"Still in London, Rodney."
"Yes, till the end of the week; and then I go to Italy. And you? You're going to meet Sir Owen Asher at Marseilles."
"I am going to Ireland," and, catching sight of a look of astonishment and disapproval on Rodney's face, Harding began to explain why he must return to Ireland.
"The rest of your life is quite clear," said Rodney. "You knew from the beginning that Paris was the source of all art, that everyone here who is more distinguished than the others has been to Paris. We go to Paris with baskets on our backs, and sticks in our hands, and bring back what we can pick up. And having lived immersed in art till you're forty, you return to the Catholic Celt! Your biographer will be puzzled to explain this last episode, and, however he may explain it, it will seem a discrepancy."
"I suppose one should think of one's biographer."
"It will be more like yourself to get Asher to land you at one of the Italian ports. We will go to Perugia and see Raphael's first frescoes, done when he was sixteen, and the town itself climbing down into ravines. The streets are lonely at midday, but towards evening a breeze blows up from both seas—Italy is very narrow there—and the people begin to come out; and from the battlements one sees the lights of Assisi glimmering through the dusk."
"I may never see Italy. Go on talking. I like to hear you talk about Italy."
"There are more beautiful things in Italy than in the rest of the world put together, and there is nothing so beautiful as Italy. Just fancy a man like you never having seen the Campagna. I remember opening my shutters one morning in August at Frascati. The poisonous mists lay like clouds, but the sun came out and shone through them, and the wind drove them before it, and every moment a hill appeared, and the great aqueducts, and the tombs, and the wild grasses at the edge of the tombs waving feverishly; and here and there a pine, or group of pines with tufted heads, like Turner used to draw.... The plain itself is so shapely. Rome lies like a little dot in the middle of it, and it is littered with ruins. The great tomb of Cecilia Metella is there, built out of blocks of stone as big as an ordinary room. He must have loved her very much to raise such a tomb to her memory, and she must have been a wonderful woman." Rodney paused a moment and then he said: "The walls of the tombs are let in with sculpture, and there are seats for wayfarers, and they will last as long as the world,—they are ever-lasting."
"Of one thing I'm sure," said Harding. "I must get out of London. I can't bear its ugliness any longer."
The two men crossed Piccadilly, and Harding told Rodney Asher's reason for leaving London.