Exile

Sylvia Lynd

Exile

Across the crowded teashop he was aware of two eyes watching him, large dark eyes that wee brilliant with excitement. At the same moment he recognized Mrs Alladale and his pleasure was mingled with a little unexamined puzzle of surprise that her recognition of himself was so unfeignedly joyous. He had known her to be gracious and pretty as she spoke a few words with him when they met at parties in London; but she had never asked him to her house, never shown any personal interest in him whatever. So little had she been interested, indeed, that he had been unable to feel anything but the remotest admiration for her—a tribute as formal as the passing of a vote of thanks at a committee. His vanity saw to that. He understood perfectly the attitude of the poet who said: “If she be not fair for me, what care I how fair she be?” As soon think of falling in love with Mrs. Alladale as with—as with—oh, well, say Mary Pickford. Grown men did not do these things. If a photograph that moved, and rolled its eyes, and laughed, could become suddenly a creature of flesh and blood, descend from the screen, advance upon him through the auditorium, cry out his name with a delighted voice and seem about to fling her arms round his neck—that would be another matter. He realized as he rose from his chair that that was what was happening. Only Mrs. Alladale was not advancing towards him. He was advancing towards her.

“How delightful,” she cried, really too soon, while he was still twisting his way among the little tables, “how delightful to see you in Florence.”

It made him glow with pleasure to be welcomed so ostentatiously. Yet he was conscious of being puzzled. He could find in himself no reason for her pleasure. Without excessive modest he knew that little George Bingham of the Education Office was not the sort of person to cause delight to the beautiful Mrs. Alladale. The embarrassing possibility occurred to him that he had mistaken him for someone else. But not, she was saying to her companions, “Let me introduce Mr. Bingham.,” and he found himself shaking hands with a little old Englishman with an eyeglass, Captain Wallace, a young Italian whose name he didn't catch, and a crop-haired girl in a bright red jumper whom he perceived at first glance to be an American and an art student. Her name was Miss Bolst.

“Have you been here long?” Mrs Alladale was asking him, and, while he answered that he had only arrived that morning, was threading her voice through his with little ecstatic exclamations of pleasure. “This is too delightful. We must find you a chair. What a crowded place this is,” and in Italian to the proprietor who was standing near in a tightly-buttoned, tight-waisted frock coat, “A chair for this gentleman, please”

George Bingham shook his wits awake. However surprised he was at least man enough to make the most of his good fortune.

“How splendidly lucky for me to meet you here,” he said.

“Oh, everyone meets at Doney's sooner or later,” cried Mrs. Alladale, and added: “Ah, here's a chair for you. Now we can all have tea together.”

“How do you like Florence?” asked little old Captain Wallace. “Been here before?”

George admitted that it was his first visit and that he had been to the Uffizzi that morning.

“Seeing those pictures for the first time,” said the American girl; “Why, it's like falling old friends' necks.”

“Yes, yes, like meeting them alive and well,” said Captain Wallace, “after a long separation.”

They asked George Bingham if he were making a special study of anything. And George replied that he was a simple tourist, a borrowed Baedeker for the year 1909 in one pocket and 'Italian Self-taught' in the other. “Tourists—well, there's nothing better than just watching the life in the streets of a new country. Better than a theatre.”

Though he sat silent for the most part, putting into his mouth at intervals one of the little mouth-sized cakes that Miss Bolst had gone to the counter to choose for them, George Bingham felt himself to the the success fo the party. Mrs. Alladale's dark eyes constantly enveloped him in happy glances, however her liips and ears might be engaged with the other three. It was as if he and the beautiful mature woman shared a secret unknown to the others. George Bingham wished he could guess what the secret was.

When the tea was finished and they rose to go, Mrs. Alladale told him that she was living in a villa out at Fiesole. In the street she bade good-bye to the others and, “Mr Bingham will put me into my tram,” she said.

With a feeling of being an impostor George accompanied her. If it hadn't been for that feeling his pleasure would have been intense. But there was no reason, none, why this tall, beautiful, graceful woman in her dark, distinguished clothes should make him the object of her conspicuous favour, he felt altogether inadequate. His pale grey eyes could not provide any reflex for the intense glances her dark ones gave him. The brilliance of her presence increased his sense of dullness and futility.

She was talking to him about Florence, telling him what he must not miss and wherein his Baedeker was now out of date and unhelpful. She told him ow the noontide siesta would cut into his time for sightseeing, pointed out the Strozzi lamp and the Palazzo d'Avanzati, and so brougt him to where the Fiesole tram starts beside the great marble cliff of the cathedral.

“You'll come and see me?” she said, taking leave of him. “There are such heaps of things i want to talk about, I've been away more than six months, you know. You'll have to come to Fiesole. Come and dine with me. We'll dine at the hotel and then come back and make coffee at my little villa—Villano Margerits—just at the back of the Villa Medici. I live all alone there. You can't miss it. I haven't much to offer you but a superb view. And the jasmine is still in flower. I was in the mountain all the summer, and I'm going down to Rome and on to Sicily soon. When will you come?”

George, with great presence of mind, said, “To-morrow.”

Mrs Alladale was obviously pleased. “How lovely—how very nice of you—I shall look forward to seeing you much.”

The little tram tattered away, hugging the cliff of the Duomo, and George Bingham walked to his hotel in the twilight. How beautiful it was, how romantic! If only he could by some efflorescence of the imagination become part of its romance and beauty! Mrs. Alladale was part of it. The secrets of night, of jewelled light, of whispering laughing voices, or rose-red carnations were her secrets. But he was only an onlooker, an outsider. If he wee not shut out he should not be so are of the beautiful appearance of things and the contrasting cold emptiness that took the place of a bounding warmth in the breast. The fine pure beauty of Florence and the rich cosmopolitan beauty of Mrs. Alladale made him feel like a pressed flower among growing ones.

Hitherto he had not been unhappy. He had lived safely and uneventfully. He had played reserve in the house eleven and taken a scholarship at Merton. He had passed with requisite efficient into the Education Office. His only anxiety had been the health of his invalid mother, a charming old lady to whom he was devoted. During the war he had learned to drill and shoot with the utmost sincerity, but he had never been called on to do more than sit beside a searchlight for the last twelve months of the conflict. He lived in rather elegant rooms in Queen Anne Street. His housekeeping was done for him by an excellent widow who had been cook to his mother and had married a policeman. He spent the week-ends with his mother at Weybridge. He was thirty-two and looked twenty-six. His health never troubled him except for heavy colds in winter, and even those never went on to his chest. Reviewing his life he could not call himself unhappy, and he had hitherto called himself happy; now seeing the lights in the dark Arno and listening to the plucking of the inevitable guitars, he realized that his had been a purely negative existence—neither happy nor unhappy—just nothing at all. Deeply discontented with himself, he went to bed.

Next morning, returning from the San Marco, and going for lunch into a restaurant on the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, he found Captain Wallace seated in a corner reading an Italian newspaper.

“Ah, ha, my dear chap,” the brown-skinned, crumpled little man hailed him, “looking for something to eat? Come to my table and let me expound the mysteries of the menu—la carta.”

George Bingham obediently sat down opposite him, and Captain Wallace discoursed about food for the next twenty minutes, chose his lunch for him, and ordered for them both a flask of chianti. George marvelled at his friendliness, at this unfeigned desire to talk to his young compatriot. The Captain was a dapper old man. George Bingham wondered how long ago he had left the army, and why he had left it. Perhaps the Crimean days, George thought. He was very ancient. George was sure that he had done no work for fifty years. He had the garrulousness and the inquisitiveness of the idler. Probably a small fixed income and a life spent in following the English, colony from Bordighera to Florence, and from Florence to Naples, thought George. Captain Wallace talked of the exchange, and with considerable excitement of the shocking increase in prices.

“Those who remember Italy in pre-war days, my dear boy—you could live in a Palazzo like a prince for three hundred a year—and how much do you think one paid a servant?”

Rome, he told his young friend, was too dear and too noisy for life to be pleasant in it. “Now here in Florence there isn't a stranger comes to the place without you seeing him. Tea-time in Doney's, sooner or later he'll be. We are one big house-party. Rome's too big, too big and noisy altogether.”

And now, George Bingham felt sure of it, the old man was approaching the nucleus of conversation. He leant confidently across the table and settled his eyeglass in its socket with a little flourish that indicated indubitably the direction of Fiesole.

“La bella Signora, she's goin' on to Rome next month, she tells me. Know her well in England, I suppose?”

George, increasing his aire of caution, replied that he had known her very little.

“A woman of considerable social standing,” said Captain Wallace. “Bound to have been. Not a doubt of it”

George said he always had the impression that Mrs. Alladale was a great success socially.

"Not a doubt of it," said Captain Wallace. "Mrs. Leslie Alladale, I've seen her picture in the paper—a very pretty picture it makes. What's she doing out here?"

The question was sudden and too direct for George's taste.

George, impenetrable as ever, said he did not know.

The Captain screwed his face into sceptical wrinkles.

"Une mystere," he said with great satisfaction. "A very easily solved mystery. Now what is the only possible reason for a charming woman like that to be traipsing about the Continent all alone?"

He posed the question. George Bingham, feeling at once inquisitive, a blockhead, and resentful that Mrs. Alladale should be made the subject of prying chatter, replied with an almost snobbing indifference again that he did not know.

"Ah, my dear boy, when you've seen as many days in the world as i have, you'll find there is only one answer to every question where a beautiful woman is concerned. The answer to the Question Woman, my dear boy, is Man. There's a Mister Alladale, I may suppose?" asked Captain Wallace.

George replied that he believed there was an found himself adding that Mr. Alladale, he believed, was rich—something in the City—and that Mrs. Alladale had always gone about alone.

"Alone?" Up went the Captain's eyebrows.

"Without Alladale." George said with irritation.

"Ah, ha!" said the Captain, refilling his glass. George had the sensation that he was being pumped. Until that moment he had not recollected the existence of Mr. Alladale.

"Now, what is the reason," said Captain Wallace, "what is the reason for the absence fo Alladale from the side of his lovely and alluring spouse?"

George remained sulkily and ignorantly silent.

"Obviously because they don't get on together. And why do they not get on together? Clearly you or I could get on admirably with Mrs. Alladale. The reason must be—well, we can guess the reason?"

George could not guess. He felt base, but he was curious. "We haven't not seen Mr. Alladale, you know."

"True!" said Captain Wallace. "We have not seen Mr. Alladale. But we will assume for purposes of argument that his wife is not particularly interested in him. But then, who is she interested in? Not a breath of scandal, not one breath of scandal has attached to her out here, i assure you." He dropped his voice. "If it is bad, i should have heard about it. All the same," he added, "there is bound to be someone. Beautiful creature in the prime of life—I'll tell you something else about her."

George loathed himself for what he felt to be eavesdropping, and yet, in reality, is yesterday's acquaintance wit Captain Wallace was already a more intimate one than his five years' acquaintance with the elusive Mrs. Alladale.

"She lives p there," the Captain was saying now. "in a little villano all by herself. Pretty little place. Has a maid in to mend and dust and that sort of thing; but sleeps by herself at night. It isn't safe. There isn't a country in Europe where that sort of thing is safe since the war. Doubt if it ever was safe. Gambling with destiny, I call it. A beautiful woman all alone up there. Reported rich—all foreigners are reported rich. It isn't safe. I've said to her half a dozen times, 'Dear lady, it isn't safe. I lie awake at night on account of it.' She laughs at me, our sweet Mrs. Alladale laughs at me. But she knows that I'm perfectly right." He leant across the table. "She doesn't care," he said emphatically, "she simply doesn't care. Now, what," he asked, "could make a woman like that not care whether someone broke in, stole her pearls, and battered her brains out?"

George was unable to guess.

"Why—because she's unhappy." the Captain expounded, still triumphantly. "There's only one reason for such senseless recklessness. It's damnable. The husband ought to have more decent feeling. Still, it's not on this account that she has come out here—since you tell me they've been more or less separate for years."

George made a sound of protest, but the Captain did not heed him.

"There's the heart of my story," he said in triumphant, "there's the one and only inevitable explanation—an unhappy love affair—a love affair—there's never any other explanation where a beautiful woman is concerned."

And then the little satyr gave out a little laugh: "Of course, it isn't always necessarily the same love affair."

George was relieved at the arrival of the waiter with the bill. He wold have been chagrined had the interruption come sooner, but, as it was, he felt he still retained a wrapping of spiritual dignity. He had not, at any rate, attempted to prolong the Captain's conversation.

"Well, we shall meet again," said the old man lifting a hand in benediction, "in Doney's or somewhere else. One is always running into people in Florence."

He resumed the reading of his paper and George Bingham walked away.

The Captain's gossip, though it was only the expression of a theory, filled the young man's heart with tenderness for Mrs. Alladale. Why had she been so friendly to him? It was not, as the old man perhaps hinted, that she perceived in him the outline of a new lover. No, George was too honest a fellow for such self-flattery as that.

Why, then? Why, then? It struck him that Captain Wallace was jealous of the singular honour of Mrs. Alladale's notice. Oh, well—let it remain a mystery. All he wanted was to protect and adore her.

He was impatient for dinner-time. He could not attend to churches and pictures until he had seen her. He felt that she had some message for him, some communication to make to him, some use to put him to—but he could not guess what. The Captain's speculations aroused all his recollections of Mrs. Alladale in London. Had any name been coupled with hers there? He could not recollect it. Crowded rooms came before his eyes—the Moffats, Lady Moreton's, a concert in Wigmore Street, a private view of the London Group—but if she had been accompanied anywhere George had never noticed who her companion was. He had gazed at her as if she were a star—a thing impersonal and splendid. And now, however close to him she might stoop out of the evening sky, he could not change his vision.

When at last the little tram had trailed up the hill to Fiesole, he found Mrs. Alladale waiting for him on the hotel terrace in the yellow evening sunshine. She was wearing a white dress and a white shawl and a sprig of white jasmine in her dark hair. It was with the enthusiasm of the day before that she welcomed her.

"It's so warm and beautiful still, I said we'd dine out of doors. I was sure you would like it."

Spring is the "season" in Fiesole, so the hotel in September was empty. They had the terrace to themselves. George Gingham looked down across the valley at Florence, across the smoke of grey olive-trees and the black geometrical shapes of the cypresses, black triangular cypresses, smoke-vague olives—and the white-walled houses with their flat roofs, golden in the evening light. The vine-wreathed canopy of the terrace made a dark frame for the landscape. Just below, steeply and deeply below, was a little garden, paved with grey flagstones. There were stone bowls containing little pools of water, dark-leaved tropical plants in grey stone vases, and thin pale grey cats prowling about softy as smoke among them. Mist covered the distant Arno. The copper-red dome of the cathedral glowed about it. George Bingham gazed at the landscape and Mrs. Alladale gazed at George Bingham with rapture in her eyes.

They dined upon sardines, soup, spaghetti, roast chicken, salad and cheese. They drank Orvieto wine. And Mrs. Alladale talked eagerly the whole time—of food—the exchange—the sights and customs of the country—as she had talked the day before—as Captain Wallace had talked at lunch time—as all travellers talk at all times. But while she talked her face had the disproportionate eagerness and excitement that the young man had noticed from the beginning.

"Come!" she said at length. "It will soon be getting chilly. Come and have coffee at my villano."

She moved across the garden with steps that seemed to restrain her eagerness. A dusty lane leading from the dusty road brought them to a little white-walled, flat-roofed house, folded in between two taller houses. Mrs. Alladale opened the door with her key and led the young man into a slip of shadowed hall.

"I hire this place furnished," said Mrs. Alladale. "It belongs to a friend of Miss Bolst's. It's pretty, I think. There's the terrace view again, you see. This is my living-room. Do sit down. Do smoke. The coffee will be ready—well, it won't be ready for at least twelve minutes."

She moved about the room lighting four candles and the blue wisp of flame beneath the glass funnel of a coffee machine. George smoked and watched her. Beside him the large open window showed a translucent sky and yellow lights became every moment more numerous in the plain. Suddenly out of the intense shadow and small stabbings of light she addressed him.

"Well, I've talked enough. It's for you to begin now.  Tell me who you've seen in London. I've been away a lifetime."

Without Captain Wallace's interpretation George Bingham might have been carelles in his answering. As it was he felt like an actor who has heard his cue.

"All the people in London that I've met seem very dull, colourless creatures compared with... Florence..." he began. He was too shy to you 'you' with frank gallantry.

"But distance lends enchantment, you know."

George saw an obvious opening for something about enchantment not necessarily needing distance; but he was not clever at that sort of thing. He said: "Who is it I'm to tell you about?" and his brain cried silently, "Who? Who?"

"Oh, about everyone," said Mrs. Alladale lightly, tapping the glass funnel fo the coffee machine with her fingers. She was smiling but those tapping fingers were radioing in 'Hurry up!'

"I was at Alice Moffat's a week ago."

"A week ago," murmured Mrs. Alladale.

"She was in very good form she told several amusing stories."

"New Stories?"

He laughed. "Well... most of them were new."

"What was she wearing?" asked Mrs. Alladale.

George Bingham felt that he was not being a success.

"Some sort of bluish thing, I think," he said lamely, "and she'd a gold thing tied round her head."

Mrs. Alladale's laugh made the spirit flame flicker.

"Splendid!" she cried. "Who else was there?"

"Oh, the Crouches, the O'Rourkes, Tom Dyce, all the usual people. Jack Moreton brought his bride. Elmer seton was there, fatter than ever. O'Rourke is in business now and says he prefers City men to gentlemen any day of the week."

"He can afford to say so with his father in the House of Lords," said Mrs. Alladale. "Tell me about them. Go on."

"Mrs. O'Rourke's dress." said George Bingham. "It was a sort of tube the colour of those flowers they grow in cottage window-bozes. You know the kind—shaped like convolvuluses—but they aren't convolvuluses—striped a sort of red-purple colour."

"Petunia," said Mrs. Alladale. "Go on."

George Bingham knew he had not told the essential thing yet. He wishes Mrs. Alladale would say warm, warmer, or cold, cold, freeezing, as the children do when they play 'Hunt the thimble.' When he talked about Mrs. O'Rourke he knew that he was freezing.

"Crouch has published a new novel," he said hopefully.

"Yes, I saw it reviewed somewhere," said Mrs, Alladale, blowing out the little spirit flame and drawing the coffee cups nearer to her.

"It seems to be better than his last one," said George ("Freezing, simply freezing,") he shouted at himself.

Mrs. Alladale poured out the coffee with a meditative smile. "So Elmer Seton's fatter than ever," she said. "He must be very fat."

"He is," said George (could this be the explanation?) He sought about for a phrase and said: "He has the Continental shirt front—shaped like a robin's  you know."

Mrs. Alladale laughed merrily. The thing was incredible—yet George was old enough to know that the fancies of love nearly always are.

"The Continental shirt front," she repeated enjoyingly.

"Alice Moffat said that of him," said George, honest as ever.

"Yes. It's the sort of thing Alice Moffat does say." She handed the little cup to George Bingham. "Who else did you say was there?"

"That's everyone, I think..." said George, wrinkling his forehead vaguely, "except for Jack Moreton and his brand new bride."

"Oh yes," said Mrs. Alladale, "tell me about her. Sugar?... Not sugar," she withdrew the little silver bowl. "What did she wear? Not petunia, I'm sure."

"No, it certainly wasn't petunia," said the young man smiling and feeling that after all he had been a success; "it was—something white, i think. I don't remember," he ended lamely.

"Goodness, poor girl, not to be remembered," said Mrs. Alladale mockingly. "How is Lady Moreton?" she briskly added.

"I haven't seen her since July," said George, sipping his coffee; "not since Jack's wedding."

"Oh, were you at the wedding?" asked Mrs. Alladale, sipping too. "Who was there? How did it go?"

"Oh, there was a most tremendous job. Jack looked superbly bored as usual."

"Oh, he looked superbly bored as usual did he?" echoed Mrs. Alladale, and her eyes added a sparkle as of wit to George Bingham's plain statement.

"Lady Moreton was magnificent, of course. She was in great feather about it."

"Literally, so I should imagine."

"They were talking of selling Howe, you know."

"Yes, I knew they contemplated that this winter."

"Jack wouldnn't have cared if they had—at least so Simon Ellis-Jones was telling me."

"They ought to have sold immediately after the war if they wanted to make money on the sale," said Mrs. Alladale.

"Oh, well, he's provided for, for life now," said the young man.

"Yes," said Mrs. Alladale.

"Coal," said George. "a ward in Chancery, 'no encumbrances', Alice Moffat said. She's pretty, too."

Mrs. Alladale reached for his cup. "More coffee? Is she dark or fiar? What a silly question?"

"Fair, at least..." he paused and laughed, "yes, she certainly is fair. She thinks Jack the cleverest man in the world."

"Don't you think him clever?" asked Mrs. Alladale.

"Well, no," the young man meditated, "clever is too small a word," he finally added.

Mrs. Alladale smiled at something that she thought of, then she said: "Well, she'll be very happy—as long as she thinks that. It's nice to be young and pretty and rich and at the beginning of things—thinking one's husband the cleverest man in the world, you know." She laughed.

George Bingham wondered what she wanted him to say now.

"Jack's hung fire for a longtime as a prospective bridegroom," he said. "Lady Moreton was getting desperate, Simon Ellis-Jones told me. She was saying Jack would have to leave the army and look for work..."

Mrs. Alladale did not appear to be listening. She was looking at the square of the open window where, burning dimly against the candlelight, the stars were showing over Florence.

Perhaps she wanted him to begin about Elmer Seton again. "Elmer Seton," he said, but her eyes did not turn from the window and the laughter had gone out of her face.

He put down his coffee cup and stood up. "It's time for me to say goodbye."

Mrs. Alladale rose too.

"It has been nice, seeing you," she said formally.

This was the Mrs. Alladale whom he had known in London—gracious, beautiful, but remote.

"Good-bye," he said, turning to the door.

"I'll bring a light," said Mrs. Alladale, "or you won't be able to find your hat."

She picked up one of the candles and stood in the doorway.

"When you are back in England," she said, "remember me to everyone, won't you?"

"I will, indeed."

"To Alice Moffat, and the Crouches, and the O'Rourkes, and Jack Moreton, and everybody."

"And Elmer Seton and Lady Moreton?" asked George.

"No," again mockery, a rather sad mockery came into her face. "I don't think you need remember me to Lady Moreton."

George Bingham had an inspiration.

"I'll tell them what a lovely life you live out here."

"Do!" said Mrs. Alladale, suddenly bright and laughing again. "Do. Tell them all. Tell everyone. Tell the everything about me. Tell them about the petunia tube thing I wore and about the gold thing tied round my head, and about the bad dinner and the squalid view, and how Captain Wallace thinks I'll be murdered here some night in my lonely bed."

"I'll tell them," said the young man, confused by the radiance of her image.

"Remember me to them all," cried Mrs. Alladale. "Remember everything. Remember that the jasmine is in flower and how bright the stars are over Florence."