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BOOK II - THE NEW LIGHT: CHAPTER 1
Zu neuen Ufern lockt ein neuer Tag.
2.1.
One afternoon of April in the year 1774, Odo Valsecca, riding down the
hillside below the church of the Superga, had reined in his horse at a
point where a group of Spanish chestnuts overhung the way. The air was
light and pure, the shady turf invited him, and dismounting he bid his
servant lead the horses to the wayside inn half way down the slope.
The spot he had chosen, though secluded as some nook above the gorge of
Donnaz, commanded a view of the Po rolling at his feet like a flood of
yellowish metal, and beyond, outspread in clear spring sunshine, the
great city in the bosom of the plain. The spectacle was fair enough to
touch any fancy: brown domes and facades set in new-leaved gardens and
surrounded by vineyards extending to the nearest acclivities;
country-houses glancing through the fresh green of planes and willows;
monastery-walls cresting the higher ridges; and westward the Po winding
in sunlit curves toward the Alps.
Odo had lost none of his sensitiveness to such impressions; but the sway
of another mood turned his eye from the outstretched beauty of the city
to the vernal solitude about him. It was the season when old memories of
Donnaz worked in his blood; when the banks and hedges of the fresh
hill-country about Turin cheated him with a breath of budding
beech-groves and the fragrance of crushed fern in the glens of the high
Pennine valleys. It was a mere waft, perhaps, from some clod of loosened
earth, or the touch of cool elastic moss as he flung himself face
downward under the trees; but the savour, the contact filled his
nostrils with mountain air and his eyes with dim-branched distances. At
Donnaz the slow motions of the northern spring had endeared to him all
those sweet incipiencies preceding the full choral burst of leaf and
flower: the mauve mist over bare woodlands, the wet black gleams in
frost-bound hollows, the thrust of fronds through withered bracken, the
primrose-patches spreading like pale sunshine along wintry lanes. He had
always felt a sympathy for these delicate unnoted changes; but the
feeling which had formerly been like the blind stir of sap in a plant
was now a conscious sensation that groped for speech and understanding.
He had grown up among people to whom such emotions were unknown. The old
Marquess's passion for his fields and woods was the love of the
agriculturist and the hunter, not that of the naturalist or the poet;
and the aristocracy of the cities regarded the country merely as so much
soil from which to draw their maintenance. The gentlefolk never absented
themselves from town but for a few weeks of autumn, when they went to
their villas for the vintage, transporting thither all the diversions of
city life and venturing no farther afield than the pleasure-grounds that
were but so many open-air card-rooms, concert-halls and theatres. Odo's
tenderness for every sylvan function of renewal and decay, every
shifting of light and colour on the flying surface of the year, would
have been met with the same stare with which a certain enchanting
Countess had received the handful of wind-flowers that, fresh from a
sunrise on the hills, he had laid one morning among her toilet-boxes.
The Countess Clarice had stared and laughed, and every one of his
acquaintance, Alfieri even, would have echoed her laugh; but one man at
least had felt the divine commotion of nature's touch, had felt and
interpreted it, in words as fresh as spring verdure, in the pages of a
volume that Odo now drew from his pocket.
"I longed to dream, but some unexpected spectacle continually distracted
me from my musings. Here immense rocks hung their ruinous masses above
my head; there the thick mist of roaring waterfalls enveloped me; or
some unceasing torrent tore open at my very feet an abyss into which the
gaze feared to plunge. Sometimes I was lost in the twilight of a thick
wood; sometimes, on emerging from a dark ravine, my eyes were charmed by
the sight of an open meadow...Nature seemed to revel in unwonted
contrasts; such varieties of aspect had she united in one spot. Here was
an eastern prospect bright with spring flowers, while autumn fruits
ripened to the south and the northern face of the scene was still locked
in wintry frosts...Add to this the different angles at which the peaks
took the light, the chiaroscuro of sun and shade, and the variations of
light resulting from it at morning and evening...sum up the impressions
I have tried to describe and you will be able to form an idea of the
enchanting situation in which I found myself...The scene has indeed a
magical, a supernatural quality, which so ravishes the spirit and senses
that one seems to lose all exact notion of one's surroundings and
identity."
This was a new language to eighteenth-century readers. Already it had
swept through the length and breadth of France, like a spring storm-wind
bursting open doors and windows, and filling close candle-lit rooms with
wet gusts and the scent of beaten blossoms; but south of the Alps the
new ideas travelled slowly, and the Piedmontese were as yet scarce aware
of the man who had written thus of their own mountains. It was true
that, some thirty years earlier, in one of the very monasteries on which
Odo now looked down, a Swiss vagrant called Rousseau had embraced the
true faith with the most moving signs of edification; but the rescue of
Helvetian heretics was a favourite occupation of the Turinese nobility
and it is doubtful if any recalled the name of the strange proselyte who
had hastened to signalise his conversion by robbing his employers and
slandering an innocent maid-servant. Odo in fact owed his first
acquaintance with the French writers to Alfieri, who, in the intervals
of his wandering over Europe, now and then reappeared in Turin laden
with the latest novelties in Transalpine literature and haberdashery.
What his eccentric friend failed to provide, Odo had little difficulty
in obtaining for himself; for though most of the new writers were on the
Index, and the Sardinian censorship was notoriously severe, there was
never yet a barrier that could keep out books, and Cantapresto was a
skilled purveyor of contraband dainties. Odo had thus acquainted himself
with the lighter literature of England and France; and though he had
read but few philosophical treatises, was yet dimly aware of the new
standpoint from which, north of the Alps, men were beginning to test the
accepted forms of thought. The first disturbance of his childish faith,
and the coincident reading of the Lettres Philosophiques, had been
followed by a period of moral perturbation, during which he suffered
from that sense of bewilderment, of inability to classify the phenomena
of life, that is one of the keenest trials of inexperience. Youth and
nature had their way with him, however, and a wholesome reaction of
indifference set in. The invisible world of thought and conduct had been
the frequent subject of his musings; but the other, tangible world was
close to him too, spreading like a rich populous plain between himself
and the distant heights of speculation. The old doubts, the old
dissatisfactions, hung on the edge of consciousness; but he was too
profoundly Italian not to linger awhile in that atmosphere of careless
acquiescence that is so pleasant a medium for the unhampered enjoyment
of life. Some day, no doubt, the intellectual curiosity and the moral
disquietude would revive; but what he wanted now were books which
appealed not to his reason but to his emotions, which reflected as in a
mirror the rich and varied life of the senses: books that were warm to
the touch, like the little volume in his hand.
For it was not only of nature that the book spoke. Amid scenes of such
rustic freshness were set human passions as fresh and natural: a great
romantic love, subdued to duty, yet breaking forth again and again as
young shoots spring from the root of a felled tree. To
eighteenth-century readers such a picture of life was as new as its
setting. Duty, in that day, to people of quality, meant the observance
of certain fixed conventions: the correct stepping of a moral minuet; as
an inner obligation, as a voluntary tribute to Diderot's "divinity on
earth," it had hardly yet drawn breath. To depict a personal relation so
much purer and more profound than any form of sentiment then in fashion,
and then to subordinate it, unflinchingly, to the ideal of those larger
relations that link the individual to the group--this was a stroke of
originality for which it would be hard to find a parallel in modern
fiction. Here at last was an answer to the blind impulses agrope in
Odo's breast--the loosening of those springs of emotion that gushed
forth in such fresh contrast to the stagnant rills of the sentimental
pleasure-garden. To renounce a Julie would be more thrilling than--
Odo, with a sigh, thrust the book in his pocket and rose to his feet. It
was the hour of the promenade at the Valentino and he had promised the
Countess Clarice to attend her. The old high-roofed palace of the French
princess lay below him, in its gardens along the river: he could figure,
as he looked down on it, the throng of carriages and chairs, the
modishly dressed riders, the pedestrians crowding the footpath to watch
the quality go by. The vision of all that noise and glitter deepened the
sweetness of the woodland hush. He sighed again. Suddenly voices sounded
in the road below--a man's speech flecked with girlish laughter. Odo
hung back listening: the girl's voice rang like a bird-call through his
rustling fancies. Presently she came in sight: a slender black-mantled
figure hung on the arm of an elderly man in the sober dress of one of
the learned professions--a physician or a lawyer, Odo guessed. Their
being afoot, and the style of the man's dress, showed that they were of
the middle class; their demeanour, that they were father and daughter.
The girl moved with a light forward flowing of her whole body that
seemed the pledge of grace in every limb: of her face Odo had but a
bright glimpse in the eclipse of her flapping hat-brim. She stood under
his tree unheeded; but as they rose abreast of him the girl paused and
dropped her companion's arm.
"Look! The cherry flowers!" she cried, and stretched her arms to a white
gush of blossoms above the wall across the road. The movement tilted
back her hat, and Odo caught her small fine profile, wide-browed as the
head on some Sicilian coin, with a little harp-shaped ear bedded in dark
ripples.
"Oh," she wailed, straining on tiptoe, "I can't reach them!"
Her father smiled. "May temptation," said he philosophically, "always
hang as far out of your reach."
"Temptation?" she echoed.
"Is it not theft you're bent on?"
"Theft? This is a monk's orchard, not a peasant's plot."
"Confiscation, then," he humorously conceded.
"Since they pay no taxes on their cherries they might at least," she
argued, "spare a few to us poor taxpayers."
"Ah," said her father, "I want to tax their cherries, not to gather
them." He slipped a hand through her arm. "Come, child," said he, "does
not the philosopher tell us that he who enjoys a thing possesses it? The
flowers are yours already!"
"Oh, are they?" she retorted. "Then why doesn't the loaf in the baker's
window feed the beggar that looks in at it?"
"Casuist!" he cried and drew her up the bend of the road.
Odo stood gazing after them. Their words, their aspect, seemed an echo
of his reading. The father in his plain broadcloth and square-buckled
shoes, the daughter with her unpowdered hair and spreading hat, might
have stepped from the pages of the romance. What a breath of freshness
they brought with them! The girl's cheek was clear as the
cherry-blossoms, and with what lovely freedom did she move! Thus Julie
might have led Saint Preux through her "Elysium." Odo crossed the road
and, breaking one of the blossoming twigs, thrust it in the breast of
his uniform. Then he walked down the hill to the inn where the horses
waited. Half an hour later he rode up to the house where he lodged in
the Piazza San Carlo.
In the archway Cantapresto, heavy with a nine years' accretion of fat,
laid an admonishing hand on his bridle.
"Cavaliere, the Countess's black boy--"
"Well?"
"Three several times has battered the door down with a missive."
"Well?"
"The last time, I shook him off with the message that you would be there
before him."
"Be where?"
"At the Valentino; but that was an hour ago!"
Odo slipped from the saddle.
"I must dress first. Call a chair; or no--write a letter for me first.
Let Antonio carry it."
The ex-soprano, wheezing under the double burden of flesh and
consequence, had painfully laboured after Odo up the high stone flights
to that young gentleman's modest lodgings, and they stood together in a
study lined with books and hung with prints and casts from the antique.
Odo threw off his dusty coat and called the servant to remove his boots.
"Will you read the lady's letters, cavaliere?" Cantapresto asked,
obsequiously offering them on a lacquered tray.
"No--no: write first. Begin 'My angelic lady'--"
"You began the last letter in those terms, cavaliere," his scribe
reminded him with suspended pen.
"The devil! Well, then--wait. 'Throned goddess'--"
"You ended the last letter with 'throned goddess.'"
"Curse the last letter! Why did you send it?" Odo sprang up and slipped
his arms into the dress-tunic his servant had brought him. "Write
anything. Say that I am suddenly summoned by--"
"By the Count Alfieri?" Cantapresto suggested.
"Count Alfieri? Is he here? He has returned?"
"He arrived an hour ago, cavaliere. He sent you this Moorish scimitar
with his compliments. I understand he comes recently from Spain."
"Imbecile, not to have told me before! Quick, Antonio--my gloves, my
sword." Odo, flushed and animated, buckled his sword-belt with impatient
hands. "Write anything--anything to free my evening. Tomorrow
morning--tomorrow morning I shall wait on the lady. Let Antonio carry
her a nosegay with my compliments. Did you see him Cantapresto? Was he
in good health? Does he sup at home? He left no message? Quick, Antonio,
a chair!" he cried with his hand on the door.
Odo had acquired, at twenty-two, a nobility of carriage not incompatible
with the boyish candour of his gaze, and becomingly set off by the
brilliant dress-uniform of a lieutenant in one of the provincial
regiments. He was tall and fair, and a certain languor of complexion,
inherited from his father's house, was corrected in him by the vivacity
of the Donnaz blood. This now sparkled in his grey eye, and gave a glow
to his cheek, as he stepped across the threshold, treading on a sprig of
cherry-blossom that had dropped unnoticed to the floor.
Cantapresto, looking after him, caught sight of the flowers and kicked
them aside with a contemptuous toe. "I sometimes think he botanises," he
murmured with a shrug. "The Lord knows what queer notions he gets out of
all these books!"
Content of BOOK II - THE NEW LIGHT: CHAPTER 1 [Edith Wharton's novel: The Valley Of Decision]
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Read next: BOOK II - THE NEW LIGHT: CHAPTER 2
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