"You are," said Keith, rather sharply. "Quite a pretty echo. And you ought to be a voice. Follow my prescription, Denis. The Cave of Mercury."
Count Caloveglia remarked:
"What a pity that Latin, as scholars' language, for the definition and registration of ideas, was ever abandoned! It has the incalculable advantage that the meanings of words are irrevocably fixed by authority. New ones could be coined as occasion required. Knowledge would gain by leaps and bounds. There would be a cross-fertilization of cultures. As things now stand, half the intellectuals of this world are writing about matters which, unbeknown to themselves, have already been treated by the other half. One would think that Commerce, which has broken down geographical barriers, might have done the same to political ones. Far from it! In sharpening men's lust for gold, it has demarcated our frontiers with a bitterness hitherto unknown. The world of thought has not expanded; it has contracted and grown provincial. Men have lost sight of distant horizons. Nobody writes for humanity, for civilization; they write for their country, their sect; to amuse their friends or annoy their enemies. Pliny or Linneus or Humboldt—they sat on mountain-tops; they surveyed the landscape at their feet, and if some little valley lay shrouded in mist, the main outlines of the land yet lay clearly distended before them. You will say that it is impossible, nowadays, to gather up the threads of learning as did these men; they are too multifarious, too divergent. A greater mistake could not be imagined. For there is a contrary tendency at work—a tendency towards unification. The threads converge. Medieval minds knew many truths, hostile to one another. All truths are now seen to be interdependent; never was synthesis easier of attainment. Conflict of nationality and language hinders the movement. Mankind at large is the loser. The adoption of a universal scholars' tongue would do much to remove the obstacle. When these Southern races coalesce to form the great alliance which I foresee, when the Mediterranean basin is once more the centre of human activity as it deserves to be, some such plan will doubtless be adopted."
"Your notion would suit me down to the ground," said the bishop, who was a good Latinist. "I would love to converse in the old style with a student from Salamanca or Bergen or Khieff or Padua or—"
Don Francesco gave utterance to some wholly unintelligible speech. Then he observed:
"The student might not be able to catch your meaning, Mr. Heard. I was only talking Latin! You see, we would be obliged to standardize our pronunciation. I wonder, by the way, why the old scholars' language was ever discarded?"
"Patriotism destroyed it," replied the Count. "That narrow modern patriotism of the cock-on-the-dung-hill type."
Mr. Keith began:
"It is an atavistic and altogether discreditable phenomenon—this recent recrudescence of monarchical principles—"
"What did you promise about long words?" playfully enquired the
Duchess, who had just returned.
"I cannot help it, dear lady. It is my mother's fault. She was so very precise. I was carefully brought up."
"That is a pity, Mr. Keith."
"Northern people are very precise," said Don Francesco, folding his gown around his ample limbs. "Particularly in love affairs. We down here, who live in this sirocco, are supposed to be calculating and mercenary in matters of the heart. We want dowries for our daughters—they say we are always coming to the point: money, money! The capacity of an English girl for coming to the point will take some beating. She paralyses you with directness. I will tell you a true story. There was a young Italian whom I knew—yes, I knew him well. He had just arrived in London; very handsome in the face, though perhaps a little too fat. He fell in love with an elegant young lady who was employed in the establishment of Madame Elise in Bond Street. He used to wait for her to come out at six o'clock and follow her like a dog, not daring to speak. He carried a costly bracelet for her in his pocket, and every day fresh flowers, which he was always too shy and too deeply enamoured to present. She was his angel, his ideal. He dreamt of her by day and night, wondering whether he would ever have the courage to address so tall and queenly a creature. It was his first English love affair, you understand; he learnt the proper technique later on. For five or six weeks this unhappy state of things continued, till one day, when he was running after her as usual, she turned round furiously and said: 'What do you mean, sir, by following me about it this disgusting fashion? How day you? I shall call the police, if it occurs again.' He was deprived of speech at first: he could only gaze in what you call dumb amazement. Then he managed to stammer out something about his heart and his love, and to show her the flowers and the bracelet. She said: 'So that's it, is it? Well of all the funny boys. Why couldn't you speak up sooner? D'you know of a place round here—'"
"Ha, ha, ha!"
It was a formidable explosion on the part of the Commissioner, in an adjoining room.
He was talking to some friends about Napoleon.
They wanted a fellow like that on Nepenthe—a fellow who got things done. Napoleon would have made no bones about the Wilberforce woman over there. It was a scandalous state of affairs. What was the use of a Committee for trying to keep her in order and getting her locked up in a sanatorium? Everybody knew what a Committee meant. Committee! It was a preposterous word. Committees were the same all the world over. Committee! He was in charge of that particular one; they were dong all they could, but what did it amount to? Nothing. To begin with, there was not enough money coming in, unless somebody could wheedle a cheque out of that rich old Koppen sensualist whose yacht might be arriving at any moment. And then her own pig-headedness! She refused to be talked over into doing what was in her own interests. Napoleon, he reckoned, might have talked her over—ha, ha, ha!
The lady in question, all unaware of these humanitarian designs, had taken up a strategic position in the neighbourhood of the drinks, and was glancing shyly round the room in search of a likely male who would fetch her a stiff glass of something from the buffet, and that soon. She was groggy, but not sufficiently primed to go there herself; she knew that everybody's eye would be fixed upon her; she had been much talked about of late. Drunk, she was impossible; dead sober, almost as bad—haughty, sullen, logical, with a grieved and surprised air suggestive of wounded dignity.
People avoided Miss Wilberforce. And yet you could not help liking her in those rare moments when she was just a little disguised. She had a pretty wit, then; a residue of gentle nurture; tender instincts and a winsomeness of manner that captivated you. Nor were appearances against her. That frail, arrowy figure was invariably clothed in black. She wore the colour by instinct. They said she had lost her sailor fiance who was drowned, poor lad, in the Mediterranean; and that now she wandered about at night looking for him, or trying to forget him and seeking oblivion in tipple.
The story happened to be true, for a wonder. She had received a twist for life. The death of this young lover gave to her impressionable being a shock which never passed off again. The world was turned inside out for Amy Wilberforce. She seldom spoke of his fate. But she was always talking about the sea. She tried to drown herself, once or twice. Then, gradually, she put on a new character altogether and relapsed into queer ancestral traits, stripping off, like so many worthless rags, the layers of laboriously acquired civilization. The refined and bashful girl became brusque, supercilious, equivocal. When sympathizing friends said that they had also lost lovers, she laughed and told them to look for new ones. There were better fish in the sea, etc., etc.
Soon she found herself abandoned, in spite of a full banking account.
People had dropped her, right and left.
The years went by.
Calmly, without misgivings
