I took off my hat as I approached. The old man stared at me absently, and it was only when I was already almost past him that he recollected who I was.
“Wait,” he called after me, “wait!” And he hastened down the road in pursuit. Taken utterly by surprise and at a disadvantage—for it was engaged in retorting to the affront imprinted on the cypress roots—the dog permitted itself to be jerked after him. Too much astonished to be anything but obedient, it followed its master. “Wait!”
I waited.
“My dear sir,” said the old gentleman, catching me by the lapel of my coat and blowing most disagreeably in my face, “I want to apologise.” He looked around him, as though afraid that even here he might be overheard. “I want to apologise,” he went on, “about that wretched pump business. I assure you that, if it had been only my affair, I’d have put the thing right as soon as you asked. You were quite right: a bathroom is an implicit guarantee of bath water. I saw from the first that we should have no chance if it came to court. And besides, I think one ought to treat one’s tenants as handsomely as one can afford to. But my wife”—he lowered his voice—“the fact is that she likes this sort of thing, even when she knows that she’s in the wrong and must lose. And besides, she hoped, I dare say, that you’d get tired of asking and have the job done yourself. I told her from the first that we ought to give in; but she wouldn’t listen. You see, she enjoys it. Still, now she sees that it must be done. In the course of the next two or three days you’ll be having your bath water. But I thought I’d just like to tell you how....” But the Maremmano, which had recovered by this time from its surprise of a moment since, suddenly bounded, growling, up the road. The old gentleman tried to hold the beast, strained at the leash, tottered unsteadily, then gave way and allowed himself to be dragged off. “... how sorry I am,” he went on, as he receded from me, “that this little misunderstanding....” But it was no use. “Good-bye.” He smiled politely, made a little deprecating gesture, as though he had suddenly remembered a pressing engagement, and had no time to explain what it was. “Good-bye.” He took off his hat and abandoned himself completely to the dog.
A week later the water really did begin to flow, and the day after our first bath Signora Bondi, dressed in dove-grey satin and wearing all her pearls, came to call.
“Is it peace now?” she asked, with a charming frankness, as she shook hands.
We assured her that, so far as we were concerned, it certainly was.
“But why did you write me such dreadfully rude letters?” she said, turning on me a reproachful glance that ought to have moved the most ruthless malefactor to contrition. “And then that writ. How could you? To a lady....”
I mumbled something about the pump and our wanting baths.
“But how could you expect me to listen to you while you were in that mood? Why didn’t you set about it differently—politely, charmingly?” She smiled at me and dropped her fluttering eyelids.