The Sightseers

by Laura Spencer Portor

THE SIGHTSEERS

BY LAURA SPENCER PORTOR

MAXWELL followed her along the narrow terrace of the hotel, the Subasio, overlooking the valley. Near the balustrade he noticed the two Englishwomen he had seen in Siena and Florence. He had kept coming across them, always with their guidebooks under their perpetually nearsighted eyes. They had made him more shy than ever about his own guidebook, which he kept whimsically hid in his pocket. He remembered their vocal habit of surprise, perpetual surprise, and the rising inflection. They were typical sightseers, people who made up their minds beforehand what they wanted to see, and then proceeded assiduously to see it, missing all the essential beauty.

Juliet Claflin drifted past them now to where the stone steps led to the lower terrace, and seated herself on one of these. Maxwell took his place on the step below at her feet.

"I believe I like Assisi better than any place I've seen," he said at last.

She put her hands together in her lap, with a little quick movement.

"Ah, my Assisi!"

"Mine, too," he said, a little eagerly.

She shook her head. "Not as it is mine."

"Why?" He turned his face toward her.

"I think," she said, "it is because you seek. You have sought out Assisi because of a kind of preconceived idea of it. You have come prepared to find it thus or so, as sightseers do."

He made an odd little grimace of distaste in the starlight. In view of the tiresome little English ladies and what he had been thinking of them, she had hit upon an amusingly unpleasant accusation. But he was in no mood to argue. In the half light of the stars the lovely outline of her grace gave him a sensible pleasure. She was as different from other women as Assisi was different from other places, and as much more appealing. He had realized this the first time he saw her, when he had met her and Fra Felice a week before in the cloisters of the Convento and they had stopped to speak with him. That was the beginning of their acquaintance which had progressed easily and naturally enough. He had been in Italy only a month, and in Assisi for the first time, whereas Italy was rather her adopted country, and Assisi was like home to her. She returned to it, sometimes in the summer as now, but always in the spring and in the fall—"at the two perfect moments," she had told him, "when the grape is in bloom, and later when it is gathered."

"What a night!" she said, looking up at the vast, starlit dome. "What a night! I left my poor old uncle asleep. Isn't it strange that to the old sleep is better than to watch the stars pass over the Umbrian Valley?" She ran her fingers softly among the leaves of the vine that clung to the wall beside her. "Feel how cool! Ah, my Italy!"

The voice of one of the little English ladies could be heard now, tentative, a little deprecating:

"I'm not sure, really. The authorities seem to differ, but my book says the crypt is considered more interesting."

His companion turned to him.

"Hear them!" she said. "Hear them talking of Assisi! As if, with all their seeking, they could ever catch so much as a glimpse of it!"

"And you?" Maxwell said. "What does Assisi mean to you?"

"It means Saint Francis," she said, quickly, "and his Italy. 'If you wish truly to name this place,'" she quoted, "'call it not Assisi, but call it rather the East, because of the sun that rose here.'"

"I'll call it the East, if you like," he said, leaning toward her with a little quick devotion, "but rather as Shakespeare did. Do you remember?

"What light is that through yonder casement breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun."

But she appropriated to herself none of his manner of saying it. She had a way of taking compliment for granted, the way the foot takes for granted the road or grass it rests upon. It was indeed her delicately sovereign accustomed air, as though men had always paid her homage, that was half her charm.

He drew his eyes away from her and looked instead across the valley, that was filled with dim starlight.

"You will go, to-morrow," he said, moodily.

"Yes, and very early, before the sun is up, and before my uncle and his man-servant are awake. But there is Italy, all of Italy left you, and the heart of her to learn to know—but not through any guidebook."

"Show me Italy," he said, quickly. "Be my guide!"

She fell in with his mood. "Close your eyes. Have you closed them?"

"Yes."

"Now think of those who inhabit Italy to make its glory; think, for instance, of the Madonnas, all of them in gold and purple and blue and red, with the halos about their brows and holding the Christ Child on their breasts—for centuries. Do you see them?"

"Yes."

"That is Italy. And the angels of the Annunciation, so many, so many. Some of them bearing palms, some of them lilies in their hands. And all the women of Italy, too, of the olden time, they who loved and died and yet remain. And the bells of the cities; and the mountains and the valleys, and the ruins without name, and the oleanders—that is Italy. Do you suppose any of these things can be put in a guidebook? What the travelers see is only the outward semblance. They see merely what they want to see or expect to see, or have been told to see. They have no insight into the real Italy, into the real soul of her. They are sightseers merely; that is all."

He remembered whimsically how his delightfully reserved and conventional mother had made out a list for him of things he really must see in Italy.

The terrace was empty now. The painstaking little Englishwomen had gone indoors to bed, probably, so as to rise the earlier for to-morrow's sightseeing.

Maxwell found himself possessed by a strange unrest. This woman seated on the step above him was like an allegorical Italy herself, but near and human and elusive. The edges of her dress touched his arm as they flowed past him, white and mystical. There were oleanders at her belt.

They had stood on the hillside together that afternoon, above the town, and she had called his attention to the tiled roofs clustered around the chaste square tower of Santa Chiara; and below and beyond to the valley, with its fields garlanded with vines festooned from acacia to acacia; and the one simple road, running so white across it, as direct as Saint Francis. And the domes of Santa Maria, and the little houses kneeling about it like pilgrims; and on beyond and beyond, the beautiful distance; and to the right, all yellow and red and gold in the sunset, the Convento of the Minori.

It seemed she was following his thought.

"All those beautiful things we saw at sunset are gone now, melted in the night, like pearls in wine, and that wine, Italy."

"It is you who are Italy!" he broke in, impulsively.

But she had already risen.

"Do you know I think it must be getting quite late. The others have gone indoors long ago."

When they came to the casement window, which was the only entrance on to the terrace, they found the shuttered blind of it closed. He shook it slightly, testing it.

"Good heavens! It's locked!"

He laughed, as a child does who finds something that frightens it slightly, yet pleases it.

She tried it also. "But there is a bell."

He found it and rang it. They could hear the shadowy tinkle of it like faint laughter in some dark distance.

He rang again and they waited; then still again.

"There is no way in but by this door, as you know. What do you wish me to do? I suppose we can rouse the servants if we ring long enough or knock on the blind, but not without rousing the guests also."

She weighed the matter. "I should have remembered that they go to bed early in this little place. But it is nothing. The night is very short now. I was shut out once before like this, and I stayed quite happily there on the steps. I must have slept two or three hours with my arm and head on the ivy. I should like to do so again. I remember how surprised the old fat waiter was when he let me in in the morning. You might have supposed I was a spirit."

It flashed through Maxwell's mind what the Englishwomen and the other guests might think if this happening ever came to their ears; what his mother, too, would say, or not say, in that delicate, severe way of hers, should she ever hear of it.

"He is a sympathetic old soul, that waiter," his companion said. "Once he was over his surprise, he didn't think it strange at all. I think he knows the soul of Italy."

Maxwell stood aside to let her pass by him, with a slight shame at having questioned her wisdom or her wish.

They returned to the steps and she made room for him in the old place. As she bent aside the odor of the oleanders she wore was left close to him, and he drew it in. The very breath of Italy it seemed. He remembered that he had seen occasional oleanders, but never any like these that grew in this land. Women he had seen, too, all his life, but not before a woman like this.

He turned longingly to her. It seemed good to be at her feet. Some enchantment, some spell of her loveliness was all about him and ran in his veins.

"I have you to thank for showing me Italy and all this loveliness." He glanced over the dim valley below them. "It's infinitely better than sightseeing."

He took his red guide from his pocket. It was a fat, comfortable looking book, bound about with a broad elastic. He turned it over whimsically.

She put out her hand and took it from him.

"Ah, your red guidebooks! your fearful red guidebooks! Some day—shall I prophesy?—you will have no need of them ever, ever again. In view of that, shall I drop this one over the wall, there below in the little lettuce and radish patch that used to be the garden of the Minori? Shall I?"

Her hand lingered over the edge of the wall, hesitating, like a person.

"As you choose," he said, watching her with keen, half-amused interest.

Suddenly her fingers opened. In an instant there was a thud and a slight crashing of leaves below. He laughed softly, and she brought back her empty hand, and held it out to show him.

"Are you sorry?"

"Not a bit in the world," he laughed, lightly. "Only, now, I shall not know where to find the house where Michael Angelo lived, nor where Dante was born, or the seat where he sat, or the corner where Gemma—"

She interrupted him. "Ah, well, then I'm glad I threw it away."

She closed her eyes, suddenly solemn. Her hands lay loose in her lap, her head was thrown back, like one who with shut eyes sees some vision. It was such a pose, fine and spiritual, Maxwell remembered, as Rossetti had given his Beatrice.

She put her hands together quickly in her lap, "Oh, Italy? my Italy! Do not think me foolish. Some day, perhaps, she will be your Italy, too."

"Be my Italy," he said, impulsively. Immediately he would have withdrawn it, as something absurd, nearly frivolous, such a thing as men say easily and with light gallantry to women of another type. But it seemed she had not heard him, so far and gently withdrawn from him did she seem.

"What makes Italy so much yours," he urged, "not mine?"

"Sightseeing!" she said, with whimsical promptness. "As I said before, you come choosing what you will see, seeing not what is really here, but what others have told you is here. And my beautiful Italy shows you only what you want to see, and no more. The soul of a land is like the soul of a person; it is shy, terribly shy, easily mistaken. You have never thought of that?"

He did not answer. Perhaps he had; he did not know. There was a spell about her that robbed him of the wish to argue or defend himself. He had a mad thought that he would like to go down on his knees to her, or put his head on her lap and give himself up completely to the comfort and protection of her loveliness. Instead, he remained as he was, with his easy dignity and reserve and his easy, impeccable manner, that manner which his mother had with so many tendings cultivated, in his boyhood years, training him toward homage to herself and all women, as a young grapevine is lifted from running at will in the rank field to a prepared arbor placed thus or so, beneath which, in times to come, women shall walk graciously protected, or shall pause to pluck offered pleasure or to break refreshment on the lips delicately, in passing.

There was a faint sound far off of a few frogs, otherwise nothing. The valley was cool now, and the sweet breath of it came drifting toward them. The whole night had shifted a little to the west. The odor of some unknown flower came up from the terrace below, like a song that moves in the memory, too subtle to be voiced; and, warm at the girl's belt, the oleander blooms betrayed them selves, they also perfumedly in the silence.

"It is late now," she said. "I shall stay here. I like it better. There is a bench right below by the lime tree. I'm sure you can sleep well there."

"I shall see you early before you leave," he said, rising, with his slight, habitual formality. "Must I go?"

"Yes, I think so. And in case I should slip away in the early, early morning, before you waken, good-by." She put out her two hands, with a gentle impulse. "No; Addio! 'I give you to God!' That is better! That is my Italy speaking. And perhaps some day—if the gods are good—it will be your Italy, too."

He stooped and kissed first one hand and then the other, as they rested in his own.

"If you need me for anything," he said, with gentle gravity, "a word would bring me; not only now, but always."

"Grazie." She drew her hands away slowly and a moment later watched him go down the steps from her. Once he turned, and she put her hand out with a little gesture of greeting and dismissal, and a smile.

In the terrace below, stretched full length on the bench, he could see a little of her dress and the curve of her shoulder above the wall. He kept his eyes on them for a long while, as one watches a star. Once he saw her raise her head and look up at the heavens, then a little later she moved so that he could see nothing of her. He waited for a long while for the glint of her dress to reappear, but it did not. At last he turned his attention to the stars, with the thought of her.

Looking up at them, the earth seemed to fall away on all sides. The night bent over him like a woman whose quiet look searches the face of a loved sleeper. Above him was the girl who was, to him, Italy—above him, only a few feet away, a few stone steps to be climbed—that was all. The nearness of her was a real thing that laid hold on his senses, and made nothing of time. If he could have remained there always near her in the starlight; never to touch her—he would be content never to touch her—but to hold her dear as one holds one's soul dear, above the flesh. The thought of it was like moonlight through a forest, lending a beauty to his nature, a mystery, a worthiness to life, that his daytime purposes did not see. He remembered his home, his mother, the well-trained servants, and it all seemed to him infinitely far away. Once, well into the night, he got to his feet and crept softly up the steps to see if there was anything he could do to serve her. He paused three steps below her to await a sign. But there was none. Her head was pillowed on her arm. One hand lay still, white, in the leaves of the vine on the wall. He recognized in a dark blotch against her waist the oleander flowers. He was not conscious of how long he remained there; once he reached out and just touched with reverent fingers the hem of her dress that lay white on the stone of the steps below her. She did not stir. She was asleep as Italy all about her was asleep. He had a sense, suddenly, of vastness. He and she and Italy—under the stars together!

Then at last he felt his way softly down the steps, blinded a little by his feeling, as a man finds his way, after a great moment, out of a church.

When he wakened it was late dawn. He remembered and started up, ashamed to have slept so long. The valley was still cool, but the last veil was being withdrawn. The peasants had been in the field since the first light. The vine swinging from the low pergola above him caught on his shoulder and followed him slightly like a detaining hand, then returned to its place trembling. Had she gone? When he got to the foot of the stone steps he saw she was not there.

On the upper terrace the casement window stood open. No one was about. He went through the lower hall. As he reached the door the fat, duck-faced waiter opened it and came in from the street.

"Tell me"—Maxwell drew one hand down over the back of his head, hesitating, like one asking a question he perhaps should not ask—"has the signora gone? She was to leave early this morning."

"Si, signor, an hour ago. Tonio and the old woman, her maid, went with her."

Maxwell turned away full of indecision. He went to the steps at the end of the terrace to test the scene once again. He looked about him; he went down a step or two, stooped and picked up a single oleander blossom. Its watery pinkness was crushed here and there at the edges to brown, but as he put it on his palm and smelled of it it gave out still an exquisite odor.

He left, himself, that afternoon for Perugia. Despite the fact that she had managed so perfectly to keep an invisible wall between him and her, to whose presence he had in his own manner consented; despite the fact that she had rebuked him for a sightseer, he carried the thought of her persistently, intimately, in his heart everywhere after that, with that excessive kindness that is unadmitted love.

The summer had gone, and the fall, and now it was early winter. No word had come to Maxwell from the girl who had stood before all the Madonnas in his vision, and led in her beauty all the angels of the Annunciation. Often he remembered the word —hers of all others—"Grazie"—and sometimes he relived the moment when she had stood before him, with her two hands fully and warmly in his, and had said, "Addio." Occasionally he took down an Italian book and read in it.

As soon as the spring opened he was going back to Italy. She would be in Assisi in the spring. He would be there also. He would present himself punctual as the season. There would be—he smiled at the thought—a preordination in their meeting. They would come together in those perfect days with a kind of inevitability, as grape bloom and almond flower, without will of their own, keep inevitable tryst, and meet from far causes, deep as life, without prearrangement. They would come toward each other like stars which from far courses hurry fatefully to their appointed trysting places in the spring.

And he would open to her then his heart as he had not been able to open it that one perfect summer night. Why? Because, as she had apprehended, the most of us are only sightseers, after all, seeing in one another's lives only what we desire to see, or have been taught by the guidebooks of our miserable conventions to expect. Here was a woman incomparable, and he and she had spent marvelous hours together, but had spent them stupidly, unfruitfully, as tourists spend time in seeing strange cities; knowing no more of each other's inner aspirations and dreads and delights than those little chanting Englishwomen knew of Assisi. He had acted toward her in every way as a well-bred man of her own well-bred class would act—no more. And what had they talked of that even so much as touched on the realities and the depths of life? Yet they had spent that night, that incomparable night alone under the same sky, in the presence of sacred beauty, like chosen souls favored beyond all hope by the gods.

Now he knew. No such mistake would be possible again. He would laugh away the barriers of convention. He would speak as it is given a man to speak who has endured the eyes of rebuking memory, and bowed under the scourge of folly, and has come thereby somehow into his heritage. He would say: "Reveal yourself to me. Be mine wholly. I am a poor pilgrim enough, God knows! but I have glimpsed you, poor as I am. I have guessed the hidden incomparable beauty of you. And you, whether you admit it or not, have seen deep into me; and we are bound by irrefragable bonds to reveal our hearts each to the other. Come! Say you love me. It cannot be otherwise. I stood for a little while, that night you slept, within a sanctuary. We are two souls meant and destined for each other—we who wasted in silences and unimportant comment the most perfect hours, and slept, like the guards of Peter, when the Angel of Deliverance came and opened the prison gates all about us. Well, they are open again now, thank God! It is spring in Italy, and you and I are here. And Italy is mine and you are mine—and it cannot be—it cannot be otherwise."

All this surged in his thought as the sea surges in shells, whenever, remembrance of their separation becoming unendurable, he lent his ear again to memory of her.

He found a strange shadowy comfort in the distinct discomfort of poking about on four successive rainy, bleak days among musty, second-hand book shops, trying to find a book Fra Felice had one day wished he might own. Maxwell had said lightly at the time, "Maybe I can pick up a copy of it for you some day in America," and she, rather than Fra Felice, had turned to him with delight, "Oh, could you?"

He found it at last, wrapped it up, first putting his card with his address between the flyleaves. On it he wrote a casual message: "This is the book you wanted, is it not? Good wishes."

When she went back to Assisi in the spring, if by any chance she should arrive before he did, Fra Felice would tell her—and she would think of him suddenly with tenderness—and presently he himself would be there.

So, planning with a splendid audacity for the days he would spend ere long in the city of her heart, he went over again the night spent on the terrace of the Subasio, and smiled, remembering how she had shown him her empty hand to indicate he had irrevocably lost his red guidebook.

One evening, several weeks later, when he came back to his study, an envelope addressed in a foreign hand lay on his table awaiting his leisure. In it were two letters; one from Fra Felice, written on the paper of the Sacro Convento e Basilica d' Assisi:

My dear Friend,—I received the book with great my pleasure. You have been very kind against me and I thank you.

I hope that you are very well; the same is about me.

Maxwell stopped to smile at the quaint wording. The letter brought back everything—Italy, Assisi, all that these meant to him.

He read on:

Here at Assisi in the winter one is too badly; it is windy and it rains much often. The hotels are almost empty because the passengers are very few, and therefore, in Assisi is now much misery and all wish the spring.

I have seen the signora. She was much ill and came to Assisi during a fortnight. Her uncle, the old signor, was dead. I was with her on the terrace; we read much often. She took great her joy to see the people gathering of the grapes. Then I must be sent to Padua and Pisa and Venice for the church of St. Francis. My brother, Giovanni Batista, was in my place beside her. When my return the signora was gone. The brother Giovanni Batista and the old woman say both she died without pain.

Maxwell got up sharply, dazed as by a sudden blow. It was some moments before he could read on:

She slept one night and waked up with God. Two days before that, she wrote an epistle to you which I send. I should have send it before.

Thanking you again very much, and with best my regards, I remain,

P. Felice Cenzi,
Assisi—Sacro Convento.

He drew his hand across his eyes, as though to brush away some nightmare or incredible horror. He could hear his mother stirring in her room across the hall from his. By and by, hardly knowing what he did, he went to his door and locked it, as against some further and terrible power, then went back to his chair and sat down and put his head in his hands, not daring yet to touch or read the unopened letter. It was nearly midnight, indeed, at last, when with icy hands he raked the coals into a blaze, and read:

Amico Caro,—I have thought so often of you, but never more than to-day. Yesterday the old fat waiter, triumphant, yet very humble (you will remember just how), brought me, what do you think!—your red guide book! He had rescued it long before from the radishes and lettuce. You see, it has your name in it. He knew I should return here, and he remembered that you and I were friends, so he kept it for me; and now it is mine.

Oh! your red guidebook that my fingers dropped over the wall that night! I looked it through and you know what I found. On the flyleaves, and here and there throughout, in your handwriting, all those lines from the great poets who have loved my Italy. I hung over them like a shamed, adoring child.

And then you know what I found besides when I turned to Siena, and Val d'Arno, and Assisi, and the rest. The verses here and there, so brief, but all so exquisite, so completely understanding, with your own initials set down under them. Oh, my dear! How could I have missed knowing that under the outward, conventional ways of you, you were a poet, and that you had a vision beyond my own for the beauty of Italy?

Yet I think I did know in some dim way—because with you I was so content, so perfectly at peace, as I have been with no one else in the world, ever. You remember my telling you you were only a sightseer of Italy, my Italy! I could laugh now at the crudeness of that ! And all the while that we talked it was I who was a sightseer, and there was your heart, unrevealed, like a locked city.

(He started, as he read, as though she had laid a hand on him. She was indeed the very lady of his soul who so understood him, whose very figures of speech were his own! What nightmare was this that separated him from her at the very instant that it gave her now completely to his keeping?)

I think you even liked my haughty ways; yes, and my conventional well-bred ones, and even my arrogancy. These are manners that men are taught to respect. They stand for certain things in women. You expect them of us, if we belong to a certain class; are prepared to find them, and admire them more than frankness, quite the way those little English ladies were prepared to like the crypt better than the nave, because their guidebooks say they should.

Will you like as well the real soul of me that stands so humble in this letter and bows down, adoring, before the intimate beauty of yours?

I shall never have the answer from you. But it does not matter. It is enough to be writing you this, in which I place in your hands, bending down to put my lips against them, the key to the city of my heart.

(Then it was as though she would not leave with him any sadness.)

Fra Felice has gone to Padua. His brother Fra Giovanni, a patient old man, reads to me each day. The old fat waiter is as attentive as ever (you remember the day we were late to dinner because we must look again and again at the valley in the sunset!), and in these days he turns so kind a face toward me.

Addio—a rivedere!

Some bitter wind of the spirit seemed suddenly to shake and strip the leaves of his life from him. He felt now that he was grown old, and his youth was gone like an irrecoverable season of memoried plenty. What bare boughs, what storms and freezings lay ahead of him. Then he returned passionately to her simile and his own: What sightseers they had been, he and she! What sightseers, both of them!

Across the hall, his mother, with a glance at his door, at last closed her own. It was his custom to come to her room for a few words with her, and to kiss her good night. But these were things she never forced nor insisted upon. She was a woman with very definite and fixed standards of what the relationship between men and women and sons and mothers should be. If he forgot to-night, he would but remember the better the next night, she thought. He had done so before.