“I wish I could boast as good a reason for being here! It is the dentist that brings me.” Martin noticed that she did not say from where. “But I am afraid I have thrown away my reputation for nothing. You have not yet explained the hordes that pour through this country with their red books in their hands, as regular as the birds in their seasons. Why do they do it, do you suppose? They make no poetical pilgrimages. Have they no lives of their own to live?”
“You are rather hard on us!” laughed Martin. They turned out of their alley, a mere crack between the houses with a strip of blue hung high above, into a cross street that led to a small square. “It is very simple. No American woman is quite happy until she has a motor car and has been to Europe. And then there is Culture, with a large C, which is making terrific inroads among us. And there is—‘Kennst Du das Land’—You know? Not many of us are so lucky as to stay, like you in the different colonies.” He looked at her to see how his guess would catch.
“I remember I had ideas about them once,” she said, in a tone that made Martin wonder. “But I know them too well now.”
“What about them?”
“They have most of the characteristics of Botany Bay at its flourishing period. There are a few workers and loafers; but most of us are hiders, sitting more or less modestly under smaller or larger clouds! Don’t ask me which I am!” she laughed, as Martin looked at her. “I used to think that disreputable people would be more interesting than reputable ones,” she went on, “because they had at least the courage of their convictions. But I have discovered to my sorrow that they can be just as dull as anybody. Of course there are glittering exceptions. But I have even met people of the most unquestionable virtue who were really worth knowing! I have come to the sad conclusion that existing classifications do not classify.”
Martin laughed with her as they went up the wider street into which their crossway had led them. But the interest which her very first word had aroused grew stronger in him than amusement. This dainty white person whom he had never seen before to-day—who was she? Where had she been, what had she done, yesterday, all the other days that went before their chance meeting by the Arno? There was something in the lightness of her words, in the simplicity with which she had accompanied him, that was not of common days.
The street opened out in front of them into a space of sun that widened as they advanced, disclosing the famous piazza with its group of white buildings under the city wall.
“Isn’t it nice?” she asked. “They always remind me of a little convoy of ships becalmed—these lonely white things with their broad shadows in the sunlight. But don’t look at that tower. I detest it for having tried in such a stupid way to be different from all the towers in the world. Nothing is nice about it but the view from the top. Which it is too hot to get at now. Let’s go over to the Campo Santo and look at the shadows of the tracery on the pavement. It is always cool and quaint there.”
She raised her parasol and led obliquely across the great square, between the cathedral and the baptistery, to a canopied door in a low wall. Martin stared curiously about him as they went. The burnt grass between the hot flagstones gave a strange impression of the solitude of the place, of its evident separation from the life of the city, which contrasted singularly with the splendours setting it apart among the shrines of the world. They rang at the canopied door and were admitted. It was like stepping into another century—so calm, so cool, so of itself was that burial place of another age. Of a different quality was the very sunshine which gilded the green of the quadrangle and retraced on the pavement of the cloister the outlines of the marble lace-work between the pillars. Martin was without words as they slowly made the round of the ambulatory, following and smiling together over the delightful frescoes. It all seemed to him a piece of the magic of this woman who had so unexpectedly released him from the intolerable mood of the morning.
Suddenly, among the sarcophagi, fragments of sculpture, and commemorative marbles which strew that painted cloister, a tablet caught his eye. It was in old French, with a flavour of Italian, and together they picked out the quaint lettering: