THE
CICERONE
as a courier, proposing to take them to dinner, to the Piazza San
Marco, to Harry's Bar, where the smart English officers went and the
international set with their electric-blue suits, blond mistresses, heavy
jaws, and decorations from Balkan kings. With all these little of–
fices and services, his mind was completely occupied. His original
mission, Miss Grabbe, had plainly dropped into some
oubliette
of
his faculties, and the two friends, observing him, could nearly have
sworn that his sole purpose in coming to Venice had been to prepare
a place for them, like Jesus for
his
disciples in Heaven.
Dinner, however, soon restored him to his normal state of dis–
affection. Once the four were seated upstairs, in the yellow lamplight
at Quadri's, he was his old self, bored, petulant, abstracted. He
jumped up from his chair with almost indecent .agility to speak to a
bearded gentleman in a respectable suit of clothes, coming back
finally to announce that this was Prince Rucellai, an illustrious Flo–
rentine nobleman who practiced the trade of antique-dealer. In the
manner of all Mr. Sciarappa's native acquaintances, the prince at
once quitted the restaurant, but Mr. Sciarappa's attention went with
him out into the square, abandoning the Americans summarily for
the evening. It was as if he suffered from some curious form of am–
nesia that made him mislay his purpose halfway on the road to
accomplishment. He was in Venice and could not remember why, and
he stayed on hoping, somehow, for a refreshment of his memory. Now
and then, during the following days, the Americans would find him
looking at them with a curious concentration, as though their appear–
ance might recall to
him
his motive in seeking their society. From Miss
Grabbe, on the contrary, whose emeralds should have furnished him
his clue, he persistently averted his eyes.
The little bohemian heiress, in fact, was the center of his inatten–
tion, an inattention principled and profound. From the very first
night, apparently, she had associated herself in his mind v.rith culture,
and hence, merely by talking about them, she had fallen into the ·
class of objects--cathedrals, works of art, museums, palaces main–
tained by the state-which, by being free to all, were valuable, in
his
opinion, to none. And by the same trick by which he substituted
an empty space for the cathedral in the Piazza San Marco, he "van–
ished" Miss Grabbe from the table at dinner. The possibility of her
169
