Walk by night must sleep by day, and having in my mind the severe
verses of James Bayle, sometime Fellow of St Anne's, that 'in Tuscan
summers as a general rule, the days are sultry but the nights are
cool' (he was no flamboyant poet; he loved the quiet diction of the
right wing of English poetry), and imagining an owlish habit of
sleeping by day could be acquired at once, I lay down under a tree of
a kind I had never seen; and lulled under the pleasant fancy that this
was a picture-tree drawn before the Renaissance, and that I was
reclining in some background landscape of the fifteenth century (for
the scene was of that kind), I fell asleep.
When I woke it was as though I had slept long; but I doubted the
feeling. The young sun still low in the sky, and the shadows not yet
shortened, puzzled me. I looked at my watch, but the dislocation of
habit which night marches produce had left it unwound. It marked a
quarter to three, which was absurd. I took the road somewhat stiffly
and wondering. I passed several small white cottages; there was no
clock in them, and their people were away. At last in a Trattoria, as
they served me with food, a woman told me it was just after seven; I
had slept but an hour.
Outside, the day was intense; already flies had begun to annoy the
darkened room within. Through the half-curtained door the road was
white in the sun, and the railway ran just beyond.
I paid my reckoning, and then, partly for an amusement, I ranged my
remaining pence upon the table, first in the shape of a Maltese cross,
then in a circle (interesting details!). The road lay white in the
sunlight outside, and the railway ran just beyond.
I counted the pence and the silver - there was three francs and a
little over; I remembered the imperial largesse at Lucca, the lordly
spending of great sums, where, now in the pocket of an obsequious man,
the pounds were taking care of themselves. I remembered how at Como I
had been compelled by poverty to enter the train for Milan. How little
was three francs for the remaining twenty-five miles to Siena! The
road lay white in the sunlight, and the railway ran just beyond.
I remembered the pleasing cheque in the post-office of Siena; the
banks of Siena, and the money changers at their counters changing
money at the rate of change.
'If one man,' thought I, 'may take five per cent discount on a sum of
money in the exchange, may not another man take discount off a walk of
over seven hundred miles?
