The Voice Oe Beauty

SHE went with him along the gravel path beneath the cypresses, past the ancient urns to the gate in the wall, where he stepped down from the garden of the Villa Pallada into the road, and she stood above him, waving good-by. There had been import in his look to her, silent and direct, as she had said, “Not next week; because we shall be gone, — to South Africa.” “Then I shall come again sooner, — perhaps to-day,” he had said.

Her white gown, her voice, — all the soft, clear exposition of herself in her look and her attitude, lingered with him as he walked the Via Bolognese toward the city. She had not said or looked too much; neither had she shown a fear of doing so by expressing too little. Never had she seemed to invite him, nor to betray an exaltation at his presence; yet he felt that, she liked him, that she was happy with him, that all the needs and circumstances of her life supported him in her regard. That she should leave Italy, and go with her father to the newest continent, sprang her into sharp relief with what would be her new surroundings, — a relief in which she would be less happy, he felt, — less in tune with a background that would be no longer Italian, Old-World, and rare, — words which, despite her strain of English blood, to him described her. Which reminded Jefferson that he was an American, and that there was his own background, dim though his four full years of expatriation made it seem.

Of course she had known that her announcement would enliven him; she had made no pretense of concealing that. There were mysteries and mysteries, he mused; and hers was one no less mysterious because it inspired in him no fear of untried darknesses beyond the barriers that still lay between them. They had passed many hours in the garden of the Villa Pallada; her father had looked down from his study window without altering their little intimate self-confessions, nor the frequency of the young man’s visits. Their episode had progressed with a beautiful restraint, he said to himself. It had been set to the quality of Carlotta’s voice, — leisurely, soft and low, but live and flexible. Never a sharp note had entered it; never a crude impatience had beset the proving of their affinity. A quick sincerity had rescued all their threatened moments, making exhilarations out of dangers, — a perfection of smoothness that put him thinking of what Carlotta might have been, had she not been Carlotta, but some girl discovered nearer home.

The Via Bolognese, the Villa Pallada, Carlotta, were indeed far from Buffalo, and the days and the ways and the maidens of his adolescence. There were exuberant phenomena distinguishing the manners of the young women he had known at home. He imagined Carlotta confronting the girls of his schooldays, and — unless they had greatly altered — drawing her fine line between herself and them. Already he had seen Carlotta draw it, though invisibly to the American tourists he had had the fortune to present to her. She had not been able to see the underlying virtues of their free ways. She had not talked afterwards to him about his friends; although they might have constituted a namable type in her mind. It was improbable that they remained in her mind; and Jefferson found himself believing all this without shock to his national feeling. Was he particularizing in Carlotta’s favor, and generalizing to the disadvantage of his countrywomen ? Or had he become a citizen of the world, for whom boundaries were not national, but only human ? He shaped the question without troubling to answer it. To-day or to-morrow he was going to ask Carlotta to marry him.

The professor would be at the window, almost within hearing; but Carlotta and her friend would sit by the pond beneath the blossoming trees; and after a moment her answer would come, yes or no. With a “yes” she would put into the sound just that soft tone that would carry, so exquisitely measured, just the conviction melting from her heart. How could he be mistaken ? Their communion had been too perfect. They had condemned so many of the iniquities and banalities,— as the world seemed to them, — that their blackening of the map left them obviously on an island together. Should he take her back to America ? Not until some reason came for it. But what reason ever would come for it? He was saying this in Italian as he crossed the Ponte Rosso and wound into the Piazza Cavour, as familiar to him as any of the rectangular regions of Buffalo. He looked upon himself as denationalized.

The young woman who crossed beneath the arch of the Porta San Gallo, so closely in front of him that, had she noticed him, it is to be thought that she would have turned aside rather than block his way, — she was not only his countrywoman, but of a mien that haunted him as if from days of immaturity. She was examining the face of the arch, and he made a circuit and entered the arch once more, to look at her. The tall American girl crossed the path again, indifferent to the passers through the arch. Then the gate of San Gallo seemed fixed in her memory, and she started rapidly, at what appeared her wonted pace, through the Via Cavour toward the Arno.

The simplicity of her white blouse, with its white stock and turquoise sleevelinks, and of her short skirt, marked a perfection of line and a richness of material. The fine, small shoeing and gloving, the hat of the season draped in a flowing veil, — these completed the American uniform for the year, against which her individuality struggled in his memory. Jefferson took the opposite sidewalk and copied her steady gait. He recalled her; theirs had been an affair between a maid of fourteen and a youth of sixteen, of such detail as could have been true only in a free country. This was Marian!

She leaned a little noticeably forward as she marched, with her head carried a little noticeably back. Her nose, thus elevated above those of the few women of her own height she passed, was small and of perfect shape, fittingly with her hands and feet. One hardly could have criticised them disparagingly, save for want of quantity. On her brow was a little accustomed frown, as of impatience with things heard and seen, but impatience mastered in philosophy. Her figure was of faultless slimness. If her eyes seemed to him a trifle small, the brow made up for them in sweep and force; and the mouth, if the lips were somewhat thin, compensated with its firmness. She progressed, her eyes on the distance and the heights; she charged the crossings with an indifference to the traffic that made it wait and yield her way. Jefferson paralleled her, with a growing interest.

She did contrast with Carlotta. It was worth something to his mind to determine just how. He was going to take a momentous step; and he wished it to be without illusions, and without depreciating that young woman of America to whom, whosoever she might have been, all his thoughts, had he stayed in Buffalo, might to-day have been trending: if not Marian, then some other young lady whose head would have tipped at the same angle with her body, and who, in that year of our Lord, would have walked forth in a white shirtwaist and a plain short skirt and a flowing hat, and a little frown of freedom.

Marvelous land of liberty! Its breadth, its wealth, its opportunity for any one from anywhere! Only America could have produced this wonderful creature on the other side of the narrow street, into whose eyes he now almost, looked as her face was for a moment mirrored in the pane of a show window. How her selfconfidence fitted with her rights and privileges, her predominance, — over her father, over her mother, even over her brother when he was at home. Hers was the air which only noble houses thought to wear in the rest of the world; her nobility did not lean on years of heredity, — on some ancient service, long since many times repaid. Her nobility was rooted in the actual deed, only a generation old, hardly yet completed. She was real; she was the growth of doing and possessing; she was ipso facto one of our many, many queens. You must acknowledge it. Place her among the patented of Europe, and her chin would have risen merely a little higher, partly in self-assertion and partly in a righteous surprise and disapproval directed at their ways of life and speech. She would have emerged stronger than ever; nothing could have made her yield an inch.

She held herself so wholly unawares that he felt no compunction in keeping up with her. He felt, indeed, that he might have stooped and passed under her chin, and she would have been none the wiser for his presence. From no such creature would ever a beckon come in all the heart-play of a courtship. One’s secret knowledge of one’s shortcomings, one’s comparative meanness as a male thing, enforced by the regal presence of our modern lady, would be hung about one’s neck as one proposed the startling step of marriage. One would battle one’s way without a helping hand; unless, indeed, one possessed some unusual gift which lies in the province of professed diviners of women. At least, so Jefferson thought; she was the New World, — the New Female Thing, — that which you miss when you become an American without a vote.

She crossed the square of the Baptistery, ignoring it as if it had been Jefferson himself. Doubtless she had visited that, already, in the morning round of sightseeing. When he had another near look at her, after following in a street without footwalks, she was crossing the Ponte Veechio, and her pace had not changed. It was only three o’clock; probably she was going to devote a few minutes to San Miniato. Presently, persuaded quite from the direction he had planned, Jefferson was pursuing her with agility up the steps toward that edifice; and he felt himself becoming re-Americanized.

He ought to make one visit to his native land. His marriage would have to mean, if Carlotta so wished it, that a world containing no North America could be wide and interesting enough to contain herself and him. He ought to go back and neutralize his biases, and be able to testify, as the sight of the girl before him made him inclined to testify, to all that was commodious and startling and affable in the great modified order of things. In America you could be a citizen of the world by looking out of your window; men of every race and clime would pass you by; and the spoken tongue would be garnished with flavors of all of them. He ought to experience once again the free field which a man of leisure may find in America: one great scenic woman’s club of afternoons, with all the men at business or removed from sight. Above all, to stay away and be no patriot, to take no part in the uplifting, the spreading, the celebrating of the national cult, — should he be able to reconcile himself with this in his old age ?

Marian kept looking down upon the Arno, not approvingly, he thought. There was dirt; there had been odors and people in rags below; and the river was yellow with silt. She passed two policemen, whose soiled cocked hats and threadbare uniforms made Jefferson, as he caught the look he thought he read from her face, feel apologetic. He became aware that the carrozze and their horses were inferior, that Florence, indeed, was in many respects cheap and antique. Not that her frown had deepened; perhaps she was not dwelling on the facts; hut her very presence proved that Italy is old and poor, and wears inferior cloth. She had let a glance suffice for the church of San Miniato al Monte; she was on the Viale Macchiavelli; there were trees, and the boulevard aspect and the stretches with growing things were more in keeping with herself. She looked at her shiny footgear, and picked her way across the drive, with lightness that gave her the air of a lady in a mural painting. She had not noticed Jefferson; she was as unaware of him as when she had nearly run him down at the Porta San Gallo. He crossed in her footprints. He saw that, alone and without fear or misgiving, she had sat on one of the benches of the Viale, giving herself a pretty background of some rhododendrons.

Indeed, he had traveled far from his original modes of thought. After all, was there any good reason why a young lady, if fatigued, should not rest herself on a bench on a Viale, even though alone ? Carlotta would have kept on, taxing her strength, or would have taken a cab, if you could have tired Carlotta’s half-English blood with walking. Marian sat watching what roofs and towers of Florence rose above the opposite shrubs. Since she had not yet noticed him, Jefferson sat down on the adjacent bench. He would allow himself to look at her until such time as her attention might stray to him; and thereafter he would discreetly avoid her eyes, unless she should recognize him. There had been a time when he would not have waited, but in a breezy way would have approached her, — “sailed up” to her, and greeted her telephonically, “Hello! ” At least,he thought there had been such a time; but now she carried such a presence that he mistrusted his memory.

She really was beautiful, once you went back and caught the standards of her place and time. Her fatigue had attacked the rigidity of the relations between her head and body; and she sat, if not according to the mode, yet according to the feelings of a girl who was tired. She was beautiful, and doubtless, once you were admitted to her acquaintance, she was full of that humor, that quaintness of phrase, that intimate address, which, — so long as you avoided aught that could be construed as touching on the relations of the sexes, — Heaven, how out of touch these four short years had left him with his native land!

He would go home before he asked Carlotta to marry him. It would be a greater justice to her and to himself. The steamer would be full of his compatriots, mostly women; and he would not steel himself against any one of them. Let nationality have its due. There would be something of patriotism about it, — justice to his native land, tribute to his sisters of like birth. Carlotta was not being budged from his heart; he was not disgracefully sitting here and gulping in Marian. But he ought to see, by going home, how Carlotta found herself in his heart when it began to beat in rhythm with New York and North America.

In the course of these thoughts, he found himself blankly staring into Marian’s eyes; at least, it had seemed so. But if she was looking straight at him, it was presently apparent that she did not see him, if that is possible. Her eye shifted so slowly past his eye, past his cheekbone, past his shoulder and his bench, that he could not tell if she had really taken him in. But it was his first chance, as in good taste it must be his last, to look her in full face across the space of a few feet. She was beautiful; she was faultlessly put together, and her clothes insisted upon it; she was American; she was queenly; and America was a great place!

He turned about in the direction of her gaze; and there it was as if he suddenly had seen her again in one of those mirrors which extraordinarily broaden and shorten the form. The same white shirtwaist was approaching their two benches, the same short skirt, the blue links, the veil, the poise, the frown; only the figure was different, much shortened, broadened, and breathless. He heard Marian rise and rustle forward to meet her friend. Jefferson was about to hear Marian speak.

The two collided on the walk, in front of him, glowing to each other. They stood where a movement of his stick would have made it touch their impeccable shoes. Into the oblivion where he sat now burst the contact of their voices.

“Where you been ?” — it was Marian’s he disentangled. “This is n’t me; I just dropped dead hunting for you! And, my dear! ! Harry can’t stand it: he’s gone off back to Paris!! But I think Florence is very attractive! Don’t you ? Docs my guidebook seem to look very noticeable? It’s hidden inside, — that red cover doubles the price of everything you want to buy, — and I can’t remember what you say to the driver. Is my hat” —

Which she interrupted at the rise of the near-by stranger, and his dive into a passing empty carrozza. Its horse whipped off down the winding Viale, and in a few minutes took Jefferson beyond the understanding of their voices. It was the sound, not. the matter, which first took qualification on the turgid surface of his impressions. Marian had opened her mouth, and it was as if from out it had jumped the New World. She had opened her mouth, and it had been as if he were in the heart of New York, with the scream of the whistles, the clang of the cars, the clatter of the trains, — all the shriek and screech of home and prosperity making New World music in his ears. The voice of American womanhood had triumphed over all these sounds; the orchestra had not downed the prima donna. He was like some aged pupil of Donizetti’s, sitting near the tympani at the first performance of Tannhäuser. He seemed to have landed at a wooden pier; he seemed to have fought his way through the mud and the swearing, past the uniformed Hibernian, to a sidewalk slippery with fragments of vegetables, to a cab with bony horses. He seemed to be driving at great peril in a narrow trench far down beneath the sky, past endless lines of Hebrew names, by the side of a young woman who bisected her monosyllables. Unbelievably strenuous Italians ran after them with newspapers announcing their arrival in enormous letters. Everybody was about to be run over, and knew it; everything was about to collide with everything else. All was prosperity and progress, so loud, so fast, that his head was swimming. A quiet voice called to him from over the sea.

“Dove va, signore ? ” the driver asked. Jefferson kept repeating this under his breath, as nearly as he could in the tone of the driver: “Dove va, signore ? Dove va, signore ? ” He kept clinging to it,as if it were a rope thrown overboard to him. But against it there rasped: —

“Where you bi-in? This is n’t me-e! I-ih just die-id — hunting for you! And my dear!! Hairy can’t stand it: he’s gawn awf back to Pairus!! But I-ih thi-ink Flawrnce is vurry” —

The two young women could see the carrozza dropping down to a way toward the Ponte Vecchio.

“It’s funny!” shrieked Marian into the ear of her friend. “That mayun followed me all over town; and he seemed to me like an Amurriean!”

“Dove va, signore?” said the driver presently.

“Via Bolognese! Villa Pallada!” cried Jefferson.