UNTO THE DAY
I
Martin leaned across the dusty parapet, ridden by that singular depression which one may know in strange cities. The fervour of the August sun, giving an intolerable vividness of outline and detail to the curving perspective, did not serve to cozen his mood. The ragged gully of the Arno, sunken between the ordered stone embankments, the wider curve of parallel façades with their indefinable touch of dignity and age, the dainty miniature of Santa Maria della Spina, the crenelated pile of the old citadel behind the Ponte a Mare, gave him the sense of something known and wearied of long ago. He looked down as from an infinite height upon a group of boys shouting below. They were splashing in a shallow pool or chasing each other naked on the sands, with an abandon enviable alike for its disregard of nature and of man. Beyond, where a rivulet of the shrunken stream made some pretence of motion, a row of women knelt above their wash-boards. They beat their hapless linen with a vehemence which at such a temperature would have been preternatural had their chatter not made it miraculous. The theatrical vivacity of the people, their unaccustomed faces, their foreign speech, weighed again on Martin’s humour. He rose impatiently and turned his back to the river.
The quay was hardly more engaging in the pitiless morning glare. White pavement and stucco façades danced together in the quivering silence. Scarcely a living creature was visible. A man passed with a panier-laden donkey, uttering a harsh unintelligible cry. The straw hat on the beast’s head, through which two long ears protruded comically, provided a fleeting object of interest. In the distance a woman approached. She was dressed in white, and Martin felt a personal resentment against her for not affording some contrast to the intolerable monotony of light. Had she come forth in sky-blue or bottle-green, she would have been a public benefactress, worthy the freedom of the city.
Wondering miserably what he should do with himself, Martin cast an indifferent glance at the building in front of him. It was one of the high dark-browed Tuscan palazzi, broad-eaved and strong-barred like the great houses of Florence. The entrance was open, giving a glimpse of a shady courtyard within. Above the massive archway was a device that attracted the young man’s attention. A fragment of chain hung there, from a bolt projecting above the keystone; and between the chain and a high stone escutcheon ran the legend, in letters of tarnished brass let into the weathered marble:
ALLA GIORNATA
Martin’s interest was caught. The three links of chain, the heraldic lion, the enigmatic inscription—what did they signify? He studied the open gate, the marble benches beside it, the forbidding windows, the iron torch-sconces, as if for a clue. As he did so the sound of steps intruded lightly upon his survey. Glancing about he remarked the offensive person in white. He noted, furthermore, that her offence extended to and included her shoes, but not her hair—which was dark; that she twirled a white parasol over her shoulder in the most obvious and irritating satisfaction; and that her eyes were upon him, with an expression which closely resembled amusement. At his look she turned them to the palace gate.
A moment later his resumed inspection of the writing in the stone was interrupted by the transit of the parasol. Something of the butterfly assurance with which that cloud of lace and chiffon blotted out the dusty inscription prompted Martin to wonder whether it had a secret which was denied himself. From a sudden whimsical impulse he demanded aloud:
“What does it mean?”
To his intense astonishment and no small dismay the parasol slowly turned, revealing a pair of eyes which no longer dissembled amusement. Yet it was not the parasol nor the eyes, but the owner of them who answered:
“It means everything. It means the whole of life.”
Then the parasol resumed its rotatory orbit up the Lungarno Regio.
Martin stared after it, not knowing whether to be more astounded at his own temerity or at the sound of his native tongue. But everything in him cried out against the solitude of that sun-smitten quay; and he called, desperately:
“Thank you, but I wish you would be a little more explicit—considering that I have been after that formula a good many years, and don’t happen to have my phrase-book about me.”
The parasol hesitated, came gradually to a stand-still, and once more performed an axial revolution of forty-five degrees. This time—had Martin not been too eager to perceive it—the amusement in the eyes was mingled with curiosity:
“They don’t put it in phrase-books. People have to translate it for themselves.”
“But I don’t know Italian!” protested Martin, hastily, taking off his hat: “Giornata—Is it like journée? The day? That which happens between dark and dark?”
The lady still faced the river, looking back at him over her shoulder:
“Yes.”
“And the chain!” pursued Martin: “Is it a whole chain or a broken one?”
“That depends!”
“‘To the day’—and a chain! Why is that the whole of life?”
“Why is it not the whole of life?”
“Because it’s only a part. And it’s not the best part: the part that gets things done, the part that one likes to remember.”
The parasol eddied lightly in the scorching sun:
“You have been reading phrase-books too much. That is exactly what it is: the best part, the part that gets things done—if things ever are done—the only part that one likes to remember. The rest is merely padding.”
“But that chops things up so!” objected Martin, polemically: “And it makes too much of the chain.”
“O! I beg your pardon,” responded the lady bowing slightly: “I thought it was information you wanted.” She turned a little toward the Ponte di Mezzo.
“I suppose you are right,” admitted Martin precipitately, “in a way. But would you really have people live just for the day?” As he stood there with his back against the baking stone of the parapet, his head uncovered to the sun, he became aware that the point of his interest had somehow shifted from the writing above the gate to its interpreter with the parasol. She was not so young, he observed, but neither—on the other hand—was she so old. He felt that he would gladly suffer a sunstroke if he could succeed in prolonging the interpretation.
The lady laughed outright:
“They do! I’m not responsible for it! But what have you against me? An inoffensive person walks down the street, at peace with all the world, when she is suddenly waylaid by a defiant young man whom she has never seen and is forced into the heat of argument—as if the sun were not bad enough already!”
Martin laughed too, albeit not so lightly, for he perceived that the interpretation was at an end:
“I beg pardon for waylaying you. I can only offer you my word that it is not my habit to go about distressing and destroying all ladies, like Sir Breuse Saunce Pitie. I suppose I fancied myself the sole person cognizant of the English language in this town, which I have never seen and which I already hate.”
To his relief the lady did not take instant departure, but laughed again:
“If it comes to apologies we shall be quits. I can only beg you to believe that it is not my habit to stop and chaffer with strange gentlemen. I suppose it was the novelty of your attack that undid me. If you had begun with so harmless a remark as ‘Good morning’ I would have known you at once for an objectionable character; but since you immediately engaged me in the ultimate problems of existence you surprised me out of my conventions!”
“I will offer you any reparation in my power—even to the point of a card!” eagerly rejoined Martin, who detected signs of unrest in the parasol.
“I will not exact that proof of you,” said the lady: “Names are necessary in complex societies only—of three or more.” Although she said it lightly, she said it in a way that made Martin put back his card-case and hastily button his coat. “But you mustn’t hate Pisa,” she went on: “There are charming river curves in it, and narrow streets with overhanging eaves. And, if you don’t mind my mentioning things which are so ordinary as to be starred by Baedeker, I know a cloister in a quiet corner of the city wall where the Middle Ages are buried. Or I could even show you the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them from the top of a tower.”
“I wish you would!” burst out Martin, before he knew what he was about. The next instant, remembering the card-case, he damned himself.
But after looking across her shoulder at him for a moment she gave her parasol a jerk of decision.
“I will!” she smiled, facing him at last: “Now that I have hopelessly compromised myself it is too late to assume a forgotten dignity and sweep away with an outraged stare! Why should I not practise what I preach? Alla giornata! I was just wondering what to do with this long hot morning. And do put your hat on. I am already smouldering, even under my parasol.”
II
They crossed the quay to a dark little alley that skirted the flank of his palace, and Martin could scarcely realise how it was that his mood had so completely changed.
“Be warned in time!” he said: “It is not too late to repent. I don’t want to lure you away under false pretences. I’m just a common tripper and I have a Baedeker in my pocket.”
“I knew it!” she rejoined: “That is why I am throwing my reputation to the winds. And I hope you notice, in the meantime, that we are entering the Way of Wisdom. See?” she pointed to the name of the street—Via della Sapienza—cut in a high stone. “But I always wanted to know what trippers did. Do tell me!” She put down her parasol as they entered the cool of the shadow. Martin was glad, for it enabled him to see her better.
“Must I be butchered to make a Pisan holiday?” he asked. “Know then that I, who now tread the Way of Wisdom, started out on a poetical pilgrimage. I have been walking—figuratively, and a trifle anachronously—in the footsteps of Shelley. Rome knows me; also Venice, Ravenna, and the Euganean Hills. I have been to Spezia. I have pensively treadled bicycles up and down behind every villa at San Terenzo, wondering which was the one. I have sailed boats on the Seno di Lerici. I have gone swimming at Viareggio. I have haunted the harbour of Leghorn. And early this morning I wheeled up here. I am now prepared to make a brief but comprehensive survey of the city and environs—particularly of the pineta at Bocca d’Arno. There I shall compose a sonnet, sitting with my back against a sea-viewing pine, and then I shall go home. The anatomy of tripping is laid bare before you!”
The lady laughed.
“I wish I could boast as good a reason for being here! It is the dentist that brings me.” Martin noticed that she did not say from where. “But I am afraid I have thrown away my reputation for nothing. You have not yet explained the hordes that pour through this country with their red books in their hands, as regular as the birds in their seasons. Why do they do it, do you suppose? They make no poetical pilgrimages. Have they no lives of their own to live?”
“You are rather hard on us!” laughed Martin. They turned out of their alley, a mere crack between the houses with a strip of blue hung high above, into a cross street that led to a small square. “It is very simple. No American woman is quite happy until she has a motor car and has been to Europe. And then there is Culture, with a large C, which is making terrific inroads among us. And there is—‘Kennst Du das Land’—You know? Not many of us are so lucky as to stay, like you in the different colonies.” He looked at her to see how his guess would catch.
“I remember I had ideas about them once,” she said, in a tone that made Martin wonder. “But I know them too well now.”
“What about them?”
“They have most of the characteristics of Botany Bay at its flourishing period. There are a few workers and loafers; but most of us are hiders, sitting more or less modestly under smaller or larger clouds! Don’t ask me which I am!” she laughed, as Martin looked at her. “I used to think that disreputable people would be more interesting than reputable ones,” she went on, “because they had at least the courage of their convictions. But I have discovered to my sorrow that they can be just as dull as anybody. Of course there are glittering exceptions. But I have even met people of the most unquestionable virtue who were really worth knowing! I have come to the sad conclusion that existing classifications do not classify.”
Martin laughed with her as they went up the wider street into which their crossway had led them. But the interest which her very first word had aroused grew stronger in him than amusement. This dainty white person whom he had never seen before to-day—who was she? Where had she been, what had she done, yesterday, all the other days that went before their chance meeting by the Arno? There was something in the lightness of her words, in the simplicity with which she had accompanied him, that was not of common days.
The street opened out in front of them into a space of sun that widened as they advanced, disclosing the famous piazza with its group of white buildings under the city wall.
“Isn’t it nice?” she asked. “They always remind me of a little convoy of ships becalmed—these lonely white things with their broad shadows in the sunlight. But don’t look at that tower. I detest it for having tried in such a stupid way to be different from all the towers in the world. Nothing is nice about it but the view from the top. Which it is too hot to get at now. Let’s go over to the Campo Santo and look at the shadows of the tracery on the pavement. It is always cool and quaint there.”
She raised her parasol and led obliquely across the great square, between the cathedral and the baptistery, to a canopied door in a low wall. Martin stared curiously about him as they went. The burnt grass between the hot flagstones gave a strange impression of the solitude of the place, of its evident separation from the life of the city, which contrasted singularly with the splendours setting it apart among the shrines of the world. They rang at the canopied door and were admitted. It was like stepping into another century—so calm, so cool, so of itself was that burial place of another age. Of a different quality was the very sunshine which gilded the green of the quadrangle and retraced on the pavement of the cloister the outlines of the marble lace-work between the pillars. Martin was without words as they slowly made the round of the ambulatory, following and smiling together over the delightful frescoes. It all seemed to him a piece of the magic of this woman who had so unexpectedly released him from the intolerable mood of the morning.
Suddenly, among the sarcophagi, fragments of sculpture, and commemorative marbles which strew that painted cloister, a tablet caught his eye. It was in old French, with a flavour of Italian, and together they picked out the quaint lettering:
D O M
Cy gist Achilles Gvibert de Chevigny, fils de
Pierre Gvibert, Escvier, Sievr de Chevigny, Conseiller,
Secretair dv Roy, Maison, Covronne deFrance
et de Dame Clavde Gviet Gallard dela
Paroisse Sainct Andre dela ville de Paris, le qvel
Achille av sortir del’ Accademie, et des
movsquetaires dv Roy, vovlovst faire le voiage
DItalie et sen retovrnant deRome en France, estant
tombe malade Alivovrne, povr changer dair, se fit
porter en cette ville de Pise, ov, apres avoir recev les
saincts sacremens ordonnez par nostre mere saincte
Eglise, il movrvt, et fvst enterre en ce saint liev, le
XXI: iovr Daovst MDCLXXIV: agee de XXVI: ans.
Priez Diev povr le salvt de son ame.
Fait par le tres cher amy dela nation, et
Maison de France, Labbe Gaetani archidiacre de cediocese.
For a moment they were silent. In the stillness of that sequestered place the forgotten story seemed to live again. Then Martin put his finger to the stone:
“See!” he exclaimed. “It was the twenty-first of August. And to-day is the twenty-first!”
His companion turned her eyes to his, with a curious smile.
“And I came to show you! If I had any qualms about les convenances I have none now.”
They were silent again, looking at each other and at the white tablet. There was something in the little coincidence which seemed to Martin strangely significant.
“‘Lequel Achille voulut faire le voyage d’Italie.’ How near it makes him seem, poor boy! I did not think of there being trippers then,” he said with a smile. “There was no Shelley; not even a Goethe and a Mignon—two hundred and thirty-three years ago!”
She made no reply at first. Then she said, softly:
“I wonder how it was with Dame Claude. There were other things that lacked then, beside your poets. It must have taken time for the Abbé Gaetani’s letter to get to Paris.”
“However it was then, it happily makes no difference now,” returned Martin. A rising elation filled him—out of the utter unexpectedness of this meeting, out of its picturesqueness, out of the infinity of possibilities which it might promise. He was accordingly amazed at the vehemence with which his companion turned upon him.
“Why do you say that?” she exclaimed. “You who brought me here, and on this day! Have you forgotten the gateway by the river? Now is not the time. The time was when the horseman clattered up the cobble-stones of St. André and into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Chevigny; when Dame Claude seized the packet from the page at the door and ran with it to the secretaire du roi; when he broke the seal, read the first lines of the Abbé Gaetani, went white to the lips, looked at Dame Claude, and turned away. It was then that it made a difference. It was then that nothing else made a difference. Things come, and then other things come. Time is only a chain to hold us to them—or away from them. It is mere chance whether it breaks all at once or by degrees....”
Martin watched her keenly as she spoke, white in the shadow of the cloister, her hair dark against the wan frescoes. There was a curious contrast between the vivid modern figure and those faded images of a life so dim and far away. And recalling the palace gate he wondered what there might be of consistency or inconsistency between what she said so lightly then and what she said so intensely now. And why? Where had she been, what had she done, yesterday, all the other days that went before their chance meeting by the Arno?
She stopped, as if reading in his eyes. She touched the white stone softly.
“Good-bye, poor Achille,” she said—“you and your twenty-six years.”
She did not speak again as they passed on. But at one of the openings into the green quadrangle a sudden impulse seized her. She stepped down into the grass and picked some crimson-tipped daisies growing there. Then she went back and laid them on top of the tablet, adding:
“That is for Dame Claude, who was not here all those years ago to-day.”
III
They sat where they could follow the shining river coils that wound down out of the hills, dived under the red of the city roofs, and wound on again into the iridescent plain. Through the haze of the Maremma the glint of the sea at last began to burn, and out of the north issued ghostly the apparition of the Carrara mountains. The day had somehow flamed away, there in that leaning gallery in the corner of the city wall, where the storied marbles stood alone with their shadows—a little fleet of ships becalmed in a quiet haven of the world.
“I am like the wicked in Scripture,” she said. “I love groves and high places.”
“I would say rather that you were like the Empress Elisabeth,” rejoined Martin. It seemed to him that they had always been there, that they would always remain there—he and this woman whose very name he did not know.
“Why am I like the Empress Elisabeth?” she asked.
“Haven’t you read Christomanos?”
“What is that?”
“Your ignorance is the first gratification my vanity has had to-day!” laughed Martin. “Christomanos is the hero of a modern fairy story—which is all the prettier for being true. It is a kind of inverted ‘Cinderella.’ He was a little Greek student in the university of Vienna, who lived in a garret in an alley. You know the kind? With stair gables, and bread shops, and clothes lines? Imagine a Greek there! And one day a court carriage rumbled up, just as if it had suddenly rolled out of a pumpkin, and carried him off to talk Greek to the empress. The carriage came every morning after that; and he would spend the day in the imperial park at Lainz, and go back at night to his stair gable. And at last he went to live in the palace altogether, and talked to the empress while she had her hair combed, and walked leagues with her, and went to Schönbrunn and Miramar and Corfu. Of course the ladies-in-waiting were scandalised, but she was used to that—and he was something of a poet.”
“And after she died he wrote a book about it. Which shows how true a poet he was!”
“Wait till you read him. The thing was that people said such things about her, and he knew better; and it hurt him. Of course he couldn’t help seeing the picturesqueness of it all, but he isn’t nasty about it. Most of it is what she said about things.”
“What did she say about things?”
Martin watched the profile beside him, out-lined against the marble of the tower and touched faintly by the glow of the westering sun.
“Well, one thing was a good deal like what you just told me about high places. Christomanos says that she always liked hills because there are so few untrampled places in the world.”
“It was rather imperial of her to want to trample them herself, then. And your Christomanos sounds as if he lacked humour.”
“I fancy he did,” uttered Martin.
Something in his tone made his companion look at him.
“Don’t be teased,” she said. “Tell me more about them. How did it end? Did he run away, or did she send him away, or what?”
“O dear, no! The day of his going was set before he came.”
“O! I begin to approve of your empress.” She was silent a moment, looking out toward the sea. “How was it, do you suppose?”
“Why, she was ages older and wiser and everything else. It was only that she was terribly lonely and bored, and he could do things that she couldn’t ask of a maid of honour, and was likewise incliné à comprendre.”
“O! And what about him?”
“He was so dazed that I don’t suppose you can tell anything about him. He must have been dazed all the time—by the enormousness of the distance between them, by her tragic history, by her personality, her eyes, her hair, everything about her. And to drop out of it all—to go back to being a simple Greek student, and live in a stair gable, and be despised by bakers and washerwomen when he had been the familiar friend of their empress, must have been hard.”
“Well, he had his moment,” she mused. “Did anyone ever have more?”
“Likewise,” chanted Martin:
“But it’s a high price,” she commented, simply.
“It’s worth it,” asserted Martin.
“You have not sat enough upon towers!” She looked at him a moment, with a half smile, and then across the plain again. “No; it’s not because this place is untrampled that I like to come here. But you can see over everybody’s walls. You get some kind of proportion. And I like to think of all the people—under these roofs, in that haze. Common life is what pleases me, and common people—simple people. Our ideas for ourselves are so single. They shut out so much that might be, and they hardly ever come out right. Our lives are generally made up of two or three real days, with years of waiting and remembering between. Common lives and common things are better, just as they happen, from day to day.”
Martin studied her, half wondering what lay behind her words and half taken by the charm of her slow inflection. She turned under his eyes; and he asked at random:
“Do you come here often, for the tower?”
“Not very. I have one of my own, near Naples, where I have sat much and seen many things.”
“Think of having a tower near Naples! And I have to sail in a month!”
“Would you like to exchange?” she asked, smiling.
“Wouldn’t I!”
“Very well, we will!” she said, playfully. “I will throw in a view of the city and the bay, with a bit of Pozzuoli, and a big garden, and all the statues you can talk to, and an olive orchard that runs down hill to the sea, and a frog pond....”
“There are worse things!” interrupted Martin.
“What?” she demanded, eyeing him curiously.
“New England!” he exclaimed, with a laugh.
“I suppose you will think so,” she rejoined gravely, “until you have sat by yourself in a tower and listened to frogs in a pond. For that matter, though, the frogs are what I like best.” She looked out again across the Maremma. The sea began to widen in the sunset, toward which the Arno ran in links of brightening fire. “No,” she said at last. “It is not for us.”
“What?” he asked.
“This!” she answered, waving her hand against the golden space before them. “We are of the North. We belong to mist and pallor and dreams. Here they have no dream. What is there left for them to dream about? They live. But we don’t know how to live. We are always waiting—or remembering.”
“As a background, however, I would prefer Campania to Vermont!”
“No, it is not for us,” she repeated. “Our roots are not here: how can we grow? But it is curious how it catches us all, and how it is typical of desire fulfilled. What does one ever really attain, really possess? Things are too great or too unresponsive, and always too mysterious. Even a little gem that you can hold in your hand and never let escape: how much is it yours—that strange indifferent fire? There is no possession. Instead of getting something else we lose something of ourselves. After all, people like Achille down there are happiest, who live their moment so intensely that they lose themselves all at once instead of by slow shreds and patches. The moment is everything. After that——” She put her hand to her cheek with a motion of weariness. Then she suddenly looked at Martin and laughed. “Do you see that sun? I presume the police have already been notified of my disappearance! I must beg your pardon for having given you such a day of it, and ask you to take me down.”
She sprang to her feet and Martin followed, reluctantly.
“I suppose I shall wake up,” he said, as they descended the winding steps, “and find that you were a dream. When I feel as I do, that I have known you all my life, and then reflect that twelve hours ago I had never set eyes on you—that even now I know no more about you than that you have a tower in Posilipo—I am inclined to doubt the so-called realities of existence.”
Again she laughed.
“Why? The actual matter of prolonged passions has occupied less time! I don’t see what more I could possibly tell you. The rest would be merely frills. But people waste so much time in these things. Don’t you think so? They miss so many chances, waiting for each other to begin and manœuvring each other to the proper point. That is why I came with you this morning—because you lost no time. Think how different it would have been if you had not waylaid me so unpardonably!”
Martin did think so. The consciousness of it suddenly overwhelmed him as they came out into the deserted square and crossed to the Via Santa Maria. He would not even have looked back, but for his companion.
“See!” she cried.
The dome of the baptistery, the roof of the cathedral, the top of the tower where they had been, were alight with a delicate rose glow which contrasted extraordinarily with the cold white of the lower shadow. The spectacle was to Martin symbolic and revealing. He saw as if apart from himself the romance of his day. Could it really have been he to whom this adventure had fallen? He glanced furtively at his companion. Was she the intimate stranger with whom he had been? It pleased him that he had known herself before knowing things about her. There would be so much more significance in making last the steps of acquaintance which usually come first. But she looked weary, and a thousand uncertainties, a thousand concerns, assailed him. He could not find courage to say the things which rose to his lips. His thoughts, however, wove themselves into a tissue of dreams.
So they went silently down the crooked street which at last left them on the Lungarno Regio. Martin hardly knew where he was. Through the gateway between the houses where the Arno wound out to the plain the splendour of sunset streamed into the city, touching the dusty façades with a fairy glamour, filling the sandy river bed with undreamed secrets of colour, transmuting the parcelled water into purple and gold. The quay where Martin had that morning discovered two persons was crowded with carriages and pedestrians enjoying the cool of the day. The theatrical vivacity of the people, their unaccustomed faces, their foreign speech, gave a new poignancy to his mood of exaltation.
One of the carriages in the slow progress caused some confusion by driving out of line. Martin noticed the handsome horses, the correct footman, the old lady with a black parasol. She eyed him narrowly as the landau drove up to the curb. He called the attention of his companion, who was looking toward the river.
She turned.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, with a bow and a smile to the lady in the carriage, “I am afraid I must go.” He looked blankly into her eyes as she hesitated a moment. “It was a nice day! It was so long since I had seen anybody. And the cloister—that was nice. I shall always think of you there. It would have been so different if we had not been ready! Good-bye, Achille.”
The footman held open the emblazoned door.
“Good-bye—Elisabeth!” said Martin, too dazed to think or utter more.
The door clicked, the footman leaped to his box, the coachman flicked the horses. Beside the black parasol a white one went up, hiding the figure behind it. Martin’s first impulse was to follow, to see where the carriage went. He began to walk hastily in the direction it had taken, watching the two parasols. Then he stopped and turned resolutely away. “Lequel Achille voûlut faire le voyage d’Italie,” he said to himself. “Priez pour le salut de son âme.”
Wondering miserably what he should do with himself, Martin cast an indifferent glance at the building in front of him. It was one of the high dark-browed Tuscan palazzi, broad-eaved and strong-barred like the great houses of Florence. The entrance was closed. Above the massive archway was a device that attracted the young man’s attention. A fragment of chain hung there, from a bolt projecting above the keystone; and between the chain and a high stone escutcheon ran the legend, in letters of tarnished brass let into the weathered marble:
ALLA GIORNATA