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Title: World So Wide
Author: Lewis, Sinclair [Harry Sinclair] (1885-1951)
Date of first publication: 1951
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Random House, 1951
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 5 January 2019
Date last updated: 5 January 2019
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1588

This ebook was produced by
Al Haines, Cindy Beyer, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






WORLD SO WIDE

by Sinclair Lewis




    No character in this story is
    the portrait of any real person.




    TO the Donna Caterina, Alec, John, Tish, Victor, Margherita,
    Tina, Claude and so many other memories of Italy.





CHAPTER 1


The traffic policemen and the two detectives from the homicide squad
examined the tracks of the car and were convinced that a soft shoulder
of the road had given way.

They had been returning from Bison Park, after midnight but quite sober.
Hayden Chart was driving the convertible and hating his wife, Caprice,
and hating himself for hating her. He was not given to grudges and,
despite her glitter of pale-green dinner dress and her glitter of
derisive gossip, Caprice was a simpleton who no more deserved hatred
than did a noisy child. But she did chatter so. It wore Hayden down like
a telephone bell ringing incessantly in an empty house.

She gabbled, "Jesse Bradbin is so dumb! He's an absolute hick, and he's
about as much of an architect as my left foot. Why couldn't you get a
smarter partner? And is he a lousy bridge player! Is he ever!"

"He's not bad."

"No, it's his cluck of a wife that really gets me down. In my candid
opinion, Mary Eliza Bradbin is the worst dose of vinegar in Newlife; the
most hypocritical combination of piousness and secret drinking I ever
ran into. And always criticizing some poor bunny. You pretend like you
like everybody, but even you got to admit Mary Eliza is a pain in the
neck. Isn't she, huh? Isn't she?"

"Yes. Stupid. But means well," said Hayden Chart.

"She means poison, that's what she means!"

The scolding did not become Caprice, thought Hayden. She was elfin, tiny
and quick and rose and pale gold, given to affectionate giggles in
between her miaows. If she would only shut up, he sighed, he could go on
loving her like a dutiful husband--perhaps.

He longed for silence. Especially on a moony night like this, driving on
smooth cement with this suave engine, he liked to look up at the
mountains against the moon-pale sky, to look with satisfaction at the
houses he himself had planned in these comely new suburbs of Newlife,
"the fastest-growing city in Colorado"--Newlife, with its skyscrapers
set among flat one-story supply-houses for silver miners and
sheep-ranchers; Newlife and its symphony orchestra, with a Spanish
conductor, playing in a Renaissance temple where a fiery dance-hall had
stood but twenty years before. Newlife had swollen from 30,000 to
300,000 in thirty years, and it expected a million in another thirty.

And in Newlife no firm was more enterprising than Chart, Bradbin &
Chart, architects: the heavy-handed Jesse Bradbin, aged sixty, and the
thirty-five-year-old Hayden, who was slim and compact and patient, and
given to playing tennis and reading biography.

He did not know Caprice. It would always be his fault with women that
his imagination darted into their inner minds, thought with and through
their minds. He took their side even against himself, and saw to it,
thus, that he invariably lost in the war against women.

He could not even be thunderous with a woman client guilty of the most
sickening of crimes (except for not paying the bill): wanting what she
wanted in a house and not what the architect knew was good for her. He
was both maddened and sympathetic now when Caprice, exasperated at not
having made him pay more attention to her, started all her little tricks
of propaganda, which mutely shrieked, "Notice me--notice me!"

Holding it visibly high, from her lizard-skin evening bag she took out
her gold-link purse; out of the purse she took a package in silver
paper; out of the silver paper she took the prize she had just won at
bridge: a brooch of imitation jade. Then she wrapped up the brooch, put
the silver paper in her purse, put the purse in the bag, loudly clicked
the bag shut, loudly clicked it open again, took out the purse, took out
the silver paper...

She was capable of doing this over and over until he testified to her
powers of torture by scolding her.

But tonight his anger at her petty bullying was lost in pity that, at
slightly over thirty, she should still have the mind of a child
delighted by any sort of gift. He made himself say to her, civilly,
"That's a nice jade charm. I'm glad you won it."

Now that she had made him recognize her presence, she returned to her
gabbing, but more spitefully; she did what she gleefully called
"needling him a little."

"But you, big boy, were _you_ ever terrible tonight! You played worse
than Mary Eliza. You got no more card sense than a zebra. But what
amused me, when it didn't get me sore--oh, you didn't think I noticed;
you think you're such a smoothie about covering up your sniffing around
after women--what had me sunk was the way you kept sneaking in a look at
Roxanna's ankles and Alice's buz-_zoom_ and Jane's god-awful lipstick.
You'd be _the_ most ridiculous tail-waving cat out on the tiles, if it
wasn't that you're such a coward!"

His irritation, sparking into wrath at this injustice, may have made his
hand twitch on the steering wheel, or it may have been entirely the soft
shoulder of the highway caving in. Whichever, the car was suddenly and
appallingly shooting off the embanked road, and as he protested, "This
can't be happening to me!" they were turning over and over in air.

There was something comic in that grotesque horror. The roof was below
him, then the car upended like a rearing horse, then his head had struck
the roof and afterward the windshield, then the whirling cosmos banged
down, and the side window was below him, on the earth, then up beside
him again, and they were still. The huge noise dissolved into a huge
blank silence, and the car shook like a panting animal. They were
tilted, but nearly right-side-up.

He thought that his head was bleeding and both his arms broken and he
knew that he was very sick and that Caprice was not there beside him.

"Where are you? Darling!" he was screaming--he was trying to scream,
while he realized that his voice was choked. He thought he could hear a
small shaky answer from her, but he was so dazed that he could not be
sure whether it was a moan or a sneer. With agony he managed to turn his
head enough to make out their situation.

With a freakishness like that of a tornado, Caprice seemed to have been
thrown into the shallow back seat, and the light fabric top of the
convertible had been so deeply dented that she was imprisoned there,
with only an aperture between the two seats large enough for him to hear
her sobbing; not large enough for either of them to pass. In any case,
he could not move far. He was jammed between the seat and the twisted
steering post. The glass had been ripped clear out of the windshield; it
seemed to have slashed his scalp.

"Caprice!"

"Ohhhhhh..."

"Can you move? Can you reach me?"

"Ohhhhhh..."

"Are you hurt badly?"

"I don't know.... Oh, yes, my neck--hurts dreadfully."

More than the pain which beat in a steady rhythm of agony in an arc that
traversed his head, he felt anxiety for her--with her poor, pretty jade
charm. For perhaps the first time this past year or so, he felt not just
a resigned endurance of her malice, but an active affection, a desire to
sacrifice himself to help her.

He was trying to shout for help, expecting to be rescued, to have aid at
once. But his voice was a parched trickle, weak as that of an ailing
baby. He struggled to raise his head from the cool upholstery against
which his cheek rested, and look through the empty windshield frame. He
perceived, in a dull, sick way, that they were in a brush-thick hollow
far down below the level of the highway, hidden from it. Even were it
not night, they would not be seen, be heard, from any of the rushing
automobiles whose lights, innumerable and swift, level comet-tracks,
were darting above them, with the steady swish of tires on cement.

Caprice and he might lie here, bleeding, stranglingly thirsty, for many
nights and days.

He could hear Caprice's voice, in a tiny angry scolding:

"Inexcusable carelessness, and you always claim to be such a good driver
and then practically killing me!"

He agreed with her. He did love her so much! If he had of late thought
himself indifferent to her, it had been only the self-absorbed busyness
of a craftsman, he told himself.

He was not sure just how conscious she was, back there, as she prattled
away more and more spitefully:

"Why don't you _do_ something? Get out and get some help, not sit there
and wait for somebody to find us! Always so helpless and never, never
think about what I may want or need or anything!"

A snigger then of dainty malice, the cat sniggering as it patted the
dying mouse:

"Oh, not you! Always so high-and-mighty and cultured, telling everybody
about these big thick history books you're always reading, and you never
really finish any of 'em! Ridiculous spectacle of yourself, and
everybody laughing at you. Pretending you're so hot and bothered about
classical music and oh yes, of course, just have to have it on the radio
when you're reading, and never hear one note! Oh, I've proved it! I've
switched it to jazz and you never even noticed. Not mind your being so
phony if you weren't so clumsy about it and everybody gets onto
you--what a goat!"

In his mind he pleaded with her, "Don't, oh, please don't, not now when
I've turned back to you. Let me go on loving you!"

His head seemed to have stopped bleeding but it was all a thick mass of
aching, his throat was dry as a desert water-hole, and he could not make
out a word now as she cackled on, delirious and incomprehensible. He was
losing account of time. Had he passed out, had he been unconscious?

They could both die here before they were found. Was this the end of
everything?

"Is this all I'm going to get from life? I've done so little and seen so
little out of all I wanted. In college, that Kipling thing, 'For to
admire and for to see, I've wandered o'er the world so wide.' I was
going to see everything, everywhere."

He made a monstrous list of the things he had wanted, now that it was,
no doubt, too late ever to do them. To be state tennis champion. To camp
in British Columbia and have a winter in the Caribbean. To speak French
and live in Paris and know wines and meet dashing actresses and wise old
men with spade beards. To live for months overlooking a monastery
garden, mystic and contemplative.

(It would have to be an Episcopal monastery, though, wouldn't it? His
great-great-grandfather had been Church of England Bishop of North
Carolina.)

And--a familiar dream which he had illustrated with drawings on stray
envelopes--now he would never build that prairie village which was to
have been all housed in one skyscraper: the first solution in history of
rural isolation and loneliness. He could have done it, too! He was
amazed that these hands, this aching brain, so hotly alive now, might at
a moment crumble in dissolution.

Too late? But if he did get free from this prison, he would renounce his
routine provincial life and follow every one of his fantasies.

Surely Caprice would come with him--_perhaps_ she would. There were no
children to consider, even after their eight years of marriage, nor did
Caprice really want any. At thirty-five, with enough money earned by
himself or inherited from his father, who had founded their
architectural firm, he was freer than at eighteen.

With his even tan, his small mustache, his erect slenderness, Hayden
Chart might have been a Scotch major or a Yorkshire man. His face was
thin, and people said that his eyes were kind. In a business world where
so many hustlers like Jesse Bradbin were inclined to be damply
enthusiastic and clammy to the handshake, there was a fine, dry, hard
quality about Hayden, the quality of a polished dagger.

The dagger had been too long sheathed.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Caprice was still muttering on, scarcely heard, with a sound like dry
leaves shifting in an autumn breeze. His pity for her grew more
passionate. She was so youthful, at thirty-one; she had so loved this
new automobile and everything in their new Georgian brick house, from
the deep-freeze and the red-and-black tiled rumpus-room to her dressing
room, all crystal and frilly curtains. With a heartier, blunter, more
alcoholic husband, she would have exulted in a life of dancing and risky
gambling. He had always hurt her, Hayden sighed, and he hadn't meant to,
he never had meant to.

He was keeping up, this while, an effort to shout which mangled his
throat yet seemed no louder than a moan. But he may have been heard.

Near them, a match was lighted and held up, revealing the twisted hood
of the car and a scared, bearded, rustic face peering in through the
windshield frame. Hayden managed a gasp of "Get help!" The match went
out, and his battered consciousness went out with it.

In a shaky dream he saw or thought he saw the car flooded with light
from a wrecker, felt himself being eased out from behind the steering
wheel and lifted from the car, and swift surgical fingers about his
scalp and his arms. His mind faded again, complete, and he never knew
whether he had seen or merely thought he had seen the broken, still body
of Caprice. For years he seemed to have been protesting, "Such a pretty
toy and so frail; they shouldn't have hurt her."

He came clearly to in a hospital, with his head bandaged and Dr.
Crittenham, their mild indecisive family physician, by the bed. He felt
miraculously safe, and not for two days did he know that Caprice had
been buried the day before, and that he was desolatingly free to wander
in a world too bleakly, too intimidatingly wide.




CHAPTER 2


He could feel the strength flowing back into him, like a slow and steady
sea tide, and that flowing life, that mysterious busy workmanship of
nature, was repairing his broken arms, his contused skull, though it
could not yet repair the bruised mind in which, incessantly, he agonized
that he had killed his helpless child, Caprice, and with her killed the
right to love.

He feebly wanted to get out of this, away from clucking nurses and Dr.
Crittenham's owlish peering and the horrible scrambled eggs and cold
toast. He wanted to be working, to be taken seriously again as part of
the cheerful world that goes daily to its work. But, hazily forming,
more and more resentful, was a realization that for a long while yet he
could not endure fussy clients: well-to-do women demanding tiled baths,
an assembly-line kitchen, a forty-by-thirty living room and innumerable
cedar closets, for the price of a four-room bungalow.

As indignant as though he were still in his office arguing with them, he
remembered the mean and cheating determination not to be cheated which
was characteristic of women who had never been in business: those tight
lips, that smell of rotten carnations, that snarling, "Well, I must
_say_, I thought a' architect was supposed to look after folks'
interests, not try and rob them!"

He recalled whole families of clients: Father standing back, looking
anxious, hoping that The Wife wouldn't run him into too much money.
Father himself would be satisfied with anything from a domestic tomb
made of cement blocks to a Samoan grass hut, provided they got a good
heating plant, but Sistie kept repeating that they must have a place to
dance, and Junior had incessant new ideas: a closet for skis, a bowling
alley, a swimming pool and, while they were about it, why not a four-car
garage instead of a two-car shanty?

"I can't take it! What they all demand! Now I know how the doctor feels
when I complain about the diet here, and the injections!"

Nor could he take the demands of the unions, nor the shiftiness of tough
contractors, nor the delays in bank loans nor, least of all, the
violently active idleness of his older partner.

Jesse objected to the wages of the draftsmen, to time spent on
twice-daily inspections of operations; he tried to wiggle into every new
building job in town; and he repeated everything he said to you,
repeated it with emphasis, as though--even when he had nothing weightier
to communicate than the chance of rain today--he were revealing a
message from Heaven.

Between the two sections of his thundering verbal trains, Jesse always
put in a "See whatta mean?" He ruled, "Dead certain to be a cold fall,
this fall, see whatta mean? Dead certain--whatta mean--a cold fall!"

Life could have been tremulous with noble emotions and cultivated
senses--or so the poets informed him, Hayden sighed--and was he to spend
its swift flicker in listening to an old miser bellowing, "See whatta
mean"? Whenever Hayden had a notion for a warehouse that should be
something more than a prison, Jesse protested, "You long-haired artists
give me a pain. I'm a practical man!"

It was painful that while Jesse regarded him as an anarchist, the local
Modernist and Functionalist and general Impossiblist, Mr. Kivi from
Finland--_Doctor_ Kivi--considered Hayden "a nize fella personal, but
yoost anudder old-fashion architectural tailor, giffing the dumb
bourgeois whateffer kind suitings dey tink dey vant."

"I need, in fact, a year off," reflected Hayden, "and I'm going to take
that year off, and find out whether I can do anything more amusing than
being batted over the net by Jesse and batted back by Kivi. I think that
I would like to be a self-respecting human being, and even learn to
read!"

He could amply afford the year off. As a young architect he had, on
speculation, planned a large Merchandise Mart, and his share in that
alone would give him a rather tight living. He renewed now his regret,
in the prison of the wrecked car, that he had missed so many treasures
of learning. Compared with Jesse Bradbin, he was an encyclopedia but,
lying in bed, annoyed when the day nurse tried to entertain him with
what she thought she remembered of a radio skit, he made lists of the
things he did not know.

He knew nothing, very nearly, of Byzantine or Egyptian, Chinese or Hindu
architecture. He spoke no foreign language--should not an educated man
be able to speak French and German, along with Italian or Spanish? He
had only a mail-order smattering of music, painting; he had never read
Dante or Goethe nor anything of Shakespeare except the plays on which he
had been spoon-fed at Amherst; he was innocent of chemistry and
astronomy; and of history before 1776 he was certain only that there had
been Gothic and Renaissance churches and that America had been
discovered, from time to time, by a lot of Scandinavians and by a
gentleman called Christopher Columbus, who had trained for it by
continually standing eggs on end.

He had assumed that he would be classed as a Civilized Man. He wondered
now if he was not a jungle-dwelling cannibal without even an expert
knowledge of how to catch and cook prime human beings. How proud he had
been that--to Caprice's rage--on many evenings, instead of highball
parties, he had gone to bed at nine-thirty and "got ten good hours of
sleep." Now he speculated that he had probably been wasting three hours
a day of this too-brief life in snoozing like a hobo by the railroad
tracks.

Could he make up for all that?

As a starter, he longed for first-hand sight of the Europe which is the
mother of most Americans as it is of the Mongolian-Chaldaic-Saracen-Slav
races who call themselves European. His nearest step to it had been a
wander-month in England with a couple of classmates after their
graduation from Amherst. The glory of the English cathedrals had decided
him to be an architect, like his father. Before he could go on to the
Continent, he had been called home by the illness of his mother. He had
gone to a New York school of architecture, and that was the end of
Romany Rye.

In World War II, he had been a major, but he had been kept in the United
States, constructing miles of huts and warehouses. Before it, he had sat
in on the designing of banks, office buildings, churches, but he had
become a specialist in "medium-priced housing," along with an occasional
Labrador-Spanish palace for a stockman, or this very hospital that was
his detention camp.

He loved Litchfield, Sharon, Williamsburg; he preferred the Georgian,
and he had theories about developing a truly American style. He was
called a plodder by all the Kivis, and in turn he disliked their bleak
blocks of Modernist cement, their glass-fronted hen-houses, their
architectural spiders with cantilever claws.

Yet now he wanted to desert his solid American brick and timber and flee
to the stone and thatch of the heathen gods of Europe.

                 *        *        *        *        *

With all his dismaying thoughts, he excitedly worked out a philosophy of
hope which he called the Doctrine of Recovered Youth.

He meditated upon it through the motionless hours when he awoke at three
in the morning and could not sleep again till after breakfast. He heard
the small derisive night noises: a policeman plodding down the street, a
drunk singing, a wild ambulance screaming, a woman crying, then the
banging of the ash cans. He looked for hours at the plaster walls and
wished that instead of making this hospital crisp and hygienic, he had
created an orgy of Alhambra harem decoration, to entertain sleepless
patients suffering through the gray hours. Over and over he sighed about
the lost wisdoms he had missed, till from nowhere, sharp, exhilarating,
came the faith that he had not missed them, that they could be ahead of
him.

_The Doctrine of Recovered Youth._ He was to spend no time in regretting
failures but to concentrate on what he could do in a future that was
ready to his hand.

He was not to think back fifteen years to the time when he was twenty,
credulous and enthusiastic, when he was strong for walking, for singing,
for making love. He was to look fifteen years ahead to the time when he
would be fifty--and a fine, sound, competent age that was, too, when he
ought to be able to eat and laugh and make love as well as ever.
Compared with fifty, he still _was_ young, he _had_ recovered youth. Ah,
the blazing wonders he was going to experience in these fifteen years
ahead, with perhaps another twenty-five years on top of that! He was
going to see all of the world so wide.

                 *        *        *        *        *

His acquaintances were presently allowed to call on him, and the strange
thing, in his fast-recovering strength, was that he did not want to see
many of them. He was impatient with the tedious past which these
fellow-clansmen so tenderly dragged in, certain that he would be
delighted to hear how everything had been going with Dear Old Bill
Smith, the celebrated fisherman and drunk, delighted to get all the
shivery details of the membership drive of the Bison Park Country Club.

It had been assumed, he himself had half assumed, that he was
gregarious, fond of being yelled at by a dozen people in a small room,
for this was expected of any competent professional man in Newlife. He
discovered in this, his first pious retreat since college, that it had
been an enforced habit, and that he preferred the sweetness of silence
to even the newest smutty story.

But such treachery to American good-fellowship he kept concealed. He
tried to be grateful to all the kind men who, at such inconvenience,
during busy days, took off an hour to "run in and cheer up good ole
Hay," by bellowing at him, "Well, well, well, well, you certainly look
fine today, you certainly do, you look well on the way to recovery, so
take good care yourself, be sure and take care yourself now, and let me
know anything I can do for you."

They would have been shocked, Civic Virtue in Newlife would have rocked,
if he had said, "There is one thing you can do: go away and don't come
back."

The agonizing crisis of these visitations was when they stopped
mid-sentence and he knew that, with obscene tact, they were avoiding
even a natural mention of the dead Caprice, or when, instead, they
dragged in her poor remains and overpraised her. He told himself that
the profoundest reason why he wished they would forget Caprice was that
he was in love with his purified memory of her. All round her shrine was
a cloister where no heathen were allowed to tread.

                 *        *        *        *        *

He felt wan and reedy as he sat up in bed in his coarse hospital
nightgown, while Jesse Bradbin, tilting back and forth, back and forth,
in a straight chair, looked like a flyblown leg of beef. Jesse held out
his whisky flask with a roar of, "Try a nip of this--Mother's Knee
Bourbon. Your doc would throw a fit, but it's time for you to get back
in harness again, see whatta mean, get back in shape and have a little
fun, see whatta mean?"

"Thanks, no. Uh--Jesse, I may take some time off when I'm out of the
hospital."

"What d'you think you want to do?"

"I might skip out to California--try loafing in the sun, maybe catch up
on my reading."

"Well, I suppose a month of that wouldn't hurt you, though it'll be
blame inconvenient."

"Not a month. Maybe I'll take a year off."

"A--a _year_? Great good suffering catfish! That accident knocked all
the whatever sense you've got clean out of your head, see whatta mean,
knocked out all what sense you got! You're crazy as a loon! A _year_?
With a bunch of new contracts in sight?"

"I'll find you a good substitute."

"If you went and found me a Cass Gilbert--at thirty bucks a week--I'd
still be dodging my duty toward you, as a partner, as an intimate
friend, as a fellow-Coloradan, see whatta mean--dodging my duty. I got a
moral responsibility toward you, now that Caprice has passed on. Got to
be somebody to take care of you and get you straightened out and direct
you and try to put some common sense and dependability into that
damn-fool poetical brain of yours. No, sir-ee! The way to forget that
poor girl and your own shaking up is to hustle and get back on the job
and work harder than ever. You'll be surprised how you'll enjoy it,
getting away from all this unhealthy _thinking_! Back into the fray!
You'll enjoy it, see whatta mean--enjoy it. You always did like chatting
and chinning and visiting with the lady clients, you old rogue! Heh,
heh?"

"Got to have some sleep now," muttered Hayden wearily.

But that missionary of manly enterprise, Mr. Bradbin, had not been
entirely without moral effect. Hayden reflected, "To go back to the
office now would be the most horrible punishment I can think of, and
perhaps that's why I must do it. I must endure a heavy penance to make
up, in some tiny degree, for killing Caprice. Oh, she only wanted to
dance in the sun! I murdered her, and her revenge is that I have never
been so bound to her as now.

"I shall not look at another woman all my life. I shall never be that
romantic wanderer, that troubadour in a ribbon-tied jeep singing through
Provence, that I dreamed of. Suffering has made me prosaic. I may just
as well go back to the office and sell everybody on attic-insulation.
I'm finished. If I were only twenty again, and strong and unafraid..."




CHAPTER 3


The day nurse, who considered Mr. Hayden Chart an edifying but somewhat
depressing model of dignity who "will never give any skirt a tumble
since his wife had passed away," was surprised by the vigor with which
he demanded, "Show her right in!" when she announced Miss Roxanna
Eldritch.

Roxanna Eldritch--Roxy--had been a friend of Caprice, as fond as she of
gin-rummy and skiing and aquaplaning, but three or four years younger
and altogether a more solid and good-tempered citizeness. She was a
reporter on the Newlife _Evening Telescope_, and she wrote not only of
Society and its fabulous orange-flavored weddings (or Nuptials, if the
groom made over ten thousand a year) but capably handled general
assignments: interviews with lecturers and with remarkably intelligent
horses, hardware-association dinners, and even such big news as an
alderman's explanation of how he had just happened to pick up on the
street the marked bills found in his desk.

Roxy came in like a shy mouse, but a mouse that will immediately start
waltzing if the cat is asleep. She was a smallish, blue-eyed redhead,
with the richest deep-copper hair, and the fair skin and jaunty freckles
of the redhead. She was not plump, and her ankles were fine-drawn, but
she was rounded and appetizing. Even old friends of her father, an
unimportant beet-sugar broker, though they feared that Roxy would laugh
at them, found it hard to keep their hands off her.

Sometimes, in white flannel at ten in the morning, she looked twenty-two
and ready for tennis; sometimes, late in the evening, she looked an old,
old, haggard twenty-nine, a veteran who has met too many public men and
heard them boasting, for the benefit of Press & Public, of how many
extraordinary things they were going to do as soon as this astonishing
grand-jury indictment was quashed.

She stood in the doorway, glancing sharply at Hayden as he yanked a
red-and-yellow Navajo blanket about his shoulders and smoothed his hair.

"My gracious, you look like a lily!" said Roxy. "How's everything in
Astolat? Elaine back from Camelot yet? But honestly, Hay, you're in
wonderful shape. I am so glad!"

Her voice was warm and kind, though it did have a bit of western
flatness, the voice of a bird flying at dun twilight over the western
plains.

"I'm getting all right, Roxy. Nice you came."

"Sit down a minute? Really came to ask you whether you'd like cigarettes
or candy or detective stories. I'm sure you've had too many flowers."

"Enough so that they rather horribly suggested a funeral. The
steamfitters' union sent me about half a mile of forget-me-nots. I
thought that was rather sinister."

"When do you think you'll be ready for some tennis, Hay? I'm your man.
You'll have to be careful, and of course I gambol around the court like
a furniture truck, but you're so much neater than I am that you'll still
lick me every set."

He had been thinking that she was very like Caprice, that essentially
she _was_ Caprice, was every dance-mad, cocktail-gulping young female in
Newlife, but he reflected that, no, Roxanna had more humor, sympathy,
industry than the Caprices. But he was jarred to find, in the zest with
which he looked at Roxy's luscious throat and breast, that he had fallen
with ludicrous haste from his mystic worship of Caprice's wistful and
shadowy image.

Roxanna could not have noticed any ruefulness in him. She was too
excited about making her announcement:

"I just wanted to say, if we do get in any tennis, it will have to be
quick, because as soon as I get my passport and learn how to say
'Where's the depot?' in English English, I'm going to Europe. By
myself!"

"No!"

"My managing editor--next year there'll be a lot of pilgrims from here
going to Rome and so on for the Holy Year, and he allowed it might be a
good idea to get the lowdown on what makes there now, all over Europe.
I'm to do a series for the _Telescope_ and outlying sheets on how you
eat and sleep and _per combien_ on good American dollars--or is it _par
combien_?--in the Old Country. Oh, Hay, I try to be flippant about it,
but I'm awed to death and scared to death! Think, pal, I'll be seeing
English rose gardens and the midnight sun in Sweden and Paris cafs and
the Colosseum!"

It was at that moment that, without knowing it, Hayden started for
Europe.

There were hesitations, worries, preparations to be got through. Dr. and
Mrs. Windelbank called on him. He was a dentist with a taste for
attending lectures, about which he discoursed to patients when he had
them racked in the chair with cotton rolls in their mouths, and his lady
gave talks on gardening. They came in now to boast that they too were
going to Europe, and not on one of your ridiculous three-week tours. No,
they would fly across and have an entire month just for sightseeing,
with two entire days in Venice, two in Florence, and three in Rome!

For years the Windelbanks had gloried in their annual adventures: their
journeys to Mexico, to Alaska, and the Famous Homes of New England,
including Coolidge's, and they implied that Hayden was a
stick-in-the-mud, without imagination.

Clearly, he had to go and spend a couple of months abroad in revenge
upon these loving neighbors. Yet even this natural human spite may have
moved him less than the superiority of Dr. Kivi.

That priest of Modernism in Architecture came in as condescendingly as a
duke or a headwaiter, and when Hayden fretted, "Do you think I would get
much out of seeing Europe as it is now, Maestro?" the Finnish orchid
seemed amused.

He was made up to look the great artist, with bushy hair, bushy
mustache, black bow tie with bushy canary-colored waistcoat--a squat
man, full of salt herring and energy. He hated his titanic rivals,
Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright and Neutra and Saarinen and Van der Rohe;
he said "efen a gang of carpenters like Chart-Bradbin are better dan
dose swindlers dat mess on de sacred name off Modarnism." He looked at
Hayden not with loathing but with such fondness as one might give to a
silky Pekingese--if it stayed out of your armchair. He said blandly, "Vy
not go? Even an American bourgeois can look on naked beauty vidout much
injury, as my friend Sibelius is often saying to me. But as you don't
know de t'ree t'ousand years of history, as you neffer had a
_Kinderstube_, don't expect too much or you vill be ferry lonely and
disappointet."

Afterwards, Hayden grumbled to himself. He recalled rumors that Dr. Kivi
had no bracing Finnish blood in him at all, but was actually a German
named Hans Schmuck. But to Hayden he was formidable. He had seen Kivi
beat the local chess champion who, being named Perkins, could not
conceivably rival a master who smelled of beer and gherkins. In Denver,
Hayden had heard Kivi publicly affirm his faith:

"I am not going to let my clients haf all the pingpong tables and leetle
antique furniture they vant, efen if I go broke and take to honest
farming." That Augustinian creed had set all the Rocky Mountain
architects debating, and enabled Kivi to charge an extra thousand
dollars on every house.

But Kivi's discouragement built up in Hayden a stubborn Western-Yankee
resentment. Probably, he admitted, he was nearer to the capering Kivi
than to the mulish Jess Bradbin. He vowed, "All right, I _will_ go
abroad! I'll learn at least one language, and I'll bring back more of
the genius of Rome than this bounding baboon Kivi could ever
understand!"

The news enlivened Newlife that Hayden Chart was going abroad. Himself,
he was not yet quite sure, and he did not remember having told any one
definitely, but in that ardent community, so proud of having transcended
the village and become urban and urbane, every one knew your affairs
better than you did. His neighbors came to the hospital to give him
advice based on affection and a superb ignorance of both Europe and
Hayden. In World War II, some hundreds of local young people had
campaigned in Italy and France, and the general city belief was now, and
for another ten years probably would be, that all through Europe
"conditions" were exactly what they had been in a bombed city in 1944.

"Be sure and take along plenty of soap," they urged him, "and
toothbrushes and sugar and toilet paper and aspirin and razor blades,
and you better carry plenty of food. I'd advise your taking some nice
boxes of crackers and a few cans of pork and beans. And _hundreds_ of
rolls of film for your camera."

"I'm not going to take a camera--if I decide to go at all," said Hayden.

"You're--not--going--to take a--_camera_?" they howled. "Then what are
you going to Europe for?"

"Post-card photographs would be better than anything I could take."

"Good Lord, Hay, I shudder to think what's going to happen to a poor
innocent like you among them pirates! I never been in
Europe--_personally_--but I been reading where right in Paris you got to
bring your own bed sheets, even in the best hotels!"

Often in any country of Europe, months later, when he stood admiring
show windows that were positively a Versailles of soap and toothbrushes
and inconceivable millions of razor blades, he sighed to think how
unknown this frontier wilderness called Europe was to that ancient home
of decorum and conservatism, America, so hoary with outdated wisdom that
it could not appreciate the venturesome young barbarians of Rome and
London.

Many among these valued neighborhood counselors begged him not to go at
all. "Or if for some fool reason you feel you simply got to, don't go
making a fool of yourself blundering around alone," they implored. "Join
some nice conducted tourist party of twenty or thirty, and they'll tell
you what to see and just when to see it, and what hotels to stay at, and
you'll always have some folks from home to visit with, wherever you are,
and not go crazy with loneliness, or have to depend on natives with
their queer ideas!"

The chief among his guardians was Jesse Bradbin.

"I guess the Old Country was all right in its day, but now we got the
world by the tail; we got the bulge on Europe not only in banking and
university work and the soft-drink business, but in architecture and
even in music and story-writing and all that guff. A European guy that
wants to make good in any high-class artistic racket today has got to
come to America--hat in hand. But then, you and I are alike. We don't
fall for the arty pose. We know that it's just another way of making a
living and cashing in big--like the chain-grocery game. No, no. Come to
your senses and have a nice sensible rest, playing golf in Florida for
maybe couple weeks, and get back to work. Then you'll thank me for
having steered you away from your schoolboy notions about going off
half-cocked to the Old Country. Yes-sir-ee! You'll thank me big!"

Hayden lay fuming that Bradbin, after knowing him for thirty-five
years--ever since his first day in this surprising and slightly
unsatisfactory world--should not know him at all, and yet should often
dare to explain him to others. He reflected that he was like Bradbin in
being industrious and in always paying his bills on the second of the
month, but that otherwise he was less like Bradbin than like the
clammiest, dirty-haired Left Bank female pseudo-painter whose only
completed designs, year after year, were patterns of wet rings on
smoke-dizzy caf tables.

He sighed, "And I wonder if Caprice knew me any better? Or anybody else
in this town, except maybe Roxy Eldritch? The rest of them think I'm a
steady, contented, home-loving man of business. And I'm a tramp that
only wants to see new towns and learn to read Plato in the Greek. Or I
think I am!

"Do I know myself any better than they do? I must voyage away from
everybody who is familiar with the shape of my nose and the contents of
my checkbook, find a world where I've never seen a soul, and so find
some one who knows what I'm really like--and who will tell _me_, because
I'd be interested to learn!

"What I want is less to voyage in any geographical land than travel in
my own self. I may be shocked by what I find there. Maybe I'm not the
master of my fate and the captain of my soul. Maybe the real captain is
a foul-minded sadist and I'm his scared cabin boy. All right! That'll be
no worse than being the safe and busy Young Mr. Chart, whom you can
always count on for a subscription!"

He was, then, planning to take abroad with him something even more
important than his folding slippers or a dependable can of pork and
beans. In accordance with his own Doctrine of Recovered Youth, he was
going to take a defiant young man who was willing to burn his own house,
destroy his own city, so that he might in fiery freedom see all of this
world so wide.

                 *        *        *        *        *

In college days, the art of reading had given to Hayden prospects of a
richer universe but, like most of his classmates thirteen years later,
he was sometimes inclined to consider books a genteel way of getting
through the desert hours between dictating business letters and playing
bridge. But he had not quite lost them; he had followed the novels of
Hemingway and Steinbeck and Willa Cather, he had read at history, mostly
the history of America since 1776, according to Van Doren, De Voto,
Durant, Holbrook--scholars who believed that the purpose of scholarship
is to nourish human beings, not professors of pedagogy.

Jesse Bradbin read only an architectural magazine which dealt
pontifically with Costs and Accounting and in the newspapers read the
murder trials and the national weather reports. Jesse could, and firmly
did, tell you what the temperature was yesterday in Abilene, Texas,
Butte, Montana, and Trenton, New Jersey, and the comparative snowfall in
Devil's Lake, North Dakota, on this same date in 1944, 1934, 1924 and
1870. Caprice had read only the society page, the fashion notes, and
those same murder trials. Both of them regarded Hayden as a Francis
Bacon, and he had been tempted to that thought himself till now when, in
growing horror, he decided that he was an unlettered hillbilly.

"We'll repair some of that, as soon as we make the voyage and look into
who this zero, Chart, really is and whether, with his miraculous new
youth, he is worth saving!"

He leapt into an orgy of books, most of them obligingly fetched to him
by his friend, the city librarian: Walter Pater, Jacob Burckhardt,
Thompson and Johnson's epic _Introduction to Medieval Europe_, and the
good red guidebooks of the good gray master, Herr Baedeker. Europe came
to him not as a heap of abraded stones stenciled with dates, but as a
dome filled with the softest chanting, broken by the shout of young
warriors.

Before he left the hospital for good, he was able to take a few drives.
He avoided even a sight of his own house, but he was in the gang which
saw Roxanna Eldritch off for New York and Europe: Miss Roxanna in a
flying, mouse-gray cloak, holding a bunch of red roses, herself a red
rose, a flushed and rosy American missionary to the gloom of Europe. She
waved to them and then her face puckered and she was crying--not the
dashing lady journalist, but an affectionate child.

                 *        *        *        *        *

His dreaming in the hospital seemed to him the only reality, and reality
an uncomfortable dream, when he unlocked his wide white front door and
walked into the hallway with its pictorial wallpaper of beaux and ladies
in victorias. He stared at the living room: the chintz chairs, the tall
white fireplace, the ruby and emerald and apricot of liqueur bottles
pyramided behind his mahogany bar.

He looked at their bedroom: the chaise longue, the tapestry wallpaper,
the black and silver desk. Though he had designed it all himself, it
seemed to him a dream of luxury fabulous and wasteful and a little
vulgar.

The whole house was a dead thing now that it was deserted by Caprice's
yelling and flouncing and running up- and downstairs and telephoning
violently and for hours. A dream and a languid, draining dream then was
his hasty giving-away of Caprice's clothes and her poor treasures: the
silver-gilt vanity case, the onyx desk-set, her stout little ski boots,
the flimsy bathing suits that she had loved. It was a dream of a life in
which he had been busy and important and well-bedded and well-fed and
had glowingly possessed everything except friends and contentment and
any reason for living: a dream, a fable, a caricature of grandeur.

He first awoke from dreaming when he found himself telephoning to a
travel agency about sailings for England, and awoke again when he stood
on the promenade deck of the steamer, in October, looking wonderingly
down at the horde of two classmates who were seeing him off. He tried to
remember where he was going and just why he was going there.




CHAPTER 4


He stared at the gangplank, that awning-covered bridge between the vast
black wall of the ship and the surly black wall of the dockhouse. There
was time; he could still go back and be a sensible architect, and not go
off to a hostile camp where he knew no language, where he had no
friends, no way of earning a living.

He watched the gangplank with apprehension. He saw the pier crew at the
ropes, and he did not stir. And now the plank was drawn in, and his link
to land, to America, to Newlife, to Hayden Chart of Chart, Bradbin &
Chart, was cut, and he was in for it--an exile. And he did not feel that
he had recovered youth at all. He was a tired man; too tired, surely, to
make a new life or do anything but regret the old life that he had known
as safe and profitable.

He had seen no one whom he knew coming aboard. The intolerably long
lines of the deck planks belonged to a prison corridor. He drifted to
his stateroom, but for all its pertness of cretonne bedcover and
varnished wardrobe and a mechanical bunch of flowers, it was no place to
live in; just big enough to contain him impatiently until it flung him
out again, six days from now.

Already he knew what every exile before Dante or since has had to learn:
that in the whole world only a few neighborly streets are interested in
letting you live, and if you challenge strangers, "But I have the high
purpose of exploring and conquering and colonizing my soul," they yawn,
"Oh, yes? But why do it here?"

So this was the joyous venture into the unknown that the novelists loved
to talk about!

At the head steward's window he asked for a table by himself in the
dining salon. There, he dabbled at cavalcades of hors d'oeuvres and duck
reeking with orange sauce, and went up to the Corinthian Smoking Room
and was just as solitary and unspeaking as he had been below. It seemed
to him that his fellow passengers were all a vast nonsense, and he could
not see why any of them should go abroad.

Except for his hospital sentence, it was the first time in years when he
had been alone, day after day, and for four days he felt abused and more
misunderstood than ever. He suddenly found that he was enjoying it; that
he had resented being alone here on shipboard only because for years all
his acquaintances had believed that a man was not successful or even
decent unless six people an hour were exulting, "Fine day, isn't!" and
sixteen were telephoning, "Well, we got a fine day all right! May I
bother you for a couple minutes?"

It was a luxury more difficult than a great wine vintage to appreciate,
to be able, hour by hour, to sit still and not try to sell himself and
his charms to anybody--not even to himself. He decided, "I'll get
something out of this trip even if I never see a cathedral but learn to
sit still in a caf and not feel guilty at not jumping up and rushing
around to save America."

The life that had been flowing back into him became a full, sun-warmed
tide; he became so sure of himself and his ability to do anything he
wanted that he did not have to do anything to prove it. He spent hours
walking the deck, contented with the companionship of beckoning waves
and, as they approached land, of the gulls that were less birds than
flashes of light.

He discovered that a ship is always the center of the enormous round of
sea, the center and purpose of the universe, man's justification of his
skinny insignificance, and he landed at Southampton and climbed up into
a compartment of the boat train with the holy peace of the hermit upon
him.

He did most of the proper tourist things in London.

He ate roast beef and saw the guard-mounting at Buckingham Palace and
viewed the crown jewels in the Tower--he agreed that they really did
sparkle more importantly than even a windowful of costume jewelry in a
five-and-ten-cent store. He drank bitter beer and admired all the tombs
of all the kings in the Abbey. He liked the rows of houses, frowning and
supercilious but somberly enduring, indifferent to publicity and the
stare of strangers.

He supposed that he ought to be lively here where, any moment on any
street, he might encounter Mr. Pickwick or David Copperfield or Sherlock
Holmes or Sir John Falstaff or even Winston Churchill, those triumphs of
the imagination, more fabulous than Lord Beaverbrook yet more real. But
incessantly he remembered how, with his classmates thirteen years ago,
he had experimented with these same omnibuses, listened to Cockneys in
these same Whitechapel pubs, coursed through Hampstead Heath half the
night, singing; and in contrast his solitude made him melancholy. Was it
not sacrilegious for an old tragedian of thirty-five to thrust his
lumbering gloom into the gay ghost company of two-and-twenty?

He did not consider himself particularly good company for anybody and,
as on the steamer, he walked alone and silent. He used none of the
letters of introduction which the magnates at home had heaped on him,
urging, "Now be sure and look up my friend Bill Brown-Potts; swell
guy--for an Englishman; just like you and me, Hay--plain as an old shoe,
but a very important guy in the coke business, a good golfer with a
lovely wife and kiddies."

Hayden did not feel that even the most dependable old-shoeishness would
raise his spirits. He was comfortable in London, particularly well fed,
but he planlessly hired a car to go out and search for a flowery England
of Anne Hathaway cottages. But he was broodingly unable to see even the
most ivied tower as anything but a pile of stones till, inexplicably,
the miracle of recovered hope and courage transformed him.

He was on the Cornish coast, looking from the mainland at St. Michael's
Mount: the castled isle, the cherubic little clouds, the gulls, the
fishing boats drawn up on the flashing wet sand and, beyond them, in the
sun, the sea that rolled down to Spain and Africa. Instantly, on his
road to Damascus, the world so wide turned beautiful and free. It was
worth taking, and it was his to take. There was no longer a pall of
futility between him and the sun; he had truly recovered his youth; he
was back in the magic and breathlessness of youth. He cried to himself,
"Oh, _let_ yourself be happy!"

His soul lifted above all the several Hayden Charts that had hitherto
trudged the road of indecision, dusty and self-doubting. That crustiest
of taskmasters, himself, did let himself be happy.

Again he had that lift, definite as sudden music, on the steamer to
Calais when first he left the England on which his other youth had
staked out too many claims, and for the first time ventured on the new
land that was so old beneath the towers of Eldorado.

                 *        *        *        *        *

At the American Express in Paris, there was a note from Roxanna Eldritch
of Newlife:

"Dear Hay, welcome to our instructive little continent. I've been
working hard, my editor seems to like my pieces explaining how
Trouville, Montreux, etc. almost as good as Colorado Sprgs. Going to
stay w. old sidekicks Mr. & Mrs. Solly Evans of Denver--oodles of money
(inherited a railroad). They've taken a show-place villa at Cannes rite
on the shore. They know yr cousin Edgar & heard all about you & be
tickled pink if you joined house-party for few days, do come. Your
friend, Roxy."

Northern France was brown and drawn-in with late autumn, and when he
descended from his train at Cannes, it was like the surprise of
Pasadena: roses and palms and oranges and bamboo after the desert. There
was a light, gay quality in the air. It seemed to have a sparkle of its
own, and seemingly no one strolling in the streets of the old provincial
town had any care more serious than the design to have another apritif.
And out on the Mediterranean, so ancient, so sacred, now first seen by
Hayden, there were colored sails.

The Solly Evans villa was a rackety collection of terraces, yellow
plaster walls, an old stone tower to which had been tacked a flimsy
barracks of bedrooms, and a garden for oleanders and mammoth grape
vines, all on the edge of the sea, with a rock-edged inlet for a
swimming pool, and airy diving boards and scarlet-cushioned lounge
chairs under orange-and-black sun-shades. When Hayden crossed the
terrace, ushered by a butler like a Chicago undertaker, he first saw his
host, a thin, browned young man in a tattered rag for bathing suit,
standing out on a diving raft, bouncing a chrome-and-glass cocktail
shaker.

"You're Hay, aren't you? Hi! I'm Solly!"

And on a rock bench beside the pool Hay saw Roxanna Eldritch, in a
French bathing suit which had, by the most skilled hands in Paris, been
thoughtfully made to look twice as nude as any American bathing dress of
one-half the dimensions. And when she ran to kiss him, though her kiss
was a light tap on his cheek, rustic and innocent as Roxy herself had
been on the train platform in Newlife, yet he had a dismaying urge to
curl his hand about her bare waist.

"Good gracious!" thought the pious hermit.

He was introduced to fellow guests: an American miss with jolly eyes,
hard mouth and hair like glass fiber, who had something to do with the
radio in Paris, a young Brazilian who seemed to have no identity beyond
owning a country house in Switzerland, an Irish aviator, a young man who
was something important in an American bank in Brussels but who was
English, real or synthetic, an excessively gloomy but rich older
American manufacturer, a Spanish countess and a Swedish baron.

Among them the only one whose speech Hay could understand was the Swede,
so feverishly did the others scream. When lunch came out from the main
house, on wheeled wagons with things in aspic and two-litre flasks of
wine, the guests and the host and lean, cheery hostess went off in
shrieks in which Hayden could make out only such indigestible bits as,
"Actually, it was too, too amusing," and, "Actually, it was too
unutterably foul."

And with them, as passionately pointless as any of them, chattered
Roxanna Eldritch, once of Colorado.

After lunch they all had a siesta which, they said languidly, was
enforced by their admirable activity in dancing and gambling till three
in the morning. Hayden could not settle down to a siesta. He sat
grousing in his bedchamber, in which the white bed and the white
wardrobe doors were adorned with carved garlands and indiscreet angels
thickly gilded. He thought of Roxy as a dear daughter gone regrettably
mad, and then as a very undaughterly girl with silky bare legs.

For the tennis hour, Roxy came out in a thin sweater and the shortest
shorts Hayden had ever seen; and for eight-thirty dinner, she had a
simple dress which, even to Hayden's eye, had the simplicity of a
masterful Parisian dressmaker; one which, as a cub journalist and
daughter of a small beet-sugar exploiter, she certainly could not
afford. It was of rather violent green, and could not possibly have gone
with her red hair, and did.

He contrived to segregate her from the backgammon players for a talk,
and it seemed to him that her slippery new slickness was not borne
easily, but was a little defiant and head-tossing, as though she were
saying, "I dare you to go back to that stupid old Newlife and say that
I've turned fast!"

The note she had written to him had been full of the colloquialisms of a
soda fountain in Newlife, but her speech as she lolled, neat knees
showing, among scarlet cushions on the gigantic eight-place davenport,
was mostly a rattling imitation of the English bright young things.

"I can see you're having a good time," he said paternally.

"I've been up to my eyebrows in the most amusing madnesses! My new young
man is the most appallingly brilliant young Hungarian writer. He writes
plays, verses, novels, criticism, everything. I don't think any of it
has been published yet, but he'll be another Evelyn Waugh. Actually. And
the Baronessa Gabinettaccio, who is _the_ most beautiful and most
immoral _femme_ in Europe. Oh, _say_ it, Uncle Hay! But don't you think
Baby has improved over here?"

"No."

"You don't?"

"No."

"You might sugar it a little! Don't you think these people are
frightfully amusing?"

"No. And I liked you natural."

"My dear man, I am natural now! It was when I thought porridge was
something to eat that I wasn't natural. Besides! As Dicky Floriat says,
the post-war gen is too weary to live up to the ardors of being their
simple selves.... Oh, don't look so glum, Grampa Hay! You're so
middle-class. You dislike gaiety not because it's immoral but because
it's gay."

"I know. I've read some Oscar Wilde myself. But isn't he slightly
old-fashioned now? Sixty years ago!"

                 *        *        *        *        *

Solly Evans insisted that the gambling rooms at the Casino, over at
Monte Carlo, were "great fun," and Hayden went to them expecting a
cinema circus of exiled grand dukes, with broad ribbons of honor across
their shirt fronts, quaffing champagne from goblets and escorting ladies
with tiaras and ermine, and, with the barbaric splendid laughter of the
steppes, winning and losing millions of roubles. He expected, as
guaranteed to him by Hollywood, Greek millionaires and Argentine
cattle-kings and ruined princesses, in a somber magnificence rather like
the new D. and R. G. Depot, and caviar handed about like paper napkins,
and at least one suicide, nightly, at 11:17, of a young Englishman of
high family.

He found plenty of magnificence at the Casino, but it was a magnificence
in which large plaster lady roustabouts supported baroque pillars, and
chilly young women were depicted walking through dewy meadows. Even in
the inner gambling room, at the roulette tables there was not so much as
one obvious duke, grand or Class B, but only faceless men in unpressed
business suits and yellowing-skinned old women of a dozen nationalities,
quietly hysterical as they risked, and so often lost, another fifty
cents. One of them half rose from her chair each time she wagered,
clutching her baggy throat as though she were very sensibly choking
herself to death here and now.

These disinterred witches were either frowsy or too elaborately shingled
and weather-sheathed; they were either twitchingly agitated or
dreadfully still, so intent on play that nothing else existed for them.
They were like corpses as the croupier swiftly and callously paid out or
raked in the bone chips--dead men's bones.

As Roxanna looked at these derelict remittance-women she shuddered. "I
get what you mean, Hay! Yes. Let's go have a wholesome banana split and
then stay home and see a basketball epic on the television. I'm having a
frightful vision! I'm married to a rich old monster over here and he
dies and I'm so bored with all the other sensations that I come here to
play, every evening. I live in a flat, like these old bags, and I don't
do anything till late afternoon, when it's time to come and start
gambling. Hay! Is Europe all played out?"

"No, no, no! You'd find just as dreary dope-fiends shooting crap in New
York or Nevada--I guess. There is a great, stately Europe--I think. I
want to find it, to know it, to _know_!"

"Okay. I'll go back to Paris and swap my commutation ticket at the
Joujou Bar for a library card."

But Roxanna's estimable resolutions were sunk next day, when they came
on a Sadie Lurcher Big-Name party at the Hotel Concilier, on Cap
Attente.

The Concilier is so fashionable and international that it is not merely
a luxury hotel--an inn, a boarding-house, though it is that, too, no
doubt, with a vulgar balance-sheet and dividends--but a purpose in life.
The bath towels are nine feet long, its food is as good as the average
village inn, with more parsley, and all the clerks speak six languages,
not so much to assist the accepted guests as to keep unwanted applicants
away; to snub undesirable persons like American millionaires who cannot
read French menus and even earls and countesses if they have been
suspected of voting Labor.

To a small rich man like Solly Evans, when he dares to sneak in and buy
a drink even in the larger and less exclusive Bayeux Bar of the
Concilier, the waiter says "Yes?" as if Solly's intrusion is an
astonishing mistake and, unless he tips three times the amount of his
bill, every waiter in the place turns into a revolving electric
refrigerator, wheeling toward him and emitting a refreshing blizzard.

Sadie Lurcher was as _fin de tout_ as the Concilier itself. She was a
stringy lady, immensely tall and virginal, whose super-ambassadorial
function was introducing munition magnates, minor royalty and theatrical
comets to one another. She gave the most photographed luncheons in
France, and nobody ever quite seemed to know how she financed them. As
to her origin, there were different schools. She was variously reported
as having been born in America, Scotland, Russia and Smyrna.

She owned a modest castle above Cannes, fifty-six rooms with fourteen
habitable, but, for the greater convenience of the press photographers,
she gave her more intimate luncheons at the Hotel Concilier pool, with
its Petit Trianon Snack Bar, its vast rock-pool of lofty diving boards
and a raft made of balsa wood and glass, and the world-renowned Picnic
Plateau, up on a sea-fronting cliff, where lunches were served outdoors
by a diplomatic corps of waiters in wigs and gold-laced mauve
tail-coats. This was to distinguish them from the guests, for the
richer, more notorious, oftener-divorced and wittier a male guest was,
the more likely he was to wear, at Sadie's repasts, nothing but shorts,
sandals, a revoltingly hairy chest, and a toupe.

Today, Sadie Lurcher was giving one of her nobler luncheons on the
Plateau. Her troupe included several ladies, beautiful or titled or
rich, and among the men, all in the uniform of hairy chest and the
light, easy friendliness that marks the more perfected snob, were some
of the world's most notorious names: an ex-king, an ex-commanding
general, an English author so proud of everything British that he lived
entirely in France, and two of the most titanic of the Hollywood
hierarchy, freshly flown in to make a picture in Italy: a ducal
producer, and a movie actor twenty-six times as famous as the President
of the United States. You may see him scowling at you from posters
startlingly encountered in back alleys in Greece or China, and his
brilliant changes from barefacedness to wearing a ferocious beard are
pictured in the newspapers of thirty-nine countries.

From their humble distance Roxy looked adoringly up at this Olympus, and
snapped at Hayden, "It's all very well to talk, but actually now,
_actually_, the international set like that has a wonderful life!"

"I know," mused Hayden. "Yes. It was to transfer power from the
munition-sellers and the old aristocracy to the airlines and the movies
and the radio and oil, from the eugenic to the photogenic, that the
young men died in the war and I heroically built a billion cubic feet of
hutments. When I look up there at Rupert Osgoswold's Hemingwayesque
bosom in person, I feel rewarded. Roxy! Not so cheap!"

She looked at him irritably, and went off to get a cocktail.

He was to leave for Italy. Probably Roxy would be taking her newly
excavated European glitter back to New York and become a streamlined
career woman, lively and expensive and elegant, slippery as quicksilver
and as hard. Himself, he would have a few weeks in Florence and Rome and
Naples, and go home. He thought that now he could endure Jesse Bradbin
and the querulous clients who wanted Louis Seize redwood.

He would be missing nothing in Europe. He had not made one friend here,
and in Roxanna he had lost the one friend he had.

At the Cannes station, in a limp dawn when the palm trees were too damp
to clatter and the sunshine-yellow awnings of the cafs were pulled up
and dripping, he said good-bye to Roxanna and Solly Evans, who were
mechanical and regretful and very sleepy.




CHAPTER 5


The railway station at Florence had a fine, flaring Mussolini touch,
very spacious and inclined to marble and wood panels, but the piazza in
front of it was of a suburban drabness, and the back of the church of S.
Maria Novella was a mud-colored bareness, sullen with evening. He would
not be staying here long! His taxi-driver was learning English, and was
willing to make it a bi-lingual party, but as Hayden's Italian was
limited to _bravo_, _spaghetti_, _zabaglione_ and the notations on sheet
music, this promising friendship did not get far, and he went to bed
blankly at the admirable Hotel Excelsior.

But in the bright morning of late autumn he looked from his hotel and
began to fall in love with a city.

He saw the Arno, in full brown tide after recent mountain rains, with
old palaces along it and cypress-waving hills beyond. On one side was
the tower of Bellosguardo and a fragment of the old city wall, and on
the other the marvel of the church of San Miniato, white striped with a
dark green that seemed black from afar. Hayden saw a city of ancient
reticences and modern energy, with old passageways, crooked and
mysterious, arched over with stone that bore carven heraldic shields.

"I like this! Maybe I'll stay out the week."

There was then living in Florence a friend and classmate of Hayden's
father: a retired American automobile-manufacturer, competent engineer
and man of business, aged seventy-five or so, named Samuel Dodsworth.
Hayden sent a letter up to him by hand at his Villa Canterbury on Torre
del Gallo Hill, and the Dodsworth chauffeur brought down a note inviting
Hayden to cocktails that afternoon.

In between, he trudged the erratic streets of Florence, so unchanged
from medieval days that from a secret courtyard you expected to see
emerge a lady with peaked headdress and a gallant in satin with a falcon
perched on his wrist, and he came full on the Piazza, della Signoria,
where Savonarola was martyred, where rears the Palazzo Vecchio, with its
heaven-high tower.

He was deeply contented as he was driven up the hill to Samuel
Dodsworth's.

Unlike most Italian villas, which show to the passer-by only a plastered
wall flush with the street and a small door that opens on the delights
of garden and terrace within, the Dodsworths' Villa Canterbury, which
had been built for Lord Chevanier in 1880, was set back from the street,
with a lawn and an ilex alley. It was a timbered manor house,
half-English and half-Yonkers. The interior was chintz and willow plate
and Jacobean oak, and the chief change from his Lordship's day was that
the Paris _Herald Tribune_ had ousted the London _Times_, and the _Yale
Alumni Magazine_ the _Fortnightly Review_.

Not even yet was Hayden up to an eight-thirty-dinner schedule and,
arriving at six, he was half an hour early for cocktails, which gave him
a chance to study his hosts. Dodsworth was a tall, portly,
gray-mustached man, given to quiet listening, and his wife, to whom he
referred as Edith, looked somewhat Italian, though Hayden thought that
she might have been born in Canada or Massachusetts.

Dodsworth, in his armchair, was a largeness and a solidity; he looked as
though he would not willingly move from it. He asked of Hayden, amiably,
"Let's see: how long is it now since Monty--your father--died?"

"Ten years ago, and my mother just afterward."

"They were mighty good Americans. Did you know your father used to make
applejack in college? Once he gave a party that started at three A.M.
and lasted till noon. I lost eleven dollars and a photograph of Sarah
Bernhardt, playing penny ante."

"No! Why, he was a crank, though very gentle about it, on the evils of
booze and gambling!"

"Well, he ought to have known! How long you staying in Italy, Hayden?"

"I can't tell yet. I had a motor smash, and I'm taking a few months off.
I may stay in Florence for--for a fortnight."

"Don't stay in Italy too long--or anywhere else abroad. It gets you.
Since I was fool enough to sell the Revelation Motor Company, Edith and
I have drifted through India and China and Austria and God knows where
all, and this time, we've been back in Italy for three years--course,
Edith's been coming here off and on for many years. Well, we tried to go
back and live in the States, in Zenith, but we're kind of spoiled for
it. Everybody is so damn busy making money there that you can't find
anybody to talk with, unless you're willing to pay for it by busting a
gut playing golf. And I got to dislike servants that hate you and hate
every part of their job except drawing their pay. I like having the girl
here bring me my slippers without feeling so doggone humiliated that she
rushes out and joins the Communist Party!

"And back home, this last time, I was bored listening to all the men I
used to know talking about hunting and fishing and baseball and same old
golf. Fishing! Hell, I used to skip down to Florida, one time, and enjoy
yanking in a mean tarpon as much as anybody, but when you hear most of
those old, gray-haired galoots, the way they talk about catching a
vest-pocket black bass, you'd think the man was a ten-year-old brat that
had just hooked his first crappie. Kind of immature, they struck
me--even fellows that could swing a big traction deal and skin a board
of directors that had cut their first teeth on broken bottles.

"And--when I was still in harness in Zenith, I never was the skittish
kind, much. I never did like our brand of humor any too well. I always
got kind of sour when a smart banker that was a good friend of mine,
nice fellow, too, but he always had to yell at you, 'Well, you old horse
thief!' After the first twenty-thirty thousand times, I thought that got
less original--and every time he saw you, he tried to tickle you. I can
get along with awful little tickling! And now I cotton to hearty humor
even less than I used to.

"And then I like these hills in Tuscany and the monasteries and villas
and the variety of it--get in your car and in an hour or so you're in
San Gimignano, looking at those old towers. Starts your imagination
working about the old wars and battles right there where you're
standing. Or you're in Siena and have lunch out in that old square there
and look at that big slender tower and wonder how the devil those old
fellows managed to raise those enormous blocks of stone without any of
our machinery.

"Afraid I'm not putting up any very good argument about chasing you back
home, but I mean--that's what's so dangerous here; you do get to like it
and hesitate to go back and face responsibilities, and that would be bad
for a young fellow like you. Me--I never can learn this cursed Italian
language; Edith has an awful time getting me to say _acqua fresca_ when
I want a glass of water. But I do like to have food that you can eat and
wine that you can drink without paying four and a half bucks at a
restaurant for a burnt steak and some fried spuds flavored with
penicillin!

"Still, I do get homesick, and I never miss my class reunion in New
Haven, never!

"Edith, you better shut me up! I haven't gassed this long for a year.
It's having Hayden here, and get in the first crack at him and tell him
to beat it, go right home and stay there--and then go downtown and sign
another two-year lease on this house. In which, Hayden, we may have
Italian servants, but you bet your life we got first-class American
central heating!"

Guests were beginning to chatter in, but before the cocktails came, Mrs.
Dodsworth led Hayden out on the terrace for the View which, by Florence
custom, is advertised along with laundry equipment, garage, cost of
upkeep and distance from Leland's Bar.

Although it was masked by the early darkness, Hayden was conscious of
power in the aspect of Florence below them in its golden basket, between
this hill range of Arcetri and, far across, the Fiesole Hill. Mrs.
Dodsworth could point out the scarcely seen tower of the Bargello,
Giotto's bell-tower, the spire of Santa Croce while, flaunting, soaring,
even more whelming than by day in the floodlights which the mists turned
to wreaths of floating rose, the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio dominated
the world more than any bullying skyscraper of a hundred steel-strapped
stories.

As an architect, as a tongueless poet, Hayden was uplifted; as a lonely
man on a voyage to find himself, he wondered if down there, in that
pattern of sunken stars, he might not find a clue to his lost highway.
He was in love, and if only with a city, he knew that he could still
move to the magic of love for something.

And then he went in to say Yes, he thought an olive in his dry martini
would be fine.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The guests were most of them from the Florentine Anglo-American Colony,
which is united only in a firm avoidance of their beloved native lands.
There were a few of the scholarly eccentrics for whom Florence has been
renowned ever since Dante, but the rest were of the active militia of
card players.

Of high rank among the bridge-brigade was Mrs. Orlando Weepswell, a
sixty-year-old widow, very rich. She had lived in the handsome Villa
Portogallo for twenty years now, and had learned forty-seven words of
Italian, most of them meaning "too much" or "too late." She was the
daughter of a country pastor and, as a girl, had in a surprised and
doubtful way become the bride of a banker and shipowner who was
occasionally a congressman, often a Sunday-school teacher, and always a
crook. Her Florentine villa had wine-red brocaded walls and
hypothetically antique chairs with tooled-leather seats, but in her
bedroom, safe from the jeers of the Colonists, she kept the Hon. Mr.
Weepswell's favorite Morris chair.

She was the first person except the amiable Dodsworths to make Hayden
feel so warmly at home that he believed he could live as securely and as
naturally in Florence as in Newlife.

When you looked at Tessie Weepswell you did not see a woman of sixty but
the glove-soft credulous girl who had been sandbagged by the Honorable
Orlando. You saw her pretty fleetness and innocence all unchanged, and
her eyes undimmed. Her voice was still quivery with enthusiasms about
ice cream and kittens and James Whitcomb Riley. It was just that over
her face was a dusty veil of many years' weaving which, surely, she
could twitch away whenever she chose.

"Now you _must_ rent a villa and live here, Mr. Chart," she panted.
"Honestly, we need you!" (One likes to hear that, especially a shy and
warm-hearted man like Hayden.) "The minute I spotted you here I said to
myself, 'Now there's a man with sensitive feelings, that ain't a
lotus-eater like the rest of us gilded snobs, and that would be real
nice to sit and visit with!' And I'll bet you'll learn Italian like a
house afire! Do you know any yet?"

"Well, today I've picked up the Italian for 'where is?' and 'veal' and
'consomm with noodles.'"

"My, that's wonderful! In one day! You're a real linguist! But how well
do you know your Ely Culbertson?"

"Perfectly."

"I _knew_ you were a scholar, minute I laid eyes on you. You're invited
to tea at my little shack whenever you feel the least mite lonely."

Hayden was pounced upon then by Augusta Terby--Gus--a fine, flushed,
tennis-leaping English girl of thirty, who looked like a roan horse and
who was attended by a mamma who looked like a suspicious pony. Augusta
believed that all American males were rich, and willing to be espoused
and have some one to send out the laundry. She invited Hayden to play
tennis and have a nice cup of tea at their villa. He felt more than ever
a citizen of this generous frontier village, the Colony, and Augusta
felt, as she had not for nearly a week now, that this time she really
had solved her matrimonial puzzle, while Augusta's mother asked Hayden
how he liked London--a sign of recognition with which she favored very
few of these strange, loud American Cousins.

With these pawns there were larger chessmen on the Dodsworths'
black-and-white checkered-marble music-room floor. Hayden was privileged
to see Sir Henry Belfont, Bart., that mossiest and most moated of
British historical monuments, an outsize donjon-tower in morning
clothes, with a deerpark of eyebrows, and Lady Belfont, a small and
silent American heiress.

Sir Henry welcomed Hayden with what he considered absolute folksiness:

"Ah. An American!"

"Yes."

"Ah! You are staying for some time?"

"I hope so."

"I am afraid you will find our Florentia very provincial, after your
resplendent Hollywood and New York!"

Nevertheless, Sir Henry had apparently let him in.

Hayden was most taken with a Santa Claus of a man, beard and round belly
and kind, discriminating eyes: Professor Nathaniel Friar, who had come
here from Boston almost half a century ago. Friar was talking with his
friend Prince Ugo Tramontana, shaven and tall and lean, the last of a
fabulous but decayed Tuscan family. Mrs. Dodsworth whispered that these
two men were the only near-rivals in Florence of Bernard Berenson in
knowledge of early Italian art and love for it. They attended the
Dodsworths' clinics because they liked the host and hostess, and because
the food was rich and piled high, and neither of them got very much of
it at home. They bowed to Hayden amiably, and he felt that he would like
such men as neighbors. They were the keepers of the learning that he
desired.

All this while, even when he was being bright about backhand shots with
Gus Terby, he had been looking past the others at a young woman of
twenty-seven or -eight who seemed as out of place as Hayden himself. He
thought of ivory as he noted the curious Mediterranean pale-dark hue of
her oval face, of her competent hands, which would be smooth to the
touch: her cheeks and brow and hands smooth as a horn spoon, as a
tortoise-shell box, as an ivory crucifix. Her black hair was parted
above the oval ivory face; over her head was a gold-threaded
ivory-colored scarf, and her dress was of pure cream-colored wool with
no adornment except a broad belt of golden fabric. There was something
Latin, something royal in her, something almost holy, free from human
vulgarity and all desire except for the perfection of sainthood.

When this paragon joined Professor Friar and Prince Ugo, with whom she
seemed to be on terms of familiarity and respect, Hayden asked Mrs.
Dodsworth, "Is that girl talking to Mr. Friar an Italian? She could be a
_principessa_."

"No, she's a plain Miss, and she's an American, but she does speak
Italian almost well enough for a native. Her name is Olivia Lomond--Dr.
Lomond, I suppose it is. She's a professor, or assistant professor or
something, in the history department at the State University of
Winnemac, of which my Sam is a trustee. That's how we happen to know
her, because I imagine she looks down on us bridge maniacs. She's doing
research on some manuscript records in the Laurentian Library for a year
or so. Would you like to meet her?"

He earnestly would.

Olivia Lomond, when he talked with her, was a little blank; civil enough
but not interested. Yes, she was collating some Machiavelli and
Guicciardini manuscripts with early official records of Florence; a
dusty job, not very rewarding. Yes, she taught at Winnemac: Early
European History, especially the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in
Italy.

Hayden tried, "That's a period that, just now, I'd like to know more
than anything in the world, and I'm as ignorant of it as a Colorado
sheepherder. It must have so much more than just sword-and-roses
romance."

She nodded and she said nothing, but her expression said clearly enough,
"Yes, of course you would be ignorant of it; you, the American
businessman, the tourist!"

He was piqued, and he boasted, "Naturally, as an architect, I suppose I
could draw from memory the floor plans of the Riccardi-Medici palace."

"Oh! Oh, you're an architect? In the States?"

"Out West. Newlife. Do you know it?"

"I'm afraid not--afraid not." Nor did she seem very much to want to know
it. She was merely paying a conversational rent on her cocktail. "Do you
speak any Italian?"

"I'm afraid not--no." He was determined to be as lofty as this goddess
whose ivory veins were filled with ice-cold ink.

"You should speak it."

"Why?"

"If you ask that, you answer me."

"It's not a very important commodity in Newlife. But then, you probably
don't think much of Newlife."

"How could I? It just hasn't entered my philosophy of life. I have no
doubt it's a very friendly community, with lovely shade trees--one of
the most enterprising spots in Nebraska."

He let it go. He disliked her; perhaps, with a little attention to it,
he could hate her. She seemed indifferent not only to him but, as she
glanced about while they talked, to all males. Only when it fell on old
Professor Friar, in his shabby sack suit and ill-regimented beard, was
her look kindly. She had bartered her soul for trifles of learning that
were no more important, in the atomic age, than a list of Assyrian
kings. Suave as ivory, passionless as ivory, Olivia Lomond made him
suddenly prize the file-rasping fussing of Mary Eliza Bradbin--about
bidding and rubber overshoes and sandwich fillings--as fecund and
womanly.

Uninterestedly continuing her social duty, Dr. Lomond droned at Hayden,
"Are you staying here for some days?"

Astounded by his own news, he heard himself asserting, "I may stay here
for some years!"

"No! Really?"

He had aroused her--to at least as much attention as she would give to a
donkey cart in the street, and, as she said "Really?" he had perceived
that her voice was beautiful: melodious, rather grave, suitable to a
woman all of ivory.

She sounded almost half-interested with, "Are you to have an official
position here?"

"No. No job. I shall just be studying--go back to school in my senility.
I want to master your blasted Italian speech and history."

But there never was anything so cold as her, "I'm sure that will be
amusing," and she turned to talk to Augusta Terby.

He had meant it--for that moment he had. He would set up shop as a
scholar; he would be an Erasmus, a Grosseteste, an Albertus Magnus, if
only to _show_ this intellectual snob of a lady professor.

But he did not like her enough to hate her; to want to hurt her. Dr.
Lomond fascinated him like a rattlesnake on a putting green. He kept
looking at her for the rest of the cocktail hour, while she talked,
seemingly on level terms, with that great gentleman, that superior
historian, Prince Ugo Tramontana. Her voice came across the room to him
like the flowing of small waters, not the flat, provincial quacking of
so many vigorous young women at home. Whether or not he would attain it,
Dr. Lomond was worthy of a good healthy hating.

He would _show_ her, and in her show the whole wide world.




CHAPTER 6


His good-night from Dr. Lomond was as curt as though she did not
remember ever having seen him. Her eyes were beautiful, and so unmoved,
so superior to all the angry, corrupting temptations of life, he
reflected, because she did not know that there were any temptations. He
thought rudely, "I'm going to get a D Minus in her class and there is no
use trying to bluff her. She wouldn't be angry. She'd just efficiently
flunk me."

But the Dodsworths so warmly invited him to return that he still felt at
home in Florence.

He planned to walk down the hill to his hotel, and considered himself
rather heroic over a foot journey of half an hour. In Newlife a man,
unless he be strengthened by carrying a golf club, has to take out his
car for any distance of more than three blocks. He found Professor
Nathaniel Friar also intending to walk. Apparently to him, walking was
not a new invention, startling and rather risky, but a normal means of
getting places. So old-fashioned had this Bostonian become in his four
decades abroad.

They jogged downhill together, looking at the light-pricked city below
and at the road lamps looping up the hill to Fiesole, miles away.

"You had an agreeable time, talking to Miss Lomond?" said Professor
Friar.

"She seems intelligent. But a little distant."

"She's cool. Women scholars occasionally get like that. They're
dedicated. Frequently they aren't certain to what they're dedicated, but
clearly it can't be to such wingless objects in trousers as you and I.
This Lomond girl is a really competent and accurate compiler of quite
useless facts, so naturally she seems a bit suspect to most men--and to
all women. You can't ask females to 'burn with a hard, gemlike flame'
and still be obliging about waffles at midnight. Here we are. This is my
place. Do come in and see it."

"Professor" Friar, oftener known as Nat, had never been a regularly
enlisted professor of anything beyond Veronese wines and the more
acceptable sorts of Italian sausages, nor had he ever written anything
more popular than articles in journals of art criticism so learned that
just the look of the gray, close pages made your eyes ache. But he had
explored every Tuscan and Umbrian church and village, and he could tell
you the name and dates of every third-cousin of Domenico Ghirlandaio.

For twenty years he had lived in this five-room wing of the massive
Palazzo Gilbercini, sharing the geometric gardens and their cypress
alleys ending at coy nude statues. He had never been rich, but the
securities left to him by his mother, a Trenchard of Braintree, had
provided him with a few casks of wine, a great many books in eight
languages, a Perugian altar cloth of 1235, half a dozen chairs, a
canister of Earl Grey's Mixture tea for his friends, and one noble
picture: an Annunciation by Getto di Jacopo, a picture reverent and
softly human, soft blues and grays against lambent gold, the kneeling
angel so exalted, the Madonna so timidly proud, her head bent over the
lily in her fragile hand.

As Hayden stared at the Getto, hung against a faded Egyptian rug above a
table bristly with old pipes, he began to take hold of the medieval
passion for identification with the divine spirit and its longing for
authority, earthly and heavenly. He drank his vermouth and lemon
juice--Nat Friar considered cocktails as he would a griffin: exciting
but not practical--and he looked at the comfortable frowsiness of Nat
and felt at home as he never had felt at home at home.

Nat Friar was large and fat and thick-bearded and his eyes were
cheerful. There always was pipe-ash on his vest; his rather small living
room smelled of tobacco and brandy; and he loved to sit up all night and
talk about immortality and Baron Corvo and the Lucca Cathedral.

"Why have you lived here so long?" demanded Hayden. "Or is that
impertinent?"

"No, nothing more pertinent. In my case, it might seem to be a
self-indulgent escape from reality and the dry-goods business, of which
my paternal grandfather was a ferocious pioneer armed with a yardstick.
But I think my life has been devoted to proving that one can be just as
smugly self-righteous and still do no honest work.

"My occupation and my vice are hoarding useless knowledge, I know more
about the history of the Palazzo dei Consoli at Gubbio than any other
living man, and nobody cares, including myself. And I like to go on
sprees of something new: biology or Sanskrit. Learning, for its own
winsome, perverse self--hug it to you but keep a club handy. It is the
most entertaining of all mistresses, and the least to be trusted.

"Particularly must one avoid the superstition that there is some
mystical virtue in erudition. We all feel that some day we shall be
sought after by the pretty girls for our spoken Arabic, our kindness to
Cousin Mimosa, or the neatness in which we keep our medicine cabinets.
We shan't! These virtuous doings should be cultivated for their own sake
alone.

"I have of late been peeping into the history of the Baglioni family of
Perugia, a charming chronicle, all iron and gold clotted with fraternal
blood and the tears of ardent young widows. What subject could be more
beautiful and useless? Guard your idleness. You are surrounded by
barbarians armored with sobriety and punctuality and the Book of 1001
Useful Facts. Be ye watchful in sloth, lest ye be corrupted into
industriousness and become a Public Figure, a supporter of all worthy
causes, a member of the Elks Club and the Lgion d'Honneur, and have
five hundred citizens enjoy your funeral--at fifty."

"I'm safe," insisted Hayden. "My partner--I'm an architect--thinks I'm
poetically impractical. Tell me: how shall I go about learning Italian?"

"Look over the several accredited springs of Tuscan undefiled: the
university, the commercial language schools, the highly educated decayed
professors who combine Italian grammar with voice-culture and the
black-market exchange of dollars. Then forget all of them and get a
girl."

"I might!"

"I don't mean one like Miss Lomond, who would teach you Dante's
directions to Hell, but one who will teach you _important_ things, like
'These pair of socks by favor to darn' and, 'Bring to me suddenly a
plate of anchovies.'"

"Are Dante and anchovies incompatible?"

"Linguistically. I speak an Italian which would thrill the archbishop by
its accuracy; I can address a learned academy on the Battle of
Cortenuova in Italian, and they will wail with admiration, but when I
ask for a pair of shoelaces, the clerk answers me in bad English, and
wants to know whether I'm staying in Florence overnight.... By the
way, if you'd like, I'll invite you to tea with Miss Lomond. You may
find her admirable."

"Well, she might introduce me to some American students more nearly my
own mental age--sixteen!"

                 *        *        *        *        *

He sat in what was to become his favorite room in Florence, the bar of
the Hotel Excelsior with its dark mirroring wood and its two bartenders,
Enrico and Raffaele, the men in town most worth cultivating, and he
contentedly planned to stay in Florence for a week, a month, a season.
He would pray for a Biblical miracle: to become again as a little child,
and go back to school.

Next morning he again climbed the Torre del Gallo Hill, to have by clear
light the view he had seen in twilight enchantment. Below him he saw the
bronze-red majesty of the cathedral dome, and Giotto's tower--as ivory
as Olivia Lomond. Fiesole, across the valley, was sharply defined on a
hill silver-gray with olive trees. Florence is a thousand years less old
than Rome, yet in its medieval reds and yellows and dark passageways, it
seems older, as in New England a moldering gingerbread mansion of 1875
seems more venerable than a severe white parsonage of 1675.

"I'll do it. I'll stay. I'll hunt for Michelozzos, not mallards!" said
Hayden.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Dr. Olivia Lomond was at Nat Friar's modest tea, frowning and duskily
beautiful in her plain brown dress--that is, all of her was there except
her heart and soul and manners. But Hayden was diverted by the presence
of Nat's prim and aged sweetheart, Mrs. Shaliston Baker, whose
unbubbling fount had been Boston. She was as small and quiet as a
sparrow that has been discreetly reared in the Harvard Yard, and she
wore her grandmother's cameo brooch. She spoke exquisite Italian, even
if her English did smack a little of flapping codfish tails and the
clatter of lead-foil in chests for China tea. She belonged to the Dante
Society, which meets to discuss the longing of Florence to get Dante's
poor exiled corpse back from stubborn Ravenna. It is an up-to-date
topic, and has been so since 1320.

Every Sunday for a fifth of a century, these reserved lovers, Ada Baker
and Nat, had had tea together.

Nat gave them food as noble as the Samuel Dodsworths', and Hayden
guessed that he would by considerable omission in his own meals make up
for this fedora cake, which is the Florentine specialty, with chocolate
and whipped cream on it, and for the hot American toast, the honey from
Monte Rosa, the tea and blackberry jam and ginger from London.

There were peacefulness and chatter. Nat chronicled his search for a
lost altarpiece of Guiduccio Palmerucci through lofty, wind-raked hill
towns of Umbria; a tale of sleeping on stone floors, living on bread and
olives, and finding that one village was gaily planning to beat him to
death as a tax-spy from Rome. Hayden suspected that Nat's confession of
being unable to buy shoelaces in Italian had been a great and
gentlemanly lie, and that the old fraud could actually speak an Italian
as colloquial, bloodthirsty and beautiful as a Neapolitan taxi-driver's.

As the talk passed to Dr. Lomond, hers was no glimpse of romantic
espionage in mountain passes at twilight, but a complaint about the
dusty-eyed, head-cracking drudgery of pawing over a thousand papers in
her present investigation of the maternal source of Duke Alessandro de'
Medici--the one who was so wholesomely murdered in 1537. The Duke's
mother, sighed Dr. Lomond, did not seem to have been a lady of doubtful
virtue. She just didn't have any virtue to be doubtful about.

From both of these hygienic ghouls Hayden had clues to an erudition
which should not be a smart assemblage of facts to equip a man who
should have been an auctioneer or a train-caller to "get a Ph.D.", nor a
putting on of spangled intellectual costumes to impress the dullards,
nor a job, nor a gentlemanly way of passing the time, but a gently
ruthless, secretly panting, rival-murdering hunt for the facts which are
the bones of truth; an unremitting war in which your quick and
sympathetic allies are men and women who have themselves been historic
facts for five hundred years.

Such scholarship he had never beheld in Newlife, and even in Amherst
College and in his school of architecture, it had been rare, and not
considered quite well bred, nor useful for grabbing a Full
Professorship.

When Jesse Bradbin went in his swift automobile on a sightseeing tour,
Jesse explained, "Ah, what the hell, you don't want to learn too doggone
much about all these Beauty Spots and Points of Interest. Just give 'em
the once-over and see what they're like and be able to say you've been
there. When I'm on a tower, if I can't kill five hundred miles a day, I
figure I'm wasting my time, and if my wife hollers about missing the
scenery, I tell her, 'Oh, we'll catch that on the way back--maybe!'"

That philosophy of Bradbin, pompously offered at the country-club bar as
something new and valuable, caused no riots or harsh cries of offended
dignity. "Yuh, that's so," agreed the president of the Ranchers and
Silver National Bank.

The tyro Hayden was as moved. It was not with hostility or with a
flirtatiousness that winked to itself that he petitioned Dr. Lomond, as
they tramped together from Nat's down to the tram-line, "I wish you'd do
me the favor of having dinner with me this evening, if you are free."

"I don't know--uh--Mister--Chart? I'm not sure I can...."

He was sick of all his meekness. "Then you know damn well you can! Come
on!"

"But I would prefer..."

"If you're one of these independent females that insist on paying their
own share, I don't mind. We can go dutch."

"I don't insist on anything of the kind! I'm delighted to find a man who
will buy me a dinner! I'm lucky when I'm out with some wistful young
male student--_so_ sensitive and clever--and don't have to buy _his_!
Italy may be the home of gallantry, but lone lady grinds don't often get
invited to dinner."

"Not even when they're beautiful?"

"Not even when they're _very_ beautiful!"

With that, she surprisingly smiled at him, and looked nearly human.

"Where shall we go?" he asked.

"Let's see--maybe Oliviero's or the Paoli or Nandina's. Nandina's is
light and bright and quiet and great food. Usually, when I don't
mournfully stay at my _pensione_ for dinner, I get taken to one of these
frantic student hang-outs, the kind they call 'Bohemian,' which means
noisy and not very clean, tables elbow-to-elbow, filled with American
G.I. graduate students and Belgian painters and White Russians whose
only profession is being White Russians and English ladies whose only
profession is living in small villas back of other villas. They're all
so poor. I hate poor people! I'm so poor myself!"

"Those--uh--Bohemian restaurants sound pretty interesting, though,"
confessed the tourist. "But we'll go to Nandina's tonight."

                 *        *        *        *        *

He so far reverted to the meekness which he had sworn to forswear as to
chuck masculine pride and ask her to do the ordering of dinner. While
she rattled the menu, he was fixed on Dr. Olivia Lomond; he saw that at
her neck and the wrists of her sexless workaday brown dress were little
edgings of fine Burano lace, somehow touching. Her hands were not small.
They had the untiring competence of a workman, of a peasant, but they
were extraordinarily smooth, and there was an anxious gesture toward
feminineness in the two small ruby rings that betrayed her strong
fingers. And he noticed that her nails were slightly tinted now. They
had not been so at the Dodsworths'. Had she put this on for the
tea-party--for him?

But his feeling that there might be ardor buried in her was killed by
her mechanical questions, neither liking him enough to rejoice in his
presence nor yet fearing him enough to be at all wary with him.

"I suppose you have made some progress in your plan to study Florence?"

"No--just wandered around, you know, walked 'round."

"Anything you've especially liked?"

"No--oh, lot of different things."

And they fell silent and looked at a family birthday party at a table
across the room. There was about the family nothing of the faded gold of
aristocracy nor yet of the "quaint and picturesque natives" for whom the
three-day tripper seeks. They were all volubly Italian, but in look and
dress the father might have been a businessman of London or Glasgow or
Pittsburgh. He was the type of tall, busy and competent engineer or
salesman who was trying to rebuild Italy after two wars and two million
foreign tourists. His wife would have seemed normal in Stockholm or Des
Moines. But in their exuberant family affection they did differ from the
couples whom Hayden knew. And the grandmother laughed in secret intimacy
with the youngest child; the middle-sized small boy burlesqued his
bachelor uncle's flourishing way of eating an artichoke, and the uncle
laughed loudest of them all.

"Families! They seem to exist here, still," wondered Hayden.

"And they did all through Italian history. A brother would either murder
his brother--which, I suppose, may be one way of showing keen domestic
interest--or else he would go out to a neighboring tower and murder a
rival family there, to keep his brother in the Council. All Italian
history is made up of layers of families."

Hayden complained, "Seems to me that at home the children consider the
house just a free inn and rental garage. And we older deserters: I have
two sisters and a brother who live in four different states and don't
see one another twice in a decade, and I have three nephews--no, four it
is now, I guess--that I've never seen at all!"

Dr. Lomond sounded regretful, her cold independence betrayed by memory.
"Sometimes I've thought I'd like to be the founder of a family, like
those grand old American women who went West in a Conestoga wagon. Then,
maybe, one would never be lonely."

"Ah! You get lonely here, too!"

She abruptly cloaked her wistfulness again, and said sharply, "Never!
Not now, I mean."

"Didn't you a little when you first came to Europe?"

She studied her forkful of long ivory-colored strands of _tagliatelli_;
she seemed shyly to be remembering the girl student that had been, and
she answered with some March-morning warmth in her voice:

"I'm afraid I was, first. I would tell myself that I was a trained
traveler. Hadn't I gone way off to graduate school at Columbia, with
mother's lunch, deviled-ham sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, in a
shoebox? And in _Europe_--oh, I _couldn't_ get lonely, all this to see,
and I had plenty of resources in myself; I could read and think,
couldn't I? Not like girls who had to have flattery from slobbering men
all the while. Besides, I scolded myself, I had been adequately
conditioned to loneliness in my first year of teaching at Winnemac; I
just corrected papers there and took long walks.

"So I surely couldn't be anything but cheerful in the panorama of
Europe. But I was lonely in Paris, I was lonely in Rome, and when I
first came to Florence, nearly two years ago... I'm not impressed by
these celebrated lonely prisoners who made a pet of a rat. I made a pet
of a housefly."

"But you can't!"

"I did!"

"How could you tell...?"

"There was only one in my room--winter it was, too cold for flies, but
this one, really, he was the bravest, most clever little fly. His name
was Nicky."

"How did you know?"

"He told me so."

"Of course."

"The minute I'd come back to my room from the library and take off my
jacket, he'd be there lighting on it--perhaps barking a welcome in some
infinitesimal way. Nights, he slept on the hot-water tap, always. He
never touched my breakfast till I had finished it; just walk on the rim
of the tray and look at the pot of honey. He would take walks on my hand
without tickling me--quite the most refined fly in Florence--and the
only person here that I knew well, till I met Professor Friar. Don't you
call that a loneliness of distinction--to be ecstatic over a housefly?"

"Yes, that's big league. What happened to Nicky?"

"He passed away. From pneumonia. He is now buried, though without a
tombstone, in a volume of Mirandola manuscript letters in the Laurentian
Library."

"I understand him, slightly," said Hayden. "When I first went off to
college, there was an imitation oriental rug in my room, and because I
was too scared to find one single happy thing to do, the first four-five
days, I sat mooning over that rug till it occurred to me that one of the
figures in it was like a dancing girl, young and gay, with whirling
ballet skirts and gold stockings--darling, rather small face, excited
and innocent.

"Her imaginary smile kept me alive all that first week in college. The
next fall, she had vanished, sold along with her rug, to some sordid
flesh-dealer. But last night, here at my hotel, when I was drearily
thinking that, after all, I might drift on to Rome, I saw her again in
my bedroom rug: dancing in a different show now, very different costume,
silly costume, feather boa and a huge muff and a lively little pillbox
cap, but there she was, cheering me again, bidding me stay here, for she
would comfort me.... Seventeen years later!"

"I would not have supposed you were so imaginative, Mr. Chart."

"Why not?" (A little huffily.)

"No reason. Just my stupidity. I'm a hermit, in a cell roofed over with
books, looking for gallantry in the _trecento_, and so I miss it when it
stands right in front of my cell, I suppose."

"What did you think I'd be like--Olivia?"

"Oh--efficient, clean, kind, devoted to your wife and children and your
friends and your favorite daily paper--though I'm sure you have risen
from the sports page to the editorial."

"Is that a rise? Well, my wife is dead, I have no children, and only
very casual friends, and my partner in architecture--at least by
preference he would not be an architect at all but a salesman and a
penny-grinder: Jesse Bradbin--he's an illiterate, and yet I like him and
admire him and his wife, Mary Eliza, better than anybody else in
Newlife. I was as lonely as I am here--only busier there."

"Oh."

"But I don't know that your diagnosis of me as a page with nothing
printed on it except dollar signs is so far wrong. I think most of us
are simply patterns of clothes and habits of work and the same way of
saying good morning, invariably. 'Mornin', mornin', mornin', well, how
are you, this fine beautiful morning!' Jesse screams, every day, rain,
shine, or snow, and then I feel so superior to him, but I'm no
better.... I just glare, and probably it's always the same glare.
That must be one of the great pleas of religion: that if a man hasn't a
precious soul behind all this unchanging blankness, then he's a pretty
shabby animal!

"I've always been busy; busy as a son, busy as a college brat. My
specialties then were tennis (gone rusty) and history (forgotten) and
draftsmanship (good). Afterwards I was busy as an architect. And as the
husband of my popular wife... I don't know that I have any
personality at all, really. (Not that you have ever asked me about it!)
Maybe I'll find a personality here."

"I think you're probably hard on yourself, Mr. Chart."

"No. Let's face it--as people say when they want to be unpleasant."

"But you seem to be unusually kind and fair--for a _man_!"

"You don't like men much?"

"Why should I? From my university president, that back-slapping,
endowment-hounding old fraud, looking for generals and judges to whom he
can give honorary degrees in return for publicity, from him or from the
head of my department, that dyspeptic old phonograph--and he thinks
Cesare Borgia should have been a Y.M.C.A. secretary--from them to the
dumbest young man in my classes--who's only a bit younger than me,
really, and not as good a dancer, but he says he hates being taught by a
stringy old maid like me--oh, the whole lot of males that I know best
have very successfully combined to keep me an apologetic schoolteacher
instead of a hard-boiled scholar who would slap down my academic betters
when they're my worse."

"But isn't there--isn't there something else, some resentment, something
personal..."

"We won't go into that!"

"I'm sorry, Olivia--honestly. It was just the intrusion of a lonely
pilgrim who considers you splendid and somewhat intimidating. You'll
forgive me, Olivia? I'm so harmless--disgustingly so!"

"It's all right. Let's forget it--Hayden."

"Okay. Olivia, do you plan to stay very long in Italy?"

"Just as long as I can manage it, by swindling or armed robbery."

"What is your home--I mean, what do you think of as your home? Zenith,
like Mr. Dodsworth?"

"Never!"

"Where then? In America, I mean."

"Nowhere in America! My real home is anywhere, anywhere at all, on the
Continent of Europe--except maybe Russia; any place where they drink
wine instead of ice water and tomato juice, and where they don't
consider the World's Series and madam's new vanity case the most exalted
topic of conversation."

"So you're that famous scoundrel, the escapist, the expatriate."

"Escape? Why not escape from a world of gas pumps and canned soup to a
world where 'the wind sets in with the autumn that blows from the region
of stories'?"

"Yes. I still like Swinburne."

"Oh."

He could but grin at her slight inflation, and something resembling a
smile warmed her face, like the sun after cold dawning. She demanded,
"You read poetry?"

"Not much. I used to. But there are men who do read it."

"Oh--_men_! Lumbering, lecherous, jocular animals! But they don't smell
clean, like the animals; they smell of pipes and pork chops and onions
and shaving cream. With their grimaces that are supposed to delight a
maiden's heart and that just give away their itch for sly conquest. Men!
My dear Mr. Chart! My innocent Hayden!"

No. She was detestable.




CHAPTER 7


No. She was little likely to be an intimate of his, he thought as they
finished dinner. He had that chilled feeling, familiar even to so
unflirtatious a man, of finding a pretty girl at a party, finding her
warm and fetching, then having her, for no evident reason, turn into a
stranger.

But he still admired Olivia's assured tautness and a moving strength in
her that was fantastically different from the swishing excitements of an
Art Appreciation Class. When he was with her he felt that it would not
be an effeminate hobby but solid work for a man to stay here--for a
while--and labor to understand the strangely flowering beauty of the
Middle Ages. He would bathe in the magic and perilous waters of medieval
history: proud-colored, hot, heroic, vicious knights in armor that had
been decorated by voluptuous goldsmiths, dungeons and silent convents,
exiles on Venetian galleys standing east for Cyprus. He was lost in an
enchantment of which he did not understand even the vocabulary.

If only he could be guided through this wizardry by Olivia, whose hands
lay still on the table, hands not thin and meanly desirous but arrogant,
ivory in every line carved to loveliness. The hollow between her thumb
and forefinger was a polished curve. They were hands that could grasp
and hold, and they excited him even while he was talking prosily:

"If I stay here, I'd like to get a sort of permanent place cheaper than
the big hotels. Have you any ideas?"

"The _pensione_ I'm living in, the Tre Corone, is all right. The
furniture is simple and the food is good and--this interests a
professional romanticist like myself--it occupies two floors of one of
the oldest Florentine houses, the Palazzo Spizzi."

To invite him, or at least permit him, to be near to her, near to her
ivory hands, her lips that were dark-red in a lovely and tragic ivory
mask--that stirred him, till he reflected that she was probably so
indifferent to him that she did not care whether he lived next door or
in Novaya Zemlya.

Nor did she mention the _pensione_ again, as they finished dinner and
tramped to the Spizzi. But next day he was busily inspecting it.

                 *        *        *        *        *

A palazzo in Italy signifies only a large house, usually of stone, built
a few hundred years ago for a very rich and very noble family who became
very rich and noble by conducting a war, with a large cut in the
pillage, or by lending money to popes and kings and dukes who conducted
wars. These houses are lordly, rivaled today only by movie theaters. In
Florence, the Palazzo Spizzi, on the Lungarno not far from the Ponte
Vecchio, is one of the lordliest, with granite walls in rough rustica.

There are surly, prison-barred windows on the ground floor, but on the
four floors above, elegant Gothic windows with stone tracery. Along the
street are bronze torch-holders, and rings for tethering the horses of
knights dead these five hundred years, with a long stone bench on which
once lounged the armed servants of the magnate, waiting for commands
which might mean fun or death, and probably both.

You go through an arched gateway into an arcaded central court, with
high-colored heraldic shields and one sacred fresco on the smooth stone
walls. The court and its little statues of lyric fauns are dominated by
a vast stone stairway. Here, the Medici hurried, and the Pazzi, Bardi,
Rucellai, Cavalcanti. One of them, one day, walked in white carnival
satin that suddenly, here on this green-molded spot, became streakily
variegated with red, as the expert assassin from Forli slid in his
dagger. And over there, most briefly afterward, the assassin had his
toes lightly toasted before his head was jaggedly hacked off.

In this niche of crimson and gold and crocus-colored mosaic, a Spizzi
garroted his ardent bride. It is now a rented storage space for
bicycles.

Since 1550, even Florence has changed. Today, the doors along the arcade
give on the office of a Polish refugee specialist in radiotherapy, a
tearoom kept by an old English lady, an embroidery shop kept by an even
older Scotch lady, and a ferocious left-wing book shop kept by two young
Welsh ladies who play piano duets and admire Jacob Epstein and drink
nothing but vodka and diuretic mineral water.

You pant up the stairs to the offices of machinery agents and of buyers
representing stores in Dallas, Montreal and Oslo. The two floors above
these constitute the Pensione Tre Corone, and up to it climbed Hayden
Chart. It was a racking ascension, but Hayden felt strong and fresh, his
accident healed over.

In a standard _pensione_ hallway of green rep walls, a reed chair and a
mummied palm, a door painted with ferocious roses was opened for him by
an extremely handsome Italian young man wearing the man-about-Florence
standard uniform of wavy black hair, cigarette, checkered brown-and-gray
sports jacket and gray slacks. Hayden did not at all care for the
thought of this jazz satyr living in the house with Olivia, and he was
relieved at the coming of Mrs. Manse, the manager.

She was a small, active Italian widow who had married a Birmingham
traveling salesman and lived for years in England. She spoke English
like an A.B.C. tea-shop waitress, a refined duchess, a Cardiff coal
miner and a Tuscan peasant, all at once.

"Oh, yes, we have a very nice room with a love-ely view of the Duomo and
the Santa Annunziata and Fiesole and _everything_ and a private
bath--ooh, just like home. But you're not English, are you?"

"I'm an American."

"Ow... Well, we quite like Americans here--the better class. You are
not married?"

"No."

"But then, you're not the wild sort that would want to be
entertaining--uh--_people_ in your room, and I'm sure you will want full
_pensione_."

"What is that?"

"Both luncheon and dinner here daily. It's so much more satisfactory,
you know, to have your meals here, _all_ of them, and not go risking
your digestion at these restaurants. Res-taurants! And not knowing what
you're getting and the _pasta_ stale and the veal tough and no pure
Chianti, such as we serve. Mrs. Engineer Purdy, one of our very oldest
guests, often says to me, 'Signora, I simply do not understand how you
can afford to serve such love-ely pure unmixed Chianti at the shockingly
low price we pay here!' And of course she _knows_! So shall we say full
_pensione_?"

"No, I plan to take at least one meal a day out."

"It's a mistake, but of course I never even give advice to my gentlemen
but it's a mistake and quite hard on me, with such love-ely clean rooms
and serving such a variety of food and the butter always fresh, at such
shockingly low prices as you pay, but shall we say half-_pensione_
then?"

They would say that, yes, with luncheon taken here, Hayden agreed, proud
of being so businesslike in securing his first Italian home and
forgetting only to ask the amount of those shockingly low prices. He was
dazed by the Anglo-Italian verbal hemorrhage and yet he felt secure. He
had lived with Mrs. Manse, under different names and accents, in
Newlife, Amherst, Denver, New York, London, and he knew that he would be
cheated only the correct proportion.

"And when you are not able to be here for _colazione_, will you kindly
let me know twenty-four hours beforehand? So many gentlemen are
thoughtless about that," said Mrs. Manse.

She introduced him to a bedroom, smallish, square, with blank plaster
walls, which yet delighted him, for the one window was Gothic-pointed
and the ceiling was groined. It had surely been part of some greater
salon in the early palace, or perhaps of a chapel, and the clean
bareness of it was proper for the studious monk he meant to become.

The varnished yellow pine bed was narrow, not bad; there was a large
white wardrobe for clothes, a large white table for the notes on Italian
history that he would certainly be making and for the profound books
that he would certainly buy and possibly even read.

There was a hideous but comfortable yellow-velvet armchair with a
fiddle-shaped back, a straight chair, a pinched radiator, and a
composition stone floor, with a rug beside the bed.... But he looked
unsuccessfully for his dancing girl in the rug.

The bathroom was little larger than the ancient tub, but it was
adequate, and even contained articles which seemed to Hayden somewhat
perplexing and certainly of great superfluousness. One of these was a
bootjack. He had ridden horses in the Berkshire Hills, on dude ranches,
on the cheery camping journeys through the Rockies on which Caprice had
been both at her most complaining and her most recklessly gay, but he
did not think it likely that he would ride a Western pony up to the
Palazzo Spizzi and tether it to one of the great bronze rings below.

The place seemed to him almost voluptuous when Mrs. Manse explained that
only one bedroom in three at the Tre Corone had its private bath.

What starred his room and filled it with light and stimulation for the
daytime was the window and the vista of towers and fourteenth-century
battlements and, down below, the humbler roofs of tiles, cherry-colored,
soft rose, violent crimson or pale orange, above yellow-plaster walls. A
top-floor tenement down there--it was, he learned afterwards, above a
ground-floor leather shop full of gold-tooled purses and small jewel
boxes--had an open loggia and a terrace with geraniums and with
goldfinches in cages, and a broad-sterned woman was hanging out a hot
red shirt to dry. He would be seeing real Florentines, and not just
palace walls, spacious but decaying.

Mrs. Manse, that unlaureated mistress of psychology, knew that he would
take this room. She knew! When he did, at last, remember to confer
delicately about the price, he was so under the spell that she
overcharged him grossly: she charged him at least one-half as much as
such a cell would have cost in America. He did not quite dare to ask how
near to his own door was that of Dr. Olivia Lomond. He found later that
it was eight from his, round a corner of the matting-covered stone
corridor.

All this was on the upper floor of the _pensione_. On the floor below
were still more bedrooms--there were twenty-eight in all--with the
office, the dining room, the lounge. The dining room was simple and
white and cheerful, with white-clothed tables for one or two or four,
each of them with coquettish napkin rings and a tight bouquet of asters
and, usually, a Chianti bottle. The serving-table--the _credenza_--had
once been an over-gorgeous drawing-room table of marquetry with gilded
metal edges.

The lounge must have been a great salon of the ferocious and devoutly
pious Spizzi family: lofty, vaulted, cold. Around somewhat dreary
damask-covered tables, displaying Italian motoring magazines, were
modern chairs artfully but unhappily devised of twisted red-stained
wood, or aged refugee chairs from destroyed parlors, resembling indigent
gentlewomen. There was a case of novels and travel books which fleeing
guests had intelligently left behind: a French guidebook to Sicily dated
1899 and such romances as _Lively Lassie o' London Town_, by Mrs. Beth
Levinson Knibbs-Crochet.

In this clean shabbiness you could rest familiarly enough, and the
lounge windows looked down on the Ponte Vecchio, that venerable bridge
of shops devoted now to sellers of artificial pearls and not to Donati
defending the crossing with loud swords.

Late that afternoon, with small trunk and ill-assorted bags and a
hastily purchased new blue-silk cravat, Hayden moved into his cell at
the Tre Corone.

                 *        *        *        *        *

He met his floor maid, Perpetua, a smiling, black-eyed, powerful woman
of fifty, only just slightly felonious, who would also be his waitress,
valet, chamberlain, social arbiter, and chief professor in the Italian
tongue: a low-built peasant in black dress and white apron who seemed to
be on duty from five A.M. to midnight.

Shyly, not knowing how he should dress, he went down to his first
dinner, at eight, to _risotto_ and boiled beef, and met most of the Tre
Corone guests. They too were in lounge clothes. In treachery to all
tradition, there was no retired British colonel with lady, nor even a
British major or vicar.

He encountered, instead, a Hungarian widow of fifty and her daughter,
highly polylingual and undevoted to Bolsheviks, a round-faced American
graduate student who listened to and sometimes understood lectures on
Italian art at the university, an out-of-favor Italian ex-diplomat, a
Dutch baron devoted to cameos, to Americans and other novelties, an
Italian lawyer with three daughters, a soured French silk-buyer, and an
Italo-American agent for documentary films, who wanted to discuss
trout-fishing in Maine with Hayden.

Dr. Lomond--Olivia--sat by herself at a small table and read the
air-mail continental _Time_. She looked at Hayden twice before she
remembered him (that is what she thought he would think) and she nodded
and said nothing and went back to reading about Congressman Marcantonio,
the latest biography of Susan B. Anthony, murder by a balding man late
at night in a rubber-boot warehouse, revolution in the Celebes, the
mortality rate in successor-disease affecting former confidants of
Stalin, chemobiologimicrophotography in the University of Leyden, and
the other brighter topics of the day. Olivia's compressed lips were
hidden from him by the _Time_ cover, portraying, in color, a fabulous
chain-store organizer, with a background of prunes, motorcycles, cash
registers and bathing caps, and instead of Olivia's glass-smooth cheeks
or hostile, inquiring eyes, Hayden studied only his plate of
saffron-yellow rice.




CHAPTER 8


Out of his plastered cell, Hayden made a cluttered and familiar home. It
was, possibly, the first home he had ever had. In boyhood, "home" had
been aggressively his father's house, and in his marriage, their three
successive houses had been saturated with Caprice and her clamorous
friends.

In a second-hand shop he bought a couple of low tables, a small rosy
armchair and a shaky set of bookshelves that had been used for bottles.
At Alinari's he got color prints of the _Primavera_ and Angelico's
_Great Crucifixion_ and the fairyland of Benozzo Gozzoli's gold and
crimson courtier pilgrims.

In the book shops he went on a spree. He bought histories of Florence in
English, English-Italian grammars and dictionaries, a Cambridge history
of the Renaissance, and in Italian he had books which he certainly would
not be able to tackle for two years: Dante and Petrarch, Manzoni's
classic _I Promessi Sposi_, which is written in hedgerows and not in
lines, Machiavelli's _Prince_, and a volume of Giovanni Villani's
Florentine history--a brand-new edition, dated 1650.

He had, in fact, all of a university except the yell and the bursar's
office.

His exploration of Florence, begun immediately, was not altogether that
of the enraptured and credulous tourist, for Hayden Chart was an
architect, a good one, not unlearned, and he saw the purposes of arches
and buttresses; his eye picked up ornamental iron balconies and in
apparent mere gaps between buildings he detected minute streets leading
to some lost square with a little church, an old, very old, very holy
church sheltering the tomb of a spacious Platonist who in 1492 was
discovering the old world as dangerously as Columbus was finding the
new.

He went graspingly at learning Italian, a tongue reputed among the
untutored to be all melody and tra-la-la's and mobile dames and ice
cream cries, but actually so thorny with perverse irregular verbs and
pronouns that have more exceptions than rules and suffixes meaning Big,
Pretty Big, Very Big, Enormously Big, Little, Delightfully Little,
Nasty, or Perfectly Horrible that most tenderfoot students give it up,
moaning, after learning how to make love and order a meal.

He looked into the official Italian Language course at the University,
but it was all in Italian from the first, too much for the halting brain
of thirty-five. He tried a School of Languages, but he did not feel
stimulated by his fellow-students: Anglo-American women who, after
housekeeping in Florence for a decade, had decided that it was time to
find out what they had really been eating all these years, or English
businessmen who wanted to sell British machinery, or the aunts of
American European Relief Program officials, all of whom interrupted the
lessons to explain what they thought about Italy, with an urgency which
indicated that they believed the natives, from dope-runners to the
President, were pantingly waiting for their verdicts.

Hayden found, through Mrs. Dodsworth, a Signora Pendola, an oldish fat
widow with an umbrella and elastic-sided shoes, afflicted with
bronchitis and sadness of the heart, tired, so poor and tired, but a
patient teacher, with a voice like Eleonora Duse. Hayden was fond of her
and treated her as though she were his mother. Before each lesson, down
in the salon, he had the waiter bring the Signora a cup of tea, and she
announced that he was the kindest American since that born Yankee
hustler, Julius Caesar.

Along with her instruction, he daily studied his book of grammar, but
this seemed to be another Italian. Rarely did any of the words which he
painfully drilled into himself from the printed lists slip over into
normal conversation.

As he learned each phrase from the Signora, Hayden tried it out on the
maid, Perpetua, who, being Italian and generous, did not find it funny
when he meant to ask her to sew on a button, but gravely made it, "By
favor, I pray of cook those stick on my shirtmakeress." He tried his new
words in shops, in small restaurants. The friendly Florentines were
pleased that the stranger should want to know their tongue, and he began
to love the gently grave men, the flexibly moving women.

He had thought, at first, that the Italian women had noses too
long--from the nasal standard of American magazine-cover girls--but
presently he was convinced that these _almost_ long noses were part of a
medieval grace and long flying lines that ought to be seen not in the
chopped-off smart New York styles which prosperous Italian women wear
today, but in a fluency of trailing silk, soft green trimmed with silver
and rare furs. He noted with comfort that Olivia Lomond's nose was one
one-hundredth of an inch longer than the severe Colorado norm, and he
felt that if he should ever see Roxanna Eldritch's pert snub nose again
he would consider it truncated and vulgar.

As rudely as though he were flagrantly picking her up at a railroad
station, he tackled Olivia at her icy island table and insisted that she
go on a walk with him. She consented indifferently, and as they tramped
together, squeezed close by the exigency of a two-man-wide alley, they
still seemed as far apart as at the _pensione_. He worked hard then, as
young men of thirty-five or eighty-five do, to convince her that he was
a devilish clever fellow. She might know all about the bellicose
families who once had fought from these rough towers, but he could tell
her what foundation a tower must have and how much it tapered and what
the square holes in the walls were for.

She came to treat him as being almost as decent and capable a human
being as Perpetua. She did not mock him--much.

With Olivia or by himself he looked at the great churches--Or San
Michele, Miniato, Santa Croce, Maria Novella, San Marco, the
Battistero--and at the galleries till he understood how a Giotto
differed from a Spinello Aretino. He began, a little, to follow the
symbolism whereby a pictured saint portrayed both the saint and a
Medici, and a red star marked St. Dominic; to see that a picture in
which the misdrawn toes were as long as fingers and the children were
only dwarf grown-ups could yet in the whole composition hold ecstasy and
delight.

But he also discovered that the one place colder than his own room at
two A.M. was any Italian church, north of Naples, at ten A.M. on a
February day. The rosiest Madonna looked blue-frozen as the malicious
air crept up from a crypt that had grown colder, winter by winter, for
centuries. He admired the fortitude of the Italians: beardster and
babies cheerful at Mass while he fled outdoors to get warm.

And he found the smoochers--he worked out the Doctrine of Smoochers.

_Smoochers_--the word was Hayden's own; first blooming of his Florentine
poetic revelations--are those shaggy and lumbering men who in a church
or a ruined palace or a public square pop out of a vacuum, guides and
sextons and loafers and plain floor-sweepers, who with hazy but
persistent firmness wreck and ruin and shatter the still raptness in
which you have been contemplating a faade or, say, a Ghirlandaio by
telling you that, remarkably enough, it _is_ a church or a Ghirlandaio.
You knew it already. That is why you went there.

The English spoken by smoochers lacks not only verbs but adjectives and
they good-naturedly date Simone Martini as anywhere from 1140 to 1760.
But if you are sorry for them as being needy, you can usually persuade
them to let you alone by instantly insulting them with a fifty-lire
note.

Subdivisions of the smoochers, indoors and out, include insistent
post-card sellers, sellers of bead necklaces and of fountain pens, and
would-be changers of dollar bills.

                 *        *        *        *        *

In the great churches, he thought often of how Jesse Bradbin would have
snorted, "But what's the _practical_ use of all this old art?" And in
imaginary answer he insisted that it seemed to him improbable that one
who had much contemplated Or San Michele or a Botticelli would willingly
allow himself or any one else to become just a file number in a
bureaucracy such as Russia now is and America and Great Britain threaten
to be.

Along with the English Cemetery, where rests Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
and such little-altered medieval quarters as the toy Piazzetta
Elisabetta, he paid suit to modern Florence: to some dozen restaurants,
to shops for silver and china and lace and gold-embossed leather, and to
the county-family pleasantness of the Anglo-American Pharmacy, and he
studied the tribal rites of the resident Americans at Doney's and
Leland's, the tearoom bars, to which go equally the more dependable
drunks and the crisp American girls being finished off in finishing
schools, who believe that to see Inside Italy means to go downtown and
have pastry with whipped cream.

The American Colony is divided into three parts: those who have their
cocktails at Leland's or Doney's, a small sect who have them at home,
either with firelight and old silver and a butler and many guests or, by
the good tradition of Bohemian poverty, with boxes to sit on round the
kitchen stove and the drinks mixed in a broken-nosed pitcher, and the
third part, a tiny and suspect group, which does not have cocktails.

Hayden himself--he had daily only an Americano, that mixture of vermouth
and kindness of which no American ever hears till he comes to Italy.

A Florentine might have pointed out to Hayden that in defining a city of
palaces and paintings and bars, he was missing nine-tenths of the living
community: a post-war world of workers jobless or anxious in hospitals,
small officials with meat once a month and wine at Christmas, repressed
but angry citizens hating the well-fed foreigners who came brightly to
gloat over a Filippo Lippi Madonna and never learned that a descendant
of Filippo was hauling garbage. But Hayden understood all of this. Even
in new Newlife he had built tenements. He was more moved by poverty
among American students here.

He met American girl students whose life here was a storm of
frustration, between a passion to stay in Florence and apprehension that
it would keep them from going on to see the rest of Italy--Rome, Milan,
Turin; a passion to remain in Italy and fear that they were becoming
unfitted for the ways, the friends, back home. Half their anxieties,
thought Hayden, would be soothed if they only had enough money to move
flexibly, and he a little despised such burghers as himself and the
Dodsworths, who were so amiably and pointlessly advisory to the shabby
students.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The most exhilarating part of his new life was in his quiet room at the
Tre Corone, finding himself.

It was a secret life, a life that he hugged to him. In studious solitude
he saw winter pass like blown smoke. Half the night he sat up trying to
read medieval history in the Italian of Villani, of Guicciardini, and
meditating upon the meaning, to himself and to his day, of that world of
authority, ceremony, color, and enchanting but just slightly cockeyed
fables. To rest his eyes he had, on his portable radio, Mozart from
Milan.

He read on nightly, till he felt uncomfortable and was dismayed to find
that his room was slush-cold. The Florentine winter lasts only from
mid-December to March, and in that season there are luminous days, but
there are also jeeringly cold nights and days together when the
_tramontana_ wind comes devastatingly down from the Alps three pinched
days at a spell, blowing pitilessly, playing rowdy with the tiles and
shutters, chasing the night policemen down the streets and into
bicycle-storage alcoves, marching through Hayden's northward-facing
window as though it were a paper screen.

In the _tramontana's_ shriek of an ice-tortured fiend, Hayden thought he
could catch a stated tune: rising, rising, rising to a scream, a sullen
sinking down again, and rising, rising.

By day, he could see the olive tree on a terrace below him turn
altogether silver, with its sheet of leaves so lifted by the gale that
he saw only the undersides, while a cypress tree bent over in twisting
pain. The tempest seemed worst during the fits of grudging sunshine
when, afar, he could see the aloof and whitened peaks of the Pistoia
Mountains coldly leering at this uncouth stranger who once had talked of
"sunny Italy."

Mrs. Manse let her radiators go cold before midnight, and at one in the
morning the cold in Hayden's room seemed visible, a part of the pallid
walls and glistening stone floor. Cold was in his eyeballs, in his
chest, and his breath was coldly vaporous. He understood why beggars,
hopeless at night on winter doorsteps, crouched themselves together.

He had had words with Mrs. Manse about an electric heater, and had
bought one for himself: a good little Italian electric stove composed of
two sheets of glass with wires between. It glowed obedience to its
scholar-master, but it could not do much more than keep itself warm and,
impatiently determined to go on reading, Hayden huddled his overcoat and
scarf over his woolen dressing-gown and, to crown this costume of a lone
miser, he put on his polite brown hat.

His immensest luxury was a cup-size Italian aluminum stove with sticks
of Meta compound for fuel, and pulverized instant coffee. Nearly warmed
by his coffee, he thought of what he had been reading: Lodovico il Moro,
taking his nephew's throne in Milan, playing gaudy host and patron to
religious painters and dying a flea-tortured prisoner in France....
Pico della Mirandola, fairest and most febrile youth of the Renaissance,
learning Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, challenging the College of Cardinals,
and dying at thirty-one, to be buried over here in the cold gloom of San
Marco.

It was all magic. With pleasant recognition he found himself and his
vigils in _Il Penseroso_ when he picked up some English poetry on a book
barrow on the Piazza D'Avanzati. The night-bewitched scholar, timeless
and immortal, from a Colorado boomtown of 1950 or from the Florence of
1490, Hayden or Count Pico, all of them in all their shabby majesty he
found as he read Milton's "lamp at midnight hour, seen in some high
lonely tower," where the hermit sought "forests and enchantments drear,
where more is meant than meets the ear."

Mrs. Dodsworth examined him, woman-wise, when he went to the Villa
Canterbury to play bridge.

"Have you got yourself a girl yet?"

"None in sight."

"What about Miss Lomond--this _professoressa_?"

"She'd be interested only in Professor Santayana."

"What do you do with yourself? You can't spend all your time
sightseeing."

"I tinker with Italian maps--try to find the best route to forests and
enchantments drear."

"You're very young, Hayden--pleasantly so."

"_Or_ very old, and repentant of a wasted life in which the only poetry
I ever learned was 'Yes, we have no bananas.' I think I ought to tell
the press services to send out a story that a man can read poetry
without getting kicked out of the Athletic Club."

"I doubt that! I've been in Zenith!"

                 *        *        *        *        *

With the other guests--but privately he thought of them as "the
boarders"--at the Tre Corone, he had after-dinner coffee, and they all
asked "Have you seen the Bargello?" He went to Nat Friar's again and
found him reading an Eric Ambler thriller. Nat said he was rather off
Great Books, since the University of Chicago had taken a lease on them
and was now sponsoring Great Books for Juveniles 7-11, Great Book
neckties and Great Book Bran Brainfood for Breakfast.

And he had a night club evening with Vito Zenzero, the wavy-black-haired
dancing man, nephew of Mrs. Manse, who was the _pensione's_ desk-clerk,
headwaiter and entertainer of spinsters. Vito spoke energetic English,
learned from the less refined members of the American Expeditionary
Forces, and he took Hayden to a hot spot in a thick-walled basement
under an old palace. Hayden had noted that Olivia was blank to Vito
when, looking like the best of B films in his yellow-green jacket and
brown slacks, he teetered and uttered about the dining room, encouraging
the guests to buy Frascati wines.

"Why are you so cranky? Poor Vito, he flowers in the sunshine." Hayden
desired to know of Olivia.

"Poor Vito flowers in manure! He sells black-market cigarettes and gets
a commission on all the guests whom he coaxes to take him to night
clubs...."

"Oh!"

"...and he's seduced every girl in this district."

"That's what I said. He's a real medieval character. You like them only
in books, Olivia. If you'd been in Italy in 1400, you'd have fled to
Ireland and a nunnery."

"Oh, pooh!" she said, not very convincingly.

This evening, Hayden had, without any noticeable invitation, firmly sat
down at her table for coffee. Her manner toward him still had the
persistent grayness of a _tramontana_, and this admirably strong-willed
woman was apparently able to keep it up forever. More with a collector's
curiosity than with any sympathy she asked, "What are you 'studying'
now, Hayden?"

"I'm trying to get into Dante, with a trot."

"You really are naive!"

"It's you that are naive, in not understanding that I'm having an
adventure. For me it's as novel to try to wallow through Dante as it
would be for you to plan a modern low-price bathroom with
compartments--plastic and stainless steel--green and silver."

"But I shouldn't _care_ to plan a green bathroom--with compartments--nor
to use one, either!"

He thought about slapping her. He told himself that, with this conceited
grind, there was no merit in even a boarding-house courtesy. He left her
gruffly, and it was an astonishment to him, a week later, when she
invited him to take her to the Camillo for dinner.

That brisk restaurant, across the river in the Oltrarno quarter, on the
Borgo San Jacopo with its ancient walls, is a favorite of the scores of
American students in Florence, and of students German, French, Swedish,
Burmese. A few of them had learned Italian and had actually met an
Italian, but most of them were as innocently detached from the local
life as were their financial betters, the Colonists. They met nightly in
zealously argumentative groups devoted to the prose of Henry Miller and
the pastoral delights of Marxism, while they let down their _fettuccine_
noodles and drank carafes of _vino rosso sciolto_.

At most Florentine restaurants, eight o'clock is a charming hour in the
early dawn, but at the Camillo every table is full by a quarter to
eight, and by eight-fifteen, Picasso and Existentialism have already
been mentioned, which means another regrettable night up till
two-thirty, at Danny's or Rachel's "studio," and the head like a tornado
in the morning and the Sforzas not yet studied.

Olivia had always the art of making Hayden feel wizened and uncertain,
but she had never been so authoritative as at the Camillo, where all the
students recognized her, perhaps feared her a little, and called her
"Doctor" or "Professor." They wanted to know what she thought of the
Delia Robbias, and she told them.... And with considerable comfort
Hayden perceived that she had the three Robbias all mixed up, and that
both she and the convivial students supposed that because she knew the
legal and political history of the fifteenth century, she must be a
sound taster of its art.

Her insufficiency did not keep her from being confident or the students
from noting down what she said, to be repeated for decades afterward to
the unfortunate future students of these students, in far-flung
crepuscular colleges on the plains or in the hills--colleges where
"far-flung" is considered a novel and forceful adjective.

When he had been permitted to take Olivia home, even that friendly pup
Hayden had had enough, and he did not speak to her again for a week.
Then, shatteringly, came the embarrassment in the hall.




CHAPTER 9


Hayden, in respectable hat and brown topcoat, had respectably come in
from seeing an American film and he was thinking how odd it was to hear
an actor from Ohio making love with Neapolitan ardor. He was whistling
softly and unaware, and he stopped with a jar as he came full on Olivia,
a negligee lacy about her breast, carrying under her silk-draped arm the
intimacies of sponge-bag, soap, towel, fresh nightgown.

She was astonishingly embarrassed about it. She trembled a little as she
quavered, "Have to use bathroom down here--somebody in the other one
that I often use--I _do_ have a private bath but it's out of order.
_Really_ not accustomed to parading naked in the hall! I--oh, excuse
me--Mr. Chart!"

He attacked: "What's the trouble? What bothers you so about the nearness
of a male lout? Why are you so sufferingly virginal, Olivia?"

"I am not!" But she was deep-flushed, and panting.

"You're abnormally so!"

"That's silly! I'm not.... Oh, I suppose I do get startled-faunish,
leading such a cloistral life here."

The superior Dr. Lomond was defenseless. He felt brutal and
bad-mannered, but she had been so stonily lofty on their evening at the
Camillo that he was not particularly kind. And in soft oriental silk she
was interesting--at least.

"Olivia, my dear, you often give me good advice about not being an
amateur scholar. I can't resist advising you to taste a little more
salty life. Come out to a night club with me. Dance. Even laugh a
little. Don't be an amateur saint!"

"Perhaps I--well, I must get on with..."

Down the hall they heard the door of Bathroom 2 closing and the running
of water. He laughed. "Cut off on all sides! Forest fire back of us,
mountain lions in front! Come sit in my room till that swine there has
finished his dip.... It will be perfectly proper. I'll leave my door
open. Don't be scared."

"I could not conceivably be scared by you or anybody else!" But the hot
flash of blood under her Syrian skin had faded to a rare paleness, and
her voice was uneven. "I think I'd better wait in my own room, though,
thank you."

Her look had such appeal as he would never have expected from
her--appealing, a girl, a woman--and she begged, "Please! It's kind of
you, but I think Mrs. Manse still tries to convince us she's a born
Lancashire woman, with all the proprieties, and she might not care for
our dormitory chat."

"Good night, my dear. Sorry the enemy captured all the baths. Good
night!"

He sat thinking that she was as feminine, in a betraying cloudiness of
silk, as Caprice had been; as much the forest nymph white in the
woodland twilight. But there was something wrong; some nameless injury
that she had taken. He was sorry for the lofty Dr. Lomond, and with his
pity came fondness for her.

Next evening, at dinner, she looked at him with a trace of intimacy, of
pleading, yet by after-dinner-coffee time she was as self-sufficient as
ever, and she was noticeably rude to his friend Vito Zenzero when Vito
came pussycatting around to ask, Had the _professoressa_ enjoyed the
beautiful artichokes?

Nothing seemed to have happened, nothing did happen, and Hayden was
again drawn into a hobo life in the jungles of the American Colony,
trying to find out how innocent these Innocents Abroad were, and why
they were abroad at all.

                 *        *        *        *        *

He saw less of the American students or the Italo-American businessmen
than of the golden loafers of the Colony, the Dodsworth set with their
Louis Seize cabinets and chauffeurs and hospitality to poor Colonists
who were pitiful martyrs in not having chauffeurs.

Many of these Colonists were content, month on month, to go to cocktail
parties with amiable friends, to play a little bridge, to dine out, to
read the latest books sent over from Home, to look once a month at a
gallery or a church and, all in all, unknowing all, do nothing but wait
for death. Hayden was not going to wait for death. He had, and not long
since, been through most of its agonies, and he was going to use every
energy and inspired curiosity in him to keep himself consciously living,
to find and cherish life in his new career, in a dozen new careers.

He believed that Americans could do that, as the Founding Fathers had.
In even the most languid and habitual of the Florentine Colonists, in
even the most fluttering pansy, he discerned American ore.

Mr. Henry James was breathless over the spectacle of Americans living
abroad and how very queer they are, in English country houses or Tuscan
villas or flats in Rome, and how touchy they become as they contemplate
the correctness of Europeans.

But just how queer they are, Mr. James never knew. He never saw a radio
reporter, never talked to an American Oil Company proconsul gossiping in
the Via Veneto about his native Texas. Americans are electric with
curiosity, and this curiosity has misled foreigners and Mr. James into
crediting them with a provincial reverence which they do not possess; a
reverence which their ancestors got rid of along with their native
costumes, one month after Ellis Island or after Plymouth Rock.

If a queen comes to America, crowds fill the station squares, and
attendant British journalists rejoice, "You see: the American Cousins
are as respectful to Royalty as we are."

But the Americans have read of queens since babyhood. They want to see
one queen, once, and if another came to town next week, with twice as
handsome a crown, she would not draw more than two small boys and an
Anglophile.

Americans want to see one movie star, one giraffe, one jet plane, one
murder, but only one. They run up a skyscraper or the fame of generals
and evangelists and playwrights in one week and tear them all down in an
hour, and the mark of excellence everywhere is "under new management."

Nor are they so different when they are expatriates. After years of
Europe, Sam Dodsworth was unalterably midwestern in his quick humorous
glance, his scorn for social climbers, his monotonous voice, his liking
for dry cereals, his belief that if he met a stranger and took to him,
they were friends from that hour. He had the result of the annual
Yale-Princeton football game cabled to him, and he amused his more
Italianized wife by sometimes addressing a countess as "Missus."

And the much-younger Hayden Chart, listening to the music of ancient
zithers in yellow-spotted books, planning to go on to the Spice Islands
and the red-enameled gates of China, was yet cynically hard about female
compatriots who were too gushingly reverent toward gray eminences or
gray towers. Like Dodsworth, he thought well of American hospitals and
streamlined trains and the reluctance of Democrats to behead all
Republicans.

Mr. James's simple miss has become the young lady at the Ritz Bar, and
his young American suitor, apologetic for having been reared in the
rustic innocence of Harvard instead of the Byzantine courtliness of a
bed-sitting-room at Oxford, has been replaced by the American flying
major who in Africa, Arabia, China, Paris is used to being courted as
the new Milord.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Hayden found that the Florentine American Colony considered itself a
community sufficient and significant. The Colonists who had been here
for forty years looked down on the settlers of ten years standing who
looked down on the one-year squatters who looked down on the newcomers
of one month who were extremely lofty and informative with the one-week
horrors. Altogether, the Colony made up one-tenth of one per cent of the
population of Florence.

And the claims of none of these reversed patriots so much interested
Hayden as his own secret life.

As an Italian gentleman of Hayden's age might develop a quite new
personality among the ranches and mines of Colorado, so Hayden was
developing a new personality in an equally perilous Italian world of
disjunctive pronouns, Gothic triforiums, and the mystery of Olivia down
the hall. As the mercenary Colleoni once attacked the fortress of a
girl's heart, so Hayden attacked the history of Colleoni and all that
insane medieval jumble of wars and dynasties.

He loved this Italy precisely because it was strange to him. In his
restricted cell of a bedroom here he had but little of an exile's
longing for the luxury and space of his house in Newlife; for the chaise
longue and the shelves of detective stories and the heated garage, and
the breakfast table, of glass and flowery iron-work, on the sunporch.
They were overbalanced by Florence and its memory of banners and slow
deep bells, of towers and swords and torture.

He believed that he could go beyond the futility of merely piling up
historical timber. It was easy enough for even a guidebook-tripper to
learn a catalogue of the names of painters and battles, but Hayden
wanted out of his scant erudition to make a solid structure to rest in,
to make a signboard that would point out on what road mankind had
marched.

With Henry Adams, he tried to see the same ornament and soaring ambition
in Gothic cathedrals and Gothic hymns, the same grace and light in
Renaissance palaces and villas and sculpture and song. He sought the
relationship of all his new visions to his own profession.

In Florence, his favorite Newlife brick Georgian houses, with delicate
fanlights and wide windows which promised welcome and wreaths and
Christmas candles (but strictly with movable partitions and oil-heating
and insulated roofs!), still seemed fitting and dear, though he did not
want them in Italy. And equally from the integrity of old stone walls
and from Roman classic columns he was refreshed in his belief that in no
time or land have there been more imperially beautiful buildings than
the towers of Rockefeller Center, in New York.

In Newlife he had needed some unfamiliarity, some strangeness, and had
needed conversation that should not always be in the same platitudes, so
that from the first two words he could predict everything else that the
oracle was about to thunder. How great those needs had been he knew when
he was called to the _pensione_ office to answer the telephone, and
heard a heavy American masculine chuckle:

"I'll bet you'll never in the world guess who this is!"

"No, I'm afraid I can't."

"Well, try and make a guess now."

"It isn't Mr. Dodsworth?"

"No, no, no no! I ought to needle you a little and punish you for
forgetting your old friends so easy, but I'll put you out of your
misery. It's Bill Windelbank, from Home!"

It was indeed that excellent and intellectual dentist who, as much as
Roxanna Eldritch, had summoned him to the asphodels of Europe. But
Hayden thought, and was ashamed to be caught thinking it, that he did
not desire to see Dr. William Windelbank at all, nor his nimble lady.
Would he have to introduce them to Olivia, to Nat Friar, to the
Dodsworths?

He disliked his own snobbishness and disloyalty, but he did not think he
could ever stand hearing the Windelbanks explain to Sir Henry Belfont,
self-importantly and in detail, how barbaric Italy was in not serving
flapjacks and doughnuts, and insisting upon giving Belfont's _cordon
bleu_ the recipes. Or jocularly saying to Nat Friar, "Prof, I hope you
folks here don't let Hay put it over on you about what a highbrow he is.
Home, he just reads the comic strips and goes to bed at nine-thirty like
the rest of us, but he always was a great guy for trying to show off and
make like a deep reader--don't you now, Hay?"

But Hayden was cordial.

"Well! Thought Jean and you were only going to stay abroad for five
weeks, and here it must be over four months. Golly!"

One magic touch of Home and he was already back in its good-fellowship,
its sterling virtues and its lack of vocabulary.

"Yes-sir-ee, it certainly is!" boasted Windelbank. "Four months,
seventeen days and nine and a half hours since we sailed from little ole
New York! But right off the bat, we started seeing so doggone much and
we like it, and I said to Jean, 'We only live once, and the food is a
lot better and tastier in Europe than we expected, and we'll never come
back here--too many more important points of interest to cover, like
Brazil and Nova Scotia. So,' I said, 'let's go hog-wild and have
four-five months here.'

"But now we've had enough--plenty. The food may be delicious, but it
don't stay by you and nourish the maxillary blood supply like a good
Colorado beefsteak. So we're finishing up the tower with two days in
Florence and three in Rome, just like we originally planned. We did our
two days in Venice, but don't think too much of it: real picturesque,
but awful rundown and shabby. Where we've put in most of our time was
Scandinavia and a lovely little lake resort we found in Northern
England--just like home. And now--only two days here, Hay! What do we
do?"

In terror Hayden perceived that he was expected to spend all of those
two days with the Windelbanks, providing meals, transportation,
interpretage, and learned artistic guidance, answering rapidly and with
apparent accuracy all questions about the weight of the Duomo cupola,
the biographies, with dates, of all the more important inhabitants of
all tombs in all churches, and the number of members in all political
parties in Tuscany.

"Well, why not?" he rebuked himself. "They'd do the same for me, even
if--especially if!--I didn't want them to!"

Anyway, they were too kind and loyal for him to think of dodging them,
and he trumpeted, "How about my picking you up and taking you to dinner
tonight?"

"Well now, that's real nice of you. Be glad to. Jean--you know how
finicking and suspicious women are--she said, 'Maybe Hay's gone and
gotten in with a lot of snobs here and won't care to see plain folks
like us,' but I says to her, 'Not on your life! I know Hay's character
like I know his bicuspids! He may talk fancy and highfalutin, but at
heart he'll always be just a plain, back-slappin' Western boy, like all
the rest of us!'"

                 *        *        *        *        *

As punishment for his sin of alienation, Hayden found, at dinner, that
Dr. Windelbank had noticed many things that he, in the same islands of
bliss, had never marked: the routes of the Paris Metro, the wages of
bellboys in Belgium, the horsepower of London taxicabs. The doctor was
buoyant about his discoveries; he made Hayden feel aged and juiceless,
as Sam Dodsworth made him feel credulous and boisterous and infantile.

Dinner was comfortable--and Jean Windelbank's new gray dinner dress was
excellent. Hayden was surprised to find with what excitement he learned
from the Windelbanks, who had assiduously corresponded with everybody
back home, the more salient items of news: that Mary Eliza Bradbin's new
upper plate took all the wrinkles away from around her mouth, that Dr.
Crittenham had bought a "new Chevy, a swell two-tone-color job," that
Bobby Tregusis, the nephew of Chan Millward's first wife's first
husband, had a lovely job with the Cripple Creek telephone company.

And in Paris the Windelbanks had seen Roxanna Eldritch.

"I phoned her--she couldn't guess who it was, at first, but then she was
real glad to hear my voice--I'll bet she was; kid like that so far away
from home among these queer foreigners and all these moral pitfalls. She
bought us a real nice dinner at a real Parisian restaurant that all
these tourists and all never get to hear about--kidneys, their specialty
was. Personally, I never did care too much for kidneys at home, but the
way they did them there, they was real nice.

"There was a mighty smart lady running the place. She said to me--she
spoke English real good--she said, 'You're Americans, aren't you?' and I
said, 'Yes--how can you tell?' and she just laughed and she said, 'Oh, I
can tell!' and then I said to her, 'But I'm willing to go on record as
saying that never even in America have I tasted a nicer kidney!'

"Well, sir, I said to Roxy, 'I hope you're the same sweet, fresh,
unspoiled young lady you always was at home, even among all those
reporters and politicians,' and she said to me, 'Dr. Bill, no girl can
ever go wrong if she's been brought up to understand the moral standards
of Colorado, and I hope I'm still the mountainside daisy and not the
rank orchid!' Yes-sir-ree!"

(That sly little devil. I shall send her a volume of Machiavelli! Hayden
privately admired.)

But this conviviality was presently marred by rivalry. There is, Hayden
found, something like a system of credits for sightseeing: doing a
cathedral thoroughly counts, let us say, eleven points--exterior only,
five; looking for not less than one second at every single picture in a
large gallery comes to thirteen, inspecting a mountain village rarely
beheld by tourists is seventeen, dining at a celebrated restaurant is
six, but if you found it all by yourself, the credit is nine.

By this most reasonable standard for computing good works, the
Windelbanks had acquired at least four times as many points of merit as
Hayden.

They were pained by his evident sloth, and fretted out a number of
queries. Had he seen Madame Tussaud's Waxworks in London? In Paris, had
he done Napoleon's Tomb and had fish at Prunier's? At his No's the
doctor mourned, "Well, I must say! What have you _done_ with your time
over here? How a man could have this wonderful chance and come all the
way to England and not see Madame Tussaud's is beyond me!"

Hayden childishly reached for equality, tried to show off, tried to show
what an utterly changed and Europeanized and generally improved edition
he had become. He spoke in Italian to the waiter (who seemed to
understand parts of what he said) but it was no go. The Windelbanks had
definitely taken the lead in culture now, and they brought out a few
scientific conclusions with an air of authority.

The citizens of Bologna (where they had spent three hours) were
definitely more cheerful than the citizens of Padua (two hours).
Throughout France, the sale of American soft drinks (thanks to the
purity of our soldiers who had served in that untutored land) was
practically wiping out the sale of wine. In Cannes (twenty-two hours)
there is always rain, at all seasons of the year, and the Windelbanks
had warned the hotel clerk there that he was a very silly fellow to
remain. He ought to see the climate in Newlife, Colorado.

But they so far forgave Hayden as to promise to send his address and
telephone number here back to all the human catandogs whom they had
picked up along their way and who might be arriving here soon: to that
delightful young American couple they met in Glasgow--the husband owned
a brickyard, so Hayden and he would have a lot of professional interests
in common, and his little wife was such a dear little woman; she liked
to read the guidebook aloud, and Hayden would enjoy them both so much,
and enjoy showing them around Florence. And the splendid Holland
Dutchman who was so amusing about salmon-fishing in Scotland, and the
wonderful Baptist pulpit-orator from Chicago, who would enjoy showing
Hayden around Florence and explaining the Catholic Church to him.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Hayden had not meant to call for help, but later in the evening he
petitioned Olivia to help him have lunch with the Windelbanks next day.
Once, he knew, she would have refused, but ever since he had met her,
silken and defenseless, in the hall, she had shown him a shade of
pleading humility that almost slipped into obedience. She accepted, with
only a few scurrilous observations on the sort of people he seemed to
know at home.

He put in the morning before lunch in helping the Windelbanks exchange
their dollars and in leading them through pages 400-426 of the tenth
edition of Baedeker's _Northern Italy_, along with the compulsory daily
shopping: the kodak films, the lace collars and sweater for Jean Jr.,
their married daughter. It would not be accurate to say that they had
bought a sweater for Jean Jr. in every country in Europe. They had never
been in Albania.

Hayden also advised them in the daily choice of three plain and four
colored post cards to send home.

"How many folks do you send souvenir cards to regularly, Hay?" nosed the
doctor.

"Why, not any--regularly," admitted Hayden, and then, guiltily, "or
irregularly either!"

"You don't? Why, you're missing half the fun of travel, to say nothing
of the pleasure you might be bringing into people's drab lives!" From a
waistcoat pocket the doctor whipped out a thin gilt-and-mauve notebook.
"I've got the names and addresses here of my forty-seven very closest
friends, relatives and patients that are prompt pay, and every single
week I send each of 'em a card from somewhere in Europe, always with
some cheering message or interesting piece of information--say, like
total population of Italy. And this treasure-house book, as I call it,
also contains my birthday list for use at home, with folks' names under
the dates of their birthdays _and_ wedding anniversaries. How many cards
do you send out on birthdays and Easter and Christmas?"

"Maybe not as many as I ought to," said the abashed liar, who darkly
detested all standard greeting cards depicting two sparrows and an
antelope, with the apostrophe, "Where'er you are or go or do, this
festal day we think of you!"

"Now, Hay, you mustn't go and make the fatal error of thinking just
because you're getting so much smarter out of all this classy travel,
you can afford to neglect your friends. I may be a good
practitioner--I'll match my bridgework against anybody's--but even so, I
bet I wouldn't get _anywhere_, I wouldn't make three thousand bucks a
year, without the love and loyalty of my friends.

"_They're_ the guys that understand and support and recommend you! Don't
forget that, among all these snooty foreigners that they simply don't or
won't understand what a real friend is like! And, mind you, I don't just
mean the good old gang that you see every week at the Kiwanis or at
church or the country-club bar, and that pay their dentist right on the
dot, but the dear and tender chums of the magic bygone days, long
severed but forgotten ne'er, that if they happen to be in your town for
a convention or on a motor tour will honor you by phoning you first
thing and coming right out to the house to take potluck with you and
cheer up the wife by kidding her along. You're damn tootin'! You may
find a lot of stuck-up highbrows here, always gassing their heads off
and talking so much while guys like us prefer to remain silent and not
show off our ignorance, but you're not going to find the old deep
friends like we know at home! Hm. Home! You know..."

Bill Windelbank was dreaming. When he spoke, all the brag and
bumptiousness were for a moment gone from him, and he looked at Hayden
appealingly:

"You know, Jean and me are awful seasoned tourists and we always make
out like we never get homesick, not even for Jean Junior or her two
babies or for the cottonwoods along the crick just below our house. But
one time, this trip, we were in a Paris joint, real gay but high-toned,
and suddenly, with no warning, the band strikes up _Home on the
Range_--'where never is heard a discouraging word.' Well, sir, I looked
at Jean and Jean looked at me, and suddenly I could just _see_ those
cottonwoods, and God, how I did long to be back there, safe! I could
have cried! And Jean--she did!"

How good they were, thought Hayden, and how kind--as the Dodsworths were
kind, as Sir Henry Belfont was not, as Olivia was not.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Olivia met them at the Baglioni roof garden for lunch, and horror struck
immediately.

Hayden could not stop Dr. Windelbank who, to Olivia's small leering
delight, referred to him as Haysy-Daisy, and who chronicled the one
episode of which Hayden was most ashamed, for its cheap bullying and
hysterical loss of temper: the time when he had threatened a tough
sub-contractor with an empty revolver and the man had caved in, all two
hundred and forty hairy pounds of him.

"Hay was a major in the last war, and a champ pistol shot!" crowed Dr.
Windelbank.

"And Hay was also nothing but a boss draftsman in that crusade and never
heard a shot fired in anger!" glared Hayden.

But it seemed to him that Olivia looked at him almost affectionately,
and on their way back to the _pensione_ she said, "I like you much
better as a competent rowdy than as a polite dilettante. But how those
people hated me! They are very brave and charitable, but they feel
entirely competent to tell me what to teach--to tell Italy and France
what to teach--to tell the bishop how to pray and God how to listen to
the teaching and the prayer."




CHAPTER 10


On the northern rim of Florence, toward the mutely watching mountains,
Fiesole perches on its hilltop like a monstrous eagle, with its
bell-tower for upstretched neck. It looks down on the flood plain of the
Arno, which is Florence, and remembers that it was a ponderous-walled
Etruscan city twenty-five hundred years ago, when Florence was a
nameless huddle of mud huts. Up here, Boccaccio's maidens stayed the
plague with song and most improper story.

Half a mile from the Fiesole piazza, on the northern edge of the cliff,
is the small Raspanti Inn. The window-side tables look into the sweetly
climbing Mugnone Valley, where the river runs through vineyards and
barley fields, past farmhouses of plaster, red-tiled and yellow-walled,
with airy loggias for the summer.

Hayden had bought a tiny Italian car--a topolino, people called it: a
"little mouse." To get into it you had to hoist your knees up to the
level of your forehead, but it had a gallant motor for hill-climbing,
and it hugged the corkscrew curves of the Italian mountains, or went
happily cantering past the enormous blue omnibuses. In it he had flashed
to Arezzo, and to the old walled town of Lucca, now that, in
mid-February, spring was imminent, the grass between the olive trees was
tinsel-green and mimosa was displaying its canary-colored showers.
Olivia had gone with him once or twice, her obedience still astonishing
him, and today, at the Raspanti, she was seemingly contented to be with
him.

"One of those old farmhouses down there," he said, as they finished
their fedora cake and ordered coffee and Strega, "a man, a family, could
live quietly there."

"For a while."

"For keeps!"

"If there's a good bus, so you could go to the Laurentian Library and
the Uffizi," granted Olivia.

"A lazy spring day like this, I can't imagine going on anywhere else,
not even to Egypt."

"But I'm not lazy. Industry is my one poor virtue."

"Olivia! Let's talk--really talk!"

"Must we?"

"Yes. We are two lone ships in a waste of the South Pacific, the days so
empty and the nights so long under the stars. Why can't we sail
together?"

"Maybe the ships are going in opposite directions."

"Can't they stop a moment and get closer together?"

"Your poetic inquiry sounds very much like what my vulgar students at
Winnemac would call 'propositioning me.'"

"Olivia, you say things that shock me! You chatter about ancient Greek
tarts so frankly that it's embarrassing, and yet you seem afraid of any
natural, friendly contact--like this." He took her hand, across the
table, and she flinched. "What makes you so abnormal?"

She said irritably, "Abnormal! My dear young man! You know nothing about
me. I may have ties that are entirely unknown to you."

"I doubt it. I look at your mail on the hall table--shamelessly. If you
have some magnet, he's probably imaginary. Like my own obsession with...
Olivia, I never have talked to you about my wife; haven't talked
to anybody much, I guess. I just told you she was killed in a motor
accident. The way she died is important, because sometimes I feel I
murdered her by my careless driving, and start brooding. Now, I make
myself come out of it, and realize I've just been wallowing in a
melodrama of regret, like a child scaring itself by drawing spiders. I'm
trying, at least, to look at her death the way a good doctor would.

"I do honor her memory. She was extraordinarily plucky and quick-witted,
even if she wasn't kind-hearted like those people you met--the
Windelbanks. (Caprice always thought they were a pair of stuffed shirts,
by the way, with minds that weren't so much photographic as
phonographic.) She was a bluebird. But she only liked the accidental
things about me: my tennis and swimming, and I used to be not so bad a
dancer till I got tired of the highballs and the shrieking and the
swapping of wives. But she never liked any of my virtues."

"Have you many?"

"Yes. I have. As you know. I'm dependable and punctual and a fine
designer of unfine houses. Those tedious virtues. But I also have a
fighting conviction that men can be more than trout-fishermen; that
there must have been human beings who could build San Miniato. I have
much more imagination about possible ways of living than you have, of
course."

"Oh! _Have_ you!"

"Much. You tackle the Middle Ages to get them down in figures, as a job,
but I take a chance on making myself ridiculous by feeling them as life,
visibly around us still. You--this continual aversion of yours to the
normal male..."

"Oh, quit it! Don't try to show off your knowledge of psychoanalysis as
well as of Lucrezia Borgia!"

"Olivia, you've never let yourself live. Lucrezia--they didn't hate her
because she did any poisoning, but because she could handle so many
lovers. Why don't you imitate her, not just dig her poor lovely bones
out of their paper grave? You could be adorable, but you're nothing but
an expert in pedagogy researching in the quickest methods of teaching
knitting."

"Oh, pooh!"

"There's an American girl wandering around Europe somewhere, Roxanna, a
redhead, that I despair of because she's gone native with a gang of
artistic heels. She's rackety and undisciplined, and she doesn't know
whether Borgia was a duke or a suburb, and yet I give her more chance to
get the sinful, glorious human heart of Europe than you'll ever have.
Oh, try living! It was quite well thought of by Titian!"

"You are so breezy and Western and uninhibited. You are so naive."

"You've called me that before."

"Naturally! So naive in believing that every woman ought to be a
college-campus petter!" She added, with spite and something not unlike
jealousy, "As your redheaded Miss Roxanna apparently is!"

"She is no friend of petting. She doesn't need to be! Yes, I am Western.
I won't eat my breakfast unless I can lasso it. And yet in my attitude
toward self-repressing women, I am exactly like Nat Friar or Ugo
Tramontana. We consider them monstrosities."

"You don't know what you're talking about. You're babbling--oh, not so
much coarse as boyish nonsense! I'd rather you _were_ coarse."

She arose, erect and angry in her blue nylon dress. He said to himself,
"She wants me to be coarse? I will be. She's so armored that a bowman
has to try a shot at her. Let's see if she's human." He slipped his arm
round her, his hand over her shoulder, a sweet slim curve that contented
his palm.

She seemed not rigid and prudish but still with terror. She whimpered,
like a bewildered girl shocked by a trusted old friend, "Oh, don't--oh,
don't--oh, please!"

He had quick pity for her. He released her, and she dropped into her
chair at the table again, her face all one raddled blur of emotion, and
as he sat down, she spoke tremblingly:

"Yes, there is.... It is true. I'm not quite natural toward any man
younger than Professor Friar. But there is a reason. It's not me. I was
turned so.

"I was twenty--so young and undeveloped but so sure I was wise. I was a
prodigy; I got my bachelor's degree at eighteen and my master's at
nineteen. At a big state university, this was. I was working for my
doctor's degree and teaching a couple of classes and reading Professor
Vintner's themes for him. I thought I knew all about vices and
seductions and the elegant wiles of gallants in the Middle Ages, but I
had never taken time to study them first-hand, on the U campus in this
Middling Age. Though plenty of invitations! I knew all about Cellini but
nothing about the local quarterback.

"Leslie Vintner, _dear_ Professor Vintner, my faculty preceptor.
European History from 450 to 1750. Tall and gray-eyed and a little
rustic in his looks, but Heavens, so slick and cosmopolitan in his talk!
He was very, very learned and clever; he had studied at Montpellier and
Rome and Berne and the Sorbonne; he used to read Provenal poetry aloud,
delightful lyrics about roses and Maytime meadows and sighing lovers.
But he knew about all up-to-date diversions in modern Paris, too--he
_said_: vintages and baronesses and baccarat and Josephine Baker
singing.... Of course he had a cautious wife, with a small income of
her own. Dreary and getting plump.

"He encouraged me--so fatuously, I see now. We used to sit side by side
on the greasy leatherette couch in his office, under the reproduction of
Fra Angelico saints, and smoke cigarettes and drink tea with gin in it,
and he'd tell me I was going to be another Madame de Svign. I was
going to be poet, scholar, court beauty, and Gabriele D'Annunzio would
come back from his private perfumed hell to worship me.

"Leslie and I were most superior to that hustling campus. We were
pagans, we were winged spirits from the High Renaissance, only (and
honestly, he could do the most convincing repressed sob) just now his
wings were being clipped by his nasty big-foot wife, and only in my
sweet, languorous presence could he put on his rainbow-colored plumes.

"I really worshipped him. I was an innocent, healthy, eager kid, so
devoted, so proud, but it wasn't just lambkin love. I would have done
murder for him, or sung over washing his undershirts. I wrote sonnets
about him that I was too humble to show him, and I went out of my way to
walk past his house (that nasty gingerbread cake!) late at night, and if
there was a party and they were laughing, I was so jealous that my
stomach quivered. I used to keep a silk-tipped French cigarette butt of
his in my purse, and take it out and kiss it.

"So of course I fell for him completely whenever it amused him to finish
up the torture. Honestly, he shouldn't have killed anything as young and
loyal as I was!

"Then he got impatient. I forgot everything I had learned from
history--I thought he really meant his promises! I thought we would be
found out and both of us fired from the university, of _course_, and I
was all ready to live in a shack with him and do the cooking and keep
chickens and love it, and then some day he would be divorced and marry
me and Yale or California would understand what valorous medieval souls
we were and give him a call, and we'd live in a tower of glory and...
You know.

"What's worse, I suppose I girlishly trilled all this to him, and too
often. He must have become pretty bored and impatient, because I
certainly wasn't so anesthetic and sneering then that I chilled
demanding gentlemen like Mr. Hayden Chart--_or_ Prince Ugo! I was
recklessly passionate--panting. Poor Leslie! He did a magnificent job of
kicking me out. He really made it all quite clear--though he must have
been irritated by the way I sobbed.

"He told me that he had never thought of me as anything but a
sentimental fool, very bad at exact dates, very confused in my literary
style, and a perfect pest about telephoning him at home. And a skinny,
ugly untouchable. The way I lavished all the passion in me, he said,
made it seem cheap.

"Even before I had quit sobbing, while I was still wiping my nose with
my coarse little cotton handkerchief--it was all I could afford but I
did like it; it had such a nice rose stamped in one corner--before I had
finished crying I had determined that I would never again betray
passion--or feel any. I never have. I've ruled my feelings like mutinous
soldiers. And so--and now--that frigidity has become natural. For all my
life!"

She rose slowly, and he with her.

He kissed her cheek, very lightly, and sighed, "Poor darling. Dreadful!"
Not till they were packed together in the topolino did he go on: "It
would not be too ridiculous to think of us as married. We're both lost
orphans. We might seek the City of Peace together."

For a second he took his right hand from the steering wheel to grip
hers; for a second she returned the pressure. But she answered
resolutely:

"Hayden, I wouldn't trust myself to marry anybody. I think I've
controlled my natural storminess, but as a wife I would be too attentive
and absorbing. And I'm ambitious; I want high academic rank, but that I
could moderate. The trouble is that if I gave it up for marriage, I'd be
ambitious then for my poor, driven husband. I'd push him into absurdly
big undertakings--influential people and get in on all the gaudiest
shows. I've become a cool scholar, not bad, and that's how I want to
stay. Though if I did go native and fall for anybody--it conceivably
could be you, Mr. Chart!"

"Good!"

"You're gentle, but you aren't obsequious. And you're so young and
credulous. You actually believe that Bertran de Born was a gorgeous
figure of living tapestry, and not Question III, Section 2--if you pass
him, you can teach Advanced Principles of Medieval Mysticism and
Chivalry to the hockey team. As I shall. That makes being your wife
sound attractive. But I'm a dynamo; I'm not safe. Guard yourself!"

When they parted, in the hall of the Tre Corone, he kissed her cheek
again. She clutched his arm, turning her face of an ivory saint toward
him with a sharp breath, and then she fled.




CHAPTER 11


Spring came in with the almonds and cherries and plum trees blossoming
in early March, and Olivia and Hayden wandered through Florence. The
American Colony delightedly recognized them as potential recruits to
matrimony and to the Colony.

From Sir Henry Belfont, whom he had vaguely met at teas, Hayden had a
stiff note informing him, somewhat in the manner of a court summons,
that Sir Henry had a nephew with Shell Oil who, years ago, had met
Hayden in London. The baronet was pleased to command Hayden to luncheon,
and would he care to bring some young lady of his acquaintance?

He took Olivia. In the topolino. To the disapproval of the Scotch
butler, who preferred a Rolls-Royce.

Sir Henry marched them through his house. Leniently, not expecting them
to appreciate such treasures, he showed off his paintings. His Villa
Satiro had started out, as a fortified manor house, in 1301. It had
three-hundred-year-old dwarf lemon trees, and Dante slept here.

The handsomest room in the villa--it had been the bedchamber of a grand
duchess--was Sir Henry's study. The walls were bookcases of English oak,
with a royal ransom in folios and illuminated choir books. The ceiling
was a fantasy of little nymphs beckoning to satyrs of no strong moral
character, and under this mocking rout, at an oak desk which had
belonged to William of Orange, Sir Henry wrote his letters. But his desk
chair had nothing of the royal touch about it. It was of the latest
ingenuity, with a sponge-rubber cushion, for while Sir Henry's rear
elevation was imposing, it was not suited to oaken hardness. Too many
tons of cream sauces had gone to the construction of it.

He was a tall man and portly, and when he was surrounded by women who
admired him, or at least listened to him, he would stand with his great
head slightly on one side, with a fixed and somewhat silly smile, as
though he were shy of his own bulky splendor. In his black jacket and
linen collar--"no gentleman makes a racetrack spectacle of himself in
soft colored shirts"--Sir Henry's resemblance to the Rock of Gibraltar
would have been remarkable, if it had not been for his untrimmed
eyebrows.

These eyebrows drooped in monumental triangles, like the manes of little
lions. He had a mustache and a precise small beard as well, but they
seemed to be only drippings from the eyebrows. Sometimes, rather
wistfully, he experimented with a monocle, but it was lost under an
eyebrow and left him looking as nearly foolish as a man so much in love
with his own nobility, so admittedly representative of all that was best
in the English county families, could ever look.

But his wife was an American.

But his wife was rich.

At the luncheon were the Belfonts, Hayden and Olivia, Prince Ugo
Tramontana, and the Marchesa Valdarno, who discomfited the host by
snatching the conversation away from him. She was a thin scabbard in her
fawn suit and tight white turban. She was American-born, swift,
flashing, detestable. Rustically watching her, Hayden comprehended the
ageless elegance which Roxanna Eldritch envied, but poor Roxy was an
acolyte beside the Marchesa, who suavely jeered not only at America but
at Parisian drunkards, English watering-places, old Roman society, and
the Sadie Lurcher Riviera set, of which Valdarno was herself a member.
Hayden sought the eye of Olivia, shadowed by the snowy peak of Mt. Sir
Henry, and they mutely confided that they didn't like this.

They said practically nothing at lunch. Prince Ugo--fine, lean,
courteous--said only that Dr. Lomond was much honored at the Laurentian
Library. Olivia glowed, and Sir Henry looked at her for the first time.
The Marchesa Valdarno also looked at her--with contempt.

Throughout luncheon, Hayden had his usual discomfort over the European
trick of speaking in four languages at once, switching from English to
Italian in the one same sentence, with the next in French. He longed for
the roar and whattameaning of Jesse Bradbin.

But the soup was good.

But after lunch, as they rode home in the humble topolino, Olivia yelled
with unacademic vigor that she hated Sir Henry and his mob and wanted
never to meet any of them again.

"I would like to see him again, though," said Hayden, "because I'd like
to get to the bottom of why so many Americans and well-heeled Britishers
live permanently in Italy. Most of the Italians don't much like us. They
consider our drinkers too wet and our hermits too chilly and our
outmarrying girls, like that Valdarno woman, disloyal to their
husbands--some of them, I mean. Yet we cling to this country. Why? I'll
go to the Villa Satiro again, if I get invited, which is not too likely.
I don't think Belfont considers me one of the more tinkling talkers."

"Me neither. And no more villa. It's too Satiro!"

                 *        *        *        *        *

At night he was conscious of Olivia, down the hall, and wondered whether
he would again meet her in feminine mufti, free of her hard uniform of
professorial brown serge. But their next jaunt was considerably less
abandoned. In the fashion of Newlife in his father's era, he took her to
church; not to a resounding Roman basilica but to a home-town church, a
Main-Street church, in English Gothic but flavored, too, with prairie
wild roses.

The St. James American Episcopal Church in Florence has no more
Episcopalians than Methodists or Unitarians or plain indifferentists. In
the bright stone chancel, the American flag hangs along with the
Italian, and for an hour every Sunday morning even the Colonists who
seem almost alienated from Home are betrayed into being American again.
Social climbing is halted, and girl students kneel beside florid
gentlemen who have superbly been in steel.

Most of the Colonists are given to complaining at dinner parties that
America has gone to hell, along with lazy and overpaid servants,
impertinent children, tasteless food and fiendish labor leaders who will
soon be purging all responsible citizens. Yet at St. James's, as they
unite in the old hymns, there rises in them something primitive.

Colonists who have been asserting that they would as soon die as go back
to the States and see executives being obsequious to bellboys and subway
conductors and their own cooks, now hear through the music at St.
James's the heavy shoes on Plymouth Rock, the barefoot Confederates
marching in the wintry Tennessee mountains, the plodding of moccasins on
the Oregon Trail. In their flippant unfaith to their lean and bitter
mother, America, there is yet more faith than in their zest for Europe,
their opulent mistress.

Hayden came in Sabbatically double-breasted blue, with a black Homburg
hat, and he was proud of Olivia's blue silk and her resolutely white
gloves and the unexpected prayer-book of celluloid cover painted with
forget-me-nots which she must have borrowed at the _pensione_. Through
service, he was content to see how properly she rose and knelt. He
remembered the spires of Newlife, and was faintly lonely for home. He
knew then that he was unalterably an American; he knew what a special
and mystical experience it is, for the American never really emigrates
but only travels; perhaps travels for two or three generations but at
the end is still marked with the gaunt image of Tecumseh.

After church, they had lunch amid the fine linen of the Hotel Excelsior,
and Hayden boasted:

"You did well in church today--for a heathen. I am a correct
Episcopalian, and my firm built Holy Cross Pro-cathedral."

"Not me! I was brought up a Primitive Baptist. 'It's the oldtime
religion!' How American I still am, even when I pretend to have covered
it over with Venetian velvet!"

"It's a perfect spring day. Let's wander all afternoon."

"Not me. I have a lot to read," said the sturdy girl from Professor
Vintner's class.

So they wandered all afternoon, through the spring-emblazoned city,
through dark courtyards lighted up equally by gold-decked shrines to the
Virgin and by plaid work-shirts hung up to dry before a fifth-story
window, past the Cerchi tower, among the Sunday crowd oozing along the
Arno, with a Punch and Judy show in the Piazza Ognissanti. For tea they
went not to a bar favored by the Colony but were so bold as to sit out
in the Square of the Republic, in front of Gilli's.

They climbed up the winding driveway of the Viale dei Colli and felt not
the grandeur of Florence but its simple pleasantness, under the trees,
like the pleasantness of Newlife in June. For dinner, Olivia guided him
to a little basement _trattoria_.

They went down slippery marble stairs into a cellar with small tables of
transparent oilcloth over green-and-white table-covers. On the rough
walls were very bad landscapes with which art students had paid their
board-bills: landscapes with cow and river and a mountain composed of
cake icing. The one waiter was guiltless of a white jacket; he wore a
sweater and screamed amiably at the patrons and sometimes sat down with
them. The room was full of cheerfulness: clerks and shopkeepers and
soldiers whirled their strings of spaghetti and acrobatically ate fried
potatoes with their knives.

Olivia was an intimate of the place. The waiter beamed and led them
through a more solemn dining room where, with white tablecloths, dined
the few tourists, on to the delights of the kitchen, and that was a
kitchen out of a Christmas story.

The floor was of red tiles and the charcoal broiler lighted up a string
of copper stewpans. It glared on the swarthy face of the fat woman cook
so that she looked like a lady fiend. But beside the broiler was a
modern electric range, crimson enamel and cool steel. On a table, ready
to be cooked, were all the varieties of pasta: fat _tagliatelli_
noodles, thin and writhing _taglierini_, _tortellini_ like snug little
white doughnuts, and the sage green of _lasagne verdi_, made with
spinach.

On benches at the long central table five hardy taxi-drivers were
dredging their grassy soup, and they looked up to salute Olivia with
"_Ecco! La Dottoressa!_"

"It's an honor to be allowed to eat in the kitchen," Olivia explained,
as they took places on a bench. "I ate in the outside room for a long
while before the Signora would let me join them here. Now I'm part of
the family, and you will be."

"I appreciate it." And indeed when the drivers nodded to him as though
he were not a Foreigner and a Fare but a man, he felt more honored than
in any toleration by Sir Henry Belfont. Olivia was hearty with a plate
of giant ribbed _maccheroni_ with meaty Bolognese sauce, and they drank
red table wine poured out of what looked like a Newlife pop bottle.

Roaring with friendliness, the drivers wanted to know how stood the
Dottoressa, and had she dug out of the library any scandals more recent
than 1600? She fenced with them in colloquial Italian, and they cackled.
Though the sharp career woman is new in Italy, there has always been a
tradition of the Learned Lady, like Camilla Rucellai, like Romola, a
tradition of honor, and Olivia seemed to wear the laurel crown with
ease.

Hayden studied her with fond pride. Was he movingly in love with her, a
thing to last? With a throb, with sorrow for the shallowness of his
tribute to Caprice, he wondered if his heart had forgotten her complete,
and her faded little ghost was wandering now forlorn in the Colorado
winter, shelterless.

The restaurant was conducted by a family of whom the grandmother was
chieftain and chef, the youngish father was the outside waiter in the
sweater, his wife was assistant chef, their two small sons were
dishwashers and bus boys, and the baby, with its dark eyes and humorous
mouth, was the most expansive customer. All evening, it seemed to
Hayden, that baby was eating, eating everything, ham and breast of
chicken and peas cooked with bacon and rather more red wine than
strictly modern mothers give to the hygienic infants of America.

The baby and Olivia found each other delightful and slightly funny. They
winked at each other, and the baby went to sleep with its head against
Olivia's arm. She flushed then; her lips were tight and she breathed
quickly. Hayden could not tell whether this contact with the flesh of a
baby was gratifying or distressing. She fell altogether silent and
stared at the baby with a sun-and-shadow alternation of frown and
tenderness. He guessed that she was thinking of Professor Leslie
Vintner.

When the drivers had gone and the kitchen was somewhat more quiet,
Olivia said carelessly, "I'll have to be leaving Florence this coming
week."

"_What?_"

"Oh, only for three-four days, and not till Tuesday. I have to go to
Venice, which it happens I have never seen, to look up some records in
the State Archives."

"I've never been in Venice, either. I'll drive you up there."

"Oh, I don't think we could do that. No, I'm quite sure we couldn't.
Thank you, though."

"Who's going to mind? It would be only too innocent. Who would be
shocked? Mrs. Manse?"

"I would be!"

"What?"

"I mean... We've had a lovely day, and I've enjoyed it, and all the
more reason why I must remember my resolution not to be dominated by any
male."

"Who's trying to dominate you? Just friends."

"Not even too lively a friendship with a man, if it could possibly grow
into too much importance. I've been slack in regard to you. Spring! I
must put on my armor again. There! I have! You're just an amiable
gentleman who lives in my _pensione_."

He was irritated to ruthlessness by her undependability. She was being a
tease, flirtatious and bogus, encouraging him and then drawing back. He
expected that of a campus hoyden, not of a devoted scholar. She could,
it seemed, be just as phony as Caprice--in the opposite direction: the
Caprice who pretended, like a man, to be only a breezy companion,
uninterested in love-making, when she was thinking of nothing else.

"So," he said treacherously, "we're just amiable acquaintances again;
very polite."

"That seems to be it."

"With no silly sentiment between us."

"None whatever."

"Two careless laddy-boys together. So we _can_ go to Venice, without any
compromise!"

"Oh, stop it!"

"I won't argue, but that's the logic of it."

He thought she looked disappointed when he talked vigorously, and only,
of the Dodsworths' new car. They returned to the Tre Corone rather
silently and, for once, he accompanied her down the hall to her room
and, as she opened the door, for the first time he saw the interior.

It was decidedly not dusty and doctoral. Her bed was covered with a
fluffy white spread and over it was a cast of smiling little angels. He
seized her hand, and urged, "Olivia! Let's both go to Venice! Let's not
be skittish ingenues. We don't have too many live joys. Let's discover
the wonder of Venice together!"

"But if we should go--oh then, _please_!"




CHAPTER 12


Olivia was youthful in white linen. "For a scholar, she spends quite a
lot on clothes," he reflected. Like a girl back home, she was not
wearing stockings, and there was a glow of bare ivory knees as she
tucked herself into the topolino.

"Is it possible that she has chucked her aloofness, that she likes me a
good deal?" he wondered.

They were close together in the tiny car on this, their first mammoth
excursion. Wisteria was beginning to paint the walls, the mimosa bush
was in yellow cataracts, and the daffodils were like shy English
visitors. The Tuscan spring was sweet with the smell of plowed fields
among the vine rows, where gentle oxen moved in leisure, great white
oxen against the brown earth, and the liberated lovers were bound for
Venice, city to them enchanted but unknown. They sang together as they
crawled, spiraled, sped up on the road across the Apennines that is the
highway to Bologna and Venice.

After the Futa Pass, before the high notch of Raticosa, there was a long
upland ridge with valleys like unknown kingdoms castle-starred below
them. It was flying. The sheep pastures, the pocket vineyards, the dumpy
plaster farmhouses, and lone monasteries which were high above the
valley floor and yet hundreds of feet below the car could be comfortably
reached, said Hayden, by a jump and then a good deal of quiet falling.
It was a twisted trail for eagles.

Olivia looked out of the car and directly down. "I'm not much used to
mountain driving. Are you good at it?"

"Used to it, at least."

"You sound confident. Then I am."

Before Raticosa they were in a mountain-top barren of stunted pine and
heather. Up here, it was still late winter, and patches of sandy snow
were dark along the road as they went back in time two months behind
Florence. The higher peaks beyond them were solid snow.

"This must be frightening, in January. Like your Rockies. I'm a plodding
plainsman and marsh-jumper. A lot of my childhood in Southern New
Jersey," said Olivia.

The Italians have been admirable road-engineers since centuries before
Julius Caesar, and the car came down fast but securely on the corkscrew
road that drops from the pass to Bologna in its valley, brisk red
Bologna with its arcades. Then it was all flat land across Emilia and
the Veneto, and eight hours from Florence, they left the car at the
Piazzale Roma and magically took a gondola up the canals of Venice, past
palaces whose doorsteps were washed by the sea channels.

Venice, on the map, resembles one large island (which is really a group
of small ones) curved like a heavy thumb and hand, grasping at the head
of another island like a timid animal with agitated pointed paws. When
Hayden pointed this out, rattling a map in the breeze, Olivia cried, "An
architect does get to have an eye! My poet!"

For propriety, they stayed at two different _pensioni_ near the Piazza
Morosini. They had cocktails at the Palazzo Gritti, the most luxurious
hotel in Italy, and dined at the Colombo on tiny shrimps fresh from the
Adriatic, listening to the Venetian citizens standing at the wine
counter and peacefully quarreling. Then they walked through Venice till
midnight, getting lost and found and more lost than ever among streets
that changed their names every two blocks and after eight or ten, ended
slap in a courtyard with an ancient wellhead and no exit or else crept
up on a bridge over a canal and down under the bulk of a palace, in
darkness, to emerge on an astonishing square, vast, empty,
palace-walled. They saw arches reflected in the small interior canals
and the more exuberant illumination mirrored flickeringly in the wide
Grand Canal, caught through alleys that were only three-foot slits
between six-story warrens.

Here is the only city without wheeled traffic, the only city dedicated
to human beings and not to dictatorial automobiles, and over all of it
is unreality. They walked with stilled reverence through the small
crowds, free of the horrors of motorcycles and of the bicycles that
elsewhere in Italy stalk pedestrians and bring them down.

Venice is not a city. It is one colossal palace on a low rock in the
sea. These are not squares and courtyards but roofless halls, and if the
stone is worn and the plaster blotched, there is gaudy Renaissance
history in balconies and Gothic windows.

These are not streets but corridors of the palace, and these bright
bazaars, heaped with figured satin and ivory triptychs and spun
iridescent glass, are not shops but the ancient loot of the doges, and
this is not stone pavement but the palace floor, polished by centuries
of feet that first skipped here, then strode, then shuffled till they
were borne to the funeral gondola by sturdier feet; a floor so polished
thus that by night light all the granite roughnesses vanish in an even
glow.

All round the palace a breeze flickers in from Ragusa and Albania and
the Adriatic isles. Fishing smacks with colored lateen sails come in
with cargoes of devilfish, and disdainful steamers fresh from Egypt and
its musky airs, and the gondolas, with their small prow lights, lurch
over the Grand Canal, the gondoliers swinging on the poop.

Here and not elsewhere live Neptune and his daughters, whose hair is
spray. They were visible that night to Hayden and his girl, pacing
through hollow-sounding piazzas, their arms round each other. He had
little to say but "To find all this with _you_!" and reluctantly he
kissed her good-night at her door.

By working late, Olivia finished her research the next day, and they
dined in grandeur at the Gritti and again walked the night half out. All
the morning after they spent in the Piazza San Marco.

They sat, in an idleness and contentment so profound that they amounted
to activity, at a table outside the Lavena, and watched the operetta of
the crowd: the tourists feeding the pigeons which, at the bang of the
clock struck by the bronze giants, rose together in a tide of wings; the
smoochers--sellers of post cards and coral necklaces and the guide with
the red scarf who was always saying hopefully, "Guide? Me spik gud
English."

An American destroyer was in harbor, and the crew and officers had
flooded ashore, each with a camera, from executive officer to mess boy.
San Marco cathedral must that day have exceeded its quota of being
photographed fifty times an hour.

Of these rangy American boys, with the freshness of Salem Harbor or the
Iowa hills under their salt glaze, Hayden was proud. "Look at them! And
next week, in Greece or Smyrna or Spain! They've brought back the
tradition of the clipper days when Yankee faces (including a
great-something-grandfather of mine) were seen in every port of China
and Africa and the Spice Islands!"

He was incredibly contented with the friendly presence of Olivia, the
magnificence of the hour and place, where he could see Byzantine and
Gothic and Renaissance all together, in a tremendous harmony. He thought
that Olivia looked almost like a fond wife when he passed on to her, as
a lover's gift, all the architectural lore he was harvesting.

He dutifully inquired, "But do you think we'd better be starting? It's
going to cloud over."

"Not yet. I've forgotten the responsible Dr. Lomond. Let's drown in this
sun while it lasts. Americans are always so restless to be off; they
follow some mental timetable that they'll probably take with them to
Heaven, to the considerable annoyance of the timeless angels, who don't
mind a bit if you're a couple of thousand years late for choir
practice!"

Her complaint was generously illustrated by an American tourist couple
at a table near.

They were people of sixty, and prosperous; they looked as though they
had retired from the woes of golf and children and could be at leisure
now. But while the wife bent her neck forward, enraptured by the glow of
the San Marco mosaics, the husband showed his frustration by jiggling
his feet, tapping on the table, violently trying to catch flies, looking
at his watch, clearing his throat, yawning, and making a sporadic sound
halfway between a hum and a band-saw. He blurted at last, "Well, come
on, come on, Heaven's sake, let's get going!"

"Going _where_?" his wife sighed. "We're here!"

"I know, but good God, you can't just sit around all _day_! Let's--we
can go back to the hotel and write some more letters, can't we?"

When the man of affairs and efficiency and death was gone, Hayden
sighed, "I've said that a lot of the Colonists in Florence are too idle,
but that's incomparably better than the restless-footed sightseers like
that man. Yes, you and I'll sit here for seven years."

But the clouds were coming now, were darkening, and he was dependable
enough to make Olivia go.

When they had reached their topolino and started southward, rain was
already scouting in a sulky afternoon sky. Olivia looked tired; her
youthful white linen, unsuited to motoring, was somewhat mussy; she was
half yawning.

He ordered, "Go to sleep. The late hours these two evenings have been
too much for you. I'll drive fast, but with the care due to my learned
passenger."

She dozed off, with that ivory cheek, that sleek blackness of hair, near
his shoulder. He wanted to touch her, but in his rigid creed nothing was
more enduring than his father's croaking injunction, "Both hands on the
wheel, Son, _especially_ when you're out with the girls." And he had a
memory of a car whirling off the Bison Park highway, turning over. He
remembered, too, that once before, when they had been coming down from
Fiesole, he had for a second touched her hand in the car. Out of all
this he had now a quite satisfactory nervousness and worry till he made
himself forget it.

It was raining before they reached Bologna, and from her quivering he
knew that Olivia had awakened and was stiffly uncomfortable.

"It's all right. Pavement not very slippery. Relax, darling," he
clucked, and he was surprised at the kindness in his own voice.

He made a business of getting them home. They did not talk, and she must
again have slid into sleep. As they swung up the steep climb beyond
Bologna, up into the mountains, snowflakes began shivering down in front
of them; tentative wisps of down, then large, solid-looking flakes
against which, he began to imagine, they might bump and be smashed.

Olivia awoke with a nervous "Oh!"

"I'm used to winter driving. And good road. Don't worry."

But it was hard to see clearly through the windshield. The blades of the
wiper could not do much against the thick grease of wet snow; the glass
was streaky and clouded, and on the sharp mounting curves he had to
slacken speed, waste the momentum he needed, to see which way the curves
were turning.

As she leaned to a curve, Olivia's shoulder touched his, and he found
that she was rigid.

At just over two thousand feet of altitude, they came instantly, without
warning, into a belt of fog. He was blind in the fog, and he had to keep
going or slide back. It was impossible to see the sides of the road. He
opened the window beside him and drove with his head thrust outside, the
snow licking his forehead and cheeks and chilled nose, the fog soaking
his hair. But moving slowly, sometimes at five miles an hour, he could
make out thus the boulder-marked boundaries of the highway.

For all the fog, the wind was loud enough so that not till she had
repeated it did he hear Olivia's distressed, "What would happen if we
shot off the road here?"

He drew his head far enough into the car to answer, "Probably wouldn't
hurt a thing. We'd just drop onto a meadow slope and be stopped by the
rocks and brush."

So? To run off the road--again? Was he to crush Olivia as he had crushed
Caprice? Was that his ever-revolving fate?

She went on, "And then again we might keep on going--five hundred feet?"

"Could be."

She laughed. "Oh, its all right. I'm getting used to it. You aren't
scared?"

"This is just routine fog driving. Bus drivers do this regularly, and
never even notice it."

"But you're not a routine bus driver. You have no idea how I admire your
competence. But think of all the fine scenery that must be lavishing
itself unnoticed, straight down below us there--on both sides of this
ridge. I'm glad I can't see how far down!"

He was too absorbed to comment. He had never driven in a worse fog, and
with a road so steep, so curving, so slippery with snow, he could not
save their lives if the car skidded and took charge.

He was back below the Bison Park highway, imprisoned, too late to begin
living again--and then he would not let himself be there. He bleakly
forced himself to be only here, single-minded. He methodically
considered stopping in one of the turnouts, but with boundary lines so
blurred by the fog, he might be hit there by another car. It was safer
to go on.

He was startled when two sickly car lights were conjured up just in
front of him, and he had to swerve, to take the chance of going off the
road and down, bottomlessly down.

She shuddered, "Oh! Shouldn't we stop?"

"We shall, the minute we hit a place, a village or something where there
is room for safe parking, and we can get out and have a drink. I
remember one or two inns up along here. And we've got to begin thinking
about holing up for the night. This fog may keep up till morning, and if
we stayed in the car, we'd about freeze. But we may find a country inn."

"You mean we may have to sleep there tonight?"

"Probably."

"All right."

He was pleased that she should agree, and a little dubious about his own
pleasure in it.

They had now a month, a year, of agony. Snow slid maliciously through
the open window beside Hayden, and he could feel Olivia's shoulder
shaking convulsively as she became more wet and chilled. The stone
markers were only darker blurs in a general dark drifting gray. But they
had to go on.

They were penned in a moving prison for a lifetime sentence, to be
ended, perhaps, by sudden and shocking death. But they had to go on.

Only with a tired incredulity did he see and lose and see again a
fabulous glow in the smear ahead, and then a cluster of fog-wrapped
lights. "Golly!" he said, and not very logically wanted to kiss Olivia
but, busy with the clammy wheel, did nothing so reasonable.

They had reached some kind of a fair-sized building, with a blessed wide
parking space. He bade her, "Wait in the car till I size the place up."
Both of them breathed long and sighingly with the relief of being, for a
moment, safe.

Their refuge, he found, was a mountain-country combination of hotel,
grocery shop, wine shop, bar, billiard room and restaurant. At the
counter a dozen young mountaineers were drinking, tough but not
unfriendly, and they nodded to his greeting. The landlady, in her
cascade of striped apron, was a woman of character and considerable
poundage. The walls were roughcast, and the three dining tables had
cloths worn and darned, but it was all clean enough, and there was a
pink terra-cotta stove that shouted warmth.

Yes, the landlady said, she had three bedrooms for rent, two still
unoccupied; yes, he could have a fine supper here, with the choicest of
veal.

It was toward seven now, with no chance of the fog clearing.

He hurried out to assure Olivia, "Warm! Clean! Two rooms! Grub! We'll
stay the night."

"Yes." She crawled out of the topolino, a comic figure in the laprobe
heaped over her white linen. She tottered with stiffness--wavering,
sobbing. He held her to him, not kissing her but laying his warmed cheek
against her ghostly cheek, and she clung to him, hands tight about his
shoulders, whimpering, "So childish, nothing but a little cold on a good
road, fine main highway, and me frightened like that! But I was so lost
and scared. But I'm so glad I'm with you!"

"Want a brandy?"

"_Si, si, certo!_ And a room that doesn't keep sliding over into an
abyss!"

"Can do."

"My mountaineer! My valiant major!"

"Come on."

In the crowded barroom-restaurant the drinkers looked at Olivia with
relish. Her color was Calabrian, but her unmelting eyes convinced them
that she was not Italian but English, and from their fathers, who had
known the spacious days when all of the English milords took walking
trips in the mountains, they had heard that all Englishwomen are
beautiful and mad.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The landlady showed them the bedrooms: narrow, stone-floored, cold as
outdoors. On each of the narrow beds was one of those Italian country
quilts evidently stuffed with steel-filings and geology, which, though
they are very heavy, on the other hand induce no warmth at all.

But Olivia said gaily, "You would have your adventure! You'll have it
tonight, sleeping in this Greenland igloo. But there's a very nice
sacred oleograph in each room. _Bene!_"

As they went back downstairs, through the partly open door of the third
bedroom peered an old man with a fall of despondent mustache and an
ancient cape gone gray-green.

"Our fellow guest. He looks all right," Hayden muttered.

(He was in Europe, he actually was in Italy, at an inn, at night, with
his girl, with a man of cloaked mystery down the hall, and he was not
making it all up in his hospital bed in Newlife, sleepless, looking at
the radium dial of his bedside clock!)

Olivia insisted, "Oh, the old man is fine. Possibly just a little
homicidal--believes that he is a soldier of Garibaldi and we are
Austrians.... Of course you noticed that there are no locks on our
bedroom doors."

"You can wedge a chair under the knob."

"Don't be silly. I shall depend on you."

They had with them their bags, packed for Venice, but of any washing
save with a can of hot water there was no prospect. In their glaring
hunger, they did not care. "I never allow myself bath salts nor a bath
thermometer, not even since I inherited the ten million," she said
cheerfully; then: "But if we _had_ gone off the road..."

He stroked her cheek, and hastened to get into her the spiritual solace
of hot noodle soup. The mountaineers had gone home, and the common room
became a private dining room and the landlady their private chef. They
had spaghetti, veal cooked with mozzarella cheese, pink cake and pink
local wine. By moving their table next to the pink terra-cotta stove,
into which the landlady kept stuffing brush roots, they were not
cold--not intolerably cold--just shivering a little.

The mystery man in the cape came down to have his spaghetti, but he did
not seem to be looking at them. He read in a small old leather-bound
book.

The dining room was also the lounge, and they sat at their table long
after dinner.

"Comfortable?" Hayden said. He meant his voice to be only placid and
encouraging, but it sounded tender.

"Very! You know, this place isn't really strange to me. It's
homelike--something warm and littered and casual about it. Sometimes I
get tired of the cold chastity of my room at the Tre Corone. It's just a
hygienic waiting room for tired souls. Your room is better, a bit more
disordered and bachelor-slatternly, and yet it's almost as bitterly neat
as mine."

"What do you know about my room?"

"Oh, I look in every time I pass it. You have a neighborly wild-western
way of leaving your door open."

"I suppose I do." He laughed at himself. "My pose is the solitary
scholar--the devout hermit--Marsilio Ficino--mustn't be disturbed by
anything--chase out the dog and strangle the children. And all the while
I guess I want to hear those cheerful domestic noises: the cook smashing
dishes and Vito Zenzero bawling out Perpetua for stealing the guests'
perfume and not saving any of it for him. And hoping that you _will_
give me a Hello and come in. Why don't you?"

"I do sometimes--in spirit--and have long grave talks with you."

"What do we say in those grave talks?"

"I ask your opinion, as an architect, on the merits of fan-vaulting."

"I see!"

"And sometimes I feel like reading to you my sister's latest
letter--evenings when I'm a little homesick."

"Why don't you?"

"I never get _that_ homesick! Oh, darling..."

"Yes?"

"Let's not waste this one completely quiet evening--maybe the only one
we'll ever have--waste it in being chatty," said Olivia. "I get worried
about you. It's impersonal, really, but it rises from such a liking for
you, and respect.

"As I heard Mr. Dodsworth say to you once, why do you let Europe get
you? For us Americans it's a drug, a sleeping-draught, all made of
poppies and the wonder of old, old civilizations and religions and
dreams, so lulling after our brisk, raw climate at home, where we have
to face the blizzard, fight through it or freeze. Go home, my dear!"

"Would you go back with me?"

"I can't. Europe _has_ got me. I'm an exile here, but back in America
I'll always be an exile double-distilled."

The old man in the faded cape sighed to himself, "There is an American
couple who are not glib and hustling, but true tender lovers. Darling
forgotten, we were like that, _then_!"

He rose, bowed good-night, and left them.

"But you," Olivia was urging Hayden, "can still go back to America
uninfected."

"I'm not so sure. I love Florence. It's very much like you. I wonder
sometimes if I'll ever go home. With Caprice gone, I'd be lonely there."

He realized with a jar that he ought never to speak of Caprice to
Olivia. He hastened to cover it with a false-hearty, "In Florence
there's a kind of perpetual excitement; not football-game excitement but
a blissful stir. I look in at some new church, or call on Nat Friar and
listen to his newest lies about Sir Henry Belfont. He swears that for
twenty-two years Belfont was butler for the Duke of Nottingham and sold
the household wine and invested the swag in gambling houses. Or I go to
the Dodsworths' for bridge. But most of all, I can talk to you, after
dinner--when you're not being cold and repulsive."

"Am I cold sometimes?"

"And repulsive."

"Wonderful! I try to be, so that I won't get found out as the
embarrassed village tomboy I am at heart. And you're still the village
high-school hero: the basketball captain and tenor in your Episcopal
choir and valedictorian, with such a thoughtful Commencement essay
comparing Columbus and General Grant. That was a good life we knew as
kids--so much more than the surface Florence that we see. It was as real
as this mountain wind. Go back to it while you can."

"Would you mind if I left you?"

She looked at him full, ivory softly flushing, and murmured, "It would
be very much safer for me if you left me!"

                 *        *        *        *        *

She became warmly sleepy, in relaxation from the cold, the danger. She
stretched her arms out on the table and dropped her head on them. She
turned her pure, shadowy face toward him for a moment, with a funny,
babyish smile, a defenseless smile all unlike her normal dignity, and
went confidently off to sleep.

He passed his hand over her head, her shoulders, her good arms, not
actually touching them but seeming to follow a delicate invisible
integument that sheathed her and kept her inviolate. Then, unmoving, he
watched her. Time was abolished, time and space were only in her. And
the landlady came heavily clumping and Olivia awoke.

Hayden rather thought that, in her mountain accent, the landlady was
saying, "Good night. When you get ready to go to bed, put out the lights
in this room. Sleep well." She leered at Hayden and thumped away and
upstairs.

"Uuuuuuuh," yawned Olivia.

"What did our hostess say?"

Olivia slowly sat straight, murmured slowly, "She said that all pleasant
things must come to an end and that it's time for us to say good-night."

Suddenly it all came over him.

He bluntly moved his chair toward hers, put his arm round her, pulled
her toward him.

"Olivia! I had been planning to make love to you--not planning it all
day, not all our journey, but tonight, when you were soft and warm and
near me. But something has hit me hard, something too basic to allow any
experimental love-making. I don't know--I think I may be desperately in
love with you. And when I think of the dreadful thing I might have done
in trying to tempt you, I'm aghast! I'm not fit to love you. I'm a
murderer! I murdered Caprice by my carelessness. _I am not fit!_"

She sprang up and he agitatedly rose to face her. Her voice was strained
and fierce, with not one evasive civilized qualm in it.

"You did not murder her! You're a fool to say it! You told me about
her--you've told me much more than you knew--about her and about you.
But if you had meant to kill her, I'd be glad!"

"No!"

"I'm glad you did! I hate your damn, curly-headed, curly-minded leech,
Caprice! Sucking your blood--living on your kindness and your
gentleness!"

"That's not true! She was plucky and gay...."

"She was a sneak thief of life!"

"Olivia!"

"O-liv-ia! Professoressa Dottoressa Olivia! That frump! That good, safe,
cautious doctor of frigidity! She's dead, too, and you murdered her,
too--thank God! The wild highlander in me has come to life again, in
this wild, windy highland--thank God. Dearest Hayden, quit blaming
yourself, quit smothering yourself! I love you!"

Her arms were round his neck and she was pressed against him before his
hands locked behind her shoulders. When he could look at her, all the
restraints in her face were loosened, and she was as abandoned as the
most feckless highland lass, and breathed as hard.

She said nothing more, and they did not remember to turn off the lights
in the dining room.




CHAPTER 13


The morning sun was warm and shameless, and their eggs, consumed to a
view of snowy Apennine peaks absurdly like piles of the best peach ice
cream, had ozone in them--so Hayden asserted. They were chatty and they
were smiling somewhat smugly, and did not even see an old man with a
cape and a small Elzevir.

"Looks as though we are to be beautifully married," said Hayden.

"Astonishingly enough, it does! My lord and master, may I go on
studying?"

"You are graciously permitted. Do you want to stay on in Italy, and
maybe France and Holland and so on, for a few years?"

"Oh, a couple of years or so, if you can stick it. But I do want to see
your Newlife--your house--our house! I want to find out whether I've
learned so much about the terror and splendor of the Middle Ages that
now I can become a halfway decent commonplace wife and do the job as
well as Catherine Sforza would. Oh, yes, I shall love Newlife--in a
controlled way!"

"We'll build a Renaissance church there."

"What do you mean _we_ will? _You_ will! I'm a simple, admiring wife
now. I shan't even give you any advice, ever. Whatever you do will seem
wonderful to me.... Except just this. You are not to build any
Renaissance churches or Gothic churches or Romanesque or anything else
imitative of Europe. Go ahead and develop the American Georgian, as you
planned. Stand for something; don't just copy."

He said meekly, "Yes, that might be--yes."

All the way to Florence, she sang Neapolitan lyrics and smoothed his
sleeve.

With a not very-well-defined feeling that now they should march out from
solitude and take their civic place, Olivia and Hayden were presently
seen flauntingly together everywhere in Florence, at church, at the
bars, walking on the Tornabuoni and the Lungarno. In the tight
environment of their _pensione_, which was as close to them and
sometimes as itchily intrusive as a hair shirt, they had not announced
any engagement and they kept their separate tables, but their attachment
must have been clear.

Certainly it was to Vito Zenzero, clerk, headwaiter, and authority on
which countesses in town were authentic. Vito looked confidently at
Olivia as he took her dinner order, and she seemed contented now to be
accepted as merely a woman, betrayed and lost to scholarship and
generally happy. Every time Hayden looked from his table to hers, he
smiled and Olivia smiled and Vito smiled with them both, and Olivia was
not offended.

As a child, Hayden had devotedly trusted in his sturdy father, his
fragile and fanciful mother. But from this serenity the neighborhood
bully, a foul brat, had first startled him. With Caprice and Jesse
Bradbin he had been distrustful, constantly vigilant. Now, first since
the dawn years, he felt, with Olivia, not only an arousing tension but a
secure faith, in which his mind flowed smooth and full.

He was proud of escorting this young woman, so wise, so warmly
beautiful, so affectionate--but only to him. Her brown dress, which
formerly had seemed merely serviceable and neat, was to him now a
garment of singular gracefulness and fine fabric, and its choice showed
his lady's knowledge of the smart world. It seemed to him that her
darkly pallid face was richer now with new fast blood. It must have
seemed so to every one, for Mrs. Dodsworth observed, "You're getting out
more now, Olivia. You look much livelier for it."

And said Sam Dodsworth, "I used to be embarrassed with you two young
highbrows, but you've become as simple-hearted a couple as I ever saw.
Glad of it. Edith claims that we old married exhibits get what she calls
vicarious pleasure out of young love. Don't you two let me down, like a
lot of undependable young pups these days--eight different engagements
and two divorces in five years. You two stick!"

"We'll stick!" proclaimed Hayden, and Olivia looked complaisant--though,
to be precise, their betrothal was most undefined, with such unromantic
business as deciding when and where they would be married scarcely
discussed. But the ardor between them certainly had not lessened and, in
the pallid cautiousness of the Tre Corone boarding-house as in the wild
inn, they roused each other to an ardor that sometimes frightened
Hayden.

"You seem changed, somehow," they all said to Olivia--Tessie Weepswell,
the prima donna of bridge, Mrs. Manse, Prince Ugo Tramontana, and if
Vito Zenzero did not say it, his eyes said it for him. Most of them all,
Hayden was startled by it.

Olivia was a good workman; she was as steadily about her subway labors
at the libraries as ever, but she mocked her own laboriousness now; she
was occasionally willing to sit long over red Chianti at lunch, and in
every inch of her, as Hayden lovingly surveyed her, he found her blood
more torrential--in moving lips, in hot cheeks, in firmly grasping
hands.

It was particularly at Nat Friar's house that they were accepted as a
Young Couple. Not for many years had the once-gallant young Nathaniel
Greenleaf Friar of Boston been an adventurous amorist. Nowadays he
looked upon passion as he looked upon assassination: as a diversion that
had been fashionable in the Middle Ages, and very useful, but of which,
surely, there had been enough by 1600.

At supper for the Young Couple, served on his living room table cleared
of books and pipes, with a noble San Daniele ham, Nat smiled and teased
his beard, and addressed Hayden: "I suppose I must give my sanction to
the dangerous exploit that Dr. Lomond and you are contemplating. People
still do get married, do they? I thought they all got tired of it about
twenty-five years ago.

"Well, marriage is an excellent and almost tolerable institution for
groundlings who have nothing else to keep them annoyed and occupied in
the long evenings, but I have never commended it for scholars. All
through my life I have had acquaintances who dashed in howling, 'Nat,
you need some one to take care of you, and I've found just the woman for
you!' Then they drag in some weedy virgin or unwieldy widow whose
ambition is to be supported in return for such caretaking as hiding my
slippers where I can never find them, or quarreling with my maid, whom I
have cherished for fifteen years, and replacing her with a fancy male
who cooks with butter and collects even more than the legal illegal
commission of ten per cent on all shopping. These solitary animals who
call themselves 'scholars'--they should never marry. And Ada will
agree."

"You," said Mrs. Shaliston Baker, gently, "are the most selfish,
loquacious and untidy old barbarian living."

"Uncle Nat," said Olivia, "I could kill you with pleasure. I used to be
cynical, too, but now I can see that there may be a better reason for
living than just a knowledge of Etruscan tombs."

"If you two women really believed any of that, you would really kill me
and not just babble about it, when I make so basic an attack on your
sex, when I judiciously point out that a wife's notion of being a
faithful helpmate is to be willing to wait while you are paying the bill
for the mink coat she has swindled out of you. But no woman believes in
Women. When I attack your faction, you both gloat."

"Oh, pooh!" said Olivia.

"And you, Hayden, you agree with me, or presently will."

Startled, Hayden wondered about that. He admitted to himself that he was
sometimes a little edgy over the panting watchfulness which the changed
Olivia now kept over him. He had been so free!

                 *        *        *        *        *

Among the yodeling witnesses to their bliss, none was more fervid than
those new _pensione_ boarders, the Grenadiers.

The Grenadiers, as Vito Zenzero had named them, were middle-aged twin
American ladies. They had been well paid for divorcing uncouth husbands
who were in trade--shoes and wholesale plumbing; who were not, in short,
"creative." _Creative_ was the Grenadiers' favorite word. It was
_creative_ to sell antiques but not plumbing.

The Grenadiers came from Pennsylvania, but they had lived long in
England, in Bloomsbury boarding houses, and they said "lift"--when they
remembered it--and hoped to be taken for English.

They took photographs all day long.

They had also lived in Carmel, Taos, Taxco, Greenwich Village and
Montparnasse, tracking down not so much Culture as the creative and
romantic dealers in Culture: ballet-dancers, summer-theater directors,
fiddlers. They had now moved their field station to Florence.

They took photographs all day long and showed them to you all evening
long.

They were unbeatable at coursing through churches, galleries, art shops,
and they took buses out to Prato and the Certosa. They had picked up a
young male slut who was supposed to be an American student but whose
studies were only of bars. They introduced him as "such an ardent,
creative talent--he speaks seven languages--he just _hates_ America!"

Whichever the seven languages may have been, they did not include any
Italian, nor much English beyond, "Actually," "Amusing" and "Oh, my
dears."

The Grenadiers' burlesque of his own Culture-stalking made Hayden want
to go home, where he would cultivate not this quarter-knowledge of
history but his full and accurate knowledge of Newlife; where he could
tell you, offhand, just how much 12,758 Schuyler Boulevard would bring
per front foot, and who was the father of the wife of the third baseman
of the Newlife team. He denied his own denial; he insisted that his
white nights of outwatching the Bear had been fruitful, but he was
learning what older and wearier practitioners of scholarship and the
arts all learn: that their worst enemy is the rich female amateur.

Hayden could endure the winter cold of his room, the contempt of Jesse
Bradbin, but he could not endure the approval of the Grenadier Sisters
when they bubbled to him, "We do think that your engagement to Dr.
Olivia is _the_ most romantic thing we ever saw. It's truly creative: an
architect who _appreciates_ how vulgar most Americans are marrying a
woman scholar who knows how many gardeners Lorenzo Magnifico kept at his
villa!"

Put that way, Hayden saw his interest in Olivia as fairly sickening.

"_But_, Mr. Chart," croaked the Grenadiers, "you'll have to watch your
step. Very few of you men have the chance to be the consort of Dr.
Olivia--such a rare woman and she can put it over any of you men, and
you got to admit it, when it comes to creative ability. You may be so
efficient and all that, but here you have to take a back seat. We'll bet
a cookie, if Olivia quits her teaching job when you get married, she'll
step right out on the lecture platform, and my! think how proud you'll
be, with thousands of people listening to her, hundreds anyway, when she
explains what St. Catherine and St. Francis and Boccaccio and all those
deep thinkers were thinking! You let us tell you, Mister Man, you'll
have to be content to share her with the world!"

He brooded to himself, "Perhaps an uninspired routine draftsman like me
would feel more secure with a woman who isn't in danger of being
intoxicated by the limelight and the microphone and fools like these
sisters. No! Nonsense! That's half treachery and half idiocy. Dear
Olivia, she would never ride a sound-truck in the public square!"

And Olivia joined him in ridiculing the Grenadiers' proprietorship of
the good, the true and the beautiful, but one evening she listened
unsnickering when they gushed, "Oh, Dr. Olivia, you've got to excuse us
if we bore you by raving so about you. We do love Culture, oh, we think
it's simply wonderful, and so much needed, but we're just amateurs
compared with a wonderful, wonderful trained expert like you!"

Olivia murmured, "Me? I'm a schoolma'am who was lucky in having
hard-boiled teachers."

But she did listen while the Grenadiers gave her the useful information
that she was a mistress of medieval law and as beautiful as Clarice
Orsini.

Hayden noted that the Olivia who once, after the _pensione_ dinner, had
taken coffee alone at her table and then flitted off to her barricaded
cell, was staying on for coffee in the lounge, and now and then holding
forth to eye-brightened circles on what was really worth seeing in
Florence. When the North Italy agent for the Little Dandy Tractors of
Moline said to her admiringly, "Say, Doctor, there's one thing I never
could get straight about these doggone Middle Ages--maybe you can tell
me," then Olivia did tell him, and she did not look at an impatient Mr.
Hayden Chart off in a corner.




CHAPTER 14


Somewhat less than four weeks after their mountain inn, four weeks
during which Hayden had tried to march on in Italian history, Olivia
demanded, while they dined at Paoli's, in their familiar
escutcheon-brightened corner, "Darling, there's one quite important
thing you might do for me."

"It's done."

"I want to go to lunch at Sir Henry Belfont's some more."

"That pompous old fake? You said you never wanted to see him again. You
disliked him even more than I did."

"I have reasons."

"But how could I arrange it? I can't phone him and say we want a change
from the Tre Corone boiled tongue and spinach, and how much does he
charge?"

"No! Don't try that. He might take you seriously and take us as boarders
and he'd charge enough to ruin us. Whatever the old pot may be, I'm sure
he knows how to make it pay.... As you'll make it pay, my ardent
young architect, when I've looked over your setup in Newlife and
probably fired your partner, Bradbin or whatever his silly name is, for
cheating you! With Henry, it will be extremely easy. Call him up and
invite him and Lady Belfont to lunch at some cheap _trattoria_--be sure
and give him the name of the place. He'd hate it. So he'll haw a little
and then ask if he can't invite you and Dr. Lomond--you know that lovely
Livy?--to his place instead."

"Do you really want to go there and listen to him tell how well he knows
the Queen of Saxony and His Serene Grace, the Sixteenth Duke of
Brabant?"

"Well now, Henry knows a lot about Italian painting, at least a quarter
as much as Prince Ugo. And he's very rich and vain. If I could get him
interested in our art gallery at my university--I have a not entirely
silly hope that when we're married and I break my university
connections, they may make a new post for me: lecturer on history and
only have to go there a month or so out of every year, but keep in
touch. And they might name the lecturership after me."

"You'd be away from Newlife that long?"

"You could come along and listen, if you wanted to."

"Yes--yes..."

"Anyway, there's no sense in your inverted snobbery about Sir Henry. He
may come in very useful. Imagine him coming to visit at the university
while I'm there, and me introducing the old windbag to the president and
the students. They'd be so impressed by his tenth-rate title. And then
maybe he'll give us the art gallery. So run along now and do as I tell
you, and don't argue."

"Have you such a definite expectation of being bored in Newlife--or
rather, with me--that you're already sketching an emergency exit?"

"I'll adore every minute with you, and I expect to run our servants like
a sergeant major. But you know that with the academic work I've done, I
do have other interests. After _all_!"

"But Olivia, suppose we don't have any servants to run and we have to do
our own housework, you and I together? You've urged me to freelance, and
that may not mean much money for quite a while."

"Then you'll need my help more than ever, need me making a little money,
too. Darling, why are you so difficult today, so argumentative? You
aren't usually."

"This whole business of catering to a poop like Belfont revolts me. A
little while ago you would have scorned the thought of toadying to him.
You would have slapped down anybody who suggested that you would ever be
willing to introduce him to your president--whom you also despise!"

"My dear, that scrupulous Dr. Lomond--the chilly, opinionated old
prig!--is gone, and I'm another woman. You ought to know. You certainly
contributed enough to the change. And you can't have me both the
shrinking virgin and the bold earthy lover--you can't have anything both
ways. Now skip in and phone!"

The telephonic swindling worked out as the shrewd new Olivia had
planned. Sir Henry shuddered at the thought of meeting normal Italians
at a restaurant, and he lavishly invited Hayden and Olivia to the Villa
Satiro.

They drove up in the topolino, which again caused an aggravated spasm of
agony in the butler, who was a cheap reprint of Sir Henry, not bound in
the original eyebrows.

As they descended, out from a taxicab just arrived frisked a stalwart
and handsome young man over whom Olivia fluttered, "What a beautiful
animal _he_ is! A Lombard knight, without fear and splendidly without
brains. I can place him within a decade or two: 875 A.D., I think."

He was almost certainly an American, with a look about him of
Scandinavian ancestry: an extremely large young man in his early
thirties. Over his fresh-looking tweeds a light topcoat was slung from
his shoulders like a cape. He was hatless, with an exuberance of flaxen
hair. Hayden, who looked upon the fellow with much less exuberance than
Olivia, thought that with a show of knighthood he combined a suggestion
of a college football star, of a vacuum-cleaner salesman, and of a
popular singing evangelist shouting jazz piety.

The stranger waved his wide hand to them and entered the villa after
them, in the manner of royalty standing aside for aged peasants.

Sir Henry met them in the hall and said to Olivia, as though nobly
amused, "I seem to be specializing today in you streamlined Yankee
scholars. You are all so very brisk about cartelizing facts and diagrams
that you make a shy old British putterer like me seem incorrigibly
provincial.

"This young gentleman who has charged in with you is Professor
Lundsgard--Professor _Lorenzo_ Lundsgard--till recently the French and
Spanish don at Huguenot University, which is somewhere in your Southern
states.

"He has resigned, and I understand that he is to devote himself to the
study of our wistful Italian culture, which nowadays is so unused to
being wooed by anyone so resolute and twittering with dawn as you two
acolytes--you three. In his letter introducing Professor Lundsgard, a
man who calls himself President Sleman of Huguenot informs me that our
youthful friend is a 'stimulating teacher and an accomplished scholar,
who will stir up the sleeping Tuscan lions.' That is a spectacle that I
shall very much enjoy.... Dr. Lundsgard, this your rival
lion-stirrer, Dr. Olivia Lomond of the University of--Winnemac, I
believe it is called. Oh. And Mr. Chart."

Then he let them go in to lunch. Lady Belfont was also there, though
this is noted, like the day's temperature, only as a matter of record.

As they wavered in to face the butler and the footman, standing like the
Sphinx and the largest pyramid, Hayden noted how gallantly Lundsgard
smiled at Olivia, and how sharply he sized her up. Her smile in return
was warmed by a flirtatiousness which six weeks ago she would have
denounced as cheap. He saw, too, how the beige vicuna sweater which
Lundsgard wore for waistcoat managed on his hearty torso to get itself
to look like chain mail, and how the sun through the lofty windows
brought out metallic lights in his rough, corn-colored hair.

The five of them, plus the inescapable Marchesa Valdarno, sat prim about
the refectory table of Irish oak, eating their molds of rice with duck
livers served on English plates with views of Kent, while Belfont, with
what he felt to be gentlemanly but learned humor, pumped Lundsgard, who
answered with good-hearted simplicity.

"I'm afraid I can't claim to be any kind of a real scholar, Sir Henry.
Fact, in college, I was more devoted to football, but I had a sneaking
worship for learning, especially old history. Like a dumb farmer seeing
a vision of chariots in the August sky, and not daring to even try and
explain them. Oh, I did get my Phi Beta Kappa key, along with my letter
in two sports, but that was an accident."

("This fellow is probably my own age, but he seems much fresher and
younger," thought Hayden, and looked anxiously at Olivia, who was fixed
on Lundsgard, her lips open.)

"In the War I served in North Africa; a very high-ranking corporal I
was, till they demoted me to second looey, and I got laid up with
nothing more than a fool machine-gun wound in one foot. While I was
convalescing, I got acquainted with French caf society there and
learned a little of the lingo. Then I got hit again, really awful light,
but they invalided me out and I went home and got my Ph.D. in Romance
languages--never very good at them, either! But I got a job teaching in
that little university and, by coaching football and taking the
president's son out duck-hunting, I got by.

"Then a sort of ridiculous thing happened. I was spending a Christmas
vacation with a friend, and right out of the blue, a movie producer
offered me a job acting--as a young cop in a Big City picture, and then
couple of Westerns. Seemed like preposterously big salary: three-fifty a
week. Dollars, not cents! Now here's the funny thing. It wasn't at any
college but on the lot in Hollywood that I first heard the Gospel of
Beauty, from a grand old script writer who had been a playwright in
Hungary.

"I started reading about the Middle Ages, and then by chance, which is
sometimes so kind to a heavy-handed duffer like me, I was in a Middle
Ages costume play, and I was sold on history complete. The actor and
halfback scholar!"

Lundsgard thundered with laughter, in which they vaguely joined.

("Olivia is looking at him like a Fond Mother.")

"Oh, I'm a fighting fool for study. Sir Henry, I've read all your essays
on Tuscan Art, and personally I think they're much more profound than
Bernard Berenson. Much!"

Sir Henry looked lavish. That made two people who thought so.

"I have a pretty definite idea in coming here. I want to prepare myself
to give the undisciplined people of the United States a Message of the
sublime importance of authority, and I want to hand on to them at the
same time the lofty philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, the magnificence
of Lorenzo, the reverence of Savonarola, and through it all, the
superworldly quality of Leadership."

"Ah," condescended Sir Henry.

"And in America, where any garageman thinks himself just as good as a
bank president, we so lack the phenomenon of sanctified and yet forceful
Leadership. And as a pioneer, I may do something to create it."

("The man is a fool. But Olivia looks as if she likes him. But cannibal
sandwich with laurel trimmings is not my meat.")

"All of you clever people" said Lundsgard, "will think I am a ridiculous
bumpkin, but I do have some plans that are awfully exciting. My agent is
planning a huge lecture tour for me, on six subjects, including
Mysticism and Leadership and--and this is something new--the lectures
are to be tied in with a feature movie, which I am to script, about the
Medicis, with the lead played by Rupert Osgoswold--or possibly by your
humble servant!"

Olivia muttered, so softly that it was heard only by Hayden, "Very
exciting!"

Lundsgard caroled on, "The president of Cornucopia Films--do you know
that outfit, Sir Henry?"

"My boy, I am much too secluded and timid to understand the neologies of
the cinema, but it does happen that my Man of Business, in London, has
invested some small sums for me in Cornucopia."

"Well, that's dandy. Maybe you'll be interested in the fact that the
president of Cornucopia is going to town on this, and he's advanced a
big wad to finance my work here. Being such a stupid guy and having so
little time, I have to depend on assistants--photographers and
secretaries and researchers and so on. But Cornucopia agrees with me
that we must not think of this as a money-making project--though I got
to admit that it'll probably bring me in several thousand bucks a week!
But we think of it as a public service, to improve the mental stamina
and subtlety of America. A great friend of my father and, I am honored
to say, of mine, a United States Senator who carries a lot of weight on
the Foreign Relations Committee, believes that my crusade for more
authority and leadership might both elevate our restless American morals
and improve our standing everywhere abroad. That goes to show there are
people who see our crying need!

"Sir Henry, I realize how fortunate I am to be allowed to see the Villa
Satiro. I have read a little of its history as well as the book of its
present owner. I am honored!"

Lundsgard turned on Sir Henry, on the Marchesa Valdarno, on Olivia a
smile full of soul and sunshine, the smile of a brave young ambassador
who loves battle and smitings, but also loves little children and
quotations from _Alice in Wonderland_. He chanted, "By myself, I never
could learn much of the Middle Ages. I am too much the energetic outdoor
man. What I'd like to do, Sir Henry, is to ask an occasional question of
a veteran like you, and perhaps of Dr. Lomond, of whose accomplishments
I have heard."

In a quarter-hour of well-padded if not particularly well-turned
sentences, Sir Henry said, Yes, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance make
clear the horrors of this so-called Democracy. Civilization ended with
the Fall of the Bastille. Aristocracy means the Rule of the Best, and
how sadly we need that amid the clamorous and greedy herd of Britain,
and no doubt of your America.

To all this delirium Lundsgard listened with attention, and Hayden
reflected that good listeners are to good talkers as one to ten.

His Olivia listened also.

Hayden had heard her hold forth on the wickedness of the popularizers
who condense a five-hundred-page book on Einstein into a two-page
article including three racy anecdotes and a thumb-nail drawing of a
relativitized cow. She liked her books thick and close-printed and
accurate about their geography, and she had demanded that everybody else
like them the hard way, too. And she was now looking tenderly at a man
who was going to lecture on philosophy in the Rose Bowl.

Sir Henry was bestowing on Lundsgard an invitation to frequent his
villa, use his books, come and have lunch with Prince Ugo. "And I shall
write to the president of Cornucopia," said Sir Henry, "my approval of
your Crusade."

Running over with gratitude, Lundsgard took leave. Olivia burst out,
"Have you a taxi coming, Mr. Lundsgard? I'm sure Mr. Chart would be glad
to give you a lift in his funny little flivver."

"Splendid, Doctor; much obliged," said Lundsgard.

But Hayden was thinking, "It isn't funny and it isn't a flivver. It has
a powerful motor and sweet steering, and how you're going to get your
fat carcass into it, Lundsgard, I don't know." But aloud, "Surely. Of
course. Thank you for a beautiful lunch--Lady Belfont."

He remembered how generous to guests Caprice had been with _his_
cigarettes, his Scotch, even his fine large linen handkerchiefs; how she
would insist to a guest after a party, at three on a winter morning,
"Oh, don't phone--Hay will be _glad_ to drive you home!"




CHAPTER 15


By sitting sidewise in the back of the topolino and not daring to
breathe, Lundsgard was perilously carted down into town. Olivia turned
her head to discourse with him most of the way, while Hay drove and
sulked. She commented:

"I do think your plan is a little wild, Mr. Lundsgard, but..."

Lundsgard shouted, "Listen, baby, I hate this formality among us Yanks,
even when we're in Europe. I wish you'd call me Lorenzo, or maybe Lorry.
I'm certainly going to call you Livy, even if you are a top-flight
history shark, and if your boy friend don't slap me down for it, I'll
call him Hay. Okay, Doc? Be friendly to the poor cowboy minnesinger."

She giggled. She said, "Very well."

Never had Hayden called her anything more loose than Olivia; never, he
remembered, even in tenderness, had she called him anything but Mr.
Chart and then Hayden.

"But Lorry," she burst out, "do you actually think you can make
ecclesiastical art and thought as simple to Main Street as the rules of
croquet?"

"Maybe not, but it's worth taking a shot. Holy smoke, don't you think
all this deep stuff, even in my bum version of it, will be better for
the American hoi pollois than a lot of crime and sex stories? Huh,
darling?"

And to Hay's profound gloom, the tawny lily, the one-time nun of
learning, answered, "Yes, I do."

"Say, folks," Mr. Lundsgard gurgled, "from all I can learn, the average
age of the Anglo-American Colony here must be about sixty-five. Kick me
out if I get intrusive, but I do hope I'm going to be friendly with you
young brats.

"Say, come see my office at the Excelsior. Maybe it'll hand you a good
laugh. It's pretty commercial for a highbrow crusader, but if I'm going
to collect as many facts about Florence in couple months as that old
gasbag, Belfont, has in maybe twenty years, I've got to have a regular
assembly-belt. I've got Rome down cold in my notes and snapshots, and
some Venice and Ravenna, and now it's Florry's turn.... Listen, I
sound brash, but I'm awful in earnest. Come on!"

Mr. Lundsgard was extremely appealing, yet all the while his sun-shot
basso was extremely dominating. He leaned forward to pat Olivia's
shoulder, and the priestess of the chill twilight let his hand lie there
for a minute.

                 *        *        *        *        *

From a second bedroom in Lundsgard's large suite at the Excelsior, all
bedroom furniture had been removed, and he had turned it into one of the
briskest offices Hayden had ever seen.

At a typewriter on the newest thing in extra-sized green steel typists'
desks, with a dictation phonograph beside her, a young woman secretary
was working. On an oak table in the center were at least fifty books on
Italian history, with quarterly reviews in four languages--not looking
much perused. An enormous filing-cabinet had on its various drawers such
tasty but unexpected labels as "Anecdotes of Famous Dukes," "Clothing,
Houses & Dec.," "Jewels & Furs," "Manners, Morals in Med. Courts,"
"Beautiful Bits from Poets, Philosophers," "Hunting Leopards, Falcons,
Methods of Execution," "Horses, Heroism."

On one wall was a bulletin board to which a youngish Italian with dark
hair and a wise, thin face was pinning snapshots of Florentine palaces,
city walls, armor from the museums. He looked like an educated cousin of
Vito Zenzero, a cousin who could read the telephone book without moving
his lips.

"This is Angelo Gazza, my photographer--best photographer in Italy,"
said Lundsgard. "Born here in Florry, but lived in England, and chummed
with the Yankee troops here. Speaks English by the book. He saves my
life. I see a historic bit, or quaint, beautiful or native. I always
have Angelo following me and Snap! and he gets the local color for me
even better than my notes.... Angelo, this is Dr. Lomond and Mr.
Chart. They'll give us a lot of pointers about what to see in Florry.
We'll be plenty grateful to 'em."

Gazza nodded. If he was grateful now, he did not show it.

Nor was the secretary, when Lundsgard introduced her, particularly
cordial. She had a fine face, but it was too varnished, too reminiscent
of the Marchesa Valdarno, and her hair was a slide of smooth ash-blond.
She seemed hard and competent, but the near-green eyes which sized up
Olivia had in them resentment and suffering.

"This is Miss Hoxler, Evelyn Hoxler, or Mrs. Baccio, if you prefer.
She's true-blue American, but she's lived here for years; married to a
fine young Italian businessman, friend of mine, Art Baccio; lives in
Rome. She just loves this art work. Hey, Evelyn?"

"Yes," said Miss Hoxler, and it was as sullen a sound as the cry of a
marsh bird.

"She's unquestionably the finest stenog in Italy, in both Italian and
English. She never forgets an engagement--or lets me forget one. Hey,
Evelyn?"

"Yes?" said Miss Hoxler, and went back to typing, and the machine
sounded profane.

"Well, children, we'll go in and have a drink."

Mr. Lundsgard markedly did not include Gazza or Miss Hoxler in his
invitation.

He shut the door between the office and his living room. A portable bar
had been set up; one rich in bourbon, rye and French brandy. As he mixed
a highball, Lundsgard snarled, "That confounded Hoxler woman is a good
machine-pounder, but she's getting altogether too independent for my
taste. I guess she misses her husband, though he's the most wishy-washy
excuse for a man you ever saw. I found a job for him, in an office, but
do you think he appreciates it? Well, a man who tries to do something
for mankind gets to expect ingratitude. The real trouble with most folks
is that they haven't got any insight."

And Olivia apparently agreed.

Lundsgard was bountiful in suggestions for things they three could do
together: excursions to nearby villages; and if Hayden was not
enthusiastic about the implication that he and his good little topolino
would be at their constant service, Olivia was. None of Lundsgard's
jolly objectives was new to her but she greeted them with apparent
surprise and delight.

That night, late, in Hayden's room, he was as harsh with her as his
tenderness would permit. She was tired, her eyes were print-tired, and
she stretched out in his deepest chair, relaxed, while he sat primly
straight and interrogated her, with an ugly memory of a time when he had
investigated a wartime carpenter suspected of sabotage.

"You like this fellow, Lundsgard?"

"Like him, dear? How do you mean? He has so much buoyancy and freshness.
They're really charming to a tired old lady like me, and even his
amusing ignorances. He's so naive."

"That's your favorite word."

"Well, it's the favorite quality among the few men who are attracted by
a dried-up old maid like me."

"Not noticeably dried-up now!"

They smiled together.

"'Livy!' This fellow is a clinker. We may see too much of him,"
protested Hayden.

_Clinker_ was one of their private words. It had been an invention of
Hayden, along with smoocher, and he had worked out a _Doctrine of
Clinkers_. He may have been thinking of pre-oil-heating days and how
hard it was to get a burnt-out coal, a clinker, out of a furnace grate.

Clinkers are those newly arrived persons, not friends or their close kin
or people likely to become friends, but acquaintances of twenty years
back, or friends of friends of friends, or complete strangers, who come
bounding into your particular Florence or your Newlife with letters of
introduction, or merely with a telephone call or a note on hotel
stationery, announcing, "You've probably never heard of me but I know
the sister-in-law of the nephew of a _great_ friend of yours. I'm here
only for three days, but I thought I might have the pleasure of shaking
your hand and buying you a cocktail."

Which, in Florence, meant that they expected a free cocktail, a free
meal, an escorted tour of the city, and perhaps introductions to Prince
Ugo and Sam Dodsworth. They would also accept a trip to Siena and your
assistance in all their shopping. As many clinkers came to Newlife as to
Florence, but there, at least, they could speak the language and buy
their own cigarettes.

It is the supposition of all clinkers that the chief purpose of any
Americans in coming all the way to Florence is to spend all his time
there with fellow Americans.

In the Doctrine of Clinkers there is no implication that clinkers are
persons of low manners. They may be virtuous lodge-members and favorite
honorary pall-bearers, soft-voiced and informed about astronomy and the
history of West Point. But in quantities of more than one a season, they
are appalling nuisances.

Frequently they believe that they are being benefactors to what they
call "lonely exiles." One of them clacked to Hayden on the telephone,
"Course I've never met you, but I said to myself, 'What the hell! Hay'll
be tickled to death to see an American face, I guess!'"

                 *        *        *        *        *

Olivia sat up to protest, "That's unfair. Lorry isn't a clinker. He's
going to stay here and be one of us--whatever that means--delicate
connoisseurs, I suppose!"

"There is nothing delicate about your 'Lorry.' Playful he is, powerful
he is, and a good drinking-man. He'll die of apoplexy at fifty. But
delicate? No!"

"So much the better! He won't just dabble in art criticism. He's going
at it with an earnestness and yet a humility that may take him far. He's
really touching. And he doesn't take himself too seriously; he has a
divine, rough humor about his own deficiencies. He may become quite a
fair scholar."

"Maybe--if he isn't entirely a charlatan."

"Why are you so intolerant?"

"With this fellow, frankly, I'm a little jealous of him. I didn't expect
you--oh, you say you're changed, but it wasn't so long ago that you were
the coolest judge of bumptiousness I ever met, and I didn't expect you
to get so girlish over a ham actor playing a professor. A real crush!"

"Oh, pooh!"

"I agree."

"Honestly, Hayden, you astonish me, being jealous when I'm merely amused
by the antics of a good-hearted climber. I take Lorry about as seriously
as I do that cocker spaniel we always meet on the Tornabuoni. I probably
wouldn't recognize Lorry if I saw him tomorrow."

She did protest too much, thought Hayden. Was there a faint stink of
treachery? He urged:

"I'd better get my patent on you filed, quick."

"What am I? An invention?"

"Of the devil! There is a sort of theory that we are engaged to be
married, which seems to me a surprisingly good idea, but we have never
much discussed when or what afterward. Can't we be married this summer,
and take a look at the Alps and maybe Austria, and then in the fall
we'll decide whether we want to go home or stay on in Europe? What about
it?"

"I'm willing, though I do think one of the charms of our friendship has
been that we haven't had a lot of family around to drive us into a
marital schedule, so they can order their wedding garments early. Can't
we still just drift, for a while yet?"

"Possibly."

It was not her evasiveness which dismayed him but the discovery in
himself of relief that she was evading fixed terms, and that he was not
yet going to be tied down to definiteness.

                 *        *        *        *        *

If it had not been for the threat to Olivia's unstable emotions, he
might have liked Lundsgard for his backwoods humor. The three had
comfortable outings at the enticing country restaurants at Maiano and
Pratolino and St. Casciano and sat there on outdoor terraces for hours.
Olivia mockingly called Lundsgard the "Dazzling Dane" and explained to
him that it is not enough to qualify as an authority to know that Italy
is a peninsula and that the Medicis were bankers. Lundsgard took it
affably, and he danced with Olivia in arbors to the melody of
accordions.

He was taken up by the peerage of the American Colony with unexpected
speed. He had a way of telling retired gentlemen whose only vocabularies
were of the Stock Exchange how profound they were about international
politics, and of looking at their wives with reverence and surprise. He
had a competent game of bridge, a neatness in mixing drinks, a skill in
listening to symptoms, which caused Hayden to wonder if his story of
untutored country boyhood was quite truthful.

On his own, Lundsgard gave a party which marked him as not just an
acceptable eighth for dinner, but as a social factor of merit. He hired
three suites at the Excelsior for the evening; in one, he had the
bridge-players, in one the more thoughtful boozers, in the third there
was dancing to a Swiss orchestra in Bulgarian costumes playing Brazilian
tunes. Even the testiest Colonists advanced from bridge to the bar and a
few even to the samba, and Lundsgard was considered a man of the rarest
parts.

Thereafter, the juicy seventeen-year-old granddaughters of the exiled
bankers, who now and then visited Florence, clamored for the presence of
Lundsgard.

Along with the pillars, Lundsgard got in with the dubious and
unexplained who make up an interesting part of all the foreign colonies
in Florence and of the Italians who are close to them: mysterious owners
of villas gorgeous but secluded; ex-officials of the Allied Military
Government who had been minor clerks before War II and millionaires
afterward; royalty in exile; Italians in whose presence it was not
considered tactful to mention dope-running; men sometimes grave and
solid seen usually with men young and pretty.

In Florence, even the patently proper British and Americans are often
inexplicable. With so many demure ladies you never quite know whether
they are widows, divorced or still married and of what sort their
husbands' grandparents had been. And with all these (since he did not,
like Hayden, have to stay home evenings and study, having his Miss
Evelyn Hoxler to do that for him) Lundsgard cruised, blithe and free,
generally popular, and Hayden reflected that there is no more useful
pose than that of the honest yokel of whom it would be a shame to take
advantage.

However much Hayden doubted Lundsgard, it was a season when clinkers
were trooping into town, and any tested permanent acquaintance was a
refuge. Olivia and Hayden and Lundsgard escaped from tourists on
frequent mountain picnics, and it was on one of these that Hayden's
suspicions of Olivia and Lundsgard forced him to recognize them.




CHAPTER 16


Lundsgard was a skilled picnic guest. He scrupulously fetched his share
of the lunch, paid for his share of the gasoline, and once, when there
was a tire to be changed, he pushed Hayden aside and did all the
changing.... Hayden ungratefully thought that their family Tristan
was somewhat too buoyant and powerful about it. Though probably a year
older than Hayden, he contrived to look more youthful.

Nowadays he usually called Olivia "Sister," "Cookie" or "Helena Troy."

They picknicked today up above Settignano in a grove of olive and apple
trees, with a venerable castle nearby, and the towers and low houses of
Florence far below. Throughout lunch--cold duck and bread and butter and
red wine and cheese with dates and raisins--Lundsgard was jovially
teasing Olivia about her feebleness. He insisted that she had studied so
much that she was unable now to walk two blocks. She lost all detachment
and shouted at Lundsgard, as though he were some one whom it was
important to impress, that in college she could have been woman track
champion if she had taken the time for training.

"Okay, let's see how good you are, Cutie!" bellowed Lundsgard. "I'll
race you down to that old olive tree with the trunk rotted through."

It is not at all certain that Lundsgard let her win the race; he was a
little cumbersome and wavering, while the Diana of the Laurentian
Library was astonishingly fleet. She did win, and they came back up the
hillside laughing, innocently swinging hand in hand. But the
uncomfortable Hayden wondered whether it _was_ so innocent. There are
things other than purloined letters that are most artfully concealed by
exposing them. But the two returned to him so clear-eyed and so candidly
laughing that he felt rebuked.

He and his suspicions had it out at three o'clock that night. He had
awakened in the darkness to a memory which tore at him, of Olivia's eyes
utterly fixed on this lout, the tip of her tongue moving against her
upper lip.

He could not sleep again. Could he ever sleep again?

In his old dressing-gown and soft worn Pullman slippers he padded over
to the marble-topped table and, with his little Meta stove, he made
coffee, served with condensed milk.

No, he thought calmly, he was not the typical suspicious husband, with a
vanity which made him surprised that his wife could like any other male
at all, when she was so blessed as to have _his_ divine favor. There was
no suspicion about it; he was coldly and wretchedly sure that Olivia
could surrender to this lusty Lundsgard animal; the question was whether
she had done so now, and whether she would now go on succumbing to a
dreary line of sneak thieves afterward.

"I coaxed her out of the cold tomb and warmed her. Did I do that only
for the benefit of Lundsgard and his successors?"

Then, "Oh, what nonsense! To be so sick-jealous you can't stand her
even laughing with a lively acquaintance! She's as single-minded in
love as...

"She's a reckless fool, she's uncontrollable when she takes a fancy to a
man. I'd like to hear Professor Leslie Vintner's version of their
affair! At least, Caprice was dependable that way. She never more than
flirted at a dance.... I don't think she did.... Of course there
are some flabby, whimpering individuals who were born to be
cuckolded.... Oh, go back to bed, Chart! Can't you get enough torture
without making a hobby of it?"

                 *        *        *        *        *

When the three lunched next, Hayden could not resist probing the campus
Casanova about his opinion of this recently discovered world-menace,
Sex.

Lundsgard had often confided that he had never been married, and now he
was frank and unsparing of himself. He had been fervently engaged, he
said, to a "cute little chick and awful smart" at Huguenot University,
but he admitted that in his ruthless youth he had been cruel to this
young lady. He had scolded her for not rising to the splendor of his
ambition to be a lord of learning--at several thousand dollars a week.

"I was kind of raw and unsympathetic, I reckon. I wasn't a big enough,
rich enough soul then to appreciate a gentle little saint like Bessie
and be patient with her."

But his humility quickly ran out, and he hinted that in Hollywood and
Rome he had been favored by the handsomest and most befurred women. And
Olivia, Hayden marked, was not angered by this rakishness. She listened
to Lundsgard's advertising without one of the crisp comments, flavored
with mustard and pepper and ice, for which she had once been dreaded.

"I'd better get her out to Newlife quick!" thought Hayden.

                 *        *        *        *        *

At the Tre Corone, now, she did not merely tolerate Vito's insinuating
croons. Hayden heard Vito mutter that they might go out to a night club,
and though she refused, she was not haughty.

Even at the Villa Satiro, to which they were often invited for lunch
now, along with Lundsgard, she was not above a sly confidence with Sir
Henry, who wagged his fat back and leaned over her with the coyness of a
distinguished circus elephant.

Hayden was bored by Belfont's ponderous way of being salacious by
referring to the reprehensible doings of the less respectable Grecian
gods. Hayden wondered whether Olivia would be spiritually advancing or
declining if she switched from Lundsgard's boisterous salesmanship to
Sir Henry's soggy glory. Yet now, when he was most distressed by her
base transmutation, Hayden was most held by her ardent love, and the
once simple Tre Corone boarding-house had become for him a splendor of
heaven edged with infernal gloom.

Then the cable from his partner, Jesse Bradbin, from Newlife:

"Big deal pending you required stop. Big dough quit being irresponsible
come home next boat."

It tempted him to think of leaving paradise and all the heavy
proprieties demanded in an angel, and of being busy and important in
Newlife again; of not having to remember historical dates or impress the
Dodsworths or shepherd his ewe lamb lest she fall over the most obvious
cliffs. He could smell the Rocky Mountain air, heady with sage instead
of olives. And he owed something to his fatuous yet devoted partner. But
to love Olivia was more important even than to snatch contracts from his
worthy rivals in business.

He refreshed his love by reviewing the virtues of Olivia. Remember, he
coached himself, what unexampled beauty and courage and knowledge she
has. You must be patient while she is getting over her first real fling,
which she takes so much the worse because, at nearly thirty, she's new
to it.

Would Jesse Bradbin ever give up anything he greatly wanted for him?

His cabled lie was warm and polite.

                 *        *        *        *        *

It was harder for him to snub Lundsgard because the man, with a breezy
humbleness, was always turning to him for advice. And once he said, "I
wish you'd get in on some of this movie dough, Hay, by doing a little
research for me, in your spare time."

It was amiably said and amiably refused.




CHAPTER 17


They were dining, Hayden and Olivia, with Nat Friar and his love, Mrs.
Shaliston Baker. The dinner, served on Nat's living room table
imperfectly cleared of books and the chess set, was as good as ever,
with curried shrimp and tiny strawberries, but Nat was less bland. He
was restless, he spilled the wine, and Ada Baker watched him nervously,
like a little old cat watching its good but alarming friend, the woolly
setter. Their example made Hayden and Olivia unusually gentle with each
other. When Nat said, "After you two young people are married, as Ada
and I have never had the courage to be, you mustn't stay in the cautious
splendor of Florence but try the world," then Olivia put out her hand,
to let it lie relaxed in Hayden's.

Hayden explained the tidal phenomenon of Lorenzo Lundsgard, whom Nat had
never seen. "He has depressing energy and touching reverence. It might
interest you to meet him, Nat."

"So that I may then re-enact the very sensible and enjoyable egotism of
the Pharisee in gloating, 'Thank God I am not as these tourists'?"

"Why not? By the way, Lundsgard sounded me out about making some money
on the side as part-time researcher for him. I turned it down."

"What," wondered Nat, "is a researcher?"

"You are."

"Young gentleman, I am a frowsty old bachelor. I am also a lie-abed and
a secret drinker. I know what research is: something unpleasant that men
in white jackets, like barbers, do to dogs in dungeon laboratories. But
I don't know what a researcher is."

"He goes out and does the marketing."

"You say that this Dr. Lundsgard," fretted Nat, "would like a researcher
in medieval folkways?"

"Yes. Bring him in two facts and he'll cook them into a whole lecture."

"Do you suppose he could use me, Hayden?"

"Could a village bank 'use' J. Pierpont Morgan? Could a popular preacher
'use' an archangel?"

"The answer is not necessarily 'yes' in either case. Their methods might
be different. But the fact is..."

Nat spoke heavily, looking down into his beard.

"This may be the last dinner I shall ever give. My cable has finally
come, refusing reprieve: the company to which I so cannily switched all
my funds, not long ago, has failed. My income is finished. I need a job.
This is the first time I have ever said, 'I need a job.'"

Mrs. Baker cried out and she, the fragile and prudent, ran to Nat and
shamelessly sat on his knee, her head against his shoulder.

"I have been too cowardly to tell Ada till I should be fortified by the
presence of you strong barbarians. Yes, with considerable ingenuity, I
have managed to lose every cent I had."

Mrs. Baker said harshly, "Nonsense! You have all that I have."

"But you haven't anything, my beloved; just enough to exist on. It
doesn't matter. For some time I have been preparing for this. I haven't
paid my rent for six months, and my poor servant, I haven't paid her now
for two months and two days, and this past week she has been bringing me
in vegetables from her brother, who is a market-gardener and a reader of
Petrarch. He is really our host, this evening, but this is the last time
I shall impose on him. By the way, he speaks with an interesting
Livornese accent with a word, now and then, that I cannot spot except as
a Greek survival.... Oh, Ada, Ada, don't, my dear!"

Mrs. Baker was sobbing, close against him, all her pride and frail
austerity gone.

"It's not so bad, Ada. It's a new adventure. I shall now work according
to other people's notions of what my usefulness may be, instead of my
own. If there is anything here, or even back in the States, that I can
do that is not too honest or too cultural, I shall do it gladly.
Meantime, Hayden, do you think this Dr. Lundsgard might hire me for a
season? I am very punctual and tidy--well, reasonably. And at my age, I
shall come very cheap."

                 *        *        *        *        *

Hayden telephoned to Lundsgard that there was a chance he might be able
to get the renowned Professor Friar to give him some "material," and of
course Dr. Friar was one of only eleven men living who knew European
History minute by minute, acre by acre, from 400 A.D. to 1800.

Lundsgard was excited. "I have some of Dr. Friar's articles cut out. You
honestly think he might brief me? How would I get to meet him? Should I
go and call on him at his home? Would you be willing to take me there?"

Hayden reflected that the shabbiness of Nat's living room would cut a
hundred dollars a week off his market value, and he said hastily, "No, I
think that as you would be his superior officer, it would be protocol
for him to call on you."

"I don't insist on form, with a big shot like him, though of course good
form--well, you know how it is. Good form is one of the things that I
intend to take back to the States, along with philosophy; I mean the
super-high-tone good form, like Ugo's. So maybe... But ask the Prof
to pick his own hour to come here. Does he ever sneak in a drink?"

"If you had some very dry sherry for him, I think he might take a sip."

"I'll have some so dry he'll think it's from Kansas."

                 *        *        *        *        *

Nat Friar put on his one good gray suit, he washed and combed his beard,
he had a hefty glass of cognac at home, he looked Olympian and felt even
better. But in Lundsgard's suite he spoke with mild delicacy and only
touched the glass of offertory sherry.

Hayden fretted to himself, "Nat and I are selling the most honest goods
on the market, and yet we're somehow being fakes. I don't like selling
one's own self--for Nat or for Olivia or for me."

Encouraged by Lundsgard, Nat started on long tales of the old Italy:
Amadeo the Green Count; Pope Anacletus II, who was of the great Jewish
family of the Pierleoni; that poet and gallant, Aeneas Sylvius
Piccolomini, who was to become Pope Pius II, to build the mountain
village of Pienza as his monument and to lead a crusade; the Wolf of
Gubbio, a beast wolf not a human one, who was converted and became a
practising Christian; Clarice Strozzi, who cursed the tyrants out of the
Medici Palace. The stories were as full of gaiety as they were of
erudition, and Lundsgard was in ecstasy. He humbly addressed Nat as
"sir," and he kept ejaculating over the chronicles, "Why, that's
corking, sir, that's superb, that's just what I need!"

Hayden wondered why Lundsgard did not take notes, till he discovered
that the door to the office was part open and that in there Evelyn
Hoxler was thriftily getting it all down in shorthand.

Lundsgard hesitated, "I know of course, sir, that if you cared to give
me your invaluable aid for a month or so, I couldn't even begin to pay
you what such priceless learning is worth. But would a hundred and fifty
dollars a week somewhat compensate you?"

Hayden was certain that Nat would not know whether that was fabulously
large or pitifully small, and he stepped in with, "Why Lundsgard, you
ought certainly to pay him at least two hundred a week!"

Lundsgard's glance was very sharp, somewhat resentful, and he said
curtly, "We'll make it one-seventy-five."

"That sounds very nice," beamed Nat.

With no further "sirs," Lundsgard ordered, "Professor, you start in here
next Monday morning, nine o'clock."

"Nine? Nine in the _morning_? Very well," said Nat disconsolately.

                 *        *        *        *        *

All day long--that is, from nine-thirty or ten or eleven, when he
arrived, and leaving out the hour that he took off now and then when he
went out for a drink--in an old velvet jacket and an antique straw
gardening hat with which he shaded his eyes, Nat sat happily dictating
anecdotes out of the most unhackneyed (though reasonably accurate)
history.

He thought the dictation machine was the most patient ear he had ever
found. He sat with the mouthpiece tucked into his beard, smiling at the
machine and making explanatory gestures in its direction, telling it
about kings and cardinals as though it was likely already to have heard
a great deal about them. Nat paid no attention at all to Lundsgard's
visitors, such as smoochers who came in to sell Lundsgard original
Botticellis for twenty-five dollars.

Translated into lire, which just now were about six hundred to the
dollar, Nat's hundred and seventy-five dollars a week seemed to him like
Babylonian wealth. He paid his debts to his servant and her brother, he
gave a little something to his landlord, and he bought for himself a
fine purple corduroy smoking-jacket with pockets large enough to carry
books. For Hayden he bought an Aldine Aristophanes and for Mrs.
Shaliston Baker, a silver tea-caddy.

Lundsgard never criticized Nat for unpunctuality. He just read page on
page of medieval oddities transcribed by Evelyn Hoxler from Nat's
recorded prattle, and chuckled, "My dear Professor Friar, you come awful
dear, but you sure are a treasure!"

"Dr. Lundsgard is a very kind man," said Nat to Hayden.

"I suppose he is."

"I just wonder why he took up the crabbed calling of being a
medievalist. He would have been so useful as a singing cowboy--if he can
sing."

"If he can punch cattle."

"Exactly. But always very kind."

"Oh, yes--yes, certainly--very kind."




CHAPTER 18


In the late afternoon, after office hours, Hayden went to see Lundsgard.
He thought he heard "_Avanti_," when he tapped at the outer door of the
suite; he opened, and stood aghast. Beyond the living room, in the
office, Lundsgard could be heard talking to Evelyn Hoxler:

"I've had enough of your bellyaching. Go on! Bawl! I like to hear it,
Eve. It makes you even homelier than when you put on the white enamel
and look like a madam. Lissen. You got no kick coming at all. You knew
what would happen just as well as I did. In fact, you planned it. You
hoped to get a wad of--well, call it severance money out of me."

"Lorry, I didn't! I wanted to help Arturo. You made me feel that
anything I did for you, when you were so friendly with him, was really
for him."

"The loving Mrs. Baccio! The innocent Miss Hoxler! Just a country babe!
Say, I'd hate to write to the registrar in whatever hayseed county you
really come from and ask him your real birth date!"

"Don't. Please, Lorry! I won't be angry any more."

"You're damn right you won't. Not around here you won't. And I don't
think you'll be around here at all, much longer."

Hayden hastened away, down the hotel corridor, more sick than furious.
There are maggots too vile to touch. And for tomorrow there was to have
been a giddy lunch with Lundsgard and Olivia.

At the Tre Corone he found her, very cheerful, and he cried, "Sweet, I
want to call off tomorrow's lunch with Lundsgard."

"Why?" Her disappointment was clear.

"He isn't as decent a fellow as you thought. I've just heard him talking
to Eve Hoxler, viciously."

"I'm glad to hear it. At last! That woman has been trying to nab him.
She takes advantage of his good nature and his quite charming reverence
for women."

"Rev---- Oh, good God!"

"Don't you ever have any argument but 'Good God'? Aside from the
blasphemy, it's a little undetailed."

"All right. We'll _have_ our lunch with that felthead, and I'll try to
get him to show just how much reverence he really has for your frail,
cast-iron sex!"

At their lunch, at Paoli's, with what he felt to be silken cunning, not
looking at Olivia but being as cunning as a dove and as innocent as a
serpent, he challenged Lundsgard:

"You're always saying that women inspire you, and yet I wonder what you
really think about the ones like Olivia, who are so independent?"

He wondered if the fault could have been Evelyn Hoxler's, when he saw
how grave and mature Lundsgard became:

"You won't like my sure-enough attitude, Hay, and Livy won't."

"Oh?" said Hayden, and Olivia said, "Oh!"

"I'll have to give you my whole philosophy, and I'm not very articulate,
you might say. As I see it, the world has been going through what you
might call a multiple revolution, and the uppity girl who thinks her
whole family are dubs and the left-wing agitator and the psychoanalyst
and all these smeary modern painters belong right together--all
anarchists. But I figure their seven-story revolution is over, all but
the shouting. The whole world wants authority and, you might call it,
tradition. New world coming!

"It'll first of all want _heroes_ and not a gang of statisticians and
wisecracking critics. Unluckily for me, I'm not big enough, or I'm too
early, to be one of the star magnificoes, but I can help clear the way
for them--yes, and you just watch 'em ride in on a golden highway, with
flags and trumpets!

"These guys that'll be the leaders, they'll have to have power and
responsibility. They'll want their orders obeyed on the jump, though
they'll be darned generous to their mob in return. They may not wear any
ten-ton armor, but they'll make my ancestor Lorry the Magnificent,
Serial One, look like a ribbon clerk. They'll use chemistry and jet
planes and atomic power, and their slogan will be that only the best is
good enough, and I guess they'll be willing to get killed for it--and to
kill!"

To all this souvenir-post-card Nietzsche, this 1905 pre-Hitlerism,
Olivia was listening, with no hostility but with fond amusement at her
Lorry's enthusiasm. Encouraged by her if not by Hayden, he boomed on:

"But all these high duties for the men leaders mean there's got to be
even higher duties for the women. A guy can't lead an army and still
stay at home and teach the Little Woman golf. Nowadays the career woman,
who was the big news even five years ago, is as old-fashioned as a buggy
whip. Now she's got a better goal: to be loyal to men that got to be big
enough to be loyal to; to give herself in a real blazing devotion to
helping carry on her man's battle for supremacy; to lead the Leader.
Can't you _see_ it, Livy? She won't get a professor's chair or a slick,
leather-covered desk in an advertising agency, but she'll share a
throne--and believe me, there's going to be thrones to share! You bet!
To be queen in her home isn't old-fashioned but the most ultramodern,
up-to-the-split-second, re-revolutionary ideal there is!

"So go ahead and shoot me, both of you. Hay, you can report me to all
your revolutionary little friends for wanting to march all the poor
farmboys (like you and me both!) right back to their peasant huts,
unless they can get the Vision of Leadership and obey it. Okay! I'm
ready!"

Afterward, Hayden avoided discussing with Olivia this
scarlet-and-pea-green vision of Lundsgard, the view of the noblest man
as the mining-camp bully. If she had been unhappy about it, he wanted to
spare her; if she had liked it, he wanted to spare himself.

And that same afternoon, Evelyn Hoxler, who had never talked to Hayden
by himself, telephoned asking him, and anxiously, to meet her at Gilli's
for a drink.

When he met her, there was something rigid and frightening about Miss
Hoxler. He had the impression of a rattlesnake in ambush, and indeed
there was a good deal of hiss in all her S's, as she rapidly drank down
Italian cognacs:

"Lundsgard is sending me sobbing back to Rome, and I asked to see you,
Mr. Chart, so I could try and do the stinker a little harm before I go
skipping back to commit suicide."

She did not strike Hayden as notably benevolent, and he listened not too
willingly to her hatred.

"I gave Lorry the best clerical assistance _he'll_ ever get and you've
probably guessed--I never tried to hide it especially--I gave him a lot
more. He's a quick worker. When you first meet him, if you can be
useful, he'll love you, but the moment he can get more out of sponging
on somebody else's brains, out you go, without even a handshake. When he
gets to be a dictator, he'll pull off some of the finest purges in
history, and then sleep like a baby.

"By the way, his first name isn't Lorenzo. His fond mother named her
golden-haired Viking rosebud Oley, and in college he changed that to
Lawrence, and he put on the Lorenzo, along with a shot at English accent
(when he remembers it) in Hollywood.

"I want to warn you, with the most evil intentions, that while I don't
think he's had much chance to fool with this conceited young woman of
yours, Miss Lomond, he's certainly licking his chops."

"I think Dr. Lomond can take care of herself!"

"I _know_ I can take care of _myself_! That don't do you much good when
the car hits a patch of grease like Lundsgard and skids." The
appositeness of it jarred Hayden and frightened him. "Mr. Chart, I have
a feeling you plan to get out of this combination cocktail party and
mental sanitarium they call the American Colony and go home. Home! Beat
it, fast, and take that highfalutin sweetheart of yours along with you.
So long. No flowers!"

He met Angelo Gazza, Lundsgard's photographer, on the street, and
invited him to coffee. He blurted, "What sort of a chap is this
Lundsgard, really?"

"Oh, Lorenzaccio is all right. He's a pusher. Pays pretty good but gets
his money's worth and then some.... Say, you're fond of Dr. Lomond,
aren't you?"

"Very. Why?"

"Oh, she comes in to see Professor Friar and maybe Lundsgard now and
then and... She's trained too good, for _our_ shop. She wants us to
get our facts--we do an import and export business in historical
facts--she wants 'em catalogued like a history book, but Lundsgard tells
her, 'Never mind the efficiency stuff. This isn't a factory; this is a
solar center for radiating inspiration.' Dr. Lomond is very well
informed--for an American."

"You don't like us Americans, do you?"

"No, that's the hell of it. I love you. Best chum I ever had was a
master-sergeant from Brooklyn, half-Wop and half-Mick. I'd like to live
in America. That's why I keep panning you--to keep safe from you
hundred-and-eighty pound babies! Why are so many Americans immature? Why
don't you grow up? Half of you pulling polysyllables, when 'I don't
know' would do, and the other half--medical majors and chaplains and
flying colonels--talking like high-school boys, 'Oh, Boy!' and 'Watch my
smoke' and not enthusiastic about anything except baseball and women.

"And the American woman is the only one I know of whose heart and brain
stay cold and indifferent to you while all the rest of her body pretends
to catch fire. An Italian or French woman either loves you or she
doesn't, but the American lady--she kisses you hot at eight-thirty and
looks at you cold at eleven--or anyway at eight-thirty next morning. And
yet I do admire so your American enterprise. I am so sick of all the
Memorable Ruins in Italy.

"That's what has turned so many of us into guides and postcard sellers.
We could build the best ships and automobiles and electrical equipment
in the world, but our medieval gateways and _palazzi municipali_ gum up
our city planning.

"I'd like to blow up every building in Italy older than 1890. All you
tourists shrieking that it's so cute of us to have three-foot alleys for
thoroughfares and yelling your heads off when we put in broad boulevards
like you all do at home. Oh, it's probably real quaint in me to be
descended from some Etruscan gangster.... And I'll watch Dr. Lomond
for you like a sister-in-law."

"You think she needs it?"

"Lundsgard is one of these Leaders, and all Leaders think that all the
votes and the applause and the money and the women belong to them....
Good luck! _Ciao_!"

                 *        *        *        *        *

Olivia was absent-minded at dinner and it was only after a quarter-hour
of mere thermometric conversation that she said, "Lorry is going to fire
that Hoxler woman."

"Yes."

"In fact he has."

"I see."

"He wants me to come in and help him out, three or four hours a day,
till he finds a new secretary."

"You can't do it! You absolutely can't!"

"I'm going to."

"You, the independent, and you want to be that fellow's copyist!"

"I shall be nothing of the sort. I'll really be a fellow-researcher with
Uncle Nat, and I'll put the office files in order--they need it. Or do
you _insist_ on my spending all the rest of my life in libraries where
nobody ever comes, except displaced mice? Or perhaps you prefer to take
advantage of my extreme fondness for you by ordering me to go home!"

"I love you, and when you turn beastly, when you use arguments that you
know are crooked, I am helpless, Olivia--the only person in the world
that I am helpless with."

"I know. Forgive me. And honestly, you can just forget it. It'll only be
a few hours a day with Lorry for a few weeks."

"That seems to me too much, with _him_!"

"But I need the money, Hay--Hayden. Maybe with your sharp eyes, that can
look right through a fat woman and see a ducky bungalow and a
two-thousand-dollar fee, you noticed, when you first arrived here, that
I hadn't many clothes, and most of them kind of shabby. Well, I haven't
a very large scholarship, and I've been buying quite a wardrobe,
entirely for you, and I am busted."

"Then you must let me..."

"No! That much independence I'll still keep. No!"




CHAPTER 19


When the wildfire news ran round the hills that Signore il Professor
Friar was paying his debts, he was assaulted by bills a year old, five
years old, most of which he had forgotten and some of which he did not
owe. In particular, his landlord, long a tolerant friend, once he saw
the sheen of ten-thousand-lire notes wanted to be paid to date, and his
former intimates, the book-sellers, threatened to cart off his library,
beloved and a quarter unpaid-for.

Nat refused to take even a loan from Mrs. Baker, who was little more
affluent than himself. He became grim. Now that he had started, he would
be businesslike.

He said to Hayden, "I would prefer, of course, to desert Lundsgard, now
that the adventure is rusty. I have no complaint about him; he treats me
well. He is the only man living who thinks my information about Gubbio
and Spoleto is worth listening to, and that, to me, is grateful. Like
many people weary with knowledge, I have perhaps unduly esteemed the
fresher wisdoms of younger people, but this mental passion has rarely
been reciprocated--perhaps only by you and Olivia and Lundsgard. But I
have some difficulty in liking the fact that I am now part of a cultural
swindle.

"I'm not sure but that Dr. Lundsgard is a very bad man. He is nimble at
making historical parallels to prove that the rule of plain unlettered
men has always been disastrous, to prove that we need louder-voiced
millionaires to guide us. But to prove it, he adulterates all the facts
that I go down into the coal pit and shovel up to him.

"I'm not sure but that it's what you call a racket, I'm not sure but
that he is in the soundest tradition of treason--treason to love, to
friendship, to patriotism, to religion, for the most sensitive blessings
are also the most interesting to betray. In his case, he is making a
cheerful activity of treason to learning, like the journalists who trap
invalids by praising fraudulent medical discoveries.

"He is even developing prophetic illusions: that all history has been
moving toward a moral goal according to a discernible scheme, and that
he is the only man who can discern it. I have studied a number of
skilled methods of assassination which I might use with him, but
otherwise, what am I to do? Place your charming girl, Olivia, under my
arm and take to the Abruzzi caves to escape my remaining creditors?

"I can see now where all my quandary started: paying my servant, who is
a true Italian peasant and never expected such an insult from an
_illustrissimo_!"

But Nat did nothing. And Hayden did nothing, and suddenly he was sick of
Lundsgard and Florence and Europe. It can happen so with exiles. One
moment he loved Italy; the next, its ways seemed antiquated and a little
silly. He could not even hear the language clearly. It was all an
unaccented gabble. When he walked in the evening, a group of sharp young
loafers in front of a movie theater--as dangerous as a like group in
Concord, Massachusetts--seemed to be his enemies, whispering, "Let's
stab that foreigner or chase him out of the country!"

That week, letters from home, from Jesse and Mary Eliza Bradbin, from
classmates whom he had not seen for ten years, letters which had
recently bored him by their weather reports and the gossip about people
whom he did not remember, were suddenly precious salvation. When he had
first come to Florence he had gratefully used the hospitality of the
governmental American Library in the Palazzo Strozzi and read the
American magazines, the newspapers. He had later become almost
indifferent to their bulletins of a land so far off, but now he hastened
back to them, and they promised him the refuge of home.

That promised refuge he needed the more because daily he less liked the
relationship between Lundsgard and Olivia.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Rich now in what he considered knowledge, in Nat's anecdotes and Gazza's
photographs, strong in the approval of Sir Henry Belfont and the
toleration of Sam Dodsworth, Mr. Lundsgard still considered Hayden a
decent fellow, but he no longer considered his counsel of any merit, and
when Hayden had an idea, Lundsgard's attitude was "Yes, yes." He
preferred to see Hayden only in bars but, grimly risking snubs, Hayden
frequently marched into the wolf's den to find out how much of his lamb
had been devoured now.

He warned himself that Lundsgard's office was a busy place, that he had
no more right to intrude there than to stroll into an operating-room and
suggest having a cigarette with a performing surgeon. They were not
snubbing him--no, they were just busy. But all he knew was that he got
snubbed.

Nat beamed at him, but even the friendly Gazza seemed annoyed, Lundsgard
looked impatient, and Olivia, busy with lists of Umbrian painters,
snapped, "Oh, _must_ you leave that door open, Hayden dear?"

How patronizing and unlovely was her "Hayden dear" compared with her
tender "Dear Hayden"!

But he bullied Lundsgard and her into coming out to tea with him. They
were in the Piazza della Republica, outside of Donnini's at a small
table among Italian families prosperous and voluble.

The researchers did not look at Hayden. Olivia was competently answering
Lundsgard's equally competent questions about the wool-carders guild in
ancient Florence. Hayden felt like a tolerated younger brother,
listening to his betters. And when the interrogation was over--he could
imagine it, gilded and magnified and made to sound learned and
important, bestowed on a respectful lecture audience in a municipal
arena dedicated to wrestling, political conventions, roller skating and
Shakespeare--the two of them apparently believed that they were alone in
the Forest of Arden, no melancholy Mr. Chart within ten leagues. They
creaked happily in their wicker chairs as they teased each other--about
punctuality! One would not have chosen that topic as a beguiling link
between illicit lovers, and yet Lundsgard and the girl were lyric as he
cloyingly bickered, "And you were ten minutes late--you were, you
_were_," and the female conspirator murmured, "Oh, pooh, I--was--_not_!"

It seemed to Hayden that an appalling softness had come over her in her
manner toward Lundsgard. When that bounding animal touched her bare
elbow, which he did oftener than was quite necessary for emphasis, she,
the late inviolable, did not seem annoyed, and she had for him a smile
which went beyond the pleased obedience which custom expects from a
female office-hand.

Lundsgard was startled to discover some one much like Hayden Chart still
with them, and he went out of his way to get in, "You certainly have a
grand effect on your girl friend here, Hay. When you aren't around, she
treats me like dirt, but when you're here, she tries to make you jealous
by treating me fairly good. I wish I had your neat touch with the
women!" And looked, then, at Olivia in a proprietarial pride which was
more betraying than any yelp of passion.

No.

Hayden was coldly certain that this pair of profit-hunting pedants, of
ranging sensationalists, were lovers now, beyond charity. Then they
deserved each other!

But the stubbornness that had always marched with him, most relentless
when it was most quiet, the stubbornness that had fortified him to
endure Caprice's clownish demands and Jesse Bradbin's witless jesting,
rose in Hayden now, and he was the more resolved to save Olivia.

No one else could do it--certainly not the moist-eyed young woman
herself, now yearning toward Lundsgard's ten-bushel of manly beauty.
And, reflected Hayden, he himself had guiltily broken through her poor
wall of defense. She was "worth saving"--this trained and honest woman,
even now when she was demonstrating that she was not in all things so
edifyingly honest.

He would save her--if. He had nothing of more importance to do,
now.... And, with a fascination apparently undiminished by her
idiocy, he happened to love her.

Lundsgard was giving himself, and apparently he felt that he was giving
them, considerable gratification in letting them know that he now moved
on a charming social plane, jammed with Gracious Living. Prince Ugo
Tramontana had invited him to come for tea and see some Second Century
Roman cameos.... He referred to the learned relic as Ugo, and before
he rose he lighted a tremendous American cigar, with the Lorenzan band
still on it, and extinguished the match with an archducal flourish.

When Lundsgard was gone, Olivia said briskly, "Well, have to start home
and wash my face."

"Sit down again, Olivia. I want to do some scolding. I want you to quit
your job with Lundsgard...."

"I shouldn't think of it."

"...and at once. You can call him up this evening."

"Ri-dic-ulous!" She sat down firmly.

"And tell him to hurry up and find that new stenographer--whom he had no
intention of finding."

"Why, I've never heard..."

"And then, without any tapering off or artful use of drugs, I want you
to kick that fellow out, complete."

"Ab-surd!"

"I don't know precisely where you stand with Lundsgard now, but I do
know it's just a matter of whether you will or whether you have.
_What?_" She jumped at the unexampled force and roughness of his "What?"
He jumped himself.

"What _what_?"

"Are you two lovers now?"

She quieted down. She looked at him without fear. "Well, we could be,
and that's all I shall tell you."

"It's enough. Do you want to get rid of me?"

"No, really, Hay--Hayden, I don't. I am enormously fond of you. It's so
happy and easy to be with you, and I admire your decency and calm. I
would like to hold you, always--no, I _intend_ to hold you! And I agree
with you that Lorry is a misguided and misguiding truck-driver--in fact,
I know it much better than you do! But he is also a knight, a blithe and
unconquerable knight. After all, Giovanni delle Bande Nere wasn't
distinguished for his accurate knowledge of dates or his fidelity to the
sweet girl at home. Lorry is a fake--good Heavens, don't you suppose I'm
well trained enough to know that! But he is extremely charming in a
nasty way. Besides, what could either you or I do to head him off?"

"You really are satisfied to let yourself be tied and hogtied by this
gorilla?"

"You still do get very American, don't you, dear!"

"I hope so! Answer me! You're satisfied?"

"Maybe not. But what can I do?"

"Do you happen to know that your golden Lorenzo's real first name is
Oley?"

"Is it? That's good. It sounds strong and honest and yet not
puritanical; positively debonair. I was afraid--of course I was
reasonably sure that he wasn't a _geborener_ Lorenzo--I thought probably
he was a Hiram or a Jabez."

"Olivia, I don't think this hour calls for humor. You must have some
notion of how serious it is for me. Leave out jealousy and hurt pride: I
can choke those, but you can guess what it means to me to see a
well-bred woman in the red hands of that butcher--that cigar-waving
fancy gent!"

"That is my battle, or as Lorry _and_ you would say, 'That's _my_
lookout'!" Olivia was so defiant that she did not even trouble herself
to stress it greatly.

"Yes. It isn't easy. I couldn't slug that football hero--I would get
killed. There's no use my exposing him as a charlatan--everybody with
any scholarship guesses that already. But still, I certainly do not
intend to be the complaisant husband. I demand as strict a fidelity of
you as I do of myself. And I can't do the most natural and convenient
thing of all: tell you that I am disgusted, that I am not standing any
more, that I am through; because I am still almost completely hypnotized
by you--just _almost_, mind you! I don't know what to do."

Softly, but with the slippery softness of a false woman, she urged, "Oh,
forget it, my dear. It's the sort of thing that can't last."

"Not last--no, merely in the heart and brain and devoted faith, that's
all! Frankly, Olivia, I am trying to coach myself to feel easy in
cutting you out as I would any other vice that hurt me too much, and I
can't--not yet!"

With flippant impatience, she piped, "Have you finished now with your
fussing and clucking and general sad bewilderment over something that
ought to be obvious--that, as I keep telling you but you won't listen, a
flirtation like this just can't last? Or matter!"

"I've given you my warning."

"And I my warning that you will be extremely sorry, not for any crime
_I_ am committing but for your own subhuman, dry-as-dust,
school-principal nagging--with no heart in it and no humor. Oh, Hayden,
you admire our medieval gallants so much, you say, and then the minute
anything touches _you_, you flee from them back to your dry-codfish
Maine ancestors!" She was working herself up to the outraged and
innocent wrath that is nowhere so splendidly found as among the guilty.
"I have never lied to you or about you. Well, I am going now, and you
may do exactly whatever you please! _Arrivederci!_"

She flounced away and, without explanations, she did not come to dinner
that evening at the _pensione_.

So he cut and ran.




CHAPTER 20


He cut and ran. It was absurd not to have seen Rome; it was intolerable
to sit and twiddle his fingers and watch Olivia chase the dragon and be
only very annoyed by a St. George.

He drove to Rome through the pleasant hills and, as always, fell in love
with Siena almost as with Florence: the square, the cathedral, the
Palazzo Chigi. But Rome he found too buxom, too busy, too operatically
regal for love, and only fit for wonder, from the Vatican's sanctuary to
the Palatine Hill where he walked through 100 B.C.

He did perceive how grandly Rome was marching back to her ancient throne
as Queen of the World. Hard by an arch of the emperors he saw the jeeps
parked between the Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs; the traffic was more
alarming than Michigan Avenue; overhead were the airplanes which rarely
teased demure Florence; and in new and haughty cement buildings
breathlessly telephoning were California oilmen, Persian oilmen, British
airplane agents, Hungarian cinema producers, French television
engineers, Egyptian steamship agents, quiet Russians who loved an
evening alone with their pipes and books and one small atomic bomb,
Brazilian vendors of coffee and jazz symphonies, and Croat spies spying
on Bulgar spies spying on Turkish spies spying on Rome.

Not even the massive haughtiness of the antique temples and the imperial
baths more lightened Hayden's technical eye than the urbanity of avenues
like Via Veneto. Yet he was not annoyed that in Rome, with all the Holy
Year pilgrims, he had been unable to find a satisfactory hotel room, and
had gone with his topolino out to a village inn. After supper there he
sat on a bench in an arbor and looked at the green evening sky of Latium
and was homesick for the warm buoyancy of a new and terrible Olivia.

He returned to Florence and the Tre Corone late in the afternoon and
Olivia was there and unexpectedly welcoming. She tightened her arms
round him, she muttered, "So much, missed you so much."

He shakily tried to be carefree in a cheerful, "Let's go out and have
dinner this evening."

"Oh, darling, I am so, _so_ sorry, but I have an invitation to
dinner--didn't know when you were coming back--might have sent a girl a
post-card."

He did not ask, she did not say, from whom was her invitation. "I'll
make it up to you later!" she chirruped, with needless sweetness.

He dined alone, except for the table-to-table yells of the newest
generation of boarding-house pests, who were not, this time, large like
the Grenadier Sisters and were not females and were not American, but
three diminutive and aged males from Luxembourg. But it was all the same
thing, and they entertained him at dinner by yelping "Haf you seen the
Cenacolo in the convent of Sant' Onofrio? _No?_" and "Haf you seen the
tomb of Oddo Altoviti by Rovezzano? _No?_"

Olivia returned very late, still with no information volunteered about
her evening entertainment, and she was not so affectionate in saying
good-night to him as she had promised; she was mechanical about it and
slightly annoyed; and he went to sleep in a trance of emptiness and
futility.

Hayden had been going to one Dr. Stretti to keep watch on the headaches
he still had, now and then, from his motor smash, and had become
admiring and fond of that round, dumpy, very learned and skillful
physician with his mouse of a mustache. He was not only Hayden's friend
and his doctor but, Italian-wise, his doctor _because_ he was a subtle
and understanding friend. On the morning after his return from Rome,
Hayden's head was one round pain held together by his skull, and he
hastened to Stretti, who assured him that this was but eyestrain from
the glare of the road from Rome. He bathed Hayden's eyes and laughed at
his tension and generally did medical magic on him.

Said Dr. Stretti, "My brother, who is also an architect, in Turin, and
who is very curious about American methods, will be in Florence just for
today. Could you come to a very plain supper at my flat this evening and
meet him?"

Hayden had made no definite plan with Olivia for dinner this coming
evening, and indignantly, with the injustice typical of all particularly
fond lovers, he thought, "I'll teach that young woman a lesson--leaving
me flat last evening, my first evening back in Florence," and he said to
the doctor heartily, "Shall be very happy to."

Dr. Stretti's apartment was in one of the long, newish, solemn,
residence streets out near the Cascine; on a fourth floor reached by a
particularly adventurous self-service elevator in which you felt, when
you pressed the button for your floor, that the cage would fly to pieces
instantly. But the apartment itself was like that of any well-to-do
doctor in Newlife or in New York, except that there were rather more
upholstered chairs around small tables in the living room, and more
poison-green upholstered armchairs with doilies, and books in three
languages, and far more paintings by contemporaries.

The architect-brother, whose English was as struggling as Hayden's
Italian, gave him a small homesickness by confessing exactly such
struggles with clients and contractors and unions and politicians as
Hayden knew at home: the same newly rich who wanted marble bathrooms for
the price of tile, and tile bathrooms for the price of linoleum. He
glowed at Hayden and took him in. So did the doctor; so did Mrs.
Stretti, though she spoke no English at all. But she assured Hayden,
with more kindness than strict factualness, that he was now speaking
Italian like a _professore_.

The whole family took him in. In their cordiality and ease with a
stranger, they seemed to him more like Americans than any nationals he
had met since he had sailed. He felt at home, as after dinner he drank
small glasses of _vino santo_ and agreed with them that, yes, they would
indeed like Hollywood and the Grand Canyon.

But of them all, one had more importance than just well-mannered
amiability, and that was the daughter, Tosca Stretti, a girl of twenty
who was all eyes and shine of dark hair and slimness and youth and
trustfulness. She was constantly turning to her uncle, her parents, with
affection and admiration; she loved life and loved her family. And,
without having any English, she could say to Hayden that she looked upon
him as a man and a remarkable one.

An aggressive American woman would have jeered of Tosca, "Sure, you men
like 'em submissive, like 'em as slaves. This little Italian would clean
your shoes and you'd love it!" Yes, Tosca probably _would_ clean them,
if there should be need, but devotedly, with dignity, not submissively.
Without discussion she would expect to love and ardently to be loved.

That night, abed, Hayden did not think of his colleague, the architect,
but of Tosca. It would be fun to be with her, to teach her English, to
show her his America. Why hadn't he such a girl, soft and trusting and
yet as sharply capable as her mother, and not an inspiring heartache
like Olivia?

Why not? By coaxing Tosca to come home with him, he would have in the
stability of home that strangeness and flavor which he had needed in
Newlife. All next day he thought of Tosca and the thought was to him a
soft comfort which he needed after reading a note which Olivia had left
for him when she went off, early, to the Laurentian Library--or to
Lundsgard's boudoir office:

    I had assumed we would be having dinner together last evening
    but you skipped off with no explanations. That is too bad
    because _this_ evening _I_ have a date & shall not see you.

    O. L.

His inward comment had all of lovers' logic. "But you can't blame her.
But I'm not going to stand for being stood up but _she_--oh yes, _she_
is to desert me whenever she feels like it but I'm to stand by all the
time. But naturally she was miffed--you can't blame her."

Olivia and he had, without any special agreement, built up a habit of
festival evening together each Saturday, with restaurant dinner and a
movie or a concert, but on this warm, resonant Saturday evening in the
Italian late spring, he dined drearily, alone, at the Tre Corone,
cheered only by the thought of how trustingly Tosca Stretti had smiled
at him. He was at his coffee when Perpetua came to inform him that a
"Signorina Altici" was there to see him, waiting in the _salotto_.

Tosca? Why?

He went hurriedly and on a couch, her hat put aside, in a fawn suit that
seemed much worn and leather sandals that certainly were worn, tired,
defiant, appealing, forlorn, familiar, stranger than any Calabria
peasant, pert-nosed and freckled and redheaded, was Miss Roxanna
Eldritch of Newlife, Colorado.

                 *        *        *        *        *

But mostly, she was very quiet.

She had sprung up to greet him; he had galloped forward and kissed her.
She was a chunk of Home miraculously set down before him: the cheerful,
overcrowded streets; cottonwoods and willows by the river bank; swiftly
grown skyscrapers; the office and the club where he was not a bookish
nonentity studying in an alien and indifferent land, but a man, a boss,
a friend, a citizen, a person of heart and welcome, and in it all a
jolliness that could never warm an Olivia in her delicate savor of
life--nor even a Tosca conceivably so dear. And this home soil was his
own, without explanations or working at it. In a jungle he had seen,
startling, his own familiar flag, and Roxy and he yelled at each other
with fond tribal cries.

The more he looked at her, the more she seemed changed. She was as
fetching as ever but she looked down at the floor more than at him, and
there was dejection in her shoulders. And, "Might as well get it over,"
said Roxy. "I've plumb flopped. Been fired."

"How come?"

"Oh, partly loafing and dissipation, I guess, though I did a lot of
work, too. But it has slowly been borne in on me that the bright kid
from the home town, who thinks it would just be too cute if she could be
the big noise as an authority on Europe and tell the home folks all
about the hobbies of the dethroned kings and interview a few prime
ministers, and throw in a few explanations of the devaluation of the
pound--she isn't so hot when she gets into competition with the veterans
that have been here, off and on, twenty years and speak five languages
and actually read a book once.

"Funny but they simply won't see the light and obligingly hand over
their prestige to me and go to work in the jute factory--along with
their wives and kids. The old meanies! I sent home oceans of copy and
first my managing editor used a lot and even got a few pieces
syndicated, but I guess the novelty went bump, and little while ago, he
tactfully wrote canning me, with a warm-hearted suggestion--the old
sweetheart--that I _might_ get my old job back if I hustled to Newlife,
but quick!

"But now I'm here, I want to see more of Europe, maybe Greece and Spain,
and then Israel and Egypt. And I _am_ going to work--work like a worker
and not like a Bohemian amateur lady journalist who gets busy only when
the bars are closed and the handsome young vice-consul won't answer his
phone.

"Honestly! Getting bounced was an awful shock to me. I guess most
American women, even _some_ of those that have been quite a long time on
a real job, still think that their sacred womanhood entitles them to do
anything they want to, arrive late and loaf on the job they're paid for,
and any boss that kicks is no gentleman--never was brought up at
anybody's mother's knee. Shock? I'll say! It made me think, 'Rox, my
man, maybe that managing editor wants to print written writings and not
your charming intentions and your sorrel hair!'

"And I guess, even before the assassination, I'd had about enough of the
bar-to-bar girlish lady tourists of fifty, the students of singing who
never sing anything but 'Just pickle my bones in alcohol,' and all the
artistic young men from Wyoming and the Bronnix that wear nasty little
beards as sandwich boards to advertise their otherwise imperceptible
talents, beards like young alley goats and flannel shirts like
zoot-suiters.

"While I'm over here, if it's not too inconvenient, I would still like
to meet one French Frenchman and one Italian Italian. You know--quaint
but almost as interesting as the sixteenth young American this month to
found a Little Magazine dedicated to freedom, the new arts and gin.

"I admit I've had me quite a time with these drunks, but still and all,
I guess, along with my Uncle Joe, who was the prize drunk in Butte, I've
got something in me of Gramma O'Larrick, who ran a boarding-house and
sent seven sons to study for the ministry.

"So I've come down here to Florence, partly because it's not too noisy
and partly, I'll admit, because you were here, and you always were kind.
But I don't intend to sponge on you in any way, Hay, get that clear,
money or time or anything. I just want your assurance that I'm still
potentially human, even if I am a flop!"

He cried, "_How_ human! Now, right away, I'll take you out for a dinner
that would make Reverend Gowelly--remember the Prohibition raider, back
home?--throw up his dusty hat and kiss the bartender."

"Thanks--some night--tomorrow if you'd like--but I've had a rick of
spaghetti already tonight."

"Tomorrow we'll look for a room for you, Roxy--maybe here in this
refined junction depot."

"Thanks, I've already found a room in a dump across the river. I asked a
tourist agency. Iron cot and a kitchen chair and a nice calico curtain
for wardrobe; 327 yards from the bathroom. Honestly, I won't bother
you...."

"You couldn't, my dear!"

"Oh, couldn't I! Give me credit! No, all I want is some advice about
getting a job here, for a girl that speaks no known language...."

If Hayden was, a moment, inattentive, it was because he knew that Olivia
might come in and find him affectionately seated on the couch beside the
not inconspicuous charms of Roxy. Would it not be discreet to explain
Roxy before Olivia should see her--to take her out, now, to the security
of a caf? But he turned defiant; he rebuked himself for his sour
timidity. Roxy was beyond debate a tempting wench, but he was doing
nothing of which to be ashamed--not like Olivia and her bounding Lorry.

"Let's see, Roxy. There's a Mrs. Dodsworth here, important in the
Colony, and I remember her saying something about being a trustee of an
American school for girls that's just being organized. I'll phone her
this evening. And now--more of you, my dear! Have you lost your heart to
any of your young geniuses with the tarred-and-feathered chins?"

"No, not much. A young female wandering around Europe alone learns to be
pretty glacial when she gets picked up."

"That happen often?"

"Continuously! French drugstore-cowboys and Norwegian artists and Swiss
professors and American G.I.'s and American lieutenant colonels. You do
get tired of their 'How about it?' smirk. We all used to think that it
was the funniest thing in the world that our great-grammas, if they
could afford it, couldn't travel without a chaperone in black sateen,
but how I would have loved a chaperone, mitts and evil mind and all, in
Europe!"

"Why don't you go home, Roxy?"

"Why should I?"

"It seems natural to be home, where you understand people by instinct,
understand why they do the particular things they do do and do say--dumb
or dreary or noble and silly."

"Then why don't you go, Hay?"

"Oh, I've really settled down contentedly to study. And, uh, I have a
girl I'm somewhat interested in..."

"Oh!"

"Two, in fact: a splendid American scholar, and an adorable Italian
girl."

"Two? Then it's all right."

"I want you to..."

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, Mr. Chart, and me too, I'm just dying to meet them,
both of them, all sixteen of them--there's nothing I enjoy more than
meeting my gemmun-friends' lovely girl friends, except hearing you rave
about them.... Over my dead body, Chart!"

"You still haven't given me much reason for your staying on in Europe."

"Oh, I'm just another of these American girl sparrows you see hopefully
hopping along every road in Europe, afraid to chirp. We don't know what
we want but we all believe that, without doing any special work to get
it, we'll be smitten with glory and suddenly find some romantic peak
where we'll shine. Get on the stage or be what the beginners call
'penwomen' or ballet dancers or art-photographers. Or get married, but
only to a tall, gently tragic, gray-eyed painter, with black hair gone
faintly gray--guy named Peter or Michael or..."

"Or Lorenzo?"

"You guessed it. And I suppose I'm typical of all those young women, who
won't be patient, who find it easier to jump on a train and skip on to
some new capital than to stick in one place and make solid friends."

"I don't think you are, Roxy. You've had a fling, but I know you'll get
set. Sufficiently."

"Thank you, dear. I like to have your approval, more than anybody's,
even if it is a little qualified and stingy."

He felt that he must go on admitting that he carried an Olivian
passport. He was not going to sneak across the frontiers. He did his
duty by a pleasantly argumentative, "But I know that not all you
American girls in Europe are the vacuous kind you take so much sadistic
trouble in beating up. You aren't. Neither is my--young woman living
here at the Tre Corone, a professional historical scholar--Dr. Lomond,
Dr. Olivia Lomond."

Roxy burst. "Dr. Olivia Lomond! Oh, my foot to Dr. Lomond! A vinegary,
sexless, flat-chested old maid carting you around to tearooms and
reading Ruskin aloud! I knew I should never have let you come to Europe
alone! You were quite a lad in Newlife, whenever you got sore on the
tennis court. A plague of bot flies and Texas jiggers on Doc-tor Lomond!
That dried up arroyo!"

"No, not exactly dried-up!" He tenderly took Roxy's hand; the hand of
his dear little sister, his chronic niece, his oldtime enduring friend.
"I very much want you to meet her and appreciate her...."

"Neither do I!"

He was stroking her hand, feeling slightly more than avuncular, when a
menace trembled in the air and made him look up. Olivia was just inside
the room, watching them, and as Hayden saw her Borgia eyes, they said,
almost audibly, "Ah, I _see_! And you the species of camel who has been
demanding that I give up my innocent colleague, Professor Lundsgard!"

He did have sense enough not to throw Roxy's hand at Olivia and jump up
guiltily; he did have the genius to go on holding that hand comfortably
and to purr, "So glad you came, Olivia. This is none other than Roxanna
Eldritch that I've told you so much about--great friend of Caprice, and
I've known her, bless her dear neighborly heart, since she was a baby."

Before Roxy could even get started, Olivia fired:

"That does make quite a long, _long_ period of knowing Miss Uh,
_doesn't_ it!"

But there proved, then, to be nothing wrong with Roxy's artillery.




CHAPTER 21


They were both rare, thought Hayden: Olivia, crystal framed in ivory and
silver; Roxanna, rose-crystal rimmed with burnished copper. If they
could be friends! He blundered--but perhaps no cardinal secretary of
state could have been altogether diplomatic in this crisis: "I hope you
two charmers are going to be close friends. You're certainly the best
friends _I_ have!"

Olivia said to him sweetly, "Are we also to be close friends with your
dear Tosca Stretti?"

"Now what the devil do you know about Tosca? A delightful girl
but _how_..."

"You forget Florence is a small town. Lorry Lundsgard went in to see Dr.
Stretti today about a lame wrist--he strained it years ago in a great
football battle, and the doctor told him that you and his daughter had
hit it off wonderfully--I think he is quite hopeful of her having an
escorted tour to the wonders of Colorado, some day before long!
Congratulations--to you, I mean, not to the poor young lady!"

Just when Hayden was bewildered by this foul attack, Olivia was
temporarily reinforced by the enemy, Roxanna, who tittered, "Who is this
little number you've been keeping up your sleeve, without letting Mother
know, Hay? Doing the young Italian wrecks along with the old Italian
ruins, are you?"

He stated, with just the ludicrous touchy dignity that both Olivia and
Roxy had meant to stir up in him, "Miss Stretti is a young girl I met
casually at dinner. She doesn't even speak English."

"I _see_!" said Olivia and "_I_ see!" said Roxy, with feminine derision
that wiped him out. And so, having punished him for introducing them to
each other, the two puritanical and jeeringly righteous ladies turned
murderously upon each other.

"You're not staying long in Florence are you, Miss Eldritch?" Olivia
said caressingly.

("And she pretended first not to remember Roxy's name!")

But Roxy snatched off the first skirmish. She put on, not the damning,
insinuating cordiality of Olivia but the more dangerous pose of never
posing; she was as simple and frank as Satan. "I really don't know how
long I'll be here, Dr. Lomond. Oh, yes, I know your name so well. Hay
was telling me what a fine scholar you are, and how you've helped him,
the poor darling, helpless amateur, understand something of Florence.
But me, I'm simply a sketchy newspaper hack, and I reckon I'll be lucky
if I ever as much as learn Florence's last name."

"Last...? Oh, yes--yes... You'll be going on to Rome, no doubt.
I'm sure you'll want to take maybe four or five days in Rome. It's an
extremely important focal point."

"Yes, I think I read that somewhere," said Roxy, most plain-faced and
obedient. "You feel so, too? Then I'll have to take a quick look at the
place, I guess."

More sweetly than ever, from Olivia: "I suppose you're staying at the
Grand or the Excelsior, here in Florence? A poor student on a
scholarship, like me--I confess I do envy you rich journalists."

Roxy didn't take it; she didn't blurt that she was poor and jobless; she
said rustically, "I guess I'm just a lucky girl. But I don't know as
I'll stay on at the Excelsior. My private bathroom is pretty fair
there--black marble and a crocus-yellow tub, but I don't know--they
couldn't give me a dressing room with a big-enough toilet table to set
out all my cosmetic bottles--you do get into such a naughty habit of
buying cut-glass flasks in Paris, so amusing to amble along the Rue de
la Paix and the dear old Champs and pick up exclusive perfumes. Of
course, in my profession, having to meet prime ministers and generals
and atomic scientists and handsome movie stars so intimately, and
_really_ important historians, I have to have a decent place to chat
with them."

Olivia was not routed. "Naturally, my dear. Such interesting, important
work. And you shouldn't feel especially inferior with them, or so
humble."

"_I--don't!_"

("Are two women who like the same man, or who have opposite political
faiths, always bitches to each other when they meet? Or merely
usually?")

"Quite right, quite right, Miss Eldritch. Perhaps these dignitaries get
something of a fresh, breezy point of view from meeting you. And now,
Hayden, I must trot off to my room. The Ministry of Education, in Rome,
has asked for my opinion on some secret documents about Charles VIII
that have just been discovered. I'll leave you and Miss Eldritch to
enjoy talking about your neighbors in Newlife. If I don't see you again,
Miss Eldritch, I hope you will have a very enjoyable journey to Rome.
Good night!"

                 *        *        *        *        *

"That woman," said Roxanna, "that woman--that woman is--she's a
knockout. She knows how to make up that mahogany skin of hers so it
looks slick. Even with a crooked nose and too small a mouth and a
wrinkly forehead and ears like a rabbit, she manages to look quite
beautiful."

"Now you..."

"And without any training except bossing a schoolroom for years and
years, she makes like real royalty. The boarding-house queen! What a
lucky boy you are! When she gets you back home, the Bradbins will take
to her like a duck to water. She has their same stunt of making you feel
that if you disagree with them, you're not only a fool--you ought to see
a doctor."

Hayden was tired of their war; he had seen only too much of such
delightful business in Caprice's opinion of every pretty woman newly
arrived in Newlife. He said, affectionately, "Roxy, I appeal to you as
an old friend and neighbor..."

"Yes?"

"To shut up."

"Oh!"

"I'm extraordinarily fond of you, and always have been, and I hope to
give you a good time seeing Florence--with the assistance of Olivia, who
knows more about it than sixteen tourists like you and me put together.
So when you and she get the posing and prancing and pawing the earth
over, we'll all be happy and almost grown-up."

"Okay, Chief!"

"And I'll introduce you to her friend, and mine, Lorenzo Lundsgard,
who's a scholar and a smart lecturer and a football hero and a Hollywood
actor and a big handsome brute and a sophisticated European and a
friendly Yankee all put together--and he loves redheads."

"That vision," stated Roxanna, "you got out of a book. He's Abelard and
Heloise, that's who he is, and he's dead. I've seen his tomb in
Pre-Lachaise." She rose.

"I'll take you home, Roxy. I have a little car."

"No, honestly, sweetie; I told you! I'm not going to sponge on you. I
want to walk home and begin to learn this town. All I want is a tip on a
job. Will you ask Mrs. What's-her-name about it tomorrow?"

"Dodsworth? I certainly shall. Roxy, it's nice to have you here!
Extremely!"

"Thanks, dear. And I'll quit picking on your Mexican sugar pie."

"Splendid."

"It was too easy! Good night, Wonderful!"

                 *        *        *        *        *

Olivia came to his room that evening and attacked at once.

"Who is this little fly-by-night Eldritch piece, _really_, aside from
your having known her--as a clerk in the Five-and-Ten, I imagine--in
your Colorado wilderness?"

"You know perfectly that she was a friend of my wife and myself, just a
little younger, and she is a newspaperman of standing."

"Have you been keeping her up your sleeve all the time you've been in
Europe?"

"You know I haven't." He was grave, unsquabbling. "I have always liked
her and honored her. She is gallant and a little touching in her
ambition to be something more than a jolly pirate. No, I do not plan to
flirt with her. No, I have not done so in the past--except in that she
is so radiant and well rounded and highly touchable that _no_ normal man
could look at her without being a little fatuous and lively.... Oh,
Olivia, it's hard enough for us to stay infatuated without asking some
outsider to come in and think up good ways of making us miserable!"

"That's what I _say_! This Eldritch number!"

"I didn't mean her. I meant Lorenzo--Lancelot. I do worship you--I
think. Don't let's let _anybody_ come between us! Let's quit this
childish, 'You broke that engagement so I'll break this one and teach
you a lesson.' Both of us! Let's be content with love. Let's not tamper
with the gift of God!"

Instantly she rose to her passionate affection of the past, crying, "No!
We mustn't! We've been so close! Oh, people always become traitors to
love. It's so simple and tremendous that their mean little minnows of
souls can't stand the glory!"

Despite the danger of the practically ubiquitous Mrs. Manse, despite the
charms of Roxanna and the manly Mr. Lundsgard and Tosca Stretti, they
embraced each other with hungry sighing, almost weeping over the perils
they had now conquered.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Next morning, less shining of wing and slightly irritable when Perpetua
was late bringing in his coffee and rolls and marmalade, Hayden wondered
why it might not be an inspired notion to get--to try to get--Olivia to
hand over her job in Lundsgard's office to Roxanna, together with all
her rights, privileges and interests in the said Lundsgard.

But that would be a dirty trick to play on Roxy, aside from the fact
that Olivia would see them both damned first. So he telephoned to Mrs.
Samuel Dodsworth.




CHAPTER 22


Mrs. Dodsworth was a woman equally kind and efficient. For Roxanna she
could find no school post but she did ferret out a position as
chauffeur, reader, masseuse, servant-firer and listener to anecdotes
about deceased spouse and successful nephews, to the rich Mrs. Orlando
Weepswell, and there Roxanna had a suite and a maid and a slight
paralysis of the auditory nerves.

Roxy, with Hayden, met Nat Friar, at a bar, and the two missioners of
American irreverence formed a pious alliance. As Roxy expressed it,
"Uncle Nat and I sure clicked."

To Nat, beauty was a dynamic force, culture was more revolutionary than
war, the product of the artist (though not the artist himself and his
mistresses and bank account) was to be studied with reverence, and the
more he held this gospel, the more impatiently did Nat hear the adorers
who gabbled or gurgled or wheezed about the arts; who capitalized Beauty
and Culture along with their social positions.

If Roxanna could never have Nat Friar's knowledge nor his gruff
reverences, she had even more horrible synonyms for the word "fake," and
Nat was grateful. When Hayden went by himself to Nat's villa, he often
found Roxanna perched there, cross-legged on the couch, being cheery
with Nat and Ada Baker.

In Florence, Roxanna, being in a state of repentance and poverty, did
not see any of Sadie Lurcher's international set, glittering like broken
glass edges, sharp as broken glass, unpleasant under the teeth as broken
glass. They do not find Florence "smart," nor do they often remain. For
the most part, Hayden judged, Roxanna associated with that borderline
assortment, the "American Students," of whom some were frugal and
studious, and some were shaggy, drunken, late-walking and floridly
abnormal or given to a confusion about private interests in wives.

In general they were less noisy and self-advertising than their cousins
in Paris, and Hayden felt that Roxanna was a colt now broken of
loco-weed.

His introduction of his quasi-cousin, Roxy, to Lundsgard was operatic
and a success.

He had invited Roxy, Lundsgard and Olivia to dine with him at the
Cantina de' Pazzi (you will not find it under that name), in the
basement of the venerable Palazzo Suoli. Under massive arches, the
basement, clattery with dishes and the delighted chatter of tourists,
wanders off into circular stone cubicles which hint of ancient tortures.
The walls, scurfy with old blood, are coy now with travel posters,
bull-fighter costumes from London sweatshops and paintings of carnivals
in Venice--you were never quite sure whether it was Venice, California,
or its bawdy older sister. To complete the Cantina's charm for tourists,
the management had ordered that bread sticks and free colored post cards
be displayed on the tables nightly before the guests arrived.

As Hayden and Roxanna waited there--she had refused more than one
cocktail--they saw Olivia and Lundsgard, coming in from their office
work. Roxy's lips lifted in an arch of delight at Lundsgard, and she
crooned, "Oh, buy him for me, will you, Cousin Hay?"

And truly this Viking Lorenzo was something to enchant a maiden:
broad-shouldered and his face all one beam of loving intelligence and
conscious power and masculine resolution. He was hatless, his heroic
head well back and his flaxen hair a coronet. With his sports jacket and
gray open shirt, he had a purple and yellow Florentine silk scarf and,
as he came near, on one masterful hand Roxy must have seen a vast opal
ring.

"Golly, that's a lot of man in one consignment," sighed Roxanna.

Olivia was determined to be agreeable. She gurgled to her enemy, "How's
the job going?" and even called her "Roxanna." And Lundsgard as
boisterously greeted her, "Welcome to our nice little city, Miss
Eldritch and, speaking as a veteran here, may I announce that it hasn't
seen anything cuter than you since Dante tried to make Be-_at_-triss.
Roxanna, we _moriturus_, salute thee!"

("Olivia is right; he really will popularize learning in the States,
though of course he'll kill it on the way.")

Roxanna was gushing to Lundsgard, "You don't look as if Culture and
Florence have stunted your boyish growth!"

He smiled on her as though she were a poor but worthy woman to whom he
was giving thousands of dollars, dollar by dollar. "Roxy, the sneaking
fact is that I'm not cultured. I can teach that stuff, because I like
college youngsters and I realize that all they want, or ever need, is to
get a smattering of art and history, so when they become docs or lawyers
or manufacturers, they won't look ignorant. But I'm just a funnel, and
with all your interviews, you've probably got ten times as much real
inside dope on these flyblown European countries as I'll ever get."

Roxanna answered as benevolently as he.

"Olivia was only too darn kind. I've never really done any big
interviews--just real-life stories like interviews with Paris bartenders
on do Yankee tourists prefer _vol au vent_ or pickled pigs' feet. No,
you're the goods on the culture--apparently."

Till now Roxy had been a true woman canvasser for the Lorry Party, and
Olivia had difficulty in looking companionable when Lundsgard turned a
shoulder on her and leaned into Roxanna. But with noticeably less
reverence, Roxanna went on and Hayden thought he smelled malice:

"But you haven't been a professor all the time, have you, Lorenzo?"

"No, no. Lotta strings to my bow."

"You were in Hollywood?"

"Don't know as the L. A. papers raved much about it, but yes, I did a
little ham acting."

"I'll bet all the girls hounded you for autographs."

This was pleasing to the great Lorenzo and astonishing to Hayden. He had
never thought of that. He had never known any one whose autograph was
sought after, who was so beautiful or clever that those fetish-seekers
and magnified clinkers and general nuisances called autograph-hounds
would ever course after him. But Lorenzo took his own tremendousness for
granted, and with genial democracy he admitted:

"Oh, they used to ask for my fist now and then."

"_Little_ girls, I meant--junior misses' size--twelve to fourteen."

Lorenzo was huffy. "No, not just junior misses! I've had some doggone
beautiful, rich women ask me for an autograph!"

"I'll bet. Seriously, Lorenzo, I was going to ask you for one myself and
please, pretty please, give me one now before I forget it! If it
wouldn't bore you? I want to keep it with Gene Tunney's and Andr Gide's
and all those."

Hayden noted that the sheet which Roxy managed to find in her handbag
and present to Lundsgard for his signature was a bill which did not look
receipted. Lundsgard signed it with large, rolling L's and looked
delighted. Roxy purred. Olivia looked sour, then tried to look amused,
and in a great-lady manner she chuckled "Lorry, I'm afraid I missed
something. It never occurred to me to ask for your autograph--except as
I do have your initials signed to so many gay little notes."

"I'll bet you have!" snarled Roxanna and went over to Lundsgard
complete.

They agreed that they were shrewd, generous, swift-moving Americans,
with no nonsense. When Olivia tried to be lofty with their lowness and,
to keep the debate fair, Hayden joined Olivia, the two hard-riding
highwaymen teased them for the "solemncholy way you listen to a lot of
snooty French and English and German cranks and fall for it when they
claim you can write better with a pen than you can with a typewriter."

Lundsgard seemed to be expanding with appreciation, and he had a good
deal of buoyant hydrogen in his chest to expand. Roxy was his pal.
Perhaps he had been bored by Olivia's elegance of old ivory, and bored
even by the fierce, channeled ardor with which she could vary her level
coldness; perhaps, for a time, he might find the tartness of the rosy
apple that was Roxanna spicier than the richness of Olivia's pear. So
Hayden meditated, but he himself found Roxy's generous enthusiasm of
voice somewhat flat and loud and quacking in competition with Olivia's
deep melodies.

It was when Lundsgard was most admiring himself in Roxy's mirror and
most enjoying an advertisement of his friendliness with Prince Ugo
Tramontana that the slippery minx twisted away.

"Oh, yes," confided Lundsgard, "I've become quite a buddy of His
Highness and I like..."

"A non-royal prince is not a Highness," Roxy cackled. "Don't be like
that, and let 'em see the patched overalls you still wear under the
luscious doctoral robe, dear."

"Why, you little stinker! Me--overalls? Lissen! I don't want to boast,
but I pay my tailor in Hollywood two hundred and seventeen bucks a
suit!" roared the outraged Lorenzo. "And--you and your alleged knowledge
of protocol and titles and that junk! Let me tell you Ugo is a mighty
good intimate of mine and I hang around that grand old palazzo of his
like I would around the Faculty Club and--everything's worn out and the
velvet worn and those gilt mirrors got liver patches on 'em, but he's
got more doggone medieval paintings and manuscripts by Poliziano (I
guess it is) and old swords than you can shake a stick at, but he thinks
I'm swell, and he says I got what he calls a new vision, and he likes to
try his theories out on me. He _said_ so!"

Roxanna restored amity and even increased their alliance by bubbling,
"And I'll bet that's true. He knows you aren't tied by a lot of bum
traditions. Sure. He's glad to have a smart scholar that at the same
time's husky and _human_ like you around."

Nobly pleased, Professor Lundsgard said modestly, "It seems like he
does."

Roxanna did not strike again till after dinner, when Lundsgard
flamboyantly lighted a huge Havana, and she muttered, "My, my, what a
big man that cigar is smoking! I'll bet Prince Ugo gets to panting when
you smoke those El Imperialses around the palace!"

For once, Olivia giggled and Lundsgard looked wounded, but again it did
not take much of Roxy's gamine art to restore him to self-admiration, to
delight in his little pal.

Hayden thought, "What a stupid, humorless, touchy oaf that man is! Once
Olivia's fling is over--and I think perhaps it is now, when she's seen
him tossed around by a crazy juggler like Roxy--I'll be able to snatch
Olivia back from him, and I can hold her--for always? I suppose so."

He was sorry for Lundsgard, driven in Roxanna's tinsel reins. Perhaps
Olivia could not avenge Evelyn Hoxler, but Roxanna would do so, blithely
and tenderly and viciously. Poor Lorenzo, shaking a sceptre hung with
jester's bells!

"I think we should all be going home," said Olivia, tightly.

"See you to your bachelor digs, Rox?" said Lundsgard, the deft man of
the world.

"Uh-huh," said Roxy.

"_Hay_-den! Let's go!" said Olivia.




CHAPTER 23


Hayden, especially loaned by kindness of Dr. Olivia Lomond for one
evening, was dining with Roxanna among the students at Camillo's. He was
not pleased by the contemptuous hardness which Roxanna seemed again to
be putting on. She was slightly too showy, in her old green dress with a
white turban possibly modeled on the streamlined yet haremlike Marchesa
Valdarno and a string of jade beads; she was slightly too harsh and
ambition-vaunting as she rattled, "I'm getting my second wind. I think
before long I'll feel like leaving your nice little Florence."

"What do you mean by 'little'! It's even bigger than St. Paul,
Minnesota, or Omaha, Nebraska. Why, it's about as big as Denver!"

"Our Nathan Hale! I am sorry I have but one life to give for studying
the _predella_ on the right of the third picture of the altar piece in
the third chapel of the left aisle of the sixty-seventh most important
ecclesiastical structure in our sacred Flow-rence! You're as bad a faker
as Lorry Lundsgard!"

"Oh. How are you and your Dr. Tarzan progressing?"

"I may give him a tumble, if I don't get the hell out of this backwater.
But as I was saying, pretty soon I may get going now and leave my set of
nursing-bottles for Mother Weepswell, and do a lot of freelance stories.
Have I got ideas now! A piece about young Italian noblemen, like Roberto
Tramontana, who're busted and who've cheerfully gone to work in garages
or any other honest labor. Heh? Heh? How about it, Uncle Hayden?"

"Roxy darling, don't get too enterprising again. I like you more when
you're gentle."

("Is this young woman nothing more than Caprice with a passport?")

"And I like you better when you're more brash and neighborly, Hay.
You're in danger of becoming another of these erudite old gentlemen
living lonely in a villino, so dreadfully mild and well-washed and
reticent, knowing all about some old hellhound like Malatesta Baglioni
and nothing about President Truman; a reservoir that has all the facts
and don't know what any of them signify. Uncle Nat Friar but wrapped in
oiled silk. And worse, you could lose all your democracy here. Oh, you
never were a guy to run out and kiss the postman or make the hired girl
have her supper with the folks, but you did think the postman and hired
girl might get married and have a kid who'd be a better lawyer than
_your_ kid--if you'd only had one, you and Caprice, poor darling!

"But here, you talk of _contadini_, of farmers, as if they couldn't ever
be educated like you and me. And like all Americans, you always overdo.
Talk about me overdoing the hustle! You feel you can't monkey with
Italian history at all unless you become a professor of it, which _Gott
soll behten_, you never will. If you were building bungalows with
sweety-pie yellow bathrooms, you'd dream about waffles. If you're
learning Italian, you try to talk same to Heinie tourists and Svensk
trippers. Okay--but don't overdo your underdoing our ole American
democracy, pal!

"You're in _much_ more peril than I am with my play at dissipation,
which I can chuck so easy. _Your_ danger is virtuous prissiness, and
that's a nastier vice than double martinis. Pete's sake, Hay, don't
listen to your old Italian gorillas roaring so you can't hear the big,
sweet hell of a roar our Americans have always put up, too:

"Casey Jones at the throttle and the old engine moanin'! Bound away for
the Wide Missourai! Banjo on my knee. Frankie and Johnny
root-a-toot-tootin'! In the evening by the moonlight, the old folks
singing! Boy! Am I proud of our own troubadours! And you forgetting them
for English skylarks and some dinky little thin song by Petrarch about a
girl he never even made!"

Vigorously, from Hay, "I don't forget them! Never! Sitting in San
Miniato, looking at the altar-screen, I caught myself humming _Casey
Jones_! Besides, you're a true Westerner; you've heard some Old Timers
sing hallelujahs. But most American kids today have only learned our
ballads, rejoiced in our own tradition, when they've heard 'em--if they
_could_ hear 'em over the smack of their chewing gum, on the radio,
rollicked out by some ferocious Nevada thousand-dollar-a-week singing
cowboy who was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and learned his Native
Western American melodies in the glee club at the Southern New Jersey
School of Accountancy. Or the fat man who gets up and sings 'em with the
soloist at a New York night club--he's a Native Cal-y-for-ny-an born in
Lithuania!

"Besides--now, for the first time, America belongs to the world, not
just to America, and Casey Jones has to take his chance against the
skylark and Laura and Roland and Nicolette and all of them, and not
complain, as you do _for_ him, if Franois Villon drowns him out!
Casey's been a sensitive plant too long--sheltered by the Wide
Missourai!"

"Okay, okay! Slap Walt Whitman up against Gilbert and Sullivan and see
if he's so cute. But if you're going to be so darned world-conscious,
Hay, you got to get out of Florence--I mean, the Limey-Yankee Florence.
It's such a hick village! It gossips worse than Bison Park ever thought
of! Tessie Weepswell and Sam Dodsworth and even Mrs. D. gossip about you
all day long. Will you marry Olivia? (And may she develop the bots!) If
you stop on the Tornabuoni and talk to some old rabbit for two minutes
at noon, the Colony has complete details by one-thirty and talks about
your new romance all afternoon.

"And then that ratty bunch of American pansies that sit at the same bar,
every afternoon, out on the sidewalk, exhibiting their beauties to any
visiting firemen fairies that may happen to hit town. Provincial? Good
Lord, those serious young men of talent are so busy, just like the gang
at the Newlife Bonanza Poolroom, talking all day, that they don't even
get around to see the Uffizi Gallery once a month.

"No, my boy. You either disappear into _Italian_ Florence--I've heard
there used to be one--or else go on to Paris or Zurich or Newlife,
Colorado, or one of those universal cities. And take your O-ly-vya with
you. And _try_ not to push her off an Alp on the way!"

Hayden said, "Well..."

Roxanna might, he thought uncomfortably, be right. He might drift here
into a negligent snobbishness in which only persons with
art-vocabularies or titles or official posts would seem to master. He
ought, he thought, to see more of Roxy and get more actively into
soul-saving; save hers from the suave brutality of female
careerism--save himself from the fussy brutality of damning Perpetua
every time she moved a book on his reading table.

To an ironic Olivia, late that evening, after a good-natured but
uncompromising parting with Roxanna, he explained that he really had to
be neighborly with his old friend Roxy and not let the poor waif stumble
into alien pitfalls alone.

"You mean she'll land softer if you stumble with her?" said Olivia. "Go
ahead.... Heavens, Hayden! Do you suppose for one moment I could be
jealous of a street Arab like your Roxanna? Don't insult me! Spend _all_
your evenings--and nights, too--with her, if it amuses you."

Olivia was too willing. He wondered, a thousand times, if the high
spirits of Roxanna had not already enticed Lundsgard away from Olivia;
if that lady, born to Byzantine courts and trafficking for Hellenic
manuscripts in Cyprus, was becoming silkenly double-faced.

As a matter of fact his two or three dinners alone with Roxanna were but
mildly devoted to her endangered morals. It proved that Roxy had, as
most diners-out had not, as Olivia sniffily had not, his own trick of
telling himself exclamatory stories about all of his fellow diners at a
restaurant, and that was a trick well shared and inducing common
excitement. At the Oliviero, most cosmopolitan restaurant in town, they
picked out a French diplomat (he was probably a Milanese manufacturer),
a Chinese general (probably Burmese). They looked sidewise,
inconspicuously but intensely, at a quarreling young couple, and
speculated, "I wonder if we hadn't better go over and tell him that his
girl has too rocky a jaw, for all her funny nose, and he'd better duck
before she shackles him for life?"

Always it was what Roxanna called "good fun." And then she would
infuriate him by returning to the charge that he was becoming a frail
old scholar-hermit, and she would defend Lorenzo as a good fellow who
had antagonized Hayden only by being his own honest, rollicking self.

At the next dinner out of the three, Roxanna said to Lundsgard,
derisively, "How's all your lovely wives keeping, Loraccio?"

"You mean my girl friends here? Why, sweetness, I haven't got any except
you and Livy, who're both gone on that frozen-faced hermit, Hay."

"No, Professor, I don't mean us. _Wives_, I said!"

Lundsgard's "I dunno whacha talking about" was blurred and most
unprofessional.

"It's none of my business and I don't care a hoot, but I'm a reporter,
and don't ever let them tell you I'm not a good one. Anyway, a busy one.
You're always explaining to everybody that you've never slipped into
wedlock. You were just mean, when you were a rosy-cheeked young
instructor with goldie tresses, to some juicy little cricket named
Bessie, and she canned you for your he-man tyranny.

"But I've been snooping--pumping some of the American students here that
you've been chummy with. And I wrote a few letters to a script writer
that I know in Hollywood. And I am now able to inform you--it may be no
news to you, Lorry, but it will interest Livy: you were married, bell,
book and neon lights, to two different cuties and got divorced by one
after two years and by t'other after eighteen months--grounds, in both
cases, amnesia about who you were really married to. Oh, it's okay, but
I just feel we'll all be happier, as simple, trusting American girls, if
we could expect a consignment of home truth now and then!"

Olivia was rigidly furious.

"I'm sure I don't know why we should hear all this. Mr. Lundsgard is my
employer, and nothing else. I have no slightest interest in his private
affairs of any sort!"

It was Lundsgard who was surprisingly undisturbed.

He snorted, "So you took enough interest in poor old Lorry to really get
busy and find out about him, heh? Yuh, I guess your yarn is more or less
true, Rox. I never could see why I should bother you folks with my
troubles, but believe me, I could a tale unfold of a couple of the
nastiest little tramps you ever heard of, if I hadn't made it an
iron-clad rule to never yap about my wounds but just bear 'em in
silence. But I will say," and he looked at Roxanna and then at Olivia as
fondly as though they were two lovely little breakfast sausages and he a
hungry hero, "that an awful lot of women hung around hoping to comfort
me, after the obsequies."

"_Did_ they, big boy!" slashed Roxanna.

"Do you mind if we forget all of this and talk about something more
interesting?" grated Olivia.

Curiously, during the rest of that meal, Lundsgard looked most fondly
upon Roxanna, and argued down Olivia's evasive doubts when Roxy
announced that the one thing in the world she wanted to do was to get
invited to lunch with Sir Henry Belfont.

They all did go, as arranged and tourist-guided by Mr. Hayden Chart.




CHAPTER 24


They were only six at lunch: Sir Henry and Lady Belfont, Olivia and
Roxanna, Hayden and Lundsgard, who had brought Roxanna in a taxicab and
who seemed, on landing, to be more gurglingly intimate with Roxy than
before her revelations of his multiple marriages.

When Sir Henry found that Roxy was esteemed not only by the unimportant
onlooker, Hayden, but by the favorite courtier, Professor Lundsgard, he
was markedly attentive to her, and honored her with a portentous
discourse on American Womanhood. You gather that he did not think much
of it.

Roxy listened pertly; Lady Belfont pointedly did not listen at all but,
with small sharp eyes, examined Roxy and apparently passed her.

Yet after Sir Henry had accepted her and she should have put on the
manners of a Belgravia governess, Roxanna was very naughty. Sir Henry
belched at her, "Gracious little lady, you are fortunate in being able
to tarry for a while in the City of the Lilies. Most of your dreadful
American females who come here, so uninvited--gauche schoolteachers and
librarians and the like--remain only twelve hours or a day or two, and
scamper on to Rome."

But Roxanna was not grateful for this implication of her superiority.

She took from an overdecorated spectacle case of Florentine
leather-work, with golden scrolls on blue and sealbrown, and put on a
pair of Hollywoodized tinted sun-glasses, huge and aggressive affairs
with harlequin frames of pink plastic. Through these insulting portholes
she stared at Sir Henry, and blatted, "Maybe the poor darlings of
teachers haven't enough cash to stick it out here any longer, and they
got to 'scamper.' Maybe they'd stay here for years, too, if they'd
inherited a wad of money."

Every one, but especially Sir Henry and perhaps Roxanna herself, seemed
to consider her tone offensive. He gulped; he tried to forgive this
curious campfollower of his favorite Lorenzo; and he sailed on:

"Conceivably that may be their melancholy plight, though I cannot
understand why middle-class persons, particularly your Americans, should
be privileged to come to our Florence at all. Such ecstasy, Miss
Eldritch, is no part of our common rights, like bread and beer; it is a
delightful good fortune which the prankish gods may bestow or deny at
their will, quite unaccountably.

"But all of your vast, marvelous country, Miss Eldritch, is full of
false claims and assertions and astounding optimism. Children over there
invariably address their fathers not with obedient reverence but--I
shudder--'Hya, Pop'! And _them_, I fancy, even your kind heart could
scarcely categorize as 'poor darlings'! Eh?"

Said Roxy, "In the first place, mostly they don't say it, and if they
did, it would just show they liked their dads enough to want to be
chummy with them."

For a time, then, Roxanna was not offensive. But when Sir Henry had
rambled, "When we consider that there once existed a Raphael, the
insanities of these contemporary artists become not merely mawkish but
blasphemous," then Roxy struck again. She turned her impertinent
Hollywood sun-glasses on Belfont, and she piped, "Maybe that's what the
old boys said about Rafe, too, when he was beginning."

Sir Henry looked stricken. Lady Belfont, behind the mild harem bars of a
tiny lace handkerchief, seemed to be giggling. Hayden was definitely
impatient with Roxy for her pointless rudeness; he was definitely sorry
for Sir Henry, whom he could see now as a pathetic old actor getting his
first hisses and trying to take them gallantly.

Hayden thought, "The man is a bore and a snob. He's built up a social
position to which he has to sacrifice everything. He has built a jail
and shut himself up in it. He can never have any fun at all--never can
laugh or talk easily or be flippant or go to a movie and dine with poor
people, lest he be seen. Poor, timid, wheezing Pekingese in the body of
a mastiff! I am extremely annoyed with Roxanna, as much for her
pretentious spectacles as for her sauciness--which certainly does no
credit to the good manners that we do have in Newlife. A splendid
missionary of hate she is! Mark Twain's bumptious rustic, his Innocent
Abroad. Still with us!"

Sir Henry was not enfeebled by Roxy's impertinence, but angered. It was
a long time since any one had dared to make small of such a formidable
monument of guineas capped with a baronetcy. This was indeed his notion
of blasphemy. But he counterattacked Roxy with stately tolerance for
such small female bugs:

"My dear young lady, I agree that had he existed in your America,
Raffaello would have been denounced in his own day. I quite understand
that--quite. I am not shocked but only grieved by the irreverence and
boorishness that is, perhaps, to be expected from such a lusty young
giant of a country. For, indeed, some of my own relatives belong to you
good American people."

Then, to the horror of everybody except Lady Belfont, whose lips danced,
and of the butler, who slapped a napkin over his mouth and fled from the
room, Roxy demanded, "Sir Henry, don't all of your own relatives belong
to us good American people?"

"I beg your pardon!"

"Including your father and mother?"

"I beg your pardon!"

"I heard so many interesting things about you from a newspaperman who
used to be your secretary. You fired him--remember?--for laughing when a
dinky gilt chair busted under you. He was left stranded--bad. This
fellow, the rat, he told me that you never saw England or the Continent
till you were fourteen. You were born in Ohio and your Grampa
Belfont--if that was the name--started the family fortunes during our
American Civil War by selling adulterated drugs and shoddy uniforms to
the North and South equally."

Sir Henry was paralyzed. The thing was so monstrous that even the
competent Hayden, the managerial Lundsgard were paralyzed, as Roxy went
smilingly on:

"This ex-secretary said it cost you sixteen years of living in Kent and
London and getting snubbed practically every hour, and then forty-five
thousand pounds in cash, to buy a seat in Parliament and finally an
unpaid job as a baronet. But he said, this beast, that he guessed that
to the miners who work in your Kentucky coal mines it was worth every
shilling. But this tattletale couldn't possibly have been right, now
could he!"

Sir Henry with his death pangs just slightly eased, croaked, "He
certainly could not."

"No, indeed. For instance: how could he know exactly how much you paid
for your title? Maybe they stuck you much more than forty-five thousand
pounds. And I do want to say how wise I think you were to move on to
Italy. In England, you must have found it so hard to get away with the
pose of being English."

Sir Henry rose, but it was not Roxanna whom he was denouncing; it was
astonishingly his admirer and fellow fraud, Professor Lorenzo Lundsgard:

"Lundsgard, you plotted this outrage, sir. You brought in this woman,
whom I shall certainly have the police investigate. And as for _you_,
sir, I shall write this very afternoon to the president of Cornucopia
Films--of which I happen to own fifty-seven percent--recommending that
they give up their plan to make a Medici picture, or any other
amateurish nonsense that you may plan, ever, and denounce you to your
lecture agents as a half-witted booby. Good day, ladies and gentlemen."

He marched out, followed by a cattishly smiling Lady Belfont. The butler
hurried back in, to take the better silver out with him for
safeguarding.

Lundsgard screamed, "My God, we got to do something!"

Roxy said comfortably, "Not me! I've always been hankering to blow up
that pompous old shyster, after what this kid, my friend, told me about
him in London."

"Be quiet, Roxanna," Hayden said sharply.

Olivia, with unexpected independence, stated, "Roxanna was inexcusably
rude and vulgar, but it is our fault for bringing her here. We should
have understood that she would not know even the first duties of being a
decent guest."

Roxanna cried, "Hey, now look here, you!" but Olivia iced her out with,
"Although I am quite indifferent to what Mr. Belfont thinks of me. In my
group, we consider him an incompetent dilettante."

Lundsgard was raging, "You've all got to put your heads together and
help me--and you, Roxy, I'm certainly going to throttle you! I'm ruined,
if Cornucopia Films welch on me. Didn't you realize that, Roxy, you
dangerous little fool?"

"Oh yes, Lor-en-zo, I had some idea of it. I've just sort of been
resenting your idea I would be an easy conquest. I'm not a round-heel
like Livy."

Olivia was a leopard leaping. "You little vixen! And I am not a...
I don't even know what the vile word means!"

"How come it makes you so sore then?"

Hayden gravely interposed--though he too was being forced up to a plane
of screaming: "I think you've done enough harm, Roxanna--and don't be so
smug about your efficiency as a guttersnipe. We are justifying Sir Henry
in his hatred of us Americans--of his own countrymen! We must leave this
house."

"You simply got to come to my office and help me fix this thing up,"
besought Lundsgard. "You can't see me busted like this. We'll all tell
Sir Henry that Roxanna is hysterical. We just learned it--we've thrown
her right smack out on her back, bang, for keeps...."

To point it all up, the butler came back to inform Lundsgard that his
taxicab (which Lundsgard had never ordered) was waiting.

As he drove Olivia to Lundsgard's office in the small car, Hayden
imagined from blocks away that he could hear Roxy and Lundsgard
quarreling in their cab, but he had little time for imaginings. He was
occupied with listening to Olivia, and Olivia had an eloquence she never
got out of Machiavelli.

"This whole boresome incident has been a revelation to me, Hayden. I saw
what a cowering coward Lorry is--or Lawrence or Oley or whatever he is.
I'm not sure but that he's even worse than your shrieking, hair-pulling
young fishwife, Roxanna."

"Now, now, she isn't a..."

"She is too, and you know it! And I want you to be as honest about this
as I am; I want you to admit your blindness, as I certainly admit mine,
now. The veil of sensuality has been lifted from before my eyes; that
horrible, sooty veil. I see now--I was a fool and an ingrate not to see
it before. It's you, not I, who are the artist-scholar. Hayden dear,
you, not Lorry, who are the true Magnificent, without flashy banners.

"For a while I fell into an illusion--it doubtless came from overmuch
reading of medieval chronicles and ballads, but still, it was childish
and inexcusable--an illusion that a man ought to be obviously splendid:
the knight crusader, daring and poetic, the Duke of Urbino, the
battle-breaker, the patron of poets and artists; powerful, cloaked in
brocade, belted with a great sword, surrounded by medieval color and all
the respect of a medieval court.

"I dreamed, in this schoolgirl dream, that he should travel wide and
swiftly, have his commands obeyed swiftly; be extravagant and sometimes
ruthless, and forever uplift the whole groveling world by his gorgeous
example.

"What a sentimental fool I was! I see that that kind of an idea is more
likely to produce a pompous fraud like Belfont or a pilfering clown like
Lundsgard than a man like _you_, who is strong enough to be willing to
be quiet!"

She kissed him tremendously, to his considerable discomfiture while
tacking in the topolino among the trucks, cars, motorcycles,
vespas--motorcycles with platforms and tin aprons--bicycles, scooters,
pedestrians reading the newspapers while suicidally strolling, which so
interestingly complicate the traffic of Florence. But these dangers did
not dismay him so much as the thought that he was caught for good, and
that the world which Olivia would now permit him to see would not be
very wide.

"You know, I'm not always so quiet," he fretted. "And I'm not sure I can
ever do much with the Magnificence role, with or without banners.
Olivia, I wonder--does it ever occur to you that maybe we're making a
mistake? Perhaps we're both too stubborn to be married."

"Nonsense! We'll both learn."

"But can we? Just because you _are_ so capable, you'll always be pretty
independent."

"I suppose our hoyden friend Roxanna is your idea of pliability!"

"Oh, she's a pirate, but same time, she never fools herself, as you and
I do. I admire her a lot. Olivia! Let's not be too sure about our
marriage. It scares me a little."

"Not me. You just do what I tell you to, and you'll be happy."

"Maybe!"




CHAPTER 25


They parked the topolino at the Excelsior just as Roxanna and Lundsgard
were leaving their taxicab. They four went up in the elevator, but there
were two English ladies in it, making that apartment unsuitable for
expert quarreling. Not till they had entered Lundsgard's office, where
Nat Friar sat with his large, dusty boots up on a desk, his rustic straw
hat over his eyes, alternately reading a Dorothy Sayers thriller and
Monnier's _Le Quattrocento_, was Lundsgard able to attack:

"I don't know which of you two women is the worst slut and the most
ungrateful!"

Hayden had achieved only a sharp, "We'll have no more of..." when he
was interrupted by Uncle Nat. As his boots banged down on the floor, Nat
fussily poked his straw hat into a wastebasket and spoke:

"Lundsgard, I don't like your manner. Remember there are gentlemen
present. By the way, before you discharge me, may I say that I am
leaving you for a job in a travel agency? I shall be paid only one-fifth
as much, but there I shall be doing nothing more evil than to direct
homeless travelers to corrugated beds. It may be that after a month I
shall feel somewhat cleansed from the sin of having helped you to
corrupt that great lady, Learning."

Angelo Gazza, the photographer, was just coming in and at him Lundsgard
shrieked, "_You_, anyway--you're _fired_!"

"Oh, no, I'm not! Professor Friar told me his plan to quit, and I'm rat
number two. You, the big athlete, that thought he could kick history
around like a football! You're going to feel funny when you get back to
teaching schoolboys and tell 'em what a hit you were in Italy with all
the princes and the cardinals--and see that not one of your students
believes you--ever. Blackboards again, and chalkdust and weekly themes!
_Addio, tutti! Ciao_, Oley!"

The stricken Lundsgard pressed his eyes with his large, beringed hands
and stood shaking, and from this spectacle of doom they crept out in
pity.

"I hate these renegades like ourselves," Nat Friar said to Hayden,
Olivia, Roxy, Angelo, "who triumph over less virtuous scoundrels like
Lundsgard. We are so much less colorful. May I buy you all a last
cognac? We shall toast the fallen idol. It will probably be the last
toast that anybody will ever drink to Mr. Lundsgard."

In the Piazza della Republica, shabby small boys were begging and the
old scavengers were picking up cigarette butts. All the umbrellas over
the outdoor caf tables had blossomed in front of Gilli's; the gentle
violet-seller circulated and girls laughed in peace.

"Can Olivia and I _ever_ leave Florence?" Hayden wondered.

From the caf, Hayden and Olivia and Roxanna walked away, but with Roxy
only tagging.

Olivia was holding Hayden's arm. She sighed, "Ohhhh!"--a hungry sound.
She mourned, "I don't know how many kinds of a fool and bully I've been,
but I think I've paid for all of them. Lorry looks at me now with such
hatred; he makes me feel loose and compromised. But you, my good angel,
you'll never be treacherous as Lorry is--as I've been! You'll never take
your obligations lightly. In your presence, I feel absolved and secure."

She held his arm the more tightly and as he managed an embarrassed
glance at her, he saw that her forehead was serene, her eyes were clear
and tender; she was angelic again and splendid and desirable.

He felt manacled by her lovely ivory hand. How could he desert this
passionate woman whom he had helped to destroy, whom he must help to
restore to her principalities?

But he ached for his solitary room and the sweet drudgery of books and,
after certain years of them, to venture onward to the brazen sea of
Arabia, the West Indian islands shining at dawn, the high lone whistling
passes of the Himalayas. On such unscheduled wandering, Olivia would
never accompany him. Her love would encompass him, but bind him.

They were at the Palazzo Spizzi.

Roxanna caught up with them and proposed, "How about a dish of tea?"

With a remarkably chilly, "Not for me, thanks--perhaps Hayden will care
for one," Olivia curtly left them, went into the Palazzo.

"How about you?" Roxy hesitated.

"I'd love some," said Hayden, and they strolled on to a small tea-shop
off the Tornabuoni. As they sat down, Roxy sighed:

"I know I've already talked too much today, but one more thing. I used
to respect you so, Hay, for your dignity and honesty. Now it kills me to
see you turned into Livy's stooge."

Hayden was working up to a denial, but Roxy clattered on:

"I loathe seeing you get all silent and intense again the way you used
to be with Caprice. But I guess you must have it--you bleating _martyr_!
When I get back to Newlife and the mountains--that big, huge place where
you look up to the horizon, where there's freedom to be ignorant of the
ruling dynasty of Piacenza, I'll think of you solemnly grinding away
here, trying to satisfy Professor Olivia! But I hope I'll have your
forgiveness for having plagued you, and for having been a pest today."

Roxy, on the wall-bench beside him, was suddenly crying, a defenseless
and bewildered child. She spoke through sobs like the sobs of a child,
hurt, broken, bewildered:

"Oh, darling Hay, I thought you'd all be delighted to have me show up
that old sergeant-major, Harry Belfont, today, and get him off your
necks!"

Hayden was trembling, but he tried to be hard-hearted. "It was needless
and cruel of you. The old comedian is perfectly harmless."

He was glad that a serving-table concealed them from the rest of the
tea-shop.

Roxy was still broken with sobbing as she stammered, "Maybe he's
harmless but you all talk so's you'll impress him. I wanted to help you,
even Livy. But then I saw you all hated me and despised me for bawling
him out--shanty Irish, flannel-mouth, nuisance!"

Roxy was crying hard now. He touched her shoulder and she melted against
him, she seemed to melt into him, to be one with him. She was a familiar
part of him and his own land. There was a sweet wild smell about her,
like sagebrush. He cried, "Why, I'm in love with you, Roxy, and I always
have been!"

"Didn't you know that? Did you have to go to Italy and read all about
arquebuses and apses, to find that out?"

"Will you go with me to Burma and Brazil and Damascus?"

"Sure!"

He kissed Roxanna, very happily.

                 *        *        *        *        *

It was later, as tea prolonged into dinner, that he said sadly, "But
Roxy, I'm no good. I seem to honor women, and yet I help to destroy
them--Caprice and now Olivia."

"Sure you do. You let them use you and tyrannize over you. No woman that
ever lived can stand that much privilege. I'm likely to try it on, too,
but maybe not, because I've been in love with you too many years. You
know something? Here's the real secret of my life:

"When you were an old man of eighteen, very handsome and dignified, like
a secretary of state, you were rehearsing your salutatorian's essay for
Commencement exercises, in the empty auditorium of the Kit Carson High
School, all by yourself--you thought you were. But I was curled up
behind a row of seats in the balcony, making myself very small and
silent, sucking my lollypop in the utmost silence. I was an earnest
young lady of ten, then. I meant to be a United States Senator, and you
were my model. (You were to be President.)

"You carried on something wonderful; all about the International Court
and how nice it would be if all the nations would listen to you and
learn about justice. It sounded swell! I just knelt there and said to
myself, 'Some day I'm going to marry that man, even if I have to follow
him to Denver or even Minneapolis.' I didn't count on Italy. That's how
you slipped me! Dear Hay!"

"Dear Roxy!" he said earnestly.

But he had a worry.

"Now, I have to go tell Olivia, I suppose!"

Roxy said brightly, "Want me to do it for you?"

"Oh, no, I _think_ I can manage it," groaned Hayden.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The wedding of Hayden and Roxanna--the civil service in the office of
the kindly American Consul, and the religious service at St. James's
church--was an Event, attended by all the Anglo-American Colony except
Sir Henry Belfont.

Dr. Olivia Lomond was at the church, looking contented and superior. She
was warmly on the arm of the chief foreign official then to be found in
Florence: the newly appointed First Assistant American Cultural
Commissioner to Peru, a confident, beaming, success-radiating magnifico
in morning clothes and Ascot tie. His name was Professor the Hon.
Lorenzo O. Lundsgard, Ph.D.

                 *        *        *        *        *

They were in Rapallo.

"All right, we'll do that then, unless we want to change our minds,"
said Roxanna. "Go home by way of Ceylon and India and Japan, if they'll
let us in. Home! But if I ever catch you getting to be successful, I'll
snatch you back here, for a course in humility. Maybe we came to Italy
too late. We'll never speak the lingo so naturally that we won't even
notice we're speaking it. But there is something great here for us--so
great because it is so quiet. The American Colonists in Florence are
richer in their hearts than the Men of Distinction back home that take
themselves so seriously selling whisky or lawsuits or college-alumni
enthusiasm. Oh, darling, am I holding forth?"

"Yes--yes," amiably.

"Oh, dear! But you never help me. I suppose you have to be born to it,
to know how to beat women, and you weren't."

"I'll try."

"Look. When we get to Rome, are there any more presents we'll have to
buy? Last minute in Florence, I got a leather box for Aunt Tib, and the
rosary for Lizzie Edison and the linen luncheon-set for Mrs. Dr.
Crittenham and a souvenir deck of cards for Bill and Jean Windelbank
(won't we enjoy talking over Europe with _them_!) and the Venetian glass
and the blue-and-gold spectacle case for Mary Eliza Bradbin. It'll be
such fun to see her when she gets it!"

                 *        *        *        *        *

"Such fun"--he realized how often Roxanna said it, as hand in hand they
walked through Ravenna. Even King Theodoric's Arian cathedral and the
tomb of the Empress Honoria she found "such fun," and he wondered if
their sculptors had not also considered them "fun."

"Dear Roxy," he said, even in the sanctity of Dante's tomb.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Far up in the mountains behind Salerno, one light persisted while their
steamer plodded southward from Naples, bound out for Smyrna and
Alexandria.

Was it a light in the hut of a peasant or of some studious
hermit-priest, a priest in that sacred land where Hayden had known
defeat and glory, where he had begun to know himself?

"Do you think we might have one modest drink before we turn in?" said
Roxanna.

"I think that might be possible, if the bartender is kind-hearted."

"The bartender is Italian," said Roxy, "and he speaks English, French,
German, Spanish, Swedish, Polish, Croatian and some Arabic. His name is
Fortunato, and he was born in Reggio Emilia, but his wife was born in
Bari. He has two children, a girl of seven and a son, six, and he likes
Italian crossword-puzzles--he is such fun. He has a cousin in San Jose,
California--Giuseppina Vespi of 1127 Citrus Court. She is married to an
upholsterer named Joe Murphy and they have two children. I am to send
her a picture post card from Palermo. I'm sleepy. Let's have that drink
and then turn in."

"Splendid!" said Hayden.






[End of World So Wide, by Sinclair Lewis]
