and safety, to make the journey of a mile or two from the dust-heap to
the height of Castel Gandolfo, where our new friend had her abode. How
are we to be perfectly certain that if we drive by the highroad we
shan’t wish we had walked through the wood?--but before deciding to walk
through the wood, let us remember that since Teresa sprained her ankle
at Porto d’Anzio last summer it has never been the ankle that it was
before. Emilio eagerly advised caution, caution! “Aha!” said Berta, “he
knows he will be forced to carry her all day on his back, as at Porto
d’Anzio.” (What a picture!) Emilio felt the heat distressingly,
liberally; his gloss was already much bedimmed, he was in no case to
shoulder the lovely burden this afternoon. But Erda brandished her staff
and struck out for the forest, Olga fluttered after her, Mimi awoke
refreshed with a sudden convulsion of black legs and flung herself in
pursuit; and Teresa laughed surprisingly on a high reckless note,
lunging quite vulgarly at Emilio with her umbrella, and declared herself
equal to carrying _him_, if need be, “pig-a-back jolly well all the
time!”--such was her phrase. This was the right vein of rollick for the
adventure of a country holiday, and in this spirit we accomplished the
journey, not a little elated by the sense of our ease and dash. Emilio
did his best to reach our level; he stepped out vigorously, mopping his
brow, and after some careful cogitation in silence he edged to my side
and nudged me, pointing to Teresa and Berta where they breasted the
stony path in front of us. “They are verri sporting gurls,” said Emilio.
Erda guided us by winding ways to her abode--which was a great black
gaunt old villa, masked by a high wall, muffled by thickets of mystery;
she opened a door in the wall, and immediately the place was so grand
and sad, so brave and dark, that its influence arose and hushed us as we
crowded into the dank courtyard. Me at least it silenced, and I should
wish to forget Teresa’s remark when the door closed behind us and she
felt the mounting chill of the scarred and stained old pavement beneath
her tread. Erda had found the right retreat for the austerity of the
poetry of her style; here she lived alone, screened from the world,
musing in her big cool mind upon the processes of time. I wanted to
tell her that she had no business to admit this party of haphazard
starers into her privacy; for Teresa would be certain to make other
remarks, like her last, when she tramped under the vaulted entry and
climbed the bare stone stairway and beheld the heroic emptiness of the
great saloon. She made many indeed; but Erda’s far-away smile passed
over our heads, and you could see that it wasn’t a few bits of trash
like ourselves, idly invading her sanctuary, that would profane the
height of her solitude. For my part I strayed about the great saloon,
looked from the windows at the shining view of the broad Campagna, tried
not to listen to Olga’s polyglot chatter--and wondered how this singular
being occupied herself in her lonely days. For after all she was a
German spinster, a stranger and a pilgrim like the rest of us; and one
ought to be able to picture the detail of her life as she lived it,
between the azure bowl of the Alban lake behind her and the silvery
plain in front, instead of surrendering the impression to the romance of
the ancient poetry she had brought with her from the north.
She appeared to have brought nothing else. The great room contained no
personal trace of her whatever, nothing but a few old chunks of
furniture that were evident relics of the noble owners of the house. On
the walls there were pale vestiges of festal painting, on the chairs and
tables there was a glimmer of exhausted gold; and there was nothing
else, not a stick, not a crock, to suggest that a stranger had arrived
to take possession of the past. The woman from Germany stood in the
middle of the wide floor, distantly smiling; and she filled the space
like a monument, with a grand pervasion of her presence, a distribution
of her authority--so that she seemed to inhabit the amplitude of her
retreat, to populate it, even though she had never sat down in one of
the gilded chairs, never written a line or opened a book there, never
put the room to any of the common uses of life. If I tried to imagine
how she employed herself when she was alone, I could only see her still
standing there in the midst, smiling out of her big tolerant serenity,
while the evening darkened and the night shut her in with her secret
thoughts. I wonder what they were. There seemed to be all the simplicity
of the world in her air and poise--and deeps of old wisdom too, full of
such long and wild experience as would trouble the repose of most of us;
but _she_ didn’t care, the memories of the dark forest and the fighting
men and the clashing assemblies had never disturbed her secular dream;
and now at last, driven from the haunts of her tribe, she had found a
place empty and large enough to contain her for a few centuries more,
perhaps, till the vulgar invasion becomes too much for her even
here--and I should like to know where she will then betake herself. And
what would she think, meanwhile, if she guessed how my fancy had
transformed a plain and elderly Saxon, living for her convenience in a
fine old villa near Rome?--for she had no romantic view of herself, she
saw her own image as unceremoniously, I am sure, as any of the trivial
starers might see it, who for the moment were making free with her
domain.
She really was, however, more splendid than she knew; and it can’t be
denied that a truly intelligent inspiration had brought her to the fine
old Roman villa. The empty shell of the grand style, so long abandoned,
was the one place in the world for her; for she needed greatness and
grandeur, and she couldn’t have found either among the tattle and the
comfort and the sentiment from which she had escaped; and she needed
desolation, a faded grandeur, a dilapidated greatness, secure from the
smart uneasy assertion of our own age’s ridiculous attempt to be
magnificent. Erda was surely the most peculiar of all the Roman pilgrims
I encountered; she had come to Rome because it is big and bare--and yet
not inane, not dumb to reverberating echoes, like the mere virginal
monstrosity of untrodden lands. The echoes of the great saloon were
innumerable; old festivities, old revelries creaked and croaked in it
above a droning and moaning undertone in which I could distinguish, with
a very little encouragement, the most awful voices of lust and hate and
pride. Erda had only to stand still and silent in the evening gloom to
discover that she had the company of all the passions that had clashed
about her in the time of the heroes; she felt at home there, no
doubt--she couldn’t have endured an atmosphere soaked in the childish
spites and jealousies of the present. Yes, she was rightly installed and
lodged--and let that be enough for us; I check the trivial curiosity
that sets me wondering how she really existed, how she came by the
possession of the strange old house, how long she had lived there.
Oddest and unlikeliest of all, if it comes to that, is the fact that
Olga and Teresa should have had the entry of her solitude, should be
cackling in unconcerned familiarity beneath her smile, should be putting
her foolish questions which I try to disregard. I hadn’t the least
intention of asking them how they had made the acquaintance of the
earth-mother; I didn’t want to know, for example, that when she first
came to Rome she had dwelt for a time in Olga’s dishevelled
boarding-house; and you never can tell, if I should press too closely I
might be met with nonsense of that kind. I much prefer to stand apart,
in the embrasure of one of the high windows, and to notice how flat the
thin shriek of these women was falling in the vacancy of the saloon. No
wonder Erda could afford to smile. With one turn of her hand she could
have bundled the whole party out of her sight and her mind; I never so
clearly saw the contract between the real person, standing square upon
her feet, and the sham, drifting and pitching helplessly because it
hasn’t the human weight to hold it to the ground. Even Emilio, who had
seemed weighty enough as he trudged and mopped himself in the
forest-path, had now shrunk to a ducking deprecating apologizing trifle
to whom nobody attended. The women indeed maintained their flutter and
gibber unabashed; but their noise didn’t even reach to the great ceiling
of the room, it broke up and dropped in mid-air; it utterly failed to
mingle with the real echoes of the place, deeply and hoarsely speaking
above our heads.
There now, however, when we had quite given up expecting her, arrived
Miss Gilpin. She appeared in the doorway and she stopped on the
threshold for a moment, collecting the eyes of the company before she
made her advance. She was a trim little woman, not very young, but with
an extremely pretty head of fox-brown hair; and with a graceful gesture
of both hands she sang out a greeting to us all, at a distance, in a
small tuneful voice, standing where the light fell upon the bright coils
of her hair; and with her arms still wide she tripped along the floor to
join our party, giving a hand here and a smile there in a sort of
dance-figure of sweetness and amiability--pausing finally, before me
the stranger, with a kind little questioning smile, while she waited
and looked to Erda for an introduction. You haven’t forgotten, perhaps,
that Miss Gilpin had a certain reputation of pride; and indeed she was a
public celebrity, for she was the authoress of books, of several books,
though she didn’t rely upon these for her effect on entering a room. Her
mazy motion and her hair and her gracious ways were enough for a
beginning, let alone the flattering charm of her inclination when I was
duly presented. She pressed my hand as though to say that already she
marked me off from the rest of the company--whose second-rate mixture we
could both appreciate, she and I; but for her part she didn’t mean to be
wanting in civility to the good souls, and so--“Cara mia!--che
piacere!--dopo tanto!”--she warbled her cries and beamed and inclined
her head in a manner to make everybody feel exceedingly plain and
coarse.
The finest instrument of her superiority, could the rest of the company
perceive it, was her Italian accent. It was probably lost on them, but
it did all its execution on me. She continued to talk Italian, though
Teresa plumped out her rich-vowelled English in return, and though Erda
disdained the use of any speech but her elemental Gothic. Miss Gilpin’s
Italian, you see, was remarkably perfect; her intonation had the real
right ringing edge to it, which you don’t often hear upon English lips.
She pounced upon the stresses and bit off the consonants and lingered
slidingly upon the long vowels--but I needn’t describe it, you easily
recall the effect; and the point of it was that she had acquired it all
by her taste, by her tact, by her talent--not merely because she
couldn’t help it, rubbing against the language all the time (like Olga
or Teresa) in the middle-class tagrag of the town. To me at least the
distinction was very clear. Poor old Teresa, with her English airs,
betrayed herself by the genuine slipshod of her swift Roman
interjections, now and then, aside to her niece or to Emilio; she would
mumble or hiss out a word or two in which there was no mistaking the
carelessness of the native. Miss Gilpin, exquisitely intoning her lovely
syllables, had none of the smirch of professionalism; she seemed to
bring the language of Dante into the drawing-room of a princess--and yet
she was just a clever little English lady, smart and pretty and
well-bred, and you couldn’t for a moment suppose she was anything else.
She was the authoress of several cultivated and charming works, so I
have always understood, in which Italian history and Italian landscape
were artfully blended--her art showing peculiarly in this, that her gush
of romance (over the landscape) was redeemed from weak femininity by her
scholarship, while her severity and soundness (over the history) was
humanized by her descriptions of peasant life, village humours,
parochial ceremonies; and so you learned about the popes and the great
ladies of the Renaissance, and at the same time you slipped unawares
into the very heart of the old unspoilt enchanting country, the real
Italy--or perhaps I should put it the other way round, the vintage and
the white oxen and the kindly old village-priest coming first, leading
you easily onward and upward to the very heart of the Renaissance.
Anyhow Miss Gilpin had her note, and I believe she struck it to
considerable applause. But she didn’t assume the style of a woman of
letters--in this matter too there was nothing professional about her.
She was still the Englishwoman of good connexions, who happened to be
related by marriage or even friendship to two or three of the most
splendid houses of Rome--but who wore this accidental embellishment very
simply, just as a matter of course, needing no words--and who lived by
herself, lived daintily on small means, lived in Italy because she loved
the dear villagers and the white oxen; and when you had taken in all
this, she had still in reserve the telling fact that she wrote these
remarkable books, the kind of books you wouldn’t expect from an elegant
little Englishwoman of the Alban hills--or indeed from a woman at all,
considering their scholarly and manly style; so that she beats the
professional literary hack upon his own ground without making a parade
of it--showing up his assumptions and pretensions rather cleverly, don’t
you agree? There were plenty of people who _did_ agree, and who told her
so; and altogether Miss Gilpin, living amusingly and unconventionally in
the Alban hills, might be thought to enjoy a happy and original position
in her world. Erda was one of the quaint impossible friends that dear
little Nora Gilpin always managed to unearth, with her talent for
discovering interest where other people would fail to notice it.
Behold Miss Gilpin, then, seating herself at ease in one of the great
gilded arm-chairs and making a circle around her of Minna Dahl’s yet
more impossible, frankly impossible, rout of acquaintance; though it
happens that among them to-day is an awkward young Englishman, looking
very much out of his place and apparently with nothing to say for
himself, who isn’t quite the kind of thing that Minna generally produces
on these occasions. (Yes, in Miss Gilpin’s company I am reduced to
giving Erda her own poor name.) An eye may be kept upon the young
Englishman--Miss Gilpin will have a word with him before she goes. For
the present she rustles and warbles, settling herself in the cardinal’s
chair; and she sends Emilio on an errand for something she has left
below, she remembers a question she particularly wished to ask Madame de
Shuvaloff (how lucky a chance!), she places Berta at her side, not
noticing the slight defiance in Berta’s attitude, with a little friendly
tap; and here is a pretty group, gathered and constituted all in a
minute, to brighten the blankness of Minna’s gaunt unhomely
drawing-room. For indeed the dark saloon of the historic passions had
become a drawing-room at once; Miss Gilpin, as she sat there, had
somehow given it the clever touch that makes a room personal,
individual, a part of yourself--the touch that is so slight, though it
achieves such a difference. How is it done? She simply pushes a chair or
two, breaking their rigid rank, she lays her handkerchief on the bare
table and casually throws her moss-green scarf over the back of an
angular couch; she draws Berta on to a low stool beside her (Berta’s
face was a study indeed), she raises her eyes with a clear gaze of
thanks to the cavalier who returns with her tiny embroidered bag; and
the proud old room seems to have surrendered to her charm, adapting
itself to her, attentively serving to accommodate her friends and her
scattered possessions. Poor Minna Dahl, she is strangely without the
knack of making a place comely and habitable.
But Minna Dahl, for a woman like Miss Gilpin, is refreshing in her
singularity; that is the secret of dear Nora’s odd friendship for this
uncouth and unlovely German whom she has picked up somewhere in her
neighbourhood. The lone German, with her offhand manners and her
dreadful clothes, makes a pleasing change for a creature so compact of
civilization as Miss Gilpin. Ah, there are times when we are sick of
culture, bored by style, exasperated by the finer feelings; and then the
relief, the repose in the company of somebody who never reads, never
feels, never questions--who exists in placid contentment like a natural
fact, like a tree in the solid earth! Miss Gilpin could tell you that
after visiting Minna she returns with the sense of having spent a
fortnight alone by the sea-side; she goes home to the world, to her book
and her style, invigorated by great draughts of quiet weather, her
imagination laved by the soothing surging monotony of the ocean tides;
these are her very words. She could also tell you that Minna’s abysmal
ignorance of the Italian Renaissance, and Minna’s atrocious Italian
accent, and Minna’s failure to obtain the least little footing in the
splendid houses of Rome--Miss Gilpin could tell you (but these are not
her words) that by all this too she is very considerably fortified as
she trips home to tea. For the fact is that Miss Gilpin is _not_ as
young as she was, and the reviewers are less respectful to her
scholarship than they used to be, and perhaps she begins to be aware
that she mustn’t visit the Marchesa and the Principessa _too_ often in
these days; and so, and so, as Miss Gilpin flutters away to her solitary
chair by the evening lamp, she quite congratulates herself on the rare
chance of a quiet time with her work, snatched from the claims of the
world--which wasn’t the way she had put it when she set out, rather
wearily, to call on old Minna this afternoon. Who then shall grudge her
the strength she is imbibing at this moment, while she dismisses Emilio
with a smile and repeats (in her pure intonation) a phrase that Minna
has just mangled in her strange Teutonic Italian?
Mimi, the horrid child, had been misbehaving again in some way, and she
and her mother had been fighting it out, and Minna had serenely
interposed and excused the child--“In somma, non è un gran che,” said
Minna with her _bocca tedesca_; and then, chiming upon the air, the same
words tinkled like silver bells from the mouth of Miss Gilpin--with a
difference that can’t be written in print, though it yawns to the ear as
the distance between the Altmarkt and the Piazza del Popolo. Miss Gilpin
perhaps hadn’t done it on purpose, but the effect was to bring the eyes
of Erda (Erda once more!) largely sweeping round upon her, with a gleam
of amusement under which Miss Gilpin for an instant faltered. Erda
towered above her, good-humoured, ironic, solid; and Miss Gilpin had the
sudden misgiving (how well I know it) that she was being watched by a
dispassionate onlooker. She sat enthroned in her chair of state, with
her satellites and her litter of possessions about her; and Erda stood
dispossessed in the background, claiming no rights in the place or the
scene; and yet that passing glimpse of Erda’s amusement disarranged the
plan, and a wan chill for a moment blenched the satisfaction of Miss
Gilpin. Oh, it was nothing, it vanished--at least it vanished for Miss
Gilpin; she was herself again, she held and graced the situation. For
me, however, it was enough to restore my Erda to her predominance--or
rather to reveal that she had never lost it. To suppose that little Miss
Gilpin could really install herself in the empty seat of grandeur, fill
it with her fine shades and her diminutive arts! Erda is still there,
massive in her simplicity, knowing no arts, needing none.
To me it was a relief, I must say, when at last Miss Gilpin broke up the
party and we streamed forth again into the brilliant evening. Erda
dismissed us all with a deep farewell at the gateway, leaving us to face
the renewed problem of the path, the fatigues of the journey, the tram
that we should probably miss, the train of which Emilio had forgotten
the hour. Miss Gilpin hastily made off to her own abode, near by, waving
a light loose invitation to us all to visit her there “next time,” and
annoying Berta extremely by disappearing before she could have observed
the very guarded manner of Berta’s reply. “She won’t see _me_ there in a
horry,” said this young woman with proper pride. Mimi refused to walk
another step, Olga stormed, Emilio spread his hands and shook his
fingers in a wrangle with Teresa over his forgetfulness; and so we
proceeded to the tram and the train and the scramble of our fretful
times. But for my part I carried back to Rome a vision that I kept
securely and that is still before me: Erda closing the gate behind us,
Erda remounting the black stairway and re-entering the solitude of her
great room, Erda standing there in the middle of it, all by herself,
never moving, while again the old night rolls in upon her from the dead
plain.
X. VIA SISTINA
Miss Gilpin, before she fled, had duly taken the measure of the awkward
young Englishman; a probing question or two had given her all the
insight she required. And the consequence was that a very little later,
when she happened to be spending a day or two with some friends in Rome,
I was summoned to present myself at their apartment in the Via Sistina.
I had an idea that this was decidedly an upward step for me. Miss
Gilpin’s level, as I understood it, was a higher than I had touched as
yet, and I set off in response to this call from the Via Sistina with
some complacency. It was only a few days ago, after all, that I had
drifted to the Fountain of the Tortoises in the condition of a mere
romantic waif, knowing nobody, knowing nothing of the true life of the
real Rome; and now the shut doors were opening, I had passed within, I
had my own Roman circle like Deering himself. I watched a British
family-party issuing from their hotel in the Piazza di Spagna for the
sight-seeing of the afternoon--I watched them with amused supremacy.
They whispered to each other, noticing me, that I was evidently an old
hand, a familiar resident; or if they didn’t I whispered for them--and
so sympathetically that I was quite flattered by the respectful envy of
their tone. The next moment I was face to face with Deering himself; he
was being besieged, as it chanced, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, by
those dreadful little boys in velvet breeches and matted curls of whom
we had spoken the other day.
He was vexed that I should see him at this disadvantage. The little
beasts, they were treating him as they treat the common tourist; they
hadn’t noticed the extreme Romanism of his hat. Deering vilified them
most idiomatically, but they had no sense of style. The right way with
violent children is more universal, I think; it applies to them all and
everywhere, if you have the command of it; but Deering was singularly
helpless, and the children bothered and clung to him, recognizing their
prey. When at last he had beaten them off he was greatly ruffled, and he
snapped at me rather pettishly, demanding to know where I came from and
was going. That was easily explained; but how could I account for the
presence of Deering on the Spanish Steps, in the thick of the rabble of
the English ghetto? We mounted the splendid flight, evading a courteous
gentleman who merely wanted us to look, for he said so, at a remarkable
collection of mosaic jewelry which he happened to be carrying in a
cabinet under his arm; Deering winced at his approach and answered me
with raised voice in Italian. His pretty hands danced before him in the
urgency of his surprise, his amusement, at finding himself in these
haunts of the simple Briton; it took him back, he said, to the days of
his innocence; and it flashed upon me that Deering had now turned yet
another corner of his emancipation--the newest and latest perversity,
perhaps, was to throw over the marble halls of the Via Nazionale and to
come round again to the tea-room of the English old maids at this end of
the town. The rate at which Deering refines upon refinement is
bewildering to a plain man. But no, Deering hadn’t pursued his culture
to this point as yet, though no doubt he would arrive there in time; it
was just an accident that had led him into the neighbourhood of the
tea-room this afternoon.