Two months! It is incredible. Years must have passed since the children have come here. My past life seems remote as ancient Egypt. This morning came a letter from Biagi of the Laurentian, asking why he did not hear from me, when was I coming to Florence, and adding that at Oxford also some Brunetto Latini material has been recently unearthed and that I might stop on the way and examine it. I laughed. Gone are those days, never, I fear, to return. If only I could smell a good old parchment once again! I still remember the thrill I felt when Biagi first showed me the vellum script of Sophocles at the Laurentian. I could actually see the scribe in the Byzantium of the eleventh century reverently copying the lofty beautiful words, in a spirit of high worship, his pale cheeks flushed with his pious task. I _was_ that scribe! Why, I ask, was that strange and eager feeling implanted in my particular bosom? Could it be that in some past age, I was myself the scholarly Greek?—But that is nonsense.
If only I could pay my bills. Yet I dare not touch the trifle Laura left to her children. That must remain for emergency.
And on May first we must change our quarters. The renting agent, a decent enough little person, was very apologetic.
"I have kids myself," he informed me deprecatingly, "and I know what it is. But you understand. A bachelor is one thing and four children is quite another. Makes a difference." I told him that I was more or less aware of the difference it made.
"And these people here, in this here, now, building," he explained, "they’re so nasty nice—they can’t stand the sight of a kid, let alone the sound." I made no comment, for too recently had I been just so nasty-nice.
Fred Salmon, as good as his word, has actually looked me up.
I don’t know why the mere entry of that breezy Mohock into the room brought my unwilling fatherhood into a relief ten times sharper than I had felt it before. I suddenly felt myself a gawk and a failure before a man of the world—even though I did not wholly respect the man of the world. Once more I was acutely aware of lost freedom. Abstract Freedom, out of which I had stepped as a man steps from life into death.
Luckily Fred is not one to beat about the bush.