La Duchessa D'Aquilanera was a Colonna and came from the conservative
wing of a family that cannot forget its cardinalitial, royal and papal
traditions. Her husband had come of a Tuscan house that had received its
illustration by the thirteenth century, was praised in the histories of
Machiavelli and execrated in Dante. Neither family had counted a
misalliance in twenty-two generations, and even in the twenty-third
incurred only such stigma as attaches to marriage with an illegitimate
Medici or a Pope's "niece". The Duchess could never forget--among a
thousand similar honors--that her grandfather's grandfather, Timoleo
Nerone Colonna, Prince of Velletri, had carried many an insulting
message to the ancestors of the present King of Italy, the old but
apologetic house of Savoy; and that her father had refused a Grandeeship
at the court of Spain because it had been withheld from his father; and
that through herself she carried to her son the titles of Chamberlain of
the Court of Naples (if there were one). Prince of the Holy Roman Empire
(if that superb organization had only survived) and Duke of Brabant, a
title which unfortunately reappears among the pretensions of the royal
families of Spain, Belgium and France. She had the best of claims to an
Altesse, and even to an Altesse Royale; at least to the Sérénissime,
for her mother had been the last member of the royal family of
Craburg-Hottenlingen. She had the largest cousinage outside the Buddhist
priesthood. The heralds of the European courts bowed to her with a
particular distinction realizing that by some accident many diverse and
lofty lines converged in her odd person.
She was fifty when I met her, a short, black-faced woman with two
aristocratic wens on the left slope of her nose, yellow, dirty hands,
covered with paste emeralds (an allusion to her Portuguese claims; she
was Archduchess of Brazil, if Brazil had only remained Portuguese), lame
with the limp that pursues the Della Quercia, just as her aunt had been
epileptic with the epilepsy of the true Vani. She lived in a tiny
apartment in the Palazzo Aquilanera, Piazza Aracœli, from the windows
of which she watched the sumptuous weddings of her rivals, ceremonies to
which she had been invited, but dared not attend, foreseeing that she
would be assigned to places that fell below her pretensions; to accept a
humble seat would be to admit that one had relinquished the whole bundle
of vast historic claims. She had left many a great function abruptly on
discovering that her chair was behind some of those Colonna cousins who
had cast away all right to aristocratic distinction by marrying theatre
women or Americans. She refused to be seated behind pillars among
dubious Neapolitan titles--in the shadow of her own family tombs; to be
left among the footmen at the door of a musicale; to be invited at the
eleventh hour; and to be kept waiting in antechambers. For the most part
she clung to her ugly stuffy rooms, brooding on the disregarded glories
of her line and envying the splendors of her richer relatives. The fact
is that from the point of view of a middle-class Italian she was not
really poor; but she was too poor to afford the limousine and livery and
great entertainments; to be without these and yet invested with her
pretensions was to be poorer than the last nameless body fished out of
the Tiber.
Recently however she had begun to receive unexpected and thrilling
recognitions. Little though she went out, when she did appear in
society, her austere face, her majestic limp, and her strange jewels
carried conviction. People were afraid of her. The arbiters of
precedence in Rome dared at last to intimate to the Odescalchi and
Colonna and Sermoneta that this almost shabby little woman whom they
snubbed and shoved like some half-wit poor relation, had every right to
precede them at a formal function. French circles, such as had not lost
all seigneurial deferences under the sponge of republicanism recognized
her ultramontane alliances. She was the first to notice the improvement
in her reception, and if a bit bewildered it did not take her long to
set her sails to the unexpected breeze. She had a son and daughter to
advance and it was for them that she now resolved to immolate her pride.
From the earliest signs of her rehabilitation she forced herself to
sally out into the world, and finding that her stock was higher in the
international colony she stooped distastefully to call upon the American
peeresses and on the South American representatives. Eventually she
found herself at Miss Grier's midnight suppers. The reflection of the
consideration she received in such places finally reached her own people
and she was gradually spared the more obvious humiliations.
It became necessary for her now to drop her former friends, the dull
soured old women, more plaintive than herself, and with less reason,
with whom she had been accustomed to fret away the long afternoons and
evenings behind the drawn blinds of the Piazza Aracœli. She was obliged
likewise to abandon a sordid habit that linked her no less surely to the
previous centuries, namely that of rushing into law-suits. The innate
capacity for affairs which abounded in this woman had found during the
days of her obscurity this extraordinary outlet. She went about scenting
out old claims and deeds, the slips of tradesmen and the subtle
omissions of lawyers. She was always protecting her shyer friends from
imposition, and she was always successful and often made a good deal of
money. She employed obscure boy-lawyers and when she was called upon as
a witness, relying on her distinctions to prevent her being interrupted,
she used the occasion as an opportunity to sum up the whole case. The
middle classes seeing in the morning paper that S. A. Leda Matilda
Colonna duchessa d'Aquilanera was attacking the City of Rome over the
valuation of property near a railroad, or contesting the bill of some
popular stationer or fruiterer on the Corso, suffered willingly the
inconvenience of holding a seat in court for hours in order to see the
malignant resourceful woman and to hear her trenchant sarcasms and her
irresistible accumulation of evidence. Yet her relatives had always
sneered at this passion, failing to see that she represented more
clearly than themselves the qualities that had always gone to
characterize the aristocracy.
It was this woman then whom we confronted when we returned at midnight
for our third engagement that day in the old palace. Supper was served
in a larger, brighter apartment than I had yet seen. As I entered the
huge doorway my eyes fell upon a strange figure that I knew at once must
be a Cabalist. A short, dark, ugly woman, holding a cane between her
knees was staring at me with magnificent fierce eyes. With the bodiced
dress and eagle's head I became aware of her jewels, seven huge lumpy
amethysts strung about her neck on a golden rope. I was presented to
this witch who at once, and by the blackest art, made one like her. On
hearing that Blair was leaving Rome shortly she centered her attention
on me.
For a moment she sat before me, sliding the end of her stick nervously
about on the floor, drawing in her upper lip, and gazing hard into my
eyes. She asked me my age. I was twenty-five.
I am the Duchess d'Aquilanera, she began. What language shall we speak?
I think we will talk English. I do not talk it good, but we must be
plain. It must be so you must understand me quite perfectly. I am a
great friend of Miss Grier. I have often talked over with her a great
problem--a sorrow, my young friend--that is in my home. Suddenly tonight
at seven o'clock she call me up on the telephone and told me she have
found someone who could help me: she mean you. Now listen: I have a son
of sixteen. He is important because he is somebody. How you say?--he is
a personage. We are of a very old house. Our family has been in the
front of Italy, everyone in her triumph and in her trouble. You are not
sympathetic to that kind of greatness in America, not? But you must have
read history, no? ancient times and the middle times and like that? You
must realize how important the great families are ... have always been
to ... countries ...
(Here she grew nervous, and blew several bubbles and expended herself in
those splendid Italian gestures denoting difficulty, perhaps futility,
and resignation before the impossible. I hastened to assure her that I
had great respect for the aristocratic principle.)
Perhaps you have and perhaps you haven't, she said at last. In all
events, think of my son as a prince whose blood contains all sorts of
kings and noble people. Well, now I must tell you he has fallen in bad
ways. Some women have got hold of him and I do not know him any more.
All our boys in Italy go that way when they are sixteen, but
Marcantonio, my god, I do not know what is the matter with him and I
shall go crazy. Now in America you are all descended from your Puritans,
are you not, and your ideas are very different. There is only one thing
to do, and that is: you must save my boy. You must talk to him. You must
play tennis with him. I have talked to him; the priest has talked to
him, and a good friend of mine, a Cardinal, has talked to him and still
he does nothing but go to that dreadful place. Elizabeth Grier says that
most boys in America at your age are just ... naturally ... good. You
are _vieilles filles_; you are as temperate as I do not know what. It's
very strange, if it's true, and I do not think I believe it; at all
events it's not wise. At all events you must talk to Marcantonio and
make him stay away from that dreadful place or we shall go mad. My plan
is this: next Wednesday we are going for a week to our beautiful villa
in the country. It is the most beautiful villa in Italy. You must come
with us. Marcantonio will begin to admire you, you can play tennis and
shoot and swim and then you can have long talks and you can save him.
Now, won't you do that for me, because no one has ever come to you in
such trouble as I have come to you in today?
Hereupon, in sudden fear that all her efforts had been in vain, she
began waving her stick to attract Miss Grier's attention. That lady had
been watching us from a corner of her eye and now came running up. The
Duchess burst into a flood of tears, crying into her pocket
handkerchief: Elisabetta, speak to him. Oh, my god, I have failed. He
not want us and all is lost.
I was divided between anger and laughter and kept muttering into Miss
Grier's ear: I'd be glad to meet him. Miss Grier, but I can't lecture
the fellow. I'd feel like a fool. Besides what would I do with a whole
week....
She's put it to you wrongly, said Miss Grier. Let's not say anything
more about it tonight.
At this the Black Queen began rolling about in her chair, the motions
preparatory to rising. She rammed her stick against my shoe for leverage
on the polished floor and stood up. We must pray to God to find another
way. I am a fool. I do not blame the young man. He cannot realize the
importance of our family.
Nonsense, Leda, said Miss Grier, firmly in Italian. Be quiet a moment.
Then turning to me: Would you like to pass a week-end at the Villa
Colonna-Stiavelli, or not? There's no stipulation about lecturing the
Prince. If you like him, you'll feel like talking to him anyway, and if
you don't like him, you're welcome to leave him alone.
Two Cabalists were begging me to take a glimpse of the most famous of
Renaissance villas, one moreover that was obstinately closed to the
public and that had to be peered at from the road half a mile away. I
turned to the Duchess and bowing low accepted her invitation. Whereupon
she kissed the shoulder of my coat, murmured with a beautiful smile:
Christiano! Christiano! and bidding us good night, passed bowing from
the room.
I shall see you Sunday at Tivoli, said Miss Grier, and tell you all
about it there.
During the next few days my mind lay under the dread of the two
engagements that lay ahead of me: the week-end at the Villa Horace and
the missionary enterprise at the Villa Colonna. I stayed in my rooms,
depressed, reading a little, or took long walks through the Trasteverine
underworld, thinking about Connecticut.
The car that called for me Saturday morning already contained a
fellow-guest. He introduced himself as M. Léry Bogard, adding that
Mlle. de Morfontaine had offered to send for us separately, but that he
had taken the liberty of requesting that we be called for together, not
only because any company in crossing the Campagna is better than none,
but because he had heard many things of me that led him to believe that
we would not be uncongenial. I replied in that language wherein all
courtesy sounds sincere, that the possibility of being congenial to so
distinguished a member of the French Academy and to so profound a
scholar was a greater honor than I dared hope for. These overtures did
not tend to chill the encounter. M. Bogard was a fragile elderly
gentleman, immaculately dressed. His face was delicately tinted by
exquisite reading and expensive food, russet and violet about the eyes,
his cheeks a pale plum from which rose the ivory-white of his nose and
chin. His manner was soft and conciliatory, expressed for the most part
in the play of his eyelids and hands both of which fluttered in unison
like petals about to fall upon the breeze. I spoke hesitantly of the
pleasure I had derived from his works, especially from those pages, so
faintly tinctured with venom, on Church History. But now he cried out at
once: Do not mention them! My early indiscretions! Horrible! What would
I not give to withdraw them. Can that nonsense have reached as far as
America? You must let your friends know, young man, that those books no
longer represent my attitude. Since then I have become an obedient son
of the Church and nothing would give me greater comfort than to hear
that they had been burned.
What may I tell my friends now represents your real views? I asked.
Why read me at all? he cried in mock grief. There are too many books in
the world already. Let us read no more, my son. Let us seek out some
congenial friends. Let us sit about a table (well-spread, pardi!) and
talk of our church and our king and perhaps of Virgil.
My face must have shown a trace of the suffocation I experienced at this
plan of life, for M. Bogard became at once more impersonal. The country
we are traversing now, he said, has known stirring times ... and he
began an instructive travelogue, as though I were some stupid
acquaintance, his hostess' son, and as though he were not, nor ever had
been, a distinguished scholar.
On arriving at the Villa we were met by the steward and shown to our
rooms. The Villa had been a monastery for many years and in purchasing
it Mlle. de Morfontaine had obtained likewise the adjoining church which
still served the peasants of the hillside. She claimed that the Villa
was the very one that Maecenas had given to Horace: local tradition
affirmed it; the foundations were of the best opus reticulatum; and the
location fulfilled the rather vague requirements of classical allusion;
even onomatopoea testified, declared our hostess, asserting that from
her window the waterfall could be literally heard to lisp
"... domus Albuniae resonantis
Et praeceps Anio ac Tibumi locus et uda
Mobilibus pomaria rivis."
In furnishing her monastery our hostess had combined, as best she could,
a delight in æsthetic effects and a longing for severity. A long low
rambling plaster building, without grace of line, was the Villa Horace.
Disordered rose gardens surrounded it, with intentionally neglected gravel
paths, and chipped marble benches. One entered a long hall at the end of
which several steps descended to a library. The hall was lined with
doors at regular intervals on both sides, doors to what had once been
cells now thrown together into reception rooms. Many of these doors
stood open during the day and the long corridor paved with russet tile,
was striped with the sunshine that fell across it. The ceiling had been
coffered, and like the doors touched with dark green and gilt, and with
that rich wasted brick-red that is the color of Neapolitan tiles. The
walls were yellow white, of caked and crumbling plaster, and the beauty
of the view with the optical illusion of distance and the depth and the
lightness of the library seen like some great green-golden well at the
further end, appealed to that sense of balance and one's tactile
imagination as do the vistas in the paintings of Raphael whose spell is
said to reside in that secret. To the left lay the reception rooms,
carpeted in one color, hung with tabernacles and Italian primitives,
while huge candelabra, pots of flowers and tables covered with brocades
and crystals and uncut jewels, relieved the severity of unfreshened
walls. Towards the end of the hall at the right one ascended a few steps
to the refectory, the barest room in the house. By day the refectory was
a meaningless casual club-room. Luncheon was a negligible affair at the
Villa; one's conversation must be saved for dinner; at luncheon one
barely looked at one another, one talked about the last rains and the
next drought, or any subject that did not faintly allude to the
devouring passions of the house, religion and aristocracy and
literature. The beauty of the refectory was purely a matter of lighting
and at eight o'clock the greatness of the room lay in the pool of
wine-yellow light that was shed on the red table cloth, the dark green
crested plates, the silver and the gold, the wineglasses, the gowns and
decorations of the guests, the ambassadorial ribbons, the pontifical
violets, and the little army of satin-clad footmen that suddenly
appeared from nowhere.
On the night of my arrival the Cardinal was the last to appear at
dinner, and entered directly into the refectory where we stood waiting
for him. His expression was benignant, even beaming. While he blessed
the meal, Mlle. de Morfontaine knelt on her admirable yellow gown and M.
Bogard dropped on one knee and shaded his eyes. The grace was in
English, a strange affair discovered by our erudite guest among the
literary remains of some disappointed Cambridge parson.
Oh, pelican of eternity,
That piercest thy heart for our food,
We are thy fledglings that cannot know thy woe.
Bless this shadowy and visionary food of substance,
Whose last eater shall be worm,
And feed us rather with the vital food of
Dreams and grace.
The Cardinal, though unimpaired in mind and body, looked all of his
eighty years. The expression of dry serenity that never left his yellow
face with its drooping moustache and pointed beard gave him the
appearance of a Chinese sage that has lived a century. He was born of
peasants on the plain between Milan and Como, and had begun his
education at the hands of the local priests who soon discovered in him a
veritable genius for latinity. He was passed upward from school to
school gaining in his progress all the prizes the Jesuits had to offer.
The attention of a large body of influential churchmen was gradually
drawn to him and at the time of his graduation from the great college on
the Piazza Santa Maria sopra Minerva (presenting a thesis of
unparalleled brilliance and futility on the forty-two cases in which
suicide is permissible and the twelve occasions on which a priest may
take up arms without danger of homicide) a choice between three great
careers was offered to him. The details of each had been prepared under
the highest patronage: he might become a fashionable preacher; or one of
the courtier-secretaries of the Vatican; or a learned teacher and
disputant. To the amazement and grief of his professors he suddenly
announced his intention of following a road that to them meant ruin; he
declared for Missions. His foster-fathers raged and wept and called on
heaven to witness his ingratitude; but the boy would hear of nothing
less than the Church's most dangerous post in Western China. Thither in
due time he departed with scarcely a blessing from his teachers who had
already turned their attention to more docile if less brilliant pupils.
Through fire, famine, riots, and even torture, the young priest labored
for twenty-five years in the province of Sze-chuen. This missionary
fever however did not entirely spring from piety. The boy, conscious of
the great powers raging within him, had been throughout his youth
insolent, contemptuous of his teachers and of his companions. He knew
and despised every type of a churchman to be found in Italy; never had
he seen a thing adequately done by them, and now he dreamed of a field
of work where he would be answerable to no fool. In the whole realm of
the Church there was only one region that filled his requirements; a
month's travelling by crude wagon separates one from the next priest in
Sze-chuen. There, then, after a shipwreck, some months of slavery, and
other experiences that he never related, but which reached the world
from his native helpers, he settled in an inn, dressed as a native, grew
a pigtail, and lived among the villagers for six years without
mentioning his faith. He passed the time studying the language, the
classics, the manners, ingratiating himself with the officials and so
perfectly identifying himself with the daily life of the city that in
time he all but lost the odor of foreignness. When at last he began to
declare his mission to those merchants and officials in whose homes he
had become an almost nightly visitor his work was rapid. Perhaps the
greatest of all the Church's missionaries since the Middle Age, he
turned many a compromise that was destined to shock Rome profoundly. He
somehow achieved a harmonization of Christianity and the religions and
accepted ideas of China that had its parallel only in those daring
readings that Paul discovered in his Palestinian cult. So subtle were
the priest's adaptations that it never occurred to his first converts to
be even conscious of repudiating their old faith until at last after
twenty lectures he showed them how far they had gone and how charred
were the bridges that lay behind them. Once he had them baptized
however, he could give them only the bitterest bread to eat: the
foundations of his cathedral lay squarely on a score of martyrs' graves,
but once built suffered no further assault and grew slowly and
irresistibly. Finally sheer statistics did what envy could not prevent
and he was made a bishop. At the end of his fifteenth year in the East
he returned to Rome for the first time and was received with cold
dislike. His health had been partly undermined, and he was granted a
year's repose, during which he worked in the Vatican library on a thesis
relative to nothing in China, the donation of Constantine. This was
considered shocking in a missionary and when it was published its
learning and impersonality won it the neglect of the ecclesiastical
reviewers. He was treated with condescension by the courtiers of the
Palace; by implication they described to him their idea of his great
creation in Western China: a low mud-brick meeting-house and a
congregation of beggars who pretended to a conversion in order to be
fed. He did not trouble to describe to them the stone cathedral with two
awkward but lofty towers, the vast porch, the schools and library and
hospital; the processions on Feast days carrying garish but ardent
banners entering the great cavern of the Church and singing the
correctest Gregorian; nor of the governmental honors, the
tax-exemptions, the military respect during revolutions, the
co-operation of the city.
At last he returned, willingly enough, to sink himself for another ten
years into the remote interior. His visit to Rome had not altered his
boyish attitude toward his fellowmen. He had heard strange tales about
himself,--how he had amassed a huge fortune by taking bribes from the
Chinese merchants, how he had interpreted the atonement in Buddhist
terms and had allowed pagan symbols to be stamped upon the Host itself.
The ecclesiastical honors that eventually arrived must have been
extravagantly deserved, for they came without his or any friend's
negotiation. Sheer accomplishment must so have stared the Vatican in the
face that it had felt torn from its hands the trophies it was accustomed
to relinquish only on the receipt of petitions bearing ten thousand
signatures or at the instance of wealth or power. To receive these new
distinctions, the Bishop returned to Rome again after an absence of ten
years. This time he meant to remain in Italy, having decided that
henceforth his work would be better in the hands of natives. The
ecclesiastics viewed this return with considerable trepidation, for if
he returned as a scholar eager for doctrinal debates they dreaded seeing
exposed their lack of interest or equipment; if he came as a critic of
the Propaganda, they were all in danger. They watched him settle down
with two Chinese servants and an absurd peasant woman whom he insisted
on referring to as his sister, in a tiny villa on the Janiculum, join
the Papal Archaeological Society and apply himself to reading and
gardening. Within five years his retirement had become a greater
embarrassment to the Church than his pamphlets might have been. His fame
among Romanists outside Rome was unbounded; every distinguished visitor
rushed from the station to get an introduction to the recluse of
Janiculum; the Pope himself was a little tried by the zeal of visitors
who imagined that His Holiness enjoyed nothing better than discussing
the labors, the illness, and the modesty of the Cathedral Builder of
China. English Catholics and American Catholics and Belgian Catholics
who did not understand the exquisite subtlety of these matters and
should let them alone, kept crying: Why isn't something being done for
him? He humbly refused a high honorary Librarianship in the Vatican, but
his refusal was not accepted and his name crowned the stationery; the
same thing happened with the great committees on Propaganda; he did not
appear at the meetings, but no speech was so influential as the report
of chance words let fall in conversation with disciples at the Villino
Wei Ho. His very lack of ambition frightened the Churchmen; they
supposed it must arise from a similar emotion to that which kept
Achilles sulking in his tent, and dreaded the moment when he would
ultimately arise, swinging his mighty prestige and crush them for the
honors they begrudged him; finally he was offered the Hat, by a
committee from the College all in a perspiration lest he refuse it. This
time he accepted their offer and went through the forms with a rigid
decorum and with an observance of traditional minutiae that had to be
elaborately explained to his Irish American colleagues.
It would be hard to say what his thoughts were those dear mornings as he
sat among his flowers and rabbits, a volume of Montaigne fallen on to
the gravel path from the tabouret beside him, what were his thoughts as
he gazed at his yellow hands and listened to the hushed excitement of
the Aqua Paola exclaiming in eternal praise of Rome. He must surely have
asked himself often in what year his faith and joy had fled. Some said
that he had become attached to a convert who had relapsed into paganism;
some said that one day under torture he had renounced Christianity to
save his life from the hands of brigands. Perhaps it was only that he
had attempted the hardest task in the world and found it not so
difficult after all; and reflecting that he could have built up a huge
fortune in the financial world with half the energy and one-tenth the
gifts; that he was the only person living who could write a Latin that
would have entranced the Augustans; that he was the last man who would
be able to hold in his head at one moment all the learning of the
Church; and that to become a Prince of the Church required nothing but a
devoted indifference to its workings,--reflecting on these things he may
well have felt the world not to be worth the thunder of admiration and
applause that was so continually mounting to Heaven in its praise.
Perhaps one of the other stars is more worthy of one's best efforts.
Grace concluded, the meal could not be begun until the Cardinal was
informed as to Alix. But where's Alix?
Alix is always late.
Are you sure she's coming?
She telephoned this afternoon, that ...
Now isn't that too bad of her! She's coming in panting when the dinner's
half over. Then apologies. Father, you're too kind to her. You always
forgive her directly. You must act cross.
We must all act cross.
Everybody look angry when Alix comes in.
I had assumed that the conversation of the Cabala _in camera_ in camera
would be vertiginous. If I anticipated the wit and eloquence of its
table-talk I dreaded their gradual discovery that I was tongue-tied or
doltish. When, therefore, the conversation at last broke forth I had the
mixed sensation of discovering that it was not unlike that of a house
party on the Hudson. Wait, I told myself, they will warm up. Or perhaps
it is my presence here that prevents them from being at their best. I
recalled the literary tradition that the gods of antiquity had not died
but still drifted about the earth shorn of the greater part of their
glory--Jupiter and Venus and Mercury straying through the streets of
Vienna as itinerant musicians, or roaming the South of France as
harvesters. Casual acquaintances would not be able to sense their
supernaturalism; the gods would take good care to dim their genius but
once the outsider had gone would lay aside their cumbersome humanity and
relax in the reflections of their ancient godhead. I told myself that I
was the obstacle, that these Olympians chattered and chaffed for a
season until my departure, when the air would change,--what divine
conversation....
Presently in burst their Alix, the Princess d'Espoli, panting and
a-flutter with apologies. She knelt to the Cardinal's sapphire. No one
looked the least bit cross. The very servants beamed. We are to know a
great deal about the Princess later; suffice it to say that she was a
Frenchwoman of the utmost smallness and elegance, sandyhaired, pretty,
and endowed with a genius for conversation in which every shade of wit,
humor, pathos and even tragic power followed in close succession. Within
a few moments she was enchanting the company with a lot of nonsense
about a horse who had started talking on the Pincian Hill and the
efforts of the Police Force to suppress such an aberration of nature. As
I was presented to her she murmured quickly: Miss Grier told me to tell
you that she will be here at about ten-thirty.
After dinner Madame Bernstein played the piano for a time. She was still
the power behind the great German banking house. Without ever venturing
into her sons' offices or directors' meetings she yet disposed of all
the larger decisions of the firm, by curt remarks at their dinner
tables, by postscripts to her letters and by throaty injunctions at the
moment of saying goodnight. She wanted the sensation of having retired
from its direction, her whole middle life have been expended in a
magnificent display of generalship and financial imagination, yet she
could not keep her mind off its problems. The friendship of the Cabala
was beginning to reconcile her to advancing age, and drawing her further
and further into her love for music.
As a girl she had often heard Liszt and Tausig in her mother's home; by
dint of never playing Schumann or Brahms she had kept her fingers all
silver and crystal, and even now, practically in her old age, she evoked
the great era of virtuosi, a time when the orchestra had not led piano
technique into a desperate imitation of brass and strings. Mlle. de
Morfontaine sat holding in the cup of her hand the muzzle of one or
other of her splendid dogs. Her eyes were filled with tears, but whether
they were the facile tears of her half-mad nature or the witness of
memories brought back on the tide of Chopin's sonata, we cannot know.
The Cardinal had retired early and the Princess sat in the shadows, not
listening to the music, but pursuing some of the phantoms of her most
secretive mind.
Barely had the army with banners ceased drilling in the wintry sunlight
of the last movement when a servant whispered to me that the Cardinal
wished to see me.
I found him in the first of the two small rooms that had been set aside
for him at the Villa. He was writing a letter, standing up to it at one
of those high desks known to the clerks of Dickens and the illuminators
of the Middle Age. I was later to receive many of those famous letters,
never more nor less than four pages long, never falling short of their
amazing suavity, never very witty nor vivid yet never untouched from
beginning to end by the quality of their composer's mind. Whether he
declined an invitation or suggested a reading of Freud's book on
Leonardo, or gave suggestions on the feeding of rabbits, always from the
first sentence he foresaw his last and always like a movement from
Mozart's chamber-music the whole unit lay under one spirit and the
perfection of details played handmaid to the perfection of the form. He
seated me in a chair that suffered all the light that was in the room,
treating himself to a fine shadow.
He began by saying that he had heard that I was to keep an eye on Donna
Leda's son for a while.
I became warm and unintelligible in an effort at protesting that I could
guarantee nothing; that I was most reluctant; and that I still reserved
the right to withdraw at any moment.
Let me tell you about him, he began. Perhaps I should say first that I
am a sort of old uncle in the family, and their confessor for many
years. Well,--this Marcantonio. What shall I say? Have you seen him?
No.
The boy is full of good things. He ... he ... Full of good things.
Perhaps that's his trouble. You say you haven't met him yet?
No.
Everything seemed to start well. He was good in his studies. He made a
lot of friends. He was particularly good in the ceremonial that his rank
requires, his attendance at Court and at the Vatican. His mother was a
little anxious about his boyish dissipations. She had his father in
mind, I suspect, and wanted the boy to get over them as soon as
possible. Donna Leda is a more than usually foolish woman. She was very
pleased when he set up his own apartment off on the Via Po and became
very secretive about it.
Here the Cardinal began to grope about again, perhaps surprised at his
own awkwardness. Presently however he gathered up the reins with new
determination and said: And then, my dear young man, something went
wrong. We thought he would go through the usual experience of a Roman
young man of his class and come out. But he has never come out. Perhaps
you can tell me why this young fellow couldn't have had his five or six
little affairs and gotten over it?
I showed myself as quite unequal to answering this question. In fact I
was so amazed at the five or six little liaisons for a boy of sixteen,
that it was all I could do to keep my face casual. I wanted badly not to
appear shocked and endeavored by a lift of an eyebrow to imply that the
boy might have a score if he liked.
Marcantonio, continued the priest, went around with a group of boys
older than himself. His greatest wish was to be like them. You could see
them at the races, in the music-halls, at Court, in the tea-rooms and
hotel lobbies. They wore monocles and American hats, and all they talked
about was women and their own successes. Euh ... perhaps I should begin
at the beginning.
There was a pause.
He was first initiated--perhaps I should use a stronger word--on Lake
Como. He used to play tennis with some very warm little South American
girls, heiresses from Brazil, I believe, from whom no secrets were hid.
I fancy our Tonino merely meant to pay them a shy compliment or two, a
sudden kiss under the laurel-bushes. But he soon found himself with a
little ... a sort of Rubens riot on his hands. Well, it began in
imitation of his older friends. From imitation it went to an exercise of
vanity. What was Vanity became Pleasure. Pleasure became a Habit. Habit
became a Mania. And that's where he is now.
There was another pause.
You must have heard of how certain insane persons become enormously
intelligent--that is, they become sly and secretive--trying to conceal
their delusion from their guards? Yes; and I am told that vicious
children perform feats of duplicity worthy of the most expert criminals,
in an effort to conceal their tricks from their parents. You have heard
of such things? Well, that is where Marcantonio is now. What can be
done? Some people would say that we should let him go and make himself
thoroughly sick. Perhaps they are right, but we should like to step in
before that, if possible. Especially since there has a come a new
development into the story.
My mood at that moment was overwhelmingly against new developments. In
the distance I could hear that Madame Bernstein had resumed her Chopin.
I would have given a lot for the power of being rude enough to leap for
the doorknob and bid my host goodnight, a long goodnight to the
wallowing little Prince and his mother.
Yes, continued the Cardinal, his mother has at last found a marriage for
him. To be sure she does not believe there is a house in the world that
can bring any new distinction to her own, but she has found a girl with
an old name and some money and expects me to do the rest. But the girl's
brothers know Marcantonio. They are in the group I described to you.
They refuse to permit the marriage until Marcantonio has, well--been
quiet for a while.
Now my face must have shown a rich mixture of horror and amusement and
anger and astonishment, for the Cardinal became perplexed. You never can
tell what will surprise an American, he probably said to himself.
No, no. Excuse me, father. I can't, I can't.
What do you mean?
You want me to go to the country to hold him down to a few weeks of
temperance. I don't understand how you can mean such a thing, but you
do. He's a sort of Strassburg goose whom you want to stuff with virtue,
don't you, against his marriage. Don't you see...?
You exaggerate!
Excuse me if I sound rude, Father: No wonder you couldn't make an
impression on the boy,--you didn't believe in what you were saying. You
don't really believe in temperance.
Believe in it. Of course I do. Am I not a priest?
Then why not make the boy...?
But after all, _we are in the world_.
I laughed. I shouted with a laughter that would have been insulting, if
it hadn't contained a touch of hysteria. Oh, I thank thee, dear Father
Vaini, I said to myself. I thank thee for that word. How clear it makes
all Italy, all Europe. _Never try to do anything against the bent of
human nature_. I came from a colony guided by exactly the opposite
principle.
Excuse me, Father, I said at last. I can't go on with it. Under any
conditions I should' feel an awful hypocrite talking to the boy. But if
I knew it were only a measure to keep him good a month or two I should
feel ten times more so. It can't be argued; it's just a matter one
feels. I must tell Miss Grier I cannot visit her friend. She is driving
out here at ten-thirty. If you will excuse me I shall go and find her in
the music-room now.
Do not be angry with me, my son. Perhaps you are right. Probably I do
not believe these things.
Hardly had I re-entered the music-room with my revolt written all over
me when the Princess d'Espoli came forward. By that telepathy which the
Cabala employed in its affairs she already knew that I had to be
persuaded all over again. She made me sit down beside her and with the
briefest outlay of those gifts of suppliance and enchantment of which
she held the secret, she won my promise. In two minutes she had made it
seem the most natural thing in the world that I should play stern older
brother to a gifted drifting friend of hers.
As by the click of some invisible stage-manager Miss Grier entered.
How are you, how are you? she said, trailing her russet draperies across
the tiles toward me. You can't guess who drove me out. I must hurry
back. The Lateran choir is coming to sing Palestrina to me about
twelve,--perhaps you know the motets from the Song of Songs? No?
Marcantonio brought me here. He loves high-powered cars, and as his
mother can't give him one I let him play with mine. Can you come out and
meet him now? You'd better get your coat. Do you like night rides?
She led me out to the road where behind two blinding headlights a motor
was humming impatiently. Antonino, she called. This is an American
friend of your mother's. Do show him the car for half an hour, will you?
Don't kill anybody.
An incredibly slight and definite little elegant, looking exactly his
sixteen years, with spark-like black eyes bowed stiffly to me in the
faint light over the wheel. Italian princes do not rise at the approach
of ladies.
Don't hurt my car or my friend, Marcantonio.
No.
Where are you going?
But he did not choose to answer and the aroused motor drowned out the
lady's questions. For ten minutes we sat in silence while the road rose
to the headlights. After a harrowing struggle with his own selfishness
Don Marcantonio asked me if I wanted to take the wheel. Assured that
nothing would alarm me more, he settled down to driving with an almost
voluptuous application. He made nice distinctions with grades and
corners, took long descents cantabilemente, and played scherzi on
cobblestones. The outlines of the Alban hills stood out against the
stars that like a swarm of golden bees recalled that haughty Barberini
who had declared that the sky itself was the scutcheon of his house. All
lights were out on the farms, but occasionally we passed through a
village whose francobollo shop showed a lantern and a group of card
players. Many a wakeful soul in those enormous family beds must have
turned over, crossing himself, at the sighing whistle of our flight.
Presently however the driver wanted to talk. He asked a great many
questions about the United States. Could one plunge into the life of the
Wild West any minute? Were there many big cities as big as Rome? What
language was spoken in San Francesco? in Philadelphia? Where did our
athletes train for the Olympic Games? Was the public allowed to watch
them? Did I know about such things? I replied that at school and college
one couldn't help picking up hints on form and training. He then
disclosed the fact that at the Villa Colonna he had directed the
gardeners to make a running-track, cinders and hurdles and pit and shed
and embanked corners. And that we were to use it every morning. He
dreamed of himself doing incredible distances in incredible time. He
outlined a plan to me whereby under my direction he would begin by
running a mile every morning, and should add a half-mile daily for
weeks. This would go on for years and then he would be ready to enter
the Paris Olympics of 1924.
In my head the nerves of astonishment had been a little fatigued lately,
what with Mlle. de Morfontaine and her Œcumenical Council, the Cardinal
and his tolerances. Miss Grier and her cereals. But I confess they
received no small twinge when this frail and emptied spirit announced
his candidacy for a world's record in long runs. Not without sly
intention I began to outline the sacrifices that such an ambition would
entail. I touched on diet and early hours and early rising; he accepted
them eagerly. I then skirted those self-denials that would touch him
more particularly, and now with a mounting exaltation, with an almost
religious fire, he pledged himself to all temperance. The fact that I
was astonished shows my immaturity. I thought I was witness to a great
conversion. I told myself that he wanted to be saved; that he was
rolling up outside forces that might protect himself from his weakness;
and that he hoped to find in athletics a deliverance from despair.
Returning to the Villa we found the company still listening to music. As
we entered the room all eyes were turned towards us and I knew that for
the present the Cabala had laid aside all activity and was brooding over
one thing, the rescue of Donna Leda's son.
On arriving at my rooms in Rome I found several notes from a Mr. Perkins
of Detroit, a successful manufacturer who had crossed with me. Mr.
Perkins, descending upon Italy for the first time, was resolved to see
it at its best. There were no collections so private but that he was
able to secure letters of admittance; no savants too occupied but that
he obtained their services as ciceroni; audiences he obtained with the
Pope were, as he called them, "super-special"; excavations not yet open
to the public suffered his disappointed peerings. Some secretary at the
Embassy must have mentioned that I had already made some Italian
acquaintances, for there were these notes from him reminding me that he
wanted to know some real Italians. He wanted to see what they were like
in their homes, and he expected me to show him some. Mind, real
Italians. I wrote him at once that all the Italians I knew were half
French or half American, but assured him that when I had actually
isolated a native I would bring them together. I added that I was
leaving for the country, but would return in a week or two and see what
could be done.
To the country then I went, being driven for the greater part of a day
by Marcantonio himself. His enthusiasm for running had by no means
abated; in fact it seemed to have gone from strength to strength,
probably because of some lapses from strict training in the interval. It
was late afternoon and a red sunset was filtering through a blue dusk
when we entered the great gates of the park. There was first a forest of
oaks; then a mile of open lawn with some hurrying sheep; then a pineta
with a brook; the farmhouses in a cloud of doves; the upper terrace with
a perspective of fountains; and at last the casino with the Black Queen
trailing her garments of dusty serge across the driveway of powdered
shell. There was little time to admire the orange-brown front of the
villa roughened with wreaths and garlands that were crumbling away
before the sun and rain, or the famous frieze of the women in Ariosto's
poems, recalling the days when Pope Sylvester Lefthand held here his
academy and invented the Sylvestrian sonnet-form. All I could do was to
conceal my pleasure at the discovery that I was to live by candle-light
in rooms that though the originals of hundreds of bad copies on Long
Island, were here the secret shame of their owners. My hosts' ideal of
residence was a hotel on the Embankment and they all but breathed an
apology for the enormous rooms to which I was conducted, and in which I
stood transfixed, lost in antiquarian dreams until Marcantonio knocked
on the door to call me to supper.
At table I was presented to Donna Julia, Marcantonio's half-sister, and
to a spinster cousin of the family, always present, always silent and
whose lips never ceased moving, as solitaries' must, to the measure of
her inner thoughts. Like all girls of her class Donna Julia had never
been alone for more than a half-hour in all her life. Her immense
talents for being bad had been balked at every turn; they had been
forced to take refuge in her eyes. She had never even been allowed to
read anything more inflammatory than the comedies of Goldoni and I
Promessi Sposi, but she guessed at a criminal world and presently when
marriage suddenly opened up to her every freedom she played her part in
it. Donna Julia was a little stiff, almost ugly with her level baleful
regard. She kept silent most of the time, was utterly incurious of me,
and seemed chiefly occupied in angling for her brother's evasive glance
so as to plant into it a triumphant significant idea.
One retired early at the Villa Colonna. But Marcantonio, for whom my
simplest remarks were astonishing, would stop in at my room and talk for
hours over some glasses of Marsala. No doubt his mother, noting the
visits through her half-opened door down the hall, assumed with great
satisfaction that I was reading lectures on hygiene. But, especially as
the week advanced, we were chiefly taken up with a diagram that showed
day by day how the little champion had run and in what time.
It must have been at the end of a week of this that in one of our late
conversation his friendliness suddenly turned into contempt. A week's
preoccupation with unsentimental matters now took its revenge. Back into
his mind flooded the images of passion, and he wanted to boast. Perhaps
he saw that prowess on the field was not to be his, and his egoism being
athirst for all possible superlatives, he must replace it with a
catalogue of the first prizes he had won in another arena. He recalled
the Brazilian girls under the arbors of Como. He described how he had
returned to Rome after that initiation bent on seeing whether the game
was as easy as it had seemed. Suddenly his eyes had been opened to a
world he had not dreamed of. So it was true that men and women were
never really engaged in what they appeared to be doing, but lived in a
world of secret invitations, signals and escapes! Now he understood the
raised eyebrows of waitresses and the brush of the usher's hand as she
unlocks the loge. It is not an accident that the wind draws the great
lady's scarf across your face as you emerge from the door of the hotel.
Your mother's friends happen to be passing in the corridor outside the
drawing-room, but not by chance. Now he discovered that all women were
devils, but foolish ones, and that he had entered into the true and only
satisfactory activity in living--the pursuit of them. One minute he was
exclaiming at the easiness of it; the next he described its difficulties
and subtlety. Now he sang the uniformity of their weakness and now the
endless variety of their temperaments. Next he boasted of his utter
indifference and his superiority to them; he knew their tears but he did
not believe they really suffered. He doubted whether they had souls.
To incidents that were true he added others that he wished had been
true. To his acquaintance with a corner of Rome he added a
fourteen-year-old's vision of a civilization where no one thought about
anything but caresses. This fantasy took him about two hours. I listened
without a word. It must have been this that undermined his exhilaration.
He had been talking to impress me. Impressed I certainly was; no New
Englander could help it; but I knew that a great deal depended on my not
showing it. Perhaps it was his sudden realization that, seen through my
eyes, these adventures were not enviable; perhaps it was that the black
tide of reaction licked close on the heels of such pride; perhaps it was
just truth finding room for utterance in his mounting fatigue,--at all
events, there was strength left for one more outburst: I hate them all!
I hate it. There's no end to it all. What shall I do? And he fell on his
knees beside the bed and buried his face in the side of the mattress,
his hands feverishly pulling at the cover.
Priests and doctors must often hear the cry Save me! Save me! I was
destined to hear it from two other souls before my Roman year was over.
Who now thinks it uncommon?
I scarcely know what I said when my turn at last came around. All I know
is that my mind whipped up to its subject with a glee. Heaven only knows
what New England divines lent me their remorseless counsels. I became
possessed with the wine of the Puritans and alternating the vocabulary
of the Pentateuch with that of psychiatry I showed him where his mind
was already slipping; I pointed out wherein he already resembled his
uncle Marcantonio, no mean warning; I made him see that even his interest
in athletics was a symptom of his disintegration; how that he was
incapable of fixing his mind on the general interests of man, and how
everything he thought and did--humor, sports, ambition, presented
themselves to him as symbols of lust.
My little tirade was effective beyond all expectation and for a number
of reasons. In the first place, it had the energy and sincerity which
the Puritan can always draw upon to censure those activities he cannot
permit himself,--not a Latin demonstration of gesture and tears, but a
cold hate that staggers the Mediterranean soul. Again, all my words had
already their dim counterpart in the boy's soul. It is the libertine and
not the preacher who conceives most truly of the ideal purity and
soundness, because he pays it out, coin by coin, regretfully, knowingly,
unpreventably. All my words went to rejoin their prototypes in
Marcantonio's mind. Again, how could I know that he had arrived but
recently at that stage of failure when one's whole being reverberates,
as with some bell of despair, with the words: I shall never get out of
this. I am lost. Again, I found out later that Marcantonio had a streak
of religious frenzy in him, that for a year he had watched himself
alternating communion and dissipation, the exaltation of the former
itself betraying him into the latter and the despair of the latter
driving him in anguish to the former. At last in sheer cynicism, after
watching himself fail so often, he had missed Mass for several months.
All these reasons go toward explaining the prostrating effect my brief
and vindictive speech had. He cowered against the carpet, begging me to
stop, gasping out his promises of reform. But having brought him to a
conviction he might never attain again, I thought it unwise to let go. I
had reserves of indignation left. But now he knelt crying on the carpet,
covering his ears with his hands and shaking his wet face at me with all
its terror and suppliance. I stopped and we stared at one another,
darkly, trembling under our several headaches. Then he went to bed.
The next morning he seemed etherialized, made almost transparent by his
new resolutions. He walked lightly and with an air of humility. No
reference was made to the scene of the evening before, but his glances
over the tennis net implied an obedience and a deference that were more
annoying than impudence. After two sets we wandered over to the lower
fountain and here stretched out on the semi-circular bench he slept for
three hours. It seemed to me as I watched morning advance to noon and
the sun penetrate his thin body in the delicious fatigues that follow
hysterical outbursts, it seemed that it would not be rash to wonder if
possibly we may have succeeded. I day-dreamed. From the formal terrace
below the casino came the click of topiary shears; from the field where
the ancient altar had been placed, drum-shaped and bearing an almost
effaced frieze, came the shouts of some divinity students (to whom a
little villa on the estate had been offered as a vacation house) playing
football, their cassocks tucked up about their knees; from the pine wood
the exclamations of two shepherds who sat whittling while their flock
drifted almost imperceptibly to the road beyond. The fountain before me
gave forth its varied sounds: the whir of its initial jet and the tinkle
as it fell back into the first bowl; the drumtaps as this overflowed and
slipped into the second; and the loud loquacity with which the lowest
basin received all that came to it from every level. Tacitus lay unread
upon my knee while my eyes followed the lizards that flashed in and out
of the brilliant sunshine on the gravel, noting their confusion when a
sudden breeze bent the poised veil of the fountain and swept us all with
a fine mist. The monotony of light and the noise of water, of insects,
and of doves in the farmhouses behind me, combined to recall those
tremulous webs of sound that modern composers set shimmering above their
orchestra, to draw across it presently on the oboes their bleating
melody in thirds.
While I sat there a note was brought me from the house. Mr. Perkins of
Detroit had heard I was at the Villa and from the hotel in the nearby
town announced his intention of calling on me,--lucky in have a pretext
for entering the most inaccessible villa in Italy. I scribbled on the
back of his envelope that an unfortunate event in the family prevented
my asking him to the house at present.
The hot sunlight of the morning had gathered its storm and all afternoon
we sat indoors. Marcantonio and Donna Julia attempted teaching me the
Neapolitan dialect, while the silent cousin sat by, deeply shocked. But
my lesson soon descended into a subtle and barbed quarrel between the
teachers. It was conducted for the most part in rapid and hate-laden
parentheses, far above my head, in their thick _argot_. What she taunted
him about I can only guess. He was invariably beaten; he grew loud and
angry. Twice he leaped around the table to strike her; she waited for
the blow, stretching herself sleekly and looking up at him from her
magnetic eyes. At length he urged me to come away from her and to go
upstairs, and the two parted much as children of seven would with a bout
of grimaces and a competition to have the last ugly word.
After dinner the war was resumed. The Duchess was nodding by the fire;
the cousin was mumbling opposite her. And the two children sat in the
shadows exchanging invective. I was made strangely uneasy by their
curious quarreling. I excused myself and went to bed. The last thing I
saw was an infuriated blow that Marcantonio directed at his sister's
shoulder and the last sound I heard was the tremolo of her provocative
laughter as they tussled on the carved wooden chest in the corner. I
debated with myself on the stairs: surely I had imagined it; my poor
sick head was so full of the erotic narratives of the week; surely I
imagined the character of mixed love and hate in those blows that were
savage caresses, and that laughter that was half sneer and half
invitation.
But I had not imagined it.
At about three I was awakened by Marcantonio. He was still dressed. He
poured at my drowsy head a torrent of whirling words in which I
distinguished nothing but a feverish reiteration of the phrase: You were
right. Then he left the room as abruptly as he had come.
What luck Mr. Perkins had always had! Even now when he brought to bear
all his American determination and broke into the gardens of the
forbidden Villa, what guardian angel arranged that he should see the
Villa at its most characteristic? Surely a rich old Italian villa is at
its most characteristic when a dead prince lies among the rose-bushes.
When Frederick Perkins of Detroit leapt the wall in the crystal airs of
seven in the morning, he discovered at his feet the body of Marcantonio
d'Aquilanera, 14th prince and 14th duke of Aquilanera and Stoli, 12th
duke of Stoli-Roccellina, marquis of Bugnaccio, of Tei, etc., baron of
Spenestra, of Gran-Spenestra, seigneur of the Sciestrian Lakes; patron
of the bailly of the order of San Stephano; likewise prince of
Altdorf-Hotenlingen-Craburg, intendant elector of Altdorf-H-C.; prince
of the Holy Roman Empire, etc., etc.; chamberlain of the court of
Naples; lieutenant and cousin of the Papal Familia; order of the Crane(
f. class); three hours cold, and with a damp revolver clutched in his
right hand.
* * * * * *