The Greater Inclination

She stayed a month at Villa d’Este, and Danyers was with her daily.  She showed an unaffected pleasure in his society; a pleasure so obviously founded on their common veneration of Rendle, that the young man could enjoy it without fear of fatuity.  At first he was merely one more grain of frankincense on the altar of her insatiable divinity; but gradually a more personal note crept into their intercourse.  If she still liked him only because he appreciated Rendle, she at least perceptibly distinguished him from the herd of Rendle’s appreciators.

Her attitude toward the great man’s memory struck Danyers as perfect.  She neither proclaimed nor disavowed her identity.  She was frankly Silvia to those who knew and cared; but there was no trace of the Egeria in her pose.  She spoke often of Rendle’s books, but seldom of himself; there was no posthumous conjugality, no use of the possessive tense, in her abounding reminiscences.  Of the master’s intellectual life, of his habits of thought and work, she never wearied of talking.  She knew the history of each poem; by what scene or episode each image had been evoked; how many times the words in a certain line had been transposed; how long a certain adjective had been sought, and what had at last suggested it; she could even explain that one impenetrable line, the torment of critics, the joy of detractors, the last line of The Old Odysseus.

Danyers felt that in talking of these things she was no mere echo of Rendle’s thought.  If her identity had appeared to be merged in his it was because they thought alike, not because he had thought for her.  Posterity is apt to regard the women whom poets have sung as chance pegs on which they hung their garlands; but Mrs. Anerton’s mind was like some fertile garden wherein, inevitably, Rendle’s imagination had rooted itself and flowered.  Danyers began to see how many threads of his complex mental tissue the poet had owed to the blending of her temperament with his; in a certain sense Silvia had herself created the Sonnets to Silvia.

To be the custodian of Rendle’s inner self, the door, as it were, to the sanctuary, had at first seemed to Danyers so comprehensive a privilege that he had the sense, as his friendship with Mrs. Anerton advanced, of forcing his way into a life already crowded.  What room was there, among such towering memories, for so small an actuality as his?  Quite suddenly, after this, he discovered that Mrs. Memorall knew better:  his fortunate friend was bored as well as lonely.

“You have had more than any other woman!” he had exclaimed to her one day; and her smile flashed a derisive light on his blunder.  Fool that he was, not to have seen that she had not had enough!  That she was young still—­do years count?—­tender, human, a woman; that the living have need of the living.

After that, when they climbed the alleys of the hanging park, resting in one of the little ruined temples, or watching, through a ripple of foliage, the remote blue flash of the lake, they did not always talk of Rendle or of literature.  She encouraged Danyers to speak of himself; to confide his ambitions to her; she asked him the questions which are the wise woman’s substitute for advice.

“You must write,” she said, administering the most exquisite flattery that human lips could give.

Of course he meant to write—­why not to do something great in his turn?  His best, at least; with the resolve, at the outset, that his best should be the best.  Nothing less seemed possible with that mandate in his ears.  How she had divined him; lifted and disentangled his groping ambitions; laid the awakening touch on his spirit with her creative Let there be light!

It was his last day with her, and he was feeling very hopeless and happy.

“You ought to write a book about him,” she went on gently.

Danyers started; he was beginning to dislike Rendle’s way of walking in unannounced.

“You ought to do it,” she insisted.  “A complete interpretation—­a summing-up of his style, his purpose, his theory of life and art.  No one else could do it as well.”

He sat looking at her perplexedly.  Suddenly—­dared he guess?

“I couldn’t do it without you,” he faltered.

“I could help you—­I would help you, of course.”

They sat silent, both looking at the lake.

It was agreed, when they parted, that he should rejoin her six weeks later in Venice.  There they were to talk about the book.