FLORENCE
The very afternoon after Aaron’s arrival in
Florence the sky became dark, the wind cold, and rain
began steadily to fall. He sat in his big, bleak
room above the river, and watched the pale green water
fused with yellow, the many-threaded streams fuse into
one, as swiftly the surface flood came down from the
hills. Across, the dark green hills looked darker
in the wet, the umbrella pines held up in vain above
the villas. But away below, on the Lungarno,
traffic rattled as ever.
Aaron went down at five o’clock to tea, and
found himself alone next a group of women, mostly
Swedes or Danish or Dutch, drinking a peculiar brown
herb-brew which tasted like nothing else on earth,
and eating two thick bits of darkish bread smeared
with a brown smear which hoped it was jam, but hoped
in vain. Unhappily he sat in the gilt and red,
massively ornate room, while the foreign women eyed
him. Oh, bitter to be a male under such circumstances.
He escaped as soon as possible back to his far-off
regions, lonely and cheerless, away above. But
he rather liked the far-off remoteness in the big
old Florentine house: he did not mind the peculiar
dark, uncosy dreariness. It was not really dreary:
only indifferent. Indifferent to comfort, indifferent
to all homeliness and cosiness. The over-big
furniture trying to be impressive, but never to be
pretty or bright or cheerful. There it stood,
ugly and apart. And there let it stand.—
Neither did he mind the lack of fire, the cold sombreness
of his big bedroom. At home, in England, the
bright grate and the ruddy fire, the thick hearth-rug
and the man’s arm-chair, these had been inevitable.
And now he was glad to get away from it all.
He was glad not to have a cosy hearth, and his own
arm-chair. He was glad to feel the cold, and
to breathe the unwarmed air. He preferred the
Italian way of no fires, no heating. If the
day was cold, he was willing to be cold too.
If it was dark, he was willing to be dark. The
cosy brightness of a real home—it had stifled
him till he felt his lungs would burst. The
horrors of real domesticity. No, the Italian
brutal way was better.
So he put his overcoat over his knee, and studied
some music he had bought in Milan: some Pergolesi
and the Scarlatti he liked, and some Corelli.
He preferred frail, sensitive, abstract music, with
not much feeling in it, but a certain limpidity and
purity. Night fell as he sat reading the scores.
He would have liked to try certain pieces on his
flute. But his flute was too sensitive, it winced
from the new strange surroundings, and would not blossom.
Dinner sounded at last—at eight o’clock,
or something after. He had to learn to expect
the meals always forty minutes late. Down he
went, down the long, dark, lonely corridors and staircases.
The dining room was right downstairs. But he
had a little table to himself near the door, the elderly
women were at some little distance. The only
other men were Agostmo, the unshapely waiter, and
an Italian duke, with wife and child and nurse, the
family sitting all together at a table halfway down
the room, and utterly pre-occupied with a little yellow
dog.
