Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster (the little red hen read aloud .TXT) 📖

was stout and ugly; but her voice was still beautiful, and as she sang the theatre murmured like a hive of happy bees. All through the coloratura she was accompanied by sighs, and its top note was drowned in a shout of universal joy.

So the opera proceeded. The singers drew inspiration from the audience, and the two great sextettes were rendered not unworthily. Miss Abbott fell into the spirit of the thing. She, too, chatted and laughed and applauded and encored, and rejoiced in the existence of beauty. As for Philip, he forgot himself as well as his mission. He was not even an enthusiastic visitor. For he had been in this place always. It was his home.

Harriet, like M. Bovary on a more famous occasion, was trying to follow the plot. Occasionally she nudged her companions, and asked them what had become of Walter Scott. She looked round grimly. The audience sounded drunk, and even Caroline, who never took a drop, was swaying oddly. Violent waves of excitement, all arising from very little, went sweeping round the theatre. The climax was reached in the mad scene. Lucia, clad in white, as befitted her malady, suddenly gathered up her streaming hair and bowed her acknowledgment to the audience. Then from the back of the stage—she feigned not to see it—there advanced a kind of bamboo clothes-horse, stuck all over with bouquets. It was very ugly, and most of the flowers in it were false. Lucia knew this, and so did the audience; and they all knew that the clothes-horse was a piece of stage property, brought in to make the performance go year after year. None the less did it unloose the great deeps. With a scream of amazement and joy she embraced the animal, pulled out one or two practicable blossoms, pressed them to her lips, and flung them into her admirers. They flung them back, with loud melodious cries, and a little boy in one of the stageboxes snatched up his sister’s carnations and offered them. “Che carino!” exclaimed the singer. She darted at the little boy and kissed him. Now the noise became tremendous. “Silence! silence!” shouted many old gentlemen behind. “Let the divine creature continue!” But the young men in the adjacent box were imploring Lucia to extend her civility to them. She refused, with a humorous, expressive gesture. One of them hurled a bouquet at her. She spurned it with her foot. Then, encouraged by the roars of the audience, she picked it up and tossed it to them. Harriet was always unfortunate. The bouquet struck her full in the chest, and a little billet-doux fell out of it into her lap.

“Call this classical!” she cried, rising from her seat. “It’s not even respectable! Philip! take me out at once.”

“Whose is it?” shouted her brother, holding up the bouquet in one hand and the billet-doux in the other. “Whose is it?”

The house exploded, and one of the boxes was violently agitated, as if some one was being hauled to the front. Harriet moved down the gangway, and compelled Miss Abbott to follow her. Philip, still laughing and calling “Whose is it?” brought up the rear. He was drunk with excitement. The heat, the fatigue, and the enjoyment had mounted into his head.

“To the left!” the people cried. “The innamorato is to the left.”

He deserted his ladies and plunged towards the box. A young man was flung stomach downwards across the balustrade. Philip handed him up the bouquet and the note. Then his own hands were seized affectionately. It all seemed quite natural.

“Why have you not written?” cried the young man. “Why do you take me by surprise?”

“Oh, I’ve written,” said Philip hilariously. “I left a note this afternoon.”

“Silence! silence!” cried the audience, who were beginning to have enough. “Let the divine creature continue.” Miss Abbott and Harriet had disappeared.

“No! no!” cried the young man. “You don’t escape me now.” For Philip was trying feebly to disengage his hands. Amiable youths bent out of the box and invited him to enter it.

“Gino’s friends are ours—”

“Friends?” cried Gino. “A relative! A brother! Fra Filippo, who has come all the way from England and never written.”

“I left a message.”

The audience began to hiss.

“Come in to us.”

“Thank you—ladies—there is not time—”

The next moment he was swinging by his arms. The moment after he shot over the balustrade into the box. Then the conductor, seeing that the incident was over, raised his baton. The house was hushed, and Lucia di Lammermoor resumed her song of madness and death.

Philip had whispered introductions to the pleasant people who had pulled him in—tradesmen’s sons perhaps they were, or medical students, or solicitors’ clerks, or sons of other dentists. There is no knowing who is who in Italy. The guest of the evening was a private soldier. He shared the honour now with Philip. The two had to stand side by side in the front, and exchange compliments, whilst Gino presided, courteous, but delightfully familiar. Philip would have a spasm of horror at the muddle he had made. But the spasm would pass, and again he would be enchanted by the kind, cheerful voices, the laughter that was never vapid, and the light caress of the arm across his back.

He could not get away till the play was nearly finished, and Edgardo was singing amongst the tombs of ancestors. His new friends hoped to see him at the Garibaldi tomorrow evening. He promised; then he remembered that if they kept to Harriet’s plan he would have left Monteriano. “At ten o’clock, then,” he said to Gino. “I want to speak to you alone. At ten.”

“Certainly!” laughed the other.

Miss Abbott was sitting up for him when he got back. Harriet, it seemed, had gone straight to bed.

“That was he, wasn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes, rather.”

“I suppose you didn’t settle anything?”

“Why, no; how could I? The fact is—well, I got taken by surprise, but after all, what does it matter? There’s no earthly reason why we shouldn’t do the business pleasantly. He’s a perfectly charming person, and so are his friends. I’m his friend now—his long-lost brother. What’s the harm? I tell you, Miss Abbott, it’s one thing for England and another for Italy. There we plan and get on high moral horses. Here we find what asses we are, for things go off quite easily, all by themselves. My hat, what a night! Did you ever see a really purple sky and really silver stars before? Well, as I was saying, it’s absurd to worry; he’s not a porky father. He wants that baby as little as I do. He’s been ragging my dear mother—just as he ragged me eighteen months ago, and I’ve forgiven him. Oh, but he has a sense of humour!”

Miss Abbott, too, had a wonderful evening, nor did she ever remember such stars or such a sky. Her head, too, was full of music, and that night when she opened the window her room was filled with warm, sweet air. She was bathed in beauty within and without; she could not go to bed for happiness. Had she ever been so happy before? Yes, once before, and here, a night in March, the night Gino and Lilia had told her of their love—the night whose evil she had come now to undo.

She gave a sudden cry of shame. “This time—the same place—the same thing”—and she began to beat down her happiness, knowing it to be sinful. She was here to fight against this place, to rescue a little soul—who was innocent as yet. She was here to champion morality and purity, and the holy life of an English home. In the spring she had sinned through ignorance; she was not ignorant now. “Help me!” she cried, and shut the window as if there was magic in the encircling air. But the tunes would not go out of her head, and all night long she was troubled by torrents of music, and by applause and laughter, and angry young men who shouted the distich out of Baedeker:—

Poggibonizzi fatti in la, Che Monteriano si fa citta!

Poggibonsi was revealed to her as they sang—a joyless, straggling place, full of people who pretended. When she woke up she knew that it had been Sawston.