They now found themselves face to face with the librarian, and Mr. Waters made a gesture of waiving himself in Colville’s favour.
“No, no!” said the latter; “you had better ask. I am going to put this gentleman through rather an extended course of sprouts.”
The librarian smiled with the helplessness of a foreigner, who knows his interlocutor’s English, but not the meaning of it.
“Oh, I merely wanted to ask,” said Mr. Waters, addressing the librarian, and explaining to Colville, “whether you had received that book on Savonarola yet. The German one.”
“I shall see,” said the librarian, and he went upon a quest that kept him some minutes.
“You’re not thinking of taking Savonarola’s life, I suppose?” suggested Colville.
“Oh no. Villari’s book has covered the whole ground forever, it seems to me. It’s a wonderful book. You’ve read it?”
“Yes. It’s a thing that makes you feel that, after all, the Italians have only to make a real effort in any direction, and they go ahead of everybody else. What biography of the last twenty years can compare with it?”
“You’re right, sir—you’re right,” cried the old man enthusiastically. “They’re a gifted race, a people of genius.”
“I wish for their own sakes they’d give their minds a little to generalship,” said Colville, pressed by the facts to hedge somewhat. “They did get so badly smashed in their last war, poor fellows.”
“Oh, I don’t think I should like them any better if they were better soldiers. Perhaps the lesson of noble endurance that they’ve given our times is all that we have the right to demand of them in the way of heroism; no one can say they lack courage. And sometimes it seems to me that in simply outgrowing the different sorts of despotism that had fastened upon them, till their broken bonds fell away without positive effort on their part, they showed a greater sublimity than if they had violently conquered their freedom. Most nations sink lower and lower under tyranny; the Italians grew steadily more and more civilised, more noble, more gentle, more grand. It was a wonderful spectacle—like a human soul perfected through suffering and privation. Every period of their history is full of instruction. I find my ancestral puritanism particularly appealed to by the puritanism of Savonarola.”
“Then Villari hasn’t satisfied you that Savonarola wasn’t a Protestant?”
“Oh yes, he has. I said his puritanism. Just now I’m interested in justifying his failure to myself, for it’s one of the things in history that I’ve found it hardest to accept. But no doubt his puritanic state fell because it was dreary and ugly, as the puritanic state always has been. It makes its own virtues intolerable; puritanism won’t let you see how good and beautiful the Puritans often are. It was inevitable that Savonarola’s enemies should misunderstand and hate him.”
“You are one of the last men I should have expected to find among the Arrabiati,” said Colville.
“Oh, there’s a great deal to be said for the Florentine Arrabiati, as well as for the English Malignants, though the Puritans in neither case would have known how to say it. Savonarola perished because he was excessive. I am studying him in this aspect; it is fresh ground. It is very interesting to inquire just at what point a man’s virtues become mischievous and intolerable.”
These ideas interested Colville; he turned to them with relief from the sense of his recent trivialities; in this old man’s earnestness he found support and encouragement in the new course he had marked out for himself. Sometimes it had occurred to him not only that he was too old for the interests of his youth at forty, but that there was no longer time for him to take up new ones. He considered Mr. Waters’s grey hairs, and determined to be wiser. “I should like to talk these things over with you—and some other things,” he said.
The librarian came toward them with the book for Mr. Waters, who was fumbling near-sightedly in his pocketbook for his card. “I shall be very happy to see you at my room,” he said. “Ah, thank you,” he added, taking his book, with a simple relish as if it were something whose pleasantness was sensible to the touch. He gave Colville the scholar’s far-off look as he turned to go: he was already as remote as the fifteenth century through the magic of the book, which he opened and began to read at once. Colville stared after him; he did not wish to come to just that yet, either. Life, active life, life of his own day, called to him; he had been one of its busiest children: could he turn his back upon it for any charm or use that was in the past? Again that unnerving doubt, that paralysing distrust, beset him, and tempted him to curse the day in which he had returned to this outworn Old World. Idler on its modern surface, or delver in its deep-hearted past, could he reconcile himself to it? What did he care for the Italians of today, or the history of the Florentines as expressed in their architectural monuments? It was the problems of the vast, tumultuous American life, which he had turned his back on, that really concerned him. Later he might take up the study that fascinated yonder old man, but for the present it was intolerable.
He was no longer young, that was true; but with an ache of old regret he felt that he had not yet lived his life, that his was a baffled destiny, an arrested fate. A lady came up and took his turn with the librarian, and Colville did not stay for another. He went out and walked down the Lung’ Arno toward the Cascine. The sun danced on the river, and bathed
