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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fr?ulein 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 found myself loitering by that pretty little Fountain of the Tortoises, not for the first time; but this time 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 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 and joined hands with common life.

"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.

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 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.

"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" 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 pass? par l?"; 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.

When we presently swung open the plate-glass door of the caf? 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.

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.

I was caught by a word of Jaff's , 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 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.

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.

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. 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.

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 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.

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 --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.

"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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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 , 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 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.

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.

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