocked.
“Years ago. It was unpublishable; the censors would never have let it pass. And the ideas are mostly current now in other men’s works.”
“You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t burn your ideas—Could you rewrite it?”
“No. The ideas are common now. And anyhow, why? There’s nowhere to publish anything of that kind.”
“Yes, there is. Will be.”
Brunoy cocked his head.
“I am asking you for a contribution to the first issue of Novesma Verba.”
Still Brunoy said nothing.
“How do you like the name?”
“‘The newest word’—I like it very much. But whose word?”
“Ours. Me, Brelavay, Frenin, you—the country—Europe—mankind…I’ll tell you,—the name is my idea, the others like it, it sounds right, but I’ll tell you what it means to me. We have something to say, and we haven’t said it yet. We stammer. We try to learn to speak, like infants. We don’t know how. We say a little of what we have to say sometimes, in different languages, in a painting, in a prayer, in an act of knowledge. Every so often we learn a new bit of it, a new word. The newest word is the word Freedom. Maybe it’s no more than a new way of saying one of the old words. I don’t think so. It’s new. Still we’re a long way from being able to say the whole thing yet. But we must learn the new words, all of us, we must all be able to speak them. They’re no good if you don’t say them aloud…”
“O Prometheus,” Brunoy said very softly.
“All right, that’s all my notions. The point is, it is now possible that we may actually publish this journal. And I am asking you to contribute to the first number. Since the first number will very likely be the last, my request gains urgency…”
Brunoy raised his beer-mug, gestured to Itale to do the same, and touched mugs in salute. “To Novesma Verba, long life!” They drained their mugs.
“So?” said Itale, triumphant, setting down his mug.
Brunoy shook his head.
“Why not, Egen?”
The older man looked down, was silent for a minute. Their food was served. Itale began to eat, shoveling it in, though he continued to watch Brunoy in puzzlement and hope. Brunoy looked at his plate, did not eat, and said finally, “Fear.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Not fear of the Censor, fear of the police. If that was all I had to fear…”
He made some pretense of eating, set his fork down again.
“In order to do what you’re doing, Itale, one must believe in it entirely, passionately. One must believe in the importance, the necessity of it. That belief is wealth, strength…health…”
“I don’t know that we’re doing the right thing, Egen, or doing it the right way. I am doing all I know how to do—all I can find to do—It may all be useless, worse than useless.”
“You know it is not.”
“I hope it is not. And you, too.”
“I do not hope. I do not have time for hope. I am a poorer man than you know, than you’re able to know. You have no idea what poverty is, Itale.” He spoke with open affection, tenderly, so that Itale, confused between what he had said and how he said it, did not know what to reply.
“I gave up all I had,” he said at last, painfully.
“You gave up all you could. It’s not your fault you’re rich!”
“What I care about—What I care about most in the world, it’s no use talking about it here, I didn’t know it myself, until I gave it up. That’s what’s so stupid, I keep going ahead, working for the time to come, that’s what I care about, you say. But what I know is that my home is behind me, that I’ve lost it—let it go.”
“Your home?”
“My home, no metaphor, I mean the land, the place, the house I was born in—the dirt, the stupid dirt! I am tied to that land like an ox tied to a stake…”
“If you don’t know where your home is, how shall you be a pilgrim?—You’re a hypocrite, Itale, you wouldn’t trade your homesickness for all the freedom in the world.”
“But I am ashamed of it.”
“Shame is the conscience of the rich.”
“Oh, come on, Egen, write for us!”
Brunoy coughed, smiled, shook his head.
“You’re not afraid.”
But his friend only smiled, luminous, elusive.
When he left Brunoy Itale set off to see Brelavay, going some blocks out of his way to walk through the Eleynaprade. It was a sunny, hazy autumn day, the city grey and golden; leaves drifted underfoot in the walks of the great park. Itale liked the chestnut alleys and long lawns of old Queen Helen’s Fields, but the new “English” addition, with ruins, grotto, and so-called waterfall, struck him as contemptible. He thought of the caverns of Evalde over Malafrena, caves where sensation was drowned in the enormous, ceaseless thunder of an emprisoned stream plunging through darkness till it broke out torrential into sunlight and leaped to the lake a hundred feet below; what price plaster grottoes? He crossed the river on Old Bridge and headed out towards the Boulevard Prussia. All this section of the Trasfiuve had been built up in the last twenty years: long, straight streets of row houses, row after row after row. Because they were all alike there seemed no reason for any one of them to be there, and there also seemed no reason why they should ever cease, they might run on forever house after house, row after row: but if one walked on far enough, they ceased, stopped being, and with them the city ceased to exist, giving place to a field of burdock and mullein and shards, a dirt road going nowhere, perhaps a decaying shack or warehouse, and the hazy eastern hills. Walking those long dreary streets gave Itale the feeling of being caught in a stupid dream, and, as befitted the dream, when he got where he was going Brelavay was out. He left a note and started back. Crossing Old Bridge he leaned a while on the parapet to watch the silky bluish water running quietly to the south, reflecting the lindens of the Molsen Boulevard on the west bank. At the end of the parapet stood a stone figure of St Christopher, his large, stiff hand with fingers all the same length raised in benediction over all pilgrims and traffic of the bridge.
River Quarter stank, shrieked, loomed, swarmed as ever, and in the doorway of 9 Mallenastrada sat the landlady Mrs Rosa, her seamed, dark face glowering over the cat, one or another of all her mangy cats, that sat in her lap. But she smiled tightly at Itale. She like having a gentleman in her first-floor back, though he paid no more rent than the weaver’s family in the first-floor front. When Frenin moved out, she had divided the four rooms into two flats, which meant Itale had to go through his neighbor’s rooms to reach his own—a small inconvenience for a ten-krune rent. The weaver, Kounney, was at his loom when Itale came through; he was at his loom fourteen or fifteen hours a day. He worked on the putting-out system: the factory issued him thread, he worked at home, and returned the cloth to the factory for finishing and cutting: a system very popular among owners, since the workmen competed in isolation instead of cooperating in union. The smell of dye, the rhythmic thump and rattle of the loom, were ground-texture to all Itale’s hours in his rooms; the loom filled half that bare room where he had first talked with Frenin. The family were thin, fair, white-faced people, cautious and wary in their ways, subdued; Itale could not get much response even from the five-year-old, and almost none from Kounney; they were, he thought, afraid of him, afraid of everyone except one another. He slipped past the great complex loom on which the white band of cloth grew relentlessly slow, faultlessly even, like some inhuman process of the world, the movement of the shadow on a dial, the progress of a glacier. Kounney nodded. The baby was crying thinly in the other room. Itale sat down at his table to write, but his conversation with Brunoy and his fruitless errand into the Trasfiuve had left him depressed, and he lay down on the cot in the closet that served him as a bedroom, intending to read Montesquieu and forget his troubles. Within ten minutes he had forgotten them and Montesquieu as well, the book on his chest, his hands on the book, fast asleep. He was waked by a knock and staggered into the other room, which was full of hot red sunset light, expecting Brelavay. He did not recognise the red-haired man in the doorway.
“Estenskar. We met at the Paludeskars’ in August.”
It was Estenskar all right, the poet, the great poet. Itale stood staring, utterly floored.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Estenskar said in his high, hard voice.
“Not at, not at all—Please sit down—Not that chair, the back falls off—”
Estenskar tested the back of Frenin’s chair, found that it did indeed come off the seat, removed it, laid it aside, and sat down on the seat as on a stool. “I came to make an apology, Mr Sorde.”
“An apol, an apology—”
“I had no right to be rude to you, that night.”
“Every right,” Itale said, waving his hands.
“I’m sorry about it.”
“It’s absolutely unnecessary, Mr Est,” Itale’s throat dried up in the middle of the name.
“No; it was necessary, if I wanted to talk with you again.” And Estenskar smiled, a brief, unjoyful, youthful smile. “There are a lot of stupid people at the Paludeskars’ and I have got into a habit of being rude to them, since they expect it of me. But to be rude to you was a mistake, and I knew it at the time. Are you really trying to found a review, a journal?”
“Yes. Please, this chair’s all right—”
“I like this one. How far have you got?”
“Enough money for a couple of issues, and enough promised for several more. A printer who knows what he’s in for. A letter from Stefan Oragon, in Rakava—”
“That could be more a liability than an asset.”
“If the Estates meet it could be a real asset.”
“What about the Censor?”
“My friend Brelavay thinks he’s getting somewhere. With the—the man you mentioned. Goyne.”
Estenskar gave his short, artificial-sounding laugh. “How many of you are there?”
“Four of us from Solariy. Six or seven from Krasnoy now. Givan Karantay is one of them, perhaps you know him.”
“Yes. A splendid talent and a good man. Virtuous; Givan Karantay is a virtuous man. You are lucky to have him. Is it to be a literary journal, then?”
“At first. The Bureau seems more approachable if we keep to literature.”
“Yes!” Estenskar said harshly but with real amusement. “You always get around them in the long run, because they don’t really believe words can do anything, they don’t really listen to Metternich. He knows better! If Metternich could have his heart’s desire every poet in the Empire would be locked up in the Spielberg prison for the rest of his life. I admire Metternich, he is an enemy, an equal. He has the wits and the enlightenment to fear the power of ideas, the power of the word. He’s of the breed of ’89—not one of these nouveaux, these Gentzes with their turncoat opportunism and illiterate mysticism, these worthy servants of the Habsburg-Bourbon-Romanov-Cretins, who wouldn’t recognise an idea if it was pointing a gun at their empty heads. Thank God Metternich is off in Vienna and all we have to fight here is nineteenth-century stupidity, not eighteenth-century intelligence!”
All barriers fell under that onslaught. “We’re calling it Novesma Verba,” Itale said, and they were off, interrupting each other, excited, ardent, gesticulating, pacing, while the red light flared and sank in the room, and the loom rattled next door, and the bells of St Stephen’s, the university chapel, and the cathedral struck six and all the quarters and then seven, and the roofs and chimneypots across the courtyard dimmed in brown autumnal dusk and grew dark and hard against the sky. Itale thought to light a candle at last. As he stood by the table, tinderbox in hand, making sure the wick had caught, he looked up and in the smoky light his eyes and Estenskar’s met.
“You see why I had to come,” the poet said.
“I am glad you did,” Itale said in his quiet voice.
“I recognised you, that night.” Estenskar continued to watch Itale with his peculiar, yellowish, immobile gaze. “I don’t know if you know what I mean by that. One comes to certain places, certain persons, to which one must come. To fail to recognise them, to turn aside from them, is to fail one’s destiny. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“But one’s destiny isn’t always good, you know—I think you haven’t considered that yet—Are you Catholic?”
“Yes. As I eat with a knife and fork, and wear a hat instead of feathers.”
“So was I. I took off the hat.”
“Forms are unimportant,” Itale said broadly.
“Not to a poet. But never mind. I’d like—I want to tell you about myself, Sorde.” He spoke with intensity, turning away from the light of the candle; then his voice hardened as he said, “I suppose you know all about it from the Paludeskars.”
“I’ve never been back there.”
“You haven’t? Luisa has spoken of you several times; I thought you went there often. But I’m surprised they said nothing that evening. Discretion’s not their virtue. They love gossip, the more sordid the better, the stupider the better—love affairs, they’re called. The old word for it is adultery. If you know me, you’ll know this, I’d rather tell you myself. Two years ago I performed the action known as falling in love; I became a lover. The object of my love is a married woman who is rather stupid, very greedy, very cruel, not particularly beautiful. As soon as I saw her she slipped her hands under my skin and took hold of me on the raw flesh and nerve and I’ve been her puppet ever since, I dance when she raises a finger. I am her possession. If she called for me now I would crawl to her house on all fours. I have stood on the doorstep and begged the footman to let me in, I have gone to her husband and asked him in t-tears—Excuse me, Sorde. I’m going. Not fit.” He had stood up, neat and abrupt in his well-cut coat and fine linen, his voice still clear, and was blundering towards the door. Itale, with no consideration of his act, blocked his way: “You can’t go now!” he said fiercely.
Estenskar felt for the backless chair, sat down, sat hunched up for a minute, crying. He got out his pocket handkerchief and wiped his eyes and nose. “No good,” he said in a soft, boyish voice, and then, shoving back his red hair and speaking in his usual tone or very near it, “What’s your name?”
“Itale.”
“Amadey. What…What sort of cheese is that?”
“Portacheyka.”
“Did you bring it with you?” It was about a yard across.
“My aunt sent it. God knows how she bribed the carrier; he brought it to the door here. Are you hungry?”
They were soon sitting at the table; the huge cheese, looking more prosperous in its blue coat than its owner did in his, sat between them, with a knife, a half-loaf, and a jug of rather stale water. There was one plate. “I don’t do much entertaining,” Itale observed, “I like to keep to the old country ways, you know, nothing ostentatious, no plates, no forks, no manners.”
“An aunt sent this, you said? What other family have you got up there?”
“Aunt and uncle, sister, parents. Hardly counts as a family in the Montayna.”
“More than I have. One brother, never leaves the estate. You’re the heir, then. You left something, to come here.”
“It seemed the thing to do.”
“The thing to do…” Estenskar looked at Itale, at the cheese, at the candle-flame. “How easily you say that. And I can guess pretty well at how much you have to give to earn the right to say it…To do the thing one has to do, that’s the way, the right road, of course. And I’ve lost it.”
“But your writing—”
“I haven’t written a word for months. Of course that’s my road, but when it leads to a wall? or a hole in the ground?…The End. You can’t start a book with ‘The End,’ can you?” He spoke without excitement, and went on munching his bread and cheese contentedly. “This is first-rate cheese,” he said. There was a knocking on the hall-door, the sound of voices in the weaver’s room, a rap on Itale’s door, and in burst Brelavay. He now sported a brocade vest and silk hat, but looked just as he had looked in college, thin, buoyant, and ironic. “Victory! Triumph!” he proclaimed, and then noticed the stranger. “Sorry! Am I in the way?”
“No, of course not—Thomas Brelavay, Amadey Estenskar. What’s up? Do you want some cheese?”
“Very honored indeed, Mr Estenskar,” said Brelavay, taken aback and so looking ironic to the point of being diabolical. “I—This is a real privilege—No, I don’t want any cheese, for God’s sake, this is no time for cheese!”
“What is it for?”
“Go on with your cheese, please don’t let me disturb you. Will this chair hold together if I sit down carefully?”
“I’ve got the trick one,” Estenskar said, still munching.
“Did you talk with Goyne?”
“I did. Late this afternoon. And I don’t want to hear any more talk about old Brelavay, he’s a jolly sort but he never does anything, I know the kind of talk that goes on among these damned seditious radical groups, especially since you haven’t got the manners to wait until my back’s turned. Do you want to hear what I said to Goyne and then what Goyne said to me and then what I said to Goyne with infinite tact and diplomacy und so weiter, und so weiter, or shall I—”
“Come on, Tomas!”
“Entire sanction and license for the publication of—”
“No! By God! you got it!” Itale shouted, jumping up, and Brelavay, only less excited because he was so pleased with himself, said, “Let me tell you about it, will you?” They continued to talk more or less simultaneously for some while. Amadey Estenskar watched them. He was envious of their old friendship, envious of their jubilation, and dubious of it. What did it amount to, this little crack in the immense wall of indifference, this glimmer in the dead endless night of intellect? And yet this was what he had come here for, driven, exactly this, hope; and it caught at him as he watched them, so that exultation began to grow in him and brought him too to his feet. “Come on,” he said, “where do you fellows meet? The Illyrica? This calls for the open air.”
“Exactly, come on, Itale!”
“All right, I’m coming, just let me get my hat!” They ran down the black stairs, out of the house into the streets full of early night and a gusty, dry, autumnal wind blowing from the east. “Come on!” Itale urged when the others slowed their pace in the pressure of talk, and he went ahead, full of that same exultation and certainty, letting the dark wind of October blow by him and singing out loud the banned hymn, “Beyond this darkness is the light, O Liberty, of thine eternal day!” so that passing whores and locked-out children turned and laughed or looked at him.
The same dry east wind was singing next day in the pines of the mountainsides and lashing up whitecaps on Malafrena, bright and wild in the morning sun. Piera Valtorskar came wandering down the lane that led through the valley from the pass. To her right lay the stubble fields and orchards of Valtorsa, to her left, the orchards and stubble fields of the Sorde estate. All things, trees, apples on the trees, clods, mountains, were distinct in the acute autumn light. Piera’s hair blew loose and her red skirt flashed in gusts of wind. In her left hand she carried an apple with a bite out of it, in her right a bunch of wild grass and flowers.
Down from a side path along the Sorde apple orchard came a mounted horse with a neat quick gait. Recognising the fat mare and thin rider, Piera waved her wildflowers in the sunshine. Guide raised his hand in salute and came riding up to her. “I thought, whose lass is that in her Sunday dress? But it’s no one but thee in common clothes…” Sometimes he called her by her title, sometimes he still used thou to her as to a child. She called him you and Mr Sorde, but that was the extent of her formality with him. At times she pondered the questions: did she love Mr Sorde as much as she loved her father? Ought she to? And why did she? She found no answers, no scales for weighing love, no reasons. She loved him because he loved her. That she knew, better perhaps than he did. Not being responsible for her, he was free to show his feelings to her, as he was not free with his own daughter and son. He could play with Piera long years after he had ceased to tease and praise and play with Laura. He looked down at her now smiling, seeing the flash of her red skirt, her blown hair, her clear, bright eyes, seeing her a frail, wild bit of the bright day of wind; his look was praise.
“I stole one of your apples, see? Should I put it back?”
“Eat it, eat it,” said he.
“It’s got a worm right through it.”
“That’s the serpent that tempted thee, Eve.”
She looked up at him and laughed. “May I feed it to Bruna? Are you in a hurry, Mr Sorde?”
She stood at the mare’s head, offering the apple. Bruna tossed her head and mouthed her bit, and Guide had to slap the bit out so she could eat Piera’s apple. He did not mind humoring the girl and the wilful old mare. The beauty of the morning put him in a patient mood, a mood that fit the season; he liked the autumn above all seasons, because it brought him that quietness.
“You’re going in to Portacheyka, Mr Sorde?” Piera asked in a ladylike tone. She was always changing that way from country Eve to proper miss, in a breath, for no reason.
“Aye.” Guide shifted in the saddle and added the explanation: “The Post comes in today.”
“Oh, of course.” Piera scrubbed her horse-slobbered hand with Bruna’s long mane quite as a child would do, while remarking with womanly tact, “And it’s a lovely morning for a ride.”
“And for escaping lessons, eh?” he teased her a little heavily.
“Oh, Miss Elisabeth never gets up till eight. I have hours and hours before lessons.” She was twining the one bright flower of her October nosegay, a last cornflower, into the mare’s mane. When Guide had left her and was riding on towards town his gaze fell on the blue nodding flower, and he felt a curious tenderness, an ache, as he looked at it. They passed on the road, she at sixteen and he at fifty-six, and she left him a blue cornflower twined in his horse’s mane. It was queer, he thought, how you met and passed souls thus, and a few of them left sweetness with you. You passed one another and parted, it might as well be forever, and yet there remained the touch of sweetness, and of pain.
Piera wandered on towards Valtorsa, murmuring a French irregular verb. As she murmured, her mind, also, wandered. The Post came in today. It would stop, high, dusty, swaying, at the Golden Lion. On it, in one of the two or three mail sacks containing the fortnight’s correspondence to all the people of the Lakes, would be a letter to the Sordes, a square envelope of heavy, cheap paper addressed in black ink, the corners bent and dirty from the long trip. These letters were thoroughly familiar to Piera. Eleonora and Laura read them alone, read them together, read them with Piera, read them to each other, quoted them, misquoted them (especially Eleonora), interpreted them, dreamed about them, and twice a month awaited them with a longing that made the post coach’s delay a disaster, its arrival a festivity. Till now one or both of the women had driven in to meet the Post, and Piera wondered why this time Guide had gone. They were expecting something unusual, perhaps. That afternoon, when her lessons were over for the day, she told Miss Elisabeth that she was going to visit with Laura, and came straight along the lakeside path to the Sordes’ without any wanderings off to the side. By now she was certain that Itale was coming home—in fact he had probably been on the coach.
Laura was seeing out the old tutor, Mr Kiovay of Portacheyka, who came once a week to read French with her, as he came to Valtorsa to improve Piera’s spoken French. He had improved the French of every young lady in Val Malafrena for forty years; and the French spoken there did not resemble that spoken anywhere else on earth, being, to a considerable extent, Mr Kiovay’s own invention. He had taught Eleonora, now he taught her daughter, whom he liked, because she was quiet; but he dreaded Piera. He quailed as she came up the path beside the mandevilia. “Que je vinsse!” she cried aloud at them. “Que tu vinsses! Qu’il vînt!” She had mastered the Past Subjunctive of Venir.
“Mais viens donc!” said Laura.
“Vient-il?” said Piera. Mr Kiovay escaped, while the girls went into the house. “There was a letter, wasn’t there?”
“Mama has it, I’ll get it. They’re going to have a journal, Itale’s going to be an editor.”
“But he’s not…” Piera did not finish. He was not coming home, of course. Whatever had possessed her to think he was?
Laura prised the letter away from her mother, promising not to damage it or lose it, and went with Piera down to their favorite haunt on sunny afternoons, the lawn by the boat house, now a sweep of golden green in the mellow light. Sitting there Piera read and Laura reread Itale’s letter. It was, as always, rather stiff, bookish, impersonal. He talked about plans for the journal. He attempted to describe Amadey Estenskar, but on this subject his language became stuffier than ever, probably because he was self-conscious or over-conscious of his readers as he wrote. There was a good deal of detail about the complexities of dealing with the bureaucrats at the Censor’s office, which was hard to follow. But the dry, stiff letter was permeated, penetrated, shot through and through with joy. A great work to do, the friendship of great spirits, the road open before him, the world to be renewed and the strength to renew it.
“What became of that baron…and baroness…that he wrote about at first?” Piera inquired, gazing out over the dark, bright lake.
“He hasn’t mentioned them again,” said Laura, folding the letter carefully. “Oh dear, I wish…”
“What?”
“That I weren’t envious of him.”
Piera brooded over this for a while. It did not make much sense to her at first. Laura was Laura, and was here; Itale was Itale, and was there. Piera’s mind did not easily mix the absent with the present. Her imagination did not move lightly in and out of possibilities; so she was seldom envious, and seldom discontented. She was cautious about entering the realm of the possible, for when she did her will came with her.
“It really isn’t fair,” she said at last, “him getting all the excitement, and you none.”
“It isn’t the excitement. It’s just that he’s…doing something, being someone. I don’t get bored, it isn’t that.”
“I am so dreadfully bo-aaard,” Piera said nasally, imitating the eldest Sorentay daughter, and she and Laura both giggled.
“I never get bored. I just feel unnecessary. It’s what Itale says here about Mr Estenskar, that’s what I mean—” She already knew the sentence by heart: “‘He seeks with all his strength to find the way that he and only he can, and hence must, follow.’ So is Itale trying to do that. And he will do it. But anybody in the world could do everything I do.”
“Nobody else could be Laura Sorde, though.”
“What’s the use being me if I don’t do anything?”
“If you weren’t you what would I do? Who would I talk to? How could I even be me? Anybody can run around doing things, but nobody can be you except you. And I hope you never change.”
“I won’t change in what I love,” Laura said. Her face was turned to the western sunlight and the dark reflecting bulk of San Larenz Mountain above the lake. “But you see, you’re already in love, you’ve started on your way…I haven’t. I have no way. I just wait and time goes by and by and by and life goes by…Surely I was made for more?”
Piera did not answer for a while. She felt more than the three years’ age difference between herself and Laura, the very great difference between sixteen and nineteen years old; she felt an inferiority of character that had nothing to do with age. She was in love, Laura said. And indeed six weeks ago she and Alexander Sorentay had become secretly engaged, and she had rushed to tell Laura the secret and show her Alexander’s carnelian ring on a chain around her neck. That was so, that was true. But as Laura spoke Piera blushed as if she had been caught stealing jam. She was engaged to be married, but she did not, in her deep heart, take it seriously. Laura did. It would never occur to Laura that one might experiment with betrothal, or play at love—that one could even speak of being in love without having given one’s whole heart. The little girl felt Alexander’s carnelian ring a cold lump against her breastbone, and thought, “I’m a pig, I’m a pig, I’m a pig.”
“When you fall in love,” she said, “it’ll be with a tremendous man, a king. Nobody around here! A man from far away, a man like a lion, and you’ll go away with him and see, oh, I don’t know, Vienna and all the cities, and do wonderful things, and write letters home and I’ll be envious…”
“Silly,” said Laura. “What would I leave Malafrena for? Let’s go to vespers at St Anthony’s, Peri.”
“Oh, Miss Elisabeth wanted to, I forgot. Come on!” Piera jumped up like a branch suddenly released; Laura uncurled and followed her. They left the letter with Eleonora, went by Valtorsa for the pony cart and the governess, and got to St Anthony’s barely in time for the service. There at the base of San Larenz the sunlight was long gone. The granite chapel looked like a toy set down between the forested ridge and the deep curve of the lake. Inside the chapel smelled of stone, whitewash, balsam, pine. The two girls, the fat, quiet governess, a young peasant couple, and three old women were all that evening’s congregation. They heard vespers in the silence of the lonely place, in the growing cold of the mountain evening. When they came out the far reaches of the lake were grey with dusk and the water in the shadow of San Larenz was streaked with a cold, strong, silent wind rising.
Laura and the priest, Father Klement of Sinviya, old friends, fell to talking, and there was a matter of arranging to have some firewood brought to the cottage of one of the old women, and then the priest came back with them in the pony for supper at the Sordes’, so that Piera and Miss Elisabeth got home rather late, delaying supper at Valtorsa by a few minutes. After supper Count Orlant, Miss Elisabeth, neighbor Rodenne, and the count’s new overseer played whist. Vist, it was called in the Montayna, and many autumn and winter evenings were given up to vist. Auntie sat in her straight-backed chair, a ball of red yarn on her lap. Piera sat by the marble fireplace with her lesson book. She was supposed to write a composition on the Duties of the Young Female. She hated to write compositions, or letters, or notes, or anything. They were always very dull, and then Miss Elisabeth made red circles around the misspellings. She had composed one sentence so far: “Young girls should be obeidient.”
“Auntie, would you like me to read to you?”
“No, my dear,” said Auntie, slowly, slowly rewinding the red yam.
“Young girls should be obeidient.” Piera thought and thought. “They should not argue or talk very much loudly. Their are numierous things young girls should not do. But these are not duties.” Her pen made a row of dots on the paper, then of its own accord drew three profiles of young men with large eyes and noses, facing left, and a lion with a curly mane; facing right. “Young girls should get M and have B” she wrote very small and then crossed it out very black. “It is important for them to learn there lessons but less important than for young gentlemen to learn there’s as they will find them more useful in life. They should be neat and orderly.” The pen drew three maidens with Grecian noses all facing left. Piera gave it up and began to watch the card-players.
Her father had his cards up under his nose, not because he was suspicious, but because he was nearsighted. Neighbor Rodenne had a good hand and looked smug. He was a small landowner; vist and hunting were his passions, and he had never married, stating that a wife would keep him from vist and hunting. Miss Elisabeth looked, as usual, contented. She was a placid soul; nothing stirred her; she praised God with a mild heart. Next to her the new overseer, Gavrey, looked thin and sharp as a knifeblade. He was a Val Altesma man, and had been with Count Orlant only a month. Piera had not paid much attention to him, as he was always busy with papers and account books, speaking to her father but not to her, and missing dinner more often than not because he was working in the office or the orchards or the fields. He was sitting quiet now, alert, studying the other players’ faces; so Piera studied his. He was a good-looking man, thin-lipped, dark-eyed, with a ruddy brown complexion. The best thing about being engaged to Alexander, Piera thought, was that it gave her a safe refuge, a look-out tower, from which to look at other men.
Since she was twelve she had been trying to fall in love. It was hard work, falling in love with pictures, strangers glimpsed in Portacheyka, heroes of romantic novels, and the few boys she met who were not put out of the running by warts or stupidity. It was hard work and unrewarding. But she kept at it. She practiced: as a musician practices on his violin, not coldbloodedly, yet methodically, not for present profit or enjoyment, not because he longs to play each scale ten times over, but because to play the violin well is his gift, his need, his job. So Piera practiced at the art of love. She had known Alexander Sorentay all her life. No social event took place along the northern lake-shore without representatives from the Sorentay, Sorde, and Valtorskar families. In the last generation the latter two had got few in numbers, even to the point where the Valtorskar name would die with Piera; but the Sorentays abounded. There were never less than fifteen of them under the dynastic roof, northwest of Valtorsa in a flank valley of Sinviya Mountain. The senior family of the estate had six children, three girls and three boys, all tall and boisterous except the eldest, Alexander, who was short and quiet. He was Laura’s age, and when they were both sixteen he had written her a long love-letter embellished with quotations from The New Heloise (which his mother had borrowed from Eleonora they year before and forgotten to return). Laura had shown the letter almost at once to her mother, who counselled inaction. Nothing had come of it except a lasting embarrassment for both Laura and Alexander; at every party the memory of the letter lay like a tombstone between them. For three years they danced together at every dancing-party in stony and tormented silence. It was a great relief to Laura when she could hand Piera over to Alexander and do her dancing with Papa Sorentay, the uncles, the cousins, the brother-in-law, and the rest of the inexhaustible fund of Sorentays. This handing-over took place at the August ball, the ball they had discussed one July evening by the lake, the ball to which Piera wore a white gown with gold flowers embroidered down the bodice, her first evening gown. Alexander gawked at her as if he had never seen her. Indeed he never had. In her first evening gown Piera was new as the newborn, her childhood left behind, her womanhood fresh from the hands of God and the seamstress. By midnight Alexander had decided that if she would not marry him life was meaningless. Three weeks later, in the evening of a long, loud picnic day in the pine forest across the lake, he climaxed a spasmodic but earnest wooing with the offer of marriage. Piera accepted at once. “Yes,” she said. She was sitting on a fallen log near a stream. Alexander hovered about her, not daring either to kneel or sit down.
“May I speak to your father?” he said.
“Perhaps we should wait a while,” she said.
She gave no reason why, and he asked none. They agreed without discussion that the engagement should be kept secret; neither thought to ask why. They were in perfectly good faith. Alexander, experiencing real desire, never questioned that he was in love. Piera was more aware that they were playing a game, yet it was not a game to her; what she was playing was the moto perpetuo or the tarantella that follows the well-practiced scales; a beginner’s piece, but music. She did not know why he said he would marry her. She said she would marry him because she needed to practice her art. She scarcely thought about their getting married. They were engaged to be married: betrothed. That was enough, for the present. They deceived each other—Piera deceived him more than he did her—and they deceived themselves—he deceived himself more than Piera did herself. But they were quite happy. Piera looked up into Alexander’s blocky, callow face, and he looked down at her sitting on the log and said, “My bride!”
Later on he said, “Our properties touch, you know, at Galia’s Hill.”
He was the principal heir to the Sorentay property; Piera was the only heir to Valtorsa. The joined estates would be an excellent holding. Piera found it very interesting that he had seen this and thought about it; she admired him for doing so. Her father was an impractical man, inept at the management of his property and miserable when he had to deal with money matters. Guide Sorde was always trying to set him straight. But Guide, though a good farmer and manager, was not a practical man either; he loved the work, not the profit from it. Alexander saw the work neither as a punishment nor an end in itself, but as a means to an end. He preferred work in the estate office to the fields, and had been his father’s accountant for two years. All his talk of loss and profit, income and outlay, was quite new to Piera, and she listened with deep interest to all he told her. That intelligent interest, and her honest and unqualified admiration of his talents, soon won Alexander to her with a bond stronger, perhaps, than his desire.
The sweetest moment of it all for Piera was when she told Laura that she was betrothed. She felt triumph; Laura felt envy; but those were mere emotions, twinges, straw on the current of their friendship. Piera’s love-affair brightened Laura’s life, a life that ran too quiet and too solitary; while, without Laura, Piera would not have enjoyed her betrothal very much at all. Indeed she preferred talking about Alexander with Laura, to being with Alexander himself.
She did not see him often, as he could not on her openly. She had requested secrecy, and a call from a young man on a young woman, in that small watchful society, was as good as a proposal. They met in secret, and Laura’s connivance was needed to arrange the meetings. She was as drunk with the romance of it all as Piera and Alexander; she waited on guard on the lawn beneath the stars, tense and ecstatic, while they whispered in the shadow of the boat house. She was perhaps happier than they.
They had kissed once: the first evening. Given abruptly and received awkwardly, the kiss had landed near Piera’s ear. After it neither had dared move. They had held still so long their necks began to ache. Piera had tried with all her heart to feel delighted, but not even when she was alone could she manage it; and she did not mention the kiss to Laura. Alexander did not offer to repeat it. At most he held her hand: and when he did, his was wet. She did not much like that soft, nervous touch, and as they talked would contrive to withdraw her own hand, and he would not notice.
Once, in one of the endless conversations that were their chief pleasure, Laura had said, “You know, Peri, I can tell you something now.”
“What, what, what?”
“Nothing really. I used to wonder what it would be like if you and Itale fell in love. You know how you think things like that, just arranging the world to suit yourself…”
Piera nodded.
“It wouldn’t have done at all, really.”
“Why not?”
“Oh—his politics. And both your tempers. And anyhow, he isn’t Alexander!”
As she sat by the fire, her composition on the Duties of the Young Female on her knee, Piera thought again of that brief conversation, of Laura’s wistful, teasing, loving look, and the same chill of fear ran through her. Fall in love with Itale, marry him? No! That was something altogether different from Alexander Sorentay and being engaged and holding hands. That was no game she could play, nothing she could manage, it was not to be thought of; nor was he to be thought of, the scent of mandevilia, and the roar of summer rain, and the door open and he standing there. She had not read the book he had given her, the New Life. It stood in her bookshelf in her room, and she never took it out. And she had believed, this morning, that he was coming back! That was nonsense. He was not coming back. He was gone.
Auntie’s eyes had closed, her fingers lay motionless on the red yarn. “Young girls should be obeidient…They should be neat and orderly…” Piera yawned, and neighbor Rodenne said grinning from the card table, “Don’t swallow the fireplace, contesina!”
Voices and steps outside. Piera bounced up; visitors thank God! It was Father Klement wanting a word with Count Orlant about the next meeting of the Catholic Men’s Sodality of Val Malafrena, and the Sordes come along with him for the walk. Eleonora had brought some new silks for Auntie. “Is your rheumatism any better, Auntie dear?” she asked, and the old lady, raising her clear grey eyes from sleep without the least surprise, said, “No.” Guide and neighbor Rodenne fell to talking hounds. Piera went off to the kitchen to stir up the cook, for Count Orlant never let a guest leave unfed. The new overseer rose from the interrupted vist game to stretch his legs and warm his back at the fire. Laura, who had seen him only a few times before, asked politely, “Are you liking it here at Malafrena, Mr Gavrey?”
“Aye, miss,” he answered. She blushed as she always did when talking to a stranger. That was all their conversation.
As the Sordes went home by the lake-shore path Laura asked, “What sort of man is Count Orlant’s new overseer, father?”
“A considerable improvement. He may get the estate run something like properly, if he keeps at it.”
“I can’t find out much about him,” said Eleonora. “Of course he’s not one of the Gavres from Kulme, it’s Gavrey; his father’s a farmer, freeholder, near Mor Altesma, he’s the second son. He’s very closemouthed, none of the women at Valtorsa know a thing about him. I hope he’s honest. How can you trust a closemouthed man?”
“You can trust him not to blabber,” Guide said with dry good humor. He was still in the good mood of the early morning. He breathed the night air of autumn as they walked, felt his body as straight and lithe as ever, and held his wife’s arm in his own. Fifty-six wasn’t the worst time of life. It was pleasant to walk home in the darkness of October, under pines and stars, between two well-beloved women.
When Laura bade him good night before going upstairs he kissed her and sketched the cross on her hair, as he did rarely since she was grown.
Eleonora watched, and thought, “You have your daughter, but I do not have my son.” But the flicker of bitterness was lost as she looked at Laura’s face: all evening long, as always when she was tense or troubled, Laura’s likeness to her brother had been very strong, Itale had been in the turn of her head, in the tone of her voice. On whose head had Guide set his blessing? His eyes, his hands, were kinder than his head, and wiser.
She followed Laura upstairs after a little. As she passed the empty bedroom something moved, a figure between the doorway and the grey starlit window.
“I thought you were in bed.”
“I wanted to look at the lake.”
In her white nightgown Laura was very tall and thin, a white crane startled from the reeds at night.
“You’re barefoot! Come to bed before you catch a pleurisy.” She followed Laura to her bedroom, which looked out onto the valley, the orchards, San Givan dark against stars. The window was half open, letting in the sweet, dry odors of an autumn night in farmlands. Laura curled up in bed, her mother sat down by her. Her long, thin hand lay on the coverlet, and the girl looked at it and at the wedding ring, of soft gold, worn thin.
“Mama, when you fell in love first…”
“With your father.”
“Not the Cavalry Lieutenant?”
Eleonora laughed, and her underlip drew in, demure and sly. “Oh, no; that was just moustaches…and the boots…”
“Can people fall in love intentionally?”
Eleonora considered. “I really don’t know. It sounds very odd. But I believe…Well, so much of love comes after marriage. At least for us.” She meant, for women. “I don’t believe one can force an inclination; but if it is there, one can certainly improve upon it.”
They sat in peaceable silence for a minute, the girl thinking forward, the woman thinking back.
“Wasn’t Father Klement funny about the soup?”
They both laughed. “I never see him,” said Eleonora, “but I think of the grey hen Eva was so fond of, do you remember it? it had such a peculiar way of clucking when it laid an egg, he sounds very like it.” They both laughed again. Guide’s step was on the stairs, coming up; Eleonora rose. She looked at her daughter with her head a little to one side. “You’re sad,” she said.
“Oh, no.”
The mother said nothing, but continued to gaze.
“I miss Itale. On letter nights.”
“It’s high time we answered Matilda’s letter.”
Eleonora’s brother Angele Dru and his wife Matilda, in Solariy, had invited Laura to stay with them over the winter.
“I’d rather go in spring,” Laura said imploringly.
“The winter down there would be good for your chest. And some new faces at Christmas…Well, we really must think about it, dear. Put your feet under the covers, do you breathe through your toes? Good night, my darling.” Eleonora blew out the candle on the chest of drawers and went out, a little round figure in the darkness. Laura did not lie down, but put her feet obediently under the covers; with her arms round her knees she sat for a long time looking out at the mountain and the hazy stars beside and above it, flaring in the gulfs of night and autumn and the wind.