And so because, in his uncalled-for chivalry, he had made himself guide
to a lady in a ball-room, Gerald, one thing leading to another, was once
more committed to serving as a guide in Florence.
He had filled the part so often, at the appeal of one good friend and
another, that he had sworn never again to be caught, cajoled, or hired.
He could have hated the Ghiberti doors had such a thing not been
impossible. He did rather hate the Santissima Annunziata. And now it was
all to do over again.
It might be adduced, as a mitigation of his misfortune, that this was
different.
This was sometimes very different.
A singular thing about acquaintance with Mrs. Hawthorne was that it had
in a sense no beginning. One started fairly in the middle. No sooner did
one meet her than one seemed to have known her long and know her well.
Most people found this so. One therefore readily slid into speaking
one's mind to Mrs. Hawthorne, dispensing with the formal affectation of
a perfect respect for her every act and opinion, secure in the
recognition that anger, sulkiness, the self-love that easily takes
umbrage, were as far from her breezy sturdiness as the scrupulosities of
an anxious refinement.
That one could say what one pleased to Mrs. Hawthorne put more life into
intercourse with her, naturally, than there would have been if, with her
limitations, one had been forced to be entirely and tamely circumspect.
"Mrs. Hawthorne," cried Gerald, "do me the very real favor, will you,
like a dear good woman, of not calling the most venerable of the
primitives Simma Bewey!"
It was astonishing what things Gerald Fane could say without losing his
effect of a complete, even considerate politeness.
"But that's the way it's written," said Mrs. Hawthorne.
"You will pardon the liberty I take of contradicting you; it is not. It
gives me goose-flesh. Cimabue!"
"Very well. I'll try to remember. But it doesn't matter what I call him;
his Madonna is no beauty. Do you mean to tell me there was a time when
people admired faces like that? She gives me a pain."
"That is not the point; her beauty is not the point. Besides, she is
beautiful."
"Oh, very well. If you'd like to have me look like her, I can."
She tipped her head to one side, lengthened her jaw, pointed her hand,
and by a knack she had for mimicry made herself vaguely resemble the
large-eyed, small-mouthed, pale and serious Lady of Heaven before whose
portrait by the old master this dialogue took place.
"It is really a very poor joke, Mrs. Hawthorne," Gerald said, with mouth
distorted by the conflict between laughter and disgust. "To travesty a
dignified and sacred thing is a very poor pastime. Of course I laugh.
Miss Madison laughs, and I laugh. I think very poorly of it, all the
same. You would do much better to frame your mind to an attitude of
respect and try to understand. I can't say, though, that I think it
unnatural you should not at first appreciate the earliest old masters.
We will go to look at something more obvious."
"Wait a moment. These fascinate me, they're so queer and so awful. I
tell you those old codgers of the time you say these belong to had
strong nerves and stomachs. All these wounds and dripping blood and
hollow ribs and criminals being boiled in caldrons, and having their
heads cut off and arrows shot into them!... I guess you're right; we'd
better move on to something more cheerful."
Miss Madison was never guilty of the foolishness that fell from Mrs.
Hawthorne's gross and unconcerned ignorance. Miss Madison took modesty
and tact with her, as well as keenness of eye, when she went to
picture-galleries and museums. But this, strange to say, did not make
her the more acceptable companion of the two to their guide. What Miss
Madison did never seemed so important as what her larger, weightier
friend did. The one personality to a singular extent eclipsed the other,
who was accustomed to this to the point of not feeling it. A laughing
lack of conceit in both women marvelously simplified their relation.
Gerald, in choosing pictures for their enjoyment, avoided with a
conscientiousness of very special brand to halt with them before
paintings fit to please their unpracticed eyes but which he did not
think worthy of admiration. He likewise passed Venuses, Eves, Truths,
all nudities, without remark or pause, acquainted of old with the
simple-minded prudery of certain Americans, and not disrespectful to it.
"Mrs. Hawthorne," he said, "to be ignorant is no sin. One may have been
doing beautiful, gracious, useful and merciful things while others were
cultivating the arts and sciences. But ignorance on any subject is not
in itself beautiful or desirable. One should therefore not be complacent
in it, proud of it. With a little humility, Mrs. Hawthorne, what can one
not hope to accomplish? Now, please, Mrs. Hawthorne, drop all
preconception, and use your eyes. Look at that angel."
"Do you mean to tell me I could live long enough to think that angel
beautiful? With those Chinese eyes?... Give it up, my friend, why do you
want to bother?"
"Because, Mrs. Hawthorne, you have essentially a good brain. You are at
the back of all a very intelligent woman--"
"Go 'way with you! You know that if you feed me taffy enough you can
make me see and say anything you want."
"--a very intelligent woman. And I am so constituted that I simply
cannot go on living in the same world with a really intelligent
woman--my friend, besides--who does not see the difference between
Raphael and Guido Reni, and likes one exactly as well as the other. I
ache to change it!"
"Go ahead. We don't want you to die. But I'm afraid it'll take surgery.
You'll have to drill a hole in my thick head to get the things you mean
into that good brain so full of real intelligence."
"If you wouldn't be flippant!"
"What's that?"
"If you would bring reverence to the study of things done by great
people, and that people of great taste and learning have collected for
our joy and improvement!"
"See here! Don't you want me to have a little fun while we do Florence?
I don't see how I can stand it, if we're to be solemn as those old
saints with mouldy green complexions."
"We're not to be solemn. I have done these galleries solemnly times
enough, Heaven knows. But we're to be attentive, respectful, of an open
and receptive mind. We're not to say outrageous things in the mere
desire to shock our guide, or tease him."
"You don't mean to say you think that I--?"
"It's not funny."
"It mayn't be funny--but it's fun! Go on and lecture. You haven't got a
bit of fun in you."
"Yes, I have!" said Gerald, and with a creeping smile--grudging at
first, then brighter--looked Mrs. Hawthorne in the eye, while such fun
as lived in him traveled over the bridge of their glances, and she was
permitted to get a glimpse of his underlying relish.
"All I ask of you, Mrs. Hawthorne," he said, finally, "is that you will
not let your innocence on these subjects appear when you are with
others. I don't say pretend. Just keep still, be silent! It does not
matter when you are with me. When you are with me I beg of you to be
yourself. But with others.... You would become the talk of the town,
and--" he shuddered, "I should most horribly hate it!"
* * * * *
"Mrs. Hawthorne," he said, with a quiver of annoyance in his voice a few
days later, "did I not implore you not to let it be known in Florence
how you are affected by the proudest treasures of her world-famous
collections?"
"Yes, you told me. But I didn't promise."
"And now I am asked--with laughter and mockery--whether I have seen Mrs.
Hawthorne giving an imitation of a Madonna by Simma Bewey, and heard
Mrs. Hawthorne on the subject of G. Ottow and Others."
"Didn't you say--with laughter? Well, then, it's all right. Don't you
care. I just got to training and did it to make them a little sport.
Didn't they tell you about my Native of Italy eating Macaroni?"
"Mrs. Hawthorne, you are just a bad big school-girl--a bad big
school-girl--"
"'Hark, from the tomb!'" said Mrs. Hawthorne, in lieu of anything more
scintillating.
"A bad big school-girl, and I will have nothing more to do with you. If
you delight in being the talk of the town, all you have to do is allow
your friend Mr. Hunt in his spare hours to take you to see such things
as I have not yet had the honor of showing you."
"Blessed if I--Look here, you aren't mad in earnest? Sooner'n lose you,
I won't say another word. There! I've been Tchee-mah-boo-eh's Madonna
for the last time. Don't be cross with little T. T.--Talk of the Town!"
"If you had any discrimination, any reticence ..."
"No reticence? Does that mean can't keep anything to myself? You don't
know me!"
"You even tell your age."
"You aren't going to find fault with me for _that_?"
"Yes. At your age one should know better. It is part of your general and
too great frankness."
They upon occasions came near quarreling, but not seriously, her
disposition to quarrel was so small. Yet, two could not be outspoken and
one of them irritable, and those rocks never even be grazed.
She unwarily enlarged to him one day upon her disappointment in
Florence. By this time, she said, she was growing used to it, she didn't
notice so much the things she didn't like. But at first, with her
expectation high, her imagination inflamed by the Judge's and Antonia's
eloquence, the narrow streets, in some of them no sidewalks even, the
gloomy bars at the windows, the muddy river with the dirty old houses
huddled on the bank, the stuffy churches with the average height of the
Italian populace marked on the pillars by a dubious grindy brown tint,
the dreadful beggars, the black fingernails, the smells....
"Mrs. Hawthorne!" came from Gerald, who with difficulty had let her go
on thus far, "those were all you noticed, were they? In the most
wonderful city in the whole world, those are all you find to talk about!
The narrow streets, the beggars, the smells. Mrs. Hawthorne--" he nearly
trembled with the effort to keep calm, "this is obviously not the place
for you. You should have gone to ... to Switzerland! Instead of a
sunburned hill-side, with sober silver olives and solemn black
cypresses, and a pair of beautiful calm white oxen plowing, you would
have seen a nice grass-green pasture, at the foot of blinding peaks, cut
by an arsenic-green stream, on whose bank a red and white cow feeding!
Then among the habitations all would have been well-regulated, the
churches swept, perhaps even ventilated, the people washed, clean
aprons, clean caps, no beggars, no disorder, no crimes. And there would
have been no disturbing manifestations of genius, either; no troublesome
masterpieces or other evidences of a little fire in the blood. It would
have suited you perfectly."
"I guess you mean that to be cutting, don't you?"
"Let me try to tell you how much I liked New York, when I went back
there some years ago after an absence of ten or eleven years. I had some
idea, you know, of perhaps returning to live in America. Well, I
shivered. I shut my eyes. I held my ears. I fled. I remained just the
time I was forced to by the affairs of my poor mother and, as I tell
you, I fled!"
"Why, what's the matter with New York?"
"I will tell you what is the matter with New York, with Boston, with all
the places in America that I have seen again since I was grown up--"
"No! Stop! Don't say anything against America. It's the one way to make
me mad.--I didn't know you felt the same way about Florence. You aren't
an Italian, are you? It's because we're both alike Americans that we sit
here fighting so chummily."