The Good Soldier | Page 7

of time, as it reached me
from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.
So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the
fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me.
And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the
distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright
stars. From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out
at the great moon and say: "Why, it is nearly as bright as in Provence!"
And then we shall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a
sigh because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories
are gay. Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago
Florence and I motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the
Black Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up an
immense pinnacle and on the pinnacle are four castles--Las Tours, the
Towers. And the immense mistral blew down that valley which was the
way from France into Provence so that the silver grey olive leaves
appeared like hair flying in the wind, and the tufts of rosemary crept
into the iron rocks that they might not be torn up by the roots.
It was, of course, poor dear Florence who wanted to go to Las Tours.
You are to imagine that, however much her bright personality came
from Stamford, Connecticut, she was yet a graduate of Poughkeepsie. I
never could imagine how she did it--the queer, chattery person that she
was. With the far-away look in her eyes--which wasn't, however, in the
least romantic--I mean that she didn't look as if she were seeing poetic
dreams, or looking through you, for she hardly ever did look at
you!--holding up one hand as if she wished to silence any objection--or
any comment for the matter of that--she would talk. She would talk
about William the Silent, about Gustave the Loquacious, about Paris
frocks, about how the poor dressed in 1337, about Fantin-Latour, about
the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranée train-deluxe, about whether it would be
worth while to get off at Tarascon and go across the windswept
suspension-bridge, over the Rhone to take another look at Beaucaire.
We never did take another look at Beaucaire, of course--beautiful
Beaucaire, with the high, triangular white tower, that looked as thin as

a needle and as tall as the Flatiron, between Fifth and
Broadway--Beaucaire with the grey walls on the top of the pinnacle
surrounding an acre and a half of blue irises, beneath the tallness of the
stone pines, What a beautiful thing the stone pine is! . . .
No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to Heidelberg, not to Hamelin,
not to Verona, not to Mont Majour--not so much as to Carcassonne
itself. We talked of it, of course, but I guess Florence got all she wanted
out of one look at a place. She had the seeing eye.
I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I
want to return--towns with the blinding white sun upon them; stone
pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and
painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped gables with the
little saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi and walled towns a mile
or so back from the sea, on the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and
Naples. Not one of them did we see more than once, so that the whole
world for me is like spots of colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it
weren't so I should have something to catch hold of now.
Is all this digression or isn't it digression? Again I don't know. You, the
listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don't tell me
anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of life it
was I led with Florence and what Florence was like. Well, she was
bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance over the floors of castles
and over seas and over and over and over the salons of modistes and
over the plages of the Riviera--like a gay tremulous beam, reflected
from water upon a ceiling. And my function in life was to keep that
bright thing in existence. And it was almost as difficult as trying to
catch with your hand that dancing reflection. And the task lasted for
years.
Florence's aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in
Philadelphia. They had never been to Philadelphia and they had the
New England conscience. You see, the first thing they said