followed the thread which he had placed in my hand the other day. “My
poor friend,” he said, “how you have bungled it! Is it to this that I
have brought you?” He warned me that I had missed my opportunity, he
wasn’t responsible for my floundering plunges. Yet he bade me proceed,
and he should look on from a distance and mark the progress of my
madness. “Return to me,” he said, “when you recover your senses.”
Madness, he plainly indicated, lay in the direction of Miss Gilpin and
the Via Sistina; the coils of the friends of Miss Gilpin, once they have
caught an imprudent explorer, effectually destroy his chances of
attaining to--well, to what? If Deering is going to start his old
refrain about the “real Rome” I have now my answer; I have discovered
this much at least, that there are many more “real Romes” than are
dreamed of in his preciosity. Already a dozen people, I assured him, had
opened my eyes to the reality of Rome; some said it no longer existed,
some said it was a very poor affair, some said it was a secret only
known to themselves; but they all had their views, and I didn’t yet feel
able to discriminate finally, to determine which of them was in
possession of the truth. I must go forward and hear more; and I promised
to let him know when I came to a conclusion. “Go your way by all means,”
said Deering, “and come and tell me when you escape.” So we left it at
that, and we parted at the head of the magnificent stairway; Deering
carried his swaying grace (but he _was_ developing plumply, I observed
as he went) towards the gardens of the Pincio, and I turned in the other
direction down the narrow switchback of the Via Sistina.
These friends of Miss Gilpin occupied a dim and constricted apartment,
and they too were rather dim. They were English, they consisted of
husband and wife and daughter, and they disappointed, I must own, my
idea that I had ascended the scale of initiation when I reached their
door. Mr. and Mrs. Clarkson, Miss Agnes Clarkson--you can’t make much of
a romance out of names like these; you must take them as you find them,
wan respectable gentle-mannered Britons, who had been spending the
winter in the south because Mr. Clarkson has a delicate chest. They had
found the winter colder than they had expected, and perhaps they had
found it long. Rome is delightful, is wonderful, is full of beauty and
instruction--Mrs. Clarkson, hooking comfortably at her crochet, entirely
recognized this; but then so much of its beauty, and practically all its
instruction, is too bitterly cold in the winter season for Mr.
Clarkson’s chest; and no, they hadn’t been able to go about very much,
or indeed at all, though they had enjoyed their walks upon the Pincio;
and their rooms were excellent, all they could desire, but Mrs.
Clarkson, as she leaned uncomplainingly against the rococo spikes and
jags of her chairback, was bound to say that a hired apartment was never
the same as one’s home--great indeed as is the privilege and pleasure of
foreign travel. Mrs. Clarkson had on the whole no more to say, but her
husband took the view that the winter was over now, and he mentioned
that he was thinking out an excursion or two for them to make before
they returned to England; and as for Miss Agnes Clarkson, a
hollow-cheeked maiden with a suffocated voice, she really had nothing to
say at all, beyond reminding us that it would soon be too hot for
sight-seeing in comfort. Dimness seemed indeed to settle upon us all,
and we scarcely knew what to talk of next.
But this was in the absence of Miss Gilpin, who happened to be out when
I arrived. The door presently opened, and the flimsy draperies were
caught aside by Miss Gilpin’s hand as she peeped into the room with a
little air of coyness and archness--I don’t know why, unless because it
was one of her methods of entering a room, and she thought this one as
good as another. She floated in on a waft of sweetness and light,
followed by a gentleman. “More company for you,” she exclaimed--“I’ve
brought Mr. Bashford!” She stood aside, directing Mr. Bashford,
installing him in the circle with proprietary gestures and cries; and
she reached out back-handed to me as she did so, pacifying my impatience
till she could give me her attention. The Clarkson family were roused, a
faint warmth kindled their chill. “Why, father,” said Mrs. Clarkson,
“you remember Mr. Bashford--he came here when Miss Gilpin was with us
the last time.” “To be sure, to be sure--we are quite in society when
Miss Gilpin is with us!”--and Mr. Clarkson amiably bestirred himself to
meet the incursion of the world. Agnes swept her mother’s work-basket
out of a chair, her father’s patience-cards off the table; she
ministered as she could, but society seemed to disregard her. She
fidgeted round the room, disturbing the thin litter of home-life which
they had sprinkled over the alien bedrock of the Via Sistina--very thin
and sparse it was, easily swept into a corner with a few English volumes
from the circulating library. Within five minutes of the departure of
the Clarksons every trace of their settlement in the south could have
been obliterated; you wouldn’t have supposed that the Clarksons belonged
to a conquering race. But they were grateful, it seemed, for the
brightening of their dimness; if they couldn’t do much for themselves,
they were glad to be taken in hand by their brilliant friend.
Their brilliant friend was aware of it. Miss Gilpin was now free to
encourage the shy young man she had run across at Castel Gandolfo; she
beckoned him into a corner and soon put him at his ease. Miss Gilpin is
known for her cleverness in drawing out shy young men and winning their
confidence; it is an art that perhaps you don’t usually associate with
little literary ladies of a certain age, and that is just what makes it
so pretty and so clever in Miss Gilpin. She does it with all the
naturalness in the world--you mustn’t imagine that she makes a foolish
affectation of youth, of playfulness, or that she vulgarly uses her
charm. No, her manner is brisk, sensible, downright--but I needn’t dwell
upon it at this juncture, for she had no difficulty with the present
young man. She made short work of me; having tamed and civilized and
made me presentable within five minutes, she returned to the Clarksons
and sought to create a circle of general talk. The poor Clarksons, they
couldn’t be left longer in their helplessness; their charming friend
must give them the support of her social ease. But Miss Gilpin really
used more tact than they needed, for the Clarksons were talking away
quite gaily with Mr. Bashford. They were talking about a family whom
they had met last winter at Torquay, nice kind quiet people, to whom it
most oddly appeared that Mr. Bashford was related. “Do you hear that,
Agnes?” cried Mrs. Clarkson, “Mr. Bashford is a cousin of the
Marshams.” Why, how small the world is! Agnes had seen a great deal of
the Marshams at Torquay, and it was worth while having come to Rome, she
seemed to imply, for the unexpected chance of talking about them to a
friend and a cousin. “Have you heard from them lately?” she asked--it
might have been the first question she had asked in Rome with a sincere
interest in the answer. Miss Gilpin even spoilt things a little by her
intervention; Mrs. Clarkson had dropped her crochet to tell Mr. Bashford
about a drive she had taken with Mrs. Marsham last winter, but the story
faltered and the hooking was resumed before the competent sweep of Miss
Gilpin’s tact. She was so brilliant that it became rather dull and dowdy
to talk about the Marshams.
Mr. Bashford, however, was not to be discouraged; he chanced to have
received a letter quite recently from his cousins, and he was anxious to
tell Miss Agnes that they had this year selected Bournemouth for their
winter retreat, and had there been enjoying the best of weather. “Do you
hear that, mother?” exclaimed Miss Agnes; “the Marshams have been at
Bournemouth.” The Clarksons, very remarkably, had themselves been at
Bournemouth the year before last, and Mr. Bashford really envied them
the experience. Mr. Bashford was not noticeable in appearance, at least
upon the golf-course at Torquay; though for the streets of Rome he was
perhaps too weather-bronzed, too tawny-haired, too baggy in his homespun
clothing. One may well wonder how it happens that Mr. Bashford, who
certainly hasn’t a delicate chest, can have strayed so far from the
first green at Bournemouth in this fine spring weather. He and Mr.
Clarkson are there again, it seems, as they fall into an absorbing
discussion of the merits of the course--Mr. Bashford knows it well,
having played many a round there a few years ago. “Now they’re off!”
says Mrs. Clarkson, smiling over her hook; and she too, good soul, might
be seated in her corner of the ladies’ drawing-room at the Sea View
Hotel, while she tranquilly enquires of Miss Gilpin whether she isn’t
badly “wanting her tea.” Mr. Bashford, in short, had made the Clarksons
feel thoroughly at home; the long chill of the Roman winter was a thing
of the past, they breathed the kindly and temperate air of the Marine
Parade. Mr. Bashford, you may judge, was just such another poor
wandering exile, driven by mischance into a region where the servants
simply can’t, with the best will in the world, learn how to serve an
English tea--Mrs. Clarkson protested feelingly that _she_ had done what
she could to teach them, and in vain.
But no, the story of Mr. Bashford was not such as you might suppose.
Later on I learned it, and I found to my surprise that this golfing
gossiping puffing Englishman, with the red face and the yellow
moustache, was actually _romano di Roma_ in all the conditions of his
life. He had been born in Rome, he had lived all his years in Rome; he
possessed by inheritance a tenement in the Piazza Navona and a farm in a
valley of the Volscian hills; English weather had counted for nothing in
his complexion, and to the English golf-club he had only been admitted
as a holiday-making stranger from foreign parts. He was the son, I
discovered, of a certain mid-Victorian amateur of the arts, an
independent gentleman of some quality, who had been an early and earnest
disciple of the eloquence of Ruskin. Mr. Bashford the elder had followed
the teaching of his master with zeal, but not blindly--for it must be
allowed that Ruskin fell away from the gracious culture of his prime
into many a harsh extravagance of taste and doctrine. It was to the
_true_ Ruskin that this disciple remained himself ever true: Ruskin whom
one pictures, a grave and blue-eyed young man, stepping out into the
early summer morning of a little Tuscan town to set up his easel in a
deserted sacristy, an echoing cloister--where he will work through the
long hours with piety and concentration, glorifying the beauty that a
simple industrious God-fearing peasantry (if only they would bear it in
mind) may always possess and impart to a man of feeling, trained among
the refining influences of Gothic architecture at Oxford. I am not, if
you please, describing Ruskin, but I am describing him closely as he
appeared to an earnest disciple (with a delicate chest) in the sixties
of the nineteenth century. This was the devotee who settled in
Italy--“whether” (as he puts it in his diary) “for health’s sake or for
love of St. Ursula I know not”--settled in Italy with a wife (“my
entirely precious and meek-eyed Dora,” says the same document), and
there became responsible for the gentleman who at this moment is
observing to Mr. Clarkson that he has found it advisable to use an iron
upon the fourth tee at Ilfracombe.
Ruskin and St. Ursula--Italy, my Italy--the ineffable meekness of dear
old Brother Angelico: by names, by phrases of this kind I suggest the
atmosphere that was about the cradle of Mr. Bashford the son. But human
children, we know, have long ago brought to the highest pitch the art of
self-protection; and little Bashford, I dare say, was not yet weaned
when he cautiously shut the doorways of his head against the assault of
his parents’ enthusiasm. It was firmly done, it was final; little
Bashford proceeded to grow as he pleased into the big red middle-aged
Bashford who is now before our eyes. In other circumstances he might
have allowed his nature to remain more plastic, at least in the cradle;
but his was a special case, an English babe exposed to culture in
foreign parts. There was nothing for it but to guard himself utterly and
absolutely; and I think we may say that only an English babe could have
carried the affair so successfully through to the end. For forty years
and more an insidious culture, reinforced by the unwholesome excitement
of foreign ways, had been beating upon the skull of Mr. Bashford, and
all without creating the faintest disturbance within it; secure behind
its powerful sutures he had lived the life of which the accidents of his
birth had conspired to deprive him. He was in no position to trifle with
the danger. It is all very well for people like Deering and Cooksey to
allow themselves the freedom of flirtation with the spirit of Rome; they
are well grounded upon their insular training and will come to no great
harm. And similarly the parents of Mr. Bashford, colonists of the first
generation--they could follow the siren voices unafraid, carrying with
them the probity of their English birthright. It is a very different
matter for their offspring, denied the advantages which they enjoyed.
He, poor lamb, thrown from the beginning upon the dubious world of all
that isn’t English, must take his own deliberate precautions; and he
doesn’t hesitate, he begins in time--and at forty he will meet you in
the Via Sistina with the certainty that his clothes and his speech and
his colour belong unmistakably to the land in which he wasn’t born.
His case, it must be owned, is more interesting than his talk. Miss
Gilpin fidgeted openly and did her best to break up the alternation of
leisurely anecdote into which Mr. Bashford and Mr. Clarkson had now
contentedly fallen. But she had no success; she only made Mrs. Clarkson
rather nervous and uneasy with her acid interjections. Dear Miss Gilpin
was a little difficult in a plain household; she couldn’t understand
that when the men are occupied and happy it is foolish indeed to disturb
them. Mrs. Clarkson, more experienced, would willingly have let them go
prosing on about their games and rubbish as long as they chose; Agnes
and she could sit quiet and get on with their work. But Miss Gilpin was
brilliant, and to be sure they were indebted to Miss Gilpin for her
attention; Mr. Clarkson forgot his bad throat when she appeared, and had
been quite annoyed with Agnes for reminding him in Miss Gilpin’s
presence (though he had told her always to remind him) to put on his
flannel chest-protector before going out. Such was the tissue of Mrs.
Clarkson’s thought, week in and week out, during their winter in Rome;
and if I seem to be interpreting my short observation of her too freely,
I can only say that her mind was an open page of very simple words. But
something had to be done to restrain Miss Gilpin from interrupting poor
father’s favourite story of the sheep in the bunker; he had just reached
the crowning point at which he broke off with a laugh and a pause before
proceeding--“Believe me or not, there was the old sheep on her back in
strong convulsions”--and Mrs. Clarkson positively hissed at Miss Gilpin
to stop her, to detach her from the circle of the men, before she should
spoil the climax with one of her tiresome clever remarks. Mrs.
Clarkson, as it happened, was too late; Miss Gilpin swept the story of
the sheep off the board and resolutely placed there some livelier topic
of her own.
Mr. Clarkson clutched the falling fragments of his tale and was
evidently ruffled; and as for the good Bashford, he stared solidly at
Miss Gilpin’s challenge and made no movement to take it up. His
expression, as I now watch it again, gives me the secret of his massive
integrity. He looked at Miss Gilpin as I might blankly look at some
diagram or equation of the higher mathematics--at something so
disconnected with my being that it doesn’t even rouse my curiosity. That
was how Mr. Bashford saved himself from going to pieces in the climate
of Rome. If you divide the world into two parts, calling one of them “my
sort” and the other “not my sort,” your position is unassailable; in the
first case you needn’t question what you know already, in the second it
is no concern of yours. Mr. Bashford had been able to remain true to
himself through a lifetime so unnaturally Roman because anything that
wasn’t “his sort” was a problem, as you might say, in the differential
calculus. See him, then, regarding in that light the playful sallies of
Miss Gilpin--a good little woman, no doubt, but not at all his sort; he
has nothing to say to her, he doesn’t attempt to find anything to say to
her, he merely waits. She for her part can’t bring herself to
acknowledge defeat; she always thinks she may yet succeed in striking a
spark out of that sleepy old Bash. “Ah, Mr. Bashford, when you look at
me like that I feel as though I were indecently exposed!”--this, believe
me or not, is one of her flings at his stolidity; but he takes it
without the flicker of an eyelid, and he leaves it to Mr. Clarkson to
find some happy retort, as daring as her attack, yet expressed in all
good taste. Mrs. Clarkson, glancing up, noted that that clever little
woman had certainly a way with her; poor dear father had already
forgotten that she had spoilt his story.
When at length I said good-bye to the Clarksons I didn’t tell them that
they had given me a new experience. It was the first hour I had spent in
Rome of which I might truthfully say that I had spent it in the Sea View
Hotel. In the heart of Rome our little group had gathered and talked;
but with Rome all about us, jangling its bells and calling its
street-cries, we had sat secluded upon a few square feet of our native
soil. And did I say that the Clarkson family seemed to have entered a
strange land with no conquering mien? That was a superficial judgment;
for what have the Clarksons done but to change their patch of the Via
Sistina into English ground?--and that so easily, so instinctively, that
they are quite unaware of their own prepotency. No need for them to
create their colony with laborious arts; Mr. Clarkson spreads his game
of patience on the table, his wife winds her wool over a chair-back, his
daughter goes out to buy a cake for tea--and the thing is achieved. True
they are not as comfortable as they were at Torquay, and they miss the
Marshams; but you can’t have everything, and the English chemist is very
obliging, and what with the English banker and the English news-agent
Mr. Clarkson can always find an object for a walk. Of course if you ask
_why_ they have come to Rome, seeing that the Roman climate is far more
treacherous than that of our nice mild “English Riviera”--well,
certainly it is difficult to see how the Clarksons are in candour to
answer the question. But it isn’t fair to expect them to grasp their
motive and to put it into words--they are not used to being called upon
so harshly. One goes to Rome for the winter because, if one has private
means and delicate health, it is what one _does_; that is enough for the
Clarksons. And next winter, when they are happily restored to Torquay,
they will be able to tell the Marshams about the intensely interesting
time they passed in Rome.
XI. PIAZZA NAVONA
Old Miss Gainsborough was stately and splendid; she made such an effect
on me, as she sat enthroned in Bashford’s big frowzy sitting-room, that
I had no attention for the kindly struggles of my host in his care for
my entertainment. Mr. Bashford, though perhaps suspecting that I was not
his sort, wrestled for a while with his manly silence and produced a
remark or two; but he was relieved to find that I was happy in watching
Miss Gainsborough, and he was more than ready to relax his effort and to
let me take my entertainment as I chose. So we watched Miss Gainsborough
together--she was sitting at a distance, very upright on an
uncomfortable bench, talking to a large untidy female who writhed at her
side among the cushions of a low arm-chair. “Ah, Miss Gainsborough, you
and I, as old Romans, know better than that!”--the female crooned out
the words with an ecstatic lunge towards the bench. “Ah, Lady Mullinger,
you and I, as old frumps, had much better hold our tongues!”--and as the
answer fell with a rap upon the extended knuckles of the female I
recognized my acquaintance of the other day, the day of the pilgrims in
the church: Cooksey’s Lady Mullinger, who had tried to arrange that
helpful little tea-party for poor Charlotte. She was only for a moment
disordered by Miss Gainsborough’s retort; then she collected herself for
a good laugh at her friend’s delightful wit.
Miss Gainsborough, handsome, high-coloured, decorated with much
magnificence, surveyed Lady Mullinger with a contemptuous eye. “What’s
the woman laughing at now?” she demanded--and her ladyship was convulsed
anew. They had been talking of some one lately arrived in Rome, to whom
they alluded as Lady Vera; and it appeared that Lady Vera in the
innocence of her zeal had been shocked by the language of the old
Romans, such as Lady Mullinger, when they spoke of matters that to her,
Lady Vera, were breathlessly sacred and august. It was the eternal game,
you see, to which Cooksey had already introduced me--the game at which
you score off the new-comer by your careless natural freedom in the
inner ring; but Miss Gainsborough stamped on it summarily--not, I judge,
because she had any objection to it herself, but because Lady Mullinger
was a fool and needed a smacking. The annoying part of it was that the
more she was smacked the louder she cackled. “For the Lord’s sake sit up
and behave yourself,” cried Miss Gainsborough; and she called across the
room--“Bashford, come and see if you can make her sit quiet and not
guffaw like a jackass whenever I open my mouth!” Bashford, rosily
perturbed, got up and planted himself before Miss Gainsborough; he
seemed to have some idea of protecting Lady Mullinger, but he couldn’t
do much for her with the other lady’s daunting eye upon him; he made
vague noises of remonstrance and hoped for the best. “Speak up,” said
Miss Gainsborough; “be a man, Bashford, and tell her to behave like a
reasonable creature!”
Lady Mullinger was indeed deplorable; she writhed, she quaked with
obsequious enjoyment; nothing could discourage her ecstasy, not even the
fact that her witty friend, addressing herself to Bashford, completely
ignored it. Bashford was prudent, but he faced Miss Gainsborough
squarely, masking his dread of her with his burly solemnity; she heckled
him sharply and shrewdly, not without humour; and Lady Mullinger hung
upon the spectacle, industriously applauding unnoticed--except that
Bashford now and then, as an honourable and mannerly host, tried to hand
her some little share of Miss Gainsborough’s attention to himself. But
you can’t help a woman like Lady Mullinger to save her face; she is
driven to expose her indignity, do what you will. I take it that in
spite of many years of sedulous Romanism she was still beating blindly
against the wall of that impregnable fortress of the “old Roman”; and
just as she always hoped to entice Father Holt some day to her
tea-party, so she couldn’t be reconciled to the sight of Miss
Gainsborough chuckling, grandly carousing, digging Mr. Bashford in the
ribs with imperious freedom--and turning her straight back upon Lady
Mullinger as though she didn’t exist. Poor soul, I thought of her
comfortably gossiping with Cooksey the other day--what a pity it seems
that she and Cooksey can’t acquiesce in their prime disability and
console each other, without breaking themselves upon the fortress. Their
disability is of course the fact, never to be lived down, that only an
inspiration and a conviction and an enthusiasm brought them to Rome;
they weren’t in any way (there are more ways than one) born there.