V.

It was beyond Godolphin. "I was advising the Russian Fleet in 1904," he remembered. "They didn't take my advice, the Japanese – you'll remember – bottled us up in Port Arthur. Good God. It was a siege in the great tradition, it lasted a year. I remember frozen hillsides, and the ghastly nagging of those field-mortars, coughing away day in and day out. And white spotlights, moving over the positions at night. Blinding you. A devout junior officer, with an arm gone and the empty sleeve pinned across like a sash, said they looked like the fingers of God, seeking soft throats to strangle."

"Lieutenant Weissmann and Herr Foppl have given me my 1904," she told him, like a schoolgirl enumerating birthday gifts. "Just as you were given your Vheissu."

Hardly any time at all passed before he cried, "No! No, I was there." Then, his head moving with difficulty to face her, "I didn't tell you about Vheissu. Did I?"

"Of course you did."

"I hardly remember Vheissu myself."

"I do. I have remembered for us."

"'Have remembered,'" with a sudden canny tilt to one eye. But it relaxed, and he rambled off:

"If anything gave me my Vheissu it was the time, the Pole, the service . . . But it's all been taken away, I mean the leisure and the sympathy. It's fashionable to say the War did it. Whatever you choose. But Vheissu is gone and impossible to bring back, along with so many other old jokes, songs, 'rages.' And the sort of beauty one had in Cleo de Merode, or Eleonora Duse. The way those eyes turned down at the corners; the incredible expanse of eyelid above, like old vellum . . . But you're too young, you wouldn't remember."

"I'm past forty," smiled Vera Meroving, "and of course I remember. I was given the Duse too, by the man in fact who gave her to Europe, over twenty years ago, in Il Fuoco. We were in Fiume. Another siege. The Christmas before last, he called it the Christmas of blood. He gave her to me as memories, in his palace, while the Andrea Doria dropped shells on us."

"They'd go to the Adriatic on holiday," Godolphin said with a foolish smile, as if the memory were his own; "he, naked, rode his sorrel into the sea while she waited on the strand . . ."

"No," suddenly and only for the moment vicious, "not selling her jewels to suppress the novel about her, nor using a virgin's skull for a loving cup, none of that's true. She was past forty and in love, and he hurt her. Went out of his way to hurt her. That's all there was to it.

"Weren't we both in Florence then? While he was writing the novel about their affair; how could we have avoided them! Yet it seemed always that I was just missing him. First in Florence, then in Paris just before the war, as if I'd been condemned to wait until he reached his supreme moment, his peak of virtú: Fiume!"

"In Florence . . . we . . ." quizzical, weak.

She leaned forward, as if hinting she'd like to be kissed. "Don't you see? This siege. It's Vheissu. It's finally happened."

Abruptly then occurred one of those ironic reversals in which the weakling for a short while gains the upper hand, and the attacker is forced, at best, into a holding operation. Mondaugen, watching, credited this less to any internal logic in their discussion than to a latent virility in the old man, hidden against contingencies like this from the cormorant graspings of age.

Godolphin laughed at her. "There's been a war, Fraulein. Vheissu was a luxury, an indulgence. We can no longer afford the likes of Vheissu."

"But the need," she protested, "its void. What can fill that?"

He cocked his head and grinned at her. "What is already filling it. The real thing. Unfortunately. Take your friend D'Annunzio. Whether we like it or not, that war destroyed a kind of privacy, perhaps the privacy of dream. Committed us, like him, to work out three-o'clock anxieties, excesses of character, political hallucinations on a live mass, a real human population. The discretion, the sense of comedy about the Vheissu affair are with us no more, our Vheissus are no longer our own, or even confined to a circle of friends; they're public property, God knows how much of it the world will see, or what lengths it will be taken to. It's a pity; and I'm only glad I don't have to live in it too much longer."

"You're remarkable," was all she'd say; and after braining an inquisitive goldfish with a rock, she left Godolphin.

Alone, he said: "We simply grow up. In Florence, at age fifty-four, I was a brash youth. Had I known the Duse was there, her poet chap might have found dangerous competition, ha-ha. The only trouble is that now, nearing eighty, I keep discovering that damned war has made the world older than I. The world frowns now on youth in a vacuum, it insists youth be turned-to, utilized, exploited. No time for pranks. No more Vheissus. Ah, well." And to a catchy, rather syncopated fox-trot tune, he sang:

“Once we could flirt and spoon,

Down by the summertime sea.

Your aunt Iphigenia found it terribly odd

To see us stealing a kiss there on the Promenade, oh