From Paris he proceeded to Lyons, Marseilles, and Monte Carlo, in which places he disposed of the remainder of his collection, this time at a small profit. During these business transactions he felt that he was generally regarded as a thief, and more than once his experiences were unpleasant; but he was so full of the idea of hiding his tracks, and of building up once more the old life of freedom beyond the range of Dolly’s prying eyes, that he adopted, without any regard to his natural sensitiveness, all manner of subterfuges and variations of name.
At length, with quite an unwieldy packet of small notes, he made his way along the coast, crossed the frontier, being still under his real name, and stopped at Savona, Genoa, and Spezia, where he laboriously changed the money, little by little, into Italian currency. He then proceeded by way of Pisa to Rome, where, with a sense of almost schoolboyish exultation, he deposited his vagrant’s fortune at a well-known bank, and opened an account in the name of “James Easton.” This accomplished, he felt that he had taken the first firm step in his emancipation; for in future, whenever Eversfield became unbearable, he could speed over to Rome, even for but a month at a time, and, moving eastwards or southwards from this base, under the name by which he had formerly been known, he would always find money at his disposal, and complete freedom from domestic obligations.
He had now been gone from England some fourteen days, but Rome was the first place at which he had assumed this other name, for he intended Italy to be the western frontier of the vagrant’s life. The change of name meant far more to him than can easily be realized: it had a psychological effect upon his mind, such as, in a lesser degree, can sometimes be produced by a complete change of clothes. He almost hoped that he would be recognized and hailed by some acquaintance from England in order that he might look him deliberately in the face and say: “I am afraid you have made a mistake. My name is Easton: I come from Egypt.”
Having assumed this alias his first object was to recapture the old beloved sense of liberty by resuming his wandering existence, and by turning his back upon the elegances of life. Under the name of Easton, therefore, he at once selected a small inn in the democratic Trastevere quarter, near the Ponte Sisto, which had been recommended to him as the resort of commercial travellers and the like who desired a little cleanliness in conjunction with moderate honesty and extreme low prices; and having here deposited his portmanteau and engaged a room for a fortnight hence, he went at once to the railway station with nothing but a knapsack and a walking-stick in his hand and took the long journey back to Pisa, his intention being to wander southwards from that point along the beautiful coast, where the pine-woods came down to the seashore.
During the years at Eversfield his emotions had dried up, and he had become barren of all exalted thoughts. He was, as he expressed it to himself, continuously “off the boil.” But now once more his brain was galvanized, and all his actions were intensified, speeded up, and ebullient. His power of enjoyment, lost so long, had come back to him, and now not infrequently he was blessed with that fine frenzy which had left his mind unvisited these many weary months. He was a different man to-day: again hot-blooded, again eager to listen to the lure of the unattained, again capable of soaring, as it were, to the sun and the stars.
Two days later there befell him an adventure which changed the whole course of his life.
He had been walking all day through the pines and along the beach, and in the late afternoon he inquired of a passer-by whether there were any village in the neighbourhood where he might spend the night. The man replied that the path by which Jim was going led to a small fishermen’s inn, where a room and a meal were generally to be obtained, but that if he desired to reach the next little town he would have to retrace his steps and make a considerable detour, for, although it stood upon the seashore only three kilometres further along, it could not be approached by the beach, owing to the presence of a wide estuary. The day having been extremely hot, Jim was tired, and he therefore decided to try his luck at this house, which, the man said, was distant but ten minutes’ walk.
He found it to be a high, square, drab-washed building, which like so many poorer houses in Italy, gave the melancholy suggestion that it had seen better days. The red-tiled roof was in need of repair, the green shutters were falling to pieces, and there were innumerable cracks and small dilapidations upon its extensive areas of blank wall. The only indications that it was an inn were a long table and a bench upon one side of the narrow doorway, and a number of crude drawings in charcoal upon the lower part of the front wall.
The house stood upon a mound facing the beach, and backed by the dark pines; and at one side there was a patch of cultivated ground in which a few vegetables were growing. A small rowing-boat, moored by a rope, floated upon the smooth surface of the sea, and upon a group of rocks near by two dark-skinned fishermen sat smoking cigarettes. One of these, upon seeing Jim, put his hand to his mouth and called out to the innkeeper, who replied from some empty-sounding part of the ground-floor, and presently came with clamorous footsteps along the stone-flagged passage to the door.
He was a tall, stout man, with a two-days’ growth of grey stubble covering the lower part of his tanned face, and an untidy mat of white hair upon his head. His forehead was deeply wrinkled, and his eyes were screwed up as though the light hurt him. Had he changed his loose corduroy trousers and his collarless striped shirt for the garb of his ancestors, one would have said that the marble Sulla of the Vatican Museum had come to life.