Read Ebook: Roman pictures by Lubbock Percy

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 130 lines and 67907 words, and 3 pages

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 OEdipus, 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 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.

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.

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 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.

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 ??" 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 --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.

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.

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 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.

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 , and we could abandon ourselves to our national delight in the country.

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 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.

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.

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 , 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 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 Fr?ulein Dahl, Berta's German friend, would be descending from Castel Gandolfo 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.

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 Fr?ulein Dahl, so flat and so featureless, seemed absurdly inadequate.

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 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 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.

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. 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 , 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 , 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 born there.

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.

Miss Gainsborough was holding a banquet; and Father Holt and Mr. Vickery 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 , 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.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet