With inexpressible relief I heard the following day that we were to
leave for Rome immediately.
Alma was to go with us, but that did not matter to me in the least.
Outside the atmosphere of this place, so artificial, so unrelated to
nature, her power over my husband would be gone. Once in the Holy City
everything would be different. Alma would be different, I should be
different, above all my husband would be different. I should take him to
the churches and basilicas; I should show him the shrines and papal
processions, and he would see me in my true "part" at last!
But what a deep disappointment awaited me!
On reaching Rome we put up at a fashionable hotel in the new quarter of
the Ludovisi, and although that was only a few hundred yards from the
spot on which I had spent nine happy years it seemed to belong to
another world altogether. Instead of the church domes and the monastery
bells, there were the harsh clang of electric trams, the thrum and throb
of automobiles, the rattle of cars and the tramp of soldiers.
Then I realised that there were two Romes--an old Rome and a new one,
and that the Rome we had come to hardly differed from the Cairo we had
left behind.
There was the same varied company of people of all nations, English,
Americans, French, German; the same nomad tribes of the rich and
dissolute, pitching their tents season by season in the sunny resorts of
Europe; the same aimless society, the same debauch of fashion, the same
callous and wicked luxury, the same thirst for selfish pleasures, the
same busy idleness, the same corruption of character and sex.
This made me very unhappy, but from first to last Alma was in the
highest spirits. Everybody seemed to be in Rome that spring, and
everybody seemed to be known either to her or to my husband. For Alma's
sake we were invited everywhere, and thus we saw not only the life of
the foreign people of the hotels but that of a part (not the better
part) of the Roman aristocracy.
Alma was a great success. She had the homage of all the men, and being
understood to be rich, and having the gift of making every man believe
he was her special favourite, she was rarely without a group of Italian
noblemen about her chair.
With sharper eyes the Italian women saw that her real reckoning lay with
my husband, but they seemed to think no worse of her for that. They
seemed to think no worse of him either. It was nothing against him that,
having married me (as everybody appeared to know) for the settlement of
his financial difficulties, he had transferred his attentions, even on
his honeymoon, to this brilliant and alluring creature.
As for me, I was made to realise that I was a person of a different
class altogether. When people wished to be kind they called me
_spirituelle_, and when they were tempted to be the reverse they voted
me insipid.
As a result I became very miserable in this company, and I can well
believe that I may have seemed awkward and shy and stupid when I was in
some of their grey old palaces full of tapestry and bronze, for I
sometimes found the talk there so free (especially among the women) that
the poisoned jokes went quivering through me.
Things I had been taught to think sacred were so often derided that I
had to ask myself if it could be Rome, my holy and beloved Rome--this
city of license and unbelief.
But Alma was entirely happy, especially when the talk turned on conjugal
fidelity, and the faithful husband was held up to ridicule. This
happened very often in one house we used to go to--that of a Countess of
ancient family who was said to have her husband and her lover at either
side of her when she sat down to dinner.
She was a large and handsome person of middle age, with a great mass of
fair hair, and she gave me the feeling that in her case the body of a
woman was inhabited by the soul of a man.
She christened me her little Irish _bambino_, meaning her child; and one
night in her drawing-room, after dinner, before the men had joined us,
she called me to her side on the couch, lit a cigarette, crossed her
legs, and gave us with startling candour her views of the marriage bond.
"What can you expect, you women?" she said. "You run after the men for
their titles--they've very little else, except debts, poor things--and
what is the result? The first result is that though you have bought them
you belong to them. Yes, your husband owns his beautiful woman, just as
he owns his beautiful horse or his beautiful dog."
This was so pointed that I felt my face growing crimson, but Alma and
the other women only laughed, so the Countess went on:
"What then? Once in a blue moon each goes his and her own way without
sin. You agree to a sort of partnership for mutual advantage in which
you live together in chastity under the same roof. What a life! What an
ice-house!"
Again the other women laughed, but I felt myself blushing deeply.
"But in the majority of cases it is quite otherwise. The business
purpose served, each is open to other emotions. The man becomes
unfaithful, and the woman, if she has any spirit, pays him out tit for
tat--and why shouldn't she?"
After that I could bear no more, and before I knew what I was saying I
blurted out:
"But I find that wrong and wicked. Infidelity on the part of the man
does not justify infidelity in the woman. The prayer-book says so."
Alma burst out laughing, and the Countess smiled and continued:
"Once in a hundred years there comes a great passion--Dante and
Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura. The woman meets the right man too late.
What a tragedy! What a daily and hourly crucifixion! Unless," said the
Countess with emphasis, "she is prepared to renounce the law and reject
society and live a life of complete emancipation. But in a Catholic
country, where there is no divorce, what woman can afford to do that?
Nobody in the higher classes can--especially if she has to sacrifice her
title. So the wise woman avoids scandal, keeps her little affair with
her lover to herself, and . . . and that's marriage, my dears."
A twitter of approval, led by Alma, came from the other women, but I was
quivering with anger and I said:
"Then marriage is an hypocrisy and an imposture. If I found I loved
somebody better than my husband, I should go to him in spite of the law,
and society, and title and . . . and everything."
"Of course you would, my dear," said the Countess, smiling at me as at a
child, "but that's because you are such a sweet, simple, innocent little
Irish _bambino_."
It must have been a day or two after this that we were invited to the
Roman Hunt. I had no wish to go, but Alma who had begun to use me in
order to "save her face" in relation to my husband, induced me to drive
them out in a motor-car to the place on the Campagna where they were to
mount their horses.
"Dear sweet girl!" said Alma. "How could we possibly go without you?"
It was Sunday, and I sat between Alma in her riding habit and my husband
in his riding breeches, while we ran through the Porta San Giovanni, and
past the _osterie_ where the pleasure-loving Italian people were playing
under the pergolas with their children, until we came to the
meeting-ground of the Hunt, by the Trappist monastery of Tre Fontane.
A large company of the Roman aristocracy were gathered there with their
horses and hounds, and they received Alma and my husband with great
cordiality. What they thought of me I do not know, except that I was a
childish and complacent wife; and when at the sound of the horn the hunt
began, and my husband and Alma went prancing off with the rest, without
once looking back, I asked myself in my shame and distress if I could
bear my humiliation much longer.
But then came a moment of unexpected pleasure. A cheerful voice on the
other side of the car said:
"Good morning, Lady Raa."
It was the young Irish doctor from the steamer. His ship had put into
Naples for two days, and, like Martin Conrad before my marriage, he had
run up to look at Rome.
"But have you heard the news?" he cried.
"What news?"
"About the South Pole Expedition--they're on their way home."
"So soon?"
"Yes, they reached New Zealand on Saturday was a week."
"And . . . and . . . and Martin Conrad?"
"He's well, and what's better, he has distinguished himself."
"I . . . I . . . I knew he would."
"So did I! The way I was never fearing that if they gave Mart half a
chance he would come out top! Do or die--that was his watch-word."
"I know! I know!"
His eyes were sparkling and so I suppose were mine, while with a joyous
rush of racy words, (punctuated by me with "Yes," "Yes," "Yes") he told
of a long despatch from the Lieutenant published by one of the London
papers, in which Martin had been specially mentioned--how he had been
put in command of some difficult and perilous expedition, and had worked
wonders.
"How splendid! How glorious! How perfectly magnificent!" I said.
"Isn't it?" said the doctor, and for a few moments more we bandied quick
questions and replies like children playing at battledore and
shuttlecock. Then he said:
"But I'm after thinking it's mortal strange I never heard him mention
you. There was only one chum at home he used to talk about and that was
a man--a boy, I mean. Mally he was calling him--that's short for
Maloney, I suppose."
"For Mary," I said.
"Mary, is it? Why, by the saints, so it is! Where in the name of St.
Patrick has been the Irish head at me that I never thought of that
before? And you were . . . Yes? Well, by the powers, ye've a right to be
proud of him, for he was thinking pearls and diamonds of you. I was
mortal jealous of Mally, I remember. 'Mally's a stunner,' he used to
say. 'Follow you anywhere, if you wanted it, in spite of the devil and
hell.'"
The sparkling eyes were growing misty by this time but the woman in me
made me say--I couldn't help it--
"I dare say he's had many girl friends since my time, though?"
"Narra a one. The girls used to be putting a glime on him in
Dublin--they're the queens of the world too, those Dublin girls--but
never a skute of the eye was he giving to the one of them. I used to
think it was work, but maybe it wasn't . . . maybe it was. . . ."
I dare not let him finish what I saw he was going to say--I didn't know
what would happen to me if he did--so I jumped in by telling him that,
if he would step into the car, I would drive him back to Rome.
He did so, and all the way he talked of Martin, his courage and resource
and the hardships he had gone through, until (with backward thoughts of
Alma and my husband riding away over the Campagna) my heart, which had
been leaping like a lamb, began to ache and ache.
We returned by the Old Appian Way, where the birds were building their
nests among the crumbling tombs, through the Porta San Paolo, and past
the grave of the "young English poet" of whom I have always thought it
was not so sad that he died of consumption as in the bitterness of a
broken heart.
All this time I was so much at home with the young Irish doctor, who was
Martin's friend, that it was not until I was putting him down at his
hotel that I remembered I did not even know his name.
It was O'Sullivan.