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BABYLON
By Grant Allen
(Cecil Power)
Author Of 'Philistia' 'Strange Stories' Etc.
In Three Volumes
Vol. III.
With Twelve Illustrations By P. Macnab
London
Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly
1885
BABYLON
[Illustration: 0005]
[Illustration: 0006]
CHAPTER XXIX. A VIEW OF ROME, BY HIRAM WINTHROP.
|In the midst of an undulating sunlit plain, fresh with flowers in
spring, burnt and yellow in summer and autumn, a great sordid shrivelled
city blinks and festers visibly among the rags and tatters in the eye of
day. Within its huge imperial walls the shrunken modern town has left
a broad skirt of unoccupied hillocks; low mounds covered by stunted
straggling vineyards, or broken here and there by shabby unpicturesque
monasteries, with long straight pollard-lined roads stretching
interminably in dreary lines between the distant boundaries. In the very
centre, along some low flats that bound a dull, muddy, silent river,
the actual inhabited city itself crouches humbly beneath the mouldering
ruins of a nobler age. A shapeless mass of dingy, weather-stained,
discoloured, tile-roofed buildings, with all its stucco peeling in the
sun, it lies crowded and jammed into a narrow labyrinth of tortuous
alleys, reeking with dirt, and rich in ragged filthy beggars. One huge
lazaretto of sin and pestilence, choked with the accumulated rubbish and
kitchen-middens of forty centuries--that was Hiram Winthrop's Rome--the
Rome which fate and duty compelled him to exchange for the wild woods
and the free life of untrammelled nature.
Step into one of the tortuous alleys, and you see this abomination of
desolation even more distinctly, under the pitiless all-exposing glare
of an Italian sky. The blotchy walls rise so high into the air to right
and left, that they make the narrow lane gloomy even at midday; and yet,
the light pours down obliquely upon the decaying plaster with so fierce
a power that every rent and gap and dirt-stain stands out distinctly,
crying in vain to the squalid tenants in the dens within to repair its
unutterable dilapidation. Beneath, the little slippery pavement consists
of herringbone courses of sharp stones; overhead, from ropes fastened
across the street, lines of rags and tatters flutter idly in the wind,
proving (what Hiram was otherwise inclined to doubt) that people at Rome
_do_ sometimes ostensibly wash their garments, or at least damp them.
Dark gloomy shops line either side; shops windowless and doorless,
entered and closed by shutters, and just rendered visible by the feeble
lamp that serves a double duty as lightener of the general darkness,
and taper to the tiny painted shrine of the wooden Madonna. A world
of hungry ragged men, hungry dirty slatternly women, hungry
children playing in the gutter, hungry priests pervading the very
atmosphere--that on a closer view was Rome as it appeared to Hiram
Winthrop.
To be sure, there was a little more of it. Up towards the Corso and
Piazza del Popolo, there was a gaunt, modern Haussmannised quarter, the
Rome of the strangers--cleaner by a fraction, whiter by a great deal,
less odorous by a trifle, but still to Hiram Winthrop utterly flat,
stale, and unprofitable. The one Rome was ugly, if picturesque; the
other Rome was modern, and not even ugly.
Work at Seguin's studio was also to Hiram a wretched mockery of an
artistic training. The more he saw of the French painter, the more he
disliked him: and what was worse, the dislike was plainly mutual. For
Audouin's sake, because Audouin had wished it, Hiram went on working
feebly at historical pictures which he hated and could never possibly
care for; but he panted to be free from the wretched bondage at once and
for ever. Two years after his arrival in Rome, where he was now living
upon the little capital he had derived from the sale of the deacon's
farm, Hiram determined, on Audouin's strenuous advice, by letter
delivered, to send a tentative painting to Paris for the Salon. Seguin
watched it once or twice in the course of its completion, but he only
shrugged his lean shoulders ominously, and muttered incomprehensible
military oaths to himself, which he had picked up half a century
before from his father, the ex-corporal. (On the strength of that early
connection with the army, Seguin, in spite of his shrivelled frame,
still affected a certain swaggering military air and bearing upon
many occasions.) When it was finished, he looked at it a trifle
contemptuously, and then murmured: 'Good. That will finish him. After
that-----' An ugly grimace did duty for the rest of the sentence.
Still, Hiram sent it in, as Audouin had desired of him; and in due time
received the formal intimation from the constituted authorities of the
Salon that his picture had been rejected. He knew it would be, and yet
he felt the disappointment bitterly. Sitting alone in his room that
evening (for he would not let even Colin share his sorrow) he brooded
gloomily by himself, and began to reflect seriously that after all his
whole life had been one long and wretched failure. There was no denying
it, he had made a common but a fatal error; he had mistaken the desire
to paint for the power of painting. He saw it all quite clearly now,
and from that moment his whole career seemed in his eyes to be utterly
dwarfed and spoiled and blighted.
There was only one part of each of those four years of misery at Rome
that Hiram could ever afterwards look back upon with real pleasure. Once
every summer, he and Colin started off together for a month's relaxation
in the Tyrol or Switzerland. On those trips, Hiram forgot all the rest
of his life altogether, and lived for thirty clear days in a primitive
paradise. His sketch-book went always with him, and he even ventured to
try his hand upon a landscape or two in oils, now that he was well out
of the way of Seguin's chilly magisterial interference. Colin Churchill
always praised them warmly: 'But then Colin, you know' (Hiram said to
himself). 'is always such a generous enthusiastic fellow. He has such
a keen artistic eye himself, of course, that he positively reads beauty
into the weakest efforts of any other beginner. Still, I do feel that
I can put my soul into drawing these rocks and mountains, which I never
can do in painting a dressed-up model in an artificial posture, and
pretending that I think she's really Cleopatra. If one had the genuine
Cleopatra to paint, now, exactly as she threw herself naturally down
upon her own Egyptian sofa, why that might possibly be quite another
matter. But, even so, Cleopatra could never have moved me half so much
as the gloss on the chestnuts and the shimmer of the cloud-light on the
beautiful purple water down below there.'
Sometimes, too, Hiram took Colin with him out into the Campagna; not
that he loved the Campagna--there was an odour of Rome about it; but
still at least it was a sort of country, and to Hiram Winthrop that was
everything. One day, in his fourth year in Italy, he was sitting on a
spring afternoon with Colin beside the arches of a broken aqueduct in
that great moorland, which he had been using as the foreground for a
little water-colour. He had finished his sketch, and was holding it at
different angles before him, when Colin suddenly broke the silence by
saying warmly: 'Some day, Winthrop, I'm sure you must sell them.'
Hiram shook his head despondently. 'No, no, Churchill,' he answered with
a half-angry wave of his disengaged hand. 'Even while I was at Seguin's,
I knew I could never do anything worth looking at, and since I took this
little studio myself, I feel sure of it. It's only your kindness that
makes you think otherwise.'
Colin took the sketch from him for a moment and eyed it carefully. 'My
dear fellow,' he said at last, 'believe me, you're mistaken. Just look
at that! Why, Winthrop, I tell you candidly, I'm certain there's genius
in it.'
Hiram smiled bitterly. 'No, no, not genius, I assure you,' he answered
with a sigh, 'but only the longing for it. You have genius, I have
nothing more than aspiration.'
Yet in his own heart, when Colin once more declared he was mistaken,
Hiram Winthrop, looking at that delicate sketch, did almost for the
moment pluck up courage again, and agree with his friend that if only
the public would but smile upon him, he, too, might really do something
worth the looking at.
He went home, indeed, almost elated, after so many months of silent
dejection, by that new-born hope. When he reached their rooms in the
alley (for Colin, in his desire to save, still stood by him, in spite of
altered fortunes) he found a large official envelope of French pattern
lying casually upon the table. He knew it at once; it bore the official
seal of the Académie Française. He tore open the letter hastily. Was
it possible that this time they might really have hung him? What did
it say? Let him see... A stereotyped form.... 'Regret to announce
to you.... great claims upon their attention.... compelled to refuse
admission to the painting submitted to their consideration by M.
Winthrop.'
Hiram let the letter drop out of his hands without a word. For the third
time, then, his picture had been rejected for the Paris Salon!
A day or iwo later, the agent to whom he always confided his works for
the necessary arrangements, wrote to him with florid French politeness
on the subject of its final disposal. Last year he had been able to give
Monsieur but forty francs for his picture, while the year before he had
felt himself justified in paying sixty. Unfortunately, neither of these
pictures had yet been sold; Monsieur's touch evidently did not satisfy
the exacting Parisian public. This year, he regretted to tell Monsieur,
he would be unable to offer him anything for the picture itself; but he
would take back the frame at an inestimable depreciation on the original
figure. He trusted to merit Monsieur's honoured commands upon future
occasions.
Those four pounds were all the money Hiram had yet earned, in four
years, by the practice of his profession; and the remains of the
deacon's patrimony would hardly now suffice to carry him through another
winter.
But then, that winter, Gwen was coming.
If it had not been for the remote hope of still seeing Gwen before he
left Rome for ever, Hiram was inclined to think the only bed he would
have slept in, that dreary, weary, disappointing night, was the bed of
the Tiber.