privileges of her sex. It wasn’t only that she could pat him on the head
(most discreetly, I must say) even among all those painted mirrors; but
she could gush at him with her nonsense instead of orating or lamenting,
and then she could drop suddenly silent and wan, lonely as a child in
that chattering crowd. This last effect, it is true, was uncalculated;
she didn’t invent her swift and pallid subsidence, poor Edna, or
thoughtfully make use of it; but it was a part of her feminine
privilege, none the less, for of the trio of mountebanks Edna, being a
woman, was by far the oldest, and this last effect was the sign of her
age. She looked like a child--but Bannock and Jaff, beside her, _were_
children, fretful and bewildered and inexperienced; Edna was a hundred
years old in comparison, and her weariness was that of a grown-up human
being, far beyond the petulant fierce resentments of a child. She was a
woman, she had the privilege of maturity in her power to taste the
flatness and dreariness of the scuffle, while the men went on nagging
and beating their heads against its injustice. And so, though her way
seemed roundabout, she reached the point long before they did; with the
echo of her nonsense still in the air she had caught Deering into an
earnest discussion, subdued to an undertone which warned off the rest of
us, and I could hear her explaining and developing her scheme, laying it
before Deering in quick nervous phrases while she absently fingered the
objects on the table. That was Edna’s way--and I don’t know at all what
her scheme was or how she intended that Deering should help her, but I
think she achieved her purpose.
Jaff meanwhile was babbling to Bannock about the glory of America, or
rather he was asking a great many questions about it and never leaving
Bannock the time to unroll his answers. The barytone was properly ready
to exalt his country if he were given the chance, and I noticed that the
big pocket-book was again in his hand. But he was placed in a
difficulty; for the pocket-book showed how America honours the artist--I
caught a few words as he opened it, “By God, that country loves a Man,
but she _worships_ an Artist”--and yet he was not as eager as you might
have expected to return home for her delight. The young singer, he had
no plan of going back again; instead he had a very clear-cut design of
conquest on the stage of Europe, a design of which he managed to expose
the opening section (it took us in a bound as far as Cracow, I
remember); and Jaff’s urgent desire to be fed with the report of
Buffalo, her sympathy and bounty, did a little embarrass the home-raised
artist of that place. But Jaff was enthusiastic enough for two, for
twenty; he spun to and fro in his imagination while Bannock was finding
the first of his clippings; and for my part I sat and watched them,
entirely forgotten by the whole party, and felt like the lady in Comus,
considerably out of it.
The silver chirrup of Edna’s laughter rang forth again at last, her
grave-eyed colloquy was at an end. She slipped from her place on the
sofa, seized Jaff and plucked him out of our circle, kissed her hand to
us all and danced him off through the crowd--and that was the last I saw
of the mercurial pair. Good luck to them, I say; and I don’t withhold my
blessing from the solemn Bannock, who now evidently intended to settle
down firmly to _his_ grave talk with Deering, the distraction of the
other young people having cleared out of his way. He would have
preferred that I too should take my departure; but Deering held me back
when I rose, and we sat on together, the three of us, for a very long
hour. I relieved the time with more pink potions, while Bannock circled
the globe through the stages of his campaign. I was numb and dumb as
before; but Deering held out bravely, wagging his head with judicial
comment as the story marched over kingdom and continent. One point alone
I noted, one conclusion I drew; whatever it cost him, Deering occupied a
position in the Via Nazionale to which he was not indifferent. He owed
it to everything that he supposed himself to have shed and cast away,
finally, when he put on his broad-brimmed hat and eschewed the English
ghetto; he owed his position to his value (poor Deering!) as a
substantial and respectable Briton. But why dwell on a painful subject?
Deering had been welcomed into a society that included an opera-singer
and two dancers, he was at home and on his feet there; and which of the
respectable Britons at that moment strolling on the Pincio, glaring at
each other and listening to the band, could imaginably say the same?
III. PIAZZA DELLA CANCELLERIA
When at length we tore ourselves from the embraces of Bannock, on the
pavement by the tram-line, the dusk of the warm day was falling--it was
nearly dinner-time. I had no wish to leave my hold of Deering, having
once secured him; he would surely now take me, I suggested, to dine in
some clever place where I could pursue my research and discover still
more of the world. Yes, he would; and he mused a little space, debating
on what new aspect of reality my eyes should next be opened. On the
whole he elected for the Vatican--so he strangely said; and he explained
what he meant as we descended the street, rounded its sharp twist, and
struck into the shabby expanse of the Piazza di Venezia. (The great
sugar-cake of the Monument of Italy, which has now smartened the piazza
to the taste of Domitian and Caracalla, hadn’t in those days begun to
appear; it still lurked low behind a tier of dingy hoarding.) We were to
dine, said Deering, at an eating-house near the Vatican--not
geographically near, but under its spiritual shadow; and by this he
signified that the company which it kept was papal, very black and papal
indeed--he was all for varying my experience to the utmost. What a
command of variety he possessed! He could lead me from the Trianon to
the Vatican in ten minutes--as free of the one as of the other, no
doubt; and he smiled naughtily as he admitted that his love of
observation took him into many queer places.
The Vatican, I urged, was the queerest place in the world--for _him_;
not that indeed I thought so in my own mind, but I knew it would please
him to think so in his. I easily saw my Deering, in fact, as a
frequenter of the “black,” demurely flirting with papistry, breathing
the perfume of that distinction, that fine-bred aloofness which it wears
with such an air. From some wonderful old saloon of the Farnese palace
or the Cancelleria (how did I know about them?--from Zola, of course),
with its beautiful faded hangings, with the high-backed papal throne
turned to the wall under its canopy, you may look down upon the jostle
of the vulgar as from nowhere else; and the most exquisite edge of your
disdain will fall (Deering would particularly appreciate this) on the
tourist, the hot-faced British matron, the long-toothed British
spinster, bustling or trailing around in their dowdy protestantism.
Obviously the very place for Deering, it seemed to me; but I quite
understood that I was to be surprised and amused at finding him
associated with ecclesiasticism of any sort, on any terms, even in a
quaint old cook-house like that to which he had presently guided me.
While we proceeded thither I delivered a sally or two on the subject of
his horrible perversity--that _he_ of all people should have friends in
the camp of the obscurantist! To have abandoned the fallen day of the
Gioconda’s dream (or was it her cave?) for an American bar--that was all
very well, and I had seen his point. But for Deering, the enlightened
and illuminated, to be hobnobbing with priestcraft, cultivating _that_
sensation--I threw up my hands in mirth and horror. Deering was
thoroughly pleased.
Our cook-shop was close to the palace of the Cancelleria, and the
solemnity of the vast pile hung above us in the dusk as we lingered for
a minute in the square. It discouraged my raillery; one can hardly take
a line of levity over the Romish persuasion in the presence of a Roman
palace. The eyes of its huge face are set in a stare of grandeur, of
pride, of massive obstinacy, quite unaware of the tittering insect at
its feet. If a grey-haired cardinal ever looks out of one of those
windows, holding aside the thread-bare folds of the damask--as he may,
for all I know--he looks without disdain upon the pair of tourists,
standing below, who find the page in their red handbooks and read the
description of the palace aloud to each other. He looks without disdain,
because utterly without comprehension; he has never so much as heard of
these alien sectarians, uninvited pilgrims from the world of outer
barbarism. That is my impression, and I scanned the rows and rows of the
Chancery windows in the hope of discovering some worn ascetic old
countenance at one of them; I should like to see a cardinal lean out to
enjoy a breath of evening air after the long studies of the day. But
Deering laughed at my admirable innocence--again!--and assured me that I
should see no cardinals here; they lived mostly in cheap lodgings near
the railway-station, and spent the day in poring over the share-list of
the morning paper. He didn’t really know, I retorted; he gave me the
answer that he considered good for me. “Wait then,” he said, “till you
meet with a cardinal outside the pages of a book”--but I never did, nor
possibly Deering either.
“Ah,” cried Deering suddenly, “Cooksey will tell you--Cooksey calls all
the cardinals by their Christian names.” We were just approaching the
low door of the Trattoria dell’ Oca, and a stout little man in a loud
suit was entering there in front of us. “Cooksey my dear, wait for your
friends,” cried Deering; and the little man faced round and greeted him
with a pleasant chuckle. Cooksey was red and genial; in his bright
check suit and his Panama hat he looked like the English globe-trotter
of tradition--I was instantly reminded of Mr. Meagles among the
Allongers and Marshongers. I can’t imagine any one more calculated, I
should have said, to send Deering shuddering and faint in the opposite
direction; but Deering smiled on him with all his sweetness, and we
passed together into the dark entry of the Goose. A plain but
distinguished Roman lady, heavily moustached, sat at a high desk inside;
she bowed graciously and called a sharp word to a chinless man,
evidently her husband, who dashed forth to make us welcome. Cooksey and
Deering were familiar customers, and we were handed to a table in an
inner room, close to the mouth of a small black recess--a cupboard
containing a little old dwarf-woman, like a witch, who was stirring a
copper sauce-pan on a stove, for the cupboard was the kitchen. It was a
much nicer place than the gilded hall of the Via Nazionale, and an
excellent meal, though slippery, was produced for us from the cupboard.
As for the wine, it came from the chinless man’s own vineyard at
Velletri--a rose-golden wine, a honey-sweet name.
Now for Cooksey. Deering tackled him at once on the question of the
cardinals, with malicious intention; and Cooksey shook his head,
chuckling, and remarked that they were a low lot, no doubt, take them
for all in all. “A poor degenerate lot,” he declared--“the college has
gone to pieces very badly. All exemplary lives, they tell me--and not
one of them would poison a fly, let alone a guest at his own table.”
Cooksey had jumped to our humour very pleasantly; he twinkled and
assured me that he longed, as Deering did and I must too, to hear of
scandals and dark secrets upon the backstairs of the Vatican. “But all I
ever find there,” he said, “is a pail of slops--I tumbled over one this
morning.” “You were on duty, were you?” asked Deering. Cooksey said yes,
and he went on to explain to me (“lest you should misconceive my
position”) that it wasn’t his duty to empty the slops. “That’s the duty
of Monsignor Mair, and I told him so, and he answered me back very
saucily indeed. I had to pursue him with a mop.” Cooksey, I learned,
held an office of some kind in the papal court--“unpaid, lavishly
unpaid”--which kept him in Rome for a term of months each year. “And
it’s still seven weeks to the holidays,” he said, “and I’ve spent all my
tin, and I daren’t ask the Holy Father to lend me any, because the last
time I did so he said he’d write home and tell my people I was getting
into extravagant ways.” Cooksey was delightfully gay; he assumed the
humour of a school-boy and it became him well, with his red face and his
jolly rotundity.
He ran along in the same strain, playing his irreverent cheer over the
occupation of his day. Nothing had gone right with him, he said, since
the morning; it wasn’t only the slop-pail, it had been one of his
unlucky days from the start. “First of all I was late for early school,”
he said; “I dashed round to church before breakfast (I always think of
it as early school), and I was three minutes late, and I fell with a
crash on the butter-slide which Father Jenkins had made in the middle of
the nave. That’s his little way--he thinks it funny; he reckons always
to catch somebody who comes running in at the last moment, and he scored
heavily this morning--I hurt myself horribly. And then I couldn’t attend
to my book because I was attacked by a flea, and just as I was cracking
it on the altar-step I found I had forgotten to button my braces; and
while I was attending to that I jabbed my stick in the face of a savage
old woman who was kneeling behind me; she gave me such a look--and the
other fellows told me afterwards I must go and apologize to her, because
it seems she’s a very special pet convert of Father Jenkins’s and would
be sure to complain to him if she was assaulted in church--that was the
way they put it. However I was comforted by one thing; just as I was
leaving I heard a great bump on the floor, and Father Jenkins had
tumbled on his own slide, the old silly, while he was rushing out to rag
the sacristan about something; and he sat there cursing and swearing
(_inwardly_, I will say for him), and I wanted to make a long nose at
him, but I was afraid it might be forbidden in church, like
spitting--not that the reverend fathers can say much about _that_!--”
Dear me, Cooksey _was_ volatile; he ran on more and more jovially,
gathering impetus as he talked.
I wished I could have questioned Deering about him--he seemed such an
odd product of the Vatican. The papal functionary was a middle-aged man;
he enjoyed his dinner with much emphasis, hailing the chinless man from
time to time (in fluent Italian idiom, but with a British accent that
caused Deering to glance round uneasily at the other tables)--summoning
the chinless man, Amerigo by name, for a word and a jest, peering into
the cupboard to banter the little witch-woman with the freedom of an old
admirer. “They know me, bless their hearts,” he remarked to me; “they
rob me as they all rob us all, and they know I know it and we’re the
best of friends. They’re all thieves together, these Romans--I tell ’em
so, and they like it. Now watch--” He called to Amerigo with an air of
indignation and began to accuse him--I forget how it was, but it
appeared that Amerigo was in the habit of grossly over-charging him in
some particular, and Cooksey was determined he would bear it no longer,
so he said, striking his knife-handle on the table defiantly; and
Amerigo spread his hands in voluble self-defence, earnestly contesting
the charge, and Cooksey held up his fist and retorted again, and they
argued the point--till Amerigo suddenly smiled across his anxious face,
darting a look at me as he did so, and Cooksey lunged at him playfully
in the stomach and clapped him on the shoulder. There was a burst of
laughter, in which Amerigo joined industriously, complaisantly, looking
again at me. Perhaps I misunderstood him, but he seemed to regard me as
the audience for whom the scene had been played. He had an eye in his
head.
Dismissing Amerigo, Cooksey began to examine me on my business in Rome,
and I was soon able to turn his enquiries upon himself. I found that he
had frequented Rome for many years, a dozen or more--“ever since a
certain event took place for me,” he said; and he paused, waiting for me
to ask what the event had been. He waited so explicitly that I felt no
delicacy; I put the question. “Oh, the _event_,” he said; “the event was
simply that I happened to become a Catholic.” He was grave for an
instant, apparently implying that my question was not in the best of
taste; but he overlooked it and passed on. He offered to do me the
honours of Rome, the kind of Rome I probably hadn’t discovered for
myself; and I nearly exclaimed that Deering was doing exactly that for
me at the moment--Cooksey was the kind of Rome, or one of the kinds,
that had been hidden from me till to-day. But all I said was something
suitably grateful, and he announced that he should take me in hand.
“You’ll find I keep very low company,” he observed, “monks and Jesuits
and such. My respectable English friends refuse to meet me when they
come to Rome. They think it disreputable of me to know so many priests.
But if you’re not afraid I’ll show you a few; rum old devils they are,
some of them--it’s all right, I call them so to their faces. We’re none
of us shy of a little plain speaking; you should hear Cardinal ----” the
name of the plain-spoken cardinal escapes me; but Cooksey had plenty to
say of him, dwelling with relish on the liberal speech of his eminence.
Then he slanted off into anecdotes, stories and scenes of clerical life,
in a funny little vein of frivolity and profanity that seemed by several
sizes too small for him, so stout and red and comfortable as he sat
there. He absorbed his dinner with a loud smacking satisfaction, and he
told stories of which the roguery consisted in talking very familiarly
of saints, of miracles, of the furniture of churches. “But I shock you,”
he remarked to me at length, enquiringly.
Did Cooksey shock me? Oh yes, he was sure of it, and he explained why he
was sure. “We all strike you as profane,” said he; his “we” stood for
those of his persuasion, that which I think of as the “Romish.” He
himself, he said, would have been frightened to death by such talk in
old days; he had been taught (like me, no doubt) that it was “beastly
bad form” to be simple and jolly in these matters. “We aren’t solemn, I
confess,” he proceeded; “we’re cheerful because we aren’t nervous, and
we aren’t nervous because we happen to feel pretty sure of our ground.
Now in old days I was as solemn as eight archbishops.” But he pulled
himself up. “I apologize, I apologize (the second time to-day!--but
you’ll be kinder than that old cat of Father J.’s). I’ll try to behave
with proper decorum--a great fat rascal like me! You wouldn’t think I
was born in the diocese of Bath and Wells. When I go back there now I
feel like a naughty boy in a sailor suit; I _can’t_ remember that I’m a
damnable heretic whom the dean and chapter ought to burn out of hand.”
So Cooksey settled that he was shocking, and the thought seemed to make
him more comfortable and expansive than ever. But with some notion of
attesting my own liberalism I then ventured on an anecdote myself, a
tale of a man who had prayed to a miracle-working image, somewhere in
Rome, and had been embarrassed by the shower of wonders that had
thereafter befallen him. It is quite a good story, the point being that
each of the miracles wrought was slightly off the mark, not exactly what
the man had asked for, and the humour appearing in the detail of the
saint’s misapprehension--he means so well, his mistakes are all so
natural. I told it brightly and candidly.
“Ah well,” said Cooksey, and he didn’t laugh. I was so frankly surprised
that my jaw dropped, as people say; I blushed hotly--there yawned
between us a pause. “On that subject,” said Cooksey, “I’m afraid we must
agree to differ. I happen to hold another view of the force of
devotion.” He stared with fixed eyes, munching slowly. I never was more
taken aback, and I was young enough to feel a burning shame of my
blunder. It seemed so awkward, so gawky of me to have offended in that
way; a civilized human being doesn’t jar the harmony of a circle in an
amusing old eating-house by the Cancelleria--he is sensitive to the
tone of the place. So Cooksey had it all his own way, and I sank in
shame. He didn’t let me off, not a tittle; he heavily maintained his
stare and his silence. It spoilt the rest of the evening for me, it
soured the wine of Velletri; though Cooksey, when he had deliberately
finished his gesture of disapproval, agreed to pretend that nothing had
happened, changed the subject and talked about the excavations on the
Palatine. Before long he was merrily continuing the story of his day,
part of which he had spent with a German archeologist in the House of
Augustus; he told us how his ill-luck had pursued him still, how he had
accidentally sat on the camera of the German and reduced it to powder;
he ignored the black hole I had made in the talk and turned his back on
it. But there it was, and I couldn’t forget it; my clumsiness fretted
me.
Cooksey had it all his own way at the time, but I reacted afterwards and
I didn’t fail to perceive that he had treated me unfairly. I was hot
with indignation, and it was long before I felt any kindness in return
for not a little on his part towards me. He was friendly, he was
helpful; it was assumed that we “agreed to differ” upon certain
subjects, and on that footing he gave me his protection. And I am sure I
don’t now grudge him the fun of his severity when I tried in my
presumption, that first evening, to take a hand in his game. It was
_his_ game, and I couldn’t expect him to admit an outsider like me; it
was mine to look on, a home-bred novice, and be a trifle fluttered and
shocked. Deering, I observed, was highly amused at my discomfiture; he
sat a little apart, looking pale and penetrating by contrast with
Cooksey’s red breadth and weight, and he watched us with a charming
sneer that was lost upon Cooksey, not upon me. He enjoyed the sight of
my indoctrination, my collision with this new little bit of the world of
Rome. If he couldn’t show me a cardinal he could produce an associate of
cardinals--or at any rate a man who had chased Monsignor Mair with a mop
on the backstairs of the Vatican, which was surely as good. Already I
had the means of correcting my fancy about the palace of the
Cancelleria--another illusion dispelled! Ascetic faces, solitary study,
proud aloofness indeed! Cooksey’s pranks and rogueries told a different
story; the guarded fortress of distinction that I had imagined--I had
now an inkling of its tone, in Deering’s opinion.
I don’t know about that; but Cooksey was undoubtedly a queer novel case
for my attention. He was showing off, it was clear; he was flourishing
his levity at an outsider; and his unexpected slap at my intrusion, when
you think of it, was extremely enlightening. He did so enjoy, you see,
his place as a member of the ring, inside the fortress; years had not
withered the freshness of it, had not staled the complacency of his
position. “Look at me, look,” he seemed to say, like a child who has
climbed a tree and balances on a branch; and then “look again,” like a
man walking familiarly on the terrace of a great grand house, while a
party of sightseers are marshalled by the butler. “See how easily we
carry our high estate--don’t you wish you were one of us, sharing the
fun?” And then, if you venture to presume, “Ah, _would_ you? No you
don’t--take _that_!” If you ever were the guest of the grand house and
happened to be pacing the terrace, carelessly, while the public were
shuffling through the state apartments and looking out of the windows,
you would sympathize completely with the mind of Cooksey. I can imagine
the sensation--who has not admired the nonchalant figure upon the
terrace, the creature of privilege at whom the public gaze from afar?
See him stroll at his ease, pause carelessly, call and wave lightly to a
companion under the sacred trees. Ah it is good to let the uninitiate
see how free one is, how playfully at home in the sanctuary of their
envy--for one can’t doubt that they do feel envy and are quick to be
conscious of their exclusion. Sweet, to be sure, are the uses of parade,
sweet and fresh after many a year.