THE main events of the two years spent abroad by our small family,
including “The Invaluable,” as we soon came to call Rose O’Neill, are
set down in _Loiterings in Pleasant Paths_, a chatty volume of travel
and sojourn, published soon after our return to America. The private
record of those two dozen months would far surpass the book in bulk. It
will never be written except as it is stamped upon “the fleshly tables
of the hearts” of those who lived and loved, studied, and revelled with
us.
We had meant to pass the first winter in Paris, but the most beautiful
city of the world was unfriendly to my sore and aching lung. After an
experiment of six weeks, we broke camp and sped southward. Ten days in
the fair Florence I was to learn in after years to love as a second
home, repeated the doleful tale of fog, rain, and chill that pierced
our bones.
An old Richmond friend, with whom I had had many a jolly frolic in my
early girlhood, was now Reverend Doctor Taylor, a resident of Rome.
After the exchange of several letters, we adopted his friendly advice
that we should give the Eternal City a trial as the refuge we sought—so
much less hopefully than at first, that I entreated my husband, on the
rainy evening of our arrival in Rome, not to push inquiries further,
but to let me go home, and die in comfort there.
Doctor Taylor had ordered rooms for us in a family hotel well spoken
of by Americans, and was at the station to conduct us to our quarters.
I was deposited upon a sofa, when my wraps were removed, and lay there,
fairly wearied out by the railway journey. The room was fireless and
carpetless. I could feel the chill of the stone flooring and the bare
walls through the blankets in which I was swathed by distressful Rose,
who “guessed these Eyetalians hadn’t the first notion of what American
comfort is!” Three long French casements afforded a full view of
leaden, low-stooping skies and straight sheets of rain. When a fire
of sticks, besmeared with resin, was coaxed into a spiteful flare,
the smoke puffed as spitefully into the room, and drifted up to the
ceiling twenty feet overhead. Invited by my ever-hospitable husband
to seat himself near an apology for a cheery hearthstone—less pitiful
to him after his ten years’ residence in Italy than to us, the new
arrivals—our friend fell into social chat of ways and means. The carpet
would be down to-morrow; the sun would shine to-morrow; I would be
rested to-morrow.
He broke off with a genial laugh there, to impart a bit of information
we were to prove true to the utmost during the next year:
“Everything is ‘_domano_’ with Italians. I think the babies are born
with it in their mouths. One falls into the habit with mortifying ease.”
I am afraid I dozed for a few minutes, lulled by the patter of rain
and the low-toned talk going on at the far (literally) side of the
apartment. A lively visitor used to wonder if we “could see across it
on cloudy days without an opera-glass.”
This was the next sentence that reached me:
“Thus far, we have met with discouragement. March is the most trying
month to weak lungs in America. And ever since we landed in Liverpool
we have had nothing but March weather. I think now we shall push on
to Algiers”—glancing ruefully at the murky windows. “Upon one thing
I am determined—to find a land where there is no March, as we know
the month. For one year I want to secure that for my wife’s breathing
apparatus.”
“I know of but one such region.” The answer was in the slight drawl
natural to the George Taylor I used to know; the speaker stared
sombrely into the peevish fire.
“And that?” interrogated the other, eagerly.
The drawl had now a nasal touch befitting the question:
“‘No chilling winds, no poisonous breath
Can reach that healthful shore!’”
“Heavens and earth, man! _That_ is just where I don’t want her to go
yet! Nor for many a long year!”
The laugh I could not suppress helped to warm and brighten us all. Do
any of us suspect how much we owe to the funny side of life?
Thus began my Roman winter. With “_domano_” came the sunshine and the
carpet, and the first of the hundred drives in and about the storied
city, that were to bring healing and vigor, such as even my optimistic
husband had scarcely dared to anticipate. That I am alive upon this
wonderful, beautiful earth at this good hour, I owe, under God, to
those divine four months among the Seven Hills. Doctor Terhune had
received the appointment to the Chaplaincy of the American Chapel in
Rome before we left Paris. He decided to accept it within a week after
our arrival in the Eternal City. It was a cosey corner for pastor
and flock—that little church in Piazza Poli, belonging to an Italian
Protestant corporation, and occupied by them for half of each Sunday,
by American tourists and transient residents of Rome for the other
half. All my memories of the wonderful and bewitching winter are happy.
None have a gentler charm than those which renew the scenes of quiet
Sunday forenoons when visitors from the dear home-land, who had never
before looked upon the faces of their fellow-worshippers, gathered by
common consent in the place “where prayer was wont to be made” in their
own tongue. There were no strangers in the assembly that lingered in
the tiny vestibule and blocked the aisle when the service was over. The
spirit of mutual helpfulness spoke in eye and speech. It should not
have been considered singular that those thus convened were, almost
without exception, refined and educated, and so unlike the commonly
accepted type of travelling American, that we often commented upon the
fact in conferences with familiar friends. We felicitated ourselves
that we caught the cream of the flow of tourists, that season.
“It is a breath of the dear old home-life!” said more than one
attendant upon the simple services, where the congregation was
kaleidoscopic in outward seeming, the same in spirit.
I cannot pass over this period of our foreign life without a tribute to
one whose friendship and able co-operation in the work laid to Doctor
Terhune’s hand, did more than any other one influence to make for him a
home in Rome. Dr. Leroy M. Vernon, who subsequently became Dean of the
University of Syracuse, in New York State, was the rarest combination
of strength and gentleness I have ever seen. He had been for some years
resident in Rome; was an enthusiastic archæologist and art-student,
speaking Italian with fluency and grace, and thoroughly _au fait_
to the best literature of that tongue. From the beginning of their
acquaintanceship, the two men fraternized heartily. In the ripening of
liking into intimacy, they walked, rode, talked, and studied together.
What the association was to the younger of the two, may be imagined
by one who has had the privilege of close communion with a beloved
comrade who held the key to the treasure-house one has longed all his
life to enter.
“The winter in Italy with Vernon was worth more to me than a course
in the Academy of Fine Arts, combined with ten years of archæological
lectures from experts,” was the testimony of the survivor, twenty years
later, when the news of the dean’s death was brought to us.
They loved each other tenderly to the end of mortal companionship.
Who can doubt that it has been renewed in the City where eager minds
are never checked by physical weakness, and aspiration is identical
with fulfilment?
In mid-May, when the Pincio put on its beautiful garments in the purple
flowering of the Judas-trees, and the tawny Tiber rolled between hills
of living green, we turned our backs upon what those marvellous months
had wrought into our own familiar dwelling-place, and took our sad,
reluctant way to Florence. Five weeks there were varied by excursions
to Fiesole, Bologna, and Venice. Our next move was to Lucerne. Leaving
the children in care of “The Invaluable,” we ran up to Heidelberg,
joining there our kinspeople, the Ashleys, and travelling with them
leisurely over mountain and through pass, until we brought up in Geneva.
We were hardly settled, as we supposed for the season, in the bright
little town of Calvin and Voltaire, when a summons came from the
American Chapel in Paris for Doctor Terhune’s services, pending the
absence of the regular incumbent in America, whither he had been
summoned by the illness of his mother. We had no thought that the
separation of the head from our transplanted family would be a matter
of even a few weeks, whereas it lasted for four months. There was
visiting back and fro; a reunion at Christmas under the massive crowns
of mistletoe, such as grow nowhere else—not even in the Britain of
the Druids—and a memorable New-Year’s dinner at the Hôtel Metropole,
arranged under American auspices, the chief pride of the feast being
mince-pies, concocted by Yankee housewives, and misspelled among the
French dishes on the gorgeously illuminated menus. In February, my
eldest daughter and myself went to Paris for a fortnight—a tentative
trip which proved beyond a question that the air of the city on the
Seine was rank poison to the healing lungs. We hurried back to jolly,
friendly Geneva, where I could walk five miles _per diem_ in air that
was the very elixir of life to my system, physical, mental, and moral.
Even the lusty winds from Mont Blanc, and the rough gales that lashed
Lake Leman into yeasty ridges for a week at a time, wrought strength,
instead of harm. That bodily strength grew apace was but one element
in the fulness of content in which we basked throughout the eight
months we spent in the lakeside city, behind which the Alps stood in
sublime calmness that was in itself tonic and inspiration. We had a
pleasant _appartement_ in the _Pension Magnenat_, directly upon the
quay. From our drawing-room windows we looked across the lake upon the
Juras, capped with snow, and made beautiful exceedingly all day long,
by changeful lights and shadows, reflected in the waters in opaline,
prismatic hues we had never seen surpassed, even in Italy.
The American colony in Geneva has a stable reputation for intelligence
and good-breeding. One expects to find these in university towns
abroad, as at home. It may not have been unusually delightful that
winter. Perhaps climate and health combined with our peaceful domestic
life, to incline us to be more than satisfied with our social
environment. Certain it is that the circle of congenial associates,
that had widened to take us in, as a part of a harmonious corporate
whole, was, to our apprehension, ideally charming. Everybody had some
specific work or pursuit to explain his, or her residence in Geneva.
The younger men were in the university, or in preparation for it,
with “coaches”; the girls were studying French, German, and Italian,
or painting from nature under such instructors as Madame Vouga, whose
renown as a painter of wild flowers was international. We matrons had
a reading-class, enlivened by the membership of our daughters, that
met weekly at the house of some one of the party. To it we brought our
easels, boards, and paint-boxes, our embroidery, or other fancy-work.
One of the girls read aloud for two hours—history, biography, or
essay—and at five o’clock what had been read was discussed freely
over afternoon tea. A club of young people of both sexes read German,
alternately with Italian and French plays, on Wednesday night, in my
_salon_, I playing chaperon at my embroidery-frame at a side-table, and
admitted to the merry chat that went around with coffee and cake, when
the reading was concluded. Some of the members of that informal “Club”
have made their mark in the large outer world since that care-free,
all-satisfying sojourn in what we forgot to call an alien land, so
happily did we blend with the classic influences, lapping us about so
softly that we were never conscious of the acclimating process.
The tall youth, who submitted meekly (or gallantly) to correction
of lingual lapses in his rendering of Molière or Wallenstein or
Ariosto, from the girl at his elbow—revenging himself by a brisk
fire of badinage in honest English after the books were closed—is an
eminent metropolitan lawyer, whose income runs up well into the tens
of thousands; another, a Berlin graduate, is the dignified dean of a
law school attached to an American university; another is a college
professor; another, a Genevan graduate, is rising in fame and fortune
in an English city; one, beloved by all, completed a brilliant course
at Harvard, and when hope and life were in their prime, laid his noble
head down for his last sleep in Mount Auburn. The gay girls are staid
matrons and mothers now, with sons and daughters of their own, as old
as themselves were in that far-off, care-free time.
I have written “care-free” twice upon one page, and because I can
conjure up no other phrase that so aptly describes what that veritable
arbor on the Hill Difficulty we call “Life,” was to me. Household cares
were an unknown quantity in the well-conducted pension. Our breakfast
of French rolls, coffee, tea, boiled eggs, honey, and, for the younger
children, creamy milk, was brought to our _salon_ every morning. A
substantial luncheon (the _déjeuner à la fourchette_) was served in the
pension _salle à manger_ at one, and a dinner of six or seven courses,
at seven. Our fellow-guests were, for the most part, unobjectionable;
a fair proportion were agreeable and desirable acquaintances. About
one-third were Americans; another third were English; the rest were
Italians, Germans, Russians, and French. A table at one end of the
room was assigned to English-speaking boarders, and we soon made up a
pleasant clique that did not, however, exclude several foreigners. Thus
we persisted in calling them to ourselves. There were excursions every
few days to places of interest within easy reach. Coppet, the home
and burial-place of Madame de Staël; the Villa Diodati, where Byron
and Shelley lived and wrote; Ferney the château from which Voltaire
wrote letters to the magnates of the world, and within the walls of
which he entertained all the famous wits and many of the beauties of
his stirring times; Chillon, immortalized by Bonnivard and the poem
founded upon his captivity—were some of the memorable haunts with which
frequent visits made us familiar.
Exercise was a luxury in the ozone-fraught air, fresh every morning,
and work was the natural result of the abounding vitality thus
engendered. In no other quarter of the globe have I found such
sustained vigor of mental and physical forces as during our residence
in Switzerland. I record the fact gratefully, and as a possible helpful
suggestion to other sufferers from the overstimulating climate and
prevalent energy of American life. Rome was a gracious rest; Geneva was
upbuilding.
It was a positive wrench to the heartstrings to leave her in May, and
take our course leisurely northward.
The summer was given, and happily, to England, our headquarters being,
successively, the Isle of Wight, Leamington, and Brighton.
Late in September, we sailed for New York.