“But how could you expect me to listen to you while you were in that
mood? Why didn’t you set about it differently--politely, charmingly?”
She smiled at me and dropped her fluttering eyelids.
I thought it best to change the conversation. It is disagreeable, when
one is in the right, to be made to appear in the wrong.
A few weeks later we had a letter--duly registered and by express
messenger--in which the Signora asked us whether we proposed to renew
our lease (which was only for six months), and notifying us that, if
we did, the rent would be raised 25 per cent., in consideration of the
improvements which had been carried out. We thought ourselves lucky, at
the end of much bargaining, to get the lease renewed for a whole year
with an increase in the rent of only 15 per cent.
It was chiefly for the sake of the view that we put up with these
intolerable extortions. But we had found other reasons, after a few
days’ residence, for liking the house. Of these the most cogent was
that, in the peasant’s youngest child, we had discovered what seemed
the perfect playfellow for our own small boy. Between little Guido--for
that was his name--and the youngest of his brothers and sisters there
was a gap of six or seven years. His two elder brothers worked with
their father in the fields; since the time of the mother’s death, two
or three years before we knew them, the eldest sister had ruled the
house, and the younger, who had just left school, helped her and in
between-whiles kept an eye on Guido, who by this time, however, needed
very little looking after; for he was between six and seven years old
and as precocious, self-assured, and responsible as the children of
the poor, left as they are to themselves almost from the time they can
walk, generally are.
Though fully two and a half years older than little Robin--and at that
age thirty months are crammed with half a lifetime’s experience--Guido
took no undue advantage of his superior intelligence and strength.
I have never seen a child more patient, tolerant, and untyrannical.
He never laughed at Robin for his clumsy efforts to imitate his own
prodigious feats; he did not tease or bully, but helped his small
companion when he was in difficulties and explained when he could not
understand. In return, Robin adored him, regarded him as the model and
perfect Big Boy, and slavishly imitated him in every way he could.
These attempts of Robin’s to imitate his companion were often
exceedingly ludicrous. For by an obscure psychological law, words and
actions in themselves quite serious become comic as soon as they are
copied; and the more accurately, if the imitation is a deliberate
parody, the funnier--for an overloaded imitation of some one we know
does not make us laugh so much as one that is almost indistinguishably
like the original. The bad imitation is only ludicrous when it is
a piece of sincere and earnest flattery which does not quite come
off. Robin’s imitations were mostly of this kind. His heroic and
unsuccessful attempts to perform the feats of strength and skill, which
Guido could do with ease, were exquisitely comic. And his careful,
long-drawn imitations of Guido’s habits and mannerisms were no less
amusing. Most ludicrous of all, because most earnestly undertaken and
most incongruous in the imitator, were Robin’s impersonations of Guido
in the pensive mood. Guido was a thoughtful child, given to brooding
and sudden abstractions. One would find him sitting in a corner by
himself, chin in hand, elbow on knee, plunged, to all appearances, in
the profoundest meditation. And sometimes, even in the midst of his
play, he would suddenly break off, to stand, his hands behind his back,
frowning and staring at the ground. When this happened, Robin became
overawed and a little disquieted. In a puzzled silence he looked at
his companion. “Guido,” he would say softly, “Guido.” But Guido was
generally too much preoccupied to answer; and Robin, not venturing
to insist, would creep near him, and throwing himself as nearly as
possible into Guido’s attitude--standing Napoleonically, his hands
clasped behind him, or sitting in the posture of Michelangelo’s Lorenzo
the Magnificent--would try to meditate too. Every few seconds he would
turn his bright blue eyes towards the elder child to see whether he
was doing it quite right. But at the end of a minute he began to grow
impatient; meditation wasn’t his strong point. “Guido,” he called again
and, louder, “Guido!” And he would take him by the hand and try to pull
him away. Sometimes Guido roused himself from his reverie and went back
to the interrupted game. Sometimes he paid no attention. Melancholy,
perplexed, Robin had to take himself off to play by himself. And Guido
would go on sitting or standing there, quite still; and his eyes, if
one looked into them, were beautiful in their grave and pensive calm.
They were large eyes, set far apart and, what was strange in a
dark-haired Italian child, of a luminous pale blue-grey colour. They
were not always grave and calm, as in these pensive moments. When he
was playing, when he talked or laughed, they lit up; and the surface
of those clear, pale lakes of thought seemed, as it were, to be shaken
into brilliant sun-flashing ripples. Above those eyes was a beautiful
forehead, high and steep and domed in a curve that was like the subtle
curve of a rose petal. The nose was straight, the chin small and rather
pointed, the mouth drooped a little sadly at the corners.
I have a snapshot of the two children sitting together on the parapet
of the terrace. Guido sits almost facing the camera, but looking a
little to one side and downwards; his hands are crossed in his lap and
his expression, his attitude are thoughtful, grave, and meditative. It
is Guido in one of those moods of abstraction into which he would pass
even at the height of laughter and play--quite suddenly and completely,
as though he had all at once taken it into his head to go away and had
left the silent and beautiful body behind, like an empty house, to wait
for his return. And by his side sits little Robin, turning to look up
at him, his face half averted from the camera, but the curve of his
cheek showing that he is laughing; one little raised hand is caught at
the top of a gesture, the other clutches at Guido’s sleeve, as though
he were urging him to come away and play. And the legs dangling from
the parapet have been seen by the blinking instrument in the midst
of an impatient wriggle; he is on the point of slipping down and
running off to play hide-and-seek in the garden. All the essential
characteristics of both the children are in that little snapshot.
“If Robin were not Robin,” Elizabeth used to say, “I could almost wish
he were Guido.”
And even at that time, when I took no particular interest in the child,
I agreed with her. Guido seemed to me one of the most charming little
boys I had ever seen.
We were not alone in admiring him. Signora Bondi when, in those cordial
intervals between our quarrels, she came to call, was constantly
speaking of him. “Such a beautiful, beautiful child!” she would exclaim
with enthusiasm. “It’s really a waste that he should belong to peasants
who can’t afford to dress him properly. If he were mine, I should put
him into black velvet; or little white knickers and a white knitted
silk jersey with a red line at the collar and cuffs; or perhaps a white
sailor suit would be pretty. And in winter a little fur coat, with a
squirrel skin cap, and possibly Russian boots....” Her imagination
was running away with her. “And I’d let his hair grow, like a page’s,
and have it just curled up a little at the tips. And a straight fringe
across his forehead. Every one would turn round and stare after us if I
took him out with me in Via Tornabuoni.”
What you want, I should have liked to tell her, is not a child; it’s a
clock-work doll or a performing monkey. But I did not say so--partly
because I could not think of the Italian for a clock-work doll and
partly because I did not want to risk having the rent raised another 15
per cent.
“Ah, if only I had a little boy like that!” She sighed and modestly
dropped her eyelids. “I adore children. I sometimes think of adopting
one--that is, if my husband would allow it.”
I thought of the poor old gentleman being dragged along at the heels of
his big white dog and inwardly smiled.
“But I don’t know if he would,” the Signora was continuing, “I don’t
know if he would.” She was silent for a moment, as though considering a
new idea.
A few days later, when we were sitting in the garden after luncheon,
drinking our coffee, Guido’s father, instead of passing with a nod and
the usual cheerful good-day, halted in front of us and began to talk.
He was a fine handsome man, not very tall, but well proportioned,
quick and elastic in his movements, and full of life. He had a thin
brown face, featured like a Roman’s and lit by a pair of the most
intelligent-looking grey eyes I ever saw. They exhibited almost too
much intelligence when, as not infrequently happened, he was trying,
with an assumption of perfect frankness and a childlike innocence, to
take one in or get something out of one. Delighting in itself, the
intelligence shone there mischievously. The face might be ingenuous,
impassive, almost imbecile in its expression; but the eyes on these
occasions gave him completely away. One knew, when they glittered like
that, that one would have to be careful.
To-day, however, there was no dangerous light in them. He wanted
nothing out of us, nothing of any value--only advice, which is a
commodity, he knew, that most people are only too happy to part with.
But he wanted advice on what was, for us, rather a delicate subject:
on Signora Bondi. Carlo had often complained to us about her. The old
man is good, he told us, very good and kind indeed. Which meant, I
dare say, among other things, that he could easily be swindled. But
his wife.... Well, the woman was a beast. And he would tell us stories
of her insatiable rapacity: she was always claiming more than the half
of the produce which, by the laws of the metayage system, was the
proprietor’s due. He complained of her suspiciousness: she was for ever
accusing him of sharp practices, of downright stealing--him, he struck
his breast, the soul of honesty. He complained of her short-sighted
avarice: she wouldn’t spend enough on manure, wouldn’t buy him another
cow, wouldn’t have electric light installed in the stables. And we had
sympathised, but cautiously, without expressing too strong an opinion
on the subject. The Italians are wonderfully non-committal in their
speech; they will give nothing away to an interested person until they
are quite certain that it is right and necessary and, above all,
safe to do so. We had lived long enough among them to imitate their
caution. What we said to Carlo would be sure, sooner or later, to get
back to Signora Bondi. There was nothing to be gained by unnecessarily
embittering our relations with the lady--only another 15 per cent.,
very likely, to be lost.
To-day he wasn’t so much complaining as feeling perplexed. The Signora
had sent for him, it seemed, and asked him how he would like it if she
were to make an offer--it was all very hypothetical in the cautious
Italian style--to adopt little Guido. Carlo’s first instinct had been
to say that he wouldn’t like it at all. But an answer like that would
have been too coarsely committal. He had preferred to say that he would
think about it. And now he was asking for our advice.
Do what you think best, was what in effect we replied. But we gave it
distantly but distinctly to be understood that we didn’t think that
Signora Bondi would make a very good foster-mother for the child. And
Carlo was inclined to agree. Besides, he was very fond of the boy.
“But the thing is,” he concluded rather gloomily, “that if she has
really set her heart on getting hold of the child, there’s nothing she
won’t do to get him--nothing.”
He too, I could see, would have liked the physicists to start on
unemployed childless women of sanguine temperament before they tried
to tackle the atom. Still, I reflected, as I watched him striding away
along the terrace, singing powerfully from a brazen gullet as he went,
there was force there, there was life enough in those elastic limbs,
behind those bright grey eyes, to put up a good fight even against the
accumulated vital energies of Signora Bondi.
It was a few days after this that my gramophone and two or three
boxes of records arrived from England. They were a great comfort to
us on the hilltop, providing as they did the only thing in which
that spiritually fertile solitude--otherwise a perfect Swiss Family
Robinson’s island--was lacking: music. There is not much music to
be heard nowadays in Florence. The times when Dr. Burney could tour
through Italy, listening to an unending succession of new operas,
symphonies, quartets, cantatas, are gone. Gone are the days when a
learned musician, inferior only to the Reverend Father Martini of
Bologna, could admire what the peasants sang and the strolling players
thrummed and scraped on their instruments. I have travelled for weeks
through the peninsula and hardly heard a note that was not “Salome” or
the Fascists’ song. Rich in nothing else that makes life agreeable or
even supportable, the northern metropolises are rich in music. That is
perhaps the only inducement that a reasonable man can find for living
there. The other attractions--organised gaiety, people, miscellaneous
conversation, the social pleasures--what are those, after all, but
an expense of spirit that buys nothing in return? And then the cold,
the darkness, the mouldering dirt, the damp and squalor.... No, where
there is no necessity that retains, music can be the only inducement.
And that, thanks to the ingenious Edison, can now be taken about in a
box and unpacked in whatever solitude one chooses to visit. One can
live at Benin, or Nuneaton, or Tozeur in the Sahara, and still hear
Mozart quartets, and selections from the Well-Tempered Clavichord, and
the Fifth Symphony, and the Brahms clarinet quintet, and motets by
Palestrina.
Carlo, who had gone down to the station with his mule and cart to fetch
the packing-case, was vastly interested in the machine.
“One will hear some music again,” he said, as he watched me unpacking
the gramophone and the disks. “It is difficult to do much oneself.”
Still, I reflected, he managed to do a good deal. On warm nights we
used to hear him, where he sat at the door of his house, playing his
guitar and softly singing; the eldest boy shrilled out the melody
on the mandoline, and sometimes the whole family would join in, and
the darkness would be filled with their passionate, throaty singing.
Piedigrotta songs they mostly sang; and the voices drooped slurringly
from note to note, lazily climbed or jerked themselves with sudden
sobbing emphases from one tone to another. At a distance and under the
stars the effect was not unpleasing.
“Before the war,” he went on, “in normal times” (and Carlo had a hope,
even a belief, that the normal times were coming back and that life
would soon be as cheap and easy as it had been in the days before the
flood), “I used to go and listen to the operas at the Politeama. Ah,
they were magnificent. But it costs five lire now to get in.”
“Too much,” I agreed.
“Have you got _Trovatore_?” he asked.