I signified, not without a grin of surprise, that I got him.
“I suppose you imagine that I owe you something,” proceeded Nick, “and so I won’t ask you to listen to any remarks on the subject of a habit you have latterly developed of snickering at inopportune moments. I will ask you, though, if you don’t mind, to go to Trondhjem and look up those enamels. I’m afraid Bode may be after them. In the meantime I think Zephine and I will beat it to the North Cape. I shouldn’t wonder if we ran around to Archangel and Nova Zembla too. I’m going to telegraph to England for a yacht. So you can take your time. But you must be ready for us to pick you up on our way back.”
At first, you know, I thought they had cooked the thing up between them. But Nick’s air—rather of a horse with the bit in his teeth—and Zephine’s unmistakable pinkness, and a queer look they at last exchanged, when Nick finished his speech and offered Zephine his arm, told me that not until that moment, when two Serene Highnesses, a baroque Englishman, and I, were staring at them, had those extraordinary young persons come to the point of undertaking the delicate negotiations vulgarly known as getting engaged. Zephine, at any rate, did not refuse Nick’s offered arm. And with a somewhat less magnificent bow they strolled away, leaving me to deal with the situation as best I might.
I did take my time. I bagged the enamels, and then I went on a two months’ walking tour with the Englishman of the pockets.
UNTO THE DAY
I
Martin leaned across the dusty parapet, ridden by that singular depression which one may know in strange cities. The fervour of the August sun, giving an intolerable vividness of outline and detail to the curving perspective, did not serve to cozen his mood. The ragged gully of the Arno, sunken between the ordered stone embankments, the wider curve of parallel façades with their indefinable touch of dignity and age, the dainty miniature of Santa Maria della Spina, the crenelated pile of the old citadel behind the Ponte a Mare, gave him the sense of something known and wearied of long ago. He looked down as from an infinite height upon a group of boys shouting below. They were splashing in a shallow pool or chasing each other naked on the sands, with an abandon enviable alike for its disregard of nature and of man. Beyond, where a rivulet of the shrunken stream made some pretence of motion, a row of women knelt above their wash-boards. They beat their hapless linen with a vehemence which at such a temperature would have been preternatural had their chatter not made it miraculous. The theatrical vivacity of the people, their unaccustomed faces, their foreign speech, weighed again on Martin’s humour. He rose impatiently and turned his back to the river.
The quay was hardly more engaging in the pitiless morning glare. White pavement and stucco façades danced together in the quivering silence. Scarcely a living creature was visible. A man passed with a panier-laden donkey, uttering a harsh unintelligible cry. The straw hat on the beast’s head, through which two long ears protruded comically, provided a fleeting object of interest. In the distance a woman approached. She was dressed in white, and Martin felt a personal resentment against her for not affording some contrast to the intolerable monotony of light. Had she come forth in sky-blue or bottle-green, she would have been a public benefactress, worthy the freedom of the city.
Wondering miserably what he should do with himself, Martin cast an indifferent glance at the building in front of him. It was one of the high dark-browed Tuscan palazzi, broad-eaved and strong-barred like the great houses of Florence. The entrance was open, giving a glimpse of a shady courtyard within. Above the massive archway was a device that attracted the young man’s attention. A fragment of chain hung there, from a bolt projecting above the keystone; and between the chain and a high stone escutcheon ran the legend, in letters of tarnished brass let into the weathered marble:
ALLA GIORNATA