Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 2/Chapter 1
AT RAONA, that ancient Mediterranean town on a cliff ledge halfway to the sky, there is one of those romantic hotels that once were monasteries. The pedestrian comes to it by flights of stone steps leading down from sixteenth-century streets; he enters a cloister where there are oleander trees and an old pink-and-white-marble fountain; then he crosses a groined corridor with a pavement of red tiles worn uneven by centuries of monkish treading, and walks out into a sunny garden on the top of a precipice. The garden is murmurous with bees, with the faint swishing of the slow, turquoise sea a thousand feet below, and sometimes, perhaps, with a quiet English voice reading the Odyssey to an invalid drowsing in the tremulous shade of feathered palm trees. Nothing could be more appropriate than such a reading, moreover; for the sea, so far below, is the very water traversed by Odysseus as he sailed nearer to Scylla and Charybdis; and Mr. Eugene Rennie, an American villa-dweller in Raona, coming into the garden upon a bright March morning in search of an enfeebled English friend of his, was pleased to find him thus entertained by an attendant spinster.
"I mustn't interrupt you, Miss Orbison," the visitor said, as he seated himself upon a painted iron bench beside them. "Really, this is just what I persuaded your brother to come here for. It's gratifying to me to find that on your very first morning you've discovered the exactly proper thing to do. Won't you go on with the reading?"
The invalid protested. He was a long, eager-eyed, brown-haired man whose extreme thinness of body was perceptible even under the heavy rug that enveloped him to the waist. "No," he said. "My sister has had enough of reading this morning, and so have I. Ulysses has been dead a very long time and I have been nearly dead a longer, I think; I'd like to hear something of people who are more alive. Last evening after you brought us up from the station and got us installed in our cells, I contrived to hobble into the refectory for dinner and so had a view of our fellow guests in this extraordinary house of entertainment. It seemed to me I never saw a crew of cosmopolites more provocative to my curiosity. Can they actually be as interesting as they look, or is it the background? The fact that we sleep in the cells of dead monks, and have tea in their abbot's corridor, may lend an exotic tint to people who would appear commonplace enough elsewhere; but they do seem coloured by romance here. Who in the world are they all, Eugene?"
"Who are they all?" the American repeated, and shook his head. "I drop in here for tea sometimes; but I usually don't know many of the hotel's guests and so I can't tell you definitely much about them—which may be the better for you, my friend."
"The better for me?" the Englishman repeated, a little perplexed. "How 'better'?"
"Because where you have no restraining information you can indulge your fancy. Yonder, for instance—that fat, black-bearded man by the pergola. Why does he wear thick white gloves in the warm sunshine? Since I can't tell you anything about him, you are at liberty to imagine any past for him you like. Obviously, that black-bearded man is a sleeked-up scoundrel who made himself wickedly rich out of Arab slave raids with Tippoo Tib thirty years ago, and it is the simplest thing in the world to see that he keeps his gloves on to conceal a telltale scar."
The invalid laughed. "I should say he wears his white gloves to show the rest of us how fashionable he is. But how about that sort of thing?" A movement of his head directed Rennie's attention toward two dapper young men who had just come into the garden and stood upon an upper terrace, where they paused to look about them. "I think I've seen something unpleasantly like those on the Parisian boulevards at night; and one could imagine a slave-raiding future as well as past for them."
The slight frown on his forehead was repeated upon the brow of his American friend. "I'm afraid one could," Rennie said, and his glance at the two young men showed an increasing disfavour. "That pair I do happen to know." Then, as if to confirm this information, the two dapper young men simultaneously caught sight of him, and, removing their brightly ribboned hats of soft white cloth, saluted him with a quick yet solemn inclination of the body from the waist.
They were thin and rather small, of pallidly swarthy complexions and shining black hair that was like jet shaped into waves. Each had a long and pointed nose, thin cheeks and noticeably glistening eyes, to which each had unnecessarily added the glitter of a monocle upon a black cord. The English invalid, still frowning, mentioned this adornment. "Monocles! Why in the world do they do it?"
The American laughed. "That's the fault of you Britishers. You carried the monocle over the Continent and even to outflung relics of history like Raona, and the impressionable Latin peoples, at first petrified by it, afterward perceived its advantages as a symbol of distinction. Not everyone can wear a ribbon in his buttonhole; but there are no restrictions upon the single eyeglass. The two Bastoni brothers yonder took them up last year when they began to attend the tea dances at the Salone. That's a species of casino we have here, though we wish we hadn't."
"Is that all they do—dance at the Salone?"
"Almost," Rennie answered. "They come from Cabrania near here, and all I've ever heard of their doing, except dancing and mixing rather nefariously in local politics, is selling their grandmother's jewellery. Now and then, as a great favour and with great secrecy, they sell a brooch or a ring—'family heirlooms'—to ladies they've danced with. They buy the jewellery in Naples, I believe; but they dance exquisitely."
"No doubt," the Englishman said. "They look as though they cut throats exquisitely too. You speak of them as Latins; but they appear to me as something rather Saracen."
"Yes, probably," Rennie agreed. "It's a mixed blood hereabouts; most of the people have a Saracen mingling by inheritance."
"It seems so," the invalid said; and he grunted. "Wolfish look it gives 'em." He turned his head toward the sea. "I think there are other people here I'd prefer to meditate upon. There, for instance."
He nodded toward the railing that enclosed the garden, and protected absent-minded strollers from walking over the rim of the precipice. It was a scroll of wrought-iron, black against the distant hazily twinkling stretches of sea visible from where they sat; and an American girl, slowly crossing the garden, paused and put her small gloved hands upon the railing, leaning over it to look thoughtfully down upon the surf far below her. Standing so, she was a graceful figure, and the Englishman found her charming.
"How prettily she's put herself in the precise centre of the canvas!" he said, for by chance she stood at the end of a short leafy vista, and was thus, to their view, neatly framed in shrubberies and a low arch of vines trained overhead. "She's like a lovely silhouette imagined by the artist in wrought-iron who made the railing. The scrollwork seems to spring from her, carrying on her own delicacies of outline; and with that little green knee-long skirt fluttering against a faded blue sea the colour of a Leonardo background, she's the most appropriate thing I could imagine for a Mediterranean garden on a precipice. Yet how completely she's an American, Eugene! One never mistakes your compatriots for anything else. She has the American profile that the most charming of your young ladies all contrive to obtain—especially the straight little nose that has the piquant effect of turning upward without actually doing it. I suppose, alas, she talks through it?"
"My dear Charles Orbison!" Rennie exclaimed. "How careful you British are never to miss a chance of proving the stubbornness of your race! Early in the nineteenth century you got the legend established among you that we're all Yankees and all talk through our noses; so you'll believe it forever, no matter what your ears tell you. As a matter of fact, the young lady yonder has studied music in Paris; she sings really well, and when she talks doesn't talk through her nose. Neither has she been at the pains to learn how to chirp like a vociferous little bird in imitation of ladies in your own island. I'm sure Miss Orbison will forgive me."
"Quite," Miss Orbison returned serenely. "It's the most perfect description of my own manner of speech. But since you decline to admit that the pretty young creature yonder talks through her nose, I think you must have been listening to her."
"Yes, a little. She's a Miss Ambler."
"'Amber' instead of 'Ambler' might have been better," Orbison said. "To give the colour of the lights in her hair, I mean. I observe that she's not only an American but an heiress as well."
Rennie laughed. "Of course all American girls abroad are heiresses! Why do you think Miss Ambler particularly one?"
"The monocled Saracens," Orbison explained, with a gesture toward the two Bastoni, who were descending from the upper terrace. "At sight of her they became instantly a trifle more wolfishly glittering. They are coming down upon her—but I must say she doesn't seem averse."
Miss Ambler, in fact, appeared to be delighted. Turning from the sea, she waved her hand toward the two young men, smiled with eager cordiality and called to them some welcoming words in Italian. That was as far as she got in their own tongue, however; for she fell back upon French as they came nearer her, and in that and some fragments of English, the greeting was completed. Each of the brothers formally kissed the back of her extended hand; then the little group turned to the railing, and the girl began to chatter in phrases from the three languages just employed, though the sound, and not the meaning of what she said, was all that came to the trio looking on.
"Shouldn't you offer a maiden from your own shores a rescue, Eugene?" the Englishman inquired. "That's too nice a little girl to be playing Red Riding Hood so gayly."
"She won't be eaten," his friend rejoined. "She's twenty-one, and as for my offering a rescue, American girls don't encourage rescues on the part of middle-aged strangers—though I'm not wholly a stranger, it's true. Her mother brought letters to me and they've been to dine with me once or twice since they came to Raona three weeks ago. Mrs. Ambler is a widow; the daughter yonder is her only child, and both of them are seeing this part of Europe for the first time with an eager inexperience I should call quite perfect."
"That may be," Orbison said. "But surely even the most inexperienced mother would make some excuse to call her daughter away from two such young men as that."
"No; she wouldn't," the American returned. "Mrs. Ambler would never call her daughter away."
"You don't mean the mother might encourage your Saracen friends?"
"No: but she wouldn't be at all alarmed about them and probably thinks them 'delightfully foreign.' Besides, she's an American mother and far too well trained ever to call her daughter away."
"I dare say," Orbison murmured discontentedly. "But after all, a girl of twenty-one is still something of a child, and if she has a mother trained not to interfere—well, I hope your patriotic confidence that an American girl is equal to anything may be warranted, Eugene."
He paused, listening to the cheerful sound of Miss Ambler's chatter. She was eagerly hurrying forth upon the air an overcrowding multitude of words, emphasizing most of them, yet breaking them continually with interjected syllables of laughter, and accompanying them with an almost uninterrupted pantomime of gestures. And this voluble pantomime of hers, as the invalid noted, was not descriptive; her gestures pictured nothing; but were merely motions expressing liveliness, good will, and the desire to be entertaining. "Great heaven!" he said with sudden vehemence. "Wouldn't you give a great deal to know just what's inside that pretty little head of hers? That child's as animated for those two sleeked wolves as if they were young Bayard and young Galahad. Why does she make such a to-do over them? Is it because Americans on foreign shores are helplessly unable to distrust even sinister appearing strangers? Or is it"
But here he interrupted himself with an exclamation. "Hello! I think she is to be rescued; but surely the rescuer isn't her mother. An Italian, isn't she?"
The lady of whom he spoke had just come into the garden from the hotel, and was descending the steps to the lower terrace, evidently with the purpose of joining Miss Ambler, upon whom the gaze of her dark eyes was fixed. She was a pale woman not young: and though she was dressed all in black, the effect she produced was more graceful and friendly than sombre. Her gaze was serious, but smilingly so; and there was even vivacity in the gesture with which she caught both of Miss Ambler's hands in her own, when she reached her.
The Bastoni brothers seemed to become graver and more glistening; but the pale lady apparently had no consciousness whatever of their presence, and, retaining one of Miss Ambler's hands, she at once moved away with her to another part of the garden, engaging her in a busy conversation seemingly of cheerful import. The two Bastoni, thoroughly chilled, stood motionless, gazing after them; and then, with monocles gleaming icily, they turned and walked solemnly back into the hotel.
Rennie chuckled. "They've had to give up the hope of eating Red Riding Hood for this morning, at least."
"Who was that very charming lady, Eugene?" Orbison asked.
"She's called the Princess Liana—a widow. I'll see that you meet her immediately, Charles."
But the invalid, who had leaned forward in his long chair, sank back smiling, and with a gesture of his thin hand, waved away his friend's badinage. "Too late," he said. "As bad a back as mine exempts one from all but the impersonal fascinations. Why did she rush in where a trained American mother wouldn't, Eugene? Has she an eligible son?"
At that, in appreciation of his friend's perspicacity, Rennie laughed outright. "She has a son, yes—a splendid one. You guessed it like a shot."
"Of course!" Orbison said, and peering through the shrubberies, he could see the Princess Liana and the girl seated upon an iron bench at the other end of the garden. "I believe that pretty little American head is just about the most piquant one I ever saw," he said. "It's not beautiful, perhaps; but it's as flashingly pretty a thing as the world can show. And what's inside it? You needn't laugh at me, you two! What's left for me except to speculate upon such matters? An invalid's place in the world is a seat in the stalls to watch the play and try to comprehend the characters of its people. I have to confess there's one character I see from time to time that always baffles me—it's the young American girl of that kind yonder. To me she's the most mysterious creature the universe has produced. I have a good enough working-idea of Kaffirs; of Arabs, Jews, Bengalese, Afghans, Turkish Beys and Argentine millionaires; I think I know pretty well what goes on in the mind of a communist girl agitator from Warsaw, or in that of a cabaret dancer from Budapest; but when I look at these slim and lively maidens of your tribe, Eugene, it's as though I were confronting a species from another planet. What does she feel? What thoughts has she?"
"What does anyone feel? What thoughts of our own do we understand?" Rennie suggested. "One has to go to Vienna to find out anything about that; and then what he gets, principally, is an old definition in new words."
"I don't mean I'd be interested in a psychologist's chart of her," the Englishman said grumblingly. "But I do wish I knew what goes on in that young head!"