there still was a few days ago, which runs up the hill of the Ludovisi,
on the way to the Pincian Gate. The garden of the Ludovisi crowned the
hill, I suppose, in the days of Kenyon and Roderick Hudson, and now the
vast new inns of the tourist stand there; but even before the time of
Rowland and Roderick the old streets had encroached up to the very edge
of the garden, and there they are still, with the great hotels towering
above them--a handful of tangled byways between the boulevard on one
side and the tram-line on the other. These papal relics are exceedingly
squalid, I must own, what with the cabbage-stalks in the mud and the
underclothing that hangs drying in the windows; but they are charmingly
named, and Luigi’s family lived in the Via della Purificazione.
From the doorstep of the house a narrow black staircase tunnelled its
way upward, and I climbed in the darkness and the dankness to the
apartment of my friends on the fifth story. I rang and stood waiting,
not in vain, for the delightful shock that seldom fails you on a Roman
threshold; I knew it well and I counted on it, for nothing gives you a
swifter tumble into the middle ages than the Roman fashion of receiving
a stranger. You stand on the landing, and you might suppose that the
commonplace door would open to the sound of the bell and admit you in a
moment. Not at all; there is a dead silence, as though somebody listened
cautiously, and presently a shrill cry of challenge from within--“Chi
è?” So it happens, and for me the house becomes on the spot a black old
fortress-tower of the middle ages, myself a bully and a bravo to whom
no prudent householder would open without parley; that deep dark
suspicion, that ancient mistrust of the stranger at the door--it pulls
me over into the pit of the Roman past, suddenly yawning at my feet. I
used to wait for the cry when I knocked at a Roman door, and to wish
that I could answer it and call back with the same note of the voice of
history. It takes a real Roman to do so, and I chanced to hear a real
young Roman do so once or twice; he answered the challenge with a
masterful tone of command that he had acquired long ago, in days when he
shouted and fought in the streets of Rome, a fine young figure in the
train of the Savelli or the Frangipani.
Luigi’s family kept a dishevelled old maid-servant, wild of hair and
eye; insanely staring and clutching the tails of her hair she ushered me
through a dark entry into the family apartment. It was a bewildering
place; there were plenty of rooms, freely jumbled together, but their
functions were confusingly mixed. I couldn’t help knowing, for example,
as I passed from one to another, that Teresa was hooking herself into
her gown by a small scullery-sink in which there stood a japanned
tea-pot and a cracked bedroom looking-glass. I was deposited finally in
a very stuffy little parlour, smothered and stifled with a great deal of
violent blue drapery and tarnished gilding. The door was closed upon me,
but it didn’t cut me off from the affairs of the household. There was a
rattling of tea-things in the kitchen and the voice of Teresa giving
directions in an urgent whisper; and from somewhere else there came
another voice, a man’s, that was new to me--a voice which uttered a
fruity torrential Italian, quite beyond any apprehension of mine,
though I could easily tell that it wasn’t the language of formal
compliment. Before long Teresa rustled brightly into the parlour, one
hand outstretched, the other searching stealthily for an end of white
tape that had slipped through her hooking and wandered over the back of
her skirt. She welcomed me on a high-pitched note, at the sound of which
the man’s voice immediately stopped; and she drew me forth through
another small room, containing an unmade bed, to an open window and a
balcony that commanded a fine wide view of the city. The balcony was
large enough to hold a table and two or three bedroom chairs; and there
we found Berta, together with a man who offered himself politely for
introduction to the new-comer.
“Mr. Daponte,” said Berta, presenting him. He was a very short thick man
of forty or so, chiefly composed of a big black moustache and a pair of
roving discoloured eyes; he was glossily neat, though rather doubtfully
clean. He bowed, while the ladies graciously exhibited him and explained
that he spoke no English. “But he understands very well,” said Berta,
“and he loves to listen.” The gentleman showed his understanding by a
grin and a flourish of his large dirty hands, and a remark seemed to be
labouring up from within him, so that we all paused expectant. It was an
English remark, but it miscarried after all. “I speak--” said Mr.
Daponte; and he spoke no more, appealing mutely to the women to help him
out. But the Medusa-head of the old servant appeared in the window at
that moment, and she fell over the step to the balcony and landed the
tea-tray with a crash on the table; and in the commotion, while Berta
busied herself over the cups and plates, Teresa drew me aside and
whispered archly, indicating the little gentleman, “He will be the
hosband of my niece.” Berta looked round and performed a blush--she
felicitously glanced, that is to say, and stirred her shoulders as
though she blushed; and she gave a little push to her swain in a girlish
manner, which took him by surprise and mystified him for an awkward
instant; but then he nodded intelligently and responded with a playful
blow. “Tea, tea!” cried Teresa, smiling largely; and we packed ourselves
round the table to enjoy a plate of biscuits and a pale straw-coloured
fluid which Berta poured from the japanned tea-pot.
The view from the balcony was magnificent, only you had to overlook the
nearer foreground. We seemed to be swung out upon space, above the
neighbouring house-roofs; and beyond and below them was a great sweep of
the sunlit city, with the dome of St. Peter like a steel-grey bubble on
the sky-line. But the nearer house-roofs, crowding into the foreground,
made a separate picture of their own, and I found it difficult to look
beyond them. There is much oriental freedom of house-top life in Rome,
on fine summer evenings; you scarcely catch a glimpse of it from the
street below, but on Teresa’s balcony we were well in the midst of it.
Bath-sheba wasn’t actually washing herself, but she felt safe and at
ease in the sanctity of the home, lifted up to the sky, and she
displayed her private life to the firmament. Little gardens of flowers
in pots, tea-tables like our own, groves and pergolas of intimate linen,
trap-doors and hatches from which bare-headed figures, informally clad,
emerged to take the evening air--it was a scene set and a drama
proceeding there aloft, engaging to the eye of a stranger, and our
balcony was hung like a theatre-box to face the entertainment. Close in
front, just beneath us, there was a broad space of flat roof on which
the householder had built an arbour, a pagoda of wire with greenery
trained about it; and in the arbour sat the householder himself, a
grey-headed old priest, crossing his legs, smoking his cigar and reading
his newspaper; and a pair of small children scuttled and raced around
him, while he placidly took his repose, and rushed shrieking to meet a
young girl, who climbed from below with a basket of clothes for the
line; and the priest looked up, waved his cigar and cried out a jest to
the girl, who stood with her basket rested on her hip, merrily
threatening the children who clutched at her skirt. The blast of a
cornet came gustily from another roof-sanctuary, further off, and there
a young man was perched astride upon a bench, puffing at his practice in
solitude. And so on from roof to roof, and I found myself sharing all
this easy domestic enjoyment of a perfect evening with rapt attention.
The voice of Teresa recalled me; for Teresa was appealing to me to
confirm her, to say that she was right in telling Emilio (Emilio was
Berta’s betrothed)--in telling him some nonsense, whatever it was, about
the splendour of London, its size or shape, its social charm; Teresa was
certain of her fact, for once she had spent a fortnight in London, and
now she dwelt upon the memory. A sole fortnight--but how she had used
it! She had discovered in some handbook a scheme for the exploration of
all London, within and without, in fourteen days; it appears that after
fourteen tours of inspection, each of them exactly designed to fit into
a long summer’s day, you may be satisfied that you have left no stone of
London unturned. Only to be sure you must rigidly stick to the
directions of the handbook, and Teresa had to regret that they didn’t
include the spectacle of Queen Victoria; which was the more to be
deplored because actually she had had the chance, and yet couldn’t take
it because the handbook forbade. You see she had duly taken her stand
one morning, according to plan, before Buckingham Palace; and a crowd
was assembled there, and a policeman had told her that the Queen was to
appear in ten minutes; but ah, the handbook gave her only five for the
front of Buckingham Palace, and then she must seize a certain omnibus
and be off to the Tower; and she couldn’t upset the whole admirable
scheme on her own responsibility, now could she?--so she hadn’t seen the
Queen, and she couldn’t convince Emilio of something or other which I
could certainly confirm if I would. What was it? Apparently Teresa had
just been telling me; but I was so much interested in the young man with
the cornet that I had missed the point.
For me the point lay rather in the surprise of our meeting together upon
a roof in Rome to talk about Buckingham Palace. I met the appeal rather
wildly, but Teresa was contented; Emilio perceived that she knew more of
London than I did, and the two women struck up a familiar selection from
their repertory, the antiphonal strain of their singular affinity to all
things of England, of the English. How they adored the “dear old
country,” they said--how they were drawn by that call in their blood, of
which I knew. Berta too had seen London, she had spent three days with
her father in a boarding-house of Bloomsbury; she had saluted and
recognized her home. So lost, so transfigured were they in their
Englishry that the Roman evening all about them was again forgotten, it
touched them not at all. Berta begged me to remember how from Gower
Street you may step round the corner into the sparkling throng of
Tottenham Court Road; and “the policemen!” she cried, and “the hansom
cabs!” and “Piccadilly Circus!”--Berta hadn’t much gift of description,
it was enough for her to cry upon the names of her delight. Emilio’s
gooseberry-tinted eyes were strained in the effort to understand our
English talk; he could offer no opinion upon its subject, for all his
mind was given to its translation, word by word, in his thought; but
perhaps he didn’t entirely approve of the general drift, for it was not
quite seemly that Berta should display an experience of the world in
which he couldn’t share. She gave him no attention, however; for she was
quite carried away, the mad thing, by her fond enthusiasm over our dear
old country. She was a little bit cracked on the subject, her aunt had
said; and her aunt leant forward and tapped her on the cheek with tender
ridicule. “You silly child!” said Teresa--for it was not to be forgotten
that the call of the English blood came from _her_ side of the family,
and that Berta stood at a further remove than she from the pride of
their lineage. “But her father,” added Teresa, “is just as bad. He was
always italianissimo, as they say here, but he loved the English
freedom. The Italians do not understand our adorrable freedom.”
No, of course not. Rome, that had old genius of tyranny, lay outspread
beneath and around us, bathed in the spring-sweetness of the first of
May. The white-headed priest had folded his newspaper and was attending
to his flower-pots, snipping and fondling his carnations; while the two
children were struggling with bleating cries for the possession of a
watering-can, which they busily hoisted under the old man’s direction
to the row of the pots; and the girl, stretching her linen on the line,
cried to them over her shoulder to be careful. The young man upon the
further roof had laid aside his cornet and was singing, singing as he
leant upon a parapet--a trailing measure that lingered upon clear high
notes with a wonderful operatic throb and thrill. On another roof
another group had assembled, lounging about a table on which a woman
placed a great rush-bound flask of wine; they were a group of men, four
or five of them, in dark coats and black soft hats, and they stretched
their legs about the table and talked in comfort while the woman filled
their glasses. I thought of Gower Street and Tottenham Court Road; but
Berta’s pitch was too high for me, and I felt that I flagged and dragged
upon them in their fine English flight. But what matter?--so much the
more brilliantly their native patriotism soared and shone; and I
couldn’t but see that it was a true passion, genuinely romantic and
pure, by which they were transported above the daily dullness of the
Street of the Purification, above the lifelong habit of Rome.
“I think you are not so English as we are,” cried Berta; and indeed it
might seem so, as my eyes wandered away from Piccadilly Circus and
followed the old priest and the children--the two children were still
struggling and yelping joyously over their watering-pot. To Berta it
might seem that I was no true Englishman, and I left it at that. Neither
she nor Teresa was troubled with a doubt whether a true Englishman,
sitting there on the balcony in the golden evening of Rome, would be
found to yearn desirously to the thought of the boarding-house in Gower
Street--“Invergarry” was the name of the house, Berta said; perhaps I
knew it? They certainly betrayed themselves badly with their innocent
outcries. I wished that we might have had Cooksey or Deering on the
balcony with us, to teach these women the style of the truly English. My
own was below the level of Cooksey’s--Berta was so far right. I ought to
have shown myself more actively and resolutely Roman, I ought to have
hailed the old priest with kindly patronage, I ought to have been ready
to instruct Berta in the custom and usage of Roman life, leaving her to
grapple as she could with the life of Bloomsbury; Cooksey would have
done all this, the good English Cooksey, true offspring of the diocese
of Bath and Wells--“bien trairoit au linage,” as they say in the old
poems. The better you favour and hold to your lineage, if it is English,
the more complacently you flout it upon the soil of Rome; it is the
sign. Berta, poor soul, hadn’t had the opportunity to grasp these
distinctions. She had only passed three days at Invergarry, and she had
learnt no more than to flourish the ecstasy of her intimacy with our
dear old country. It takes more than three days, it takes a lifetime and
a lineage, to teach you the true cackle of scorn, the thin unmistakable
pipe of irony, which you may hear and salute upon the lips of Cooksey
and of Deering. They are the sons of the dear old country, and I should
recognize their accent anywhere; Berta and Teresa, if they live for
ever, if they live till the reign of the next English pope, will never
acquire it.
But what about Luigi? Luigi, they said, had been detained by business,
but he hoped to join us before the tea-party was at an end. And
presently, sure enough, Luigi appeared on the balcony with his
conquering smile; and my first thought was to study _his_ accent, which
differed from that of his women and which indeed, truth to say, was
considerably more genuine than theirs. It was not a pretty accent, as I
have said; it was exceedingly low; but his slurred and flattened mumble,
with its bad vowels and vulgar stresses, brought the pavement of London
much nearer to me than the lyrical coloratura of his sister and his
aunt. Luigi had only to open his mouth, only to say “_Ah_ believe you”
and “A give yer _mah_ word,” to throw something like a fog of the
Thames-side over the fair southern evening; which should have pleased
the ladies, only they weren’t aware of it. Through Luigi’s talk I dimly
peered into the depths of the cosmopolitan jumble of Rome; and I saw a
company of Englishmen, young blades of commerce, spirited young clurks
in enterprising young houses of business, established upon the sacred
hills in the hope (the vain hope, Luigi assured me) that Rome would
awake from her stuffy old dreams, blinking and rubbing her eyes, to
hustle out into the world of modernity. Sanguine souls, they thought the
sleepy old place might yet be roused to bestir herself; but Luigi told
them plainly that they didn’t know Rome if they had any idea of that
kind. _He_ knew Rome--a dead place, dead and rotten and done for; it
passed _him_ why anybody who wished to do well for himself should come
to Rome. They _did_ come, however, quite a number of them; and Luigi
frequented their society and caught their tones and sedulously practised
their slang.
But in all that commercial society, you understand, there is nothing
that will do a man any _good_; Luigi indicated the reason for this, and
you will be surprised to hear that it was because these commercial
chaps, clurks and agents and travellers and such, are not
gentlemen--not a gentlemanly lot at all. One frequents their society
because no better is at hand; and one frequents it because one can’t
afford to miss _any_ chance in a place like Rome; and perhaps one
frequents it a little because a man likes an opportunity to swagger
round the town with a company of dashing young strangers and to induct
them into its resources of pleasure; but one doesn’t care to lay stress
upon these frequentations when it happens--when it happens that
something just a little bit better presents itself. I state what was in
Luigi’s mind, I offer no opinion upon his judgment; Luigi, as you know,
took the flattering view of my company that it was of the sort which
might, if it were judiciously ensued, do a man good. But I am entitled
to claim that in the end he was disappointed with me, and that the end
came soon. I saw very little more of Luigi, and I believe he never
discovered that “opening” at which he was prepared to jump, dropping the
embarrassment of his family. Some voice of the air afterwards brought me
the news that he had married the elderly widow of a Portuguese Jew, and
that with her too, or perhaps rather with her late husband, he was
grievously disappointed. His smile had carried him, I suppose, beyond
his prudence.
Meanwhile I was able, as I say, to compare his note and accent with
those of his family; and the result was that I warmed a good deal
towards the valiant cheer of Berta and Teresa. They had dropped into the
background (so far as that is possible on a small balcony where five
people were now squeezed about the table) when Luigi made his
appearance; they abdicated and he assumed the rule of the entertainment;
and it became so common and squalid under his direction that I clearly
saw the bravery which the women had lent it till he came. We had been
munching the biscuits with perfect dignity, and when Luigi began
apologizing for them he seemed to degrade us all. Teresa had handed the
plate like one who does honour to herself and her guest, and even
Emilio, whose table-manners were not very good, had pulled himself
together to imitate Berta’s dainty fingering of her tea-cup. But now
Emilio went entirely to pieces; he gulped, he filled his mouth with the
dust of the biscuits and forgot about it while he greedily questioned
Luigi, raising some matter of a promise or an appointment which Luigi
rather sulkily discouraged. “Afterwards!” said Luigi crossly, in
English, and Emilio gloomed in silence and resumed his mouthful of dust.
I don’t think those women had a gay or comely time of it when they were
alone with Luigi; I had a vision of interminable sessions on that
balcony, day after day, Luigi grumbling his discontent and his pity of
himself in an endless acrid argument with the women, while the priest
took his evening repose hard by and the young man on the further
house-top blasted perseveringly upon his cornet.
How strange and sad that these people should have no more suitable stage
for their dreary wrangles than a balcony swung out upon so much of the
history of the world, an airy platform from which you could wave your
handkerchief to the dome of St. Peter! I tried to measure what it might
mean to Berta that in the midst of the golden-brown city beneath us, the
treasury outspread before her every morning when she looked from her
chamber, you could distinguish the smooth unobtrusive crown of the
Pantheon; I pointed it out to her and found she had never noticed it
before. “La Rotonda?” she said; “but the Rotonda should be--” she didn’t
know where it should be, she didn’t know anything about it at all, she
had never seen the view from her balcony, though she knew it was very
fine. “We have a so beautiful prospect,” she said, surveying it with
aroused curiosity, as though for the first time. “In Bloomsbury the view
is not so fine,” I suggested; and she turned her back upon Rome to
protest that I didn’t know my own good fortune, with beautiful London to
enjoy whenever I would. But I liked her for the word; she loved London
for the beauty of Gower Street, not for its openings and its chances;
and she looked coolly upon Rome, not because it is no place for a
gentleman, but because in Rome she had had more than enough of the care
of a decayed old father, of the struggle with mounting prices and
expenses--and very much more than enough, I dare say, of Luigi’s sulking
and complaining, though she still managed to think she thought him a
handsome and brilliant young man. She had, however, secured a husband;
Emilio wasn’t handsome, but like Luigi she took her chance where she
found it.
VIII. ALBANO
Day after day the bounty of the springtime was unfailing; and the day of
our excursion to Albano began as a crystal, towered to its height in
azure and gold, sank to evening over the shadowy plain in pearl and
wine. If the world had been created and hurled upon its path to enjoy a
single day, one only, before dropping again into chaos, this might have
been that day itself--and quite enough to justify the labour of
creation. But in Rome that labour is justified so often, between the
dusk and the dusk, that the children of Rome have the habit of the
marvel; so I judge, at least, by Teresa and Berta, who occupied most of
the time of our small journey in wondering why they had forgotten to
bring the two light wraps which they were accustomed to take with them
in the country. Berta could only remember that she had laid them down
for a moment in the--in the scullery-sink, I suppose, with the cracked
looking-glass, but she stopped herself in mentioning the spot. And
Teresa had all but lost her very smart ivory-hilted umbrella in the
crowded tram, on the way to the station; and she was so much upset that
more than once she thoughtlessly broke out to Berta in Italian--a sure
sign in Teresa of ruffled nerves. We travelled to Albano by train, and
in our flurry of discomposure we couldn’t for a while attend to the
landscape; but presently Teresa reflected that the light wraps would be
safe where they were (she had read where they were in Berta’s eye), and
we could abandon ourselves to our national delight in the country.