“Well, did you get a letter?” said Jenny Winge when he returned to the
entrance hall of the post office, where she had been waiting for him.
“Now I will show you which tram to take.”
“Thank you, it is very kind of you.”
The piazza lay white in the sunshine; the morning air was crisp and
clear. Carts and people from the side streets were hurrying past.
“You know, Miss Winge, I don’t think I will go home. I am as wide awake
as I can be, and I should like to go for a walk. Would you think me
intruding if I asked to be allowed to accompany you a little bit of the
way?”
“Dear me, no. But will you be able to find the way to your hotel?”
“Oh, I think I can manage it in broad daylight.”
“You will find cabs now everywhere.”
They came out into the Corso, and she told him the names of the palaces.
She was always a step or two ahead of him, for she moved with ease
between the many people who had already come out on the pavements.
“Do you like vermouth?” she asked. “I am going in here to have one.”
She drank it all in one gulp, standing at the marble counter of the bar.
He did not like the bitter-sweet drink, which was new to him, but he
thought it fun to look in at a bar on their way.
Jenny turned into narrow streets where the air was raw and damp, the sun
reaching only the top part of the houses. Helge noticed everything with
great interest: the blue carts behind mules with brass-studded harness
and red tassels, the bare-headed women and dark-hued children, the small,
cheap shops and the display of vegetables in the porches. In one place
a man was making doughnuts on a stove. Jenny bought some and offered
him, but he refused politely. What a queer girl, he thought. She ate and
seemed to enjoy them, while he felt sick at the mere thought of those
greasy balls between his teeth on top of the various drinks in the night,
and the taste of vermouth still in his mouth. Besides, the old man was
very dirty.
Side by side with poor, decrepit houses, where greyish wash hung out to
dry between the broken ribs of the venetian blinds, stood massive stone
palaces with lattice windows and protruding cornices. Once Jenny had to
take him by the arm—a scarlet automobile came hooting out of a gate in
baroque style, turned with difficulty, and came speeding up the narrow
street, where the gutters were full of cabbage leaves and other refuse.
He enjoyed it all—it was so strange and southern. Year after year his
fantastic dreams had been destroyed by everyday petty reality, till
at last he had tried to sneer at himself and correct his fancies in
self-defence. And so now he tried to convince himself that in these
romantic quarters lived the same kind of people as in every other big
city—shopgirls and factory workers, typographers and telegraph operators,
people who worked in offices and at machines, the same as in every part
of the world. But it gave him pleasure to think that the houses and the
streets, which were the image of his dreams, were obviously real as well.
After walking through small, damp and smelly streets they came into an
open space in the sunlight. The ground was raked up at random; heaps of
offal and rubbish lay between mounds of gravel; dilapidated old houses,
some of them partly pulled down, with rooms showing, stood between
classical ruins.
Passing some detached houses, which looked as if they had been forgotten
in the general destruction, they reached the piazza by the Vesta temple.
Behind the big, new steam-mill and the lovely little church with the
pillared portico and the slender tower, the Aventino rose distinct
against the sunny sky, with the monasteries on the hill, and dust-grey,
nameless ruins among the gardens on the slope.
The thing that always gave him a shock—in Germany and in Florence—was
that the ruins he had read about and imagined standing in a romantic
frame of green leaves with flowers in the crevices, as you see them in
old etchings or on the scenery in a theatre, were in reality dirty
and shabby, with bits of paper, dented, empty tins and rubbish lying
about; and the vegetation of the south was represented by greyish black
evergreen, naked, prickly shrubs, and yellow, faded rushes.
On this sunny morning he understood suddenly that even such a sight holds
beauty for those who can see.
Jenny Winge took the road between garden walls at the back of the church.
The walls were covered with ivy, and pines rose behind them. She stopped
to light a cigarette.
“I am a pronounced smoker, you see,” she said, “but I have to refrain
when I am with Cesca, for her heart does not stand it; out here I smoke
like a steam-engine. Here we are.”
A small, yellow house stood inside a fence; in the garden were tables and
forms under big, bare elms, and a summer-house made of rush stalks. Jenny
greeted the old woman who came out on the doorstep.
“Well, Mr. Gram, what do you say to breakfast?”
“Not a bad idea. A cup of strong coffee and a roll and butter.”
“Coffee! and butter! Listen to him! No, eggs and bread and wine, lettuce
and perhaps some cheese. Yes, she says she has cheese. How many eggs do
you want?”
While the woman laid the table Miss Winge carried her easel and painting
accessories into the garden, and changed her long, blue evening wrap for
a short coat, which was soiled with paint.
“May I have a look at your picture?” asked Helge.
“Yes—I am going to tone down that green—it is rather hard. There is
really no light in it yet, but the background is good, I think.”
Helge looked at the painting; the trees looked like big grease splashes.
He could see nothing in it.
“Here’s breakfast coming. We’ll throw the eggs at her if they are hard.
Hurrah, they aren’t!”
Helge was not hungry. The sour white wine gave him heartburn, and he
could scarcely swallow the dry, unsalted bread, but Jenny bit off great
chunks with her white teeth, put small pieces of Parmesan in her mouth,
and drank wine. The three eggs were already done with.
“How can you eat that nasty bread without butter?” said Helge.
“I like it. I have not tasted butter since I left Christiania. Cesca
and I buy it only when we are having a party. We have to live very
economically, you see.”
He laughed, saying: “What do you call economy—beads and corals?”
“No; it is luxury, but I think it is very essential—a little of it. We
live cheaply and we eat cheaply, tea and dry bread and radishes twice or
three times a week for supper—and we buy silk scarves.”
She had finished eating, lit a cigarette, and sat looking in front of
her, with her chin resting on her hand:
“To starve, you see, Mr. Gram—of course I have not tried it yet, but
I may have to. Heggen has, and he thinks as I do—to starve or to have
too little of the necessary is better than never to have any of the
superfluous. The superfluous is the very thing we work and long for.
At home, with my mother, we always had the strictly necessary, but
everything beyond it was not to be thought of. It had to be—the children
had to be fed before anything else.”
“I cannot think of you as ever having been troubled about money.”
“Why not?”
“Because you are so courageous and independent, and you have such decided
opinions about everything. When you grow up in circumstances where it
is a constant struggle to make ends meet, and you are always reminded
of it, you sort of dare not form any opinions—in a general way—it is so
tantalizing to know that the coins decide what you can afford to wish or
to want.”
Jenny nodded pensively. “Yes, but one must not feel like that when one
has health and youth and knowledge.”
“Well, take my case, for instance. I have always believed that I have
some aptitude for scientific work, and it is the only thing I would
like to do. I have written a few books—popular ones, you know—and I am
now working at an essay on the Bronze Age in South Europe. But I am a
teacher, and have a fairly good position—that of a superintendent of a
private school.”
“You have come out here to work, to study—I remember you said so this
morning.”
He did not answer, but continued: “It was the same thing with my father.
He wanted to be an artist—wanted it more than anything else, and he
came out here for a year. Then he married, and is now the owner of a
lithographic press, which he has kept going for twenty-six years under
great difficulties. I don’t believe my father thinks he has got much out
of life.”
Jenny Winge sat as before, looking thoughtfully in front of her. In the
orchard below grew rows of vegetables, small innocent tufts of green
on the grey soil, and on the far side of the meadow one could see the
yellow masses of ruins on the Palatine against the dark foliage. The day
promised to be warm. The Alban mountains in the distance, beyond the
pines of the villa gardens, looked misty against the soft blue of the sky.
Jenny drank some wine, still looking straight ahead. Helge followed with
his eyes the smoke of her cigarette—a faint morning breeze carried it out
in the sunshine. She sat with her legs crossed. She had small ankles, and
her feet were clad in thin purple stockings and bead-embroidered evening
shoes. The jacket was open over the gathered silver-grey dress with the
white collar and the beads, which threw pink spots on her milky-white
neck. The fur cap had slid back from her fair, fluffy hair.
“I suppose you have the support of your father, though, Mr. Gram—I mean,
he understands you, doesn’t he? Surely he sees that you can’t get ahead
so quickly at that school, when you have quite different work at heart?”
“I don’t know. He was very pleased that I could go abroad, of course,
but”—after some hesitation—“I have never been very intimate with my
father. And then there is mother. She was anxious lest I should work
too hard, or be short of money—or risk my future. Father and mother
are so different—she has never quite understood him, and kept more to
us children. She was a great deal to me when I was a boy, but she was
jealous of father even—that he should have greater influence over me than
she had. She was jealous of my work too, when I locked myself up in a
room of an evening to read, and always anxious about my health and afraid
I should give up my post.”
Jenny nodded several times thoughtfully.
“The letter I fetched at the post office was from them.” He took it
out of his pocket and looked at it, but he did not open it. “It is my
birthday today,” he said, trying to smile. “I am twenty-six.”
“Many happy returns.” Miss Winge shook hands with him. She looked at him
almost in the same way as she looked at Miss Jahrman when she nestled in
her arms.
She had not noticed before what he looked like, though she was under
the impression that he was tall and thin and dark. He had good, regular
features on the whole, a high, somewhat narrow forehead, light brown eyes
with a peculiar amber-like transparency, and a small, weak mouth with a
tired and sad expression under the moustache.
“I understand you so well,” she said suddenly. “I know all that. I was
a teacher myself until Christmas last year. I started as a governess
and went on till I was old enough to enter the seminary.” She smiled a
little shyly. “I gave up my post in the school when I was left a small
amount of money by an aunt, and went abroad. It will last me about three
years, I think—perhaps a little longer. Lately I have sent some articles
to the papers, and I may sell some pictures. My mother did not approve
of my using up all the money, and did not like my giving up my post when
I had got it at last after all those years of private teaching and odd
lessons here and there at schools. I suppose mothers always think a fixed
salary....”
“I don’t think I would have risked it in your place—burning all your
bridges like that. It is the influence of my home, I know, but I could
not help being anxious about the time when the money would be spent.”
“Never mind,” said Jenny Winge. “I am well and strong and know a lot; I
can sew and cook and wash and iron. And I know languages. I can always
find something to do in England or America. Francesca,” she said,
laughing, “wants me to go to South Africa with her and be a dairy-maid,
for that is a thing she is good at, she says. And we shall draw the
Zulus; they are said to be such splendid models.”
“That is no small job either—and the distance does not seem to trouble
you.”
“Not a bit—I am talking nonsense, of course. All those years I thought
it impossible to get away, even as far as Copenhagen, to stay there
some time to paint and learn. When at last I made up my mind to give up
everything and go, I had many a bad moment, I can assure you. My people
thought it madness, and I noticed that it made an impression on me, but
that made me more determined still. To paint has always been my most
ardent wish, and I knew I could never work at home as hard as I ought to;
there were too many things to distract me. But mother could not see that
I was so old that if I wanted to learn something I must start at once.
She is only nineteen years older than I; when I was eleven she married
again, and that made her younger still.
“The curious thing when you leave home is that the influence of the
people with whom you accidentally have lived is broken. You learn to see
with your own eyes and to think for yourself, and you understand that
it rests with yourself to get something good out of your journey: what
you mean to see and to learn, how you mean to arrange your life and what
influence you choose to submit to. You learn to understand that what
you will get out of life as a whole depends on yourself. Circumstances
count for something, of course, as you said, but you learn how to
avoid obstacles or surmount them in the way that comes easiest to your
individuality, and most of the disagreeable things that happen to you are
of your own doing. You are never alone in your home, don’t you think?
The greatest advantage of travelling seems to me that you are alone,
without any one to help or advise you. You cannot appreciate all you owe
to your home, or be grateful for it, until you are away from it, and you
know that you will never be dependent on it any more, since you are your
own master. You cannot really love it till then—for how could you love
anything that you are dependent on?”
“I don’t know. Are we not always dependent on what we love?—you and your
work, for instance. And when once you get really fond of people,” he said
quietly, “you make yourself dependent on them for good and all.”
“Ye—s”—she reflected a moment, then said suddenly, “but it is your own
choice. You are not a slave; you serve willingly something or somebody
that you prize higher than yourself. Are you not glad you can begin the
new year alone, entirely free, and only do the work you like?”
Helge remembered the previous evening in the piazza San Pietro; he looked
at the city, the soft veiled colourings of it in the sun, and he looked
at the fair young girl beside him.
“Yes,” he said.
“Well”—she rose, buttoned her jacket, and opened the paint-box—“I must
work now.”
“And I suppose you would like to get rid of me?”
Jenny smiled. “I daresay you are tired too.”
“Not very—I must pay the bill.”
She called the woman and helped him, squeezing out colours on to her
palette meanwhile.
“Do you think you can find your way back to town?”
“Yes; I remember exactly how we came, and I shall soon find a cab, I
suppose. Do you ever go to the club?”
“Yes, sometimes.”
“I should like very much to meet you again.”
“I daresay you will”—and after a moment’s hesitation:
“Come and see us one day, if you care, and have tea. Via Vantaggio 111.
Cesca and I are generally at home in the afternoon.”
“Thanks, I should like to very much. Good-bye, then, and thanks so much.”
She gave him her hand: “The same to you.”
At the gate he looked back; she was scraping her canvas with a palette
knife and humming the song they had heard in the café. He remembered the
tune, and began to hum it himself as he walked away.