found that he had inevitable business in the city, and of course there
was no question or exposing the aged patriot to the risks of travel--he
seldom ventured abroad; but a friend of Teresa’s was to join us at
Albano, a charming Russian lady in reduced circumstances, and perhaps
Emilio would follow us later, and Berta had sent word to another friend
of hers, a German girl, who lived out there, and possibly we should find
Miss Gilpin too--only it seemed that Miss Gilpin was rather “proud of
herself,” Berta said, rather “high,” and if she knew that Madame de
Shuvaloff, poor thing, was to be one of our party she might think it
beneath her; for Madame de Shuvaloff, you understand, had been reduced
to keeping a boarding-house near the Ponte Margherita, to support
herself and her little girl, and Berta for her part could see nothing
dishonourable in poverty, but some people--“som people,” said Teresa
trenchantly, “think it wrong for som people to be even alive, isn’t it?”
We must, then, remember that _if_ Miss Gilpin should condescend to
accompany us--“condescend?” cried Berta, “I shall just give her a good
piece of somthing if she condescends, oh yes I shall!” “You silly gurl,”
said Teresa, “always in a passion about somthing!”--and Teresa began to
reckon the number of our party for luncheon, confusing herself
inextricably in the effort to keep the certain and the probable and the
unlikely in separate categories.
We had crossed the shining plain, had tunnelled into the hills and
arrived at Albano before we had time to delight very much in the
country; and even the glorious free English ramble that we were to take
in the woods before luncheon consisted mostly of debates and delays,
harassing doubts, wrong turnings--for Teresa was positively afraid of
her niece’s boldness, once the girl was let loose in the country, and
she was resolved that the crazy thing should incur no unpleasantness,
so she darkly mentioned, such as may easily befall one in the wild
places of the mountain. The wildness, Teresa seemed to hold, begins
where the back-streets and the chicken-runs and the rubbish-heaps of the
Albanians leave off; and our hour of adventure ran out while we peered
round corners, measured the risk of climbing a stony path that
disappeared in an ilex-wood, and recollected that we mustn’t be led on
to wander too far before the time appointed for our party at the
trattoria. “How quick the morning passes in the country!” exclaimed
Berta, casting out a black-gloved hand to beat off the flies and the
puffs of white dust--the flies and the dust in the safer parts of the
country are very thick. “But we must hurry back,” Teresa reminded us;
and we turned away from the prospect of the ilex-wood, keeping to the
shade of a high wall covered with bright blue posters, and stepped out
with more assurance to regain the street of the tram-line, the
town-piazza above the railway-station, and the homely eating-house where
Madame de Shuvaloff and the rest were to meet us.
Our party kept us waiting interminably, and in the end it consisted only
of the Russian lady, reduced and charming, with her sharp and shrill
little girl. Everybody else, it seemed, had failed us, whether in
forgetfulness or in pride. But no matter, Teresa and Berta could make a
party, as I have noted, out of the leanest material; and Madame de
Shuvaloff (it is but a random shot that I take at her name) was one of
those who occupy a large amount of room for their size. We waited long
for her; but she came straggling into the trattoria at last--a tiny
scrap of a woman with a thin pale face and huge eyes, a clutching and
clawing and shrieking little creature, like a half-fledged young bird
of prey escaped from the nest. She strayed in upon us as though by
accident, and with a shriek and a flourish of her claws, catching sight
of us, she scrambled over chairs and tables, beat her wings in startled
surprise, dashed herself against the walls and ceiling--I give the
impression I received--and disappeared again, fluttering out through the
doorway with a cry for something she had left behind. It was her child
that she had lost, and there was a scuffle without, an encounter of
clashing beaks, and she returned with the child in her talons--a still
smaller but quite as active young fledgling, which struggled and shook
itself free and bounced across the floor to its perch at our table.
Teresa and Berta sat up, very decent and straight-backed, to meet the
shock of the party, and with the subsiding of the first commotion they
were able to keep it more or less in hand. Our guests were induced to
compose themselves on their chairs in the likeness of human beings.
They did their best, and the little girl indeed (her mother called her
Mimi) straightened her frock and folded her hands and pursed her lips in
a careful imitation of Teresa, enjoying the pretence of social and
lady-like manners. She improved on her example with a coquettish dart of
her eyes (at the gentleman of the party) under lowered lids; she had a
native expertness beyond the rest of us, and at intervals through the
meal she remembered to use it. But she broke down when a dish of food
appeared, and she then became the voracious nestling, passionate to be
the first to get her fingers into the mess and to secure the likeliest
lumps. She screamed to her mother in a jumble of languages to give her
_that_ bit, the best, not the nasty scrap beside it; her mother ordered
and protested, Mimi fought and snatched--on the arrival of anything
fresh to eat there was an outbreak of the free life of the wild. Mimi,
pacified with the lump she needed, was again a young person of gracious
style; and Teresa, quite powerless before these glimpses of the unknown,
could resume her control of the occasion and the ceremony. Mimi then,
momentarily gorged and at ease, watched us with a flitting glancing
attention that I in my turn was fascinated to watch. Her mind was keenly
at work, transparently observing and memorizing; she noted our
attitudes, our speech and behaviour, she stored them away for her
benefit; and I wondered what words she was using, what language she
thought in, while she seized and saved up these few small grains of a
social experience. Whenever she caught my eye on her she began
immediately to make use of them; she consciously arched her neck, she
fingered her fork with elegance, she shot her glances with eloquent
effect.
Her mother meanwhile--but her mother was indeed a baffling study. Teresa
was quite right, she was charming; she was perfectly simple and natural,
and just as much so when she was human as when she clawed and shrieked
in her native bird-savagery. When she was human she talked with a
curious questing ingenuity in any or all of the civilized tongues. She
raised us above trivialities, she neglected Teresa’s questions about her
journey, her plans, her unpunctuality; she started (in French) a
fanciful disquisition upon some very modern matter of painting or
dancing or dressing, some revolution in all the arts that was imminent;
and it seemed that she was deep in the inner councils and intrigues of
the revolution, which had its roots in a philosophic theory (she
slipped, without missing a step, into German) that she expounded in a
few light touches of whimsical imagery (suddenly twisting off into
Italian); and I can hear her assuring Teresa that the black misery of a
woman’s life will flush into pink, will whiten to snow of pure delight,
if she breaks through the bonds of--I forget what, of earthly thought,
of esthetic imprisonment; and I can see Teresa’s blank white face, her
bonnet-strings neat under her chin, her lips decently arranged as though
her mouth were full of dough, while she waits her opportunity to declare
that this modern art is all “too ogly, too drrreadfully horrible and
ogly for words.” The little visitor smiled sweetly and darted with
nimble grace into further reaches of her argument--where she evoked a
stonier stare upon the faces of Teresa and Berta, who began to look
straight across the table at nothing at all as though they could
suddenly neither see nor hear. There seemed to be no malice in Madame de
Shuvaloff, but there was no shame either. She talked most improperly (in
French), breaking through the last of the bonds that restrain us, not
indeed from the snowier heights, but from the pinker revelries of
speculation; and I don’t know where it would have ended or how Teresa
would have tackled the daring creature at last, but Mimi (who had quite
understood that she was to look inattentive when these topics were
broached)--Mimi presently distracted her mother and all of us by hurling
herself (out of her turn) at the _fritto misto_, in a passion of fear
lest the dish should be rifled and spoilt before it reached her.
Mimi was not a nice child, but her mother was decidedly attractive--far
more artless, more unconscious, more heedless than her daughter. What in
the world was the history behind them? Madame de Shuvaloff never
explained herself, and it “passes me,” as Luigi would say, how she came
to be keeping a Roman _pension_ by the Ponte Margherita. Russian she
was, Russian was at the bottom of all her tongues; but evidently it had
for so long been overlaid by the rest of Europe that she had almost
forgotten it was there. Each of her languages, however, was a language
of her own, full of odd pretty tones and inflexions that coiled and
scooped and curled with a singular music. When the struggle over the
_fritto misto_ died down Teresa seized the word with decision, the word
that seemed furthest from Madame de Shuvaloffs indelicacy, and with
Berta’s ready help she kept the conversation on a purer level. We talked
of the terrible rise in the price of provisions: did Olga know (Olga was
Madame de Shuvaloff) that Luigi had found it was entirely due to the
weakness of the government?--the criminal weakness of the ministry
before the threats of the _bassa plebe_; and if you ask how it is that
the common people insist on an increase in the cost of living, which
seems improbable, Teresa assures you that in fact they don’t know _what_
they want, such is their ignorance and their folly. We only perceive
that the country is in a sad condition, and Luigi declares--but Madame
Olga suddenly shrieks out with a shrill exclamation, followed by a
little fountain of airy laughter, for she has just remembered that she
forgot to give any directions to her servant, before leaving Rome this
morning, and she believes the creature capable of anything--of
anything--and heaven knows what will have happened to the midday meal of
her pensioners! “How many is your table?” asked Teresa with sympathetic
concern. “Eighty!” cried Madame Olga lightly, and she fumbled in her
bag and showed us a couple of five-franc notes that she had expressly
borrowed from one of her guests, only last night, for Colomba the cook
to go marketing with to-day. Well, isn’t it unlucky? “I shall lose them
all--all my eighty!” the little lady humorously wailed. “I lose them
always; Mimi and I, we shall starve!”
I expected a howl from Mimi, but she took it unmoved; she knew her
mother. Teresa, it was evident, knew her less, for Teresa gloomed
anxiously upon the prospect, trying to hold little Olga to her words and
beginning to offer advice and warning. You couldn’t trust a Roman
cook--surely Olga had discovered that; and lodgers, in these bad times,
are precious articles and you must handle them cautiously. “But how many
did you say--?” It broke upon Teresa that Olga had played with her over
the number, and her face was a pleasant mixture of dignity a little
ruffled and mannerliness striving to meet a joke. Madame de Shuvaloff
became instantly serious; and though it didn’t appear that the disaster
of the dinnerless pensioners weighed on her, she was desperate,
unutterably hopeless, over the tragedy of a woman’s life in the great
horrible world. “Men,” she said bitterly, “do what they will with
us”--and the eyes of Berta and Teresa met in a swift glance as they
hastily struck up their give-and-take on the question of the likeliest
methods of attracting the right kind of lodger to share one’s home. One
should possibly advertise in the newspapers--but the topic was
unfortunately chosen, for Madame Olga immediately flung off into a
rippling titter of mirth, thin and savage, at the notion of
“attracting,” were it only as boarders at one’s table, the men who make
the world so black a place for a woman. “All beasts!” she declared
flatly; and this was her opportunity for a story that she addressed
particularly at me, glaring with her great eyes in the horror of what
she told.
Truly the Russian wild sends out strange little emissaries to the cities
of civilization. This tiny frail slip of a woman, who looked as though a
puff of air from the frozen plain would shrivel her dead, had somehow
scrambled across Europe and held her own and lodged herself in a cranny
of Rome; and there she had stuck, she had survived, you couldn’t tell
how, with a tenacity of slender claws that could grasp and cling where a
heavier weight would have found no chance of foothold. She was evidently
indestructible. The world, by her account, massed its ponderous strength
to crush her; but there was nothing in her that might be crushed, no
superfluous sensitive stuff to be caught by a blow; there was nothing
but one small central nut or bead of vitality, too hard for the world
itself to crack. She thrived upon the conflict; I don’t for a moment
suppose that the world was as unkind to her as it was, for example, to
poor foolish old Teresa; but she believed herself to be singled out for
its crudest attack, and the thought was exquisite and stimulating. She
had, moreover, a real artistic passion; her fire and thrill were genuine
when she talked of the strange things that were doing among the artists;
but I note that it had to be the art of the present, the art of a
chattering studio rather than of a hushed museum--she couldn’t have
thrilled and fired before the beauty of the past and dead, where there
aren’t the same intoxicating revolutions to be planned and exploded upon
an unsuspicious age. Drama she needed, and of drama you can always have
your fill if you know as well as she did how to make it. Why yes, she
created a notion of mysterious conspiracy, somewhere lurking in the
background, by her very refusal to explain and apologize when she was
late for lunch.
As for her story of the baseness of men, told with extreme earnestness
in three languages, she made a very good thing of it and we were all
impressed. But much more striking than her story was the picture that
rose before me of her establishment, her boarding-house by the Tiber,
where a dozen lodgers (she reduced them to a dozen), mostly like herself
from the Russian inane, gathered and mingled, quarrelled and stormed at
each other, conspired, bribed the cook, made love to the landlady (of
course I have only her word for it), eloped without settling their
bills, lent her five-franc notes to pay at least for the next meal--but
chiefly talked, talked day and night, sat interminably talking, while
Olga rated the servants or hunted for the lost key of the larder, while
Colomba had hysterics and dropped the soup-tureen, while Mimi killed
flies at the window and had her own little crisis of nerves over a
disappointment about a box of chocolates. All these visions appeared in
the story--which was a story of the monstrous behaviour of one of the
lodgers, a young man of whom Olga had tried to make a friend. A
friend!--yes, Olga believed in friendship, in spite of a hundred
disillusions; she believed in a species of friendship that transcends
the material, the physical; but we needn’t go into that, for though she
_had_ believed in it, the young man’s behaviour had pretty well killed
her faith, once for all, and she now saw that there could be no true
friendship in a world where half the world (the brutes of men) have no
sense of honour, none of loyalty, none of idealism, transcendentalism,
immaterialism; and Teresa still held her lips placidly bunched while
Olga circled among these safe abstractions, but the little wretch came
presently down with a bump again upon plainer terms, and it behoved
Teresa to intervene with all her decision. Olga said that the young man
had proved to be not only destitute of these safe vague qualities, but
terribly in possession of other qualities, quite of the opposite kind,
which she proceeded to name; and their names lacked that soft classical
buzz and blur (idealism, materialism, prunes-and-prism--the termination
is reassuring), and on the contrary were so crude and clear-cut that
Teresa pushed back her chair and suggested another delightful long
ramble in the forest, a “country afternoon,” such as we all adored.
There really was no malice in Olga, the little wretch; for to be
malicious you must at least have some consciousness of the feelings of
other people, you must know what will hurt them; and Olga was aware of
no feelings, no subject of sensation, save her own and herself. Imagine
all the relations of the world to be arranged like the spokes of a
wheel, with no crossing or tangling before they reach the middle; and
Olga herself in the middle, with every thread of feeling that exists all
radiating away from her into space: that was the order of nature as Olga
saw it, that indeed was her fashion of introducing order of any kind
into the universe. One must simplify somehow; and if, unlike Olga, you
suspect people of thinking and feeling on their own account, all anyhow,
turning the cart-wheel into a tangle--well then you must order your
private affairs, your habits, your household at least, into some kind
of reposeful pattern. Olga had no need of a stupid mechanical pattern,
the mere work of her own hands, to be imposed upon the facts around her.
Let Colomba rave, let the lodgers hurl their boots among the crockery
(she happened to mention it as one of their ways), let the
boarding-house seethe and heave like a page of Dostoevsky: no matter,
the universe kept its grand simplicity, all lines met at the centre,
Olga was there. The story of the base young man had no bearing upon
anybody but herself; Teresa was shocked, but Olga didn’t care, didn’t
notice, and she went on absorbed in her narrative--or she would have
done so if Mimi hadn’t made another diversion (to be frank, she was sick
before she could get to the door) in which the young man was finally
dropped and forgotten.
Emilio now joined us, very hot and shiny from the train, and as soon as
he had refreshed himself we issued forth--an orderly procession, for
Mimi clung pensively awhile to her mother’s arm; and it was agreed that
we should enjoy ourselves unconventionally, fearlessly, in a walk
through the greenwood to Castel Gandolfo. We mustn’t forget, however,
that Fräulein Dahl, Berta’s German friend, would be descending from
Castel Gandolfo (where she lived) to meet us; and we immediately saw
that whichever of the forest-paths we chose we should certainly miss
her. “We had better go perhaps no further than this,” said Berta,
pausing under the blue posters of the wall we had already studied that
morning; and Emilio proposed the amendment that it would be safer still
to wait in the middle of the town, by the tram-station, where the lady
would be sure to look for us. But Berta yearned for the country; so she
and Teresa spread a couple of newspapers upon a dust-heap under the
posters, gathered their skirts, deposited themselves with care, and
pointed out that one had a charming glimpse of the country from this
very spot. A little way up the lane indeed there was leafy shadow and
the beginning of a woodland ride; and Olga, restlessly ranging, called
to us to come further and take to the forest. But Teresa and Berta were
established, and they declared themselves at ease where they
were--though I can’t say they looked very easy, with their veils pulled
down and their knees drawn neatly together, both clutching the ornate
handles of their umbrellas. “People will think we are strange gurls,”
said Berta, “sprawling by the road like this!” Emilio had to make the
best he could of their wild English ways; he leant with resignation
against the picture of a highly developed young woman in evening dress,
who held out a box of pills with a confident smile; he sucked at a long
cigar in silence. Mimi really did sprawl; she lay where she fell, she
slept the sleep in which one repairs the disasters of a recent meal.
I followed her mother up the shadowy path into the woodland, where we
were to watch carefully for Berta’s expected friend. When at last you
are clear of the pigs and chickens of Albano you plunge immediately into
the Virgilian forest that spreads and spreads over the hills, between
the two deep bowls of the lakes. The ancient darkness of ilex leads you
on, and the darkness changes to hoary sun-sprinkled oak-shadow, to open
spaces where the big white rock-rose flowers against the outcrop of the
grey stone, and the path stumbles on into damp green tunnels among the
chestnut saplings; and a laden mule, driven by a bare-footed boy,
appears with a jangle of bells that carry me off and away, deeper and
deeper into the time-softened goodness of the wondrous land, the
Saturnian land, the great mother of kindly beast and songful man--for
the boy sings as he plods up the pathway, with long sweet notes that are
caught by a hungry ear, caught and lost, caught again in the far
distance with an echo of the years of gold, of the warm young earth in
its innocence. How can we praise the land that Virgil praised? Leave the
word to Virgil, listen while he repeats it again--again. I can hear
nothing else till the last sound of it has died; and my companion, the
strange little wild thing from the east, lifts up her finger and is
silent and motionless till it ceases. What does Olga know of the golden
years and the Saturnian land? Nothing, nothing whatever; but she listens
with uplifted finger, entranced by the freedom of the forest, for a few
fine moments forgetful of her own existence. Then she is herself again,
flitting and scrambling down the path to meet a figure that approaches
through the green shadows.
IX. CASTEL GANDOLFO
FRAULEIN DAHL CAME STRIDING UP the woodland path with a free swing of
her arms and flourish of her staff--not a Virgilian figure, yet
classical too in her way, carrying her head in the manner of a primeval
mother-goddess of the tribes. Didn’t the old Mediterranean settler,
pushing inland from the coast where he had beached his boat--didn’t he,
somewhere in the ilex-solitude of the Italic hills, encounter certain
ruder and ruggeder stragglers from the north?--and hadn’t these tall and
free-stepping strangers brought with them their matriarch, the genius of
their stock, a woman ancient as time and still as young as the morning,
with her grey eyes and her broad square brow and her swinging tread? No
doubt my ethnology is very wild, but thus it sprang into my mind and
took form at the sight of the woman who approached--for whom the name of
Fräulein Dahl, so flat and so featureless, seemed absurdly inadequate.
She flopped when she saw us, she stood serene and large while the little
Russian dashed about her with cries and pecks. Olga hung upon her with
excited endearments, with lithe gesticulations that made the new-comer
look entirely like a massive and rough-hewn piece of nature, unmoved by
the futile humanity that scrambles upon her breast. I really can’t speak
of her by the name of a middle-aged spinster from Dresden (which indeed
she was); for I can only think of her as Erda, as the earth-mother of
the ancient forest; and when she addressed me in her deep voice and her
Saxon speech, brief and full, it was as though she uttered the
aboriginal tongue of the northern twilight, the _Ursprache_ of the
heroes. I ought to have answered only with some saga-snatch of strong
rough syllables, like the clash of shield and spear beneath the spread
of the Branstock; and as I couldn’t do this, and my poor little phrases
of modern politeness were intolerably thin and mean for such an
encounter, I must own that my conversation with Erda didn’t flourish,
and I had mainly to look on while Olga, not troubled by my scruples,
clawed and dragged her into the fever of our degenerate age. Think of
Erda clutched by the skirt, pecked with familiar kisses, haled out of
the forest into the presence of Teresa and Berta, where they sit on
their dust-heap and wave their black gloves in a voluble argument, the
heat and the flies having by this time fretted their tempers and
considerably flawed, it would seem, their joy in the freedom of the
country. But nothing can disturb the large repose of Erda’s dignity, and
the groundlings of the dust recover themselves as she appears, suddenly
sweeten their smiles and their voices, advance to meet and greet a
middle-aged spinster from Dresden, hard-featured and shabbily clad.