[Illustration: FONTANA DELLE TARTARUGHE]
ROMAN PICTURES
_By_
PERCY LUBBOCK
Author of _Earlham_ &
_The Craft of Fiction_
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
_Made and printed in Great Britain by Charles Whittingham
and Griggs (Printers), Ltd., London._
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. FONTANA DELLE TARTARUGHE 9
A lonely young pilgrim, Deering, a citizen of
the world, his Roman accent, the English ghetto,
the real Rome, plump but elegant, the newest
culture, the raw world, the way to reality, Roman
pictures.
II. VIA NAZIONALE 23
Crowded tables, Mr. Bannock, the pride of the
artist, a grievance, the young dancer, coils of
oratory, tribute to Deering, Jaff’s sweetheart,
Edna’s way, college style, the report of Buffalo,
a substantial Briton.
III. PIAZZA DELLA CANCELLERIA 38
Near the Vatican, the company of the priestcraft,
the palace and the cardinal, Cooksey,
secrets of the backstairs, Father Jenkins’s joke,
Amerigo, Cooksey’s profanity, his rebuke to the
stranger, inside the fortress, a gentleman of
feeling.
IV. ST. PETER’S 52
An early reveller, the hum of the pilgrims, a
faltering cheer, Father Holt, a secret society,
Lady Mullinger, poor Charlotte, a very great
lady, finer shades, homage to Rome, Rome itself.
V. VIA GIULIA 65
Mr. Fitch, the Cheltenham furniture, the
seminarist, Maundy’s fancy, the path to Rome,
the burnt sonnet, Gina, historical research, the
golden evenings, a point of ritual, art in the void,
an uneasy neophyte.
VI. VILLA BORGHESE 79
An aged relic, Teresa and Berta, a fluent
antiphon, some English speaking, troubles of a
patriot, country days, the Virginian sculptress,
Luigi, a gentleman in Rome, precious refinements,
a chance worth seizing, Rome the inexhaustible.
VII. VIA DELLA PURIFICAZIONE 94
A tangle of byways, the medieval challenge,
Teresa at home, Mr. Daponte, Rome on the
house-tops, Teresa in London, English freedom,
Luigi on Rome, the end of his chances, a spoilt
tea-party, a prospect of Rome.
VIII. ALBANO 107
A day in the country, Teresa’s party, an
English ramble, mother and child, Mimi in
society, Olga and the arts, the forgotten pensioners,
the Russian waif, despair and disillusion,
a page of Dostoevsky, a dusty road-side, the
Virgilian forest.
IX. CASTEL GANDOLFO 121
Fräulein Dahl, a piece of nature, an Arcadian
walk, Erda’s villa, the great saloon, Miss Gilpin,
the accent of Dante, a woman of letters, the
clever touch, a reposeful friend, the accent of
Dresden, Erda in solitude.
X. VIA SISTINA 135
Deering again, the Clarksons, privileges of
travel, Mr. Bashford, a cousin of the Marshams,
golf at Torquay, the true Ruskin, an English
babe, the sheep in the bunker, Bashford’s sort,
England in Rome.
XI. PIAZZA NAVONA 149
Miss Gainsborough, Lady Mullinger again,
a sedulous Roman, the old guard, majestic wrath,
the imperial race-course, a British monument,
Mr. Platt, an elderly sprite, scandalous tales, a
good soul.
XII. CORSO 163
A sumptuous background, familiar faces, Miss
Gadge, the chant of the pilgrims, things Franciscan,
a woman and an artist, chords of the
heart, the plane of art, the youth Pole, Mr.
Champerdown, a Jesuit in a drawing-room, the
moon of May, the city gate.
XIII. THE FORUM 178
Julia’s discovery, the Professor, an inspired
lecture, the origin of Rome, Mrs. Rollesby’s
attack, poetic imagination, privilege of a scholar,
the buried statue, the Professor’s secret, a divided
audience, a single-minded pilgrim.
XIV. VIA MARGUTTA 191
A studio of romance, the old Bohemian,
pictures and friends, the study of type, the
eagle-feather, an artist’s wife, an honest tradesman,
dreams of an artist, business and a studio-chat,
a blander age, the light of the great days,
worldly protection.
XV. VIA DELLE BOTTEGHE OSCURE 205
The great name, the Marchesa at home, Roman
guile, the Principessa, the rustle of expense,
Miss Gilpin again, Madame de Baltasar, the
knightly Latin, a young barbarian, a wonder
of art, English daylight, Deering’s stroke, back to
the tortoises, the end of the quest.
ROMAN PICTURES
I. FONTANA DELLE TARTARUGHE
I found myself loitering by that pretty little Fountain of the
Tortoises, not for the first time; but this time (it was an afternoon of
late April, long years ago) I looked stupidly at the boys and the
tortoises and the dripping water, with a wish in my mind for something
more. But what? I had drifted hither and thither about Rome, from the
Gate of the People to the Baths of Caracalla--drifted day after day in
my solitude through a month of April more divinely blue and golden than
the first spring-days of the world; and whether I was in the body or out
of the body I scarcely knew, for I moved in a great bubble of
imagination that I had never known the like of in all the years (perhaps
twenty) of my life before I came to Rome. I had escaped from the poor
chamber of myself; for the imagination I dreamed and revelled in was
surely none of my own. It was of the spirit of all time, livelier,
lovelier than I could say, a power and a freedom that a rather lean
young soul, ignorantly aspiring, may enter into and take possession of
unconsciously, without an effort--in Rome.
But I do remember lingering about the Fountain of the Tortoises at last,
between sun and shadow, with a wish that something now, something or
some one, would break into my solitude and my dream; not that I was
tired of either, but because my dream and my solitude would be still
more beautiful if I could look at them for an hour across an interval,
across the kind of division that is created by--yes, exactly!--by the
sight to which I presently raised my eyes, turning away from the dapple
and ripple of the fountain. A young man, passing across the square, met
my blank gaze at this moment and suddenly threw out a sign of
recognition; and I saw with surprise that it was my precious Deering, of
whose presence in Rome I had been quite unaware. Deering it was!--after
four or five lonely weeks, in which I had never happened to see a face
that I knew, it was Deering who linked me to the real world again by
crossing the Square of the Tortoises at that hour of that afternoon. I
had left my shining bubble in a flash (he hadn’t noticed it) and joined
hands with common life.
We weren’t really on terms of intimacy; but in the strangeness of Rome
our little English acquaintance had the air of a cordial friendship. I
gushed over with a warmth that surprised me and that would have been
impossible at home; the fountain and the palaces and the Roman sunshine
had pushed me forward into a familiarity that I shouldn’t have ventured
upon elsewhere. He was of my own age, but so much more exquisite and
mannerly that I looked raw indeed at his side; I was an aspiring
amateur, he was a citizen of the world. At school I had tried to avoid
him, because I had courted (vainly, vainly) the society of the more
fashionably and the less refined; but I was eager enough to seize him by
both hands in my new freedom and to take advantage of his riper
experience. “Why, _Deering_--!” He _did_ look experienced, with his
broad-brimmed hat and his neat black clothes, as I moved towards him
and directed my greeting, a little too effusively.
He took it with a brilliant smile, he whipped off his hat and held it to
his stomach. “Eh, come sta?” he said, standing bare-headed; “è pezzo
pezzo che non ci vediamo.” He fluted the words with mellifluous
assurance, and I did my best to meet his humour with my own poor bits
and shreds of Italian. There were no flute-notes in _my_ repertory; but
I made a jest of my round British style and mouthed out some attempt at
a Roman compliment. As quick as thought he countered it with another;
and that was surely enough of the joke--the joke of our standing there
bare-headed, flourishing our hats at each other with Italian airings; so
I let loose my pent-up English talk, after those weeks of unnatural
silence, and tumbled out exclamation and question as they came--I was
voluble, enjoying the release of the tongue, and there were forty things
I wanted to say and hear, for this meeting was quite unexpected and
exceedingly opportune; and so I chattered forth my surprise and
pleasure, and then--and then I found them left upon my hands, somehow,
and I looked rather a fool.
“Ma senta, senta,” said Deering. He smiled, but he was firm. He couldn’t
deal with me on these insular terms in Rome; he made me feel it without
explanation, but the fact was that he simply couldn’t allow me to be so
inappropriate, so falsely attuned to the time and place. There we stood
in the heart of Rome, with the palaces of princes around us, secluded
among winding streets all dark with wicked history; and here was
Deering, disguised as a Roman himself, with a great black hat and a suit
of dead-black clothes; and I had stuttered out my poor innocent
school-talk, college-gossip, heaven knows what, a scrannel-pipe to the
suave warble of his flute. Had I come all the way to Rome to be still a
British undergraduate even there? Well, as for that, he very soon put it
right. He was kindness itself, but he had the upper hand of me in these
foreign parts, where he was so serenely at home and I so ecstatically at
sea. His was the advantage, as indeed I quite understood, and he used it
from the first. He gently set me in my place, not without an indulgent
smile.
“Senta, senta pure,” he said--or words to that effect; whatever they
were they keenly struck me as the very words I had wanted and missed in
my ignorant solitude. That was the way to talk to a Roman; I might have
missed it for ever, but Deering had picked it up, no doubt, the first
time he put on his broad-brimmed hat. How long had he been in Rome? I
was allowed to ask that question at least, and it appeared that he had
come to Rome for a week, six months before, and had stayed on and on
because he had happened to find rooms that pleased him. They were far
from the “English ghetto,” so he said, meaning that they were far from
the hotels and the Piazza di Spagna and touristry in general; and he had
just finished his siesta and was on his way to a café in the Via
Nazionale, where he usually spent some hours of the afternoon. And I,
where was I going? As a matter of fact I had vaguely thought of
wandering away and away, out of the city and into the country--from
whence I should return in the dusk, luxuriously tired, solemnly
enraptured, to climb the long stairs to my own little lodging, my
Arcadian meal and couch. But this I concealed from Deering; I felt at
once I must protect my dear sentimental delights from his ironic eye.
Moreover _my_ lodging, which I had thought so knowingly Roman, proved
to be full in the middle of the English ghetto; I kept this too from him
as long as I could.
His siesta, his café, his rooms remote from the vulgar--oh I had such a
vision, as he mentioned these, of the kind of Roman career that I had
failed to go in for hitherto. Deering _lived_ in Rome, I had floated on
the surface. Never mind--I threw over my private romance and adopted
Deering’s reality on the spot. He seemed to be immensely informed, and
there was a charming insolence in his wisdom; I might put my tenderest
fancies behind me and screen them in his presence, but he saw that I was
a soft young enthusiast, and he patronized me with the sweetness of his
coo, his smile, his winning gesture. He delicately blasted whatever had
appeared to me of interest and renown, he showed me the crudity of my
standards. I might feel a passing twinge, for I hadn’t been used to
regarding myself as a thing with which Deering could be indulgent and
amused. And yet I was flattered, I was magnified by his fastidious
irony; it brought me into a new world of mind and taste, more exclusive
than my own.
But I obviously couldn’t give way to him in the matter of being so very
Italian that we mightn’t talk our own language. He could take me into
another world, but to endow me at the same time with a new speech was a
miracle beyond him. “Ma come, ma come,” he said encouragingly; he
implied that in the real life of illumination we are all free of the
golden tongue, the tongue of the clear Latin _civiltà_. It seemed he
could hardly frame his lips to the uncouth noises of the northern Goth.
He brought out an English phrase with an air of handing it over to me
between disgustful finger-tips, and he relapsed unconsciously as he did
so into the sweeter idiom. Ah Deering, Deering! That unconsciousness of
his was a finished performance, I could believe he had practised it
before the glass. “But you, my dear,” he said, “you surely speak the
language like the rest of us--eh magari!” I confessed that I spoke the
language like a barbarian fresh from my native wild; I should listen to
him and the rest of them with pleasure, but to me he must talk our poor
old English. “And who _are_ the rest of you?” I demanded.
He answered my question at some length, inadvertently recovering his
former tongue. In six months of Roman life he had made many friends; he
had fallen into a circle that suited him as aptly as his rooms. “I
scarcely know how it happened,” he said, “but I seemed to find my feet
here from the first.” He apparently attributed a great deal of his
fortune to the café of the Via Nazionale; a right instinct had taken him
there in the beginning, and thereafter all had run smoothly. He had met
a journalist, he had met an actor or a lawyer or a doctor--anyhow he had
met somebody whom the ordinary Cook-driven tourist, slaving round the
ruins and the galleries, would have missed infallibly; and so he had
entered a company which belonged--he insisted on it--to the _real_ Rome,
the city unsuspected of our gaping countrymen. His secret was to “live
the life of the place,” he said; and let there be no mistake, the life
of the place is to be found among the shops and tramways of the business
quarter, nowhere else. It must be owned that in Rome a stranger runs
many a risk of overlooking the true life on these terms, which are the
terms that Deering laid down with high lucidity; for even if you avoid
the ghetto of the tourist on one hand, and the romantic desolation of
the Campagna (to which I myself was addicted) on the other, you may
still make a further mistake--and I put it to Deering that it really
depends on what you _call_ the life of Rome. There is the community of
the “student,” for example; and I should have thought that Deering, with
his rare vein of taste in the arts, would haunt the workshops of young
sculptors, ragged painters and poets--weren’t they as plentiful in Rome
as summer flies?
I had interrupted Deering’s exposition; he wanted to tell me more about
the ease with which he had dropped into the heart of Rome. But he broke
away from that, with another of his patient intelligent smiles, to
explain to me how much I failed to understand. There was no more any
life of _that_ kind in Rome--no romantic art. Did I think that those
horrible theatrical old men, those bedizened little boys and girls, who
still loaf upon the Spanish Steps and waylay the foreigner--did I think
they were genuine “models,” waiting for real painters to carry them off
and paint them? I supposed then that I was living in the Rome of Hans
Andersen and Nathaniel Hawthorne? He abounded in his sarcasm. Ragged
poets indeed! My notion of the _vie de Bohème_ was a little behind the
times, fifty years or so. “Ah you live in books,” said Deering--he
rallied me on it; “in Rome you must come out of books--I shall drag you
out of Hawthorne.” As a matter of fact he knew the young poets of Rome,
he had several friends among them; it was no use my looking for them in
garrets and operatic wine-cellars near the Tiber; the Via Nazionale was
the place, vulgar as I thought it with its crowds and trams and
plate-glass--and he was off again, with his sweet flat voice and his
neat enunciation, describing the extraordinary favour that the
journalists had shown him, or perhaps the actors.
It was remarkable, he said, how they accepted him as one of themselves.
“There seems to be something of the Italian in me,” he mentioned once or
twice, “nothing to be proud of!”--and he smiled with pride. I could
honestly tell him that there was at least nothing English in his
appearance, since he had taken to powdering his nose and to clothing
himself like an undertaker. The remark about his nose I indeed reserved,
but my allusion to his clothes was a happy one. He immediately glanced
with quiet approval at his hands, and I remembered how in earlier years,
when we were both small boys at school, he had once pointed out to me
that he had hands “like a Botticelli.” He ought to have been grateful to
me for the self-restraint I had shown in withholding that confidence
from the light. I had been surprisingly discreet, I had never used his
Botticelli hands against him in our free-spoken circle, and I was glad
of it now. Here in Rome, set free from the old snobberies of boyhood, I
was ready to take his hands quite seriously, and even the paste of
powder with which he had corrected the tint (inclining rather to Rubens)
of his nose. His black clothes were designed to set off his elegant
wrists and tapering fingers; and if a nose invariably scorched by the
sun was a weight on his mind, as I know it was, he found support in the
well-drawn oval of his face. He was not very tall, and unfortunately he
was not very slender; it was only too plain to see that before long he
would be plump. But nevertheless he might reasonably tell himself that
his figure, as he stood by the fountain and thoughtfully eyed his hands,
had a hint and a suggestion, I don’t say more, of something you might
call--of something he hoped I was calling--a lily-droop, swaying
lightly.
I can see him bend and sway accordingly; and I can recall the bright
stream of sensation in my own mind, where the old desire to scoff at his
elegancies had apparently changed to respect and envy. What a free
world, I thought, what a liberal and charming, in which a stupid
prejudice could dissolve and drop away so quickly! Perhaps I didn’t
quite understand that my respect was not so much for Deering as for
myself, not so much for Deering’s pretty graces as for my own
emancipation; but my envy of his Italian ease and competence was indeed
sincere. I would seize, yes I would, such an opportunity of learning,
discovering, experiencing; I would follow Deering, accept his guidance
and pay him his price--for his price was a small one, merely a little
tacit backing of his own view of himself. He would expect me to agree
with him that his face had a species of haunting charm; he would expect
me, at any rate, not to imply that it hadn’t. It was a trifling
indemnification for the many times he had been told in former days that
he had a face like a rabbit. I would gladly support him in abolishing
the memory of all that ribaldry; I should be rewarded by observing my
own tolerance with satisfaction and by becoming acquainted at the same
time with this “real Rome” of Deering’s--he was still fluting on about
its reality.
We shuffled for a while to and fro across the sunny little square. Now
and then a bare-headed woman came pattering by, twisting her neck for a
firm round stare at us as she went; children looked on from a distance,
struck dumb in their play by our oddity. Deering talked and talked; he
too felt the relief of uttering himself, no doubt--for I could well
believe that the real Rome didn’t supply a listener who understood him
as I did. Not one of those actors or poets, for example, could measure
the difference between Deering of old, flouted and derided, and this
remarkable young personage, ornament of a strange society, who was now
willing to be the patron of such as I. Deering talked, I appreciated the
difference; I did my part with a will, and he bloomed in the warmth of
my recognition. For six months, moreover, he had been displaying the
new, the very newest culture, and his associates hadn’t really been in a
position to perceive it. An Englishman who avoided the old ruins and
churches, who sat through the April afternoon at a marble-topped
table--why his companions would of course take him for an Englishman who
behaved, for a wonder, in a natural and commendable fashion; and this
was where I again came in so aptly, for I could do justice to the
originality and the modernity of his proceeding. It wasn’t as though
Deering sat in a café because he knew no better, because he was the kind
of person whose ideas are bounded by plush and gilt and plate-glass. He
sat there, avoiding the nightingales on the Aventine, the sunset in the
Campagna, because he knew all that and more, and because the rarity of
the perversity of his culture led him back again, round again, to the
scream of the tramway in the “business quarter.” I, who had watched him
of old, could be trusted to distinguish these niceties; there it was
that I came into the game, and he didn’t hesitate--he brought me into
play.
“Yes,” he murmured, musing gently upon my state of romance, “yes, I
should like to drag you out of literature once for all. Come out of
your books, come to Rome--come with me.” I could truthfully say that I
would go with pleasure; and as for my books, I was quite willing to let
him label me as he chose--I accepted the part for which he cast me. I
was the victim of the romantic fallacy, and it all came of my looking
for life in antiquated fiction--in Zola even, in Zola as like as
not--instead of looking for it in the raw red world: such was the part
he assigned me, and I have ever been one to fall in with an arrangement
of this kind. People, I long ago found, are never happy till they have
decided that you are this or that, some recognizable type; and for
yourself the line of least resistance is always to let them have their
way. In my time I have played many parts, acting up to the theory and
the expectation of my different companions; it saves trouble, it spares
one the effort of assertion. There are even those with whom I have been
able to assume the very attitude that Deering had now adopted towards
me, the attitude of a liberal patron towards a muddle-headed young
innocent; and then I have patronized as glibly as I now submitted.
Deering saw in the look with which I answered him the exact shade of
awkward modesty that he demanded. It was well; he approved my fluency in
the part that had fallen to me.
It was settled, then, that he was to hale me out of my sentimental
twilight into the broad noon of reality; I had lived for too long in a
dream, and now he promised himself the amusement of dispelling my
illusions. So be it; I told him I asked nothing better than to follow
his lead, and I told myself that at least I had a sharper eye for the
“facts of life” (my phrase) than ever Deering would have. We were both
well-pleased, therefore; and I wonder at which of us the spirit of
Rome, glancing that afternoon over the Square of the Tortoises, smiled
and chuckled most benignly. It was Deering at any rate, of the two of
us, who made the more intricate object of study; anybody might be drawn,
even Rome, to pause and consider him as a child of his time. When he
slipped his arm through mine and daintily drew me forward on our
way--the way to reality!--I don’t think the first comer would have
guessed that he was about to become my sponsor in the raw red world. His
graceful hands seemed rather to flutter in deprecation of any world more
earthly than the sea-pallor, say, of a sunrise in the manner of
Botticelli. But that, for Deering, was just the fun of it. Of the
sea-pale dawn he could honestly say, and he did say, “J’ai passé par
là”; in an earlier stage of his culture he had duly swooned in the
ecstasy of the burnished moment, the discriminated pulse of the
perfected sensation; but at that time he had worn an Eton jacket, and
years had flown since then, and by now his eye-lids were more than a
little weary of the raptures he had outlived. He, more precocious than
I, had left his books at the moment when I was making the first
discovery of mine; he no longer read any books at all, he told me, and
if he didn’t add that life was his book it was only because the phrase,
when he was about to utter it, struck him as old-fashioned and obvious.
“‘Youth’s sweet-scented manuscript’--you remember?”--he ventured on
that, guarding himself with a slightly acid intonation of the pretty
words.
And so Deering turned me away from the ilex-shadows and grey spaces of
an evening on the Aventine and in the further country; he clung to my
arm and directed me to the clatter of the city, and that was how it all
began. He gave me a push, with his benediction, and one thing led to
another, and I started to collect some Roman pictures of a new sort. I
stored away my more sentimental bits and notes of impression, carefully
saving them from the eye of Deering; I laid them aside, and certainly
they are not worth disturbing again at this late hour. But as for these
others, the new sort, I think it might be amusing to bring them briefly
to the light, one by one; though I don’t pretend that even with Deering
to point the way I penetrated far into Rome or the world either. After
all his offers to induct and indoctrinate me, nothing came of them to
speak of; I saw not a sign of rawness or redness, that I can
remember--so I suppose I must conclude that the heart of life escaped me
still. But even the fringes of life, if that is all they were, seemed
strange and memorable in Rome; nobody who lived in Rome, nobody who
breathed the golden air as a matter of course, nobody who trod the
sacred soil as an everyday affair, could be less than a wonder to a
rather lean young northern soul, whose lodging in the Piazza di Spagna
had only been hired by the month. The spring days were endless, but they
flashed away faster than I could count; presently they would all be
gone, and I should have to leave Rome to the few free happy creatures,
such as Deering, who could stay because they liked it, stay in Paradise
because they happened to prefer it--I should think they might! As
Deering and I, arm in arm, left the square and the babbling fountain, I
was quite overcome by my jealousy of his detachment from cares and ties,
from the stupid thrums of responsibility that so soon drag most of us
away from the Rome of our desire.
“So here you are living in Rome,” I said dejectedly, “with nothing to
prevent you from staying for ever.” Deering was his own master, I knew,
and he sedulously cultivated a frosty indifference to any claims at
home, such as they were, that might have hampered him. I didn’t exactly
admire his ruthless way, but I certainly envied it. I should like to
have had that faculty of ignoring, blankly and serenely, what I chose to
ignore; it would have been a great convenience. All I needed was a
little of Deering’s real independence of opinion; for I can’t think I
was embarrassed by many good warm qualities of heart and temper. Deering
was no unkinder than I, only bolder, more secure in his power to stand
alone. And then he had another immense advantage; he could always be
sympathetically impressed by his own performance, he was an excellent
audience of himself. “Living in Rome?” he echoed--“you don’t know me! I
shall take to the road again before long. But you’re not tormented, as I
am, by the gypsy in the blood. There are times when I envy the like of
you, the decent, the home-keeping----” He broke off with a sigh--a sigh
in which I could almost hear the involuntary murmur of applause. Yes,
the gypsy in the blood was a good stroke, and I think a new one.
II. VIA NAZIONALE
When we presently swung open the plate-glass door of the café that had
done so much for Deering, he was manifestly anxious--suppose that just
on this afternoon it should fail of its effect! For his sake as well as
for my own I hoped we should find reality there as usual. He glanced
searchingly among the tables, most of which were crowded about by hot
and talkative men; there was a tremendous rattle of conversation in all
parts of the big pillared saloon. He paused for a moment, and then he
nodded with relief in the direction of a distant corner; he twisted his
way there between the tables, I followed him, and we found a gap upon a
plush seat, under a huge mirror painted with sprays of climbing
water-lilies. We squeezed ourselves into the vacant space with polite
apologies, and Deering immediately introduced me to a young man who sat
facing us, a big young man with a low collar and a straw hat much too
small for him. Deering mentioned his name, “Mr. Bannock,” and Mr.
Bannock extended a large hand and said he was happy to meet me.
He was a young and rather common American; he smiled upon me with a wide
mouthful of teeth and said he was pleased to make my acquaintance. I
began to respond as I could, but he interrupted me to say that he was
glad to know a friend of “our friend Mr. Deering.” I began again, but he
broke in to observe that our friend Mr. Deering was a lovely man. I
rejoined that Deering was quite the loveliest of---- “And I can tell you
something about him that you may not know,” said Mr. Bannock, spreading
his palm at Deering as though he were showing off a picture; “our friend
Mr. Deering is not only a lovely man, he is a great artist--and I go
further, I say that Mr. Deering possesses the most remarkable
understanding of, and sympathy with, the mentality of the artist that it
has ever been my lot to encounter. And when I assert that even an old
friend of Mr. Deering like yourself may be ignorant of that side of his
character, I am thinking of that positively damnable modesty of his,
which has prevented him, which always _will_ prevent him----” But I
can’t do justice to the turn of the periods of Mr. Bannock, which coiled
around and around me like an anaconda, slowly deadening my attention.
Between the limber muscularity of his phrases and the glittering
crescent of his teeth I was numbed and fascinated. He continued to
address me as an old but not a very perceptive friend of Deering’s, and
I felt like a wisp in his firm clasp.
From Deering’s character he passed to the mentality of the artist in
general; “mentality” was a word to which he returned rather often, and I
think it must have been a new word in those days, for I have always
associated it peculiarly with Mr. Bannock. He sketched some of the
characteristics of the artist--“the artist as I see him,” he said; he
mentioned that possibly pride, “hard clean masculine pride,” was his
dominant quality. The lecture proceeded, Deering and I sat dumb before
the speaker. Mr. Bannock had a gesture to match his phrase; he scooped
the air with his broad palms, he sawed it with the edge of his hand, he
riddled it with his outspread fingers. His arms were perpetually in
movement from the shoulder; they withdrew to his side, they unfolded,
length upon length, to ram home the strongest points of his discourse.
It was the professional skill of his gesticulation, neither awkward nor
yet spontaneous, that presently gave me a clue to Mr. Bannock; or
perhaps it was not only this, but something in his talk about “the
artist--the artist who aims at a certain poignancy of beauty--a beauty
that _stabs_”; anyhow I soon connected him with the stage, and I
wondered how a large-faced young American, with a strange brassy accent
in his speech, should find his occupation on the stage of Rome. Deering,
when the coils of oratory happened to loosen for a moment, enlightened
me.
Mr. Bannock, it appeared, sang at the opera; Deering said so, and Mr.
Bannock gave a loud trumpet-snort of laughter at the words. “Sing? Come,
Mr. Deering, tell your friend another!” The snort expressed derisive
irony, I gathered. “I sing, oh I sing superbly--sometimes! You can come
and hear me at the opera ’most any evening--now and then! I shall be
singing there this very night--next year!” He was bitter, he was wounded
by some thought in his mind; his elbow was on the table, his chin on his
hand, a sneer upon the expanse of his face. I didn’t clearly understand,
but Deering seemed to have made a _gaffe_, and I felt awkward for half a
minute. But it was all right; Mr. Bannock was exalted by a grievance of
which Deering had reminded him. He rose to it with melancholy passion. I
didn’t like to question him, and for some time he was enigmatic, darkly
ejaculating; but then he addressed himself directly to me. He said that
I might like to hear a story--it chanced to be _his_ story, but that
didn’t matter; it would interest me as the story of an artist, _any_
artist in these days. He was engaged, he said, in an operatic company,
here in Rome, which had bound itself by many solemn promises; he was to
have the singing of several parts, small parts indeed, but parts in
which some people had thought him--well, satisfactory. He wouldn’t have
me rely on _his_ word for it--he should like me to look at a paragraph
or two that had appeared in the press at home; he produced an immense
pocket-book and began to hand me papers, explaining that he didn’t do so
from conceit, but simply that I might see how matters stood. This
company in Rome had engaged him, and it was a fact, account for it as I
might, that the seven operas in which he was to have sung were never
produced, were withdrawn whenever they were announced, though he had
good reason to know that the public were asking for them. The company
preferred to go forcing on the public a couple of ancient pieces, played
invariably to an empty house; and why did they so prefer? He could tell
me a story about _that_, and about the woman who squalled the chief part
in the blamed old things. How often had he himself appeared in a month,
did I suppose? Would I guess? Twice--in what happened to be the two
poorest parts of his repertory. Well, he had told me the story for a
curious illustration of the treatment of art in these places; as a
friend of Mr. Deering’s I was interested, for sure, in anything that
touched the artist, and the artist, poor devil, is a man who _feels_
when he is touched.
Yes, he feels--life cuts and hurts him; but then the leading strain in
his character, you remember, is his pride. “Hard clean--” but Mr.
Bannock bethought himself to vary the phrase this time; the pride of the
man was now stark, stern, steel-true. His pride was becoming more and
more alliterative when I happened to glance at Deering, who was silently
occupied with a tiny glass of some vivid pink liquor. From the
shapeless face and cheap hat and dirty collar of Mr. Bannock I looked
round at Deering beside me, and I received a singular shock. Deering
bent over his pink potion with a languid air, cultivating his
flower-frailty much as usual; but I saw him in a new light, and he
appeared to me fresh and fine, wearing a peculiar wholesome difference
in the clack and racket of the marble saloon. We were allies, after all;
my sense of our partnership gushed suddenly warm behind my eyes. Didn’t
he make the aggrieved young barytone look dingy?--and I turned back to
Mr. Bannock with a perception quickened for an accent in his manner, for
a tone in his sonority, which I began to observe more intelligently. I
thought I saw that Mr. Bannock was a little shy of Deering, a little
impressed, like me, by his freshness and fineness.
But another young man had sidled his way towards us through the
close-ranked tables, and both my companions hailed him freely and drew
him into our party. This was a quick-eyed youth, slender and shabby; he
greeted us with a word or two jerked out of him briefly as he sat down,
and then he saw that I was a stranger and bounced upon his feet to shake
hands with me across the table. “Mr. Jaffrey,” said Deering, introducing
him, “but you may call him Jaff.” I liked the look of Jaff--he seemed
very simple and bashful. Deering summoned a waiter and gave an order; he
treated Jaff as his own property, with a peremptory kindness that sat
well on him. “You shall drink what I choose to give you,” he said,
meeting Jaff’s expostulation. Jaff was English--as English as Peckham
Rye; and I began to think he might be a poet, when Deering told me that
he danced--danced at the “Eden” or the “Wintergarden” or some such
place, which I took to be a gaudy setting for a youth so gently coloured
as this. He was exhausted, tired to death; he drank off the draught that
Deering had prescribed, he sank back in his chair and sighed; and then
he brightened up with a stammer of apology and leaned forward to take
his part in our circle. Deering contemplated him pleasantly, and
mentioned that a dancer’s was a violent life. “I believe you,” said the
young man, with a sudden hard emphasis of disgust.
He then began to talk at a great rate; he poured out his tale in a
flood, twitching his head, snapping his eyes at us all in turn. Peckham
Rye sounded more and more clearly in his voice, which ran up in nervous
squeaks as his story culminated; his broken and bungled phrases were
extremely unlike Mr. Bannock’s. Mr. Bannock, by the way, seemed also
inclined to be indulgent and protective towards Jaff. “We all spoil
him,” Mr. Bannock remarked to me, patting Jaff on the shoulder. But Jaff
didn’t notice him particularly, or me either; as his story grew shriller
and more urgent it was directed especially at Deering, with questions
and appeals to him which Deering nodded a sympathetic reply to now and
then. Rather a spoilt child, perhaps--but I liked the young dancer, and
his story soon touched my own sympathy too. He was tired and hungry and
discouraged under his eager friendliness; he seemed to have been
strained too tight by a life of ill luck. And then, as he talked on,
there appeared a sad little vein of ugliness in his candour; his
eagerness was streaked with bits of cruelty and cunning which he looked
too simple, too slight and light, to have imagined for himself. His
story, I dare say, didn’t greatly differ from the resentful Bannock’s;
it was all about the lying, cheating, swindling, bullying which reigned
in the high places of the “Olympia” or the “Trianon.” But Jaff was not
so much resentful as tired and bewildered; and he couldn’t meet the
assault of life with any massive conceit of himself, only with his poor
little undigested fragments of bleak experience.
Were these two, I wondered, fair examples of the bright company which
Deering had described? In that case it was less Roman and more
Anglo-Saxon than I had supposed, but certainly they drew the eye to a
background of life in Rome that was strange to me. The romance of Rome
didn’t count for much in the agitation of these two young aliens; they
hadn’t noticed that the city differed from another, except in the
harshness of its behaviour to a stranger. Here at once, then, was a pair
of settlers in Rome who trod the seven hills as though they were dust of
the common world. Bannock and Jaff hadn’t lived in books, and they might
just as well have lived in Buffalo or Wolverhampton for any gold they
breathed in the Roman air. In twenty minutes Deering had brought me a
thousand miles from the Fountain of the Tortoises, quietly dribbling its
poetic prattle in the shadow of ancient splendour. Life in the Via
Nazionale had a harder edge to it, no doubt--and I saw in a moment that
life in the Via Nazionale _was_ the real thing, in a kind of a sense,
for in truth it was much nearer to Rome of the Caesars than I had ever
been before, in all my meditations by quiet fountains. Consider, imagine
that you were suddenly dropped into the heart of imperial Rome, with a
friend to conduct you, Horace or Martial, as Deering had conducted
me--would you presently find yourself romancing among old ruins in the
sunset? No, you would be sitting among a crowd in a new-gilded saloon,
your elbows on a marble-topped table, and it is more than likely you
might be listening to a tale of grievance and indignation from a couple
of alien mountebanks, lately arrived in Rome and already wishing
themselves back in their own Iberia or Pannonia. Taken in this way by an
intelligent imagination, Via Nazionale would prove a profounder romance
than the Palatine Hill at shut of an April evening.
There I was, you see, back again in my literary yearnings! It seemed
impossible for me to take life plainly; I _had_ to dress it up somehow
in romantic rags. I could feel the needle-point of Deering’s irony, if I
should tell him what I was already making of our session under the
painted mirror. “Can’t you _live_--isn’t life enough for you?”--he would
blandly smile the question at me, fingering the tiny slender cigarette
that he lit after swallowing his potion. I didn’t tell him, so I hadn’t
to meet the question; but I really might have asked, if it came to that,
whether Bannock and Jaff, taken plainly, furnished life enough for
_him_. Of course they were only an instalment--we should see more in
good time. But meanwhile they abounded, the two of them, in their
exceedingly diverse styles; they appeared intent on providing our friend
(me they had quite forgotten) with as much of the material of their
distresses as they could squeeze into the hour. They got considerably in
each other’s way; each wanted the ear of Deering to himself, but I
noticed that Mr. Bannock, for all the power of his winding coils, had by
no means the best of it with Jaff’s more nimble and headlong dash. Jaff,
moreover, was favoured by Deering, and the pat of Mr. Bannock’s hand on
Jaff’s shoulder grew sharp and impatient. “Yes, yes, my dear man,” he
said, “we all have our little troubles--but I want to lay a case before
you, Mr. Deering, and I don’t want you should necessurrily think of it
as _mine_, though mine it be. I take the larger ground, and I ask you,
Mr. Deering, to follow me in proclaiming to God’s firmament that the
tragedy of the artist, poor devil, is a tragedy of five lawng----”
Indeed, indeed Mr. Bannock was impressed by Deering; he admired my
Deering’s fine white hand and expensive black suit. He _courted_
Deering--I could see it in the bend of his attention, I could hear it in
the respectful catch of his voice, when he listened and replied to some
interpolation of Deering’s in the midst of the long long tragedy. “Allow
me to say, Mr. Deering, that that is an exceedingly true observation.”
And as for Deering himself, though he found the style of the young
barytone oppressive, he was evidently drawing a trifle of satisfaction
from his homage. And more and more I was impressed myself by the charm
of Deering’s graceful and well-appointed superiority over his
companions, over the scuffles and squabbles out of which the poor young
mountebanks appealed to him. I began to measure the distance between the
stage of the Trianon--where Jaff had been prancing through long hours of
rehearsal, so I gathered, bawled at all the time by “that old beast
Levissohn”--between Jaff’s Trianon and the Botticelli picture in which
Deering lived aloof. Bannock and Jaff, they were attracted to the
elegant leisure of the picture, and no wonder. There weren’t many
Botticellis in _their_ world; it was to their credit that they made the
most of one when they had the chance. And Deering, though the dancer was
shrill and the singer ponderous, did most evidently appreciate their act
of homage.
I was caught by a word of Jaff’s (he had managed to burst into the long
tragedy of the artist), something he said about expecting presently to
see “Edna--my sweetheart, you know.” He threw it out carelessly, and I
was struck by the casual felicity of his calling Edna his
“sweetheart”--pleasing old word! Edna was to join us immediately; she
had been detained at the Trianon (where she performed with Jaff) by
“poor Madam Dowdeswell,” who had been having a rare scrap with
Levissohn, the beast. Edna would turn up in a minute, and I was
picturing Jaff’s sweetheart becomingly when he spoilt the effect of the
word by using it again--he said that Levissohn had got a new sweetheart
now, a fool of a Russian girl, and the prettiness went out of the word
as I perceived that it was technical, prescriptive, not a chance
flourish. Too sugared in its archaism for the cultured, it lived
vulgarly in the speech of Jaff and his circle--I noticed the oddity and
disliked it. But I looked with interest on Edna when she did presently
appear, slipping through the crowded room towards us like a lithe little
fish. Jaff gathered her in and handed her to our table with agreeable
authority; they made an appealing pair together, so childish and so
English, and I could have wished to snatch them up and carry them off,
away from Madam Dowdeswell and Levissohn, it I had known at all where
else to put them. Edna was small and restless, a scrap of bright
quicksilver; she slid into the talk of our table with a shimmer of
playfulness, infantile nonsense and cajolery that refreshed us; her
thin cockney freedom danced over us all. She scrambled on to the plush
seat by Deering and flung an arm confidentially round his neck.
I never saw Jaff and Edna perform their turn at the Trianon, indeed I
never saw them again; I don’t know what became of them or whether they
managed to get what I soon found they ardently desired. They disappeared
into the void, so far as I was concerned, and all I can do for them is
to breathe a far-away blessing on their pretty young heads--young no
longer now, wherever they are. Their ambition at that time, as I soon
discovered when Edna began to talk seriously to Deering, was by hook or
by crook to reach America; they were going to have such brilliant times,
such dashing successes, if once they could get clear away from this old
rotten Europe. “Darling sweeting Deering,” said Edna--she crooned, and
this was when she began to be really serious, mellifluously in Deering’s
ear; “you _do_ love us, don’t you?” She coaxed, she blandished him
discreetly; and even as she piped her childishness in her weak cockney
vowel-tones she looked forlorn and wan after all, a child over-tired and
not far from tears. Poor thin-armed Edna, she knew what she wanted and
she wasted no time over laments and grievances. “Deering dear,” she
said, “_if_ you love us, I’ll tell you a secret--you’re a duck, and I’ve
always said so.” Deering gleamed at her sarcastically, and she shot out
a lively grimace, an imitation of his look, with a good deal of humour.
“And so, ducky Deering, _as_ you love us, I’ll tell you another.” But
she didn’t--she dropped suddenly grave and wistful, and sat silent. I
remember that quick shine of gravity through her play, and I hope more
than ever that she and Jaff have found their fortune, wherever it may
have awaited them, and enjoyed it.
Nobody else came to join us; but these three were enough to give me a
picture that abides with me, a picture in which Rome becomes a place of
less account than Wolverhampton, and a picture in which our good Deering
becomes, so strangely, a personage of weight and worth, a pillar of the
world. For you see what he stood for, what he was turned into, when he
entered his new Bohemia of the Via Nazionale, the unromantic Bohemia
which may remind me of imperial Rome, but certainly not of the Rome of
poor dear Hawthorne. Deering, seated between Bannock and Jaff, fluttered
over by pretty Edna, was changed into a man of substance, a man to whom
the struggling Bohemian stretched an appealing hand; for Deering had his
own firm ground above them--and he might step down into their midst on a
fine afternoon, but he could always get back again, if he would, for a
comfortable evening out of reach of the mountebanks. Did I see them
drawn by the charm of his elegance, the grace of his fair hand as he
toyed with his rose-tipped cigarette? Oh they felt it, no doubt, but
they felt it for the mark of his security in the great free expensive
world; if Deering could trifle so daintily with his pleasure it was
because he commanded such resources--such a power of connexions, of
ramifying alliances, and of sound money too, mark you, as like as not. I
thought I understood very well. Not every day did Bannock or Jaff or
Edna meet with a Deering, school and college style, Cambridge and Oxford
bred, the real right thing--not every day, at least in the wilderness of
Rome, and never and nowhere at all, perhaps, a Deering so indulgent and
a Deering of that exquisite insight into the mentality of the artist.
Coax him and court him then, by all means--I don’t blame you.