Borghese; and we wandered freely in the ilex-shade, we inspected the
children at play in the grass, we stood awhile to watch the young Roman
athletes smiting the ball in their ancestral game, we took another turn
beneath the magnificent umbrellas of the pines, we lingered for the
finish of a bicycle-race in the great Greek stadium; and I don’t deny
that we loitered and strolled and looked for something else to watch
because we found it difficult to make an excuse for separating. The fact
is that we hadn’t very much to talk about after all, without Mr. Fitch
between us to be dazzled. Apart from him we made no very stimulating
audience for each other, and we clutched at an interest in the games and
the races to cover the bare patches of our conversation.
That very small interest was cracking under the strain when there
appeared a fortunate diversion. Maundy, after a pause, had said that the
leading bicyclist was a splendid Roman type, which was just what _I_ had
said before the pause; and he had remembered this and had hastily
suggested another stroll, and I (after a pause) had observed that the
park was extraordinarily classic (an earlier remark of Maundy’s); when
it chanced that in a green alley we came in sight of an old gentleman
seated on a bench, a battered but dignified relic of a man, who faced
the prospect mildly and blankly, waiting, as it seemed, till some one
should happen to pass by and sweep him up. “There’s old Rossi,” cried
Maundy, and he rapidly explained that he had lodged with the old man’s
family when he first came to Rome, and he was sorry, but he must stop
for a minute--we both jumped at the diversion, a timely one.
We were still a little way off, and as we began to move towards the old
man two women appeared, an older and a younger, bearing down upon him
from the opposite direction. They were delayed for the moment, as they
approached, by their own conversation, which seemed to shoot up into an
argument demanding settlement before other matters could be taken in
hand. We hung back, Maundy and I, and finally the old man was taken in
hand, literally enough, and in a style which suggested that the argument
had ended to neither lady’s satisfaction. He apparently needed a good
deal of rousing and re-arranging of shawls and wraps, and I noticed that
the argument showed signs of beginning again over his heedless head. At
length he was brought to his feet, his stick was put in his hand, and
the party prepared to set forth. Immediately the two ladies caught sight
of us, recognized Maundy and raised a cry of delight. Ah, what a
fortunate meeting! They had been arguing in Italian, but they now spoke
a free crisp English; they greeted us with much politeness, dropping the
old man as one might put down a parcel on a chair. He blinked and
subsided upon his bench again, while I was introduced to the
ladies--Miss Teresa Shacker (so the name reached me at least) and Miss
Berta Rossi; in these terms Maundy referred to them, and they were good
enough to express their extreme pleasure in making the acquaintance of
his friend.
They quickly took his friend into their confidence; I learned that they
were aunt and niece, sister-in-law and daughter of the speechless old
bundle on the bench. Aunt and niece were very much alike. Teresa the
aunt was tall and spare, with pouched white cheeks, a coil of black
hair on which her headgear stood high, and long arms assertively
kid-gloved and buttoned and tight. Berta the niece was white with
slightly more lustre, black with a little more profusion, gloved and
hatted with the same defiance. The loose luxuriant evening flowered
around us while Berta and Teresa established their effect; and their
effect stood forth, hard and high-lighted as a bit of china, quite
eclipsing the lazy sprawl of sun and shadow among the trees. There was
an artistic passion in their looks and tones as they wrought. The
accidents of a dim old man, a dark grove and an April sunset, fell away
from them, were forgotten, and in the cleared space they created a
social occasion out of the slender material that we offered, Maundy and
I. They found it sufficient, they set to work with lucid determination.
Long practice had made them perfect, and the entertainment ran without a
hitch. All the talking was theirs; they talked in an antiphon so glib
that it must have been rehearsed--only that was impossible, since it
fitted the chance of our encounter; so they talked, let me say, with the
skill of the old Roman improvisers, who never hesitated for a rhyme on
any subject you could set them. Half an hour later I knew a prodigious
amount about Teresa and Berta, and I don’t think they knew anything at
all about me.
Who were they, and what? Their English dialect, in the first place, was
a study by itself. “What a pleasure,” said one of them, “to hear some
English speaking!”--and immediately they explained to me that they were
“mad for England,” such was their phrase, and that I must talk to them
of nothing but England for their pleasure. “For we,” said Teresa,
“being English maternally, love to talk our language like anything, and
we are both a little wee bit cracked on the head about England”; and
Berta put in that they weren’t English, not strictly, but rather
Virginian--“Ah,” said Teresa, “but Virginian is most English of all, as
you know so well--and you mustn’t come down on us for a couple of Yankee
women, no, not at all.” “Yankee, good God!” cried out Berta, “ah no, not
a bit of it; our family came of England in the beginning by origin; I
’ope you haven’t thought that we spoke as Americans, so very ogly, all
in the nose!” “We are always fewrious at everybody,” said Teresa, “who
will believe us American.” “But Mr. Maundy has told you about us--is it
true?” asked Berta; and Teresa chimed in with the next versicle, and
Berta caught her up with the response, and between them they brought out
their history in much profusion of detail and folded me into their
family circle with a will.
They bethought themselves of the old man on the bench and proceeded to
display him. He was enrolled for the part of a benignant Œdipus, tired
at the end of a long day, weighted with his knowledge of the jealousies
and vindictive passions of the world, but not embittered by them, only
mellowed by many hoary years of patience and fortitude. It was a fine
exhibition of patriarchal and republican simplicity. He neither spoke
nor moved nor seemed to hear anything that was said, but his attendant
maidens gave life to the part on his behalf. The grand old man, survivor
of a heroic age--had he been the inspiration of Mazzini, the counsellor
of Cavour, Garibaldi’s right hand?--all three perhaps, and anyhow a
flaming brand of freedom in the bad days of which we younger folk knew
only the eloquent tale. To think of those terrible times of oppression,
of persecution and bigotry! This patriot had given all, had sacrificed
fortune and strength to the cause of Italy in her woe, when the land lay
groaning beneath the yoke of tyrant and priest. But there were traitors
even in the camp of enlightenment, and his feelings had suffered the
cruelest laceration. His feelings were more to him than any personal
hopes or ambitions, so that little need be said of the utter collapse of
these also. He had withdrawn from the struggle, had married a wife who
was all sympathy, and had passed into a profound retirement. The
struggle of poverty was hard; but what is poverty when it is sweetened
by the heart’s affections? The poor lady, Teresa’s sister, was dead
these many years; she had bequeathed her husband, her two young
children, to Teresa’s care. Poor Leonora had had a soul too great for
her frame; the artistic inheritance in her blood would not allow her to
rest. She was the daughter of an artist, and the fire had descended on
her--that fire which had been withheld (perhaps mercifully, who knows?)
from Teresa, the younger sister.
Out it all came in a cataract. I kept my head as well as I could, and I
glanced with respectful admiration at the bundle of shawls that had
borne these historic shocks. But the ladies let him drop once more,
having played out his part for him; and they launched into a strophe of
which the burden was Leonora, poor Leonora with the fever of art in her
veins, and yet so human, a true woman, proud to devote herself to the
task of binding the wounds of a hero. Maundy--where was Maundy all this
time? He was fidgeting restlessly on the edge of our group, and I judge
that the tale of the hero and his bride wasn’t new to him; he now
managed to interrupt it with a word to excuse himself, to bid us
good-evening and depart. He left me in the hands of Teresa and Berta; I
saw them close about me and cut me off from the chance of declaring that
I too must be going on my way. Really, these women--they were like
famished creatures, rejoicing in the taste of fresh blood; they hadn’t
the least intention of resigning the chance. So they found they should
like to walk a little further under the trees, to enjoy the evening; it
occurred to them both that the evening ought to be enjoyed, for they
were passionately fond, they said, of the country.
“You English are all so fond of the country,” said Teresa, “you are such
lovers of sporting!” She had meant to say “we English,” but she wasn’t
so awkward as to correct herself. She broke off into an ecstasy over the
evening sunshine. “I adore,” she cried, “the solitude, the quiet of the
country.” The spot where we happened to be pausing was not very
countrified; for close to our green alley was an enclosure covered with
little chairs and tables, from which there went up a volley of the
brilliant chatter of Rome; but it reminded Teresa of the country days to
which they always looked forward in the summer, when they went away to
the mountains or to the baths. What mountains? Well, they sometimes went
to Frascati--“si sta tanto tanto bene in campagna,” exclaimed Teresa
without thinking, and she remembered at once that the language into
which she dropped without thinking should be English, the native English
in which she habitually (she made it clear that she habitually) thought
and dreamt. As for the “baths,” they went occasionally to the sea; Berta
was the girl for the sea--she would like to walk for miles along the
shore, alone with nature, quite out of sight of everybody. “Our Italian
friends think me an extraordinary gurl,” she brightly confessed, “as mad
as a--as a hunter.” She had a misgiving as she produced this English
idiom, but she recovered herself to pick up the next _réplique_. “We
shock our Italian friends jolly well,” she said; “ra-_thur_!” The last
word had an English note that quite reassured her.
But how was it that they came to be so English? Oh, they recurred again
to the strophe of Leonora--who was Teresa’s sister, you understand, and
Berta’s mother. Leonora and Teresa, they were daughters of the house of
Shacker--I never arrived at the true form of the name, which can’t have
been this; but they passed rather lightly over the strain of the
Shackers, and I had only a doubtful glimpse of a Polish nobleman, an
exile from an ungrateful country, who had once upon a time sought refuge
in Rome, and had found in Rome a piece of good fortune in the midst of
many and unmerited disasters. He had found a wife--and this was the
point where Teresa flung up her hands and eyes in a mute effusion of
piety for the shade invoked. In those old days, it appeared, there was a
high and noble worship of art, of _true_ art, that you wouldn’t meet
with anywhere now; and the proof was that a woman, a pure and splendid
young sculptress from Virginia, could follow the calling of her art and
carve the chaste marble in her studio, here in Rome, and be worshipped
herself and respected by the chivalry of the other carvers and painters
around her--oh, Teresa couldn’t express the beauty of the homage that
had encircled this grand severe young figure, white as the stone she
chipped, whose life was dedicated like a nun to the service of art. No
man could touch her, none, save only the poor Polish outcast--one of
the handsomest men of his time indeed, but now slipping on the brink of
starvation and despair. Oh what a romance! The snow-white marble had
taken fire; the handsome Pole became the father of Leonora and Teresa,
the fair young sculptress their mother.
And so I now, about twenty minutes after our first meeting, possessed
their history. Already they felt I was a friend; and Berta, who might
reasonably think it was her turn to make a speech, began to hope that
perhaps we might chance upon her brother--she believed he was with a
party of companions in the park, not far off. Her brother? Yes, we now
reached the next generation, the children of the aged patriot. They were
two, Berta and Luigi; and Berta couldn’t help wishing that I and her
brother might become acquainted, we had such a deal in common. Luigi,
she said, was dreadfully clever; he wrote articles in a newspaper, at
least he would do so if he had the chance; but a man without influence
was so terribly helpless, and Luigi was so awfully proud. Teresa
interposed to the effect that Luigi, like the rest of them, was indeed
half a stranger in Rome, though circumstances had compelled him to be
born and to live there. “Ah,” said Berta, “if only he could get on to a
nice position in London--everybody is happy who goes to London, I
think!” Luigi’s great distress, according to Teresa, was that in Rome he
was able to meet so few nice Englishmen. “And you,” said Berta, “you are
in business, yes?” They both looked at me expectantly; it was the first
question they had put me, and it was followed by a close and lengthy
cross-examination. I came out of it rather badly; I could give my story
nothing like the brilliance of theirs, though I obediently supplied
them with the details they demanded. They noted my information, but they
hardly seemed to be impressed by it. Berta presently suggested that we
should turn back towards the tea-garden and look for Luigi.
We discovered Luigi surrounded by a group of young companions who
certainly weren’t nice Englishmen. They looked to me like decidedly
second-rate Italians, but it didn’t appear that Luigi found them
uncongenial. They were all lounging and talking round one of the little
tables, and Luigi’s chair and his straw hat were tilted back at the same
angle, and while he volubly held forth to the circle his loud black eye
(he had the same plum-like eye as his sister and his aunt) was scanning
and following the stream of people who passed on their evening
promenade. He watched with care; Berta pointed him out to me as we
approached, and she waved her parasol to summon him; but he shook his
forefinger in reply without shifting his tilt or interrupting his
discourse. Berta waved more urgently, and her thumb flicked out sideways
in my direction as she looked at him; and Luigi then stared at me very
frankly, lifted himself from his place and came forward to join us. He
was a short and sturdy young man, smartly appointed, with a flashing
smile that was polite, indifferent, insolent--that was anyhow very
great. He paid no attention to his sister and his aunt, beyond waiting
for them to pronounce an introduction. He smiled upon me and he
spoke--and there was a sad drop in his style when he spoke, for his
English came of a meaner strain than that of his ladies. It was not less
fluent, it was more correct; but it had a vulgar flatness that wasn’t
inherited from the sculptress of Virginia. He was a pretty young
gentleman so long as he was silent, but he was common and dingy and
commercial when he opened his mouth. I suppose he had successfully
caught the intonation of the Englishmen he _had_ been able to meet in
Rome.
Teresa began to recount with vivacity the story of our acquaintance.
Luigi listened to her for a moment and then murmured a few quick words
of Italian, I don’t know what they were, before which poor Teresa seemed
to drop like a stone. He had cut her short in the middle of a word and
her mouth hung open; but she said no more, she dumbly signalled to
Berta, and two anxious women stood waiting before Luigi for their
orders. He turned away from them and they understood; they spoke up
bravely, reminded me (or told me) that I had promised to take tea with
them on the following day, and declared that they must now hasten back
to convey their old man home. They hurried away, and Luigi immediately
displayed his smile again, suggesting that I should walk with him. His
young friends appeared to hail him, to invite us both into their party;
but he denied them without a glance, with the same slight shake of his
forefinger, talking to me and drawing me off as he did so. He talked
familiarly; he asked no questions, and at first he was chiefly concerned
to explain to me the great disadvantage at which a gentleman almost
necessarily finds himself in Rome. It is all very well if you are rich;
but if you aren’t, and if you happen to be a gentleman, why then Luigi
thought there was no place in the world where you were so rottenly
situated as in Rome. Roman society is utterly snobbish, and a gentleman
doesn’t care to push among people who think themselves too good for him;
and the company of a lot of bounders is unpleasant to a gentleman, and
Luigi could assure me that it was a treat for him to shake hands with a
gentleman, and not only a gentleman, mind you, but a man of the world,
the right sort. He was pleased to imply that I was the right sort, and
he cordially took my arm.
Luigi was odious. With a gush of memory from across the years it returns
to me, the odiousness of Luigi. There was a touch of gallantry about
Teresa and Berta, a swing of bravery in their pretensions--and a real
impulse of unselfishness, poor creatures, in their care and respect for
this vulgar youth. He was their pride, the object of their disinterested
ambition; they took thought for him and used their simple arts on his
behalf; and Luigi repaid them by spending an hour in implying to me that
his family were an unfortunate drag upon a spirited gentleman. I soon
understood that I wasn’t to judge him by the dreadful commonness of his
womankind; he was in the unlucky possession of a rarer refinement, a
loftier pride, a diviner discontent than the rest of his house; and yet
here he was, tied and handicapped, as I could see for myself, by a
family incapable of profiting by his example. We took incidentally a
brief glance at the loyalty with which he stuck to them, admitting the
claim on him of two foolish women and a helpless old man, however
unworthy; that was the kind of good fellow he was--too faithful and
dutiful, perhaps, to do justice to the power that was in him. But though
it was splendid of him to make the sacrifice, it was also very
distressing that such a remarkable nature should be sacrificed at all;
so back we came to the miserable scope that this infernal old Rome has
to offer to the talents of a gentleman, if he is not prepared to cringe
and crawl for his opportunity. Luigi had much to say of it, and he
passed an agreeable hour.
The sun burned lower, the great lordly pines were smitten with gold, the
shadows crept along the green dells of the open park; and there came a
moment at last when rebellion seized me, and I actually turned upon
Luigi with a passionate outburst. It didn’t last long, and he took very
little notice of it; he merely paused, checked the flow of his lament,
and proceeded again when I held my peace. Not long ago, you remember, I
had been told at considerable length that my poor old Rome was no place
for an artist; and that tirade of the opera-singer now came over me,
while my companion ingeminated his cry that it was a place unworthy of
Luigi. The opera-singer seemed the less fatuous of the two. I can easily
bear to hear the name of art re-uttered in Rome, for the
thousand-millionth time, in any connexion, on any pretext. Is Rome a
step-mother to the arts?--it may well be so, and very likely Rome has
thought nothing of smashing an artist, carelessly, disdainfully, at all
the changes of the moon since the suckling of the twins. I can imagine
that it may lie in the character of Rome to be often brutal to the arts;
and by all means let an artist (though not that egregious Bannock
indeed, for choice) stand up and hurl out his reproach. But when Luigi,
in the face of Rome, maunders on with his vulgar stuff about the
feelings of a gentleman, I rebel--I say that to mention these flimsy
refinements in the noble great park of the Borghese is more than my
sense of fitness will endure. A gentleman!--what has Rome to do with
this nonsense of gentility, tediously and querulously droning in the
mouth of Luigi? No, Luigi; Rome, I believe, has had some slight
acquaintance with greatness and grandeur since the twins fell out with
each other, but Rome hasn’t the mind to contemplate _your_ precious
distinctions. You might as well suggest to a poet of heroism, to the
chanter of an immemorial saga, that he should study the manners of a
tea-party in a suburban drawing-room.
My outburst took another form, however; these sentiments let it loose,
but it was differently worded. Luigi only stared and waited till I had
finished. I ended on the cry that seemed never to be far from my lips in
those days, the cry of envy at the sight of the fortunate folk who could
do their cringing, if it had to be done, in Rome. I said that I should
willingly crawl the length and breadth of the city for the reward of an
abiding place within the walls; I shouldn’t mind what pope or king might
think of me. Luigi very naturally felt that I hadn’t quite grasped his
situation. He resumed his discourse, and he began to point out to me
that in my place and with my opportunities he would indeed go far. No
doubt, for example, I had very influential friends. Not very? Well, only
give _him_ the chance of a footing in England, an opening that would
bring him into the society of gentlemen--and he developed his theme
still further, guiding it, as I presently noticed, into preciser detail
than before. The sun had hardly faded from the tree-tops when I learned
that a person in my position, with my advantages, was just the person
whose hand Luigi had long desired to shake. And what did he take my
position to be, and where, pray, did he recognize its advantages? I
didn’t put the question as plainly as this, for indeed I had no wish to
meet Luigi when he came to detail. I clung to generalities, and I
suggested that there were plenty of most ungentlemanly people in London.
“I’m sure I shouldn’t think any of _your_ friends ungentlemanly,” said
Luigi.
What are you to do with a youth like that? I own that I felt a little
excited by the thought that somebody, were it only Luigi, should turn to
me for patronage; and Luigi would certainly never discover just how much
of it I had to dispense. And yet he had taken my measure fairly enough;
he didn’t suppose that my own credit was very high, but I could “mention
his name,” he said, in certain quarters, and he shot out a suggestion or
two which showed that he had already considered the ground and was
prepared. Any chance was a chance worth seizing; any simple Englishman
thrown in his way might be a step on his ladder. But he was shrewd; and
when he found that his hints were left lying where they fell, he turned
aside to disparage his unfortunate family again--his sister, his aunt,
his father, a bunch of futility that hindered a man in his effort to
announce and express himself in the world. In a few words it was
delicately implied that anybody who lent a hand to Luigi would never be
embarrassed by Luigi’s family--the admirable youth would see to that. He
was rather uneasy to think that already his women had engaged me to
visit them; he knew, to be sure, that their pride and delight was to
serve Luigi, but a prudent man doesn’t entrust his business to the
bungling devotion of two ignorant women. With this in mind he insinuated
that I needn’t trouble myself with their officious invitations; though
if I cared to see something of the town under _his_ guidance, why indeed
he was very much at my disposal. Rome the inexhaustible! The sacred
place as Luigi saw it was quite unlike the city of Deering’s vision, or
of Jaff’s, or of Cooksey’s; but he too was convinced that his was the
real and only Rome, such as it was--a poor thing compared with the
Strand of London.
VII. VIA DELLA PURIFICAZIONE