The Best Short Stories of 1920 Part 55

There is sometimes melancholy in revisiting after years of absence, a place where one was joyous in the days of youth. That is why sadness stole over me on the evening of my return to Florence.

To be sure, the physical beauties of the Italian city were intact.

Modernity had not farther encroached upon the landmarks that had witnessed the birth of a new age, powerful, even violent, in its individualism. From those relics, indeed--from the ma.s.sive palaces, the n.o.ble porches, the monuments rising in the public squares--there still seemed to issue a faint vibration of ancient audacity and force. It was as if stone and bronze had absorbed into their particles, and stored through centuries, the great emotions released in Florence during that time of mental expansion called the Renaissance.

But this integrity of scene and influence only increased my regrets.

Though the familiar setting was still here, the familiar human figures seemed all departed. I looked in vain for sobered versions of the faces that had smiled, of old, around tables in comfortable cafes, in an atmosphere of youthful gaiety, where at any moment one might be enmeshed in a Florentine prank that Boccaccio could not have bettered.

One such prank rose, all at once, before my minds eye, and suddenly, in the midst of my pessimism, I laughed aloud.

I recalled the final scene of that escapade, which I myself had managed to devise. The old cafe had rung with a bellow of delight; the victim, ridiculous in his consternation, had rushed at me howling for vengeance.

But the audience, hemming him in, had danced 'round him singing a ribald little song. The air was full of battered felt hats, coffee spoons, lumps of sugar, and waving handkerchiefs. Out on the piazza the old cab-horses had p.r.i.c.ked up their ears; the shopkeepers had run to their doorways; the police had taken notice. It was not every day that the champion joker among us was caught in such a net as he delighted to spread.

Where were they, all my jolly young men and women? Maturity, matrimony, perhaps still other acts of fate, had scattered them. Here and there a grizzled waiter let fall the old names with a shrug of perplexity, then hastened to answer the call of a rising generation as cheerful as if it were not doomed, also, to dispersion and regrets.

Then, too, in returning I had been so unfortunate as to find Florence on the verge of spring.

The soft evening air was full of a sweetness exhaled by the surrounding cup of hills. From baskets of roses, on the steps of porticoes, a fragrance floated up like incense round the limbs of statues, which were bathed in a golden light by the lamps of the piazza. Those marble countenances were placid with an eternal youth, beneath the same stars that had embellished irrevocable nights, that recalled some excursions into an enchanted world, some romantic gestures the knack for which was gone.

"After all," I thought, "it is better not to find one of the old circle.

We should make each other miserable by our reminiscences."

No sooner had I reflected thus than I found myself face to face with Antonio.

Antonio was scarcely changed. His dark visage was still vital with intelligence, still keen and strange from the exercise of an inexhaustible imagination. Yet in his eyes, which formerly had sparkled with the wit of youth, there was more depth and a hint of somberness. He had become a celebrated satirist.

"What luck!" he cried, embracing me with sincere delight. "But to think that I should have to run into you on the street!"

"I asked for you everywhere."

"In the old places? I never go to them. You have not dined? Nor I. Here, let us take this cab."

He hurried me off to a restaurant of the suburbs. Under the starry sky we sat down at a table beside a sunken garden, in which nightingales were trying their voices among the blossoms, whose perfume had been intensified by dew.

It was an old-time dinner, at least, that Antonio provided; but, alas!

those others were not there to eke out the illusion of the past. To each name, as I uttered it, Antonio added an epitaph. This one had gone to bury himself in the Abruzzi hills. That one had become a professor at Bologna. Others, in vanis.h.i.+ng, had left no trace behind them.

"And Leonello, who was going to surpa.s.s Michael Angelo?"

"Oh," my friend responded, "Leonello is still here, painting his pictures. Like me, he could not live long beyond the air of Florence."

Antonio, in fact, could trace his family back through Florentine history into the Middle Ages.

"Is Leonello the same?" I pursued. "Always up to some nonsense? But you were not much behind him in those insane adventures."

"Take that to yourself," Antonio retorted. "I recall one antic, just before you left us--" He broke off to meditate. Clicking his tongue against his teeth, he gazed at me almost with resentment, as if I were responsible for this depressing work of time. "No!" he exclaimed, looking at me in gloomy speculation, while, in the depths of his eyes, one seemed to see his extraordinary intelligence perplexed and baffled.

"That war of wit is surely over. The old days are gone for good. Let us make the best of it." And he asked me what I had been doing.

I made my confession. In those years I had become fascinated by psychic phenomena--by the intrusion into human experience of weird happenings that materialism could not very well explain. Many of these happenings indicated, at least to my satisfaction, not only future existences, but also previous ones. I admitted to Antonio that, since I was in Italy again, I intended to investigate the case of a Perugian peasant girl who, though she had never been a.s.sociated with educated persons, was subject to trances in which she babbled the Greek language of Cleopatra's time, and accurately described the appearance of pre-Christian Alexandria.

"I am writing a book on such matters," I concluded. "You, of course, will laugh at it----"

His somber eyes, which had been watching me intently, became blank for a time, then suddenly gave forth a flash.

"I? Laugh because you have been enthralled by weirdness?" he cried, as one who, all at once, has been profoundly moved. Yet laugh he did, in loud tones that were almost wild with strange elation. "Pardon me," he stammered, pa.s.sing a trembling hand across his forehead. "You do not know the man that I have become of late."

What had my words called to his mind? From that moment everything was changed. The weight of some mysterious circ.u.mstances had descended upon Antonio, overwhelming, as it seemed to me, the pleasure that he had found in this reunion. Through the rest of the dinner he was silent, a prey to that dark exultancy, to that uncanny agitation.

This silence persisted while the cab bore us back into the city.

In the narrow streets a blaze of light from the open fronts of cook-shops flooded the lower stories of some palaces which once on a time had housed much fierceness and beauty, treachery and perverse seductiveness. Knowing Antonio's intimate acquaintance with those splendid days, I strove to rouse him by congenial allusions. His preoccupation continued; the historic syllables that issued from my lips were wasted in the clamor of the street. Yet when I p.r.o.nounced the name of one of those bygone belles, Fiammetta Adimari, he repeated slowly, like a man who has found the key to everything:

"Fiammetta!"

"What is it, Antonio? Are you in love?"

He gave me a piercing look and sprang from the cab. We had reached the door of his house.

Antonio's bachelor apartment was distinguished by handsome austerity.

The red-tiled floors reflected faintly the lights of antique candelabra, which shed their l.u.s.ter also upon chests quaintly carved, bric- -brac that museums would have coveted, and chairs adorned with threadbare coats of arms. Beside the mantelpiece hung a small oil-painting, as I thought, of Antonio himself, his black hair reaching to his shoulders, and on his head a hat of the Renaissance.

"No," said he, giving me another of his strange looks, "it is my ancestor, Antonio di Manzecca, who died in the year fifteen hundred."

I remembered that somewhere in the hills north of the city there was a dilapidated stronghold called the Castle of Manzecca. Behind those walls, in the confusion of the Middle Ages, Antonio's family had developed into a nest of rural tyrants. Those old steel-clad men of the Manzecca had become what were called "Signorotti"--lords of a height or two, swooping down to raid pa.s.sing convoys, waging petty wars against the neighboring castles, and at times, like bantams, too arrogant to bear in mind the shortness of their spurs, defying even Florence. In the end, as I recalled the matter, Florence had chastened the Manzecca, together with all the other lordlings of that region. The survivors had come to live in the city, where, through these hundreds of years, many changes of fortune had befallen them. My friend Antonio was their last descendant.

"But," I protested, examining the portrait, "your resemblance to this Antonio of the Renaissance could not possibly be closer."

Instead of replying, he sat down, rested his elbow on his knees, and pressed his fists against his temples. Presently I became aware that he was laughing, very softly, but in such an unnatural manner that I s.h.i.+vered.

I grew alarmed. It was true that in our years of separation Antonio's physical appearance had not greatly changed; but what was the meaning of this mental difference? Was his mind in danger of some sinister overshadowing? Were these queer manners the symptoms of an incipient mania? It is proposed that genius is a form of madness. Was the genius of Antonio, in its phenomenal development, on the point of losing touch with sanity? As my thoughts leaped from one conjecture to another, the tiled room took on the chill that pervades a mausoleum. From the bowl on the table the petals of a dying rose fell in a sudden cascade, like a dismal portent.

"The Castle of Manzecca," I ventured, merely to break the silence, "is quite ruined, I suppose?"

"No, the best part of it still stands. I have had some rooms restored."

"You own it?"

"I bought it back a year ago. It is there that I----" He buried his face in his hands.

"Antonio," I said, "you are in some great trouble."

"It is not trouble," he answered, in smothered tones. "But why should I hesitate to make my old friend, whose mind does not reject weirdness, my confidant? I warn you, however, that it will be a confidence weird enough to make even your experience in such matters seem tame. Go first to Perugia. Examine the peasant girl who chatters of ancient Alexandria.

Return to my house one week from to-night, at dusk, and you shall share my secret."

He rose, averted his face, and went to throw himself upon a couch, or porch-bed, another relic, its woodwork covered with faded paint and gilt, amid which one might trace the gallants of the sixteenth century in pursuit of nymphs--an allegory of that age's longing for the cla.s.sic past. I left him thus, flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling, oblivious of my farewell.

Poor Antonio! What a return to Florence!

A week from that night, at dusk, I returned. At Perugia I had filled a pocket-book with notes on the peasant girl's trances. The spell of those strange revelations was yet on me, but at Antonio's door I felt that I stood on the threshold of a still more agitating disclosure.