THE CICERONE
dressing-table and the hand-mirror; he reminded them of that horror
so often met in Paris, city of beauty, the well-preserved woman in her
fifties. At the same time, he was unquestionably a man; he was already
talking of conquests. It was simply, perhaps, that the preservation of
youth had been his main occupation; age was the specter he had
dealt with too closely; like those middle-aged women he had become
its intimate through long animosity.
Yet just as they had decided that he was a man somehow without
a profession (they had come to think in unison and needed the spoken
word only for a check), he steered
himself
out of a small whirlpool
of ruffled political feelings and announced that he was in the silk
business. He was returning from London, and had spent a week in
Paris, where he had been short of francs and had suffered a serious
embarrassment when taking a lady out to lunch. The lady, it ap–
peared, was the wife of the Egyptian delegate to the Peace Confer–
ence, whom he had met-also-on the
wagons-Zits.
There was a
great deal more of this, all either very simple or very complicated,
they were unable to say which, for they could not make out whether
he was telling the same story twice, or, whether, as in a folk tale,
the second story repeated the pattern of the first but had a variant
ending. His English was very odd; it had a speed and a precision of
enunciation that combined with a vagueness of grammar so as to
make the two Americans feel that they were listening to a foreign
language, a few words of which they could recognize. In the same
way, his anecdotes had a wealth and circumstantiality of detail and
an overall absence of form, or at least so the young lady, who was the
only one who was listening, reported later to the young man. The
young man, who was tone-deaf, found the visitor's conversation
reminiscent of many concerts he had been taken to, where he could
only distinguish the opening bars of any given work; for him, Mr.
Sciarappa's stories were all in their beginnings, and he would inter–
rupt quite often with a reply square in the middle, just as, quite
often, he used to break in with wild applause when the pianist paused
between the first and second movements of a sonata.
But at the mention of the silk business, the young man's eyes
had once more burned a terrifying green. With his affiamed imagina–
tion, he was at the same time extremely practical. Hostile to Marxist
157
