An Adventure in the Alps
Elizabeth Robins, "The Mills of the Gods"
In a party of vacationers in the Swiss Alps, the trouble-making Renzo Belluci comes across an old flame whom he has wronged, Madame Paravicini. Her beautiful, silent daughter sparks his interest.
Now read on:
On the fourth day one of the curious, who stayed behind to observe, reported that they threaded their way up and down the deserted paths in a silence so absolute that it bordered on the uncanny. People began to whisper, "The girl is deaf and dumb!" When the rumour reached Bellucci he turned white: his circumspection suddenly failed him.
He had driven his party that day round Ardetz and Guarda. When almost home again his keen eyes caught sight of Madame Paravicini and her daughter returning from a walk. As they reached the door of the Waldhaus Madame Paravicini turned suddenly, hearing the sound of the coach-horn. Bellucci brought his four superb horses up with a magnificent sweep and flourish, stopping them suddenly on their very haunches precisely at the door of the great entrance. The girl gazed at the brilliant apparition with large-eyed wonder.
"Come," said Madame Paravicini.
Her daughter seemed not to hear. But Bellucci noticed with secret satisfaction, as he jumped off the box, the first sign of interest the marvellous face had worn. It was true she looked not at the driver, but at the foam-flecked mouths of the horses, and the long scarlet tassels that waved so proudly down their broad chests.
"Come, Alicia," repeated Madame Paravicini, and still the girl never moved.
An acquaintance of Bellucci, who left the group at the door to compliment the driver on his horsemanship, whispered the growing impression:
"Think of that superb creature there being deaf and dumb!"
Bellucci looked up sharply. Madame Paravicini had laid her hand on the girl's arm and was drawing her indoors. A lady's glove lay on the step. Bellucci sprang after them as they entered the hall.
"You dropped this, mademoiselle," he said close to the girl's ear. She turned at once and slowly shook her head.
Bellucci watched them till they disappeared up the broad staircase.
"She's not deaf!" he said triumphantly to his friends.
"Did she answer you?"
"No, but couldn't you see she heard me?--and I spoke low."
By dinner-time another theory was generally accepted. The beautiful Anglaise had some fatal and hideous impediment in her speech. Bellucci's heart sank again. How could he be sure the rest were wrong? There was something strange about those long dinners and those longer walks, unbroken, so far as anyone could tell, by a single syllable of speech--it was more than strange, it was inhuman. Why did the mother not talk to her in signs? Was she so proud, or was the girl--that she preferred to accept dumbly the fiat of fate and wrap herself in silence? But it wasn't true! He threw off the supposition like an evil dream. For he had recognized by this time that the girl meant something to him of allurement--promised something--(aside from being the daughter of an enemy) something of mysterious difficulty in attainment new even in his history.
He fastened his gaze on her that night at dinner, wondering, beseeching, imperious. Presently, to his joy and astonishment, he saw her great liquid eyes full upon him and seemed to shiver slightly in the cool evening air. She drew a little white lace mantle around her. He turned away an instant to disguise his triumph.
When he looked again, the great eyes were still upon him. A fresh course was being served at the moment. Madame Paravicini leaned forward and whispered something. The girl, without opening her lips, got up and changed seats with her mother. Her back was turned to Bellucci's party, so that, instead of a new love's mysterious beauty, Madame Paravicini's cold but open scorn confronted her ancient enemy.
What we love about this passage...
We love the gothic setting, the suspenseful encounter, the whiff of danger, and the reversal of fortune. There's a slight medieval feel to the setting, which infuses the tale with a sense of romance, mythology, and fairy-tale.
In just a few sentences, Robins is able to transport us to a different world: one where the scheming Bellucci believes he has the upper hand, all the time not knowing that Madame Paravicini's plan is slowly being realized under his nose. She has an axe to grind with her former lover, and sensationally, her daughter seems the perfect bait.
Despite the precise plotting, a few key details have been withheld, adding to the mystery. What exactly has happened between Madame Paracivini and Bellucci? Why is her daughter so strangely quiet? And what is she ultimately trying to win?
This is a rich story told by a master storyteller, and in the process of deftly solving one mystery, Robins will bring on new questions.
About the author
Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952) was an American playwright, actress, novelist, and suffragist who lived a long and fascinating life. On the cusp of adulthood, at 18, she took the rare opportunity of living in and writing about a goldmining camp in Colorado. This formative experience seems much at odds with the next decade of her life, when she achieved fame acting on London's stages (including in premieres of Ibsen's plays) and as a playwright. By the 1900s, she was a well-regarded actress and budding novelist, and still she continued to take on new adventures: setting off for the Klondike gold rush, becoming a prominent suffrage activist (an experience that resulted in her play Votes for Women!), and campaigning against human trafficking. She counted among her friends Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde and Henry James, and in recent decades has enjoyed a revival of interest in her life and work.
To read alongside...
Robins's story seems to draw on a number of nineteenth-century precedents, including George Eliot's short stories "The Lifted Veil" and "Brother George." The setup of a scorned lover using her daughter to enact collective revenge upon all men recalls Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, specifically Miss Havisham's fixation upon the young Estella and the injunction: “Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!”
The late nineteenth and early-twentieth century saw an interest in the dark, hyper-stylized, fantastical novella and short story. Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Kate Chopin's "An Egyptian Cigarette," and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" are classics of this genre.
And although Edith Wharton is better remembered as a novelist, she excelled at the short story, as in "The Descent of Man." She was also an early reader of Robins, particularly her 1904 novel The Magnetic North.
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The Ten Minute Book Club: https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/ten-minute-book-club
Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/
Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/
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