He had the letter at ten in the morning. At twelve he was ringing at Edith’s flat. He thrust Fran’s letter at her without a word. When Edith had read it she sighed, and suggested:
“It’s so hot here. I’ve been thinking of going down to Naples—to Posilipo, out on the point, where it’s cool—and taking a little house on the estate of the Ercoles. Baron Ercole has a big place, but he’s frightfully poor. He’s an ex-diplomat; he teaches law in the University of Naples; and the poor darlings live mostly by renting villas on their place. Why don’t you come down with me? I don’t think there’s much more to be said about your Fran, after this letter. It might be good for you to swim and sail at Naples, instead of sitting here brooding. Would you like to come?”
“Decidedly! But what about your friends who are so eager to be scandalized—”
“Oh, not the Ercoles. They’ll believe I’m having an affair with you, and be delighted—they’ve lived in too many countries, in the diplomatic corps, to have many morals. They’ll like you. Edmondo Ercole and you will have such a good time being silent together! Oh, that sounds like Fran, I imagine! I’m sorry!”
In the sunset an Italian hill town, battlements and a shaggy tower on a rock abrupt amid the sloping plain. The windows of the town took the low sunlight and blazed one after another as the train passed. “As though the houses were full of gay people,” said Edith. He looked at it with still pleasure. He felt that her presence had unlocked his heart; had enabled him, for the first time, to see Italy.
He had, theoretically, been in Naples before, but as they drove from the station to the Villa Ercole he realized that all he had seen—all he had seen anywhere in Europe—had not been the place itself but Fran’s hectic and demanding attitudes; her hysteria of delight over a moonlight, or her hysteria of annoyance over bad service. In Edith’s quiet presence he perceived that Naples was not, as he had remembered it, a rather grim, very modern barricade of tall apartment houses, but a series of connected villages extending for miles along the bay, between blue water and hills into which human beings had burrowed like gophers.
The driver of their taxi, being Neapolitan, was in a rage so long as any vehicle was on the road ahead of him, and as that was always, their journey was a series of escapes from death. Yet even in this chariot race, Sam expanded and nestled into contentment, as in the old days of overwork and brief vacations he had relaxed into delight on his holidays in a canoe.
He patted Edith’s hand in an effort to express his happiness, as he saw Vesuvius roll up, with its trail of smoke—toward Naples, now, promising good weather; saw Capri with the dots of white houses on the lofty plateau between the ruin-dotted mountains; saw sun-washed Sorrento at the foot of its giant promontory; saw the villas of Posilipo below the cliff up which their taxi was racing.
The taxi passed a yellow plaster gatehouse, with a bobbing concierge—a smiling, life-loving, plump Italian woman, with innumerous children about her—and instantly they were free of the roaring thoroughfare, free of banging traffic, ejaculatory drivers, shouldering trams, suicidal children, and cluttered little shops for the sale of charcoal and wine. The park of the Villa Ercole dropped from that high-lying thoroughfare down to the bay, with a roadway twisting and redoubling on itself like a mountain trail. They sped among enormous pines, between whose framing trunks he saw, across the suave bay, the bulk of Vesuvius, as absolute in its loneliness as Fujiyama. They passed half a dozen plaster villas, yellow as old gold, very still, remembering glories not quite past. In a modern stone wall, supporting a stretch of the corkscrew road, was a patch of thin ancient Roman brick set in a herringbone pattern and above it the fragment of a marble bust, the head of a warrior whose villa may have stood here two thousand years ago.
There was no sound, even of birds, no sound from the street above—a minute away yet inconceivably far.
“Lord, how quiet it is here!” said Sam.
“That’s why I wanted to come here—that and the Ercoles.”
On the last sweeping curve of the driveway, just before it came to an end before the tall château in which the Ercoles themselves still dwelt, Edith bade the driver halt at a tiny wooden bridge which led across to what seemed to be the top story of a yellow plaster tower whose lower stages were hidden beneath the cliff beside them.
“There’s our house!” she said. “It’s the funniest house in the world! It’s on three levels. The garden is so steep that you can enter it from any floor. And there are really only about two rooms to a floor.”
She led him, across the bridge and along a toy-house hallway, to the simplest of bedrooms. The floor was of shining stone; on the walls there were no pictures, but only a majolica Virgin and Child. The high narrow bed, with neither headboard nor footboard, had four slender posts at the corners. It was covered with a gold encrusted brocade, rather worn. There was a naked-looking white steel washstand, a fine oval mirror, two heavy brocade chairs, a heavy oak table set out with pens and stationery, a brazier for charcoal, and nothing else whatever—yet there was everything, for outside the
