No traveler, setting his foot upon the continent of Europe for the first time, was ever less impressed than I.
The roads we traversed, the hills and valleys, the cities, French or Italian, where we halted for the night, seemed all alike to me.
Everywhere was dirty, verminous, and I was nearly deafened by the noise.
Used to the silence of a well-nigh empty house—for the servants slept away in their own quarters beneath the clock tower—where I heard no sound at night but the wind in the trees and the lash of rain when it blew from the southwest, the ceaseless clatter and turmoil of foreign cities came near to stupefying me.
I slept, yes, who does not sleep at twenty-four, after long hours upon the road, but into my dreams came all the alien sounds; the banging of doors, the screech of voices, footsteps beneath the window, cart wheels on the cobbled stones, and always, every quarter, the chime of a church bell.
Perhaps, had I come abroad upon some other errand, it would have been different.
Then, I might have leaned from my window in the early mornings with a lighter heart, watched the barefooted children playing in the gutter and thrown coins to them, heard all the new sounds and voices with fascination, wandered at night among the narrow twisting streets and come to like them.
As it was, I looked upon what I saw with indifference, passing to hostility.
My need was to reach Ambrose, and because I knew him to be ill in a foreign country my anxiety turned to loathing of all things alien, even of the very soil itself.
It grew hotter every day.
The sky was a glazed hard blue, and it seemed to me, twisting and turning along those dusty roads in Tuscany, that the sun had drawn all moisture from the land.
The valleys were baked brown, and the little villages hung parched and yellow on the hills with the haze of heat upon them.
Oxen lumbered by, thin-looking, bony, searching for water, goats scuffed by the wayside, tended by little children who screamed and shouted as the coach rolled by, and it seemed to me, in my anxiety and fear for Ambrose, that all living things were thirsty in this country, and when water was denied they fell into decay and died.
My first instinct, on climbing from the coach in Florence, as the dusty baggage was unloaded and carried within the hostelry, was to cross the cobbled street and stand beside the river.
I was travel-stained and weary, covered from head to foot with dust.
For the past two days I had sat beside the driver rather than die from suffocation within, and like the poor beasts upon the road I longed for water.
There it was before me.
Not the blue estuary of home, rippling, and salty fresh, whipped with sea spray, but a slow-moving turgid stream, brown like the riverbed beneath it, oozing and sucking its way under the arches of the bridge, and ever and again its flat smooth surface breaking into bubbles.
Waste matter was borne away upon this river, wisps of straw, and vegetation, yet to my imagination, fevered almost with fatigue and thirst, it was something to be tasted, swallowed, poured down the throat as one might pour a draft of poison.
I stood watching the moving water, fascinated, and the sun beat down upon the bridge, and suddenly, from behind me in the city, a great bell chimed four o’clock, deep-sounding, solemn.
The chime was taken up by other bells from other churches, and the sound mingled with the surging river as it passed, brown and slimy, over the stones.
A woman stood by my side, a whimpering child in her arms, another dragging at her torn skirt, and she stretched out her hand to me for alms, her dark eyes lifted to mine in supplication.
I gave her a coin and turned away, but she continued to touch my elbow, whispering, until one of the passengers, still standing by the coach, let forth a string of words at her in Italian, and she shrank back again to the corner of the bridge whence she had come.
She was young, not more than nineteen or so, but the expression on her face was ageless, haunting, as though she possessed in her lithe body an old soul that could not die; centuries in time looked out from those two eyes, she had contemplated life so long it had become indifferent to her.
Later, when I had mounted to the room they showed me, and stood out upon the little balcony that gave upon the square, I saw her creep away between the horses and the carrozzas waiting there, stealthy as a cat that slinks by night, its belly to the ground.
I washed and changed my clothes with a strange apathy.
Now that I had reached my journey’s end a sort of dullness came upon me, and the self which had set forth upon his journey excited, keyed to a high pitch and ready for any battle, existed no longer.
In his place a stranger stood, dispirited and weary.
Excitement had long since vanished.
Even the reality of the torn scrap of paper in my pocket had lost substance.
It had been written many weeks ago; so much could have happened since.
She might have taken him away from Florence; they might have gone to Rome, to Venice, and I saw myself dragged back to that lumbering coach again, in their wake.
Swaying through city after city, traversing the length and breadth of the accursed country, and never finding them, always defeated by time and the hot dusty roads.
Or yet again, the whole thing might be an error, the letters scribbled as a crazy jest, one of those leg-pulls loved by Ambrose in days gone by, when as a child I would fall into some trap he set for me.
And I might go now to seek him at the villa and find some celebration, dinner in progress, guests invited, lights and music; and I would be shown in upon the company with no excuse to offer, Ambrose in good health turning astounded eyes upon me.
I went downstairs and out into the square.
The carrozzas that had been waiting there had driven off.
The siesta hour was over, and the streets were crowded once again.
I plunged into them and was lost at once.
About me were dark courts and alleyways, tall houses touching one another, jutting balconies, and as I walked, and turned, and walked again, faces peered at me from the doorways, passing figures paused and stared, all wearing upon them that same age-old look of suffering and passion long since spent which I had first noticed on the beggar girl.
Some of them followed me, whispering as she had done, stretching out their hands, and when I spoke roughly, remembering my fellow passenger from the coach, they drew back again, flattening themselves against the walls of the tall houses, and watched me pass on, with a strange smoldering pride.
The church bells began to clamor once again, and I came to a great piazza where the people stood thickly, clustered together in groups, talking, gesticulating, having, so it seemed to my alien eyes, no connection with the buildings fringing the square, austere and beautiful, nor with the statues remotely staring with blind eyes upon them, nor with the sound of the bells themselves, echoing loud and fateful to the sky.
I hailed a passing carrozza, and when I said doubtfully the words
“Villa Sangalletti” the driver answered something which I could not understand, but I caught the word
“Fiesole” as he nodded and pointed with his whip.
We drove through the narrow crowded streets, and he shouted to the horse, the reins jingling, the people falling back from us as we passed among them.
The bells ceased and died away, yet the echo seemed to sound still in my ears, solemn, sonorous, tolling not for my mission, insignificant and small, nor for the lives of the people in the streets, but for the souls of men and women long since dead, and for eternity.
We climbed a long twisting road towards the distant hills, and Florence lay behind us.
The buildings fell away.
It was peaceful, silent, and the hot staring sun that had beaten down upon the city all day, glazing the sky, turned gentle suddenly, and soft.