V.

He balled the paper up in his fist, flung it across the room. Even taking a Christian view of the situation, even assuming her intentions were well-meant and that she was not leagued with those who watched the cafés, informing Chapman was a fatal error. He could not afford to have the F.O. in on this. He sank down on the bed, head hung, hands clasped tightly between his knees. Remorse and a numb impotence: they had been jolly chums, riding arrogant on his epaulets like guardian angels for fifteen years. "It was not my fault," he protested aloud to the empty room, as if the mother-of-pearl brushes, the lace and dimity, the delicate vessels of scent would somehow find tongue and rally round him. "I was not meant to leave those mountains alive. That poor civilian engineer, dropped out of human sight; Pike-Leeming, incurable and insensate in a home in Wales; and Hugh Godolphin . . ." He arose, walked to the dressing table, stood staring at his face in the mirror. "He will only be a matter of time." A few yards of calico lay on the table, near them a pair of pinking shears. The girl seemed to be serious about her dressmaking scheme (she'd been quite honest with him about her past, not moved by his own confessional spirit so much as wanting to give him some token to prepare the way toward a mutual trustfulness. He hadn't been shocked by her disclosure of the affair with Goodfellow in Cairo. He thought it unfortunate: it seemed to have given her some quaint and romantic views about espionage.) He picked up the shears, turned them over in his hands. They were long and glittering. The ripple edges would make a nasty wound. He raised his eyes to those of his reflection with an inquiring look. The reflection smiled dolefully. "No," he said aloud. "Not yet. "

Forcing the door with the shears took only half a minute. Two flights down the back stairs and out a service entrance, and he found himself in Via Tosinghi, a block north of the Piazza. He headed east, away from the center of town. He had to find a way out of Florence. However he came out of this, he would have to resign his commission and live from here on as a fugitive, a temporary occupant of pension rooms, a dweller in the demimonde. Marching through the dusk, he saw his fate complete, pre-assembled, inescapable. No matter how he tacked yawed or dodged about, he'd only be standing still, while that treacherous reef loomed closer with every shift in course.

He turned right and headed toward the Duomo. Tourists sauntered by, cabs clattered in the street. He felt isolated from a human community - even a common humanity - which he had regarded until recently as little more than a cant concept which liberals were apt to use in making speeches. He watched the tourists gaping at the Campanile; he watched dispassionately without effort, curiously without commitment. He wondered at this phenomenon of tourism: what was it drove them to Thomas Cook & Son in ever-increasing flocks every year, to let themselves in for the Campagna's fevers, the Levant's squalor, the septic foods of Greece? To return to Ludgate Circus at the desolate end of every season having caressed the skin of each alien place, a peregrine or Don Juan of cities, but no more able to talk of any mistress's heart than to cease keeping that interminable Catalogue, that non picciol' libro. Did he owe it to them, the lovers of skins, not to tell about Vheissu, not even to let them suspect the suicidal fact that below the glittering integument of every foreign land there is a hard dead-point of truth, and that in all cases - even England's - it is the same kind of truth, can be phrased in identical words? He had lived with his knowledge since June and that headlong drive for the Pole; was able now to control or repress it almost at will. But the humans - those from whom, prodigal, he had strayed and could expect no future blessing - those four fat schoolmistresses whinnying softly to one another by the south portals of the Duomo, that fop in tweeds and clipped mustaches who came hastening by in fumes of lavender toward God knew what assignation; had they any notion of what inner magnitudes such control must draw on? His own, he knew, were nearly played out. He wandered down Via dell' Orivolo, counting the dark spaces between street lamps as he had once counted the number of puffs it took him to extinguish all his birthday candles. This year, next year, sometime, never. There were more candles at this point perhaps than even he could dream; but nearly all had been blown to twisted black wicks and the party needed very little to modulate to the most gently radiant of wakes. He turned left toward the hospital and surgeons' school, tiny and grayhaired and casting a shadow, he felt, much too large.