CHAPTER I.
IT was melancholy to admit that Italy also had ceased to interest him, thought Hamlin, as he smoked his cigarette on the hillside above the Villa Arnolfini; melancholy, although, in truth, he had suspected as much throughout the journey, and, indeed, before starting. Pale, milky morning sky, deepening into luminous blue opposite the fast‐rising sun; misty blue‐green valley bounded by unsubstantial Apennine peaks and Carrara crags; yellow shimmer of vines and of maize, green sparkle of pine and fir branches, glitter of vermilion sand crumbling under his feet among the sear grass page: 4 and the brown cistus tufts,—all these things seemed to have lost for him their emotional colour, their imaginative luminousness. He tried to realise the time when all these things had given him a thrill, had gone to his head, nay, when the mere sense of being in Italy had done so; but now the very words “thrill” and “intoxication” seemed false, disgusting, and vulgar. Formerly, at least, such things had soaked into him, dyed his mind with colour, saturated it with light; instead of remaining, as now, so separate from him, so terribly external, that to perceive them required almost an effort. He and the world had been becoming paler in the last three years; it was melancholy, but that seemed quite natural and in keeping; and besides, a washed‐out world, a man with worn‐out feelings, have quite as much psychologic interest for a poet as the reverse.
Walter Hamlin had never been your splash‐of‐scarlet and dash‐of‐orange‐and‐skyblue, lust‐and‐terror kind of lyrist; but he had begun his poetical career with a quiet concentra‐ page: 5 tion of colour, physical and moral, which had made his earliest verses affect one like so many old church windows, deep flecks of jewel lustre set in quaint stiff little frames, with a great deal of lead between, and supreme indifference to anatomy and perspective. And as a painter (perhaps just because, despite his own contrary opinion)—he certainly had less original genius as painter than as poet—he had continued in this habit of gemlike harmonies of colour; but in his poetry, and in his reality as a man, it struck him that he had little by little got paler and paler, colours turning gradually to tints, and tints to shadows; pleasure, pain, hope, despair, all reduced gradually to a delicate penumbra, a diaphanous intellectual pallor, of which this utter listlessness, this indifference even to having grown indifferent, was, as it were, the faint key‐note. The world was a pale and prismatic mist, full of vague, formless ghosts, in which it was possible to see only as far as to‐day; and, indeed, why wish to see that paler to‐day called page: 6 to‐morrow? Perhaps there was a little depression added to Hamlin’s usual listlessness. It had given him a kind of little shock to see Melton Perry again, after those twelve or thirteen years; bringing back to him the time when he had been the most brilliant and eccentric of that little knot of æsthetic undergraduates, at whose strange doings as Greek gods, and Provençal poets, and Norse heroes, Oxford had murmured in those philistine days, and which had welcomed young Hamlin, with his girlish beauty and pre‐Raphaelite verses, as a sort of mixture of Apollo and Eros, sitting at the head of the supper‐table dressed in green silk, with rose garlands on his head, while Perry led a chorus of praise, dressed in indigo velveteen, with peacocks’ feathers in his button‐hole, and silver‐gilt grasshoppers in his hair. Poor old Perry! Absurd days those were, thought Hamlin, as he walked slowly towards the house, through the grass and hemlock bending with dew, pushing aside the fig branches and vine trails along the narrow path between the page: 7 terraced olives; absurd days those, and at which he could now, having grown grave and listless, only faintly smile. Still the sight of Perry had brought back to him that recurring sense that all those absurd lads of long‐gone days, turned humdrum dons, and parsons, and squires for the most part, had had a something, a spontaneity, an aristocratic fibre, a sort of free‐bornness, which he missed among the clique‐and‐shop shoddy æstheticism with which he now associated, and which sang his praises as those boys had sung them so many years before. Professional poetry! professional art! faugh! thought Hamlin; it was that feeling which had been making London odious to him of late, and sent him abroad, he knew not whither. He was a poet himself, and a painter also, to be sure; but somehow he liked to feel (and yet it oppressed him) that he was not of the same stock as his fellow‐workers—that he had his coats made by less romantic tailors, and cut his hair and beard in less pictorial style. The sense of his difference from all those pen‐ page: 8 and‐pencil‐driving men of genius, those reviewer‐poets and clerk‐poets, those once‐a‐week‐studio‐receiving painters; the sense of the dust and smoke, as it were, of the æsthetic factory, had been choking him of late: he would rather go and associate only with well‐dressed numskulls, go and flirt with empty‐headed Faubourg St Germain ladies, or emptier‐headed Monte Carlo ladies—he would not touch pen or brush for years. It had been silly to accept Perry’s invitation to spend September at the Villa Arnolfini; he had accepted, thinking of Perry as he had been, a wild, roistering, half‐French creature, brought up at Louis‐le‐Grand, and telling wicked French stories. Good heavens! what a change! When the wretched, thin, wasted, depressed‐looking creature, fit for a medieval picture of mansuetude, had greeted him by night at the nearest station, and had driven him in the gig, he had been quite unable to realise that this was indeed Melton Perry. But he had understood all, all, when, in the bleak drawing‐room, in the glare of an ill‐ page: 9 trimmed lamp, that lank, limp, lantern‐jawed leering creature with a Sapphic profile had come forward and seized him by both hands, and kissed them, crying—
“Dear Mr Hamlin, I must kiss the hands that have opened the paradise of body and soul to so many of us.”
She, and her speech, and the damp dab on his hands, had passed before him like a nightmare; he felt that he would never be able to disassociate Mrs Melton Perry from that horrible smell of ill‐trimmed, flickering oil‐lamp. It seemed to him dreadful—a sort of hideous, harpy‐like proceeding—that his old friend should have thus been metamorphosed.
“You see,” Perry had said, “I must paint things—well—not the sort of things I exactly admire,—because, you see, there’s Mrs Perry and the children—five girls,—and last year’s baby.”
Perry’s depressed voice had remained in Hamlin’s ears. This was the end of a bright, original fellow—married for love, too! And page: 10 six children! Hamlin had already made up his mind that he could not possibly hold out long at the Villa Arnolfini. That Mrs Perry, with her leering Sapphic profile, her almost amorous admiration, the limp gown, the five girls, and last year’s baby, the all‐pervading smell of oil‐lamp, were too much for him. In three days, he calculated, he might decently, on some pretext, slip off to Florence. And then—why, from Florence he might go to America. He thought all those big hotels, with the fifteen hundred inmates and thirteen brass bands, all that tremendous strain, telegraph‐telephone vulgarity, might be refreshing.
Hamlin had got to the bottom of the hill, and in front of him, nestled among the olives and the vines, rose the Villa Arnolfini, a time‐ and weather‐stained Tuscan country‐house, with its rose‐hedges gone wild among the beans and artichokes, its grotesque ivy‐draped terra‐cotta statues, its belvedere towers, from whose crannied sides and yellow lichened tiles page: 11 the pigeons swept down on to the lawn of overgrown grass, thick with dew in the blue morning shadow. It had a sort of half‐romantic, half‐idyllic charm, which Hamlin could not help recognising: it certainly was better than an American hotel, with ten lifts, thirteen brass bands, and fifteen hundred inmates. But, like everything else, it was a snare; for behind those sleepy‐looking green shutters were the pink and blue chromo‐lithograph pot‐boilers of Melton Perry, were the five girls and the last year’s baby, nay, were the Sapphic leer and limp dresses of Mrs Melton Perry herself.
Making these reflections, Hamlin pushed open the green and blistered house‐door and entered the wide hall, with rickety eighteenth‐century chairs and tables marshalled round the walls. There was one good thing about his hosts, he thought, and that was, that they had no common breakfast, but invited their guests to do whatsoever they pleased in the early morning. The hall was very silent, and Ham‐ page: 12 lin wondered how he should get any breakfast. It struck him that he had better go and ring the bell in his bedroom. But on going upstairs he found there was no sign of a bell either in it or in the vast scantily furnished drawing‐room, where a thick layer of dust reposed on tables and mirrors, and the smell of last night’s oil‐lamp still lingered. He saw the open door of Perry’s studio; it was empty, and so was the adjoining dressing‐room, where boots and canvases littered the floor. But on the mirror was a paper, on which was written in the largest characters: “I am gone to sketch at the Lake of Massaciuccoli; shan’t be back till lunch; please look after Hamlin.”
“Confound it!” thought Hamlin, “am I to be left in tête‐à‐tête with Mrs Perry all the morning?” But since Melton Perry thought nothing of leaving his guest alone all the morning, he too—the guest—might surely be permitted to slip away after breakfast from the effusive æstheticism of his hostess. Hav‐ page: 13 ing Having found no sign of life on the first floor, Hamlin went down‐stairs once more, and proceeded to ramble about in search of breakfast, or, at least, of some servant. The ground‐floor seemed to consist entirely of servants’ rooms, offices, and strange garners, where sacks of potatoes, garden‐tools, silkworm‐mats, and various kinds of pods were gathered together. They were all empty; and empty likewise was the kitchen, its brass saucepans and huge spits left invitingly for any one who might care to step through the open garden‐door. But next to the kitchen was a sort of nursery, at least so he judged from the children’s chairs and battered dolls lying about—and here a table was spread with cups and saucers and jugs, and a cut loaf and a plate of figs. “This looks more like it,” thought Hamlin, wondering what had become of the inmates of this mysterious abode of sleep. Suddenly he heard children talking in a room at the end of the passage, and a sort of subdued, deep, melancholy chant, like some church song. He went page: 14 to the door whence came the sounds, and knocked gently. The childish chattering did not stop, nor the fitful gusts of chant—deep, nasal, but harmonious and weird, with curious, sudden, metallic falsetto notes, less like the voice of a woman than of a youth. Hamlin knocked again, and receiving no notice, boldly opened the door and stood on the threshold. He was struck by the sight which met him. The room was low and vaulted, with walls entirely frescoed with dark‐blue skies sprinkled with birds, mountains like cheeses, rivers, box‐like houses, people fishing, and plentiful ducks and parrots on perches; a faint green shimmer of leaves came through the open windows; three or four little yellow‐headed children were scrambling on the floor, struggling violently over the funeral of a doll in a biscuit‐tin. In the middle of the room was a large deal table, covered with singed flannel, on the corner of which stood a brasier with some flat‐irons, and a heap of crumpled pink pinafores; and behind this table, her tall and page: 15 powerful figure, in a close‐fitting white vest and white skirt, standing out against the dark‐blue painted wall and the green shimmer from outside, was a young woman bending over a frock which she was ironing, her bare brown arms going up and down along the board; her massive and yet girlish body bending with the movement, and singing that strange chant which Hamlin had heard from outside.
“I beg your pardon,” said Hamlin, in Italian, as he stood in the doorway. The children looked round, tittered, and made remarks in shrill whispers; the girl stopped her work, stood erect, putting her iron on the brasier, and stared full at Hamlin with large wide‐opened eyes of strange dark‐greyish blue, beneath heavy masses of dark lustreless hair, crimped naturally like so much delicate black iron wire, on her narrow white brow.
“I beg your pardon,” said Hamlin again; “but can you tell me how I may get some breakfast?”
page: 16He could not help smiling in proffering this innocent request, so serious and almost tragic was the face of the girl.
“It’s Mr Hamlin,” tittered the children, rolling under the table, and hanging to the table‐cloth.
The young woman eyed Hamlin for a second in no very gracious manner; then answered, with a certain contemptuous listlessness in her slightly hollowed pale cheeks and beautifully curled but somewhat prominent lips—
“I don’t know anything about your breakfast, sir.” She spoke, to his surprise, in perfect English, with only the faintest guttural Italian accent. “Mr Perry went to sketch at Massaciuccoli early this morning, and took the boy with him; Mrs Perry may never be disturbed till nine; and the cook is gone to Lucca for provisions.”
“That’s very sad,” remarked Hamlin, laughing, and looking at this curious and picturesque being.
The girl seemed annoyed at being discovered page: 17 in that guise, for she pulled down her white sleeves quickly.
“I suppose the cook has orders about your breakfast,” she said, in a tone which seemed to put an end to the conversation; and she took up her iron once more. “Mrs Perry did not think you would want anything so early; the cook will be back about nine.”
But Hamlin would not be shaken off; the fact was, he enjoyed watching this beautiful sullen creature much as he might have enjoyed watching a cat whom he had disturbed in its sleep.
“Nine o’clock!” he said; “that’s a long time to wait. Couldn’t you give me something to eat? I saw a table spread in the next room.”
The girl put down her iron with a sort of subdued irritation of manner.
“It’s the children’s breakfast, sir,” she answered; “we have neither tea nor coffee.”
“We have milk,” said the eldest of the little girls pertly, “and figs.”
page: 18“Milk and figs!” exclaimed Hamlin; “why, that’s a breakfast for the gods! and won’t you,” he went on rather appealingly—“won’t you share a little of it with me?”
“You are Mrs Perry’s guest,” said the girl more sullenly than ever, “and of course you are welcome to anything you choose.”
Hamlin felt rather taken aback.
“Indeed!” he said. “I don’t wish to do anything against the habits of the house, or disagreeable to you.”
“It is not against any rules,” she answered. “If you will excuse me, I will see whether the milk is heated. The children will show you the way.”
