THE
CICERONE
the emotions and sentiments, here too he had eluded them. Miss
Grabbe's net had been too coarse to catch whatever small feelings
had escaped him during the encounter.
A sense of desolation descended on the room, the usual price of
confidences. It was a relief when one of the Communist painters came
in with some lira, which Miss Grabbe put in her douche-bag. The two
friends exchanged a glance of illumination. Had this repository for
his country's debased currency proved too casual for Mr. Sciarappa's
sense of honor? Was this the cause of his flight?
If
so, was it the lira
or his manhood that was insulted? Or were the two, in the end, in–
distinguishable?
The two friends could never be sure, and when they left Venice
shortly afterwards they were still debating whether some tactlessness
of Miss Grabbe's had set Scampi at last in motion or whether his
own action, by committing him for an hour or so, had terrified him
into instant removal. He was a theoretician of practice so pure, they
said to each other on the bus, that any action must appear to him
as folly because of the risks to his shrewdness that it involved, a man
so worldly that he saw the world as a lie too transparent to fool Rino
Sciarappa, who was clever . and knew the ropes.
As
they passed
through the bony Apennines, the landscape itself seemed to wear a
face baked and disabused as Mr. Sciarappa's own, and thus to give
their theories a geological and national cast. The terraced fields lay
scorched, like Mr. Sciarappa's wrinkles, on the gaunt umber-colored
hillsides; like his vernal hopes, plants sprang up only to die here,
and the land had the mark of wisdom- it too had seen life. After
these reflections, it was a little anticlimactic to meet, half an hour
after their arrival in Florence, the. face of Italian history, whose
destination had been announced as Rome. "He is following us, but
he is ahead," said the young man, abandoning historical explanations
forever. Only one conclusion seemed possible-he must be a spy.
In Florence, at any rate, he appeared to be acquainted; he in–
troduced them to a number of American girls who worked in United
States offices and to one or two young men who wore American uni–
forms. All of these people, as he had once promised them in Venice,
called him by his first name; yet when the dinner-hour drew near
the whole party vanished as agilely as Mr. Sciarappa, and the two
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