He opened his eyes.
“‘Puro è disposto a salire alle stelle,’” he murmured to himself, staring as at a vision where this somewhat gaudy hotel lounge had no place.
“What’s that?” I said, not quite catching his words.
“Eh?” He looked at me as though he had forgotten my presence, was only now reminded of it by my voice. “Oh, that’s the last line of the Purgatorio—where Dante, having drunk forgetfulness of the earth from Lethe, is ready to ascend with Beatrice into the stars of the Paradiso. .... All right, Jimmy,” he added, with a smile of sardonic superiority which irritated me, “don’t worry yourself with trying to understand. You wont. You’re one of those whose idea of the fit habitation for the divine soul shining through the eyes of your beloved is a bijou residence in a London suburb. After a few years of you, your wife, whoever she is, will be another Mrs. Bryant.”
“Many thanks!” I replied, somewhat nettled, and a little puzzled also. This was a new Toby. We were not given to cultivating poetry in our mess. “But since when have you taken to studying Dante in the original?”
“Oh, I’ve had plenty of time,” he answered, his eyes straying away from me evasively. “I’ve lived pretty much by myself these last few years.” He rose to his feet, cutting short the subject. “Let’s go for a stroll, shall we? Get a breath of fresh air into our lungs.”
I assented willingly enough. At the back of my mind was an obscure idea that, in the stimulated sense of comradeship evoked between two friends who walk together under a night sky, he might open himself to some confidence that would help me to a more precise definition of the relationship that subsisted between himself and Sylvia. In this I was disappointed. He walked along the asphalt promenade, now almost deserted, with the sea to our left marked only by an irregular faintly gleaming line of white in the black obscurity, without a word. He did not even respond to my efforts at conversation. Apparently he did not hear them. Overhead, the metallic blue-black heaven was powdered with a multitude of stars, twinkling down upon us from their immense remoteness. He threw his head back to contemplate them as we walked in silence. He baffled me, kept me somehow from my own private thoughts.
Suddenly he switched upon me.
“There can’t be nothingness all the way, can there?” he demanded of me with a curious vehemence of interrogation. His hand made an involuntary half-gesture toward the scintillating dome of stars. “There must be something!” His manner had the disconcerting intensity of a man who has been brooding overlong in solitude. “At a distance everything melts into the blue. I have seen blank blue sky where on another day there’s a range of mountains sharp and clear across the horizon. And they pretend that in all those millions of miles there is nothing—nothing but empty space!” He finished on a note of scorn.