III
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