The Devourers

One thing only tore at her soul—the longing to see Nancy. Nancy, Nancy, Nancy! She would say the name to herself a hundred times a day, and close her eyes to try and picture the little face, and the tuft of black curls on the top of the buoyant head. Her feverish hands felt vacant and aching for the touch of the soft, warm fingers she had held. Mrs. Avory comforted her. In the spring, or at latest in the summer, Edith should see Nancy again. Edith would be quite well in a month or two if she ate many raw eggs and was brave.

So Edith ate raw eggs and was brave.

Spring climbed up the five thousand feet and reached Davos at the end of May. Fritz Klasen was leaving. He was going back to Leipzig.

"Good-bye, good-bye."

He walked round the verandah at the resting-hour, shaking hands with everyone, saying, "Gute Besserung," and "Auf wiedersehen in Deutschland," to two or three Germans.

When he reached the Russian girl she was asleep. But Edith said: "Good-bye; I am so glad—I am so glad for you!"

When he had passed she saw that the Russian girl's eyes were open, and fixed on her.

"Did you speak?" said Edith.

"No," said the Russian in her strange, empty voice; "I thought."

Edith smiled. "What did you think?"

"I thought, why do you lie?"

Edith sat up, flushing, and her breath went a little shorter. "What?" she said.

Rosalia Antonowa kept her deep eyes on Edith's face.

"You said you were glad that he was going. Perhaps you meant it," she said. "You are here so short a time; but in a year, in two years, or four years, your lips will not be able to say that, and your heart will turn sick when another goes away, and you know that you will never go—never." Her bistre lids closed.

Edith tried to find something comforting to say to her.

"Davos is so beautiful, one ought not to mind. Surely you must love all this blue and white loveliness—the mountains, and the snow, and the sun."

"Oh, the mountains!" murmured Rosalia, with clenched teeth. "The mountains, weighing on my breast, and the snow freezing and choking me, and the sun blazing and blinding me. Oh!"—she raised her thin fist to the towering immensity round her—"oh, this unspeakable, this monstrous prison of death!"

Just then a Belgian girl passed, with pale lips and a tiny waist. She stopped to ask Antonowa how she was.

"Ill," said the Russian curtly.

When the girl had passed she spoke again to Edith. "And you will know what they mean when they ask you how you are. It is not the 'comment ça va?' of the rest of the world. No; here they mean it. They want to know. 'How are you? Are you better? Are you getting better more quickly than I am? Surely you are worse than I am! What! no hæmorrhage for a month? No temperature? That is good.' And then you see the hatred looking out of their eyes."

"Oh, I don't think so," said Edith.

The Russian kept silent for a while; then she said: "Klasen will come back again. He is not cured. The doctor told him not to go. He will soon come back again."

He came back four months later. Edith was pained to see how grey and dull his face looked. Now he would have to stay two or three years more. But he said he did not mind; he was happy.

He had been married a month, and his wife was with him. He introduced his girl-wife to Edith and to Mrs. Avory on the day following his arrival. She was a gentle blonde of nineteen, a blue-blooded flower of German aristocracy, who had married Klasen against her parents' will.

"I shall cure him," she said.

The summer was magnificent. She went out a great deal for long walks and steep climbs, and she sang at all parties and concerts, for she had a lovely young voice, all trills and runs like a lark's. She would sit on the verandah at resting-time beside her husband, and near Edith, for he had his old place again, and then after a while she would kiss his forehead and run off to pay calls, or to practise, or to drive down to Klosters.

Klasen's bright blue eyes would follow her. The Russian from her couch looked at him and read his thoughts. She read: "I married that I might not be alone—alone with my ill and my terror in the night and in the day—but I am still alone. When my wife is with me, and I cough, she says: 'Poor darling!' When in the night I choke and perspire, she turns in her sleep, and says: 'Poor darling!' and goes to sleep again. And I am alone with my ill and my terror."

The Russian girl thought that Klasen's blue eyes burned with something that was not all love.

After a time the girl-wife practised less, and paid fewer calls. She said she had lost weight, and one day with her husband she went to see the doctor.

Yes, there was something—oh, very slight, very slight!—at the apex of the left lung. So a couch was brought out for her on the terrace near her husband, and she rested in the afternoons with a rug tucked round her and a parasol over her head.

Fritz held the little hand with the new wedding-ring still bright upon it. When she coughed he said: "Poor darling!" And he was no more alone. In the day-time they laughed, and were very cheerful; in the night Fritz slept better; but his wife lay awake, and thought of her sister and her two little brothers safely at home with her father and mother in Berlin.

Sometimes holiday-makers and sport-lovers came up to Davos for a fortnight or a month, especially in the winter. Mrs. Avory noticed that they laughed much less than the invalids did. When they hurried through the lounge with their skates and skis, Klasen would say:

"See how they overdo things. They wear themselves out skiing, skating, curling, bobsleighing. Yes," he would add, nodding to his wife and to Edith, "almost everyone who comes here as a sportsman returns here as an invalid."

His little laugh made Edith shiver. Sometimes the girl-wife would bend forward.

"See, Fritz; two more have arrived to-day!"

"Do you think they are tourists?"

"Oh no, no; they are ill." And in the young eyes that gazed upon the new-comers was no sorrow.

The months and the years swung round, and Edith passed along them with light and ever lighter tread. And still and always the longing for Nancy tore at her heart with poisoned teeth. Every hour of her day was bitter with longing for the sound of the childish voice, the touch of the soft, warm hand. She sometimes thought: "If I were dying, Valeria would let Nancy come here to say good-bye." Then again she thought:

"If Nancy came I should recover. I cannot eat enough now to get strong because I am so often near to crying; but if Nancy were here I should not cry. I should eat much more; I should not feel so sad; I should go out for walks with her. I know I should recover...."

But Nancy was in Italy in the house of Aunt Carlotta and Cousin Adèle, and Edith's letters were not given to her, lest the paper over which Edith had bent should carry poison in its love-laden pages.

Nancy now spoke Italian and wrote Italian poems. She went out for walks with Adèle, and Adèle held the soft, warm hand and heard the sweet treble voice. Adèle kept the house quiet and the meals waiting when Nancy was writing; and when Nancy frowned and passed her hand across her forehead with the little quick gesture she often used, Adèle laughed her loud Milanese laugh that drove all the butterfly-thoughts away. Adèle tidied Nancy's things and threw away the dried primroses Edith had picked with her in the Hertfordshire woods, and gave the string of blue beads Edith had put round Nancy's neck the day she left for Davos to the hall-porter's child, and she tore up all the poems Nancy had written in England, because they were old things that nobody could understand.

Thus, as the months and the years swung round, Edith went from Nancy's memory. Softly, slowly, with light tread, the girl-figure passed from her recollection and was gone; for children and poets are forgetful and selfish, and a child who is a poet is doubly selfish, and doubly forgetful.

When Nancy was fifteen, Zardo, the Milan publisher, accepted her first book—"A Cycle of Lyrics." By the post that brought the first proofs to the little poet came also a letter, black-edged, from Switzerland, for her mother.

"Mother, mother!" cried Nancy, drawing the printed pages from the large envelope, and shaking them out before her, "Look, the proofs, the proofs! This is my book, my own book!"

And she lifted all the rough sheets to her face and kissed them.

But Valeria had opened the black-edged letter, and was gazing at it, pale, with tears in her eyes.

"Nancy," she said, "Edith is dead."

"Oh, mother dear!" exclaimed Nancy, "I am so sorry!" And she bent over her mother and kissed her. Then she went back to her proofs and turned over the first page.

"She died on Thursday morning," sobbed Valeria. "And oh, Nancy, she loved you so!"

But Nancy had not heard. Before her lay her first printed poem. The narrow verses on the wide white sheet looked to her like a slender pathway.

And along this pathway went Nancy with starry matutinal eyes, beyond the reach of love and the call of Death, leading her dreams far out past the brief arch of Fame, into the shining plains of Immortality.

XII

So Valeria had her wish. Her child was a genius, and a genius recognized and glorified as only Latin countries glorify and recognize their own. Nancy stepped from the twilight of the nursery into the blinding uproar of celebrity, and her young feet walked dizzily on the heights. She was interviewed and quoted, imitated and translated, envied and adored. She had as many enemies as a Cabinet Minister, and as many inamorati as a première danseuse.

To the Signora Carlotta's tidy apartment in Corso Venezia came all the poets of Italy. They sat round Nancy and read their verses to her, and the criticisms of their verses, and their answers to the criticisms. There were tempestuous poets with pointed beards, and successful poets with turned-up moustaches; there were lonely, unprinted poets, and careless, unwashed poets; there was also a poet who stole an umbrella and an overcoat from the hall. Aunt Carlotta said it was the Futurist, but Adèle felt sure it was the Singer of the Verb of Magnificent Sterility, the one with the red and evil eyes.

Soon came a letter from Rome bearing the arms of the royal house. Her Majesty the Queen desired to hear Giovanna Desiderata read her poems at the Quirinal at half-past four o'clock of next Friday afternoon. The house was in a flutter. Everywhere and at all hours, in the intervals of packing trunks, Aunt Carlotta, Adèle, Valeria, and Nancy practised deep curtseying and kissing of hand, and wondered if they had to say "Your Majesty" every time they spoke, or only casually once or twice. They started for Rome at once. A gorgeous dress and plumed hat was bought for Nancy, a white veil was tied for the first time over her childish face, and in very tight white gloves, holding the small volume of her poems, she went with trembling heart—accompanied by Valeria, Carlotta, and Adèle in large feather boas—to the Quirinal.

A gentle-voiced, simply-gowned lady-in-waiting received them, and smiled a little as she explained that only Nancy was expected and could be received. Nancy was then told to remove her veil and her right-hand glove. Carlotta, Valeria, and Adèle embraced her as if she were leaving them for a week, and made the sign of the cross on her forehead; then the lady-in-waiting conducted her through a succession of yellow rooms, of blue rooms, of red rooms, into the white and gold room where the Queen awaited her.

More gentle-voiced and more simply gowned than her lady-in-waiting, the Queen, standing beside a table laden with flowers, moved to meet the little figure in the huge plumed hat. Nancy forgot the practised curtsey and the rehearsed salute. She clasped and held the gracious hand extended to her, and suddenly, as the awed, childish eyes filled with tears, the Queen bent forward and kissed her....

It was late and almost dark when Nancy returned, dream-like, with pale lips, to her mother, her aunt, and her cousin, who were having a nervous meal of sand wiches and wines with a gentleman in uniform standing beside them, and two powdered footmen waiting on them. They all three hurriedly put on their boas as soon as Nancy appeared, and they left, escorted and bowed out by the gentleman in uniform. "Probably the Duke of Aosta," said Aunt Carlotta vaguely. Another powdered footman conducted them to the royal automobile in which they returned to the hotel.

Nancy was disappointing in her description of everything. She sat in the dusky carriage with her eyes shut, holding her mother's hand. She could not tell Aunt Carlotta what she had eaten. Tea? Yes, tea. And cakes? Yes, cakes. But what kind of cakes, and what else? She did not remember. And she could not tell Adèle how the Queen was dressed. In white? No, not in white. Was it silk? She did not know. What rings did the Queen wear, and what brooch? Nancy could not remember. And had she said "Your Majesty" to her, or "Signora"? Nancy did not know. Neither, she thought. Then her mother asked timidly: "Did she like your poems?" And Nancy tightened the clasp on her mother's hand and said, "Yes."

Carlotta and Adèle were convinced that Nancy had made a fiasco of the visit and of the reading. She had blundered over the greeting, and had forgotten to say "Maestà." But they talked to everybody in the hotel about their afternoon at the Quirinal, and pretended not to be surprised when the hall-porter brought to them at the luncheon-table a packet containing three pictures of the Queen with her signature, one for each; and for Nancy a jewel-case, with crown and monogram, containing a brooch of blue enamel with the royal initial in diamonds.

Nancy bought a diary, and wrote on the first page the date and a name—the name of a flower, the name of the Queen.

They returned to Milan in a dream. A crowd of friends awaited them at the station, foremost among them Zio Giacomo, shorter of breath and quicker of temper than ever, and beside him the returned prodigal, Nino, who had never been seen and seldom been heard of for the past eight years. Adèle turned crimson, and Valeria turned white as the well-remembered dark eyes smiled at them from the handsome, sunburnt face; and Nino turned up his moustache and helped them to alight from the train, and kissed them all loudly on both cheeks. Nancy did not remember him at all. She looked at him gravely while he rapidly described to her a pink pinafore she used to wear in England eight years ago, and a Punch-and-Judy show, stage-managed by a Fräulein Something or other, and a dimple just like her mother's that she then possessed. Immediately the dimple reappeared, dipping sweetly in the young curved cheek, and Valeria smiled with tears in her eyes and kissed Nancy. Then Nino kissed Valeria and kissed Nancy, and then he kissed Adèle, too, who was acidly looking on. At last Zio Giacomo, growing very impatient, hurried them off the crowded platform and into cabs and carriages. They drove home, Nino crushing in at the last moment with Valeria, Carlotta, and Nancy. He did not ask about the Queen, nor did he tell them anything about his own long absence; but he quoted Baudelaire and Mallarmé to them all the way home in a low resonant voice broken by the jolts of the carriage. He did not quote Nancy's poems. "They are sacro sanct," he said. "My lips are unworthy." Then he drifted into Richepin:

"Voici mon sang et ma chair,Bois et mange!"

he said, looking straight before him at Valeria. And Valeria turned pale again, uselessly, hopelessly; for the eyes that looked at her did not see her.

Zio Giacomo and Nino stayed with them to dinner, and two of the poets, a successful one and an unwashed one, came later in the evening.

"What do you think of D'Annunzio?" asked Nino of Nancy, when the poets had stopped a moment to take breath.

"I have not read him. I have read nobody and nothing," said Nancy.

"That is right," cried Marvasi, the unwashed, nodding his rusty head and clapping his dusty fingers. "Read nothing, and retain your originality."

"Read everything," cried Cesare Raffaelli, "and cultivate form."

During the discussion that followed, the din of the two poets' voices built a wall of solitude round Nino and Nancy.

"How old are you?" asked Nino, looking at her mild forehead, where the dark eyebrows lay over her light grey eyes like quiet wings.

"Sixteen," said Nancy; and the dimple dipped.

Nino did not return her smile. "Sixteen!" he said. And because his eyes were used to the line of a fading cheek and the bitterness of a tired mouth, his heart fell, love-struck and conquered, before Nancy's cool and innocent youth. It was inevitable.

"Sixteen!" he repeated, looking at her, grave and wondering. "Is anybody in the world sixteen?"

And it was not the inspired author of the poems over which half Italy raved, but the little girl with the wing-like eyebrows, that his wonder went to; and it was the chilly little hand of the maiden, not the pulse of the poet, that shook his heart loose from those other white, well-remembered hands, where the blue veins, soft and slightly turgid, marked the slower course of the blood—those sad blue veins which moved his pity and strangled his desire.

"May I call you by your right name?" he asked. "'Nancy' seems so—geographical."

Nancy laughed. "Call me as you will."

"Desiderata" he said slowly, and the colour left his face as he pronounced it.

That evening Nancy wrote on the second page of her diary the date, and a name; then she scratched the name out again, and the Queen remained in the book alone.

Every morning since the visit to the Quirinal Nancy's chocolate and her letters were brought in to her at eight o'clock by Adèle herself, who regarded it now as an office of honour to wait on the little Sappho of Italy. She came in, in dressing-gown and slippers, with her long black hair in a plait, and placed the dainty tray by Nancy's bed; then she opened the shutters and came back to sit beside Nancy, and open her correspondence for her. Nancy the while, like a lazy princess, sipped her chocolate, with her little finger in the air. Newspaper cuttings about Nancy were read first; requests for autographs were carefully put aside for Adèle to answer. Adèle said that she could write Nancy's auto graph more like Nancy than Nancy herself. Then poems and love-letters were read and commented upon with peals of laughter—and business letters were put aside and not read at all.

So many people came and spoke to Nancy of what she had written that she had no time to write anything new. But her brain was stimulated by all the modernists and symbolists and futurists who recited their works to her; and in the long lamp-lit evenings, while Aunt Carlotta was playing briscola with Zio Giacomo, Nino read Carducci's "Odi Barbare" to the three listening women—Valeria, Adèle, and Nancy—who sat in their large armchairs with drooping lids and folded hands, like a triptichi of the seasons of love.

Valeria always sat a little apart in the shadow, and if anyone spoke to her she replied softly and smiled wanly. Valeria's dimple had slipped into a little line on her cheek. Valeria herself was not Valeria any more. She was Nancy's mother. She had moved back into the shadow, where mothers sit with kind eyes that no one gazes into, and sweet mouths that no one kisses, and white hands that bless and renunciate. The baby had pushed her there. Gently, inexorably, with the first outstretching of the tiny fist, with the first soft pressure of the pink fragile fingers against the maternal breast, the child had pushed the mother from her place in the sunlight—gently, inexorably, out of love, out of joy, out of life—into the shadow where mothers sit with eyes whose tears no one kisses away, with heart-beats that no one counts. Nancy sooner than others had taken her own high place in the sun; for if most children are like robin redbreasts, slayers of their old, Genius, the devourer, is like an eagle that springs full-fledged, with careless, devastating wings, from the nest of a dove.

"Nancy," cried Adèle, bursting into her cousin's room one afternoon, "here is an Englishman to see you. Come quickly. I cannot understand a word he says."

"Oh, send mother to him," said Nancy. "I have forgotten all my English. Besides, I must read this noxious Gabriele to the end."

"Your mother has gone out. Do come!" And Adèle gave Nancy's hair a little pull on each side and a pat on the top, and hurried her to the drawing-room, where the Englishman was waiting. He rose, a stern-looking, clean-shaven man, with friendly eyes in a hard face.

Nancy put out her hand and said: "Buon giorno."

He answered: "How do you do? My Italian is very poor. May I speak English?"

Nancy dimpled. "You may speak it, but I may not understand it," she said.

But she understood him. He had written a critical essay on her book, with prose translations of some of the lyrics, and wished to close the article with an aperçu of her literary aims and intentions. What work was she doing at present! What message–?

"Nothing," said Nancy, with a little helpless Latin gesture of her hands. "I am doing nothing."

"Peccato!" said the Englishman. And he added: "I mean your Italian word in both senses—a pity and a sin."

Nancy nodded, and looked wistful.

"Why are you not working?" asked her visitor severely.

Nancy repeated the little helpless gesture. "I don't know," she said; then she smiled. "In Italy we talk so much. We say all the beautiful things we might write. That is why Italian literature is so poor, and Italian cafés so interesting. As for our thoughts, when we have said them they are gone—blown away like the fluff of the dandelions I used to tell the time by when I was a little girl in England."

That childish reminiscence brought her very near to him, and he told her about his mother and his younger sister, who lived in Kent, in an old-fashioned house in the midst of a great garden.

"You make me homesick for England," said Nancy.

Mr. Kingsley looked pleased. "Do you remember England?" he asked.

"No," said Nancy; "I am always homesick for things that I have forgotten, or for things that I never have known." And she smiled, but in her eyes wavered the nostalgic loneliness of the dreamer's soul.

The Englishman cleared his throat, and said in a practical voice: "I hope that you will work very hard, and do great things."

She tried to. She got up early the next morning, and wrote in her diary, "Incipit vita nova!" and she made an elaborate time-table for every hour of the day; then she made a list of the things she intended to write—subjects and ideas that had stirred in her mind for months past, but had been scattered by distracting visits, dispersed in futile conversations. She felt impatient and happy and eager. On the large white sheet of paper which lay before her, like a wonderful unexplored country full of resplendent possibilities, she traced with reverent forefinger the sign of the cross.

Some one knocked at the door. It was Clarissa della Rocca, Nino's married sister, tall, trim, and sleek in magnificent clothes.

"Mes amours!" she exclaimed, embracing Nancy, and pressing her long chin quickly against Nancy's cheek. "Do put on your hat and come for a drive with me. Aldo has come from America. He is downstairs in the stanhope. He is trying my husband's new sorrels, and so, of course, I insisted on going with him. Now I am frightened, and I have nobody to scream to and to catch hold of."

"Catch hold of Aldo, whoever he may be," said Nancy, laughing.

"He is my brother-in-law. But I can't," said Clarissa, waving explanatory mauve-gloved hands; "he is driving. Besides, he is horribly cross. Have you never seen him? He is Carlo's youngest brother. Do come. He will be much nicer if you are there."

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