Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 2/Chapter 5
THE Salone is one thing not beautiful in Raona, though the gay little modern building is inconspicuous and may be pleasantly approached through a cypress-bordered garden. What should not be in Raona is the interior of the Salone; the manufactured throbbings of a "night club" are misplaced upon the majestic cliff that looked down upon the passing of Odysseus.
Arturo Liana hated the Salone, yet he was there, this afternoon, at a table near the door, and alone. At the opposite end of the room an orchestra of red-coated men produced adroitly suggestive tango music, to which the silent dancers moved with what seemed to Arturo a snaky accuracy. Most of the women were pale under heavily applied artificial complexions that the red lamps failed to make plausible; the men were pale, too, and there was no merriment in this sleek dancing, but, on the contrary, a trancelike gravity—a gravity as of pallid masks covering intricate and sly emotions. Slyness seemed the very air of the place; it was the key of the music; it was in the curiously revealing dresses of some of the women as well as in their eyes; most of all, Arturo thought, it was in the eyes of that sly enemy of his, Giuseppe Bastoni, with whom Claire Ambler was dancing.
Alone, of all the dancers, the young American girl seemed to be dancing merely to dance and not for the sake of something covert. She laughed and chattered to her partner; her blue eyes, under her silver-gray helmet of silk, were bright with pleasure in the rhythms measured by her feet that moved so lightly in their twinkling slim black slippers. She was gay as a child is gay; and in all this vulpine slyness, she was the only frank and natural young creature. It hurt Arturo to see her there—as he knew she knew it did, which made his hurt the keener; and yet he saw that she could go anywhere and everywhere untouched by what was about her. It was probably an American quality, he thought; but he nevertheless wished that she were not so willing to go anywhere and everywhere, or at least, would be kinder to one adviser in such matters. She had been a little brusque when he advised her, that morning, not to go to the Salone.
However, she unexpectedly atoned for her brusqueness now. She had not seen him when he came in, nor while she danced; but with the stopping of the music, she and her partner were left just before Arturo's table. She turned and uttered a little cry of pleased surprise.
"Arturo! I didn't dream you'd deign to come here after what you How lovely! Wouldn't you like to offer Giuseppe and me some tea at your table?"
Arturo had risen, and he bowed rather ceremoniously. "I should be very glad."
Claire sat down at once; but Bastoni, with a bow more ceremonious than the young Liano's, begged to decline. "I mus' speak wit' my brozzer," he said; and through his monocle there flickered at Arturo a cold glance oddly contemplative. For a moment Claire was puzzled to find herself feeling uncomfortable. There seemed to be, somewhere about her, a tensity that might have consequences; but Arturo stood imperturbable, looking straight before him and not at Bastoni; then he sat down and Bastoni went quietly away.
"I'm afraid he doesn't like it very much," Claire said thoughtfully. "I told him and the baron I didn't want any tea. Well, it won't matter; I'll be nice to them later. Why in the world did you scold me for wanting to come to this interesting place? The music's really great, and these extraordinary foreign types—I wouldn't have missed it for anything! What's the matter with it?"
"Nothing, as you see it. You only see it as interestingly foreign. There are undercurrents—undercurrents that I know."
"Are there?" Claire laughed as she cast a lively glance about the room. "There's one that I see. Every woman in the place is covertly looking at you and hoping you'll dance with her. Do you see that?"
"No," he said. "But a few of the men are looking at me by no means so flatteringly."
"Are they? Arturo, at your age I should think it would be much more fun to drop politics and just have a great time. You're so serious!"
"I fear so," he said, and shook his head ruefully. "How can I be anything but serious when you behave to me in such a manner that you do?"
"I? Why, I think I'm perfectly heavenly to you!"
"Too much so, indeed! But that is in my own appreciation of you. I spoke of how you behave toward me. You snub me for my advice and you come to this absurd and unworthy place with such people as the Bastoni. Then you immediately drop them when you see me sitting alone here and unhappy—and I am glad to say that fellow will now be twice as much my enemy as before—and you come to sit with me. But pretty soon you will go and dance with one of those fellows again; so it is all too much up and down!"
"Arturo!" she cried; and she added disingenuously: "I haven't an idea what you're talking about!"
He smiled sadly. "I was so flatter' that you call me 'Arturo'—until I found you call the Bastoni, also, by their firs' names."
"But that's nothing! At home we all do that—with everybody."
"Yes, I understand," he said. "That was what remove' my happiness in it. It was only one of the downs that come between the ups. You will let me explain what I mean by the ups and downs? I think you know very well what thoughts I have about you; but I cannot speak clearly of them to you until you let me see they would be agreeable to you. Well, you will not let me find that out. One hour you lif' me up to where I begin to think you will be not displeased if I speak of what I feel; and the next hour, you send me down to where I find nothing but a confusion in my mind. You see, I am a little baffle' and not very happy; it seems to me I have no advantage over even the Bastoni. So far as I can tell you have this same treatment for any man whatever."
"Good gracious!" Claire exclaimed. "You are a serious boy! And you must think I'm a very uninventive sort of person, if I have only the one trick to show all gentlemen! Indeed, I'm not the same to the Bastoni that I am to you! They're only fun for me, don't you see? They amuse me because they're so foreign and different—I really let 'em hang around partly to listen to their funny accent. Mother and I scream over them when we're alone! They haven't had the advantage of a year in London that you had, Arturo. I don't think they've ever been out of Raona."
"Oh, yes," he said dryly. "They go to Naples sometime'."
"Well, that doesn't help their English accent much!" Claire laughed. "You don't think I really care anything about them, do you?"
"You came here with them when I begged you not to do it."
"Just for fun, yes," she said, and then, seeming to become serious, she leaned toward him across the small table. "You don't really mind, do you?"
He looked at her steadily. "Will you let me take you back to your hotel now?"
"I couldn't be that rude to them, I'm afraid," she said, and then, as he laughed shortly, and with some bitterness, she said quickly, "Why don't you stay and dance with me too?"
"No," he answered. "I will not dance here, even with you. Later, I think I could offer you something better. There is another orchestra in Raona; it is just of mandolins and violins and guitars, and I am afraid they play rather sentimental music; but they know how, and the sentiment is pure. They are giving a moonlight concert in the Greek theatre to-night. Will you come with me?"
"It sounds lovely," she said; then she thought that if she went with him she would not be where Orbison could watch her in the corridor after dinner. Therefore she began to look conscientious. "I'm afraid my mother expects me not to go out this evening. I'm afraid I really ought to spend it with her; but you could dine with us, couldn't you? Won't you, Arturo? You will, won't you?"
She entreated him in a pretty and coaxing voice; Arturo was pleased to forget the concert, and accept. "You are very kind," he said. "I can hope that to-night will be one of the ups; so I will go now and dream of it. You are about to be ask' to dance again."
The older Bastoni, in fact, was already bowing before her as Arturo spoke; and Claire jumped up gayly; but gave her table companion a soft glance and a little nod, for au revoir, over the baron's shoulder. Arturo, standing, responded formally, and summoned a waiter to bring his account.
"Liana not stay long," the baron remarked. "I did not ever see 'im in our Salone before. 'E iss very—how you say? Severe? Yes. 'E iss severe young mans."
"Oh, no," Claire laughed. "He isn't severe."
"Not?"
"No; he just looked so to-day," she said, and she added thoughtlessly, "It was only because he didn't want me to come here and he was a little cross."
"'E advice you not to come?" Bastoni asked in a casual and commonplace tone. "Wit' my brozzer?"
His voice was so well modulated to the note of a mild and indifferent inquiry, made merely for the sake of saying something, that she failed to perceive a particular significance in his question. Dance music always made her as light-headed as she was light-footed, her mother sometimes told her with no great exaggeration. "Arturo says this is a terrible joint," she laughed. "I think it's huge fun, myself. There aren't any places like this in Naples, are there?"
"Naple'?" Bastoni said in the same tone of commonplace inquiry. "Liana tell you I go to Naple'?"
"Yes. Don't you?" she asked, a little surprised; and he misinterpreted the slight widening of her eyes—it seemed to him that she was laughing at him secretly. As Eugene Rennie had told his friend in the hotel garden, the Bastoni sometimes sold a ring or a brooch or a necklace to the foreign ladies with whom they danced. The jewel was always represented as an unobtainable antique, a Bastoni heirloom, and after an adroit temptation, the sale was made with the air of indulgent protest. Moreover, the two brothers had hoped to interest Miss Ambler and her mother in the possession of several such heirlooms, though they had even greater hopes than this; but the baron knew that the Neapolitan origin of the jewellery was no longer wholly a secret between him and his brother—the Raonese are devoted gossips, and the truth concerning the Bastoni heirlooms was something of a joke in their cafés. Familiars in Raona, especially Italians, like Liana, might easily know all about it; and the baron guessed that Arturo, for his own purposes, had betrayed him and had warned the American girl. In the morning, evidently, he had begged her not to go to the Salone; then he had come there himself and told her that the brothers dealt in spurious antique jewellery, made in Naples. Arturo was objectionably dangerous politically; but this personal interference was too much.
"Nossing to see in Naple'," Bastoni said, placidly gliding in the tango. "I sink Tunis more interessing. You been Tunis? Not? Zis fine floor for dance on. You sink so?"
Claire nodded gayly, unaware that she had come in contact with one of the undercurrents Arturo had mentioned. All the while, this afternoon, beneath the surface of her thoughts, she was engaged with an undercurrent of her own; and whatever she said to Arturo or to the Bastoni was but inconsequent prattle, wholly without any fruitful significance, she would have sworn. What preoccupied her, happily, and with the forerunning excitement of the approach to an adventure, was that idea she had so merrily charged her mother with putting into her head. In the most picturesque place in the world an intelligent girl oughtn't to find it difficult to arrange a picturesque way of meeting a disabled gentleman, she thought.