The Good Soldier Read Free

touch of a sigh because we are not in
that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay. Consider the
lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago Florence and I
motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the Black
Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up an
immense pinnacle and on the pinnacle are four castles—Las Tours,
the Towers. And the immense mistral blew down that valley which was
the way from France into Provence so that the silver grey olive
leaves appeared like hair flying in the wind, and the tufts of
rosemary crept into the iron rocks that they might not be torn up
by the roots.
    It was, of course, poor dear Florence who wanted to go to Las
Tours. You are to imagine that, however much her bright personality
came from Stamford, Connecticut, she was yet a graduate of
Poughkeepsie. I never could imagine how she did it—the queer,
chattery person that she was. With the far-away look in her
eyes—which wasn't, however, in the least romantic—I mean that she
didn't look as if she were seeing poetic dreams, or looking through
you, for she hardly ever did look at you!—holding up one hand as if
she wished to silence any objection—or any comment for the matter
of that—she would talk. She would talk about William the Silent,
about Gustave the Loquacious, about Paris frocks, about how the
poor dressed in 1337, about Fantin-Latour, about the
Paris-Lyons-Mediterranée train-deluxe, about whether it would be
worth while to get off at Tarascon and go across the windswept
suspension-bridge, over the Rhone to take another look at
Beaucaire.
    We never did take another look at Beaucaire, of course—beautiful
Beaucaire, with the high, triangular white tower, that looked as
thin as a needle and as tall as the Flatiron, between Fifth and
Broadway—Beaucaire with the grey walls on the top of the pinnacle
surrounding an acre and a half of blue irises, beneath the tallness
of the stone pines, What a beautiful thing the stone pine
is!...
    No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to Heidelberg, not to
Hamelin, not to Verona, not to Mont Majour—not so much as to
Carcassonne itself. We talked of it, of course, but I guess
Florence got all she wanted out of one look at a place. She had the
seeing eye.
    I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to
which I want to return—towns with the blinding white sun upon them;
stone pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all
carved and painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped
gables with the little saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi
and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on the
Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples. Not one of them did we
see more than once, so that the whole world for me is like spots of
colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren't so I should have
something to catch hold of now.
    Is all this digression or isn't it digression? Again I don't
know. You, the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent.
You don't tell me anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to
see what sort of life it was I led with Florence and what Florence
was like. Well, she was bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance
over the floors of castles and over seas and over and over and over
the salons of modistes and over the plages of the Riviera—like a
gay tremulous beam, reflected from water upon a ceiling. And my
function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence. And it
was almost as difficult as trying to catch with your hand that
dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years.
    Florence's aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in
Philadelphia. They had never been to Philadelphia and they had the
New England conscience. You see, the first thing they said to me
when I called in on Florence in the little ancient, colonial,
wooden house beneath the high, thin-leaved elms—the first question
they asked me was not how I did but what did I do. And I did
nothing. I