Bron Edge in her white cape climbed the rocky grey mountain. Her path was decorated with anemones, cyclamen, and orchids like small minarets. Sometimes a solitary olive tree gave her a moment’s delicate shade. Rosemary and lentisk filled the air with a bitter-sweetness; the shadows in the rocks were blue as the few trails of lithospermum that still lingered. She pressed forward eagerly, as though a lover were awaiting her up there in the azure. She was filled with the glamour of the Italian day. In Spiaggia one’s senses play a quintet in a thousand movements; there is no hour that is not filled with some sensuous delight. The delight of today was to be the mountain garden. In this sweet enclosure the tulips would be in full bloom, the irises, and the last of the daffodils.
The garden was not quite at the top. There was an untidy little shrine strewn with dead and dying wild flowers; then the path branched to the right for the topmost height where one could get gloriously drunk on half a glass of wine if the peasant who sold it happened to be there. But Bron’s path was straight on towards the hermit’s chapel. Half-way along this flat path a valley appeared to the left, and down in the valley was the garden, which was flung over the spare peasant cultivations like a gay rug. Bron always stood on the path above and contemplated the strangely fascinating landscape before she descended to the garden. On each side of the valley the mountain grimly pierced the blazing sky, and between these austere battlements there was a vista of sea in the distance, softly and meltingly blue, and Vesuvius wearing its white plume, always with an air, and always at a different angle.
Here in the mountain valley was complete solitude and a silence that held the heavens in its lap. Not a bird sang — the cicale were silent as yet. It was for this ecstatic moment of the first vision of her valley that Bron always hurried up the mountain path. Today she stood and breathed the exquisite beauty, letting her eyes wander from sky and sea to rocky peaks, and last, always last, to the valley and the gardens. Then she stared. Someone was there. Someone like a large fungus sitting among her tulips. Her mood changed, and she hurried down to the gate of the garden, which was locked. The creature must have climbed the wall. It was a woman, who rose in embarrassment when she saw Bron.
‘Do you know you are trespassing?’’ asked Bron with some indignation.
‘Yes, I’m afraid I do,’ said the other disarmingly. ‘But it didn’t seem possible that anyone could be within miles of me, and I couldn’t resist climbing over. I am so sorry. I will go at once. Please forgive me. May I say that I have never seen anything so beautiful as your garden?’
Bron melted at once.
‘If you really think that, please stay a little longer. I will get some cushions from the casetta and we will sit on the wall.’
She was eyeing with some curiosity this young woman in the hideous mud-coloured clothes. How dared she wear such things in Spiaggia? She was between twenty-five and thirty, a tall, drooping creature with large, hysterical blue eyes, a sallow face, and an abundance of colourless hair arranged untidily about her ears. She was a perfect example of the un-loved spinster. She had come to Spiaggia, she said, because she had seen a picture of it in a paper four years ago. She had made up her mind to visit it if she ever went anywhere. Her small income was not enough to live on, but by working she had saved enough, and had taken a month’s holiday.
‘What from?’
‘I work for the Charity Society and since my mother died I live at a residential club for professional girls.’
‘You mean, it’s a holiday from both?’
She smiled. Certainly life wasn’t very exciting, but she was less lonely living in the club. No, she was not at all disappointed in Spiaggia. She had never imagined anything so lovely.
‘It makes you feel quite a different being,’ she said.
‘It does indeed. Are you alone?’
‘Quite.’
‘No friends here?’
‘I talk to some old ladies and a clergyman who are staying at my little hotel on the Marina. That’s all.’
Her thin, claw-like hands were playing with the tulips Bron had given her; her narrow shoulders were hunched.
‘No men to speak of?’
‘No, I never meet any men — to speak of.’
Bron thought of a letter she had had this morning from a woman friend:
As for the Mediterranean — did it get me? My dear Bron, it got me to such an extent that I cannot live in Italy alone — it’s not possible. No, one needs a man in Italy. Climatically, it is impossible for spinsters. Like the rose, the Mediterranean has very sharp thorns. Basta!
Here was a type, interesting not in itself, but in its reaction to the lure of Spiaggia. Would this spinster too be driven forth by mutinous repressions?
Meanwhile, it was time for her to go. The tulips must be enjoyed alone.
‘Come to tea at my villa tomorrow,’ suggested Bron. She explained where it was.
‘That villa. Why, then, you must be — are you Mrs Edge?’
‘Does it frighten you?’
‘No, no. Only, it interests me tremendously.’
‘Will you come?’
‘Of course. Do you really mean it?’
Bron laughed and nodded. The drab figure sheered off, but came back again.
‘I forgot to tell you my name. It is Mabel Ebony.’
‘How nice,’ said Bron.
☙
Next day Bron was on her terrace at tea-time, and saw Miss Mabel Ebony plunging along the narrow path which led to the villa, nearly as lonely as the mountain garden, but not so remote. She seemed to be in a hurry. When she was announced by Maria (who glanced at her as much to say, ‘Well, whatever the signora does is right, but this is not my style’) it was evident that she was agitated.
‘Please forgive me if I seem bothered. I ought not to have come, but I want your advice — at least, I should say, I want to see you before I leave. I am going tomorrow.’
‘What! going tomorrow? You said you were here for three weeks.’
‘Yes, yes, I was. But I must go. I have had an experience. Dreadful. I don’t know what to do. Oh, yes. I must go tomorrow. There’s no doubt about it.’
‘Can you tell me what has happened to make you change your mind?’ Bron was burning with curiosity.
The globe-like eyes were feverishly bright.
‘Well, when I left you yesterday I didn’t go home, but wandered about the mountain till dusk, and then went down to the town and bought a few things before I started to walk down to the Marina. By that time it was quite dark.’ She gulped. ‘I hadn’t been walking long down the steps when I realised that I was being followed. He was just about three yards behind me all the way down the first stretch —’
‘How do you know he was following you? If he happened to be walking behind you —’
‘He was talking to me. I don’t know what it was, most of it, though he said a few words in English, but it was all whispered — and terrifying.’ The colour rushed up and down her neck. ‘Of course, I took no notice of him but hurried on. Then when I got to where the steps cross the road and the road makes a curve and joins the steps again, I thought I’d got rid of him, for he didn’t follow me. But when I got to the road again, there he was waiting for me, facing the steps! He must have run round quickly to get in front of me.’
‘Then what happened?’ asked Bron as the narrator seemed to collapse.
‘Then he offered to carry my string bag —’
‘String bag!’ thought Bron. ‘How like you.’
‘And walked beside me all the way to the hotel.’
‘And you let him carry your string bag?’
‘What could I do? I was much too frightened to refuse. But wasn’t it awful! Have you ever had such an experience?’
‘Hum, well, not exactly the same perhaps. But it’s not uncommon, especially here. There are lots of queer people about who don’t mind being followed as much as you do.’
‘I could never stay here alone after that, could I?’
‘Of course not, if you feel like that about it.’
‘You do advise me to leave, don’t you?’
‘Certainly. Is that all you have to tell me?’
‘Nearly. It was queer, though, when he was eating his maccheroni —’
‘What?’
‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? He said he was hungry, and when he asked me to give him some food I didn’t dare refuse. So I took him into the hotel and gave him something to eat. I didn’t eat with him, of course. But as I was saying, it was queer, because the landlady of the hotel knows him quite well. She told me he was a boatman — rather a bad lot, I think.’
‘What’s he like? Perhaps I know him.’
‘I hardly looked at him. But he’s young, and I suppose, good-looking in a dark Italian sort of way — big brown eyes and very white teeth. But he didn’t make much impression, except that in the dark he was a frightening, menacing figure. There was no one about. How was I to know he wasn’t going to murder me?’
‘Or worse,’ suggested Bron, simply to see the sallow face crimson.
‘Oh, Mrs Edge!’ she quivered. ‘Wasn’t it terrifying, though! I shall never forget it. The darkness and not knowing what he was saying, and the feeling that at any moment he might — touch me. He did bump into me once when he was carrying my bag and I wasn’t sure whether he did it on purpose. Then as he gave me my bag at the hotel he touched my hand, but that might have been an accident too. What do you think?’
‘I should say that if he bumped into you and touched your hand it was not an accident.’
‘I’m dreadfully afraid it wasn’t. What could he have meant by such behaviour? I’m sure no Englishman would do such a thing.’
‘No, I’m quite sure he wouldn’t,’ agreed Bron, faintly smiling.
Two spots of crimson had settled permanently in Miss Ebony’s cheeks.
‘I know you must think it exaggerated to take it so seriously —’ There was too much accent on the ‘you’.
‘Why should I?’
‘Oh, because you have — you must —’ she faltered.
‘I’ve had so much experience, you mean? Probably, however, I haven’t had quite as much as you’ve been led to believe.’
‘Oh, forgive me! How tactless I am. But what I meant was — you must have — I mean — Oh, please believe I don’t believe everything I hear.’
Bron would have loved to know what she had heard.
Spiaggia gossip! It was stupendous — on the grand scale. A Tower of Babel, Gothic in tendency, but richly decorated with rococo improvisations of Latin origin.
‘So you’re going tomorrow.’
‘Yes, by the early boat. He has threatened to come to the hotel tonight with some corals, but I certainly shan’t see him.’
‘No, I certainly shouldn’t. Now come and see my cliff garden, which is nearly as good as the mountain one.’
Miss Ebony was able to give a fluttering attention to the wild beauty of the garden in a cleft of the sheer cliff and the huge limestone column that dominated it, shedding a long shadow over the house. When she said goodbye there were tears in her eyes.
‘It has all been so wonderful,’ she said fervently. ‘I do hate going.’
‘Safer to go,’ smiled Bron.
‘Oh, yes, there’s no doubt about that.’
Bron sniffed a bit of rosemary when she had seen Miss Ebony through the gate. ‘Poor outraged virgin,’ she sighed. A pity she was leaving. But she was probably too deeply rooted in respectability to yield even to the siren call of Spiaggia. On behalf of all starved females Bron invoked the god whose symbol towered with such majesty above the garden, and then she forgot Miss Mabel Ebony.
Three weeks later Bron went down to the Marina. It was a grey and primrose morning. The sea, as if to show it need not always be blue to be attractive, had become quicksilver and still as a lake. The air was just touched with sirocco — enough to make one pleasantly languid. Wistaria hung from old gates and terraces, filling the air with sudden perfume, as though a goddess had brushed by on her way to some celestial tryst.
A line of girls passed, moving like young leopards, barefooted, each one as she swung by under her load saluting with a smile from bright, wanton eyes.
‘Everything that happens here, everything one sees, is an event. There is nothing without significance. That little cab trailing up the hill, with its driver half asleep inside it, has intense individuality. Every day is a different flower. Yesterday was a peony; today is a columbine. How wonderful it all is. One never gets used to it, thank God. If one did one wouldn’t deserve to live here.’
The delicious languor of the day demanded a vermouth, and from a terrace over the Marina Bron sat watching the movements of the little port. Sea and sky met in a lavender stillness, and orange boats were floating like gold-fish in a bowl. Maria had said, as she bade Bron ‘buona passeggiata’, that the sun was sick. ‘Il sole à ammalato.’ She considered it was sick if it was not blazing from a cloudless sky.
From one of the houses on the Marina a bright figure emerged — a girl with two fat pigtails, bareheaded, barelegged, brown-necked. She wore a home-made but expressive little frock of gay cretonne. Probably one of the Swedish party that was so much talked about, fair young men and women who, when they were not swimming or doing incredible gymnastics on the beach, were rooted like brilliant anemones to the rocks, sun-bathing.
‘Ecco la signorina inglese,’ remarked the waiter, pouring out another glass of vermouth. ‘She occupies the casetta of our padrone. They say she has taken it for a year.’
‘English?’ Bron said, and looked again at the girl who was approaching up the road.
‘Yes, English. Very rich, they say, and chooses to be at Spiaggia for the rest of her life. She bathes — not on the Marina. She prefers to go to distant beaches. My cousin Luigino is her marinaio. She has engaged him for the season. A simpatica signorina, he says, but a little mad, like all the English, if you will excuse me.’
It was Mabel Ebony, transformed, transmuted, blooming like a rose. She would wear pigtails and dress strangely for the rest of her life and be perfectly happy. And all because an impudent fisherman followed her home one night.
‘Ecco Luigino! He is preparing the boat.’
Untidy black curls, flashing eyes, mahogany skin, and a rich tenor voice. Blithely he sang as he threw the cushions and bathing things into the boat.
Vieni sul mar! Vieni a vogar Sentirai l’ebbrezza del tuo marinar!
to the tune of Two Lovely Black Eyes.
‘At any rate I am not responsible for this,’ thought Bron, ‘I did advise her to go home.’
She forgot the invocation to that god whose symbol towered with such majesty above her garden.