‘On the other hand no one can be sure of dying at sixty,’ I said.
‘Well, I don’t know. It depends on himself, doesn’t it?’
‘In your place I should have stayed on at the bank till I was entitled to my pension.’
‘I should have been forty-seven then. I shouldn’t have been too old to enjoy my life here, I’m older than that now and I enjoy it as much as I ever did, but I should have been too old to experience the particular pleasure of a young man. You know, you can have just as good a time at fifty as you can at thirty, but it’s not the same sort of good time. I wanted to live the perfect life while I still had the energy and the spirit to make the most of it. Twenty-five years seemed a long time to me, and twenty-five years of happiness seemed worth paying something pretty substantial for. I’d made up my mind to wait a year and I waited a year. Then I sent in my resignation and as soon as they paid me my gratuity I bought the annuity and came on here.’
‘An annuity for twenty-five years?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Have you never regretted?’
‘Never. I’ve had my money’s worth already. And I’ve got ten years more. Don’t you think after twenty-five years of perfect happiness one ought to be satisfied to call it a day?’
‘Perhaps.’
He did not say in so many words what he would do then, but his intention was clear. It was pretty much the story my friend had told me, but it sounded different when I heard it from his own lips. I stole a glance at him. There was nothing about him that was not ordinary. No one, looking at that neat, prim face, could have thought him capable of an unconventional action. I did not blame him. It was his own life that he had arranged in this strange manner, and I did not see why he should not do what he liked with it. Still, I could not prevent the little shiver that ran down my spine.
‘Getting chilly?’ he smiled. ‘We might as well start walking down. The moon’ll be up by now’
Before we parted Wilson asked me if I would like to go and see his house one day; and two or three days later, finding out where he lived, I strolled up to see him. It was a peasant’s cottage, well away from the town, in a vineyard, with a view of the sea. By the side of the door grew a great oleander in full flower. There were only two small rooms, a tiny kitchen, and a lean-to in which firewood could be kept. The bedroom was furnished like a monk’s cell, but the sitting-room, smelling agreeably of tobacco, was comfortable enough, with two large arm-chairs that he had brought from England, a large roll-top desk, a cottage piano, and crowded bookshelves. On the walls were framed engravings of pictures by G. E Watts and Lord Leighton. Wilson told me that the house belonged to the owner of the vineyard who lived in another cottage higher up the hill, and his wife came in every day to do the rooms and the cooking. He had found the place on his first visit to Capri, and taking it on his return for good had been there ever since. Seeing the piano and music open on it, I asked him if he would play.
‘I’m no good, you know, but I’ve always been fond of music and I get a lot of fun out of strumming.’
He sat down at the piano and played one of the movements from a Beethoven sonata. He did not play very well. I looked at his music, Schumann and Schubert, Beethoven, Bach, and Chopin. On the table on which he had his meals was a greasy pack of cards. I asked him if he played patience.
‘A lot.’
From what I saw of him then and from what I heard from other people I made for myself what I think must have been a fairly accurate picture of the life he had led for the last fifteen years. It was certainly a very harmless one. He bathed; he walked a great deal, and he seemed never to lose his sense of the beauty of the island which he knew so intimately; he played the piano and he played patience; he read. When he was asked to a party he went and, though a trifle dull, was agreeable. He was not affronted if he was neglected. He liked people, but with an aloofness that prevented intimacy. He lived thriftily, but with sufficient comfort. He never owed a penny. I imagine he had never been a man whom sex had greatly troubled, and if in his younger days he had had now and then a passing affair with a visitor to the island whose head was turned by the atmosphere, his emotion, while it lasted, remained, I am pretty sure, well under his control. I think he was determined that nothing should interfere with his independence of spirit. His only passion was for the beauty of nature, and he sought felicity in the simple and natural things that life offers to everyone. You may say that it was a grossly selfish existence. It was. He was of no use to anybody, but on the other hand he did nobody any harm. His only object was his own happiness, and it looked as though he had attained it. Very few people know where to look for happiness; fewer still find it. I don’t know whether he was a fool or a wise man. He was certainly a man who knew his own mind. The odd thing about him to me was that he was so immensely commonplace. I should never have given him a second thought but for what I knew, that on a certain day, ten years from then, unless a chance illness cut the thread before, he must deliberately take leave of the world he loved so well. I wondered whether it was the thought of this, never quite absent from his mind, that gave him the peculiar zest with which he enjoyed every moment of the day.
I should do him an injustice if I omitted to state that he was not at all in the habit of talking about himself I think the friend I was staying with was the only person in whom he had confided. I believe he only told me the story because he suspected I already knew it, and on the evening on which he told it me he had drunk a good deal of wine.
My visit drew to a close and I left the island. The year after, war broke out. A number of things happened to me, so that the course of my life was greatly altered, and it was thirteen years before I went to Capri again. My friend had been back some time, but he was no longer so well off, and had moved into a house that had no room for me; so I was putting up at the hotel. He came to meet me at the boat and we dined together. During dinner I asked him where exactly his house was.
‘You know it,’ he answered. ‘It’s the little place Wilson had. I’ve built on a room and made it quite nice.’
With so many other things to occupy my mind I had not given Wilson a thought for years; but now, with a little shock, I remembered. The ten years he had before him when I made his acquaintance must have elapsed long ago. Did he commit suicide as he said he would?’
‘It’s rather a grim story.’
Wilson’s plan was all right. There was only one flaw in it and this, I suppose, he could not have foreseen. It had never occurred to him that after twenty-five years of complete happiness, in this quiet backwater, with nothing in the world to disturb his serenity, his character would gradually lose its strength. The will needs obstacles in order to exercise its power; when it is never thwarted, when no effort is needed to achieve ones desires, because one has placed one’s desires only in the things that can be obtained by stretching out one’s hand, the will grows impotent. If you walk on a level all the time the muscles you need to climb a mountain will atrophy. These observations are trite, but there they are. When Wilson’s annuity expired he had no longer the resolution to make the end which was the price he had agreed to pay for that long period of happy tranquillity. I do not think, as far as I could gather, both from what my friend told me and afterwards from others, that he wanted courage. It was just that he couldn’t make up his mind. He put it off from day to day.
He had lived on the island for so long and had always settled his accounts so punctually that it was easy for him to get credit; never having borrowed money before, he found a number of people who were willing to lend him small sums when now he asked for them. He had paid his rent regularly for so many years that his landlord, whose wife Assunta still acted as his servant, was content to let things slide for several months. Everyone believed him when he said that a relative had died and that he was temporarily embarrassed because owing to legal formalities he could not for some time get the money that was due to him. He managed to hang on after this fashion for something over
a year. Then he could get no more credit from the local tradesmen, and there was no one to lend him any more money. His landlord gave him notice to leave the house unless he paid up arrears of rent before a certain date.
The day before this he went into his tiny bedroom, closed the door and the window, drew the curtain, and lit a brazier of charcoal. Next morning when Assunta came to make his breakfast she found him insensible but still alive. The room was draughty, and though he had done this and that to keep out the fresh air he had not done it very thoroughly. It almost looked as though at the last moment, and desperate though his situation was, he had suffered from a certain infirmity of purpose. Wilson was taken to the hospital, and though very ill for some time he at last recovered. But as a result either of the charcoal poisoning or of the shock he was no longer in complete possession of his faculties. He was not insane, at all events not insane enough to be put in an asylum, but he was quite obviously no longer in his right mind.
‘I went to see him,’ said my friend. ‘I tried to get him to talk, but he kept looking at me in a funny sort of way, as though he couldn’t quite make out where he’d seen me before. He looked rather awful lying there in bed, with a week’s growth of grey beard on his chin; but except for that funny look in his eyes he seemed quite normal.’
‘What funny look in his eyes?’
‘I don’t know exactly how to describe it. Puzzled. It’s an absurd comparison, but suppose you threw a stone up into the air and it didn’t come down but just stayed there
‘It would be rather bewildering,’ I smiled.
‘Well, that’s the sort of look he had.’
It was difficult to know what to do with him. He had no money and no means of getting any. His effects were sold, but for too little to pay what he owed. He was English, and the Italian authorities did not wish to make themselves responsible for him. The British Consul in Naples had no funds to deal with the case. He could of course be sent back to England, but no one seemed to know what could be done with him when he got there. Then Assunta, the servant, said that he had been a good master and a good tenant, and as long as he had the money had paid his way; he could sleep in the woodshed in the cottage in which she and her husband lived, and he could share their meals. This was suggested to him. It was difficult to know whether he understood or not. When Assunta came to take him from the hospital he went with her without remark. He seemed to have no longer a will of his own. She had been keeping him now for two years.
‘It’s not very comfortable, you know,’ said my friend. ‘They’ve rigged him up a ramshackle bed and given him a couple of blankets, but there’s no window, and it’s icy cold in winter and like an oven in summer. And the food’s pretty rough. You know how these peasants eat: macaroni on Sundays and meat once in a blue moon.’
‘What does he do with himself all the time?’
‘He wanders about the hills. I’ve tried to see him two or three times, but it’s no good; when he sees you coming he runs like a hare. Assunta comes down to have a chat with me now and then and I give her a bit of money so that she can buy him tobacco, but God knows if he ever gets it.’
‘Do they treat him all right?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure Assunta’s kind enough. She treats him like a child. I’m afraid her husband’s not very nice to him. He grudges the cost of his keep. I don’t believe he’s cruel or anything like that, but I think he’s a bit sharp with him. He makes him fetch water and clean the cow-shed and that sort of thing.’
‘It sounds pretty rotten,’ I said.
‘He brought it on himself After all, he’s only got what he deserved.’
‘I think on the whole we all get what we deserve,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t prevent its being rather horrible.’
Two or three days later my friend and I were taking a walk. We were strolling along a narrow path through an olive grove.
‘There’s Wilson,’ said my friend suddenly. ‘Don’t look, you’ll only frighten him. Go straight on.’
I walked with my eyes on the path, but out of the corners of them I saw a man hiding behind an olive tree. He did not move as we approached, but I felt that he was watching us. As soon as we had passed I heard a scamper. Wilson, like a hunted animal, had made for safety. That was the last I ever saw of him.
He died last year. He had endured that life for six years. He was found one morning on the mountainside lying quite peacefully as though he had died in his sleep. From where he lay he had been able to see those two great rocks called the Faraglioni which stand out of the sea. It was full moon and he must have gone to see them by moonlight. Perhaps he died of the beauty of that night.
THE WASH-TUB
♦
Positano stands on the side of a steep hill, a disarray of huddled white houses, their tiled roofs washed pale by the suns of a hundred years; but unlike many of these Italian towns perched out of harm’s way on a rocky eminence it does not offer you at one delightful glance all it has to give. It has quaint streets that zigzag up the hill, and battered, painted houses in the baroque style, but very late, in which Neapolitan noblemen led for a season lives of penurious grandeur. It is indeed almost excessively picturesque and in winter its two or three modest hotels are crowded with painters, male and female, who in their different ways acknowledge by their daily labours the emotion it has excited in them. Some take infinite pains to place on canvas every window and every tile their peering eyes can discover and doubtless achieve the satisfaction that rewards honest industry. ‘At all events it’s sincere,’ they say modestly when they show you their work. Some, rugged and dashing, in a fine frenzy attack their canvas with a pallet knife charged with a wad of paint, and they say: ‘You see, what I was trying to bring out was my personality.’ They slightly close their eyes and tentatively murmur: ‘I think it’s rather me, don’t you?’ And there are some who give you highly entertaining arrangements of spheres and cubes and utter sombrely: ‘That’s how I see it!’ These for the most part are strong silent men who waste no words.
But Positano looks full south and the chances are that in summer you will have it to yourself The hotel is clean and cool and there is a terrace, overhung with vines, where you can sit at night and look at the sea bespangled with dim stars. Down at the Marine, on the quay, is a little tavern where you can dine under an archway off anchovies and ham, macaroni and fresh-caught mullet, and drink cold wine. Once a day the steamer from Naples comes in, bringing the mail, and for a quarter of an hour gives the beach (there is no port and the passengers are landed in small boats) an air of animation.
One August, tiring of Capri where I had been staying, I made up my mind to spend a few days at Positano, so I hired a fishing-boat and rowed over. I stopped on the way in a shady cove to bathe and lunch and sleep, and did not arrive till evening. I strolled up the hill, my two bags following me on the heads of two sturdy women, to the hotel, and was surprised to learn that I was not its only guest. The waiter, whose name was Giuseppe, was an old friend of mine, and at that season he was boots, porter, chambermaid, and cook as well. He told me that an American signore had been staying there for three months.
‘Is he a painter or writer or something?’ I asked.
‘No, Signore, he’s a gentleman.’
Odd, I thought. No foreigners came to Positano at that time of year but German Wanderoogel, looking hot and dusty, with satchels on their backs, and they only stayed overnight. I could not imagine anyone wishing to spend three months there; unless of course he were hiding. And since all London had been excited by the flight earlier in the year of an eminent, but dishonest, financier, the amusing thought occurred to me that this mysterious stranger was perhaps he. I knew him slightly and trusted that my sudden arrival would not disconcert him.
‘You’ll see the Signore at the Marina,’ said Giuseppe, as I was setting out to go down again. ‘He always dines there.’
He was certainly not there when I arrived. I asked what there was for dinner and drank an americano, which is
by no means a bad substitute for a cocktail. In a few minutes, however, a man walked in who could be no other than my fellow-guest at the hotel and I had a moment’s disappointment when I saw that it was not the absconding financier. A tall, elderly man, bronzed after his summer on the Mediterranean, with a handsome, thin face. He wore a very neat, even smart, suit of cream-coloured silk and no hat. His grey hair was cut very short, but was still thick. There was ease in his bearing, and elegance. He looked round the half-dozen tables under the archway at which the natives of the place were playing cards or dominoes and his eyes rested on me. They smiled pleasantly. He came up.
‘I hear you have just arrived at the hotel. Giuseppe suggested that as he couldn’t come down here to effect an introduction you wouldn’t mind if I introduced myself Would it bore you to dine with a total stranger?’
‘Of course not. Sit down.’
He turned to the maid who was laying a cover for me and in beautiful Italian told her that I would eat with him. He looked at my americano.
‘I have got them to stock a little gin and French vermouth for me. Would you allow me to mix you a very dry Martini?’
‘Without hesitation.’
‘It gives an exotic note to the surroundings which brings out the local colour.’
He certainly made a very good cocktail and with added appetite we ate the ham and anchovies with which our dinner began. My host had a pleasant humour and his fluent conversation was agreeable.
‘You must forgive me if I talk too much,’ he said presently. ‘This is the first chance I’ve had to speak English for three months. I don’t suppose you will stay here long and I mean to make the most of it.’
‘Three months is a long time to stay at Positano.’
‘I’ve hired a boat and I bathe and fish. I read a great deal. I have a good many books here and if there’s anything I can lend you I shall be very glad.’