Then, his fingers trembling with eagerness, he opened Arnica’s letter. The circumstances seemed too strange; he found it difficult to fix his attention; he failed, no doubt, to make out the exact relationship existing between Julius and the old gentleman, but, at any rate, he managed to grasp that Julius was in Rome. His mind was made up at once; an urgent desire to see his brother possessed him—an unbridled curiosity to find out what kind of repercussion this affair would set up in that calm and logical mind.
“That’s settled. I shall sleep to-night at Naples, get out my trunk, and to-morrow morning return by the first train to Rome. It will certainly be a good deal less wise, but perhaps a little more amusing.”
III
At Naples Lafcadio went to a hotel near the station; he made a point of taking his trunk with him, because travellers without luggage are looked at askance, and because he was anxious not to attract attention; then he went out to buy a few necessary articles of toilette and another hat instead of the odious straw (beside which, it was too tight) which Fleurissoire had left him. He wanted to buy a revolver as well, but was obliged to put this purchase off, as the shops were already shutting.
The train he took next day started early, arriving in Rome in time for lunch.
His intention was not to approach Julius until after the newspapers had appeared with an account of the “crime.” The crime! This word seemed odd to him, to say the very least; and criminal as applied to himself totally inappropriate. He preferred adventurer—a word as pliable as his beaver and as easily twisted to suit his liking.
The morning papers had not yet mentioned the adventure. He awaited the evening ones with impatience, for he was eager to see Julius and to feel for himself that the game had begun; until then the time hung heavy on his hands, as with a child playing at hide-and-seek, who, no doubt, doesn’t want to be found, but wants, at any rate, to be sure he is being looked for. The vagueness of this state was one with which he was not as yet familiar; and the people he elbowed in the street seemed to him particularly commonplace, disagreeable and hideous.
When the evening came he bought the Corriere from a newspaper-seller in the Corso; then he went into a restaurant, but he laid the paper all folded on the table beside him and forced himself to finish his dinner without looking at it—out of a kind of bravado, and as though he thought in this way to put an edge on his desire; then he went out, and once in the Corso again, he stopped in the light of a shop window, unfolded the paper and on the second page saw the following head-line:
CRIME, SUICIDE ... OR ACCIDENT
He read the next few paragraphs, which I translate: