Читать книгу Browning's Heroines - Ethel Colburn Mayne - Страница 13

In the shrub-house on the hill-side are Ottima, the wife of Luca, and her German lover, Sebald. He is wildly singing and drinking; to him it still seems night. But Ottima sees a "blood-red beam through the shutter's chink," which proves that morning is come. Let him open the lattice and see! He goes to open it, and no movement can he make but vexes her, as he gropes his way where the "tall, naked geraniums straggle"; pushes the lattice, which is behind a frame, so awkwardly that a shower of dust falls on her; fumbles at the slide-bolt, till she exclaims that "of course it catches!" At last he succeeds in getting the window opened, and her only direct acknowledgment is to ask him if she "shall find him something else to spoil." But this imperious petulance, curiously as it contrasts with the patience which, a little later, she will display, is native to Ottima; she is not the victim of her nerves this morning, though now she passes without transition to a mood of sensuous cajolement—

"Kiss and be friends, my Sebald! Is't full morning?

Oh, don't speak, then!"

—but Sebald does speak, for in this aversion from the light of day he recognises a trait of hers which long has troubled him.

With his first words we perceive that "nerves" are uppermost, that the song and drink of the opening moment were bravado—that Sebald, in short, is close on a breakdown. He turns upon her with a gibe against her ever-shuttered windows. Though it is she who now has ordered the unwelcome light to be admitted, he overlooks this in his enervation, and says how, before ever they met, he had observed that her windows were always blind till noon. The rest of the little world of Asolo would be active in the day's employment; but her house "would ope no eye." "And wisely," he adds bitterly—

"And wisely; you were plotting one thing there,

Nature, another outside. I looked up—

Rough white wood shutters, rusty iron bars,

Silent as death, blind in a flood of light;

Oh, I remember!—and the peasants laughed

And said, 'The old man sleeps with the young wife.'

This house was his, this chair, this window—his."

The last line gives us the earliest hint of what has been done: "This house was his. … " But Ottima, whether from scorn of Sebald's mental disarray, or from genuine callousness, answers this first moan of anguish not at all. She gazes from the open lattice: "How clear the morning is—she can see St. Mark's! Padua, blue Padua, is plain enough, but where lies Vicenza? They shall find it, by following her finger that points at Padua. … "

Sebald cannot emulate this detachment. Morning seems to him "a night with a sun added"; neither dew nor freshness can he feel; nothing is altered with this dawn—the plant he bruised in getting through the lattice last night droops as it did then, and still there shows his elbow's mark on the dusty sill.

She flashes out one instant. "Oh, shut the lattice, pray!"

No: he will lean forth—

" … I cannot scent blood here,

Foul as the morn may be."

But his mood shifts quickly as her own—

" … There, shut the world out!

How do you feel now, Ottima? There, curse

The world and all outside!"

and at last he faces her, literally and figuratively, with a wild appeal to let the truth stand forth between them—

" … Let us throw off

This mask: how do you bear yourself? Let's out

With all of it."

But no. Her instinct is never to speak of it, while his drives him to "speak again and yet again," for only so, he feels, will words "cease to be more than words." His blood, for instance—

" … let those two words mean 'His blood';

And nothing more. Notice, I'll say them now:

'His blood.' … "

She answers with phrases, the things that madden him—she speaks of "the deed," and at once he breaks out again. The deed, and the event, and their passion's fruit—

" … the devil take such cant!

Say, once and always, Luca was a wittol,

I am his cut-throat, you are … "

With extraordinary patience, though she there, wearily as it were, interrupts him, Ottima again puts the question by, and offers him wine. In doing this, she says something which sends a shiver down the reader's back—

" … Here's wine!

I brought it when we left the house above, And glasses too—wine of both sorts … "

He takes no notice; he reiterates—

"But am I not his cut-throat? What are you?"

Still with that amazing, that almost beautiful, patience—the quality of her defect of callousness—Ottima leaves this also without comment. She gazes now from the closed window, sees a Capuchin monk go by, and makes some trivial remarks on his immobility at church; then once more offers Sebald the flask—the "black" (or, as we should say, the "red") wine.

Melodramatic and obvious in all he does and says, Sebald refuses the red wine: "No, the white—the white!"—then drinks ironically to Ottima's black eyes. He reminds her how he had sworn that the new year should not rise on them "the ancient shameful way," nor does it.

"Do you remember last damned New Year's Day?"

* * * * *

The characters now are poised for us—in their national, as well as their individual, traits. Ottima, an Italian, has the racial matter-of-factness, callousness, and patience; Sebald, a German, the no less characteristic sentimentality and emotionalism. Her attitude remains unchanged until the critical moment; his shifts and sways with every word and action. No sooner has he drunk the white wine than he can brutally, for an instant, exult in the thought that Luca is not alive to fondle Ottima before his face; but with her instant answer (rejoicing as she does to retrieve the atmosphere which alone is native to her sense)—

" … Do you

Fondle me, then! Who means to take your life?"

—a new mood seizes on him. They have "one thing to guard against." They must not make much of one another; there must be no more parade of love than there was yesterday; for then it would seem as if he supposed she needed proofs that he loves her—

" … yes, still love you, love you,

In spite of Luca and what's come to him."

That would be a sure sign that Luca's "white sneering old reproachful face" was ever in their thoughts. Yes; they must even quarrel at times, as if they

" … still could lose each other, were not tied

By this … "

but on her responding cry of "Love!" he shudders back again: Is he so surely for ever hers?

She, in her stubborn patience, answers by a reminiscence of their early days of love—

" … That May morning we two stole

Under the green ascent of sycamores"

—and, thinking to reason with him, asks if, that morning, they had

" … come upon a thing like that,

Suddenly—"

but he interrupts with his old demand for the true word: she shall not say "a thing" … and at last that marvellous patience gives way, and in a superb flash of ironic rage she answers him—

"Then, Venus' body! had we come upon

My husband Luca Gaddi's murdered corpse

Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close"

—flinging him the "words" he has whimpered for in full measure, that so at last she may attain to asking if, that morning, he would have "pored upon it?" She knows he would not; then why pore upon it now? For him, it is here, as much as in the deserted house; it is everywhere.

" … For me

(she goes on),

Now he is dead, I hate him worse: I hate …

Dare you stay here? I would go back and hold

His two dead hands, and say, 'I hate you worse,

Luca, than——'"

And in her frenzy of reminiscent hatred and loathing for the murdered man, she goes to Sebald and takes his hands, as if to feign that other taking.

With the hysteria that has all along been growing in him, Sebald flings her back—

" … Take your hands off mine;

'Tis the hot evening—off! oh, morning, is it?"

—and she, restored to her cooler state by this repulse, and with a perhaps unconscious moving to some revenge for it, points out, with a profounder depth of callousness than she has yet displayed, that the body at the house will have to be taken away and buried—

"Come in and help to carry"—

and with ghastly glee she adds—

" … We may sleep

Anywhere in the whole wide house to-night."

* * * * *

Now the dialogue sways between her deliberate sensuous allurement of the man and his deepening horror at what they have done. She winds and unwinds her hair—was it so that he once liked it? But he cannot look; he would give her neck and her splendid shoulders, "both those breasts of yours," if this thing could be undone. It is not the mere killing—though he would "kill the world so Luca lives again," even to fondle her as before—but the thought that he has eaten the dead man's bread, worn his clothes, "felt his money swell my purse." … This is the intolerable; "there's a recompense in guilt"—

"One must be venturous and fortunate:—

What is one young for else?"

and thus their passion is justified; but to have killed the man who rescued him from starvation by letting him teach music to his wife … why—

" … He gave me

Life, nothing less"—

and if he did reproach the perfidy, "and threaten and do more," had he no right after all—what was there to wonder at?

"He sat by us at table quietly:

Why must you lean across till our cheeks touched?"

In that base blaming of her alone we get the measure of Sebald as at this hour he is. He turns upon her with a demand to know how she now "feels for him." Her answer, wherein the whole of her nature (as, again, at this hour it is) reveals itself—callous but courageous, proud and passionate, cruel in its utter sensuality, yet with the force and honesty which attend on all simplicity, good or evil—her answer strikes a truer note than does anything which Sebald yet has said, or is to say. She replies that she loves him better now than ever—

"And best (look at me while I speak to you) Best for the crime."

She is glad that the "affectation of simplicity" has fallen off—