Читать книгу Time's Door - Esther Meynell - Страница 16

Gerda received at uncertain intervals long and glowing letters from Giovanni, assuring her of his happiness, his ecstatic devotion to his master, his violin progress—he was studying among other things Paganini’s Caprice in A minor and was exultant that he now could manage the dazzling and difficult passage in which the melody is played on muted strings to a pizzicato accompaniment by the remaining fingers.

“He can see no one in his world save Paganini,” Gerda thought a little sadly, for in spite of the many words of love to herself and the rather shy and awkward enquiries about his father, she knew that he was globed in the crystal shell of youth’s inviolate ego. “God puts the young there, like the chick in the egg,” she thought, “to grow unharmed by outside hurts. And may he stay there till he is formed into a beauty and strength that can face and conquer the world.”

It seemed to her as she waited for life to show her the path she was destined to take, that there were only two ways in which it was possible to make anything of existence—a completely developed and dominating self-hood, such as Paganini possessed, or a complete selflessness.

She had much time for thinking. There was nothing she could do for her husband—her visits, regular and faithful as they were, meant nothing to him, no recognition was in his eyes. At first he had greeted her with dull courtesy as a stranger, then he ceased to do even that, and stared at her listlessly, withdrawing his hand when she tried to touch and caress it. After these melancholy visits Gerda walked away down the white dusty road, her eyes so thick with tears she could but stumblingly see where she was going. She was immersed in desolation. She felt like a ghost, lost in a strange country. Rome was the only place in Italy that was in any sense home to her, and she could not even be in Rome, as it was too far away from the mountain monastery where Luigi Cavatini was cared for. The kind monks would persuade her to go back to Rome, seeing the uselessness and the pain of her daily visits. They would send a messenger for her if there was any change and she were needed. But Gerda would not return to Rome. She felt that suddenly Luigi might require her, and some instinct told her that his time of living would not be greatly prolonged, though the physician thought he might live for years, as the unused mind does not wear out the body.

But even Rome held little happiness for GerdaREMEMBRANCES now—only the memory of it. Giovanni was not there. Her lonely days had little light in them save Giovanni’s letters and her answers so lovingly written. Her mind, shrinking from contemplation of the future, turned to memories of her own country and her own girlhood—wandering in thought about the old clustered streets of Leipzig where everything seemed so comfortable and kind, and her father smiled at her, and her matronly sisters discussed matters of food and dress and small festivities which had no thought of pain in them. What a shelter of little friendly things had been erected all about her, and why had she, not built to an heroic pattern, as she felt convinced, stepped through them to the dangerous joys offered by this Italy, so gay in light and colour, so fundamentally tragic, so drenched with the spilled blood of humanity, so old, so dark, so secret under the sun? Why had she given to her Giovanni this trouble of a mixed inheritance, a nature that would pull him two ways? Already she saw its signature in the lines of his young face. When his youthful shell was broken he would suffer—he would suffer through temperament as well as circumstance. He had her hesitancy and trembling heart as well as his father’s fire and passion. He would feel things that Luigi had never felt. Ah, kind and friendly Leipzig, where she was born, where she belonged, life was simpler there than in Rome. In an effort to transport herself back to those days she pulled out her old green volume of Märchen from which she had never been parted—when she had packed for her fateful visit to Italy with her father she had first of all put that fat book at the bottom of her little calf-skin trunk studded with brass nails. She looked again at the beloved woodcuts, read again some of the remembered tales, the Gothic type saluting her eye with the sweetness of past days. Enchanting world, where only the wicked came to harm, and the innocent and good were befriended by winds and waters and all the creatures of fur and feather—a world where the heavy blotted law of man ran not. Giovanni had to her heart all the qualities of all the darling heroes of the fairy-tales: but she, alas, had no talisman for his happiness, no filbert nut to give him which broken in his hour of need would solve all his difficulties and lead him to the desired destiny. She fluttered the pages and smiled wistfully at the old Germanic woodcuts of goblins and big round moons, bent old women with crutches and a load of sticks on their backs, peasant girls with muslin bodices and coronals of flaxen plaits, homely old kings in slippers that ill-accorded with their crowns, proud princesses, and adventurous splendid youths. Each page to her held more than print and pictures—an aroma of her own youth was distilled for her as she turned them. Her own dreams slipped forth and looked at her—how wonderfully had they seemed fulfilled when she first saw Rome and her lover together. Now that all had vanished into a mist of melancholy. She shut the book, and it was as though she shut her happiness and her youth inside it.