The Italian Girl Read Free Page A

imperceptible way, becoming yellower or greyer, as if a fine gauze of frowning and anxiety had been pressed upon it. But her mop of intricate brown hair was glossy and unfaded. She was smartly, quietly dressed, and could have been taken for a clever business woman, a woman of affairs, while her face might have been that of a retired actress. She had a face which was in some sense old-fashioned, a round rather wistful, big-eyed, small-mouthed face such as might have peeped and simpered at the turn of the century in some overfurnished drawing-room in France. This appearance blended in a piquant way with her rather precise Scottish voice: Isabel came from the farther north, from north of the border. She caught my look now and half smiled. She had a good smile, that direct beam of one human being at another. I liked Isabel, though indeed I hardly knew her, and had often wondered why she had stayed on in that gloomy house where she must have been so very far from happy. There was Flora, of course. And there are, I suppose, always for unhappy women many good reasons for bearing the devil they know rather than seeking the other one.
    Otto I could not see, he was somewhere behind me sitting with Levkin. That completed our party, except for Maggie, of course. Lydia had had, in latter years, few friends. I had scarcely spoken to Otto in the car, and I resolved now to have a quick business talk with him before lunch. There was no reason indeed why I should not get away promptly in the afternoon. Nothing detained me. I had not in the past enjoyed observing the wreck of my brother’s marriage and did not imagine that I would enjoy it now. And though I was bound to Otto by steely bonds more awful than the bonds of love, we had, on our rare meetings, but little to say to each other. I wanted now chiefly to discover whether Lydia, who had been my father’s sole heir, had left me anything in her will. It was unlikely, since after the scandal of my departure our relations had been cold, strained and scanty. I gathered from Isabel that my name was never mentioned. Still, it was just possible that she had left me something, and I certainly needed it.
    I lived a very simple solitary life, but on the other hand I also earned very little money. The art of the wood-engraver may be deep but it is narrow. I passed my days contentedly with the twenty-six letters of the roman alphabet, whose sober authority my father had taught me to love, combining their sturdy forms with wild fantasies of decoration to produce everything from book-plates and trademarks to bank-notes and soap-coupons. My father had frowned upon any decoration of the letter itself, whose classic familiarity he compared to that of the human form, and as a letterer I too counted as a puritan. I did occasional book illustrations, and for my own pleasure, with the names of Bewick and Calvert prayerfully upon my lips, transferred to the precious small surface of the wooden block many scenes, figures, objects that I saw or imagined. But I had never become a fashionable or well-known engraver and in that sense established. I was not ambitious. No type face bore my name. Perhaps I simply lacked talent. I had little curiosity about an exact estimate of my merits, and none at all about my prestige, except in so far as it affected money-making. I would have been happy enough to count myself a craftsman and to jog along in the background of some printing house, only a taste for freedom kept me at my own bench. I had no craving for luxuries and had never had, but I did not honour poverty for its own sake, and disliked its indignities and inconveniences. I lived a solitary life. It had not always been so. But my relations with women always followed a certain disastrous and finally familiar pattern. I did not need a psychoanalyst to tell me why: nor did it occur to me to seek the aid of one of those modern necromancers. I preferred to suffer the thing that I was.
    There was a sound of movement, a