‘How extraordinarily nice and jolly he looks!’ she said enthusiastically, as they approached.
‘Does he?’ asked Mr. Cardan in some surprise. To his eyes the man looked like a hardly mitigated ruffian.
‘So simple and happy and contented!’ Miss Thriplow went on. ‘One envies them their lives.’ She could almost have wept over the little shovel—momentarily the masonic emblem of pre-lapsarian ingenuousness. ‘We make everything so unnecessarily complicated for ourselves, don’t we?’
‘Do we?’ said Mr. Cardan.
‘These people have no doubts, or after-thoughts,’ pursued Miss Thriplow, ‘or—what’s worse than after-thoughts—simultaneous-thoughts. They know what they want and what’s right; they feel just what they ought to feel by nature—like the heroes in the Iliad—and act accordingly. And the result is, I believe, that they’re much better than we are, much gooder, we used to say when we were children; the word’s more expressive. Yes, much gooder. Now you’re laughing at me!’
Mr. Cardan twinkled at her with benevolent irony. ‘I assure you I’m not,’ he declared.
‘But I shouldn’t mind if you were,’ said Miss Thriplow. ‘For after all, in spite of all that you people may say or think, it’s the only thing that matters—being good.’
‘I entirely agree,’ said Mr. Cardan.
‘And it’s easier if you’re like that.’ She nodded in the direction of the white apron.
Mr. Cardan nodded, a little dubiously.
‘Sometimes,’ Miss Thriplow continued, with a gush of confidence that made her words come more rapidly, ‘sometimes, when I get on a bus and take my ticket from the conductor, I suddenly feel the tears come into my eyes at the thought of this life, so simple and straightforward, so easy to live well, even if it is a hard one—and perhaps, too, just because it is a hard one. Ours is so difficult.’ She shook her head.
By this time they were within a few yards of the shopkeeper, who, seeing that they were proposing to enter his shop, rose from his seat at the door and darted in to take up his stand, professionally, behind the counter.
They followed him into the shop. It was dark within and filled with a violent smell of goat’s milk cheese, pickled tunny, tomato preserve and highly flavoured sausage.
‘Whee-ew!’ said Miss Thriplow, and pulling out a small handkerchief, she took refuge with the ghost of Parma violets. It was a pity that these simple lives in white aprons had to be passed amid such surroundings.
‘Rather deafening, eh?’ said Mr. Cardan, twinkling. ‘Puzza,’ he added, turning to the shopkeeper. ‘It stinks.’
The man looked at Miss Thriplow, who stood there, her nose in the oasis of her handkerchief, and smiled indulgently. ‘I forestieri sono troppo delicati. Troppo delicati,’ he repeated.
‘He’s quite right,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘We are. In the end, I believe, we shall come to sacrifice everything to comfort and cleanliness. Personally, I always have the greatest suspicion of your perfectly hygienic and well-padded Utopias. As for this particular stink,’ he sniffed the air, positively with relish, ‘I don’t really know what you have to object to it. It’s wholesome, it’s natural, it’s tremendously historical. The shops of the Etruscan grocers, you may be sure, smelt just as this does. No, on the whole, I entirely agree with our friend here.’
‘Still,’ said Miss Thriplow, speaking in a muffled voice through the folds of her handkerchief, ‘I shall stick to my violets. However synthetic.’
Having ordered a couple of glasses of wine, one of which he offered to the grocer, Mr. Cardan embarked on a diplomatic conversation about the object of his visit. At the mention of his brother and the sculpture, the grocer’s face took on an expression of altogether excessive amiability. He bent his thick lips into smiles; deep folds in the shape of arcs of circles appeared in his fat cheeks. He kept bowing again and again. Every now and then he joyously laughed, emitting a blast of garlicky breath that smelt so powerfully like acetylene that one was tempted to put a match to his mouth in the hope that he would immediately break out into a bright white flame. He confirmed all that the butcher’s boy had said. It was all quite true; he had a brother; and his brother had a piece of marble statuary that was beautiful and old, old, old. Unfortunately, however, his brother had removed from this village and had gone down to live in the plain, near the lake of Massaciuccoli, and the sculpture had gone with him. Mr. Cardan tried to find out from him what the work of art looked like; but he could gather nothing beyond the fact that it was beautiful and old and represented a man.
‘It isn’t like this, I suppose?’ asked Mr. Cardan, bending himself into the attitude of a Romanesque demon and making a demoniac grimace.
The grocer thought not. Two peasant women who had come in for cheese and oil looked on with a mild astonishment. These foreigners . . .
‘Or like this?’ He propped his elbow on the counter and, half reclining, conjured up, by his attitude and his fixed smile of imbecile ecstasy, visions of Etruscan revelry.
Again the grocer shook his head.
‘Or like this?’ He rolled his eyes towards heaven, like a baroque saint.
But the grocer seemed doubtful even of this.
Mr. Cardan wiped his forehead. ‘If I could make myself look like a Roman bust,’ he said to Miss Thriplow, ‘or a bas-relief of Giotto, or a renaissance sarcophagus, or an unfinished group by Michelangelo, I would. But it’s beyond my powers.’ He shook his head. ‘For the moment I give it up.’
He took out his pocket-book and asked for the brother’s address. The grocer gave directions; Mr. Cardan carefully took them down. Smiling and bowing, the grocer ushered them out into the street, Miss Thriplow vailed her handkerchief and drew a breath of air—redolent, however, even here, of organic chemistry.
‘Patience,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘tenacity of purpose. One needs them here.’
They walked slowly down the street. They had only gone a few yards when the noise of a violent altercation made them turn round. At the door of the shop the grocer and his two customers were furiously disputing. Voices were raised, the grocer’s deep and harsh, the women’s shrill; hands moved in violent and menacing gestures, yet gracefully withal, as was natural in the hands of those whose ancestors had taught the old masters of painting all they ever knew of expressive and harmonious movement.
‘What is it?’ asked Miss Thriplow. ‘It looks like the preliminaries of a murder.’
Mr. Cardan smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘They’re just calling him a robber; that’s all.’ He listened for a moment more to the shouting. ‘A little question of short weight, it seems.’ He smiled at Miss Thriplow. ‘Should we go on?’
They turned away; the sound of the dispute followed them down the street. Miss Thriplow did not know whether to be grateful to Mr. Cardan for saying nothing more about her friend in the white apron. These simple folk . . . the little shovel for the sugar . . . so much better, so much gooder than we. . . . In the end she almost wished that he would say something about it. Mr. Cardan’s silence seemed more ironic than any words.
CHAPTER VI
The sun had set. Against a pale green sky the blue and purple mountains lifted a jagged silhouette. Mr. Cardan found himself alone in the middle of the flat plain at their feet. He was standing on the bank of a broad ditch, brimming with gleaming water, that stretched away in a straight line apparently for miles across the land, to be lost in the vague twilight distance. Here and there a line of tall thin poplars marked the position of other dykes, intersecting the plain in all directions. There was not a house in sight, not a human being, not even a cow or a grazing donkey. Far away on the slopes of the mountains, whose blue and purple were rapidly darkening to a uniform deep indigo, little yellow lights began to appear, singly or in clusters, attesting the presence of a village or a solitary farm. Mr. Cardan looked at them with irritation; very pretty, no doubt, but he had seen it done better on many musical comedy stages. And in any case, what was the good of a light six or seven miles away, on the hills, when he was standing in the middle of the plain, with nobody in sight, night coming on, and these horrible ditches to prevent one from taking the obvious bee-line towards civilization? He had been a fool, he reflected, three or four times over: a fool to refuse Lilian’s offer of the car and go on foot (this fetish of exercise! still, he would certainly have to cut down his drinking if he didn’t take it); a fool to have started so late in the afternoon; a fool to have accepted Italian estimates of distance; and a fool to have followed
