“Me too!” I said.
Probably most of the thousands of Englishmen in Italy had the same wish.
I departed from the church. The chanting had ceased; the guides were still talking business, but the beggars had begun to whine.
In the dining-room of the hotel there was absolute silence. A lady near the door, with an Italian newspaper over her coffee-cup, who had never spoken to me before, and would probably never speak to me again, said:
“I suppose you’ve heard about—”
“Yes,” I said.
Everybody in the room knew. Everybody was
English. And nobody spoke. As the guests came down by ones and twos to breakfast, the lady near the door stopped each of them: “I suppose you’ve heard—” But none of them had. I was her sole failure. At length a retired military officer came down, already informed. “Where does this news come from?” he demanded of the room, impatiently, cautiously, half-incredulously, as one who would hesitate to trust any information that he had not seen in a London daily. With a single inflection of his commanding voice he wiped out the whole Press of Italy—that country of excellent newspapers. He got little answer. We all sat silent.