In the autumn of 1826 Piera set off for Aisnar, some forty miles north of her home, to complete her education. Her father went with her, and Miss Elisabeth, who was a native of Aisnar, and Cousin Betta Berachoy of Portacheyka who wanted to visit friends there and was of course invited to share the Valtorskar carriage, and Count Orlant’s man, and old Godin who had been the Valtorskar coachman for fifty years. They set off from Valtorsa on a morning of late September in the immense, creaking, luggage-laden family carriage, older even than the coachman. Piera’s face, pressed to the window to bid farewell to her friends and Malafrena, looked small and pale. Laura burst into tears, and Alexander Sorentay trotted his horse beside the carriage all the way to Portacheyka, though he could not talk to Piera since the window was stuck shut.
There had been some coolness between him and Piera that summer. As the secret engagement wore on into its second year, he had begun to question the necessity of its secrecy; and Piera had at once begun a quarrel with him. It did not get very far, because he would not quarrel: he went into a flat panic at the thought of losing her. He promptly revived the New Heloise and the meetings at the boathouse after dark. But Piera had played all those scales a hundred times, and was getting bored. She would have much preferred a good quarrel and either a reconciliation with tears or no reconciliation and a broken heart; but Alexander would not quarrel. He was staunch, he was tender, he was patient, he was faithful. He said, “Every hour you’re gone I’ll think of you. I will never change, Piera!” She had wept at their last parting. Now as the carriage came to the wide gates of Portacheyka, Alexander reined in his horse and raised his hand in farewell. She looked back at him as long as she could through the yellowish isinglass of the rear window of the carriage. She pressed her hand against the carnelian ring beneath her bodice. She saw the young figure on the motionless horse dwindle away, dwindle away down the street, as if she saw her own childhood, the years spent amongst dreams and mountains in the stillness of Malafrena valley, dwindle away behind her and be lost to sight. Yet her eyes were dry, now. “Discreet young fellow, that Sandre Sorentay,” Count Orlant said with a chuckle that was, for him, sly. “I wondered if he’d have the face to escort us straight through town…”
Through Portacheyka and out through its northern gate, past the ruined Tower Keep of Vermare, down into the golden lands. Towards evening a fine rain fell, veiling the hills. Concerted efforts had got the window unstuck, and Piera leaned out head and shoulders into the grey, wet freshness. Count Orlant was not one for long stages, and old Godin was protective of the fat horses: they spent the night a little less than halfway, at the inn of Bovira village. Next day they came down out of the hills, onto the long, faintly rolling plain of the Western Marches, a quiet sea of earth. In the evening they came to Aisnar and drove up Fontarmana Street beneath plane-trees already touched with gold, beside fountains, between grave, high houses to left and right. Piera had visited Aisnar when she was eight. All she remembered of it was Fontarmana Street, the fountains, the over-arching trees. Now she saw the houses row after row, the elegant equipages at the Round Fountain, well-dressed women walking in a way no woman in the Montayna knew how to walk; she was wild with silent excitement. The city, she thought, the city, the city!
It was a very quiet city. The loudest voice in Aisnar was the voice of water: the fountains. There were no still covered wells; the water leapt up into light and air and fell back with a silver rush at every corner and courtyard. From the dormitory of the convent school two fountains could be heard, the bright, thin jet down in the court and the Ring Fountain on the triangular place in front of the school, a dialogue without pauses, sweet and serene, like a colloquy of blessed souls who have been so long together in heaven that they can talk and listen at the same time. That was Piera’s fancy, her first nights in the dormitory. Her mind ran more than usual on images of the blessed, since she had not before lived among nuns, and worn a nun-grey uniform, and walked by twos on the street—nun, little girls, middle-sized girls, big girls, nun—and knelt with fifty other girls and women at dawn on bare stone in a bare chapel for hour-long devotions. None of the customs of this new life fretted her, even after her father had gone and silent excitement had turned into silent and miserable homesickness. She liked the city, the school, the new friends, and willingly changed her garnet-red skirt for the grey uniform, not pining for the long liberty of her childhood. She did not pine for her father, Laura, the familiar beloved faces of home. It was her home itself she missed, Valtorsa, the high cool rooms, the orchards and vineyards and fields, the line of the mountains on the sky, the lake, the stones of the lake-shore. Piera was one to whom the thing, not its use nor its meaning, but the thing itself mattered; she knew the thing only, as a lark knows the sun or a wolf the rain. What was given her she accepted, willingly. But what was taken from her she missed, and did not cease to miss.
All round Aisnar stretched calm, soft-colored fields. On clear days Piera looked southwards from the windows of the convent school, to see the bluish drift or massing of clouds, the clouds behind which lay the mountains and the lake.
She was seventeen. She had grown an inch since April. The conventual fashion of her hair revealed a broad forehead, gentle and stubborn, like the forehead of a little bull. In the grey school dress she looked cleanly and novicelike, and she moved and spoke more quietly than she had used to do; for she was in love now with the French teacher, Sister Andrea Teresa, a frail woman of infinite restraint, and all that was restrained, delicate, modest, gracious was now holy to Piera. All her thoughts that autumn were devotional. At the height of her love for Sister Andrea Teresa and in the spirit of Christian sacrifice, she wrote Alexander Sorentay, returning him his carnelian ring. The letter was sincere and tender, written in an ecstasy of renunciation. But for the rest of her life she never thought of it and of the grubby little packet containing his ring without a deep, hard stab of shame.
Came Christmas; she did not go home for the holidays, for the Montayna roads were deep in snow and rain and mud. She would have liked to stay on at the school, with the nuns, as did a few other girls; but obedient to her father’s wish she went to stay with the relatives they had stopped with in September, cousins on her mother’s side, the Belleynins.
The house was on the New Side, in Prince Gulhelm Square, four blocks from the Roman Fountain. It was about a hundred years old, built of the yellow Aisnar sandstone; in its walled garden was a little fountain. Inside and out the house was plain and elegant, more shabby than shiny. The aristocrats of Aisnar did not polish. Silver needs polishing, gold does best left alone; that was their attitude. Emerging from their walled gardens and high-ceilinged privacies they could be formidable, but they were not arrogant; they were too peaceable. Their manners were reserved and gentle. They had been civilised for a long time, here in the west of the country. Piera, who unlike Laura and Itale was seldom at the mercy of overpowering emotions, felt at ease amongst these people. Her feelings were slow-moving, obscure, and mute, beneath a surface play of vivacity. In the convent and with the gentlefolk of Aisnar the vivacity was subdued, the reserve refined; she behaved with the pleasant sedateness of seventeen. The Belleynins had already become very fond of her. He was a handsome, short man of sixty with a slight stammer, she, born Countess Rochaneskar, was a delicate grey-gold lady of fifty. Their two daughters, long since married, lived one in Brailava, the other around the corner. Life in the house in Gulhelm Square was ordered, serene, a little desolate. Since it was Christmas time and they had a young guest the Belleynins did more entertaining than usual, yet the days passed very quietly. Piera fitted in so well that she might always have lived there, might have been their late daughter and have played away a solitary childhood in the golden-walled garden on the lawn between the pear tree and the fountain.
Very much the same people were at all the holiday dinner parties and evenings of the Belleynins’ circle. Most of them, to Piera’s eyes, were old. She did not mind. She was used to being the youngest, and knew how to enjoy the position. And among the elderly she did not feel threatened. Young men were frightened and frightening; things always went awkwardly with them. It was much easier to talk to men of forty, there was nothing serious about it, it was like meeting an interesting foreigner.
The New Year’s Eve party was at the house of a close friend of the Belleynins’ son-in-law, a widower named Koste. His sister was hostess, and his young son was allowed to stay with the guests for an hour before being taken off to bed. Piera and four-year-old Battiste had met before and had taken a fancy to each other. She had not been with little children very much, and she found the little boy’s conversation wonderfully funny and touching. He was as handsome and well-bred as his father and his maiden aunt, but had not yet achieved their deep reserve: he prattled to Piera, admired her artlessly, and pleased her by giving her a trust and affection she had done very little to win. It was a pleasant task to attempt to deserve them. When the father, a shy, grave man, reproved Battiste for bothering her, she defended the child warmly. That earned her Battiste’s gratitude; also, perhaps, the father’s. When Battiste’s hour was up she went with his nurse to see him to bed, and got warmly kissed, and returned to the salon thinking what an extraordinary thing a child was and how pleasant it would be to have children around. Just as it was pleasant to have men around, to hear the bass notes of the human voice, not always the tweedle-tweedle-tweedle of the convent. She sat down near the fireplace. The party was cheerful and quiet. Talk flowed as clear and unhurried as the water of the fountains of Aisnar. There were some faces Piera had not seen before, but their owners behaved like all the rest. The quarter-hours slipped by quickly, marked by the tiny ping! of the French clock on the mantel. Piera sat mostly in silence, enjoying her silence, her decorum, the knowledge that by it she pleased the others. At ten a few last guests entered, Baron Arrioskar and his wife and sister and brother-in-law and their visitor from Krasnoy.
The visitor was a young woman. Perhaps in deference to provincial sobriety she wore no jewels at all, but her violet dress was magnificent, and her bearing was superb. A woman who could walk like that did not even need to be beautiful. Piera sat and gaped at her. She could not keep her eyes off her. All her standards of the admirable shook to their foundation. What was Sister Teresa beside this? mild, tenuous, sterile. This was not the brittle beauty of restraint, but the splendor of a woman’s strength and freedom. “She is wonderful,” Piera thought, “that’s what people ought to look like, she is wonderful.” They were introduced: Countess Valtorskar, Baroness Paludeskar.
The lady from the capital acknowledged the introduction in a cool, distinct contralto and prepared to be led on to the next introduction, but Piera spoke, utterly without premeditation. “I believe we both know a mutual friend, baroness,” she said, terrified at what she was saying and how stupidly she said it. The beautiful baroness smiled inquiringly.
“Mr Sorde, of Malafrena—”
“Sorde!” Baroness Paludeskar’s onward movement definitely ceased, and her eyes for the first time definitely looked, for an instant, at Piera. “Really, do you know him?” she asked indulgently.
“We’re neighbors of the Sordes’, my family. In Val Malafrena.”
“Then you’ve known Itale a long time.”
“All my life,” Piera said; and blushed. Not becoming rosy flush but a hot, red blush; her cheeks stung, her ears sang; she stood rigid and could think nothing but “O please stop, stop, stop!” If the beautiful baroness would just go away, go on, then this stupid embarrassment would pass off, she would never say anything to a stranger again.
The baroness smiled at her escort, relinquishing further introductions, and sat down in the gilt chair by the hassock on which Piera had been sitting.
In despair, Piera sat down, and folded her hands in her lap.
“My dear cousins have walked me clear around Aisnar twice today, I think,” the baroness said, and smiled a mischievous, friendly smile. “I have been longing to sit down. But what a pleasure to meet someone that knows Itale! I’m very fond of him, you know. We’ve known him since he first came, what is it, over a year now. How he’s changed!”
“Yes, he—has he—How?”
“Oh, well, when he first came he was funny, you know—very stiff, disapproving, altogether suspicious of everyone. It was inexperience; he cuts a quite impressive figure now—without intending to, I should add.” Her voice was beautifully modulated. Piera listened to it with fascination, and smiled stiffly in response to the lingering, mocking friendly smile, which deepened now. “Tell me, tell me,” the baroness said, leaning forward ready for confidences, “tell me what the father’s like, the ogre!”
“Itale’s father?”
“Yes. I want to know, I really want to know what sort of creature disinherits his son because the son wants to live like a civilised human being in the city for a while! What does the man want? What are they like, up there among the mountains? I’ve never met a woman from the Montayna, you see, that’s the trouble; men never can explain things. You explain it to me. Are you all very passionate souls?”
The beautiful woman was not teasing her; she was friendly and kindly; she did not mean to tease. It was just that Piera was a stupid provincial schoolgirl who didn’t know anything and couldn’t talk. “I don’t know,” she whispered.
“I think Itale is the most passionate man I have ever known,” Baroness Paludeskar said, her voice now soft and thoughtful. “It’s the secret of his success, of course. If he had been a saint in the old days, he would have converted whole nations of the heathen!—You know that he is becoming very well known in Krasnoy, these days?”
“No, I didn’t—I don’t—”
“One can never believe it of someone one played with as a child. I know! You’re thinking, ‘What, him? but he used to have warts and pull his sister’s hair, he can’t be famous!’ I’ve known little boys who I’m now asked to believe are councillors and judges and radicals and I don’t know what all…And one must take them seriously, you know, countess. It is up to women to take men seriously. If we didn’t, society might quite crumble away; the men would be left taking each other seriously while the rest of us laughed…Well, that’s all nonsense, but it is true that our friend is taken almost too seriously by some important people. But you don’t believe me…”
“Oh, yes, yes, I do,” Piera mumbled wretchedly. If only she didn’t have to say anything, but could just watch the baroness and listen to her and try to understand the things she said. If only she didn’t keep taking about Itale: that confused Piera. When she looked down she saw the baroness’ slim foot in a silver sandal. She tucked her own feet under her dress. She had to say something. “I suppose it’s the—the paper—”
“What? The paper?” the baroness said brusquely. “Oh, his journal, yes. It’s quite popular, I believe. It isn’t that sort of thing that matters, you know. The fact is, Itale is in fashion—his ideas, I should say, although I wonder—But now we’re all patriots, you see!”
“Oh, yes, I see,” said Piera, in despair. She was completely lost. The baroness went on, smiling so charmingly, and telling a story about Itale and somebody named Helleskar and some general and something about Austria, and it was funny at the end, so that she should have laughed, but she only smiled and nodded. Her throat was so contracted that she no longer trusted herself to say “Yes” to show she was listening. When their host came over to them she looked at him as if across a chasm, gazing wistfully at his quiet face. The baroness had not yet been introduced to the Belleynins, and he took her over to them. Presently he returned and sat down where the baroness had been sitting. “I am sorry to have interrupted your chat,” he said in his shy, grave way. Piera thought he knew she had been miserable and had saved her, and was now saving her pride; full of gratitude to him for his simple kindness, she said, “Oh, I couldn’t say a word to her, she’s too beautiful—”
“Oh yes,” Mr Koste said. “Wonderfully fashionable,” with the mild, deadly judgment of the provincial on his own ground. He looked at Piera, not smiling, but with unquestioning acceptance of her, a simple confidence in her, that went far to restore her self-respect. He brought up some indifferent subject, and they talked; as they talked, Piera saw that somehow her ill-matched conversation with the baroness had been a battle, and that she had lost it. But why a battle? Over what? And why could not one just talk easily and trustfully, as she and Mr Koste were talking now?
“Are there any patriots in Aisnar, Mr Koste?” she asked him. He looked a little surprised; paused; and answered with seriousness: “Patriots? You mean, I imagine, in the sense of nationalists? Yes, certainly. The liberal tradition here is very old, you know. It goes back to the struggle of the western provinces against the authority of the Krasnoy monarchy, I suppose. A habit of independence remained.”
“But the patriots, the nationalists—they want to have the monarchy restored, don’t they?”
“Yes. Duke Matiyas’ accession would signify the end of Austrian domination.”
“Then they don’t like the Grand Duchess Mariya because she’s an Austrian—is that all?”
“That’s the essence of it.”
“I thought perhaps they didn’t want any more kings at all,” Piera said, looking disappointed. “That hardly seems enough of a change to bother about.”
“Oh, quite enough. If Duke Matiyas became king he would take his crown from the people, swearing obedience to a constitution drawn up by the Assembly of the Estates General. He would not be the source, but merely the vehicle or channel, of authority.” He explained this without the least shade of condescension. “Are you interested in the nationalist movement, contesina?”
“I don’t know. I never understood it before.”
“It is a very complex matter. I doubt that anyone truly understands what ‘nationalism’ is—why those whose word is liberty seek the national, the particular destiny, while those who deny the old barriers of language and custom and kind often would sacrifice all liberty in the name of peace.”
“Are you a radical, Mr Koste?”
“I? No, contesina.”
“Shouldn’t the country be independent again, though? I mean, why should the Austrians rule us? They can’t even speak our language. Why can’t they let us rule ourselves?”
“Well, because none of us is alone. This peace, since Napoleon, is a fragile one. Even a minor ally of the Empire, like us, or the North Italian duchies, might shatter it, if we were free to change allegiance.”
“But is it worth while if it’s so very fragile?”
“Perhaps not,” Koste said, slowly, with an intense, inward look. “But is any war worth while?”
“Surely not,” Piera said, as intense as he was. “But actually the radicals don’t want a war, do they? They just want not to have the Austrians here, and free elections, and the king—don’t they?”
Koste nodded. “Independence; free elections; representation; the reform of corrupt institutions—great matters. But even if they can be achieved without either revolution or war, they are like revolution and war in this, they’re matters too great for any individual; they override the individual man and all that may be good in his life as it is. Where men are very poor, a movement of reform that might them upward with it is their only hope. So in Rakava, or in Foranoy, the radical movement grows every year in strength. But here in the west we have little real poverty; people here are mostly free to make of their lives what they choose to make of them. We have attained something, here in Aisnar; nothing very large; but it took many centuries in the making. It will be lost in half a decade if it’s jumbled in with the needs and wants of other classes and kinds of people. I prize this life, and these people; they are dear to me. So I cannot give my sympathy to those who in reforming the face of the earth will destroy my little, harmless corner of it.”
Piera listened carefully as he spoke, and understood him. To know what attainments he wanted preserved she had only to look at him, his child, his house, and his city, the quiet city full of the sound of fountains. To them, to him, all change was loss. And because she was talking with him and liked him very much, she agreed with him. Reform was all right elsewhere, where they needed it.
She was aware than in adopting this attitude she was turning against Itale’s beliefs; and the consciousness of it gave her pleasure. Very well! Let him to a radical, and let everybody in Krasnoy talk about him, and let Baroness Paludeskar talk about him all she liked. She did not care what they did in Krasnoy. She lived in Aisnar, and was her own woman. Her decorum and schoolgirl self-consciousness dropped away, and gayety flashed out in her like the flash of a garnet. Other people joined them; she was at the center of the group. The orchestra of three was tuning up. It was customary in Aisnar to dance the New Year in. Piera danced. She had a new gown, grey silk, the skirt caught up on one side with a rose of cloth of gold. She was slender and held her head back proudly; her dark, rosy face looked ready to break out into a laugh at what her partner, himself smiling as he handed her up the row, was saying to her. Givan Koste watched her. She and Baroness Paludeskar advanced to meet, curtsied in a mingling shimmer of violet and grey, retreated to the facing rows. Koste watched the prompt and yielding grace with which she let her partner sweep her off for their figure. He watched her eat a vanilla ice, after the dance; she ate every drop of it. He crossed the room to where she sat and asked her for the dance about to begin. She looked up in surprise. A widower of barely two years, he did not dance. She met his eyes. “Yes,” she said, rising to take his hand as she spoke, and the piano and fiddle and bass began the sweet insistent rhythm of a polonaise.
The music stopped before the dance was done, drying off in mid-chord: the little French clock was pinging out midnight. “It’s the new year,” Koste said. “We ended the old one together, shall we begin the new one?” He gave the musicians the signal, the music began, Piera took her position for the dance without replying.
“A charming girl, your little Montayna countess,” said Luisa to Koste’s sister.
“Yes, she’s a sweet child,” said Miss Koste. “Do you see her about? I wanted to say a word to her, but I haven’t seen her the last few minutes. Since last year, I should say.” She laughed softly at her little joke.
“She’s spent the year so far dancing with your brother.”
“With my brother,” Miss Koste repeated without expression, and looked at the dancers for a long minute. “It is pleasant to see my brother dance again,” she said. “After so long.”
“He has been unwell?” Luisa asked, struggling with a yawn.
“He lost his dear wife two years ago next month. I am so glad to see him forget himself a moment in his kindness to the child.”
Kindness indeed, child indeed! Luisa stared at Miss Koste. Her mouth was set, her fingers laced tight together. She might well spend the morning of the new year in tears, in her neat bedroom upstairs where no man but her father and her brother had ever been; but nothing would escape her downstairs, in company. She was too shy, too proud. There was nothing to be got from these Aisnar people, shut in their little world, inexorably and intolerably polite. Luisa gave up struggling, and yawned. “Yes, indeed,” she said. She looked at Givan Koste’s face, dark and bright as a live coal, and at the silken whirl of Piera Valtorskar’s skirts, and yawned again, openly, vindictively.
She spoke to Piera again as the evening ended. “It was a pleasure to talk with you of our mutual friend, contesina. Perhaps we can all have a good chat together when he comes.”
“When he comes?”
“Hasn’t he mentioned it to you? He may come here with my brother, in March, for a week or two.”
“Oh, I hope so,” said Piera. “Good night, baroness, I’m so happy to know you!” Off she went, happy, yes, seventeen years old and drunk with dancing; Luisa, leaving, heard her long, sweet laugh.
Piera returned to her convent school, put on her uniform, walked sedate behind a nun on Thursday afternoons, knelt an hour every morning in the cold chapel; but the piety she had striven for and enjoyed for three months had evaporated overnight, leaving scarcely an odor of sanctity behind, a faint perfume. She waited for weekends now not because of Sunday high mass but because of Saturday night, which from four to eleven she was permitted to spend with the Belleynins. She knew all that would happen there: tea in the parlor, quiet talk, dress for dinner, dine with a guest or two from among old friends or kinfolk, then coffee, perhaps a little music, then Mr Belleynin would walk her back to the convent. That was all. But these tranquil evenings centered upon her, were for her; they were lessons, the happiest kind of lessons in the subtlest of subjects. She was an apt pupil. After a few weeks any stranger would have taken her for an Aisnar girl born and bred, a bright and gentle daughter of the aristocracy. The reward of her docility was the appreciation of all around her, their kindness to her, their acceptance of her as one of themselves. The reward might not have been quite enough but for two added elements; one was that they asked only outward conformity of her, leaving her feelings her own, untouched. Reserve was the keystone of the delicate arch. They taught Piera a coherent system of behavior, but did not meddle with the spirit in her. And the other inducement to the Belleynins’ Saturday evenings was Givan Koste, the man of sorrows, the widower twice her age, the faithful visitor.
“What a joy it is to see Givan himself again,” said Mrs Belleynin over coffee, only the three of them present; and her husband assented with his slight stutter, “Well, th-there is balm in Gilead.” They both smiled, and the smile somehow referred itself to Piera so that she too smiled, feeling herself important, valued, loved. How nice they all were to her! It was delightful, and it must go on and on, exactly the same, nothing must change.
On the first Saturday of March she walked through the rain to her cousins’ house at four o’clock, and entering found Givan Koste there. He often came in the evening, but no one came Saturday afternoons. Mrs Belleynin was distrait. She talked more than usual, Koste less. She poured tea, then rose, saying, “I believe I must go look for Albrekt myself, he must be in his study,” and left Piera and Koste together alone.
Instinct, training, two months’ preparation, mere guess, any of them could tell Piera what was coming, and did so; but she turned away and shut her mind, she opened her mouth and said to Givan Koste, “Have you seen Baroness Paludeskar lately?”
“Not lately.”
“I haven’t seen her since New Year’s Eve, at your party, except on the street, just to nod to. She is so beautiful, she’s so completely elegant. Sometimes I feel like the animals in Noah’s ark when I have to go by her with all the girls two by two…”
He mustered up a smile, but no words.
“She and I both know, we have a mutual friend, isn’t that strange, since we come from so far apart. He lives in Krasnoy now, of course. The baroness said he might visit Aisnar this spring. It’s so odd to meet a person you don’t know that knows a person you do know, isn’t it?” It would not do, it would not do at all. Her teeth were chattering. She looked at him imploring him to speak and make her stop talking, to let the ax fall.
He proposed marriage to her. She accepted him.
She looked down at their clasped hands. He had taken off the gold wedding-ring. When, she wondered, today or earlier? She had never thought to look. His hand was dark, strong, well-kept; she liked the look of it, the warmth of it. She bent her head and kissed his hand. “Piera, O my God,” he whispered, and she felt, between alarm and pleasure, the tremor that ran through his whole body. He drew away from her, and walked up and down the room a couple of times.
“I shall write your father,” he said, as if threatening.
“Of course. So shall I.”
“There is the child.”
“I know the child!”
“I am nearly forty,” he said, rounding on her.
“Thirty-eight,” she said.
That threw him off. “It may not please Count Valtorskar,” he said less fiercely. “You are only seventeen.”
“My mother was seventeen when they married. He was thirty-three. Anyway, papa is usually pleased by what I do.”
“He cannot be pleased to lose you, Piera.”
“But—we’ll go home sometimes, won’t we? To Malafrena?” This time she was disconcerted.
“Certainly.”
“Then that’s all right,” she said, her distress vanishing. The word “lose” has gone through her like a knife, for an instant: to lose her father, to lose the lake, the house, the fat Cupid newel-post—But they would go home often, she need not live down here forever. She thought no more about it.
Givan Koste had stopped his pacing and was working himself up to say something, to suggest, no doubt, a new obstacle to his heart’s desire. She smiled at him. She felt so sorry for him, and he was such a handsome man, with his poised body and grave, dark face. He turned, saw her smiling at him, and swallowed without speaking, hit amidships.
“I thought—perhaps next Christmas time—” he brought out.
“Next Christmas time?”
“Your father will want you to complete your year at St Ursula’s. And a year is…customary…something less than a year in fact—”
“Ten months,” she said dreamily, looking down at her hands.
“Is it too soon?”
“Oh, no. Must we announce it directly?”
“Not until you choose to,” he said with a gratitude she did not understand.
“I do want to tell the Belleynins, and papa of course. And Laura. Oh, you’ll like Laura, Mr Koste!”
“My name is Givan,” he said, politely; they both heard the politeness, and they both laughed. Their eyes met. He looked like a boy, embarrassed. It was a wonderful relief to laugh. “Who is Laura?” he asked.
“My friend, Laura Sorde.” Saying the name she grew shy again suddenly. “She’s very nice.” She looked down, inept, a schoolgirl.
Koste was most at ease with her when she was shy, not offering him unconstrained the fulfillment he could not yet believe in. He came to her and took her hand lightly; his face and voice were warm with feeling. “I want you to talk with your cousins, Piera. I want you to have time, to be certain, I feel that I—Loving you is privilege enough—I should go now. I’ll come back when you say I should.”
“Tonight?”
“Tonight,” he said, with that smile that lit his face and left it unchanged; and he went out. She sat still. Four silver-mounted glasses full of cold tea reposed on the table beside her. She jumped up and went to find Mrs Belleynin. She did not want to be alone. They met on the stairs. “Has he gone?” the older woman asked anxiously. “Yes,” Piera said, and burst into tears.
“Oh my dear, my dear,” Mrs Belleynin murmured, hugging her there on the stair landing. “There, there, it’s all past. I’m so sorry!”
“I didn’t know I was going to cry,” Piera sobbed, burying her face in the soft, sweet-smelling shoulder.
“Poor child, it’s all our fault. How stupid I am! What a misery, what a misery!”
“But it isn’t—I mean, we are to be married—Next Christmas. I didn’t know I was going to cry!”
“Next Christmas? You are betrothed?” said Mrs Belleynin, who was in tears herself. “Oh dear me! I didn’t understand—I thought we’d made a dreadful mistake—But you aren’t happy, Piera? is something wrong?” She looked down at the broad, stubborn, childish brow which was all she could see of Piera’s face, and repeated the question still more tenderly. For her conscience was alert and sensitive; and neither of her own daughters, tranquil and self-possessed women by the age of seventeen, had ever clung to her thus in confused and passionate need.
“No, I’m very happy,” Piera sobbed, weeping so that Mrs Belleynin gave up all questions and led her upstairs to her room to comfort her. “There, there,” she murmured, “there, Piera, don’t cry any more, it’s past…”
Itale stood at a window of a house on Fontarmana Street, watching the moon rise over old gardens dim with evening and hearing the lilt of the fountain below the window as the west wind sprang up and moved in the leaves in the dusk. He was dressed in a plum-colored coat, his mother’s Christmas gift; his linen was fine and well starched, his hair was orderly, his cravat and stickpin were controlled, his face was quiet and a little forlorn. He was wondering if looking south from here on a clear day you could see the mountains.
“Never saw a chap look out windows as much as you do,” said Enrike Paludeskar, entering the room after a feeble rap. “What do you see out of ’em, Sorde?—Roofs, trees, moon, nothing going on. Same view I’ve got. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” said Itale, turning his forlorn look to Enrike’s heavy, well-shaven, goodnatured face.
“How d’ye like my rig? English fashion. Everything has to be English. I don’t know why. Come on, Luisa’s waiting. What’s the time? These damn trousers are so tight I can’t get my watch out without performing a sort of dance. We mustn’t be late, the old lady’s a dragon.”
Itale looked at his watch, which said two-thirty. It had stopped running several weeks ago, and he kept meaning to have it fixed. “Must be near six.”
“We’d better drive, then.”
Luisa smiled up at them from the foot of the broad staircase. “Don’t be silly, Harry, it’s only around the corner.”
“Town’s all squeezed up together,” Enrike grumbled. “Hate arriving on foot.” But on foot they set off into the evening of early spring. The fountains sang, the budding branches of the plane-trees interlaced above the street, the wind was soft and cool, the moon poised bright above the roofs. All things were poised: in balance. All things here, Itale thought, were in harmony.
They were to dine with one of the inmost circle of Aisnar society, the marchioness Feldeskar-Torm. Itale was well received. They knew who he was: a landowner’s son of Val Malafrena, one of the western domey; a house-guest of one of themselves; therefore, temporarily, one of themselves. Evidently they also knew what else he was, for after supper the marchioness, a small, plain, old woman, said pleasantly to him, “Well, Mr Sorde, are you bringing the revolution to Aisnar? I should have thought we were scarcely worth fomenting.”
There seemed no point in hedging. “No, markesa,” he said. “I’m only trying to lure some of your young men away to Krasnoy.”
“You city people always want the revolutions all to yourselves,” the old lady said with a ghostly laugh. “I’ve read many of your articles, Mr Sorde. They are interesting; eloquent.”
He bowed in thanks.
“They remind me sometimes of what our Valtura used to write for the old Aisnar Mercury, and of Kostant Veloy in the Krasnoy Review. Then I think Veloy has been dead for twenty years, Valtura has been in prison in Austria for ten—I suppose he is dead too. Four generations of radicals I’ve seen, Mr Sorde, but I haven’t seen the revolution.”
The challenge was direct, and he answered it directly: “I believe you will see it, markesa.”
“You keep trying. I grant you that. I see you’ve won over our handsome baroness.” She looked at Luisa, who was talking politics with Mr Belleynin and a Feldeskar-Torm great-nephew. “I doubt Valtura could have done that.”
“If he’d had the chance…”
“But he wouldn’t have had the chance,” she said, looking at him with shrewd, cold eyes.
He left the pleasant dinner party somewhat depressed in spirit. The marchioness had placed several darts in him with exquisite accuracy. She had reminded him that his cause had been defeated time and time again; she had reminded him that the Paludeskars were very curious companions for a revolutionary; she had reminded him of the ambiguity of his own position. And yet she had done all this not, he admitted, in enmity to his cause, but in support of it. She had as good as asked, Where is our revolution? What are you doing about it?
He walked restlessly about his room in the Arrioskar house, then went to the window that overlooked the garden, opened it, and leaned out. The fountain lilted in its stone basin, a thin silvery sound in the night. A fountain at the street crossing a few doors down interwove a faint counterpoint. The wind was down. It was profoundly still, the stillness of the long fields that stretched on from the city on every side. A few stars burned humidly bright in the sky washed blue with moonlight. Beauty, balance, harmony…Sick of himself, Itale tried to lose himself in the moonlight, the quiet, but could not; in this germinant darkness, this moment between March and April, between sleep and wakening, he found only anger, uncertainty, and fear.
Turned back upon himself he tried to face himself, demanding the source of the trouble. When had his work become, not an end, but a mere distraction from—or means toward?—some different and obscurer end? What necessity was he shirking, with what angel must he wrestle? In asking the questions, it seemed to him that the trouble lay in his presence here, now, in this house. All his uncertainties of the last months might clarify themselves if he could simply answer the question, What am I doing here?
His mind veered at once from the question, replacing it with a different one, the question others might ask of him. Enrike, for instance; did he wonder occasionally why Itale was with him in Aisnar? If so he gave no sign of it. He had known Itale on and off for a year and a half now, at his own house and at the Helleskar house, and probably assumed that anyone he had known so long had to be a friend. Their brief warm flare of companionship on the coach was long forgotten, they had never had a conversation of any consequence whatever since; Enrike simply took Itale for granted. And his hosts here, the Arroiskars?…But this was no good. He came presented as the Paludeskars’ friend and a gentleman, and naturally they accepted him as such. Why not admit that he felt at home with them, in this comfortable, quiet house, as he never felt at home in his two cold rooms in Krasnoy, eating bread and cheese by himself, and listening to the endless thud of Kounney’s loom? But that was no good either. The matter of comfort was irrelevant, the question of his right to be here no question. The point was, what was he doing here? Was this one of the places to which he had to come, as Krasnoy was? Again his mind sheered off from the matter, asking with self-pity if he might not have a little comfort and good company now and then while he did what he had to do: but what it was he had to do, he did not know. Leaning out the window he gazed southward over the rooftops, straining his eyes as if he looked for something real and present beyond the moonlit wash of air; his mind was quite empty; he said aloud, “Why am I wasting my time?”
He drew back thinking he had seen a movement, someone looking up, in the darkness under the trees.
The air inside the room was close. He loosened his high stock, began to take off his coat, then shrugged it back on and with a cautious, decisive step left the room, went down the hall, down the stairs, through the music room and out the side door of the house into the garden. There all was luminous and cool. The fountain sang, stars gleamed through budding branches, rows of narcissus by the paths gleamed in the moonlight and the warmer glow of the few lighted windows of the house. Itale walked to the fountain and stood watching the play of the water, then sat down on a bench near it, his hands in his pockets, his eyes still on the slender jet of water that seemed to hang suspended over the basin, catching the moonlight, falling and renewing in one motion, constant change in changelessness, alive.
“Itale?”
He got up quickly.
“It’s hot in the house, I can’t bear it…I can never sleep in spring.” Her voice was no louder than the sound of the fountain. She had thrown a shawl over her light dress, and in the broken light and shade of the garden nothing of her was clear but her face, simplified by that mixed light into simple beauty.
“I’ve wanted to talk to you ever since you came. There’s never a moment…Are you content, Itale? Are you content with what you’re doing?”
“I wouldn’t be doing anything else.”
“But is your life what you want it to be?”
“No,” he said, and moved restlessly, clasping his hands behind his back. Luisa sat down on the bench, drawing the shawl around her shoulders.
“If you were free, no responsibilities, no duties, entirely free, what would you do?”
“I can’t imagine freedom without responsibility.”
“Oh, bah,” she said, “how stuffy you can be. And how it helps you evade answering. If you were free to do exactly what you wanted to do—what would you do?” In her voice was an impertinent tenderness, a note he had never heard before and that struck him as her true note, herself speaking without defense, nervous, mocking, intent.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d go home.”
“Where is home?”
“Malafrena.—But the fact is I am doing what I want to do. Your idea of freedom is a child’s idea, baronina.”
“Probably. Women are all childlike, aren’t they? And spiritual, too, of course, Perhaps my idea of freedom is spiritual. A bit ghostly: choice without consequence. Well, I know what I would do if I were free, like a child, or a ghost…I would do very nearly what I do now.”
“Then you are happy.”
“Very nearly happy.”
He had turned to face her, wanting to see her face, which was in shadow now.
“I imagine that only moral people, like you, are very happy or unhappy,” she said. “I am always both, and most of all on spring nights when I can’t sleep, and have to walk in the garden wondering what on earth would ever make me happy without making me unhappy.”
“There is no reason why you should be unhappy.”
“None at all; I know. I am young, and rich, and very well dressed, and in any case I am a woman, and it takes very little to make a woman happy—a toy or two, a necklace or a fan.”
“I did not mean that,” Itale said stiffly.
“What did you mean?”
He did not reply for a while; when he did his tone was low and unwilling, without warmth. “I meant I don’t want you to be unhappy.”
“I know that. You want me to be happy; you want to think of me as happy, because it is so much pleasanter. And easier. If you think of me as unhappy then you have to do something about it, find a toy to amuse me…if you are my friend, of course.”
“You know I am your friend, baronina.”
“Don’t call me baronina, please. It’s a stupid title. I suppose you believe all titles are stupid. Ours certainly is. I wish my grandfather had had the courage to appear as what he was, the best of his class; I should be proud to be a haute bourgeoise, nothing more and nothing less. But he had to buy us into the nobility, and leave us clinging tooth and nail to the lowest rung of the rotten old ladder leading nowhere—pretending that it isn’t money that made us, and makes us, and will take us wherever we do go…” She looked up at Itale and laughed suddenly, a laugh of real amusement. “Oh, God, Itale, you are infectious! Lectures in the moonlight…”
“Do I lecture?”
“Almost continually.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, chagrined.
“I don’t mind. I like your lectures. At least they’re serious, at least you talk seriously to me—though whether you’re talking to me I often wonder; but at least you allow me to be present while you talk. Some day, perhaps, you will in fact talk to me.”
“I don’t…”
“No, I know you don’t. You never have.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean that under all the theories, the politics, the lectures, there is silence, a granite silence, unbroken. No, I take that back. I think you said something to me, just a minute ago, and it took me so by surprise that I almost missed it. You said that you loved—But no, you didn’t say it after all, now I think of it; I could simply hear in the way you said the name that you were finally talking about something to me, something real, not an idea, not a theory.”
“What name?”
“Malafrena.”
He half turned away again towards the fountain, his hands deep in his pockets, and shrugged.
“I miss it sometimes,” he said.
She said nothing, watching him.
“It isn’t far from here.” He looked up as if he wanted to say more, but he did not say any more. She continued to watch him, the tall hunched figure in front of her, the profile, big nose, mouth firmly closed, a portrait in charcoal, plain and strong. A few streets away the half hour struck on the bells of Aisnar cathedral. A faint wind had come up, moving the leaves, making the air feel chill. In the house, behind them, a light went off silently, leaving the path they were on and the flowers beside it cold white.
“Though you don’t talk to me, you talk to yourself sometimes.”
“When?”
“At your window, a few minutes ago. You said, ‘Why am I wasting my time?’ That’s why I asked you if you were happy. Knowing that you weren’t.” She spoke very low, in the silence after the bells.
“I don’t know what I meant.”
“It’s almost frightening to hear someone say the very words you’re thinking, but not say them to you.”
“I wasn’t talking about anything particular.”
She stood up. “I hate to watch men lie,” she said, her voice a little more distinct. “I hate anything done clumsily. But if you’re not interested in the truth, why should I be?” She turned to go. Her shawl had slipped from her shoulders and lay in a pool of silken white on the path. He picked it up; she had stopped at his movement. He set the shawl on her shoulders; as he did so she turned towards him, and reached up taking his right hand, the delicate film of silk between their hands. They stood a moment motionless.
“Luisa—”
“Itale!” she mocked him, that discordant tenderness in her tone. He bent to kiss her mouth, the warm silk slipping beneath his hand, and she slipped away, broke from him, and turned to him again at a little distance. Her face was smooth as a bright mask; her eyes were exultant and terrified. “Good night,” she whispered, and slipped away into the shadow, into the open door, of the house.
Itale stood there a while and then walked under the trees, where he had seen her first. He came to the wall of the garden. He put his hands on it, then leaned against it, his forehead on his arm. For a minute he was intensely aware of himself, felt the rough brick against his palm, smelt the extreme sweetness of the narcissus blooming at his feet, saw the late, serene night around him; then it all slid away again, and again returned, as if he were swimming in an invisible sea, warm, tumultuous, silent, from which he broke free long enough to breathe, feel his heart pounding, see the stars, then he went under again. When the cathedral bell struck three he turned slowly round and made his way to the house; he lay down on his bed fully dressed, and immediately, as if knocked out, went to sleep.
Next day he went about the business that had brought him to Aisnar—if it was business that had brought him to Aisnar. He did not consider the question. He considered nothing that was not directly under his nose. As soon as one conference or conversation was over he forgot it and went on to the next. He was if anything more decisive and efficient than usual, but at any given hour he could not have said without an effort of thought what he had been doing an hour earlier, or, perhaps, what he was doing now. One person he met broke through his insulation: an Italian, exiled for his part in the Piedmont revolt of 1820, who had spent a year in Aisnar and was about to set off for England. Something in this man reached Itale, and afterwards he recalled vividly Sangiusto’s long face, high forehead, curly hair, his cordial voice, as they sat at a cafe table in the leaf-dappled late sunlight on Fontarmana Street: “A liberal is a man who says the means justify the end,” he said, and the words too stayed with Itale.
The light got lower, dustier, more golden down the tree-arched street, a few cartages rolled by slowly, the wind smelled of ploughed fields and the moon rose over the old houses. Itale went back to supper with his hosts. Luisa’s cousin was a cold, shy woman, and Arrioskar had little conversation in him; Enrike was dining elsewhere; Luisa, whose manners were as good as she wanted them to be, kept up just enough talk that no one felt awkward, to the evident gratitude of the Arrioskars. Coffee was served upstairs at ten and at ten-fifteen the evening ended. It was now Holy Week, there would be no more parties until Easter was past.
Back in his room Itale did not open the window, or look out of it. He took off his coat, sat down at the escritoire, and began going through a pile of local and foreign pamphlets and manuscripts he had gathered in the course of the day. He read steadily, annotating occasionally, never raising his head. The room was bright with candles, but chilly, as he had let the little fire go out.
The bell of the cathedral, a soft deliberate baritone, struck midnight. Itale hunched his shoulders and went on reading.
“There must be no confusion,” said the pamphlet, “of such manifestations of radicalism as the secret societies of France, Italy, and the Germanies, nor such excesses of radical opinion as the revolutionary leagues of the last decade in England, with the liberal faction in our own country, which the Government of Orsinia not only tolerates but will indubitably come to favor as a benign and harmless indication of peaceful popular enlightenment. To forbid the publication of…” Itale went back and crossed out the word “faction,” crossed out “indubitably,” scowled and crossed out the entire sentence, then put the thing aside and put his head in his hands.
He got up, went about the room putting out the candles, took up his coat, went downstairs and out.
The air was colder tonight; the moon, a night past full, was veiled by a slight mist. The jet of the fountain blew astray now and again in the slight breeze. Itale stood by the stone bench, looking at the narcissus blooming at his feet. He heard the latch of the house door. Luisa came to him, a long dark scarf wrapped about her over her light dress. “I heard you,” she whispered with a laugh in her voice. “I was listening for you…”
“Baronina—”
“Dom Itaal!” she mocked.
“I cannot call you Luisa.”
She sat down on the stone bench, drawing the dark, voluminous scarf up about her neck, smoothing the fall of it across her skirt.
“And what else can you not do?”
“You are—unjust,” he said.
“Am I? But then I’m only a woman. No one expects justice from a woman. As you can’t call me by my name, so I can’t treat you with justice.”
“You are unjust to yourself.”
“Am I?” she said again, but without anger, thoughtfully. “I wonder. You may be right.” She looked up at him, with so direct a gaze that he could not turn from it. “You have the power to hurt me. How strange that is.”
“I have no wish to hurt you. Don’t you understand—”
“No.”
“I have no power to—You know what I am,” he said desperately, “and how I live, and where I live—”
“What of it?”
He could not answer.
“I am not asking you for manners, I am not asking you for mercy, I am asking you for the truth. To speak to me. Just once, to speak to me!”
“What can I say?”
The fountain, blown aside by the wind, rustled and pattered.
“What good would it do if I said it?” he asked in anguish.
“None,” Luisa whispered. “None.” She rocked herself a little, holding her arms about her sides, drawn into herself.
“All we can do is hurt each other, it’s no good—”
She rose suddenly, reaching out to him. His first response was startled and awkward, as her movement had been awkward. Then he held her to more strongly, their inept embrace became searching, her tension melted into yielding, fused towards him till they clung together, pressed together in an insatiable kiss.
From it she broke at last, twisting away blindly, he reaching blindly after her. With control, a reaction of momentary shock and sickness came into and he sank down on the bench and sat bowed forward, his head down. She stood hereby; her body trembled slightly from time to time; she watched him.
When he looked up he did not meet her eyes, but spoke to her arms; in an angry, pleading whisper. “Don’t you see?”
“Do you see now? At last?”
When he understood her, his expression began to change from dazed to dazzled. He stood up, and putting out his hands towards her in an uncertain gesture, said, incredulous and gentle, “Luisa—”
“Ah,” she said, “there!” She took his hands and held them, standing facing him, separate, smiling, her face raised. “I will be just,” she whispered with that exulting smile. “I will be merciful.”
He could say nothing coherent, but stammered praise and desire.
She took his arm and walked with him up and down the path, and across the lawn to the garden wall, and back to the fountain. Most of his consciousness was centered upon the warmth of her arm and her side and the warm faint fragrance of her hair. He agreed without hesitation when she said, “Now we can choose…What I can’t bear, what I can’t bear is falseness, dishonesty, the stupid rules made for stupid people, the rules of lying…What I want is the truth, and only the truth.”
“I love you,” he said.
“We are not children, and not fools, and not slaves. We can choose what we do. That is what I want, that’s all I want, the freedom to choose! Do you understand, Itale?”
“Yes,” he said, because she was so eager and intense, because she wanted freedom, happiness, as he did, because the pressure of her arm on his made his head swim with happiness.
“If you judged me now,” she continued in her intense whisper, “I would despise you. But you won’t. All you do, all your friends and their ideas, they’re trivial, but you’re above them, above all that. There’s no freedom but what one makes oneself, for oneself.”
He agreed.
“And that’s why we must choose, Itale, this week—I go back to Krasnoy Wednesday; you’ll come a week later—that’s enough time. We must each choose, both choose, what we wish to do, no one and nothing forbidding us or compelling us. I will use my life and my love as I see fit to use it. We will set each other free, Itale.”
The tremor in her voice might be exaltation or terror. He drew her to him and kissed her mouth. But as her lips softened against his, she began to draw away. He let her go. She whispered, “Only a week!” Before he realised she was going she had gone, a glimmer between moonlight and darkness on the path. “Luisa,” he said, “wait—” The house door opened and shut quietly. He stood there by the fountain, bereft and confused. Why had she gone? Had he misunderstood again? Were they not lovers, or to be lovers? He had understood her as she spoke, as she spoke of freedom, but now he did not know what she had said. A light glimmered faint behind curtains in a room upstairs: her candle; her bedroom. He sat down on the stone bench once more, shivering with cold and the aftershocks of frustrated desire, groping after the immense happiness he had felt only a minute before. “A week,” he repeated, finding the words a talisman. “Only a week.”
On Saturday afternoon Itale cut short a meeting with the author of what he thought of as the Indubitably Pamphlet, alleging another obligation. “I have to see someone out in the country,” he said abruptly. The author of the pamphlet, in awe of conspiracies, asked no questions. Itale left the house and walked straight down the street; he had no objective at all. Town houses gave place to villas set back behind low walls, villas gave place to farmhouses and open fields, and the pavingblocks of the street to the red dirt of a country road. Overhead stretched a wide, changeable April sky, reflected underfoot in long puddles left from the morning’s rain. Weeds bloomed coarse and timid by the fences; grain and grass were bright green on the plough-lands. The road, very long and straight, the Roman road that had crossed the Western Province to the garrison at Aquae Nervi, was empty; the fields were empty, except for a lone ploughman who silently answered Itale’s silent salutation from the road. It was a gentle land, monotonous, noble in its coherent and unbroken vastness from horizon to horizon. Itale walked straight on, vaguely contented by the fresh wind and the rough road under his feet, noticing more clearly from time to time a wild iris, a cloud shadow fading across a field, a lark playing in the high air, a rain-washed stone.
In four days he would go back to Krasnoy. His mind revolved perpetually about the end of that trip: what would he do, what should he do? He was sick of thinking about it and never ceased to think about it. How had he let himself be involved in an unsuitable, an impossible affair like this? a marriageable heiress, a spectacular woman, who could not possibly manage to have a lover without her brother and probably half a dozen of her suitors finding out about it—and if they did not she might very well tell them; for she was nervous, capricious, insanely wilful; spoilt. A spoilt girl. A proud, sensitive, frightened girl, a woman risking herself, offering him everything and asking nothing in return—nothing but that his courage equal hers…It was freedom she wanted; liberty. What did all his work for liberty amount to? Two rooms on Mallenastrada, an irregularly published journal of very uneven quality, a succession of jobs taken to keep the rent paid, a circle of feckless and unstable acquaintances all professing devotion to the cause but quarreling about it continually—and was this to be his life? Was this what he had left Malafrena for?
For a liberal the means justify the end. To attain freedom one must live free. It was freedom she wanted, freedom she offered—and he was already so lost among contingencies, petty considerations, and conventional moralities that he could consider rejecting that offer! Was he a man or not? Not yet, maybe; he had been a boy, until now. He had come at last into his majority. He was and would be a man.
But which man? a hand-to-mouth radical journalist, or a baroness’ lover?
Why could he not be both? Was he supposed to live celibate for the cause of liberty, was it a religion and he its holy hypocrite?—He strode through the bright fields of afternoon in a rage, sometimes waving his right arm as he argued fiercely with himself; and all the while he knew in the center of his heart that he might or might not go to Luisa Paludeskar when he returned to Krasnoy, but that it was not reason that would, or could, make the choice. Reasons abounded, but within him something single, whole, indifferent, waited for a sign.
The road led up and over one of the long, low rises of land that made up the immense level of the plain. So gradual was the ascent that slope and summit were all one. Itale stopped and looked back. Aisnar lay five or six miles away, made entire by distance, tile roofs red in the declining light, the calm towers of the cathedral rising above blue shadow. Near where he stood was the ruin of a hut, a few stones and rain-rotted planks. He sat down there on what had been a doorstep or a hearthstone, between the city and the sun. The blowing of the country wind had finally blown his thoughts away. For a long time he sat hearing only the wind in the new grass. He sought stillness of heart, the void, the gap, the silence that had been his kingdom in the sunlit afternoons of the years at Malafrena. That was liberty, but it was gone. He had lost it. He turned to look southward; the same long plains ran varied and changeless as the sea to a soft haze on the horizon.
“What would you do if you had seven hundred years to live?”
There they were, Laura in a glimmering white dress, Piera, and himself, on the terrace in late midsummer dusk, the Hunter standing dark across the blurred and shining lake. He said he would travel to China and America, Laura wanted volcanoes, and Piera, what was it she had wanted to do? But what the devil, Piera was in Aisnar. She was not there in a remembered dusk above the lake any more than he was. She was here, under one of those red-tiled roofs, in some convent school; the Belleynin he had met at the marchioness’ house was her cousin.
Itale stood up, stretched, and started back to town. He could not stay in the same town with Piera Valtorskar for two weeks and leave without a sign to her; things weren’t that bad with him yet.
At about five he was at the Belleynins’ front door. “The countess is not here today, sir,” said the old servant, polite, but mistrustful of the dusty stranger. Itale asked where he might find her. “The countess lives in the Ursuline school, sir. On the Old Side, facing the Ring Fountain.” The countess, the countess. Young Piera, with freckles on her neck. Itale marched off across Fontarmana Street to the Ring Fountain. There was a big, tightlipped building with barred windows. A porter opened to his knock and said there were no visiting hours on Easter eve; come next Saturday. Itale pleaded the fact that he must leave on Wednesday, and his right hand put a small silver piece in the porter’s without his left hand knowing a thing about it. He was shown into an icy parlor containing four straightbacked chairs and one nun. He pleaded with the nun. An older nun was called and he pleaded with her, eloquently tactful; he was, as he had been since he got to his feet in the ruined hut on the hill, determined. The second nun went away, the first retired to a chair in the hall just outside the open door, and Piera came in.
“Oh Itale,” she said, and they put their arms round each other and kissed each other on the mouth. “Oh my dear Itale!” she said, tears in her eyes, laughing, in the first, great flash of joy that ran through them both; and then they dropped their arms, and did not know what to do with them.
“My God, how did I even know you?” he said, still dazzled by the flash, and she laughed again. “Don’t swear here! I’ve grown two inches, nearly.”
“It’s like coming home to see you, Piera.”
“I know—to see you too—and you still talk Maalafren!—Come and sit down, we don’t have to stand.” Her last words were conventionally gracious. Chill grew where the bright warmth had been. Itale sat down on one of the rigid chairs. “I can’t sit down,” he said, standing up again at once, and Piera giggled: the last flare. It went out.
“It’s very strange to see you here,” he said, looking about the room, his hands behind his back.
“I know.”
Four walls, four chairs, two doors. He had to look back at her.
“How long have you been in Aisnar?”
“Ten days. I should have come before—I’ve been seeing a lot of people, time gets away. Sorry I caused all this regulation-breaking.”
“Anything rather than not seeing you at all.”
“Do you like it here?”
“Yes, it’s very nice.”
“When will you go home?”
“I’ll leave here in June, and stay with the Belleynins for a while,” she said. Her voice was hesitant; she stood hesitant, yet calm, in her sleek grey dress and white apron. “Will you not tell anyone, I mean write them, please, Itale? because there hasn’t been time yet for papa’s letter to come, my letter went on the last post—I wanted to tell you, I won’t be going home exactly either, I’m going to live in Aisnar. I’m engaged to be married. This coming winter. Or perhaps after Easter next year.”
“I see, I’m very glad for you,” he said, with a prolonged stammer. “Who is—?”
“Givan Koste. He’s a lawyer. Do you know the Belleynins? They’ve been so kind to me, I’m so fond of them—He is a friend of theirs. It’s all going to be as quiet as can be, since he’s a widower with a little boy.” He did not remember her voice being so thin, or so sweetly modulated, a young-lady voice. “I’m very fond of him, of Battiste,” she said. That was very nice, everything was nice, everyone was kind and fond, why was she telling him all this? Let her get on with it and marry her damned widower, what was it to him?
“I suppose that’s the end of it,” he said.
“Of what, Itale?”
He waved his arm. “Knowing each other. The part of life when we knew each other.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” she said in that thin voice. “If you come to Aisnar I hope you’d come see me. And we might be at Malafrena again, summers—”
“But we’ve left Malafrena,” he said. “It’s taken me a while to learn that. Life’s not a room, it’s a road; what you leave you leave, and it’s lost. You can’t turn back. That’s how it is; we most likely won’t meet again.”
“Perhaps not,” she said.
There was a considerable pause.
“Are you happy in Krasnoy?” she asked.
“Happy? No, not particularly, I suppose. I’m doing what I went to do there.”
“I see your journal sometimes.”
“They let you read seditious papers here?” He looked about with a hard grin at the walls and doors.
“Not here. Your articles are very interesting.”
“Why the situation of linen-weavers in Krasnoy slums should be interesting to you I don’t know, but thanks.” He had heard the valor in her tone, he heard the hypocrisy in his own; he could endure no more. “I must go now, Piera,” he said flatly. She turned towards him. “Goodbye,” he said, and she took his hand and said, “Goodbye, Itale.”
That was that. Outside by the double-tiered, silver-stranded Ring Fountain he looked at his watch; it said two-thirty, as usual, but the cathedral bell had just struck, it must be six. He was late for an appointment he had made with two likely contributors to Novesma Verba. He set off hastily to the cafe where they were to meet. “Life’s a road,” he heard his voice saying fatuously, fraudulently, “Life’s not a room, it’s a road”—yes, sure enough, a road going nowhere, on and on, meaningless. No turning back, no stopping, no end, no goal; best to go alone, allowing no claims. Let the dead bury their dead!
The two men he met at the cafe were young, one an ex-seminarian, the other an unsuccessful candidate for representative to the National Assembly, which was to be convened this September in Krasnoy. Itale’s unmoved familiarity with their hopes and questions left them impressed and admiring. He saw that, and grew still more dry and hard in his replies, but they would not be discouraged. He left them as soon as he could and went to the hotel to which he had moved when the Paludeskars left; he had a chop sent up to his room, and went through the last few days’ notes and papers. His fortnight in Aisnar was proving profitable. There was money here for the support of both journals, there were contributors of talent, and the prosperous middle class of the city followed the liberal tradition established in the last century. It was all very encouraging. Drearily, he got his work in order, ate the dinner he had allowed to get cold, sat down again to work. One had to go alone; no use looking for anything one had left behind. Take what happiness might come, get the work done, and no complaining. It was the only way. Alone; to be free one had to be alone.
He was getting a headache, and to shake it off he went out around eleven to walk. As he went down Fontarmana Street, all black-dappled with shadows of branches cast by lighted windows, alive with the night wind and a quiet coming and going of people, someone hailed him from a cafe table: the Italian exile, Sangiusto.
“Have a coffee with me, Sorde!”
Itale stopped by the table, but did not sit down. “I was thinking of looking in the cathedral.”
“Ha, it’s Easter. I’ll come, you don’t mind? My bill, please, five coffees.” They went on together. “Monday I leave to go to England,” said Sangiusto. “Now I don’t want to go. I speak the language better, but I like your country. I like Krasnoy, I like this Aisnar, I don’t know why I go to England!” He laughed, showing his strong white teeth. “Only at times it’s good to get out from the Empire, neh? But I shall come back, I think.”
“I hope they’ll let you in, after we’ve published your articles from England.”
“Oh, here I’m even more insignificant than in my country. And your police are not so good as those in the Piedmont. But I shall not stop in Vienna to obtain permission…”
“What if we use a false name on your articles?”
“Why not? I have been ‘Carlo Franceschi’ in Turin already. You look tired, Sorde.”
“I am.”
“And I’m full of coffee, like a ship that’s sinking. Every night I drink coffee, what else to do…” He laughed again. “What a life!—Look at the poor devils, they want to be home in their Bohemia or where they come from.” They had passed a pair of militia-men, imposing in the Imperial uniform. “Like all of us. Easter night! We would go to mass in the boat across the lake.”
“What lake?”
“Lago d’Orta,” Sangiusto said, lingering on the name with conscious love, saying it with pleasure, tenderness.
They approached the doors of the cathedral, which stood open showing a glimpse of dusk and gold within. A little procession was crossing the cathedral square coming from Old Side, nuns and girls, heavily shawled. Itale recognised the grey uniform Piera had worn. She was among the tall girls at the end of the line, no doubt, head bent submissively as she walked. She would not see him nor could he tell which of the slender, shawled figures she might be.
“Pretty ducklings,” said Sangiusto: “I see them take their walk in the afternoons, so neat, with bright eyes seeing everything like telescopes. I like the girls of convent schools, they always know so much. Excuse me, you feel religious?”
It made Itale laugh. “No,” he said.
“I should like to see your mountains where you came from; as you spoke of them yesterday I thought this sounds like my country.”
“I wish I could take you there, Sangiusto.”
“Oh, well, the time will come. If you wait the time comes, I find. To learn how to wait, that’s the job for the exile, isn’t it? I will remember your invitation, Sorde, thank you. Come on, the mass begins.” They went into the church, into the grieving, the waiting, the fulfilment of Easter night. “Christ is risen” the choir sang, the music like sunrise in the heart of night. “Christ is risen in glory!” and the joy washed over Itale’s heart like rain on a stone of the roads, like sunlight over stone.
Country women starting home the Great Market of Krasnoy, where they had arrived at dawn to sell stuff from their suburban gardens and dairies, leeks, apples, eggs, cream cheese, were halted on this morning of early September as they straggled back towards Cathedral Square with their empty baskets to meet up with the farm wagons going home. Foreign militia and a squad of the palace guard in their crimson uniforms were blocking one street, clearing another, shouting orders; cockades nodded between horses’ nervously working ears, gilt buttons flashed in the misty sunshine, already growing warm. Those people who had got nearly to the square before they were stopped in a crowd could see a whole battalion of guardsmen drawn up in rows before the doors of the cathedral. “Don’t they all stand there like red tenpins,” said a broad goodwife of Grasse to her neighbor. “Let ’em stand all they like, I’m sick of standing,” said the tall and skinny neighbor, shifting her basket on her arm. “I’d just as soon not be standing next to your goat cheeses, mother,” put in her neighbor on the other side, a man in a cobbler’s apron, with a smiling mouth pursued and lopsided from holding ready all the shoenails of all the years. “Stick to your last, cobbler,” the skinny woman said smartly. “Is it a parade?” shrilled the gaptoothed daughter of the woman from Grasse. “Oh dear little Jesus, remember the Holy Sacrament parade in Grasse, ma, and all the grand gold things? What’s a Sembly, ma?”—“How would I know?” said ma. “Do ye know what all the crowding and the soldiers are about, cobbler?”—“City folk idling,” the skinny wife snarled. “It’s a great day, mother,” said the cobbler, his mouth doing its best to stretch back to normal, “didn’t you know? We’ve all turned out to see the Assembly go by.”—“Who’d have turned out,” said an irritated clerk squeezed up against the cobbler by the growing throng behind, “if the damned guards hadn’t started pushing people around? I’d be in the office now if they’d just let me alone with their damned horses.”
It was ten o’clock; the people at Cathedral Square heard the bell of St Stephen’s under the Hill, the bell of St Roch’s in Old Quarter, but not the great bell of the cathedral. It was silent until, at nearly quarter past the hour, the whole carillon gave a mighty, hair-raising, triumphant clash and then settled into pealing tremendously treble down to bass, treble down to bass. “What the devil’s all that about?” the nervous clerk said, while the farm women crossed themselves. “It means the benediction of the Assembly’s over,” said the knowledgeable cobbler, “now watch, old woman, you’ll see ’em coming out and heading up Tiypontiy Street to the park.”—“What’s the Benediction of the Sembly, ma?” the gaptoothed daughter squealed. “Oh look! Look! Oh dear little body of Jesus, look at ’em all”
The Assembly of the Three Estates of the Kingdom came forth from the Cathedral of St Theodora in the order prescribed by the Revision of 1509: the Archbishop and his college of canons, and the deputies of the Clergy of the Ten Provinces, in order of rank, in robes befitting the season of the ecclesiastical year; following these, the deputies of the Nobility of the Ten Provinces, in armor or suitable attire, in order of rank, each attended by a squire bearing visibly the arms of the house; lastly the deputies of the Commons, in black gowns and hats of cloth or fur, though not of ermine or of sable; the whole to be attended and duly honored in their progress to the Palace by the Royal Guard, and to be met and greeted there by the King, the Rector of the Royal University of the City of Krasnoy, the Mayor of the City of Krasnoy, and the Masters of the eight Great Guilds. They went by, in their robes and top hats. Far off in the park a trumpet sounded sweetly. A few cheers went up for known faces among the Commoners, the city’s own deputies and Oragon, the deputy from Rakava. As soon as the cordons were raised the people scattered, a few following the procession across the park, the farm women across the square to meet their wagons, the clerks to their offices, the cobblers to their lasts.
Inside the Sinalya Palace, in the large, cold Assembly Room, like a marble barn, the convocation proceeded in good order. The deputies sat, the officers of the guard stood armed at each door. Grand Duchess Mariya pronounced, in Latin, the sovereign’s address of welcome.
Up in the gallery, a kind of pigeon-cote to the marble barn, twenty men stood gasping for air and jammed elbow to rib, trying to see out the four two-foot loopholes that gave on the Assembly Room below. The gallery had been built to accommodate a few court secretaries, not a score of eager reporters. “And I asked to get into this hellhole!” moaned Brelavay. “Pressed goose!” He was there with a pass, stamped by six officials of the Bureau of Censorship, the Militia, the Palace, etc., and issued to the scandal-sheet of Court confidences and city gossip that employed him. Frenin had got a similar pass for his Catholic monthly, which carried parish news and inspirational readings for priests. Itale had the pass for Novesma Verba. The rest were reporters for the government’s organ, the Courier-Mercury, or lookers-on with connections in the ducal court who had wangled themselves passes out of curiosity or self-importance. Givan Karantay stood next to Itale and watched, fascinated, the chopping motions of the grand duchess’s long chin as she read her Latin address. Karantay’s novel The Young Man Liyve, published in the spring, had made an unprecedented hit; he had become something of a national figure. The government in Vienna did not like national figures, but knew when not to meddle with them. Karantay had got a pass, signed by Prime Minister Cornelius, simply by asking for it.
The grand duchess droned to a close. “It must be four-thirty,” Brelavay groaned. The rector of the university, dark-jowled and tremendous in his gold-faced doctor’s gown, strode to the rostrum. “O miserere, Domine!” Brelavay moaned to him. The rector laid a roll of papers down on the rostrum, placed his hand upon it, and began to deliver his speech extempore. One thin, clerkish reporter for the Courier-Mercury was making notes; Itale tried to do the same, referring for help to Brelavay, who had been a Latin First Prize in Solariy. Brelavay moaned and recited Virgil. “Mugitusque boum!” he said. “Why are you scribbling, Itale? it’s only mugitus boum. Moo! Moo!” he bellowed inaudibly at the rector. The clerkish reporter, scribbling, hissed malevolently for silence in the gallery. After the rector’s orotund half hour the mayor of Krasnoy rose and made a short, Ciceronian address of which he evidently understood not a word, reading it in bursts of syllables like random gun-fire. Then in place of the Masters of the Great Guilds, which had been disbanded as had all workingmen’s associations, came the prime minister of the grand duchy, Johann Cornelius, who spoke pleasantly and fluently in good Germanic Latin for twenty minutes. The Courier’s prize scholar took it down in shorthand. Itale desperately made notes. “Forget it,” Brelavay whispered, “that’s not shorthand, he’s trying to scare us, it’s just hen-tracks.”—“What if somebody says something important?” Itale protested. “Nobody will,” said Frenin.
The speeches of welcome were over; the Assembly was adjourned for lunch.
At the Cafe Illyrica everybody was gathered awaiting the four reporters, vociferous with questions about what had gone on in the Assembly’s first session. “Mooing,” Brelavay said. All the others shouted, argued, questioned, answered; the four who had been in the Sinalya were rather silent. They had known the Assembly would speak in Latin, they had known it would begin with formalities…but the day had been a very long time coming, and was half over already, and it had amounted to nothing: nothing at all. A pageant, a fraud. Itale got back in a corner of the turbulent restaurant with Karantay. The novelist’s goodhumored equanimity was a refuge to him from the indiscriminate and beery enthusiasm of the Illyrica crowd. Karantay combined passion and patience to an unusual degree; he was an ardent and reliable Constitutionalist and Republicanist, ready to risk his already brilliant career for the cause, but unwilling ever to close his intelligence to unwelcome fact. There was a toughness in him that was increasingly welcome to Itale; and it was an endearing quality, that toughness or pragmatism, because Karantay’s novel was wildly, dramatically, whole-heartedly romantic, implausible, and magnanimous; and yet, like its author, in no way was it dishonest. In the complexity of the likeness and unlikeness of the author and his work Itale saw some adumbration of the complex relations of the real and the ideal; and he also saw a good deal that made m like Karantay better the better he knew him. They drank their beer now, and did not say very much, while the old Illyrican shouted as ever about his mistress Liberty.
Back in their chill airless gallery they watched the deputies resume their seats. A member of each Estate was to speak, thanking the Crown for convening the Assembly. The grand duchess’ seat was now empty; sovereignty had made its gesture. Johann Cornelius, slender and greyhaired, with a benevolent smile, took his place to the right of the empty chair, and the ornate Latin speeches were addressed to him since the grand duchess was absent—“And since Metternich is also absent,” said Frenin. “We thank the puppet minister of a puppet duchess vassal to a puppet emperor controlled by a German chancellor for his kindness in letting us speak a dead language together for six hours a day according to the ancient custom of our people. My God! why are we standing here watching a puppet show?”
The senior prelate of Orsinia, the archbishop of Aisnar, opened the order of the day at last. Itale had seen him last in Aisnar cathedral on Easter night, a stiff golden figure in a glory of lights and singing. In Church Latin in a thin voice he opened the meeting and placed before the deputies the suggestion that they vote unanimous thanks to the grand duchess for the convocation.
A speaker rose from the seats at the left. The archbishop conferred with assistants and finally said cautiously, in Latin, “We recognise the deputy.”
“My Lord Bishop, my lords and gentlemen, my fellow deputies,” the speaker said sonorously not in Latin but in their own tongue, “I propose this emendation of the motion before us: the Assembly of the Nation will vote thanks to the sovereign, the vote to be taken and the resolution stated in the vernacular language of the nation.” There was silence, then an outbreak of voices. “My Lord Bishop! Please call for order, I still have the floor. My name is Oragon, deputy to the Third Estate, elected by the Provincial Assembly of the Polana Province. I speak not for my province only, but for my country, to you who have met here in the name of that country: I speak of our rights and of our sacred duties—” The powerful, assured voice rose, letting the words fill the cold empty spaces of the Assembly Room: my country, my people, our rights, our responsibilities. Any word long unspoken, forbidden, gathers in it all the strength of silence. That strength, the strength of years, filled Oragon’s speech, and he knew it, and spoke on unhesitating, knowing also that his might be the first and last such speech made in that room. Up in the gallery they were all trying to get his words down verbatim. As fast as he spoke, Itale wrote, for he knew the speech already, he had learned it years ago in the quiet dark library of the house at Malafrena, the speech that has used so many words in so many languages over the years, but can all be said in four: live free, or die. Oragon spoke for forty minutes, and when he finished his voice was hoarse, the audience was dazed, and Itale dropped the pencil he could not hold any more. Karantay retrieved it and the notebook, for the Assembly was in a noteworthy state. Speakers arose on every side; the poor archbishop’s eyes rolled. Cornelius had sat quietly through Oragon’s speech. Like Itale he had heard it before, and unlike Itale he believed its day was done. But as the debate went on in the vernacular, half out of control and increasingly tumultuous, the prime minister began to look grim. Enthusiasm and disorder were his enemies. During an incoherently martial and patriotic speech by a baron from the Sovena, Cornelius rose and consulted softly with the archbishop. Oragon stood up again. His big, coarse voice, used to addressing all kinds of meetings indoors and out, cut through the baron’s speech: “My Lord Bishop, I request that we return to the Order of the Assembly of the Kingdom. Herr Cornelius, not being a deputy to any Estate, is a guest in this Assembly, without right to speak unless permission be granted by a majority of the deputies present.”
Cornelius walked back to his seat through a cowed yet sardonic silence. “I waive my opportunity to request permission to speak,” he said without raising his voice, heard only by the Clergy in the front rows. “Let discussion proceed, please.” But the martial baron was now tongue-tied. Somebody called out, “Take the vote on Mr Oragon’s proposal”—“My Lords and gentlemen,” the archbishop said, “further debate and the vote must be adjourned; it is past five o’clock. With the—” A Krasnoy deputy was on his feet. “Excuse me! Excuse me! I think we vote on whether to adjourn session!” The archbishop rubbed his forehead, setting his archiepiscopal hat askew, and said, “I must implore your patience, I have not yet become entirely familiar with my duties as president of the Assembly. I now propose that the members of the Assembly vote on closing this day’s session.” A clerk popped up next to him like a jack-in-the-box. “Sic et non,” he shouted. “Sic?”—“Hold on!” somebody shouted from among the Nobility. “Finish the business on hand! I want to be recognised!” After a long stretch of amputated orations and confusion a vote on adjournment was taken, and had to be counted. One hundred and forty voted to remain in session, one hundred and thirty-one voted to adjourn, forty-seven abstained. The archbishop ruled that the session be suspended two hours for dinner, and this was accepted. “That does it,” said Brelavay. “They’ll go stuff, come back sleepy, and vote to carry on further debates in Sanskrit.” But when the proposal was finally put to the vote, at eleven that night, there were less than a dozen voices in favor of Latin. A second proposal introduced by Oragon as connected to the first, which by changing certain rules of procedure in the provincial diets would give the Third Estate a majority in the Assembly, was shelved by the archbishop, who had evidently been crammed along with his dinner on how to spot subversive tactics and control them by using parliamentary procedures. On the note of obscure victory the session was adjourned.
Itale and Karantay left the others at the Illyrica and went to the Old Quarter, to the Helleskar house. They were greeted with champagne and cheers by George Helleskar, Luisa, Enrike, Estenskar, and others of “the liberal circle.” “Well, did ye declare war on Austria?” demanded the old count, George Helleskar’s father.
The old count, a colonel of the defunct national army, had held his last command at Leipzig, under the Grand Army of the French Empire. Itale had first met two years before, when he had yielded to George Helleskar’s repeated invitation and come to this house for supper. The place was very much grander and austerer than the Paludeskars’ and the occasion had been a fairly formal one. Itale, at his most defiant, had played the didactic republican; George Helleskar had been too busy as host to rescue from the morass of offended silence in which he had gradually and ineluctably foundered. As he sat in self-imposed exile in the farthest corner of the vast drawing-room, the old count had come over to him, walking slowly and heavily, and sat down. “I knew your grandfather,” he said. “Itale Sorde of Malafrena.”
Itale had stared at him, too involved at first with detesting himself and everyone else there to understand.
“George has spoken of you, but I didn’t place the name till I saw you,” the old man went on. “You look like him.”
“Where—Where did you know him, sir?”
“Paris. I was a young fellow, he was near forty. We came home about the same time, he back to the estate, I to take my commission. We wrote for some years. I suppose he’s been dead these many years.”
“He died in 1810.”
“I never knew a man like him.” The old man spoke gravely, his eyes fixed on Itale.
“What was he doing in Paris, sir?”
“Living there as you’re living here. There were a lot of us foreigners in Paris in the seventies. There always are. Polish exiles—best swordsmen I ever saw—Germans, us, and the French to keep us all talking. And we talked…A deal of blood and water has run under the bridges since young fellows used to sit about in coffee-shops discussing the Social Contract in the shadow of the Bastille—eh, Mr Sorde? Everything has changed—everything.”
“But we still have the Social Contract,” said Itale, without defiance.
“Eh? Oh aye, we do, and much good it’s done us. That was another age, Mr Sorde, a golden age. Milk and honey, before the milk went sour! I wasn’t in Paris in ’93 to see the butchers, but I was in Vienna in ’15 and saw the vultures…It was your grandfather that showed me that golden age, and told me about the new world that was coming, and a grand world it was, before it came! But what became of him? Back to his vineyards, and dies there like any farmer on his land. And I to take my four hundred to be cut to pieces for Napoleon at Leipzig, and come home to sit here and watch the vultures gobble…”
“Well, time hasn’t run out yet, sir,” Itale said, blowing his nose; part of his ill temper at the beginning of the evening had been due to a severe cold; he was always getting colds since he lived in Mallenastrada.
“It has for us here. Go to America, you young fellows, and find the new world there with the savages, but don’t waste your time here!”
“If there’s a new world it’s here, here or nowhere, always,” Itale said, and the old man said equally fiercely, “All right! it’s your time and your right to say that. The good years of my life were those years in Paris before the Revolution. I don’t forget that, Mr Sorde, though I don’t believe what Itale Sorde and I believed then, that all it takes to bring the golden age is hard work and good will. It takes more than that. But let me never say to a young man that it can’t be done at all!” He pounded his chair-arm with a big fist spotted brown with age, and glared around at Itale, his son George who had joined them, and the receding perspectives of the salon, dotted with beautifully dressed, amicably chattering guests.
Since that night he and Itale had been friends, linked always in Itale’s thought and the old count’s memory by that other Itale who lay beside the chapel of St Anthony under the pines of Malafrena; and Itale had first admitted a liking for George Helleskar when he saw the younger man’s pride in and tenderness toward the irascible, frail old soldier.
This night Count Helleskar recalled the last meeting of the Estates, in 1796: “They were trying to choose a king then, and went all to pieces over it. Maybe they’ll do better at getting rid of a grand duchess, eh?” He laughed, like a wolfhound barking. Among his son’s radical friends he enjoyed stating the most extreme opinions, outdoing the young men in attacking Austria, the Metternich system, censorship, the Sinalya court, and so on. The emotion was real but the opinions, if he tried to defend them rationally, disintegrated; at their root was only esteem for courage, scorn for opportunists, and the bitter pessimism of a nobleman who saw his class becoming obsolete and an officer whose last battle had been lost.
Estenskar soon joined them. Old Helleskar did not like the poet, but was polite to him, as to all guests of the house, a forced, fine courtesy that reminded Itale painfully of his own father. Others came over; not Luisa, though she had signified with one glance as Itale entered that she wanted to see him tonight. The old count had some records of the ’96 convocation, and took the group to his study to look these up. Like everyone else he had, after the day’s unlooked-for triumph, begun to hope great things of the Assembly. He and Estenskar talked vehemently. Itale listened. It had been a long day. George Helleskar looked in on them and had a bottle of brandy brought in with the message, “To restore the Deputy from the Fourth Estate.” Itale drank a little and fell fast asleep, deep in a leather armchair. The others left without disturbing him. An hour went by very quietly in the oak-panelled study, no sound but the tick of the clock and the crackle of the fire. Luisa came in, moving softly. She wore black; her mother had died in July after cruel illness, through which Luisa had cared for her; it was a suspicion of that illness that had brought her back from Aisnar before Easter. She had said nothing of it to Itale then and as little as possible about it since; she spoke plainly of her mother’s death as a release, and showed no grief. She had lost the robust, radiant quality of beauty she had had at twenty, when Itale first saw her. She was thin, and looked thinner still in black, and rather pale. Her bearing was tense and proud. She stood beside the armchair for some little while, watching the face of the sleeping man, his hands that still laxly cupped the empty brandy glass on his lap. Her face showed no expression but watchfulness. At last she took the glass from his hands, and as he woke she said, “Can you come tonight?”
He stared, shook his head, rubbed a hand over his face and hair, yawned, and said aloud, “What?”
She set the glass down on a table, went over to the bookcases, and repeated, half turned from him, “Can you come tonight?”
“What time is it?” He pulled out his watch. “Two-thirty?”
“About two.”
“Did I fall asleep? Listen, has Karantay left? We have to get to the office tonight and write up the report—Verba goes to press Wednesday noon, that’s tomorrow, today now—Listen, tomorrow night, Luisa.” He struggled out of the deep chair and went towards her. She did not turn to him, but moved on along the shelves looking at the titles of books.
“I’ll be at court tomorrow night,” she said. “Here he is, George, the Sleeping Beauty wakened by my kiss. Don’t you wish you’d gone to sleep too?”
“No,” said young Helleskar. “You’d probably have bitten me. All the radical elements in the salon are looking for you, Sorde.”
“We have to get this issue set up so the Censor can look it over, last week they took fifty-six hours to pass it—Come on with us, Helleskar, these all-night bouts are entertaining.” Refreshed and wide awake, Itale’s vitality was as bright and warm as the fire on the hearth, and George Helleskar said, “All right! if I won’t be in the way?”
“We’ll put you to work, don’t worry. Good night, baronina,” he said gaily, frankly, using her title as he always did before other people.
“Will you forgive the absconding host?” George Helleskar asked her with his kindly effrontery. She smiled and said, “I have been trying to make Enrike take me home this hour. Enjoy yourselves. Do you really think the Censor will let you print anything, now?”
But Itale had met up with Karantay at the doorway, and did not hear her, or pretended not to hear her.
From the first time she saw him, fresh off the Montayna coach, bewildered and out of place in her salon, Luisa had been afraid of him. Everything about him frightened her, his height, his blue eyes, his big nose, his strong hands, his awkwardness, his vulnerability, his ideas, his masculinity, the spirit that she saw play in him as bright and dangerous as lightning in a heavy sky. He was completely strange to her: completely different from her. She shared nothing with him. His reality was a denial of hers. To touch him would be to destroy him or to be destroyed.—So extreme a reaction displeased her; she sought control over herself, both mind and body; coolness, courage, self-possession were her own ideals. Itale’s presence was a severe test of these qualities, but to avoid him, which would have been the simplest and most natural thing in the world, to send him off and not see him again, would also be cowardice, admission of defeat. She had invited him back, against Enrike’s feeble protest. Helleskar and Estenskar had both taken m up, and now the whole group of radical journalists were people of some note in the city; she would have had to meet him in society anyhow, unless to escape him she had gone over the widening gap and joined the “Viennese,” the conservative and pro-Imperial salons. She kept in touch with that portion of society by accepting the very minor position at court which had been her mother’s; she was called to the palace once a week or once a fortnight, while the grand duchess was in town. She enjoyed the contrast of the sad, stuffy, shabby court formalities with her own increasingly brilliant and animated circle. She enjoyed testing her own nerve and her power on these ambitious and argumentative men. For most of them she had a good deal of contempt, which she concealed most of the time. Towards Itale, no degree of self-control and self-mockery could dispel the attraction she felt, or the fear of that attraction, and the resentment of it, and the terror and pleasure of his presence, which challenged all she was and all she thought she wanted.
She had grown up, not in Krasnoy for the most part, but on the immense family property in the Sovena province which her grandfather had accumulated. The parents most stayed in Krasnoy, for the court connection was the important thing in Baroness Paludeskar’s life; the children were left in the country in the care of nursemaids and servants, until when he was eleven Enrike was sent off to a military school for noblemen’s sons, where he was unspeakably unhappy, and Luisa at eight was left alone among the servants. She had done pretty much as she pleased in those years of her childhood in the big, bleak house, isolated on a knoll amidst the flat, fertile, windswept fields of her inheritance. Her playmates were the children of the estate overseer and of the tenant farmers: one step above the peasants, having had a year or two of schooling, shy, dark children, hard as nails, slaves to “the baronina’s” whim until, goaded too far, one of them would turn on her and call her a papist, their worst insult, and spit in her face, fight her, and often beat her. She could not get on with any of the girls, it led always to a fight. Her companions were boys, whom she could lead in exploits that Jack of imagination, or dour sense, would have forbidden them. But they did not like being dominated either, and when she was ten she crept home with a broken wrist; she had teased the smith’s son Kass into a rage and he cracked her arm across his knee as he would crack a willow-stick. When her mother arrived for her annual visit a week later the story was that the baronina had had a fall from her horse. “She’s very wild, ma’am,” the nurse said, weakly sounding an alarm. The baroness gave orders that Luisa should stay in to study six hours a day with her tutor, the house priest, and should not be allowed to play with Protestant children, and these orders were more or Jess obeyed until the end of the month, when the baroness left, and Luisa was off to the barns to find Kass before the carriage was out of sight on the long road across the windy plains.
A year later she and Kass took to playing a game which they called the wild dancing. Father Andre’s history lessons had included some confused accounts of heathen superstitions and rituals and Roman methods of divination. They could find out everything that was going to happen in the future, Luisa told Kass, if they danced the right way and killed a hen and read the messages inside her. They stole and killed a hen from the farmyard. Luisa was scared by the awful simplicity of the head-twist, she had never liked to watch that, but the boy was excited by her fear and disgust, by theft, waste, gratuitous killing: he tore the bird open with his hands, plunged his hands into the entrails, and pushed her face into the bloody mess jeering, “Read it! Read it!” She had fought down screams and vomit and said, “I see it—I see the future—I see fire, fire, a house on fire—” He danced for her, naked on the threshing-floor in a dark autumn evening of fog and fine rain. They were alone among the long, dreary fields. His thin, white, child’s body flashed before her, dancing, strong, wet with mist and sweat. She had not danced for him. After that night they had scarcely spoken to each other again.
When she was thirteen she began the relationship that finally got her sent back to Krasnoy. She had always been savagely rude and arrogant to the overseer’s eldest son, jeering at him and inciting the other boys to bedevil his life; now she suddenly made a friend of him, and very shortly the overgrown, overmothered boy of sixteen had achieved great power over her, cowing and fascinating her with his causeless rages, caresses, intimate talk, fits of laughter, fits of tears and threats of suicide. He told her how he had seduced a peasant girl, describing every word and act vividly, and how they had met again, and again, and all they had done. Luisa listened and at last, envious, jealous, a little incredulous, tried to match his stories, using her imagination freely. She told him that Kass had slept with her “hundreds of times.” The boy believed her, approached her and began a fumbling attempt to undress her. She took her clothes off and stood still. He made her lie down, and lay on her, but he was impotent: she began to hit at him, scratch at his face when he would not let her go, and she got away from him and scrambled into her shift and dress. The next day he talked her into trying again and the same thing happened. The boy went home and tried to shoot himself with his father’s hunting-piece; his mother came into the room as he was in the act, and he shot her instead, and blew her right hand off at the wrist. Some connection with Luisa was made out from his blubberings and wild talk. It was all kept quiet. Baron Paludeskar, then dying of cancer, never heard of it, and Luisa came back to Krasnoy to a convent school. Now after ten years all her Sovena childhood seemed infinitely far away, another person than herself in another world; yet sometimes she remembered the overseer’s son and his soft, struggling, impotent body; or, remote, the brief vision of a boy dancing naked in dusk and rain.
She did not like touching, the kisses women were expected to exchange, handshakes. She did not permit her maid to dress her or to brush her hair.
When Itale first came to her in April in the room she had taken in a hotel near West Gate she had been in unconcealable terror, trembling and stiff, silent, her eyes dry and wide. Yet she had been there waiting for him, like an animal that has walked into a trap. Nothing could have set her free but the intensity and impersonality of his desire. His passion submerged her fear like a wave over a sandcastle, and all the fear turned to equal passion, all the sand to the water of life…for a night; sometimes, some nights, for a while, since then.
When her mother’s illness became severe she was not able to come at all. During June and July she did not see Itale alone and only twice briefly in company. Her time was given entirely to the dying woman; she nursed her through a nine weeks’ agony, patient and competent. Her mother died clinging to her hand. After the funeral she stayed home, seeing no one, for a week, and then had taken up her usual life in so far as the customs of mourning permitted; but she made no sign to Itale. He would not be turned away, now, and she gave in to him; for the first time he made love to her in her own house. With some caution regarding Enrike and the servants, that had become their usual arrangement, her maid letting him in very late at night. Often she put off a planned meeting or made obstacles to setting a night; often when he did come she was, at first, passive and cold in manner. Never until the night at Helleskars had he told her he could not come.
She waited for him, a night in mid-September. He was late. He was at the Illyrica, or at the office of his journal, or with Karantay or with Estenskar or some or any of the others, the other men, in their world, his world, the political world. She looked about at her world with an ironical eye: the high-ceilinged, blue and white painted bedroom. Yet she had been right, that night, about the journal. “Will the Censor let you print anything, now?” she had asked, and they had not listened, going off in high spirits and goodfellowship to write up the events of the great day. The Bureau of Censorship had returned the proofs to them three days later with all reports on the Assembly’s first session deleted: it was the day the journal went to press: all they could do was take out the type and run the first three pages through entirely blank except for the heading Novesma Verba and the date.
On the same day, the third day of debate in the Assembly, the President announced that the decision to use the vernacular had not received the grand duchess’ sanction and was thus invalidated. Oragon at once raised the question of the grand duchess’ power of sanction and veto, since the articles of the Assembly declared it to be subject only to the king, and there was no king. Since then debate had struggled on, the left trying to put the question of sovereign authority and the right interrupting mainly with demands from the chair that the deputies speak in Latin. Itale and the others had written up a cautious report of these sessions. The Censor stamped it out and the journal appeared that week with one column on its news page, a hastily composed patriotic effusion by Karantay, and the rest of the sheet dead blank. The only news the public got of events in the Assembly Room was the brief summary of motions and votes on an inner page of the Courier-Mercury. Prime Minister Cornelius saw no need for violence, which was abhorrent to the system; it was merely a matter of laying one’s trump card down quietly at the last moment, game after game.
And it was a game that he, as surely as his idealistic opponents, had staked his life on. Only he had the soldiers and the Empire on his side, which made the contest somewhat uneven. She saw that; she did not think Itale, or Estenskar, or even Helleskar saw it clearly. She did not say much about it, but she continued to fulfil her duties at court, and she entertained men who could help Enrike in his modest diplomatic ambitions whenever he asked her to or when she saw the opportunity herself. She saw no disloyalty in this. Why should she be loyal to a cause from which she was excluded? How could she be? She could not play the game, therefore she did not care who won it.
Still he did not come. It was past two. She had been sitting at her dressing table; she lay down with the magazine he had brought her, the Bellerofon, a monthly which took most of the literary stuffing out of Novesma Verba, which had become frankly political and philosophical. In this issue Itale had a long review of a Dictionary and Historical Grammar of the Orsinian Language and its Dialects by a professor at Solariy, the leading article. Apparently they were all excited by the dictionary and grammar. Patriotism. She tried to read it. Itale’s written style was terse, logical, and didactic; effective but not seductive; not for reading lying down. Luisa yawned and began skipping. Estenskar had contributed the second part of a long review of Karantay’s novel. There weren’t even enough of them to quarrel healthily, they all had to praise one another. It was small, their world, it was shabby, as mediocre as the dreary court of the grand duchess, as futile. They were not free, though they talked forever about freedom. Nobody was free.
“There’s a nice picture,” said Itale’s quiet voice. She had gone to sleep; she opened her eyes, struggling for consciousness, but did not move. She knew from his voice that he was smiling. “Fell asleep over my review, did you?” he said bending over her, so that she smelt the night air on him and felt the warmth of his mouth brush her cheek. “Novel-reader.”
“You can read dictionaries if you like them,” she said, opening her eyes and then shutting them again to stretch a long, supple stretch and yawn. “Don’t ask me to. I don’t trust words. You’re very late.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He took off his coat and stock and sat down on the bed in waistcoat and shirtsleeves. His face looked grave and shadowed in the light of the single candle. She watched him, studied his face, as she always did, as if by watching him she could find out what he was.
“At the Illyrica,” she said. “Talk and talk and talk. Words and words and words…”
“No, I was with a friend. From that school I taught at for a while. He’s out of work.”
“You’re all out of work, always.”
She knew he did not like to be teased about the erratic jobs he had taken to pay for his rent and bread, until Novesma Verba, thriving, could pay him a tiny salary. She knew the subject of his relative poverty was one of the most dangerous ones that lay between them. It was precisely because it was dangerous that she began to edge near the crater. But no temper stirred in him now; he merely nodded, and said, “Egen quit his job, he had a good one, tutoring a family, some grain-merchant in the Trasfiuve. He’s consumptive and a doctor told him that living with the children he put them at risk. So he moved out. They tried to make him stay. I don’t know what to do for him. If he could just have a year or so to get his health back—” Itale put his head in his hands. “I don’t know, I don’t see how he can get free at all, but it can’t…”
“Yes, it can; it probably will; it generally does. And there is nothing you can do about it! Why do you torment yourself?”
“I don’t. He’s my friend.”
“You do. None of your friends is worthy of you. They are all doomed, defeated in advance.”
“Estenskar?” he said with a kind of laugh.
“Estenskar most of all. He is in love with defeat.”
“I don’t want to talk about all that now,” he said impatiently. “I’m tired.” He turned to her, but she swung off the bed with a lazy, evasive motion, gathering her silk dressing-gown about her, went to the dressing-table, sat down before the glass and began to brush her hair. He lay back across the bed, his arms over his head.
“Don’t forget to wind the clock and say your prayers,” Luisa said.
“What have I done wrong now?” he asked in a dry tone, but goodhumoredly enough.
“Marriage is not what I want.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
There was a pause before he answered. “Luisa, there has to be a certain amount we take for granted, an area of trust between us, or we can’t get on at all. We can’t start over every time.”
“Yes, we can. That is precisely what I want, what we should do. Nothing taken for granted. Nothing settled, expectable, cut-and-dried. Each night the first night.—But there’s no use, so long as you come to it from…where you do come from.”
“What do you mean, where I come from?”
“All the men you waste your breath on. All the second-rate people. The people you don’t belong with. Let the weak lean on one another. You cannot share pain; that’s the worst hypocrisy of all, the most degrading. Charity, humility, the vile Christian virtues—what are you doing in that cage?” Her voice was light and mild, she continued to brush her hair with a long rhythmic stroke. “You come to me from a cage and never know you’ve left it. And run back to it in the morning…”
He sat up on the bed and sat for a while gazing off into the shadowed end of the room, where long white drapes hid the windows. “I come to you for…for what no one else ever gave me, ever offered me,—it is trust; the greatest trust. I don’t know how to handle it. I’m no good at it, I know I hurt you. All I do is offer you what you give me, that trust, that care.”
“That cage…” He had stood up as he spoke, and she rose, turning to him, meeting him in the center of the room, her hair loose and her body warm and fresh in the flowered robe; the sleeves dropped back from her arms as she put them up to embrace him. “I want to fly beside you, like falcons, like eagles over the mountains, never looking down, never looking back…”
“I love you,” he whispered, gathering her against him, a much more expert lover now than he had been in the garden in Aisnar but no less tender, responsive to her response, so that although she wanted to go on talking, wanted to tell him “I am your freedom, and what I see in you is freedom,” she said nothing, feeling the words dissolve and the barriers go down and the joy she feared so deeply pick her up and sweep her off like foam on the torrents of the thaw.
He lay asleep beside her when she roused in early dawn. She lighted a candle; he did not stir. Again she studied his face, warm and heavy in sleep, undefended. To lie together all night naked, that was trust; yes; but she did not like the word; if there was only a way to get free of words altogether…But the servants would be getting up. He liked to leave while it was still dark, he had been bitterly resentful of the humiliation he had felt once when he slept in her bed till ten and had to be spirited out by her and her maid in a comic opera scene that she would have found very funny if only he had found it funny. He was so naive and so provincial, still; the disapproving schoolboy, the humorless Robespierre, the bumpkin pedant; self-righteous. So the fear hastily reinstating its rights and boundaries within her, rebuilding the barriers, denied gratitude, denied the yearning, brooding warmth of her body against his, her face watching his, and made her wake him sharply, saying his name.
He started up, then lay back with some inarticulate word.
“Wake up, wake up.”
“I am,” he said, turning his face against her shoulder.
“What a nose you have,” she murmured, sinking back for a moment into the warmth. “Like a ship’s prow. Ever onward.”
He was asleep again.
“It’s getting light.”
“I don’t want to go,” he groaned, and sleepily began kissing her throat and breasts. She tensed, slipped away and out of the bed, and put the flowered gown about her, turning her back on him. “I’ll tell Agata to watch the back for you.”
“Luisa. Wait.”
She half turned, impatient.
He sat up, scratching his head. “I meant to talk about this last night. But it was late, and we…” He pushed back his hair and looked at her through the dim sphere of the candle light; his face still had the heavy, defenseless look in it, the innocence of sleep, the lips slightly swollen. “I may be out of town for a while.”
“Where? How long?” she responded without emotion.
“Amadey has asked me to go home with him. I’d like to do that. And then go on to Rakava, and do a series of articles on the situation there, or find a correspondent there who can do it for us. A few weeks in all, I suppose.”
She did not like the sensation of her long, heavy, fair hair loose and tangled on her head and over her shoulders; she had not braided it last night, because they had had to make love. She went to the dressing table and brushed her hair back from her face with harsh, practiced strokes. “When did Amadey finally make up his mind?”
“He asked me to come with him a couple of days ago.”
“Well, he’s been on the brink of going back to the Polana ever since I met him five years ago. He won’t stay long…” If Itale went there would be a month, two months, that she could sleep alone, that her mind would not have to go through all the miseries of jealousy, anxiety, resentment, and terror that her body, or her soul, or some blind stupid omnipotence, forced upon her. She would be free. “Don’t stay too long,” she said.
“I won’t. No fear!” he said with naive gratitude. He got up and began dressing; in the mirror she watched him put on his shirt and button it, then his collar and stock, the stately mysteries of male clothes, the waistcoat, the tailed coat. “I’ll be back by mid-November at the latest,” he said. He had obviously been afraid she would object to his going, and was relieved that she did not.
“Perhaps I’ll go to Vienna with Enrike while you’re gone,” she said. “He’ll never get up the energy to go by himself, and he’s got to meet the ambassador if he’s ever going to get any sort of position. Though I suppose if I went I’d have to stay through Christmas. What a bore. I don’t know. Why don’t you come to Vienna? It would broaden your mind a good deal more than Estenskar’s sheep-farm and dirty Rakava…We’ll stay at the König von Ungarn, just behind the Dom…Do, Itale!”
Sitting on the bed to put on his shoes he looked up to meet her mocking, challenging glance over her shoulder. “Oh, God, you are so beautiful even at five in the morning,” he said, muffled, bending down; then, standing up again. “I can’t go to Vienna…Some day,” a little sheepishly, but also ready to take offense if she went too far, for it was a question of money, of course. It was always a question of money.
She nodded politely, dismissively, and went to put Agata on the alert. Most of the servants were reliable, she knew exactly whose servants they exchanged news with, and did not care what they said; but Enrike had hired a footman away from Count Raskayneskar recently, and she did not want to be discussed by that lot. Raskayneskar was exactly the sort of man who got his gossip from his servants, and then used it maliciously.
“Pier’s still asleep, ma’am,” Agata murmured.
She looked back into the room and said to Itale, “All clear.” He came up to her in the doorway, dressed, armored in the wholecloth of this age of respectability, formidable, a stranger; she shivered, barefoot, in her thin silk gown. “I don’t want to go,” he said softly, not touching her. “I don’t want to go now. I don’t want to go to Rakava.” He leaned down, kissed her very lightly on the lips, and went out. She could not even hear his step on the stairs.
She went back to bed and curled up in the place under the covers that was still warm. Now I can sleep, now I’m alone, she thought, but instead of sleeping she began to cry, hiding her face under the sheet, grinding her fists into her eyes like a child.