Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 2/Chapter 9
SHE knew that her exits were excellent, even though, unlike her entrances, they had to be made on the spur of the moment. An entrance could always be planned, as she had planned hers this morning. She might have written it for herself: "Enter heroine with red book of poems in her hand, and sings aria, Rupert listening."
In her room, still blushing and with eyes still wet, she sat down to wonder breathlessly how much Orbison would think she had implied by her final words to him; but even in this she was nevertheless conscious of her duality as both an emotional person and a stage director. It was a consciousness that annoyed her; and sometimes, when it became acute, as it did this morning, it almost dismayed her. All her life—even when she was a child—she had seemed to be not one person but two. One was an honest person and the other appeared to be an artist. The honest person did the feeling and most of the thinking; but the artist directed her behaviour and cared about nothing except picturesque effects. When Claire was nineteen and her father died, she had been truly grief-stricken; but the artist was present at his funeral; and she sometimes remembered with amazement that it was the artist who made her bow her head at the cemetery. This was a recollection she always hurried out of her thoughts, lest the amazement become shame.
"Heaven, please tell me," she said now, in her cell bedroom in Raona. "What's the matter with me? What am I? Can't I ever in my whole life do anything natural?"
For it seemed to her that she was in love with the broken Englishman. "Something about him," as she thought, had roused a depth of feeling she had not known before; his worn, fine face, retaining the haggard outlines of what had been a conspicuous manly beauty, was always before her, whether her actual eyes beheld it or not; the thought of him haunted her with pain and a strange joy; and she wanted him to know it. There had been days when Orbison, lying pallid in his chair in the garden, seemed almost to be dying; and she had wished to go to his side and kneel and say, "Let me die with you, dear." But even that was the picturesque impulse; she knew she would have knelt gracefully, and that even with the man she loved she could not evade her damnable artist's stage directions.
"I'm terrible!" she moaned to herself; and looked in the mirror. "But maybe it's because of that."
She meant her extraordinary prettiness. Perhaps her duality was caused by her comeliness—girls born to be pretty might be doomed for that very reason, to behave picturesquely. "Ah! If he knew me as I really am," she thought, "he wouldn't care for me; he'd be horrified instead." Then she had a brightening idea. "Probably every other good-looking girl in the world has these same two natures." And now she smiled to the glass. "Except the stupid ones!"
She was not really despondent; she was excited, and happily so. Moreover, in her thought, "If he knew me as I really am he wouldn't care for me," there was a significant assumption, although she did not pause to make it more definite. Nevertheless, it was therein contained: "Not knowing me, he does care for me!"
Yet she had said to him: "You've looked me well over and you've decided I'm a fool!" She had wept when he touched her with his hand, so pitiably thin; but the tears that filled her eyes then were already in them, because he had insisted upon talking reproachfully to her about Arturo Liana and those foolish Bastoni. That did not distress her now; she had let the Bastoni play around because they were funny and danced well, as she explained; and she was sorry if that had distressed Arturo, but there was no harm in it, she was sure; and since Orbison seemed to wish it, she would snub the Bastoni and be so nice to Arturo that he'd forget. She did not really believe the Englishman thought her a fool because he compared her to a fairy child playing with explosives; and her strong impression was that a girl's picturesqueness suffers no damage by a gentleman's persuading himself that other gentlemen are becoming explosive on her account.
Her eyes, still upon the mirror, grew large and bright with a stirred appreciation: the image before her was of a personage, that wonderful lady who had given him, he said, the final loveliness of the hour of greatest beauty he had known in all his life. Claire had resolved never to tell him that she was the lady, and she was determined to maintain her resolution. Her only problem, therefore, was to think of the best way of letting him find it out for himself.
She had not thought of any way at all when she and her mother went into the refectory for lunch; but she had the pleasure of seeing that his colour heightened—as she was aware her own did—when she nodded to him. Miss Orbison joined him in returning her salutation; Claire murmured her mother's name to them; and, when the meal was finished, the four people walked together out into the garden and together drank their coffee at a table placed beside Orbison's long chair. Mrs. Ambler noticed that it was a relief to him to get back to this chair.
"I should think you'd have luncheon brought to you here outdoors," she said. "The chairs in the refectory are so uncomfortably stiff."
He shook his head and smiled. "No. One clings to ordinary habits, doing what other people do as long as one can. Besides, this really isn't a proper place to eat—not from a porcelain plate, at least; I'm afraid they'd not understand if I asked for vine leaves. Do you know the whole story of Raona, Miss Ambler? Do you know the beginning of it?"
"No," she said, looking at him with a full straight gaze, not lacking in a mysterious gravity. "I don't even know the end of it, Mr. Orbison."
At that, his glance swept away from her quickly, and he pointed down the coast to their left. "The first Greeks landed just there," he said; and he told her of the storm that had driven the mariners back down the strait and forced this landing. She hung upon his story, never looking away from him, while Mrs. Ambler and Miss Orbison produced embroideries and plied their needles, listening, too, in the dreamy manner of sewing ladies. He talked of antique peoples as if they were human and comprehensible, not dried data of a dried historian; and, having one so intently gazing a listener as never before inspired him, he told her of the Greek fighting down the coast, of the coming of the war fleets of Alcibiades, sweeping the sea before them, of the perishing of that navy and of the strange death of Archimedes, and of Plato's sailing back to Athens after his wicked last repartee to the tyrant Dionysius.
"How lovely!" Claire cried at this, and she clasped her hands together, delighted with the ancient witticism. "I always thought Plato must be about the same as the square of the hypotenuse, or metempsychosis—until this afternoon. I'd never have believed there was anybody in the world who could make me wish I'd known him, Mr. Orbison!"
Miss Orbison looked at her watch. "Dear me! It's almost tea-time already. Charles, you do have a silver tongue!"
"I think you mean it's metal because it can be used so long without wearing out," he said; and glancing over his shoulder, he shook his head. "There's a gentleman I fear thinks it must be of iron; I hadn't noticed him. He has the air of a long-suffering poet, waiting a chance to speak to Miss Ambler."
The gentleman was Arturo Liana. He stood by the precipice railing, fiddling pensively with his straw hat and a walking stick, too patiently courteous to interrupt by a closer approach. Claire was not pleased to remember that she had determined to be nice to him; for now, at last, the man at her side had become infinitely more to her than the man at a distance. She gave the invalid a softly reproachful glance eloquent of her meaning: "All right," she said to him, entirely in this ocular demonstration. "I'll obey you and be an angel to him; but it's foolish and drags me miserably away from you."
What she said with her voice was less pathetic, though she sighed as she rose. "I suppose so. Probably wants me to take a walk. Oh, very well!"
She gave the man in the chair another look, one that meant, "You're doing this!" Then she turned away, and, rearranging her expression to a more welcoming aspect, walked briskly toward Arturo. She did not reach him, however, without being intercepted.
Giuseppe Bastoni rose from the bench where he had been sitting beyond a clustering shrubbery, and stepped forth to stand bowing before her.
"Miss Ambler—you please?"
She stopped. "Yes?"
"I please like to invite you. You will come to dance? Music at Salone nice good zis assternoon. You please enjoy to come?"
"No," she said; and she intended the coldness with which she spoke and looked at him to be observed by the person whose suggestion she thought she was obeying. "No, I believe not."
Giuseppe stared through his monocle. "No? You don't like?"
"Not to-day."
"No? You don't like to come because we go to Naple' sometime, my brozzer an' me?"
"I haven't any idea what you mean," she said. "I must go on; I'm keeping Mr. Liana waiting."
"Oh, yes! Meester Liana!" Giuseppe stood aside, and bowed deeply. "You don' like keep Meester Liana to wait. Oh, no! Excuse!"
He turned at once and strode out of the garden, while Claire, continuing upon her way to Arturo, glanced brightly back over her shoulder at the man in the long chair.
"You see?" she seemed to ask. "Are you satisfied with me?"
But he did not appear to be satisfied; and she was puzzled. "Good gracious!" she thought. "Isn't there any pleasing you at all?"
Apparently there wasn't, for he frowned heavily; and the unfortunate Arturo paid for it. She was anything but angelic to him during their walk.