Читать книгу The Old Bridge - William J. Locke - Страница 7

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The serviceable, old-fashioned car from whose steering-wheel the chauffeur had swept the royal purple pall, drove up to the decorous pile of apartment houses on the bank of the Mugnone. Perella stepped out and mounted the stairs. An elderly woman servant opening the Professor’s door, showed her into a room, a very beautiful room, she thought, with a view far away over the northern hills, Monte Morello towering among them. A wood fire was burning below a Renaissance fireplace. A few pictures, mostly Primitives, hung on an austere wall. The room was sparsely furnished; but Perella’s eye quickly appreciated the severe charm of the old rugs on the polished floor, and the perfection of chairs and tables and old Florentine book-cases filled with leather-bound volumes. Some old ivories lay about. A paper-knife with chased silver handle lay across an open, half-cut French novel, the only note of modernity. She peeped at it—it was one of the Arsène Lupin series. She found it hard to reconcile a Professor with a reader of detective novels.

This was the home of a man, a notorious bachelor—so much practical information had she gleaned from the Brabazon ladies. In her concept of man it was always difficult to rid her mind of parental impressions. A man’s room was her father’s ramshackle, dirty den, littered with pipes, tobacco, magazines, newspapers, manuscript, slippers, and bananas, of which he was inordinately fond. She could not imagine Anthony in this prim setting, though of course he would like it kept clean, and a fresh cretonne put, now and then, on his arm-chairs.... But, anyhow—she looked round again—it was a singularly beautiful and restful room.

The door opened. Some one entered.

“My dear Miss Annaway. Do forgive me for keeping you waiting. It seems so rude, but I really couldn’t help it.”

It was no doubt her host, Silvester Gayton, but where were the white beard and the stuffiness and snuffiness? She beheld a little brown-haired man, with a bald patch on the top of his head, and a little brown moustache, who looked at her apologetically through thick, near-sighted pince-nez. He was very neatly dressed. Obviously he was no longer young; his lined and withered face proclaimed the touch of the years; but he might have been any age, from forty to seventy.

He fluttered around her with the air of a shy, elderly boy.

“Do sit down.” He pulled a heavy old Florentine chair towards the fire. “I think this is fairly comfortable. And you’d like some tea. Of course you would.” He rang a bell. “And won’t you take off your coat? There!”

He gave it to the servant who entered immediately, and, having ordered tea, sat on a high-backed chair on the other side of the fireplace. Then he half rose. “Would you like a footstool? No? You see, I live so much alone that I don’t know.... If you can think of anything to make you more comfortable, please tell me.”

Perella declared herself to be perfectly content; and then it dawned on her feminine mind that this eminent and awe-inspiring professor was even more nervous than she herself. She gathered up her courage.

“It’s most kind of you to ask me to come and see you.”

“Not at all. Not at all. Your father once did me a very great service. He fought a splendid battle for me in the press. I should have never been able to do it for myself. You’re too young to remember....”

“Do tell me about it,” said Perella.

“It wouldn’t interest you. It’s Ancient History.”

“But I’m tremendously proud of my father,” said Perella.

In a shy and diffident way he outlined the story of the battle. A Prussian critic had attacked him.... He had written a little book about Italian Art. Those being days when nothing thorough could come from anywhere but Germany, all the English critics leagued themselves with the Teuton. He had falsified the philosophical history of Art; his attributions of disputed masterpieces were idiotic—in fact, the book was the work of an amateur ignoramus. A great London newspaper invited him to defend himself—he was in England at the time. They sent John Annaway to see him. John Annaway, convinced, and in possession of indisputable facts, took up his battle-axe and, in Silvester Gayton’s mild and archaic words, “went like billy ’o for the whole lot of them.” He raked up the Prussian’s dreadful critical past.... There was a certain statue bought by him for Berlin as an authentic Praxiteles which no one on earth, except the then Kaiser, recognized as being other than an impudent modern fake.... He poured ridicule on the German’s theory of the Weltgeist manifesting itself in Fra Angelico and his followers, and ... “Well,” said Gayton apologetically, “he won the battle for me. And then I wrote a little article for the Quarterly Review, which finished the thing up.”

“But father wrote me that you were very kind to him,” said Perella.

“No, no,” said Silvester hurriedly, “that’s absurd. It’s his charming way of putting it.”

Tea was brought in. He fussed round the table. He hoped she found what she liked. He had told them to get the biggest, thickest and stickiest cake in Florence, and such odds and ends as would lead artistically up to it. The table creaked under the odds and ends, and groaned under the cake. Perella caught a little breath of wonder at the old silver tea equipage and the egg-shell china cups. He stood, deferential, before her.

“Is the tea as you like it?”

She realized that she hadn’t tasted it, flushed, and said simply:

“Everything you have is so beautiful.”

He smiled. “I’m so glad you like beautiful things. If I dared give you advice, I should say, don’t let the instinct grow atrophied. It’s the greatest gift a human being can have. Life’s full of beauty and the happiest people are those who know how to collect it. It has infinite forms. What you see around you is a poor little form. It has just happened by chance to have come my way. But there are spiritual forms—I don’t know whether I’m making myself clear—memories of sunsets and bits of cool reaches of river, and a white city dreaming in the moonlight—which the connoisseur can collect.... And then, of course, there are the most sacred beauties of all ... your collection of what is most precious in the souls of human beings....” He laughed, shyly, and sipped his tea. “That, of course takes a good deal of courage.”

“What?” she asked.

“Why, don’t you see? It’s like hunting for hidden treasure, or diving for pearls—every time an adventure. It isn’t everybody that’s adventurous.”

Perella wondered whether that was the reason of his bachelordom; whether at the back of his little speech there did not lie an apology for filling his existence with the interpretations (however beautiful) of life, instead of the actualities of life itself—love, wife, children....

He cut her a hasty wedge of the juicy cake and then went off to throw logs on the fire.

“And now”—he turned—“your father said I might help you. If I can I will, of course. But first I must be impertinent enough to ask you what you are doing?”

Emboldened by the tea, the warmth, the nervous figure of the deferential elderly boy in the opposite chair, she narrated her simple history—or as much of it as mattered. Perella thought him the most sympathetic listener to whom she had ever spoken. He had an odd and delightful little way of getting ahead of her thoughts and finishing up her sentences. They discussed the Madonna del Pozzo. It used to be attributed, said he, to Andrea del Sarto—he and Franciabigio had, she must remember, once worked on the same canvas. His Prussian enemy had done his best to perpetuate the old error. But anyone could see the difference.

“With half an eye!” cried Perella, forgetting that she was talking to one of the World’s Greatest Authorities.

He made a pleased little gesture, as though accepting her on the spot as a Sister Authority. Having learned how far she was advanced in her work, he said:

“I know how painters hate it, but—if you could put up with me—I should so much like to see your copy. The growth of artistic things is so fascinating. I once went through the rehearsals of a friend of mine, rather a famous actor. He was so flattering as to ask me to look over a Renaissance Italian setting, and really, to see an acted play in the making—the men and women struggling hour by hour in the throes of artistic creation—was a revelation. To me far more interesting that the finished product.... You will let me come and see your copy soon, won’t you?”

“Of course; I should love it,” she exclaimed.

“May I come to-morrow?”

Then suddenly she remembered, and went hot and cold all over, and knew not whether her cheeks were ashen or flushed scarlet. The Greatest Authority in the World was coming to see her poor little copy—and there was that impossible out-of-drawing bit of thigh of the chubby St. John. She gasped.

“But as yet it’s dreadful. It’s all so difficult.”

“Not if you treat it reverently. The moment you try to improve the fault of a masterpiece you’re lost.”

His insight was uncanny. She looked at him in amazement.

“How did you know?”

“I happen to know—what shall we call it?—the snags of the picture.”

Suddenly he rose in concerned apology. He was the worst host in Italy, which was saying a great deal. There was a box of chocolates which he had overlooked. And a box of cigarettes. He presented both. Her chastened mood prompted the choice of chocolate. He lit a cigarette. Then took her the tour of his treasures in his dining-room, work-room and an outer hall.

“I suppose it’s childish,” said he, “but I do love showing these things to people who can appreciate them.”

At the end of the tour she took her leave. He accompanied her to the flat door; and, as he held her hand, he looked at her rather wistfully, his head on one side.

“My dear child—I can call you so because I’m years older than your father—in order to get along in a rough world we all need plenty of courage—and I think you’ve got it. Good-bye till to-morrow.”

He opened the door. Then he suddenly left her and quickly reappeared with the ornamental box of chocolates.

“Forgive me—I’m an awful idiot. But I got them especially for you.”

The waiting car took her back to the Pension Toselli. She wondered how old he was. He said he was years older than her father. He couldn’t be ninety. That was absurd. At moments, he seemed quite young. Altogether he was a puzzle—a delightful one, but a puzzle. Now and then, through his shy desire to please flashed a shaft of authority, revealing him for a moment as a man of a certain greatness of soul and mind.

When Anthony asked her at dinner: “Well, did you see the Grand Panjandrum?” his note of irreverence jarred. Instinctively she administered rebuke.

“I didn’t personally; but I’ve no doubt other people might have done.”

He laughed. “Which means, my Guide, Philosopher and Conscience, that when I visit him I must go clad in the garments of humility.”

“You’d better choose the garments carefully,” she retorted.

Presently she relented.

“He’s a very big man of course, Anthony; but really he’s the very dearest of dears.”

“Is there a man who wouldn’t be that for the sake of your beaux yeux?” said he.

Perella, who was very young in the ways of men, met his laughing eyes and flushed and forgave him. And the wise youth adroitly pursued the turn of the conversation.

There followed for Perella some weeks of unspoiled happiness. Professor Silvester Gayton, a meek little figure in an old-fashioned bowler hat, had appeared in the gallery, saluted deferentially by the uniformed attendant at the door, and had praised her copy of the Franciabigio, and, in his hesitating, apologetic way, had made valuable suggestions. The fruits of his approval manifested themselves shortly afterwards by an offer from a Florentine dealer for a copy of the Deposizione of Fra Bartolomeo in the Pitti, on behalf of an Argentine millionaire who was adding a Renaissance Picture Gallery to his palace in Buenos Aires. The road to fortune gleamed golden before her. Through Silvester Gayton she made the acquaintance of the Marchesa della Torre, an elderly English lady, a widow, who lived in a queer little old Palazzo poked away behind the Strozzi. The relations between the Marchesa and the Professor suggested to Perella’s nostrils the perfume of an old romance.

When she told the Marchesa that her mother was an Italian, the daughter of a Roman poet, the old lady fervently insisted on her learning the language of her mother’s country, and produced from the whirlpool of her late husband’s family a pretty girl, one Lucia Demonetti, who was willing to give Italian lessons in exchange for English. The lessons were given in the Demonetti apartment, delightfully reminiscent, in a queer way, of the Battersea flat, for which, now and then, she felt a child’s nostalgia. As a medium of communication the two young women employed a dreadful French.

And there was Anthony all the time, gay, delightful, holding her heart in tender hands. Her wan and fragile beauty began to bloom from insignificance into definition. Even to herself she seemed to occupy a greater space in the world. To her further content, Anthony had begun to work. All owing, said he, to the example and precept of his adorable Conscience. His Cambridge friend, Charlie Dent, had made him show his portfolio of old drawings to Cornelius Adams, the American gentleman who had set him on the cocktail path. Cornelius Adams had invited him to his villa and commissioned a crayon portrait for a favourite daughter in Scotland. Anthony had a bold line and a flourish and a magical trick of portraiture. The drawing commanded instant appreciation. Exhibited proudly by the possessor to the Anglo-American colony, it brought in two or three stray orders. He began to discuss with Perella the most suitable locality in which he could set up a studio. It became the nominal object of many walks during which they incidentally saturated themselves with the intimate atmosphere of beauty in paint and stone, which to all but Italians is the only reason for the existence of Florence. Thus Anthony Blake, dismissing with a supercilious hand the pulsating spirit of New Italy. Why should he or any foreigner care a hang about the modern significance of the place? Would a cultivated Italian go into the mildest of raptures over Glasgow or Manchester or Birmingham, which, as cities, could swallow up modern Florence and forget all about it. Florence only lived as an eternal message of the centuries. The very type and temper of the citizens were the same as in the days of the Gonfaloniere. The black-shirted Fascisti going about the streets might have burned—or stopped the living cremation according to Piedmond—of Savonarola.

He had the superficial history of the place at his tongue’s end. His academical studies in architecture at Cambridge had led him into the pleasant paths of Italian art which are inextricably intertwined with those of Italian history. He could put dates on arches and traceries and pilasters and cornices with incredible ease. She thought him wonderful. The travelling card of the Royal Institute of British Architects, duly visé-d by the Italian Consul in London, and the card of recommendation given to Perella by Professor Gayton, gave them privileges denied to the casual sightseer. Now and again old instinct would compel him to an architectural sketch. Perella looked longingly at his deft fingers. Hers were of no use for delicate drawing.... She wished some one would commission her to copy frescoes in Santa Maria Novella, or the cloisters of San Marco, while Anthony should look on.... Meanwhile, they did not find the studio.

Anthony had presented his letter of introduction to Professor Gayton, and been politely received.

“He gave me the impression,” said he to Perella, “that he had just been pulled by a conjuror out of a hat, and didn’t know where he was.”

Perella laughed, the incorrigible youth having established in her eyes his charter of libertinage. But she would have liked more cordiality in the relations between Anthony and the Professor. The latter’s verdict was:

“Yes, my dear. Quite a talented young man. He’ll make his way, no doubt. I find he knows a number of people in Florence already. They’ll be of considerable service to him.”

And then he broke out into a panegyric on that really great man, Halliday Armstrong, R.A., whose erudition was equalled only by his artistry. Which was his nervous way of indicating that he had no peculiar use for Anthony Blake.

“He really does love the old things,” said Perella.

“As an artist he must,” said Silvester Gayton. “But he doesn’t love them quite in the way that you and I do.”

This little talk took place one afternoon at the Marchesa’s, where she had met him taking tea.

She had met him several times since his inspection of her picture—once or twice she had gone, on his invitation, to the flat in the Viale Milton—refusing, with discreet wisdom, the offer of the car, and journeying thither quite comfortably by tram. One Sunday he took the Marchesa and herself up to Fiesole where, losing shyness of speech, he breathed the breath of life into the crumbling tiers of seats and the broken columns of the ancient theatre, and made the majesty of Rome live again before their eyes; filled the cold place with eager citizens, and enacted, so that they saw it vividly, the drama on the strange and unfamiliar stage. Here Perella, accustomed to rare gleams, came under the spell of his lambent genius. Now she understood why men had called him the inspired teacher and why half the governments and universities of Christendom had showered honours on his bald and modest head. By the magic of his art he had transferred, almost hypnotically, his perfect vision to her brain....

She remembered afterwards that the guardian had welcomed him with reverent obsequiousness and had addressed him as Commendatore, which explained to her the meaning of the little rosette he wore in his buttonhole.

Later the Marchesa had shown her his record in a treasured old Who’s Who.

“If he wore all his hoods and decorations at once,” laughed the lady, “there’d be nothing left of him visible.”

Perella caught the date of his birth. Yes, he was quite old, far older than her father, who was not yet fifty.

She remembered that, when they turned away to visit the cold little archæological museum near by, the Marchesa had said to him:

“My dear Silvester, what a wonder you are! How you make the past live!”

And he had replied:

“If you can’t see the past as a living thing, what’s the use of worrying about it? The present facts about ruins are as valueless as patient measurements of any old bit of jagged rock on a mountain side. And what’s the good of reconstructing the ground plan of a site like a geometrical puzzle, unless it leads to an accurate imagining of the whole building? To go to painting—what’s the good of staring like an idiot at my belovèd Primitives, unless you can project yourself into the historically-conditioned outlook on life of the painter and the people for whom he painted? Primitives are either dead or they’re astonishingly alive. When silly asses call Primitives ‘quaint,’ I see red, and want to bite them.”

Perella thought of Anthony who had dismissed the whole lot of them—Cimabue, Giotto, Ducio, Spinello, Aretini—with a gay wave of the hand.

“They get at one somehow,” he had said. “One’s sorry for them, I suppose. They meant well, but they’re funny old fowls just the same.”

She wondered what the Professor would have said to this. She pictured him perched on a chair and savagely biting Anthony’s ear.

But this was only a passing sense of the comic, which made for endearing rather than disillusionment. She began to adore him in her young and tender way.

His shyness, his horror of publicity, kept him remote from the ever-changing, semi-cultivated Anglo-Saxon society that, were it given its way, would have flowed an embarrassing, adulatory stream through his pleasant leisure from year’s end to year’s end. Hence, almost against his will, and certainly without his knowledge, there had gone up a legend of his unapproachable Grand Lama seclusion. On a lecture platform, inspired by his poetic vision, he was a compelling force; in a cosmopolitan drawing-room, he became but a bewildered and stammering undergraduate. Yet he was not unsociable. To a few houses in Florence he went in secrecy as a delighted guest; and his intimates were welcomed in the beautiful rooms in the Viale Milton. All of this Perella knew; on the one side, from the gossip of the Pension Toselli, where, as one living under the ægis, as it were, of the awe-inspiring dictator, she felt humorously inclined to put on airs; and, on the other, from her own observation and the confidences of the Marchesa della Torre.

His courteous, ever apologetic kindliness warmed her young life. Why he should ever have given a second thought to so insignificant a speck on his horizon as herself, she was at a loss to imagine. She supposed it was on account of her wonderful father, to whom she wrote reams of glowing description which bored the uninterested journalist to tears.

“All about this dismal fellow,” said he, displaying the sheets to the devoted lady who kept him out of the Fuddlers’ Club, “and not a word about my liver and my gout and my dreadful struggle for existence. Lear is the typical father of all time.”

Still, he was generous. On her birthday he sent her a Treasury Note for a pound, bidding her buy a nice little frock with it. Perella wondered whether father was ever more adorable than hers.

This by way of parenthesis, to show one of the many gleams of the soft radiance under which Perella had her being. Star-dust, as it were, with her dear Professor serene and restful moon. But Anthony blazed in her firmament a wondrous sun.

The day of days dawned for her on the Saturday before Easter. For then, against even ecclesiastical astronomics, the sun and moon were to be in conjunction.

The first thrill of it had been communicated a week before. Scarcely had she sat down to dinner when the dilapidated waiter rushed out and returned and whispered to Madame Toselli. Madame Toselli, commanding silence, apostrophized Perella.

“Miss Annaway, Professor Gayton wants you on the telephone.”

The light of expectation danced in her eyes, and she fled out, no longer feeling herself the smallest of all possible persons in the greatest of all possible worlds. Her intimacy with the Great Recluse had gained her the envious respect of the Pension. The Brabazon ladies had invited her to tea in their musty little private sitting-room at the back, and, before seeking to pump her dry, had endeavoured to set themselves on the same plane by exhibiting a couple of letters, ornamented with butterflies, written by Whistler to their aunt. Madame Toselli had transferred her to a room with a less chimney-potty outlook, and offered, if she swore inviolable secrecy, to let her have her early breakfast in bed. Also, one evening the Grewsons had invited her out to dinner to meet a pair of lost Archdeacons (male and female, and conjugally bound) from Demerara.

Said Anthony: “If you make love to him over the telephone, I’ll commit suicide by eating everything that is offered me.”

Thus it was a Personage that, in the guise of a tiny scrap of humanity, slipped along the side of the table and out of the room.

She returned, flushed and excited.

“Oh, Anthony, isn’t it lovely? He has asked us to go to the Scoppio del Carro on Saturday!”

“Us?”

She nodded brightly. “Yes—us. You and me and us two. He goes every year, and always has the same balcony. Of course I said you’d come. You will, won’t you?”

“Naturally. It’s jolly decent of him,” said Anthony. “I wonder what made him think of me.”

A rare mood of gaiety caught her.

“Who could ever see you, Antonio, without thinking of you?”

He responded with uplifted hand.

“Enough, woman. I’ve heard that sort of thing before.”

That is why the wings of the dawn awoke her to happiness on that Saturday morning.

The whole of Tuscany seemed to be pouring through the narrow streets towards the Piazza del Duomo, as they made their way to the scene of the historical Burning of the Car. To keep her by his side, Anthony tucked his hand beneath her arm, and steered her happily through the welter of men and horses and groaning automobiles. Every one looked excited and happy and anxious, for it was a most important ceremony that was to take place—nay more—the last lingering augury sanctioned by the Church forecasting the summer’s harvest. The Babel precluded coherent speech. But what did words matter when his arm bent strongly round her to save her new hat from the wet nose of a cab-horse?

The Piazza was seething with humanity when they reached the shop on the western side above which was Professor Gayton’s balcony. They mounted to the welcome of the proprietor who for years had placed his salon at the Professor’s disposal. They were the first comers; but the Commendatore would soon arrive—he looked at his watch—always in time for the great procession. Here was the best view of the Scoppio in Florence.

They went on to the balcony. On the right the white and black marble front of the domed cathedral flanked by the towering Campanile gleamed in the keen April sunlight. On the left stood the lesser but exquisite mass of the Baptistery. The only place, from skyline to ground, clear of human heads and faces lay between the two buildings. And in the midst thereof, close to the Baptistery and centred with the great West Door, and, so, with the far away hidden High Altar of the Cathedral, rose heavenward the red and gold structure of the Car, from whose shafts had been withdrawn the four pure white oxen, whose sole duty in life was to drag the Carro from and to its resting-place on one day of the year. And, just visible as the sunlight glinted here and there on them, two wires ran from the car across the Piazza straight into the Great West Door.

Humanity everywhere, at windows, on roofs, on rough deal stands; an ever thickening crush below, as all Tuscany crowded into the great square from its many tributary streets. Year after year, for centuries, the same crowd had gathered to see the same queer and childish, yet soul-uplifting spectacle.

“Charlie Dent,” said Anthony, “is the miserablest worm of a fool unstamped on.”

Perella asked why. He swept a hand.

“He wanted me to cut this out and motor to some rotten villa for lunch. Talked through his ugly hat. By the way, he wears the filthiest hats I know—soft brims turned down. I hate ’em. Never trust a man with that kind of hat.... Lord! I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Don’t you feel the thrill of it?”

They were leaning over the balcony rail and their arms were touching. Perella drew a little breath of content. Certainly she felt the thrill of it.

Soon they were joined by the Professor, neat in a new tweed suit of old-fashioned cut, the jacket tightly buttoned, bowler hat and gloves; the old Marchesa, stout and rather lame; the Master of the Cambridge College, his wife and daughter; and a deliciously rugged, untidy, red-headed man with an eye-glass, whom Perella felt sure she would love, long before she realized him as Mr. Haddo Thwaites, sculptor and Royal Academician.

“My dear,” said Gayton, in his fussy, nervous way, “I want you to take good care of Miss Edwardes, you being a resident, she a visitor.” His eyes beamed behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “I count on you to do the honours.”

Thus was her function prescribed in the somewhat lordly company. But what of Anthony? Out of the tail of her eye she saw him bracketed with Mrs. Edwardes, a severe, high-nosed lady with a mission in life, hovering on the tantalizing borderland of the obscure and the obvious.

It was only afterwards that Anthony resolved her problem.

“A channel,” said he, “through whom run Dons past, present and future.”

Dr. Edwardes, layman, scientist, up-to-date Head of a venerable college which he was pushing to the front with almost American energy, was paired with the Marchesa, an old friend. Thus were the six chairs in the front of the balcony occupied. Again, out of the tail of her eye, did Perella glance backward at the Professor. He caught her glance, almost winked, so that she was delightfully conscious of a confidential message. He was perfectly happy with Haddo Thwaites, who stood over him with a grip on both shoulders, shaking him as though he loved him.

She turned to the pale girl by her side, who seemed a curious negative of feminine coquetry in attire and manner. Miss Edwardes wore black stockings and stout black shoes with which could woman born, pulsating with a thousand spring certainties, hopes and fears, refrain from contrasting with the juxtaposed fawn silk and dainty fawn suède? And in her timid, gentle way, Perella tried to carry out her host’s behest. Said Amelia Edwardes, in her second year at Girton, in reply to the obvious commonplace:

“Of course I’ve read all about it. It has an archæological interest; but doesn’t it strike you as being dreadfully silly?”

She waved her hand to the surging crowd below, to the barbaric car, for which the banks of the Ganges were perhaps a fitter setting than the banks of the Arno, to the quivering, dancing wires.

“Just look at them now.”

A child’s balloon—there were many vendors in the crowd—had escaped, and came soaring, a red, miniature Mars, over the Bargello, into the infinite height of the blue. In an instant the massed Piazza became a shimmering mass of upturned faces, like a vast field of wild flowers stirred by the breeze.

The young lady from Girton cast upward a scornful glance.

“Did you ever see anything so idiotic? These people are really in the same state they were in four hundred years ago.”

Perella spent a few deliberate moments in travel towards this new point of view. She failed to reach it.

“But that’s the beauty of this—well, this show—to-day. It bears out what Professor Gayton is always saying. He said it wonderfully the other day. ‘So long as the past lives, the present can’t die.’ ”

“What about the future?” asked Amelia Edwardes, with a twist of her thin lips.

Parrot Perella quoted:

“It’s the child of the Present, and the grandchild of the Past.”

“Plausible, but damned nonsense,” said Miss Edwardes. “There’s an undistributed middle somewhere in the logic. Dead things are dead, and they can’t come to life again. If anybody handed me my great-grandmother’s skeleton as a great treat, I’d say: ‘Take it away and burn it and make chlorate of potash, or whatever you make of bones, with it, and use it for manure, but don’t ask me to be sentimental.’ ”

Perella again pondered awhile.

“But the chlorate of potash, or whatever it is, would make things grow, wouldn’t it? Even the old bones would carry on.”

Miss Edwardes dismissed the argument.

“We’re talking of psychology, not chemistry. Just look at this. What can it mean to human reason?”

From the cathedral, heralded by a murmur of the populace, streamed an august procession, incense-swinging, crosier-bearing, chanting; boys gorgeous in scarlet and white lace; priests in Easter vestments; mitred bishops, dazzling in gold brocade; each personage who emerged from the western door seeming the last word in ecclesiastical splendour, till the appearance, under the velvet canopy, of the scarlet-robed Cardinal Archbishop of Florence. Majestically it wound across the open space, and gradually and inevitably it disappeared into the Baptistery.

“What meaning can it have?” asked Miss Edwardes scornfully, after having watched the pageant with unconscious interest.

“They’ve gone to bless the fonts in the Baptistery?” replied Perella literally.

“I know that. But what’s the good of blessing fonts when none of these people have baths once a lifetime?”

“They wouldn’t be any cleaner if the fonts weren’t blessed,” said Perella.

“Oh, yes they would. Of course I’m talking symbolically. You only have to preach hygiene with the same fervour as you do mystical theology.”

“You’d miss all this picturesqueness and colour—and spirituality—even though you mayn’t believe in it,” said Perella.

Amelia Edwardes sniffed. She had met reactionaries like Perella before. People like her would condemn their fellow-creatures to die of ague in rotten, moss-sodden, thatched cottages, just because they looked so pretty. Perella, no great arguer, lent a meek ear, but kept a keen eye on the happenings in front of her. They were interesting. A ladder was brought up to the car, and a man ordinary to view, but the most important and nerve-racked being there that day, mounted it to secure the wires; for, if the burning of the car should fail, grievous were the hopes of Tuscany, to say nothing of the man himself, execrated by the populace, going without payment. In fiercer and more resolute times, his unskilful predecessors were put to death. And while he was nervously employed the stately procession returned to the Duomo.

The hour of noon approached. Professor Gayton squeezed behind the chairs and touched Perella’s shoulder. She turned up a smiling and grateful face. She felt it characteristic of him to leave all these important people and raise her, as it were, out of her own insignificance.

“Keep your eyes on the door,” said he.

On the first stroke of twelve there whizzed from the west door along the wires, a silver dove with a train of flame, lit at the High Altar from the sacred fire brought from the Holy Land six hundred years ago. It flew across the Piazza straight into the heart of the car, and then like a flash made its return journey. In one instant the car became a bedevilment of fireworks and smoke. The vast multitude yelled with joy. The bells in the great belfry clanged a deafening triumph. The car thundered like a battle. The scene shimmered before Perella’s eyes as an apotheosis of human rapture.

“Damned silly,” said the young lady from Girton.

Perella awakened. “It isn’t,” she cried indignantly. “It’s lovely!”

The company on the balcony waited for the melting of the crowd. The last squib in the car exploded all alone, by quaint way of anti-climax. The four white oxen were harnessed to the car for the completion of their year’s work. And the proprietor of the balcony handed round a tray of glasses of vermouth which they drank in the salon. Anthony came to Perella’s side, glowing with enthusiasm. Childish the show, of course, but beautiful, like all legend and the survival of legend. There were times when it was good for the soul to be a child and think and not to put away childish things, in spite of the good St. Paul—or was it St. Peter? He thought it was Paul, because Peter, being a married man, was more human.

Silvester Gayton, hearing him, advanced a nervous step or two.

“So glad you appreciated it. So glad. So very glad.”

Perella was overjoyed. At last Anthony had won the Professor’s heart. Now all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

“I wish I’d been sitting next to you,” said he.

“So do I,” said Perella.

“Never mind. We felt everything the same. And that’s the main thing, isn’t it?”

Two minds with but a single thought! Two hearts that beat as one! (Vide a funny old play of the long ago.) Of course that was the main thing. Perella nodded at him with shy brightness.

The world transcended her imagined possibilities of bestness on that remarkable day. She discovered that the Professor had invited them all to lunch at a restaurant. At Betti’s she lost sense of time and space until she found herself sitting at a round table between Dr. Edwardes and Haddo Thwaites. Anthony across the table sped her a wry glance, as though to say he was still on duty. She responded with a little sense of proprietorship. On occasion, discipline was good for young men.

There followed a miracle of a meal. Young women brought up in back bedrooms by shaggy, out-at-elbows members of the Fuddlers’ Club, and then thrust out into the world to fend for themselves on sixty pounds a year, seldom eat in lordly banqueting houses. They also seldom have as luncheon neighbours the Head of a Cambridge House, and an eminent sculptor. But for the happiness racing through her veins and going to her head like wine, she would have felt the most frightened insignificant atom on earth. And lo! the jovial artist, though flanked on the other side by the latest product of Girton intelligence, began to talk to her as if he had known her, not all her life, but all his—which was considerably longer. And he knew her master at Chelsea, a personage stern and aloof, whom he alluded to as Binkie though his name was Cochrane, and many of his Chelsea contemporaries; and he had fraternized with her father at the Savage Club of which he was a member. He told her stories which made her laugh; he demurely stuffed Miss Edwardes’ Economics full of squibs, and at the right moment exploded them, as the Dove did those lurking in the Carro. The lady, as she was reading for the Political Essay Tripos, grew angry. He, a Cambridge man, made her angrier, by bewailing the fact that the University seemed to have Triposes for every thing—Cabbage Planting, Tripe Dressing, Assassination. With regard to the last, he deplored the passing away of the old order of seniority. The Senior Assassin of his year—what a distinction! Amelia Edwardes gazed fishily at him for a second or two, and her eyes said: “You poor fool,” and she went on with her food, not without commendable gluttony. Thwaites caught Perella’s eye and laughed, and, after a while, entered into controversy with the courteously dogmatic Master, and upheld Perella and himself as brother artists inseparably leagued to fight materialism in the sacred cause of Art.

Her pulses throbbed. People like Haddo Thwaites were her people. After all, she was the child of a magnificent reprobate and a half-remembered mother of unknown Italian ancestry. And across the table was Anthony, on his best behaviour, knowing, shrewd fellow, that his worth was being tested by his timid yet powerful little host, conversing in debonair fashion with the two Edwardes ladies, mother and daughter, but all the time pricking an envious ear to the robust and laughing talk of Haddo Thwaites. He, too, was of her own people; the people who could see and feel and understand all in a flash. She conceded to the Edwardes folk an important place in the intellectual sphere. But that sphere would never be hers. Sociology as formulated crudely by Amelia Edwardes, and subtly, and indeed, humorously, by the young lady’s father—for the progressive, non-clerical Master of a great College must necessarily have the charm and the quick touch upon life of the accomplished man of the world—was as meaningless to her half-educated mind as the technical engineering details of a battleship. As for Mrs. Edwardes, she seemed to be nothing but an Hotel Register of Academic personalities, without any other obvious reason for existence. No. They were not her people. She belonged to the big, generous sculptor, to the quick and impulsive Anthony.... Yes, and to the shy, antediluvian boy of a bald-headed professor who knew all that there was to be known about beauty.

About three o’clock on that magical April afternoon, Perella and Anthony found themselves happy wanderers in the streets of Florence. He threw his arm round her shoulders in a transient grip.

“Thank God I’ve got you to myself at last!”

She laughed. “I think we’ve behaved ourselves very nicely.”

“Not much merit in your behaving nicely, Perella, my Conscience,” said he. “It’s I who have been noble.”

“Let us find a site for a statue for you. It’ll be something to do,” said Perella.

“You’re two foot nothing and you weigh about three pennyweights, and you’re the only really adorable thing I’ve come across in my devastated life. Where the blazes can we go so that I can tell you exactly what I mean?”

“There’s quite a respectable salon in the Pension Toselli,” said Perella.

“There is also the Boboli Garden where there are fountains and statues and all the marvels of spring. And here’s a chariot especially sent down from heaven for us by the goddess.” He held up an arresting hand. “Strip the horse-hide off them, and you’ll find a pair of doves and the young bandit on the box has wings under his jacket, and his whip is only a camouflaged bow.”

They entered the chariot. The journey to Cythera began. He put his arm around her.

“I had an idea, when I first sat down by you in that place of abomination, that you had come straight out of a fairy tale.”

In the welter of her pride and her humility she whispered:

“Why? I don’t seem to be of much account.”

“You’re a sensitive flame, my dear, labouring under the delusion that you’re a woman.”

His arm gripped her little body tighter. His free hand caught her chin. In her eyes was the tragic look of the most radiantly happy woman who, for the first time, gives herself. He kissed her in the open streets of Florence.

Little of importance remained to be said in the Boboli Garden.