Suddenly he stopped, for on a shelf above his head was a vase that arrested his attention as sharply as if it had spoken to him. Who can describe perfection? I shall not attempt to, nor even indicate the colour; for, like a pearl, the vase had its own colour, which floated on its surface more lightly than morning mist hangs on a river. . . .
‘Turn on the light!’ commanded the proprietor. So illuminated, the vase shone as if brightness had been poured over it. It might have been floating in its own essence, so insubstantial did it look. Through layer on layer of soft transparency you seemed to see right into the heart of the vase.
This passage is memorable not only for the light it throws on Mr. Hartley’s beliefs, but also as an example of his art at its beautiful best; the precise and exquisite expression of an exquisitely refined sensibility.
D.C.
SIMONETTA PERKINS
Simonetta Perkins was first published in Great Britain in 1925
1
‘Love is the greatest of the passions,’ Miss Johnstone read, ‘the first and the last.’
She lifted her eyes from the book, and they rested on the grey dome of Santa Maria della Salute, rising like a blister out of the inflamed and suppurating stonework below. The waters of the canal were turbid, bringing the church uncomfortably close. ‘How I hate Baroque,’ thought Miss Johnstone. ‘And this, I am told, is the best example of it. It comes of being born in Boston, I suppose. And yet a Johnstone of Boston should be able to appreciate anything. Anything good, that is.’
She read on.
‘Other passions tend to exaggerate and to intensify, but love transforms. The victim of the amorous passion has a holiday from himself. No longer does he discern in the objects he sees before him the pale reflection of his own mediocrity; those objects become the symbols of an inner quickening. An effulgence of the Absolute irradiates his being.’
How often have I read this sort of thing before,’ thought Miss Johnstone, trying to ignore the Salute, and fixing her gaze on the chaster outlines of St. Gregory, across the way. ‘Consider the servants here,’ she soliloquised, glancing right and left along the sunny terrace whose steps were lapped by the waves; ‘has any one of them, for any one moment, been irradiated by an effulgence of the Absolute? I think not.’ She met the smirk of a passing concierge with a reproving stare. ‘But they are all married, I suppose, or whatever in Venice takes the place of marriage.’
The print rose up at her, and she started once more to read.
‘Love is an inheritance that falls to the lot of all mankind. Anger, envy, jealousy, cruelty; pity, charity, humility, courage: these emotions are partial and unequal in their incidence. They visit some, and others they pass by. But man that is born of woman cannot escape love. Of whatsoever age thou art, reader, never believe thyself secure from his fiery dart.’
‘Now here,’ exclaimed Miss Johnstone, slamming the book face-downwards on the wicker-work table at her side, ‘here, among much vapid rhetoric and dreary rubbish is one huge, dangerous, vital, misleading falsehood.’
This outburst having caused more than one lorgnette to be directed upon her, Miss Johnstone ceased to testify openly and continued her reflections to herself. But never had her whole consciousness, her whole being, shown itself, to her, so vociferously articulate. From her toes to her hair she was an incarnation of denial. ‘It is a lie,’ she thought, ‘a cruel, useless lie. If I—since the writer, after many meaningless generalizations, now impudently addresses himself to me—if I had been capable of this passion, would not Stephen Seleucis and Michael B. Sprott and Theodore Drakenburg and Walt Watt have awakened it? They awakened it in everyone else, even in Mamma.’ She looked round: but her mother had not yet appeared.
‘The pinnacle of eligibility on which I sat, and to which in a month I must return, was, and no doubt again will be, festooned with offers of marriage. They affected me no more than an invitation to dinner, except that I was harassed by having to take some of them seriously. I am absolutely immune from love. If I marry, it will be from considerations of convenience.
‘Alas that one cannot reply to an author except by making notes in the margin, notes he will never see! And this love-adept has wisely left his margins slender. Let me see what he says now. Aha! a threat!’
‘In the case of solipsistical and egocentric natures, the tide of love, long awaited in secret’ (Miss Johnstone frowned) ‘may find a tortuous and uneasy passage. There is much to be absorbed, much to be overcome. The habit of self-communion must be subdued; all those private delights, the sense, so delicious to some, of retiring into oneself and drawing down the blinds, must be repudiated and foresworn. The unfortunate egoist must learn to take his pleasure from without; he is no longer his own warehouse and market place, he must go out to buy. No longer may he think, “I will sit in such and such a position, it gives me ease”; or, “I will take a drive to-day and refresh my spirits”, or, “to-morrow I will choose a suit of clothes”; for he will no longer find pleasure in the satisfaction of daily needs. Rather he will say, “If I rest my cheek thus upon my linger, now will Chloe regard it?” and, “I will wait upon Melissa with my barouche, though I abhor the motion”, and, “since Julia is away I must go ragged and barefoot, for without her sanction I dare not choose either silk or shoe-leather”. To such as have been accustomed to give others the first place in their thoughts, the oncoming of love will prove a bloodless revolution; but to the egoists, the epicures of their own sensations, the change will be violent, damaging and bitter.’
‘Should I call myself an egoist?’ Miss Johnstone mused. ‘Others have called me so. They merely meant that I did not care for them. Now if they had said fastidious or discriminating! On the whole it is a pity that Stephen Seleucis is coming next week; but he did once say, “Lavinia, it isn’t only your charm that attracts me, it’s your refusal to see charm in anyone else. Even in me”, he added. How could I contradict him? Certainly I am not selfish. Punctual myself, I am tolerant of unpunctuality in others. It is the mark of a saint, Walt Watt once told me. Why do I recall these foolish compliments? They ought never to have found their way into my diary; and it is no answer to the author of this odious manual (who has somehow contrived to pique me) to urge that idle young men have talked as though they were in love with me. Can it be that I am vain? Why else should I have treasured those insinuating commendations? When Mamma speaks her mind to me, it goes like water off a duck’s back.’
At that moment two visitors, both men, walked past her. One tilted his head back, as though his collar chafed him; but Miss Johnstone knew instinctively that he was indicating her, as, with an interrogatory lift of his voice he said,
‘Beautiful?’
‘Well, no,’ his friend replied, ‘not really beautiful’ They passed out of ear-shot. Miss Johnstone blinked, and involuntarily caught up the treatise upon Love, in her agitation forgetting to sneer at the opening words.
‘Like all great subjects, love has its false prophets. You will hear men say, “I do not know whether I am in love or not”; but your heart, reader, will never give you this ambiguous answer. Doubtful symptoms there may be, excitement, irritability, sleeplessness, without cause shown; but uncertainty, when the eye of desire at last has the beloved object in its view, never.’