The Golden Flame (Timeless Classics Collection) Read online

  ‘She will never be a great pianist,’ the Maestro was wont to say, because to him music came first, ‘but she will always be a sweet woman.’

  It was enough.

  Matina watched Jan with those large, heavy eyes of hers, in which it seemed that a fire once brilliant had now gone dull and smouldered. She was considerate. When rich patrons came and sent champagne to the little orchestra of two, in token of their gratitude for the music, Matina would always insist that Jan must have a sip from her glass.

  ‘We must share,’ she emphasized.

  She was so kind that when in straits he brought her his socks to mend, and she was always ready and willing to do the work for him. She lived in a humble garret across the street, high up under the eaves, a very cheap room, but it was the best that she could afford. If she had been beautiful, doubtless she would have afforded much better, but Matina would never be beautiful in the eyes of the world, only in the eyes of those who, looking deeper, saw the sweet serenity of her soul.

  And at seven every night, the lights would be lit under their coral shades, and the golden baskets of peaches, and apricots, and grapes, which grew nearby, laid upon the tables. The Maestro would step up on the dais, and start his music, which would ripple out into the cobbled street beyond.

  ‘Come,’ people would say, the rich people who made this place their playground. ‘Come, the Golden Galleon is open.’

  And they would troop inside.

  They were never like real people, these who came to play and to bathe and to be happy in a real holiday mood; they were like puppets who danced to the exigencies of the showman, and it always thrilled Jan that the Padrone was the showman.

  One night, long after midnight, when they had finished and the curtains were drawn and the last of the coral lights had been turned out, and the feet had danced away, Jan found himself alone here with Matina.

  She was standing in her little dark frock with the tiny white collar which she always kept so fresh and clean, so that he admired it. Her arms were bare, and at her throat she wore a spray of stephanotis that a client had handed to her, a client who was a little drunk, but very amiably so.

  She said: ‘This is the loveliest hour of all the twenty-four, Jan; it is a shame to go to bed.’

  He should have been too tired, but he was young and very strong, and life had attractions to offer him.

  He said: ‘Let us go out together.’

  They went to the shore.

  The sea was clear and rippling, with a cool wind blowing from it, and the moon, so large, and so wise, had painted a pathway across it with a golden brush that scintillated. There were myriad stars, and the essence of Nicotiana, and red roses mingling with magnolias. And whenever he leaned near to her there was the lovely intertwining stephanotis which Matina wore at her throat.

  They stood looking at the sea and the stars, and because the mystery of the hour was so attractive, they began to talk.

  Jan told her of his youth, of the crowded fetid room at Villefranche, and Madame in her fury at the hotel when the staff left to go to Cannes. She listened, and presently she told him of herself; simply, because she was a very simple person.

  ‘I do so love music, Jan. I have worked so hard at it and I shall never be really great. Oh, it is no good denying it, I know. You do not need to try to convince me because I shall always know.’

  ‘You play beautifully,’ he said, and truthfully, because he knew nothing of music, and believed that she did play beautifully.

  ‘No, Jan; it is only because you do not understand. My playing is only moderate, even when I have given all that I have got to it, it is still only very moderate,’ and she said it so regretfully that he was sorry for her, and put out his hand and took hers.

  It was very cold.

  So they stood hand in hand, with the moon painting the cobbles in silver, as though a fairy fish net had been flung over them. The little houses, clustering whitely, shone with precious metal, and from far away there came the sound of a girl singing the song of the Neapolitan in love.

  O sole mio,

  O sole mio.

  ‘You see?’ she said, and there were tears in her voice. ‘I was a child, and I was not wanted very much. I should have been a boy. My mother wanted a boy.’

  He said: ‘My mother had many boys,’ and thought of the little fetid room and the crowd of children who cried, and fought together.

  Slowly Matina talked.

  Her father had been a soldier, killed a couple of months before she was born. Her mother had always spoken of the coming life to her friends as of the little new soldier who would fight for his country and revenge his father’s death; but when the child was born she was a girl. Women are strange when their wishes are thwarted, and she disliked the baby because she felt that it had deceived her. As the child grew, her mother gave her the poorest clothes. For five years, which Matina did not remember very well and did not want to remember, because she was so unhappy, the two of them lived by her mother’s needle. Then she married a rich farmer, and went into the country, and took the little girl away with her. Matina knew quite well that neither of them wanted her. Other children came, every year seemed to bring a baby, and although she was an unpaid nursemaid, she could never do rightly by them, nor please her mother.

  ‘It was terrible,’ she admitted, and Jan knew that the somnolent eyes were wet.

  ‘Don’t think of it now,’ he said.

  She would have run away, and gone anywhere however dreadful because she only hoped that she might die, but she could not go because of the woman who lodged in a little house under the acacias. This woman had once been a great pianist. The child would go down the lane and stand there listening to the music, and once she was seen waiting there in a thunderstorm. The lady took her into her home, afraid that she would be washed away, and that was how the music lessons had begun.

  Every spare moment the child practised on the lady’s piano.

  Unfortunately, love of music is not genius. Love of it will not take a girl as far as she would wish to go. It was the lady who told her that she must travel to one of the cities if she was to learn much, and she got her work with another musical family she knew. Her job was really to clean the house, but that was nothing to her, for she was a strong girl and used to hard work; she did not care what they asked of her, as long as she could earn sufficient to pay for her music lessons, and be allowed to practise. This was permitted at night. There was an old piano in the attic, and there she would go to play, and because in Italy all the world loves music, nobody complained, or took it hardly, but smiled and said that one day she would go far.

  ‘But I was never a genius,’ she said.

  She had been eighteen when she had come with the family to Amalia, and then she had met the Padrone. It was all through the courtesy of the kindly old Maestro. He had got to know the girl, by hearing her playing laboriously in the evenings, when the family were out, and when she had the house to herself.

  It happened to be at a time when he had trouble with the woman who was accompanying him on the piano at the Golden Galleon. She played well, she had spirit, a dark woman with formidable eyes, but a fine pianist for all that. Too fine, said the Maestro, for she was not content to be anything but the leader, and would have put him second; as he said there could not be two who led. There had been a final clash one night when there had been hilarity in the Galleon and the parties dining there had given drinks liberally to the orchestra of two. The signorina had taken the drink only too willingly, and it had added fire to her playing, a vicious fire so that she drove the piano hard, and had no sense of accompaniment to the Maestro’s tender music.

  She had left next morning, when she was in a fury, which burnt hotly, and he was in an equal fury, but which burnt cold. Having dismissed her, he suddenly became anxious about whom he could find to fill her place that evening, and that was when he had approached Matina.

  ‘And so I came here,’ she said simply.

  ‘You l
ike it?’

  ‘One always likes the work one loves, but I hate my inferiority. I know my faults. I hate being all thumbs. I would want to be a great musician, and I know now that will never be.’

  ‘I think you are a great musician,’ he said, because it had been Matina who had stirred the love of music in him, and for him she would always play exquisitely. She appreciated the compliment that he paid.

  ‘But you do not know,’ she said quietly.

  They stood there looking at the sea, with the scent of the magnolias coming to them. He had hold of her hand. He thought for a moment, is this love? Madame had talked of love often, for she was an amorous old woman in her glass pigeon-hole of an office, and was for ever telling the boy that the great moment would come when he fell gloriously in love.

  No, he decided, this was not love.

  It was the fellow feeling of one for the other. It was the handclasp of friend for friend, no more.

  ‘We will be great friends,’ he told Matina.

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘friendship is the greatest honour that can be given one to the other. Let us be the best of friends.’

  They went home very quietly.

  Night had settled down on Amalia, and only a few lean cats straggled across the little pebbled streets. The voice that had been singing, had died down, and now there was the sound of the sea instead, like a hushing lullaby. That, and the wind stirring the big rattling leaves of the magnolias, with the scent that permeated everything.

  One day, he thought, love will come; and he waited for it eagerly, because Madame had been so sure of it.

  That would be very beautiful, he knew.

  IV

  Love came to him that evening when the Padrone had decided that it must be a carnival night. It was a festa, and the streets had been looped with wreaths of roses, and there were fireworks to keep the devils away. The place was packed with guests, and there had been a battle of flowers, and carnival cars had been drawn through the streets.

  It had been so very amusing.

  Jan had watched people throwing red and white roses at one another, and he had laughed to see it. Now the restaurant was being made gay for carnival night, and there was to be music, and at midnight the cabaret. The Padrone had arranged it all, and was determined that nothing should be missing.

  All the tables were booked, and there were camellias for the ladies, pale cream and white against their highly glazed leaves, with silver paper twisted round the stems, and a tiny bottle of camellia scent fastened to those stems, intriguingly.

  ‘The ladies will appreciate,’ said the Padrone, and he strutted round the room tweaking a napkin right, setting a fork straight, putting everything shipshape to satisfy his own personal pride.

  The Padrone treated the restaurant as though it were his child; he was like a mother, who sees her daughter in her party frock, and surveying her very critically, puts the sash to rights, smoothes this and that, and sets everything in order.

  ‘So,’ said the Padrone.

  The tourists who came to Amalia, and the guests who stayed here because it was new, and fresh, and gay, had booked tables, and they came trooping in.

  Jan worked hard, because they were never over-staffed, and he had to rush from the serving hatch to the tables. The silver grill flourished under its golden flame, and, it seemed to Jan as though his whole future swirled in that flame. It fascinated him. It burnt with a burring sound, like a dim crackling; like the last echo of the autumn, when the trees have shed their leaves, and the sun sinks in a red ball into the mist, and the winter is at hand, with its oldness and its chill.

  But Jan did not feel like autumn, for he was spring. Youth burnt with a golden flame in his own heart, and he had that feeling of expectancy, of waiting, as though he stood here, and knew that soon, the beloved would appear, and he would know her, and stand, transfixed by her beauty.

  That was love, he told himself, the sort of love that Madame had meant.

  At last the dinners were through, and the chicken bones picked bare, and the peaches done with, only a heap of broken skins left bleeding on the plates. The round bottles of Chianti had gone, and there was coffee on the tables, strong and bitter, and liqueurs, the special liqueur that the kindly monks made for the Padrone, which was very good indeed and brought many guests here specially for it.

  ‘The cabaret,’ said the Padrone.

  The Maestro had played all the evening, and because the world was in a gay mood, and too often a gay mood is a generous one, they had sent champagne up to the Maestro and Matina, but it had never disturbed the music. It was the sweet music of the gondolier, of La Bohème, and of the Fledermaus.

  The Maestro stared when the cabaret was due, and he went hot and angry because he felt that this was an insult. People should not want cabaret when they had his music, which was so sweet and tender. Cabaret, he believed, appealed to the baser senses of hard-eyed men and lipsticked girls. He had always hoped that his audience would love good music so much that they could not be charmed by an idiotic floor show, such as one heard of in other parts of the world, and therefore he was disgruntled.

  ‘Play,’ commanded the Padrone.

  Because times were hard for the Maestro, and it was highly necessary that he should keep his job here, he played.

  The lights were dimmed. Only one golden arc of light centred on the clearance which had been made in the centre of the room. Jan stood against the wall, his arms folded in the attitude of waiting. It will be pretty, he thought, it will be gay. He must not move cups and saucers while this went on, lest he made them rattle and should disturb, so he waited tranquilly.

  Into the space there floated, on the very tips of her tiny toes, the girl in the golden frock. She danced like a butterfly, one of the honey-yellow ones, which come in the Italian spring and linger on the sun-sweet grasses above the hills of Rome. They are almost like flowers, so beautiful are they; and the girl who danced was very beautiful too.

  Her golden hair was clipped close to her head, like a boy’s; it had neither curl nor waves, but was smoothed softly until it gleamed. Her face was oval, and out of it stared her eyes, dazzlingly blue, surrounded with long dark lashes; like a blue pool, thought Jan, fringed by pines, and knew that he was going poetical.

  He had never seen anybody like her before. He stared, and he was no longer the waiter with his back to the wall, waiting until the turn was over so that he could remove the coffee cups, but he had become the lover, staring impassioned at the beloved.

  He knew her at once. He knew the way that she danced, impertinently, tantalizingly, her tiny feet never making a sound, as though a golden shadow had crept into the room. She interpreted the music. She was La Bohème, and the spirit of Mimi. She was music itself.

  The Maestro, appreciating the interpretation that the little creature gave, played with more fire, and she danced whilst they all sat still to watch and to listen. She was no floor show. She was no cabaret girl dancing only because this was her livelihood and she had been taught, she was a leaf in the wind, a silver puff of hoary thistledown blown across a gale-raddled heath; she was joy; she was delight.

  Jan did not know that he watched for half an hour. It had seemed to be but a minute. He did not know that it was the end of the turn, until he saw that the guests were throwing flowers to her, red roses, and cream camellias. She gathered them up into her arms, she stuck camellias in her hair, and a red rose in her mouth, which made a splash of colour against that pale little sensitive face. Then she came running (like an eager child) down the thin alleyway of guests who applauded her so vigorously, almost into Jan’s arms and out to the room where she had changed.

  He woke up from his daydream then.

  The crowd applauded violently, but she did not return.

  He kept telling himself: ‘Surely this is not the end; surely it does not mean that I have seen her only as a golden shadow, and shall never see her again?’ He had a greater faith in life than that, a belief in love.


  He went on waiting there, and the crowd danced, but he was always going to the door, and peeping round it, hoping to see her again. He did not see her.

  Much later, the Padrone had bowed the last guest away, and the restaurant was swept clean with its petals of red roses, and cream camellias, and the tables were turned ready for the cleaning in the morning.

  ‘Now, rest,’ said the Padrone.

  ‘I must have air,’ said Jan.

  The Padrone shrugged his shoulders, and thought that he had gone a little mad, but that did not concern him, for, after all, the boy was a good waiter. One must bear with him, and he was the age for love.

  ‘Good,’ said the Padrone.

  Three

  I

  Jan went out into the street, as he had done with Matina.

  Again the moon had flung its silver fish-net across the cobbles, and the oleanders were bending under their burden of rose-flecked blossom. There was flower scent, and the sound of the sea receding, as though it sighed regretfully to leave so fair a shore. He stuck his hands in his pockets, and went slowly, not knowing where or why. He felt that fate directed his footsteps, and that he would find her, he did not know how.

  One thing was certain, she must be living in Amalia. He looked furtively at the great houses where the rich lived, and where wistarias wreathed the balconies in palest heliotrope. It would be dreadful if she were the daughter of some rich man, daughter of a great house, who danced only because it amused her. But no, he knew that she had not danced that way, but because she loved it.

  He came to the smaller houses, which ran down to the tiny quay, and there he saw her standing. Fate had directed his steps, as he had known it would; he had relied on instinct, and it had been unswerving in its sense of direction. She looked so terribly small, almost like a little child, with a dark thin shawl twisted round her, and no shoes on her little feet. He knew instantly that she was poor, possibly even poorer than he was, and he felt sorry for her. She sat on a big boulder, her hands nursing her chin, her knees propping her elbows; and staring out to the horizon; again, following instinct, he went to her.