Compton MacKenzie

“ I seem always to get down to the bedrock of the æsthetic impulse at the opera. We are deluded by a tragedy of Æschylus into supposing that art is something greater than it is, something more than a sublimation of childhood’s games, something comparable in its importance to science. In opera we see what a joke art really is. We know that in the scroll of eternity the bottle-washer of a great chemist is a more conspicuous minuscule than the greatest artist who ever shall be.”
“I think I’m too tired to listen to you any longer,” Nancy said. ”

“ More lovely now was the long sweep of the Parthenopean shore, more lucid the wash of golden air, richer and more profound the warm wintry Southern peace; and she standing there among the rosemary was transmuted by the timelessness of her grief into a timeless figure that might haunt for ever that calm and classic scene.
The last sunset stain had faded from the cloudy cap of Vesuvius, and the street-lamps were already twinkling when Nancy got back to Naples. She went into a church,247 and there in a dark corner prayed to be forgiven for that brief madness when she had wished to take her life. ”

“ I can never forget your beautiful maternal behaviour, ma’am, and, oh, ma’am, I am so anxious to be a son to you now in the hour of your trouble—a true son.”
“You never could notta be a son for me, Caleb. Siete troppo grasso, caro. You are too big. How you say? Too fat.”
“Ah, Madame Oriano, don’t say you won’t let me be a son to you till you’ve heard all I have to tell you. I want to marry your daughter, ma’am. I want to marry your Letizia. ”

“ He was not just the traditional clown with wide red mouth, bending low in exaggerated laughter and treading always on hot bricks. There was something of the Pierrot in his performance. Not that he scorned tradition overmuch. The whole audience recognised him as the authentic Joey of their imagination; but he did contrive to be somehow the incarnate spirit of that London street much more essentially than the heavy-footed Harlequin, much more essentially than Columbine, whose short pink tarlatan skirt did not become Nancy’s height, though she pirouetted on and off the stage gracefully enough. ”

“ Nancy looked up in amazement as the nun stopped speaking, for her voice sounded fresh and crystalline as a girl’s, her cheeks were flushed with youth, her eyes were deep and warm and lucent as if the Southern moon swam face to face with her in the cold March night roaring past the smoky windows of the carriage. Yet when Nancy looked again she saw the fine lines in the porcelain-frail face, and the puckered eyelids, and middle-age in those grave blue eyes. ”

“ The white guest-room was very welcome to Nancy after the fatigue of this long day, so long a day that she could not believe that it had only been fifteen hours ago that she set out from Euston to Brigham. She seemed to have lived many lives in the course of it—Bram’s life as a boy with his brother, old Mrs. Fuller’s eighty years of existence, Sister Catherine’s bright youth in Italy, and most wearingly of all, Letizia’s future even to ultimate old age and death. ”

“ Percy Mortimer offered Nancy a part in his autumn production, he did not offer her a higher salary. Not only had she been unable to save a penny in London; she had had to draw heavily on what remained of her savings when she had paid her father’s debts. No doubt, if she stayed on at the Athenæum she should gradually establish herself as a London actress, but should she ever save any money? She felt that she lacked the temperament to become a star. Even if she had had the consuming white-hot ambition, she did not possess the necessary personality. For one thing she was too useful an actress. ”

“ The drive through the cold upland air, the quiet and seemliness of the conventual life, the dignity of the aged218 Mother Superior, the whiteness and candlelight within, the snow and starshine without, all united to compose Nancy’s mind so that when she returned to the theatre she moved in a dream, like one who has voyaged from afar and whose body has arrived while the spirit still lingers on the way. ”

“ Kino was in the room when Letizia put forward this theory and with a dumpy hand she silently patted the black sleeve of Nancy, who had turned away to hide the tears.
Perhaps the kindest thing that fortune could have done for the young widow was to throw difficulties in the way of her obtaining an engagement. Had she found a “shop” immediately and gone out on tour alone after those happy years of joint engagements the poignancy of her solitude might have overwhelmed her. The battle for a livelihood kept her from brooding. ”

“ Nancy laughed. “Being with grown-up people all the time has made her a very precocious little girl, I’m afraid.”
She was wondering how she could manage to keep the conversation trained on Letizia until she could muster up the courage to ask her brother-in-law the favour she desired.
“I think it’s such a pity to let children grow up too soon,” Caleb sighed in a remote and dreamy tone that trembled like the vox humana stop with the tears of things. “I like all little things so much; but I think people and animals deteriorate when they grow big. ”

“ But her time could not be spent in abandoning herself to these sudden impulses of sentimental self-indulgence. She entered a bazaar and filled her bag with small toys for Letizia’s stocking—a woolly lamb, a monkey-on-a-stick, a tin trumpet, a parti-coloured ball—all the time-honoured cargo of Santa Claus. She had already bought a case of pipes for Bram’s Christmas present. But now she was filled with ambition to give him some specially chosen gift that would commemorate this cold Greenwich Yuletide. ”

“ They represent years of sharp practice in housekeeping. The only thing for which I may thank God sincerely is that I wasn’t married to young Caleb. I should never have succeeded in cheating him out of a penny on the household bills. I should never have managed to buy a solitary novel, had he been my accountant. I should have remained for ever what I was when I married, raw, noisy, impudent, scatterbrained, until I died as a bird dies, beating its wings against the cage. Educate Letizia, educate her. ”

“ Pantaloon, too, was good, and the actor did manage to represent that hoary-headed ancient Londoner in his absurd Venetian disguise. But Bram was the ghost of old London itself—a London that was fast dying, though here in Greenwich it might seem to be as full of vitality as ever. It was the London of sweet lavender and cherry ripe, the London of hot cockles, of Punch and Judy shows and four-wheelers and lumbering knife-board omnibuses, of gas-lamps and queer beggars. ”

“ So Nancy left Bram at the stage-door and went on to do her shopping. The streets were crowded with people, and in spite of the cold wind everybody was looking cheerful. The shops, too, with their brightly lit windows all decorated with frosted cotton-wool and holly, exhaled that authentic Christmas glow, which touches all but hearts too long barren and heads too long empty. The man who sneers at Christmas is fair game for the Father of Lies. ”

“ It is so much easier to look young than to feel young. A woman is never too old to be loved. You can hardly maintain that a man is never to old to love. I doubt if a man over thirty ever knows what love means.”
“Och, I never heard such a preposterous statement,” Nancy declared. “Why, think of the men who cherish hopeless passions all their lives.”
“For my part I can never understand a man’s cherishing a hopeless passion,” he declared. “I should feel so utterly humiliated by a woman’s refusal of her love that my own passion would be killed by it instantly. ”

“ La Dame aux Camélias is a book for youth. We have most of us lived not wisely and not well in our youth, and middle-age is not the time to judge that early behaviour. Let it be remembered that the follies of our youth are usually repeated when we are old—not always actually, but certainly in imagination. An old man should be the best judge of La Dame aux Camélias. Well, if that is a vital book, and just because of its amazing vitality, a great book, Traviata is a great opera, because, unlike that much inferior opera Aïda, it is impossible to imagine any other music for it. ”

“ In fact, I have dreamed more than once, ma’am, that you were washed in the blood of the Lamb. However, do not imagine that I should try to influence Letizia to become one of the Peculiar Children of God. I love her too dearly, ma’am, to attempt any persuasion. From a business point of view—and, after all, in these industrious times it is the business point of view which is really important—from a business point of view the match would not be a very bad one. ”

“ Nancy pushed her way through the staring group, and knelt beside Bram, now unconscious, a bloody belt round his white dress, his head pillowed on the string of sausages.
“My precious one,” she cried. “Oh, my precious one!”
His eyelids flickered at her voice, and his limp body quivered very faintly.
“A doctor will be here in a minute, Miss O’Finn,” Worsley said.
“A doctor,” she cried. “Damn you, damn you! A doctor! He told you the trap wasn’t working properly. If he dies, it will be you that has killed him.” ”

“ Nancy said. “Nobody ever told me I had, until this fairy prince arrived in Bristol.”
“Ah, but I think people are always so afraid to think anybody has a good voice until somebody else has established the fact for them,” Sister Catherine laughed. “It was just a piece of good luck that you should be heard by somebody who understood what good singing is.... I’m glad you think dear little Letizia is looking so well. She is a great treasure, and we are all very proud of her. She has so much personality, and I’m doing my best to let her keep it without spoiling her.” ”

“ Paddington is an annexe of the Crystal palace. Victoria and Charing Cross are already infected with the fussiness and insignificance of Boulogne. Waterloo is a restless improvisation, Liverpool Street a hideous ant-heap. To get a picture of the spirits of damned Londoners passing for ever from their beloved city, one should wait on a frozen foggy midnight outside the portals of Euston.
Nancy may not have read Virgil, but her heart was heavy enough with foreboding when with Letizia, a tiny Red Riding Hood, she entered the train for Brigham on that iron-bound morning early in March. ”

“ Letizia exclaimed, rubbing her leg. “It’s all fistles, and where my drawses have gone away and left a piece of my leg the fistles have bitten it. Your drawses don’t go away and leave a piece of your leg. So the fistles don’t bite you.”
At this moment the heavy door opened quietly to admit Caleb Fuller, a plump-faced young man with brown curly hair and a smile of such cordial and beaming welcome that Nancy’s heart sank, for of course he would be delighted to accept the responsibility of Letizia’s upbringing. ”

“ Endless journeys on Sundays in trains without corridors and on some lines still lighted with oil-lamps so that the baby Letizia, lying on the horsehair cushions of the railway-carriage, would drop asleep to the rhythmic movement of the oil swaying to and fro in the glass container. Long waits at stations like York and Crewe, where the only Sabbath traffic in those days seemed to be touring companies and all the compartments in all the trains were labelled engaged. ”

“ At work again! At work! Every week a new town. Always something to distract her from this eternal ache, some poor little futile change, but still change—change and work. Was it very selfish of her to sacrifice Letizia to her own need? Very wrong and very selfish? Yet even from a practical point of view, surely it was right to take this money when she had the chance? She could not leave Letizia with Mrs. Pottage indefinitely. To refuse an offer like this while she accepted the old landlady’s charity would put her in such a humiliating position. Bram surely would not blame her. ”

“ The opera played at San Carlo that night was La Traviata. Nancy, not oppressed by the sound and sight of a contralto singing and acting far better than she could ever hope to sing and act, thoroughly enjoyed it. The Violetta was a delicate and lovely creature so that, even if her coloratura did lack something of the finest quality and ease, her death was almost intolerably moving. Alfredo was played by an elderly tenor into whose voice the vibrato of age had already insinuated itself. ”

“ Madame Oriano had been glad enough to put the financial side of the business in Caleb’s hands, for, having inherited from her father, Padua’s chief artist in pyrotechny, a genuine passion for inventing new effects, she devoted herself to these with renewed interest, an interest moreover that was no longer liable to be interrupted by amours. She had grown gaunt and her temper, never of the sweetest, had long made her an impossible mistress for any man however young he might be. ”

“ It was very childish and sentimental to be sitting here in the dark dreaming like this, Nancy kept telling herself; but then once more the mystery of the tunnel would enfold her as one is enfolded by those strange half-sleepy clarities of the imagination that flash through the midway of the night when one lies in bed and hopes that the sense of illumination that is granted between a sleep and a sleep will return with daylight to illuminate the active life of the morning. Her thoughts about the nun reassumed their first portentousness ”