CHAPTER XVI

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.