The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg/Chapter 11
ON THE morning following Mr. Winnery's extraordinary attack of romanticism he awakened slowly and lay abed for a long time after the goitered Maria, maidservant of twenty years, had come in and flung open the shutters. He awakened conscious that he was feeling exceedingly well and freed of the usual torpor caused by the combination of a bad liver and the wretched climate of Brinoë. He was aware that the wind from Africa had died out altogether and that in its place there was a cool fresh breeze that changed the brilliant sun and blue sky from a nightmare into a delight. It was odd, he thought, how well he felt, considering that he had been up walking the streets on the night before until after midnight. It occurred to him that perhaps you could break habits without inviting calamities. Perhaps breaking habits made life more exciting. It was a thing he had never tried before—this exciting way of living.
And then his eye fell upon the telegram, and he suddenly felt even happier. He remembered that now he could leave Brinoë forever. He would not have to be buried in the Protestant cemetery, among all the people who had bored him for twenty years. He would not have to rest through all eternity beside someone like old Mrs. Whitehead. He could now travel everywhere and anywhere, always seeking with the bright hope of an incurable romantic some spot that would be as paradisiacal as it was reported to be by poets and old ladies and tourist circulars. Aunt Bessie was dead, God bless her.
He rose, and before doing the exercises which kept his waist measure within moderation, and his liver in action, he went to the window and looked out. Below him in the little square the usual things were going on. There were bony horses and cab drivers in varnished leather hats, three English ladies in tweeds and picture hats, armed with umbrellas, Baedekers and cameras. An elderly American couple reading out of a book about the tower of the church opposite. They read a paragraph and then regarded the tower again, as if uncertain which things had been regarded by Mr. Ruskin as beautiful and which things had not. A brown-robed monk came down from the high monastery of Monte Salvatore. A herd of goats with the shepherd in a black smock playing a tune on a strange pipe held in the hollow of his hand. A Ford automobile with nine Italians. Though it was early morning they were dressed in full evening clothes, clearly bound for a wedding or a christening. A woman leaned out of a window and screamed at the goatherd. He halted the flock, put away the pipe and set himself industriously to milking one of the she-goats.
It was a delightful place, after all, Brinoë. Perhaps it wasn't as bad as he had thought. Now that he was rich he could keep a larger apartment and have a villa somewhere in the hills. Suddenly it occurred to him that it must be later than he thought and regarding the tower opposite he discovered that it was already ten o'clock. It couldn't be as late as that. The clock was Italian and therefore probably an hour or two wrong. It was never correct with the sun, and to Italians such things didn't matter. But his own watch showed him that the clock was not fast (which he knew would be unusual in Brinoë), but slow by half an hour. It was half past ten. Maria had not called him and for the first time in twenty years he had overslept. For a moment he experienced a wild desire to summon Maria and abuse her, but something about the square, the sky and the sight of the wedding party in the Ford made him soften. He decided to do nothing about Maria's dereliction. It was odd, indeed, how well he felt, and how young and spry.
Then he saw coming round the tower of the church the tall awkward figure of a nun, walking in great haste, her full black skirt swinging with her masculine stride. "It is the crazy one," he thought, "Sister Annunziata." As she crossed the little square toward his house, he saw that she was smiling and talking to herself in the most animated fashion as she walked. She turned and disappeared through the archway by the old Palace of the Podestas.
The sight of her brought to mind Miss Annie Spragg. Well, it was an interesting case and he would have to go further into it. If he continued in his present health and spirits he would be able to complete "Miracles and Other Natural Phenomena" within a year or two. He must see Mrs. Weatherby again and go further into the history of Miss Spragg at a time when they would not be interrupted by the presence of such frivolous and worldly people as Father d'Astier and the d'Orobelli woman.
At that moment he saw the black and red motor swing from under the archway and cross the square. In it were the Princess d'Orobelli and a man whom he did not know, a dark handsome man who was not Father d'Astier. "Ah," thought Mr. Winnery, with a sudden warm feeling of being a worldly devil, "that is why she is in Brinoë at this time of year. That is it . . . a lover. A rendezvous." It made him feel almost a gay dog.
It made him also think, "If she is not too old for love, neither am I. A man lasts much longer than a woman." And that in turn made him think of Miss Fosdick and reflect again that now he was rich he could do anything he pleased. With money you could buy anything. Perhaps he might rescue Miss Fosdick from the dragon's den and marry her. Now that he was rich he would have to upset a good many habits and upsetting habits it seemed did not bring disaster. On the contrary, he never felt better. . . . Dear me, it was an odd world.
He decided that he would hire the fiacre once more and drive out to the Villa Leonardo before making up his mind entirely about Miss Fosdick. It was a pleasant day and the drive would be refreshing. He could wring more information from Mrs. Weatherby, if he could prevent her long enough from talking about herself. And perhaps he could have a word alone with Miss Fosdick. He might ask permission to call upon her. Yes, he would need a wife now that he was rich. But he must be cautious. At fifty-three one had no time to indulge in mistakes.
He tried to pretend to himself that he was being merely practical and not at all sentimental, but at the same time he experienced again that pleasant tickling sensation of satisfaction over his interest in her. It was no more than the shadow of desire. It flattered him that there was a certain . . . well, grossness . . . in the feeling. He had a most stimulating awareness of adventure.
The door opened and fat Maria came in, looking, decided Mr. Winnery, as if she had swallowed a canary. That, thought Winnery, is because she has been guilty of a dereliction of duty and expects a scolding.
"Buon giorno," he said brightly. "Buon giorno."
Maria looked somewhat astonished. Feeling a little encouraged to gossip, she asked if Signor Winnery had heard the latest about Signorina Spragg. Miss Annie Spragg was being buried today and the burial was causing the local church authorities a great deal of trouble and uncertainty. The question was a purely technical one. No one could decide whether the miraculous scars should be officially recognized as a miracle and the body of Miss Annie Spragg considered as that of a potential saint or whether she ought to be treated simply with the conventional respect due a devout follower of the Church. There was even a party among the more bigoted older priests which held that there was not even any proof that she was a Roman Catholic and that it was not proper to defile consecrated ground with the body of a heretic. And there was always that ancient decree of Pope Sixtus IV issued against Saint Catherine of Siena, Sixtus IV holding that the miracle of the Stigmata was the exclusive monopoly of Saint Francis and that it was a censurable offense to report it of anyone else. The whole thing threatened to grow into a scandal. Miss Annie Spragg had no money, so Sister Annunziata was paying for the funeral. Did Mr. Winnery know who Sister Annunziata really was? Well, it turned out that she was born the Princess d'Orobelli, and she was put into a convent because her family saw no chance of ever marrying off so ugly a woman.
Maria paused for breath and then went on. Had Signer Winnery heard about Father Baldessare, that little fat priest attached to San Giovanni? Yes, the one who had witnessed the miracle and found Sister Annunziata lying senseless after she had been visited by Saint Francis. Well, Father Baldessare had left the Church and was going from town to town, on foot, to preach in the market places. He was going to purify Christianity, she said, and begin all over again. That was a silly idea. How could there be any Christianity without the Church? Wasn't the Church Christianity?
"He has always been a little cracked," she said, "and now he seems gone out of his mind."
She had heard all this at the market. "Ah," thought Winnery, who had quite forgotten that he was still clad only in an Italian night shirt, embroidered in red cotton, "no wonder she was late."
Maria walked to the window on the opposite side of the room and stood looking down into the market. "Look," she said, pointing down. "There he is now."
Winnery crossed over to the window. In one corner of the market by the fountain of dolphins and serpents there was a crowd of cooks and chambermaids and cab drivers. On the edge stood the three English ladies with the Baedekers, umbrellas and cameras. One had placed her hand behind her ear in order to hear more distinctly. They surrounded a fat short figure clad in a brightly checked suit of the kind affected in London by bookmakers. In one hand the figure held an umbrella. The other hand was being used in emphatic but ineffective gestures. The crowd stood staring up at him, amused and astonished, but aware that it was being treated to an entertainment which cost nothing. The speaker's voice was weak and shrill so that it did not carry above the tumult of excited bargaining that was in progress on all sides. After a time the cooks began to drift away one by one to buy their leeks and spinach and potatoes. It was Father Baldessare, turned to plain Fulco Baldessare, leader of the new reformation.
Winnery, watching the spectacle, had a swift fleeting vision of humanity struggling to extricate itself from some colossal muddle. Then he returned to his breakfast, which he ate with a hearty appetite.
From the moment of Miss Fosdick's hysterical flight into the great world life began to annoy Mrs. Weatherby. For twenty years she had managed to subdue its annoyances because dear Gertrude had seen to every tiresome detail—the packing, ordering the food, shipping trunks, buying tickets, giving orders timidly to servants—in short, doing all the things which might have broken in upon the spiritual quiet of the Great Religious Experimenter. It had become a system so thorough and so monotonous that Mrs. Weatherby had quite forgotten the grey existence of such troublesome details. Now that her slave was gone, her life collapsed about her ears in a confusion of petty annoyances.
Margharita wanted to know what Giovanni should bring from the market. The men who were building a cesspool found that the cement was of the wrong kind. Should Giovanni buy a new tire for the Ford? Lulu, the elder Pomeranian, spit up her breakfast. There was no more sunflower seed for Anubis. It was as if Mrs. Weatherby's star had slipped into some profoundly disastrous conjunction. She remembered with terror that her horoscope foretold disaster and disappointments during the six months beginning with August.
And she was forced to face and solve all these calamities while suffering the greatest anguish of mind. Had she not been betrayed by the one creature on whom for twenty years she had lavished the wealth of affection and kindness of a mother? For twenty years she had been harboring an ingrate, nay, a viper, at her bosom. She kept saying this over and over again to herself while she squabbled with Margharita and dosed Lulu with castor oil. And all those cruel things which Gertrude had said the night before. She must have been thinking them in secret for years while she lived on the bounty of her doting Aunt Henrietta. And to go away without a word, not even telling her Aunt Henrietta she had gone.
"But she will return," she kept telling herself. "She will return in good time, perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow. What is there for her to do but to return?"
And when she returned she would be more controllable than before. After her ingratitude and treachery she would seek to do penance. Perhaps it would be better in the end. If there was a divine law, people suffered for such behavior.
"I must not think evil thoughts," she told herself, "because evil thoughts make us old and tired and bring on the twilight."
No, she would be sweet and forgiving when Gertrude returned; sweet and forgiving, she repeated to herself, but firm as well. She must not give in too easily.
Suddenly it occurred to her that her misfortune might have to do with the strange statue found in the cesspool. From the very beginning she had disliked it as an obscene and disturbing thing, and now since Miss Fosdick was gone and there was no other object at hand on which to vent her ill temper she began to hate the statue. There was no doubt that such an image aroused the lower nature. It was perhaps the sight of it that had caused Gertrude to behave in so idiotic a fashion with the Duke of Fonterrabia. Perhaps it was the statue that had driven her to run off like a madwoman. She might, she thought, give the statue to a museum, or, what was better still, she might bury it again, even deeper than it had been before. Yes, that was it. She would have the workmen bury it once more, and then Gertrude would return and Lulu would recover and all these troubles would disappear. Perhaps it was silly to think such things, but you could never tell about superstitions. Sometimes they were quite right. She would not have the thing about leaning against the ilex, watching everything that passed in the garden.
Presently she began to worry again about the Annie Spragg affair. Isolated there on the side of the mountain she could not discover what was happening, nor (what would have been the most valuable of all knowledge) the attitude the Church was taking toward the miracle. She was aware that she must discover this before she spoke again to Father d'Astier. If the Church looked upon Annie Spragg as an imposter then she must wash her hands of Annie Spragg and support the Church by telling all the dark things she knew about Annie Spragg. If the Church chose to regard the affair in the light of a miracle then she must espouse the cause of Miss Annie Spragg and appear as her friend. It was all perplexing enough without having the ungrateful Gertrude disappear just when she was most needed.
At noon she ate nothing but retired to her room for a siesta. In her agitation she had not closed an eye all night. More than that, Gertrude had not been there to will away the currents of evil directed against her by her enemies. Lying awake and alone in the house she had kept hearing ominous noises in the garden and in the rooms below.
It was four o'clock when she awakened at last and went down into the garden to attend to the business of reburying the hateful statue. When she saw it again, the halo of evil surrounding it struck her even more forcibly. It was only after the reflection of the wakeful night that she realized its full significance. Why, she saw now that portions of the statue had been stained, perhaps nineteen centuries earlier, in an obscene fashion.
In bad Italian and with the aid of much pantomime, she finally conveyed to the workmen her idea. When at last they understood her they exploded in a wild burst of protest. She was unable to understand any of it, though she understood well enough that they were in a tremendous state of excitement. They all screamed at her at once. In the very midst of the uproar Pietro, the old goatherd, who lived on the hillside below the villa, suddenly appeared bearing two melons and a branch laden with green olives. He was an immensely old man, dirty and unkempt, with a scraggly grey beard and pointed ears that stuck through apertures in the matted long grey hair. He walked with a limp sidewise like a crab. At sight of her he removed his battered hat and gave her a series of grovelling bows.
At first she thought he had brought the melons and olive branch as a gift for herself and touched by the picturesqueness of Italian customs, she quickly assumed the gracious manner of a chatelaine and came forward to receive the offering. But Pietro made it certain that they were not for her. As if he thought that she meant to take them from him by force, he cunningly shifted them behind his back and made a flowery speech, of which she understood not a word. Then his true purpose was revealed. He went past her and laid them at the very feet of the horrid statue. At the same moment, one of the workmen, the bronze-chested Giovanni whose physique had caught the wandering eye of the Princess d'Orobelli, said something to him, and he in his turn began to gibber at the now completely distracted seeress. It appeared that the arrival of Pietro gave them fresh courage. She saw that they intended to prevent her by force from carrying out her plan of doing away with the obscene thing. She was the tenant of this property. She intended to do with it as she pleased. Her fleshy nostrils began to distend in an ominous way. Italians, so volatile by nature, could not imagine the force of a granddaughter of Transcendentalists moved to anger by a long series of torments. And unlike Miss Fosdick, they had never witnessed the full fury of one of her tantrums.
But at the crucial moment there appeared from the opposite end of the garden a whole procession of goats which had faithfully followed Pietro up the stony hill. At the very end of the procession, emerging from the tunnel of greenery, appeared Mr. Winnery, nattily dressed for courting in a checked suit, a new pearl grey hat and lemon yellow gloves.
Mr. Winnery, entering into the cool dark garden, was overcome, as he had been once before, by the certainty that he had lost his mind. He was aware that as the last of a long procession of goats he had made an undignified entrance, but his resentment at this died almost at once before the spectacle of the Great Religious Experimenter surrounded by gibbering Italians who seemed bent upon doing her some bodily violence. Fearful that Miss Fosdick had perhaps already been done away with he hurried forward through the midst of the flock of goats, driving them out of his path with blows of his malacca stick (just purchased on the strength of Aunt Bessie's legacy).
At sight of a male foreigner, even so harmless a male foreigner as Mr. Winnery, the workmen grew silent, and Pietro retired into concealment behind them. Mrs. Weatherby, with a new face composed almost instantaneously, floated forward and greeted him, explaining at the same time that she was having difficulties with the workmen. There was perhaps some confusion owing to their inability to understand each other. Perhaps Mr. Winnery would act as interpreter.
He addressed the workmen and received in reply a perfect torrent of explanation. They all spoke at once and into their soft voices they threw whole gamuts of seduction. It would perhaps never have finished but in the midst of it he turned to Mrs. Weatherby—"They are saying that you must not bury the statue again. It is an ancient god of fertility and if you bury it they say the crops will be blighted and the she-goats barren and the eggs unfertile. They say you will bring calamity on the neighborhood. It is an ancient god of fertility. Priapus, offspring of Dionysus and Aphrodite, or, if you prefer the Asiatic version, of Sabazius and Astarte. They are quite right, though how they know such a thing is beyond me. You will find. . . ."
He would have, like the Italians, gone on for some time explaining the legend of Priapus, but Mrs. Weatherby interrupted. The nostrils had begun again to distend and quiver. She seemed about to snort fire.
"It is my garden," she said quite firmly. "I shall do with it as I like."
"Why not," suggested Mr. Winnery tactfully, "give the thing to a museum?"
"No, I understand about these things. Haven't I devoted my life to studies of the more psychic religions? It is an evil omen and ought to be buried again. I am certain of it. Ever since it was found I have been having misfortunes."
Winnery shrugged his shoulders. He failed to see quite how the seeress could with intellectual honesty support her own superstition and reject the much more ancient one supported by Pietro and his party. That, he supposed, was the common attitude of superstitious and religious people. But he simply turned to the workmen. He told them that the signora wanted the thing buried and that if they chose not to obey her, she would find other workmen. Deciding that they could risk a blight in the future more easily than the loss of a job in the present, they turned back sullenly, but not silently, and began to dig. Pietro made as if to launch a final protest and then fell silent. The goats had by now gathered in a circle about the scene of the conflict, watching it with large round eyes. Mr. Winnery had a fleeting impression that Pietro had winked at him, but he could not be certain, and he could not as a guest of Mrs. Weatherby endanger her prestige by acknowledging the wink.
"Now that we have settled it," said Mrs. Weatherby more calmly, "you must have some tea."
As they started toward the villa Mr. Winnery turned again to regard the statue in disgrace. It was a remarkably fine thing, he thought, and a pity to bury it again. Still, with this eccentric woman, arguments would arrive nowhere. She placed no value upon anything in the world but her own ego. It was a fine thing, the statue. At moments it seemed almost to have a life of its own. Just now in the heat of the afternoon it appeared lascivious and amused as if it were saying, "You may bury me and unbury me a thousand times but you can't be rid of me. I shall be with you always."
It was a pity, thought Mr. Winnery. It seemed to him that the statue had brought him luck. Everything had happened since Miss Annie Spragg had died and the statue was dug up from the cesspool.
"Shoo!" cried Mrs. Weatherby, making threatening gestures and pushing her way through the goats. "Shoo! Shoo!"
They had tea, the same bad tea out of rusty tins that tasted as if it were made of hay, and dried digestive biscuits very nearly as old, thought Mr. Winnery, as the freshly buried statue. Mrs. Weatherby at once struck an attitude in the fake Renaissance chair and began to talk about herself. Anubis the parrot blinked at them and gave out a series of disgruntled croaks. Everything was exactly the same as before save that one of the Pomeranians, instead of yapping, lay with a pallid expression on a Veronese green pillow trimmed with gold, and that the view through the loggia was even more magnificent in the clear transparent air that had followed the dust-laden sirocco. He was aware that there was still no sign of Miss Fosdick nor any reference to her. He reminded himself that it was Miss Fosdick after all whom he had come to see. He did not care to hear any more of the history of Mrs. Weatherby.
Once, however, Mrs. Weatherby did turn aside from her principal subject, but only long enough to ask for the latest developments in the scandalous affair of Miss Annie Spragg. He passed on to her what he had heard that morning from Maria. It was information which only left her where she had been before. He had not, he told her when asked, seen Father d'Astier, although he had seen the Principessa d'Orobelli driving across the square with a stranger, a man, to be exact. This bit of simple information he translated with the slight but meaning inflection that had come to be a habit born of long association with the old ladies of Brinoë.
"A very interesting woman," said Mrs. Weatherby. "I have never before seen an aura so red."
"Ah, you understand auras," murmured Mr. Winnery in a helpless effort to fill in time until he gained the courage to ask where Miss Fosdick was hiding. He was not interested in auras except as nonsense. (It was absurd that a man of his age should be as shy as a schoolboy. Why could he not utter Miss Fosdick's name?)
"Yes, it is a profound and interesting subject."
"Have you noticed my own?" asked Mr. Winnery wildly.
"Oh, yes, I noticed it at once yesterday by its paleness. I had seldom seen so pale an aura. But it has changed today remarkably. It is much redder."
"And what does that signify?"
Mrs. Weatherby simpered. "I don't know that I ought to tell you, Mr. Winnery. Still, you are an intelligent man and will not misinterpret my interest in such things."
"Yes . . . no . . . of course not," murmured Mr. Winnery.
"Red," said Mrs. Weatherby, "indicates passions of the body. I think—" she hesitated for a moment and then plunged. "I think someone, something, some new—shall I say—interest?—has entered your life since yesterday."
"Oh," said Mr. Winnery, somewhat startled. But he was aware again that he was flattered by the change in his aura.
"Green is the color of the passions of the mind. That of course is much worse . . . depraved, one might say." She was peering at him through her glistening pince-nez with a mystical intensity that made him squirm on the hard chair. He saw with terror that she was scrutinizing his aura. "I am glad to see, Mr. Winnery, that there is no trace of green in your aura."
Mr. Winnery murmured his gratitude and said modestly he supposed that that was a thing you could not control and that therefore he ought to take no credit to himself. Secretly he was feeling disturbed for fear that her intensity might increase and throw her into a trance. What could he do with her if she suddenly went into a trance?
She did not. "That is what interested me about the statue," she continued. "It has an aura, Mr. Winnery, a positive, unmistakable aura, and it is a vile mixture of red and green. That is why I thought the thing better buried again at once."
"And what does such a mixture signify?"
"That, Mr. Winnery, I cannot bring myself to tell you. Will you have more tea?"
But Mr. Winnery had done his duty to the social amenities and did not feel called upon to drink a second cup of hay-water.
"But I don't understand, Mrs. Weatherby, how a statue, an inanimate thing, may have an aura. I thought auras were connected, so to speak, with what I suppose you would call the life fluid."
He found himself wondering if Miss Fosdick had been forced to undergo much of this sort of thing, and his sympathy for her deepened and broadened.
"It is an extraordinary case. Doubtless the aura is an accumulation of evil thought directed toward the statue during its worship some centuries ago."
(Mr. Winnery thought, "I must ask after Miss Fosdick and yet how dare I after she has discovered the appearance of red in my aura.") Aloud he said, "I have never had the pleasure of knowing anyone who saw auras. It must be very disconcerting—I mean, always to see not only your friends but their auras as well." He was beginning to be afraid of the woman.
"It is a privilege given to a few," replied Mrs. Weatherby with a certain smugness.
He then asked her about Miss Annie Spragg. He felt, he said, that Mrs. Weatherby had been somewhat constrained yesterday by the presence of Father d'Astier and the Principessa d'Orobelli. With him, of course, it was different. With him she might feel quite free, as with a man of science.
But it was clear that her lips were to remain sealed. She would say nothing. Yet there remained with him the certainty that she knew far more than she chose to tell. At last he rose and made his adieux, filled suddenly with the terrible suspicion that the seeress believed he had come back to the Villa Leonardo because he found her attractive. A certain mincingness had entered her manner. She bridled and held out her little finger as she raised the teacup to her lips. Quite suddenly he was terrified and filled with a sense of panic. What did this extraordinary woman expect from him? For a moment he had the fantastic idea that the stone god (which by now must be safely buried) was having its revenge upon her.
She went with him to the door, snapping her pince-nez back on the gold fleur-de-lis pin attached to her ample bosom and thanking him for the call. She urged him to come frequently. It was a lonely place. They seldom saw many people but of course it was impossible for her to live where the confusion of twentieth century civilization broke in upon her meditations. She would always arrange it so that they could talk without intrusion.
As they reached the garden Winnery saw that the work had been done. The statue was buried again and atop the grave-like mound of reddish earth Pietro had left the olive branch and the two melons as a propitiatory offering. The goats had disappeared.
Wildly he said, "I have not seen Miss Fosdick? I was hoping to say good-day to her."
"She is not here," said Mrs. Weatherby.
There was a pause in which Mr. Winnery found himself at a loss for conversation. At last he said, "I did not know she was going away?" (Why should I know?)
"Yes. She has gone on a holiday, the first, I must say, that she has had in twenty years. I urged her to do it. I felt that she had had quite enough of me. Dear Gertrude is always so devoted. She never wants to leave me for a moment."
This cast Mr. Winnery down. "She must indeed be devoted," he murmured. And then suddenly—"Good-by, Mrs. Weatherby, and thank you for the tea."
At the mouth of the tunnel he turned suddenly, seized by what he felt must be the beginning of madness. If Mrs. Weatherby happened to be looking at his aura she must suddenly see that it had turned flaming red. "When do you think she will return?" he asked.
"I don't know," said Mrs. Weatherby. "That was left open. I told her to stay away as long as she liked. I don't imagine she'll be away long. She has been so devoted for twenty years. A thing like that gets to be a habit. Have you ever noticed, Mr. Winnery, that it is our habits and our friends which give permanence and solidity to life?"
"Quite right, Mrs. Weatherby, quite right."
By breaking habits he had gotten himself into this muddle. Breaking habits by driving in the hot afternoon with the African wind blowing. Breaking habits by going to bed long after midnight. Breaking the habit of regarding people as literary material rather than human creatures. He had made this long trip for nothing. He had not seen Miss Fosdick. He had not had a word with her. He did not even know where she was and he did not know when she would return. He had had a wretched tea and ruined his clothes. The checked suit, the new hat and yellow gloves reeked with the strong smell of goat. But Mrs. Weatherby had clearly been attracted by him. That he could not forget.
Obstacles and difficulties, says an old sentimental proverb, only serve to increase a passion, and the disappearance of Miss Fosdick only served to inflame Mr. Winnery. If Miss Fosdick had been at the Villa Leonardo she might have said or done something which would have upset so precise and finicky a man. There might have been a hole in her stocking or she might have blown her nose too loudly or, being surprised by the sudden call of Mr. Winnery, her hair might have been done sloppily. Since she was not there, none of these things happened and Mr. Winnery left disappointed (which is always good for love) and cherishing only the memory of her richly curving bosom, her nice eyes and her dove-like air. And since, despite himself, he really wanted to believe in the beauty and virtue of Miss Fosdick and really wanted to have his life disturbed and exciting now that his liver troubled him less, he went on believing in these things more and more passionately.
In the days that followed Mr. Winnery grew animated and slept very little, walking a great deal and calling upon Mr. Winnop, the curate, and the few old ladies who remained in Brinoë. He was even seized with a fit of ambition to recover some of that glory he had known a quarter of a century earlier as a literary prodigy and set to work to bring order from the confusion of notes, copyings and false starts which represented the existing state of "Miracles and Other Natural Phenomena." He discovered that love (for he conceded that love was the proper diagnosis of his strange transformation) and the creative instinct possessed an obscure and subtle interrelation.
After much wrangling among the local clergy, Miss Annie Spragg was buried at last in the little cemetery on the far slope of Monte Salvatore. The various parties reached a compromise and it was decided at length that she was to be buried in consecrated ground but without the special attentions which should have gone to a woman who was a potential saint. Nevertheless a large number of the poorer and more ignorant devout made up a disorderly cortège which followed the coffin through the dust all the way from Brinoë to Monte Salvatore. There were in it old men and women, a great many dirty children who looked upon the excursion in the light of an outing, three men who were quite drunk and sang, and even a woman pushing a perambulator. Immediately behind the coffin marched Sister Annunziata, who had disobeyed her superiors and joined the cortège. She still had in her plain face the light of a happiness that did not come of this world. At her side walked Fulco Baldessare, clad in his checkered bookmaker's suit and protecting himself from the brilliant sun with the black cotton umbrella. It was all very gay and dishevelled, in the best Italian tradition.
And when the excitement had died away a little so that Mr. Winnery felt he might undertake his investigation discreetly and without becoming involved, he set out to visit Signora Bardelli. The janitress, he felt, would be able to give him a straightforward and realistic account of what had happened, unmarred and distorted by the trimmings with which more religious and emotional witnesses were certain to decorate the strange case of Miss Annie Spragg.
But Signora Bardelli had disappeared from the Palazzo Gonfarini, and the new janitress, a gaunt, witch-like and very dirty woman who had been among those in the disorderly cortège, proved taciturn and ill-natured. It was only after Mr. Winnery had pressed into her hand a fraction of Aunt Bessie's fortune that she told him what had happened and where the former janitress could be found.
Signora Bardelli, it appeared, had behaved scandalously. No sooner had the body of Miss Annie Spragg been removed from the Palazzo Gonfarini than the janitress began spreading a singular story. She expressed it as her belief that Miss Annie Spragg was not a holy woman at all but that she had been in alliance with the dark powers of fertility during her entire lifetime. Her relics, said Signora Bardelli, were efficacious in the case of barren women. Although she conceded a belief that any of the relics possessed a certain power, she was convinced that its very center was concentrated in the only piece of furniture left behind by the relic-snatchers—the bed upon which Miss Annie Spragg had died. The act of spending a night in this bed had, she declared, a miraculous effect. She fixed a price of forty lira for the privilege and before Father d'Astier, her employer, discovered the outrage she had already accumulated three customers. And then Father d'Astier had come to the palace in person and had thrown her into the street. But she had taken the miraculous bed with her and she was now living in a tiny house in the village of Monte Salvatore, where she had set it up once more and was doing a good business.
Fate, reflected Mr. Winnery, was always drawing him back to Monte Salvatore.
But before going he went to seek out the fat little Father Baldessare and the gaunt Sister Annunziata to gather from them their version of the miracle. The priest had disappeared completely, none knew whither. His former acquaintances only confirmed the gossip of Maria—that he had gone out to bring the world back to the simplicity of Jesus. He had, they believed, now gone completely mad, but since in Italy people paid small attention to crazy people there was nothing to be done about it. At the convent Sister Maria Maddelena told him that Sister Annunziata could see no one. She had been ill for a week and quite out of her head. In her illness she had gone about saying such astounding and scandalous things that they thought it better to keep her in seclusion until the poor thing had recovered her senses.
Mr. Winnery, somewhat cast down, hired a fiacre and set out for Monte Salvatore. He felt that in all the confusion of the superstition and madness it would be refreshing to talk with a woman of hard, common sense like Signora Bardelli.
As Mr. Winnery made his entrance Signora Bardelli was just receiving forty lira from a pretty young peasant woman who had spent the night on the bed of Miss Annie Spragg. The woman was telling her story for the third time. She had been married seven years and although she had prayed to all the saints of fertility there had been no answer to her prayer. Her husband was growing impatient. He already had a child outside of wedlock and he was fonder of this child than of his wife. The woman wept a little and Signora Bardelli assured her with all the authority and brightness of a successful surgeon that from now on everything would be all right.
It was a small room in one of the bilious yellow houses of Monte Salvatore and it stood on the slope of the hill overlooking the lonely valley where the Villa Leonardo perched in its decaying and lonely splendor. In the evening the very shadow of the monastery fell across its doorstep. Unwilling to intrude upon the delicate transactions that were taking place, Mr. Winnery waited just outside the door.
He heard the former janitress giving the young woman earnest advice. Then he heard her selling for ten lira a mixture composed, she said, of amber, laurel and a powder made from the hill viper. This the young woman was to put into her husband's wine every night for seven nights following the next change of the moon. And she sold a charm containing a phial of powder (composition undescribed during the transaction) which she was to wear suspended between her two breasts. If nothing happened within three months Signora Bardelli advised returning to spend another night in the bed of Signorina Spragg. Some cases, she pointed out, were more difficult than others. It all sounded, thought Mr. Winnery, rather like the last consultation he had had with the expensive Doctor Gosse on the subject of his liver.
Then the peasant woman departed and Mr. Winnery brightly made his entrance. He planned to take Signora Bardelli directly into his confidence and so let her understand that he knew she was a shrewd and clever swindler.
His plan failed. The former janitress eyed him at once with suspicion, and even after he had explained his mission and the great work he had undertaken in driving superstition from the world, she warmed only a little. And that faint shade of warmth he divined only when he referred to the superstitions of the Church. She was, however, willing to discuss the case of Miss Annie Spragg and asked him to sit down, giving him to understand that the talk would be in the nature of a consultation and would, of course, call for a fee.
Mr. Winnery, dashed a bit by his reception, thought bitterly, "These free, generous Italians."
It was a square plain room in which dried herbs hung from the ceiling together with strings of garlic and red peppers. The walls, once painted white, were blackened by smoke. At one side there was a row of shelves with pots and jars of many sizes, colors, and descriptions, neatly arranged according to size, and in one corner there was a sort of throne like that in a restaurant. It had a till for receiving money. The whole room was all arranged efficiently, rather in the manner, thought Mr. Winnery, of the office of a specialist who charged five guineas a consultation. Certainly it was an organized business, quite as organized as the Church itself. The room was quite clean.
Mr. Winnery seated himself on a wooden bench opposite the doorway, and Signora Bardelli, taking off her spectacles, seated herself opposite him. It was not until he sat down that he noticed the magnificence of the view. The doorway gave out upon the lonely valley and far off, dimly seen through the haze of heat, he discerned the dark grove of trees which marked the Villa Leonardo.