Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 2/Chapter 6
WITHOUT a definite plan for converting her idea into action Claire Ambler left everything to the spur of the moment; but she had determined to spur the moment. She therefore made herself befittingly picturesque for dinner that evening, in a beaded dress as shining as pale-blue armour, and almost as heavy in spite of its scantness; and she added to this the splendid faded gorgeousness of a fine old Spanish shawl. Thus, when she came into the ancient refectory with Arturo and her mother, she was at least as vivid as she could have cared to be. "Like a florist's window," said Eugene Rennie, who was dining with his English friends. "Flowers, too, can carry that much colour and only make you glad to look at them."
Then, as she reached her table close by, Claire paused before she seated herself and, instead of merely nodding, she prettily made him an odd little curtsy. "Extraordinary child!" he murmured to his two companions. "I think I join you, Charles, in wondering what goes on in 'that young head.' Something charming evidently. Certainly that impulsive little curtsy was charming."
Claire, also, thought it was charming, and with good reason. Not ten minutes earlier she had made this same impulsive little curtsy—the last of a series—to the mirror in her own room; but she had not reproduced it for Mr. Eugene Rennie's benefit. "Well, did you like it?" she was saying mentally to Orbison, as she began to talk vivaciously to Arturo Liana. "If you didn't, what's the matter with it! Anyhow, though I don't know just what it'll be, I'm going to do something you will like, pretty soon!"
But the opportunity her mother had prophesied she would make was obviously not to be contrived during the hour she sat at dinner; picturesque conjunctions are not easily available at such times. Moreover, when she and Mrs. Ambler and Arturo came out into the long corridor afterward, for coffee, she was disturbed to see nothing of the trio who had occupied the next table and preceded them, by a few minutes, from the refectory. She looked about her blankly; but a little later, when coffee had been brought and Arturo was presenting a lighted match to the end of her cigarette, she caught sight of Orbison at the other end of the corridor. He was wrapped in a long ulster, with a heavy woollen muffler about his throat, and with his American friend beside him he was hobbling toward the passage that led to the cloister and the great outer gates. This was the first time the invalid had gone forth in the evening, and Claire jumped to a conclusion.
She stared, neglecting the match, though Arturo held it for her until it scorched his fingers. "They must be—they're going up to the Greek theatre!" she said under her breath.
"Who?" her mother inquired.
"What?" Claire said hazily.
"I understood you to say somebody was going up to the Greek theatre."
"Yes," the girl returned quickly. "Everybody is. There's a concert and it's a glorious night—the most wonderful full moon—I saw it from my window even before dinner. Mother, you wouldn't mind, would you?"
"Mind what?" Mrs. Ambler asked, surprised by the unusual stress her daughter put upon this petition. "What do you mean?"
For a moment Claire looked slightly confused, and she glanced hastily at Arturo. "Mother, I know I ought to stay here with you; of course I practically promised to"
"Why, no," Mrs. Ambler said. "When did you?"
"This afternoon. I really did mean to spend the evening here with you; but Arturo asked me, and I know he'd like to go. Would you mind if we went to that concert at the Greek theatre?"
"Why, certainly not," the mystified lady returned. "Why should I?"
Claire jumped up instantly. "Get your hat and coat," she said to Arturo. "I won't need more than this shawl. It's the most heavenly night!"
"Heavenly" was a word she repeated as they walked through the stone streets of the old town, and she said it again as they began the ascent of the great ruins of the theatre. "We must go clear up to the top," she said. "Oh, this heavenly place and this heavenly night!"
Other figures were climbing with them, shadowy and murmuring, no one speaking loudly among these gigantic and august relics. "The people are like ghosts of the ancients," Arturo said in a low voice. "They climb so quietly and they are all so dim, they might be the shades of those old, old audiences who came here on such a night two thousand years ago. How still and mysterious it is! There could be thousands of people here in these tremendous shadows and we would not know it."
"It's heavenly!" she sighed again; and at last they came out upon the stone platform of the huge gallery the Romans had superimposed upon the Greek structure. Here they were at the top of the theatre—upon its crest and upon the crest of precipices, with an incredible world about them, and the sea, shining and soundless, far, far below. Claire looked across the classic strait to the mountains shimmering there in luminous haze, then to left and right at the unending crescents of coastline based with white, twinkling surf and crowned with the diamond-point lights of mountain villages; but, nearer and seeming so close at hand that it was startling, the vast triangular symmetry of the volcano reposed, ivory-coloured, in the sky; and when Claire saw above its snows a faint rosy glow upon the rising masses of smoke, she found her sighing not eloquent enough. "I must do one of two things," she said. "I must either sing or I must cry!"
She said it in a whisper, for although vague groupings of motionless people could be seen here and there among the antique tiers of seats, and upon the heights of the ruinous gallery corridor, there was a silence over the place. Deep in the shadow, far below, upon the ancient stage where the sonorous measures of Euripides had once been spoken by masked lips, there was a cluster of tiny golden lights, the lamps of the orchestra; and presently these native musicians began to play.
As Arturo said, what they played was sentimental; but it was pure, and they knew how. They were of a race that has music in its heart and art in its fingers; so now this orchestra of a dozen violins and mandolins with half as many 'cellos and guitars and a flute, played old moonlight themes, sonatas, serenades, and gentle nocturnes, but played them so that a listener who had long since tired of them might well have thought he had never heard them played before. The brilliant night was still, save for this music floating up to the motionless, shadowy groups of people on the lofty platform of the open gallery; no other sound could they hear in all the endless space of land and sea revealed to them from that height; and thus the whole world seemed to have been hushed into a spellbound listening.
Claire stood leaning upon a massive and rugged cube of fallen masonry. "I've never known anything like this before—never!" she whispered to Arturo. "I never thought there could be a moonlight night when the moon wasn't the most beautiful thing in it. To-night it's just a lamp to give illumination. Do you suppose they'll play the Pastorale? I've learned it, and if they play it I'm afraid I couldn't help singing it. I honestly believe I couldn't keep it under!"
She had been in earnest when she said that she must either sing or weep; a song was in her throat, and like those Raonese musicians down by the small golden sparks, she "knew how." Somewhere among the mysterious, still figures of the listeners was the man of whom she so continually found herself thinking—because, perhaps, he thought of her; but just for this while she had forgotten that she deliberately intended a picturesque meeting with him. An overpowering sense of beauty was upon her; wings seemed to flutter ineffably in her breast; and almost unbearably she wanted to sing with the music that came lifting and lifting to the height where she stood.
She was trembling.
"It will be beautiful if you sing," Arturo said. "There is no reason you should not."
Down in the deep semicircular shadow of the amphitheatre they began to play the Pastorale; and then—at first almost without the listeners' being aware of it—a lovely sound came from no one could say where; it grew clearer, and was heard over all the great space of the theatre, yet was never loud. It seemed a natural part of the beauty of that night—this voice out of the silvered heavens overhead, singing the melody of the Pastorale.
No one except Arturo Liana and the singer herself knew who sang; least of all was she guessed by the man to whom she sang; but she had in store for her the stirring experience of hearing him describe what she had done.