Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 2/Chapter 2
THIS Platonic desire of his proved to be not at all an invalid's mere whim; and, to the pleased amusement of his sister, he omitted no opportunity to gratify it. In the afternoons, when the tea tables were set along the walls of the long, dark monkish corridor, Orbison would come hobbling forth from his cell and direct her to find places as near Miss Ambler's as possible; he had the maître d'hôtel change their table in the great refectory to one next to that of Miss Ambler and her mother; and when he was prevented from sitting near the Americans for after-dinner coffee, cordials, and music in the corridor, Miss Orbison accused him of becoming querulous.
"He swears," she informed Mr. Eugene Rennie one morning in the garden, a week after his interruption of the reading of the Odyssey. "Whenever I miss a chance to get him near Miss Ambler he uses the most fearful language he knows, and he knows a great deal."
"I don't," Orbison protested, from his long chair. "I may know it—I mean, I don't use it."
"Dear me!" she cried. "I shouldn't like Mr. Rennie to hear what you said to me last evening when you thought we weren't going to be near enough the young lady for you to listen to her chatter during the after-dinner music. We did finally get near enough, though, Mr. Rennie; and he was so absorbed in listening to her, he didn't even apologize to me. I do wonder what Miss Ambler and her mother think of us, the way we haunt them! Probably they'll expect Charles to propose, in case you introduce him. I really think you'd better do that, Mr. Rennie; I'm sure he's pining to meet her."
"I am not," Orbison said brusquely. "I can listen to her and puzzle about her much better without the pleasure of her acquaintance. She has a pretty voice; but what she says with it—good heavens!"
"You don't find it edifying?" his friend inquired.
"My dear man! I don't find it anything! That's the point—I don't find it! I listened to her for an hour last evening and I give you my word nobody in the world could be astute enough to know what she was talking about! The great mystery is, what in the name of a name could she, herself, think she was talking about? It's impossible; she couldn't tell you, I swear."
"Whom was she talking to?"
"Your two Saracen friends behind their monocles, her mother and a Japanese gentleman they'd picked up somewhere. Of course the mother didn't listen; she embroidered and appeared to be able to detach herself from the daughter's chatter enough to give the music an absent sort of attention. Miss Ambler began to talk with the utmost vivacity before they sat down, and she never stopped. I could only conclude that she was carrying the custom of her own country into foreign parts. Am I correct? In your great democracy is it regarded as the duty of a pretty young lady to be incessantly voluble as the proper entertainment for members of the opposite sex?"
"To a degree, I believe so," Rennie answered gravely. "You found not even the germ of an idea in any of her conversation?"
"'Germ?'" the Englishman exclaimed. "It was full of germs! The trouble seemed to be that all the ideas remained in a germinal state; though she had the air of possessing the most vigorous convictions upon them. She asked one of the Bastoni if he'd ever done any big-game hunting, and without waiting for his answer, said she had always been 'perfectly wild to see a rhinoceros charge' because they were such 'thrilling' beasts; but she wouldn't care to eat one; then she asked the other Bastoni if he believed in vegetarianism, and told the Japanese gentleman she adored rice, and asked him if there was a Japanese form of Fascismo and what he thought of the League of Nations. She didn't give him any chance to tell her; but said that the League could never deal with the Soviets and she thought perhaps there was something in the idea that religion is the opium of the people. She abhorred every form of 'Victorianism' she said, including Tennyson, and believed that by the time her own children were grown up, 'birth control' would be 'regulated by law.' Immediately upon that, she said she was reading Dante's Inferno 'in the original'; thought its 'medievalism' was 'perfectly rapturous,' and declared her belief that democracy has proved an utter failure and is producing 'no art worth the name,' though there probably is 'some advance in science.' And 'modern interpretive dancing' is an 'advance,' too, she thought; but the world would be really 'so much more picturesque without steam and electricity!' Altogether, she made me dizzy. The action of her mind makes me think of a flea upon the open pages of an encyclopedia."
"You spent the whole evening being dizzied by the flea, Charles?"
"No; I didn't have the chance. Your friend, the Principessa Liana, came in and carried her away to some kind of party, as I gathered, at a villa."
"At any rate you've made enough progress toward knowing what's in the 'pretty young head' to discover that Miss Ambler is like a flea."
"You call it progress," Orbison exclaimed, "to be made dizzy! All I've discovered is that listening to an American girl is the last way in the world to find out what are her constituent parts. All I get by listening"
But his sister interrupted, cautioning him to lower his voice. Two young people had just come down from the upper terrace and were walking slowly, in a deep preoccupation with each other, toward one of the iron benches by the railing. They were Miss Ambler and a slender, tall, dark boy of a manly and serious, yet gentle, appearance. That is to say, in the eyes of the two gentlemen, his seniors, observing him, he seemed to be a boy; but he was twenty-four, and his good looks were of that keen outline, almost imperial, still seen at its finest, sometimes, as the ancient heritage of a son of northern Italy.
Miss Orbison glanced at him appreciatively. "What a romantic-looking young prince and what pretty looks they're giving each other!" she whispered. "Surely that's the princess's son you said was splendid, Mr. Rennie?" Then, upon his nodding, she turned to Orbison and laughed. "You have before you the very answer to your puzzle, Charles. Isn't it plain that you're looking at what would occupy all the space in any young girl's head, even an American's?"
"No," he said. "Only the space in her heart." And his tone was so gloomy that his sister looked amazed.
"Dear me!" she murmured. "I thought this was to be a purely Platonic investigation. American girls as piquant as this one seem to be high explosives, only to be studied by experienced experts long accustomed to observing them, like Mr. Rennie. Or perhaps I'm mistaken, and Mr. Rennie is himself painfully disturbed by this advent of a Renaissance princeling. Springtime in Raona may be contagious. Are you as stricken as Charles is, Mr. Rennie?"
She spoke in a lowered voice, almost whispering, for Miss Ambler and her romantic companion were passing close by, just then; and Rennie did not hear the question. He, too, had been amazed by the gloom in the invalid's voice, and sat gazing upon him in delighted surprise. The American knew that in the reluctant opinion of his friend's physicians this was the last springtime Orbison would ever see; but if he could still be depressed by the preoccupation of a pretty girl's heart, it seemed that at least he was so far continuing to be most cheeringly alive.