Don Calixto and the Canon went away to Spain. Cæsar thought he was
wasting time in Rome and that he ought to get out, but he remained. He
kept wondering why Susanna Marchmont had left and never written him.
Twice he asked about her at the Hotel Excelsior, and was told that she
had not returned.
One evening at the beginning of May, when he had managed to decide to
pack up and go, he received a card from Susanna, telling him of her
arrival and inviting him to have tea at the _Ristorante del Castello dei
Cesari._
Cæsar immediately left the hotel and took a cab, which carried him to
the top of the Aventine Hill.
He got out at the entrance to the garden of the _Ristorante_, went
across it, and out on a large terrace.
There were a number of Americans having tea, and in one group of them
was Susanna.
“How late you come!” she said.
“I have just received your card. And what did you do in Corfu? How did
things go down there?”
“Very well indeed. It is all wonderful. And I have been in Epirus and
Albania, too.”
Susanna related her impressions of those countries, with many details,
which, surely, she had read in Baedeker.
She was very smart, and prettier than ever. She said her husband must be
in London; she had had no news from him for more than a month. “And how
did you know I was still here?” Cæsar asked her.
“Through Kennedy. He wrote to me. He is a good friend. He talked a lot
about you in his letters.”
Cæsar thought he noticed that Susanna talked with more enthusiasm than
ordinarily. Perhaps distance had produced a similar effect on her
to what wondering about her had on him. Cæsar looked at her almost
passionately.
From the terrace one could see the tragic ruins of the Palace of the
Cæsars; broken arcades covered with grass, remains of walls still
standing, the openings of arches and windows, and here and there a
pointed cypress or a stone pine among the great devastated walls.
Far away one could see the country, Frascati, and the blue mountains of
the distance.
As it was already late, the group of Susanna’s American friends decided
to return by carriage.
“I am going to walk,” said Susanna in a low tone. “Would you like to
come with me?”
“With great pleasure.”
They took leave of the others, went down the garden road, which was
decorated on both sides with ancient statues and tablets, and issued on
the Via di Santa Prisca, a street between two dark walls, with a lamp
every once in a while.
“What a sky!” she exclaimed.
“It is splendid.”
It was of a blue with the lustre of mother-of-pearl; in the zenith a
stray star was imperceptibly shining; to the west floated golden and red
clouds.
They went down the steep street, alongside a garden wall. In some
places, bunches of century plants showed their hard spikes, sharp as
daggers, over the low walls.
There was a great silence in this coming of night. Among the foliage of
the trees they heard the piping of sparrows. From far away there came,
from time to time, the puffing of a train.
_DESOLATION_
They walked without speaking, mastered by the melancholy of their
surroundings. Now and again, a peasant, tanned by the sun, with his
little sack full of grass, came home from the fields, singing.
Cæsar and Susanna passed alongside of the Jewish cemetery, and stopped
to look in through a grill. The wall hid the burning zone of twilight; a
greenish blue reigned in the zenith.
They went on again. A bell began to ring.
Cæsar was depressed. Susanna was silent.
They crossed a street of new, dark houses; they passed by a little
square with a melancholy church. The street they took was named for
Saint Theodore. To the left, down the Via del Velabro, they saw an arch
with many niches on the sides of the single opening.
A band of black seminarians passed.
“Poor creatures!” murmured Cæsar.
“Are you very sympathetic?” said Susanna, mockingly.
“Yes, those chaps rouse my pity.”
Now, on the right, the furious ruins of the Palatine were piled up:
brick walls, ruined arches, decrepit partitions, and above, the terrace
of a garden with a balustrade. Over the terrace, against the sky, were
the silhouettes of high cypresses almost black, of ilexes with their
dense foliage, and a large palm with arching leaves.
From these so tragic ruins there seemed to exhale a great desolation,
beneath the deep, green sky.
Susanna and Cæsar drew near the Forum.
In the opaque light of dusk the Forum had the air of a cemetery. Two
lighted windows were shining in the high dark wall of the Tabularium,
and sharp-toned bells were beginning to ring.
They went up the stairway that leads to the Capitol, and on a little
terrace they stopped to look at the Forum.
“What terrible desolation!” exclaimed Susanna.
“All the stones look like tombs,” said Cæsar. “Yes, that is true.”
“What are those three high open vaults that give so strange an
impression of immense size?” asked Cæsar.
“That is what remains of Constantine’s basilica.”
For a long while they gazed at that abandoned space, with its melancholy
columns and white stones.
In a street running into the Forum, there began to shine two rows of
gaslights of a greenish colour.
As they passed down the slope leading to the Capitol, in a little street
to the left, the Via Monte Tarpea, they saw a funeral procession ready
to start. At that moment the corpse was being brought into the street.
Several women in black were waiting by the house door with lighted
candles.
The priest, in his white surplice and holding up his cross, gave the
order to start, and pushed to the front of the crowd; four men raised
the bier and took it on their shoulders, and the procession of women in
black, men, and children, followed behind. Bells with sharp voices began
again to sound in the air.
“Oh, isn’t it sad!” said Susanna, lifting her hand to her breast.
They watched how the procession moved away, and then Cæsar murmured,
ill-humouredly:
“It is stupid.”
“What?” asked Susanna.
“I say that it’s stupid to take pleasure in feeling miserable. What we
are doing is absurd and unhealthy.”
Susanna burst into laughter, and when she said good-night to Cæsar she
squeezed his hand energetically.