It was an exquisitely beautiful Italian morning, promising heat that
a mild and constant breeze would temper. The East was one glitter.
Harmless clouds were loitering across the pale sky, and across the
Piazza children were taking the longest way to early school, as I passed
from the clear sunshine into the soft transparent gloom of one of the
great pantheons of Italy--a vast thirteenth-century Franciscan church,
the largest church ever built by any mendicant Order--carved and
decorated and painted by Donatello, Giotto, Andrea della Robbia,
Rossellino, Maiano, Taddeo Gaddi, Verrocchio, the incomparable Mino da
Fiesole, Vasari, Canova.
Already the whole place had been cleansed and swept, but at one of the
remotest altars a charwoman was dusting. Little by little I descried
other visitors in the distance, moving quietly under the intimidation of
that calm, afraid to be the first to break the morning stillness. There
was the red gleam of a Baedeker. At a nearer altar a widow in black was
kneeling in one of those attitudes of impassioned surrender and appeal
that strike you so curiously, when for instance, you go out of Harrods’
Stores suddenly into the Brompton Oratory. From an unseen chapel came
the sound of chanting, perfunctory, a part of the silence; and last
of all, at still another altar, I made out a richly coloured priest
genuflecting, all alone, save for a black acolyte. In a corner two
guides were talking business, and by the doors the beggars were talking
business in ordinary tones before the official whining of the day should
commence. The immense interior had spaciousness for innumerable separate
and diverse activities, each undisturbed by the others. And all around
me were the tombs and cenotaphs of great or notorious men, who had made
the glory and the destiny of Italy; Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo,
Donatello, Machiavelli; and Alfieri, Rossini, Aretino, Cherubini,
Alberti; and even St. Louis, and a famous fourteenth century English
Bishop, and a couple of Bonapartes; many ages, races, climes.
*****
I sat down and opened the damp newspaper which I had just bought outside
at the foot of the steps leading up to the dazzling marble façade. And
when I had been staring at the newspaper some time I became aware that
the widow at the altar in the middle distance had risen and was leaving
the church, and then I saw to my surprise that she was an Irish lady
staying in my hotel. She passed near me. Should I stop her, or should I
not? I wanted to stop her, from the naïve pride which one feels in being
able to communicate a startling piece of news of the first magnitude.
But on the other hand, I really was nervous about telling her. To tell
her seemed brutal, seemed like knocking her down. This was my feeling.
She decided the question for me by deviating from her path to greet me.
[Illustration: 0227]
“What a lovely morning!” she said.
“Have you heard about the King?” I asked her gruffly, well knowing that
she had not.
“No,” she answered smiling. And then, as she looked at me, her smile
faded.
“Well,” I said, “he’s dead!”
“What! _Our_ King?”
“Yes. He died at midnight. Here it is.” And I showed her the
“_Recentissime_” or Latest News page of the newspaper, two lines in
leaded type: “_Londra, 7, ore 2:30 (Urgenza). Re Edoardo è morto a
mezzanotte_.” She knew enough Italian to comprehend that.
“This last midnight?” She was breathless.
“Yes.”
“But--but--no one even knew anything about him being ill?” she
protested.
“Yesterday evening’s Italian papers had columns about the illness--it
was bronchitis,” I said grimly.
“Oh!” she said, “I never see the Italian papers.”
Yet the name of Edward the Seventh had been on every newspaper placard
in the land on Friday night. But in Italy these British have literally
no sight for anything later than the sixteenth century.
Tears stood in her eyes. On my part it would have been just as kindly to
knock her down.
“Just think of that little fellow at Osborne--he’s got to be Prince of
Wales now, and I suppose they’ll take him away from there,” she murmured
brokenly, as she went off, aghast.
*****
I sat down again. It seemed to me, as I reflected among these tombs and
cenotaphs, that a woman’s eyes, on such an occasion, were a good test of
the genuineness of popular affection.
I then noticed that, while the Irish lady and I had been whispering,
another acquaintance of mine had mysteriously entered the church without
my cognizance and had set up his tent in the south transept. This was a
young man who, having gained a prominent place in a certain competition
at the Royal College of Art, had been sent off with money in his pocket,
at the expense of the British nation, to study art and to paint in
Italy. He possessed what is called a travelling scholarship, and the
treasures of Italy were at his feet as at the feet of a conqueror.
Already he had visited me at my hotel, and filled my room with the odour
of his fresh oil-sketches. There were only two things in his head--the
art of painting, and the prospect of an immediate visit to Venice.
He had lodged his easel on a memorial-stone among the flags of the
pavement, and was painting a vista of tombs ending in a bright light
of stained glass. His habit was to paint before the museums opened and
after they closed. I went and accosted him. Again I was conscious of
the naïve pride of a bringer of tragic tidings. He was young and strong,
with fire in his eye. I need not be afraid of knocking him down, at any
rate.
“The King’s dead,” I said.
He lifted his brush.
“Not--?”