EATH GANNON, familiarly known to the members of his very special profession as the Fifth Ace, rose from his seat in the little public park for the performance of an unpleasant task. Before him lay an irregular, stone-lipped pond, and Gannon's task was to see how far he could walk about the water without having to seek a bench. The distance he was able to cover had steadily grown shorter. When he had first come to Florence he would have been unconscious of it as a distance at all; then he had been only mildly disturbed by the inability to sleep through the night or so previous, following a slow-gathering exhibition of nerves; but in the week that had ensued his sleeplessness had grown serious, then grave. Now he realized clearly and with increasing indifference that it was killing him.
He had found La Vasca, the pond under the blackened walls of the Fortezza Basso, by chance while driving through the city in a vain endeavor to leave behind him the dark specter of a growing dread. The park was so withdrawn from the stir of the Tornabuoni, so free from the unexpected noises that set his tense nerves shuddering, that, as he had grown worse, he had returned again and again to sit on the deserted benches and measure his flagging vitality. He started forward quite sharply, determined to reach at least the sixth bench from where he stood—but at the second his knees were shaking; at the third the pavement seemed to rock under his feet; and at the fourth he sank down and clutched the iron arm, with a feeling that the world was dropping away from him and that his limbs had become dust.
Four benches! He had lost twenty feet in two days. He sat clinging with emaciated hands to his resting place until the giddiness receded; then signaled with his stick for his cabman. The latter with burly sympathy assisted Heath Gannon into the low, open vehicle and then drove slowly and carefully toward the center of the city.
Gannon wondered, curiously impersonal, how much longer he would last. Perhaps two weeks! He had given up all hope, all thought of sleep. The doctors he had seen, after trying less desperate courses had one and all arrived at the prescription of opiates and the advice to move into the rarer air of Switzerland—or, as he had cynically expressed it, to "die somewhere else."
The cab crawled about a large, depressing square covered with gray pebbles, over which skittered the sere autumnal leaves. A clangoring yellow tram ran along one side and disappeared in an ancient stone way. The monotonous, rectangular façade, gray like the pebbles and sky, held the echo for a moment; and then only the plodding progress of the horse was audible. The silence in the square was so unbroken that Heath Gannon heard distinctly the period suddenly pronounced by a man standing on a box above the pavement a considerable distance away.
His illness had robbed him of all interest, all curiosity, in exterior objects or happenings; and it was with total indifference that he heard the statement made with extraordinary vehemence, in English—or, rather, in American:
"Hasten; for Rome and Constantinople are crying with a great cry for the universal panacea of Zwillerism."
The cab drew opposite the orator, and its driver, fascinated by the unusual spectacle, stopped his complacent horse. The speaker was a tall, heavy man in a funereal frock coat, with a black felt hat in his thick hand. He had a smooth, pallid countenance, small, deeply pouched eyes, and a wide, facile mouth. As he spoke he made suave, inviting gestures; his voice ran with surprising ease over the entire gamut of sentimental appeal—it sank to a heartfelt sob of supplication and rose to a clarion trumpeting toward surprising and glorious consummations.
Its English—or, rather, American—was interpolated with Italian phrases of the most astonishing license of form and pronunciation; and its entire tenor was an amplification of the first statement.
"The ellipse," he declared, "is the only figure that contains within itself the immortal truths. Every soul is an ellipse, but imperfect until completed by Zwillerism. You, my little ellipses, heirs to the flawless oval, may now, in grasping my hand, approach the final form."
His "little ellipses" were a stolid hotel porter, in a linen blouse; a guarda civile, in a cocked hat and sword, hovering at the point of an official diversion and suppression; a fat nurse, in appalling flutings of white, with a broad pink streamer; a second identical, with blue; a man, obviously German, with an uncovered head like the cylinder of a music box; and Heath Gannon and the driver in the low conveyance—the former gaunt and white, with eyes that seemed to have retreated far into his skull.