that masked ball you have made of life itself, and I tell you it is not worth the dust at our feet.
“All my life I have know such idlers, arrogant, corrupt, full of nothing but vainglorious protection of the right to lives of utter worthlessness, the supreme privilege of doing nothing of any significance from the cradle to the grave.
“But your voice! Ah, your voice, your voice which has become the nightly incubus of my beloved Guido and has driven him mad, that is another matter, your voice! Because had you but half the talent he described to me, but half the holy fire, you could have made dwarfs and monsters of ordinary men! London, Prague, Vienna, Dresden, Warsaw, you give the cities to me, was there not in some forgotten corner of your stinking city a world globe? Did you not know the size of Europe, had you never been told?
“And in all those capitals you could have brought them to their knees, thousands upon thousands would have heard you, carrying your name out of the opera houses and the churches into the very streets. They would have said it like a prayer from one end of the continent to the other, as they speak of rulers, of heroes, of the immortals.
“That is what your voice could have been, had you but let it rise out of the ruin of what you were, had you but forged it out of all your suffering and all your pain to give back to God that which He had given you!
“But you are of that ancient ilk that recognizes no other aristocracy save itself, the gilded maggots feeding on the corpse of the Venetian State, brave champions of the supreme privilege of doing nothing, nothing, nothing! And so you forfeit that one strength with which you could have bested any natural man!
“Well, I will not suffer you under my roof any longer. I have no pity for you now. I cannot help you. You are but a freak of nature without its destined gift, and there is nothing lower! Leave this place, go out of it. You have means to find a habitat for your misery somewhere else.”
6
THE MOUNTAIN was talking again.
Its distant rumble rolled over the moonlit slopes, a faint and shapeless and horrible sound that seemed to rise out of the earth itself everywhere: a great sigh seeping from cracks and crannies in these ancient winding streets as if any moment the ground would commence to buckle and shake as it had so often in the past and bring down with it these hovels and palaces which for some reason or other, unknown to man, had survived all earlier holocausts.
Balconies and rooftops everywhere were crowded with dimly lit excited faces, turned to the lightning and smoke against the wide open sky, so brilliantly lit by this full moon that it seemed broad daylight as Tonio descended the hill, his feet leading him blindly into the wide piazzas and avenues of the lower city.
His back was straight; he walked slowly, gracefully, his heavy silk-lined cape over his shoulder, his right hand resting on the hilt of his sword, as if he knew in fact where he might go, what he might do, what might become of him.
But pain had numbed him. It had like a great blast of icy wind frozen his skin so that he was aware of every dimension of his body: cold face, cold hands, cold limbs that moved mindlessly towards the sea, and the Molo, thundering with carriages and plumed horses galloping before it.
Now and then a violent shudder swept over him, stopping him, lifting him for the moment off the balls of his feet so that he would sink down, disoriented, his unconscious moan lost in the crowd that everywhere jostled him and forced him forward.
He wove his way through vendors and hawkers of sweets, men offering fruit drinks and white wine, strolling musicians, and lovely women of the streets who brushed against him, their laughter like hundreds of little bells, all it seemed in an air of noonday fest as if before this volcano finally burst and buried them all under its ash, they must live, live, live as if there were no hereafter.
But the volcano would bury no one tonight. It would roar and spit its hot stones and steam into the cloudless sky while the moon shone on the waves and those who swam in the warm sea, and those who played on