VOL. 87

No. 1

OR my part, I do not know what to think. I can only tell it as it happened.

My old friend, Alexandre Grimaux, invited me to visit him. It was a flattering proposal. Grimaux, besides being a famous, if somewhat spectacular, archæologist, is a notorious recluse. I doubt if he receives so intimately a friend a year, either in the house near Paris, which he occupies in winter, or in the charming nest on the hillside above Florence, where he was summering when I got his letter. His marvelous collection of antique objects, his books on dead arts and customs, his manuscripts and printer's proofs, form his whole interest. Or, rather, formerly did so. For lately Alexandre Grimaux had taken a wife.

This wife was a sort of mystery. No one seemed to know who she was or even what race had produced her. She was described as beautiful, silent, strange. She spoke her husband's language with difficulty, Italian with an extraordinary syntax of her own, English, German, and Russian not at all. She cared nothing for society. She gave the impression of a stranger from afar, who in her new abode would always remain an alien. But everybody agreed that she seemed devoted to her husband.

I confess it was on account of her that of I accepted Alexandre's invitation.

Cutting short an engrossing piece of work, I traveled a long way uncomfortably in order to throw myself on his hands before he had time to change his mind. For I had not known Alexandre Grimaux at school and in the university without discovering that he could be the master pattern for eccentrics.

Recently, in fact, it had been whispered about among those who came nearest to knowing him that his eccentricity was increasing in a way to cause uneasiness.

It was at about the time of his marriage that people began to mark this change in him.

I arrived at Florence toward evening, took carriage in the direction of Fiesole, and, just as the sun was setting, alighted, in a narrow road lined with cypresses, before his red-washed garden wall. No one had met me. The servant who opened the gate seemed surprised to see my luggage. I had difficulty in persuading him to disturb his master on my account. When finally Alexandre appeared, I knew he had forgotten all about inviting me. But at once he became cordial enough to dispel my misgivings.

"Sapristi! It is thou! How I am con

LXXXVII-1

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tent!" He let his big hands fall on my arms in a hard grip.

Alexandre Grimaux was a tall, burly fellow whose taurine formidability reminded one of the images, bearded and covered with knotted muscles, on Assyrian palaces. He had a nose like a beak; his black eyes gleamed beneath bushy brows; his beard, inky and curly, rippled down over his waistcoat.

At first glance, he seemed to irradiate all his old strength and intellectual power, the splendid energy, combined with the vivid manner, of the peasant stock of southern France infected with genius. But almost immediately I perceived that something had happened to him. Whether Whether from emotion or his labors, he was exhausted, nervously on edge, overwrought. The inner man was disorganized.

"Quite well?" I asked.

"Never better," he retorted, as it seemed to me, defiantly. And he led the way through a hall of white stucco set with mutilated statues to his workroom.

"Tea, coffee, or something else? If you want a wash, the wash-room is there, rather untidy, I fear, from mummy-dust. Best to put some corrosive sublimate in the bowl. I have been dissecting the lady in the corner, a favorite of Ptolemy Soter, and as neat an example as I have ever seen of the Egyptian embalmer's subcutaneous padding. For half an hour after I unwrapped her she was the most shapely thing imaginable. Before she began to go, I got all my measurements, and took this cast of her head —a beauty, hein? But of course that sort of thing is merely recreation. You must see my work, my final classification of the pre-Hyksos pottery. And my new arrangement-the proper one this time-of the 'weak' and 'strong' Egyptian verbs. And a monograph on their pseudo-participle, which is not the perfect of the Semitic conjugation. Then there are some fragments-weapons and trinkets and so on-which I found in a very unlikely place. That reminds me. Madame is in her boudoir; she may join us and she may not. Meanwhile repose."

He pushed me into a deep leather chair. The immense desk before me was covered with folio-sheets and palimpsests, coins and chiseled gems, figurines and ushebti images from temples of Cnossus and Egyptian tombs, bottles of iridescent glass,

Ægean masks, four-thousand-year-old toys of children, a bewildering litter of precious rubbish. In fact, the big room was a museum. Amphoræ, gladiators' helmets, torsos of marble and terra-cotta filled the corners. On the walls, between shelves crammed with books, or bristling with bronzes and Mycenæan faience, appeared plaster fragments, decorated with the dim mural painting of the Romans. Even the floors were littered, with heaps of personal ornaments, with baskets of broken shards, with tessera of porcelain mosaic from Crete, arranged on the rug like half-completed picture-puzzles. Over a chair hung lengths of mummy-linen, gummed and stained by spices, from the shriveled brown object, stiff and straight on the table by the windows, which once on a time had been the fair favorite of Ptolemy Soter.

In the midst of this disorder Alexandre Grimaux sat beaming at me, cigarettesmoke drifting through his inky, curly beard, in his hand a glass of brandy and soda, already nearly empty. For cognac, after working hours, was Alexandre's weakness-a weakness from which more than one professional rival had profited in the past, when garrulity had disclosed some secret work or new discovery.

"But how I am content," he repeated, "to have thee here! I have been lonely." He glanced sidewise at the door. "For a man friend, well understood; for one who knows me well, whom I can trust and talk to freely." He fell into a reverie. Presently he added: "For I can talk to you. To be sure, your ignorance of the ancient world is pitiable. Even Nero knew more of the Homeric Age than you know of so simple an epoch as his. But if you have no special erudition, at least you are sympathetic to me. You are a Sagittarius person, I an Aries, so." He regarded me sharply, then remarked with a sort of jovial ferocity:

"My wife, also, is a Sagittarius person, with Venus, Mercury, and the moon in the ascendant. Take care not to look at her too warmly, or I shall be apt to smash your head with this iron statuette of Aphrodite Mechanitis."

"Madame Grimaux is warned, I hope, that you 've been so revolutionary as to invite me?"

"Why should I tell her that an Amer

ican of the twentieth century is to be our guest? She is like me: except for each other, we live in the past."

"You ought to be very happy nowadays."

He looked away, as if secretly agitated. "My friend, I have found a happiness so strange that I sometimes wonder whether I am not dreaming, or, perhaps-"

Abruptly he stood up, and offered to show me the garden. And the cause of these emotions did not appear till dinner was announced.

We awaited her in the pergola outside the dining-room. The heavens were full of mellow stars, the rose-garden below us was thick with purple shadows. Farther down the hillside, amid vague masses of foliage that blotted the distant sheen of Florence, nightingales were warbling. And the odor of innumerable flowers ascended to us with the concentrated sweetness that Italian nights bring forth.

"You are a sentimentalist, after all," I said; "for you never wander from this land for long."

"Less now than formerly," Alexandre replied, "because my wife prefers places that do not remind her too sharply of the past. That prevent her from suffering too much of a very curious home-sickness, the most curious sort, I believe, that mortal has ever known." He added, laying his hand on my shoulder: "I seem to be telling you things I never discussed before." A suspicion began to invade me. I suggested:

"These slight fancies are amenable to the simplest treatment, to recreation out of doors, to taking the waters here and there, to certain kinds of literature-"

Alexandre laughed shortly.

"My wife is quite sane, my old one. She is merely the victim of peculiar circumstances that I am helping her to regard with resignation."

At this moment Mme. Grimaux appeared in the French window of the dining-room-against the light a tall silhouette of elegant contours, in a smoky-red gown of unusual, yet nobly simple, fashion. Her glinting hair, however, was intricately arranged in a coiffure such as I had never seen before. Advancing slowly into the pergola, she brought with her an indescribable atmosphere of mingled fa

"It is nothing," she answered gently, and led the way to dinner.

At table, in the glow of the candles, her full beauty was revealed. I saw one of those amber-skinned blondes, with large brown irises and eyebrows darker than the tresses, who appear occasionally in Southern races. All her lovely features combined to give an effect intensely peculiar, exotic. Her forehead was low and broad; her eyes stood wide apart; her mouth, with its full lips, was of a perfect yet extraordinary contour. She looked warmblooded, intense, capable both of deep thought and of quick wit; but all the while she seemed to be covering her qualities with a profound reserve. It was only when her gaze met Alexandre's that she at all revealed herself. Evidently she cared for her husband deeply. The impression came to me that he was the only person who might understand her, and whom she cared to understand.

There was much about her, all the same, from which, I felt, I ought to be able to divine her race, her proper environment, her social antecedents. She was vaguely suggestive of things which I had known, or known of. I thought that presently she would place herself for me involuntarily. But she did nothing of the sort.

Alexandre talked; she, for the most part, listened. She appeared neither shy nor bored. Once or twice she said enough to give the impression of amiable hospitality. No one could more clearly have shown herself, even in her gracious silences, a woman of the world. One saw, at least, that wherever she had come from, her previous surroundings had been rich and cultivated.

The dinner, as a dinner, was a success. Alexandre, for all his seclusion, and ardu