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Title: Roman pictures
Author: Percy Lubbock
Release date: October 6, 2023 [eBook #71818]
Language: English
Original publication: NYC: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMAN PICTURES ***
[Illustration: FONTANA DELLE TARTARUGHE]
ROMAN PICTURES
_By_
PERCY LUBBOCK
Author of _Earlham_ &
_The Craft of Fiction_
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
_Made and printed in Great Britain by Charles Whittingham
and Griggs (Printers), Ltd., London._
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. FONTANA DELLE TARTARUGHE 9
A lonely young pilgrim, Deering, a citizen of
the world, his Roman accent, the English ghetto,
the real Rome, plump but elegant, the newest
culture, the raw world, the way to reality, Roman
pictures.
II. VIA NAZIONALE 23
Crowded tables, Mr. Bannock, the pride of the
artist, a grievance, the young dancer, coils of
oratory, tribute to Deering, Jaff’s sweetheart,
Edna’s way, college style, the report of Buffalo,
a substantial Briton.
III. PIAZZA DELLA CANCELLERIA 38
Near the Vatican, the company of the priestcraft,
the palace and the cardinal, Cooksey,
secrets of the backstairs, Father Jenkins’s joke,
Amerigo, Cooksey’s profanity, his rebuke to the
stranger, inside the fortress, a gentleman of
feeling.
IV. ST. PETER’S 52
An early reveller, the hum of the pilgrims, a
faltering cheer, Father Holt, a secret society,
Lady Mullinger, poor Charlotte, a very great
lady, finer shades, homage to Rome, Rome itself.
V. VIA GIULIA 65
Mr. Fitch, the Cheltenham furniture, the
seminarist, Maundy’s fancy, the path to Rome,
the burnt sonnet, Gina, historical research, the
golden evenings, a point of ritual, art in the void,
an uneasy neophyte.
VI. VILLA BORGHESE 79
An aged relic, Teresa and Berta, a fluent
antiphon, some English speaking, troubles of a
patriot, country days, the Virginian sculptress,
Luigi, a gentleman in Rome, precious refinements,
a chance worth seizing, Rome the inexhaustible.
VII. VIA DELLA PURIFICAZIONE 94
A tangle of byways, the medieval challenge,
Teresa at home, Mr. Daponte, Rome on the
house-tops, Teresa in London, English freedom,
Luigi on Rome, the end of his chances, a spoilt
tea-party, a prospect of Rome.
VIII. ALBANO 107
A day in the country, Teresa’s party, an
English ramble, mother and child, Mimi in
society, Olga and the arts, the forgotten pensioners,
the Russian waif, despair and disillusion,
a page of Dostoevsky, a dusty road-side, the
Virgilian forest.
IX. CASTEL GANDOLFO 121
Fräulein Dahl, a piece of nature, an Arcadian
walk, Erda’s villa, the great saloon, Miss Gilpin,
the accent of Dante, a woman of letters, the
clever touch, a reposeful friend, the accent of
Dresden, Erda in solitude.
X. VIA SISTINA 135
Deering again, the Clarksons, privileges of
travel, Mr. Bashford, a cousin of the Marshams,
golf at Torquay, the true Ruskin, an English
babe, the sheep in the bunker, Bashford’s sort,
England in Rome.
XI. PIAZZA NAVONA 149
Miss Gainsborough, Lady Mullinger again,
a sedulous Roman, the old guard, majestic wrath,
the imperial race-course, a British monument,
Mr. Platt, an elderly sprite, scandalous tales, a
good soul.
XII. CORSO 163
A sumptuous background, familiar faces, Miss
Gadge, the chant of the pilgrims, things Franciscan,
a woman and an artist, chords of the
heart, the plane of art, the youth Pole, Mr.
Champerdown, a Jesuit in a drawing-room, the
moon of May, the city gate.
XIII. THE FORUM 178
Julia’s discovery, the Professor, an inspired
lecture, the origin of Rome, Mrs. Rollesby’s
attack, poetic imagination, privilege of a scholar,
the buried statue, the Professor’s secret, a divided
audience, a single-minded pilgrim.
XIV. VIA MARGUTTA 191
A studio of romance, the old Bohemian,
pictures and friends, the study of type, the
eagle-feather, an artist’s wife, an honest tradesman,
dreams of an artist, business and a studio-chat,
a blander age, the light of the great days,
worldly protection.
XV. VIA DELLE BOTTEGHE OSCURE 205
The great name, the Marchesa at home, Roman
guile, the Principessa, the rustle of expense,
Miss Gilpin again, Madame de Baltasar, the
knightly Latin, a young barbarian, a wonder
of art, English daylight, Deering’s stroke, back to
the tortoises, the end of the quest.
ROMAN PICTURES
I. FONTANA DELLE TARTARUGHE
I found myself loitering by that pretty little Fountain of the
Tortoises, not for the first time; but this time (it was an afternoon of
late April, long years ago) I looked stupidly at the boys and the
tortoises and the dripping water, with a wish in my mind for something
more. But what? I had drifted hither and thither about Rome, from the
Gate of the People to the Baths of Caracalla--drifted day after day in
my solitude through a month of April more divinely blue and golden than
the first spring-days of the world; and whether I was in the body or out
of the body I scarcely knew, for I moved in a great bubble of
imagination that I had never known the like of in all the years (perhaps
twenty) of my life before I came to Rome. I had escaped from the poor
chamber of myself; for the imagination I dreamed and revelled in was
surely none of my own. It was of the spirit of all time, livelier,
lovelier than I could say, a power and a freedom that a rather lean
young soul, ignorantly aspiring, may enter into and take possession of
unconsciously, without an effort--in Rome.
But I do remember lingering about the Fountain of the Tortoises at last,
between sun and shadow, with a wish that something now, something or
some one, would break into my solitude and my dream; not that I was
tired of either, but because my dream and my solitude would be still
more beautiful if I could look at them for an hour across an interval,
across the kind of division that is created by--yes, exactly!--by the
sight to which I presently raised my eyes, turning away from the dapple
and ripple of the fountain. A young man, passing across the square, met
my blank gaze at this moment and suddenly threw out a sign of
recognition; and I saw with surprise that it was my precious Deering, of
whose presence in Rome I had been quite unaware. Deering it was!--after
four or five lonely weeks, in which I had never happened to see a face
that I knew, it was Deering who linked me to the real world again by
crossing the Square of the Tortoises at that hour of that afternoon. I
had left my shining bubble in a flash (he hadn’t noticed it) and joined
hands with common life.
We weren’t really on terms of intimacy; but in the strangeness of Rome
our little English acquaintance had the air of a cordial friendship. I
gushed over with a warmth that surprised me and that would have been
impossible at home; the fountain and the palaces and the Roman sunshine
had pushed me forward into a familiarity that I shouldn’t have ventured
upon elsewhere. He was of my own age, but so much more exquisite and
mannerly that I looked raw indeed at his side; I was an aspiring
amateur, he was a citizen of the world. At school I had tried to avoid
him, because I had courted (vainly, vainly) the society of the more
fashionably and the less refined; but I was eager enough to seize him by
both hands in my new freedom and to take advantage of his riper
experience. “Why, _Deering_--!” He _did_ look experienced, with his
broad-brimmed hat and his neat black clothes, as I moved towards him
and directed my greeting, a little too effusively.
He took it with a brilliant smile, he whipped off his hat and held it to
his stomach. “Eh, come sta?” he said, standing bare-headed; “è pezzo
pezzo che non ci vediamo.” He fluted the words with mellifluous
assurance, and I did my best to meet his humour with my own poor bits
and shreds of Italian. There were no flute-notes in _my_ repertory; but
I made a jest of my round British style and mouthed out some attempt at
a Roman compliment. As quick as thought he countered it with another;
and that was surely enough of the joke--the joke of our standing there
bare-headed, flourishing our hats at each other with Italian airings; so
I let loose my pent-up English talk, after those weeks of unnatural
silence, and tumbled out exclamation and question as they came--I was
voluble, enjoying the release of the tongue, and there were forty things
I wanted to say and hear, for this meeting was quite unexpected and
exceedingly opportune; and so I chattered forth my surprise and
pleasure, and then--and then I found them left upon my hands, somehow,
and I looked rather a fool.
“Ma senta, senta,” said Deering. He smiled, but he was firm. He couldn’t
deal with me on these insular terms in Rome; he made me feel it without
explanation, but the fact was that he simply couldn’t allow me to be so
inappropriate, so falsely attuned to the time and place. There we stood
in the heart of Rome, with the palaces of princes around us, secluded
among winding streets all dark with wicked history; and here was
Deering, disguised as a Roman himself, with a great black hat and a suit
of dead-black clothes; and I had stuttered out my poor innocent
school-talk, college-gossip, heaven knows what, a scrannel-pipe to the
suave warble of his flute. Had I come all the way to Rome to be still a
British undergraduate even there? Well, as for that, he very soon put it
right. He was kindness itself, but he had the upper hand of me in these
foreign parts, where he was so serenely at home and I so ecstatically at
sea. His was the advantage, as indeed I quite understood, and he used it
from the first. He gently set me in my place, not without an indulgent
smile.
“Senta, senta pure,” he said--or words to that effect; whatever they
were they keenly struck me as the very words I had wanted and missed in
my ignorant solitude. That was the way to talk to a Roman; I might have
missed it for ever, but Deering had picked it up, no doubt, the first
time he put on his broad-brimmed hat. How long had he been in Rome? I
was allowed to ask that question at least, and it appeared that he had
come to Rome for a week, six months before, and had stayed on and on
because he had happened to find rooms that pleased him. They were far
from the “English ghetto,” so he said, meaning that they were far from
the hotels and the Piazza di Spagna and touristry in general; and he had
just finished his siesta and was on his way to a café in the Via
Nazionale, where he usually spent some hours of the afternoon. And I,
where was I going? As a matter of fact I had vaguely thought of
wandering away and away, out of the city and into the country--from
whence I should return in the dusk, luxuriously tired, solemnly
enraptured, to climb the long stairs to my own little lodging, my
Arcadian meal and couch. But this I concealed from Deering; I felt at
once I must protect my dear sentimental delights from his ironic eye.
Moreover _my_ lodging, which I had thought so knowingly Roman, proved
to be full in the middle of the English ghetto; I kept this too from him
as long as I could.
His siesta, his café, his rooms remote from the vulgar--oh I had such a
vision, as he mentioned these, of the kind of Roman career that I had
failed to go in for hitherto. Deering _lived_ in Rome, I had floated on
the surface. Never mind--I threw over my private romance and adopted
Deering’s reality on the spot. He seemed to be immensely informed, and
there was a charming insolence in his wisdom; I might put my tenderest
fancies behind me and screen them in his presence, but he saw that I was
a soft young enthusiast, and he patronized me with the sweetness of his
coo, his smile, his winning gesture. He delicately blasted whatever had
appeared to me of interest and renown, he showed me the crudity of my
standards. I might feel a passing twinge, for I hadn’t been used to
regarding myself as a thing with which Deering could be indulgent and
amused. And yet I was flattered, I was magnified by his fastidious
irony; it brought me into a new world of mind and taste, more exclusive
than my own.
But I obviously couldn’t give way to him in the matter of being so very
Italian that we mightn’t talk our own language. He could take me into
another world, but to endow me at the same time with a new speech was a
miracle beyond him. “Ma come, ma come,” he said encouragingly; he
implied that in the real life of illumination we are all free of the
golden tongue, the tongue of the clear Latin _civiltà_. It seemed he
could hardly frame his lips to the uncouth noises of the northern Goth.
He brought out an English phrase with an air of handing it over to me
between disgustful finger-tips, and he relapsed unconsciously as he did
so into the sweeter idiom. Ah Deering, Deering! That unconsciousness of
his was a finished performance, I could believe he had practised it
before the glass. “But you, my dear,” he said, “you surely speak the
language like the rest of us--eh magari!” I confessed that I spoke the
language like a barbarian fresh from my native wild; I should listen to
him and the rest of them with pleasure, but to me he must talk our poor
old English. “And who _are_ the rest of you?” I demanded.
He answered my question at some length, inadvertently recovering his
former tongue. In six months of Roman life he had made many friends; he
had fallen into a circle that suited him as aptly as his rooms. “I
scarcely know how it happened,” he said, “but I seemed to find my feet
here from the first.” He apparently attributed a great deal of his
fortune to the café of the Via Nazionale; a right instinct had taken him
there in the beginning, and thereafter all had run smoothly. He had met
a journalist, he had met an actor or a lawyer or a doctor--anyhow he had
met somebody whom the ordinary Cook-driven tourist, slaving round the
ruins and the galleries, would have missed infallibly; and so he had
entered a company which belonged--he insisted on it--to the _real_ Rome,
the city unsuspected of our gaping countrymen. His secret was to “live
the life of the place,” he said; and let there be no mistake, the life
of the place is to be found among the shops and tramways of the business
quarter, nowhere else. It must be owned that in Rome a stranger runs
many a risk of overlooking the true life on these terms, which are the
terms that Deering laid down with high lucidity; for even if you avoid
the ghetto of the tourist on one hand, and the romantic desolation of
the Campagna (to which I myself was addicted) on the other, you may
still make a further mistake--and I put it to Deering that it really
depends on what you _call_ the life of Rome. There is the community of
the “student,” for example; and I should have thought that Deering, with
his rare vein of taste in the arts, would haunt the workshops of young
sculptors, ragged painters and poets--weren’t they as plentiful in Rome
as summer flies?
I had interrupted Deering’s exposition; he wanted to tell me more about
the ease with which he had dropped into the heart of Rome. But he broke
away from that, with another of his patient intelligent smiles, to
explain to me how much I failed to understand. There was no more any
life of _that_ kind in Rome--no romantic art. Did I think that those
horrible theatrical old men, those bedizened little boys and girls, who
still loaf upon the Spanish Steps and waylay the foreigner--did I think
they were genuine “models,” waiting for real painters to carry them off
and paint them? I supposed then that I was living in the Rome of Hans
Andersen and Nathaniel Hawthorne? He abounded in his sarcasm. Ragged
poets indeed! My notion of the _vie de Bohème_ was a little behind the
times, fifty years or so. “Ah you live in books,” said Deering--he
rallied me on it; “in Rome you must come out of books--I shall drag you
out of Hawthorne.” As a matter of fact he knew the young poets of Rome,
he had several friends among them; it was no use my looking for them in
garrets and operatic wine-cellars near the Tiber; the Via Nazionale was
the place, vulgar as I thought it with its crowds and trams and
plate-glass--and he was off again, with his sweet flat voice and his
neat enunciation, describing the extraordinary favour that the
journalists had shown him, or perhaps the actors.
It was remarkable, he said, how they accepted him as one of themselves.
“There seems to be something of the Italian in me,” he mentioned once or
twice, “nothing to be proud of!”--and he smiled with pride. I could
honestly tell him that there was at least nothing English in his
appearance, since he had taken to powdering his nose and to clothing
himself like an undertaker. The remark about his nose I indeed reserved,
but my allusion to his clothes was a happy one. He immediately glanced
with quiet approval at his hands, and I remembered how in earlier years,
when we were both small boys at school, he had once pointed out to me
that he had hands “like a Botticelli.” He ought to have been grateful to
me for the self-restraint I had shown in withholding that confidence
from the light. I had been surprisingly discreet, I had never used his
Botticelli hands against him in our free-spoken circle, and I was glad
of it now. Here in Rome, set free from the old snobberies of boyhood, I
was ready to take his hands quite seriously, and even the paste of
powder with which he had corrected the tint (inclining rather to Rubens)
of his nose. His black clothes were designed to set off his elegant
wrists and tapering fingers; and if a nose invariably scorched by the
sun was a weight on his mind, as I know it was, he found support in the
well-drawn oval of his face. He was not very tall, and unfortunately he
was not very slender; it was only too plain to see that before long he
would be plump. But nevertheless he might reasonably tell himself that
his figure, as he stood by the fountain and thoughtfully eyed his hands,
had a hint and a suggestion, I don’t say more, of something you might
call--of something he hoped I was calling--a lily-droop, swaying
lightly.
I can see him bend and sway accordingly; and I can recall the bright
stream of sensation in my own mind, where the old desire to scoff at his
elegancies had apparently changed to respect and envy. What a free
world, I thought, what a liberal and charming, in which a stupid
prejudice could dissolve and drop away so quickly! Perhaps I didn’t
quite understand that my respect was not so much for Deering as for
myself, not so much for Deering’s pretty graces as for my own
emancipation; but my envy of his Italian ease and competence was indeed
sincere. I would seize, yes I would, such an opportunity of learning,
discovering, experiencing; I would follow Deering, accept his guidance
and pay him his price--for his price was a small one, merely a little
tacit backing of his own view of himself. He would expect me to agree
with him that his face had a species of haunting charm; he would expect
me, at any rate, not to imply that it hadn’t. It was a trifling
indemnification for the many times he had been told in former days that
he had a face like a rabbit. I would gladly support him in abolishing
the memory of all that ribaldry; I should be rewarded by observing my
own tolerance with satisfaction and by becoming acquainted at the same
time with this “real Rome” of Deering’s--he was still fluting on about
its reality.
We shuffled for a while to and fro across the sunny little square. Now
and then a bare-headed woman came pattering by, twisting her neck for a
firm round stare at us as she went; children looked on from a distance,
struck dumb in their play by our oddity. Deering talked and talked; he
too felt the relief of uttering himself, no doubt--for I could well
believe that the real Rome didn’t supply a listener who understood him
as I did. Not one of those actors or poets, for example, could measure
the difference between Deering of old, flouted and derided, and this
remarkable young personage, ornament of a strange society, who was now
willing to be the patron of such as I. Deering talked, I appreciated the
difference; I did my part with a will, and he bloomed in the warmth of
my recognition. For six months, moreover, he had been displaying the
new, the very newest culture, and his associates hadn’t really been in a
position to perceive it. An Englishman who avoided the old ruins and
churches, who sat through the April afternoon at a marble-topped
table--why his companions would of course take him for an Englishman who
behaved, for a wonder, in a natural and commendable fashion; and this
was where I again came in so aptly, for I could do justice to the
originality and the modernity of his proceeding. It wasn’t as though
Deering sat in a café because he knew no better, because he was the kind
of person whose ideas are bounded by plush and gilt and plate-glass. He
sat there, avoiding the nightingales on the Aventine, the sunset in the
Campagna, because he knew all that and more, and because the rarity of
the perversity of his culture led him back again, round again, to the
scream of the tramway in the “business quarter.” I, who had watched him
of old, could be trusted to distinguish these niceties; there it was
that I came into the game, and he didn’t hesitate--he brought me into
play.
“Yes,” he murmured, musing gently upon my state of romance, “yes, I
should like to drag you out of literature once for all. Come out of
your books, come to Rome--come with me.” I could truthfully say that I
would go with pleasure; and as for my books, I was quite willing to let
him label me as he chose--I accepted the part for which he cast me. I
was the victim of the romantic fallacy, and it all came of my looking
for life in antiquated fiction--in Zola even, in Zola as like as
not--instead of looking for it in the raw red world: such was the part
he assigned me, and I have ever been one to fall in with an arrangement
of this kind. People, I long ago found, are never happy till they have
decided that you are this or that, some recognizable type; and for
yourself the line of least resistance is always to let them have their
way. In my time I have played many parts, acting up to the theory and
the expectation of my different companions; it saves trouble, it spares
one the effort of assertion. There are even those with whom I have been
able to assume the very attitude that Deering had now adopted towards
me, the attitude of a liberal patron towards a muddle-headed young
innocent; and then I have patronized as glibly as I now submitted.
Deering saw in the look with which I answered him the exact shade of
awkward modesty that he demanded. It was well; he approved my fluency in
the part that had fallen to me.
It was settled, then, that he was to hale me out of my sentimental
twilight into the broad noon of reality; I had lived for too long in a
dream, and now he promised himself the amusement of dispelling my
illusions. So be it; I told him I asked nothing better than to follow
his lead, and I told myself that at least I had a sharper eye for the
“facts of life” (my phrase) than ever Deering would have. We were both
well-pleased, therefore; and I wonder at which of us the spirit of
Rome, glancing that afternoon over the Square of the Tortoises, smiled
and chuckled most benignly. It was Deering at any rate, of the two of
us, who made the more intricate object of study; anybody might be drawn,
even Rome, to pause and consider him as a child of his time. When he
slipped his arm through mine and daintily drew me forward on our
way--the way to reality!--I don’t think the first comer would have
guessed that he was about to become my sponsor in the raw red world. His
graceful hands seemed rather to flutter in deprecation of any world more
earthly than the sea-pallor, say, of a sunrise in the manner of
Botticelli. But that, for Deering, was just the fun of it. Of the
sea-pale dawn he could honestly say, and he did say, “J’ai passé par
là”; in an earlier stage of his culture he had duly swooned in the
ecstasy of the burnished moment, the discriminated pulse of the
perfected sensation; but at that time he had worn an Eton jacket, and
years had flown since then, and by now his eye-lids were more than a
little weary of the raptures he had outlived. He, more precocious than
I, had left his books at the moment when I was making the first
discovery of mine; he no longer read any books at all, he told me, and
if he didn’t add that life was his book it was only because the phrase,
when he was about to utter it, struck him as old-fashioned and obvious.
“‘Youth’s sweet-scented manuscript’--you remember?”--he ventured on
that, guarding himself with a slightly acid intonation of the pretty
words.
And so Deering turned me away from the ilex-shadows and grey spaces of
an evening on the Aventine and in the further country; he clung to my
arm and directed me to the clatter of the city, and that was how it all
began. He gave me a push, with his benediction, and one thing led to
another, and I started to collect some Roman pictures of a new sort. I
stored away my more sentimental bits and notes of impression, carefully
saving them from the eye of Deering; I laid them aside, and certainly
they are not worth disturbing again at this late hour. But as for these
others, the new sort, I think it might be amusing to bring them briefly
to the light, one by one; though I don’t pretend that even with Deering
to point the way I penetrated far into Rome or the world either. After
all his offers to induct and indoctrinate me, nothing came of them to
speak of; I saw not a sign of rawness or redness, that I can
remember--so I suppose I must conclude that the heart of life escaped me
still. But even the fringes of life, if that is all they were, seemed
strange and memorable in Rome; nobody who lived in Rome, nobody who
breathed the golden air as a matter of course, nobody who trod the
sacred soil as an everyday affair, could be less than a wonder to a
rather lean young northern soul, whose lodging in the Piazza di Spagna
had only been hired by the month. The spring days were endless, but they
flashed away faster than I could count; presently they would all be
gone, and I should have to leave Rome to the few free happy creatures,
such as Deering, who could stay because they liked it, stay in Paradise
because they happened to prefer it--I should think they might! As
Deering and I, arm in arm, left the square and the babbling fountain, I
was quite overcome by my jealousy of his detachment from cares and ties,
from the stupid thrums of responsibility that so soon drag most of us
away from the Rome of our desire.
“So here you are living in Rome,” I said dejectedly, “with nothing to
prevent you from staying for ever.” Deering was his own master, I knew,
and he sedulously cultivated a frosty indifference to any claims at
home, such as they were, that might have hampered him. I didn’t exactly
admire his ruthless way, but I certainly envied it. I should like to
have had that faculty of ignoring, blankly and serenely, what I chose to
ignore; it would have been a great convenience. All I needed was a
little of Deering’s real independence of opinion; for I can’t think I
was embarrassed by many good warm qualities of heart and temper. Deering
was no unkinder than I, only bolder, more secure in his power to stand
alone. And then he had another immense advantage; he could always be
sympathetically impressed by his own performance, he was an excellent
audience of himself. “Living in Rome?” he echoed--“you don’t know me! I
shall take to the road again before long. But you’re not tormented, as I
am, by the gypsy in the blood. There are times when I envy the like of
you, the decent, the home-keeping----” He broke off with a sigh--a sigh
in which I could almost hear the involuntary murmur of applause. Yes,
the gypsy in the blood was a good stroke, and I think a new one.
II. VIA NAZIONALE
When we presently swung open the plate-glass door of the café that had
done so much for Deering, he was manifestly anxious--suppose that just
on this afternoon it should fail of its effect! For his sake as well as
for my own I hoped we should find reality there as usual. He glanced
searchingly among the tables, most of which were crowded about by hot
and talkative men; there was a tremendous rattle of conversation in all
parts of the big pillared saloon. He paused for a moment, and then he
nodded with relief in the direction of a distant corner; he twisted his
way there between the tables, I followed him, and we found a gap upon a
plush seat, under a huge mirror painted with sprays of climbing
water-lilies. We squeezed ourselves into the vacant space with polite
apologies, and Deering immediately introduced me to a young man who sat
facing us, a big young man with a low collar and a straw hat much too
small for him. Deering mentioned his name, “Mr. Bannock,” and Mr.
Bannock extended a large hand and said he was happy to meet me.
He was a young and rather common American; he smiled upon me with a wide
mouthful of teeth and said he was pleased to make my acquaintance. I
began to respond as I could, but he interrupted me to say that he was
glad to know a friend of “our friend Mr. Deering.” I began again, but he
broke in to observe that our friend Mr. Deering was a lovely man. I
rejoined that Deering was quite the loveliest of---- “And I can tell you
something about him that you may not know,” said Mr. Bannock, spreading
his palm at Deering as though he were showing off a picture; “our friend
Mr. Deering is not only a lovely man, he is a great artist--and I go
further, I say that Mr. Deering possesses the most remarkable
understanding of, and sympathy with, the mentality of the artist that it
has ever been my lot to encounter. And when I assert that even an old
friend of Mr. Deering like yourself may be ignorant of that side of his
character, I am thinking of that positively damnable modesty of his,
which has prevented him, which always _will_ prevent him----” But I
can’t do justice to the turn of the periods of Mr. Bannock, which coiled
around and around me like an anaconda, slowly deadening my attention.
Between the limber muscularity of his phrases and the glittering
crescent of his teeth I was numbed and fascinated. He continued to
address me as an old but not a very perceptive friend of Deering’s, and
I felt like a wisp in his firm clasp.
From Deering’s character he passed to the mentality of the artist in
general; “mentality” was a word to which he returned rather often, and I
think it must have been a new word in those days, for I have always
associated it peculiarly with Mr. Bannock. He sketched some of the
characteristics of the artist--“the artist as I see him,” he said; he
mentioned that possibly pride, “hard clean masculine pride,” was his
dominant quality. The lecture proceeded, Deering and I sat dumb before
the speaker. Mr. Bannock had a gesture to match his phrase; he scooped
the air with his broad palms, he sawed it with the edge of his hand, he
riddled it with his outspread fingers. His arms were perpetually in
movement from the shoulder; they withdrew to his side, they unfolded,
length upon length, to ram home the strongest points of his discourse.
It was the professional skill of his gesticulation, neither awkward nor
yet spontaneous, that presently gave me a clue to Mr. Bannock; or
perhaps it was not only this, but something in his talk about “the
artist--the artist who aims at a certain poignancy of beauty--a beauty
that _stabs_”; anyhow I soon connected him with the stage, and I
wondered how a large-faced young American, with a strange brassy accent
in his speech, should find his occupation on the stage of Rome. Deering,
when the coils of oratory happened to loosen for a moment, enlightened
me.
Mr. Bannock, it appeared, sang at the opera; Deering said so, and Mr.
Bannock gave a loud trumpet-snort of laughter at the words. “Sing? Come,
Mr. Deering, tell your friend another!” The snort expressed derisive
irony, I gathered. “I sing, oh I sing superbly--sometimes! You can come
and hear me at the opera ’most any evening--now and then! I shall be
singing there this very night--next year!” He was bitter, he was wounded
by some thought in his mind; his elbow was on the table, his chin on his
hand, a sneer upon the expanse of his face. I didn’t clearly understand,
but Deering seemed to have made a _gaffe_, and I felt awkward for half a
minute. But it was all right; Mr. Bannock was exalted by a grievance of
which Deering had reminded him. He rose to it with melancholy passion. I
didn’t like to question him, and for some time he was enigmatic, darkly
ejaculating; but then he addressed himself directly to me. He said that
I might like to hear a story--it chanced to be _his_ story, but that
didn’t matter; it would interest me as the story of an artist, _any_
artist in these days. He was engaged, he said, in an operatic company,
here in Rome, which had bound itself by many solemn promises; he was to
have the singing of several parts, small parts indeed, but parts in
which some people had thought him--well, satisfactory. He wouldn’t have
me rely on _his_ word for it--he should like me to look at a paragraph
or two that had appeared in the press at home; he produced an immense
pocket-book and began to hand me papers, explaining that he didn’t do so
from conceit, but simply that I might see how matters stood. This
company in Rome had engaged him, and it was a fact, account for it as I
might, that the seven operas in which he was to have sung were never
produced, were withdrawn whenever they were announced, though he had
good reason to know that the public were asking for them. The company
preferred to go forcing on the public a couple of ancient pieces, played
invariably to an empty house; and why did they so prefer? He could tell
me a story about _that_, and about the woman who squalled the chief part
in the blamed old things. How often had he himself appeared in a month,
did I suppose? Would I guess? Twice--in what happened to be the two
poorest parts of his repertory. Well, he had told me the story for a
curious illustration of the treatment of art in these places; as a
friend of Mr. Deering’s I was interested, for sure, in anything that
touched the artist, and the artist, poor devil, is a man who _feels_
when he is touched.
Yes, he feels--life cuts and hurts him; but then the leading strain in
his character, you remember, is his pride. “Hard clean--” but Mr.
Bannock bethought himself to vary the phrase this time; the pride of the
man was now stark, stern, steel-true. His pride was becoming more and
more alliterative when I happened to glance at Deering, who was silently
occupied with a tiny glass of some vivid pink liquor. From the
shapeless face and cheap hat and dirty collar of Mr. Bannock I looked
round at Deering beside me, and I received a singular shock. Deering
bent over his pink potion with a languid air, cultivating his
flower-frailty much as usual; but I saw him in a new light, and he
appeared to me fresh and fine, wearing a peculiar wholesome difference
in the clack and racket of the marble saloon. We were allies, after all;
my sense of our partnership gushed suddenly warm behind my eyes. Didn’t
he make the aggrieved young barytone look dingy?--and I turned back to
Mr. Bannock with a perception quickened for an accent in his manner, for
a tone in his sonority, which I began to observe more intelligently. I
thought I saw that Mr. Bannock was a little shy of Deering, a little
impressed, like me, by his freshness and fineness.
But another young man had sidled his way towards us through the
close-ranked tables, and both my companions hailed him freely and drew
him into our party. This was a quick-eyed youth, slender and shabby; he
greeted us with a word or two jerked out of him briefly as he sat down,
and then he saw that I was a stranger and bounced upon his feet to shake
hands with me across the table. “Mr. Jaffrey,” said Deering, introducing
him, “but you may call him Jaff.” I liked the look of Jaff--he seemed
very simple and bashful. Deering summoned a waiter and gave an order; he
treated Jaff as his own property, with a peremptory kindness that sat
well on him. “You shall drink what I choose to give you,” he said,
meeting Jaff’s expostulation. Jaff was English--as English as Peckham
Rye; and I began to think he might be a poet, when Deering told me that
he danced--danced at the “Eden” or the “Wintergarden” or some such
place, which I took to be a gaudy setting for a youth so gently coloured
as this. He was exhausted, tired to death; he drank off the draught that
Deering had prescribed, he sank back in his chair and sighed; and then
he brightened up with a stammer of apology and leaned forward to take
his part in our circle. Deering contemplated him pleasantly, and
mentioned that a dancer’s was a violent life. “I believe you,” said the
young man, with a sudden hard emphasis of disgust.
He then began to talk at a great rate; he poured out his tale in a
flood, twitching his head, snapping his eyes at us all in turn. Peckham
Rye sounded more and more clearly in his voice, which ran up in nervous
squeaks as his story culminated; his broken and bungled phrases were
extremely unlike Mr. Bannock’s. Mr. Bannock, by the way, seemed also
inclined to be indulgent and protective towards Jaff. “We all spoil
him,” Mr. Bannock remarked to me, patting Jaff on the shoulder. But Jaff
didn’t notice him particularly, or me either; as his story grew shriller
and more urgent it was directed especially at Deering, with questions
and appeals to him which Deering nodded a sympathetic reply to now and
then. Rather a spoilt child, perhaps--but I liked the young dancer, and
his story soon touched my own sympathy too. He was tired and hungry and
discouraged under his eager friendliness; he seemed to have been
strained too tight by a life of ill luck. And then, as he talked on,
there appeared a sad little vein of ugliness in his candour; his
eagerness was streaked with bits of cruelty and cunning which he looked
too simple, too slight and light, to have imagined for himself. His
story, I dare say, didn’t greatly differ from the resentful Bannock’s;
it was all about the lying, cheating, swindling, bullying which reigned
in the high places of the “Olympia” or the “Trianon.” But Jaff was not
so much resentful as tired and bewildered; and he couldn’t meet the
assault of life with any massive conceit of himself, only with his poor
little undigested fragments of bleak experience.
Were these two, I wondered, fair examples of the bright company which
Deering had described? In that case it was less Roman and more
Anglo-Saxon than I had supposed, but certainly they drew the eye to a
background of life in Rome that was strange to me. The romance of Rome
didn’t count for much in the agitation of these two young aliens; they
hadn’t noticed that the city differed from another, except in the
harshness of its behaviour to a stranger. Here at once, then, was a pair
of settlers in Rome who trod the seven hills as though they were dust of
the common world. Bannock and Jaff hadn’t lived in books, and they might
just as well have lived in Buffalo or Wolverhampton for any gold they
breathed in the Roman air. In twenty minutes Deering had brought me a
thousand miles from the Fountain of the Tortoises, quietly dribbling its
poetic prattle in the shadow of ancient splendour. Life in the Via
Nazionale had a harder edge to it, no doubt--and I saw in a moment that
life in the Via Nazionale _was_ the real thing, in a kind of a sense,
for in truth it was much nearer to Rome of the Caesars than I had ever
been before, in all my meditations by quiet fountains. Consider, imagine
that you were suddenly dropped into the heart of imperial Rome, with a
friend to conduct you, Horace or Martial, as Deering had conducted
me--would you presently find yourself romancing among old ruins in the
sunset? No, you would be sitting among a crowd in a new-gilded saloon,
your elbows on a marble-topped table, and it is more than likely you
might be listening to a tale of grievance and indignation from a couple
of alien mountebanks, lately arrived in Rome and already wishing
themselves back in their own Iberia or Pannonia. Taken in this way by an
intelligent imagination, Via Nazionale would prove a profounder romance
than the Palatine Hill at shut of an April evening.
There I was, you see, back again in my literary yearnings! It seemed
impossible for me to take life plainly; I _had_ to dress it up somehow
in romantic rags. I could feel the needle-point of Deering’s irony, if I
should tell him what I was already making of our session under the
painted mirror. “Can’t you _live_--isn’t life enough for you?”--he would
blandly smile the question at me, fingering the tiny slender cigarette
that he lit after swallowing his potion. I didn’t tell him, so I hadn’t
to meet the question; but I really might have asked, if it came to that,
whether Bannock and Jaff, taken plainly, furnished life enough for
_him_. Of course they were only an instalment--we should see more in
good time. But meanwhile they abounded, the two of them, in their
exceedingly diverse styles; they appeared intent on providing our friend
(me they had quite forgotten) with as much of the material of their
distresses as they could squeeze into the hour. They got considerably in
each other’s way; each wanted the ear of Deering to himself, but I
noticed that Mr. Bannock, for all the power of his winding coils, had by
no means the best of it with Jaff’s more nimble and headlong dash. Jaff,
moreover, was favoured by Deering, and the pat of Mr. Bannock’s hand on
Jaff’s shoulder grew sharp and impatient. “Yes, yes, my dear man,” he
said, “we all have our little troubles--but I want to lay a case before
you, Mr. Deering, and I don’t want you should necessurrily think of it
as _mine_, though mine it be. I take the larger ground, and I ask you,
Mr. Deering, to follow me in proclaiming to God’s firmament that the
tragedy of the artist, poor devil, is a tragedy of five lawng----”
Indeed, indeed Mr. Bannock was impressed by Deering; he admired my
Deering’s fine white hand and expensive black suit. He _courted_
Deering--I could see it in the bend of his attention, I could hear it in
the respectful catch of his voice, when he listened and replied to some
interpolation of Deering’s in the midst of the long long tragedy. “Allow
me to say, Mr. Deering, that that is an exceedingly true observation.”
And as for Deering himself, though he found the style of the young
barytone oppressive, he was evidently drawing a trifle of satisfaction
from his homage. And more and more I was impressed myself by the charm
of Deering’s graceful and well-appointed superiority over his
companions, over the scuffles and squabbles out of which the poor young
mountebanks appealed to him. I began to measure the distance between the
stage of the Trianon--where Jaff had been prancing through long hours of
rehearsal, so I gathered, bawled at all the time by “that old beast
Levissohn”--between Jaff’s Trianon and the Botticelli picture in which
Deering lived aloof. Bannock and Jaff, they were attracted to the
elegant leisure of the picture, and no wonder. There weren’t many
Botticellis in _their_ world; it was to their credit that they made the
most of one when they had the chance. And Deering, though the dancer was
shrill and the singer ponderous, did most evidently appreciate their act
of homage.
I was caught by a word of Jaff’s (he had managed to burst into the long
tragedy of the artist), something he said about expecting presently to
see “Edna--my sweetheart, you know.” He threw it out carelessly, and I
was struck by the casual felicity of his calling Edna his
“sweetheart”--pleasing old word! Edna was to join us immediately; she
had been detained at the Trianon (where she performed with Jaff) by
“poor Madam Dowdeswell,” who had been having a rare scrap with
Levissohn, the beast. Edna would turn up in a minute, and I was
picturing Jaff’s sweetheart becomingly when he spoilt the effect of the
word by using it again--he said that Levissohn had got a new sweetheart
now, a fool of a Russian girl, and the prettiness went out of the word
as I perceived that it was technical, prescriptive, not a chance
flourish. Too sugared in its archaism for the cultured, it lived
vulgarly in the speech of Jaff and his circle--I noticed the oddity and
disliked it. But I looked with interest on Edna when she did presently
appear, slipping through the crowded room towards us like a lithe little
fish. Jaff gathered her in and handed her to our table with agreeable
authority; they made an appealing pair together, so childish and so
English, and I could have wished to snatch them up and carry them off,
away from Madam Dowdeswell and Levissohn, it I had known at all where
else to put them. Edna was small and restless, a scrap of bright
quicksilver; she slid into the talk of our table with a shimmer of
playfulness, infantile nonsense and cajolery that refreshed us; her
thin cockney freedom danced over us all. She scrambled on to the plush
seat by Deering and flung an arm confidentially round his neck.
I never saw Jaff and Edna perform their turn at the Trianon, indeed I
never saw them again; I don’t know what became of them or whether they
managed to get what I soon found they ardently desired. They disappeared
into the void, so far as I was concerned, and all I can do for them is
to breathe a far-away blessing on their pretty young heads--young no
longer now, wherever they are. Their ambition at that time, as I soon
discovered when Edna began to talk seriously to Deering, was by hook or
by crook to reach America; they were going to have such brilliant times,
such dashing successes, if once they could get clear away from this old
rotten Europe. “Darling sweeting Deering,” said Edna--she crooned, and
this was when she began to be really serious, mellifluously in Deering’s
ear; “you _do_ love us, don’t you?” She coaxed, she blandished him
discreetly; and even as she piped her childishness in her weak cockney
vowel-tones she looked forlorn and wan after all, a child over-tired and
not far from tears. Poor thin-armed Edna, she knew what she wanted and
she wasted no time over laments and grievances. “Deering dear,” she
said, “_if_ you love us, I’ll tell you a secret--you’re a duck, and I’ve
always said so.” Deering gleamed at her sarcastically, and she shot out
a lively grimace, an imitation of his look, with a good deal of humour.
“And so, ducky Deering, _as_ you love us, I’ll tell you another.” But
she didn’t--she dropped suddenly grave and wistful, and sat silent. I
remember that quick shine of gravity through her play, and I hope more
than ever that she and Jaff have found their fortune, wherever it may
have awaited them, and enjoyed it.
Nobody else came to join us; but these three were enough to give me a
picture that abides with me, a picture in which Rome becomes a place of
less account than Wolverhampton, and a picture in which our good Deering
becomes, so strangely, a personage of weight and worth, a pillar of the
world. For you see what he stood for, what he was turned into, when he
entered his new Bohemia of the Via Nazionale, the unromantic Bohemia
which may remind me of imperial Rome, but certainly not of the Rome of
poor dear Hawthorne. Deering, seated between Bannock and Jaff, fluttered
over by pretty Edna, was changed into a man of substance, a man to whom
the struggling Bohemian stretched an appealing hand; for Deering had his
own firm ground above them--and he might step down into their midst on a
fine afternoon, but he could always get back again, if he would, for a
comfortable evening out of reach of the mountebanks. Did I see them
drawn by the charm of his elegance, the grace of his fair hand as he
toyed with his rose-tipped cigarette? Oh they felt it, no doubt, but
they felt it for the mark of his security in the great free expensive
world; if Deering could trifle so daintily with his pleasure it was
because he commanded such resources--such a power of connexions, of
ramifying alliances, and of sound money too, mark you, as like as not. I
thought I understood very well. Not every day did Bannock or Jaff or
Edna meet with a Deering, school and college style, Cambridge and Oxford
bred, the real right thing--not every day, at least in the wilderness of
Rome, and never and nowhere at all, perhaps, a Deering so indulgent and
a Deering of that exquisite insight into the mentality of the artist.
Coax him and court him then, by all means--I don’t blame you.
Edna’s way was much the best, but of course she had the unfair
privileges of her sex. It wasn’t only that she could pat him on the head
(most discreetly, I must say) even among all those painted mirrors; but
she could gush at him with her nonsense instead of orating or lamenting,
and then she could drop suddenly silent and wan, lonely as a child in
that chattering crowd. This last effect, it is true, was uncalculated;
she didn’t invent her swift and pallid subsidence, poor Edna, or
thoughtfully make use of it; but it was a part of her feminine
privilege, none the less, for of the trio of mountebanks Edna, being a
woman, was by far the oldest, and this last effect was the sign of her
age. She looked like a child--but Bannock and Jaff, beside her, _were_
children, fretful and bewildered and inexperienced; Edna was a hundred
years old in comparison, and her weariness was that of a grown-up human
being, far beyond the petulant fierce resentments of a child. She was a
woman, she had the privilege of maturity in her power to taste the
flatness and dreariness of the scuffle, while the men went on nagging
and beating their heads against its injustice. And so, though her way
seemed roundabout, she reached the point long before they did; with the
echo of her nonsense still in the air she had caught Deering into an
earnest discussion, subdued to an undertone which warned off the rest of
us, and I could hear her explaining and developing her scheme, laying it
before Deering in quick nervous phrases while she absently fingered the
objects on the table. That was Edna’s way--and I don’t know at all what
her scheme was or how she intended that Deering should help her, but I
think she achieved her purpose.
Jaff meanwhile was babbling to Bannock about the glory of America, or
rather he was asking a great many questions about it and never leaving
Bannock the time to unroll his answers. The barytone was properly ready
to exalt his country if he were given the chance, and I noticed that the
big pocket-book was again in his hand. But he was placed in a
difficulty; for the pocket-book showed how America honours the artist--I
caught a few words as he opened it, “By God, that country loves a Man,
but she _worships_ an Artist”--and yet he was not as eager as you might
have expected to return home for her delight. The young singer, he had
no plan of going back again; instead he had a very clear-cut design of
conquest on the stage of Europe, a design of which he managed to expose
the opening section (it took us in a bound as far as Cracow, I
remember); and Jaff’s urgent desire to be fed with the report of
Buffalo, her sympathy and bounty, did a little embarrass the home-raised
artist of that place. But Jaff was enthusiastic enough for two, for
twenty; he spun to and fro in his imagination while Bannock was finding
the first of his clippings; and for my part I sat and watched them,
entirely forgotten by the whole party, and felt like the lady in Comus,
considerably out of it.
The silver chirrup of Edna’s laughter rang forth again at last, her
grave-eyed colloquy was at an end. She slipped from her place on the
sofa, seized Jaff and plucked him out of our circle, kissed her hand to
us all and danced him off through the crowd--and that was the last I saw
of the mercurial pair. Good luck to them, I say; and I don’t withhold my
blessing from the solemn Bannock, who now evidently intended to settle
down firmly to _his_ grave talk with Deering, the distraction of the
other young people having cleared out of his way. He would have
preferred that I too should take my departure; but Deering held me back
when I rose, and we sat on together, the three of us, for a very long
hour. I relieved the time with more pink potions, while Bannock circled
the globe through the stages of his campaign. I was numb and dumb as
before; but Deering held out bravely, wagging his head with judicial
comment as the story marched over kingdom and continent. One point alone
I noted, one conclusion I drew; whatever it cost him, Deering occupied a
position in the Via Nazionale to which he was not indifferent. He owed
it to everything that he supposed himself to have shed and cast away,
finally, when he put on his broad-brimmed hat and eschewed the English
ghetto; he owed his position to his value (poor Deering!) as a
substantial and respectable Briton. But why dwell on a painful subject?
Deering had been welcomed into a society that included an opera-singer
and two dancers, he was at home and on his feet there; and which of the
respectable Britons at that moment strolling on the Pincio, glaring at
each other and listening to the band, could imaginably say the same?
III. PIAZZA DELLA CANCELLERIA
When at length we tore ourselves from the embraces of Bannock, on the
pavement by the tram-line, the dusk of the warm day was falling--it was
nearly dinner-time. I had no wish to leave my hold of Deering, having
once secured him; he would surely now take me, I suggested, to dine in
some clever place where I could pursue my research and discover still
more of the world. Yes, he would; and he mused a little space, debating
on what new aspect of reality my eyes should next be opened. On the
whole he elected for the Vatican--so he strangely said; and he explained
what he meant as we descended the street, rounded its sharp twist, and
struck into the shabby expanse of the Piazza di Venezia. (The great
sugar-cake of the Monument of Italy, which has now smartened the piazza
to the taste of Domitian and Caracalla, hadn’t in those days begun to
appear; it still lurked low behind a tier of dingy hoarding.) We were to
dine, said Deering, at an eating-house near the Vatican--not
geographically near, but under its spiritual shadow; and by this he
signified that the company which it kept was papal, very black and papal
indeed--he was all for varying my experience to the utmost. What a
command of variety he possessed! He could lead me from the Trianon to
the Vatican in ten minutes--as free of the one as of the other, no
doubt; and he smiled naughtily as he admitted that his love of
observation took him into many queer places.
The Vatican, I urged, was the queerest place in the world--for _him_;
not that indeed I thought so in my own mind, but I knew it would please
him to think so in his. I easily saw my Deering, in fact, as a
frequenter of the “black,” demurely flirting with papistry, breathing
the perfume of that distinction, that fine-bred aloofness which it wears
with such an air. From some wonderful old saloon of the Farnese palace
or the Cancelleria (how did I know about them?--from Zola, of course),
with its beautiful faded hangings, with the high-backed papal throne
turned to the wall under its canopy, you may look down upon the jostle
of the vulgar as from nowhere else; and the most exquisite edge of your
disdain will fall (Deering would particularly appreciate this) on the
tourist, the hot-faced British matron, the long-toothed British
spinster, bustling or trailing around in their dowdy protestantism.
Obviously the very place for Deering, it seemed to me; but I quite
understood that I was to be surprised and amused at finding him
associated with ecclesiasticism of any sort, on any terms, even in a
quaint old cook-house like that to which he had presently guided me.
While we proceeded thither I delivered a sally or two on the subject of
his horrible perversity--that _he_ of all people should have friends in
the camp of the obscurantist! To have abandoned the fallen day of the
Gioconda’s dream (or was it her cave?) for an American bar--that was all
very well, and I had seen his point. But for Deering, the enlightened
and illuminated, to be hobnobbing with priestcraft, cultivating _that_
sensation--I threw up my hands in mirth and horror. Deering was
thoroughly pleased.
Our cook-shop was close to the palace of the Cancelleria, and the
solemnity of the vast pile hung above us in the dusk as we lingered for
a minute in the square. It discouraged my raillery; one can hardly take
a line of levity over the Romish persuasion in the presence of a Roman
palace. The eyes of its huge face are set in a stare of grandeur, of
pride, of massive obstinacy, quite unaware of the tittering insect at
its feet. If a grey-haired cardinal ever looks out of one of those
windows, holding aside the thread-bare folds of the damask--as he may,
for all I know--he looks without disdain upon the pair of tourists,
standing below, who find the page in their red handbooks and read the
description of the palace aloud to each other. He looks without disdain,
because utterly without comprehension; he has never so much as heard of
these alien sectarians, uninvited pilgrims from the world of outer
barbarism. That is my impression, and I scanned the rows and rows of the
Chancery windows in the hope of discovering some worn ascetic old
countenance at one of them; I should like to see a cardinal lean out to
enjoy a breath of evening air after the long studies of the day. But
Deering laughed at my admirable innocence--again!--and assured me that I
should see no cardinals here; they lived mostly in cheap lodgings near
the railway-station, and spent the day in poring over the share-list of
the morning paper. He didn’t really know, I retorted; he gave me the
answer that he considered good for me. “Wait then,” he said, “till you
meet with a cardinal outside the pages of a book”--but I never did, nor
possibly Deering either.
“Ah,” cried Deering suddenly, “Cooksey will tell you--Cooksey calls all
the cardinals by their Christian names.” We were just approaching the
low door of the Trattoria dell’ Oca, and a stout little man in a loud
suit was entering there in front of us. “Cooksey my dear, wait for your
friends,” cried Deering; and the little man faced round and greeted him
with a pleasant chuckle. Cooksey was red and genial; in his bright
check suit and his Panama hat he looked like the English globe-trotter
of tradition--I was instantly reminded of Mr. Meagles among the
Allongers and Marshongers. I can’t imagine any one more calculated, I
should have said, to send Deering shuddering and faint in the opposite
direction; but Deering smiled on him with all his sweetness, and we
passed together into the dark entry of the Goose. A plain but
distinguished Roman lady, heavily moustached, sat at a high desk inside;
she bowed graciously and called a sharp word to a chinless man,
evidently her husband, who dashed forth to make us welcome. Cooksey and
Deering were familiar customers, and we were handed to a table in an
inner room, close to the mouth of a small black recess--a cupboard
containing a little old dwarf-woman, like a witch, who was stirring a
copper sauce-pan on a stove, for the cupboard was the kitchen. It was a
much nicer place than the gilded hall of the Via Nazionale, and an
excellent meal, though slippery, was produced for us from the cupboard.
As for the wine, it came from the chinless man’s own vineyard at
Velletri--a rose-golden wine, a honey-sweet name.
Now for Cooksey. Deering tackled him at once on the question of the
cardinals, with malicious intention; and Cooksey shook his head,
chuckling, and remarked that they were a low lot, no doubt, take them
for all in all. “A poor degenerate lot,” he declared--“the college has
gone to pieces very badly. All exemplary lives, they tell me--and not
one of them would poison a fly, let alone a guest at his own table.”
Cooksey had jumped to our humour very pleasantly; he twinkled and
assured me that he longed, as Deering did and I must too, to hear of
scandals and dark secrets upon the backstairs of the Vatican. “But all I
ever find there,” he said, “is a pail of slops--I tumbled over one this
morning.” “You were on duty, were you?” asked Deering. Cooksey said yes,
and he went on to explain to me (“lest you should misconceive my
position”) that it wasn’t his duty to empty the slops. “That’s the duty
of Monsignor Mair, and I told him so, and he answered me back very
saucily indeed. I had to pursue him with a mop.” Cooksey, I learned,
held an office of some kind in the papal court--“unpaid, lavishly
unpaid”--which kept him in Rome for a term of months each year. “And
it’s still seven weeks to the holidays,” he said, “and I’ve spent all my
tin, and I daren’t ask the Holy Father to lend me any, because the last
time I did so he said he’d write home and tell my people I was getting
into extravagant ways.” Cooksey was delightfully gay; he assumed the
humour of a school-boy and it became him well, with his red face and his
jolly rotundity.
He ran along in the same strain, playing his irreverent cheer over the
occupation of his day. Nothing had gone right with him, he said, since
the morning; it wasn’t only the slop-pail, it had been one of his
unlucky days from the start. “First of all I was late for early school,”
he said; “I dashed round to church before breakfast (I always think of
it as early school), and I was three minutes late, and I fell with a
crash on the butter-slide which Father Jenkins had made in the middle of
the nave. That’s his little way--he thinks it funny; he reckons always
to catch somebody who comes running in at the last moment, and he scored
heavily this morning--I hurt myself horribly. And then I couldn’t attend
to my book because I was attacked by a flea, and just as I was cracking
it on the altar-step I found I had forgotten to button my braces; and
while I was attending to that I jabbed my stick in the face of a savage
old woman who was kneeling behind me; she gave me such a look--and the
other fellows told me afterwards I must go and apologize to her, because
it seems she’s a very special pet convert of Father Jenkins’s and would
be sure to complain to him if she was assaulted in church--that was the
way they put it. However I was comforted by one thing; just as I was
leaving I heard a great bump on the floor, and Father Jenkins had
tumbled on his own slide, the old silly, while he was rushing out to rag
the sacristan about something; and he sat there cursing and swearing
(_inwardly_, I will say for him), and I wanted to make a long nose at
him, but I was afraid it might be forbidden in church, like
spitting--not that the reverend fathers can say much about _that_!--”
Dear me, Cooksey _was_ volatile; he ran on more and more jovially,
gathering impetus as he talked.
I wished I could have questioned Deering about him--he seemed such an
odd product of the Vatican. The papal functionary was a middle-aged man;
he enjoyed his dinner with much emphasis, hailing the chinless man from
time to time (in fluent Italian idiom, but with a British accent that
caused Deering to glance round uneasily at the other tables)--summoning
the chinless man, Amerigo by name, for a word and a jest, peering into
the cupboard to banter the little witch-woman with the freedom of an old
admirer. “They know me, bless their hearts,” he remarked to me; “they
rob me as they all rob us all, and they know I know it and we’re the
best of friends. They’re all thieves together, these Romans--I tell ’em
so, and they like it. Now watch--” He called to Amerigo with an air of
indignation and began to accuse him--I forget how it was, but it
appeared that Amerigo was in the habit of grossly over-charging him in
some particular, and Cooksey was determined he would bear it no longer,
so he said, striking his knife-handle on the table defiantly; and
Amerigo spread his hands in voluble self-defence, earnestly contesting
the charge, and Cooksey held up his fist and retorted again, and they
argued the point--till Amerigo suddenly smiled across his anxious face,
darting a look at me as he did so, and Cooksey lunged at him playfully
in the stomach and clapped him on the shoulder. There was a burst of
laughter, in which Amerigo joined industriously, complaisantly, looking
again at me. Perhaps I misunderstood him, but he seemed to regard me as
the audience for whom the scene had been played. He had an eye in his
head.
Dismissing Amerigo, Cooksey began to examine me on my business in Rome,
and I was soon able to turn his enquiries upon himself. I found that he
had frequented Rome for many years, a dozen or more--“ever since a
certain event took place for me,” he said; and he paused, waiting for me
to ask what the event had been. He waited so explicitly that I felt no
delicacy; I put the question. “Oh, the _event_,” he said; “the event was
simply that I happened to become a Catholic.” He was grave for an
instant, apparently implying that my question was not in the best of
taste; but he overlooked it and passed on. He offered to do me the
honours of Rome, the kind of Rome I probably hadn’t discovered for
myself; and I nearly exclaimed that Deering was doing exactly that for
me at the moment--Cooksey was the kind of Rome, or one of the kinds,
that had been hidden from me till to-day. But all I said was something
suitably grateful, and he announced that he should take me in hand.
“You’ll find I keep very low company,” he observed, “monks and Jesuits
and such. My respectable English friends refuse to meet me when they
come to Rome. They think it disreputable of me to know so many priests.
But if you’re not afraid I’ll show you a few; rum old devils they are,
some of them--it’s all right, I call them so to their faces. We’re none
of us shy of a little plain speaking; you should hear Cardinal ----” the
name of the plain-spoken cardinal escapes me; but Cooksey had plenty to
say of him, dwelling with relish on the liberal speech of his eminence.
Then he slanted off into anecdotes, stories and scenes of clerical life,
in a funny little vein of frivolity and profanity that seemed by several
sizes too small for him, so stout and red and comfortable as he sat
there. He absorbed his dinner with a loud smacking satisfaction, and he
told stories of which the roguery consisted in talking very familiarly
of saints, of miracles, of the furniture of churches. “But I shock you,”
he remarked to me at length, enquiringly.
Did Cooksey shock me? Oh yes, he was sure of it, and he explained why he
was sure. “We all strike you as profane,” said he; his “we” stood for
those of his persuasion, that which I think of as the “Romish.” He
himself, he said, would have been frightened to death by such talk in
old days; he had been taught (like me, no doubt) that it was “beastly
bad form” to be simple and jolly in these matters. “We aren’t solemn, I
confess,” he proceeded; “we’re cheerful because we aren’t nervous, and
we aren’t nervous because we happen to feel pretty sure of our ground.
Now in old days I was as solemn as eight archbishops.” But he pulled
himself up. “I apologize, I apologize (the second time to-day!--but
you’ll be kinder than that old cat of Father J.’s). I’ll try to behave
with proper decorum--a great fat rascal like me! You wouldn’t think I
was born in the diocese of Bath and Wells. When I go back there now I
feel like a naughty boy in a sailor suit; I _can’t_ remember that I’m a
damnable heretic whom the dean and chapter ought to burn out of hand.”
So Cooksey settled that he was shocking, and the thought seemed to make
him more comfortable and expansive than ever. But with some notion of
attesting my own liberalism I then ventured on an anecdote myself, a
tale of a man who had prayed to a miracle-working image, somewhere in
Rome, and had been embarrassed by the shower of wonders that had
thereafter befallen him. It is quite a good story, the point being that
each of the miracles wrought was slightly off the mark, not exactly what
the man had asked for, and the humour appearing in the detail of the
saint’s misapprehension--he means so well, his mistakes are all so
natural. I told it brightly and candidly.
“Ah well,” said Cooksey, and he didn’t laugh. I was so frankly surprised
that my jaw dropped, as people say; I blushed hotly--there yawned
between us a pause. “On that subject,” said Cooksey, “I’m afraid we must
agree to differ. I happen to hold another view of the force of
devotion.” He stared with fixed eyes, munching slowly. I never was more
taken aback, and I was young enough to feel a burning shame of my
blunder. It seemed so awkward, so gawky of me to have offended in that
way; a civilized human being doesn’t jar the harmony of a circle in an
amusing old eating-house by the Cancelleria--he is sensitive to the
tone of the place. So Cooksey had it all his own way, and I sank in
shame. He didn’t let me off, not a tittle; he heavily maintained his
stare and his silence. It spoilt the rest of the evening for me, it
soured the wine of Velletri; though Cooksey, when he had deliberately
finished his gesture of disapproval, agreed to pretend that nothing had
happened, changed the subject and talked about the excavations on the
Palatine. Before long he was merrily continuing the story of his day,
part of which he had spent with a German archeologist in the House of
Augustus; he told us how his ill-luck had pursued him still, how he had
accidentally sat on the camera of the German and reduced it to powder;
he ignored the black hole I had made in the talk and turned his back on
it. But there it was, and I couldn’t forget it; my clumsiness fretted
me.
Cooksey had it all his own way at the time, but I reacted afterwards and
I didn’t fail to perceive that he had treated me unfairly. I was hot
with indignation, and it was long before I felt any kindness in return
for not a little on his part towards me. He was friendly, he was
helpful; it was assumed that we “agreed to differ” upon certain
subjects, and on that footing he gave me his protection. And I am sure I
don’t now grudge him the fun of his severity when I tried in my
presumption, that first evening, to take a hand in his game. It was
_his_ game, and I couldn’t expect him to admit an outsider like me; it
was mine to look on, a home-bred novice, and be a trifle fluttered and
shocked. Deering, I observed, was highly amused at my discomfiture; he
sat a little apart, looking pale and penetrating by contrast with
Cooksey’s red breadth and weight, and he watched us with a charming
sneer that was lost upon Cooksey, not upon me. He enjoyed the sight of
my indoctrination, my collision with this new little bit of the world of
Rome. If he couldn’t show me a cardinal he could produce an associate of
cardinals--or at any rate a man who had chased Monsignor Mair with a mop
on the backstairs of the Vatican, which was surely as good. Already I
had the means of correcting my fancy about the palace of the
Cancelleria--another illusion dispelled! Ascetic faces, solitary study,
proud aloofness indeed! Cooksey’s pranks and rogueries told a different
story; the guarded fortress of distinction that I had imagined--I had
now an inkling of its tone, in Deering’s opinion.
I don’t know about that; but Cooksey was undoubtedly a queer novel case
for my attention. He was showing off, it was clear; he was flourishing
his levity at an outsider; and his unexpected slap at my intrusion, when
you think of it, was extremely enlightening. He did so enjoy, you see,
his place as a member of the ring, inside the fortress; years had not
withered the freshness of it, had not staled the complacency of his
position. “Look at me, look,” he seemed to say, like a child who has
climbed a tree and balances on a branch; and then “look again,” like a
man walking familiarly on the terrace of a great grand house, while a
party of sightseers are marshalled by the butler. “See how easily we
carry our high estate--don’t you wish you were one of us, sharing the
fun?” And then, if you venture to presume, “Ah, _would_ you? No you
don’t--take _that_!” If you ever were the guest of the grand house and
happened to be pacing the terrace, carelessly, while the public were
shuffling through the state apartments and looking out of the windows,
you would sympathize completely with the mind of Cooksey. I can imagine
the sensation--who has not admired the nonchalant figure upon the
terrace, the creature of privilege at whom the public gaze from afar?
See him stroll at his ease, pause carelessly, call and wave lightly to a
companion under the sacred trees. Ah it is good to let the uninitiate
see how free one is, how playfully at home in the sanctuary of their
envy--for one can’t doubt that they do feel envy and are quick to be
conscious of their exclusion. Sweet, to be sure, are the uses of parade,
sweet and fresh after many a year.
One can’t have the public, however, stepping into the enclosure and
blundering into the fun of the talk; one draws back coolly if they begin
to take a liberty; and that too is a movement and a gesture enjoyable in
its quiet dignity. Cooksey, at the moment when he was delivering his
rebuke to me, was intensely dignified; I clearly remember the calm
decency with which he set me down. “On _that_ subject we must agree to
differ”; it was as though I had dealt him an ugly blow, but he could
make allowances for my want of the finer feelings. At the same time it
was more than a personal matter, and he couldn’t let me off my
punishment; so he gravely stared and allowed the lesson to sink home. It
was all the heavier for the contrast of his disapproval with the gay
rattle of his ordinary style. Cooksey, I had to admit, was much nearer
the heart of Rome than either Deering or I. He had arrived from as far
afield as we; but he had not only detached himself from Bath and Wells,
he had become a responsible member of the Roman state and had the right
of chastising us in its name. All the majesty of Rome was at his
back--majesty I say advisedly, for you don’t look for anything majestic
in modern Rome, you didn’t in those days at any rate, save in the
historical shadow of the Vatican. Cooksey was himself explicit upon this
point. He happened to make some allusion to the vulgar new gingerbread
(so he described it) of the upstart Italian monarchy, the coarse
intruder whom the Vatican was coldly staring down in its ancient pride.
Cooksey, needless to say, was whole-heartedly on the side of the noble
and patient old sufferer against the upstart and the bully; and indeed
as he put the matter the Vatican seemed the only fit place for a
gentleman of feeling. The moral support behind him was immense, and his
flippant style was accordingly the more suggestive. Where would be the
charm, where the consequence, of a jest about slop-pails and
butter-slides, if they belonged to the household of the upstart? But in
the midst of the immemorial state of the other place it is very amusing,
no doubt, to find them in their homely incongruity, or to say you have
found.
So Cooksey was really the first person I had ever come across who had a
foothold, as it struck me, square and firm upon the soil of Rome, in
spite of his loud orange boots and his globe-trotting check suit. If I
had a doubt at all upon the subject it was due to something else--to his
absurd little passage with Amerigo, wherein I felt sure that Amerigo had
been humouring and playing down to him, with the dexterity of much
practice. Cooksey, no, was not in a position to meet the chinless master
of the Goose on equal terms; he had much to learn, like the rest of us,
before he could presume to treat the guileful Roman as a plaything. But
in the shelter of the Vatican he was securely entrenched, at any rate
on the backstairs. I didn’t clearly understand his position there, I
judge it was a modest one; but at least he had a real job of work to be
done, which “kept him in Rome,” as he said, and which gave him a hold
upon the city of enchantment. “Yes, I know Rome well enough,” said
Cooksey, as we prepared to depart at the end of our meal; “I can say I
know something of Rome, and of the Romans too.” He bowed gallantly to
the lady at the desk, and she looked down on him with her brilliant eyes
like a good shrewd aunt upon a rather uproarious school-boy.
IV. ST. PETER’S
Cooksey was helpful, even more helpful than I desired; he carried me on
a round of church-visiting, the very next afternoon, and showed me a
number of delicious old nooks and corners which I had already discovered
for myself. In peregrinations of that kind he could teach me little; I
could moon and roam and quote my red handbook with the best. I was still
considerably annoyed with him and not much inclined to accept him as my
guide, so long as he only guided me back again to my familiar haunts. I
had some difficulty in allowing him to believe that he was befriending
me with his superior knowledge; but indeed he scarcely waited for my
consent--he instructed me, as we made our round, without noticing the
tact of my compliance. No matter for that afternoon, however, which
brought me no new picture of Roman life; it was on an early morning a
day or two later that Cooksey presented me with an impression for which
I was grateful, at least I hope so.
I ought to have been grateful; for without the help of Cooksey I
shouldn’t have had occasion to set forth from my lodging, very early in
the day, clad as though for a dinner-party at eight in the morning.
Rakish and raffish it seemed to be stepping across the Piazza di Spagna,
in that April freshness, wearing a swallowtail coat and a polished
shirt-front, like a belated reveller of last evening; I shrank from
observation, my clothes of state looked jaded and green in the sweet
air. But in Rome this morning appearance of a strayed roysterer is not
misunderstood; the cabman whom I hailed knew whither I was bound, and he
rattled me off through the empty streets in the direction of the Tiber
and the Bridge of St. Angelo. We crossed the river, and presently we
were cantering over the vast open space of the Square of St. Peter,
between the showering fountains. Hundreds and hundreds of people were
scattered over the square, converging upon the slope which ascends to
the steps of the church; and there I joined the throng and pushed
forward in its company beneath the leather curtain of the portal--a
pilgrim, one of I don’t know how many thousands, gathered from the ends
of the earth and now assembling in the morning to receive an august
benediction.
The great floor of the church was open to all the world; the crowd
spread over it and was gradually packed to density under the dome, a
mass that steadily grew as the stream of concourse poured and poured
through the doorways and along the nave. It was a crowd of many
languages and of all conditions, and an immense hum of excitement surged
from it, breaking readily into applause and acclamation--though there
were hours to wait before the climax should be reached and expectation
crowned. It was a grand event, I suppose, but not of the grandest; it
was a reception of some few thousands of votaries, for whom the basilica
was this morning the chamber of audience. How many thousands will the
chamber hold? It had filled to over-flowing before the morning had
passed, and the hum as it deepened grew fervid and passionate with the
loyalty of a strangely mingled army. These people had been drawn to Rome
from afar like the rest of us, like myself, like Deering and Cooksey;
but the voice of their enthusiasm had a profounder note than ours. I
picked my way among the assembling tribes, listening to snatches of
their talk and trying to identify the outlandish forms of their gabble.
My place, however, was not in their midst; for by the kindness of
Cooksey I had admission to some special enclosure or tribune, lifted
above the heads of the mob; and that is why I was dressed for a party at
this untimely hour--it is the rule.
I found my place of honour on a kind of scaffold, raised in the choir at
a point that commanded the splendid scene. The pilgrims thronged and
thickened just beneath us; but they seemed far away in their murmurous
confusion when I had taken my seat on the scaffold, among the
black-arrayed group already established there aloft. We were a dozen or
so, men and women; we looked not at all like pilgrims, and instead of
joining in the jubilant roar that soon began to sway to and fro in the
thousands of throats beneath us--instead of crying aloud in our homage
before the shrine of Rome--what could we do but look on as at a
spectacle, a display which we had luckily chanced upon and overtaken in
time? We had nothing to do with it, no share in that rising passion of
fidelity;--or perhaps indeed I should speak for myself alone, for my
neighbour on the scaffold had presently attracted my attention by a
sudden movement, springing to her feet (she was a middle-aged woman),
throwing up her hands and cheering--cheering with a strange uncertain
bird-like note that shockingly embarrassed the rest of us. She had been
carried away by a sympathetic enthusiasm and she wanted to join in the
full-throated roar; but she was detached from it, isolated in a little
ring of decorous silence; so that her queer _hoo-hoo-hoo_ fell upon her
own ears too with disconcerting effect, and she faltered rather
lamentably in the middle of her outcry. Discreet ladies, black-veiled as
they all were, sitting around her on the scaffold, looked rigidly in
front of them; and the poor enthusiast subsided as best she could,
blushing and effacing herself. That was our only demonstration; the
company of the scaffold sat otherwise unmoved to the end of the great
affair, talking unobtrusively under that vast dome-full of human sound.
There was a long while to wait before the august and magnificent entry
which we were expecting. Cooksey appeared very soon, and with him was a
neat and slender and priestly figure to which I instantly gave the name
of Father Holt. You remember the figure, of course, in Thackeray’s
gallery--the polished and enigmatic gentleman of the world, who wrought
so vividly upon the boyhood of Esmond. If Cooksey’s friend had chanced
to take me in hand when _I_ was a boy, he would indeed have found me
easy moulding. He was dark, he was very handsome in the clear-eyed and
hard-lipped manner; he had the ghost of a smile and a most musical
voice. Cooksey came bustling to the front of the platform, where I was,
and Father Holt dropped behind. One of the black-veiled ladies put out a
hand to him and he dealt with it urbanely; but he disengaged himself, he
held himself aloof in the background; and indeed we were not a party of
much distinction, and I didn’t wonder that Father Holt found us a little
plebeian. Cooksey breathed heavily in my ear to the effect that the
female just behind me was the old wretch of whom he had spoken the other
evening, the pet votaress of Father Jenkins--“and I know I shall put my
foot in it again,” he said, “because I always make a fool of myself on
these solemn occasions.” He chuckled wickedly, and he added that “these
old cats” took it all so seriously, one had to be desperately careful.
The elderly gentlewoman in question was taking it very seriously indeed,
though she didn’t commit herself to the point of standing up and
cheering. She had forgiven Cooksey his assault upon her in church, and
she now drew him into a conversation that I followed with interest. I
can’t reproduce it, for it was highly technical, full of odd phrases and
allusions that were strange to me; Cooksey and Lady Mullinger (that was
her name) conversed in the language of a secret society from which I was
excluded. It struck me as very picturesque, and it exhaled a cloud of
suggestion--“puff on puff,” not exactly of “grated orris-root,” but of a
pleasant and pungent effluence that reminded me of many things. This
vein of Roman talk never seems to me to have any of the associations of
an ancient history, of a long-seasoned tradition, of a bygone grace
denied to those who are not of the society. Oh no, it is intensely
modern and angular; it reminds me of raw new buildings, filled with
chalk-blue and shrimp-pink imagery; it reminds me of deal praying-chairs
and paper roses and inscriptions in ugly French lettering. When Cooksey
and Lady Mullinger talk together they appear to delight in emphasizing
their detachment, their disconnexion from all the sun-mellowed
time-hallowed sweetness of antiquity; but of course it is exactly this
odd modernity of their tone which makes their talk so picturesque in the
hearing of an outsider. I was a complete outsider; and the manner in
which these two spoke of the rites and forms and festivals of their
society was a manner quite fresh to me, and I enjoyed it.
Lady Mullinger was elderly and plain. Catching sight of Father Holt, she
made him signals so urgent that he had to come forward; she beset him
with smiles and gestures and enquiries under which he stood patient and
courteous, a picture of well-bred disdain. Lady Mullinger had no
misgiving, and she rallied him archly, she appealed to him, she bunched
her untidy amplitude together to make room for him at her side. He
looked at her sidelong with his bright eyes, and he took no notice of
her advances beyond answering her large sloppy questions with a neatly
worded phrase. She made the foolish mistake of coupling Father Holt and
Cooksey together in her broadly beaming patronage; Cooksey was well
aware that it was a mistake, and his assurance failed him. Father Holt
(I can’t call him anything else) glanced from one to the other with a
single flit of his cool observation, and it was enough. Cooksey was ill
at ease; he had been gossiping quite comfortably with her ladyship, but
with Father Holt’s quiet glance on him he tried to disown her. He saw
that she was stout and ordinary, and that he himself looked terribly
like her; he edged away and did his best to range himself on Father
Holt’s side of the colloquy. But Father Holt kept them serenely at a
distance, the pair of them; it was easy to see that it was not for
Cooksey to stand by his side uninvited.
“No, Lady Mullinger,” said Father Holt, “I can’t, I fear, make you a
definite promise in that matter.” He spoke with a charming vibrating
bell-tone; it was like the striking of a rod of polished silver in the
midst of the sawing of strings out of tune. Lady Mullinger, unsuspecting
and unabashed, flung herself the more vehemently into her demand; she
wanted him to do this and that, but mainly she wanted him to come to tea
with her on Thursday and to have a little talk with “poor Charlotte”;
she pressed it as an opportunity for poor Charlotte which he mustn’t
deny her. Poor Charlotte was in a sad way; nothing seemed to ease her,
nobody had proved able to open “the door of her spirit.” So Lady
Mullinger said, and she was positive that Father Holt would open the
door, he alone, and she would arrange that nobody should disturb them,
her _salottino_ would be free (they would have tea in the big room), and
he and poor Charlotte could then have a “nice little talk.” Lady
Mullinger had set her heart on it--“just a nice little talk, quite
informal”; she shouldn’t tell poor Charlotte that he was expected, and
he could just draw her aside, after tea, and help the poor thing to
“find her way.” The convenience of the _salottino_ was urged once more,
and the tact with which Lady Mullinger would keep her other guests out
of it; and the ghost of the smile was upon the lips of Father Holt as he
repeated, very distinctly, his refusal to make her a promise. Poor
Charlotte would evidently have to find the way for herself, and Lady
Mullinger abounded in despair.
Cooksey had introduced me to the beautiful priest, and I had one of his
sharp glances to myself. For half a second I thought he was going to be
interested in me, and I sat up with pleasure; but then I was turned
down, I was placed with the rest of the company, and I perceived that I
was no finer or rarer or more exquisite than Cooksey himself. It was
worse, however, for Cooksey than for me, and the contrast between his
natural exuberance and his shrivelled loose-jawed malease under the eye
of Father Holt was melancholy indeed. Father Holt was the real thing,
Cooksey could only pretend to be the real thing in his absence. You
can’t attain to the heart of Rome, after all, by the simple and obvious
methods of a Cooksey; you can’t set off from Bath and Wells, travelling
to Rome because Rome attracts you, and then expect to find yourself on
terms of equality with Father Holt, whose foot was on the stair of the
Vatican when Doctor Tusher (your spiritual forbear) was scraping to his
lordship and marrying the waiting-maid. Cooksey could impose upon _me_
with the airy flourish of his intimacy with a world from which I was
locked out; but he was reduced to the position of a very raw new boy in
the company of the born initiate. Poor old Cooksey--it was a shame that
I should be there to see it.
He couldn’t renew his pleasant gossip with Lady Mullinger, and he rather
stupidly persisted in trying to range himself with Father Holt. He
received his measured stint of Father Holt’s admirable manners, and his
uneasy gratitude was pathetic. Where was now my Cooksey of the liberal
jest, of the gay scuffle with Monsignor Mair? The conversation drooped,
and presently Father Holt had slipped off again into the background,
where there now arose a small stir of a new arrival. He was at the head
of the staircase which ascended to the scaffold, he was welcoming
somebody who emerged from below; and this was a little old lady, at whom
the eyes of the company were turned with cautious curiosity. Cooksey
nudged me, whispering her name and her title, both very splendid; as
discreetly as I might, I stared at her with all my attention. None of us
ventured to join Father Holt in the graceful and natural ceremony that
he made of handing her to her place in the front of the platform. He
dropped into the chair by her side, he engaged in a talk with her that
we couldn’t overhear, and he was subtly transfigured as he did so.
There was no change in his composure and his bland dignity; but he
seemed to sink with relief into a society where he felt at home. The
rest of us were silent, we couldn’t set up a rival society in the face
of _that_ exhibition; and besides we wished, I think, to miss nothing of
its effect.
She was small and shabby and very neat; her hair, under her black veil,
was scraped together in a little grey knob; she had a strange old mantle
upon her, short to her waist, of much-worn black, and her tiny arms
appeared beneath it, with hard white cuffs, ending in gloves that were
like the Russia-binding of a prayer-book. She was not pretty, but she
was perfect; her eyes were very sweet and soft, and her face had no
colour in it at all, and the light that shone out of her eyes seemed to
shine equally through the diaphanous pallor of her cheek. I never saw
any one so transparent; she looked infinitely fragile--because it was as
though you could see through her and could see that she hadn’t a drop of
common life to give her substance. I could hear the gentle purity of her
voice, with its quiet and even intonation. She was English, though the
name and the title that Cooksey had spluttered in my ear were not; she
was intensely English--she couldn’t otherwise have talked with that
smooth silk-thread of a monotone which was so well in keeping with the
pearl-glimmer of her face. She was perfect indeed; and if she dressed in
her rusty black and wrung her hair into its knob with the purpose of
making the utmost of her wondrous distinction--why then she did rightly
and her style was consummately chosen, for her distinction was enhanced
beyond measure by her queer little white-cuffed dowdiness. All the rest
of us were things of such tawdry attractions, such twopenny
pretensions; she must have walked in a moving circle of perpetual
vulgarity, for I can scarcely imagine a face or a word or a movement
that wouldn’t strike you, at the moment when you looked away from her,
as the commonest trash.
Didn’t I even perceive that Father Holt’s distinction was not what it
had appeared a minute ago? It was now just a thought too sleek, too
glossy, too well-appointed; and I wondered wildly if I was never to come
to the end in my discovery of finer shades and finer. So the best has
still a better--but indeed I _had_ come to the end at this point, for I
have never reached a better in her kind than the great little old lady
of that morning in St. Peter’s. Lady Mullinger positively creaked with
reverential contemplation; she didn’t aspire to attracting any sign of
notice from the great lady--who seemed, however, to ignore our company
in modest and delicate shyness, not in pride--but she pored, she gloated
upon the vision with all her being. Poor Charlotte was forgotten,
Cooksey had dropped out of the world; Lady Mullinger was intently
committing to memory the details of so historic an impression. Much
would be heard of it, no doubt, at tea in the big room on Thursday.
Meanwhile I was not far behind her, I confess, in using the opportunity
of the moment; I was fascinated by this sudden exaltation of my standard
in the grace of the highest style.
But the brilliance and the rumour of the great church, filled more and
more with crowding movement, made it soon impossible to attend to any
other than its own distinction. This was a staring and thumping affair
by comparison with the small voice of perfection; but mere size, when it
is miles high, and mere gold, when it is inches thick, and mere noise,
when it is in the throats of all the tribes, will use their overbearing
power and assert their dignity. There was nothing perfect in the seethe
and clamour of the pilgrims, nothing in the sprawl of ostentation over
the whole adornment of the scene; but it was a vast and riotous and
haphazard work of genius, all of it together--the overflow of an
imagination no better than my own, or not so good, but as large as an
ocean against my own poor painful tap-trickle. The passion that rolled
along the nave and swept round the hollow of the dome, toppling,
breaking in uncontrollable excitement--I hung over it, clinging to my
perch on the tribune, and I flung into it my own small cup-full; but how
could I think to swell it with these few drops, claiming to ally myself
with genius of _that_ enormity? It was vain, I was the flimsiest of
onlookers; and the pilgrims could bring a tribute to Rome that was
profuse enough, indiscriminate and coarse enough, to fill the chamber
prepared to receive it, to brim the church of St. Peter in an hour or
two. Their capacity was well-matched; Rome and the pilgrims, they
wrought upon the same scale, they understood each other.
Rome, yes--but what about the Romans? Father Holt surveyed the struggle
of the pilgrims with something like the high indifference of the
philosopher at a show of gladiators; he inclined his ear to the little
transparent old princess beside him, he received her remarks with
courteous care; and as for her, she was as far aloof from the common
scramble as a flower that unfolds upon the cliff-edge above the booming
ravine. Cooksey indeed was intent on the display with all the eager
bulge of his eyes; but he had frankly relapsed into sight-seeing, he was
just a Briton in foreign parts. Lady Mullinger, though she murmured to
her neighbour that the zeal of the crowd had “filled her heart,”
couldn’t really attend to anything but the princess; she glanced
perfunctorily at the crowd, but she was trying all the while to catch
the silvery murmur that was holding the privileged ear of Father Holt.
It was altogether evident that our party on the scaffold was neither of
Rome nor of the pilgrimage, and the great affair proceeded beneath us
with a roar and a rush that sounded more and more remote in my hearing,
even while now it mounted to its culmination. That “real Rome,” of which
I thought I had been learning so much, was magnificently bestirring
itself to accept the homage of its swarming subjects, and I tried to
look through their eyes and to see what they saw in their jubilation.
They at least had no doubt, they knew where to look for the genius of
Rome. Far away across the church and down the nave, somewhere near the
great portals at the end, there was a side-door, and a broad lane from
this door had been cleared through the crowd. Rome was very soon to
issue from the door, it was for Rome that the lane was kept open along
the roaring church. But a church, do I say?--it was the temple of Rome,
the “great main cupola” of the Roman genius. It stands upon the hill of
the Vatican in our day, and it has stood there for some little time; but
its rightful place is the Capitol, the mount of triumph--it is there
that the temple belongs. Kings and queens were led captive to that
shrine, the multitude mocked and jeered at their abasement; and I see
what is wanting to the due completeness of the resounding assembly in St
Peter’s--it is the presence of captive kings and queens, brought low by
the power of Rome, over whom the multitude might exult with glee and
ferocity. And indeed the multitude would, it is easy to see; _I_
shouldn’t, nor Father Holt, nor the rest of us up here, and that is why
we feel thus cut off from the tumult beneath us; but the pilgrims would
delight in deriding the poor dazed wretches, and their reverence for the
majesty of Rome would be the more enhanced. This joy, which they would
have tasted upon the Capitol, is denied them upon the tomb of Peter; but
they have lost nothing else by the shifting of the shrine. Rome above
all, Rome the wonder of the world, is still the attraction of their
worship; and from the door of the temple that we watch with strained
expectation, suddenly hushed as the great moment approaches, Rome is
about to emerge and appear before us. Look, it is there--a high swaying
throne or pedestal, borne upon the shoulders of faithful knaves, and an
ancient white-robed figure that sits aloft, springing upright and
subsiding again with outstretched hand, and a smile, a fixed immemorial
smile in a blanched face, beneath a pair of piercing eyes: Rome, Rome
indeed.
V. VIA GIULIA
And Cooksey took me to tea, that same day, with his little old friend
Mr. Fitch. I was greatly charmed by Mr. Fitch, who was small and frail
and wore a dust-coloured beard; and his first suspicion of me (he was
afraid of the young) was allayed when he found that I knew and adored a
particular Roman church or two, remote and neglected, which he didn’t
suppose that a casual intruder like myself would have discovered. I
remember how Cooksey threw an arm of patronage around me and explained
that he had been my guide to the holy places of the city; but Mr. Fitch
caught my eye with a twinkle of intelligence, quickly withdrawn, which
set up a happy understanding between us on the spot. He did the honours
of his apartment with pleasant chirps and fidgets, hospitably bustling
about the tea-tray, beaming and fussing and apologizing, with bird-like
cries to the stout maid-servant who was energetically seconding his
welcome.
Mr. Fitch was a scholar, a student, who worked daily in the library of
the Vatican. I believe he was a hundred years old, and indeed he looked
it; but he didn’t appear to have _grown_ old, only to have suffered a
slow deposit of time to accumulate upon his person. Time was deep upon
his hair and face and clothes; but a few score years more or less could
have made no difference to the cheerful little bird-spirit in his
breast, and it was because he was shy and defenceless, not because he
was old, that he feared the onslaught of the young. A young person,
however, who was found to have made his way unaided to the church of San
Cesareo, far away among the vineyards on the verge of the city, was one
towards whom Mr. Fitch could hop and twitter in kindly confidence, and
he did so. Before we parted he invited me to lunch with him a day or two
later, and I fully understood that this was for him a remarkable
demonstration. “Gina!” he called, and Gina, the voluble maid-servant,
came from the kitchen with a run, to receive his command concerning the
festival. She was delighted, she swept me into the happy plan, she
seemed to be immediately arranging a treat for two merry little
children, for me and Mr. Fitch. We were like children between her broad
palms, all but hugged to her bosom; and with dancing eyes she told us to
leave it all to her--she would do something splendid. “Gina will see to
it,” said Mr. Fitch; and he asked her whether he shouldn’t invite some
other young thing to join the party--what about the giovanotto who had
called the other day? “Quel poverino?” said Gina--yes, the very thing.
So we should be a party of three; and Gina clapped her hands and ran
back to the kitchen, as though to set about her preparations there and
then.
Mr. Fitch lived in the Via Giulia, deep in the depth of Rome, not far
from the great mass of the Farnese palace. He had the craziest little
apartment, a tangle of rooms with bare tiled floors, in which his funny
frumpy English furniture, which might have come straight (and no doubt
it had) from his mother’s parlour at Cheltenham, looked strangely
shocked and ill at ease. Forty years of the Via Giulia (it can hardly
have been less) had not reconciled the mahogany overmantel and the
plush-topped tea-table to the ramshackle ways of foreign life; mutely
they protested, keeping themselves _to_ themselves, wrapped in their
respectability. Mr. Fitch, I think, had never so much as noticed their
plight; he sat on a chair, he made tea on a table, and one chair or
table was as good as another for the purpose. He himself looked homely
and frumpy enough, to be sure, lodged there under the wing, so to speak,
of Julius the Pope; but _he_ didn’t feel at a loss, and he tripped along
the proud-memoried street of his abode, with his decent English beard
and his little mud-gaiters on his boots, as brisk as a sparrow. He
accompanied us down the street and left us to go and invite the
“poverino” to meet me at lunch; I see him waving us good-bye at some
grand dark street-corner, where he turned and pattered off on his
errand. Cooksey treated him with large protective kindness and contempt,
out of which the old man seemed to slip with a duck of his head and a
gleam of fright and amusement in his two bright eyes.
The luncheon-party, a day or two later, was a great success. I climbed
to the apartment on the stroke of the hour, but the other young man was
already there before me, and Mr. Fitch ceremoniously performed an
introduction. The name of the youth was Maundy, and he proved to be one
of those aspiring priests, novices, seminarists--I don’t know what their
rightful name may be, but you know them well, you remember how they
converge in long lines upon the Pincian Hill towards evening, how they
pick up their skirts and romp with the gaiety of the laity upon the
greensward of the Villa Borghese. Maundy was his name, and he didn’t
look, for his part, as though he had had much romping; he was pale and
meagre, he reclined in a contorted cat’s-cradle of thin arms and legs on
one of Mr. Fitch’s fringed and brass-nailed arm-chairs. If Gina’s word
for him meant a poor young specimen of chilly lankness she was right;
his limp black soutane (is it a soutane?) couldn’t disguise his
sharp-set knees or the lean little sticks of his arms. He jumped up,
however, quite alert and spritely for our introduction, and he greeted
me with a friendly high-piping composure that made it unnecessary to
pity him. I had begun to pity him, as I always do feel compassionate, so
gratuitously, at the sight of his kind--at the sight of the young
novices, caught and caged and black-skirted in their innocence,
renouncing the world before they have had the chance to taste it; but
Maundy turned the tables upon me in a moment, and he revealed himself as
a perfectly assured young son of the world, with whom I had no call to
be sympathetically considerate. He shook hands with me, using a gesture
which at that time, so long ago, was reputed a mark of distinction--I
forget how it went exactly, but I think the pair of clasped hands was
held high and waved negligently from side to side. Maundy achieved it
with an air, not failing to observe that I had stepped forward to meet
him with the ordinary pump-handle of the vulgar.
And so we sat down to Gina’s admirable meal, and Mr. Fitch was in a
flutter of pleasure and excitement, and Maundy talked and talked--he led
the conversation, he led it almost beyond our reach, he led it so
masterfully that it hardly escaped him at all. Mr. Fitch lost his hold
on it at once; he sat with his head on one side, making small clucking
noises of assent and question now and then, while Maundy piped and swept
away from us in his monologue. But no, I oughtn’t to say that he left us
both behind, for he kept turning and waiting for me to catch him up, he
flatteringly showed me that he wished for my company. “Such a blessing,”
he said, “to get away from piety”--and he intimated with a smile that it
was I who represented the impious. He desired my company, not my talk;
and he might have been breaking out with the relief of unwonted freedom,
soaring forth into topics that were discouraged in the congregation of
the poor caged lambs; and I dare say he enjoyed the spread of his wings
among the tinted and perfumed vapours of his fancy. It was all beyond
Mr. Fitch, who clearly couldn’t explain him with my ready mixture of
metaphor; Mr. Fitch was bewildered. But to me the fancies of Maundy were
sufficiently familiar; I knew the like of them from of old, and I fear
we both took a certain pleasure in noting the bedazzlement of our host.
The good soul, he sat and plied us with food and wine, while Maundy
rattled away in his emancipation and I assumed the most impious look (I
had small opportunity for more than looks) that I could accomplish.
Maundy threw off a light word or two about his place of residence and
instruction in Rome--the seminary, the college, I forget how he referred
to it. He seemed disdainful of all its other inmates; he couldn’t regard
them as companions for a person of intelligence and fine feeling. How he
came to have placed himself among them, submitting to their rule, he
didn’t explain at the time, but I afterwards made out a little of his
history. He had written a great deal of poetry at Oxford, and he had
kept an old silver oil-lamp burning night and day before a Greek
statuette, and he had had his favourite books bound in apricot linen,
and he had collected thirty-five different kinds of scented soap--and I
know it sounds odd, but he appeared to consider these achievements as
natural stages on the path to Rome. He didn’t go quite so far as to say
that he repented of having made the journey and embraced the Roman
discipline; but after a year in the college or the seminary his mind, I
think, was in a state of more painful confusion than he allowed me to
see. Somehow the argument at one end, the Oxford end, where he had
draped his dressing-table with an embroidered rochet (he told me so),
seemed to have so little in common with the argument at the other, the
Roman end, where he walked out with his young associates for exercise in
the Villa Borghese and not one of them had heard of the poetry of Lionel
Johnson; and somehow he had perceived the discrepancy without
discovering where the chain of his reasoning had failed, and in the
privacy of his discontent he was still floundering backwards and
forwards, trying to persuade himself of the soundness of all the
links--and perhaps seeking with a part of his mind (a growing part) to
be convinced that he had reasoned wrong. Something of this kind, I
believe, was fretting his life in Rome, and how it may have ended I
never knew; he didn’t confide his troubles to me--he simply hailed me as
one who would possibly understand what it meant to him to have once, in
an eating-house of Soho, been introduced to Aubrey Beardsley.
“The _passion_ of his line,” he said, referring to that artist; and
again, “The passion of his _line_!”--and he described the scene in Soho,
mentioning that the impression had wrought upon him so potently that
afterwards he had sat up all night, with some golden Tokay beside him in
a blue Venetian glass (not drinking it, only refreshed by the sight of
it), and had written a poem, a sonnet of strange perfumes and fantastic
gems, which he had dedicated in Latin to the hero of the evening. And
then he had gone out into the dawn, and had wandered through Leicester
Square to Covent Garden, and had bought a bunch of mauve carnations;
and he had thought of sending them, with the sonnet, to the master who
had inspired him--but then he had returned to his lodging and had burnt
the sonnet, heaping the carnations for a pyre, having resolved to guard
the experience, whole and rounded and complete, in the secrecy of a
faithful memory. He pointed out that to share these things is to lose
them; as soon as you turn them into words for another’s eye they cease
to be perfectly yours, they are dissipated into the common air; which
was why a friend of his, at Oxford, had insisted that one should write
no words, paint or carve no colour or line, but only make one’s images
and pictures and poems out of the rainbow-tinted substance of memory,
that exquisite material always awaiting and inviting the hand of an
artist. So one avoids, you see, the sick disillusion of the writer who
flings forth his maiden fancy to the ribaldry of the crowd; and Maundy
himself had tried to rise to this height of disinterested passion, and
in the dying perfume of the mauve carnations he had sacrificed what he
saw to be a vulgar ambition. Oh yes, depend upon it, the greatest works
of art have never been seen of any but their maker; and to Maundy it was
a beautiful thought, the thought of the white secret statues locked away
by the thousand in their secluded shrines, safe from the world, visited
now and again by the one and only adorer who possessed the key. “But
stay,” said Mr. Fitch, “have you considered--” oh yes, Maundy had felt
the weight of that objection, and Dickson after all (Dickson was the
friend at Oxford) had written and printed his volume, but that was
because he had found no other way to rid himself of an obsession; the
white statue in his case had become more real than life, and he had
cast it forth to retain--to retain, you might say, his sanity.
Well, we must publish or go mad; that is the melancholy conclusion. Mr.
Fitch stared doubtfully, and I shook my head like one whose hold upon
his senses is precarious indeed. Maundy was quick to interpret my
movement, and it encouraged him to yet giddier flights. He was hovering
upon the climax of one of these when Gina happened to come clattering in
with a dish; and she paused, sinking back upon her heels, the dish held
high before her, and she threw up her head and she flashed out such an
amusing challenging bantering look at Maundy, where he flourished his
thin fingers in the zest of his eloquence, that I have never forgotten
the picture of her mirth and her plumpness as it was framed at that
moment in the doorway. “Ah, the poor little fellow,” she said to
herself, “he loves to talk!” And she too began to talk, breaking into
his monologue with unabashed and ringing frankness; she set down her
dish on the table with a dancing gesture, whipping her hands away from
it like an actress in a play, and she stood by his side, patting him on
the shoulder, approving him, scolding him, bidding him eat, eat!--and
Maundy turned round to her with a peal of sudden light laughter, a burst
of naturalness that changed his whole appearance; so that Gina had
transformed the temper of the party and had raised it at once to a
breezier level of gaiety than it would ever have touched without her. It
was delightful; I couldn’t understand a word she said, for her words
flew shining and streeling over our heads as quick as thought, and I
dare say Maundy answered their spirit rather than their meaning; but he
responded well, he had some good neat conversational turns of idiom
that he shot back at her with a knowing accent, and she chuckled, she
threatened him, she bustled out of the room with a smile for me and Mr.
Fitch and a last fling of playfulness over her shoulder for Maundy. Mr.
Fitch had said that Gina would “see to it,” and he was quite right; we
started afresh in a much better vein, all three of us, after her
incursion.
Mr. Fitch produced a bottle of “vino santo” at the end of the meal and
charged our glasses. The sacred liquor was exceedingly good, and he took
heart from it to talk more freely. Gina had relaxed the strain of
Maundy’s preciosity, and he had begun to cross-question our host about
his occupation, his early life, his establishment in Rome, with an
inquisitive and youthful familiarity under which the old man shyly and
prettily expanded. He told us how in the dim ages he had received a
commission to do a little historical research among the manuscripts of
the Vatican, and how he had taken his seat in the library, with a pile
of volumes around him, and had never left it again from that moment to
this. His first commission was long ago fulfilled, but it had revealed a
point of singular interest, some debatable matter in connexion with a
certain correspondence about a question raised in a contemporary version
of an unofficial report of a papal election in the seventeenth
century--yes, a matter which had chanced to be overlooked by previous
investigators; and Mr. Fitch, sitting fast in his chair at the library,
day after day, year after year, had been enabled to throw a little light
upon the obscurity, and had even published a small pamphlet--“not, I
must admit, for the very cogent reason that prompted your friend at
Oxford, but from a motive that I justify as a desire for historical
accuracy, and that I condemn as vanity”; and Mr. Fitch, so saying,
beamed upon us with a diminutive roguishness, more sparrow-like than
ever, which he immediately covered by plying us anew with the sacred
bottle.
And then he told us of the long evenings he had spent, year after year,
in wandering among the ancient byways of the city--every day, when he
was turned out of the library at the closing hour, he had set forth to
explore the grand shabby old city that had now perished, he said,
bequeathing little but its memory to the smart new capital of to-day.
Rome had changed around him, he only had remained the same; but he could
truthfully claim that he knew nothing, save by report, of Rome’s
rejuvenation--say rather of its horrible pretentious bedizenment in the
latest fashion; for he had long abandoned his old pious pilgrimages, he
now went no farther than his lodging here and the library over there,
and he was proud to declare that he had never set eyes on a quarter of
the monstrosities of which he heard tell. There was a break of
indignation in his voice as he spoke of them; he had loved that Rome of
the far-away golden evenings, it was all he ever _had_ loved except his
work, and he had been robbed of it, bit by bit, till nothing was left
him but his well-worn seat among the state-papers and the pontifical
dust that nobody had taken the trouble to clear away. I don’t mean that
he said all this, but it was all in his gentle regretful tone; he seemed
to stand solitary and disregarded among the riot of modernity, and to
utter a little tiny dismal reproach, barely audible in the din--the
plaintive “how _can_ you, how _can_ you?” of a small bird whose nest has
been trampled down by a pack of stupid louts on a holiday. It was hard
on him; the louts might just as well have stamped and scuffled
somewhere else; but so it was, they had violated his wonderful Rome, and
nobody noticed the sad small squeak of protest that arose here and there
from a scholar, a student, a lover.
What did Maundy think of it all? Mr. Fitch brightened in hospitable care
for our amusement; he didn’t often have two young things to lunch with
him, and he mustn’t blight the occasion with his griefs; and so he
recovered his spirit and tried to set Maundy off again in one of his
droll tirades. What _did_ Maundy think of it? Oddly enough the question
of Rome, in the light in which it appeared to Mr. Fitch, hadn’t
seemingly occurred to him; Maundy’s Rome had been predominantly a matter
of Spanish altar-lace and rose-tinted chasubles, and a year by the Tiber
had brought him to think that Oxford is now more purely, more daintily
Roman than the city of the Popes; and that was really his only
conclusion on the subject, and I don’t believe he had given a thought to
the Roman romance, vanished or vanishing, that had inspired the
tenderness of Mr. Fitch. Maundy knew nothing of San Cesareo, nothing of
the enchanted evenings among the ruins and the cypresses that were still
to be recaptured, I could give Mr. Fitch my word for it, even in the
desolation of to-day. “Ah yes, no doubt of it,” said Mr. Fitch, “if one
happens to be twenty years old to-day!”--but this he threw out in
passing, and he returned to the strange case of Maundy, which perplexed
and troubled him. It seemed that Maundy, whenever he went wandering
through Rome, had only one interest in view; I forget what it was, but
it had something to do with a point of ritual that Maundy excessively
cherished; and he used to go hunting round the city to discover the
churches in which it was properly observed, keeping a black-list of
those which failed to make good. It was the only aspect in which San
Cesareo could engage him, and Mr. Fitch and I had both neglected it.
With Rome ancient or modern Maundy was otherwise little concerned. He
listened blankly to Mr. Fitch’s melancholy regrets; for him they were
the mild ravings that you naturally expect from the very old. He was
ignorant of the past, so ignorant that it couldn’t raise the least stir
in his imagination; he had lived upon flimsiness, upon a little
sentiment and a little second-hand art, and he hadn’t the stomach, I
suppose, for Rome. It was curious to see how his insensibility puzzled
Mr. Fitch. Maundy’s glibness about unknown artists, about poems that
hadn’t been written and statues that drove you mad, had certainly
surprised and impressed him; but the gulf of vacuity that yawned beneath
Maundy’s culture was a shock. Of course it only showed what a
featherweight of a tatter it was, that culture; if you are thus artistic
in the void, with the empty inane below you, it proves that your art
hasn’t substance enough to make it drop. But Mr. Fitch was too humble
and kindly for that harsh judgment, and he seemed to be beating about in
his courtesy to find an explanation more honourable to Maundy. Surely
the young man was very able, very original and brilliant; if he spurned
the treasures of the past he must have some clever new reason for doing
so. I think I could have told Mr. Fitch that Maundy’s reason was no
newer than simple ignorance; and perhaps I began to parade my own
slender stock of learning to mark the contrast. But Mr. Fitch was
unconvinced, and I still see him eyeing young Maundy with a sort of
hesitating admiration, hovering on the edge of a question that he
couldn’t formulate. As for Maundy, he was thoroughly at ease; Mr. Fitch
had confessed that the name of Aubrey Beardsley was unknown to him.
Anyhow the party had been most successful, and Mr. Fitch might go
trotting back to his afternoon’s work with the pleased sense that two
very young people had made friends under his and Gina’s auspices. He
liked to observe that Maundy and I were making a plan to meet next day,
and he blessed our alliance, taking credit for the good thought of
acquainting Maundy’s brilliance with my--my what?--my honest and
old-fashioned enthusiasm. Gina too was satisfied; she stood at her
kitchen-door as we went out, and she cordially invited us to come again.
She pointed out that Maundy set me an example with his soutane and his
aspiration to the priesthood, and she assured me that I couldn’t do
better than to place myself under his guidance; but at the same time she
allowed that it wasn’t for all of us to aim so loftily, and perhaps I
was wise to be content with a lower standard. She cheerily dismissed us;
she had developed these reflections in twenty seconds of farewell. We
descended to the street, the three of us, and Mr. Fitch waved his hat as
he sped off to his happy labours, and Maundy and I turned away in the
direction of his seminary, where it was now time for him to rejoin his
black-skirted brethren. I was rather proud to be seen walking beside his
sweeping robe and clerical hat; it seemed so intimately Roman. But I
found to my surprise that Maundy was quite uneasy and apologetic about
it; he hated his uniform, he well understood that a man should feel shy
of its company. “If I were you,” he said, twitching his skirt
disdainfully, “I should hate to appear in public along with _this_.” He
was an odd jumble of cross-purposes, poor Maundy, and here was another
glimpse of his natural mind. He was more of a self-conscious school-boy
than ever he was of a musk-scented sonnetteer; but in either character I
am afraid, or I hope, that he didn’t fit comfortably into his Roman
retreat. I can’t think that the cage was to hold him much longer.
VI. VILLA BORGHESE
We had planned nothing more enterprising than a stroll in the Villa
Borghese; and we wandered freely in the ilex-shade, we inspected the
children at play in the grass, we stood awhile to watch the young Roman
athletes smiting the ball in their ancestral game, we took another turn
beneath the magnificent umbrellas of the pines, we lingered for the
finish of a bicycle-race in the great Greek stadium; and I don’t deny
that we loitered and strolled and looked for something else to watch
because we found it difficult to make an excuse for separating. The fact
is that we hadn’t very much to talk about after all, without Mr. Fitch
between us to be dazzled. Apart from him we made no very stimulating
audience for each other, and we clutched at an interest in the games and
the races to cover the bare patches of our conversation.
That very small interest was cracking under the strain when there
appeared a fortunate diversion. Maundy, after a pause, had said that the
leading bicyclist was a splendid Roman type, which was just what _I_ had
said before the pause; and he had remembered this and had hastily
suggested another stroll, and I (after a pause) had observed that the
park was extraordinarily classic (an earlier remark of Maundy’s); when
it chanced that in a green alley we came in sight of an old gentleman
seated on a bench, a battered but dignified relic of a man, who faced
the prospect mildly and blankly, waiting, as it seemed, till some one
should happen to pass by and sweep him up. “There’s old Rossi,” cried
Maundy, and he rapidly explained that he had lodged with the old man’s
family when he first came to Rome, and he was sorry, but he must stop
for a minute--we both jumped at the diversion, a timely one.
We were still a little way off, and as we began to move towards the old
man two women appeared, an older and a younger, bearing down upon him
from the opposite direction. They were delayed for the moment, as they
approached, by their own conversation, which seemed to shoot up into an
argument demanding settlement before other matters could be taken in
hand. We hung back, Maundy and I, and finally the old man was taken in
hand, literally enough, and in a style which suggested that the argument
had ended to neither lady’s satisfaction. He apparently needed a good
deal of rousing and re-arranging of shawls and wraps, and I noticed that
the argument showed signs of beginning again over his heedless head. At
length he was brought to his feet, his stick was put in his hand, and
the party prepared to set forth. Immediately the two ladies caught sight
of us, recognized Maundy and raised a cry of delight. Ah, what a
fortunate meeting! They had been arguing in Italian, but they now spoke
a free crisp English; they greeted us with much politeness, dropping the
old man as one might put down a parcel on a chair. He blinked and
subsided upon his bench again, while I was introduced to the
ladies--Miss Teresa Shacker (so the name reached me at least) and Miss
Berta Rossi; in these terms Maundy referred to them, and they were good
enough to express their extreme pleasure in making the acquaintance of
his friend.
They quickly took his friend into their confidence; I learned that they
were aunt and niece, sister-in-law and daughter of the speechless old
bundle on the bench. Aunt and niece were very much alike. Teresa the
aunt was tall and spare, with pouched white cheeks, a coil of black
hair on which her headgear stood high, and long arms assertively
kid-gloved and buttoned and tight. Berta the niece was white with
slightly more lustre, black with a little more profusion, gloved and
hatted with the same defiance. The loose luxuriant evening flowered
around us while Berta and Teresa established their effect; and their
effect stood forth, hard and high-lighted as a bit of china, quite
eclipsing the lazy sprawl of sun and shadow among the trees. There was
an artistic passion in their looks and tones as they wrought. The
accidents of a dim old man, a dark grove and an April sunset, fell away
from them, were forgotten, and in the cleared space they created a
social occasion out of the slender material that we offered, Maundy and
I. They found it sufficient, they set to work with lucid determination.
Long practice had made them perfect, and the entertainment ran without a
hitch. All the talking was theirs; they talked in an antiphon so glib
that it must have been rehearsed--only that was impossible, since it
fitted the chance of our encounter; so they talked, let me say, with the
skill of the old Roman improvisers, who never hesitated for a rhyme on
any subject you could set them. Half an hour later I knew a prodigious
amount about Teresa and Berta, and I don’t think they knew anything at
all about me.
Who were they, and what? Their English dialect, in the first place, was
a study by itself. “What a pleasure,” said one of them, “to hear some
English speaking!”--and immediately they explained to me that they were
“mad for England,” such was their phrase, and that I must talk to them
of nothing but England for their pleasure. “For we,” said Teresa,
“being English maternally, love to talk our language like anything, and
we are both a little wee bit cracked on the head about England”; and
Berta put in that they weren’t English, not strictly, but rather
Virginian--“Ah,” said Teresa, “but Virginian is most English of all, as
you know so well--and you mustn’t come down on us for a couple of Yankee
women, no, not at all.” “Yankee, good God!” cried out Berta, “ah no, not
a bit of it; our family came of England in the beginning by origin; I
’ope you haven’t thought that we spoke as Americans, so very ogly, all
in the nose!” “We are always fewrious at everybody,” said Teresa, “who
will believe us American.” “But Mr. Maundy has told you about us--is it
true?” asked Berta; and Teresa chimed in with the next versicle, and
Berta caught her up with the response, and between them they brought out
their history in much profusion of detail and folded me into their
family circle with a will.
They bethought themselves of the old man on the bench and proceeded to
display him. He was enrolled for the part of a benignant Œdipus, tired
at the end of a long day, weighted with his knowledge of the jealousies
and vindictive passions of the world, but not embittered by them, only
mellowed by many hoary years of patience and fortitude. It was a fine
exhibition of patriarchal and republican simplicity. He neither spoke
nor moved nor seemed to hear anything that was said, but his attendant
maidens gave life to the part on his behalf. The grand old man, survivor
of a heroic age--had he been the inspiration of Mazzini, the counsellor
of Cavour, Garibaldi’s right hand?--all three perhaps, and anyhow a
flaming brand of freedom in the bad days of which we younger folk knew
only the eloquent tale. To think of those terrible times of oppression,
of persecution and bigotry! This patriot had given all, had sacrificed
fortune and strength to the cause of Italy in her woe, when the land lay
groaning beneath the yoke of tyrant and priest. But there were traitors
even in the camp of enlightenment, and his feelings had suffered the
cruelest laceration. His feelings were more to him than any personal
hopes or ambitions, so that little need be said of the utter collapse of
these also. He had withdrawn from the struggle, had married a wife who
was all sympathy, and had passed into a profound retirement. The
struggle of poverty was hard; but what is poverty when it is sweetened
by the heart’s affections? The poor lady, Teresa’s sister, was dead
these many years; she had bequeathed her husband, her two young
children, to Teresa’s care. Poor Leonora had had a soul too great for
her frame; the artistic inheritance in her blood would not allow her to
rest. She was the daughter of an artist, and the fire had descended on
her--that fire which had been withheld (perhaps mercifully, who knows?)
from Teresa, the younger sister.
Out it all came in a cataract. I kept my head as well as I could, and I
glanced with respectful admiration at the bundle of shawls that had
borne these historic shocks. But the ladies let him drop once more,
having played out his part for him; and they launched into a strophe of
which the burden was Leonora, poor Leonora with the fever of art in her
veins, and yet so human, a true woman, proud to devote herself to the
task of binding the wounds of a hero. Maundy--where was Maundy all this
time? He was fidgeting restlessly on the edge of our group, and I judge
that the tale of the hero and his bride wasn’t new to him; he now
managed to interrupt it with a word to excuse himself, to bid us
good-evening and depart. He left me in the hands of Teresa and Berta; I
saw them close about me and cut me off from the chance of declaring that
I too must be going on my way. Really, these women--they were like
famished creatures, rejoicing in the taste of fresh blood; they hadn’t
the least intention of resigning the chance. So they found they should
like to walk a little further under the trees, to enjoy the evening; it
occurred to them both that the evening ought to be enjoyed, for they
were passionately fond, they said, of the country.
“You English are all so fond of the country,” said Teresa, “you are such
lovers of sporting!” She had meant to say “we English,” but she wasn’t
so awkward as to correct herself. She broke off into an ecstasy over the
evening sunshine. “I adore,” she cried, “the solitude, the quiet of the
country.” The spot where we happened to be pausing was not very
countrified; for close to our green alley was an enclosure covered with
little chairs and tables, from which there went up a volley of the
brilliant chatter of Rome; but it reminded Teresa of the country days to
which they always looked forward in the summer, when they went away to
the mountains or to the baths. What mountains? Well, they sometimes went
to Frascati--“si sta tanto tanto bene in campagna,” exclaimed Teresa
without thinking, and she remembered at once that the language into
which she dropped without thinking should be English, the native English
in which she habitually (she made it clear that she habitually) thought
and dreamt. As for the “baths,” they went occasionally to the sea; Berta
was the girl for the sea--she would like to walk for miles along the
shore, alone with nature, quite out of sight of everybody. “Our Italian
friends think me an extraordinary gurl,” she brightly confessed, “as mad
as a--as a hunter.” She had a misgiving as she produced this English
idiom, but she recovered herself to pick up the next _réplique_. “We
shock our Italian friends jolly well,” she said; “ra-_thur_!” The last
word had an English note that quite reassured her.
But how was it that they came to be so English? Oh, they recurred again
to the strophe of Leonora--who was Teresa’s sister, you understand, and
Berta’s mother. Leonora and Teresa, they were daughters of the house of
Shacker--I never arrived at the true form of the name, which can’t have
been this; but they passed rather lightly over the strain of the
Shackers, and I had only a doubtful glimpse of a Polish nobleman, an
exile from an ungrateful country, who had once upon a time sought refuge
in Rome, and had found in Rome a piece of good fortune in the midst of
many and unmerited disasters. He had found a wife--and this was the
point where Teresa flung up her hands and eyes in a mute effusion of
piety for the shade invoked. In those old days, it appeared, there was a
high and noble worship of art, of _true_ art, that you wouldn’t meet
with anywhere now; and the proof was that a woman, a pure and splendid
young sculptress from Virginia, could follow the calling of her art and
carve the chaste marble in her studio, here in Rome, and be worshipped
herself and respected by the chivalry of the other carvers and painters
around her--oh, Teresa couldn’t express the beauty of the homage that
had encircled this grand severe young figure, white as the stone she
chipped, whose life was dedicated like a nun to the service of art. No
man could touch her, none, save only the poor Polish outcast--one of
the handsomest men of his time indeed, but now slipping on the brink of
starvation and despair. Oh what a romance! The snow-white marble had
taken fire; the handsome Pole became the father of Leonora and Teresa,
the fair young sculptress their mother.
And so I now, about twenty minutes after our first meeting, possessed
their history. Already they felt I was a friend; and Berta, who might
reasonably think it was her turn to make a speech, began to hope that
perhaps we might chance upon her brother--she believed he was with a
party of companions in the park, not far off. Her brother? Yes, we now
reached the next generation, the children of the aged patriot. They were
two, Berta and Luigi; and Berta couldn’t help wishing that I and her
brother might become acquainted, we had such a deal in common. Luigi,
she said, was dreadfully clever; he wrote articles in a newspaper, at
least he would do so if he had the chance; but a man without influence
was so terribly helpless, and Luigi was so awfully proud. Teresa
interposed to the effect that Luigi, like the rest of them, was indeed
half a stranger in Rome, though circumstances had compelled him to be
born and to live there. “Ah,” said Berta, “if only he could get on to a
nice position in London--everybody is happy who goes to London, I
think!” Luigi’s great distress, according to Teresa, was that in Rome he
was able to meet so few nice Englishmen. “And you,” said Berta, “you are
in business, yes?” They both looked at me expectantly; it was the first
question they had put me, and it was followed by a close and lengthy
cross-examination. I came out of it rather badly; I could give my story
nothing like the brilliance of theirs, though I obediently supplied
them with the details they demanded. They noted my information, but they
hardly seemed to be impressed by it. Berta presently suggested that we
should turn back towards the tea-garden and look for Luigi.
We discovered Luigi surrounded by a group of young companions who
certainly weren’t nice Englishmen. They looked to me like decidedly
second-rate Italians, but it didn’t appear that Luigi found them
uncongenial. They were all lounging and talking round one of the little
tables, and Luigi’s chair and his straw hat were tilted back at the same
angle, and while he volubly held forth to the circle his loud black eye
(he had the same plum-like eye as his sister and his aunt) was scanning
and following the stream of people who passed on their evening
promenade. He watched with care; Berta pointed him out to me as we
approached, and she waved her parasol to summon him; but he shook his
forefinger in reply without shifting his tilt or interrupting his
discourse. Berta waved more urgently, and her thumb flicked out sideways
in my direction as she looked at him; and Luigi then stared at me very
frankly, lifted himself from his place and came forward to join us. He
was a short and sturdy young man, smartly appointed, with a flashing
smile that was polite, indifferent, insolent--that was anyhow very
great. He paid no attention to his sister and his aunt, beyond waiting
for them to pronounce an introduction. He smiled upon me and he
spoke--and there was a sad drop in his style when he spoke, for his
English came of a meaner strain than that of his ladies. It was not less
fluent, it was more correct; but it had a vulgar flatness that wasn’t
inherited from the sculptress of Virginia. He was a pretty young
gentleman so long as he was silent, but he was common and dingy and
commercial when he opened his mouth. I suppose he had successfully
caught the intonation of the Englishmen he _had_ been able to meet in
Rome.
Teresa began to recount with vivacity the story of our acquaintance.
Luigi listened to her for a moment and then murmured a few quick words
of Italian, I don’t know what they were, before which poor Teresa seemed
to drop like a stone. He had cut her short in the middle of a word and
her mouth hung open; but she said no more, she dumbly signalled to
Berta, and two anxious women stood waiting before Luigi for their
orders. He turned away from them and they understood; they spoke up
bravely, reminded me (or told me) that I had promised to take tea with
them on the following day, and declared that they must now hasten back
to convey their old man home. They hurried away, and Luigi immediately
displayed his smile again, suggesting that I should walk with him. His
young friends appeared to hail him, to invite us both into their party;
but he denied them without a glance, with the same slight shake of his
forefinger, talking to me and drawing me off as he did so. He talked
familiarly; he asked no questions, and at first he was chiefly concerned
to explain to me the great disadvantage at which a gentleman almost
necessarily finds himself in Rome. It is all very well if you are rich;
but if you aren’t, and if you happen to be a gentleman, why then Luigi
thought there was no place in the world where you were so rottenly
situated as in Rome. Roman society is utterly snobbish, and a gentleman
doesn’t care to push among people who think themselves too good for him;
and the company of a lot of bounders is unpleasant to a gentleman, and
Luigi could assure me that it was a treat for him to shake hands with a
gentleman, and not only a gentleman, mind you, but a man of the world,
the right sort. He was pleased to imply that I was the right sort, and
he cordially took my arm.
Luigi was odious. With a gush of memory from across the years it returns
to me, the odiousness of Luigi. There was a touch of gallantry about
Teresa and Berta, a swing of bravery in their pretensions--and a real
impulse of unselfishness, poor creatures, in their care and respect for
this vulgar youth. He was their pride, the object of their disinterested
ambition; they took thought for him and used their simple arts on his
behalf; and Luigi repaid them by spending an hour in implying to me that
his family were an unfortunate drag upon a spirited gentleman. I soon
understood that I wasn’t to judge him by the dreadful commonness of his
womankind; he was in the unlucky possession of a rarer refinement, a
loftier pride, a diviner discontent than the rest of his house; and yet
here he was, tied and handicapped, as I could see for myself, by a
family incapable of profiting by his example. We took incidentally a
brief glance at the loyalty with which he stuck to them, admitting the
claim on him of two foolish women and a helpless old man, however
unworthy; that was the kind of good fellow he was--too faithful and
dutiful, perhaps, to do justice to the power that was in him. But though
it was splendid of him to make the sacrifice, it was also very
distressing that such a remarkable nature should be sacrificed at all;
so back we came to the miserable scope that this infernal old Rome has
to offer to the talents of a gentleman, if he is not prepared to cringe
and crawl for his opportunity. Luigi had much to say of it, and he
passed an agreeable hour.
The sun burned lower, the great lordly pines were smitten with gold, the
shadows crept along the green dells of the open park; and there came a
moment at last when rebellion seized me, and I actually turned upon
Luigi with a passionate outburst. It didn’t last long, and he took very
little notice of it; he merely paused, checked the flow of his lament,
and proceeded again when I held my peace. Not long ago, you remember, I
had been told at considerable length that my poor old Rome was no place
for an artist; and that tirade of the opera-singer now came over me,
while my companion ingeminated his cry that it was a place unworthy of
Luigi. The opera-singer seemed the less fatuous of the two. I can easily
bear to hear the name of art re-uttered in Rome, for the
thousand-millionth time, in any connexion, on any pretext. Is Rome a
step-mother to the arts?--it may well be so, and very likely Rome has
thought nothing of smashing an artist, carelessly, disdainfully, at all
the changes of the moon since the suckling of the twins. I can imagine
that it may lie in the character of Rome to be often brutal to the arts;
and by all means let an artist (though not that egregious Bannock
indeed, for choice) stand up and hurl out his reproach. But when Luigi,
in the face of Rome, maunders on with his vulgar stuff about the
feelings of a gentleman, I rebel--I say that to mention these flimsy
refinements in the noble great park of the Borghese is more than my
sense of fitness will endure. A gentleman!--what has Rome to do with
this nonsense of gentility, tediously and querulously droning in the
mouth of Luigi? No, Luigi; Rome, I believe, has had some slight
acquaintance with greatness and grandeur since the twins fell out with
each other, but Rome hasn’t the mind to contemplate _your_ precious
distinctions. You might as well suggest to a poet of heroism, to the
chanter of an immemorial saga, that he should study the manners of a
tea-party in a suburban drawing-room.
My outburst took another form, however; these sentiments let it loose,
but it was differently worded. Luigi only stared and waited till I had
finished. I ended on the cry that seemed never to be far from my lips in
those days, the cry of envy at the sight of the fortunate folk who could
do their cringing, if it had to be done, in Rome. I said that I should
willingly crawl the length and breadth of the city for the reward of an
abiding place within the walls; I shouldn’t mind what pope or king might
think of me. Luigi very naturally felt that I hadn’t quite grasped his
situation. He resumed his discourse, and he began to point out to me
that in my place and with my opportunities he would indeed go far. No
doubt, for example, I had very influential friends. Not very? Well, only
give _him_ the chance of a footing in England, an opening that would
bring him into the society of gentlemen--and he developed his theme
still further, guiding it, as I presently noticed, into preciser detail
than before. The sun had hardly faded from the tree-tops when I learned
that a person in my position, with my advantages, was just the person
whose hand Luigi had long desired to shake. And what did he take my
position to be, and where, pray, did he recognize its advantages? I
didn’t put the question as plainly as this, for indeed I had no wish to
meet Luigi when he came to detail. I clung to generalities, and I
suggested that there were plenty of most ungentlemanly people in London.
“I’m sure I shouldn’t think any of _your_ friends ungentlemanly,” said
Luigi.
What are you to do with a youth like that? I own that I felt a little
excited by the thought that somebody, were it only Luigi, should turn to
me for patronage; and Luigi would certainly never discover just how much
of it I had to dispense. And yet he had taken my measure fairly enough;
he didn’t suppose that my own credit was very high, but I could “mention
his name,” he said, in certain quarters, and he shot out a suggestion or
two which showed that he had already considered the ground and was
prepared. Any chance was a chance worth seizing; any simple Englishman
thrown in his way might be a step on his ladder. But he was shrewd; and
when he found that his hints were left lying where they fell, he turned
aside to disparage his unfortunate family again--his sister, his aunt,
his father, a bunch of futility that hindered a man in his effort to
announce and express himself in the world. In a few words it was
delicately implied that anybody who lent a hand to Luigi would never be
embarrassed by Luigi’s family--the admirable youth would see to that. He
was rather uneasy to think that already his women had engaged me to
visit them; he knew, to be sure, that their pride and delight was to
serve Luigi, but a prudent man doesn’t entrust his business to the
bungling devotion of two ignorant women. With this in mind he insinuated
that I needn’t trouble myself with their officious invitations; though
if I cared to see something of the town under _his_ guidance, why indeed
he was very much at my disposal. Rome the inexhaustible! The sacred
place as Luigi saw it was quite unlike the city of Deering’s vision, or
of Jaff’s, or of Cooksey’s; but he too was convinced that his was the
real and only Rome, such as it was--a poor thing compared with the
Strand of London.
VII. VIA DELLA PURIFICAZIONE
There is a little dirty wedge of the streets of old Rome, there is or
there still was a few days ago, which runs up the hill of the Ludovisi,
on the way to the Pincian Gate. The garden of the Ludovisi crowned the
hill, I suppose, in the days of Kenyon and Roderick Hudson, and now the
vast new inns of the tourist stand there; but even before the time of
Rowland and Roderick the old streets had encroached up to the very edge
of the garden, and there they are still, with the great hotels towering
above them--a handful of tangled byways between the boulevard on one
side and the tram-line on the other. These papal relics are exceedingly
squalid, I must own, what with the cabbage-stalks in the mud and the
underclothing that hangs drying in the windows; but they are charmingly
named, and Luigi’s family lived in the Via della Purificazione.
From the doorstep of the house a narrow black staircase tunnelled its
way upward, and I climbed in the darkness and the dankness to the
apartment of my friends on the fifth story. I rang and stood waiting,
not in vain, for the delightful shock that seldom fails you on a Roman
threshold; I knew it well and I counted on it, for nothing gives you a
swifter tumble into the middle ages than the Roman fashion of receiving
a stranger. You stand on the landing, and you might suppose that the
commonplace door would open to the sound of the bell and admit you in a
moment. Not at all; there is a dead silence, as though somebody listened
cautiously, and presently a shrill cry of challenge from within--“Chi
è?” So it happens, and for me the house becomes on the spot a black old
fortress-tower of the middle ages, myself a bully and a bravo to whom
no prudent householder would open without parley; that deep dark
suspicion, that ancient mistrust of the stranger at the door--it pulls
me over into the pit of the Roman past, suddenly yawning at my feet. I
used to wait for the cry when I knocked at a Roman door, and to wish
that I could answer it and call back with the same note of the voice of
history. It takes a real Roman to do so, and I chanced to hear a real
young Roman do so once or twice; he answered the challenge with a
masterful tone of command that he had acquired long ago, in days when he
shouted and fought in the streets of Rome, a fine young figure in the
train of the Savelli or the Frangipani.
Luigi’s family kept a dishevelled old maid-servant, wild of hair and
eye; insanely staring and clutching the tails of her hair she ushered me
through a dark entry into the family apartment. It was a bewildering
place; there were plenty of rooms, freely jumbled together, but their
functions were confusingly mixed. I couldn’t help knowing, for example,
as I passed from one to another, that Teresa was hooking herself into
her gown by a small scullery-sink in which there stood a japanned
tea-pot and a cracked bedroom looking-glass. I was deposited finally in
a very stuffy little parlour, smothered and stifled with a great deal of
violent blue drapery and tarnished gilding. The door was closed upon me,
but it didn’t cut me off from the affairs of the household. There was a
rattling of tea-things in the kitchen and the voice of Teresa giving
directions in an urgent whisper; and from somewhere else there came
another voice, a man’s, that was new to me--a voice which uttered a
fruity torrential Italian, quite beyond any apprehension of mine,
though I could easily tell that it wasn’t the language of formal
compliment. Before long Teresa rustled brightly into the parlour, one
hand outstretched, the other searching stealthily for an end of white
tape that had slipped through her hooking and wandered over the back of
her skirt. She welcomed me on a high-pitched note, at the sound of which
the man’s voice immediately stopped; and she drew me forth through
another small room, containing an unmade bed, to an open window and a
balcony that commanded a fine wide view of the city. The balcony was
large enough to hold a table and two or three bedroom chairs; and there
we found Berta, together with a man who offered himself politely for
introduction to the new-comer.
“Mr. Daponte,” said Berta, presenting him. He was a very short thick man
of forty or so, chiefly composed of a big black moustache and a pair of
roving discoloured eyes; he was glossily neat, though rather doubtfully
clean. He bowed, while the ladies graciously exhibited him and explained
that he spoke no English. “But he understands very well,” said Berta,
“and he loves to listen.” The gentleman showed his understanding by a
grin and a flourish of his large dirty hands, and a remark seemed to be
labouring up from within him, so that we all paused expectant. It was an
English remark, but it miscarried after all. “I speak--” said Mr.
Daponte; and he spoke no more, appealing mutely to the women to help him
out. But the Medusa-head of the old servant appeared in the window at
that moment, and she fell over the step to the balcony and landed the
tea-tray with a crash on the table; and in the commotion, while Berta
busied herself over the cups and plates, Teresa drew me aside and
whispered archly, indicating the little gentleman, “He will be the
hosband of my niece.” Berta looked round and performed a blush--she
felicitously glanced, that is to say, and stirred her shoulders as
though she blushed; and she gave a little push to her swain in a girlish
manner, which took him by surprise and mystified him for an awkward
instant; but then he nodded intelligently and responded with a playful
blow. “Tea, tea!” cried Teresa, smiling largely; and we packed ourselves
round the table to enjoy a plate of biscuits and a pale straw-coloured
fluid which Berta poured from the japanned tea-pot.
The view from the balcony was magnificent, only you had to overlook the
nearer foreground. We seemed to be swung out upon space, above the
neighbouring house-roofs; and beyond and below them was a great sweep of
the sunlit city, with the dome of St. Peter like a steel-grey bubble on
the sky-line. But the nearer house-roofs, crowding into the foreground,
made a separate picture of their own, and I found it difficult to look
beyond them. There is much oriental freedom of house-top life in Rome,
on fine summer evenings; you scarcely catch a glimpse of it from the
street below, but on Teresa’s balcony we were well in the midst of it.
Bath-sheba wasn’t actually washing herself, but she felt safe and at
ease in the sanctity of the home, lifted up to the sky, and she
displayed her private life to the firmament. Little gardens of flowers
in pots, tea-tables like our own, groves and pergolas of intimate linen,
trap-doors and hatches from which bare-headed figures, informally clad,
emerged to take the evening air--it was a scene set and a drama
proceeding there aloft, engaging to the eye of a stranger, and our
balcony was hung like a theatre-box to face the entertainment. Close in
front, just beneath us, there was a broad space of flat roof on which
the householder had built an arbour, a pagoda of wire with greenery
trained about it; and in the arbour sat the householder himself, a
grey-headed old priest, crossing his legs, smoking his cigar and reading
his newspaper; and a pair of small children scuttled and raced around
him, while he placidly took his repose, and rushed shrieking to meet a
young girl, who climbed from below with a basket of clothes for the
line; and the priest looked up, waved his cigar and cried out a jest to
the girl, who stood with her basket rested on her hip, merrily
threatening the children who clutched at her skirt. The blast of a
cornet came gustily from another roof-sanctuary, further off, and there
a young man was perched astride upon a bench, puffing at his practice in
solitude. And so on from roof to roof, and I found myself sharing all
this easy domestic enjoyment of a perfect evening with rapt attention.
The voice of Teresa recalled me; for Teresa was appealing to me to
confirm her, to say that she was right in telling Emilio (Emilio was
Berta’s betrothed)--in telling him some nonsense, whatever it was, about
the splendour of London, its size or shape, its social charm; Teresa was
certain of her fact, for once she had spent a fortnight in London, and
now she dwelt upon the memory. A sole fortnight--but how she had used
it! She had discovered in some handbook a scheme for the exploration of
all London, within and without, in fourteen days; it appears that after
fourteen tours of inspection, each of them exactly designed to fit into
a long summer’s day, you may be satisfied that you have left no stone of
London unturned. Only to be sure you must rigidly stick to the
directions of the handbook, and Teresa had to regret that they didn’t
include the spectacle of Queen Victoria; which was the more to be
deplored because actually she had had the chance, and yet couldn’t take
it because the handbook forbade. You see she had duly taken her stand
one morning, according to plan, before Buckingham Palace; and a crowd
was assembled there, and a policeman had told her that the Queen was to
appear in ten minutes; but ah, the handbook gave her only five for the
front of Buckingham Palace, and then she must seize a certain omnibus
and be off to the Tower; and she couldn’t upset the whole admirable
scheme on her own responsibility, now could she?--so she hadn’t seen the
Queen, and she couldn’t convince Emilio of something or other which I
could certainly confirm if I would. What was it? Apparently Teresa had
just been telling me; but I was so much interested in the young man with
the cornet that I had missed the point.
For me the point lay rather in the surprise of our meeting together upon
a roof in Rome to talk about Buckingham Palace. I met the appeal rather
wildly, but Teresa was contented; Emilio perceived that she knew more of
London than I did, and the two women struck up a familiar selection from
their repertory, the antiphonal strain of their singular affinity to all
things of England, of the English. How they adored the “dear old
country,” they said--how they were drawn by that call in their blood, of
which I knew. Berta too had seen London, she had spent three days with
her father in a boarding-house of Bloomsbury; she had saluted and
recognized her home. So lost, so transfigured were they in their
Englishry that the Roman evening all about them was again forgotten, it
touched them not at all. Berta begged me to remember how from Gower
Street you may step round the corner into the sparkling throng of
Tottenham Court Road; and “the policemen!” she cried, and “the hansom
cabs!” and “Piccadilly Circus!”--Berta hadn’t much gift of description,
it was enough for her to cry upon the names of her delight. Emilio’s
gooseberry-tinted eyes were strained in the effort to understand our
English talk; he could offer no opinion upon its subject, for all his
mind was given to its translation, word by word, in his thought; but
perhaps he didn’t entirely approve of the general drift, for it was not
quite seemly that Berta should display an experience of the world in
which he couldn’t share. She gave him no attention, however; for she was
quite carried away, the mad thing, by her fond enthusiasm over our dear
old country. She was a little bit cracked on the subject, her aunt had
said; and her aunt leant forward and tapped her on the cheek with tender
ridicule. “You silly child!” said Teresa--for it was not to be forgotten
that the call of the English blood came from _her_ side of the family,
and that Berta stood at a further remove than she from the pride of
their lineage. “But her father,” added Teresa, “is just as bad. He was
always italianissimo, as they say here, but he loved the English
freedom. The Italians do not understand our adorrable freedom.”
No, of course not. Rome, that had old genius of tyranny, lay outspread
beneath and around us, bathed in the spring-sweetness of the first of
May. The white-headed priest had folded his newspaper and was attending
to his flower-pots, snipping and fondling his carnations; while the two
children were struggling with bleating cries for the possession of a
watering-can, which they busily hoisted under the old man’s direction
to the row of the pots; and the girl, stretching her linen on the line,
cried to them over her shoulder to be careful. The young man upon the
further roof had laid aside his cornet and was singing, singing as he
leant upon a parapet--a trailing measure that lingered upon clear high
notes with a wonderful operatic throb and thrill. On another roof
another group had assembled, lounging about a table on which a woman
placed a great rush-bound flask of wine; they were a group of men, four
or five of them, in dark coats and black soft hats, and they stretched
their legs about the table and talked in comfort while the woman filled
their glasses. I thought of Gower Street and Tottenham Court Road; but
Berta’s pitch was too high for me, and I felt that I flagged and dragged
upon them in their fine English flight. But what matter?--so much the
more brilliantly their native patriotism soared and shone; and I
couldn’t but see that it was a true passion, genuinely romantic and
pure, by which they were transported above the daily dullness of the
Street of the Purification, above the lifelong habit of Rome.
“I think you are not so English as we are,” cried Berta; and indeed it
might seem so, as my eyes wandered away from Piccadilly Circus and
followed the old priest and the children--the two children were still
struggling and yelping joyously over their watering-pot. To Berta it
might seem that I was no true Englishman, and I left it at that. Neither
she nor Teresa was troubled with a doubt whether a true Englishman,
sitting there on the balcony in the golden evening of Rome, would be
found to yearn desirously to the thought of the boarding-house in Gower
Street--“Invergarry” was the name of the house, Berta said; perhaps I
knew it? They certainly betrayed themselves badly with their innocent
outcries. I wished that we might have had Cooksey or Deering on the
balcony with us, to teach these women the style of the truly English. My
own was below the level of Cooksey’s--Berta was so far right. I ought to
have shown myself more actively and resolutely Roman, I ought to have
hailed the old priest with kindly patronage, I ought to have been ready
to instruct Berta in the custom and usage of Roman life, leaving her to
grapple as she could with the life of Bloomsbury; Cooksey would have
done all this, the good English Cooksey, true offspring of the diocese
of Bath and Wells--“bien trairoit au linage,” as they say in the old
poems. The better you favour and hold to your lineage, if it is English,
the more complacently you flout it upon the soil of Rome; it is the
sign. Berta, poor soul, hadn’t had the opportunity to grasp these
distinctions. She had only passed three days at Invergarry, and she had
learnt no more than to flourish the ecstasy of her intimacy with our
dear old country. It takes more than three days, it takes a lifetime and
a lineage, to teach you the true cackle of scorn, the thin unmistakable
pipe of irony, which you may hear and salute upon the lips of Cooksey
and of Deering. They are the sons of the dear old country, and I should
recognize their accent anywhere; Berta and Teresa, if they live for
ever, if they live till the reign of the next English pope, will never
acquire it.
But what about Luigi? Luigi, they said, had been detained by business,
but he hoped to join us before the tea-party was at an end. And
presently, sure enough, Luigi appeared on the balcony with his
conquering smile; and my first thought was to study _his_ accent, which
differed from that of his women and which indeed, truth to say, was
considerably more genuine than theirs. It was not a pretty accent, as I
have said; it was exceedingly low; but his slurred and flattened mumble,
with its bad vowels and vulgar stresses, brought the pavement of London
much nearer to me than the lyrical coloratura of his sister and his
aunt. Luigi had only to open his mouth, only to say “_Ah_ believe you”
and “A give yer _mah_ word,” to throw something like a fog of the
Thames-side over the fair southern evening; which should have pleased
the ladies, only they weren’t aware of it. Through Luigi’s talk I dimly
peered into the depths of the cosmopolitan jumble of Rome; and I saw a
company of Englishmen, young blades of commerce, spirited young clurks
in enterprising young houses of business, established upon the sacred
hills in the hope (the vain hope, Luigi assured me) that Rome would
awake from her stuffy old dreams, blinking and rubbing her eyes, to
hustle out into the world of modernity. Sanguine souls, they thought the
sleepy old place might yet be roused to bestir herself; but Luigi told
them plainly that they didn’t know Rome if they had any idea of that
kind. _He_ knew Rome--a dead place, dead and rotten and done for; it
passed _him_ why anybody who wished to do well for himself should come
to Rome. They _did_ come, however, quite a number of them; and Luigi
frequented their society and caught their tones and sedulously practised
their slang.
But in all that commercial society, you understand, there is nothing
that will do a man any _good_; Luigi indicated the reason for this, and
you will be surprised to hear that it was because these commercial
chaps, clurks and agents and travellers and such, are not
gentlemen--not a gentlemanly lot at all. One frequents their society
because no better is at hand; and one frequents it because one can’t
afford to miss _any_ chance in a place like Rome; and perhaps one
frequents it a little because a man likes an opportunity to swagger
round the town with a company of dashing young strangers and to induct
them into its resources of pleasure; but one doesn’t care to lay stress
upon these frequentations when it happens--when it happens that
something just a little bit better presents itself. I state what was in
Luigi’s mind, I offer no opinion upon his judgment; Luigi, as you know,
took the flattering view of my company that it was of the sort which
might, if it were judiciously ensued, do a man good. But I am entitled
to claim that in the end he was disappointed with me, and that the end
came soon. I saw very little more of Luigi, and I believe he never
discovered that “opening” at which he was prepared to jump, dropping the
embarrassment of his family. Some voice of the air afterwards brought me
the news that he had married the elderly widow of a Portuguese Jew, and
that with her too, or perhaps rather with her late husband, he was
grievously disappointed. His smile had carried him, I suppose, beyond
his prudence.
Meanwhile I was able, as I say, to compare his note and accent with
those of his family; and the result was that I warmed a good deal
towards the valiant cheer of Berta and Teresa. They had dropped into the
background (so far as that is possible on a small balcony where five
people were now squeezed about the table) when Luigi made his
appearance; they abdicated and he assumed the rule of the entertainment;
and it became so common and squalid under his direction that I clearly
saw the bravery which the women had lent it till he came. We had been
munching the biscuits with perfect dignity, and when Luigi began
apologizing for them he seemed to degrade us all. Teresa had handed the
plate like one who does honour to herself and her guest, and even
Emilio, whose table-manners were not very good, had pulled himself
together to imitate Berta’s dainty fingering of her tea-cup. But now
Emilio went entirely to pieces; he gulped, he filled his mouth with the
dust of the biscuits and forgot about it while he greedily questioned
Luigi, raising some matter of a promise or an appointment which Luigi
rather sulkily discouraged. “Afterwards!” said Luigi crossly, in
English, and Emilio gloomed in silence and resumed his mouthful of dust.
I don’t think those women had a gay or comely time of it when they were
alone with Luigi; I had a vision of interminable sessions on that
balcony, day after day, Luigi grumbling his discontent and his pity of
himself in an endless acrid argument with the women, while the priest
took his evening repose hard by and the young man on the further
house-top blasted perseveringly upon his cornet.
How strange and sad that these people should have no more suitable stage
for their dreary wrangles than a balcony swung out upon so much of the
history of the world, an airy platform from which you could wave your
handkerchief to the dome of St. Peter! I tried to measure what it might
mean to Berta that in the midst of the golden-brown city beneath us, the
treasury outspread before her every morning when she looked from her
chamber, you could distinguish the smooth unobtrusive crown of the
Pantheon; I pointed it out to her and found she had never noticed it
before. “La Rotonda?” she said; “but the Rotonda should be--” she didn’t
know where it should be, she didn’t know anything about it at all, she
had never seen the view from her balcony, though she knew it was very
fine. “We have a so beautiful prospect,” she said, surveying it with
aroused curiosity, as though for the first time. “In Bloomsbury the view
is not so fine,” I suggested; and she turned her back upon Rome to
protest that I didn’t know my own good fortune, with beautiful London to
enjoy whenever I would. But I liked her for the word; she loved London
for the beauty of Gower Street, not for its openings and its chances;
and she looked coolly upon Rome, not because it is no place for a
gentleman, but because in Rome she had had more than enough of the care
of a decayed old father, of the struggle with mounting prices and
expenses--and very much more than enough, I dare say, of Luigi’s sulking
and complaining, though she still managed to think she thought him a
handsome and brilliant young man. She had, however, secured a husband;
Emilio wasn’t handsome, but like Luigi she took her chance where she
found it.
VIII. ALBANO
Day after day the bounty of the springtime was unfailing; and the day of
our excursion to Albano began as a crystal, towered to its height in
azure and gold, sank to evening over the shadowy plain in pearl and
wine. If the world had been created and hurled upon its path to enjoy a
single day, one only, before dropping again into chaos, this might have
been that day itself--and quite enough to justify the labour of
creation. But in Rome that labour is justified so often, between the
dusk and the dusk, that the children of Rome have the habit of the
marvel; so I judge, at least, by Teresa and Berta, who occupied most of
the time of our small journey in wondering why they had forgotten to
bring the two light wraps which they were accustomed to take with them
in the country. Berta could only remember that she had laid them down
for a moment in the--in the scullery-sink, I suppose, with the cracked
looking-glass, but she stopped herself in mentioning the spot. And
Teresa had all but lost her very smart ivory-hilted umbrella in the
crowded tram, on the way to the station; and she was so much upset that
more than once she thoughtlessly broke out to Berta in Italian--a sure
sign in Teresa of ruffled nerves. We travelled to Albano by train, and
in our flurry of discomposure we couldn’t for a while attend to the
landscape; but presently Teresa reflected that the light wraps would be
safe where they were (she had read where they were in Berta’s eye), and
we could abandon ourselves to our national delight in the country.
The excursion had been the happy idea of the two ladies. Luigi luckily
found that he had inevitable business in the city, and of course there
was no question or exposing the aged patriot to the risks of travel--he
seldom ventured abroad; but a friend of Teresa’s was to join us at
Albano, a charming Russian lady in reduced circumstances, and perhaps
Emilio would follow us later, and Berta had sent word to another friend
of hers, a German girl, who lived out there, and possibly we should find
Miss Gilpin too--only it seemed that Miss Gilpin was rather “proud of
herself,” Berta said, rather “high,” and if she knew that Madame de
Shuvaloff, poor thing, was to be one of our party she might think it
beneath her; for Madame de Shuvaloff, you understand, had been reduced
to keeping a boarding-house near the Ponte Margherita, to support
herself and her little girl, and Berta for her part could see nothing
dishonourable in poverty, but some people--“som people,” said Teresa
trenchantly, “think it wrong for som people to be even alive, isn’t it?”
We must, then, remember that _if_ Miss Gilpin should condescend to
accompany us--“condescend?” cried Berta, “I shall just give her a good
piece of somthing if she condescends, oh yes I shall!” “You silly gurl,”
said Teresa, “always in a passion about somthing!”--and Teresa began to
reckon the number of our party for luncheon, confusing herself
inextricably in the effort to keep the certain and the probable and the
unlikely in separate categories.
We had crossed the shining plain, had tunnelled into the hills and
arrived at Albano before we had time to delight very much in the
country; and even the glorious free English ramble that we were to take
in the woods before luncheon consisted mostly of debates and delays,
harassing doubts, wrong turnings--for Teresa was positively afraid of
her niece’s boldness, once the girl was let loose in the country, and
she was resolved that the crazy thing should incur no unpleasantness,
so she darkly mentioned, such as may easily befall one in the wild
places of the mountain. The wildness, Teresa seemed to hold, begins
where the back-streets and the chicken-runs and the rubbish-heaps of the
Albanians leave off; and our hour of adventure ran out while we peered
round corners, measured the risk of climbing a stony path that
disappeared in an ilex-wood, and recollected that we mustn’t be led on
to wander too far before the time appointed for our party at the
trattoria. “How quick the morning passes in the country!” exclaimed
Berta, casting out a black-gloved hand to beat off the flies and the
puffs of white dust--the flies and the dust in the safer parts of the
country are very thick. “But we must hurry back,” Teresa reminded us;
and we turned away from the prospect of the ilex-wood, keeping to the
shade of a high wall covered with bright blue posters, and stepped out
with more assurance to regain the street of the tram-line, the
town-piazza above the railway-station, and the homely eating-house where
Madame de Shuvaloff and the rest were to meet us.
Our party kept us waiting interminably, and in the end it consisted only
of the Russian lady, reduced and charming, with her sharp and shrill
little girl. Everybody else, it seemed, had failed us, whether in
forgetfulness or in pride. But no matter, Teresa and Berta could make a
party, as I have noted, out of the leanest material; and Madame de
Shuvaloff (it is but a random shot that I take at her name) was one of
those who occupy a large amount of room for their size. We waited long
for her; but she came straggling into the trattoria at last--a tiny
scrap of a woman with a thin pale face and huge eyes, a clutching and
clawing and shrieking little creature, like a half-fledged young bird
of prey escaped from the nest. She strayed in upon us as though by
accident, and with a shriek and a flourish of her claws, catching sight
of us, she scrambled over chairs and tables, beat her wings in startled
surprise, dashed herself against the walls and ceiling--I give the
impression I received--and disappeared again, fluttering out through the
doorway with a cry for something she had left behind. It was her child
that she had lost, and there was a scuffle without, an encounter of
clashing beaks, and she returned with the child in her talons--a still
smaller but quite as active young fledgling, which struggled and shook
itself free and bounced across the floor to its perch at our table.
Teresa and Berta sat up, very decent and straight-backed, to meet the
shock of the party, and with the subsiding of the first commotion they
were able to keep it more or less in hand. Our guests were induced to
compose themselves on their chairs in the likeness of human beings.
They did their best, and the little girl indeed (her mother called her
Mimi) straightened her frock and folded her hands and pursed her lips in
a careful imitation of Teresa, enjoying the pretence of social and
lady-like manners. She improved on her example with a coquettish dart of
her eyes (at the gentleman of the party) under lowered lids; she had a
native expertness beyond the rest of us, and at intervals through the
meal she remembered to use it. But she broke down when a dish of food
appeared, and she then became the voracious nestling, passionate to be
the first to get her fingers into the mess and to secure the likeliest
lumps. She screamed to her mother in a jumble of languages to give her
_that_ bit, the best, not the nasty scrap beside it; her mother ordered
and protested, Mimi fought and snatched--on the arrival of anything
fresh to eat there was an outbreak of the free life of the wild. Mimi,
pacified with the lump she needed, was again a young person of gracious
style; and Teresa, quite powerless before these glimpses of the unknown,
could resume her control of the occasion and the ceremony. Mimi then,
momentarily gorged and at ease, watched us with a flitting glancing
attention that I in my turn was fascinated to watch. Her mind was keenly
at work, transparently observing and memorizing; she noted our
attitudes, our speech and behaviour, she stored them away for her
benefit; and I wondered what words she was using, what language she
thought in, while she seized and saved up these few small grains of a
social experience. Whenever she caught my eye on her she began
immediately to make use of them; she consciously arched her neck, she
fingered her fork with elegance, she shot her glances with eloquent
effect.
Her mother meanwhile--but her mother was indeed a baffling study. Teresa
was quite right, she was charming; she was perfectly simple and natural,
and just as much so when she was human as when she clawed and shrieked
in her native bird-savagery. When she was human she talked with a
curious questing ingenuity in any or all of the civilized tongues. She
raised us above trivialities, she neglected Teresa’s questions about her
journey, her plans, her unpunctuality; she started (in French) a
fanciful disquisition upon some very modern matter of painting or
dancing or dressing, some revolution in all the arts that was imminent;
and it seemed that she was deep in the inner councils and intrigues of
the revolution, which had its roots in a philosophic theory (she
slipped, without missing a step, into German) that she expounded in a
few light touches of whimsical imagery (suddenly twisting off into
Italian); and I can hear her assuring Teresa that the black misery of a
woman’s life will flush into pink, will whiten to snow of pure delight,
if she breaks through the bonds of--I forget what, of earthly thought,
of esthetic imprisonment; and I can see Teresa’s blank white face, her
bonnet-strings neat under her chin, her lips decently arranged as though
her mouth were full of dough, while she waits her opportunity to declare
that this modern art is all “too ogly, too drrreadfully horrible and
ogly for words.” The little visitor smiled sweetly and darted with
nimble grace into further reaches of her argument--where she evoked a
stonier stare upon the faces of Teresa and Berta, who began to look
straight across the table at nothing at all as though they could
suddenly neither see nor hear. There seemed to be no malice in Madame de
Shuvaloff, but there was no shame either. She talked most improperly (in
French), breaking through the last of the bonds that restrain us, not
indeed from the snowier heights, but from the pinker revelries of
speculation; and I don’t know where it would have ended or how Teresa
would have tackled the daring creature at last, but Mimi (who had quite
understood that she was to look inattentive when these topics were
broached)--Mimi presently distracted her mother and all of us by hurling
herself (out of her turn) at the _fritto misto_, in a passion of fear
lest the dish should be rifled and spoilt before it reached her.
Mimi was not a nice child, but her mother was decidedly attractive--far
more artless, more unconscious, more heedless than her daughter. What in
the world was the history behind them? Madame de Shuvaloff never
explained herself, and it “passes me,” as Luigi would say, how she came
to be keeping a Roman _pension_ by the Ponte Margherita. Russian she
was, Russian was at the bottom of all her tongues; but evidently it had
for so long been overlaid by the rest of Europe that she had almost
forgotten it was there. Each of her languages, however, was a language
of her own, full of odd pretty tones and inflexions that coiled and
scooped and curled with a singular music. When the struggle over the
_fritto misto_ died down Teresa seized the word with decision, the word
that seemed furthest from Madame de Shuvaloffs indelicacy, and with
Berta’s ready help she kept the conversation on a purer level. We talked
of the terrible rise in the price of provisions: did Olga know (Olga was
Madame de Shuvaloff) that Luigi had found it was entirely due to the
weakness of the government?--the criminal weakness of the ministry
before the threats of the _bassa plebe_; and if you ask how it is that
the common people insist on an increase in the cost of living, which
seems improbable, Teresa assures you that in fact they don’t know _what_
they want, such is their ignorance and their folly. We only perceive
that the country is in a sad condition, and Luigi declares--but Madame
Olga suddenly shrieks out with a shrill exclamation, followed by a
little fountain of airy laughter, for she has just remembered that she
forgot to give any directions to her servant, before leaving Rome this
morning, and she believes the creature capable of anything--of
anything--and heaven knows what will have happened to the midday meal of
her pensioners! “How many is your table?” asked Teresa with sympathetic
concern. “Eighty!” cried Madame Olga lightly, and she fumbled in her
bag and showed us a couple of five-franc notes that she had expressly
borrowed from one of her guests, only last night, for Colomba the cook
to go marketing with to-day. Well, isn’t it unlucky? “I shall lose them
all--all my eighty!” the little lady humorously wailed. “I lose them
always; Mimi and I, we shall starve!”
I expected a howl from Mimi, but she took it unmoved; she knew her
mother. Teresa, it was evident, knew her less, for Teresa gloomed
anxiously upon the prospect, trying to hold little Olga to her words and
beginning to offer advice and warning. You couldn’t trust a Roman
cook--surely Olga had discovered that; and lodgers, in these bad times,
are precious articles and you must handle them cautiously. “But how many
did you say--?” It broke upon Teresa that Olga had played with her over
the number, and her face was a pleasant mixture of dignity a little
ruffled and mannerliness striving to meet a joke. Madame de Shuvaloff
became instantly serious; and though it didn’t appear that the disaster
of the dinnerless pensioners weighed on her, she was desperate,
unutterably hopeless, over the tragedy of a woman’s life in the great
horrible world. “Men,” she said bitterly, “do what they will with
us”--and the eyes of Berta and Teresa met in a swift glance as they
hastily struck up their give-and-take on the question of the likeliest
methods of attracting the right kind of lodger to share one’s home. One
should possibly advertise in the newspapers--but the topic was
unfortunately chosen, for Madame Olga immediately flung off into a
rippling titter of mirth, thin and savage, at the notion of
“attracting,” were it only as boarders at one’s table, the men who make
the world so black a place for a woman. “All beasts!” she declared
flatly; and this was her opportunity for a story that she addressed
particularly at me, glaring with her great eyes in the horror of what
she told.
Truly the Russian wild sends out strange little emissaries to the cities
of civilization. This tiny frail slip of a woman, who looked as though a
puff of air from the frozen plain would shrivel her dead, had somehow
scrambled across Europe and held her own and lodged herself in a cranny
of Rome; and there she had stuck, she had survived, you couldn’t tell
how, with a tenacity of slender claws that could grasp and cling where a
heavier weight would have found no chance of foothold. She was evidently
indestructible. The world, by her account, massed its ponderous strength
to crush her; but there was nothing in her that might be crushed, no
superfluous sensitive stuff to be caught by a blow; there was nothing
but one small central nut or bead of vitality, too hard for the world
itself to crack. She thrived upon the conflict; I don’t for a moment
suppose that the world was as unkind to her as it was, for example, to
poor foolish old Teresa; but she believed herself to be singled out for
its crudest attack, and the thought was exquisite and stimulating. She
had, moreover, a real artistic passion; her fire and thrill were genuine
when she talked of the strange things that were doing among the artists;
but I note that it had to be the art of the present, the art of a
chattering studio rather than of a hushed museum--she couldn’t have
thrilled and fired before the beauty of the past and dead, where there
aren’t the same intoxicating revolutions to be planned and exploded upon
an unsuspicious age. Drama she needed, and of drama you can always have
your fill if you know as well as she did how to make it. Why yes, she
created a notion of mysterious conspiracy, somewhere lurking in the
background, by her very refusal to explain and apologize when she was
late for lunch.
As for her story of the baseness of men, told with extreme earnestness
in three languages, she made a very good thing of it and we were all
impressed. But much more striking than her story was the picture that
rose before me of her establishment, her boarding-house by the Tiber,
where a dozen lodgers (she reduced them to a dozen), mostly like herself
from the Russian inane, gathered and mingled, quarrelled and stormed at
each other, conspired, bribed the cook, made love to the landlady (of
course I have only her word for it), eloped without settling their
bills, lent her five-franc notes to pay at least for the next meal--but
chiefly talked, talked day and night, sat interminably talking, while
Olga rated the servants or hunted for the lost key of the larder, while
Colomba had hysterics and dropped the soup-tureen, while Mimi killed
flies at the window and had her own little crisis of nerves over a
disappointment about a box of chocolates. All these visions appeared in
the story--which was a story of the monstrous behaviour of one of the
lodgers, a young man of whom Olga had tried to make a friend. A
friend!--yes, Olga believed in friendship, in spite of a hundred
disillusions; she believed in a species of friendship that transcends
the material, the physical; but we needn’t go into that, for though she
_had_ believed in it, the young man’s behaviour had pretty well killed
her faith, once for all, and she now saw that there could be no true
friendship in a world where half the world (the brutes of men) have no
sense of honour, none of loyalty, none of idealism, transcendentalism,
immaterialism; and Teresa still held her lips placidly bunched while
Olga circled among these safe abstractions, but the little wretch came
presently down with a bump again upon plainer terms, and it behoved
Teresa to intervene with all her decision. Olga said that the young man
had proved to be not only destitute of these safe vague qualities, but
terribly in possession of other qualities, quite of the opposite kind,
which she proceeded to name; and their names lacked that soft classical
buzz and blur (idealism, materialism, prunes-and-prism--the termination
is reassuring), and on the contrary were so crude and clear-cut that
Teresa pushed back her chair and suggested another delightful long
ramble in the forest, a “country afternoon,” such as we all adored.
There really was no malice in Olga, the little wretch; for to be
malicious you must at least have some consciousness of the feelings of
other people, you must know what will hurt them; and Olga was aware of
no feelings, no subject of sensation, save her own and herself. Imagine
all the relations of the world to be arranged like the spokes of a
wheel, with no crossing or tangling before they reach the middle; and
Olga herself in the middle, with every thread of feeling that exists all
radiating away from her into space: that was the order of nature as Olga
saw it, that indeed was her fashion of introducing order of any kind
into the universe. One must simplify somehow; and if, unlike Olga, you
suspect people of thinking and feeling on their own account, all anyhow,
turning the cart-wheel into a tangle--well then you must order your
private affairs, your habits, your household at least, into some kind
of reposeful pattern. Olga had no need of a stupid mechanical pattern,
the mere work of her own hands, to be imposed upon the facts around her.
Let Colomba rave, let the lodgers hurl their boots among the crockery
(she happened to mention it as one of their ways), let the
boarding-house seethe and heave like a page of Dostoevsky: no matter,
the universe kept its grand simplicity, all lines met at the centre,
Olga was there. The story of the base young man had no bearing upon
anybody but herself; Teresa was shocked, but Olga didn’t care, didn’t
notice, and she went on absorbed in her narrative--or she would have
done so if Mimi hadn’t made another diversion (to be frank, she was sick
before she could get to the door) in which the young man was finally
dropped and forgotten.
Emilio now joined us, very hot and shiny from the train, and as soon as
he had refreshed himself we issued forth--an orderly procession, for
Mimi clung pensively awhile to her mother’s arm; and it was agreed that
we should enjoy ourselves unconventionally, fearlessly, in a walk
through the greenwood to Castel Gandolfo. We mustn’t forget, however,
that Fräulein Dahl, Berta’s German friend, would be descending from
Castel Gandolfo (where she lived) to meet us; and we immediately saw
that whichever of the forest-paths we chose we should certainly miss
her. “We had better go perhaps no further than this,” said Berta,
pausing under the blue posters of the wall we had already studied that
morning; and Emilio proposed the amendment that it would be safer still
to wait in the middle of the town, by the tram-station, where the lady
would be sure to look for us. But Berta yearned for the country; so she
and Teresa spread a couple of newspapers upon a dust-heap under the
posters, gathered their skirts, deposited themselves with care, and
pointed out that one had a charming glimpse of the country from this
very spot. A little way up the lane indeed there was leafy shadow and
the beginning of a woodland ride; and Olga, restlessly ranging, called
to us to come further and take to the forest. But Teresa and Berta were
established, and they declared themselves at ease where they
were--though I can’t say they looked very easy, with their veils pulled
down and their knees drawn neatly together, both clutching the ornate
handles of their umbrellas. “People will think we are strange gurls,”
said Berta, “sprawling by the road like this!” Emilio had to make the
best he could of their wild English ways; he leant with resignation
against the picture of a highly developed young woman in evening dress,
who held out a box of pills with a confident smile; he sucked at a long
cigar in silence. Mimi really did sprawl; she lay where she fell, she
slept the sleep in which one repairs the disasters of a recent meal.
I followed her mother up the shadowy path into the woodland, where we
were to watch carefully for Berta’s expected friend. When at last you
are clear of the pigs and chickens of Albano you plunge immediately into
the Virgilian forest that spreads and spreads over the hills, between
the two deep bowls of the lakes. The ancient darkness of ilex leads you
on, and the darkness changes to hoary sun-sprinkled oak-shadow, to open
spaces where the big white rock-rose flowers against the outcrop of the
grey stone, and the path stumbles on into damp green tunnels among the
chestnut saplings; and a laden mule, driven by a bare-footed boy,
appears with a jangle of bells that carry me off and away, deeper and
deeper into the time-softened goodness of the wondrous land, the
Saturnian land, the great mother of kindly beast and songful man--for
the boy sings as he plods up the pathway, with long sweet notes that are
caught by a hungry ear, caught and lost, caught again in the far
distance with an echo of the years of gold, of the warm young earth in
its innocence. How can we praise the land that Virgil praised? Leave the
word to Virgil, listen while he repeats it again--again. I can hear
nothing else till the last sound of it has died; and my companion, the
strange little wild thing from the east, lifts up her finger and is
silent and motionless till it ceases. What does Olga know of the golden
years and the Saturnian land? Nothing, nothing whatever; but she listens
with uplifted finger, entranced by the freedom of the forest, for a few
fine moments forgetful of her own existence. Then she is herself again,
flitting and scrambling down the path to meet a figure that approaches
through the green shadows.
IX. CASTEL GANDOLFO
FRAULEIN DAHL CAME STRIDING UP the woodland path with a free swing of
her arms and flourish of her staff--not a Virgilian figure, yet
classical too in her way, carrying her head in the manner of a primeval
mother-goddess of the tribes. Didn’t the old Mediterranean settler,
pushing inland from the coast where he had beached his boat--didn’t he,
somewhere in the ilex-solitude of the Italic hills, encounter certain
ruder and ruggeder stragglers from the north?--and hadn’t these tall and
free-stepping strangers brought with them their matriarch, the genius of
their stock, a woman ancient as time and still as young as the morning,
with her grey eyes and her broad square brow and her swinging tread? No
doubt my ethnology is very wild, but thus it sprang into my mind and
took form at the sight of the woman who approached--for whom the name of
Fräulein Dahl, so flat and so featureless, seemed absurdly inadequate.
She flopped when she saw us, she stood serene and large while the little
Russian dashed about her with cries and pecks. Olga hung upon her with
excited endearments, with lithe gesticulations that made the new-comer
look entirely like a massive and rough-hewn piece of nature, unmoved by
the futile humanity that scrambles upon her breast. I really can’t speak
of her by the name of a middle-aged spinster from Dresden (which indeed
she was); for I can only think of her as Erda, as the earth-mother of
the ancient forest; and when she addressed me in her deep voice and her
Saxon speech, brief and full, it was as though she uttered the
aboriginal tongue of the northern twilight, the _Ursprache_ of the
heroes. I ought to have answered only with some saga-snatch of strong
rough syllables, like the clash of shield and spear beneath the spread
of the Branstock; and as I couldn’t do this, and my poor little phrases
of modern politeness were intolerably thin and mean for such an
encounter, I must own that my conversation with Erda didn’t flourish,
and I had mainly to look on while Olga, not troubled by my scruples,
clawed and dragged her into the fever of our degenerate age. Think of
Erda clutched by the skirt, pecked with familiar kisses, haled out of
the forest into the presence of Teresa and Berta, where they sit on
their dust-heap and wave their black gloves in a voluble argument, the
heat and the flies having by this time fretted their tempers and
considerably flawed, it would seem, their joy in the freedom of the
country. But nothing can disturb the large repose of Erda’s dignity, and
the groundlings of the dust recover themselves as she appears, suddenly
sweeten their smiles and their voices, advance to meet and greet a
middle-aged spinster from Dresden, hard-featured and shabbily clad.
It took a long while to settle how best, how with the greatest propriety
and safety, to make the journey of a mile or two from the dust-heap to
the height of Castel Gandolfo, where our new friend had her abode. How
are we to be perfectly certain that if we drive by the highroad we
shan’t wish we had walked through the wood?--but before deciding to walk
through the wood, let us remember that since Teresa sprained her ankle
at Porto d’Anzio last summer it has never been the ankle that it was
before. Emilio eagerly advised caution, caution! “Aha!” said Berta, “he
knows he will be forced to carry her all day on his back, as at Porto
d’Anzio.” (What a picture!) Emilio felt the heat distressingly,
liberally; his gloss was already much bedimmed, he was in no case to
shoulder the lovely burden this afternoon. But Erda brandished her staff
and struck out for the forest, Olga fluttered after her, Mimi awoke
refreshed with a sudden convulsion of black legs and flung herself in
pursuit; and Teresa laughed surprisingly on a high reckless note,
lunging quite vulgarly at Emilio with her umbrella, and declared herself
equal to carrying _him_, if need be, “pig-a-back jolly well all the
time!”--such was her phrase. This was the right vein of rollick for the
adventure of a country holiday, and in this spirit we accomplished the
journey, not a little elated by the sense of our ease and dash. Emilio
did his best to reach our level; he stepped out vigorously, mopping his
brow, and after some careful cogitation in silence he edged to my side
and nudged me, pointing to Teresa and Berta where they breasted the
stony path in front of us. “They are verri sporting gurls,” said Emilio.
Erda guided us by winding ways to her abode--which was a great black
gaunt old villa, masked by a high wall, muffled by thickets of mystery;
she opened a door in the wall, and immediately the place was so grand
and sad, so brave and dark, that its influence arose and hushed us as we
crowded into the dank courtyard. Me at least it silenced, and I should
wish to forget Teresa’s remark when the door closed behind us and she
felt the mounting chill of the scarred and stained old pavement beneath
her tread. Erda had found the right retreat for the austerity of the
poetry of her style; here she lived alone, screened from the world,
musing in her big cool mind upon the processes of time. I wanted to
tell her that she had no business to admit this party of haphazard
starers into her privacy; for Teresa would be certain to make other
remarks, like her last, when she tramped under the vaulted entry and
climbed the bare stone stairway and beheld the heroic emptiness of the
great saloon. She made many indeed; but Erda’s far-away smile passed
over our heads, and you could see that it wasn’t a few bits of trash
like ourselves, idly invading her sanctuary, that would profane the
height of her solitude. For my part I strayed about the great saloon,
looked from the windows at the shining view of the broad Campagna, tried
not to listen to Olga’s polyglot chatter--and wondered how this singular
being occupied herself in her lonely days. For after all she was a
German spinster, a stranger and a pilgrim like the rest of us; and one
ought to be able to picture the detail of her life as she lived it,
between the azure bowl of the Alban lake behind her and the silvery
plain in front, instead of surrendering the impression to the romance of
the ancient poetry she had brought with her from the north.
She appeared to have brought nothing else. The great room contained no
personal trace of her whatever, nothing but a few old chunks of
furniture that were evident relics of the noble owners of the house. On
the walls there were pale vestiges of festal painting, on the chairs and
tables there was a glimmer of exhausted gold; and there was nothing
else, not a stick, not a crock, to suggest that a stranger had arrived
to take possession of the past. The woman from Germany stood in the
middle of the wide floor, distantly smiling; and she filled the space
like a monument, with a grand pervasion of her presence, a distribution
of her authority--so that she seemed to inhabit the amplitude of her
retreat, to populate it, even though she had never sat down in one of
the gilded chairs, never written a line or opened a book there, never
put the room to any of the common uses of life. If I tried to imagine
how she employed herself when she was alone, I could only see her still
standing there in the midst, smiling out of her big tolerant serenity,
while the evening darkened and the night shut her in with her secret
thoughts. I wonder what they were. There seemed to be all the simplicity
of the world in her air and poise--and deeps of old wisdom too, full of
such long and wild experience as would trouble the repose of most of us;
but _she_ didn’t care, the memories of the dark forest and the fighting
men and the clashing assemblies had never disturbed her secular dream;
and now at last, driven from the haunts of her tribe, she had found a
place empty and large enough to contain her for a few centuries more,
perhaps, till the vulgar invasion becomes too much for her even
here--and I should like to know where she will then betake herself. And
what would she think, meanwhile, if she guessed how my fancy had
transformed a plain and elderly Saxon, living for her convenience in a
fine old villa near Rome?--for she had no romantic view of herself, she
saw her own image as unceremoniously, I am sure, as any of the trivial
starers might see it, who for the moment were making free with her
domain.
She really was, however, more splendid than she knew; and it can’t be
denied that a truly intelligent inspiration had brought her to the fine
old Roman villa. The empty shell of the grand style, so long abandoned,
was the one place in the world for her; for she needed greatness and
grandeur, and she couldn’t have found either among the tattle and the
comfort and the sentiment from which she had escaped; and she needed
desolation, a faded grandeur, a dilapidated greatness, secure from the
smart uneasy assertion of our own age’s ridiculous attempt to be
magnificent. Erda was surely the most peculiar of all the Roman pilgrims
I encountered; she had come to Rome because it is big and bare--and yet
not inane, not dumb to reverberating echoes, like the mere virginal
monstrosity of untrodden lands. The echoes of the great saloon were
innumerable; old festivities, old revelries creaked and croaked in it
above a droning and moaning undertone in which I could distinguish, with
a very little encouragement, the most awful voices of lust and hate and
pride. Erda had only to stand still and silent in the evening gloom to
discover that she had the company of all the passions that had clashed
about her in the time of the heroes; she felt at home there, no
doubt--she couldn’t have endured an atmosphere soaked in the childish
spites and jealousies of the present. Yes, she was rightly installed and
lodged--and let that be enough for us; I check the trivial curiosity
that sets me wondering how she really existed, how she came by the
possession of the strange old house, how long she had lived there.
Oddest and unlikeliest of all, if it comes to that, is the fact that
Olga and Teresa should have had the entry of her solitude, should be
cackling in unconcerned familiarity beneath her smile, should be putting
her foolish questions which I try to disregard. I hadn’t the least
intention of asking them how they had made the acquaintance of the
earth-mother; I didn’t want to know, for example, that when she first
came to Rome she had dwelt for a time in Olga’s dishevelled
boarding-house; and you never can tell, if I should press too closely I
might be met with nonsense of that kind. I much prefer to stand apart,
in the embrasure of one of the high windows, and to notice how flat the
thin shriek of these women was falling in the vacancy of the saloon. No
wonder Erda could afford to smile. With one turn of her hand she could
have bundled the whole party out of her sight and her mind; I never so
clearly saw the contract between the real person, standing square upon
her feet, and the sham, drifting and pitching helplessly because it
hasn’t the human weight to hold it to the ground. Even Emilio, who had
seemed weighty enough as he trudged and mopped himself in the
forest-path, had now shrunk to a ducking deprecating apologizing trifle
to whom nobody attended. The women indeed maintained their flutter and
gibber unabashed; but their noise didn’t even reach to the great ceiling
of the room, it broke up and dropped in mid-air; it utterly failed to
mingle with the real echoes of the place, deeply and hoarsely speaking
above our heads.
There now, however, when we had quite given up expecting her, arrived
Miss Gilpin. She appeared in the doorway and she stopped on the
threshold for a moment, collecting the eyes of the company before she
made her advance. She was a trim little woman, not very young, but with
an extremely pretty head of fox-brown hair; and with a graceful gesture
of both hands she sang out a greeting to us all, at a distance, in a
small tuneful voice, standing where the light fell upon the bright coils
of her hair; and with her arms still wide she tripped along the floor to
join our party, giving a hand here and a smile there in a sort of
dance-figure of sweetness and amiability--pausing finally, before me
the stranger, with a kind little questioning smile, while she waited
and looked to Erda for an introduction. You haven’t forgotten, perhaps,
that Miss Gilpin had a certain reputation of pride; and indeed she was a
public celebrity, for she was the authoress of books, of several books,
though she didn’t rely upon these for her effect on entering a room. Her
mazy motion and her hair and her gracious ways were enough for a
beginning, let alone the flattering charm of her inclination when I was
duly presented. She pressed my hand as though to say that already she
marked me off from the rest of the company--whose second-rate mixture we
could both appreciate, she and I; but for her part she didn’t mean to be
wanting in civility to the good souls, and so--“Cara mia!--che
piacere!--dopo tanto!”--she warbled her cries and beamed and inclined
her head in a manner to make everybody feel exceedingly plain and
coarse.
The finest instrument of her superiority, could the rest of the company
perceive it, was her Italian accent. It was probably lost on them, but
it did all its execution on me. She continued to talk Italian, though
Teresa plumped out her rich-vowelled English in return, and though Erda
disdained the use of any speech but her elemental Gothic. Miss Gilpin’s
Italian, you see, was remarkably perfect; her intonation had the real
right ringing edge to it, which you don’t often hear upon English lips.
She pounced upon the stresses and bit off the consonants and lingered
slidingly upon the long vowels--but I needn’t describe it, you easily
recall the effect; and the point of it was that she had acquired it all
by her taste, by her tact, by her talent--not merely because she
couldn’t help it, rubbing against the language all the time (like Olga
or Teresa) in the middle-class tagrag of the town. To me at least the
distinction was very clear. Poor old Teresa, with her English airs,
betrayed herself by the genuine slipshod of her swift Roman
interjections, now and then, aside to her niece or to Emilio; she would
mumble or hiss out a word or two in which there was no mistaking the
carelessness of the native. Miss Gilpin, exquisitely intoning her lovely
syllables, had none of the smirch of professionalism; she seemed to
bring the language of Dante into the drawing-room of a princess--and yet
she was just a clever little English lady, smart and pretty and
well-bred, and you couldn’t for a moment suppose she was anything else.
She was the authoress of several cultivated and charming works, so I
have always understood, in which Italian history and Italian landscape
were artfully blended--her art showing peculiarly in this, that her gush
of romance (over the landscape) was redeemed from weak femininity by her
scholarship, while her severity and soundness (over the history) was
humanized by her descriptions of peasant life, village humours,
parochial ceremonies; and so you learned about the popes and the great
ladies of the Renaissance, and at the same time you slipped unawares
into the very heart of the old unspoilt enchanting country, the real
Italy--or perhaps I should put it the other way round, the vintage and
the white oxen and the kindly old village-priest coming first, leading
you easily onward and upward to the very heart of the Renaissance.
Anyhow Miss Gilpin had her note, and I believe she struck it to
considerable applause. But she didn’t assume the style of a woman of
letters--in this matter too there was nothing professional about her.
She was still the Englishwoman of good connexions, who happened to be
related by marriage or even friendship to two or three of the most
splendid houses of Rome--but who wore this accidental embellishment very
simply, just as a matter of course, needing no words--and who lived by
herself, lived daintily on small means, lived in Italy because she loved
the dear villagers and the white oxen; and when you had taken in all
this, she had still in reserve the telling fact that she wrote these
remarkable books, the kind of books you wouldn’t expect from an elegant
little Englishwoman of the Alban hills--or indeed from a woman at all,
considering their scholarly and manly style; so that she beats the
professional literary hack upon his own ground without making a parade
of it--showing up his assumptions and pretensions rather cleverly, don’t
you agree? There were plenty of people who _did_ agree, and who told her
so; and altogether Miss Gilpin, living amusingly and unconventionally in
the Alban hills, might be thought to enjoy a happy and original position
in her world. Erda was one of the quaint impossible friends that dear
little Nora Gilpin always managed to unearth, with her talent for
discovering interest where other people would fail to notice it.
Behold Miss Gilpin, then, seating herself at ease in one of the great
gilded arm-chairs and making a circle around her of Minna Dahl’s yet
more impossible, frankly impossible, rout of acquaintance; though it
happens that among them to-day is an awkward young Englishman, looking
very much out of his place and apparently with nothing to say for
himself, who isn’t quite the kind of thing that Minna generally produces
on these occasions. (Yes, in Miss Gilpin’s company I am reduced to
giving Erda her own poor name.) An eye may be kept upon the young
Englishman--Miss Gilpin will have a word with him before she goes. For
the present she rustles and warbles, settling herself in the cardinal’s
chair; and she sends Emilio on an errand for something she has left
below, she remembers a question she particularly wished to ask Madame de
Shuvaloff (how lucky a chance!), she places Berta at her side, not
noticing the slight defiance in Berta’s attitude, with a little friendly
tap; and here is a pretty group, gathered and constituted all in a
minute, to brighten the blankness of Minna’s gaunt unhomely
drawing-room. For indeed the dark saloon of the historic passions had
become a drawing-room at once; Miss Gilpin, as she sat there, had
somehow given it the clever touch that makes a room personal,
individual, a part of yourself--the touch that is so slight, though it
achieves such a difference. How is it done? She simply pushes a chair or
two, breaking their rigid rank, she lays her handkerchief on the bare
table and casually throws her moss-green scarf over the back of an
angular couch; she draws Berta on to a low stool beside her (Berta’s
face was a study indeed), she raises her eyes with a clear gaze of
thanks to the cavalier who returns with her tiny embroidered bag; and
the proud old room seems to have surrendered to her charm, adapting
itself to her, attentively serving to accommodate her friends and her
scattered possessions. Poor Minna Dahl, she is strangely without the
knack of making a place comely and habitable.
But Minna Dahl, for a woman like Miss Gilpin, is refreshing in her
singularity; that is the secret of dear Nora’s odd friendship for this
uncouth and unlovely German whom she has picked up somewhere in her
neighbourhood. The lone German, with her offhand manners and her
dreadful clothes, makes a pleasing change for a creature so compact of
civilization as Miss Gilpin. Ah, there are times when we are sick of
culture, bored by style, exasperated by the finer feelings; and then the
relief, the repose in the company of somebody who never reads, never
feels, never questions--who exists in placid contentment like a natural
fact, like a tree in the solid earth! Miss Gilpin could tell you that
after visiting Minna she returns with the sense of having spent a
fortnight alone by the sea-side; she goes home to the world, to her book
and her style, invigorated by great draughts of quiet weather, her
imagination laved by the soothing surging monotony of the ocean tides;
these are her very words. She could also tell you that Minna’s abysmal
ignorance of the Italian Renaissance, and Minna’s atrocious Italian
accent, and Minna’s failure to obtain the least little footing in the
splendid houses of Rome--Miss Gilpin could tell you (but these are not
her words) that by all this too she is very considerably fortified as
she trips home to tea. For the fact is that Miss Gilpin is _not_ as
young as she was, and the reviewers are less respectful to her
scholarship than they used to be, and perhaps she begins to be aware
that she mustn’t visit the Marchesa and the Principessa _too_ often in
these days; and so, and so, as Miss Gilpin flutters away to her solitary
chair by the evening lamp, she quite congratulates herself on the rare
chance of a quiet time with her work, snatched from the claims of the
world--which wasn’t the way she had put it when she set out, rather
wearily, to call on old Minna this afternoon. Who then shall grudge her
the strength she is imbibing at this moment, while she dismisses Emilio
with a smile and repeats (in her pure intonation) a phrase that Minna
has just mangled in her strange Teutonic Italian?
Mimi, the horrid child, had been misbehaving again in some way, and she
and her mother had been fighting it out, and Minna had serenely
interposed and excused the child--“In somma, non è un gran che,” said
Minna with her _bocca tedesca_; and then, chiming upon the air, the same
words tinkled like silver bells from the mouth of Miss Gilpin--with a
difference that can’t be written in print, though it yawns to the ear as
the distance between the Altmarkt and the Piazza del Popolo. Miss Gilpin
perhaps hadn’t done it on purpose, but the effect was to bring the eyes
of Erda (Erda once more!) largely sweeping round upon her, with a gleam
of amusement under which Miss Gilpin for an instant faltered. Erda
towered above her, good-humoured, ironic, solid; and Miss Gilpin had the
sudden misgiving (how well I know it) that she was being watched by a
dispassionate onlooker. She sat enthroned in her chair of state, with
her satellites and her litter of possessions about her; and Erda stood
dispossessed in the background, claiming no rights in the place or the
scene; and yet that passing glimpse of Erda’s amusement disarranged the
plan, and a wan chill for a moment blenched the satisfaction of Miss
Gilpin. Oh, it was nothing, it vanished--at least it vanished for Miss
Gilpin; she was herself again, she held and graced the situation. For
me, however, it was enough to restore my Erda to her predominance--or
rather to reveal that she had never lost it. To suppose that little Miss
Gilpin could really install herself in the empty seat of grandeur, fill
it with her fine shades and her diminutive arts! Erda is still there,
massive in her simplicity, knowing no arts, needing none.
To me it was a relief, I must say, when at last Miss Gilpin broke up the
party and we streamed forth again into the brilliant evening. Erda
dismissed us all with a deep farewell at the gateway, leaving us to face
the renewed problem of the path, the fatigues of the journey, the tram
that we should probably miss, the train of which Emilio had forgotten
the hour. Miss Gilpin hastily made off to her own abode, near by, waving
a light loose invitation to us all to visit her there “next time,” and
annoying Berta extremely by disappearing before she could have observed
the very guarded manner of Berta’s reply. “She won’t see _me_ there in a
horry,” said this young woman with proper pride. Mimi refused to walk
another step, Olga stormed, Emilio spread his hands and shook his
fingers in a wrangle with Teresa over his forgetfulness; and so we
proceeded to the tram and the train and the scramble of our fretful
times. But for my part I carried back to Rome a vision that I kept
securely and that is still before me: Erda closing the gate behind us,
Erda remounting the black stairway and re-entering the solitude of her
great room, Erda standing there in the middle of it, all by herself,
never moving, while again the old night rolls in upon her from the dead
plain.
X. VIA SISTINA
Miss Gilpin, before she fled, had duly taken the measure of the awkward
young Englishman; a probing question or two had given her all the
insight she required. And the consequence was that a very little later,
when she happened to be spending a day or two with some friends in Rome,
I was summoned to present myself at their apartment in the Via Sistina.
I had an idea that this was decidedly an upward step for me. Miss
Gilpin’s level, as I understood it, was a higher than I had touched as
yet, and I set off in response to this call from the Via Sistina with
some complacency. It was only a few days ago, after all, that I had
drifted to the Fountain of the Tortoises in the condition of a mere
romantic waif, knowing nobody, knowing nothing of the true life of the
real Rome; and now the shut doors were opening, I had passed within, I
had my own Roman circle like Deering himself. I watched a British
family-party issuing from their hotel in the Piazza di Spagna for the
sight-seeing of the afternoon--I watched them with amused supremacy.
They whispered to each other, noticing me, that I was evidently an old
hand, a familiar resident; or if they didn’t I whispered for them--and
so sympathetically that I was quite flattered by the respectful envy of
their tone. The next moment I was face to face with Deering himself; he
was being besieged, as it chanced, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, by
those dreadful little boys in velvet breeches and matted curls of whom
we had spoken the other day.
He was vexed that I should see him at this disadvantage. The little
beasts, they were treating him as they treat the common tourist; they
hadn’t noticed the extreme Romanism of his hat. Deering vilified them
most idiomatically, but they had no sense of style. The right way with
violent children is more universal, I think; it applies to them all and
everywhere, if you have the command of it; but Deering was singularly
helpless, and the children bothered and clung to him, recognizing their
prey. When at last he had beaten them off he was greatly ruffled, and he
snapped at me rather pettishly, demanding to know where I came from and
was going. That was easily explained; but how could I account for the
presence of Deering on the Spanish Steps, in the thick of the rabble of
the English ghetto? We mounted the splendid flight, evading a courteous
gentleman who merely wanted us to look, for he said so, at a remarkable
collection of mosaic jewelry which he happened to be carrying in a
cabinet under his arm; Deering winced at his approach and answered me
with raised voice in Italian. His pretty hands danced before him in the
urgency of his surprise, his amusement, at finding himself in these
haunts of the simple Briton; it took him back, he said, to the days of
his innocence; and it flashed upon me that Deering had now turned yet
another corner of his emancipation--the newest and latest perversity,
perhaps, was to throw over the marble halls of the Via Nazionale and to
come round again to the tea-room of the English old maids at this end of
the town. The rate at which Deering refines upon refinement is
bewildering to a plain man. But no, Deering hadn’t pursued his culture
to this point as yet, though no doubt he would arrive there in time; it
was just an accident that had led him into the neighbourhood of the
tea-room this afternoon.
And a lucky accident too--for I was pleased to tell Deering how I had
followed the thread which he had placed in my hand the other day. “My
poor friend,” he said, “how you have bungled it! Is it to this that I
have brought you?” He warned me that I had missed my opportunity, he
wasn’t responsible for my floundering plunges. Yet he bade me proceed,
and he should look on from a distance and mark the progress of my
madness. “Return to me,” he said, “when you recover your senses.”
Madness, he plainly indicated, lay in the direction of Miss Gilpin and
the Via Sistina; the coils of the friends of Miss Gilpin, once they have
caught an imprudent explorer, effectually destroy his chances of
attaining to--well, to what? If Deering is going to start his old
refrain about the “real Rome” I have now my answer; I have discovered
this much at least, that there are many more “real Romes” than are
dreamed of in his preciosity. Already a dozen people, I assured him, had
opened my eyes to the reality of Rome; some said it no longer existed,
some said it was a very poor affair, some said it was a secret only
known to themselves; but they all had their views, and I didn’t yet feel
able to discriminate finally, to determine which of them was in
possession of the truth. I must go forward and hear more; and I promised
to let him know when I came to a conclusion. “Go your way by all means,”
said Deering, “and come and tell me when you escape.” So we left it at
that, and we parted at the head of the magnificent stairway; Deering
carried his swaying grace (but he _was_ developing plumply, I observed
as he went) towards the gardens of the Pincio, and I turned in the other
direction down the narrow switchback of the Via Sistina.
These friends of Miss Gilpin occupied a dim and constricted apartment,
and they too were rather dim. They were English, they consisted of
husband and wife and daughter, and they disappointed, I must own, my
idea that I had ascended the scale of initiation when I reached their
door. Mr. and Mrs. Clarkson, Miss Agnes Clarkson--you can’t make much of
a romance out of names like these; you must take them as you find them,
wan respectable gentle-mannered Britons, who had been spending the
winter in the south because Mr. Clarkson has a delicate chest. They had
found the winter colder than they had expected, and perhaps they had
found it long. Rome is delightful, is wonderful, is full of beauty and
instruction--Mrs. Clarkson, hooking comfortably at her crochet, entirely
recognized this; but then so much of its beauty, and practically all its
instruction, is too bitterly cold in the winter season for Mr.
Clarkson’s chest; and no, they hadn’t been able to go about very much,
or indeed at all, though they had enjoyed their walks upon the Pincio;
and their rooms were excellent, all they could desire, but Mrs.
Clarkson, as she leaned uncomplainingly against the rococo spikes and
jags of her chairback, was bound to say that a hired apartment was never
the same as one’s home--great indeed as is the privilege and pleasure of
foreign travel. Mrs. Clarkson had on the whole no more to say, but her
husband took the view that the winter was over now, and he mentioned
that he was thinking out an excursion or two for them to make before
they returned to England; and as for Miss Agnes Clarkson, a
hollow-cheeked maiden with a suffocated voice, she really had nothing to
say at all, beyond reminding us that it would soon be too hot for
sight-seeing in comfort. Dimness seemed indeed to settle upon us all,
and we scarcely knew what to talk of next.
But this was in the absence of Miss Gilpin, who happened to be out when
I arrived. The door presently opened, and the flimsy draperies were
caught aside by Miss Gilpin’s hand as she peeped into the room with a
little air of coyness and archness--I don’t know why, unless because it
was one of her methods of entering a room, and she thought this one as
good as another. She floated in on a waft of sweetness and light,
followed by a gentleman. “More company for you,” she exclaimed--“I’ve
brought Mr. Bashford!” She stood aside, directing Mr. Bashford,
installing him in the circle with proprietary gestures and cries; and
she reached out back-handed to me as she did so, pacifying my impatience
till she could give me her attention. The Clarkson family were roused, a
faint warmth kindled their chill. “Why, father,” said Mrs. Clarkson,
“you remember Mr. Bashford--he came here when Miss Gilpin was with us
the last time.” “To be sure, to be sure--we are quite in society when
Miss Gilpin is with us!”--and Mr. Clarkson amiably bestirred himself to
meet the incursion of the world. Agnes swept her mother’s work-basket
out of a chair, her father’s patience-cards off the table; she
ministered as she could, but society seemed to disregard her. She
fidgeted round the room, disturbing the thin litter of home-life which
they had sprinkled over the alien bedrock of the Via Sistina--very thin
and sparse it was, easily swept into a corner with a few English volumes
from the circulating library. Within five minutes of the departure of
the Clarksons every trace of their settlement in the south could have
been obliterated; you wouldn’t have supposed that the Clarksons belonged
to a conquering race. But they were grateful, it seemed, for the
brightening of their dimness; if they couldn’t do much for themselves,
they were glad to be taken in hand by their brilliant friend.
Their brilliant friend was aware of it. Miss Gilpin was now free to
encourage the shy young man she had run across at Castel Gandolfo; she
beckoned him into a corner and soon put him at his ease. Miss Gilpin is
known for her cleverness in drawing out shy young men and winning their
confidence; it is an art that perhaps you don’t usually associate with
little literary ladies of a certain age, and that is just what makes it
so pretty and so clever in Miss Gilpin. She does it with all the
naturalness in the world--you mustn’t imagine that she makes a foolish
affectation of youth, of playfulness, or that she vulgarly uses her
charm. No, her manner is brisk, sensible, downright--but I needn’t dwell
upon it at this juncture, for she had no difficulty with the present
young man. She made short work of me; having tamed and civilized and
made me presentable within five minutes, she returned to the Clarksons
and sought to create a circle of general talk. The poor Clarksons, they
couldn’t be left longer in their helplessness; their charming friend
must give them the support of her social ease. But Miss Gilpin really
used more tact than they needed, for the Clarksons were talking away
quite gaily with Mr. Bashford. They were talking about a family whom
they had met last winter at Torquay, nice kind quiet people, to whom it
most oddly appeared that Mr. Bashford was related. “Do you hear that,
Agnes?” cried Mrs. Clarkson, “Mr. Bashford is a cousin of the
Marshams.” Why, how small the world is! Agnes had seen a great deal of
the Marshams at Torquay, and it was worth while having come to Rome, she
seemed to imply, for the unexpected chance of talking about them to a
friend and a cousin. “Have you heard from them lately?” she asked--it
might have been the first question she had asked in Rome with a sincere
interest in the answer. Miss Gilpin even spoilt things a little by her
intervention; Mrs. Clarkson had dropped her crochet to tell Mr. Bashford
about a drive she had taken with Mrs. Marsham last winter, but the story
faltered and the hooking was resumed before the competent sweep of Miss
Gilpin’s tact. She was so brilliant that it became rather dull and dowdy
to talk about the Marshams.
Mr. Bashford, however, was not to be discouraged; he chanced to have
received a letter quite recently from his cousins, and he was anxious to
tell Miss Agnes that they had this year selected Bournemouth for their
winter retreat, and had there been enjoying the best of weather. “Do you
hear that, mother?” exclaimed Miss Agnes; “the Marshams have been at
Bournemouth.” The Clarksons, very remarkably, had themselves been at
Bournemouth the year before last, and Mr. Bashford really envied them
the experience. Mr. Bashford was not noticeable in appearance, at least
upon the golf-course at Torquay; though for the streets of Rome he was
perhaps too weather-bronzed, too tawny-haired, too baggy in his homespun
clothing. One may well wonder how it happens that Mr. Bashford, who
certainly hasn’t a delicate chest, can have strayed so far from the
first green at Bournemouth in this fine spring weather. He and Mr.
Clarkson are there again, it seems, as they fall into an absorbing
discussion of the merits of the course--Mr. Bashford knows it well,
having played many a round there a few years ago. “Now they’re off!”
says Mrs. Clarkson, smiling over her hook; and she too, good soul, might
be seated in her corner of the ladies’ drawing-room at the Sea View
Hotel, while she tranquilly enquires of Miss Gilpin whether she isn’t
badly “wanting her tea.” Mr. Bashford, in short, had made the Clarksons
feel thoroughly at home; the long chill of the Roman winter was a thing
of the past, they breathed the kindly and temperate air of the Marine
Parade. Mr. Bashford, you may judge, was just such another poor
wandering exile, driven by mischance into a region where the servants
simply can’t, with the best will in the world, learn how to serve an
English tea--Mrs. Clarkson protested feelingly that _she_ had done what
she could to teach them, and in vain.
But no, the story of Mr. Bashford was not such as you might suppose.
Later on I learned it, and I found to my surprise that this golfing
gossiping puffing Englishman, with the red face and the yellow
moustache, was actually _romano di Roma_ in all the conditions of his
life. He had been born in Rome, he had lived all his years in Rome; he
possessed by inheritance a tenement in the Piazza Navona and a farm in a
valley of the Volscian hills; English weather had counted for nothing in
his complexion, and to the English golf-club he had only been admitted
as a holiday-making stranger from foreign parts. He was the son, I
discovered, of a certain mid-Victorian amateur of the arts, an
independent gentleman of some quality, who had been an early and earnest
disciple of the eloquence of Ruskin. Mr. Bashford the elder had followed
the teaching of his master with zeal, but not blindly--for it must be
allowed that Ruskin fell away from the gracious culture of his prime
into many a harsh extravagance of taste and doctrine. It was to the
_true_ Ruskin that this disciple remained himself ever true: Ruskin whom
one pictures, a grave and blue-eyed young man, stepping out into the
early summer morning of a little Tuscan town to set up his easel in a
deserted sacristy, an echoing cloister--where he will work through the
long hours with piety and concentration, glorifying the beauty that a
simple industrious God-fearing peasantry (if only they would bear it in
mind) may always possess and impart to a man of feeling, trained among
the refining influences of Gothic architecture at Oxford. I am not, if
you please, describing Ruskin, but I am describing him closely as he
appeared to an earnest disciple (with a delicate chest) in the sixties
of the nineteenth century. This was the devotee who settled in
Italy--“whether” (as he puts it in his diary) “for health’s sake or for
love of St. Ursula I know not”--settled in Italy with a wife (“my
entirely precious and meek-eyed Dora,” says the same document), and
there became responsible for the gentleman who at this moment is
observing to Mr. Clarkson that he has found it advisable to use an iron
upon the fourth tee at Ilfracombe.
Ruskin and St. Ursula--Italy, my Italy--the ineffable meekness of dear
old Brother Angelico: by names, by phrases of this kind I suggest the
atmosphere that was about the cradle of Mr. Bashford the son. But human
children, we know, have long ago brought to the highest pitch the art of
self-protection; and little Bashford, I dare say, was not yet weaned
when he cautiously shut the doorways of his head against the assault of
his parents’ enthusiasm. It was firmly done, it was final; little
Bashford proceeded to grow as he pleased into the big red middle-aged
Bashford who is now before our eyes. In other circumstances he might
have allowed his nature to remain more plastic, at least in the cradle;
but his was a special case, an English babe exposed to culture in
foreign parts. There was nothing for it but to guard himself utterly and
absolutely; and I think we may say that only an English babe could have
carried the affair so successfully through to the end. For forty years
and more an insidious culture, reinforced by the unwholesome excitement
of foreign ways, had been beating upon the skull of Mr. Bashford, and
all without creating the faintest disturbance within it; secure behind
its powerful sutures he had lived the life of which the accidents of his
birth had conspired to deprive him. He was in no position to trifle with
the danger. It is all very well for people like Deering and Cooksey to
allow themselves the freedom of flirtation with the spirit of Rome; they
are well grounded upon their insular training and will come to no great
harm. And similarly the parents of Mr. Bashford, colonists of the first
generation--they could follow the siren voices unafraid, carrying with
them the probity of their English birthright. It is a very different
matter for their offspring, denied the advantages which they enjoyed.
He, poor lamb, thrown from the beginning upon the dubious world of all
that isn’t English, must take his own deliberate precautions; and he
doesn’t hesitate, he begins in time--and at forty he will meet you in
the Via Sistina with the certainty that his clothes and his speech and
his colour belong unmistakably to the land in which he wasn’t born.
His case, it must be owned, is more interesting than his talk. Miss
Gilpin fidgeted openly and did her best to break up the alternation of
leisurely anecdote into which Mr. Bashford and Mr. Clarkson had now
contentedly fallen. But she had no success; she only made Mrs. Clarkson
rather nervous and uneasy with her acid interjections. Dear Miss Gilpin
was a little difficult in a plain household; she couldn’t understand
that when the men are occupied and happy it is foolish indeed to disturb
them. Mrs. Clarkson, more experienced, would willingly have let them go
prosing on about their games and rubbish as long as they chose; Agnes
and she could sit quiet and get on with their work. But Miss Gilpin was
brilliant, and to be sure they were indebted to Miss Gilpin for her
attention; Mr. Clarkson forgot his bad throat when she appeared, and had
been quite annoyed with Agnes for reminding him in Miss Gilpin’s
presence (though he had told her always to remind him) to put on his
flannel chest-protector before going out. Such was the tissue of Mrs.
Clarkson’s thought, week in and week out, during their winter in Rome;
and if I seem to be interpreting my short observation of her too freely,
I can only say that her mind was an open page of very simple words. But
something had to be done to restrain Miss Gilpin from interrupting poor
father’s favourite story of the sheep in the bunker; he had just reached
the crowning point at which he broke off with a laugh and a pause before
proceeding--“Believe me or not, there was the old sheep on her back in
strong convulsions”--and Mrs. Clarkson positively hissed at Miss Gilpin
to stop her, to detach her from the circle of the men, before she should
spoil the climax with one of her tiresome clever remarks. Mrs.
Clarkson, as it happened, was too late; Miss Gilpin swept the story of
the sheep off the board and resolutely placed there some livelier topic
of her own.
Mr. Clarkson clutched the falling fragments of his tale and was
evidently ruffled; and as for the good Bashford, he stared solidly at
Miss Gilpin’s challenge and made no movement to take it up. His
expression, as I now watch it again, gives me the secret of his massive
integrity. He looked at Miss Gilpin as I might blankly look at some
diagram or equation of the higher mathematics--at something so
disconnected with my being that it doesn’t even rouse my curiosity. That
was how Mr. Bashford saved himself from going to pieces in the climate
of Rome. If you divide the world into two parts, calling one of them “my
sort” and the other “not my sort,” your position is unassailable; in the
first case you needn’t question what you know already, in the second it
is no concern of yours. Mr. Bashford had been able to remain true to
himself through a lifetime so unnaturally Roman because anything that
wasn’t “his sort” was a problem, as you might say, in the differential
calculus. See him, then, regarding in that light the playful sallies of
Miss Gilpin--a good little woman, no doubt, but not at all his sort; he
has nothing to say to her, he doesn’t attempt to find anything to say to
her, he merely waits. She for her part can’t bring herself to
acknowledge defeat; she always thinks she may yet succeed in striking a
spark out of that sleepy old Bash. “Ah, Mr. Bashford, when you look at
me like that I feel as though I were indecently exposed!”--this, believe
me or not, is one of her flings at his stolidity; but he takes it
without the flicker of an eyelid, and he leaves it to Mr. Clarkson to
find some happy retort, as daring as her attack, yet expressed in all
good taste. Mrs. Clarkson, glancing up, noted that that clever little
woman had certainly a way with her; poor dear father had already
forgotten that she had spoilt his story.
When at length I said good-bye to the Clarksons I didn’t tell them that
they had given me a new experience. It was the first hour I had spent in
Rome of which I might truthfully say that I had spent it in the Sea View
Hotel. In the heart of Rome our little group had gathered and talked;
but with Rome all about us, jangling its bells and calling its
street-cries, we had sat secluded upon a few square feet of our native
soil. And did I say that the Clarkson family seemed to have entered a
strange land with no conquering mien? That was a superficial judgment;
for what have the Clarksons done but to change their patch of the Via
Sistina into English ground?--and that so easily, so instinctively, that
they are quite unaware of their own prepotency. No need for them to
create their colony with laborious arts; Mr. Clarkson spreads his game
of patience on the table, his wife winds her wool over a chair-back, his
daughter goes out to buy a cake for tea--and the thing is achieved. True
they are not as comfortable as they were at Torquay, and they miss the
Marshams; but you can’t have everything, and the English chemist is very
obliging, and what with the English banker and the English news-agent
Mr. Clarkson can always find an object for a walk. Of course if you ask
_why_ they have come to Rome, seeing that the Roman climate is far more
treacherous than that of our nice mild “English Riviera”--well,
certainly it is difficult to see how the Clarksons are in candour to
answer the question. But it isn’t fair to expect them to grasp their
motive and to put it into words--they are not used to being called upon
so harshly. One goes to Rome for the winter because, if one has private
means and delicate health, it is what one _does_; that is enough for the
Clarksons. And next winter, when they are happily restored to Torquay,
they will be able to tell the Marshams about the intensely interesting
time they passed in Rome.
XI. PIAZZA NAVONA
Old Miss Gainsborough was stately and splendid; she made such an effect
on me, as she sat enthroned in Bashford’s big frowzy sitting-room, that
I had no attention for the kindly struggles of my host in his care for
my entertainment. Mr. Bashford, though perhaps suspecting that I was not
his sort, wrestled for a while with his manly silence and produced a
remark or two; but he was relieved to find that I was happy in watching
Miss Gainsborough, and he was more than ready to relax his effort and to
let me take my entertainment as I chose. So we watched Miss Gainsborough
together--she was sitting at a distance, very upright on an
uncomfortable bench, talking to a large untidy female who writhed at her
side among the cushions of a low arm-chair. “Ah, Miss Gainsborough, you
and I, as old Romans, know better than that!”--the female crooned out
the words with an ecstatic lunge towards the bench. “Ah, Lady Mullinger,
you and I, as old frumps, had much better hold our tongues!”--and as the
answer fell with a rap upon the extended knuckles of the female I
recognized my acquaintance of the other day, the day of the pilgrims in
the church: Cooksey’s Lady Mullinger, who had tried to arrange that
helpful little tea-party for poor Charlotte. She was only for a moment
disordered by Miss Gainsborough’s retort; then she collected herself for
a good laugh at her friend’s delightful wit.
Miss Gainsborough, handsome, high-coloured, decorated with much
magnificence, surveyed Lady Mullinger with a contemptuous eye. “What’s
the woman laughing at now?” she demanded--and her ladyship was convulsed
anew. They had been talking of some one lately arrived in Rome, to whom
they alluded as Lady Vera; and it appeared that Lady Vera in the
innocence of her zeal had been shocked by the language of the old
Romans, such as Lady Mullinger, when they spoke of matters that to her,
Lady Vera, were breathlessly sacred and august. It was the eternal game,
you see, to which Cooksey had already introduced me--the game at which
you score off the new-comer by your careless natural freedom in the
inner ring; but Miss Gainsborough stamped on it summarily--not, I judge,
because she had any objection to it herself, but because Lady Mullinger
was a fool and needed a smacking. The annoying part of it was that the
more she was smacked the louder she cackled. “For the Lord’s sake sit up
and behave yourself,” cried Miss Gainsborough; and she called across the
room--“Bashford, come and see if you can make her sit quiet and not
guffaw like a jackass whenever I open my mouth!” Bashford, rosily
perturbed, got up and planted himself before Miss Gainsborough; he
seemed to have some idea of protecting Lady Mullinger, but he couldn’t
do much for her with the other lady’s daunting eye upon him; he made
vague noises of remonstrance and hoped for the best. “Speak up,” said
Miss Gainsborough; “be a man, Bashford, and tell her to behave like a
reasonable creature!”
Lady Mullinger was indeed deplorable; she writhed, she quaked with
obsequious enjoyment; nothing could discourage her ecstasy, not even the
fact that her witty friend, addressing herself to Bashford, completely
ignored it. Bashford was prudent, but he faced Miss Gainsborough
squarely, masking his dread of her with his burly solemnity; she heckled
him sharply and shrewdly, not without humour; and Lady Mullinger hung
upon the spectacle, industriously applauding unnoticed--except that
Bashford now and then, as an honourable and mannerly host, tried to hand
her some little share of Miss Gainsborough’s attention to himself. But
you can’t help a woman like Lady Mullinger to save her face; she is
driven to expose her indignity, do what you will. I take it that in
spite of many years of sedulous Romanism she was still beating blindly
against the wall of that impregnable fortress of the “old Roman”; and
just as she always hoped to entice Father Holt some day to her
tea-party, so she couldn’t be reconciled to the sight of Miss
Gainsborough chuckling, grandly carousing, digging Mr. Bashford in the
ribs with imperious freedom--and turning her straight back upon Lady
Mullinger as though she didn’t exist. Poor soul, I thought of her
comfortably gossiping with Cooksey the other day--what a pity it seems
that she and Cooksey can’t acquiesce in their prime disability and
console each other, without breaking themselves upon the fortress. Their
disability is of course the fact, never to be lived down, that only an
inspiration and a conviction and an enthusiasm brought them to Rome;
they weren’t in any way (there are more ways than one) born there.
It seems unfair, but it can’t be helped; Lady Mullinger had better have
turned her back (her round and wriggling back) upon Miss Gainsborough
and gone off to her pleasant game of tattle with Cooksey. For Miss
Gainsborough was as hard as a rock; she was one of the old guard,
possessing hereditary rights in Rome that had been bequeathed to her,
with the bone of her nose and the slash of her tongue, by I don’t know
how many stubborn generations of antiquity in the midland shires. You
could note them in the insolence of her eye, in the depth of her riotous
chuckle, in the coarse old provinciality of some of her tones. She stood
upon the pyramid of her fathers, a last survival--terribly out of date
in a world where there are fewer and fewer people to whom we may safely
be rude. Miss Gainsborough’s grandmother, perhaps, may have trodden upon
the necks of freeborn men and women to her heart’s content; and it must
be bitter to her granddaughter to reflect that at _her_ end of time she
is reduced to pounding an occasional old goose like Lady Mullinger. Such
a triumph is too easy--it is beneath her; and yet I suppose we can
hardly expect that Miss Gainsborough, with so much fighting bullying
blood in her clear cheek, should hold her hand and soften her tongue
when Lady Mullinger comes cringing to meet the attack. As a matter of
fact Miss Gainsborough didn’t bother her head about this question, or
indeed any other; she inherited her stinging hand and her few tough
stalwart opinions, and she gave you either or both in the face if you
showed a sign of weakness.
Bashford was horrified, but not weak; he received her rich old banter
with a smiling front in silence; and in large silence he still attended
when she presently dropped her sportive play and took up some subject of
the moment, some dire political portent that she had detected in the
newspaper of that morning--over which she was implacable in majestic
wrath. It mattered little to _her_, an old woman who would soon be safe
with her fathers, rest their souls!--but Bashford, a mere youth, would
live to see the fulfilment of her word; and her word, smartly rattling
among the tea-cups, was Damnation! Nobody listened to _her_, nobody
cared; and the mad infatuation of a crowd of sheep, of swine, of
serpents--oh you may laugh, but Miss Gainsborough will call them all the
bad names she can think of; and when the crash comes you will remember
that _she_ wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. Afraid? Well, Miss
Gainsborough hadn’t after all a great deal to be afraid of, it occurred
to me; she sat pretty comfortably entrenched within her fortress,
hurling her defiance at a world which couldn’t touch her; and the shy
observer who was watching her from across the room was almost moved to a
desperate rejoinder, something to the effect that she hadn’t perhaps
considered an argument which the young observer could have expounded
with persuasive force, with reason invincible. Shyness saved me, I am
glad to think, from the fatuity of offering reason and persuasion to
Miss Gainsborough--as though she bothered her head about the why or the
wherefore of the opinions that she brandished. They were solid in the
hand, they had seen good service and hadn’t failed her; so she laid
about her vigorously, like her fathers before her. Lady Mullinger,
struck solemn by the thought of the world’s insanity, fervently breathed
her assent; and Bashford too was very grave--he feared, so he said, that
Miss Gainsborough was only too much in the right of it.
I sat as it chanced by a low window, and a turn of the head gave me a
view of half the long length of the Piazza Navona--the old circus or
race-course or whatever it was in ancient days. The oblong space with
its rounded end--it shows you the line where the Roman chariots traced
and raced; for when the games of imperial Rome were over, the track was
built about with houses, and now there is a palace on one side, and a
church, and three great splashing fountains down the middle; and still
the sweep of the track is marked by this open space in the midst of the
city, and Bashford’s apartment was like the royal box for the monarch
and his minions and his dames. Bashford could hardly sit for the
monarch, nor I for the minion; but his dames, one of them at least,
might look over the heads of the crowd, surveying the contest, and never
be known for an intruder from other lands and times. Miss Gainsborough
would have figured admirably upon the scene; and it seemed the waste of
a great opportunity that the empress should be here, and the
race-course--and yet no crowd, no chariots, only the Piazza Navona
sleepily resting and lounging in the hot afternoon. Miss Gainsborough
has come too late; the force that she wields has no meaning, no purchase
upon the madness of to-day--it has no terror for the Piazza Navona. A
few idlers were sprawling out there in the shade, easy-going children of
the generation that Miss Gainsborough had chastised and warned; but it
was impossible to think that a single knee would tremble if she were to
appear at the window and speak her mind. The world couldn’t touch
her--but then the world has no will to touch her; these Roman idlers
stretch their limbs in the softness of the year, smiling good-naturedly
when she orders them to instant execution.
It is too true--her vigour is wasted upon Rome. She may bully Lady
Mullinger; but upon Rome at large, the picture of indifference, her
ancestral authority produces no impression. She might surely, however,
betake herself to a country more capable of understanding her message.
At this moment she happened to be lifting her voice against “that
rascally feller,” and again, “those good-for-nothing louts”--and the
rascal was a puzzle-headed English statesman, and the louts were a
large proportion of the English race; and if Miss Gainsborough had their
infamy so much at heart it seemed unfortunate that only Bashford and
Lady Mullinger should have the benefit of her conviction. “True, true,”
said Bashford--“a bad business, I’m afraid”; and “If they could only be
_told_!”--Lady Mullinger despairingly sighed. I thought I saw Miss
Gainsborough seated upon the pedestal of all that had gone to produce
her--acres of English soil, dozens of big stout Warwickshire
land-owners, hundreds of other people’s labour and fidelity: an imposing
mass, not unworthily crowned by this handsome old image with the bright
cheeks and the floriferous bonnet. But what was such a magnificent pile
of British solidity doing in Rome, I should like to ask her--in Rome,
where its effect was lost in the alien air, and where there was nobody
to render it the tribute of admiration, of sacred terror, of fierce
exasperation (all three) which it plainly deserved. Her Roman
tea-parties could offer Miss Gainsborough no kind of justice. From Lady
Mullinger she might indeed receive admiration, and from Bashford terror,
and from me my little mite of silent rebellion; but I had to acknowledge
that we made an inadequate show, grouped about the base of this
remarkable monument. It ought to be set up in London, breasting the big
rude crowd of its countrymen--not in Rome, where to the loungers of the
Piazza Navona it must be meaningless.
But what far-fetched fancies to be teased with in the presence of Miss
Gainsborough--who certainly felt that she had plenty of good sound
meaning wherever she was. Perhaps her establishment in Rome was a
stately protest against the conduct of the louts and rascals at home;
perhaps she preferred the homage of a tea-party to the jostle of a
crowd; in any case she did as she chose and owed no account to
anybody--least of all to an obscure young observer, hitherto barely
noticed, on whom her eye now fell with a command to approach. Miss
Gainsborough, I must own, could be very gracious to the young, though
she was inclined to despise the shy. Youth pleased her, even awkward and
inarticulate youth, and the call of her friendly sarcasm was
encouraging. “Come and sit by me, you talkative young man, and don’t let
old Platt get near me. Bashford’s expecting old Platt, and he and I
always fight like the dooce. I shan’t quarrel with you, because you’re
straight from home--Lord, I can tell that! I only get to blows with old
monkeys who’ve forgotten _where_ they came from--if they ever came from
anywhere. Bashford was born in Rome, poor lamb, but he’s a good lump o’
home stuff for all that--look at him, with his great red face! Ho,
Bashford, you’re blushing at my pretty speeches, I’m sure, only it don’t
show on your manly bloom. When Platt comes I’m going to elope with this
young man; he’ll please to carry me off before I forget that I’m a
lady.” She tapped me impressively on the shoulder and bade me be ready
to snatch her up the moment she seemed likely to lower herself by
violent conduct. Lady Mullinger, who could learn nothing, crowed out on
this with a joyous titter; and the moment of my privilege seemed indeed
to have arrived--Miss Gainsborough’s fingers twitched and tingled.
But here was old Platt; before we had noticed his entry he was bending
over those very fingers, elegantly saluting Miss Gainsborough; and
before she had time to forget herself he had skilfully escaped, he was
out of her reach; and she sat very stiff and haughty, her head erect,
trying to pretend that she hadn’t submitted to his easy liberty with her
hand. She had, however--old Platt had been too quick for her; it looked
terribly as though Platt, the old monkey, had caught her by surprise and
compelled her to be polite to him. It was quite a humiliation for Miss
Gainsborough, and I was ashamed to be aware of it. For all her
magnificence a man like Platt had the advantage of her, because he was a
supple and deft and nimble old wretch, versed in ingratiating arts,
while she was accustomed to sit monumentally and to slash at her ease.
It is the penalty that is paid by the straight-backed daughter of
Warwickshire squires when she leaves her home, exposing herself to the
arts and tricks of the foreigner. These outsiders don’t know the rules
of the game, or they deliberately flout them with their underhand craft;
they won’t see that the rules were laid down by the forefathers of Miss
Gainsborough, and that it is not for any impertinent upstart from
nowhere to tamper with what he didn’t invent. So Miss Gainsborough fumed
in silence; and the devoted Lady Mullinger, pursued to the last by her
fatality, thought it a good opportunity to show that she too was of her
dear old friend’s opinion--give _her_ she said in emphatic undertones, a
_man_, a _real_ man, not an effeminate old thing only fit to dance
attendance in a drawing-room. “My good woman,” exclaimed Miss
Gainsborough coarsely, “it’s late for _you_ to be asking for a man, real
or sham. You and I must take what we can get, at our time o’ life.” Lady
Mullinger heaved and cracked with her mirth--“Isn’t she _hard_ on me?”
she gasped to the room. But Miss Gainsborough was still discomfited,
and she had to remain where she was; she couldn’t now elope to leave old
Platt with his advantage.
He was enjoying it very discreetly; nothing could be more graceful than
his unconsciousness of Miss Gainsborough’s glare. He hovered about the
room with little shrieks of admiration at its dingy adornments, he
clasped his hands and fell back in enchantment before a picture, he
seized upon Bashford and tenderly slapped him--“My dear boy, _don’t_
look so young and so buxom; it’s thoughtless and cruel of you--there!”
Bashford received the dainty slap with all his sturdiness, and Mr. Platt
made a pretty little face at him, pouting reproachfully; and then there
were more shrieks of delight and a tinkle of laughter, for Mr. Platt had
discovered a great row of briar-wood pipes, hanging in a rack on the
wall, and he vowed and declared that he had _never_ seen such a darling
old John Bull as Mr. Bashford--there, once more! “I ought to have
brought a bull-dog and a hunting-crop,” he trilled playfully, “only I
shouldn’t know which was which--fancy if I cropped the dog instead of
hunting the bull! Now go away and don’t make me laugh, because I’ve got
something dreadfully serious to say to Lady Mullinger, who’s a bad bad
woman--aren’t you, sweet lady?”--and he skipped to her side, shaking his
finger at her, and arranged himself very neatly on a stool at her feet.
“Now don’t listen, any of you,” he cried; “it’s a secret--only it isn’t,
for it’s the talk of the town; otherwise I’d hush it up, you poor dear
thing, for the sake of our past.” He soothed her, patting her hand; and
again he knew just how to disengage himself at the right instant, before
Lady Mullinger in the surge of her agitation had time to act. He shot a
glance of knowing intimacy at Miss Gainsborough in passing, and
precisely managed to evade the heart-felt oath that she barked after him
as he frisked away.
This elderly sprite had no call to envy the buxom freshness of anybody;
he was beautifully pink and buoyant and clear-eyed. Stout he was, but
trimly and compactly stout, and his gay little feet twinkled in agile
movement. He didn’t remain with us for long; he _had_ to tear himself
away, because he was expecting two professors and a doctor of divinity
under his own humble roof, and since Lady Mullinger had been untrue to
him--“not that I can wonder at _that_, with a dangerous youth like
Bashford”--he must trip round and beat up another pretty girl or two for
his party; and as for the faithless woman herself, “Oh, my dearest Bash,
be very gentle with her--she’s so impulsive”; and with the flutter of a
handkerchief, with chirruping cries, with pattering boots, Mr. Platt
scattered his leave-taking over the company and was gone. And when he
was safely outside, behind the closed door--ah, I should like to have
seen him then! Did he pause and turn, did he make an odious and vulgar
sign in the direction of the company? I can very well imagine that he
did so, and small blame to him. He had brought off a bright and engaging
little _scena_ without a hitch, in the teeth of his restive audience;
and I can’t believe that he wasn’t deliberately playing with his skill,
or that he didn’t smile to himself upon the staircase, tasting the
thought of Miss Gainsborough’s expression upon the closing of the door.
He knew what he was about.
“Huh!” said Miss Gainsborough--as nearly as I can represent her comment;
and she said no more upon that subject, she talked for a few minutes to
Bashford upon other matters, and then she made an exceedingly royal
departure. Lady Mullinger and I had the appearance of forming a “lane”;
Bashford armed her down it and escorted her to the staircase. When he
returned Lady Mullinger flounced at him with an outburst of volubility
that she was now able to let loose. She wasn’t afraid of old Bashford,
and she relapsed into her natural exuberance, as though with the removal
of a tightened belt; she fell to work with determination upon the diet
that she craved. She abounded upon the topic of Platt--his origin so
dubious, his history so mysterious, his connexions so questionable; Lady
Mullinger, as one who never listened to scandal, knew nothing _against_
the man, and of course one met him everywhere; but she had been told for
a _fact_ that he was involved in that horrid business of--well, you
remember it, and how he had suddenly left Rome, so strangely, just
before it all came out; and of course it’s no secret that he stays here
now because he _daren’t_ go home--yes, Lady Mullinger had had _that_ on
the best authority; and nobody hated to be censorious more than she, but
in our little friendly Roman circle one must be careful; and after all
what _did_ happen exactly in that other affair, the affair of the
sacristan and the suppressed pamphlet?--because if Bashford knew, Lady
Mullinger felt that she _ought_ to ask him to tell her plainly; and by
this time she had quite forgotten that there was a third person present,
and on the shock of accidentally meeting my interested gaze she gave a
lurch and a plunge, sheering heavily aside into the reflection that for
her part she liked to believe the best of everybody, and had always
maintained that Mr. Platt was a very good-natured amusing old person.
And now she really must fly, with a thousand thanks to dear Mr. Bashford
for his charming hospitality.
So she fled--it was a disorderly rout; and with the fall of repose and
silence upon the comfortable room I began to follow. But Bashford held
me; he was obscurely aware of a burden upon his mind that he wished to
throw off. “Give me time,” he seemed to say, detaining me with a firm
broad hand. There was plenty of time, and he laboured with his
difficulty unhurried. He couldn’t allow a young stranger to carry off
the impression that his tea-party hadn’t been quite--hadn’t been
exactly--hadn’t been what you might call--; but this line of attack led
nowhere, and with the silence still unbroken he cast around for another.
Every approach seemed blocked by his loyalty to his guests, but he
arrived at last. “A good soul, her ladyship,” said he; and then, drawing
a bolder breath--“Tongue runs away with her a bit, at times.” Oh, I
quite understood; it may happen to any of us. “It’s my belief,” said
Bashford, “that some people _must_ have their talk--keeps ’em alive, if
you see what I mean.” He looked up gravely for my effusive assent and
found his way now more freely. “That’s what I like about old Martha
Gainsborough,” he reflected; “she talks very fierce, but there’s no
mischief about her. It’s my belief that some people _will_ make
mischief--keeps ’em going, if you see what I mean. Now what I like about
old Martha--” The circle of his locution was narrow; he was surprised to
find himself at the same point again so soon. He broke away--“There’s
plenty of good stuff in old Martha; and that keeps _her_ alive; so she’s
no need to pull her friends to pieces.” He frowned approvingly on the
phrase, and it started a smile. “Except to their faces,” he added with
humour. He had brought me to the door, and he dismissed me warmly. “And
mind you,” he called after me, “she’s a very good soul, her ladyship.” I
knew who was, anyhow.
XII. CORSO
There was no doubt that I had climbed to good purpose when I reached
Miss Gainsborough’s _piano nobile_ in the Corso. Here was
grandeur!--such a pomp of high mirrors and gilded garlands and red
brocades, such a blaze of candlelight and crystal, as gave old Martha
the sumptuous background that became her. She stood on the hearth-rug,
upright as ever, her hand upon the crutch of an ebony wand; she stood in
all her panoply to receive the world. She was flanked by a pair of
supporters, two gentlemen already in attendance; and the world
approached her across a shining floor that was broad enough to make the
world feel very small and trifling, or very large and uncouth, before it
gained her presence. But she took my hand with kindness, though she
spoke with acerbity; and she seemed to hold me under her protection,
like a friend, while she presented me loftily to the gentlemen in
waiting. One of these I recognized at once; he had the bright dark eyes,
the musical voice, the sharp-lipped smile of Father Holt--who recalled
our meeting in the church and gracefully renewed our acquaintance. The
other was an old man with a great patriarchal head, snowily bearded--a
picturesque old figure, bedecked in careful negligence of black velvet
and creamy silk; he was very loud and deaf, and he accepted my
introduction with abounding heartiness.
Miss Gainsborough was holding a banquet; and Father Holt and Mr. Vickery
(the patriarch) had been retained for the occasion as a pair of faithful
henchmen, who would kindly be at hand to beat off the crowd when she
collapsed. She was giving them their directions to this effect when the
crowd began to gather, and I own there was some disillusionment again
for me in the sight of the trio who first appeared. Miss Gainsborough’s
drawing-room glowed and shone, prepared for all the brilliance of a
historic capital; and anybody might have felt that high expectations
sagged a trifle when there presently drifted through the curtained
portal the long plain faces of the Clarksons. They, poor creatures, had
perhaps the same reflection, discovering me upon the hearth-rug; when
for once you dine in the Corso it is flat to encounter the mere Briton
to whom you have been kind in your lodging. But other faces quickly
crowded upon us, and the room was filled with chatter and stir; the
party was a large one, and among the gathering of many strangers Miss
Agnes and I, trying to make conversation as we looked at the show, might
imagine that we beheld the flower of historic pride. I at least was
ready to make the most of it, for the honour of the Corso and of
ourselves; but Miss Agnes blinked more doubtfully with her short-sighted
eyes and appeared dissatisfied. Was it possible that old Martha was
putting us off with our own sort, a rabble of floating touristry--whom
she swept together and polished off from time to time with a perfunctory
banquet? Yes, when a few minutes later I was sent to dinner with Miss
Gadge it seemed all too probable.
How we do despise each other, we simple pilgrims! There is no meanness
to which we are ashamed of stooping if only we may so persuade the rest
of the herd that we are not as they, gaping in the rawness of innocent
wonder. Miss Gadge and I were quite capable, I believe, of deliberately
lying to each other about our condition and rank in the general
pilgrimage; there was instant rivalry between us, a competition into
which we dropped as a matter of course. Even after long years it might
make us both uncomfortably flush to recall the sound of our voices as we
plied one another with the well-known strokes--for they are all
well-known, the possibilities of the game have been ransacked a thousand
times over. Not one of us all, I suppose, ever really deceived another;
and yet we are unable to talk with candour and freedom--and Miss Gadge
is by no means a spiritless talker--until we have paid our debt to the
devouring snobbery which overtakes us in Rome. I try to smother some
degrading puffs and flourishes of my own that return to me; but I may
claim that no less vivid in memory are the struttings and bouncings of
Miss Gadge. The game was drawn when at last we abandoned it, and we have
never since had occasion to start it again. Years have flown, and if
Miss Gadge and I were to meet once more at a dinner-party in the Corso
we should meet as strangers; yet I can hear the insinuating tone in
which she would begin by asking me whether this was my first visit to
Rome. “Not quite!” I should answer, with a dangerous ironic smile; and I
should allow her to commit herself further before crushing her with the
load of my superiority. I should find, furthermore, that it isn’t easy
to crush a bouncer of such experience as Miss Gadge.
As for the particular crowd that old Martha had collected that evening,
the suspicion of Miss Agnes was confirmed. We were a fortuitous lot,
jetsam of the hotels and the boarding-houses, with only Father Holt and
Mr. Vickery to give us a stiffening of the real Rome. They toiled, I
have no doubt, manfully; but they were outside my range (Miss
Gainsborough kept them jealously near herself--not that she seemed
likely to collapse), and I was plump in the midst of the conversation,
everybody knows the kind, which we pilgrims make for ourselves when we
assemble together. It begins with the unseemly game I have described,
and when this has been played to a draw it goes on to an endless chant,
recurring points of admiration and exclamation, over the churches and
the ruins and the hill-towns that have stirred our gushing affections.
The dear sweet places, we name them in succession; and like Berta when
she grew so lyrical over Gower Street and the hansom-cabs, we hardly
need more than the sweet pretty names--they are conversation enough by
themselves. Hark to the swelling chorus!--our shrewd hostess knew she
could trust us, her body-guard was merely for her own protection against
a clack of ecstasy that bored her to death. She at her end of the table
was again declaiming, arraigning, denouncing in her grandest manner; the
rest of us left the world to its fate, and assured each other that
Assisi--that Perugia--that Siena--needed no more words to express what
we all agreed that they were. In half a dozen eager colloquies about the
table this truth was upheld.
Take the case, for example--not of Miss Gadge, occupied for the moment
with her other neighbour; but take the case of Miss Turnbull, who
happened to have arrived that very day from Assisi, where she had spent
a fortnight alone with her feelings. These, she was clear, were
unutterable; but so were mine, and when we threw them together the
effect was instant. “Assisi!” we both exclaimed in an outburst. Miss
Julia Turnbull--she was a fair and flushed young woman of thirty; and
she had travelled up and down over Italy, quite by herself, and had
never had the smallest difficulty with the Italians. Wherever she went
it was the same story--nothing but perfect friendliness and delightful
manners. Treat an Italian as you would treat anybody else, and he will
behave accordingly--if this result of Miss Turnbull’s experience seems
ambiguously worded, nothing could be plainer or franker than her ringing
laugh and her broad blue gaze. With these she had made all sorts and
conditions of friends in her walks around Assisi; she had talked to
every one she met, they told her of their joys and troubles--dear
things, they seemed to feel that Miss Turnbull was akin to themselves;
and perhaps there _was_ something of the south, something of the soil in
her--she couldn’t otherwise account for it. Anyhow she had realized that
it was among the peasants and the simple folk of the country, not among
the professors and the theologians, that (to use her own image) one
“touched the heart of things Franciscan”; and she had not only touched
it, she had borne it away with her, and some day perhaps she would put
it in a little book--but it would evidently take her a long while to
think of the necessary words. And so meanwhile, “Assisi!”--the book, for
Miss Turnbull and me, was already in the cry of the name.
“A book? who’s going to write a book?”--Miss Gadge caught up the echo
with a pounce. Miss Gadge was small and lean and dry, with a pair of
nippers that clawed and lacerated her nose to maintain their hold
against her emphatic nods and jerks. If we were talking of books we
might be interested to know the name of the grey-haired lady on the
other side of the table--“but don’t seem to be noticing her; look
presently,” said Miss Gadge; and in a very unnecessary whisper she
breathed a literary _nom de guerre_ of thumping circulation, I believe,
in those days. That simple old lady, so unobtrusive in her plain white
shawl, was _she_; and Miss Gadge was her friend and had the privilege of
travelling with her on an Italian tour--a tour undertaken for a purpose
that Miss Gadge oughtn’t really to mention, but that she did confide to
us because we were interested in books. Emmeline (so Miss Gadge referred
to the authoress) had a new novel shaping in her mind, and this time she
was going to “bring in Italy”; and so she had come to Italy to _take_ it
in, as you might say, before bringing it in--she was one who felt that a
novel was only of value in so far as it was sincere. And if you have
ever had the chance of watching a novelist (a sincere one) while he or
she is simply waiting, imbibing and inhaling the atmosphere that is
presently to be brought in--you can believe that Miss Gadge was almost
afraid, at times, of interrupting the studies and meditations of her
friend, lest she should mar such an exceedingly delicate process. It
isn’t as though it were merely a matter of taking notes and accumulating
facts; Emmeline constantly remarked to Miss Gadge that it was something
far more intimate that she desired. She already had her “plot” quite
clear in her head--it had come to her at Bournemouth; the atmosphere
could only sink in gradually, taken on the spot.
The old lady in the shawl was placidly attending to her dinner, and we
could observe her without indiscretion. I had for my part a real
curiosity in doing so. In those far-away years it wasn’t every day that
I saw a novelist, and I looked upon the mild brow of Emmeline with
questioning wonder. From that smooth forehead they had sprung, those
generously passionate romances that had been considered too rich and
ripe--all the men in them were “clean-limbed,” all the women
“deep-breasted”--for Miss Turnbull to read as a school-girl. Oh she
_had_ read them, you may be sure, and she warmly agreed with Miss Gadge
that there was nothing in their frankness which could inflame a
wholesome mind. Indeed Miss Turnbull often thought that if, as a woman
grown, she possessed some power of appreciating the big things, the real
things, the human things, she largely owed it to her long immersion in
the romances of Emmeline. There comes a time, no doubt, when we turn to
life itself, to the book of the heart, rather than to an imaginary
picture of it, however sincere; a mere novel then loses its hold on us
and we reach out to our kind. Yes, yes--but what so painfully impressed
Miss Gadge, for one, was the vainness of our attempts in that direction;
our lives are isolated, barriers divide us--I am not sure that Miss
Gadge had ever been able to feel she had truly attained to the life of
another, for all her striving. Ah, to that Miss Turnbull had much to
say; there are currents, divinations, magnetic chords--but though there
is much to say about them, it appears to be difficult to say it clearly;
Miss Turnbull got entangled in the chords to such an extent that she
lost her bearing in the currents. But Miss Gadge was ready with the true
conclusion; in these perplexities, in these obstructions, it is the
genius of the artist that will point the way. Where the rest of us
fumble and hesitate the novelist marches straight; he knows, _she_
knows, how to throw down the barrier and to unlock the soul. There she
sits, bless her, just across the table; and if she seems to be thinking
of nothing but the lobster’s limb that she is tapping and cracking so
busily--type of how many a heart that she has smitten and laid gaping
with her pen--one needn’t doubt that she is taking in, at this very
moment, more of the meaning of life than the rest of us put together.
Perhaps we shall find that she has brought it in, with Italy, when we
read her next.
The conversation of these ladies had joined hands across me; they were
so much more familiar than I was with the hearts and chords and barriers
that I could have nothing to say. But they didn’t appear to get very far
with the subject of their discussion; they soon managed to lose it in
the difficulty of agreeing what it was. Miss Gadge thought that
essentially it was the spirit in which she and Emmeline were conducting
their tour; and if that were so it was obvious that Miss Gadge should
first describe, without interruption, the nature and the quality of the
spirit. This she was quite willing to do--taking as an illustration a
day they had lately spent among the “ghosts of the centuries” (I quote
Emmeline) in the Campagna; and she began the day in much detail,
dwelling on the tone in which Emmeline had said of the Appian Way, “It
speaks to me, it speaks to me!”--like that. But Miss Turnbull’s view of
the subject in hand was different; and she slanted off to _her_ view by
a rapid cut at a drooping youth who sat exactly opposite to me, nursing
his chin in a slender and very flexible hand. “Mr. Pole, say you agree
with me; say you think that on the plane of art--” Miss Turnbull was
great upon “planes”; but we all know the slipperiness of that one, and
she crashed heavily when the youth Pole, after listening unmoved for a
minute or two, sighed out some cruel and insidious comment. Such a
languorous slim-throated slender-handed youth--he was just what Deering
had planned to be, what Deering perceived that he daily more fatally
failed of being; I thought compassionately of Deering as I noticed the
waxen nose and the relaxed waistcoat of the youth Pole. He tripped up
Miss Turnbull on her plane, gave a limpid glance at the havoc of her
fall, and returned to the seclusion of his graceful attitude.
Miss Turnbull had met him at Assisi, and though she didn’t think much of
him as a man--he had none of the square-jawed virility of Emmeline’s
heroes--she was impressed by his authority as an artist. She had never
seen any one who appeared to live so exclusively upon the most
treacherous of all the planes; half protesting, half admiring, she
acknowledged the supremacy of the feat. Miss Gadge on the other hand was
so loud in her scorn that it might have flawed the Narcissus-dream in
which the youth was apparently sunk--he was bending his gaze as though
the loveliest of visions were reflected in the table-cloth. The
disregarded nymph at his side was Miss Agnes, and it wasn’t _her_ poor
dreary countenance, mooning over his shoulder, that would divide the
attention of Narcissus; and he was equally heedless, it seemed, of the
sharp word of Miss Gadge, though she flung it viciously into the mirror
of his contemplation. She had no patience with these affected young men;
to one who has lived in familiarity with a true artist the sight of the
sham is a disgust--the nippers quivered at the thought. Emmeline often
says that all great art is intensely human; she says too that every
great artist is essentially a man; and Miss Gadge puts in, fondly, what
Emmeline in her modesty leaves out--that a great artist is also “very
woman,” if that happens to be her sex. Well, it follows that a thing
like _that_, limp and boneless, soft where he ought to be rugged and
square, pale where he ought to be “flushing through his tan,” is a
creature of a kind that Miss Gadge has such a horror of that she seems
capable of actually forcing him to listen to her candid opinion. A very
little more and she would have him by the slim white throat; Miss Gadge
doesn’t profess to be artistic herself, only to reverence the gift in
others, and she is not such a very woman but that she could easily
collar the fair young Pole.
Luckily there was beside her a moderating influence; her neighbour on
her right was an English parson, as rugged and brown and broad-beamed a
man as Emmeline could picture in her most womanly moments; and his deep
rumbling laughter diverted Miss Gadge from her indignation. He was
laughing at Pole, he was laughing at her too, he was laughing at
everything that was too small to be taken seriously; there was drollery
and laziness and potency in his laugh. He leaned back in his chair and
derided Miss Gadge, and she bristled up at first with snaps and jerks;
but she was a puny little being, all splutter and shrillness, in the
grasp of his indolent humour, and she was very soon tittering happily at
his thrusts. Was he too one of our oddly mixed pilgrimage? Miss Turnbull
knew all about him, and she told me his story in an undertone of ardent
admiration. All that she knew, however, cast no light on the compelling
richness of his laughter--which was an attraction that held and
interested me more and more as I caught the rumour of his encounter with
Miss Gadge. My other neighbour’s tale was of no account; it was about
offices and dignities and benefices--nothing to the point; but I learned
at any rate that his name was Mr. Champerdown and that he was in Italy,
I think indeed he was abroad, for the first time in his life. Ah, that
gave me a sudden lift of mind, like a recollection of something
forgotten. The gushing Julia, the pouncing Gadge, the drooping Pole, not
to mention the neglected Agnes and the placid Emmeline, had driven
something out of my thought which returned refreshingly, all in a
moment, when I learned that Mr. Champerdown, with his power and his
laughter, was for the first time in Rome. With a sense of satisfaction
that was queer and sweet I repaired my loss.
But wait--for before I can attend to this matter our sumptuous meal is
at an end, Miss Gainsborough pushes back her chair, Emmeline pops a last
large chocolate into her mouth and clutches her shawl, and we stream
back in procession to the crimson and golden drawing-room. Old Martha
was bearing herself valiantly, and nobody could say that she denied the
barbarians the best of her splendour, though her disdain might gleam in
her eye. The entertainment proceeded, broke out afresh, developed and
extended; old Martha controlled a shifting circle at one end of the
room, Mr. Vickery displayed his roaring picturesqueness at the other,
Father Holt glided and sparkled with watchful courtesy in the midst.
Trays of cups appeared--and then more trays of jugs and glasses--and
then of little crystal plates and dishes; there was always a tray of
something delicate and charming at one’s elbow to fill the pause while
Mrs. Clarkson waited for one’s next remark. She had to wait often and
long, for she had the gift of exhausting a separate subject with each
remark of her own; there was nothing to add when she had mentioned that
she thought so too. She couldn’t be tempted with the jugs and glasses,
but she waited calmly--she waited so mildly that I lost myself in
watching a small drama, enacted in my view, and I only jumped back to
her when at last she repeated that she had always thought so, rightly or
wrongly. Mrs. Clarkson wasn’t easily remembered from one remark to
another, and it happened that the drama in question was unusual and
expressive. Not many people have ever seen Father Holt at a loss; it is
a rare chance, and indeed one has to be quick to seize it. He is
extremely sensitive to his surroundings, very adaptable, very deft; but
once in a while he is over-confident, and he makes a slip.
I need hardly say that if there was any run of mankind with whom Father
Holt felt sure of himself it was the run of the Anglican clergy on a
tourists’ holiday in Rome. It didn’t, of course, come a great deal in
his way, but he might reasonably feel that he had all its few varieties
by heart. He well knew the breezy tact, or the burly independence, or
the shining forbearance, or the envious--but enough, he knew them all,
all the tones of their response to the courteous charm of a Jesuit. He
thought he knew; and as he circulated in his distinction among Miss
Gainsborough’s rabble he approached the broad back of Mr. Champerdown
with all his ease. He rounded the back, he faced Mr. Champerdown (who
was seated); he addressed him in that fine finished manner which he wore
so lightly; and he didn’t even pause to verify its effect, it was just a
polite word in passing for the clumsy big cleric--of the breezy kind,
probably, prepared with a volley of manly tact and taste that Father
Holt had no wish to confront. So he turned to pass on, having made his
attentive sign, and in the next moment there happened the rare chance I
speak of. A large hand, reaching out to a surprising distance, fell
upon his shoulder--fell upon the whole of him, as it rather seemed, and
gathered him up and drew him back and placed him where Mr. Champerdown
could survey him conveniently; the thing was done so deliberately, so
gigantically, so gently, that it was as though you were to screw round
in your chair and to pick up a mouse or a small bird from the
ground--some little unsuspecting funny creature, taken unawares, whom
you had the fancy to examine more closely. With perfect gentleness Mr.
Champerdown held the bright-eyed bird and inspected it--and only for an
instant or two, before he set it down again uninjured. That was all he
wanted--just to take a singular opportunity, the first he had had, and
to see for himself what a Jesuit in a Roman drawing-room looked like in
the hand. It was delightfully done, and it was over in a moment; but in
that moment the expression of Father Holt was enough to make one forget
a more vivid pre-occupation than Mrs. Clarkson. “Yes, always,” she said,
“rightly or wrongly”--and her neighbour manifestly jumped to overtake
her mild rumination.
When at length old Martha felt entitled to put us to flight I was
careful to find myself descending the great staircase at the side of Mr.
Champerdown. We issued forth together into the silence of the
Corso--Miss Gainsborough’s portal was at the silent end of the long
straight highway--and he serenely accepted my company. He pointed the
way towards the Place of the People, hard by, and we walked out into the
middle of the broad empty square. A night of May, a night of Rome--and
moreover a night of full moonshine: the beauty of the night was too
great to be praised. Two speechless men, alone in the emptiness, stared
around them at a marvel of beauty that was close to them, all but
touching their eyes and cheeks--that was infinitely remote and
unattainable in the height of space. It was caressing and kind--and yet
it drew away and away, impalpably melting, re-appearing, receding; and
at last it had led our sight further and further, this way and that,
creating a void in which not only a pair of speechlessly wondering men,
but the great open square itself was absorbed and lost. And then again
it lay empty before us, the glimmering Place of the People, snowy in the
moonlight; and we passed over and stood before the triumphal archway of
the city-gate, where it rose up to breast the splendour of the May-night
and of Rome. We gazed for a while, still silent, and we turned again;
and now, as though we had just entered by the northern gate, the city
lay before us that was the goal of our patient pilgrimage. We had
reached Italy at last, and the end of the journey and the threshold of
the city. My companion stopped dead, his big forehead thrown back; and
he lifted his arms, he stood in an attitude of amazement, of salutation,
of adoration--all that and more was in the gesture with which he
acknowledged the presence of Rome. It reminded me--of what did it remind
me?--of something in the Bible, in the book of the law; it was the
“heave-offering,” and he raised it aloft and offered it here in the
night upon the threshold. “Ave Roma!”--his voice trolled out soft and
profound in the stillness.
I never again saw Mr. Champerdown, nor heard of him; but before we
parted that night I had welcomed and enjoyed the possession that he
restored to me. It was the thought of Rome--obliterated by the voices
and the faces of the evening, and indeed of the last many days; it was
the sight of the city, obscured unawares by the crowding heads of our
pilgrim band. The broad shoulders of Mr. Champerdown seemed to have
ploughed an opening in the throng, and there was Rome; even the mere
noise of his power and humour, and the notion of his power and humour
for the first time fronting Rome--this had been enough to bring out the
vision again in all its force. One inevitably forgets the look of it in
the jumble of our pious company; only a very few of them here and there
have the faculty of clearing the way. With one of these few I had stood
before the Gate of the People; and I gladly accepted, I gratefully
commemorate, the help of his remarkable gift. It came just in time; for
my Roman days were now running out, I should soon have to depart with
whatever I could save from them; two or three more fragments thrown upon
the medley of my impressions will complete the pile. But the vision of
Rome was safe, ensphered in that memory of the spring-night and the
moonshine--safe and secure for me to carry away when I must go.
XIII. THE FORUM
Julia of Assisi, fresh from the heart of things Franciscan, had been
painfully struck by the heartlessness of Rome. In all the grandeur and
the pride of the Seven Hills there is something which made her say to
herself, as soon as she arrived, that it wasn’t the same as Assisi--a
weak phrase, but she found the right expression before long. A want of
heart!--for a time she wandered disconsolate, feeling that it was no
place for her. What then was delight to discover in Rome her old friend
and ally Professor Minchin--a man, as I believe, of European reputation,
and a man for whom Julia has one of the frankest and most gurgling of
passions. See her, hear her, on a perfect morning in the Forum, as she
presents him with the party she has collected for the treat of a tour,
under his guidance, among the excavated ruins. He knows them intimately,
from the temple to the sewer; there _is_ a heart of things Roman after
all, and the Professor undertakes to reveal it. Not in the great bleak
galleries and the tawdry churches, but here among broken columns and
crumbling masonry, still half buried in historic dust--here is that
human and homely touch, or note, or message (for either word is used, if
we follow Julia), which at first one took to be lacking altogether in
Rome. The darling Professor had made all the difference to her enjoyment
of the place; no wonder that she whinnied and panted in her enthusiasm,
while she tried to keep us in a bunch and to marshal us properly for our
treat.
The Professor seemed conscious of Julia as of some disturbance in the
air, some unexplained flutter or flicker that confused him slightly; but
he brushed it aside, he vaguely greeted the rest of us, and he flung
himself immediately into the zeal of his task. Miss Turnbull, I know,
was a young woman easily stirred to ideal raptures, but I soon
acknowledged that the Professor was irresistible. He had the appearance
partly of a moth and partly of a scarecrow; and the mixture, as I recall
it, surprisingly gives him the likeness of a soft and ragged rain-cloud,
swept by a kindly gust. He veered at high speed across the broken floor
of the Forum, and Julia had much difficulty in holding the half-dozen of
us in her embrace while she trundled us after him. The Professor had his
view of the particular drain or paving-stone where the study of Rome
begins; and there was nothing for it, said Julia, but to accept his rule
and to squeeze as we might into the awkward pit or cleft in which the
fundamental object is to be found. “Mind the tail of your skirt, Mrs.
Rollesby,” cried Julia, growing heated; “there’s room for Kathleen at
this end, out of the puddle; wait, Professor, wait--I want Mr. Ram to
hear this; really, Mr. Ram, if you crouch you can easily get in.” We
were a handful, but Julia kept her head; the most trying member of the
party was the Professor, who heeded nothing but the book which he had
drawn from his pocket and from which he was gleefully reading
aloud--translating as he went, for it was an ancient text.
It wasn’t the best situation for a classical lecture, and Mr. Ram,
splashing in the puddle, sighed faintly in good Italian. “Per l’amor di
Dio!” he murmured; he was very helpless, and the girl called Kathleen
seized him with a manly arm and set him to rights on his perch.
Crouching, scuffling, apologizing, we wedged ourselves about the
lecturer--with sudden changes of pressure when Mrs. Rollesby leaned and
peered over her capacious bosom (she may have been one of Emmeline’s
heroines) to see what was happening to her skirt. Under the Professor’s
elbow sat a bewildered maiden with a pulled-out neck like a hen’s, and
she distracted the whole company by taking notes of the lecture on a
little pad--scrawling down words like “republican (said to be)” and “(?)
Etruscan,” which we all tried to read. Julia listened fervently, her
lips moving in the effort to get the message of the paving-stone by
heart; and the message ran on, ran on, now translated from the ancient
book, now poured forth at an amazing rate in the exposition of the
Professor. He was inspired; he stood upon the mouth of the sewer (if
sewer it was--“masonry doubtful (perhaps),” obscurely noted the
hen-necked girl)--he stood there and flourished his book and flaunted
his interpretation and ransacked the ages, casting up the history of
races, of immigrations, of the colour of men’s hair, of the obscenities
of their religion, of the shapes of their water-pots; and he whipped
open his book again and triumphantly quoted, he dashed it away to remind
us of Pelasgic sources and Punic infusions and Iberian influences; and
perhaps I rather recall the heads of his discourse as they reached the
bewildered pad than as they fell from the Professor, but they were
various and bristling and abundant; for it all came in, it all came
round, it all came finally back to the stone on which Mr. Ram was trying
to twist himself into a tolerable attitude without spoiling his
trousers. “Ah,” exclaimed Julia uncontrollably, “how one _feels_ it on
the very spot!” Mr. Ram seemed to think so too; he raised himself,
ruefully inspecting the damp green traces it had left on the very spot.
The Professor dived again into his book like a man possessed.
He kept us at last so long in our narrow pit that we must surely have
laid the foundations of Rome and tunnelled its drains with all
thoroughness; the notes on the pad were still dubious, but Mrs. Rollesby
began to wonder if we hadn’t now reached the surface of the soil--she
too had taken her share of the ooze of the ages. She signed to Julia
with winks and nudges--and Mr. Ram appealed to Julia with a woeful
smile, to which Kathleen added an imperative frown; everybody looked to
Julia to take action--everybody except the maiden with the pad, intent
upon the uncertainties of learning. The Professor was Julia’s property,
it was for her to deal with him; and he had clearly forgotten that we
were still underground, he didn’t even notice that the reason why he
couldn’t get at the pocket in his coat-tail (he made a sketchy motion
towards it now and then) was that the hen’s-neck stretched in the way.
We might just as well be sitting comfortably in the sun, and between her
responsibility and her rapture poor Julia was flustered. “Soon, very
soon--the blue-eyed infusion predominant--I’ll get him to move in a
moment--their pots were shallower”: Julia tried to whisper encouragingly
to Mrs. Rollesby without dropping the thread of the message. (I don’t
answer for her version of it.) But the Professor swept over her head,
beaming in the zest of his approach to the real inwardness, the ultimate
significance, the true truth of the origin of Rome--it appeared that we
were only there, even now, and the first damp stone, so homely and said
to be so Etruscan, had still to be laid. We were to stick in our cleft
indefinitely, I thought, for Julia’s tactful advances and coughs made no
impression. The hen-necked girl scratched out “Etruscan” and wrote
wildly “theory abandoned (if at all)”; and the Professor struck her
forcibly on the jaw as he flung out upon the climax, the glad surprise
to which he had been gradually leading us--his discovery of the
solution, the answer to all the queries of the distracted student.
“But first,” he said, “I fear I must disturb you.” He explained with
apologies that we should be better able to judge the weight of his
argument if we followed him--and he was gone, leaping to the upper air
with a sudden agility that brought on one of the tiresome attacks to
which Mrs. Rollesby is subject on being startled. These attacks take the
form of an extraordinary surging and quaking of the bosom, and she has
to be seized and supported and propelled to a spot where she can sit on
something less painful than a heap of brickbats. So she says; but the
girl Kathleen (who proved to be her niece) declared rather brutally that
a little smart exercise would do her all the good in the world. “If she
_will_ gobble at breakfast she’ll palpitate before lunch--naturally,”
said Kathleen, who was as taut and muscular as a young tree. With all
this the Professor had given us the slip, our party was adrift and
scattered, Mr. Ram saw a chance of escape--he feared and detested
Kathleen. But Julia signalled so excitedly through a gap in some ruinous
brickwork, not far off, that she drew us together again for the
Professor’s revelation. Mrs. Rollesby, still surging, was somehow
hoisted through the gap, and here we found a more convenient space and a
less Etruscan boulder, on which she was deposited. There was more room;
but it seemed that the secret of Rome still lurks in rather confined and
dingy places. The Forum on a spring morning is a sweet spot, and Mr. Ram
assured me that he loved every stone of it; the columns tower against
the blue sky, roses scramble among the mouldering walls, the dark
ilex-crown of the Palatine hangs nobly on its height. But the Professor
dragged us away from the view and the roses, he thrust us into a dusty
corner where there was nothing to be seen except the blank face of the
brickwork to which he joyously pointed. Now, he said, we could perceive
for ourselves the conclusion to which his argument had tended; and he
shone so radiantly with his glee in the surprise prepared for us that
Julia bravely gave a cry and a gasp of recognition on behalf of all. He
was enchanted with his success. “I knew you would see it at once,” he
said proudly; “_that_ speaks for itself.” He patted and caressed it with
the hand of a collector, a connoisseur; it appeared to be a little rim
or ledge of greyish cement between the reddish bricks.
His triumph illuminated the shabby corner. Julia’s falsity, Mrs.
Rollesby’s palpitation, Mr. Ram’s uneasy mistrust in the neighbourhood
of Kathleen--he was rapt above all these in his blissful vision. I don’t
know that any of us attained to a share in it; for even Julia, who
perhaps came nearest, was so much disturbed by her own rashness and by
the fear of being unmasked that she was altogether thrown out in her
absorption of the message. She was soon in a fearful state of muddle
between the homely touch and the human note, and if the Professor had
had eyes for anything post-Iberian (but the pad must surely have got
this word wrong) he couldn’t have failed to see that her attention
wandered. I attribute my own confusion in the matter of the sewer and
the grey cement in the first place to the hen-necked girl (whom Julia
addressed as “Hicksie dear”)--for the eye was fatally drawn by her pad;
and secondly to Mrs. Rollesby’s alarming attack--which in spite of her
niece’s treatment abated little on the boulder, some of the symptoms
being so tumultuous that they even affected the Professor in his cloud.
Mr. Ram, moreover, was inclined to attach himself to me, as the only
member of the party who wasn’t rather rough with him; for the dry bones
of learning, he said, left him cold, and he wanted to point out to
somebody that the past only lives for us when it is touched by a poetic
imagination. So he pointed it out to me, and in principle I agreed with
him; but I couldn’t admit that the Professor was wanting in poetry. To
me he seemed romantically poetic, and though his argument escaped me I
appreciated the spirit of his dream.
It was the spirit of those old fine men, the scholars of the great
revival, to whom the glory of antiquity was disclosed in the recovery of
the lost books and the forgotten tongue; and even more, perhaps, it was
the spirit of the artist, the lover of the marble and the bronze, who
stood in breathless expectation while the spade unearthed the buried
goddess and gave her back after long eclipse to a newly adoring world.
As Poggio over a brown Greek manuscript, as Michael over the great
smooth limbs that had lain for a thousand years of oblivion in the soil
of the vineyard--so our Professor was hailing no less than a revelation
in his turn. What is the mere fidget of the foreground, the present, the
transient, compared with the huge unchanging past, where everything is
secured and established under the appearance of eternity?--and how, when
the obstruction is wonderfully pierced, the page restored, the earth of
the present shovelled away, shall we refrain from dashing headlong into
the world thrown open, serenely offering itself to our exploration?
“There, there’s the appropriate country”--for no man can think rarely
and intensely in the rattle of things proceeding, changing, palpitating,
catching the eye momently with their ambiguous queries. A scholar shares
the blest opportunity of the higher mathematician, and the two of them
share it with the artist; all three, and doubtless the saint for a
fourth, inhabit a region of completed things, of motionless truth. It is
not to say that they are calm and motionless themselves--the Professor
almost dances and leaps in the inspiration of his research, returning
again and again to the wonder of the speaking brickwork. But the truth
that he seeks is there before him, eternally disposed for the hand, the
eye, the brain--and I am not afraid of Mr. Ram’s own word, for the
poetic imagination--that is able to discern and seize it.
To the Professor it was as lovely as a lyric of Sappho or a torso of the
golden age. His fingers rested on the battered brick, the rubbish, the
rubble--whichever it was that held the secret--with a touch that might
have been laid on the exquisite curves of the perfect marble. His statue
had come to the light, he chanted its beauty, he was ready to linger
over its gracious lines for the benefit even of a few ignorant gapers
like ourselves. Homely indeed!--and human!--Julia was wide of the mark.
It was divine, if the word means anything, in its immortal completeness;
and as for homeliness, why it carries you off into the clouds, a soft
tattered cloud yourself, so that the earth with its gapers and its great
fat panting gobblers is forgotten--or would be if it weren’t for the
singular moanings of the dying storm in Mrs. Rollesby’s breast. These,
as I have said, did occasionally penetrate to the Professor; he glanced
earthward with a puzzled look, as though he asked himself whether he had
heard or only fancied the report of some commotion. Only fancy, he
concluded; and he returned to the height of his discourse--which all
this time you must imagine to have been ranging onward, sweeping
backward, darting and circling as vivaciously as ever. The wretched
Hicksie tore leaf after leaf from her pad, scattering fresh
interrogations as fast as the last were answered. Julia was still bright
and eager, but her bad conscience was beginning to show in the flush of
her dishevelment. The Professor alone didn’t flag; we had given up all
thought of the roses and the view, and we gazed stonily at his vigour.
Oh, the common earth of the present had little with which to retain such
a man; he was caught into the past, into the loving celebration of his
statue, his lyric--which is my figure for the secret revealed to his
exploring and divining scholarship. I envy him as I envy an artist and a
saint, or even a mathematician; there, there’s where I would be, where
things stand still and are silent, and you roam among them, chanting the
rapture of your research, till you drop. That is a life.
And what was the secret after all? I picture it vaguely as a brilliant
divination and revival of the past, the result of the play of the
Professor’s penetrating insight upon the vast amassment of his learning.
I think of his jubilant glee as aroused, how naturally, by some great
spectacle of the ancient world that he perceives in the light of his
patient faithful studies. Alas, it is vague to me; but he sees it as
clearly, no doubt, beneath the dust and rubbish of the Forum, as I see
the green-veiled woman who strays drearily into our corner, murmuring
over her red handbook “to our right lie the rude substructures of the
peristyle.” And in point of fact I am quite as wide of the mark as Julia
herself. The Professor was not the man to have spent good time and good
thought over the visionary fancies I ascribed to him; not for him to be
a mere “popularizer of the specious”--a phrase that he utters with
hissing scorn, for it is one of his side-hits at the showier lore of a
“sister university.” No, the Professor took a different view of the
scholar’s privilege. It is for the scholar to find a loose stone or an
insidious chink in the work of his predecessors and to leave it
tightened and slopped; then as he dies he tells himself that he has done
something which needed doing--not every man can say as much. Was it a
small thing?--it may seem a small thing to you or me, but the Professor
retorts that in these matters our clumsy measure is of no authority; if
a fact has been inserted where no fact was, then truth is the better for
it--and with what sort of scale, pray, will you undertake to estimate
the betterment of truth? All this nonsense of torsos and secrets and
lyrics may be well enough in a pretty book; but the Professor has been
putting a great deal of energy into an explanation, which I seem to have
totally misunderstood, of the point that had baffled--or worse, that had
deceived and misled--all researchers before him. He has demonstrated his
own theory, and when I mention that it has found complete acceptance
even at the “sister university” (where to be sure they consider it a
trifling matter--they _would_!) I think we may assume that a fanciful
amateur, vacantly gaping, is not likely to find a flaw in it. Here is
something accomplished for a man to rest upon with satisfaction--so much
so that even now, after an hour of mercurial discourse, the Professor
is still prepared to go springing off to the next dusty corner and rude
substructure that speaks for itself in support of his view.
But what is it, what is it? At this distance of time I long to know, but
I confess that at the moment, what with the wear and tear of the various
distractions I have described, I could only agree with Mr. Ram that the
day was indeed growing “sultry”--I never heard this word on the lips of
anyone else--and that it would be pleasant to seek a little repose and
refreshment. Mr. Ram looked at his watch--“Time for a little _vino_, a
little _spaghetti_,” he insinuated gently and playfully; and though he
spoke aside to me, the suggestion was caught up with promptitude by Mrs.
Rollesby. All eyes were again directed upon Julia, and poor harassed
Julia had once more to begin coughing and sniffing significantly at each
of the Professor’s full slops. Kathleen indeed told her aunt plainly
that lunch on the top of “all that stodge” at breakfast would be
disastrous for one so lately startled; and Mr. Ram drew a sharp breath
between his teeth as she added, swinging round at him and pointing to
his waist, “Yes, and for you too, Mr. Ram--you’d much better come for a
tramp with me before you lay on any more of that deposit.” Hicksie also
seemed to have no thought of food or rest; her scribbling was by this
time almost delirious in the fever of its queries, but she stuck to it.
And the Professor ran on, ran on, blind to Mrs. Rollesby, deaf to
Julia--until it happened as before, he suddenly apologized for being
compelled to disturb us again, and was gone. This time he was gone so
imperceptibly that Mrs. Rollesby was unfluttered; she was consulting
Mr. Ram with regard to the handiest place for her lunch. Might we
decently take it that the lecture was finished? Not so--Julia, beckoning
me to follow, had dashed in pursuit of the Professor; we saw her
scrambling up a steep bank to a sort of platform among the ruins,
elevated and exposed, where he was renewing his exposition to an
audience of one--for the faithful Hicksie had kept pace with him and was
sitting at his feet, bent already over a new page. Julia gained the
height and doubled his audience; and Mr. Ram and I, glancing at each
other rather guiltily, suggested that they seemed very well as they
were. The Professor was clearly quite unconscious of the dwindling of
his audience; we seized our chance.
Over our _sorso di vino_, as Mr. Ram still called it, I was inclined to
think that we had indeed been very near the heart of things Roman that
morning--very near, if not completely in touch with it. The Professor’s
single-minded certainty was contagious; he held his faith as a grain of
mustard-seed, and his passion almost convinced me that we waste our time
in our random researches, away from his guidance, after the heart of
Rome. Suppose Julia was right, and it was the Professor who had really
the clue--for indeed there was a quality in his faith, with its
blankness to vulgar appeals, which hadn’t been noticeable on the whole
among the rest of our band. Unfortunately I couldn’t put my question to
Mr. Ram; he was pre-occupied with his own more tender, more
understanding and sensitive love of every stone of the Forum. It hurt
him to see the Forum treated as a class-room, and he blamed himself for
having suffered Miss Julia to include him, much against his rule, in the
class. He didn’t wish to speak of the Professor, but rather of the
impression that the Forum, familiar as it was, had made upon himself
last evening in a strangely “bistred” afterglow, whatever that may be.
But with all his tenderness the faith of Mr. Ram was a languid thing
beside that of the Professor, and I returned to the impression that the
Forum had made upon myself in the iridescent halo (thus I capped Mr.
Ram) of the Professor’s ardour. Where had I seen the like of it? Nowhere
at all, I reflected, except perhaps in one place--and that was the great
church, when the genius of Rome came riding and swaying over the heads
of the multitude. Those eager votaries, yelling their homage--the
Professor dancing in his zeal: they had come to Rome with something in
common, their single mind.
XIV. VIA MARGUTTA
A Studio!--I found myself at last in the studio of an artist. Deering
had mocked my bookish and antiquated notions of Roman life and I had
obediently dropped them; I had thrown over Hawthorne and Andersen, even
the ingenuous romance of poor old Zola, and my pursuit of reality had
carried me along the path that I have traced. But at last I arrived at a
studio, and I hadn’t spent ten minutes there before I was back again in
the dear familiar company of the Improviser and the Faun, the friends of
my sentimental and pre-Deering past. I had had an inkling of them even
as I approached the door; for the Via Margutta, tucked under the terrace
of the Pincian Hill, is a corner of Rome where you might well expect to
be brushed by their gentle ghosts. It is a street of studios, or it was
a few days ago--perhaps it is a street of motor-works and cinema-houses
by now; and a quiet bystreet not far from the Spanish Steps, full of
shabby buildings with high northern lights, was still populous with
Kenyon and Donatello and Roderick, for me at least it was, in that
spring-time of the middle distance to which I now look back. Even as I
turned into the Via Margutta, then, I had a hint that Deering had
deceived me; and ten minutes later I knew he had, for I stood before the
canvases that lined the studio of Mr. Vickery.
He was as loud and deaf and picturesque as I had seen and heard at Miss
Gainsborough’s; he wore a great blue smock and a loose slouch-cap of
black velvet, his white hair coiled upon his shoulders. There was a
bewildering crowd of people in the big room, and there were several low
tables spread out with fine old china and a lavish refection; and at
first I was rather taken aback, for Mr. Vickery’s invitation to me had
implied that I should find him lost to the world as usual and dabbling
in his paints, but glad to welcome a friend to the casual cheer of an
old Bohemian. He was casually welcoming such a crowd, and the
strawberry-dishes were so many, and the room was so grand with
tapestries and armour and cushioned divans, that I was struck shy and
lonely at the start, forgetting my pleasant hint of Kenyon outside; but
Mr. Vickery rolled jovially to greet me--he had a large rocking movement
on his legs that was full of heartiness--and begged me to put up with
the easy ways of an old Bohemian like himself. He was very loud and
clear upon the point, and I heard him reiterate it as he rambled among
his guests; I made out that we had all dropped in upon him casually, and
must take him as we found him in the rude simplicity of his workshop.
Presently he had picked up a palette daubed with colours and was wearing
it on his thumb; and he clutched a sheaf of long-handled brushes that he
threw down with splendid geniality to grasp the hand of somebody
arriving or departing. We had surprised him, it appeared, at work on a
gigantic canvas, a landscape, which was hoisted on an easel so
tremendous that he had to climb by a step-ladder to reach the azure
distances of the Alban hills. He climbed to them again from time to
time, and he looked wonderfully striking, I must say, as he stood on the
steps, his brush poised, glancing over his shoulder with a laughing
boyish word to the crowd below.
The great picture represented a view of the Roman Campagna; the azure
hills were seen through the straddling stilted arches of one of the
ruined aqueducts; in the foreground was a party of goats, attended by a
handsome old man, sheepskin-clad, who shaded his eyes and looked
benignantly across at a boy blowing a pipe in the left-hand corner--and
the boy, as I live, had matted curls and a pair of weather-stained
velvet breeches. My mind flew to Deering--he should hear of this!
Deering was too clever by half, with his derision of my innocent
fancies; here was an artist, just as I had supposed, who duly studied
the “picturesque models” of the English ghetto and introduced them into
a picture as venerable and as romantic and as big almost as the Campagna
itself. Is it into a picture, moreover? It is into fifty pictures, hung
on the walls or tilted on easels all about the studio; and I wandered
from one to another, very pleasantly, in the recovered company of my
familiar old friends. Hawthorne murmured his prim harmonious phrases;
another and a younger figure, very watchful under the careful
correctness of his bearing, noticed everything and said little; and we
passed from picture to picture, pausing before each with a smile of
charmed recognition. The old man in his sheepskin, the boy in his curls,
met us by many a crumbling arch of a sun-bathed aqueduct; and sometimes
they met us in a street-scene, by a splashing fountain and a gay
flower-stall, where they were joined by a girl with gleaming teeth and
black provocative eyes; and again they met us in deep mountain-valleys,
very verdurous and lonely, where there was a ruined temple on the height
of a crag and a bandit at the mouth of a cavern; and everywhere the
sheepskin and the curls and the fine dark glances had a charm for us,
away from Deering’s sarcastic eye, to which I for one surrendered in
comfort and peace. This was a world I knew; it was quite a relief to
cease from facing reality for a few minutes.
I was brought back to reality by encountering Miss Gadge, who said (as
my shadowy companions vanished) that there was nothing she enjoyed more,
as an old Roman, than a prowl round the studio of a true artist. She
delighted in the temple and the bandit, but she seemed a little
distraught in her reverence by her desire to talk about the people
present. She had a great deal of information concerning all the company,
and she hastened to impart it--for it would interest me, she said, to
know something of the kind of types one met in a typically Roman studio.
She went through them all, giving of each what is called a “thumbnail”
sketch; she admitted that the phrase was Emmeline’s, and that in
Emmeline’s society she had fallen into the habit of seeing people always
in an intensely typical light--Emmeline says that a novelist does so
quite instinctively. “Now that girl there with the blue beads--she’s a
kind you only see in Rome: very charming, very lady-like and
that--pretty I _don’t_ say, and a bad complexion, but that’s neither
here nor there; well, her name is Sandra Deeprose (an odd name, isn’t
it?)--” Miss Gadge’s sketches seemed to be wanting in crispness, and for
an observer of type she was excessively occupied with the individual,
but she wandered on over the company and presented me with a large
number of facts and names. Mr. Vickery, she told me, was held to be the
_doyen_ of the “colony” in Rome; he had lived in Rome for ever, from far
back in the ancient days of the Pope-King; he had known everybody, he
had known the Brownings--and sharply on that word I looked round to
devour the strange new wonderful sight of a man who had known the
Brownings. He happened to be standing at the far end of the room with
his back against a darkly figured hanging of tapestry; and his head in
its florid grandeur, so carefully composed, was relieved upon its
background like a daring portrait--brilliantly, slashingly painted, you
might say, by some artist not afraid of an obvious effect. Of his own
effect Mr. Vickery was very sure, and with reason; he offered himself as
a finished achievement of art and nature, sufficient as he stood. But
far from it, he was at that moment nothing in himself, he was everything
for what he implied--to one pair of eyes at least, fixed on him with
intensity. He had known the Brownings--how strange it seems and new!
It was true enough, no doubt; Miss Gadge was certain of the fact, she
had heard him speak of “picnics in the Campagna” with the Brownings--the
throb of the thought was almost painful to me as she said it. But how
delightful, she pursued, to know that I was a “Browning-lover” like
herself; and she dropped the subject of the picnics in order to quote,
to declaim some lines from “Rabbi ben Ezra” in a strangulated sing-song,
quite unlike her ordinary voice, which expressed the power of her
devotion to the poet. “Grow old along with me--” she intoned the lines
in a hoarse and quavering wail; and I broke out on her with a passionate
cry, though it remained unheard, over the depth of her misunderstanding.
If a wish could have struck her in the face she would have reeled on the
spot; but though I had struck her I couldn’t have made her understand
how completely she mistook my feeling. “It’s not _that_,” I might have
burst out, “not in the least like _that_!”--and how should she have
understood that my sudden interest in Mr. Vickery was larger and rarer
and stranger than that of a “Browning-lover,” even of one who could
intone the chant of the Rabbi from end to end. I could any day have
repeated the poems of Browning against Miss Gadge, though not on the
pitch of her wail; but I was high above _them_, I felt, when I started
at the sight of Mr. Vickery--at the gleam of the eagle-feather. I was
with the Brownings in the Campagna, suddenly _with_ them, stopping to
speak to them: don’t you understand?--I wasn’t repeating their poems,
which I have known by heart for years. It was useless to try explaining
this to Miss Gadge, and I let her quaver on while I gazed my fill at the
wonder. It was a strange excitement; and I don’t pretend to make light
of it as I now look back, or to smile distantly at the thought of the
thrill, the wild sweet breeze that ran through the imagination of the
youthful onlooker. A man who had known the Brownings--there he stood!
The company thinned at length, and I was able to approach him, though I
knew full well that the demon of shyness would prevent my questioning
him, as I longed to question, on the subject of the picnics. But first I
was held awhile longer by Miss Gadge, who on discovering that I was a
less worthy worshipper of the poet than she had imagined went on with
her study of type; and this brought her to a shabby and crumpled little
old woman who was slipping furtively about the room with a purposeful
air, talking to nobody. Miss Gadge named her, and the name was indeed a
surprise--Mrs. Vickery; she was actually the wife of our resplendent
host, but Miss Gadge threw a world of meaning into her headshake and her
delicate grimace as she referred to her. Poor Mr. Vickery, all through
his long and sumptuous career that dowdy impediment had hung to him;
and Miss Gadge, like all his admirers, was impressed by his
fidelity--though indeed you might equally call it his wife’s tenacity.
But to do her justice she kept to the background when his brilliance was
turned to the world; I could see this for myself, as she slunk among his
visitors without attempting to pretend they were hers. Look, however--at
that moment Mrs. Vickery did venture to accost one of them, a queer
untidy bundle of a woman not unlike herself, though much more colourful
and bold-eyed. “Ah yes, of course,” said Miss Gadge, nodding shrewdly,
“she talks to the reporter”; for the bold bundle, it seemed, was a
common type, a haunter of studios and public places and _some_
drawing-rooms even, where she picked up what she could for the
exceedingly vulgar and brazen newspaper that you know so well. Mrs.
Vickery fastened upon her with decision and drew her apart; and they
stood together by one of the easels--not indeed looking at the picture,
but evidently speaking of it, for Mrs. Vickery jerked her thumb at the
bandit and proceeded to explain something very minutely to the
journalist, emphasizing her points with a finger tapped on her palm. I
caught a snatch of her explanation as I passed up the room. “He _never_
asks less,” Mrs. Vickery was saying earnestly--“and he feels it should
be _known_.”
The artist was now at work again; he was mounted on his step-ladder,
that is to say, with brush poised and palette displayed, and at
intervals he gave a masterly stroke to the Alban hills. He wanted to get
“a little more nerve, more _race_, into the folds”: such was his odd
expression. The crowd had cleared, but there was a small knot of people
still clustered about him, and the braver occasionally sent a
compliment or a question bawling up at him. “Don’t talk to me of
‘movements,’” he genially cried back; “the only movement a painter
should think of is _this_”--and he twirled his brush in a narrowing
spiral till it lighted on tiptoe in a fold of the hills. “The only
movement I attend to is my own,” he exclaimed, swinging round, flashing
on us superbly; “it extends from my house to my studio and back again.
‘Don’t talk about art--show me your work--here’s mine’: that’s what I
say to the youngsters. My trade is paint, and I stick to it. An honest
tradesman before the world--that’s what an artist should make and keep
himself. Before the world, mark you!--his dreams are his own affair. Ah,
his dreams--!” Mr. Vickery paused, dropping his brush, and he smote his
hand to his eyes and held it there in a long silence. “My God, his
dreams!” he murmured. The little group of us stood in a row below him,
hushed and intent. The grand old figure of the painter towered against
the monument of his toil, and the light of a spacious age seemed to beat
on him in the hush. An old master-craftsman of the Renaissance, in his
flat velvet cap, his loose blue working-garb--a tradesman he called
himself, sturdy in his pride, but we had a glimpse of what he hid from
the world. More than a glimpse indeed; for it was a long minute, I
should think, before he turned and caught up his brush and set
boisterously to work again. As he did so I was sharply prodded from
behind--by the lady-reporter, I discovered. “What was that about
dreams?” she asked; “did he mean _art_-dreams?” She wanted to have it
clear, but Mrs. Vickery stole swiftly forward and nudged her for another
point. “You quite understand,” Mrs. Vickery distinctly whispered, “that
it mustn’t appear to come from _him_--what I told you.”
Before long the painter stepped down from his ladder, inspected the
nerve of the hills from the proper distance and declared himself
satisfied. He stretched his arms with a long happy sigh. “Well, well,
well, it’s a great game--thank the gods for it! Where should I have been
without it these fifty years? Can you imagine me without my poor old
toys, Marchesa? Colour-box and canvas--give me them and take the rest!
‘He was born, he painted, he died’--my biography; when you write it
don’t add another word.” The Marchesa looked at him with kind timid eyes
(she was a very tall and angular Englishwoman) and answered vaguely; she
spoke vaguely because it was impossible for her to reach Mr. Vickery’s
hearing with her gentle huskiness, so that it didn’t matter what she
said. The artist motioned her to a big divan and threw himself beside
her among the cushions. He talked on. “Ah, there has been some work done
in this old room for fifty years! What’s been happening all that time in
the world, Marchesa? You great ones of the earth have had your hour and
your power, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. A poor painter wishes well to
the world, always, for so long as the world is happy and busy it will
forget the poor painter--he counts on that.” Mr. Vickery’s glance roved
for a moment, taking in the circle of his listeners; his wife was still
engaged with the reporter at a distance, but she looked hastily round on
the pause and gave the reporter a little push, directing her towards the
divan. This lady hurried across and took a vacant chair by my side. Mr.
Vickery had turned again to address the Marchesa, and he proceeded to
speak with emotion of the long lonely laborious service to which a
painter is dedicated; and insensibly he lifted the veil, musing to
himself, and the light fell upon the hope, the faith, the ambition that
an artist so jealously hugs and hides. “He hugs them like a secret,”
said Mr. Vickery, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, “a secret that
he daren’t profane.” Once more there was a silence. My neighbour bent to
me anxiously: “Did he say ‘profane’?” she enquired; “why profane, do you
think?--do ask him.”
I don’t know in what form the “Roman studio-chat” appeared in the brazen
journal, but if the good lady had as much difficulty in sorting her
impressions as I had over mine she can’t have got them ready for the
following Saturday. The Marble Faun, the Brownings, the goatherd and the
bandit, and then the resplendence of Mr. Vickery--in all this there was
far too much for an easy cosy column with plenty of “cross-headings,”
even if one left out the array of the types. Mrs. Vickery by herself
might be the substance of a leisurely chat; she didn’t attend the
session of the divan--she was very busy at a writing-table in a far
corner, where she seemed to be sorting papers, making entries in books,
stowing things into drawers and locking them up with jingling keys. She
at least was forgotten by the world and obviously knew she could count
on it; but if one happened to notice her she appeared as the one small
sign of lonely concentration in the decorative staging of an artist’s
life. I watched her examining a slip of paper, biting her pen; and
presently she left her place, edged round the wall to the divan, and
unobtrusively offered the paper and the pen to one of our party, a
well-fed middle-aged man with side-whiskers. “You’ve forgotten to fill
in the date,” I heard her say softly. He filled it in, apologizing, and
as she moved away she added that it would be sent without fail to his
hotel next morning. Mrs. Vickery was attending to business, assured that
the world was happy without her; she locked up the slip of paper and
returned to the entries in her note-book. Yes, I think she would have
made the best subject of all for one of the “jottings in Rome”; but the
jotter missed it--she was preparing to ask Mr. Vickery about the
profanity that she had also inadvertently missed.
He gave her no opportunity, however, so I suppose she had to supply it
herself in the chat. I too had had my own question for Mr. Vickery, if I
could have found the courage to bawl it--or rather if I could have
framed it in any words. But I no longer desired to ask him about the
Brownings, and indeed the air of the studio wasn’t favourable to
questions, with its comfort so easy and public and its pictures so
candid and explicit. If you want the answer to any question, look round
you!--the room tells you all there is to be told. There was certainly
nothing mysterious about the pictures; with one voice they declared
themselves, repeating their frank formula with the glibness of fifty
voluble years. There was nothing questionable about the luxurious
installation of their maker--nothing, at any rate, if one noticed the
obscure corner of industry that attracted so little attention. And least
of all did the painter himself provoke any doubts that he didn’t plainly
satisfy, with his picturesque frontage turned so full to the light; the
fumbling reporter was the only person who had missed a syllable of
anything he intended to convey. And the upshot of it all was that Mr.
Vickery had endured from a blander age, bringing a waft of its goodly
confidence and ease, trailing a train of its illustrious memories--only
_not_ bringing, as it happened, the forgotten secret on which its glory
and its confidence reposed. The blander world of romantic Rome didn’t
greatly trouble itself with questions, didn’t object to a florid style,
wasn’t afraid of the telling effect of a handsome old head against the
bluest hills of Italy; but there _had_ been something else, and Mr.
Vickery didn’t chance to have brought it with him--it remained with the
Brownings, they kept it. Let me ask Miss Gadge what it was. She thinks
it must have been their _depth_, and she is ready to intone the whole of
“Abt Vogler” to bear out her opinion.
Mr. Vickery, then, survived in our thin and acid air, to meet the
assault of carping doubts from which his prime was protected; and he
hadn’t the depth (if that is Miss Gadge’s word) to keep the faith of the
romantic age as impressively as it was kept in his youth. I was glad
that he had escaped the eye of Deering, to whom I should never betray
him; Mr. Vickery, taken as he stood, too freely gave away the honour of
Roman romance to be revealed to Deering. With me it was safe; but that
sardonic observer, I am sure, wouldn’t consent to view the old survivor
as I did, as I still can, when he placed himself before the dark
tapestry with the golden light streaming full upon his patriarchal
nobility. For me he was the man who remembered the great days, who had
roamed in the Campagna with poets, and the man in whose studio the
shadows of genius were still to be seen and talked with if one loved
them. I loved them myself so dearly that I could easily give Mr. Vickery
the benefit of their presence; and in their presence one didn’t take him
as he stood, far from it, but with the lustre of his association upon
him, strange and new. Deering wouldn’t have had this fond understanding;
indeed he would have steeled himself against it with his modern doctrine
that one mustn’t read books, at any rate in Rome. “Come out of your
books,” he had exhorted me, and it wasn’t likely that he would relapse
with me into Browning at this hour--into Browning, whose influence had
been strong on him during a period of manly piety through which he had
passed in the nursery. So I kept Mr. Vickery to myself, hugging him in
secret, and I was content to ask no questions about those
eagle-feathered picnics of the past. It is much for us if we can catch
but a reflection of the light of the great days; it is enough, even
though their depth is screened from us by fifty commoner years. Mr.
Vickery shall not be exposed to the daunting chill of Deering’s irony if
I can help it.
Such was my feeling; for it seemed clear to me that Mr. Vickery had
lived on incautiously till he faced a critical age, knowing nothing of
its deadly arts, needing protection. And thereupon I noticed that he was
now conducting the Marchesa and the well-fed man on a tour round the
studio, pausing at one after another of the pictures; and I began to
perceive, following and listening, how much he required my kindly care
while he was flanked by the great ones of the earth. The well-fed man
was Lord Veneering (or something to that effect), and he explained to
the Marchesa that he was “forming a gallery” at a little place he had
bought in the country, and that Mr. Vickery had very obligingly “aided
him with expert advice”; and the Marchesa said pleasantly that one
couldn’t do better than follow Mr. Vickery’s taste, because he
possessed, what is nowadays so rare, the spirit of the great masters.
“This,” said Mr. Vickery, indicating one of the canvases, “is a little
smudge of paint that pleases me as well as anything I ever did--which
may seem odd to a layman, for it’s purely a painter’s picture. Very bad
policy, in these days, to spend time over work like that; but we paint
for each other, we of the trade--we understand.” The velvet breeches and
the sheepskin seemed to me to occupy their usual places in this picture,
but his lordship was particularly struck by their “high relief.” Mr.
Vickery didn’t hear, he was lost for a moment in contemplation. “Yes,”
he said, “a painter would understand what I’ve tried to say there.” Our
carping age, represented by the Marchesa and Lord Veneering, reverently
gazed. Mrs. Vickery, still over her papers at the table, glanced up at
her husband with a look that understood more, I incline to think, than
many painters. Certainly he was well muffled against our chilling and
doubting day; but I wonder how he would have shielded his complacency if
his wife had spoken her mind. However she was much too deep in her
entries and reckonings for a wild idea like that.
XV. VIA DELLE BOTTEGHE OSCURE
I don’t pledge myself to the actual street, twisting into the dark heart
of Rome, that led me to the great solemn palace of the Marchesa; but it
might have been the street of the Dark Shops, and I am apt to think it
may. It rambled vaguely into the gloom of all the ages and brought me to
a stand before an immense _portone_, the doorway of a family whose
classic name was inscribed in monumental lettering upon the lintel. What
a name!--it strode away across the long centuries, it wore the purple
and the tiara, it raised its shout in the bloody brawls of its faction,
it disappeared into the barbaric night; and again it emerged, plain to
see, clear in the classic day, the pride and the renown of the young
republic. It seems, as you read it over the doorway, to speak casually
of Scipio, of Cincinnatus, friends of yesterday, vanished so lately that
there has barely been time to miss them; and there may be a touch of
parade in this, but who shall prove it?--and anyhow it is a great and
glorious name, nobly time-worn from its immemorial journey, and it is
written over the dark archway of the palace for its only and sufficient
decoration. You enter accordingly under the sign of all the Roman
history that you ever read, you cross the cloistered court and mount the
broad sweep of the staircase; and you find yourself in the presence of a
shy kind elderly Englishwoman, who appears to be still wondering a
little, after many years, how she came there.
The great old family, though it still held up its head with high
dignity, seemed to have outlived its fortune in the world. The Marchesa
sat in the midst of tattered and shredded relics of splendour, mildly
boiling her kettle over a spirit-lamp; and I don’t know how she came
there, but in many years she had never succeeded in wearing her faded
state with confidence, and she looked forlorn and patient, quietly
accepting as a duty a condition of things that she didn’t understand.
She was too lady-like in her gentle manners for the worldly pride of her
majestic drawing-room; and whereas its majesty held aloof more proudly
than ever in impoverishment, she herself was too humble to reject the
little comfort and kindness of a hissing kettle and a few sociable
friends to tea. She tried to keep one hand upon their homely support
without losing touch at the same time with the palatial scorn that
watched her; and yet there was a disconnexion somehow, and she hadn’t
the power, the impudence, the adaptability, whatever it might be, to
make herself the link between the two. It may have been easier in the
Marchese’s lifetime (he was long departed); but now she had to carry her
prodigious name by herself, and the weight of the responsibility, and
her earnest sense of her duty, and her simple unassuming
inefficiency--what with it all there was much to make her look anxious
and bewildered while we sat, she and I, waiting for the kettle to boil.
She was conscious of having too much history on her hands; and yet she
couldn’t in loyalty disown it and settle comfortably down upon the style
and culture of a plain quiet Englishwoman.
The good Marchesa, she had somehow been left all alone in her august
establishment by deaths, accidents, dispositions that are obscure to me;
but the result of them was that she sat by herself in a corner of her
mighty palace, watched and terrorized from a distance by a crowd of her
kindred, offshoots in many degrees of her husband’s race--a needy Roman
throng possessing complicated claims on her, rights to bully her,
chances to torment her with conscientious scruples; and no doubt she had
found that her integrity and her perfect manners were a very poor match
for the guile of twenty centuries of Rome. “I’m expecting two English
nephews of mine this afternoon,” she said--“such dear boys”; and again,
“My sister writes to me from Devonshire to ask me if I can introduce
them to a few nice friends”: that was the tone of the Marchesa, and it
wouldn’t seem that she could offer much resistance to a band of hungry
wily Romans. It was more, however, than might be thought, for her back
was straight and firm in her duty at any cost to herself; only it all
made a puzzling task, and there was no one and nothing around to support
her, to stand by her side with encouragement and explanation, unless it
was the companionable English tea-cup in a corner of her huge old
drawing-room. It will presently appear how it is that I can read such a
tale in her shy plainness, but much of it would be legible even without
what I afterwards learned. She was an exceedingly simple soul.
The Principessa was simple too in her way, but it was not the same way.
“Why, Gertrude,” she cried, rustling down the long room from the
doorway, “don’t you look lovely to-day!” (It was the voice of New York.)
“But that’s nothing new--I don’t tell you what you don’t _very_ well
know--only it strikes me fresh every time I see you!” And indeed the
slight flush and smile that began to spread upon the Marchesa’s brownish
pallor did become her, as she rose to greet her guest. “Every time I see
you,” repeated the Principessa, brightly glancing. “There’s something
about you that’s perfection, and I shall _never_ know just what it is.
Don’t you want to tell me what it is? You needn’t be afraid--I shan’t
ever be able to copy it. I watch my little girl every day to see if she
won’t catch a look of it somehow. ‘My blessed child,’ I say to her, ‘for
mercy’s sake try to look _real_--like the Marchesa.’ But she doesn’t,
she looks like her father--and you know the sort of old Greek
plaster-cast that _he_ is, and all his family. I tell them they can’t
impose on _me_ with their grand pretences; I’ve seen the real thing. I
never meant to marry Filippo, I meant to marry a man out of an English
novel--yes, the same novel that _you_ come out of, Gertrude, whichever
it is; if I happen to find it I shall throw over Filippo and bolt--he’s
well aware of it. Don’t you want to tell me his name, Gertrude--the name
of the hero in your novel? Maltravers, Sir John Mauleverer, something
like that; you know I come here in the hope of meeting him. Some day
he’ll turn up and I shall fly into his arms; he’ll quite understand.”
The Principessa was perfect too in her way, but it was not the way of
the Marchesa. They sat side by side on a broad couch; and if the most
eloquent aspect of their contrast was on their lips and in their speech,
there was another almost as vivid that was plainly displayed at this
moment on the floor. The Marchesa’s long flat foot, with its well-worn
shoe and the hole in her grey stocking, rested on the floor beside the
Principessa’s smart little arch, with its dolphin-like plunge from heel
to toe and its exquisite casing of down-soft leather and filigree silk;
it was a lucid contrast, the two of them side by side. The Principessa
was altogether small, compact, and neater than I should have thought it
possible for any one to be neat on our rolling globe; but small and trim
as she was she managed to rustle (to rustle!--I revive the forgotten
word in an age that no longer knows the liquefaction of her clothes
whenas she goes!)--she rustled in a manner that the Marchesa, though
with so much more height to sweep from, had never dreamed of emulating.
Rustling, it may be, depended more on depth of purse than height of
person; and indeed you couldn’t notice the tip of the Principessa’s
little finger, let alone the brilliant arch of her foot, without
observing that it cost more at every breath she drew than the whole
angular person of the Marchesa through the long quiet day. The
Principessa was consummately expensive--though with a finely pointed
extremity of taste that again the Marchesa had never caught a glimpse
of; from the tilt of her big hat the little Principessa was the spirit
of expense to the click of her neat heel. And yet, yet--what is it that
she sees in the good incompetent Marchesa, sees and admires and owns to
be beyond imitation? Let me ask--why yes, most appropriately, let me ask
Miss Gilpin.
Miss Gilpin, however, is not so ready with information as Miss Gadge;
for Miss Gilpin in the palace of the Marchesa is considerably more
pre-occupied, less communicative, than she is in the lodging of the
Clarksons. Several other people had arrived or were arriving, and a
side-glance of her attention in passing was all she could spare for her
awkward young friend. She was very agile and easy herself, slipping
among the company like a bird of pretty plumage, moving so lightly that
you would never suppose such a fresh young thing to be a woman of
professional learning and experience. She lifts her wide clear gaze to
the face of the person whom she addresses, and it might be almost
embarrassing in its frank admiration, but her gay little well-worded
remarks relieve it; and she never lingers, never clings, she is drawn
away to somebody else and flits on with a shining look behind her; and
so she weaves her dance-figure through the company, and it brings her
gradually to the side of the Principessa--at sight of whom she gives a
tiny jump, as the unexpected pleasure beams out in her childlike eyes.
The Principessa seemed to be less surprised, and Miss Gilpin got rather
a cool return for her sparkle of delight. The dance was arrested with
some abruptness; but there is this about Miss Gilpin, that she always
has her wits about her and can adapt herself to a sudden change of plan.
Her eye darted quickly forward to the Marchesa--and it was to the
Marchesa after all that she had a particular word to say, if the other
lady would forgive her for hastening on. One can safely count on the
excellent Marchesa; yet it must be confessed that life is complicated,
and Miss Gilpin sank a little wearily into an absorbing conversation
with our hostess.
But what was the pretty plumage of Miss Gilpin, even at its most
unruffled, compared with the rich hues of the creature that now swooped
upon the modest gathering? Half flower and half bird--half peony and
half macaw--Madame de Baltasar was in our midst; and so much so that
nothing else for a while was in our midst--the central object was Madame
de Baltasar. Peony in face, macaw in voice and raiment, she embraced and
enveloped the Marchesa--who closed her eyes, evidently in prayer, as she
nerved herself for the assault. The poor pale lady bore it
unflinchingly, but that was all; she was cowed, she was numbed, by the
mere voice of the visitor, equally penetrating in any language. The
visitor, however, had no further need for the Marchesa; what she needed
was a slim and very beautiful young man who happened to be talking to
the Principessa--she plucked and removed him without delay. Even as she
did so another young man, also very well in his fashion, appeared
accidentally in her path; he too was annexed; and Madame de Baltasar,
doing what she could to lend them a conquering rather than a consenting
air, established them in a corner with herself between them. The
Marchesa, reviving, gave a sudden gasp at the sight; for the second
victim, who was a very British and candid-looking youth in naval
uniform, was one of the dear boys, her nephews, and a glimpse of the
peony-face beside him brought the letter from Devonshire very sharply to
her mind. “A few nice friends--!” The Principessa looked up with humour.
“I feel for you, dear Gertrude,” she said, “but what do you expect? Why
ever do you let that woman into your house?” “I don’t let her,” wailed
the Marchesa, very helpless. “Well, she’s grabbed Don Mario from me and
your nephew from you,” said the Principessa comically; “at any rate
they’ll keep her quiet for a time.” A peal of liberal shrieks rang out
from the lady in the corner, and the Marchesa closed her eyes again in a
mute petition.
It was a pleasantly expressive picture all the same, that of the group
in the corner. The parti-coloured lady, who was by no means young, had
so settled herself that she appeared imprisoned, penned in her place by
two masterful men; and it would be natural to suppose that the two men
were disputing for possession of her, but this effect was less easily
contrived--since one of the men was English, of an odd unchivalrous
tribe whose ways are beyond calculation. I don’t know what race had
produced Madame de Baltasar--the united effort of them all, may be, for
all their tongues were mingled in her shrieks; but there was no doubt
concerning Don Mario--he was the last perfection of Latinity and he
played his part. He was peerlessly beautiful, and he sat with his long
fingers entwined about his knee, his eyes attentively upon the peony,
his cold profile turned with utter correctness to his rival. He was far
too mannerly, of course, to be jealous, to be hostile in any open
movement; even when his rival failed to notice the lady’s glove on the
floor it was only by the barest implication of a gesture that Don Mario
rebuked and triumphed over him. A lady in a corner may rely on Don
Mario; however hard she begins to find it to tighten that horrid loose
fold under her chin, however mauve the powder on her cheek now shows
upon the underlying crimson, Don Mario’s eyes are still fixed on her in
deep unwavering attention. And Madame de Baltasar, I dare say, had by
this time schooled herself to be blind to something that she might
easily have seen, if she had chosen, in his steady regard--in that
knightly “belgarde” which she accepted without scrutinizing it too
closely; for he wasn’t troubled to hide the serene amused impudence with
which he played his part. The crazy old ruin, with her cautious neckband
and her ruddled wrinkles--he lent himself politely to her ancient game,
remarking that she had grown careless in the handling of the orange
lights in her hair, which were certainly fitful and obscured towards the
roots. But a lady needn’t concern herself with the finer shades in Don
Mario’s eloquent looks; he can be thoroughly trusted, at any rate in a
public corner of a drawing-room.
An Englishman on the other hand, a candid young Briton, is a queer
untutored thing of which you can never be really sure. The Marchesa’s
nephew was pink and pleasant, and his undisguised interest in Madame de
Baltasar might please her, you would think, for any one could see that
it was much more genuine than Don Mario’s. It did please her, no doubt,
and she liberally challenged and rallied him; she gave him more than his
share, it was he who had the full blaze of her charms. He luminously
faced them in return with the frankest interest and wonder; never, never
had he seen such a wildly remarkable object. “Well, of all the queer old
picture-cards--!” he said to himself; and he laughed with a volleying
explosion at the freedom of her humour. He liked her too, the quaint old
freak and spark that she was; you couldn’t help liking her loud familiar
cackle, her point-blank coquetries discharged with such brass and
bounce; she brisked you up and rattled you on in a style you don’t
expect in the Marchesa’s solemn saloon. To Madame de Baltasar, no doubt,
the pink British face was an open book, and in his barbaric fashion the
young man was well enough, and she enjoyed herself. But then his
barbarism was declared in a manner of simplicity which proved to her,
yes, that these island-seamen are not to be trusted as one may trust Don
Mario. The open young sailor, instead of turning his own more faulty
profile to his rival and ousting him in triumph--what must he do but
burst out pleasantly to the knightly Latin, appeal to him with mirthful
eyes, join hands with him hilariously to watch the sport! It was so,
there was no mistaking it; the young British monster had drawn the other
man, his antagonist, into a partnership of youth, irreverent,
unchivalrous, to watch the raree-show of this marvellous old bird and
stimulate her to wilder efforts. And so naturally too, so ingenuously,
like the great silly oaf that he really was, with his long legs and huge
hands! It hadn’t so much as crossed his mind that a woman, still a fine
woman in her ripeness, was signally honouring a man; he only saw a crazy
jolly absurd old sport who made him laugh so heartily that he had to
share the fun with his neighbour. One can’t be surprised if Madame de
Baltasar asked herself what, in heaven’s name, they teach these young
monsters in their barbaric wild.
I find it impossible to tear my eyes from the group. What, I wonder,
does Don Mario think of the young Englishman? They were evidently much
of an age; but Don Mario could regard himself, no doubt, as a highly
experienced gentleman compared with this bubbling school-boy. He knew
the world, he knew himself, he very well knew the lady; and I fear it
must be inferred that he thought the Englishman a negligible simpleton.
The school-boy’s familiarity could hardly please him, but he took it
with his accomplished amenity, transformed it into a quiet and neutral
kindness and handed it back; and the Englishman--ah, this is where the
simple youth enjoys such an advantage, where he is unassailable--he saw
no difference at all between what he gave and what he received again, he
supposed they were the same. The same--his own thoughtless guffaw of
companionship, Don Mario’s civilized and discriminating smile!--well
might Don Mario feel that the barbarian took much for granted.
Communication upon such terms is out of the question, with the
Englishman ready to fall on your neck--in fact the islander’s arm was
affectionately round Don Mario’s at this moment--if you decently mask
your irony in a fine thin smile. But let it not be imagined that the
Roman _civiltà_, heritage of the centuries, will exhibit any signal of
discomfort, even with the hand of the savage patting it sociably and
encouragingly on the back. Don Mario talked easily and with all his
charm; he told a story, some experience of his own, for the
entertainment of the lady. The details escape me, but it was a story in
which the Englishman, listening closely, seemed to detect a drift and
purpose, an approach to a point; and he listened still more carefully,
gazing at the speaker, working it out in his mind; and his brow
contracted, he was lost--but aha! he suddenly saw the light and he
seized the point. “You mean you’re in _love_ with somebody,” he jovially
exclaimed. The words fell with a strange clatter on the polished surface
of the tale, but Don Mario had caught them up in a wink. “Why
certainly,” he said--“I’m in love with Madame de Baltasar.” Lord!--for
the moment it was too quick for the blank and simple youth; but relief
came with the lady’s scream of delighted amusement, and he broke into
the humour of the jest with resounding appreciation. A good fellow,
this Don Whatever-he-is, and a sound old sport, Madame de
What’s-her-name--and altogether a cheerier time than one would look for
at Aunt Gertrude’s rather alarming tea-fight.
The Marchesa herself was finding it less enlivening; one of the dear
boys had got into the wrong corner, the other was still missing, poor
Nora Gilpin _would_ try to waylay the Principessa; and though the
Marchesa was used to the sense that nothing in the world goes ever
easily, she betrayed in her look the weight of all she was carrying. But
she was grateful to the Principessa, and with cause; for so long as Miss
Gilpin was kept at a distance the little American was indeed a treasure
to an anxious hostess. Nothing gayer, nothing more ornamental and
affable could be desired for a festival that threatened to languish. She
sat on a round stool or tuffet, her small person erect, her knee tilted
and her toe pointed like a porcelain shepherdess--a wonder of art, an
exquisite toy of the eighteenth century; and one could infer how
precious and rare the little figure must be from the fact that it was
entirely perfect, not a finger broken, not a rose damaged on her
decorative hat--which showed with what scrupulous care she had been
packed and kept. One could almost have sworn that the tint of clear
colour in her cheek was alert and alive, that it came and went with a
living pulse; she was a triumph of the hand of the craftsman who
produced her. And to think that she came, not from the cabinet of the
Pompadour, but from the roaring market of democracy--how have they
learnt such perfection of delicate workmanship over there? She seemed as
manifestly the result of ages of inherited skill as Don Mario himself;
at least I should say so, perhaps, but for the chance that again places
them side by side before me. For Don Mario, the party in the corner
having at last broken up, had returned to the Principessa; and he stood
by her side, charmingly inclined, with glances more burning, less
scorching, than those he had levelled at the orange-clouded fringe. And
I now remark that with all Don Mario’s beautiful finish he doesn’t set
one gaping at the price he must have cost; one sees in a moment than an
object of that sort is not to be bought with money. “Not to be
bought?”--I can imagine the tone of the Principessa, if she chose to
speak: “He looks as though he weren’t to be bought? Why, it’s exactly
_that_ that will fetch his price, and well he knows it. Not to be
bought indeed!--I could tell you a little about that. Now there behind
you--_there’s_ where money fails, if you like!”
She meant of course the Marchesa; and with the unspoken word of the
china shepherdess in my ear I swing round towards the spectacle she
faces. The sudden movement surprises the effect to which the Principessa
no doubt alluded; I catch the Marchesa from the right point of view and
I understand. The harassed soul was easier now, for the tropical
intruder had departed and the simple seaman was re-established in more
temperate company; the letter from Devonshire was no longer a reproach.
The Marchesa breathed more freely; she stood for a moment unoccupied,
resting upon her relief, almost persuaded that the world was leaving her
in peace. She was no worldling, the good lady; neither she nor her
forefathers had taken thought to be prepared for the world, to study the
arts with which it may be repulsed, attracted, trodden under or turned
to account. The Marchesa had no manners, no glances, no speeches--no
raiment even, you might say--but those of her kindly nature, the
well-meaning right-intending soul that she happened to be. She was not a
work of art; and therein is the effect that she makes in her Roman
palace, the effect you may surprise if you follow the word of the
Principessa and look suddenly round. There clings about her, and she
seems to diffuse it upon the company, a pallor of simple daylight, a
grey uncertain glimmer from a morning in Devonshire; and it gives her a
friendly gentle air, for it is the light to which she was born and it is
natural to her; but to the Principessa, to Don Mario, even to the Roman
palace, it is not a trifle disastrous. The pretty little work of art
upon the tuffet was aware of it, and I could fancy that she bids me
look, look again at _her_, to see how ghastly her china-tints have
become in the dimness of a rainy English morning. I won’t say that--the
Principessa exaggerated, perhaps defiantly; but it certainly was plain
that she wasn’t intended to face the open weather. Good Aunt Gertrude,
troubled and incompetent in facing the world, could be left out in rain
and storm at any time, and none the worse. The fibre that is by this
betokened is not, we understand, to be bought for money. The Principessa
may be right, but I doubt whether she honestly wishes her child to
acquire it. After all the Marchesa is about as ornamental as the
waterproof in which as a girl she braved the weather of an uncertain
climate.
And now there arrived, there crossed the room with a quick step, there
shook hands ceremoniously with the Marchesa, a personage whose
appearance in that company I hadn’t at all expected. Deering!--who could
have supposed that Deering would present himself here, and that too at
the very hour which is consecrated to the plush and marble of the real
Rome in the Via Nazionale? He caught my eye as he crossed the room, and
he smiled, as I thought, self-consciously; it put him slightly to the
blush that I should see him attending the mild tea-pot of the Marchesa.
She greeted him with pleased effusion and drew him aside; I wasn’t near
enough to hear their talk, but the Marchesa had evidently much to say,
and Deering listened with his well-known gleam of sarcastic observation.
He was quite becomingly at his ease, and his flower-droop was markedly
successful--it was clearly one of his more slender days; but I noticed
that in the patched and tattered saloon, which had struck me as the
topmost height of all the Romanism I had met with, the careful
composition of his Roman clothing looked alien and singular. He may have
been dressed in the taste of the real Rome, but the result was to make
him appear as much of a stranger in the palace of the Dark Shops as the
forlorn Marchesa herself. That good lady presently released him, and he
made his way towards me--but with a signal to me to wait as he did so,
for he stopped momentarily in passing beside the Marchesa’s nephew and
laid a light finger on his shoulder. The young seaman looked round,
nodded familiarly and went on with his talk. I shall never get to the
end of Deering, and I told him so when he joined me; for I didn’t see
how or where these excellent people should fit into the circle of his
associations, those with which he had dazzled me when we met last month
by the Tortoises. I had been supposing that _my_ way, though it was he
who had smarted me on it, was steadily leading me further from the world
he had sketched so brilliantly as his own. Yes, said Deering, I might
well be surprised; but he could assure me it was much more surprising to
himself. He had no intention, however, of lingering--he proposed that I
should come away with him at once. Could he fly so soon?--it seemed
abrupt, but he waved off my scruple and led me immediately to the
Marchesa to take our leave. “Good-bye, Aunt Gertrude,” he said--“I fear
I must be going.” “Good-bye, dear boy,” returned the Marchesa; “come
very soon and see me again.”
He was the missing nephew!--the stroke of his revelation of the fact was
thoroughly successful, for it took me absurdly by surprise. My thought
travelled back to the poor flimsy mountebanks of the Via Nazionale, and
I perceived that they had divined my detached and scornful Deering, him
with the gypsy in his blood, even more shrewdly than I had supposed--or
rather, no doubt, they had had fuller information than mine. He had told
them nothing, but they knew all about him, trust them--they knew how
firmly his other foot was planted upon a solider world than theirs. When
Deering and I now issued from the portal of the classic name I stopped
him, I pointed to the name and the vast grey palace-front, and I asked
him how he had had the face to talk to me in my innocence about his
“real Rome” of the tram-lines and the plate-glass windows--with all this
within a few yards of us at the very moment. Had he been ashamed of me,
unwilling to present me to Aunt Gertrude and the monument of history up
his sleeve?--no indeed, and I didn’t even put the question, for
Deering’s motives are much loftier than this. Rather it was magnificent
of him, I confessed, to drop the palace, disregard the grandiose name,
neglect it as unworthy of mention compared with the company of the
mountebanks at the marble-topped table. But how he had deceived me--I
now trusted his word no more, and I began to see trickery of some sort
even in that chance encounter with him the other day by the English
tea-room; he was probably then on his way to join the Marchesa in her
afternoon drive on the Pincio. And it was he, perverse and double-lived,
who had for a brother that soul of open candour I had just been
studying. “I have never consented,” said Deering rather primly, “to be
judged in the light of my relations. I take my way, and I gave you the
opportunity of taking it too. You have bungled it so shockingly that it
has brought you to this.”
It had brought us in fact to the neighbouring Square of the Tortoises;
there were the four boys crouched beneath the bowl of the fountain,
clutching the tails of the tortoises in the ripple of the water, the
dapple of the sunlight. Where would Deering’s line have brought me if I
had clung to him throughout? In the end, it would seem, to the palace of
the Marchesa, which I had reached on my own account; what I may have
missed on the way to it I shall never know. I could declare to him, none
the less, that I had seen many things of singular mark, things that I
should never have discovered in the state of romantic innocence which he
had been the first to corrupt; and for this I thanked him, though on the
matter of Rome’s reality I was even now in confusion as deep as ever. My
authorities wouldn’t agree; and on the whole I maintained to Deering
that my own romance, when now and then I had caught a glimpse of it
between the heads of the crowd, had to my eye a more substantial look
than most of the realities that had been offered me in the place of it.
What had he to say to that? Well then he had to say, regretfully but
distinctly, that I was incurable; and one of the Botticelli hands was
laid upon my arm in a gesture that resigned me, with tenderness, with
compassion, with finality, to the sad ravages of my illusion. “Go back
to your books,” he sighed; “I have done my best--good-bye!” It was
touchingly felt and spoken; the attitude was striking. But his farewell,
I am glad to say, was only rhetorical. We shuffled for a long while to
and fro across the sunny little square, discussing my month of
blunders.
[Illustration]
LONDON: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND GRIGGS (PRINTERS), LTD.
CHISWICK PRESS, TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE.
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