CHAPTER XIV
AND IF FOR EVER
“It’s no use wasting words,” Florian observed, with decision. “As our old friend Homer justly remarks, ‘Great is the power of words; wing’d words may make this way or that way.’ I’m a practical man myself: I stick close to the facts; they’re solid; they’re tangible; they’re not to be evaded. I won’t allow myself to be argued out of a reasonable conviction. I put it like this: if it was right for you, as you admitted, to leave St Valentin, then, by parity of reasoning, it’s right for you now to leave Innsbruck instantly. Mill, Whately, and Jevons would allow that that’s logic. Why did we come here? Partly, no doubt, to instruct ourselves in the contents of this most interesting town; but mainly, I submit, to deliver you forthwith from your milkmaid’s clutches. Why should we go away again? Partly because we’ve seen all that Innsbruck contains of historical or artistic; but largely, also, because the milkmaid insists upon pursuing us through the land and jingling her bells till she compels us to listen to her.”
“She didn’t know we were here,” Will interjected, bristling up.
“She didn’t know we were here, that’s true; but she’s followed us all the same, cow-bells and pails and all, and we must break away at once from her. I’ve said so to Rue, and Rue fully agrees with me. As I told you before, if you mean the girl harm, – well and good; I don’t meddle with you. But if you mean to go on shilly-shallying like this, – saying goodbye for ever – and sending her coral necklets; meeting her again at hotels – and applauding her rapturously; saying goodbye once more – and letting it run, for aught I know to the contrary, to diamonds and rubies – why, what I say is this, I’ve seen the same thing tried on more than once before, and my experience is, the man who begins by meaning only to flirt with a girl, sinks down, down, down, by gradual degrees, till at last he loses every relic of self-respect – and ends by marrying her!”
Will fingered his under lip, and knit his brow reflectively. “At least,” he said, “I must see her and tell her I’m going away again.”
Stern justice once more embodied itself as Florian. “Certainly not,” the little man answered, with an emphatic shake of the head. “If you say goodbye, she’ll want to know where you’re going. If she knows where you’re going, she’ll want, of course, to follow you. If you don’t mean her harm, then, hang it all, my dear fellow, you must mean her good – which is far more dangerous. There are only two possible motifs in such an affair – ou le bon, ou le mauvais. You must mean the first, if you don’t mean the second. I’ve talked it over with Rue, and Rue entirely supports me. For the poor girl’s own sake, she says, it’s your duty at once to run away from the spot, post haste, and leave her.”
A little later in the day, on the slopes behind Mühlan, Will thrashed it out himself, tête-à-tête with Rue, seated close by her side on the grassy upland. “She’s in love with you, poor thing,” Rue said very seriously. “You mayn’t see it yourself; sometimes, you know, Mr Deverill – I can’t always say Will; it seems so forward – sometimes, you know, you men – even the best of you – are unkind to us poor women through pure excess of modesty. You don’t realise how much a girl may really think of you. Your very want of self-conceit may make you blind to her feelings. But consider what you must seem to a child like Linnet. You’re a gentleman, a poet, a man of the great world, wholly removed from her sphere in knowledge, position, culture. She looks up to you, vaguely and dimly no doubt, with a shrinking respect, as some one very grand and great and solemn. But your attentions flatter her. Florian has told me all about how you met her at St Valentin. Now, even a lady,” and Rue looked down as she spoke, and half stifled a sigh, “even a lady might be pleased at attracting the notice of such a man as you; how much more then a peasant-girl! I watched her close last night when you first came into the room, and I saw such a red flush break over her throat and cheeks, like a wave surging upwards, as I never saw before on any woman’s face – though long ago.. myself.. when I was very young.. I think I may have felt it. And I knew what it meant at once; I said to myself as I looked, ‘That girl loves Mr Deverill.’ ”
“I think she’s fond of me,” Will admitted modestly. “I didn’t notice it so much myself, I confess, at St Valentin; but last night, I won’t deny I watched her hard, and I could see she was really very pleased to meet me.”
Rue looked grave. “Mr Deverill,” she said in a serious voice, “a woman’s heart is not a thing to trifle with – I’m an old married woman myself, you see, and I can speak to you plainly. You may think very little yourself – for I know you’re not conceited – of the effect you’re likely to produce on women. I’ve known cruel things done, before now, by very good men, just because they never realised how much store women set on their passing attentions. You’ve only to look at Linnet to see she has a deeply passionate nature. Now, I beg of you, don’t play fast and loose with it any longer. If you don’t mean anything, don’t see her again. The more you see of her, the worse it will be for her.”
Will listened, and ruminated. Rue’s words had more effect on him by far than Florian’s. For one thing, she was a woman, and she treated the matter earnestly, where Florian only treated it with the condescending flippancy of his native clubland. To Rue, in her true womanliness, an alp-girl’s heart was still a sacred object; to Florian, ’twas a toy for the superior creature, man, as he said, “to play skittles with.” But then, again, Florian had dwelt much to him on the chance of his finally marrying Linnet. To Will himself, that contingency seemed too remote to contemplate. As he sat by Rue’s side on the grassy upland, and heard Rue speak so gently to him in her well-turned sentences, the distance between a refined and educated lady like that and a musical alp-girl appeared to his mind too profound to be bridged over. Was it likely, in a world which held such women as Rue, he ever could marry such a girl as Linnet? Now, Rue herself never spoke of marriage between Linnet and himself as even possible. She took it for granted the end must be either Linnet’s ruin or Linnet’s desertion. And all she urged him was not to break the poor child’s heart for her. So, where Florian’s worldly wisdom fell somewhat flat on his ears, Rue’s feminine sympathy and tact produced a deep effect upon him.
“It’ll make her very sad, I’m afraid, if she doesn’t see me again,” he said, looking down, with masculine shyness.
“I know it will,” Rue answered, pushing her point with advantage. “I could see that last night. But all the more reason, then, you shouldn’t let it go any further.”
“Well, but must I never see her again?” Will inquired with an anxious air. For his own sake, even, that counsel of perfection was a very hard saying.
Rue’s face grew still graver. “No; I think you must never see her again,” she answered, seriously. “Remember what it involves. Remember what she is; how dazzled she must be by a gentleman’s advances. The more you see of her, the more she’ll think of it – the more she’ll love you, confide in you, lean on you. That’s only womanly. We all of us do it.. with a man we admire and feel greater and better than us. And you and she, after all, are both of you human. Some day, perhaps, carried away by a moment of emotion – ” She broke off quite suddenly, and let her silence say the rest. “And then,” she went on, after a long pause, “when all’s lost and all’s done, you’ll be sorry, poor child, you’ve spoilt and wrecked her whole life for her..” She paused again, and grew crimson. “Mr Deverill – Will – ” she said, faltering, “I wouldn’t speak to you like this if I didn’t feel I was doing it to save this poor child in the end from untold misery. It’s not only the material consequences I’m thinking of now (though those are bad enough), but the girl’s own heart – for I can see she has got one. If you don’t go away, sooner or later you’ll break it. What other end can there be to an affair like this between a poet like you and a Tyrolese peasant girl?”
What other end, indeed! Will knew it, and felt it. He saw she was right. And her words thrilled through him. When a beautiful woman discusses your personal affections in such a strain as this it isn’t in human nature (in its male embodiment) not to tingle through and through in pure instinctive response with her. While Rue spoke like that, Will felt he must indeed see no more of Linnet. “But where must I go?” he asked, vaguely, just to distract the talk from his own potential misdeeds. Their original idea was Cortina and the Dolomites.
The innocent question fell in pat with Rue’s plans. Already that morning she had talked it over with Florian; and Florian, for the furtherance of his own designs, had agreed it would be best for them to alter their route, as things stood, in favour of a new project which Rue suggested. She was going to Meran herself, for a month or six weeks of bright autumn weather, on her way down to Italy. Why shouldn’t they come there, too, she asked, and keep the family together? Florian, not unmindful of her seven hundred thousand pounds, admitted at once the cogency of her reasoning. It would be quite delightful, he said – in point of fact, consummate. But would Will consent to it? Then Rue expounded to him her views about Will and his future in life – how he ought to retire to the wilderness for forty days, after the manner of the prophets, to meditate, and, if possible, to begin some great work, which should bring in the end name and fame and honour to him. Florian admitted, just to humour her, that if Will had the chance, and chose to buckle to, he might really produce something quite worth looking at. “Persuade him to it,” he said, in his mellifluous tones. “To you, Rue, it comes so easy, you see, to be persuasive. One word from your lips is worth fifty from mine. Make him stop away for three months from that dear, delightful, distracting London, and begin some big thing that the world must listen to.”
To inspire a great work is a mission in life for a woman – to be some Petrarch’s Laura, some Dante’s Beatrice. So, when Will asked plaintively, “Where must I go?” that afternoon, Rue answered with prompt decision, “Why, of course, to Meran. I’m going there myself. You must come with us and stop there.”
“What for?” Will inquired, not wholly untouched in soul – for proximity counts for much, and they were sitting close together – that the pretty American should so desire his company.
Then Rue began to explain, to persuade, to reason. And reason from those lips was profoundly conclusive. No syllogism on earth could have failed to convince from them. Meran was the prettiest place in South Tyrol, she said; the pleasantest climate for the autumn months, the loveliest scenery. The sun always shone, and the birds always sang there. Though it froze underfoot, you could bask on the hill-tops. But that wasn’t all; – and she leaned forward confidentially – she wanted to speak to him again about that subject she had broached the other day on the Lanser Kopf. When a pretty woman interests herself in your private concerns, she’s always charming; when she pays you the delicate flattery of stimulating you to use “your own highest powers” – that’s the proper phrase – she’s quite irresistible. So Will Deverill found Rue. Why, she asked, should he go back so soon to London? This devotion to mere journalism was penny-wise and pound-foolish. Could he afford to stay away for six weeks at Meran – just barely afford it – and settle himself down at a quiet hotel to some really big work that would make him famous?
Will, drawing a deep breath, and looking wistfully into her eyes, admitted his funds in hand would permit him, with care, such a hard-working holiday.
Then Rue pressed him close. She brought ghee to his vanity. She was convinced if he stopped in this keen mountain air, among these glorious Alps, fresh inspired from Nature, he could turn out a poem, a play, a romance, some great thing of its kind, that the world must listen to. He had it in him, she felt sure, to make his name famous. Nothing venture, nothing have. If he didn’t believe in himself enough to risk six weeks of his precious time on the effort to sketch out something really worthy of him, then all she could say was – and she flooded him as she spoke with the light of her lustrous eyes – he believed in himself far less – oh, so far, far less – than his friends believed in him. Florian had told her Will held no regular staff-appointment on any London paper; he was an occasional journalist, unattached, earning a precarious livelihood, in fear and trembling, by reviews and poems and descriptive articles in half-a-dozen assorted dailies and weeklies. Why shouldn’t he give them up for awhile, then, and play boldly and manfully for some larger stake, some stake such as she knew he could well attain to? And she quoted Queen Elizabeth – or was it Walter Raleigh? —
“He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desert is small,
Who will not put it to the touch
To lose, or win it all.”
Now, this line of argument, as it happened, exactly fell in, for a special reason of his own, with Will’s mood for the moment. A holiday, we all know, especially in the pure and stimulating air of the mountains, has always a most invigorating and enlivening effect upon the jaded intellect. And Will’s holiday in the Zillerthal had inspired him by degrees with fresh ideas and scenes for a Tyrolese drama. It was a drama of the hills, with some poeticised version of Linnet for its heroine – a half-musical sketch, a little mountain operetta, the songs in which were to be all of his own composing. Hitherto, he had never taken himself quite seriously as a composer; but Linnet and Andreas Hausberger had praised the few pieces he played over for them at St Valentin, and Rue had thought well of the stray snatches from his notes he had given them, under protest, on the very untuneful hotel piano. Now the idea occurred to him to write and compose a little play of his own, while the picture of Linnet was still fresh in his brain; and this holiday Rue dangled so temptingly before him would just suffice to get the first scaffolding of his piece together. The filling in he could manage at his leisure in London. So Rue won her point; but ’twas Linnet who won it for her.
“Yes; I’ll go to Meran,” he said at last, after a long break in their talk, “and I’ll settle down to work there, and I won’t even wait to say goodbye to Linnet.”
Poets are weak, however, where a woman is concerned. In this respect, it may be allowed, Apollo’s sons closely resemble the rest of the children of Adam. Will left Innsbruck, indeed, without bidding Linnet goodbye, but he couldn’t refrain from just dropping her a line before he went, to say he must leave her. “To meet you once more,” he wrote, “would be only to part again. I must say farewell, and this time for ever. But, Linnet, it makes my heart ache to do it!” You see, he was a poet.
CHAPTER XV
A CRITICAL EVENING
Florian and Rue, as it happened, were very ill-informed as to the Tyrolese minstrel market, otherwise they would certainly never have chosen Meran as a place of refuge for Will Deverill against the pressing temptations of his acquaintance with Linnet. They chose it because it was a delightful and frequented autumn resort; because the climate was charming and the sunshine unfailing; because the grape-cure was then on in full swing in the valley; and because everybody else at Innsbruck that moment was going there. For those very reasons, the wisdom of the serpent might have taught them to avoid it: ’twas the innocence of the dove that led them to fly right into it. In point of fact, Meran is crowded in October and November. High well-born Graf and consumptive plebeian disport themselves all day long on the leafy promenades, eating grapes as they go, beside the band and the Kurhaus. It stands to the world of Berlin and Vienna as Cannes and Mentone to the world of London. That was precisely why Andreas Hausberger had marked it out long since, as the next southward point on their way Riviera-wards.
“Are there many hotels there?” Franz Lindner asked dubiously, much crestfallen at his own comparative failure with the public of Innsbruck. A little of his jauntiness had been washed for the moment out of Franz Lindner’s figure; he looked limper in the back and not so stiff in the neck – nay, even his hat stood cocked on his head at a less aggressive angle.
“There isn’t anything else,” Andreas Hausberger answered in his Western style. “Meran and Obermais are one enormous gasthaus. If Linnet does as well as she has done at Innsbruck, it’ll take us take three weeks or a month, at least, to get right through with them. We took a good bit, considering all things, the other evening. I think she draws; I noticed old gentlemen slipped their florins under their palms into the plate unobtrusively. Besides, in a Kurort, she’ll soon get talked about. People at one hotel or pension will speak of us at another – ‘Seen this Tyrolese troupe going about in the place? Pretty girl; sings sweetly.’ I take it there can’t be less than thirty houses in Meran where we could get an audience. That carries us well on to the end of November. By that time, San Remo and Bordighera’ll be filling up fast, and from there we can go on to Cannes, Nice, Mentone.”
So three days later saw them safe at Meran. To Linnet, that journey from north to south, across the great ridge of the Alps, seemed like transplantation into an earthly fairyland. She had never seen the luscious wealth of vineclad lands before; for North and South Tyrol are two different countries, one cold, bleak, Germanic, the other soft, warm, Italian. Meran itself appeared to her ardent imagination more beautiful than anything eye hath seen or mind conceived of. And, indeed, it is beautiful. Whoever knows it loves it. A brawling little mountain stream, the Passer, rushes headlong from the glaciers of the Otzthaler Alps through a wild upland glen, to join in due time the broader stream of the Adige, which threads the bleak Vintschgau on its precipitous course from the lofty snow-fields of the Ortler and the Wild-Spitze. Near the point where the two unite, on a long tongue of land, the little town of Meran nestles close among its vines, under shelter of the rounded ice-worn Küchelberg. It clings with its ancient walls, its steeples, its watch-towers, as if glued to the lower slopes of the basking mountain. Linnet gazed at it, delighted. For here, on the south side of the Alps, looking down the broad valley to sunny Italy, the vegetation differed greatly, both in richness and in character, from anything she had ever seen in her native Zillerthal. Indeed, even Italy itself, parched as it often is with excessive heat, seldom shows such wild luxuriance of foliage and fruit as these green and well-watered South Tyrolese valleys. There is a bowery, flowery lavishness and lushness about it all that defies description. The vines that trail loose across their trellised archways; the gourds that hang pendent from their wooden frails; the great yellow pumpkins that lean temptingly over every terraced wall; the lizards that bask blinking on the sun-smitten rock-face; the crimson sprays of Virginia creeper that droop in festoons from the brown verandah wood-work of coquettish châlets, mingled with the pine-clad slopes and bare snow-sprinkled peaks of the upper background, make a charming hybrid between Switzerland and Lombardy. Imagine for yourself an ancient German town, with mouldering walls and high turrets, like Boppard or Andernach, and crenellated castles of quaint mediæval architecture, but with arcaded streets and Italian loggias, plumped down incongruously in the midst of this half-Alpine, half-southern scenery, and you get a very fair bird’s-eye view indeed, in its way, of the main traits of Meran.
On the very first morning of her arrival in the town, Linnet took her way out with Franz Lindner and Philippina along the brawling stream that forms the centre and rallying point of the gay little watering-place. Meran is all parade, winter-garden, and band, and they walked through its midst to see and be seen of the lounging Herrschaft. They were dressed in full costume; ’twas a form of advertisement Andreas greatly believed in. Franz held himself erect, with his feather still stuck Robbler-wise, and his defiant air, as he strode through the crowd that lined the promenade – the gayest, most varied, and most fashionable throng Linnet had ever set eyes on. He and Philippina stared hard at the world that displayed itself before them. German Jews from Frankfort, great Viennese bankers, the round-faced, engaging Bavarian fräuleins, the tall and tailor-made English lawn-tennis misses. Linnet gazed at them, too, but cast her eyes now and then from the people and the shops to the great cleft mountain peaks that soared everywhere high and clear-cut into the sky above them.
In the lower part of their walk the river was smooth, and the roadway was bordered by fantastic pensions and quaint Tyrolese buildings; but in the upper part, which they reached beyond a single bold arch of stone-work that spanned the Passer, precipitous rocks began to hem it in, the river assumed the guise of a foaming torrent, and the ruined fortress of the Zenoburg, with its Romanesque portal, frowned down from high above them on a water-worn gorge where the stream forced its way in a dashing cataract. A little platform overhangs the very edge of the cascade. Linnet stood there long, leaning over the iron rail, and gazing with delight at the white foam beneath, and the placid deep green of the calm rock-basin that received the mountain stream as it leapt from the precipice.
Franz and Philippina wouldn’t let her remain there, however. With the restlessness of their kind, they were eager to explore this new world more fully. They strolled through the town, and up the hills behind, where all seemed fresh and southern and romantic to Linnet. Through green alleys of vines, trained like bowers over their heads, they mounted at last by a cloven ravine to the chestnut-covered slopes, where they looked down like a map on the vast garden of the Etschthal. It was a wonderful view. Linnet drank it in eagerly. In front crouched the town with its huddling red roofs wedged in between the hill and the scurrying river; beyond lay a wide plain of such luxuriant tilth as Linnet till then had never dreamt of. Villages and churches clustered thick by the dozen on slope and hill-top; but what added the last touch of charm to the strange scene in Linnet’s eyes was the extraordinary number and variety of its feudal châteaux. Every height was crowned by its castellated Schloss, ivy-clad Planta, huge sun-smitten Labers, the terraced front of Rametz, the frowning bastions of Fragsburg: Franz Lindner, with his keen eyes, could count no less than forty-three of them. The exhilaration of the fresh scene, and of the southern trees and creepers, so different from the stunted pines of their own chilly Zillerthal, filled Linnet with a certain vague and indefinable delight: had but her Engländer been there, she would have been perfectly happy.
Andreas Hausberger had taken charge of the health of his troupe, in strict accordance with his own favourite theories. The two girls were to walk on the hills for three hours every morning. They were to dine thus and thus. They were to do or avoid this, that, or the other thing. He himself had gone off meanwhile to one of the smaller hotels to make arrangements beforehand for that evening’s concert. One of the smaller hotels, bien entendu, for Andreas knew well the money value of mere gossip as a means of advertisement. Not till he had seen what impression Linnet made on the public of the lesser houses would he launch her on the Meranhof or the Erzherzog Johann. That ensured him the full benefit of the talk of the town. A shrewd man, Andreas Hausberger! By the time he reached those larger and richer houses in his nightly rounds, he didn’t doubt the world of Meran would have heard and tattled much of his new-found singer; people would say to one another, “Don’t miss the Tyrolese troupe that’s coming to us to-night; they say there’s one girl in it worth seeing and hearing.” For Andreas was above all things a man of the world; he never threw away the chance of earning an extra gulden.
That evening, in due course, their concert came off at the Austria at Obermais. You know the Austria? – a small but select and aristocratic pension, much affected by the Von So-and-so’s of Berlin and Vienna. The result (in net cash) surpassed the prudent Andreas’s highest expectations. Though no Will Deverill was there to inspire her efforts, Linnet sang divinely. Indeed, to say the truth, though she had met him and lost him once more at Innsbruck, that meeting and losing, instead of dashing her hopes to the ground, as Rue and Florian expected, had only produced on her simple little mind a general impression that now, by the blessed Madonna’s aid, her Engländer might turn up any day, anywhere. In that innocent hope, born of the age of faith, she sang her best with a will, and charmed her audience, looking hard at the door all the while, to see if, peradventure, her Engländer would enter. And when no Engländer came, she comforted her soul with the thought that Andreas had said there were twenty-nine other hotels in Meran and Obermais – at any one of which, no doubt, that dear friend might be stopping. Her heart wasn’t crushed – not the least bit of it – and her trust in the blessed Madonna on the Britannia metal pendant that hung round her neck was as vivid and as childishly unquestioning as ever. Our Dear Frau had brought her her lover at Innsbruck; Our Dear Frau could bring him her just as well at Meran here.
She sang three times. Each time the audience applauded vociferously. The Austria, you see, is mainly frequented by Germans. Now, your German is musical; he has little reserve; he loves a good noise; and he’s never afraid of displaying his feelings. Moreover, the little party in the salon that night was largely composed of Viennese or Bavarians; they understood the zither and the Tyrolese songs; they were to the manner born, good judges of execution. Franz Lindner’s feather curled once more, quite as perkily as ever, when they applauded the bravado of his facile playing. Philippina smiled and bobbed, a wicked twinkle in her eye, when they cried “Bis!” to the loudest and sauciest of her jodels. But at each of Linnet’s songs, her hearers grew silent, then burst as she ceased into uproarious approbation. She was the heroine of the night, the black swan of the party; not often had they heard such a voice as hers at so humble a performance.
When all was finished, ’twas Linnet’s task to hand round the plate and make the little collection. She hated the work, but ’tis always imposed, and with sound commercial reason, on the prettiest girl of the troupe, so it naturally devolved upon Linnet to perform it. Even good-humoured Philippina admitted without dispute her claim to the function. Hot in the face, and ill at ease, Linnet walked round the room in a maze of confusion, with her little silver salver. She offered it first to the rich Jew banker from Frankfort-on-the Main, with the diamond pin, and the seals on his watch-chain. Now, your pretty face is a mighty opener of your purse-strings. The rich Jew banker, holding out one fat thumb and forefinger gingerly, after a second’s hesitation (for ’tis hard to part with so much money at once) dropped a ten-florin piece in good Austrian gold, plump into the middle of the silver salver. It fell with a ring. His example was contagious. Christian Freiherrs could not stand being beaten in their appreciation of vocal art by Jewish financiers from Frankfort. People who meant to give one florin now gave two; people who meant to put off on their wives the duty of dispensing the family bounty now drew out their purses and became their own almoners. Linnet had never seen a gold piece in her life before; when she finished her round, bowing low, that night, there were three of them on the salver.
Andreas Hausberger eyed the plate with a carefully-suppressed smile of subdued satisfaction. His mouth never moved; only the corners of his eyes betrayed his emotion. But that evening’s haul had far-reaching consequences – for him and for Linnet. He saw in a moment he had found indeed, as he thought, a treasure. He didn’t need the assurances of the rich Jew banker, and the lady amateur with the tortoise-shell eyeglasses who came from Berlin, that Linnet should be placed at once for instruction in a proper conservatorium. He saw for himself, from the effect she produced on the audience that night, she would yet do wonders. As Linnet left the Austria, Andreas held her cloak for her. But it wasn’t mere gallantry. “Wrap your throat round well, Linnet,” he said, with much zealous care. “For Heaven’s sake don’t take cold. The air on the hills in the daytime won’t hurt you; but after sitting in these crowded, over-heated rooms, the night fogs are so bad for you.”
The goose that lays the golden eggs deserves to be well tended.