for he just hailed me with all his characteristic gusto, and thrust his pass-a privilege which comes of living in the Guidi Palace-under the nose of the guard, who duly admitted us into the Grand-Duke’s domain.
It soon became clear that Browning was in his most energetic form. He hurried me along a promenade, between massive shiny evergreen hedges, so fast that I thought there must be something he wished to show me at the end. Once we got there, however, he merely turned down another alley-this one covered in trellises, where in a few months the vines will bud and leaf — and I began to realise that my companion’s haste was an index not of any urgency in our goal, but of his state of nervous excitement. And so we went on, circumnavigating the magnificent gardens at a cracking pace, passing the bold vistas and romantic prospects so artfully arranged to catch the eye without so much as a glance, while Browning talked, and talked, and talked.
I found it extremely odd to be trotting along beside the man, knowing what I knew; and odder still to think how recently I used to idolise him, and to dread nothing so much as the one thing I now sought above all: to be rid of him and his never-ending talk full of allusions in half a dozen languages I do not know to half a hundred books I have never read and do not wish to read.
How his self-indulgent verbosity used to inspire me when I thought he was the real right thing I had found at last! And how it disgusts me now I know what manner of thing he is. Listen:
‘It was the word
And so on, and so on. But do not fear-I shall spare you any more of the facetious riddles and learned references and pedantic explications I had to suffer, and bring you immediately where he in the end came out.
‘Does not this garden, on such a day as this, seem a vision of paradise?’ Browning rhetorically enquired. ‘And yet, in that note I sent you, I suggested it might bear a slightly-adapted motto from a celebrated account of another place. You took the hint, I trust? There is no need for me to explain further. No?’
I did not speak.
‘Why, man, that’s the key!’ Browning cried impatiently. ‘Old Dante and his Inferno!’
19
Browning stood gazing triumphantly at me, his chest pushed out and hands working away in his capacious pockets-the very image of a provincial shopkeeper who has backed the Derby winner. What an odious little man, I thought. Him, great? Him, a genius? Never, plainly, had I been further from the mark than when I had somehow contrived to persuade myself of
‘Dante!’ he repeated enthusiastically, when I failed to respond. The thing is so plain now that it seems hardly possible I did not see it long ago-but who would have thought to look for such a freakish association? There is no longer the slightest doubt about it, however. Take Chauncey, for example. She was found, you remember, with a broken neck. The maid-a lass of imagination, evidently; I should like to meet her! — described her mistress’s head as having been turned around like an owl’s. Dante put it more prosaically:
‘ “As on them more direct mine eye descends, each wonderously seem’d to be reversed at the neck-bone … “: such is the poet’s terrifying vision of the soothsayers, who are punished in the eighth circle of his hell. The leader of this pack was a woman-Manto.
The correspondence is clear. Miss Chauncey pretended to be what Manto was: one who seeks to push aside the curtain of mortality, to see further than God judges proper for His creatures-what Dante would have called
‘But now-and here’s the true devilry of the thing-what Dante imagined and wrote, someone in Florence is putting into practice! Thus Edith Chauncey is found dead, her neck broken like Manto’s, and a piece of paper thrust into her hand like the sign hung about the neck of an executed felon, spelling out the nature of her offence. On it appears the name of her archetype in Dante’s poem-MANTO-and the number of the circle in which that personage is to be found-8.
‘Once I had found this key, unlocking the remaining inscriptions was of course child’s play, and each served to confirm the pattern until all possibility of doubt was extinguished. Thus at the spot where Maurice Purdy was savaged by an enormous rabid dog we found the figure 3 and the word CIACCO. We were told that this means a pig, as indeed it does. But Dante employs it not as a noun but a name-it was the nickname of a notorious Florentine glutton, who also features in Boccaccio’s
‘Cecil DeVere, on the other hand, devoted himself not to the inner but the outer man-a fact which did not escape the murderer’s ferocious irony. “Argenti”, he called him, “Silver”-the nickname of one Filippo de’ Cavicciuli, whose ostentatious extravagance was such that he had his horse shod with silver shoes: “equum ferris argenti ferrari fecit”, as the old chronicle says. DeVere, of course, did not go quite so far, but it cannot be denied that he spent a considerable amount of time and money on his appearance. Argenti ended up immersed in the mire of a dead channel in the fifth circle of Dante’s Hell; DeVere in the filthy slime of the Arno.’
‘I was not aware that dandyism was either a mortal sin or a justification for murder,’ I put in tardy.
‘It is of course neither,’ returned Browning, shooting me a look of some surprise. ‘As regards the author of these crimes, it is surely superfluous to state that we are dealing with a totally deranged mind, for whom the merest peccadillo can be used to justify any abomination. In that he is the opposite-or, better, the negative-of his model Dante hated not the sinners but the sin-the wickedness which shuts out that pure love-drenched intellectual light he sings in the
‘A great lover-him!’ I exclaimed contemptuously.
‘His work is full of love.’
‘It is full of the
I had allowed myself to say far more than I had meant to, and had spoken with undue warmth. Browning