The Cabalists received the news of Marcantonio's death philosophically.
The account of it which the bereaved mother gave to Miss Grier was a
miracle of misunderstanding. According to her I had done wonders; in
fact it was the suddenness and thoroughness of the boy's reformation
that had broken his health. She, she, was to blame. She should have
foreseen that continence was not to be expected of a mere lad; he had
gone insane from an excess of virtue and shot himself from too much
sanctity. These things are out of our hands, dear Leda, murmured Miss
Grier. The Cardinal made no comment.
The Cabala went back to its usual occupations. Being the biographer of
the individuals and not the historian of the group I shall not take up
much space here with details of the discomfiture of Mrs. Pole (she had
been impudent to Miss Grier), nor of the Renan performance (_L'Abbesse
de Jouarre_ was effectively not given as a benefit at the Constanzi).
From a purely disinterested love of Church tradition they blocked the
canonization of several tiresome nonentities that had been proposed to
gratify the faithful in Sicily and Mexico. They saved the taxpayers of
Rome the purchase of hundreds of modern Italian paintings, and the
establishment of a permanent museum for them. They interested public
opinion in the faint smell of drains that is wafted through the Sistine
Chapel. When an oak forest fell ill in the Borghese Gardens no one but
the Cabala had the sense to send to Berlin for a doctor. To tell the
truth their achievements were not very considerable. I soon saw that I
had arrived on the scene in the middle of the decline of their power. At
first they thought they could do something about the strikes, and about
the Fascismo, and the blasphemies in the Senate; and it was only after a
great deal of money had been spent and hundreds of persons ineffectually
goaded that they realized that the century had let loose influences they
could not stem, and contented themselves with less pretentious
assignments.
I came to see more and more of them. My youth and foreignness never
ceased to amuse them and they were made almost uncomfortable by the
knowledge that I so liked them. They thought they had outgrown being
susceptible to being liked. From time to time they would point their
fingers to where I sat staring at them in sheer wonder.
He's like an eager dog with his tongue out of his mouth, Alix d'Espoli
would cry. What does he see in us?
He never loses hope that we will suddenly say something memorable, said
the Cardinal looking at me musingly,--the look of a great talker who
knows that for lack of a Boswell his greatness must die with him.
He comes from the rich new country that will grow more and more splendid
while our countries decline to ruins and rubbish heaps, said Donna Leda.
That's why his eyes shine so.
Why, no, cried Alix. I believe he loves us. Just simply loves us in a
disinterested new world way. Once I had a most beautiful setter, named
Samuele. Samuele spent all his life sitting around on the pavement
watching us with a look of most intense excitement.
Did he bite? asked Donna Leda who had a literal mind.
You didn't have to give Samuele a sandwich to win his devotion. He liked
to like. You won't be angry with me if every now and then I call you
Samuele to remind me of him?
You mustn't talk about him in front of him, muttered Mme. Bernstein who
was playing solitaire. Young man, get me my furs from the piano until
these people remember themselves.
The Princess explained me. What fairer service can one render another?
How could I do other than attach myself to one with so quick and
gracious an interpretation.
The Princess was not really modern. As scientists gazing at certain
almost extinct birds off Australia are able to evoke a whole lost era,
so in the person of this marvellous princess we felt ourselves permitted
to glimpse into Seventeenth Century and to reconstruct for ourselves
what the aristocratic system must have been like in its flower.
The Princess d'Espoli was exceedingly pretty in a fragile Parisian way;
her vivacious head, surmounted by a mass of sandy reddish hair was
forever tilted above one or other of her thin pointed shoulders; her
whole character lay in her sad laughing eyes and small red mouth. Her
father came of the Provençal nobility and she had spent her girlhood
partly in provincial convent schools and partly climbing like a goat the
mountains that surrounded her father's castle. At eighteen she and her
sister had been called in from the cliffs, dressed up stiffly and hawked
like merchandise through the drawing-rooms of their more influential
relatives in Paris, Florence, and Rome. Her sister had fallen to an
automobile manufacturer and was making the good and bad weather of
Lyons; Alix had married the morose Prince d'Espoli who had immediately
sunk into a profounder misanthropy. He remained at home sunk in the last
dissipations. His wife's friends never saw or referred to him;
occasionally we became aware of him, we thought, in her late arrivals,
hurried departures and harassed air. She had lost two children in
infancy. She had no life, save in other peoples' homes. Yet the sum of
her sufferings had been the production of the sweetest strain of gaiety
that we shall ever see, a pure well of heartbroken frivolity. Wonderful
though she was in all the scenes of social life, she certainly was at
her finest at table, where she had graces and glances that the most
gifted actresses would fall short of conceiving for their Millamonts,
and Rosalinds and Célimènes; nowhere has been seen such charm, such
manners, and such wit. She would prattle about her pets, describe a
leave-taking seen by chance in a railway station, or denounce the Roman
fire departments with a perfection of rendering of Yvette Guilbert, a
purer perfection in that it did not suggest the theatre. She possessed
the subtlest mimicry, and could sustain an endless monologue, but the
charm of her gift resided in the fact that it required the collaboration
of the whole company; it required the exclamations, contradictions, and
even the concerted shouts as of a Shakespearean mob, before the Princess
could display her finest art. She employed an unusually pure speech, a
gift that went deeper than a mere aptitude for acquiring grammatical
correctness in the four principal languages of Europe; its source lay in
the type of her mind. Her thought proceeded complicatedly, but not
without order, in long looping parentheses, a fine network of relative
clauses, invariably terminating in some graceful turn by way of climax,
some sudden generalization or summary surprise. I once accused her of
speaking in paragraphs and she confessed that the nuns to whom she had
gone to school in Provence had required of her every day an oral essay
built on a formula derived principally from Madame de Sévigné and
terminating in a _concetto_.
Such rare personalities are not able to derive nourishment from ordinary
food. Rumors of the Princess's strange stormy loves reached us
continually. It seems that she was doomed to search throughout the
corridors of Rome a succession of attachments as brief and fantastic as
they were passionate and unsatisfied. Nature had decided to torment this
woman by causing her to fall in love (that succession of febrile
interviews, searches, feints at indifference, nightlong solitary
monologues, ridiculous visions of remote happiness) with the very type
of youth that could not be attracted by her, with cool impersonal
learned or athletic young Northerners, a secretary at the British
Embassy or Russian violinist or German archaeologist. As though these
trials were not sufficient, society had added to them this aggravation,
that her Roman hostesses, conscious of this failing and wishing to make
sure that at their tables the Princess would display her finest flights,
would intentionally include among their guests the Princess's latest
infatuation to whom throughout the evening she would sing, like a swan,
her song of defeated love.
As a mere girl, if I may presume to reconstruct the growth of her
personality, she sensed the fact that there was in her something that a
little prevented, her making friends, namely; intelligence. The few
intelligent people who truly wish to be liked soon learn, among the
disappointments of the heart, to conceal their brilliance. They
gradually convert their keen perceptions into more practical
channels,--into a whole technique of implied flattery of others, into
felicities of speech, into the euphemisms of demonstrative affection,
into softening for others the crude lines of their dullness. All the
Princess's perfection was an almost unconscious attempt at making
friends of those who would first be her admirers, yet realizing that if
she were too artistic they would be dazzled but repelled, and that if
she were less than perfect they would dismiss her as a trivial bright
hysteric. For many years she had practiced this babbling speech on her
friends, unconsciously noting on their faces which tones of the voice,
which appropriate fleck of the hands, which delayed adjectives were more
and which less successful. In other words she had achieved mastery of a
fine art, the all but forgotten art of conversation, under the impetus
of love. Like some panic-stricken white mouse in the trap of a
psychologist's experiment she had been seeking her ends by the primitive
rules of trial and error, only to learn that at the last one is too
bruised by the mistakes to enjoy the successes. The exquisite and
fragile mechanism of her temperament had not been able to stand the
strain laid upon it, the double exhaustion of inspiration and woe; and
the lovely being was already slightly mad. She grew daily more
light-headed and could be caught from time to time in moods that were
variously foolish and pathetic. But her deepest wound was still to come.
James Blair and his notebooks were staying over in Rome after all. He
had come upon some new veins of research. For him ten lifetimes would be
all too short to pursue the horizons of one's curiosity. Think, he would
say, it would take about ten years to work up the full critical
apparatus to attack the historical problems surrounding the life of St.
Francis of Assisi. It would take almost as many to get up the Roman
road-system, the salt roads and the wheat roads,--God, the whole problem
as to how the Rome of the Republic was fed. Another day he would be
dreaming about starting on the eight or ten books in French and German
on Christina of Sweden and her life in Rome; then one studied up Swedish
and read the diaries and the barrels-full of notes; when one knew more
about her than did anyone alive one passed on to her father and buried
oneself for months in libraries to master the policies and the military
genius of Gustavus Adolphus. Thus life stretched ... bindings ...
bindings ... catalogues ... footnotes. One studied the saints and never
thought about religion. One knew everything about Michelangelo yet never
felt deeply a single work. James spent weeks of fascinated attention on
the women of the Caesars and yet could scarcely be dragged to dinner at
the Palazzo Barberini. He found all moderns trivial, and was the dupe of
the historians' grand style which fails to convey the actuality (for
Blair, the triviality) of their heroes. The present casts a veil of
cheapness over the world: to look into any face, however beautiful, is
to see pores and the folds about the eye. Only those faces not present
are beautiful.
The fact is that quite early James Blair had been frightened by life (in
a way which the Princess, in a moment of misery and inspiration, was to
divine later with the cry: What kind of a stupid mother could he have
had?) and had forever after bent upon books the floodtides of his
energy. At times his scholarship resembled panic; he acted as though he
feared that raising his eyes from the page he would view the world, or
his share in the world, dissolving in ruin. His endless pursuit of facts
(which had no fruit in published work and brought no intrinsic æsthetic
pleasure) was not so much the will to do something as it was the will to
escape something else. One man's release lies in dreams, another's in
facts.
All this resulted in a real unworldliness, which with his youth and
learning and faintly _distrait_ courtesy especially endeared him to
older women. Both Miss Grier and Mme. Agaropoulos hovered about him with
mothering delight and sighed with vexation at his obstinate refusal to
come and see them. He reminded me of the lions that stare, unwinking and
unseeing, at the crowd about their cage, the crowd that grimaces and
waves admiring parasols, though the beast disdains to pick up even a
biscuit from such vulgar givers.
At the time that the Princess's story begins he was engaged in
establishing the exact location of the ancient cities of Italy. He was
reading mediæval descriptions of the Campagna and tracing through
place-names, through dried water-courses, through cracked old paintings
the exact position of disused roads and abandoned towns. He was learning
about the country's former plants and animals: he was quite happy.
Sometimes he made notes of all this, but for the most part he preferred
to learn the truth and then forget it.
When it began to get cold in his room he serenely made use of mine,
covering my tables with his velumbound folios, standing his pictures
against my wall, and strewing my floors with his maps. He had dazzled
one of the librarians at the Collegio Romano with his allusions and had
obtained the privilege of bringing the material home.
One day the Princess d'Espoli came to see me. Ottima admitted her. She
came in upon James Blair who was kneeling on the floor crawling from
city to city on some yellow crested maps. His coat was off; his hair was
in a tangle, and his hands were gray with dust. He had never met her and
did not like her clothes. He did not want to be drawn into a
conversation and stood, handsome and sulky, his glances stealing to the
maps on the floor. Explained that I was out. Might not be back before.
Would not forget to tell that.
Alix didn't mind. She even asked for some tea.
Ottima had just come in to begin thinking about dinner. While tea was
making Alix asked to have the maps explained to her. Now the Princess
was more capable of entering into an enthusiasm for old cities than most
of the several hundred women of her acquaintance; but short of a
doctorate in archæology one does not enter upon such ground with James
Blair. Coldly, haughtily, and with long quotations from Livy and Virgil,
he harangued my guest. He dragged her remorselessly up and down the
seven hills; he wrung her in and out of all the shifting beds of the
Tiber. When I finally returned I found her sitting gazing at him over
the edge of her teacup with a faintly mocking expression. She had not
known that such a man was possible. Throughout the whole episode Blair
had acted like nothing so much as a spoiled boy of seven interrupted in
a game about Indians. It would be hard to say what had most captivated
the Princess, but it was probably that trace of sturdy spoiled egotism.
It might have been, in part, the cold douche of being unwelcome,--she
who was the delight of the most delightful people in Europe, who had
never entered a door without arousing a whirlpool of welcome, who had
never come too early nor left too late,--suddenly she had tasted the
luxury of being resented.
As soon as I arrived Blair took a swift and awkward departure.
But he's charming! He's charming! she cried. Who is he?
I told her briefly of his home, his progress through the universities,
and his habits of study.
But he's extraordinary. Tell me: is he--shy, is he _boudeur_ with
everybody? Now perhaps I did something to annoy him? What could I have
said, Samuele?
I hastened to reassure her. He's that way with everyone. And most people
like him all the more for it. Especially older women. For example, Miss
Grier and Mme. Agaropoulos adore him and all he does is to sit on their
chairs inventing excuses for not coming to dinner.
Well, I'm not old and I like him. Oh, he is so rude! I could have
slapped him. And he only looked at me once. He will have a hard time in
life, Samuele, unless he learns to be more gracious. Isn't there anybody
he likes, no? besides you?
Yes, he's engaged to a girl in the United States.
Dark hair or light?