Edith Wharton - SSC 09 (17 page)

 
          
Kilvert
felt that he was beginning to understand the situation. “She’s
married—unhappily married. That must be it. And everything draws her to this
man, who is her predestined mate…. But some terrible obstacle lies between
them. Her husband, her children, perhaps some obligation of his that he wants
to forget, but that she feels compelled, for his own sake, to remind him of,
though she does so at the cost of her very life—ah, yes, she’s bleeding to
death for him! And they’ve been off, spending a last day together in some quiet
place, to talk it all over for the last time; and he won’t take her refusal for
an answer—and by God, I wouldn’t either!” Kilvert inwardly shrieked, kindled to
a sudden forgotten vehemence of passion by the mute display of it before him.
“When people need each other as desperately as those two do—not mere
instinct-driven infants, but a mature experienced man and woman—the gods ought
to let them come together, no matter how much it costs, or for how short a time
it is! And that’s what he’s saying to her; by heaven, he’s saying: ‘I thought I
could stand it, but I can’t.’ …”

 
          
To
Kilvert’s surprise his own eyes filled with tears; they came so thick that he
had to pull out his handkerchief and wipe them away. What was he mourning—the
inevitable break between these two anguished people, or some anguish that he
himself had once caught a glimpse of, and missed? There had been that gray-eyed
Russian girl, the governess of his sister’s children; with her he had very
nearly sounded the depths. He remembered one long walk with her in the summer
woods, the children scampering ahead. … At a turn when they were out of sight,
he and she had suddenly kissed and clung to each other….
But
his sister’s children’s governess—?
Did he mean to marry her? He asked
himself that through a long agitated night—recalled the chapter in
“Resurrection” where Prince Nekludov paces his room, listening to the drip of
the spring thaw in the darkness outside—and was off by the earliest train the
next morning, and away to Angkor and Bali the following week. A man can’t be
too careful—
or
can
he? Who knows? He still remembered the shuddering ebb of that night’s
emotions….

 
          
“But
what a power emotion is!” he reflected. “I could lift mountains still if I
could feel as those two do about anything. I suppose all the people worth
remembering—lovers or poets or inventors—have lived at white-heat level, while
we crawl along in the temperate zone.” Once more he concentrated his attention
on the couple facing him. The woman had risen in her turn. She walked away a
few steps, and stood leaning against the rail, her gaze fixed on the faint
horizon-line that was shaping itself into wavering domes and towers. What did
that distant view say to her? Perhaps it symbolized the life she must go back
to, the duties, sacrifices, daily wearinesses from which this man was offering
her an escape. She knew all that; she saw her fate growing clearer and clearer
before her as the boat advanced through the summer twilight; in half an hour
more the crossing would be over, and the gang-plank run out to the quay.

 
          
The
man had not changed his position; he stood where she had left him, as though
respecting the secrecy of her distress, or else perhaps too worn out, too
impoverished in argument, to resume the conflict. His eyes were fixed on the
ground; he looked suddenly years older—a baffled and beaten man….

 
          
The
woman turned her head first. Kilvert saw her steal a furtive glance at her
companion. She detached her hands from the rail, and half moved toward him;
then she stiffened herself, resumed her former attitude, and addressed her
mournful sunken profile to the contemplation of
Venice
…. But not for long; she looked again; her
hands twitched, her face quivered, and suddenly she swept about, rejuvenated,
and crossed the space between herself and her companion. He started at her
touch on his arm, and looked at her, bewildered, reproachful, while she began
to speak low and rapidly, as though all that was left to be said must be
crowded into the diminishing minutes before the boat drew alongside the quay.
“Ah, how like a woman!” Kilvert groaned
,
all his
compassion transferred to the man. “Now she’s going to begin it all over
again—just as he’d begun to resign
himself
to the
inevitable!”

 
          
Yet
he envied the man on whom this intolerable strain was imposed. “How she must
love him to torture him so!” he ejaculated. “She looks ten years younger since
she’s come back to him. Anything better than to spend these last minutes apart
from him…. Nothing that he may be suffering counts a single instant in
comparison with that. …” He saw the man’s brow darken, his eyebrows jut out
almost savagely over his suffering bewildered eyes, and his lips open to utter
a word, a single word, that Kilvert could not hear, but of which he traced the
passage on the woman’s face as if it had been the sting of a whip. She paled
under her deep sunburn, her head drooped, she clung to her companion
desolately, almost helplessly, and for a minute they neither spoke nor looked
at each other. Then Kilvert saw the man’s hand steal toward hers and clasp it
as it still lay on his arm. He spoke again, more softly, and her head sank
lower, but she made no answer. They both looked exhausted with the struggle.

 
          
Two
men who had been sitting near by got up and began to collect their bags and
baskets. One of the couple whom Kilvert was watching pointed out to the other
the seats thus vacated, and the two moved over and sat down on the narrow
board. Dusk was falling, and Kilvert could no longer see their faces
distinctly; but he noticed that the man had slipped his arm about his
companion, not so much to embrace as to support her. She smiled a little at his
touch, and leaned back, and they sat silent, their worn faces half averted from
one another, as though they had reached a point beyond entreaties and arguments.
Kilvert watched them in an agony of participation….

 
          
Now
the boat was crossing the
Grand Canal
;
the dusky palaces glimmered with lights, lamplit prows flashed out from the
side canals, the air was full of cries and guttural hootings. On board the boat
the passengers were all afoot, assembling children and possessions, rummaging
for tickets, chattering and pushing. Kilvert sat quiet. He knew the boat would
first touch near the railway station, where most of the passengers would
probably disembark, before it carried him to his own landing-place at the
Piazzetta. The man and woman sat motionless also; he concluded with
satisfaction that they would probably land at the Piazzetta, and that there he
might very likely find some one waiting for him—some friend of Mrs.
Roseneath’s, or a servant sent to meet him—and might just conceivably discover
who his passionate pilgrims were.

 
          
But
suddenly the man began to speak again, quickly, vehemently, in less guarded
tones. He was speaking Italian now, easily and fluently, though it was obvious
from his intonation that it was not his native tongue. “You promised—you
promised!” Kilvert heard him reiterate, no doubt made reckless by the falling
darkness and the hurried movements of the passengers. The woman’s lips seemed
to shape a “no” in reply; but Kilvert could not be sure. He knew only that she
shook her head once or twice, softly, resignedly. Then the two lapsed once more
into silence, and the man leaned back and stared ahead of him.

 
          
The
boat had drawn close to her first landing-stage, and the gang-plank was being
run out. The couple sat listlessly watching it, still avoiding each other’s
eyes. The people who were getting off streamed by them, chattering and jostling
each other, lifting children and baskets of fowls over their heads. The couple
watched….

 
          
And
then, suddenly, as the last passengers set foot on the quay, and the whistle
for departure sounded, the woman sprang up, forced her way between the sailors
who had their hands on the gang-plank, and rushed ashore without a backward
glance or gesture. The man, evidently taken by surprise, started to his feet
and tried to follow; but a bewildered mother clutching a baby blocked his way,
the bell rang, and the gangplank was already being hauled onto the boat…. The
man drew back baffled, and stood straining his eyes after the fugitive; but she
had already vanished in the dispersing throng.

 
          
As
Kilvert’s gaze followed her he felt as if he too were straining his eyes in the
pursuit of some rapture just glimpsed and missed. It might have been his own
lost destiny mocking him in the flight of this haggard woman stumbling away
distraught from her last hope of youth and freedom. Kilvert saw the man she had
forsaken raise his hand to his eyes with a vague hopeless gesture, then give
his shoulders a shake and stand leaning against the rail, unseeing, unhearing.
“It’s the end,” Kilvert muttered to himself.

 
          
The
boat was now more than half empty, and as they swung back into the Grand Canal
he was tempted to go up to the solitary traveller and say a word to him—perhaps
only ask him for a light, or where the boat touched next. But the man’s face
was too closed, too stricken; Kilvert did not dare intrude on such
a secrecy
of suffering. At the Piazzetta the man, who had
taken up his place near the gang-plank, was among the first to hurry ashore,
and in the confusion and the cross-play of lights Kilvert for a moment lost
sight of him. But his tall gray head reappeared again above the crowd just as
Kilvert himself was greeted by young Harry
Breck,
Mrs.
Roseneath’s accomplished private secretary. Kilvert seized the secretary’s arm.
“Look here! Who’s that man over there? The tall fellow with gray hair and
reddish beard … stalking-cap … there, ahead of you,” Kilvert gasped incoherently,
clutching the astonished Breck, who was directing one of Mrs. Roseneath’s
gondoliers toward his luggage.

 
          
“Tall
man—where?” Young Breck, swinging round, lifted himself on his tiptoes to
follow the other’s gesture.

 
          
“There—over
there! Don’t you see? The man with a stalking-cap—”

 
          
“That?
I can’t be certain at this distance; but it looks like Brand, the ‘cellist,
don’t it? Want to speak to him? No?
All right.
Anyhow,
I’m not so sure….”

 
          
They
went down the steps to the gondola.

 
          
  

 
          
“
That,
would account for their hands,” Kilvert suddenly
thought, rousing himself to wave away a second offering of
langoustines a la Venitienne.
He looked down Mrs. Roseneath’s
shining dinner-table, trying to force himself to a realisation of the scene;
but the women’s vivid painted heads, the men’s polished shirt-fronts, the
gliding gondoliers in white duck and gold-fringed sashes, handing silver dishes
down the table, all seemed as remote and unrelated to reality as the great
Tiepolesque fresco which formed the background of the scene. Before him Kilvert
could see only a middle-aged life-worn man and woman torn with the fulness of
human passion. “If he’s a musician, so is she, probably,” he thought; and this
evocation of their supple dramatic hands presented itself as a new clue to
their identity.

 
          
He
did not know why he was so anxious to find out who they were. Indeed, some
secret apprehension half held him back from pressing his inquiries. “Brand the
‘cellist—” from young Breck’s tone it would seem that the name was well-known
among musicians. Kilvert racked his memories; but music and musicians were not
prominent in them, and he could not discover any association with the name of
Brand—or any nationality either, since it might have been at home anywhere from
Edinburgh
to
Oslo
.

 
          
Well,
all this brooding was really morbid. Was it possible that he would stoop to
gather up gossip about this couple, even if he succeeded in finding out
who
they were? No! All he wanted was to identify them, to be
able to call them by name, and then enshrine them in some secret niche of
memory in all their tragic isolation. “Musicians’ hands—that’s it,” he
murmured.

 
          
But
the problem would not let him rest, and after dinner, forsaking the groups who
were scattering and forming again down the length of the great frescoed saloon,
he found a pretext for joining Breck on the balcony.

 
          
“That
man I pointed out as I left the boat—you said he was a musician?”