II
They crossed the quay to a dark little alley that skirted the flank of his palace, and Martin could scarcely realise how it was that his mood had so completely changed.
“Be warned in time!” he said: “It is not too late to repent. I don’t want to lure you away under false pretences. I’m just a common tripper and I have a Baedeker in my pocket.”
“I knew it!” she rejoined: “That is why I am throwing my reputation to the winds. And I hope you notice, in the meantime, that we are entering the Way of Wisdom. See?” she pointed to the name of the street—Via della Sapienza—cut in a high stone. “But I always wanted to know what trippers did. Do tell me!” She put down her parasol as they entered the cool of the shadow. Martin was glad, for it enabled him to see her better.
“Must I be butchered to make a Pisan holiday?” he asked. “Know then that I, who now tread the Way of Wisdom, started out on a poetical pilgrimage. I have been walking—figuratively, and a trifle anachronously—in the footsteps of Shelley. Rome knows me; also Venice, Ravenna, and the Euganean Hills. I have been to Spezia. I have pensively treadled bicycles up and down behind every villa at San Terenzo, wondering which was the one. I have sailed boats on the Seno di Lerici. I have gone swimming at Viareggio. I have haunted the harbour of Leghorn. And early this morning I wheeled up here. I am now prepared to make a brief but comprehensive survey of the city and environs—particularly of the pineta at Bocca d’Arno. There I shall compose a sonnet, sitting with my back against a sea-viewing pine, and then I shall go home. The anatomy of tripping is laid bare before you!”
The lady laughed.
“I wish I could boast as good a reason for being here! It is the dentist that brings me.” Martin noticed that she did not say from where. “But I am afraid I have thrown away my reputation for nothing. You have not yet explained the hordes that pour through this country with their red books in their hands, as regular as the birds in their seasons. Why do they do it, do you suppose? They make no poetical pilgrimages. Have they no lives of their own to live?”
“You are rather hard on us!” laughed Martin. They turned out of their alley, a mere crack between the houses with a strip of blue hung high above, into a cross street that led to a small square. “It is very simple. No American woman is quite happy until she has a motor car and has been to Europe. And then there is Culture, with a large C, which is making terrific inroads among us. And there is—‘Kennst Du das Land’—You know? Not many of us are so lucky as to stay, like you in the different colonies.” He looked at her to see how his guess would catch.
“I remember I had ideas about them once,” she said, in a tone that made Martin wonder. “But I know them too well now.”
“What about them?”
“They have most of the characteristics of Botany Bay at its flourishing period. There are a few workers and loafers; but most of us are hiders, sitting more or less modestly under smaller or larger clouds! Don’t ask me which I am!” she laughed, as Martin looked at her. “I used to think that disreputable people would be more interesting than reputable ones,” she went on, “because they had at least the courage of their convictions. But I have discovered to my sorrow that they can be just as dull as anybody. Of course there are glittering exceptions. But I have even met people of the most unquestionable virtue who were really worth knowing! I have come to the sad conclusion that existing classifications do not classify.”
Martin laughed with her as they went up the wider street into which their crossway had led them. But the interest which her very first word had aroused grew stronger in him than amusement. This dainty white person whom he had never seen before to-day—who was she? Where had she been, what had she done, yesterday, all the other days that went before their chance meeting by the Arno? There was something in the lightness of her words, in the simplicity with which she had accompanied him, that was not of common days.
The street opened out in front of them into a space of sun that widened as they advanced, disclosing the famous piazza with its group of white buildings under the city wall.
“Isn’t it nice?” she asked. “They always remind me of a little convoy of ships becalmed—these lonely white things with their broad shadows in the sunlight. But don’t look at that tower. I detest it for having tried in such a stupid way to be different from all the towers in the world. Nothing is nice about it but the view from the top. Which it is too hot to get at now. Let’s go over to the Campo Santo and look at the shadows of the tracery on the pavement. It is always cool and quaint there.”
She raised her parasol and led obliquely across the great square, between the cathedral and the baptistery, to a canopied door in a low wall. Martin stared curiously about him as they went. The burnt grass between the hot flagstones gave a strange impression of the solitude of the place, of its evident separation from the life of the city, which contrasted singularly with the splendours setting it apart among the shrines of the world. They rang at the canopied door and were admitted. It was like stepping into another century—so calm, so cool, so of itself was that burial place of another age. Of a different quality was the very sunshine which gilded the green of the quadrangle and retraced on the pavement of the cloister the outlines of the marble lace-work between the pillars. Martin was without words as they slowly made the round of the ambulatory, following and smiling together over the delightful frescoes. It all seemed to him a piece of the magic of this woman who had so unexpectedly released him from the intolerable mood of the morning.
Suddenly, among the sarcophagi, fragments of sculpture, and commemorative marbles which strew that painted cloister, a tablet caught his eye. It was in old French, with a flavour of Italian, and together they picked out the quaint lettering:
D O M
Cy gist Achilles Gvibert de Chevigny, fils de
Pierre Gvibert, Escvier, Sievr de Chevigny, Conseiller,
Secretair dv Roy, Maison, Covronne deFrance
et de Dame Clavde Gviet Gallard dela
Paroisse Sainct Andre dela ville de Paris, le qvel
Achille av sortir del’ Accademie, et des
movsquetaires dv Roy, vovlovst faire le voiage
DItalie et sen retovrnant deRome en France, estant
tombe malade Alivovrne, povr changer dair, se fit
porter en cette ville de Pise, ov, apres avoir recev les
saincts sacremens ordonnez par nostre mere saincte
Eglise, il movrvt, et fvst enterre en ce saint liev, le
XXI: iovr Daovst MDCLXXIV: agee de XXVI: ans.
Priez Diev povr le salvt de son ame.
Fait par le tres cher amy dela nation, et
Maison de France, Labbe Gaetani archidiacre de cediocese.
For a moment they were silent. In the stillness of that sequestered place the forgotten story seemed to live again. Then Martin put his finger to the stone:
“See!” he exclaimed. “It was the twenty-first of August. And to-day is the twenty-first!”
His companion turned her eyes to his, with a curious smile.
“And I came to show you! If I had any qualms about les convenances I have none now.”
They were silent again, looking at each other and at the white tablet. There was something in the little coincidence which seemed to Martin strangely significant.
“‘Lequel Achille voulut faire le voyage d’Italie.’ How near it makes him seem, poor boy! I did not think of there being trippers then,” he said with a smile. “There was no Shelley; not even a Goethe and a Mignon—two hundred and thirty-three years ago!”
She made no reply at first. Then she said, softly:
“I wonder how it was with Dame Claude. There were other things that lacked then, beside your poets. It must have taken time for the Abbé Gaetani’s letter to get to Paris.”
“However it was then, it happily makes no difference now,” returned Martin. A rising elation filled him—out of the utter unexpectedness of this meeting, out of its picturesqueness, out of the infinity of possibilities which it might promise. He was accordingly amazed at the vehemence with which his companion turned upon him.
“Why do you say that?” she exclaimed. “You who brought me here, and on this day! Have you forgotten the gateway by the river? Now is not the time. The time was when the horseman clattered up the cobble-stones of St. André and into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Chevigny; when Dame Claude seized the packet from the page at the door and ran with it to the secretaire du roi; when he broke the seal, read the first lines of the Abbé Gaetani, went white to the lips, looked at Dame Claude, and turned away. It was then that it made a difference. It was then that nothing else made a difference. Things come, and then other things come. Time is only a chain to hold us to them—or away from them. It is mere chance whether it breaks all at once or by degrees....”
Martin watched her keenly as she spoke, white in the shadow of the cloister, her hair dark against the wan frescoes. There was a curious contrast between the vivid modern figure and those faded images of a life so dim and far away. And recalling the palace gate he wondered what there might be of consistency or inconsistency between what she said so lightly then and what she said so intensely now. And why? Where had she been, what had she done, yesterday, all the other days that went before their chance meeting by the Arno?
She stopped, as if reading in his eyes. She touched the white stone softly.
“Good-bye, poor Achille,” she said—“you and your twenty-six years.”
She did not speak again as they passed on. But at one of the openings into the green quadrangle a sudden impulse seized her. She stepped down into the grass and picked some crimson-tipped daisies growing there. Then she went back and laid them on top of the tablet, adding:
“That is for Dame Claude, who was not here all those years ago to-day.”