The first of April

DJUNA BARNES

Messages by wire and a rendez-vous in Rome prove to two lovers that love is a pleasant habit

■ Into Rome for the last thirty years had come, for the month of April, that distinguished Bavarian visitor the Baron Otto Lowenhaven to meet, in secret, the flower of Italy, the Contessa Mafalda Beonetti. To say that this long liaison was secret is merely indulgent, for every cabman in the city cracked his whip with a knowing smile almost before the lovers had clasped hands in the high and dark room of the pensione overlooking the Tiber which had seen their love in its flower, and in every succeeding phase of its growth.

For many years the beauty of the Contessa Mafalda Beonetti had been a song in the heart of all Italy. Some feline propensity in her father, some lanky Devon blood flowing in her mother's veins had made her both ungainly and magnificent, and the sirocco that swung across Italy had been, for Mafalda, the furnace that fused her qualities into so perfect an accord that she might have been her own conception of herself, so exactly was she what she would have approved.

At twenty she had married the count Antoni Beonetti because it was quite the right thing to do; at twenty-one she had become the mistress of the Baron Otto Lowenhaven because it was quite the wrong thing to do. They found each other delightful.

■ Otto was a year her senior, and as frostily handsome as the perpetual Bavarian idealism indulged in by generations of romantic mothers could make him. He was tall and slender and blond. His cheeks were a flawless mingling of red and white. His curling hair rose up from a high arched brow in crisp tendrils, and his mustache swerved away from his nostrils in a darting upward line with the swift felicity of a bird on the wing. When he murmured "Ich liebe dich!" it was with the voice of one who recovers a treasure mislaid a thousand years, and there was in his background, to make him stand out yet more sharply on the heart, an unhappy but politically perfect marriage with a wailing Viennese, Helena von Spergen... a thin woman who carried her knowledge of the Baron's affair with the "Italian devil" so close to her sense of injustice that she had, in thirty weeping years, earned the nick-name of "The Eye in a Thousand Handkerchiefs."

During the long years of his affair with Mafalda it had been plainly hinted to the Baron that she would undoubtedly ruin his political hopes; she was not liked in Bavaria. To these remarks he had turned a consistently deaf ear, but as he neared fifty, and saw his political ambitions still unfulfilled, he began himself to see that perhaps the affair had gone on long enough. His wife, embittered with jealousy and indefatigable with frustration, had often told him so, although on these occasions she spoke drearily, and without much hope.

Now it was nearing the last days of March and the Baron was making arrangements for his annual April in Rome. Everyone, his wife included, knew just where he was going, and to whom; and she thought her time had come. Wrapped in her usual trailing muslin, carrying a lace handkerchief and acrid with purpose, she entered the library where the Baron sat pulling his hound's ear, warming himself before one of the season's last fires.

■ Moving upon him in long, sweeping steps, tall and haggard as a winter willow, pressing her lace to her mouth, she pointed out to him in just what way he had become ridiculous.

She said that to walk in beauty was one thing, but to walk with a withering woman was another. She observed that the very emeralds that he, as a young man, had clasped about Mafalda's throat, were now lost in the folds of her chin, as her beauty was lost in the corroding immensity of age.

Helena leaned a little forward as she talked, her handkerchief held below her mouth, and she saw the Baron wince.

Once more she took the room in her long, pitiless stride, and in the half arc of her passage, offered time's deadly weapon hilt out, and the hilt was flattery.

"You," she said, "so handsome and in your prime... tied to an old woman!"

The Baron's colour slowly faded. He himself had thought that his affair should end, but never before had he thought of Mafalda as an old woman. It was true. She was stout. She was fifty.

"I will wire her. I will tell her it is all over, it is farewell."

For the first time in thirty years Helena pressed her handkerchief to her heart.

"You will not go to Rome?"

"No," he said, "I will not go to Rome. I am going to Florence for a little while. I want to be alone."

At the small, inconspicuous hotel over the Arno where he had first met the Contessa, and to which they had sometimes come in the winter, the Baron asked for a room for the night. Being Bavarian, he wanted to cry a little for a love that had endured so many years, a love that was about to end. He paced from the window to the door, thinking. His friends were right, his wife was right; it was high time that he, a man in his prime, a man superbly fifty-one, should become a model husband and citizen. His youth could not go on forever...

His meditations were snapped in two by a voice in the next room. It was the firm, excellently modulated voice of the Count Beonetti—Mafalda's husband.

"My dear Mafalda," he was saying, "you yourself have begun to realize, perhaps without conscious knowledge, that your affair with the Baron should cease; or why did you come here to Florence, to the very hotel where, I believe, you first made his acquaintance? You said, when you left Rome, that you wanted quiet, that you wanted to think—well, of what does a woman think when she returns to that city in which she was first thoughtless? I do not blame you for coming here—women always like to terminate a romance where they began it." He paused. "I have followed you here to urge you, in case it was sentiment and not determination, to conclude this affair, my dear. Ten, twenty-five years ago I would have made little objection to it—in fact I made none. The Baron, in his day, was a very charming fellow—and if you had to be unfaithful, he was exactly the man I should have chosen. But—" There was a longer pause... "that was twenty-five, twenty, ten years ago. Now, I mast object. I let you make yourself scandalous, but I will not let you make yourself ridiculous. I cannot permit you to link my name, which you bear, with that of an old man—and the Baron, my dear, is not only an unsuccessful politician ... he is short of breath."

The Baron, sitting stiffly in his chair (for, at the first word, he had found himself unable to stand), heard her crying. Then he heard her say:

■ "Yes, Antonio, you are right. I will wire him. I will tell him it is farewell, that it is over. But please go now, I want to be alone, alone a little while..." Her voice trailed off and the door was opened and closed softly. Then there was silence, but in that silence the Baron's heart was pounding like a madman's. They were right, both of them, his wife and Mafalda's husband. The Contessa and he were old, and after all they were both ridiculous. Suddenly he stood up. If he got to Rome quickly he could retrieve his wire, he could save Mafalda needless pain. She might of course never receive it, and yet the pensione knew where to forward the Contessa's mail. . . .

On the road to Rome, in the early dawn, two motors going at as swift a pace as their chauffeurs could make them, passed each other. The Baron sat in the one behind and he kept urging the driver to go faster, faster. Once the Baron's car passed the new crimson racer, but the Baron, leaning heavily on his cane, did not turn his head. For a few moments his car held the lead, then it dropped back again.

Drawing up before the familiar pensione, the Baron, as briskly as his shortness of breath would permit, hurried up the steps and moved toward the desk. Old Beppo, a familiar figure, came forward. He bowed, as he had bowed a hundred times; smiled, as he had smiled a hundred times.

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"A telegram!" gasped the Baron.

"As always Signor." Beppo slid into the Baron's hand an envelope addressed in his name. Beppo bowed again, waiting.

The telegram was not the one the Baron had come for. It was the one Mafalda had promised to send the night before.

"Yes, yes," the Baron said hurriedly, crumpling it in his hand, "but the other . . . addressed to . . ." He got no further.

"Si Signor, as always," Beppo smiled with happiness, "she is here; she came not a quarter of an hour ago. She has received it."

The Baron dropped his cane with a crash. He stooped to pick it up, his face as red as flame. Beppo stepped out from behind his desk.

"Strange Signor, but she, too, wanted not her own telegram, but yours. But alas, you see, Amedeo, he is our new boy, was alone here when she came in, and not knowing that it would be . . . quite all right, would not give it to her. Of course when I came in I scolded him roundly. I said 'Fool, it is the custom, to give to either of them always what he or she asks for!' But it was too late, she had gone out. But now that you have it, it is all satisfactory, yes?"

He was a little troubled. "I have your rooms all prepared, my first Spring flowers are in all the vases. Will you go up?"

The Baron, leaning on his cane in a daze tried to pull himself together. "Where has she gone?" he managed to whisper. "Where has she gone?"

"Ah," said Beppo happy again, "she will not, she tells me, be gone long. She went toward the Piazza."

Frowning with anxiety, the Baron allowed himself to be conducted to the familiar rooms, cool and dark. He sat down. Beppo left him, seeing him abstracted. The Baron removed his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. How could he have known that Mafalda would come to Rome? Still, he might have known—women were like that. When everything was over, dead, they came back—as he had.

From afar he heard what he thought was the cruelty of a dream ... the familiar step. The door opened. He turned—stood up. For one long moment they looked at each other. She was smiling, drawing off her gloves. Then, suddenly, she was in his arms.

"It was sweet of you," she said, and her deep, enchanting voice held that pause, "not to wire me this time. Just to trust me to know that you would come."

He took her hand and put it to his eyes. "It was divine of you Mafalda," for a second he could not speak... "not to wire me. At last it seems we know each other, trust each other.."

She unclasped her cloak. "Telegrams are so unnecessary, really Otto. We know, the world knows, that we will both be here always on the first of April. The first of April . . . always." She leaned forward, taking his hands.

The waiter appeared. "Did you ring, Signor?" he asked, knowing quite well that the Signor had not rung.

The Baron turned with a flourish. "Yes!" he thundered, "a bottle of your best, and schnell!"