The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) (21 page)

I will await developments, and, meanwhile, keep his chapters until he chooses to write to me decently again.

Ever yours sincerely

R. Hugh Benson

If he did, he kept them for a long time. The wheel had almost turned; once more Rolfe’s affairs approached a crisis. There were several factors to provoke it. First, he owed a number of small sums in Oxford, sums which, though small, he was quite unable to pay. Second, as has been seen, he had quarrelled with his friend Benson. Thirdly, Mr Taylor’s complaisance had reached its limit. Finally, the Gordons had decided that at the following Christmas Gwernvale should be closed until they returned from a tour in the East. Rolfe saw that he had to make a move; and the means lay ready to his hand.

CHAPTER 15: THE VOLUNTARY EXILE

Among those who listened with interest, and an almost unwilling admiration, to Rolfe’s monologues and diatribes at Gwernvale was Professor R. M. Dawkins, at that time Director of the British School of Archaeology at Athens, now the holder of the Bywater and Sotheby chair of modern Greek at Oxford. In 1907 he returned to England to settle the affairs of a small, newly-inherited estate in Breconshire, and was duly entertained as a neighbour by the Pirie-Gordons. On one of these visits he met Rolfe; and, as he writes, ‘I was immediately struck by the personality of the man; not by his learning, which was on the surface, nor his history, which was picturesque, but by his personal intensity and singularity, which roused my curiosity and interest.’ Later, after the inevitable quarrel, Rolfe described Professor Dawkins in his most vivid vein of personal abuse, though he added parenthetically, ‘he knew more Greek archaeology than anyone else in the world, and his brains were occasionally pickable’.

Indeed, Rolfe was drawn as by a magnet to this fountain of learning (who was also a landowner, and therefore, in Rolfe’s eyes, rich); while Professor Dawkins, who possessed that scientific turn of mind which often accompanies scholarship, was attracted and amused by the
outré
stranger, with his mixture of superstition and personal power, who talked of astrology as though it was an exact science, and ascribed his misfortunes to planetary influences. For, though Rolfe deceived others, he seemed also the dupe of his own spells; and this, and the other elements of his contradictory make-up, provided a stimulating problem to the sceptical professor. Perhaps it was the intensity of Rolfe’s self-deceptions which gave him his power, frequently displayed, of attracting the interest and sympathy of chance acquaintances. The present instance was no exception. In one of his first letters to Dawkins (for, after the latter’s return to Athens, a correspondence followed) Rolfe wrote:

My difficulty, however, is, not to find friends as I get older, but to keep those whom the gods send me in such profusion. I find that, unless one is able to reciprocate social am
œ
nities, one’s friends sheer off; and it is quite impossible to do one’s share in friendship – the share which one burns and yearns to do – as long as one is harassed and distracted and simply torn to pieces by the struggle of keeping on the cheerful mask disguising one’s struggles for life. So I shall watch with much interest to see how long you and I can keep it up. Don’t be afraid that I shall drop it. No. When it ends, do just tell yourself that it is the malignance of my stars which has snatched my end of the cord out of my hand. And do not be surprised: for I dance on volcanoes all the time – if you can call it dancing . . . I’m telling you all this so that if I don’t answer your letters you’ll know that it’s not the will but the ability which is lacking. When things go quite wrong with me I’ve got the habit of putting on corduroy and a blue belcher and a pseudonym and running away to hide myself until benignant stars bring me out into a more ample air.

In later letters Rolfe dwelt on the homelessness impending over his head: Gwernvale was to be closed, and Benson – the whole story was retold – ‘has let me down with a bang’. The ‘blubber-lipped Professor of Greek’ was touched by these confidences: it must be remembered that he knew nothing of Rolfe and his affairs beyond what he was told by the Pirie-Gordons (who naturally set their guest in a good light, since they knew no harm of him beyond that he was poor and queer) and by Rolfe himself. Seeing an opportunity to help a ‘lame dog’ and secure himself amusing companionship at the same time, he suggested that Rolfe should join him in a holiday at Venice later in the year, and offered to provide the money necessary for expenses. ‘He was to repay me from money to be made by descriptive writing’, Professor Dawkins writes. ‘I was glad enough to risk a little cash for the pleasure and interest of his company, and of course I never really expected to see it back again.’

Plans were made accordingly. Rolfe was extremely excited, and very grateful; new turrets were added to his castles in the air. There was good reason for his excitement. In an expression that used to be popular, he had an elective affinity for Italy, a fostered devotion for her sunshine, her history, and her speech. His one visit to Rome had made him a Baron in name, and tinged his nature with something more than the remembrance of Southern intensity. Now, again, he was to visit the country he had so long loved, and loved all the more by revulsion from his repeated failures in his own.

Fr. Rolfe setting out for foreign travel was a curious sight. He had changed very much from the young man with the ‘handsome, sensitive face’ of Oscott days who had scandalized the authorities of the Scots College by his aesthetic vagaries, and captivated the elderly Duchessa by his charm. Then, he was tonsured from choice; now, in his forty-ninth year, his skull was covered with an iron-grey stubble kept closely clipped. Then, he had treasured a silver-fitted dressing case, Heaven knows how acquired; now, on this second visit, his luggage was contained in a large laundry basket, fastened by a homely bar and padlock – a mode of carrying baggage which seemed highly suspicious to the Customs officials. But still he was the same unchanging Rolfe, who contrived to give an air of queerness to ordinary actions: as in the wearing of a silver crucifix so large and heavy that to pacify his chafed flesh he wore always beneath its foot a thickness of goldbeater’s skin: or the carriage of a fountain pen at least thrice the size of those usually sold in shops. ‘During the war I feel sure that the secret services of Europe would have quarrelled as to which of them should shoot Rolfe as a spy. He looked always so extremely and self-consciously odd’, observes his travelling companion.

Rolfe was unchanged, too, in his propensity to incur debts, and his attitude to other people’s money. Officially he had not come as Professor Dawkins’s guest, but as one who had borrowed money which he would presently repay. Since it was his intention and hope to repay whatever he might spend, he saw no reason for stinting himself; and his host (in fact if not in name) soon found that Rolfe’s idea of enjoyment included numerous forms of ‘elaborate idleness’ which were expensive, as well as more than ordinarily good food and wine. Protests he met with ‘a sort of worrying bullying’. Despite the subtlety on which Rolfe prided himself, he frequently went astray over simple matters. It was so now. Professor Dawkins, far from being pleased by the pleasant ways of spending money which Rolfe was constantly discovering, was disconcerted to find that he was expected to live almost
en prince
for two. So, inventing an excuse that was reasonably true, he announced his intention of examining Greek manuscripts at Rome (an alternative to Venetian idleness which did not attract Rolfe) and departed, with expressions of goodwill that he hardly felt, leaving Rolfe enough money to enable him to stay in Venice for a time and then return home. The friends never met again; indeed, not one of his English friends ever again saw Fr. Rolfe in the flesh, though they saw and shivered at his beautiful script.

Alone in Venice, Rolfe set himself to weave new dreams. The sun shone bright in the city of canals; and the battered, homeless wanderer had always loved water and sunshine. Moreover, he had money in the bank. Not much; but to one who had lived so long on debts and credit, even thirty pounds (he can have had little more) seemed a sum. We can guess almost exactly how he spent his time. Certainly he swam a great deal, and hired a sandalo, which he learned to row in the Venetian mode – a difficult task. He talked in his faulty and academic Italian to everyone in reach, from fisher-boys to hotel secretary, though perhaps most of all to the fisher-boys. And he gratified the lust of the eye. All through his life Rolfe had shown himself strongly susceptible to outward appearances. Now, in the old Italian city, he indulged in an orgy of sightseeing where there was so much to see.

Fr. Rolfe left an account of his first impressions of Venetian life which deserves quotation:

I came to Venice in August for a six week’s holiday; and lived and worked and slept in my
barcheta
almost always. It seemed that, by staying on, I could most virtuously and most righteously cheat autumn and winter. Such was the effect of this kind of Venetian life on me, that I felt no more than twenty-five years old, in everything excepting valueless experience and valuable disillusion. The bounding joy of vigorous health, the physical capacity for cheerful (nay, gay) endurance, the careless, untroubled mental activity, the perfectly gorgeous appetite, the prompt, delicate dreamless nights of sleep, which betoken healthy youth – all this (with indescribable happiness) I had triumphantly snatched from solitude with the sun and the sea. I went swimming half a dozen times a day, beginning at white dawn, and ending after sunsets which set the whole lagoon ablaze with amethyst and topaz. Between friends, I will confess that I am not guiltless of often getting up in the night and popping silently overboard to swim for an hour in the clear of a great gold moon – plenilunio – or among the waving reflections of the stars. (O my goodness me, how heavenly a spot that is!) When I wanted change of scene and anchorage, I rowed with my two gondoglieri; and there is nothing known to physiculturalists (for giving you ‘poise’ and the organs and figure of a slim young Diadymenos) like rowing standing in the Mode Venetian. It is jolly hard work; but no other exercise bucks you up as does springing forward from your toe-tips and stretching forward to the full in pushing the oar, or produces such exquisite lassitude at night when your work is done. And I wrote quite easily for a good seven hours each day. Could anything be more felicitous?

And, one day, I replenished my stock of provisions at Burano; and at sunset we rowed away to find a station for the night. Imagine a twilight world of cloudless sky and smoothest sea, all made of warm, liquid, limpid heliotrope and violet and lavender, with bands of burnished copper set with emeralds, melting, on the other hand, into the fathomless blue of the eyes of the prides of peacocks, where the moon rose, rosy as mother-of-pearl. Into such glory we three advanced the black
barcheta,
solemnly, silently, when the last echo of
Ave Maria
died.

Slowly we came out north of Burano into the open lagoon; and rowed eastward to meet the night, as far as the point marked by five
pali,
where the wide canal curves to the south. Slowly we went. There was something so holy – so majestically holy – in that evening silence, that I would not have it broken even by the quiet plash of oars. I was lord of time and place. No engagements cried to be kept. I could go when and where I pleased, fast or slow, far or near. And I chose the near and the slow. I did more. So unspeakably gorgeous was the peace on the lagoon just then, that it inspired me with a lust for doing nothing at all but sitting and absorbing impressions motionlessly. That way come thoughts, new, generally noble.

The wide canal, in which we drifted, is a highway. I have never seen it unspeckled by the
sandali
of Buranelli fishers. Steam-boats and tank-barges of fresh water for Burano, and the ordinary barks of carriage, disturb it, not always, but often. My wish was to find a smaller canal, away – away. We were (as I said) at the southern side, at the southward curve marked by five
pali.
Opposite, on the other bank, begins the long line of
pali
which shows the deep-water way right down to the Ricevitorio of Treporti; and there, at the beginning of the line, I spied the mouth of a canal which seemed likely to suit me. We rowed across to it, and entered. It tended north-eastward for two or three hundred metres, and then bended like an elbow north-westward. It looked quite a decent canal, perhaps forty metres in width, between sweet mud-banks clothed with sea-lavender about two-foot lengths above high-water mark in places. We pushed inshore, near to the inner bank at the elbow, stuck a couple of oars into the mud fore and aft, and moored there.

Baicolo and Caicio got out the draught board and cigarettes, and played below their breath on the
puppa;
while I sat still, bathing my soul in peace, till the night was dark and Selene high in the limpid sapphire-blue. Then they lighted the
fanali,
and put up the impermeable awning with wings and curtains to cover the whole
barcheta;
and made a parmentier soup to eat with our wine and
polenta.
And, when kapok-cushions had been arranged on the floor, and summer sleeping bags laid over them, we took our last dash overboard, said our prayers, and went to bed. Baicolo at
prova
with his feet towards mine amidships, and Caicio under the
puppa
with his feet well clear of my pillowed head. So, we slept.

Soon after sunrise I awakened: it was a sunrise of opal and fire: the boys were deep in slumber. I took down the awning, and unmoored quietly, and mounted the
puppa
to row about in the dewy freshness in search of a fit place for my morning plunge. I am very particular about this. Deep water I must have – as deep as possible – I being what the Venetians call ‘appassionato per l’acqua’. Beside that, I have a vehement dyspathy against getting entangled in weeds or mud, to make my toe-nails dirtier than my finger-nails. And, being congenitally myopic, I see more clearly in deep water than in shallow, almost as clearly, in fact, as with a concave monocle on land. So I left the
barcheta
to drift with the current, while I took soundings with the long oar of the
puppa,
in several parts of the canal, near both banks as well as in the middle. Nowhere could I touch bottom; and this signified that my bathing place was more than four metres in depth. Needless to say that I gave a joyful morning yell, which dragged from sleep the luxury-loving Baicolo to make coffee, and the faithful dog Caicio to take my oar and keep the
barcheta
near me; and then I plunged overboard to revel in the limpid green water. Lord, how lovely is Thy smooth salt water flowing on flesh!

But £30 does not last for ever, even when living is cheap; and the little store of sterling slowly melted. Rolfe wrote for more money to Mr Taylor, and the friendly Gordons of Gwernvale. They sent £25 and £12 10s. respectively; but they also asked his plans.

His plans! He had none. He wanted to live in the sun, and that savour of the past which surrounds and exhales from the city of St Mark; he wanted to go on talking and sightseeing, to continue his excursions, to saturate himself in the atmosphere and spirit of beauty and Italy. But the question was insistent; he could not live on beautiful impressions. So he found a ‘plan’. His old-time skill in photography should be his ‘plan’; and he suggested that he should establish himself as a shopkeeper in Venice, selling fine photographs to the tourists, living above his business, and, in his leisure, writing books which should make him rich.