The Lee Shore Part 37

"Difendi, O Caterina Da peste, fame e guerra, Il popol di Cartoleto In mare e in terra..."

Above the hymn rose the howls of little St. John the Baptist, who had been, no doubt, suddenly mastered by his too high-spirited lamb and upset on to his face, so that his mother had to rush from out the crowd to comfort him and brush the dust from his curls that had been a-curling in papers these three weeks past.

It was no doubt a beautiful procession, and Peter and Thomas loved processions, but they had seen one that morning at Varenzano, so they were content to see and hear this from a distance.

Why, Peter speculated, do we not elsewhere thus beautify and sanctify our villages and cities and country places? Why do they not, in fis.h.i.+ng hamlets of a colder clime, thus bring luck to their fis.h.i.+ng, thus summon the dear saints to keep and guard their sh.o.r.es? Why, Peter for the hundredth time questioned, do we miss so much gaiety, so much loveliness, so much grace, that other and wiser people have?

Peter shook his head over it.

"A sad business, Thomas. But here we are, you and I, and let us be thankful. Thankful for this lovely country set with pleasant towns and religious manners and nice people, and for the colour and smoothness of the sea we're going paddling in, and for our nice tea. _Are_ you thankful, Thomas? Yes, I'm sure you are."

Someone, pa.s.sing behind them, said with surprise, "Is that _you_, Margerison?"

Peter, looking round, his tin mug in one hand and a biscuit in the other, recognised an old schoolfellow. He was standing on the beach staring at the tea-party--the four disreputable vagabonds and their cart.

Peter laughed. It rather amused him to come into sudden contact with the respectable; they were always so much surprised. He had rather liked this man. Some people had good-temperedly despised him for a molly-coddle; he had been a delicate boy, and had cherished himself rather. Peter, delicate himself, incapable of despising anyone, and with a heart that went out to all unfortunates, had been, in a mild and casual way, his friend. Looking into his face now, Peter was struck to sorrow and compa.s.sion, because it was the face of a man who had accepted death, and to whom life gave no more gifts, not even the peace of the lee sh.o.r.e. It was a restless face, with hollow cheeks unnaturally flushed, and bitter, querulous lips. His surprise at seeing Peter and his vagabond equipment made him cough.

When he had done coughing, he said, "What _are_ you doing, Margerison?"

Peter said he was having tea. "Have you had yours? I've got another mug somewhere--a china one."

As he declined with thanks, Peter thought, "He's dying. Oh, poor chap, how ghastly for him," and his immense pity made him even gentler than usual. He couldn't say, "How are you?" because he knew; he couldn't say, "Isn't this a nice place?" because Ashe must leave it so soon; he couldn't say, "I am having a good time," because Ashe would have no more good times, and, Peter suspected, had had few.

What he did say was, "This is Thomas. And this is San Francesco, and this is Suor Clara. They're all mine. Do you like their faces?"

Ashe looked at Francesco, and said, "Rather a mongrel, isn't he?" and Peter took the comment as condemning the four of them, and divined in Ashe the respectability of the sheltered life, and was compa.s.sionate again. Ashe cared, during the brief s.p.a.ce of time allotted to him, to be respectably dressed; he cared to lead what he would call a decent life.

Peter, in his disreputability, felt like a man in the open air who looks into the prison of a sick-room.

Ashe said he was staying at Varenzano with his mother, and they were pa.s.sing through Castoleto on the way back from their afternoon's drive.

"It's lungs, you know. They don't give me much chance--the doctors, I mean. It's warm and sheltered on this coast, so I have to be here. I'd rather be here, I suppose, than doing a beef-and-snow cure in one of those ghastly places. But it's a bore hanging round and doing nothing.

I'd as soon it ended straight off."

Ashamed of having been so communicative (but Peter was used to people being unreserved with him, and never thought it odd), he changed the subject.

"Are you on the tramp, or what? Is it comfortable?"

"Very," said Peter, "and interesting."

"_Is_ it interesting? How long are you going on with it? When are you going home?"

"Oh, this is as much home as anywhere else, you know. I don't see any reason for leaving it yet. We all like it. I've no money, you see, and life is cheap here, and warm and nice."

"Cheap and warm and nice...." Ashe repeated it, vaguely surprised. He hadn't realised that Peter was one of the permanently dest.i.tute, and tramping not from pleasure but from necessity.

"What do you _do_?" he asked curiously, seeing that Peter was not at all embarra.s.sed.

"Oh, nothing very much. A little needlework, which I sell as I go along.

And various sorts of peddling, sometimes. I'm going up to the hotel this evening, to try and make the people there buy things from me. And we just play about, you know, and enjoy the roads and the towns and the fairs and the seash.o.r.e. It's all fun."

Ashe laughed and made himself cough.

"You awfully queer person! You really like it, living like that?... But even I don't like it, you know, living shut away from life in this corner, though I've money enough to be comfortable with. Should I like it, your life, I wonder? You're not bored, it seems. I always am. What is it you like so much?"

Peter said, lots of things. No, he wasn't bored; things were too amusing for that.

They couldn't get any further, because Ashe's mother called him from the carriage in the road. She too looked tired, and had sad eyes.

Peter looked after them with compa.s.sion. They were wasting their little time together terribly, being sad when they should have found, in these last few months or years of life, quiet fun on the warm sh.o.r.e where they had come to make loss less bitter.

Tea being over, he went paddling, with Thomas laughing on his shoulder, till it was Thomas's bedtime. Then he put Thomas away in his warm corner of the cart, and Livio joined him, and they had supper together at a _trattoria_, and then climbed the road between vineyards and lemon gardens up to the new white hotel.

Livio, as they walked, practised his repertory of songs, singing melodious s.n.a.t.c.hes in the lemon-scented dusk. They came to the hotel, and found that the inhabitants were sitting round little tables in the dim garden, having their coffee by the light of hanging lanterns.

From out of the dusk Livio struck his mandolin and sweetly sang. Peter meanwhile wandered round from group to group displaying his wares by the pink light of the lanterns. He met with some success; he really embroidered rather nicely, and people were good-natured and kind to the pale-faced, delicate-looking young man who smiled with his very blue, friendly eyes. There was always an element in Peter that inspired pity; one divined in him a merry unfortunate.

The people in the hotel were of many races--French, Italian, German, and one English family. Castoleto is not an Anglo-Saxon resort; it is small and of no reputation, and not as yet Anglicised. Probably the one English family in the hotel was motoring down the coast, and only staying for one night.

Peter, in his course round the garden, came suddenly within earshot of cultured English voices, and heard some one laugh. Then a voice, soft in quality, with casual, pleasant, unemphasised cadence, said, "Considering these vile roads, she's running extraordinarily well. Really, something ought to be done about the roads, though; it's absolutely disgraceful.

Blake says ..." one of the things that chauffeurs do say, and that Peter did not listen to.

Peter had stopped suddenly where he was when the speaker had laughed. Of the many personal attributes of man, some may become slurred out of all character, disguised and levelled down among the herd, blurred with time, robbed of individuality. Faces may be so lost and blurred, almost beyond the recognition of those who have loved them. But who ever forgot a friend's laugh, or lost the character of his own? If Ulysses had laughed when he came back to Ithaca, his dog would have missed his eternal distinction.

Soft, rather low, a thing not detached from the sentence it broke into, but rather breaking out of it, and merging then into words again--Peter had carried it in his ears for ten years. Was there ever any man but one who laughed quite so?

Looking down the garden, he saw them, sitting under a pergola, half-veiled by the purple drifts of the wistaria that hung in trails between them and him. Through its twilight screen he saw Denis in a dinner-jacket, leaning back in a cane chair, his elbow on its arm, a cigarette in his raised hand, speaking. The light from a big yellow lantern swinging above them lit his clear profile, gleamed on his fair hair. Opposite him was Lucy, in a white frock, her elbows on a little table, her chin in her two hands, her eyes wide and grey and full of the wonder of the twilight. And beyond her sat Lord Evelyn, leaning back with closed eyes, a cigar in his delicate white hand.

Peter stood and looked, and a little faint, doubtful smile twitched at his lips, as at a dear, familiar sight long unseen. Should he approach?

Should he speak? For a moment he hung in doubt.

Then he turned away. He had no part with them, nor they with him. His part--Rodney had said it once--was to clear out.

Livio, close to him, was tw.a.n.ging his mandolin and singing some absurd melody:

"Ah, Signor!"

"Scusi, Signora?"

"e forae il mio marito, Da molti anni smarrito?..."

Peter broke in softly, "Livio, I go. I have had enough."

Livio's eyebrows rose; he shrugged his shoulders, but continued his singing. He, anyhow, had not yet had enough of such a good-natured audience.

Peter slipped out of the garden into the white road than ran down between the grey mystery of the olive groves to the little dirty fis.h.i.+ng-town and the dark, quiet sea. In the eastern sky there was a faint s.h.i.+mmer, a disturbance of the deep, star-lit blue, a pallor that heralded the rising of the moon. But as yet the world lay in its mysterious dusk.

Peter, his feet stirring on the white dust of the road, drew in the breath of the lemon-grown, pine-grown, myrtle-sweet hills, and the keen saltness of the sea, and the fis.h.i.+ness of the little, lit, clamorous town on its edge. In the town there was singing, raucous and merry. Behind in the garden there was singing, melodious and absurd. It echoes fleeted down the road.

"Ah, Signor!"

"Scusi, Signora?"

"e forse il mio marrito..."