* * * * *
I
Midway of the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, where three arches break the
lines of the little jewellers' booths glittering on either hand, and
open an approach to the parapet, Colville lounged against the corner of
a shop and stared out upon the river. It was the late afternoon of a day
in January, which had begun bright and warm, but had suffered a change
of mood as its hours passed, and now, from a sky dimmed with flying grey
clouds, was threatening rain. There must already have been rain in the
mountains, for the yellow torrent that seethed and swirled around the
piers of the bridge was swelling momently on the wall of the Lung' Arno,
and rolling a threatening flood toward the Cascine, where it lost itself
under the ranks of the poplars that seemed to file across its course,
and let their delicate tops melt into the pallor of the low horizon.
The city, with the sweep of the Lung' Arno on either hand, and its domes
and towers hung in the dull air, and the country with its white villas
and black cypresses breaking the grey stretches of the olive orchards on
its hill-sides, had alike been growing more and more insufferable; and
Colville was finding a sort of vindictive satisfaction in the power to
ignore the surrounding frippery of landscape and architecture. He
isolated himself so perfectly from it, as he brooded upon the river,
that, for any sensible difference, he might have been standing on the
Main Street Bridge at Des Vaches, Indiana, looking down at the tawny
sweep of the Wabash. He had no love for that stream, nor for the
ambitious town on its banks, but ever since he woke that morning he had
felt a growing conviction that he had been a great ass to leave them. He
had, in fact, taken the prodigious risk of breaking his life sharp off
from the course in which it had been set for many years, and of
attempting to renew it in a direction from which it had long been
diverted. Such an act could be precipitated only by a strong impulse of
conscience or a profound disgust, and with Colville it sprang from
disgust. He had experienced a bitter disappointment in the city to whose
prosperity he had given the energies of his best years, and in whose
favour he imagined that he had triumphantly established himself.
He had certainly made the Des Vaches _Democrat-Republican_ a very good
paper; its ability was recognised throughout the State, and in Des
Vaches people of all parties were proud of it. They liked every morning
to see what Colville said; they believed that in his way he was the
smartest man in the State, and they were fond of claiming that there was
no such writer on any of the Indianapolis papers. They forgave some
political heresies to the talent they admired; they permitted him the
whim of free trade, they laughed tolerantly when he came out in favour
of civil service reform, and no one had much fault to find when the
_Democrat-Republican_ bolted the nomination of a certain politician of
its party for Congress. But when Colville permitted his own name to be
used by the opposing party, the people arose in their might and defeated
him by a tremendous majority. That was what the regular nominee said. It
was a withering rebuke to treason, in the opinion of this gentleman; it
was a good joke, anyway, with the Democratic managers who had taken
Colville up, being all in the Republican family; whichever it was, it
was a mortification for Colville which his pride could not brook. He
stood disgraced before the community not only as a theorist and
unpractical doctrinaire, but as a dangerous man; and what was worse, he
could not wholly acquit himself of a measure of bad faith; his
conscience troubled him even more than his pride. Money was found, and a
printer bought up with it to start a paper in opposition to the
_Democrat-Republican_. Then Colville contemptuously offered to sell out
to the Republican committee in charge of the new enterprise, and they
accepted his terms.
In private life he found much of the old kindness returning to him; and
his successful opponent took the first opportunity of heaping coals of
fire on his head in the public street, when he appeared to the outer eye
to be shaking hands with Colville. During the months that he remained to
close up his affairs after the sale of his paper, the
_Post-Democrat-Republican_ (the newspaper had agglutinated the titles of
two of its predecessors, after the fashion of American journals) was
fulsome in its complimentary allusions to him. It politely invented the
fiction that he was going to Europe for his health, impaired by his
journalistic labours, and adventurously promised its readers that they
might hope to hear from him from time to time in its columns. In some
of its allusions to him Colville detected the point of a fine irony, of
which he had himself introduced the practice in the _Democrat-Republican_;
and he experienced, with a sense of personal impoverishment, the
curious fact that a journalist of strong characteristics leaves
the tradition of himself in such degree with the journal he has
created that he seems to bring very little away. He was obliged
to confess in his own heart that the paper was as good as ever.
The assistants, who had trained themselves to write like him, seemed to
be writing quite as well, and his honesty would not permit him to
receive the consolation offered him by the friends who told him that
there was a great falling off in the _Post-Democrat-Republican_. Except
that it was rather more Stalwart in its Republicanism, and had turned
quite round on the question of the tariff, it was very much what it had
always been. It kept the old decency of tone which he had given it, and
it maintained the literary character which he was proud of. The new
management must have divined that its popularity, with the women at
least, was largely due to its careful selections of verse and fiction,
its literary news, and its full and piquant criticisms, with their long
extracts from new books. It was some time since he had personally looked
after this department, and the young fellow in charge of it under him
had remained with the paper. Its continued excellence, which he could
not have denied if he had wished, seemed to leave him drained and
feeble, and it was partly from the sense of this that he declined the
overtures, well backed up with money, to establish an independent paper
in Des Vaches. He felt that there was not fight enough in him for the
work, even if he had not taken that strong disgust for public life which
included the place and its people. He wanted to get away, to get far
away, and with the abrupt and total change in his humour he reverted to
a period in his life when journalism and politics and the ambition of
Congress were things undreamed of.
At that period he was a very young architect, with an inclination toward
the literary side of his profession, which made it seem profitable to
linger, with his Ruskin in his hand, among the masterpieces of Italian
Gothic, when perhaps he might have been better employed in designing
red-roofed many-verandaed, consciously mullioned seaside cottages on the
New England coast. He wrote a magazine paper on the zoology of the
Lombardic pillars in Verona, very Ruskinian, very scornful of modern
motive. He visited every part of the peninsula, but he gave the greater
part of his time to North Italy, and in Venice he met the young girl
whom he followed to Florence. His love did not prosper; when she went
away she left him in possession of that treasure to a man of his
temperament, a broken heart. From that time his vague dreams began to
lift, and to let him live in the clear light of common day; but he was
still lingering at Florence, ignorant of the good which had befallen
him, and cowering within himself under the sting of wounded vanity, when
he received a letter from his elder brother suggesting that he should
come and see how he liked the architecture of Des Vaches. His brother
had been seven years at Des Vaches, where he had lands, and a lead-mine,
and a scheme for a railroad, and had lately added a daily newspaper to
his other enterprises. He had, in fact, added two newspapers; for having
unexpectedly and almost involuntarily become the owner of the Des Vaches
_Republican_, the fancy of building up a great local journal seized him,
and he bought the _Wabash Valley Democrat_, uniting them under the name
of the _Democrat-Republican_. But he had trouble almost from the first
with his editors, and he naturally thought of the brother with a turn
for writing who had been running to waste for the last year or two in
Europe. His real purpose was to work Colville into the management of his
paper when he invited him to come out and look at the architecture of
Des Vaches.
Colville went, because he was at that moment in the humour to go
anywhere, and because his money was running low, and he must begin work
somehow. He was still romantic enough to like the notion of the place a
little, because it bore the name given to it by the old French
_voyageurs_ from a herd of buffalo cows which they had seen grazing on
the site of their camp there; but when he came to the place itself he
did not like it. He hated it; but he stayed, and as an architect was the
last thing any one wanted in Des Vaches since the jail and court-house
had been built, he became, half without his willing it, a newspaper man.
He learned in time to relish the humorous intimacy of the life about
him; and when it was decided that he was no fool--there were doubts,
growing out of his Eastern accent and the work of his New York tailor,
at first--he found himself the object of a pleasing popularity. In due
time he bought his brother out; he became very fond of newspaper life,
its constant excitements and its endless variety; and six weeks before
he sold his paper he would have scoffed at a prophecy of his return to
Europe for the resumption of any artistic purpose whatever. But here he
was, lounging on the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, whither he had come with
the intention of rubbing up his former studies, and of perhaps getting
back to put them in practice at New York ultimately. He had said to
himself before coming abroad that he was in no hurry; that he should
take it very easily--he had money enough for that; yet he would keep
architecture before him as an object, for he had lived long in a
community where every one was intensely occupied, and he unconsciously
paid to Des Vaches the tribute of feeling that an objectless life was
disgraceful to a man.
In the meantime he suffered keenly and at every moment the loss of the
occupation of which he had bereaved himself; in thinking of quite other
things, in talk of totally different matters, from the dreams of night,
he woke with a start to the realisation of the fact that he had no
longer a newspaper. He perceived now, as never before, that for fifteen
years almost every breath of his life had been drawn with reference to
his paper, and that without it he was in some sort lost, and, as it
were, extinct. A tide of ridiculous home-sickness, which was an
expression of this passionate regret for the life he had put behind him,
rather than any longing for Des Vaches, swept over him, and the first
passages of a letter to the _Post-Democrat-Republican_ began to shape
themselves in his mind. He had always, when he left home for New York or
Washington, or for his few weeks of summer vacation on the Canadian
rivers or the New England coast, written back to his readers, in whom he
knew he could count upon quick sympathy in all he saw and felt, and he
now found himself addressing them with that frank familiarity which
comes to the journalist, in minor communities, from the habit of print.
He began by confessing to them the defeat of certain expectations with
which he had returned to Florence, and told them that they must not look
for anything like the ordinary letters of travel from him. But he was
not so singular in his attitude toward the place as he supposed; for any
tourist who comes to Florence with the old-fashioned expectation of
impressions will probably suffer a disappointment, unless he arrives
very young and for the first time. It is a city superficially so well
known that it affects one somewhat like a collection of views of itself;
they are from the most striking points, of course, but one has examined
them before, and is disposed to be critical of them. Certain emotions,
certain sensations failed to repeat themselves to Colville at sight of
the familiar monuments, which seemed to wear a hardy and indifferent
air, as if being stared at so many years by so many thousands of
travellers had extinguished in them that sensibility which one likes to
fancy in objects of interest everywhere.
The life which was as vivid all about him as if caught by the latest
instantaneous process made the same comparatively ineffective appeal.
The operatic spectacle was still there. The people, with their cloaks
statuesquely draped over their left shoulders, moved down the street, or
posed in vehement dialogue on the sidewalks; the drama of bargaining,
with the customer's scorn, the shopman's pathos, came through the open
shop door; the handsome, heavy-eyed ladies, the bare-headed girls,
thronged the ways; the caffès were full of the well-remembered figures
over their newspapers and little cups; the officers were as splendid as
of old, with their long cigars in their mouths, their swords kicking
against their beautiful legs, and their spurs jingling; the dandies,
with their little dogs and their flower-like smiles, were still in front
of the confectioners' for the inspection of the ladies who passed; the
old beggar still crouched over her scaldino at the church door, and the
young man with one leg, whom he thought to escape by walking fast, had
timed him to a second from the other side of the street. There was the
wonted warmth in the sunny squares, and the old familiar damp and stench
in the deep narrow streets. But some charm had gone out of all this. The
artisans coming to the doors of their shallow booths for the light on
some bit of carpentering, or cobbling, or tinkering; the crowds swarming
through the middle of the streets on perfect terms with the wine-carts
and cab horses; the ineffective grandiosity of the palaces huddled upon
the crooked thoroughfares; the slight but insinuating cold of the
southern winter, gathering in the shade and dispersing in the sun, and
denied everywhere by the profusion of fruit and flowers, and by the
greenery of gardens showing through the grated portals and over the tops
of high walls; the groups of idle poor, permanently or temporarily
propped against the bases of edifices with a southern exposure; the
priests and monks and nuns in their gliding passage; the impassioned
snapping of the cabmen's whips; the clangour of bells that at some hours
inundated the city, and then suddenly subsided and left it to the
banging of coppersmiths; the open-air frying of cakes, with its
primitive smell of burning fat; the tramp of soldiery, and the fanfare
of bugles blown to gay measures--these and a hundred other
characteristic traits and facts still found a response in the
consciousness where they were once a rapture of novelty; but the
response was faint and thin; he could not warm over the old mood in
which he once treasured them all away as of equal preciousness.
Of course there was a pleasure in recognising some details of former
experience in Florence as they recurred. Colville had been met at once
by a _festa_, when nothing could be done, and he was more than consoled
by the caressing sympathy with which he was assured that his broken
trunk could not be mended till the day after to-morrow; he had quite
forgotten about the festas and the sympathy. That night the piazza on
which he lodged seemed full of snow to the casual glance he gave it;
then he saw that it was the white Italian moonlight, which he had also
forgotten....