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Title:      World So Wide (1951)
Author:     Sinclair Lewis
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      World So Wide (1951)
Author:     Sinclair Lewis





To the Donna Caterina, Alec, John, Tish, Victor, Margherita, Tina,
Claude and so many other memories of Italy.



1


The traffic policemen and the two detectives from the homicide
squad examined the tracks of the car and were convinced that a soft
shoulder of the road had given way.

They had been returning from Bison Park, after midnight but quite
sober.  Hayden Chart was driving the convertible and hating his
wife, Caprice, and hating himself for hating her.  He was not given
to grudges and, despite her glitter of pale-green dinner dress and
her glitter of derisive gossip, Caprice was a simpleton who no more
deserved hatred than did a noisy child.  But she did chatter so.
It wore Hayden down like a telephone bell ringing incessantly in an
empty house.

She gabbled, "Jesse Bradbin is so dumb!  He's an absolute hick, and
he's about as much of an architect as my left foot.  Why couldn't
you get a smarter partner?  And IS he a lousy bridge player!  Is he
ever!"

"He's not bad."

"No, it's his cluck of a wife that really gets me down.  In my
candid opinion, Mary Eliza Bradbin is the worst dose of vinegar in
Newlife; the most hypocritical combination of piousness and secret
drinking I ever ran into.  And always criticizing some poor bunny.
You pretend like you like everybody, but even you got to admit Mary
Eliza is a pain in the neck.  Isn't she, huh?  Isn't she?"

"Yes.  Stupid.  But means well," said Hayden Chart.

"She means poison, that's what she means!"

The scolding did not become Caprice, thought Hayden.  She was
elfin, tiny and quick and rose and pale gold, given to affectionate
giggles in between her miaows.  If she would only shut up, he
sighed, he could go on loving her like a dutiful husband--perhaps.

He longed for silence.  Especially on a moony night like this,
driving on smooth cement with this suave engine, he liked to look
up at the mountains against the moon-pale sky, to look with
satisfaction at the houses he himself had planned in these comely
new suburbs of Newlife, "the fastest-growing city in Colorado"--
Newlife, with its skyscrapers set among flat one-story supply-
houses for silver miners and sheep-ranchers; Newlife and its
symphony orchestra, with a Spanish conductor, playing in a
Renaissance temple where a fiery dance-hall had stood but twenty
years before.  Newlife had swollen from 30,000 to 300,000 in thirty
years, and it expected a million in another thirty.

And in Newlife no firm was more enterprising than Chart, Bradbin &
Chart, architects: the heavy-handed Jesse Bradbin, aged sixty, and
the thirty-five-year-old Hayden, who was slim and compact and
patient, and given to playing tennis and reading biography.

He did not know Caprice.  It would always be his fault with women
that his imagination darted into their inner minds, thought with
and through their minds.  He took their side even against himself,
and saw to it, thus, that he invariably lost in the war against
women.

He could not even be thunderous with a woman client guilty of the
most sickening of crimes (except for not paying the bill): wanting
what she wanted in a house and not what the architect knew was good
for her.  He was both maddened and sympathetic now when Caprice,
exasperated at not having made him pay more attention to her,
started all her little tricks of propaganda, which mutely shrieked,
"Notice me--notice me!"

Holding it visibly high, from her lizard-skin evening bag she took
out her gold-link purse; out of the purse she took a package in
silver paper; out of the silver paper she took the prize she had
just won at bridge: a brooch of imitation jade.  Then she wrapped
up the brooch, put the silver paper in her purse, put the purse in
the bag, loudly clicked the bag shut, loudly clicked it open again,
took out the purse, took out the silver paper . . .

She was capable of doing this over and over until he testified to
her powers of torture by scolding her.

But tonight his anger at her petty bullying was lost in pity that,
at slightly over thirty, she should still have the mind of a child
delighted by any sort of gift.  He made himself say to her,
civilly, "That's a nice jade charm.  I'm glad you won it."

Now that she had made him recognize her presence, she returned to
her gabbing, but more spitefully; she did what she gleefully called
"needling him a little."

"But you, big boy, were YOU ever terrible tonight!  You played
worse than Mary Eliza.  You got no more card sense than a zebra.
But what amused me, when it didn't get me sore--oh, you didn't
think I noticed; you think you're such a smoothie about covering up
your sniffing around after women--what had me sunk was the way you
kept sneaking in a look at Roxanna's ankles and Alice's buz-ZOOM
and Jane's god-awful lipstick.  You'd be THE most ridiculous tail-
waving cat out on the tiles, if it wasn't that you're such a
coward!"

His irritation, sparking into wrath at this injustice, may have
made his hand twitch on the steering wheel, or it may have been
entirely the soft shoulder of the highway caving in.  Whichever,
the car was suddenly and appallingly shooting off the embanked
road, and as he protested, "This can't be happening to me!" they
were turning over and over in air.

There was something comic in that grotesque horror.  The roof was
below him, then the car upended like a rearing horse, then his head
had struck the roof and afterward the windshield, then the whirling
cosmos banged down, and the side window was below him, on the
earth, then up beside him again, and they were still.  The huge
noise dissolved into a huge blank silence, and the car shook like a
panting animal.  They were tilted, but nearly right-side-up.

He thought that his head was bleeding and both his arms broken and
he knew that he was very sick and that Caprice was not there beside
him.

"Where are you?  Darling!" he was screaming--he was trying to
scream, while he realized that his voice was choked.  He thought he
could hear a small shaky answer from her, but he was so dazed that
he could not be sure whether it was a moan or a sneer.  With agony
he managed to turn his head enough to make out their situation.
With a freakishness like that of a tornado, Caprice seemed to have
been thrown into the shallow back seat, and the light fabric top of
the convertible had been so deeply dented that she was imprisoned
there, with only an aperture between the two seats large enough for
him to hear her sobbing; not large enough for either of them to
pass.  In any case, he could not move far.  He was jammed between
the seat and the twisted steering post.  The glass had been ripped
clear out of the windshield; it seemed to have slashed his scalp.

"Caprice!"

"Ohhhhhh . . ."

"Can you move?  Can you reach me?"

"Ohhhhhh . . ."

"Are you hurt badly?"

"I don't know. . . .  Oh, yes, my neck--hurts dreadfully."

More than the pain which beat in a steady rhythm of agony in an arc
that traversed his head, he felt anxiety for her--with her poor,
pretty jade charm.  For perhaps the first time this past year or
so, he felt not just a resigned endurance of her malice, but an
active affection, a desire to sacrifice himself to help her.

He was trying to shout for help, expecting to be rescued, to have
aid at once.  But his voice was a parched trickle, weak as that of
an ailing baby.  He struggled to raise his head from the cool
upholstery against which his cheek rested, and look through the
empty windshield frame.  He perceived, in a dull, sick way, that
they were in a brush-thick hollow far down below the level of the
highway, hidden from it.  Even were it not night, they would not be
seen, be heard, from any of the rushing automobiles whose lights,
innumerable and swift, level comet-tracks, were darting above them,
with the steady swish of tires on cement.

Caprice and he might lie here, bleeding, stranglingly thirsty, for
many nights and days.

He could hear Caprice's voice, in a tiny angry scolding:

"Inexcusable carelessness, and you always claim to be such a good
driver and then practically killing me!"

He agreed with her.  He did love her so much!  If he had of late
thought himself indifferent to her, it had been only the self-
absorbed busyness of a craftsman, he told himself.

He was not sure just how conscious she was, back there, as she
prattled away more and more spitefully:

"Why don't you DO something?  Get out and get some help, not sit
there and wait for somebody to find us!  Always so helpless and
never, never think about what I may want or need or anything!"

A snigger then of dainty malice, the cat sniggering as it patted
the dying mouse:

"Oh, not you!  Always so high-and-mighty and cultured, telling
everybody about these big thick history books you're always
reading, and you never really finish any of 'em!  Ridiculous
spectacle of yourself, and everybody laughing at you.  Pretending
you're so hot and bothered about classical music and oh yes, of
course, just have to have it on the radio when you're reading, and
never hear one note!  Oh, I've proved it!  I've switched it to jazz
and you never even noticed.  Not mind your being so phony if you
weren't so clumsy about it and everybody gets onto you--what a
goat!"

In his mind he pleaded with her, "Don't, oh, please don't, not now
when I've turned back to you.  Let me go on loving you!"

His head seemed to have stopped bleeding but it was all a thick
mass of aching, his throat was dry as a desert water-hole, and he
could not make out a word now as she cackled on, delirious and
incomprehensible.  He was losing account of time.  Had he passed
out, had he been unconscious?

They could both die here before they were found.  Was this the end
of everything?

"Is this all I'm going to get from life?  I've done so little and
seen so little out of all I wanted.  In college, that Kipling
thing, 'For to admire and for to see, I've wandered o'er the world
so wide.'  I was going to see everything, everywhere."

He made a monstrous list of the things he had wanted, now that it
was, no doubt, too late ever to do them.  To be state tennis
champion.  To camp in British Columbia and have a winter in the
Caribbean.  To speak French and live in Paris and know wines and
meet dashing actresses and wise old men with spade beards.  To live
for months overlooking a monastery garden, mystic and contemplative.

(It would have to be an Episcopal monastery, though, wouldn't it?
His great-great-grandfather had been Church of England Bishop of
North Carolina.)

And--a familiar dream which he had illustrated with drawings on
stray envelopes--now he would never build that prairie village
which was to have been all housed in one skyscraper: the first
solution in history of rural isolation and loneliness.  He could
have done it, too!  He was amazed that these hands, this aching
brain, so hotly alive now, might at a moment crumble in
dissolution.

Too late?  But if he did get free from this prison, he would
renounce his routine provincial life and follow every one of his
fantasies.

Surely Caprice would come with him--PERHAPS she would.  There were
no children to consider, even after their eight years of marriage,
nor did Caprice really want any.  At thirty-five, with enough money
earned by himself or inherited from his father, who had founded
their architectural firm, he was freer than at eighteen.

With his even tan, his small mustache, his erect slenderness,
Hayden Chart might have been a Scotch major or a Yorkshire man.
His face was thin, and people said that his eyes were kind.  In a
business world where so many hustlers like Jesse Bradbin were
inclined to be damply enthusiastic and clammy to the handshake,
there was a fine, dry, hard quality about Hayden, the quality of a
polished dagger.

The dagger had been too long sheathed.



Caprice was still muttering on, scarcely heard, with a sound like
dry leaves shifting in an autumn breeze.  His pity for her grew
more passionate.  She was so youthful, at thirty-one; she had so
loved this new automobile and everything in their new Georgian
brick house, from the deep-freeze and the red-and-black tiled
rumpus-room to her dressing room, all crystal and frilly curtains.
With a heartier, blunter, more alcoholic husband, she would have
exulted in a life of dancing and risky gambling.  He had always
hurt her, Hayden sighed, and he hadn't meant to, he never had meant
to.

He was keeping up, this while, an effort to shout which mangled his
throat yet seemed no louder than a moan.  But he may have been
heard.

Near them, a match was lighted and held up, revealing the twisted
hood of the car and a scared, bearded, rustic face peering in
through the windshield frame.  Hayden managed a gasp of "Get help!"
The match went out, and his battered consciousness went out with
it.

In a shaky dream he saw or thought he saw the car flooded with
light from a wrecker, felt himself being eased out from behind the
steering wheel and lifted from the car, and swift surgical fingers
about his scalp and his arms.  His mind faded again, complete, and
he never knew whether he had seen or merely thought he had seen the
broken, still body of Caprice.  For years he seemed to have been
protesting, "Such a pretty toy and so frail; they shouldn't have
hurt her."

He came clearly to in a hospital, with his head bandaged and Dr.
Crittenham, their mild indecisive family physician, by the bed.
He felt miraculously safe, and not for two days did he know that
Caprice had been buried the day before, and that he was desolatingly
free to wander in a world too bleakly, too intimidatingly wide.



2


He could feel the strength flowing back into him, like a slow and
steady sea tide, and that flowing life, that mysterious busy
workmanship of nature, was repairing his broken arms, his contused
skull, though it could not yet repair the bruised mind in which,
incessantly, he agonized that he had killed his helpless child,
Caprice, and with her killed the right to love.

He feebly wanted to get out of this, away from clucking nurses and
Dr. Crittenham's owlish peering and the horrible scrambled eggs and
cold toast.  He wanted to be working, to be taken seriously again
as part of the cheerful world that goes daily to its work.  But,
hazily forming, more and more resentful, was a realization that for
a long while yet he could not endure fussy clients: well-to-do
women demanding tiled baths, an assembly-line kitchen, a forty-by-
thirty living room and innumerable cedar closets, for the price of
a four-room bungalow.

As indignant as though he were still in his office arguing with
them, he remembered the mean and cheating determination not to be
cheated which was characteristic of women who had never been in
business: those tight lips, that smell of rotten carnations, that
snarling, "Well, I must SAY, I thought a' architect was supposed to
look after folks' interests, not try and rob them!"

He recalled whole families of clients: Father standing back,
looking anxious, hoping that The Wife wouldn't run him into too
much money.  Father himself would be satisfied with anything from a
domestic tomb made of cement blocks to a Samoan grass hut, provided
they got a good heating plant, but Sistie kept repeating that they
must have a place to dance, and Junior had incessant new ideas: a
closet for skis, a bowling alley, a swimming pool and, while they
were about it, why not a four-car garage instead of a two-car
shanty?

"I can't take it!  What they all demand!  Now I know how the doctor
feels when I complain about the diet here, and the injections!"

Nor could he take the demands of the unions, nor the shiftiness of
tough contractors, nor the delays in bank loans nor, least of all,
the violently active idleness of his older partner.

Jesse objected to the wages of the draftsmen, to time spent on
twice-daily inspections of operations; he tried to wiggle into
every new building job in town; and he repeated everything he said
to you, repeated it with emphasis, as though--even when he had
nothing weightier to communicate than the chance of rain today--he
were revealing a message from Heaven.

Between the two sections of his thundering verbal trains, Jesse
always put in a "See whatta mean?"  He ruled, "Dead certain to be a
cold fall, this fall, see whatta mean?  Dead certain--whatta mean--
a cold fall!"

Life could have been tremulous with noble emotions and cultivated
senses--or so the poets informed him, Hayden sighed--and was he to
spend its swift flicker in listening to an old miser bellowing,
"See whatta mean"?  Whenever Hayden had a notion for a warehouse
that should be something more than a prison, Jesse protested, "You
long-haired artists give me a pain.  I'm a practical man!"

It was painful that while Jesse regarded him as an anarchist, the
local Modernist and Functionalist and general Impossiblist, Mr.
Kivi from Finland--DOCTOR Kivi--considered Hayden "a nize fella
personal, but yoost anudder old-fashion architectural tailor,
giffing the dumb bourgeois whateffer kind suitings dey tink dey
vant."

"I need, in fact, a year off," reflected Hayden, "and I'm going to
take that year off, and find out whether I can do anything more
amusing than being batted over the net by Jesse and batted back by
Kivi.  I think that I would like to be a self-respecting human
being, and even learn to read!"

He could amply afford the year off.  As a young architect he had,
on speculation, planned a large Merchandise Mart, and his share in
that alone would give him a rather tight living.  He renewed now
his regret, in the prison of the wrecked car, that he had missed so
many treasures of learning.  Compared with Jesse Bradbin, he was an
encyclopedia but, lying in bed, annoyed when the day nurse tried to
entertain him with what she thought she remembered of a radio skit,
he made lists of the things he did not know.

He knew nothing, very nearly, of Byzantine or Egyptian, Chinese or
Hindu architecture.  He spoke no foreign language--should not an
educated man be able to speak French and German, along with Italian
or Spanish?  He had only a mail-order smattering of music,
painting; he had never read Dante or Goethe nor anything of
Shakespeare except the plays on which he had been spoon-fed at
Amherst; he was innocent of chemistry and astronomy; and of history
before 1776 he was certain only that there had been Gothic and
Renaissance churches and that America had been discovered, from
time to time, by a lot of Scandinavians and by a gentleman called
Christopher Columbus, who had trained for it by continually
standing eggs on end.

He had assumed that he would be classed as a Civilized Man.  He
wondered now if he was not a jungle-dwelling cannibal without even
an expert knowledge of how to catch and cook prime human beings.
How proud he had been that--to Caprice's rage--on many evenings,
instead of highball parties, he had gone to bed at nine-thirty and
"got ten good hours of sleep."  Now he speculated that he had
probably been wasting three hours a day of this too-brief life in
snoozing like a hobo by the railroad tracks.

Could he make up for all that?

As a starter, he longed for first-hand sight of the Europe which is
the mother of most Americans as it is of the Mongolian-Chaldaic-
Saracen-Slav races who call themselves European.  His nearest step
to it had been a wander-month in England with a couple of
classmates after their graduation from Amherst.  The glory of the
English cathedrals had decided him to be an architect, like his
father.  Before he could go on to the Continent, he had been called
home by the illness of his mother.  He had gone to a New York
school of architecture, and that was the end of Romany Rye.

In World War II, he had been a major, but he had been kept in the
United States, constructing miles of huts and warehouses.  Before
it, he had sat in on the designing of banks, office buildings,
churches, but he had become a specialist in "medium-priced
housing," along with an occasional Labrador-Spanish palace for a
stockman, or this very hospital that was his detention camp.

He loved Litchfield, Sharon, Williamsburg; he preferred the
Georgian, and he had theories about developing a truly American
style.  He was called a plodder by all the Kivis, and in turn he
disliked their bleak blocks of Modernist cement, their glass-
fronted hen-houses, their architectural spiders with cantilever
claws.

Yet now he wanted to desert his solid American brick and timber and
flee to the stone and thatch of the heathen gods of Europe.



With all his dismaying thoughts, he excitedly worked out a
philosophy of hope which he called the Doctrine of Recovered Youth.

He meditated upon it through the motionless hours when he awoke at
three in the morning and could not sleep again till after
breakfast.  He heard the small derisive night noises: a policeman
plodding down the street, a drunk singing, a wild ambulance
screaming, a woman crying, then the banging of the ash cans.  He
looked for hours at the plaster walls and wished that instead of
making this hospital crisp and hygienic, he had created an orgy of
Alhambra harem decoration, to entertain sleepless patients
suffering through the gray hours.  Over and over he sighed about
the lost wisdoms he had missed, till from nowhere, sharp,
exhilarating, came the faith that he had not missed them, that they
could be ahead of him.

The Doctrine of Recovered Youth.  He was to spend no time in
regretting failures but to concentrate on what he could do in a
future that was ready to his hand.

He was not to think back fifteen years to the time when he was
twenty, credulous and enthusiastic, when he was strong for walking,
for singing, for making love.  He was to look fifteen years ahead
to the time when he would be fifty--and a fine, sound, competent
age that was, too, when he ought to be able to eat and laugh and
make love as well as ever.  Compared with fifty, he still WAS
young, he HAD recovered youth.  Ah, the blazing wonders he was
going to experience in these fifteen years ahead, with perhaps
another twenty-five years on top of that!  He was going to see all
of the world so wide.



His acquaintances were presently allowed to call on him, and the
strange thing, in his fast-recovering strength, was that he did not
want to see many of them.  He was impatient with the tedious past
which these fellow-clansmen so tenderly dragged in, certain that he
would be delighted to hear how everything had been going with Dear
Old Bill Smith, the celebrated fisherman and drunk, delighted to
get all the shivery details of the membership drive of the Bison
Park Country Club.

It had been assumed, he himself had half assumed, that he was
gregarious, fond of being yelled at by a dozen people in a small
room, for this was expected of any competent professional man in
Newlife.  He discovered in this, his first pious retreat since
college, that it had been an enforced habit, and that he preferred
the sweetness of silence to even the newest smutty story.

But such treachery to American good-fellowship he kept concealed.
He tried to be grateful to all the kind men who, at such
inconvenience, during busy days, took off an hour to "run in and
cheer up good ole Hay," by bellowing at him, "Well, well, well,
well, you certainly look fine today, you certainly do, you look
well on the way to recovery, so take good care yourself, be sure
and take care yourself now, and let me know anything I can do for
you."

They would have been shocked, Civic Virtue in Newlife would have
rocked, if he had said, "There is one thing you can do: go away and
don't come back."

The agonizing crisis of these visitations was when they stopped
mid-sentence and he knew that, with obscene tact, they were
avoiding even a natural mention of the dead Caprice, or when,
instead, they dragged in her poor remains and overpraised her.  He
told himself that the profoundest reason why he wished they would
forget Caprice was that he was in love with his purified memory of
her.  All round her shrine was a cloister where no heathen were
allowed to tread.



He felt wan and reedy as he sat up in bed in his coarse hospital
nightgown, while Jesse Bradbin, tilting back and forth, back and
forth, in a straight chair, looked like a fly-blown leg of beef.
Jesse held out his whisky flask with a roar of, "Try a nip of this--
Mother's Knee Bourbon.  Your doc would throw a fit, but it's time
for you to get back in harness again, see whatta mean, get back in
shape and have a little fun, see whatta mean?"

"Thanks, no.  Uh--Jesse, I may take some time off when I'm out of
the hospital."

"What d' you think you want to do?"

"I might skip out to California--try loafing in the sun, maybe
catch up on my reading."

"Well, I suppose a month of that wouldn't hurt you, though it'll be
blame inconvenient."

"Not a month.  Maybe I'll take a year off."

"A--a YEAR?  Great good suffering catfish!  That accident knocked
all the whatever sense you've got clean out of your head, see
whatta mean, knocked out all what sense you got!  You're crazy as a
loon!  A YEAR?  With a bunch of new contracts in sight?"

"I'll find you a good substitute."

"If you went and found me a Cass Gilbert--at thirty bucks a week--
I'd still be dodging my duty toward you, as a partner, as an
intimate friend, as a fellow-Coloradan, see whatta mean--dodging my
duty.  I got a moral responsibility toward you, now that Caprice
has passed on.  Got to be somebody to take care of you and get you
straightened out and direct you and try to put some common sense
and dependability into that damn-fool poetical brain of yours.  No,
sir-ee!  The way to forget that poor girl and your own shaking up
is to hustle and get back on the job and work harder than ever.
You'll be surprised how you'll enjoy it, getting away from all this
unhealthy THINKING!  Back into the fray!  You'll enjoy it, see
whatta mean--enjoy it.  You always did like chatting and chinning
and visiting with the lady clients, you old rogue!  Heh, heh?"

"Got to have some sleep now," muttered Hayden wearily.

But that missionary of manly enterprise, Mr. Bradbin, had not been
entirely without moral effect.  Hayden reflected, "To go back to
the office now would be the most horrible punishment I can think
of, and perhaps that's why I must do it.  I must endure a heavy
penance to make up, in some tiny degree, for killing Caprice.  Oh,
she only wanted to dance in the sun!  I murdered her, and her
revenge is that I have never been so bound to her as now.

"I shall not look at another woman, all my life.  I shall never be
that romantic wanderer, that troubadour in a ribbon-tied jeep
singing through Provence, that I dreamed of.  Suffering has made me
prosaic.  I may just as well go back to the office and sell
everybody on attic-insulation.  I'm finished.  If I were only
twenty again, and strong and unafraid . . ."



3


The day nurse, who considered Mr. Hayden Chart an edifying but
somewhat depressing model of dignity who "will never give any skirt
a tumble since his wife had passed away," was surprised by the
vigor with which he demanded, "Show her right in!" when she
announced Miss Roxanna Eldritch.

Roxanna Eldritch--Roxy--had been a friend of Caprice, as fond as
she of gin-rummy and skiing and aquaplaning, but three or four
years younger and altogether a more solid and good-tempered
citizeness.  She was a reporter on the Newlife Evening Telescope,
and she wrote not only of Society and its fabulous orange-flavored
weddings (or Nuptials, if the groom made over ten thousand a year)
but capably handled general assignments: interviews with lecturers
and with remarkably intelligent horses, hardware-association
dinners, and even such big news as an alderman's explanation of how
he had just happened to pick up on the street the marked bills
found in his desk.

Roxy came in like a shy mouse, but a mouse that will immediately
start waltzing if the cat is asleep.  She was a smallish, blue-eyed
redhead, with the richest deep-copper hair, and the fair skin and
jaunty freckles of the redhead.  She was not plump, and her ankles
were fine-drawn, but she was rounded and appetizing.  Even old
friends of her father, an unimportant beet-sugar broker, though
they feared that Roxy would laugh at them, found it hard to keep
their hands off her.

Sometimes, in white flannel at ten in the morning, she looked
twenty-two and ready for tennis; sometimes, late in the evening,
she looked an old, old, haggard twenty-nine, a veteran who has met
too many public men and heard them boasting, for the benefit of
Press & Public, of how many extraordinary things they were going to
do as soon as this astonishing grand-jury indictment was quashed.

She stood in the doorway, glancing sharply at Hayden as he yanked a
red-and-yellow Navajo blanket about his shoulders and smoothed his
hair.

"My gracious, you look like a lily!" said Roxy.  "How's everything
in Astolat?  Elaine back from Camelot yet?  But honestly, Hay,
you're in wonderful shape.  I am so glad!"

Her voice was warm and kind, though it did have a bit of western
flatness, the voice of a bird flying at dun twilight over the
western plains.

"I'm getting all right, Roxy.  Nice you came."

"Sit down a minute?  Really came to ask you whether you'd like
cigarettes or candy or detective stories.  I'm sure you've had too
many flowers."

"Enough so that they rather horribly suggested a funeral.  The
steamfitters' union sent me about half a mile of forget-me-nots.
I thought that was rather sinister."

"When do you think you'll be ready for some tennis, Hay?  I'm your
man.  You'll have to be careful, and of course I gambol around the
court like a furniture truck, but you're so much neater than I am
that you'll still lick me every set."

He had been thinking that she was very like Caprice, that
essentially she WAS Caprice, was every dance-mad, cocktail-gulping
young female in Newlife, but he reflected that, no, Roxanna had
more humor, sympathy, industry than the Caprices.  But he was
jarred to find, in the zest with which he looked at Roxy's luscious
throat and breast, that he had fallen with ludicrous haste from his
mystic worship of Caprice's wistful and shadowy image.

Roxanna could not have noticed any ruefulness in him.  She was too
excited about making her announcement:

"I just wanted to say, if we do get in any tennis, it will have to
be quick, because as soon as I get my passport and learn how to say
'Where's the depot?' in English English, I'm going to Europe.  By
myself!"

"No!"

"My managing editor--next year there'll be a lot of pilgrims from
here going to Rome and so on for the Holy Year, and he allowed it
might be a good idea to get the lowdown on what makes there now,
all over Europe.  I'm to do a series for the Telescope and outlying
sheets on how you eat and sleep and per combien on good American
dollars--or is it par combien?--in the Old Country.  Oh, Hay, I try
to be flippant about it, but I'm awed to death and scared to death!
Think, pal, I'll be seeing English rose gardens and the midnight
sun in Sweden and Paris cafés and the Colosseum!"

It was at that moment that, without knowing it, Hayden started for
Europe.

There were hesitations, worries, preparations to be got through.
Dr. and Mrs. Windelbank called on him.  He was a dentist with a
taste for attending lectures, about which he discoursed to patients
when he had them racked in the chair with cotton rolls in their
mouths, and his lady gave talks on gardening.  They came in now to
boast that they too were going to Europe, and not on one of your
ridiculous three-week tours.  No, they would fly across and have an
entire month just for sightseeing, with two entire days in Venice,
two in Florence, and three in Rome!

For years the Windelbanks had gloried in their annual adventures:
their journeys to Mexico, to Alaska, and the Famous Homes of New
England, including Coolidge's, and they implied that Hayden was a
stick-in-the-mud, without imagination.

Clearly, he had to go and spend a couple of months abroad in
revenge upon these loving neighbors.  Yet even this natural human
spite may have moved him less than the superiority of Dr. Kivi.

That priest of Modernism in Architecture came in as condescendingly
as a duke or a headwaiter, and when Hayden fretted.  "Do you think
I would get much out of seeing Europe as it is now, Maestro?" the
Finnish orchid seemed amused.

He was made up to look the great artist, with bushy hair, bushy
mustache, black bow tie with bushy canary-colored waistcoat--a
squat man, full of salt herring and energy.  He hated his titanic
rivals, Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright and Neutra and Saarinen and
Van der Rohe; he said "efen a gang of carpenters like Chart-Bradbin
are better dan dose swindlers dat mess on de sacred name off
Modarnism."  He looked at Hayden not with loathing but with such
fondness as one might give to a silky Pekingese--if it stayed out
of your armchair.  He said blandly, "Vy not go?  Even an American
bourgeois can look on naked beauty vidout much injury, as my friend
Sibelius iss often saying to me.  But as you don't know de t'ree
t'ousand years of history, as you neffer had a Kinderstube, don't
expect too much or you vill be ferry lonely and disappointet."

Afterwards, Hayden grumbled to himself.  He recalled rumors that
Dr. Kivi had no bracing Finnish blood in him at all, but was
actually a German named Hans Schmuck.  But to Hayden he was
formidable.  He had seen Kivi beat the local chess champion who,
being named Perkins, could not conceivably rival a master who
smelled of beer and gherkins.  In Denver, Hayden had heard Kivi
publicly affirm his faith:

"I am not going to let my clients haf all the pingpong tables and
leetle antique furniture they vant, efen if I go broke and take to
honest farming."  That Augustinian creed had set all the Rocky
Mountain architects debating, and enabled Kivi to charge an extra
thousand dollars on every house.

But Kivi's discouragement built up in Hayden a stubborn Western-
Yankee resentment.  Probably, he admitted, he was nearer to the
capering Kivi than to the mulish Jess Bradbin.  He vowed, "All
right, I WILL go abroad!  I'll learn at least one language, and
I'll bring back more of the genius of Rome than this bounding
baboon Kivi could ever understand!"

The news enlivened Newlife that Hayden Chart was going abroad.
Himself, he was not yet quite sure, and he did not remember having
told any one definitely, but in that ardent community, so proud of
having transcended the village and become urban and urbane, every
one knew your affairs better than you did.  His neighbors came to
the hospital to give him advice based on affection and a superb
ignorance of both Europe and Hayden.  In World War II, some
hundreds of local young people had campaigned in Italy and France,
and the general city belief was now, and for another ten years
probably would be, that all through Europe "conditions" were
exactly what they had been in a bombed city in 1944.

"Be sure and take along plenty of soap," they urged him, "and
toothbrushes and sugar and toilet paper and aspirin and razor
blades, and you better carry plenty of food.  I'd advise your
taking some nice boxes of crackers and a few cans of pork and
beans.  And HUNDREDS of rolls of film for your camera."

"I'm not going to take a camera--if I decide to go at all," said
Hayden.

"You're--not--going--to take a--CAMERA?" they howled.  "Then what
are you going to Europe for?"

"Post-card photographs would be better than anything I could take."

"Good Lord, Hay, I shudder to think what's going to happen to a
poor innocent like you among them pirates!  I never been in Europe--
PERSONALLY--but I been reading where right in Paris you got to
bring your own bed sheets, even in the best hotels!"

Often in any country of Europe, months later, when he stood
admiring show windows that were positively a Versailles of soap and
toothbrushes and inconceivable millions of razor blades, he sighed
to think how unknown this frontier wilderness called Europe was to
that ancient home of decorum and conservatism, America, so hoary
with outdated wisdom that it could not appreciate the venturesome
young barbarians of Rome and London.

Many among these valued neighborhood counselors begged him not to
go at all.  "Or if for some fool reason you feel you simply got to,
don't go making a fool of yourself blundering around alone," they
implored.  "Join some nice conducted tourist party of twenty or
thirty, and they'll tell you what to see and just when to see it,
and what hotels to stay at, and you'll always have some folks from
home to visit with, wherever you are, and not go crazy with
loneliness, or have to depend on natives with their queer ideas!"

The chief among his guardians was Jesse Bradbin.

"I guess the Old Country was all right in its day, but now we got
the world by the tail; we got the bulge on Europe not only in
banking and university work and the soft-drink business, but in
architecture and even in music and story-writing and all that guff.
A European guy that wants to make good in any high-class artistic
racket today has got to come to America--hat in hand.  But then,
you and I are alike.  We don't fall for the arty pose.  We know
that it's just another way of making a living and cashing in big--
like the chain-grocery game.  No, no.  Come to your senses and have
a nice sensible rest, playing golf in Florida for maybe couple
weeks, and get back to work.  Then you'll thank me for having
steered you away from your schoolboy notions about going off half-
cocked to the Old Country.  Yes-sir-ee!  You'll thank me big!"

Hayden lay fuming that Bradbin, after knowing him for thirty-five
years--ever since his first day in this surprising and slightly
unsatisfactory world--should not know him at all, and yet should
often dare to explain him to others.  He reflected that he was like
Bradbin in being industrious and in always paying his bills on the
second of the month, but that otherwise he was less like Bradbin
than like the clammiest, dirty-haired Left Bank female pseudo-
painter whose only completed designs, year after year, were
patterns of wet rings on smoke-dizzy café tables.

He sighed, "And I wonder if Caprice knew me any better?  Or anybody
else in this town, except maybe Roxy Eldritch?  The rest of them
think I'm a steady, contented, home-loving man of business.  And
I'm a tramp that only wants to see new towns and learn to read
Plato in the Greek.  Or I think I am!

"Do I know myself any better than they do?  I must voyage away from
everybody who is familiar with the shape of my nose and the
contents of my checkbook, find a world where I've never seen a
soul, and so find some one who knows what I'm really like--and who
will tell ME, because I'd be interested to learn!

"What I want is less to voyage in any geographical land than travel
in my own self.  I may be shocked by what I find there.  Maybe I'm
not the master of my fate and the captain of my soul.  Maybe the
real captain is a foul-minded sadist and I'm his scared cabin boy.
All right!  That'll be no worse than being the safe and busy Young
Mr. Chart, whom you can always count on for a subscription!"

He was, then, planning to take abroad with him something even more
important than his folding slippers or a dependable can of pork and
beans.  In accordance with his own Doctrine of Recovered Youth, he
was going to take a defiant young man who was willing to burn his
own house, destroy his own city, so that he might in fiery freedom
see all of this world so wide.



In college days, the art of reading had given to Hayden prospects
of a richer universe but, like most of his classmates thirteen
years later, he was sometimes inclined to consider books a genteel
way of getting through the desert hours between dictating business
letters and playing bridge.  But he had not quite lost them; he had
followed the novels of Hemingway and Steinbeck and Willa Cather, he
had read at history, mostly the history of America since 1776,
according to Van Doren, De Voto, Durant, Holbrook--scholars who
believed that the purpose of scholarship is to nourish human
beings, not professors of pedagogy.

Jesse Bradbin read only an architectural magazine which dealt
pontifically with Costs and Accounting and in the newspapers read
the murder trials and the national weather reports.  Jesse could,
and firmly did, tell you what the temperature was yesterday in
Abilene, Texas, Butte, Montana, and Trenton, New Jersey, and the
comparative snowfall in Devil's Lake, North Dakota, on this same
date in 1944, 1934, 1924 and 1870.  Caprice had read only the
society page, the fashion notes, and those same murder trials.
Both of them regarded Hayden as a Francis Bacon, and he had been
tempted to that thought himself till now when, in growing horror,
he decided that he was an unlettered hillbilly.

"We'll repair some of that, as soon as we make the voyage and look
into who this zero, Chart, really is and whether, with his
miraculous new youth, he is worth saving!"

He leapt into an orgy of books, most of them obligingly fetched to
him by his friend, the city librarian: Walter Pater, Jacob
Burckhardt, Thompson and Johnson's epic Introduction to Medieval
Europe, and the good red guidebooks of the good gray master, Herr
Baedeker.  Europe came to him not as a heap of abraded stones
stenciled with dates, but as a dome filled with the softest
chanting, broken by the shout of young warriors.

Before he left the hospital for good, he was able to take a few
drives.  He avoided even a sight of his own house, but he was in
the gang which saw Roxanna Eldritch off for New York and Europe:
Miss Roxanna in a flying, mouse-gray cloak, holding a bunch of red
roses, herself a red rose, a flushed and rosy American missionary
to the gloom of Europe.  She waved to them and then her face
puckered and she was crying--not the dashing lady journalist, but
an affectionate child.



His dreaming in the hospital seemed to him the only reality, and
reality an uncomfortable dream, when he unlocked his wide white
front door and walked into the hallway with its pictorial wallpaper
of beaux and ladies in victorias.  He stared at the living room:
the chintz chairs, the tall white fireplace, the ruby and emerald
and apricot of liqueur bottles pyramided behind his mahogany bar.

He looked at their bedroom: the chaise longue, the tapestry
wallpaper, the black and silver desk.  Though he had designed it
all himself, it seemed to him a dream of luxury fabulous and
wasteful and a little vulgar.

The whole house was a dead thing now that it was deserted by
Caprice's yelling and flouncing and running up- and downstairs and
telephoning violently and for hours.  A dream and a languid,
draining dream then was his hasty giving-away of Caprice's clothes
and her poor treasures: the silver-gilt vanity case, the onyx desk-
set, her stout little ski boots, the flimsy bathing suits that she
had loved.  It was a dream of a life in which he had been busy and
important and well-bedded and well-fed and had glowingly possessed
everything except friends and contentment and any reason for
living: a dream, a fable, a caricature of grandeur.

He first awoke from dreaming when he found himself telephoning to a
travel agency about sailings for England, and awoke again when he
stood on the promenade deck of the steamer, in October, looking
wonderingly down at the horde of two classmates who were seeing him
off.  He tried to remember where he was going and just why he was
going there.



4


He stared at the gangplank, that awning-covered bridge between the
vast black wall of the ship and the surly black wall of the
deckhouse.  There was time; he could still go back and be a
sensible architect, and not go off to a hostile camp where he knew
no language, where he had no friends, no way of earning a living.

He watched the gangplank with apprehension.  He saw the pier crew
at the ropes, and he did not stir.  And now the plank was drawn in,
and his link to land, to America, to Newlife, to Hayden Chart of
Chart, Bradbin & Chart, was cut, and he was in for it--an exile.
And he did not feel that he had recovered youth at all.  He was a
tired man; too tired, surely, to make a new life or do anything but
regret the old life that he had known as safe and profitable.

He had seen no one whom he knew coming aboard.  The intolerably
long lines of the deck planks belonged to a prison corridor.  He
drifted to his stateroom, but for all its pertness of cretonne
bedcover and varnished wardrobe and a mechanical bunch of flowers,
it was no place to live in; just big enough to contain him
impatiently until it flung him out again, six days from now.

Already he knew what every exile before Dante or since has had to
learn: that in the whole world only a few neighborly streets are
interested in letting you live, and if you challenge strangers,
"But I have the high purpose of exploring and conquering and
colonizing my soul," they yawn, "Oh, yes?  But why do it here?"

So this was the joyous venture into the unknown that the novelists
loved to talk about!

At the head steward's window he asked for a table by himself in the
dining salon.  There, he dabbled at cavalcades of hors d'oeuvres
and duck reeking with orange sauce, and went up to the Corinthian
Smoking Room and was just as solitary and unspeaking as he had been
below.  It seemed to him that his fellow passengers were all a vast
nonsense, and he could not see why any of them should go abroad.

Except for his hospital sentence, it was the first time in years
when he had been alone, day after day, and for four days he felt
abused and more misunderstood than ever.  He suddenly found that he
was enjoying it; that he had resented being alone here on shipboard
only because for years all his acquaintances had believed that a
man was not successful or even decent unless six people an hour
were exulting, "Fine day, isn't!" and sixteen were telephoning,
"Well, we got a fine day all right!  May I bother you for a couple
minutes?"

It was a luxury more difficult than a great wine vintage to
appreciate, to be able, hour by hour, to sit still and not try to
sell himself and his charms to anybody--not even to himself.  He
decided, "I'll get something out of this trip even if I never see a
cathedral but learn to sit still in a café and not feel guilty at
not jumping up and rushing around to save America."

The life that had been flowing back into him became a full, sun-
warmed tide; he became so sure of himself and his ability to do
anything he wanted that he did not have to do anything to prove it.
He spent hours walking the deck, contented with the companionship
of beckoning waves and, as they approached land, of the gulls that
were less birds than flashes of light.

He discovered that a ship is always the center of the enormous
round of sea, the center and purpose of the universe, man's
justification of his skinny insignificance, and he landed at
Southampton and climbed up into a compartment of the boat train
with the holy peace of the hermit upon him.

He did most of the proper tourist things in London.

He ate roast beef and saw the guard-mounting at Buckingham Palace
and viewed the crown jewels in the Tower--he agreed that they
really did sparkle more importantly than even a windowful of
costume jewelry in a five-and-ten-cent store.  He drank bitter beer
and admired all the tombs of all the kings in the Abbey.  He liked
the rows of houses, frowning and supercilious but somberly
enduring, indifferent to publicity and the stare of strangers.

He supposed that he ought to be lively here where, any moment on
any street, he might encounter Mr. Pickwick or David Copperfield or
Sherlock Holmes or Sir John Falstaff or even Winston Churchill,
those triumphs of the imagination, more fabulous than Lord
Beaverbrook yet more real.  But incessantly he remembered how, with
his classmates thirteen years ago, he had experimented with these
same omnibuses, listened to Cockneys in these same Whitechapel
pubs, coursed through Hampstead Heath half the night, singing; and
in contrast his solitude made him melancholy.  Was it not
sacrilegious for an old tragedian of thirty-five to thrust his
lumbering gloom into the gay ghost company of two-and-twenty?

He did not consider himself particularly good company for anybody
and, as on the steamer, he walked alone and silent.  He used none
of the letters of introduction which the magnates at home had
heaped on him, urging, "Now be sure and look up my friend Bill
Brown-Potts; swell guy--for an Englishman; just like you and me,
Hay--plain as an old shoe, but a very important guy in the coke
business, a good golfer with a lovely wife and kiddies."

Hayden did not feel that even the most dependable old-shoe-ishness
would raise his spirits.  He was comfortable in London, particularly
well fed, but he planlessly hired a car to go out and search for a
flowery England of Anne Hathaway cottages.  But he was broodingly
unable to see even the most ivied tower as anything but a pile of
stones till, inexplicably, the miracle of recovered hope and courage
transformed him.

He was on the Cornish coast, looking from the mainland at St.
Michael's Mount: the castled isle, the cherubic little clouds, the
gulls, the fishing boats drawn up on the flashing wet sand and,
beyond them, in the sun, the sea that rolled down to Spain and
Africa.  Instantly, on his road to Damascus, the world so wide
turned beautiful and free.  It was worth taking, and it was his to
take.  There was no longer a pall of futility between him and the
sun; he had truly recovered his youth; he was back in the magic and
breathlessness of youth.  He cried to himself, "Oh, LET yourself be
happy!"

His soul lifted above all the several Hayden Charts that had
hitherto trudged the road of indecision, dusty and self-doubting.
That crustiest of taskmasters, himself, did let himself be happy.

Again he had that lift, definite as sudden music, on the steamer to
Calais when first he left the England on which his other youth had
staked out too many claims, and for the first time ventured on the
new land that was so old beneath the towers of Eldorado.



At the American Express in Paris, there was a note from Roxanna
Eldritch of Newlife:

"Dear Hay, welcome to our instructive little continent.  I've been
working hard, my editor seems to like my pieces explaining how
Trouville, Montreux, etc. almost as good as Colorado Sprgs.  Going
to stay w. old sidekicks Mr & Mrs Solly Evans of Denver--oodles of
money (inherited a railroad).  They've taken a show-place villa at
Cannes rite on the shore.  They know yr cousin Edgar & heard all
about you & be tickled pink if you joined house-party for few days,
do come.  Your friend, Roxy."

Northern France was brown and drawn-in with late autumn, and when
he descended from his train at Cannes, it was like the surprise of
Pasadena: roses and palms and oranges and bamboo after the desert.
There was a light, gay quality in the air.  It seemed to have a
sparkle of its own, and seemingly no one strolling in the streets
of the old provincial town had any care more serious than the
design to have another apéritif.  And out on the Mediterranean, so
ancient, so sacred, now first seen by Hayden, there were colored
sails.

The Solly Evans villa was a rackety collection of terraces, yellow
plaster walls, an old stone tower to which had been tacked a flimsy
barracks of bedrooms, and a garden for oleanders and mammoth grape
vines, all on the edge of the sea, with a rock-edged inlet for a
swimming pool, and airy diving boards and scarlet-cushioned lounge
chairs under orange-and-black sunshades.  When Hayden crossed the
terrace, ushered by a butler like a Chicago undertaker, he first
saw his host, a thin, browned young man in a tattered rag for
bathing suit, standing out on a diving raft, bouncing a chrome-and-
glass cocktail shaker.

"You're Hay, aren't you?  Hi!  I'm Solly!"

And on a rock bench beside the pool Hay saw Roxanna Eldritch, in a
French bathing suit which had, by the most skilled hands in Paris,
been thoughtfully made to look twice as nude as any American
bathing dress of one-half the dimensions.  And when she ran to kiss
him, though her kiss was a light tap on his cheek, rustic and
innocent as Roxy herself had been on the train platform in Newlife,
yet he had a dismaying urge to curl his hand about her bare waist.

"Good gracious!" thought the pious hermit.

He was introduced to fellow guests: an American miss with jolly
eyes, hard mouth and hair like glass fiber, who had something to do
with the radio in Paris, a young Brazilian who seemed to have no
identity beyond owning a country house in Switzerland, an Irish
aviator, a young man who was something important in an American
bank in Brussels but who was English, real or synthetic, an
excessively gloomy but rich older American manufacturer, a Spanish
countess and a Swedish baron.

Among them the only one whose speech Hay could understand was the
Swede, so feverishly did the others scream.  When lunch came out
from the main house, on wheeled wagons with things in aspic and
two-litre flasks of wine, the guests and the host and lean, cheery
hostess went off in shrieks in which Hayden could make out only
such indigestible bits as, "Actually, it was too, too amusing,"
and, "Actually, it was too unutterably foul."

And with them, as passionately pointless as any of them, chattered
Roxanna Eldritch, once of Colorado.

After lunch they all had a siesta which, they said languidly, was
enforced by their admirable activity in dancing and gambling till
three in the morning.  Hayden could not settle down to a siesta.
He sat grousing in his bedchamber, in which the white bed and the
white wardrobe doors were adorned with carved garlands and
indiscreet angels thickly gilded.  He thought of Roxy as a dear
daughter gone regrettably mad, and then as a very undaughterly girl
with silky bare legs.

For the tennis hour, Roxy came out in a thin sweater and the
shortest shorts Hayden had ever seen; and for eight-thirty dinner,
she had a simple dress which, even to Hayden's eye, had the
simplicity of a masterful Parisian dressmaker; one which, as a cub
journalist and daughter of a small beet-sugar exploiter, she
certainly could not afford.  It was of rather violent green, and
could not possibly have gone with her red hair, and did.

He contrived to segregate her from the backgammon players for a
talk, and it seemed to him that her slippery new slickness was not
borne easily, but was a little defiant and head-tossing, as though
she were saying, "I dare you to go back to that supid old Newlife
and say that I've turned fast!"

The note she had written to him had been full of the colloquialisms
of a soda fountain in Newlife, but her speech as she lolled, neat
knees showing, among scarlet cushions on the gigantic eight-place
davenport, was mostly a rattling imitation of the English bright
young things.

"I can see you're having a good time," he said paternally.

"I've been up to my eyebrows in the most amusing madnesses!  My new
young man is the most appallingly brilliant young Hungarian writer.
He writes plays, verses, novels, criticism, everything.  I don't
think any of it has been published yet, but he'll be another Evelyn
Waugh.  Actually.  And the Baronessa Gabinettaccio, who is THE most
beautiful and most immoral femme in Europe.  Oh, SAY it, Uncle Hay!
But don't you think Baby has improved over here?"

"No."

"You don't?"

"No."

"You might sugar it a little!  Don't you think these people are
frightfully amusing?"

"No.  And I liked you natural."

"My dear man, I am natural now!  It was when I thought porridge was
something to eat that I wasn't natural.  Besides!  As Dicky Floriat
says, the post-war gen is too weary to live up to the ardors of
being their simple selves. . . .  Oh, don't look so glum, Grampa
Hay!  You're so middle-class.  You dislike gaiety not because it's
immoral but because it's gay."

"I know.  I've read some Oscar Wilde myself.  But isn't he slightly
old-fashioned now?  Sixty years ago!"



Solly Evans insisted that the gambling rooms at the Casino, over at
Monte Carlo, were "great fun," and Hayden went to them expecting a
cinema circus of exiled grand dukes, with broad ribbons of honor
across their shirt fronts, quaffing champagne from goblets and
escorting ladies with tiaras and ermine, and, with the barbaric
splendid laughter of the steppes, winning and losing millions of
roubles.  He expected, as guaranteed to him by Hollywood, Greek
millionaires and Argentine cattle-kings and ruined princesses, in a
somber magnificence rather like the new D. and R. G. Depot, and
caviar handed about like paper napkins, and at least one suicide,
nightly, at 11:17, of a young Englishman of high family.

He found plenty of magnificence at the Casino, but it was a
magnificence in which large plaster lady roustabouts supported
baroque pillars, and chilly young women were depicted walking
through dewy meadows.  Even in the inner gambling room, at the
roulette tables there was not so much as one obvious duke, grand or
Class B, but only faceless men in unpressed business suits and
yellowing-skinned old women of a dozen nationalities, quietly
hysterical as they risked, and so often lost, another fifty cents.
One of them half rose from her chair each time she wagered,
clutching her baggy throat as though she were very sensibly choking
herself to death here and now.

These disinterred witches were either frowsy or too elaborately
shingled and weather-sheathed; they were either twitchingly
agitated or dreadfully still, so intent on play that nothing else
existed for them.  They were like corpses as the croupier swiftly
and callously paid out or raked in the bone chips--dead men's
bones.

As Roxanna looked at these derelict remittance-women she shuddered.
"I get what you mean, Hay!  Yes.  Let's go have a wholesome banana
split and then stay home and see a basketball epic on the
television.  I'm having a frightful vision!  I'm married to a rich
old monster over here and he dies and I'm so bored with all the
other sensations that I come here to play, every evening.  I live
in a flat, like these old bags, and I don't do anything till late
afternoon, when it's time to come and start gambling.  Hay!  Is
Europe all played out?"

"No, no, no!  You'd find just as dreary dope-fiends shooting crap
in New York or Nevada--I guess.  There is a great, stately Europe--
I think.  I want to find it, to know it, to KNOW!"

"Okay.  I'll go back to Paris and swap my commutation ticket at the
Joujou Bar for a library card."

But Roxanna's estimable resolutions were sunk next day, when they
came on a Sadie Lurcher Big-Name party at the Hotel Concilier, on
Cap Attente.

The Concilier is so fashionable and international that it is not
merely a luxury hotel--an inn, a boarding-house, though it is that,
too, no doubt, with a vulgar balance-sheet and dividends--but a
purpose in life.  The bath towels are nine feet long, its food is
as good as the average village inn, with more parsley, and all the
clerks speak six languages, not so much to assist the accepted
guests as to keep unwanted applicants away; to snub undesirable
persons like American millionaires who cannot read French menus and
even earls and countesses if they have been suspected of voting
Labor.

To a small rich man like Solly Evans, when he dares to sneak in and
buy a drink even in the larger and less exclusive Bayeux Bar of the
Concilier, the waiter says "Yes?" as if Solly's intrusion is an
astonishing mistake and, unless he tips three times the amount of
his bill, every waiter in the place turns into a revolving electric
refrigerator, wheeling toward him and emitting a refreshing
blizzard.

Sadie Lurcher was as fin de tout as the Concilier itself.  She was
a stringy lady, immensely tall and virginal, whose super-
ambassadorial function was introducing munition magnates, minor
royalty and theatrical comets to one another.  She gave the most
photographed luncheons in France, and nobody ever quite seemed to
know how she financed them.  As to her origin, there were different
schools.  She was variously reported as having been born in
America, Scotland, Russia and Smyrna.

She owned a modest castle above Cannes, fifty-six rooms with
fourteen habitable, but, for the greater convenience of the press
photographers, she gave her more intimate luncheons at the Hotel
Concilier pool, with its Petit Trianon Snack Bar, its vast rock-
pool of lofty diving boards and a raft made of balsa wood and
glass, and the world-renowned Picnic Plateau, up on a sea-fronting
cliff, where lunches were served outdoors by a diplomatic corps of
waiters in wigs and gold-laced mauve tail-coats.  This was to
distinguish them from the guests, for the richer, more notorious,
oftener-divorced and wittier a male guest was, the more likely he
was to wear, at Sadie's repasts, nothing but shorts, sandals, a
revoltingly hairy chest, and a toupée.

Today, Sadie Lurcher was giving one of her nobler luncheons on the
Plateau.  Her troupe included several ladies, beautiful or titled
or rich, and among the men, all in the uniform of hairy chest and
the light, easy friendliness that marks the more perfected snob,
were some of the world's most notorious names: an ex-king, an ex-
commanding general, an English author so proud of everything
British that he lived entirely in France, and two of the most
titanic of the Hollywood hierarchy, freshly flown in to make a
picture in Italy: a ducal producer, and a movie actor twenty-six
times as famous as the President of the United States.  You may see
him scowling at you from posters startlingly encountered in back
alleys in Greece or China, and his brilliant changes from
barefacedness to wearing a ferocious beard are pictured in the
newspapers of thirty-nine countries.

From their humble distance Roxy looked adoringly up at this
Olympus, and snapped at Hayden, "It's all very well to talk, but
actually now, ACTUALLY, the international set like that has a
wonderful life!"

"I know," mused Hayden.  "Yes.  It was to transfer power from the
munition-sellers and the old aristocracy to the airlines and the
movies and the radio and oil, from the eugenic to the photogenic,
that the young men died in the war and I heroically built a billion
cubic feet of hutments.  When I look up there at Rupert Osgoswold's
Hemingwayesque bosom in person, I feel rewarded.  Roxy!  Not so
cheap!"

She looked at him irritably, and went off to get a cocktail.

He was to leave for Italy.  Probably Roxy would be taking her
newly excavated European glitter back to New York and become a
streamlined career woman, lively and expensive and elegant,
slippery as quicksilver and as hard.  Himself, he would have a few
weeks in Florence and Rome and Naples, and go home.  He thought
that now he could endure Jesse Bradbin and the querulous clients
who wanted Louis Seize redwood.

He would be missing nothing in Europe.  He had not made one friend
here, and in Roxanna he had lost the one friend he had.

At the Cannes station, in a limp dawn when the palm trees were too
damp to clatter and the sunshine-yellow awnings of the cafés were
pulled up and dripping, he said good-bye to Roxanna and Solly
Evans, who were mechanical and regretful and very sleepy.



5


The railway station at Florence had a fine, flaring Mussolini
touch, very spacious and inclined to marble and wood panels, but
the piazza in front of it was of a suburban drabness, and the back
of the church of S. Maria Novella was a mud-colored bareness,
sullen with evening.  He would not be staying here long!  His taxi-
driver was learning English, and was willing to make it a bi-
lingual party, but as Hayden's Italian was limited to bravo,
spaghetti, zabaglione and the notations on sheet music, this
promising friendship did not get far, and he went to bed blankly at
the admirable Hotel Excelsior.

But in the bright morning of late autumn he looked from his hotel
and began to fall in love with a city.

He saw the Arno, in full brown tide after recent mountain rains,
with old palaces along it and cypress-waving hills beyond.  On one
side was the tower of Bellosguardo and a fragment of the old city
wall, and on the other the marvel of the church of San Miniato,
white striped with a dark green that seemed black from afar.
Hayden saw a city of ancient reticences and modern energy, with old
passageways, crooked and mysterious, arched over with stone that
bore carven heraldic shields.

"I like this!  Maybe I'll stay out the week."

There was then living in Florence a friend and classmate of
Hayden's father: a retired American automobile-manufacturer,
competent engineer and man of business, aged seventy-five or so,
named Samuel Dodsworth.  Hayden sent a letter up to him by hand at
his Villa Canterbury on Torre del Gallo Hill, and the Dodsworth
chauffeur brought down a note inviting Hayden to cocktails that
afternoon.

In between, he trudged the erratic streets of Florence, so
unchanged from medieval days that from a secret courtyard you
expected to see emerge a lady with peaked headdress and a gallant
in satin with a falcon perched on his wrist, and he came full on
the Piazza della Signoria, where Savonarola was martyred, where
rears the Palazzo Vecchio, with its heaven-high tower.

He was deeply contented as he was driven up the hill to Samuel
Dodsworth's.

Unlike most Italian villas, which show to the passer-by only a
plastered wall flush with the street and a small door that opens on
the delights of garden and terrace within, the Dodsworths' Villa
Canterbury, which had been built for Lord Chevanier in 1880, was
set back from the street, with a lawn and an ilex alley.  It was a
timbered manor house, half-English and half-Yonkers.  The interior
was chintz and willow plate and Jacobean oak, and the chief change
from his Lordship's day was that the Paris Herald Tribune had
ousted the London Times, and the Yale Alumni Magazine the
Fortnightly Review.

Not even yet was Hayden up to an eight-thirty-dinner schedule and,
arriving at six, he was half an hour early for cocktails, which
gave him a chance to study his hosts.  Dodsworth was a tall,
portly, gray-mustached man, given to quiet listening, and his wife,
to whom he referred as Edith, looked somewhat Italian, though
Hayden thought that she might have been born in Canada or
Massachusetts.

Dodsworth, in his armchair, was a largeness and a solidity; he
looked as though he would not willingly move from it.  He asked of
Hayden, amiably, "Let's see: how long is it now since Monty--your
father--died?"

"Ten years ago, and my mother just afterward."

"They were mighty good Americans.  Did you know your father used to
make applejack in college?  Once he gave a party that started at
three A.M. and lasted till noon.  I lost eleven dollars and a
photograph of Sarah Bernhardt, playing penny ante."

"No!  Why, he was a crank, though very gentle about it, on the
evils of booze and gambling!"

"Well, he ought to have known!  How long you staying in Italy,
Hayden?"

"I can't tell yet.  I had a motor smash, and I'm taking a few
months off.  I may stay in Florence for--for a fortnight."

"Don't stay in Italy too long--or anywhere else abroad.  It gets
you.  Since I was fool enough to sell the Revelation Motor Company,
Edith and I have drifted through India and China and Austria and
God knows where all, and this time, we've been back in Italy for
three years--course, Edith's been coming here off and on for many
years.  Well, we tried to go back and live in the States, in
Zenith, but we're kind of spoiled for it.  Everybody is so damn
busy making money there that you can't find anybody to talk with,
unless you're willing to pay for it by busting a gut playing golf.
And I got to dislike servants that hate you and hate every part of
their job except drawing their pay.  I like having the girl here
bring me my slippers without feeling so doggone humiliated that she
rushes out and joins the Communist Party!

"And back home, this last time, I was bored listening to all the
men I used to know talking about hunting and fishing and baseball
and same old golf.  Fishing!  Hell, I used to skip down to Florida,
one time, and enjoy yanking in a mean tarpon as much as anybody,
but when you hear most of those old, gray-haired galoots, the way
they talk about catching a vest-pocket black bass, you'd think the
man was a ten-year-old brat that had just hooked his first crappie.
Kind of immature, they struck me--even fellows that could swing a
big traction deal and skin a board of directors that had cut their
first teeth on broken bottles.

"And--when I was still in harness in Zenith, I never was the
skittish kind, much.  I never did like our brand of humor any too
well.  I always got kind of sour when a smart banker that was a
good friend of mine, nice fellow, too, but he always had to yell at
you, 'Well, you old horse thief!'  After the first twenty-thirty
thousand times, I thought that got less original--and every time he
saw you, he tried to tickle you.  I can get along with awful little
tickling!  And now I cotton to hearty humor even less than I used
to.

"And then I like these hills in Tuscany and the monasteries and
villas and the variety of it--get in your car and in an hour or so
you're in San Gimignano, looking at those old towers.  Starts your
imagination working about the old wars and battles right there
where you're standing.  Or you're in Siena and have lunch out in
that old square there and look at that big slender tower and wonder
how the devil those old fellows managed to raise those enormous
blocks of stone without any of our machinery.

"Afraid I'm not putting up any very good argument about chasing you
back home, but I mean--that's what's so dangerous here; you do get
to like it and hesitate to go back and face responsibilities, and
that would be bad for a young fellow like you.  Me--I never can
learn this cursed Italian language; Edith has an awful time getting
me to say acqua fresca when I want a glass of water.  But I do like
to have food that you can eat and wine that you can drink without
paying four and a half bucks at a restaurant for a burnt steak and
some fried spuds flavored with penicillin!

"Still, I do get homesick, and I never miss my class reunion in New
Haven, never!

"Edith, you better shut me up!  I haven't gassed this long for a
year.  It's having Hayden here, and get in the first crack at him
and tell him to beat it, go right home and stay there--and then go
downtown and sign another two-year lease on this house.  In which,
Hayden, we may have Italian servants, but you bet your life we got
first-class American central heating!"

Guests were beginning to chatter in, but before the cocktails came,
Mrs. Dodsworth led Hayden out on the terrace for the View which, by
Florence custom, is advertised along with laundry equipment,
garage, cost of upkeep and distance from Leland's Bar.

Although it was masked by the early darkness, Hayden was conscious
of power in the aspect of Florence below them in its golden basket,
between this hill range of Arcetri and, far across, the Fiesole
Hill.  Mrs. Dodsworth could point out the scarcely seen tower of
the Bargello, Giotto's bell tower, the spire of Santa Croce while,
flaunting, soaring, even more whelming than by day in the
floodlights which the mists turned to wreaths of floating rose, the
tower of the Palazzo Vecchio dominated the world more than any
bullying skyscraper of a hundred steel-strapped stories.

As an architect, as a tongueless poet, Hayden was uplifted; as a
lonely man on a voyage to find himself, he wondered if down there,
in that pattern of sunken stars, he might not find a clue to his
lost highway.  He was in love, and if only with a city, he knew
that he could still move to the magic of love for something.

And then he went in to say Yes, he thought an olive in his dry
martini would be fine.



The guests were most of them from the Florentine Anglo-American
Colony, which is united only in a firm avoidance of their beloved
native lands.  There were a few of the scholarly eccentrics for
whom Florence has been renowned ever since Dante, but the rest were
of the active militia of card players.

Of high rank among the bridge-brigade was Mrs. Orlando Weepswell, a
sixty-year-old widow, very rich.  She had lived in the handsome
Villa Portogallo for twenty years now, and had learned forty-seven
words of Italian, most of them meaning "too much" or "too late."
She was the daughter of a country pastor and, as a girl, had in a
surprised and doubtful way become the bride of a banker and
shipowner who was occasionally a congressman, often a Sunday-school
teacher, and always a crook.  Her Florentine villa had wine-red
brocaded walls and hypothetically antique chairs with tooled-
leather seats, but in her bedroom, safe from the jeers of the
Colonists, she kept the Hon. Mr. Weepswell's favorite Morris chair.

She was the first person except the amiable Dodsworths to make
Hayden feel so warmly at home that he believed he could live as
securely and as naturally in Florence as in Newlife.

When you looked at Tessie Weepswell you did not see a woman of
sixty but the glove-soft credulous girl who had been sandbagged by
the Honorable Orlando.  You saw her pretty fleetness and innocence
all unchanged, and her eyes undimmed.  Her voice was still quivery
with enthusiasms about ice cream and kittens and James Whitcomb
Riley.  It was just that over her face was a dusty veil of many
years' weaving which, surely, she could twitch away whenever she
chose.

"Now you MUST rent a villa and live here, Mr. Chart," she panted.
"Honestly, we need you!"  (One likes to hear that, especially a shy
and warm-hearted man like Hayden.)  "The minute I spotted you here
I said to myself, 'Now there's a man with sensitive feelings, that
ain't a lotus-eater like the rest of us gilded snobs, and that
would be real nice to sit and visit with!'  And I'll bet you'll
learn Italian like a house afire!  Do you know any yet?"

"Well, today I've picked up the Italian for 'where is?' and 'veal'
and 'consommé with noodles.'"

"My, that's wonderful!  In one day!  You're a real linguist!  But
how well do you know your Ely Culbertson?"

"Perfectly."

"I KNEW you were a scholar, minute I laid eyes on you.  You're
invited to tea at my little shack whenever you feel the least mite
lonely."

Hayden was pounced upon then by Augusta Terby--Gus--a fine,
flushed, tennis-leaping English girl of thirty, who looked like a
roan horse and who was attended by a mamma who looked like a
suspicious pony.  Augusta believed that all American males were
rich, and willing to be espoused and have some one to send out the
laundry.  She invited Hayden to play tennis and have a nice cup of
tea at their villa.  He felt more than ever a citizen of this
generous frontier village, the Colony, and Augusta felt, as she had
not for nearly a week now, that this time she really had solved her
matrimonial puzzle, while Augusta's mother asked Hayden how he
liked London--a sign of recognition with which she favored very few
of these strange, loud American Cousins.

With these pawns there were larger chessmen on the Dodsworths'
black-and-white checkered-marble music-room floor.  Hayden was
privileged to see Sir Henry Belfont, Bart., that mossiest and most
moated of British historical monuments, an outsize donjon-tower in
morning clothes, with a deerpark of eyebrows, and Lady Belfont, a
small and silent American heiress.

Sir Henry welcomed Hayden with what he considered absolute
folksiness:

"Ah.  An American!"

"Yes."

"Ah!  You are staying for some time?"

"I hope so."

"I am afraid you will find our Florentia very provincial, after
your resplendent Hollywood and New York!"

Nevertheless, Sir Henry had apparently let him in.

Hayden was most taken with a Santa Claus of a man, beard and round
belly and kind, discriminating eyes: Professor Nathaniel Friar, who
had come here from Boston almost half a century ago.  Friar was
talking with his friend Prince Ugo Tramontana, shaven and tall and
lean, the last of a fabulous but decayed Tuscan family.  Mrs.
Dodsworth whispered that these two men were the only near-rivals in
Florence of Bernard Berenson in knowledge of early Italian art and
love for it.  They attended the Dodsworths' clinics because they
liked the host and hostess, and because the food was rich and piled
high, and neither of them got very much of it at home.  They bowed
to Hayden amiably, and he felt that he would like such men as
neighbors.  They were the keepers of the learning that he desired.

All this while, even when he was being bright about backhand shots
with Gus Terby, he had been looking past the others at a young
woman of twenty-seven or -eight who seemed as out of place as
Hayden himself.  He thought of ivory as he noted the curious
Mediterranean pale-dark hue of her oval face, of her competent
hands, which would be smooth to the touch: her cheeks and brow and
hands smooth as a horn spoon, as a tortoise-shell box, as an ivory
crucifix.  Her black hair was parted above the oval ivory face;
over her head was a gold-threaded ivory-colored scarf, and her
dress was of pure cream-colored wool with no adornment except a
broad belt of golden fabric.  There was something Latin, something
royal in her, something almost holy, free from human vulgarity and
all desire except for the perfection of sainthood.

When this paragon joined Professor Friar and Prince Ugo, with whom
she seemed to be on terms of familiarity and respect, Hayden asked
Mrs. Dodsworth, "Is that girl talking to Mr. Friar an Italian?  She
could be a principessa."

"No, she's a plain Miss, and she's an American, but she does speak
Italian almost well enough for a native.  Her name is Olivia
Lomond--Dr. Lomond, I suppose it is.  She's a professor, or
assistant professor or something, in the history department at the
State University of Winnemac, of which my Sam is a trustee.  That's
how we happen to know her, because I imagine she looks down on us
bridge maniacs.  She's doing research on some manuscript records in
the Laurentian Library for a year or so.  Would you like to meet
her?"

He earnestly would.

Olivia Lomond, when he talked with her, was a little blank; civil
enough but not interested.  Yes, she was collating some Machiavelli
and Guicciardini manuscripts with early official records of
Florence; a dusty job, not very rewarding.  Yes, she taught at
Winnemac: Early European History, especially the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance in Italy.

Hayden tried, "That's a period that, just now, I'd like to know
more than anything in the world, and I'm as ignorant of it as a
Colorado sheepherder.  It must have so much more than just sword-
and-roses romance."

She nodded and she said nothing, but her expression said clearly
enough, "Yes, of course you would be ignorant of it; you, the
American businessman, the tourist!"

He was piqued, and he boasted, "Naturally, as an architect, I
suppose I could draw from memory the floor plans of the Riccardi-
Medici palace."

"Oh!  Oh, you're an architect?  In the States?"

"Out West.  Newlife.  Do you know it?"

"I'm afraid not--afraid not."  Nor did she seem very much to want
to know it.  She was merely paying a conversational rent on her
cocktail.  "Do you speak any Italian?"

"I'm afraid not--no."  He was determined to be as lofty as this
goddess whose ivory veins were filled with ice-cold ink.

"You should speak it."

"Why?"

"If you ask that, you answer me."

"It's not a very important commodity in Newlife.  But then, you
probably don't think much of Newlife."

"How could I?  It just hasn't entered my philosophy of life.  I
have no doubt it's a very friendly community, with lovely shade
trees--one of the most enterprising spots in Nebraska."

He let it go.  He disliked her; perhaps, with a little attention to
it, he could hate her.  She seemed indifferent not only to him but,
as she glanced about while they talked, to all males.  Only when it
fell on old Professor Friar, in his shabby sack suit and ill-
regimented beard, was her look kindly.  She had bartered her soul
for trifles of learning that were no more important, in the atomic
age, than a list of Assyrian kings.  Suave as ivory, passionless as
ivory, Olivia Lomond made him suddenly prize the file-rasping
fussing of Mary Eliza Bradbin--about bidding and rubber overshoes
and sandwich fillings--as fecund and womanly.

Uninterestedly continuing her social duty, Dr. Lomond droned at
Hayden, "Are you staying here for some days?"

Astounded by his own news, he heard himself asserting, "I may stay
here for some years!"

"No!  Really?"

He had aroused her--to at least as much attention as she would give
to a donkey cart in the street, and, as she said "Really?" he had
perceived that her voice was beautiful: melodious, rather grave,
suitable to a woman all of ivory.

She sounded almost half-interested with, "Are you to have an
official position here?"

"No.  No job.  I shall just be studying--go back to school in my
senility.  I want to master your blasted Italian speech and
history."

But there never was anything so cold as her, "I'm sure that will be
amusing," and she turned to talk to Augusta Terby.

He had meant it--for that moment he had.  He would set up shop as a
scholar; he would be an Erasmus, a Grosseteste, an Albertus Magnus,
if only to SHOW this intellectual snob of a lady professor.

But he did not like her enough to hate her; to want to hurt her.
Dr. Lomond fascinated him like a rattlesnake on a putting green.
He kept looking at her for the rest of the cocktail hour, while she
talked, seemingly on level terms, with that great gentleman, that
superior historian, Prince Ugo Tramontana.  Her voice came across
the room to him like the flowing of small waters, not the flat,
provincial quacking of so many vigorous young women at home.
Whether or not he would attain it, Dr. Lomond was worthy of a good
healthy hating.

He would SHOW her, and in her show the whole wide world.



6


His good-night from Dr. Lomond was as curt as though she did not
remember ever having seen him.  Her eyes were beautiful, and so
unmoved, so superior to all the angry, corrupting temptations of
life, he reflected, because she did not know that there were any
temptations.  He thought rudely, "I'm going to get a D Minus in her
class and there is no use trying to bluff her.  She wouldn't be
angry.  She'd just efficiently flunk me."

But the Dodsworths so warmly invited him to return that he still
felt at home in Florence.

He planned to walk down the hill to his hotel, and considered
himself rather heroic over a foot journey of half an hour.  In
Newlife a man, unless he be strengthened by carrying a golf club,
has to take out his car for any distance of more than three blocks.
He found Professor Nathaniel Friar also intending to walk.
Apparently to him, walking was not a new invention, startling and
rather risky, but a normal means of getting places.  So old-
fashioned had this Bostonian become in his four decades abroad.
They jogged downhill together, looking at the light-pricked city
below and at the road lamps looping up the hill to Fiesole, miles
away.

"You had an agreeable time, talking to Miss Lomond?" said Professor
Friar.

"She seems intelligent.  But a little distant."

"She's cool.  Women scholars occasionally get like that.  They're
dedicated.  Frequently they aren't certain to what they're
dedicated, but clearly it can't be to such wingless objects in
trousers as you and I.  This Lomond girl is a really competent and
accurate compiler of quite useless facts, so naturally she seems a
bit suspect to most men--and to all women.  You can't ask females
to 'burn with a hard, gemlike flame' and still be obliging about
waffles at midnight.  Here we are.  This is my place.  Do come in
and see it."

"Professor" Friar, oftener known as Nat, had never been a regularly
enlisted professor of anything beyond Veronese wines and the more
acceptable sorts of Italian sausages, nor had he ever written
anything more popular than articles in journals of art criticism so
learned that just the look of the gray, close pages made your eyes
ache.  But he had explored every Tuscan and Umbrian church and
village, and he could tell you the name and dates of every third-
cousin of Domenico Ghirlandaio.

For twenty years he had lived in this five-room wing of the massive
Palazzo Gilbercini, sharing the geometric gardens and their cypress
alleys ending at coy nude statues.  He had never been rich, but the
securities left to him by his mother, a Trenchard of Braintree, had
provided him with a few casks of wine, a great many books in eight
languages, a Perugian altar cloth of 1235, half a dozen chairs, a
canister of Earl Grey's Mixture tea for his friends, and one noble
picture: an Annunciation by Getto di Jacopo, a picture reverent and
softly human, soft blues and grays against lambent gold, the
kneeling angel so exalted, the Madonna so timidly proud, her head
bent over the lily in her fragile hand.

As Hayden stared at the Getto, hung against a faded Egyptian rug
above a table bristly with old pipes, he began to take hold of the
medieval passion for identification with the divine spirit and its
longing for authority, earthly and heavenly.  He drank his vermouth
and lemon juice--Nat Friar considered cocktails as he would a
griffin: exciting but not practical--and he looked at the
comfortable frowsiness of Nat and felt at home as he never had felt
at home at home.

Nat Friar was large and fat and thick-bearded and his eyes were
cheerful.  There always was pipe-ash on his vest; his rather small
living room smelled of tobacco and brandy; and he loved to sit up
all night and talk about immortality and Baron Corvo and the Lucca
Cathedral.

"Why have you lived here so long?" demanded Hayden.  "Or is that
impertinent?"

"No, nothing more pertinent.  In my case, it might seem to be a
self-indulgent escape from reality and the dry-goods business, of
which my paternal grandfather was a ferocious pioneer armed with a
yardstick.  But I think my life has been devoted to proving that
one can be just as smugly self-righteous and still do no honest
work.

"My occupation and my vice are hoarding useless knowledge, I know
more about the history of the Palazzo dei Consoli at Gubbio than
any other living man, and nobody cares, including myself.  And I
like to go on sprees of something new: biology or Sanskrit.
Learning, for its own winsome, perverse self--hug it to you but
keep a club handy.  It is the most entertaining of all mistresses,
and the least to be trusted.

"Particularly must one avoid the superstition that there is some
mystical virtue in erudition.  We all feel that some day we shall
be sought after by the pretty girls for our spoken Arabic, our
kindness to Cousin Mimosa, or the neatness in which we keep our
medicine cabinets.  We shan't!  These virtuous doings should be
cultivated for their own sake alone.

"I have of late been peeping into the history of the Baglioni
family of Perugia, a charming chronicle, all iron and gold clotted
with fraternal blood and the tears of ardent young widows.  What
subject could be more beautiful and useless?  Guard your idleness.
You are surrounded by barbarians armored with sobriety and
punctuality and the Book of 1001 Useful Facts.  Be ye watchful in
sloth, lest ye be corrupted into industriousness and become a
Public Figure, a supporter of all worthy causes, a member of the
Elks Club and the Légion d'Honneur, and have five hundred citizens
enjoy your funeral--at fifty."

"I'm safe," insisted Hayden.  "My partner--I'm an architect--thinks
I'm poetically impractical.  Tell me: how shall I go about learning
Italian?"

"Look over the several accredited springs of Tuscan undefiled: the
university, the commercial language schools, the highly educated
decayed professors who combine Italian grammar with voice-culture
and the black-market exchange of dollars.  Then forget all of them
and get a girl."

"I might!"

"I don't mean one like Miss Lomond, who would teach you Dante's
directions to Hell, but one who will teach you IMPORTANT things,
like 'These pair of socks by favor to darn' and, 'Bring to me
suddenly a plate of anchovies.'"

"Are Dante and anchovies incompatible?"

"Linguistically.  I speak an Italian which would thrill the
archbishop by its accuracy; I can address a learned academy on the
Battle of Cortenuova in Italian, and they will wail with
admiration, but when I ask for a pair of shoelaces, the clerk
answers me in bad English, and wants to know whether I'm staying in
Florence overnight. . . .  By the way, if you'd like, I'll invite
you to tea with Miss Lomond.  You may find her admirable."

"Well, she might introduce me to some American students more nearly
my own mental age--sixteen!"



He sat in what was to become his favorite room in Florence, the bar
of the Hotel Excelsior with its dark mirroring wood and its two
bartenders, Enrico and Raffaele, the men in town most worth
cultivating, and he contentedly planned to stay in Florence for a
week, a month, a season.  He would pray for a Biblical miracle: to
become again as a little child, and go back to school.

Next morning he again climbed the Torre del Gallo Hill, to have by
clear light the view he had seen in twilight enchantment.  Below
him he saw the bronze-red majesty of the cathedral dome, and
Giotto's tower--as ivory as Olivia Lomond.  Fiesole, across the
valley, was sharply defined on a hill silver-gray with olive trees.
Florence is a thousand years less old than Rome, yet in its
medieval reds and yellows and dark passageways, it seems older, as
in New England a moldering gingerbread mansion of 1875 seems more
venerable than a severe white parsonage of 1675.

"I'll do it.  I'll stay.  I'll hunt for Michelozzos, not mallards!"
said Hayden.



Dr. Olivia Lomond was at Nat Friar's modest tea, frowning and
duskily beautiful in her plain brown dress--that is, all of her was
there except her heart and soul and manners.  But Hayden was
diverted by the presence of Nat's prim and aged sweetheart, Mrs.
Shaliston Baker, whose unbubbling fount had been Boston.  She was
as small and quiet as a sparrow that has been discreetly reared in
the Harvard Yard, and she wore her grandmother's cameo brooch.  She
spoke exquisite Italian, even if her English did smack a little of
flapping codfish tails and the clatter of lead-foil in chests for
China tea.  She belonged to the Dante Society, which meets to
discuss the longing of Florence to get Dante's poor exiled corpse
back from stubborn Ravenna.  It is an up-to-date topic, and has
been so since 1320.

Every Sunday for a fifth of a century, these reserved lovers, Ada
Baker and Nat, had had tea together.

Nat gave them food as noble as the Samuel Dodsworths', and Hayden
guessed that he would by considerable omission in his own meals
make up for this fedora cake, which is the Florentine specialty,
with chocolate and whipped cream on it, and for the hot American
toast, the honey from Monte Rosa, the tea and blackberry jam and
ginger from London.

There were peacefulness and chatter.  Nat chronicled his search for
a lost altarpiece of Guiduccio Palmerucci through lofty, wind-raked
hill towns of Umbria; a tale of sleeping on stone floors, living on
bread and olives, and finding that one village was gaily planning
to beat him to death as a tax-spy from Rome.  Hayden suspected that
Nat's confession of being unable to buy shoelaces in Italian had
been a great and gentlemanly lie, and that the old fraud could
actually speak an Italian as colloquial, bloodthirsty and beautiful
as a Neapolitan taxi-driver's.

As the talk passed to Dr. Lomond, hers was no glimpse of romantic
espionage in mountain passes at twilight, but a complaint about the
dusty-eyed, head-cracking drudgery of pawing over a thousand papers
in her present investigation of the maternal source of Duke
Alessandro de' Medici--the one who was so wholesomely murdered in
1537.  The Duke's mother, sighed Dr. Lomond, did not seem to have
been a lady of doubtful virtue.  She just didn't have any virtue to
be doubtful about.

From both of these hygienic ghouls Hayden had clues to an erudition
which should not be a smart assemblage of facts to equip a man who
should have been an auctioneer or a train-caller to "get a Ph.D.",
nor a putting on of spangled intellectual costumes to impress the
dullards, nor a job, nor a gentlemanly way of passing the time, but
a gently ruthless, secretly panting, rival-murdering hunt for the
facts which are the bones of truth; an unremitting war in which
your quick and sympathetic allies are men and women who have
themselves been historic facts for five hundred years.

Such scholarship he had never beheld in Newlife, and even in
Amherst College and in his school of architecture, it had been
rare, and not considered quite well bred, nor useful for grabbing a
Full Professorship.

When Jesse Bradbin went in his swift automobile on a sightseeing
tour, Jesse explained, "Ah, what the hell, you don't want to learn
too doggone much about all these Beauty Spots and Points of
Interest.  Just give 'em the once-over and see what they're like
and be able to say you've been there.  When I'm on a tower, if I
can't kill five hundred miles a day, I figure I'm wasting my time,
and if my wife hollers about missing the scenery, I tell her, 'Oh,
we'll catch that on the way back--maybe!'"

That philosophy of Bradbin, pompously offered at the country-club
bar as something new and valuable, caused no riots or harsh cries
of offended dignity.  "Yuh, that's so," agreed the president of the
Ranchers and Silver National Bank.

The tyro Hayden was as moved.  It was not with hostility or with a
flirtatiousness that winked to itself that he petitioned Dr.
Lomond, as they tramped together from Nat's down to the tramline,
"I wish you'd do me the favor of having dinner with me this
evening, if you are free."

"I don't know--uh--Mister--Chart?  I'm not sure I can. . . ."

He was sick of all his meekness.  "Then you know damn well you can!
Come on!"

"But I would prefer . . ."

"If you're one of these independent females that insist on paying
their own share, I don't mind.  We can go dutch."

"I don't insist on anything of the kind!  I'm delighted to find a
man who will buy me a dinner!  I'm lucky when I'm out with some
wistful young male student--SO sensitive and clever--and don't have
to buy HIS!  Italy may be the home of gallantry, but lone lady
grinds don't often get invited to dinner."

"Not even when they're beautiful?"

"Not even when they're VERY beautiful!"

With that, she surprisingly smiled at him, and looked nearly human.

"Where shall we go?" he asked.

"Let's see--maybe Oliviero's or the Paoli or Nandina's.  Nandina's
is light and bright and quiet and great food.  Usually, when I
don't mournfully stay at my pensione for dinner, I get taken to one
of these frantic student hang-outs, the kind they call 'Bohemian,'
which means noisy and not very clean, tables elbow-to-elbow, filled
with American G.I. graduate students and Belgian painters and White
Russians whose only profession is being White Russians and English
ladies whose only profession is living in small villas back of
other villas.  They're all so poor.  I hate poor people!  I'm so
poor myself!"

"Those--uh--Bohemian restaurants sound pretty interesting, though,"
confessed the tourist.  "But we'll go to Nandina's tonight."



He so far reverted to the meekness which he had sworn to forswear
as to chuck masculine pride and ask her to do the ordering of
dinner.  While she rattled the menu, he was fixed on Dr. Olivia
Lomond; he saw that at her neck and the wrists of her sexless
workaday brown dress were little edgings of fine Burano lace,
somehow touching.  Her hands were not small.  They had the
untiring competence of a workman, of a peasant, but they were
extraordinarily smooth, and there was an anxious gesture toward
feminineness in the two small, ruby rings that betrayed her strong
fingers.  And he noticed that her nails were slightly tinted now.
They had not been so at the Dodsworths'.  Had she put this on for
the tea-party--for him?

But his feeling that there might be ardor buried in her was killed
by her mechanical questions, neither liking him enough to rejoice
in his presence nor yet fearing him enough to be at all wary with
him.

"I suppose you have made some progress in your plan to study
Florence?"

"No--just wandered around, you know, walked 'round."

"Anything you've especially liked?"

"No--oh, lot of different things."

And they fell silent and looked at a family birthday party at a
table across the room.  There was about the family nothing of the
faded gold of aristocracy nor yet of the "quaint and picturesque
natives" for whom the three-day tripper seeks.  They were all
volubly Italian, but in look and dress the father might have been a
businessman of London or Glasgow or Pittsburgh.  He was the type of
tall, busy and competent engineer or salesman who was trying to
rebuild Italy after two wars and two million foreign tourists.  His
wife would have seemed normal in Stockholm or Des Moines.  But in
their exuberant family affection they did differ from the couples
whom Hayden knew.  And the grandmother laughed in secret intimacy
with the youngest child; the middle-sized small boy burlesqued his
bachelor uncle's flourishing way of eating an artichoke, and the
uncle laughed loudest of them all.

"Families!  They seem to exist here, still," wondered Hayden.

"And they did all through Italian history.  A brother would either
murder his brother--which, I suppose, may be one way of showing
keen domestic interest--or else he would go out to a neighboring
tower and murder a rival family there, to keep his brother in the
Council.  All Italian history is made up of layers of families."

Hayden complained, "Seems to me that at home the children consider
the house just a free inn and rental garage.  And we older
deserters: I have two sisters and a brother who live in four
different states and don't see one another twice in a decade, and I
have three nephews--no, four it is now, I guess--that I've never
seen at all!"

Dr. Lomond sounded regretful, her cold independence betrayed by
memory.  "Sometimes I've thought I'd like to be the founder of a
family, like those grand old American women who went West in a
Conestoga wagon.  Then, maybe, one would never be lonely."

"Ah!  You get lonely here, too!"

She abruptly cloaked her wistfulness again, and said sharply,
"Never!  Not now, I mean."

"Didn't you a little when you first came to Europe?"

She studied her forkful of long ivory-colored strands of
tagliatelli; she seemed shyly to be remembering the girl student
that had been, and she answered with some March-morning warmth in
her voice:

"I'm afraid I was, first.  I would tell myself that I was a trained
traveler.  Hadn't I gone way off to graduate school at Columbia,
with mother's lunch, deviled-ham sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs,
in a shoebox?  And in EUROPE--oh, I COULDN'T get lonely, all this
to see, and I had plenty of resources in myself; I could read and
think, couldn't I?  Not like girls who had to have flattery from
slobbering men all the while.  Besides, I scolded myself, I had
been adequately conditioned to loneliness in my first year of
teaching at Winnemac; I just corrected papers there and took long
walks.

"So I surely couldn't be anything but cheerful in the panorama of
Europe.  But I was lonely in Paris, I was lonely in Rome, and when
I first came to Florence, nearly two years ago . . . I'm not
impressed by these celebrated lonely prisoners who made a pet of a
rat.  I made a pet of a housefly."

"But you can't!"

"I did!"

"How could you tell . . . ?'

"There was only one in my room--winter it was, too cold for flies,
but this one, really, he was the bravest, most clever little fly.
His name was Nicky."

"How did you know?"

"He told me so."

"Of course."

"The minute I'd come back to my room from the library and take off
my jacket, he'd be there lighting on it--perhaps barking a welcome
in some infinitesimal way.  Nights, he slept on the hot-water tap,
always.  He never touched my breakfast till I had finished it; just
walk on the rim of the tray and look at the pot of honey.  He would
take walks on my hand without tickling me--quite the most refined
fly in Florence--and the only person here that I knew well, till I
met Professor Friar.  Don't you call that a loneliness of
distinction--to be ecstatic over a housefly?"

"Yes, that's big league.  What happened to Nicky?"

"He passed away.  From pneumonia.  He is now buried, though without
a tombstone, in a volume of Mirandola manuscript letters in the
Laurentian Library."

"I understand him, slightly," said Hayden.  "When I first went off
to college, there was an imitation oriental rug in my room, and
because I was too scared to find one single happy thing to do, the
first four-five days, I sat mooning over that rug till it occurred
to me that one of the figures in it was like a dancing girl, young
and gay, with whirling ballet skirts and gold stockings--darling,
rather small face, excited and innocent.

"Her imaginary smile kept me alive all that first week in college.
The next fall, she had vanished, sold along with her rug, to some
sordid flesh-dealer.  But last night, here at my hotel, when I was
drearily thinking that, after all, I might drift on to Rome, I saw
her again in my bedroom rug: dancing in a different show now, very
different costume, silly costume, feather boa and a huge muff and a
lively little pillbox cap, but there she was, cheering me again,
bidding me stay here, for she would comfort me. . . .  Seventeen
years later!"

"I would not have supposed you were so imaginative, Mr. Chart."

"Why not?"  (A little huffily.)

"No reason.  Just my stupidity.  I'm a hermit, in a cell roofed
over with books, looking for gallantry in the trecento, and so I
miss it when it stands right in front of my cell, I suppose."

"What did you think I'd be like--Olivia?"

"Oh--efficient, clean, kind, devoted to your wife and children and
your friends and your favorite daily paper--though I'm sure you
have risen from the sports page to the editorial."

"Is that a rise?  Well, my wife is dead, I have no children, and
only very casual friends, and my partner in architecture--at least
by preference he would not be an architect at all but a salesman
and a penny-grinder: Jesse Bradbin--he's an illiterate, and yet I
like him and admire him and his wife, Mary Eliza, better than
anybody else in Newlife.  I was as lonely as I am here--only busier
there."

"Oh."

"But I don't know that your diagnosis of me as a page with nothing
printed on it except dollar signs is so far wrong.  I think most of
us are simply patterns of clothes and habits of work and the same
way of saying good morning, invariably.  'Mornin', mornin',
mornin', well, how are you, this fine beautiful morning!' Jesse
screams, every day, rain, shine, or snow, and then I feel so
superior to him, but I'm no better. . . .  I just glare, and
probably it's always the same glare.  That must be one of the great
pleas of religion: that if a man hasn't a precious soul behind all
this unchanging blankness, then he's a pretty shabby animal!

"I've always been busy; busy as a son, busy as a college brat.  My
specialties then were tennis (gone rusty) and history (forgotten)
and draftsmanship (good).  Afterwards I was busy as an architect.
And as the husband of my popular wife . . . I don't know that I
have any personality at all, really.  (Not that you have ever asked
me about it!)  Maybe I'll find a personality here."

"I think you're probably hard on yourself, Mr. Chart."

"No.  Let's face it--as people say when they want to be
unpleasant."

"But you seem to be unusually kind and fair--for a MAN!"

"You don't like men much?"

"Why should I?  From my university president, that back-slapping,
endowment-hounding old fraud, looking for generals and judges to
whom he can give honorary degrees in return for publicity, from him
or from the head of my department, that dyspeptic old phonograph--
and he thinks Cesare Borgia should have been a Y.M.C.A. secretary--
from them to the dumbest young man in my classes--who's only a bit
younger than me, really, and not as good a dancer, but he says he
hates being taught by a stringy old maid like me--oh, the whole lot
of males that I know best have very successfully combined to keep
me an apologetic schoolteacher instead of a hard-boiled scholar who
would slap down my academic betters when they're my worse."

"But isn't there--isn't there something else, some resentment,
something personal . . ."

"We won't go into that!"

"I'm sorry, Olivia--honestly.  It was just the intrusion of a
lonely pilgrim who considers you splendid and somewhat intimidating.
You'll forgive me, Olivia?  I'm so harmless--disgustingly so!"

"It's all right.  Let's forget it--Hayden."

"Okay.  Olivia, do you plan to stay very long in Italy?"

"Just as long as I can manage it, by swindling or armed robbery."

"What is your home--I mean, what do you think of as your home?
Zenith, like Mr. Dodsworth?"

"Never!"

"Where then?  In America, I mean."

"Nowhere in America!  My real home is anywhere, anywhere at all, on
the Continent of Europe--except maybe Russia; any place where they
drink wine instead of ice water and tomato juice, and where they
don't consider the World's Series and madam's new vanity case the
most exalted topic of conversation."

"So you're that famous scoundrel, the escapist, the expatriate."

"Escape?  Why not escape from a world of gas pumps and canned soup
to a world where 'the wind sets in with the autumn that blows from
the region of stories'?"

"Yes.  I still like Swinburne."

"Oh."

He could but grin at her slight inflation, and something resembling
a smile warmed her face, like the sun after cold dawning.  She
demanded, "You read poetry?"

"Not much.  I used to.  But there are men who do read it."

"Oh--MEN!  Lumbering, lecherous, jocular animals!  But they don't
smell clean, like the animals; they smell of pipes and pork chops
and onions and shaving cream.  With their grimaces that are
supposed to delight a maiden's heart and that just give away their
itch for sly conquest.  Men!  My dear Mr. Chart!  My innocent
Hayden!"

No.  She was detestable.



7


No.  She was little likely to be an intimate of his, he thought as
they finished dinner.  He had that chilled feeling, familiar even
to so unflirtatious a man, of finding a pretty girl at a party,
finding her warm and fetching, then having her, for no evident
reason, turn into a stranger.

But he still admired Olivia's assured tautness and a moving
strength in her that was fantastically different from the swishing
excitements of an Art Appreciation Class.  When he was with her he
felt that it would not be an effeminate hobby but solid work for a
man to stay here--for a while--and labor to understand the
strangely flowering beauty of the Middle Ages.  He would bathe in
the magic and perilous waters of medieval history: proud-colored,
hot, heroic, vicious knights in armor that had been decorated by
voluptuous goldsmiths, dungeons and silent convents, exiles on
Venetian galleys standing east for Cyprus.  He was lost in an
enchantment of which he did not understand even the vocabulary.

If only he could be guided through this wizardry by Olivia, whose
hands lay still on the table, hands not thin and meanly desirous
but arrogant, ivory in every line carved to loveliness.  The hollow
between her thumb and forefinger was a polished curve.  They were
hands that could grasp and hold, and they excited him even while he
was talking prosily:

"If I stay here, I'd like to get a sort of permanent place cheaper
than the big hotels.  Have you any ideas?"

"The pensione I'm living in, the Tre Corone, is all right.  The
furniture is simple and the food is good and--this interests a
professional romanticist like myself--it occupies two floors of one
of the oldest Florentine houses, the Palazzo Spizzi."

To invite him, or at least permit him, to be near to her, near to
her ivory hands, her lips that were dark-red in a lovely and tragic
ivory mask--that stirred him, till he reflected that she was
probably so indifferent to him that she did not care whether he
lived next door or in Novaya Zemlya.

Nor did she mention the pensione again, as they finished dinner and
tramped to the Spizzi.  But next day he was busily inspecting it.



A palazzo in Italy signifies only a large house, usually of stone,
built a few hundred years ago for a very rich and very noble family
who became very rich and noble by conducting a war, with a large
cut in the pillage, or by lending money to popes and kings and
dukes who conducted wars.  These houses are lordly, rivaled today
only by movie theaters.  In Florence, the Palazzo Spizzi, on the
Lungarno not far from the Ponte Vecchio, is one of the lordliest,
with granite walls in rough rustica.

There are surly, prison-barred windows on the ground floor, but on
the four floors above, elegant Gothic windows with stone tracery.
Along the street are bronze torch-holders, and rings for tethering
the horses of knights dead these five hundred years, with a long
stone bench on which once lounged the armed servants of the
magnate, waiting for commands which might mean fun or death, and
probably both.

You go through an arched gateway into an arcaded central court,
with high-colored heraldic shields and one sacred fresco on the
smooth stone walls.  The court and its little statues of lyric
fauns are dominated by a vast stone stairway.  Here, the Medici
hurried, and the Pazzi, Bardi, Rucellai, Cavalcanti.  One of them,
one day, walked in white carnival satin that suddenly, here on this
green-molded spot, became streakily variegated with red, as the
expert assassin from Forli slid in his dagger.  And over there,
most briefly afterward, the assassin had his toes lightly toasted
before his head was jaggedly hacked off.

In this niche of crimson and gold and crocus-colored mosaic, a
Spizzi garroted his ardent bride.  It is now a rented storage space
for bicycles.

Since 1550, even Florence has changed.  Today, the doors along the
arcade give on the office of a Polish refugee specialist in
radiotherapy, a tearoom kept by an old English lady, an embroidery
shop kept by an even older Scotch lady, and a ferocious left-wing
book shop kept by two young Welsh ladies who play piano duets and
admire Jacob Epstein and drink nothing but vodka and diuretic
mineral water.

You pant up the stairs to the offices of machinery agents and of
buyers representing stores in Dallas, Montreal and Oslo.  The two
floors above these constitute the Pensione Tre Corone, and up to it
climbed Hayden Chart.  It was a racking ascension, but Hayden felt
strong and fresh, his accident healed over.

In a standard pensione hallway of green rep walls, a reed chair and
a mummied palm, a door painted with ferocious roses was opened for
him by an extremely handsome Italian young man wearing the man-
about-Florence standard uniform of wavy black hair, cigarette,
checkered brown-and-gray sports jacket and gray slacks.  Hayden did
not at all care for the thought of this jazz satyr living in the
house with Olivia, and he was relieved at the coming of Mrs. Manse,
the manager.

She was a small, active Italian widow who had married a Birmingham
traveling salesman and lived for years in England.  She spoke
English like an A.B.C. teashop waitress, a refined duchess, a
Cardiff coal miner and a Tuscan peasant, all at once.

"Oh, yes, we have a very nice room with a love-ely view of the
Duomo and the Santa Annunziata and Fiesole and EVERYTHING and a
private bath--ooh, just like home.  But you're not English, are
you?"

"I'm an American."

"Ow . . . Well, we quite like Americans here--the better class.
You are not married?"

"No."

"But then, you're not the wild sort that would want to be
entertaining--uh--PEOPLE in your room, and I'm sure you will want
full pensione."

"What is that?"

"Both luncheon and dinner here daily.  It's so much more
satisfactory, you know, to have your meals here, ALL of them, and
not go risking your digestion at these restaurants.  Res-tau-rants!
And not knowing what you're getting and the pasta stale and the
veal tough and no pure Chianti, such as we serve.  Mrs. Engineer
Purdy, one of our very oldest guests, often says to me, 'Signora, I
simply do not understand how you can afford to serve such love-ely
pure unmixed Chianti at the shockingly low price we pay here!'  And
of course she KNOWS!  So shall we say full pensione?"

"No, I plan to take at least one meal a day out."

"It's a mistake, but of course I never even give advice to my
gentlemen but it's a mistake and quite hard on me, with such love-
ely clean rooms and serving such a variety of food and the butter
always fresh, at such shockingly low prices as you pay, but shall
we say half-pensione then?"

They would say that, yes, with luncheon taken here, Hayden agreed,
proud of being so businesslike in securing his first Italian home
and forgetting only to ask the amount of those shockingly low
prices.  He was dazed by the Anglo-Italian verbal hemorrhage and
yet he felt secure.  He had lived with Mrs. Manse, under different
names and accents, in Newlife, Amherst, Denver, New York, London,
and he knew that he would be cheated only the correct proportion.

"And when you are not able to be here for colazione, will you
kindly let me know twenty-four hours beforehand?  So many gentlemen
are thoughtless about that," said Mrs. Manse.

She introduced him to a bedroom, smallish, square, with blank
plaster walls, which yet delighted him, for the one window was
Gothic-pointed and the ceiling was groined.  It had surely been
part of some greater salon in the early palace, or perhaps of a
chapel, and the clean bareness of it was proper for the studious
monk he meant to become.

The varnished yellow pine bed was narrow, not bad; there was a
large white wardrobe for clothes, a large white table for the notes
on Italian history that he would certainly be making and for the
profound books that he would certainly buy and possibly even read.

There was a hideous but comfortable yellow-velvet armchair with a
fiddle-shaped back, a straight chair, a pinched radiator, and a
composition stone floor, with a rug beside the bed. . . .  But he
looked unsuccessfully for his dancing girl in the rug.

The bathroom was little larger than the ancient tub, but it was
adequate, and even contained articles which seemed to Hayden
somewhat perplexing and certainly of great superfluousness.  One of
these was a bootjack.  He had ridden horses in the Berkshire Hills,
on dude ranches, on the cheery camping journeys through the Rockies
on which Caprice had been both at her most complaining and her most
recklessly gay, but he did not think it likely that he would ride a
Western pony up to the Palazzo Spizzi and tether it to one of the
great bronze rings below.

The place seemed to him almost voluptuous when Mrs. Manse explained
that only one bedroom in three at the Tre Corone had its private
bath.

What starred his room and filled it with light and stimulation for
the daytime was the window and the vista of towers and fourteenth-
century battlements and, down below, the humbler roofs of tiles,
cherry-colored, soft rose, violent crimson or pale orange, above
yellow-plaster walls.  A top-floor tenement down there--it was, he
learned afterwards, above a ground-floor leather shop full of gold-
tooled purses and small jewel boxes--had an open loggia and a
terrace with geraniums and with goldfinches in cages, and a broad-
sterned woman was hanging out a hot red shirt to dry.  He would be
seeing real Florentines, and not just palace walls, spacious but
decaying.

Mrs. Manse, that unlaureated mistress of psychology, knew that he
would take this room.  She knew!  When he did, at last, remember to
confer delicately about the price, he was so under the spell that
she overcharged him grossly: she charged him at least one-half as
much as such a cell would have cost in America.

He did not quite dare to ask how near to his own door was that of
Dr. Olivia Lomond.  He found later that it was eight from his,
round a corner of the matting-covered stone corridor.

All this was on the upper floor of the pensione.  On the floor
below were still more bedrooms--there were twenty-eight in all--
with the office, the dining room, the lounge.  The dining room was
simple and white and cheerful, with white-clothed tables for one or
two or four, each of them with coquettish napkin rings and a tight
bouquet of asters and, usually, a Chianti bottle.  The serving-
table--the credenza--had once been an over-gorgeous drawing-room
table of marquetry with gilded metal edges.

The lounge must have been a great salon of the ferocious and
devoutly pious Spizzi family: lofty, vaulted, cold.  Around
somewhat dreary damask-covered tables, displaying Italian motoring
magazines, were modern chairs artfully but unhappily devised of
twisted red-stained wood, or aged refugee chairs from destroyed
parlors, resembling indigent gentlewomen.  There was a case of
novels and travel books which fleeing guests had intelligently left
behind: a French guidebook to Sicily dated 1899 and such romances
as Lively Lassie o' London Town, by Mrs. Beth Levinson Knibbs-
Crochet.

In this clean shabbiness you could rest familiarly enough, and the
lounge windows looked down on the Ponte Vecchio, that venerable
bridge of shops devoted now to sellers of artificial pearls and not
to Donati defending the crossing with loud swords.

Late that afternoon, with small trunk and ill-assorted bags and a
hastily purchased new blue-silk cravat, Hayden moved into his cell
at the Tre Corone.



He met his floor maid, Perpetua, a smiling, black-eyed, powerful
woman of fifty, only just slightly felonious, who would also be his
waitress, valet, chamberlain, social arbiter, and chief professor
in the Italian tongue: a low-built peasant in black dress and white
apron who seemed to be on duty from five A.M. to midnight.

Shyly, not knowing how he should dress, he went down to his first
dinner, at eight, to risotto and boiled beef, and met most of the
Tre Corone guests.  They too were in lounge clothes.  In treachery
to all tradition, there was no retired British colonel with lady,
nor even a British major or vicar.

He encountered, instead, a Hungarian widow of fifty and her
daughter, highly polylingual and undevoted to Bolsheviks, a round-
faced American graduate student who listened to and sometimes
understood lectures on Italian art at the university, an out-of-
favor Italian ex-diplomat, a Dutch baron devoted to cameos, to
Americans and other novelties, an Italian lawyer with three
daughters, a soured French silk-buyer, and an Italo-American agent
for documentary films, who wanted to discuss trout-fishing in Maine
with Hayden.

Dr. Lomond--Olivia--sat by herself at a small table and read the
air-mail continental Time.  She looked at Hayden twice before she
remembered him (that is what she thought he would think) and she
nodded and said nothing and went back to reading about Congressman
Marcantonio, the latest biography of Susan B. Anthony, murder by a
balding man late at night in a rubber-boot warehouse, revolution in
the Celebes, the mortality rate in successor-disease affecting
former confidants of Stalin, chemobiologimicrophotography in the
University of Leyden, and the other brighter topics of the day.
Olivia's compressed lips were hidden from him by the Time cover,
portraying, in color, a fabulous chain-store organizer, with a
background of prunes, motorcycles, cash registers and bathing caps,
and instead of Olivia's glass-smooth cheeks or hostile, inquiring
eyes, Hayden studied only his plate of saffron-yellow rice.



8


Out of his plastered cell, Hayden made a cluttered and familiar
home.  It was, possibly, the first home he had ever had.  In
boyhood, "home" had been aggressively his father's house, and in
his marriage, their three successive houses had been saturated with
Caprice and her clamorous friends.

In a second-hand shop he bought a couple of low tables, a small
rosy armchair and a shaky set of bookshelves that had been used for
bottles.  At Alinari's he got color prints of the Primavera and
Angelico's Great Crucifixion and the fairyland of Benozzo Gozzoli's
gold and crimson courtier pilgrims.

In the book shops he went on a spree.  He bought histories of
Florence in English, English-Italian grammars and dictionaries, a
Cambridge history of the Renaissance, and in Italian he had books
which he certainly would not be able to tackle for two years: Dante
and Petrarch, Manzoni's classic I Promessi Sposi, which is written
in hedgerows and not in lines, Machiavelli's Prince, and a volume
of Giovanni Villani's Florentine history--a brand-new edition,
dated 1650.

He had, in fact, all of a university except the yell and the
bursar's office.

His exploration of Florence, begun immediately, was not altogether
that of the enraptured and credulous tourist, for Hayden Chart was
an architect, a good one, not unlearned, and he saw the purposes of
arches and buttresses; his eye picked up ornamental iron balconies
and in apparent mere gaps between buildings he detected minute
streets leading to some lost square with a little church, an old,
very old, very holy church sheltering the tomb of a spacious
Platonist who in 1492 was discovering the old world as dangerously
as Columbus was finding the new.

He went graspingly at learning Italian, a tongue reputed among the
untutored to be all melody and tra-la-la's and mobile dames and
ice-cream cries, but actually so thorny with perverse irregular
verbs and pronouns that have more exceptions than rules and
suffixes meaning Big, Pretty Big, Very Big, Enormously Big, Little,
Delightfully Little, Nasty, or Perfectly Horrible that most
tenderfoot students give it up, moaning, after learning how to make
love and order a meal.

He looked into the official Italian Language course at the
University, but it was all in Italian from the first, too much for
the halting brain of thirty-five.  He tried a School of Languages,
but he did not feel stimulated by his fellow-students: Anglo-
American women who, after housekeeping in Florence for a decade,
had decided that it was time to find out what they had really been
eating all these years, or English businessmen who wanted to sell
British machinery, or the aunts of American European Relief Program
officials, all of whom interrupted the lessons to explain what they
thought about Italy, with an urgency which indicated that they
believed the natives, from dope-runners to the President, were
pantingly waiting for their verdicts.

Hayden found, through Mrs. Dodsworth, a Signora Pendola, an oldish
fat widow with an umbrella and elastic-sided shoes, afflicted with
bronchitis and sadness of the heart, tired, so poor and tired, but
a patient teacher, with a voice like Eleonora Duse.  Hayden was
fond of her and treated her as though she were his mother.  Before
each lesson, down in the salon, he had the waiter bring the Signora
a cup of tea, and she announced that he was the kindest American
since that born Yankee hustler, Julius Caesar.

Along with her instruction, he daily studied his book of grammar,
but this seemed to be another Italian.  Rarely did any of the words
which he painfully drilled into himself from the printed lists slip
over into normal conversation.

As he learned each phrase from the Signora, Hayden tried it out on
the maid, Perpetua, who, being Italian and generous, did not find
it funny when he meant to ask her to sew on a button, but
gravely made it, "By favor, I pray of cook those stick on my
shirtmakeress."  He tried his new words in shops, in small
restaurants.  The friendly Florentines were pleased that the
stranger should want to know their tongue, and he began to love the
gently grave men, the flexibly moving women.

He had thought, at first, that the Italian women had noses too
long--from the nasal standard of American magazine-cover girls--but
presently he was convinced that these ALMOST long noses were part
of a medieval grace and long flying lines that ought to be seen not
in the chopped-off smart New York styles which prosperous Italian
women wear today, but in a fluency of trailing silk, soft green
trimmed with silver and rare furs.  He noted with comfort that
Olivia Lomond's nose was one one-hundredth of an inch longer than
the severe Colorado norm, and he felt that if he should ever see
Roxanna Eldritch's pert snub nose again he would consider it
truncated and vulgar.

As rudely as though he were flagrantly picking her up at a railroad
station, he tackled Olivia at her icy island table and insisted
that she go on a walk with him.  She consented indifferently, and
as they tramped together, squeezed close by the exigency of a two-
man-wide alley, they still seemed as far apart as at the pensione.
He worked hard then, as young men of thirty-five or eighty-five do,
to convince her that he was a devilish clever fellow.  She might
know all about the bellicose families who once had fought from
these rough towers, but he could tell her what foundation a tower
must have and how much it tapered and what the square holes in the
walls were for.

She came to treat him as being almost as decent and capable a human
being as Perpetua.  She did not mock him--much.

With Olivia or by himself he looked at the great churches--Or San
Michele, Miniato, Santa Croce, Maria Novella, San Marco, the
Battistero--and at the galleries till he understood how a Giotto
differed from a Spinello Aretino.  He began, a little, to follow
the symbolism whereby a pictured saint portrayed both the saint and
a Medici, and a red star marked St. Dominic; to see that a picture
in which the misdrawn toes were as long as fingers and the children
were only dwarf grown-ups could yet in the whole composition hold
ecstasy and delight.

But he also discovered that the one plac