A Rich Full Death

19

Browning stood gazing triumphantly at me, his chest pushed out and hands working away in his capacious pockets-the very image of a provincial shopkeeper who has backed the Derby winner. What an odious little man, I thought. Him, great? Him, a genius? Never, plainly, had I been further from the mark than when I had somehow contrived to persuade myself of that.

‘Dante!’ he repeated enthusiastically, when I failed to respond. The thing is so plain now that it seems hardly possible I did not see it long ago-but who would have thought to look for such a freakish association? There is no longer the slightest doubt about it, however. Take Chauncey, for example. She was found, you remember, with a broken neck. The maid-a lass of imagination, evidently; I should like to meet her! — described her mistress’s head as having been turned around like an owl’s. Dante put it more prosaically:

Come ‘l viso mi scese in lor piu basso,

mirabilmente apparve esser travolto

ciascun tra ‘l mento e ‘l principio del casso

‘ “As on them more direct mine eye descends, each wonderously seem’d to be reversed at the neck-bone … “: such is the poet’s terrifying vision of the soothsayers, who are punished in the eighth circle of his hell. The leader of this pack was a woman-Manto.

The correspondence is clear. Miss Chauncey pretended to be what Manto was: one who seeks to push aside the curtain of mortality, to see further than God judges proper for His creatures-what Dante would have called un ‘indovina. The poet imaged such people grotesquely mutilated as a fit punishment for their temerity, their heads so wrenched out of place that they, who presumed to scan the secrets of futurity, could not even see where they were walking. Those who scorned man’s limits, mercifully imposed by a just and loving God to shield us from knowledge we are not strong enough to bear, are denied in eternity even that degree of foresight which is proper to man.

‘But now-and here’s the true devilry of the thing-what Dante imagined and wrote, someone in Florence is putting into practice! Thus Edith Chauncey is found dead, her neck broken like Manto’s, and a piece of paper thrust into her hand like the sign hung about the neck of an executed felon, spelling out the nature of her offence. On it appears the name of her archetype in Dante’s poem-MANTO-and the number of the circle in which that personage is to be found-8.

‘Once I had found this key, unlocking the remaining inscriptions was of course child’s play, and each served to confirm the pattern until all possibility of doubt was extinguished. Thus at the spot where Maurice Purdy was savaged by an enormous rabid dog we found the figure 3 and the word CIACCO. We were told that this means a pig, as indeed it does. But Dante employs it not as a noun but a name-it was the nickname of a notorious Florentine glutton, who also features in Boccaccio’s Decameron. In the third circle of hell the poet saw him punished “per la dannosa colpa de la gola”, “for the pernicious vice of gluttony”-but how much better those yawning Tuscan vowels draw the gorging craw ever calling for more and more! There lay Ciacco, wallowing in the mud, his flesh ripped and flayed by the Hound of Hell itself-”red of eye and slimy black of pelt, his paunch distended and cruelly hooked his claws”. I think you will agree that the hydrophobic beast that savaged Purdy made a very acceptable Cerberus, all things considered. As for his victim, belly-worship was his religion-he lived to eat, and died eaten.

‘Cecil DeVere, on the other hand, devoted himself not to the inner but the outer man-a fact which did not escape the murderer’s ferocious irony. “Argenti”, he called him, “Silver”-the nickname of one Filippo de’ Cavicciuli, whose ostentatious extravagance was such that he had his horse shod with silver shoes: “equum ferris argenti ferrari fecit”, as the old chronicle says. DeVere, of course, did not go quite so far, but it cannot be denied that he spent a considerable amount of time and money on his appearance. Argenti ended up immersed in the mire of a dead channel in the fifth circle of Dante’s Hell; DeVere in the filthy slime of the Arno.’

‘I was not aware that dandyism was either a mortal sin or a justification for murder,’ I put in tardy.

‘It is of course neither,’ returned Browning, shooting me a look of some surprise. ‘As regards the author of these crimes, it is surely superfluous to state that we are dealing with a totally deranged mind, for whom the merest peccadillo can be used to justify any abomination. In that he is the opposite-or, better, the negative-of his model Dante hated not the sinners but the sin-the wickedness which shuts out that pure love-drenched intellectual light he sings in the Paradiso. He was a great hater because he was a great lover, and knew that a man cannot be one without the other.’

‘A great lover-him!’ I exclaimed contemptuously.

‘His work is full of love.’

‘It is full of the wordy certainly,’ I retorted. ‘But to know what manner of lover a man is, ask his mistress! I think I know what she would say. “He, a great lover? Oh yes, to be sure! One always glowering alone in the corner at a party, with never a word to say for himself; or lurking in the street outside my house, writhing in spiritual ecstasy-ready to swoon if I happen to notice him, and lock himself up in his room half-dead with grief if not. One whose secret wish is just to touch my hair, and kiss my brow-and nothing more! A great lover, him? Yes! Of himself!” That, depend upon it, is what Beatrice would say.’

I had allowed myself to say far more than I had meant to, and had spoken with undue warmth. Browning gave me a long thoughtful look. I knew that he had not yet been to call on Beatrice, and thus could have no notion of what awaited him there, or of how his secret had been betrayed. But however he explained them to himself, my words had plainly struck home.

‘I’m not sure that I am very interested in what Beatrice would say,’ he replied with distaste. ‘Who was she, after all? A vulgar merchant’s daughter who married a banker and died young. It may be that she would have been rash enough to speak of the poet in the fashion you suggest, although give me leave to doubt it. But if he had not singled her out from all the other pretty children, no one today would have the slightest interest in what she had to say about anything. One might hope she would remember that before she opened her mouth to mock her benefactor.’

I judged it expedient to bring these giddy conversational acrobatics down to earth.

‘I’m not sure that I see why Beatrice Portinari would have had any cause to consider Dante her benefactor. But let us leave Literature on one side, Mr Browning, for there at least I am no match for you. Tell me, what of the inscription we found at the Eakins’ villa? Riminese was the word, but who or what is of Rimini?’

‘Francesca,’ replied Browning shortly.

I did not pretend not to understand this reference to the most famous canto in the entire Inferno: the tragic and moving tale of Francesca da Rimini, murdered by her deformed husband when he found her in his brother’s bed. She and her lover appear in the second circle, where

the stormy blast of hell

With restless fury drives the spirits on,

Whirl’d round and dash’d amain with sore annoy.

The reference irresistibly brought to mind the memory of how the long white shape which had proved to be Isabel’s body had been pushed and pulled about by the storm wind in the garden of the villa. She then, had been adjudged one of those carnal sinners ‘in whom reason by lust is swayed’.

I murmured some expression of appreciation for Browning’s achievement in deciphering these enigmatic graffiti which had so sorely perplexed us hitherto. But somehow the triumph was quite gone from my companion’s manner: he did not seem to care about the inscriptions any more, or his cleverness in deciphering them. When I enquired-as I was bound to do-about the fate of the hapless Tinker, knocked down in a slum and stuffed into a baker’s oven to roast, Browning once again contented himself with the briefest possibly reply.

‘Farinata.’

‘Sorry?’

‘One of the heresiarchs tormented in red-hot tombs in Dante’s sixth circle.’

‘And the inscription?’

‘Was written up on the wall of the bakery, in the usual fashion.’

‘It is strange, then, that neither appeared in any reports of the crime. Are the authorities perhaps attempting to conceal the enormity of this murderous conspiracy, to forestall any panic among the foreign community?’

‘No, they are merely ignorant of its existence-just as they were of the marks left by the garden table beneath Mrs Eakin’s body, which no one but I remarked.’

Mrs Eakin? I thought-need you be so formal when speaking of your former mistress?

‘I found them because I was looking for them,’ Browning went on, ‘and I found the inscription in the bakery for the same reason. Among the painted list of items for sale, still visible on the plaster, was the word for flour: farina. Someone had added two letters in white chalk and a circled figure six.’

Browning was visibly regaining confidence as he recounted these further examples of his cleverness. It was time to prick the balloon again.

‘Very well,’ I commented wearily. ‘So we understand the messages this maniac leaves at the scene of his outrages. As an intellectual achievement this is no doubt something upon which you are to be congratulated. But forgive me please if I look at things from a more practical point of view. “The English in Florence are dying too much,” the police official told me. What hope is there of halting this process? Your discovery is very interesting, but what use is it? Where, in other words, does it get us? What are we to do?’

We had all this while been walking up the great central avenue which leads from the lily pond at the south-western end of the gardens, near the Porta Romana, to the famous terrace in front of the fortress of the Belvedere, where we had just arrived. This commands the most striking and extensive view of the city, and thus Browning was able to parry my question with an urbane ‘ “Do”, Mr Booth? Why, with such a prospect as this before us I hope we shall not be vulgar enough to dream of “doing” anything — anything that is but just rest our arms on this railing and our eyes on one of the great achieved miracles of the human spirit’.

It is true that the view is miraculous, and it nothing more than the way it obstinately continues to survive the worst that journalists, diarists, essayists, belletrists, aquarellists, hacks, sketchers and daubers of every nationality and either sex, professional and genteel, have been able to do to render it trite, familiar and hateful. There it was again, as fresh and satisfying and perfect as the first time I set eyes on it-all those tiled roofs catching the light at every conceivable angle, showing up as hard and abrasive as sandpaper here, there as soft and plush as velvet. This warm wash of russet, together with the walls in infinite varieties of umber, buff, fawn and burnt sienna, is then punctuated by the three slim towers of the Badia, the Bargello and the Palazzo Vecchio; by the massive rectangular bulk of the Strozzi and Antinori palaces; by the buxom comfortable domes of Santa Maria Novella, San Lorenzo, Santa Croce; and by half a hundred monuments, antiquities, towers and turrets whose names even now I hardly know. AU this, good as it is (as who should say!), is lifted, made perfect, unique and whole by the presence at its heart: Brunelleschi’s great cupola rising massively weightless over the Cathedral Church of St John, superbly dominating and pulling together the entire composition.

Legions had stood where I was standing, gazing like Keats’s stout Cortez. What their wild surmises may have been I do not know, but I am sure I was the first to look out there and feel that the Florentines had done right to exile Dante!

To be sure, this nightmare inferno whose geography Browning was exploring with such excitement was but a parody of the poet’s vision. Nevertheless, a man who occupied his life with the creation of an all-embracing minutely-organised vicarious universe in which he was exalted and his enemies made to suffer atrocious and degrading torments-what had he to do with the genius of this place whose finest monument was just this scene before my eyes: not the obsessively organised masterpiece of some lonely exile, but the splendid product of evolution, chance, history, and a dozen different hands?

Browning had also been actively contemplating the scene.

‘How often I have stood up here,’ he pronounced, ‘or on the brow of Bellosguardo, or at Fiesole, looking down on Florence! There it stands, like a theatre after everyone has gone home. How noble the verses must have been! And how the actors must have moved like kings, and spoken like gods. What we but dream of and play at, they performed. But where are they now? Vanished without trace!’

A desire to shine was almost embarrassingly evident in my companion’s words and manner. The thought which flashed into my mind, rightly or wrongly, was that he had sensed that I had withdrawn my admiration, and was waxing brilliant in order to try and win me back. If so, his efforts were wasted.

‘Until now!’ he added, giving me a significant look. ‘Now that power and scope of conception and execution have surfaced once again, albeit in an evil guise. But let us admit it-there is grandeur, there is genius, in the thing! No petty crime this! No nasty tale of a lover’s spite, as at first I thought. No-nothing less than to re-create Dante Aligheri’s Inferno here on earth, bang in the middle of the nineteenth century, punishing the heirs of the poet’s sinners in ways which parallel those which he described. This is evil on a scale worthy of this setting! Tell me honestly, Booth, do you not feel some slight admiration for the man?’

‘Not the slightest,’ I replied coldly. ‘Indeed, I am afraid I must say that I most strongly deprecate the views you have just expressed. Unlike you, I do not find evil and crime amusing or inspiring, but dreary, dark and desolate. You ask me to be honest: let me therefore tell you that if I agreed to our meeting today, it was solely for the purpose of announcing my fixed intention of withdrawing from any further involvement in this affair.

‘As you must remember, I have on several occasions urged you to place such information as you possess in the hands of the authorities. You have until now succeeded in convincing me that this would be a mistake. In the wake of recent events I am no longer convinced. You, of course, must do as your conscience directs. But please be clear that I shall henceforth disassociate myself entirely from any further private investigations into these crimes.’

Browning stood staring, his bottom lip hanging down, for all the world like a little boy trying not to cry. I almost felt sorry for him-until I recalled how he had treated me that day at the English Cemetery.

‘But why?’ he wailed. ‘You used to be so eager to help me! What has happened to change you? What are these “recent events” you speak of?’

This was too bad. I had thought he would be angry and stalk off, but by showing his hurt so plainly, Browning was managing to make me feel at fault. Was I never to be in the right with the man? There was, however, no turning back now.

Yes, I have changed,’ I told him. ‘We have been speaking of Dante. He said that his life began again the day he met the woman you have described as a vulgar merchant’s daughter. Well, I too have met Beatrice.’

Our looks met with an almost audible chink.

‘Very well, Mr Booth,’ Browning said-and his voice was hard and full of menace. ‘In that case I need detain you no longer.’

And now, at last, he turned on his heel and strode off-too late! My victory rang hollow, and I felt I had blundered badly, perhaps fatally.