They came home, dusty from Naples, for tea in the dim huge room looking on the bay. The late-afternoon glow over the piled hill of Naples faded to misty blue. The last highlight in the scene was the smoke of Vesuvius, a fabulous flamingo hue in the vanishing sunlight. As the bay turned to a blue fabric woven with silver threads, the lights of braziers came out cheerfully in the little fishing boats. And in the twilight hush, Edith’s voice was quiet, not pricking him with demands for admiration of her cleverness, her singular charms, but assuring him (though actually she talked only of the Ercoles, perhaps, or politics, or antipasto) that she was happy to be with him, that she took strength from him by giving him strength.
He assumed that he was strong and primitive as the west wind, that she was sophisticated and fragile, utterly a creature of indoors, and he was the more startled on the day when they rested on the stone wall by the orange grove. It was an ancient, crumbly, slatternly stone wall, lizards darting from the crevices, moss and tiny weeds like a velvet cushion along the top. Below, in the hollow, was a tile and plaster house of three irregular flat-roofed and terraced stories, apparently not connected, entered by doorways above crazy stone flights of steps, all curiously like a New Mexican pueblo. The grove climbed from the hollow to the highway above—orange trees, lemons, a palmetto or two, with vines stretched upon the elongated branches of mulberry trees. Where a group of boulders intruded on the slope, the earth between rocks had been painfully turned into tiny vineyards, a yard or two square, protected by little stone walls. The grove suggested centuries of minute and patient labor, yet it was disorderly, the ground rough and littered, the trees a tangle, with no straight lines.
“You wondered,” said Edith, perched on the wall, “whether I could stand a canoe trip, sleeping on the ground. What do you think of this orchard?”
“Don’t quite see the connection.”
“What do you think of it? How does it strike you—as an efficient person?”
“Well, the fruit looks all right, but it seems kind of higgledy-piggledy. And it’s darned hot, here on this wall!”
“Exactly! Well, the Italian peasant loves the heat, and he loves just the bare ridged ground—the earth, earthy earth! He loves earth and sun and wind and rain. He’s a mystic, in the highest sense of that badly escorted word. The European is the same everywhere, in that. The Tyrolese love the sharp smell of the glaciers, the ragged mountain-slopes that almost frighten me, so that they die of homesickness abroad. The Prussian loves that thick sandy waste and the bleak little pines. The French villager doesn’t mind the reality of manure piles and mud puddles in front of his house. The English farmer loves his bare downs with their sharp little furze bushes. They love earth and wind and rain and sun. And I’ve learned it from them. You wonder if I could ‘stand’ sleeping on the ground! I’d love it so much more than you! I’m so much more elementary. Here, we may have ruins and painting, but behind them we’re so much closer to the eternal elements than you Americans. You don’t love earth, you don’t love the wind—”
“Oh, look here now! What about our millions of acres of plowed fields? Nothing like it, outside of maybe Russia! What about our most important men, that get out in the fresh air and motor and golf—”
“No. Your farmers want to get away from their wash of acres to the city. Your businessmen drive out to the golf club in closed sedans, and they don’t want just bare earth—they want the earth of the golf course all neatly concealed by lawn. And I—you think of me as sitting in drawing-rooms, but here you’ve seen me reveling in sea water and running on the beach. And often and often when you think I’m napping in my room, I sneak out to that little bit of walled-off garden just above the house and lie there in the hot sun, in the wind, smelling of the reeking earth, finding life! That’s the strength of Europe—not its so-called ‘culture,’ its galleries and neat voices and knowledge of languages, but its nearness to earth. And that’s the weakness of America—not its noisiness and its cruelty and its cinema vulgarity but the way in which it erects steel-and-glass skyscrapers and miraculous cement-and-glass factories and tiled kitchens and wireless antennae and popular magazines to insulate it from the good vulgarity of earth!”
He wondered about it. He admitted that he had seen only an indoor Europe. With hotel lounges, restaurants, bedrooms, train coupés, even galleries and cathedrals and a few authentic homes, he was familiar enough. But he realized that he had but little sense of the smell of earth in the changing countries. He could remember St. Stefan’s Kirche in Vienna, but he could not remember the colors of the Austrian Alps, the sound of mountain streams, the changing smell of the crowded and musty pines at dawn, at noon, and in the dusk. He had talked with Spanish waiters but he had not been silent with Spanish peasants.
Perhaps, as she said, it was he who was the decadent and ephemeral flower of an imperiled civilization and she who was the root, not to be killed; he saw that she had more essential lustiness than he, more endurance than the lively but glass-encased Fran, vigorous enough in joy but wilting and whimpering under trials. The Ercoles, Kurt von Obersdorf, Lord Herndon, they were not to be crushed. In humility he turned to the eternal earth, and in the earth he found contentment. He had daily less need to “buzz out and look at things,” as Fran put it. He sat for hours
