Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/22

 The fiacre moved in a cloud of yellow dust. Yellow dust covered the black cypresses and the grey olive trees and the blue-black ilex that wilted against walls turned a bilious yellow by the unrelenting sun. "Ah," thought Mr. Winnery bitterly, "the beautiful blue cloudless sky of Italy. Italy, land of laughter and sunshine. Ha! Ha!" But it was worse than that, for added to the baking sun there was a hot wind from Africa. It had been blowing steadily for two days, having sprung up on the night of Miss Annie Spragg's death. It bore on its restless bosom clouds of dust and heat from the Sahara all the way across the blue Mediterranean to the foothills of the Alps. You wakened in the morning to see the trees on the hills above Brinoë swaying in what appeared to be a cool fresh breeze and then you thrust your shutters open to find that it was a wind charged with the heat of all Inferno. And quickly you clapped the shutters tight again, feeling slightly insane.

The driver of the fiacre smelled of sweat and garlic and beat his bony horses from time to time with the butt of his whip across their already scarred and blistered rumps. "Ah," thought Mr. Winnery bitterly, "these gay, kindly, carefree Italians. Children of Nature." (So read the tourist circulars.) He fell to cursing Ruskin and Browning. "Where you rest, there decorate," wrote Mr. Ruskin. (He was not sure that he had the quotation correctly, but that was the idea.) The Italians never stopped decorating. It was their passion for decoration that had induced them to cover the seat of the fiacre with great excrescences of soiled imitation filet lace.