They sat where they could follow the shining river coils that wound
down out of the hills, dived under the red of the city roofs, and wound
on again into the iridescent plain. Through the haze of the Maremma the
glint of the sea at last began to burn, and out of the north issued
ghostly the apparition of the Carrara mountains. The day had somehow
flamed away, there in that leaning gallery in the corner of the city
wall, where the storied marbles stood alone with their shadows--a
little fleet of ships becalmed in a quiet haven of the world.
“I am like the wicked in Scripture,” she said. “I love groves and high
places.”
“I would say rather that you were like the Empress Elisabeth,” rejoined
Martin. It seemed to him that they had always been there, that they
would always remain there--he and this woman whose very name he did not
know.
“Why am I like the Empress Elisabeth?” she asked.
“Haven’t you read Christomanos?”
“What is that?”
“Your ignorance is the first gratification my vanity has had
to-day!” laughed Martin. “Christomanos is the hero of a modern fairy
story--which is all the prettier for being true. It is a kind of
inverted ‘Cinderella.’ He was a little Greek student in the university
of Vienna, who lived in a garret in an alley. You know the kind? With
stair gables, and bread shops, and clothes lines? Imagine a Greek
there! And one day a court carriage rumbled up, just as if it had
suddenly rolled out of a pumpkin, and carried him off to talk Greek to
the empress. The carriage came every morning after that; and he would
spend the day in the imperial park at Lainz, and go back at night to
his stair gable. And at last he went to live in the palace altogether,
and talked to the empress while she had her hair combed, and walked
leagues with her, and went to Schönbrunn and Miramar and Corfu. Of
course the ladies-in-waiting were scandalised, but she was used to
that--and he was something of a poet.”
“And after she died he wrote a book about it. Which shows how true a
poet he was!”
“Wait till you read him. The thing was that people said such things
about her, and he knew better; and it hurt him. Of course he couldn’t
help seeing the picturesqueness of it all, but he isn’t nasty about it.
Most of it is what she said about things.”
“What did she say about things?”
Martin watched the profile beside him, out-lined against the marble of
the tower and touched faintly by the glow of the westering sun.
“Well, one thing was a good deal like what you just told me about high
places. Christomanos says that she always liked hills because there are
so few untrampled places in the world.”
“It was rather imperial of her to want to trample them herself, then.
And your Christomanos sounds as if he lacked humour.”
“I fancy he did,” uttered Martin.
Something in his tone made his companion look at him.
“Don’t be teased,” she said. “Tell me more about them. How did it end?
Did he run away, or did she send him away, or what?”
“O dear, no! The day of his going was set before he came.”
“O! I begin to approve of your empress.” She was silent a moment,
looking out toward the sea. “How was it, do you suppose?”
“Why, she was ages older and wiser and everything else. It was only
that she was terribly lonely and bored, and he could do things that
she couldn’t ask of a maid of honour, and was likewise _incliné à
comprendre_.”
“O! And what about him?”
“He was so dazed that I don’t suppose you can tell anything about
him. He must have been dazed all the time--by the enormousness of the
distance between them, by her tragic history, by her personality, her
eyes, her hair, everything about her. And to drop out of it all--to go
back to being a simple Greek student, and live in a stair gable, and be
despised by bakers and washerwomen when he had been the familiar friend
of their empress, must have been hard.”
“Well, he had his moment,” she mused. “Did anyone ever have more?”
“Likewise,” chanted Martin:
“‘_Après le plaisir vient la peine;
Après la peine, le bonheur!_’”
“But it’s a high price,” she commented, simply.
“It’s worth it,” asserted Martin.
“You have not sat enough upon towers!” She looked at him a moment, with
a half smile, and then across the plain again. “No; it’s not because
this place is untrampled that I like to come here. But you can see over
everybody’s walls. You get some kind of proportion. And I like to think
of all the people--under these roofs, in that haze. Common life is what
pleases me, and common people--simple people. Our ideas for ourselves
are so single. They shut out so much that might be, and they hardly
ever come out right. Our lives are generally made up of two or three
real days, with years of waiting and remembering between. Common lives
and common things are better, just as they happen, from day to day.”
Martin studied her, half wondering what lay behind her words and half
taken by the charm of her slow inflection. She turned under his eyes;
and he asked at random:
“Do you come here often, for the tower?”
“Not very. I have one of my own, near Naples, where I have sat much and
seen many things.”
“Think of having a tower near Naples! And I have to sail in a month!”
“Would you like to exchange?” she asked, smiling.
“Wouldn’t I!”
“Very well, we will!” she said, playfully. “I will throw in a view of
the city and the bay, with a bit of Pozzuoli, and a big garden, and all
the statues you can talk to, and an olive orchard that runs down hill
to the sea, and a frog pond....”
“There are worse things!” interrupted Martin.
“What?” she demanded, eyeing him curiously.
“New England!” he exclaimed, with a laugh.
“I suppose you will think so,” she rejoined gravely, “until you have
sat by yourself in a tower and listened to frogs in a pond. For that
matter, though, the frogs are what I like best.” She looked out again
across the Maremma. The sea began to widen in the sunset, toward which
the Arno ran in links of brightening fire. “No,” she said at last. “It
is not for us.”
“What?” he asked.
“This!” she answered, waving her hand against the golden space before
them. “We are of the North. We belong to mist and pallor and dreams.
Here they have no dream. What is there left for them to dream about?
They live. But we don’t know how to live. We are always waiting--or
remembering.”
“As a background, however, I would prefer Campania to Vermont!”
“No, it is not for us,” she repeated. “Our roots are not here: how can
we grow? But it is curious how it catches us all, and how it is typical
of desire fulfilled. What does one ever really attain, really possess?
Things are too great or too unresponsive, and always too mysterious.
Even a little gem that you can hold in your hand and never let escape:
how much is it yours--that strange indifferent fire? There is no
possession. Instead of getting something else we lose something of
ourselves. After all, people like Achille down there are happiest, who
live their moment so intensely that they lose themselves all at once
instead of by slow shreds and patches. The moment is everything. After
that----” She put her hand to her cheek with a motion of weariness.
Then she suddenly looked at Martin and laughed. “Do you see that sun?
I presume the police have already been notified of my disappearance! I
must beg your pardon for having given you such a day of it, and ask you
to take me down.”
She sprang to her feet and Martin followed, reluctantly.
“I suppose I shall wake up,” he said, as they descended the winding
steps, “and find that you were a dream. When I feel as I do, that I
have known you all my life, and then reflect that twelve hours ago I
had never set eyes on you--that even now I know no more about you than
that you have a tower in Posilipo--I am inclined to doubt the so-called
realities of existence.”
Again she laughed.
“Why? The actual matter of prolonged passions has occupied less time! I
don’t see what more I could possibly tell you. The rest would be merely
frills. But people waste so much time in these things. Don’t you think
so? They miss so many chances, waiting for each other to begin and
manœuvring each other to the proper point. That is why I came with you
this morning--because you lost no time. Think how different it would
have been if you had not waylaid me so unpardonably!”
Martin did think so. The consciousness of it suddenly overwhelmed him
as they came out into the deserted square and crossed to the _Via Santa
Maria_. He would not even have looked back, but for his companion.
“See!” she cried.
The dome of the baptistery, the roof of the cathedral, the top of
the tower where they had been, were alight with a delicate rose glow
which contrasted extraordinarily with the cold white of the lower
shadow. The spectacle was to Martin symbolic and revealing. He saw as
if apart from himself the romance of his day. Could it really have
been he to whom this adventure had fallen? He glanced furtively at his
companion. Was she the intimate stranger with whom he had been? It
pleased him that he had known herself before knowing things about her.
There would be so much more significance in making last the steps of
acquaintance which usually come first. But she looked weary, and a
thousand uncertainties, a thousand concerns, assailed him. He could not
find courage to say the things which rose to his lips. His thoughts,
however, wove themselves into a tissue of dreams.
So they went silently down the crooked street which at last left them
on the _Lungarno Regio_. Martin hardly knew where he was. Through the
gateway between the houses where the Arno wound out to the plain the
splendour of sunset streamed into the city, touching the dusty façades
with a fairy glamour, filling the sandy river bed with undreamed
secrets of colour, transmuting the parcelled water into purple and
gold. The quay where Martin had that morning discovered two persons was
crowded with carriages and pedestrians enjoying the cool of the day.
The theatrical vivacity of the people, their unaccustomed faces, their
foreign speech, gave a new poignancy to his mood of exaltation.
One of the carriages in the slow progress caused some confusion by
driving out of line. Martin noticed the handsome horses, the correct
footman, the old lady with a black parasol. She eyed him narrowly
as the landau drove up to the curb. He called the attention of his
companion, who was looking toward the river.
She turned.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, with a bow and a smile to the lady in the
carriage, “I am afraid I must go.” He looked blankly into her eyes as
she hesitated a moment. “It was a nice day! It was so long since I had
seen anybody. And the cloister--that was nice. I shall always think of
you there. It would have been so different if we had not been ready!
Good-bye, Achille.”
The footman held open the emblazoned door.
“Good-bye--Elisabeth!” said Martin, too dazed to think or utter more.
The door clicked, the footman leaped to his box, the coachman flicked
the horses. Beside the black parasol a white one went up, hiding the
figure behind it. Martin’s first impulse was to follow, to see where
the carriage went. He began to walk hastily in the direction it had
taken, watching the two parasols. Then he stopped and turned resolutely
away. “_Lequel Achille voûlut faire le voyage d’Italie_,” he said to
himself. “_Priez pour le salut de son âme._”
Wondering miserably what he should do with himself, Martin cast an
indifferent glance at the building in front of him. It was one of
the high dark-browed Tuscan _palazzi_, broad-eaved and strong-barred
like the great houses of Florence. The entrance was closed. Above the
massive archway was a device that attracted the young man’s attention.
A fragment of chain hung there, from a bolt projecting above the
keystone; and between the chain and a high stone escutcheon ran the
legend, in letters of tarnished brass let into the weathered marble:
_ALLA GIORNATA_