It was not, however, successful; for certain difficulties arose that were insurmountable.
The trio left Florence at the beginning of May, but I was left alone with the car and with the Italian servants to idle away the days as best I could. They had all three gone to Aix, I think.
The only other Englishman left in Florence appeared to be a man I had recently re-encountered, named Charlie Whitaker. He and I had become great friends, as we had been several years before. I often took him for a run on the car, to Bologna, Livorno, or Siena, and we used to meet nearly every evening.
One stifling August night Florence lay gasping.
Above the clatter of the café, the music, the laughter of women and the loud chatter in Italian, the strident cries of the newsvendors rose in the great moonlit Piazza, with its huge equestrian statue of the beloved Vittorio looming dark against the steely sky.
Only the popolo, the merry, brown-faced, easy-going Florentines, were still in the sun-baked city. All Society, even the richer tradesmen, and certainly all the foreign residents, had fled—all of the latter save two, Charlie and myself.
You, who know the quaint old mediæval city in the winter “season,” when the smart balls are given at the Corsini or the Strozzi, when the Cascine is filled with pretty women at four o’clock, and the jewellers on the Ponte Vecchio put forth their imitation cinquecento wares, would not know it in August, when beneath that fiery Tuscan sun it is as a city of the dead by day, while at night the lower classes come forth from their slums to idle, to gossip, and to enjoy the bel fresco after the heat and burden of the day.
On an August night the little dark-eyed seamstress sits and enjoys her ice at the same tin-topped table at the Gambrinus where the foreign Princess has sat in April. In winter Florence is a city of the wealthy; in summer it is given over entirely to the populace. So great is the sweltering, breathless heat, that everyone who can leave Florence in August leaves it. The great villas and palaces are closed; the Florence Club, that most exclusive institution in Europe, is shut up; the hotels move up to Camaldoli, to Pracchia, or to Abetone; and to be seen in Florence in those blazing days causes wonder and comment.
Charlie and I were the only two foreigners in Florence. I had remained on at the orders of Bindo, and Charlie—well, he remained for the best of reasons, because he hadn’t the money with which to go up into the mountains, or down to the sea.
Charlie Whitaker was an “outsider,” I knew, but not by any fault of his own. He lived in Florence mostly on the charity of his friends. A tall, lithe, good-looking fellow of thirty-two, he came of a Yorkshire stock, and for seven or eight years had lived the gay life of town, and been a member of the Stock Exchange. Left very well off, he had developed keen business instincts, and had been so successful that in three years he had gained a comfortable fortune by speculation. He bought a bijou house in Deanery Street, off Park Lane, turned it inside out, and made a pretty bachelor residence of it.