Silence Observed Read Free Page B

habitually, a good deal of SILENCE IS OBSERVED.

 
     
2
    Simple persons, of unassuming colloquial speech, will sometimes be heard to remark that one damned thing leads to another. But policemen are only too happy when it does. A distinguishable sequence or concatenation between events is just what they are after. And when one thing merely follows another they are sometimes a little slow to see that it is anything more than that. Appleby was going to feel that he had been slow in just this way in what he thought of at first as the Manallace affair.
    He had dropped into his club again at six. It was something he did twice a week for the purpose of glancing through a few continental newspapers. And this, of course, took him back to the little reading- room.
    He settled in with that morning’s Figaro .
    “Come out of this morgue,” a voice murmured. “We’ll have a drink.”
    A bishop who was reading the New Yorker looked round disapprovingly, pointed a solemn episcopal finger at the notice over the chimney piece, and then returned to his studies.
    It was an elderly man with a short grey beard who had paused for a moment beside Appleby’s chair. Sir Gabriel Gulliver was the Director of an august national institution. He was also some sort of connection of Appleby’s wife. So Appleby rose and followed him from the slumberous room. They walked in silence down the great staircase and into the hall. Through tall glass doors London showed rain-sodden and cheerless.
    “Disgusting,” Gulliver said. “To think that, if I’d been born an Italian, I might be living in the Vatican, looking after a few old walls and ceilings and things for the Pope.”
    Appleby shook his head.
    “My dear Gulliver,” he replied, “you might have the Brera, and be compelled to exist in Milan. Or be living out your life in Urbino. They’ve a nice little gallery, but I don’t think you’d care for their winters.”
    “No, no – it would have to be Rome. Have you ever wintered in Rome?” Gulliver was leading the way over stretches of obscure mosaic in the direction of the smoking room. “I never have. And that’s positively absurd. I might be a damned civil servant.”
    “But haven’t you spent years in Italy?”
    “Of course I have.” Gulliver was whimsically impatient. “How do you think I learned my job? But I tell you I’ve never spent a winter in Rome.”
    “You’d find it overrated, I don’t doubt. Better just to read about it in a nostalgic way in Edwardian novels. The reality would be disenchanting. I understand there’s a great deal of snow, and that the natives have never studied to accommodate their lives to it. Moreover in winter Rome is full of Romans, just as in spring London is full of Londoners. And you know how tiresome that is. No capital city is tolerable except when voided of its inhabitants.”
    Sir Gabriel Gulliver received this with appropriate amusement. Entering the smoking-room, he dived into a corner to ring a bell, and then returned to Appleby, still mildly laughing.
    “Nice of you,” he said, “to talk to an old buffer in what you conceive of as his own antique conversational mode. A good many of you youngsters, you know, have no conversation at all… Turned fifty yet?”
    “I’m fifty-three.”
    “Precisely. A youngster in my regard, you may well believe.”
    The arrival of a servant relieved Appleby for a moment from the necessity of keeping up this badinage. Gulliver was making some rather particular enquiries about Madeira. It was possible that the great gallery over which he presided had no retiring age for its Director, and he might well be on the farther side of sixty-five. His pose as an old dodderer, however, was merely an amiable affectation. He was in the prime at least of his intellectual powers, and there were wide stretches of art history in which he was still far ahead of any up-and-coming younger men. Appleby didn’t know him very well, despite Judith’s obscure cousinship with