"This is the life!" thought Livingstone many times during the next
weeks. He had not enjoyed himself so thoroughly since he came to Europe
to live. He was now provided, as he expressed it, with all the cultural
advantages of Europe and all the social atmosphere of an American
summer-resort; for Miss Mills seemed to wish to try, along with pension
life, the unchaperoned familiarity of real American girl-life. Mlle.
Vallet, her old school-teacher, companion-dragon was unceremoniously
left behind, or sent out by herself to do the conscientious sight-seeing
which took all her evenings to record in her diary.
Miss Mills did sight-seeing too. The tacit understanding which grew up
at once was that they were all four seriously to see Rome and to make up
for the very haphazard way in which heretofore they had been profiting
by their situation. It was certainly, thought Livingstone, a most
agreeable way to do sight-seeing, in the company of two such
good-looking girls, one of them with money to burn. Of course he could
have wished, they all would have preferred, some one less lumpish than
that great, grim Crittenden to complete their quartet. But not every
American is capable, thought Livingstone, tying his necktie in the
morning and looking at himself in the glass, not every American is
_capable_ of taking on European polish. And of an American business-man
what could you expect? Livingstone admired and did his best to imitate
the exquisite good-breeding of the two young ladies, which kept them
from ever showing the slightest impatience with Crittenden. As far as
they were concerned it would have been impossible for Crittenden to
guess that he was not in the same class with the other three. An
occasional quick look of astonishment from Miss Allen when Crittenden
made one of those crude speeches of his, and a recurring expression of
quiet fatigue on Miss Mills's face when they had had a little too large
a dose of Crittenden were the only traces of their real feelings which
showed on the surface.
That famous soiree at Donna Antonia Pierleoni's had seemed to be the
start of all this agreeable new period of sociability. Livingstone
abhorred fatuous men, but it really was rather a remarkable coincidence
that after seeing him for the first long talk they had ever had, Miss
Mills should at once have decided to come to the _pension_ where he was
staying. She had never had a real opportunity to know him before that,
Mlle. Vallet always shadowing her around, the conversation always
stiffly in French in deference to Mlle. Vallet's feelings. That, after
her first real impression of him, she should immediately have moved into
a room three doors down the corridor from his--any man might be pardoned
for considering it marked, really marked. It quite fluttered Livingstone
with the idea of the possibilities involved--although he scorned
fortune-hunters above all other men. It was not her fortune, it was her
wonderful little person that he admired, the perfection of the finish of
every detail of her body and mind. Livingstone often felt a sincere
reverence as he looked at her beautiful hair and skin and clothes and
hands and feet that had cost--oh, nobody knew how much to bring them to
that condition. And her accomplishments, her exquisite French and pure
Italian, her knowledge of art-critics, and which Luini was considered
authentic and which spurious! The harmonious way she sat down or stood
or sat at table! There was a product of European civilization at its
finest! How crude and coarse-grained the usual striding, arm-swinging
American girl would seem beside her, like a rough, splintery board
beside a finished piece of marquetry. Even Miss Allen, who was, one
might say, carelessly and indifferently European simply because she
happened to have been brought up in France, often seemed rough and
abrupt compared to her. There was nothing of the deliberate, finished
self-consciousness about Miss Allen's manners, which Livingstone had
learned to admire as the finest flower of sophistication. It was true
she really did play the piano very brilliantly. But still she had to
make her living somehow! One could be reasonably sure with her good
looks that she was counting on using the concert platform, if indeed she
got to it, as an angling station from which to fish for wealthy
eligibles. Crittenden needn't fool himself that she would ever look at
_him_, with that ridiculous little inheritance he had played up so, on
his arrival in Rome!
Not that Crittenden seemed to be trying to make an impression! Quite the
contrary. Was there anybody who, more than that poor fellow, seemed
possessed to put his worst foot foremost? If they hadn't been pitiable,
Livingstone could have laughed at the breaks Crittenden constantly made,
at the way he was everlastingly showing himself up as entirely an
outsider to their world.
That evening, when they fell to talking of their favorite dishes, was a
sample. As a parlor amusement they had been challenging each other to
construct imaginary meals such as would be perfection if you could only
get them together,--sole frite from the Ambassadeurs; roast duck with
the inimitable sauce of Foyot's; Asti Spumanti, the _real_; Brie
straight from the only farm in the Seine-et-Marne that made it right ...
all that sort of mouth-watering, exquisite imaginings. When Crittenden's
turn came, had he risen to the occasion? Had he made the slightest
effort to make a decent appearance? No, he had said, "Oh, count me out
on this. I have a regular hired-man's appetite, and if it begins to
fail, I go out and run a mile and then I can eat anything!"
Livingstone tried his best to cover up such breaks with hasty, tactful
improvisations of talk, but he had noticed the amazed stare with which
Miss Allen had received this particular revelation of Crittenden's
crudity.
Miss Mills had stared, too, or as near to it as she ever came, over in
the Capitoline, when she had asked Crittenden if he happened to know
anything about Constantius Chlorus, at whose ugly face they were just
then looking. Crittenden had answered in that coarse, would-be comic
jargon he occasionally affected, that he didn't remember reading a
thing about him, but if there was anything in physiognomy he must have
been a ward-heeler who had sandbagged his way to the head of the
machine. Miss Allen had not been able to avoid laughing at him outright
then, and Miss Mills's look had been all too eloquent.
But the worst was the pig-headed provinciality of his attitude about
picture-galleries, his avowal of a regular commercial-traveler's
ignorance of paintings and his refusal to try to learn to appreciate
them. "There are only, so far as I can make out," he said, "about a
dozen canvases in all Europe that I really _like_ to look at. And you
don't catch me trailing around till my feet drop off, looking at all the
thousands of second-raters that give me a pain. Why should I?"
Livingstone was so shocked and grieved by the crassness of such a
statement that he really longed to take Crittenden in hand. He knew so
well how to learn to like pictures, because (although he would not have
admitted it to any one) he had begun as crassly as Crittenden. He _knew_
what to do; he could tell Crittenden step by step how to pull himself up
to a higher level, because he had done it himself. You read esthetic
books, lots of them, and all the descriptions of paintings you could lay
your hands on, and all the stories you could find in Vasari or any one
else about the lives of the painters (Livingstone had a whole shelf of
books of that sort that were _fascinating_ reading--as amusing as La Vie
Parisienne)--and you read what Ruskin and Symonds had thought about this
or that canvas, and what Berenson's researches had proved about its
authenticity. If you could, you took the book right along with you to
the gallery, reading about the picture as you looked at it; and you kept
at it till you _did_ see in it what people said was there. That was the
way to form your taste! Even Crittenden could get somewhere along those
lines if he tried.
But he seemed to have no interest in anything but history and Michael
Angelo; Crittenden was perversely fond of dragging them over to the
Sistine Chapel till their heads were ready to drop off with the
neck-breaking fatigue of staring up at those sprawling figures.
There was, however, one advantage about the expedition to the Sistine
Chapel. They were always so fearfully tired afterwards that they took a
cab back to the Piazza Venezia and had ices together at a cafe. It was
the first time since he had lived in Europe that Livingstone had been
able to walk into a cafe with a handsome woman and watch the other men
stare. That was a European manoeuver which he had not somehow been able
to accomplish, a tailor-suited, low-heeled, sailor-hatted American
girl-tourist with her Baedecker in her ungloved hand, being by no means
a figure to make other men stare. Of course it was perfectly evident
that Miss Mills and Miss Allen were only nice girls (he hoped it was not
_too_ apparent that they were only Americans), but they were handsome
and Miss Mills was always stunningly dressed. It was next best to what
Livingstone had always secretly longed to do, as, eating his frugal
demi-glace, he had watched a medaled Italian officer or monocled,
heavy-eyed man-about-town sitting opposite a conspicuous woman-de-luxe
with high-heeled slippers, a provocative gown, and a huge hat shading
her black-rimmed, roving eyes, the only movable feature of her
spectacular face, painted and powdered to a hierarchic immobility.
That was the life! That was what Livingstone would love to do! Thus to
_afficher_ yourself with a really bad woman, how deliciously un-American
and cosmopolitan! On the other hand, those women were said to be very
expensive and hard to handle, rapacious, without the slightest scruple
as to how they emptied your pockets. Livingstone was in mortal terror of
letting one of them get any hold on him and his tiny resources. He knew
he would be no match for her. And anyhow all he wanted of one was to
sit, jeweled and painted and conspicuously non-respectable, across a
table from him at a cafe, so that other men would look at him as he now
looked at other men. He often wished he could hire one just to do that.
However, in the meantime, it was a very pleasant pastime (and might, by
George, _lead_ to something, who knew!) to sit across the table from two
merely nice but really very good-looking and well-dressed girls and
listen to their innocent prattle.
And although they were Americans, they had lived abroad so much that
they had many European ways which Livingstone found very fascinating and
superior. For instance, they were quite at home in Roman churches, and
whenever they went to listen to special music in some chapel the girls
had a quick, easy capacity for dropping to their knees in a quite
unself-conscious way that made them to Livingstone's eyes fit right in
with the picture. If it had not been for Crittenden, whose stiff
provincial American joints never dreamed of bending, he would have knelt
beside the girls. Not that he _believed_ in any of the religious part of
it! But it was so European to go down on your knees in public. If he
did, he was sure that people around them would think that he was a
member of one of those ultra-smart English Catholic families.
Crittenden always was the great, hulking obstacle in the way of any
flexible and gracious Europeanizing of their lives. Livingstone had seen
the two girls recoil time and time again, shocked by his bruskness. And
it was not only to women that he was brusk. He had occasionally an
insufferable way of treating any one who approached him with a civil
question, as when Livingstone on a sudden recollection had said to him,
"Oh, but by the way, Crittenden, how about your being only five days in
Rome?"
"_How_ about it?" Crittenden had repeated as though he'd never heard of
it before.
"Why, you said you had to return at once--that inheritance, you
know--you said you had only five days."
Crittenden had had the impertinence to stare at him hard and say coolly,
"Oh, you must be mistaken about that."
Civilized people didn't have such manners!
And that other time, the evening when he had stayed up late on the
terrazza to smoke with Crittenden, when he had asked, "But all men of
the world agree that nothing is so full of flavor as an affair with a
married woman. You, no doubt, Crittenden, have also had your
experiences, eh?"
What sort of an answer did Crittenden consider it, to burst out with
that sudden great horse-laugh as though Livingstone had been telling him
a funny story? The man simply had no experience or understanding--a raw,
crude, bumptious provincial, that's what _he_ was! One who had not even
sense enough to know how pitifully narrow his life was.