Villa Rubein, and Other Stories

“When you were a boy, did you go after birds’ nests, Uncle Nic?” Greta whispered.

“I believe you, Greta.” The blackbird hopped into the shrubbery.

“You frightened him, Uncle Nic! Papa says that at Schloss Konig, where he lived when he was young, he would always be after jackdaws’ nests.”

“Gammon, Greta. Your father never took a jackdaw’s nest, his legs are much too round!”

“Are you fond of birds, Uncle Nic?”

“Ask me another, Greta! Well, I s’pose so.”

“Then why did you go bird-nesting? I think it is cruel”

Mr. Treffry coughed behind his paper: “There you have me, Greta,” he remarked.

Harz began to gather his brushes: “Thank you,” he said, “that’s all I can do to-day.”

“Can I look?” Mr. Treffry inquired.

“Certainly!”

Uncle Nic got up slowly, and stood in front of the picture. “When it’s for sale,” he said at last, “I’ll buy it.”

Harz bowed; but for some reason he felt annoyed, as if he had been asked to part with something personal.

“I thank you,” he said. A gong sounded.

“You’ll stay and have a snack with us?” said Mr. Treffry; “the doctor’s stopping.” Gathering up his paper, he moved off to the house with his hand on Greta’s shoulder, the terrier running in front. Harz and Christian were left alone. He was scraping his palette, and she was sitting with her elbows resting on her knees; between them, a gleam of sunlight dyed the path golden. It was evening already; the bushes and the flowers, after the day’s heat, were breathing out perfume; the birds had started their evensong.

“Are you tired of sitting for your portrait, Fraulein Christian?”

Christian shook her head.

“I shall get something into it that everybody does not see – something behind the surface, that will last.”

Christian said slowly: “That’s like a challenge. You were right when you said fighting is happiness – for yourself, but not for me. I’m a coward. I hate to hurt people, I like them to like me. If you had to do anything that would make them hate you, you would do it all the same, if it helped your work; that’s fine – it’s what I can’t do. It’s – it’s everything. Do you like Uncle Nic?”

The young painter looked towards the house, where under the veranda old Nicholas Treffry was still in sight; a smile came on his lips.

“If I were the finest painter in the world, he wouldn’t think anything of me for it, I’m afraid; but if I could show him handfuls of big cheques for bad pictures I had painted, he would respect me.”

She smiled, and said: “I love him.”

“Then I shall like him,” Harz answered simply.

She put her hand out, and her fingers met his. “We shall be late,” she said, glowing, and catching up her book: “I’m always late!”

VII

There was one other guest at dinner, a well-groomed person with pale, fattish face, dark eyes, and hair thin on the temples, whose clothes had a military cut. He looked like a man fond of ease, who had gone out of his groove, and collided with life. Herr Paul introduced him as Count Mario Sarelli.

Two hanging lamps with crimson shades threw a rosy light over the table, where, in the centre stood a silver basket, full of irises. Through the open windows the garden was all clusters of black foliage in the dying light. Moths fluttered round the lamps; Greta, following them with her eyes, gave quite audible sighs of pleasure when they escaped. Both girls wore white, and Harz, who sat opposite Christian, kept looking at her, and wondering why he had not painted her in that dress.

Mrs. Decie understood the art of dining – the dinner, ordered by Herr Paul, was admirable; the servants silent as their shadows; there was always a hum of conversation.

Sarelli, who sat on her right hand, seemed to partake of little except olives, which he dipped into a glass of sherry. He turned his black, solemn eyes silently from face to face, now and then asking the meaning of an English word. After a discussion on modern Rome, it was debated whether or no a criminal could be told by the expression of his face.

“Crime,” said Mrs. Decie, passing her hand across her brow – “crime is but the hallmark of strong individuality.”

Miss Naylor, gushing rather pink, stammered: “A great crime must show itself – a murder. Why, of course!”

“If that were so,” said Dawney, “we should only have to look about us – no more detectives.”

Miss Naylor rejoined with slight severity: “I cannot conceive that such a thing can pass the human face by, leaving no impression!”

Harz said abruptly: “There are worse things than murder.”

“Ah! par exemple!” said Sarelli.

There was a slight stir all round the table.

“Verry good,” cried out Herr Paul, “a vot’ sante, cher.”

Miss Naylor shivered, as if some one had put a penny down her back; and Mrs. Decie, leaning towards Harz, smiled like one who has made a pet dog do a trick. Christian alone was motionless, looking thoughtfully at Harz.

“I saw a man tried for murder once,” he said, “a murder for revenge; I watched the judge, and I thought all the time: ‘I’d rather be that murderer than you; I’ve never seen a meaner face; you crawl through life; you’re not a criminal, simply because you haven’t the courage.’”

In the dubious silence following the painter’s speech, Mr. Treffry could distinctly be heard humming. Then Sarelli said: “What do you say to anarchists, who are not men, but savage beasts, whom I would tear to pieces!”

“As to that,” Harz answered defiantly, “it maybe wise to hang them, but then there are so many other men that it would be wise to hang.”

“How can we tell what they went through; what their lives were?” murmured Christian.

Miss Naylor, who had been rolling a pellet of bread, concealed it hastily. “They are – always given a chance to – repent – I believe,” she said.

“For what they are about to receive,” drawled Dawney.

Mrs. Decie signalled with her fan: “We are trying to express the inexpressible – shall we go into the garden?”

All rose; Harz stood by the window, and in passing, Christian looked at him.

He sat down again with a sudden sense of loss. There was no white figure opposite now. Raising his eyes he met Sarelli’s. The Italian was regarding him with a curious stare.

Herr Paul began retailing apiece of scandal he had heard that afternoon.

“Shocking affair!” he said; “I could never have believed it of her! B – is quite beside himself. Yesterday there was a row, it seems!”

“There has been one every day for months,” muttered Dawney.

“But to leave without a word, and go no one knows where! B – is ‘viveur’ no doubt, mais, mon Dieu, que voulez vous? She was always a poor, pale thing. Why! when my – ” he flourished his cigar; “I was not always – what I should have been – one lives in a world of flesh and blood – we are not all angels – que diable! But this is a very vulgar business. She goes off; leaves everything – without a word; and B – is very fond of her. These things are not done!” the starched bosom of his shirt seemed swollen by indignation.

Mr. Treffry, with a heavy hand on the table, eyed him sideways. Dawney said slowly:

“B – is a beast; I’m sorry for the poor woman; but what can she do alone?”

“There is, no doubt, a man,” put in Sarelli.

Herr Paul muttered: “Who knows?”

“What is B – going to do?” said Dawney.

“Ah!” said Herr Paul. “He is fond of her. He is a chap of resolution, he will get her back. He told me: ‘Well, you know, I shall follow her wherever she goes till she comes back.’ He will do it, he is a determined chap; he will follow her wherever she goes.”

Mr. Treffry drank his wine off at a gulp, and sucked his moustache in sharply.

“She was a fool to marry him,” said Dawney; “they haven’t a point in common; she hates him like poison, and she’s the better of the two. But it doesn’t pay a woman to run off like that. B – had better hurry up, though. What do you think, sir?” he said to Mr. Treffry.

“Eh?” said Mr. Treffry; “how should I know? Ask Paul there, he’s one of your moral men, or Count Sarelli.”

The latter said impassively: “If I cared for her I should very likely kill her – if not – ” he shrugged his shoulders.

Harz, who was watching, was reminded of his other words at dinner, “wild beasts whom I would tear to pieces.” He looked with interest at this quiet man who said these extremely ferocious things, and thought: ‘I should like to paint that fellow.’

Herr Paul twirled his wine-glass in his fingers. “There are family ties,” he said, “there is society, there is decency; a wife should be with her husband. B – will do quite right. He must go after her; she will not perhaps come back at first; he will follow her; she will begin to think, ‘I am helpless – I am ridiculous!’ A woman is soon beaten. They will return. She is once more with her husband – Society will forgive, it will be all right.”

“By Jove, Paul,” growled Mr. Treffry, “wonderful power of argument!”

“A wife is a wife,” pursued Herr Paul; “a man has a right to her society.”

“What do you say to that, sir?” asked Dawney.

Mr. Treffry tugged at his beard: “Make a woman live with you, if she don’t want to? I call it low.”

“But, my dear,” exclaimed Herr Paul, “how should you know? You have not been married.”

“No, thank the Lord!” Mr. Treffry replied.

“But looking at the question broadly, sir,” said Dawney; “if a husband always lets his wife do as she likes, how would the thing work out? What becomes of the marriage tie?”

“The marriage tie,” growled Mr. Treffry, “is the biggest thing there is! But, by Jove, Doctor, I’m a Dutchman if hunting women ever helped the marriage tie!”

“I am not thinking of myself,” Herr Paul cried out, “I think of the community. There are rights.”

“A decent community never yet asked a man to tread on his self-respect. If I get my fingers skinned over my marriage, which I undertake at my own risk, what’s the community to do with it? D’you think I’m going to whine to it to put the plaster on? As to rights, it’d be a deuced sight better for us all if there wasn’t such a fuss about ‘em. Leave that to women! I don’t give a tinker’s damn for men who talk about their rights in such matters.”

Sarelli rose. “But your honour,” he said, “there is your honour!”

Mr. Treffry stared at him.

“Honour! If huntin’ women’s your idea of honour, well – it isn’t mine.”

“Then you’d forgive her, sir, whatever happened,” Dawney said.

“Forgiveness is another thing. I leave that to your sanctimonious beggars. But, hunt a woman! Hang it, sir, I’m not a cad!” and bringing his hand down with a rattle, he added: “This is a subject that don’t bear talking of.”

Sarelli fell back in his seat, twirling his moustaches fiercely. Harz, who had risen, looked at Christian’s empty place.

‘If I were married!’ he thought suddenly.

Herr Paul, with a somewhat vinous glare, still muttered, “But your duty to the family!”

Harz slipped through the window. The moon was like a wonderful white lantern in the purple sky; there was but a smoulder of stars. Beneath the softness of the air was the iciness of the snow; it made him want to run and leap. A sleepy beetle dropped on its back; he turned it over and watched it scurry across the grass.

Someone was playing Schumann’s Kinderscenen. Harz stood still to listen. The notes came twining, weaving round his thoughts; the whole night seemed full of girlish voices, of hopes and fancies, soaring away to mountain heights – invisible, yet present. Between the stems of the acacia-trees he could see the flicker of white dresses, where Christian and Greta were walking arm in arm. He went towards them; the blood flushed up in his face, he felt almost surfeited by some sweet emotion. Then, in sudden horror, he stood still. He was in love! With nothing done with everything before him! He was going to bow down to a face! The flicker of the dresses was no longer visible. He would not be fettered, he would stamp it out! He turned away; but with each step, something seemed to jab at his heart.

Round the corner of the house, in the shadow of the wall, Dominique, the Luganese, in embroidered slippers, was smoking a long cherry-wood pipe, leaning against a tree – Mephistopheles in evening clothes. Harz went up to him.

“Lend me a pencil, Dominique.”

“Bien, M’sieu.”

Resting a card against the tree Harz wrote to Mrs. Decie: “Forgive me, I am obliged to go away. In a few days I shall hope to return, and finish the picture of your nieces.”

He sent Dominique for his hat. During the man’s absence he was on the point of tearing up the card and going back into the house.

When the Luganese returned he thrust the card into his hand, and walked out between the tall poplars, waiting, like ragged ghosts, silver with moonlight.

VIII

Harz walked away along the road. A dog was howling. The sound seemed too appropriate. He put his fingers to his ears, but the lugubrious noise passed those barriers, and made its way into his heart. Was there nothing that would put an end to this emotion? It was no better in the old house on the wall; he spent the night tramping up and down.

Just before daybreak he slipped out with a knapsack, taking the road towards Meran.

He had not quite passed through Gries when he overtook a man walking in the middle of the road and leaving a trail of cigar smoke behind him.

“Ah! my friend,” the smoker said, “you walk early; are you going my way?”

It was Count Sarelli. The raw light had imparted a grey tinge to his pale face, the growth of his beard showed black already beneath the skin; his thumbs were hooked in the pockets of a closely buttoned coat, he gesticulated with his fingers.

“You are making a journey?” he said, nodding at the knapsack. “You are early – I am late; our friend has admirable kummel – I have drunk too much. You have not been to bed, I think? If there is no sleep in one’s bed it is no good going to look for it. You find that? It is better to drink kummel…! Pardon! You are doing the right thing: get away! Get away as fast as possible! Don’t wait, and let it catch you!”

Harz stared at him amazed.

“Pardon!” Sarelli said again, raising his hat, “that girl – the white girl – I saw. You do well to get away!” he swayed a little as he walked. “That old fellow – what is his name-Trrreffr-ry! What ideas of honour!” He mumbled: “Honour is an abstraction! If a man is not true to an abstraction, he is a low type; but wait a minute!”

He put his hand to his side as though in pain.

The hedges were brightening with a faint pinky glow; there was no sound on the long, deserted road, but that of their footsteps; suddenly a bird commenced to chirp, another answered – the world seemed full of these little voices.

Sarelli stopped.

“That white girl,” he said, speaking with rapidity. “Yes! You do well! get away! Don’t let it catch you! I waited, it caught me – what happened? Everything horrible – and now – kummel!” Laughing a thick laugh, he gave a twirl to his moustache, and swaggered on.

“I was a fine fellow – nothing too big for Mario Sarelli; the regiment looked to me. Then she came – with her eyes and her white dress, always white, like this one; the little mole on her chin, her hands for ever moving – their touch as warm as sunbeams. Then, no longer Sarelli this, and that! The little house close to the ramparts! Two arms, two eyes, and nothing here,” he tapped his breast, “but flames that made ashes quickly – in her, like this ash – !” he flicked the white flake off his cigar. “It’s droll! You agree, hein? Some day I shall go back and kill her. In the meantime – kummel!”

He stopped at a house close to the road, and stood still, his teeth bared in a grin.

“But I bore you,” he said. His cigar, flung down, sputtered forth its sparks on the road in front of Harz. “I live here – good-morning! You are a man for work – your honour is your Art! I know, and you are young! The man who loves flesh better than his honour is a low type – I am a low type. I! Mario Sarelli, a low type! I love flesh better than my honour!”

He remained swaying at the gate with the grin fixed on his face; then staggered up the steps, and banged the door. But before Harz had walked on, he again appeared, beckoning, in the doorway. Obeying an impulse, Harz went in.

“We will make a night of it,” said Sarelli; “wine, brandy, kummel? I am virtuous – kummel it must be for me!”

He sat down at a piano, and began to touch the keys. Harz poured out some wine. Sarelli nodded.

“You begin with that? Allegro – piu – presto!

“Wine – brandy – kummel!” he quickened the time of the tune: “it is not too long a passage, and this” – he took his hands off the keys – “comes after.”

Harz smiled.

“Some men do not kill themselves,” he said.

Sarelli, who was bending and swaying to the music of a tarantella, broke off, and letting his eyes rest on the painter, began playing Schumann’s Kinderscenen. Harz leaped to his feet.

“Stop that!” he cried.

“It pricks you?” said Sarelli suavely; “what do you think of this?” he played again, crouching over the piano, and making the notes sound like the crying of a wounded animal.

“For me!” he said, swinging round, and rising.

“Your health! And so you don’t believe in suicide, but in murder? The custom is the other way; but you don’t believe in customs? Customs are only for Society?” He drank a glass of kummel. “You do not love Society?”

Harz looked at him intently; he did not want to quarrel.

“I am not too fond of other people’s thoughts,” he said at last; “I prefer to think my own.

“And is Society never right? That poor Society!”

“Society! What is Society – a few men in good coats? What has it done for me?”

Sarelli bit the end off a cigar.

“Ah!” he said; “now we are coming to it. It is good to be an artist, a fine bantam of an artist; where other men have their dis-ci-pline, he has his, what shall we say – his mound of roses?”

The painter started to his feet.

“Yes,” said Sarelli, with a hiccough, “you are a fine fellow!”

“And you are drunk!” cried Harz.

“A little drunk – not much, not enough to matter!”

Harz broke into laughter. It was crazy to stay there listening to this mad fellow. What had brought him in? He moved towards the door.

“Ah!” said Sarelli, “but it is no good going to bed – let us talk. I have a lot to say – it is pleasant to talk to anarchists at times.”

Full daylight was already coming through the chinks of the shutters.

“You are all anarchists, you painters, you writing fellows. You live by playing ball with facts. Images – nothing solid – hein? You’re all for new things too, to tickle your nerves. No discipline! True anarchists, every one of you!”

Harz poured out another glass of wine and drank it off. The man’s feverish excitement was catching.

“Only fools,” he replied, “take things for granted. As for discipline, what do you aristocrats, or bourgeois know of discipline? Have you ever been hungry? Have you ever had your soul down on its back?”

“Soul on its back? That is good!”

“A man’s no use,” cried Harz, “if he’s always thinking of what others think; he must stand on his own legs.”

“He must not then consider other people?”

“Not from cowardice anyway.”

Sarelli drank.

“What would you do,” he said, striking his chest, “if you had a devil-here? Would you go to bed?”

A sort of pity seized on Harz. He wanted to say something that would be consoling but could find no words; and suddenly he felt disgusted. What link was there between him and this man; between his love and this man’s love?

“Harz!” muttered Sarelli; “Harz means ‘tar,’ hein? Your family is not an old one?”

Harz glared, and said: “My father is a peasant.”

Sarelli lifted the kummel bottle and emptied it into his glass, with a steady hand.

“You’re honest – and we both have devils. I forgot; I brought you in to see a picture!”

He threw wide the shutters; the windows were already open, and a rush of air came in.

“Ah!” he said, sniffing, “smells of the earth, nicht wahr, Herr Artist? You should know – it belongs to your father… Come, here’s my picture; a Correggio! What do you think of it?”

“It is a copy.”

“You think?”

“I know.”

“Then you have given me the lie, Signor,” and drawing out his handkerchief Sarelli flicked it in the painter’s face.

Harz turned white.

“Duelling is a good custom!” said Sarelli. “I shall have the honour to teach you just this one, unless you are afraid. Here are pistols – this room is twenty feet across at least, twenty feet is no bad distance.”

And pulling out a drawer he took two pistols from a case, and put them on the table.

“The light is good – but perhaps you are afraid.”

“Give me one!” shouted the infuriated painter; “and go to the devil for a fool.”

“One moment!” Sarelli murmured: “I will load them, they are more useful loaded.”

Harz leaned out of the window; his head was in a whirl. ‘What on earth is happening?’ he thought. ‘He’s mad – or I am! Confound him! I’m not going to be killed!’ He turned and went towards the table. Sarelli’s head was sunk on his arms, he was asleep. Harz methodically took up the pistols, and put them back into the drawer. A sound made him turn his head; there stood a tall, strong young woman in a loose gown caught together on her chest. Her grey eyes glanced from the painter to the bottles, from the bottles to the pistol-case. A simple reasoning, which struck Harz as comic.

“It is often like this,” she said in the country patois; “der Herr must not be frightened.”

Lifting the motionless Sarelli as if he were a baby, she laid him on a couch.

“Ah!” she said, sitting down and resting her elbow on the table; “he will not wake!”

Harz bowed to her; her patient figure, in spite of its youth and strength, seemed to him pathetic. Taking up his knapsack, he went out.

The smoke of cottages rose straight; wisps of mist were wandering about the valley, and the songs of birds dropping like blessings. All over the grass the spiders had spun a sea of threads that bent and quivered to the pressure of the air, like fairy tight-ropes.

All that day he tramped.

Blacksmiths, tall stout men with knotted muscles, sleepy eyes, and great fair beards, came out of their forges to stretch and wipe their brows, and stare at him.

Teams of white oxen, waiting to be harnessed, lashed their tails against their flanks, moving their heads slowly from side to side in the heat. Old women at chalet doors blinked and knitted.

The white houses, with gaping caves of storage under the roofs, the red church spire, the clinking of hammers in the forges, the slow stamping of oxen-all spoke of sleepy toil, without ideas or ambition. Harz knew it all too well; like the earth’s odour, it belonged to him, as Sarelli had said.

Towards sunset coming to a copse of larches, he sat down to rest. It was very still, but for the tinkle of cowbells, and, from somewhere in the distance, the sound of dropping logs.

Two barefooted little boys came from the wood, marching earnestly along, and looking at Harz as if he were a monster. Once past him, they began to run.

‘At their age,’ he thought, ‘I should have done the same.’ A hundred memories rushed into his mind.

He looked down at the village straggling below – white houses with russet tiles and crowns of smoke, vineyards where the young leaves were beginning to unfold, the red-capped spire, a thread of bubbling stream, an old stone cross. He had been fourteen years struggling up from all this; and now just as he had breathing space, and the time to give himself wholly to his work – this weakness was upon him! Better, a thousand times, to give her up!

In a house or two lights began to wink; the scent of wood smoke reached him, the distant chimes of bells, the burring of a stream.

IX

Next day his one thought was to get back to work. He arrived at the studio in the afternoon, and, laying in provisions, barricaded the lower door. For three days he did not go out; on the fourth day he went to Villa Rubein…

Schloss Runkelstein – grey, blind, strengthless – still keeps the valley. The windows which once, like eyes, watched men and horses creeping through the snow, braved the splutter of guns and the gleam of torches, are now holes for the birds to nest in. Tangled creepers have spread to the very summits of the walls. In the keep, instead of grim men in armour, there is a wooden board recording the history of the castle and instructing visitors on the subject of refreshments. Only at night, when the cold moon blanches everything, the castle stands like the grim ghost of its old self, high above the river.