egregious insult, the story that they had come to Italy as tourists, they could not wipe away.
He felt himself to be the victim of an imposture, that was plain. But did he believe that they were rich pretending to be poor, or poor pretending to be rich? They could not tell. On the whole, it seemed as if Mr. Sciarappa’s suspicions, like everything else about him, had a certain flickering quality; the light in him went on and off, as he touched one theory or another, cruising in his shaft like an elevator. And, as the young man said, you could not blame Mr. Sciarappa for wondering: was it in the character of a rich man or a poor that they stayed in the best hotel, which was slightly less expensive than an American auto-camp?
The obscurity of their financial position justified Mr. Sciarappa’s anger. Nevertheless, though sympathetic, they grew tired of spending their evenings with a stranger who was continually out of sorts because he could not make up his mind whether they were worth swindling. “We did not come to Italy to see Mr. Sciarappa,” they would say to each other every night as they rode up in the elevator, and would promise themselves to evade this time, without fail, the meeting he had fixed for the next day. Yet as noon came on the following morning, they would find that they were approaching the Galleria. He is waiting, they would say to each other, and without discussion they would hurry on toward the caf é with the orange tablecloths, where they were late but never quite late enough to miss Mr. Sciarappa.
He was never glad to see them. He rose to acknowledge them with a kind of bravura laziness of his tall “English” figure, one shoulder lifted in a shrug of ennui or resignation. He kissed the young lady’s hand and said to the young man perfunctorily, and sometimes with a positive yawn, “Hello, sit down, my dear.” One of his odd little tricks was to pretend that they were not together. The young man’s frequent absences of mind he treated literally, when it suited him, as if they were absences of body, and once he carried this so far as to run his fingers up and down the young lady’s bare arm as the three of them rode in a taxi, inquiring as he did so, in the most civil tone imaginable, whether she found her friend satisfactory. His conversation was directed principally to the young lady, but for all that he had no real interest in her. It was the young man whom he watched, often in the mirror of her face, which never left her friend as he talked wildly, excitedly, extravagantly, with long wrists flung outward in intensity of gesture: did Mr. Sciarappa see beauty and strangeness in him or the eccentricity of money? Or was he merely trying to determine which it was that she saw?
It was irresistible that they should try to coax Mr. Sciarappa (or Scampi, as they had begun to call him, after fried crayfish-tails, his favorite dish) out into the open. The name of a certain lady, middlingly but authentically rich, who was expecting to see them in Venice, began to figure allusively, alluringly, in their conversation. These pointers that they directed toward Polly Herkimer Grabbe had at first a merely educational purpose. National pride forbade that they should allow Scampi to take them for rich Americans when a really good example of the genre existed only a day’s journey away. But their first references to the flower-bulb heiress, to her many husbands, her collection of garden statuary, her career as an impresario of modern architecture, failed, seemingly, to impress Scampi; he raised his eyes briefly from the plate of Saltimbocca (Jump-in-your-mouth) that he was eating, and then returned to his meal. The language difficulties made it sometimes impossible to tell whether Mr. Sciarappa really heard what they said. They had remarked once, for example, in conversational desperation, that they had come to Italy to retrace the footsteps of Lord Byron: they were on their way from Lausanne, where he
He felt himself to be the victim of an imposture, that was plain. But did he believe that they were rich pretending to be poor, or poor pretending to be rich? They could not tell. On the whole, it seemed as if Mr. Sciarappa’s suspicions, like everything else about him, had a certain flickering quality; the light in him went on and off, as he touched one theory or another, cruising in his shaft like an elevator. And, as the young man said, you could not blame Mr. Sciarappa for wondering: was it in the character of a rich man or a poor that they stayed in the best hotel, which was slightly less expensive than an American auto-camp?
The obscurity of their financial position justified Mr. Sciarappa’s anger. Nevertheless, though sympathetic, they grew tired of spending their evenings with a stranger who was continually out of sorts because he could not make up his mind whether they were worth swindling. “We did not come to Italy to see Mr. Sciarappa,” they would say to each other every night as they rode up in the elevator, and would promise themselves to evade this time, without fail, the meeting he had fixed for the next day. Yet as noon came on the following morning, they would find that they were approaching the Galleria. He is waiting, they would say to each other, and without discussion they would hurry on toward the caf é with the orange tablecloths, where they were late but never quite late enough to miss Mr. Sciarappa.
He was never glad to see them. He rose to acknowledge them with a kind of bravura laziness of his tall “English” figure, one shoulder lifted in a shrug of ennui or resignation. He kissed the young lady’s hand and said to the young man perfunctorily, and sometimes with a positive yawn, “Hello, sit down, my dear.” One of his odd little tricks was to pretend that they were not together. The young man’s frequent absences of mind he treated literally, when it suited him, as if they were absences of body, and once he carried this so far as to run his fingers up and down the young lady’s bare arm as the three of them rode in a taxi, inquiring as he did so, in the most civil tone imaginable, whether she found her friend satisfactory. His conversation was directed principally to the young lady, but for all that he had no real interest in her. It was the young man whom he watched, often in the mirror of her face, which never left her friend as he talked wildly, excitedly, extravagantly, with long wrists flung outward in intensity of gesture: did Mr. Sciarappa see beauty and strangeness in him or the eccentricity of money? Or was he merely trying to determine which it was that she saw?
It was irresistible that they should try to coax Mr. Sciarappa (or Scampi, as they had begun to call him, after fried crayfish-tails, his favorite dish) out into the open. The name of a certain lady, middlingly but authentically rich, who was expecting to see them in Venice, began to figure allusively, alluringly, in their conversation. These pointers that they directed toward Polly Herkimer Grabbe had at first a merely educational purpose. National pride forbade that they should allow Scampi to take them for rich Americans when a really good example of the genre existed only a day’s journey away. But their first references to the flower-bulb heiress, to her many husbands, her collection of garden statuary, her career as an impresario of modern architecture, failed, seemingly, to impress Scampi; he raised his eyes briefly from the plate of Saltimbocca (Jump-in-your-mouth) that he was eating, and then returned to his meal. The language difficulties made it sometimes impossible to tell whether Mr. Sciarappa really heard what they said. They had remarked once, for example, in conversational desperation, that they had come to Italy to retrace the footsteps of Lord Byron: they were on their way from Lausanne, where he
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