He worked at his new game of architecture. With Ruskin’s Stones of Venice under his arm, he saw daily a new church, a new palace, and now and then he made sketches, not very bad, and was not displeased when loudly commenting tourists mistook him for an authentic artist. He lunched simply; he slept for an hour afterward, and betook himself then to the one real duty of a wise visitor in Venice—to spend most of the afternoon and evening sitting in the Piazza and doing nothing whatever save watch the spectacle.
It had been agreeable in Paris or on Unter den Linden to watch the parade, but there the motors, the horses, the brisk policemen had made it a hard and somewhat nervous spectacle. Here, where there was no traffic, where the marble-walled piazza was like a stage with the chorus of an incredibly elaborate comic opera, there was only a lazy and unharassed contentment. The crowd changed, every second. Now two Fascist officers paced by, trim in black shirts, olive-green uniforms, and gold-badged and tasseled service caps. Now it was two carbinieri with the cocked hats of Napoleon and the solemn manner of judges. Now a tourist steamer vomited a rush of excited novices—inquiring Germans or stolid English, golden-haired Scandinavians, or Americans of whom the women were thrilled and the males cocked up their cigars and announced, very publicly, that if this was Venice, they didn’t think it was so doggone much!
The guides, slightly less numerous but much more insistent than the cloud of pigeons, attacked everyone who was not entirely engaged in the sacred act of being photographed, and yammered, “Me gide spik fine English, show you San Marco.” The children fell under everybody’s feet. The gatherers of cigarettes swooped on each butt as it fell. The English couples went by amiably contemptuous. And at last the sunset turned the dark leaded glass behind the horses of San Marco into gold.
He was content, by comparison with his active agonizing in Paris. But he was also lonely, despite the show of the Piazza. He had to have someone to talk to, and never did he meet anyone whom he knew.
It was not easy for him to pick up acquaintances. Once he sat at a table next to a party of Americans. They did not seem very complex and difficult; they looked like small town merchants and professional men with their wives; and Sam took the chance. He leaned toward the nearest, a spectacled little man, and drawled, “On a tour?”
The little man looked scornfully cautious. He’d read the papers! He wasn’t going to be taken in by any of your slick international crooks!
He sniffed “Yes,” and he did not embroider it.
“Uh—enjoying Italy?”
“Yes, thanks!”
The little man turned his back, and Sam was flushed and shamed and much lonelier than before.
He was grateful when he was picked up by a large and lugubrious and green-hatted Bavarian who was apparently even more desolate than himself, and though they had in common only a hundred words of English, twenty of German, and ten of Italian, they were both strong men who could endure a lot of gesturing. They gave each other confidence in battling with gondoliers, and together they lumbered to the Colleoni and S.S. Giovanni e Paolo, gaped at the glass-makers at Murano, and visited the Armenian monastery on the peaceful isle of San Lazzaro. Sam saw the Bavarian friend off at the station as regretfully as he had seen Ross Ireland off at Interlaken, and all that evening he clung to his favorite table at Florian’s as though it was his only home.
He heard regularly from Fran, but where once her letters had been festal, now he hesitated to open them.
She complained a good deal. It had been rainy—it had been hot. She had gone to the Tyrol for a week (she did not say that Kurt had come along but he guessed it) and the hotels had been crowded. She had suffered unparalleled misfortune in having to stay at a small hotel where the food was heavy and the guests heavier. She had met a cousin of Kurt, an Austrian ambassador, and though she had showered blessings of wit and courtesy on the fellow, he had not appreciated her.
As to whether Sam himself was any happier, she never inquired.
Her letters left him always a little blue. And they did not suggest that she would like to see him.
He was in the Piazza, meditating on one of these letters, a little after four of a blazing afternoon. He saw a familiar-looking woman pass his table. She was perhaps forty; she was slim, rather pale. She wore black crêpe, without ornament, and a wide black hat with a tiny brooch of brilliants. Her hands were as fine as lace.
He remembered. It was Mrs. Cecil R. A. Cortright, Edith Cortright, American-born widow of the British minister to Romania (or was it Bulgaria?) who, on a hint from Tub’s nephew, had asked them to tea at her flat in the Palace Ascagni in Venice, months ago. He darted up, to welcome the first recognizable face he had seen in weeks; he hesitated—Mrs. Cortright was not the sort of woman one greeted carelessly. He ventured again. He tossed a ten lira note on the table for the waiter, and, circling the square with his long stride, so arranged it that he met her as she was passing through
