Coming to know a new acquaintance was, thought Marise, as though you
stood back of a painter, watching him stroke by stroke paint the
portrait of a sitter whom you could not see.
Of course Mr. Neale Crittenden, like every one else, was physically
quite visible, and, like every one else, entirely hidden by this
apparent visibility. What you saw of people's surfaces and what was
really there were two very different matters--Marise had learned this
axiom if no other. What she saw of the newcomer was quite startlingly,
disturbingly attractive to her. All the more reason to draw back warily
and look carefully before she took a step forward. When on seeing him
for the first time in the morning, or coming on him unexpectedly
towering up above the crowd in some narrow, dark Roman street, she felt
the ridiculous impulse to run to meet him like a child, she told herself
impatiently that it was due to mere physical elements--his health, the
great strength which made itself felt in his quietest movements, and a
certain expression of his deep-set eyes which might very well not have
the slightest connection with his personality, which might be a mere
trick of bone-structure, the way his eyes were set in his head perhaps.
They chose the show priests for the great festivals at Lourdes for some
such casual gifts of physical magnetism.
No, there was nothing whatever to be known from surfaces, Marise told
herself. The subject of the portrait was always really quite invisible
behind the thick, thick screen of his physical presence. All that was
safe to do was to watch the strokes by which one by one he himself
painted his own portrait.
Marise often told herself all this as she was hurrying down the corridor
to be the first person in the breakfast room--the first, that is, after
Mr. Crittenden, who was a very early riser.
I
To begin with there was the dashing outline sketch of the first two or
three days when, in a few bold lines, he had seemed to set up the figure
on the canvas; the rescue of the swallow; justice for the cat; that
first walk and homesick talk about Ashley, and at the end those
stammering words of his which had seemed to show--Oh, that had now
turned unreal to Marise! He couldn't have said that--and meant it!
Then the soiree, the impression of force and originality he had made on
the people he had met there, her natural certainty that he must of
course have calculated that impression in order to profit by it--and
then--at this recollection, Marise always laughed silently at her own
astonishment when he had called Donna Antonia "a bad-tempered, stupid
old woman." Donna Antonia certainly was that, and every one knew it. But
nobody else would dream of saying it out loud, any more than they would
give their honest impression of the ritual of a secret society.
II
And then, just when she had been so drawn towards him by his strength
and kindness--that brusk blow in the face. Marise had felt many times
before this a thin, keen blade slipped into her back by a hand that took
care to be invisible. But never before had she encountered open
roughness. It was staggering! Breath-taking! Always, as she remembered
it, her first thought was, as it had been then, a horrified wonder why
any one should wish to hurt her. Always afterward with the memory of his
dreadful, stammering distress, his remorseful kissing of her hands, his
helpless inability to unsay what he had said, she knew once more, as she
had known then, that she had encountered something new, something
altogether different from any human relationship she had ever known, a
relationship where you did not say things in order to please or
displease people, or to make this or that impression, but because you
thought they were true. That was fine--oh, yes, that was fine. But it
was like dashing yourself against hard stones--it hurt! And it made her
fear the hand that had hurt her. She watched it, and sometimes all but
put out her fingers to touch it, to see if it were really so strong and
hard as it looked. She feared it. She envied its strength.
III
That had been a stroke of the portrait-painting brush which frightened
her to remember. But there were others that made her laugh, like the
time, off in a hill-village in the Roman country-side, when he stepped
into a little shop to buy a box of cigarettes, and came back with a
great paper-bag of the villainous, hay-like tobacco issued to the
Italian army, unsmokable by any but an Italian private soldier. To their
amazed laughter, he had replied sheepishly, with a boy's grin of
embarrassment that the little daughter of the shop-keeper, ambitiously
doing her best to wait on a customer, had misunderstood his order and
had weighed it out and tied it up before he realized what she was doing.
"I was afraid if I let them know she'd made a mistake her father would
jump on her. Fathers do seem to do such a tall amount of scolding
anyhow. And she was so set up over having made a sale all by herself."
Marise had laughed with the others over that, and laughed when she
thought of it--but her laugh often ended abruptly in bewilderment--how
was it he could be so kind, so tenderly kind to an Italian child he had
never seen before, and so sternly rough with her? That rankled; and
then, when she had had time to think, she recognized it, all over again,
with the same start of astonishment, for the truth-telling she had never
encountered.
IV
Mr. Livingstone had said something sentimental about man's love being
based on the instinct to cherish and protect, and woman's on the desire
to be cherished and protected. Eugenia had acquiesced; Marise, who hated
talk, sentimental or otherwise, about love, had said nothing. But Mr.
Crittenden had protested, "Oh, Livingstone, you've got that twisted.
That's the basis of love between group-ups and children. You don't
insult your equals trying to 'protect them'! Nothing would get me more
up in the air than to have somebody 'protect' me from life. Why should I
want to do it to anybody else? Protect your grandmother! A woman wants
to be let alone to take her chances in life as much as a man!"
V
They were crossing the Forum, on their way to a stroll in the shady
walks of the Palatine. From the battered, shapeless ruins of what had
been the throbbing center of the world rose suffocatingly to Marise's
senses the effluvium of weariness and decay. She always felt that Rome's
antiquity breathed out upon her a cold, dusty _taedium vitae_.
She thought of this, turning an attentive face and inattentive ear to
Mr. Livingstone, who was trying to make out from his guide-book where
the Temple of Mars had stood.
"You're holding that map wrong end to," said Mr. Crittenden.
"It's too hot to stand here in the sun," said Eugenia very sensibly.
They passed on, over heaps of ancient refuse, into the ruins of the
myriad-celled palace of the Caesars, silent now, not an echo left of all
the humming, poisonous intrigues that had filled it full.
"Here," said Mr. Livingstone, stopping in a vaulted, half-wrecked
chamber, ostensibly to comment on things, really to get his breath after
the climb, "here in such a room, only lined and paved with priceless
marbles, and hung with Asiatic silks, here you lay at ease in an
embroidered toga on a gold-mounted couch, and clapped your hands for a
slave to bring you your Falernian wine, cooled with snow from Monte
Cavo,--that was the life!"
"I thought it was in the Arabian Nights you clapped your hands for a
slave," said Eugenia.
"In Rome you probably cracked a whip," suggested Mr. Crittenden. "But I
bet you a nickel it didn't make any difference _what_ you did, your
slave came when he got good and ready and brought you another kind of
wine from the one you ordered--and lukewarm at that. They'd probably
used up all the Monte Cavo snow to cool the wine down in the slaves'
hall."
"What possible basis have you for saying all _that_?" cried Mr.
Livingstone, exasperated.
"That's the way things are! Folks that try to use slave labor always get
what's coming to them in the way of poor service."
"Oh, but in Rome you had the right to kill him!" cried Mr. Livingstone,
jealous of his rights.
"Sure you could kill him--and in New York you can fire your
stenographer. What good would that do you? You couldn't get intelligent
service out of the next slave either, unless you had him educated to be
intelligent, and if you did that he'd be such a rare bird that you'd
save him for something better than standing around waiting for you to
clap your hands at him. He'd be running your business for you."
"Oh, pshaw, Crittenden, why be so heavy-handed and literal! Why
wet-blanket _every_ imaginative fancy?"
"Oh, I didn't realize you were imaginatively fancying," said Mr.
Crittenden, laughing. "I thought you were trying imaginatively to
reconstruct the life of ancient Rome. And I was trying to do my share."
They passed through dusky, ill-smelling passages, clambered over a pile
of rubble and stood in twilight at the foot of a long, steep, vaulted
stairway. Far up, like a bright roof to its obscurity, were green
leaves, blue sky, bright sunshine. All that sparkling, clear radiance
seemed to heighten the boyish fit of high spirits that had entered into
the usually rather silent Mr. Crittenden. He pointed up to the stairway
and cried, "From antiquity to the present! I'll meet you at the top!"
and off he went, bounding up the high, steep steps two at a time, as if
his vitality had suddenly swept him away in the need for violent
exertion.
When the two girls emerged later, "Ladies, allow me to introduce to you
the present day," he said, calling to their attention with a sweep of
his hat the dark, sumptuous green of the cypresses and pines, the
splendor of the golden-blue sky, the fresh sprinkled smell of the earth
on the shady paths. "Not so bad for poor little old actuality, is it?"
The girls sank breathlessly on a bench. Livingstone appeared, slowly
hoisting himself up the steps, one at a time, and puffing. Mr.
Crittenden walked around and around restlessly, as though that upward
swoop had been but an appetizer to his desire to let out the
superabundance of his strength. He looked, Marise thought, like a
race-horse fretting and pawing and stepping sideways. How could he have
that eager look in this dusty cemetery of human strength and eagerness?
Glancing up at his face, she saw it lighted and shining with
amusement--what seemed like tender, touched amusement. He was looking at
something down the path. Marise looked with him and saw a workingman,
one of the gardeners, digging in the earth of a rose-bed. Beside him
capered and staggered a little puppy, a nondescript little brown cur
with neither good looks nor distinction, but so enchanted with life,
with itself, with the soft, good earth over which it pranced that to see
it was, thought Marise, like playing Weber's "Perpetual Motion." As she
looked it tried to run in a wavering circle around its master, tripped
over its own feet, tumbled head over heels in a soft ball, clumsily
struggled up and sat down to draw breath, a pink tongue hanging out of
its wide, laughing mouth, its soft young eyes beaming with mirth at its
own adventures. Its master glanced down and addressed some clucking,
friendly greeting to it, which threw it into an agony of joy. Wagging
its tail till its whole body wagged, it flung itself adoringly at its
master's trousers, pawing and wriggling in ecstasy.
Mr. Crittenden caught Marise's eye, and shared with her in a silent
smile his delighted sense of the little animal's absurdity. "Perhaps if
we looked down from this height and got a bird's-eye view we could
settle that point," said Eugenia to Mr. Livingstone, who was still
concerned about the location of the Temple of Mars. "There's a fine view
from the wall at the end of this path."
They strolled together to the wall, and Mr. Livingstone spread out on it
his plan of the Forum.
Marise looked down dispiritedly at the mutilated pillars and broken
pieces of carved marble, and most of all at the bits of old Roman
flagged paving. Nothing gave her a more acrid sense of futility than
those old, old flag-stones over which so many thousands of human feet
had eagerly, blindly sought their journey's end. Had any of them ever
found what they sought? She murmured under her breath, "Isn't it all
horribly, horribly depressing? Doesn't it make you feel all those
endless centuries bowing your shoulders down to the earth--why not now
as well as later?"
She had stated it as she felt it, a truism, what every one must feel.
Eugenia and Livingstone accepted it as such. "Yes, I often feel as
ancient as the stones," said Eugenia pensively.
Mr. Crittenden put in hastily, "Not on your life, it doesn't depress me!
Why should it? You don't seem to realize, Miss Allen, what an immense
difference there is between us! I never really took it in before
myself--not until this visit to Rome. But it's immense! Enormous! Let me
tell you about it. They're dead and we are alive! Alive!"
Marise looked up at him, thinking that in truth she had never felt any
one so alive. He bent his eyes to hers as Livingstone, with a little
gesture of giving him up, drew Eugenia to the corner of the wall and
traced lines on his map.
Mr. Crittenden went on whimsically, "I don't believe you ever fully
considered the great importance of that point, Miss Allen. It came home
to me all over again as I was looking at that puppy. Millions of dogs
have lived and died before him; but by some amazing miracle life is just
as fresh a wonder to him as if he were the first puppy ever born into
the world! It's incredible! I never realized it till I struck all these
relics of dead-and-gone men--it's incredible how none of them, not all
the millions of them, can tarnish the newness of my own life for me! I
can go my own new path over those old paving-stones--me and the
puppy--and you--and all of us!"
Marise laughed a little, still looking at him, listening to something he
was not saying, which played about his bold, clear face like sunlight
and shone on her as warmly.
Now a spark of wildness came into his eyes, half laughingly reckless,
half desperately in earnest. "You saw what happened to the puppy when
its master threw it a kind word? Well, I haven't the gift of wriggling
all over so wonderfully as that, and I haven't any tail to wag, but when
you look at me like that, Miss Allen, I...."
"We _think_ the third line of pillar-stumps is the side wall of the
Basilica Julia," said Eugenia, stepping towards them, the guide-book in
her hand.
VI
They were standing under the great gray dome of the Pantheon, innocent
clear daylight flooding all the great gray building.
"Oh, isn't it beautiful, their idea of leaving the circle open to the
sky?" Marise burst out. "Doesn't it make our dark, modern churches with
their imitation Gothic stained-glass seem cheap and affected? Every
church all over the world ought to be like this, and then we human
beings might be fit to live with."
Livingstone put in a horrified protest, "What! Miss all that exquisite
twilight that makes a church a church? I was just thinking how fiercely,
literally bright this noonday sun is. Daylight leaves no mystery,
nothing to your imagination."
Marise turned confidently to Mr. Crittenden as an ally. She was sure, as
sure of anything in the world, that he must be on her side. But he
hedged and said neutrally, "Oh, great Scott! It would be a horrible act
of tyranny to have every church like this. There are lots of folks
who'd hate it. They have a right to have some things their way, haven't
they?"
"Oh, I _didn't_ think _you'd_ take that side," said Marise, feeling
betrayed and longing for a sweeping, exclusive affirmation to match her
own. He so often hedged, it seemed to her, wanted to qualify statements.
Oh--it came to her with a start--that was another form of truth-telling!
He was trying to make his statements express the truth, rather than his
feelings!
He now said, judicially, "As far as I personally go, it depends what I'm
looking at. If I'm looking at a very fine statue or something that seems
really beautiful to me, I want as good a light as possible to see it in.
If--if I should ever have any personal happiness in my life, I'd want
daylight to see it by. But when it's a question of looking at the
interior decoration of the average modern church, why, the more mystery
and twilight the better."
This made Marise laugh. He often made her laugh, more than she had ever
laughed before. And yet he never told funny stories.
He now went on, "I suppose it depends on your opinion of what there is
to see. If you think your imagination can do better for you than
reality, of course you want a lot left to it, and plenty of dark corners
for it to work in. Just now, it seems to me that reality is so much
beyond anything my poor, starved imagination could have done...."
He did not look at Marise as he spoke. His tone was perfectly matter of
fact. She wondered what the other two made out of it. She knew very well
what she made out of it.
VII
They were sitting on the terrazza in the evening, with several other
people from the _pension_, having their coffee sociably around the big
round table and looking out over the roofs and domes and church-towers
of Rome. The conversation had been chit-chat, as was usual during
meal-times, and Mr. Crittenden had contributed little to it. His
massive capacity for silence when he had nothing special to say was a
constant source of wonder to Marise. Not to "make talk," even very
commonplace talk, was a betrayal of a tacitly accepted code as much as
calling Donna Antonia a "bad-tempered, stupid old woman." She had been
taught that it was one of the pretenses which must be kept up under
penalty of the ruin of all civilized intercourse. She envied and
resented his freedom from it.
She addressed herself directly to him now to force him out of his
reflective taciturnity. "Do you agree to that, Mr. Crittenden?"
"To what?" he asked, making no decent pretense of being abashed because
he had not been following the conversation.
"Why, Mr. Livingstone was saying that artists are the only human beings
to be envied, the only human beings who really _live_, intensely."
"They're the only ones who talk about it," he offered as his variation
on the dictum. "That's what an artist _is_, isn't he? Somebody who
happens to be put together so that it kills him to keep anything to
himself. He just goes up in smoke, if he can't run and tell the world
what he has seen, or tasted, or handled, or got hit by, and the way it
made him feel. I admire and revere artists. They certainly do a lot for
the rest of us. But I don't see any reason to think that they feel
things any more intensely than anybody else, and I don't see anything so
terribly enviable in their lot. There seems to be a lot of hard work
about it, if you judge by the way they carry on. I don't see why you
can't enjoy beauty and feel tragedy, even if you keep your mouth shut.
You can feel it just the same, can't you? I'm sure I've felt things
about a million times more intensely than anything that ever got into a
book. And I can't say I'm any less satisfied with my fate because I'm
not thriftily trying to use those same feelings as raw material for an
art."
Marise was laughing outrageously by the time he had finished, partly at
what he said, partly at Mr. Livingstone's scandalized expression. She
was ashamed of the way she laughed over Mr. Crittenden's teasing of
poor unconscious Mr. Livingstone.
"You don't understand, Crittenden, you don't get my point at all.
There's something--something--" Livingstone brought it out with a
remnant of the provincial self-consciousness before fine phrases which
he so deplored, "there's something god-like, divine, in being an artist,
_creating_ something."
Mr. Crittenden moved from his negligent pose, tightened up a little.
"Oh, if you mean by 'artist' a class broad enough to take in everybody
who creates something, yes, of course, they're the only ones who really
live. That's what most of us are trying to get a chance to do, trying to
create a little order out of chaos. But that's pretty nearly the whole
ant-heap of the human race, isn't it? Except the leisure classes."
Mr. Livingstone was in despair of making the Philistine understand.
"It's something we have so little of in America, it's hard for an
American to recognize its existence," he murmured to the company in
extenuation of his compatriot's denseness.
Mr. Crittenden sat up straighter. "I used to make my living buying and
selling lumber in the New England states," he said, addressing himself
for once to the company, "and on one of my trips I met a man in a narrow
mountain valley up there who was a creator if there ever was one. He had
started life as a mechanic, left school and went to work at sixteen, in
a shop filled with soulless cogs and bolts and screws and springs. And
his creative instinct rose up and seized on those things as the
appointed raw stuff for his creation. When I saw him he was the head of
one of the biggest metal-working factories in the country, a good many
hundred men working for him, and devoted to him, turning out tools that
have simplified the tasks of mechanics the world around. I never saw a
happier man. I never saw a human life more completely fulfilled. Yes,
you're right, Livingstone. The creators are the enviable ones."
"That wasn't in the least what I said, or meant!" protested Mr.
Livingstone warmly.
"It happens to be fresh in my mind," said Mr. Crittenden, half
apologizing for his unusual loquacity, "because to-day, walking on the
Due Macelli, I happened to see a case of his tools, and outside, just
glued to the window, a young Italian mechanic, gazing in at them, his
face on fire with his admiration and appreciation. Quite a long way,
isn't it, for a Yankee creator to reach out a helpful and stimulating
hand? But he's a first-rater, of course, a genius. The rest of us can't
hope to do that."
* * * * *
Later, as they all went down the stairs together, Marise asked him, "But
there isn't anything ... is there? ... that the rest of us, not creative
geniuses, can hope to do that's creative?"
She had not the faintest idea what he could find to answer. She herself
could conceive of no answer possible. With all the intelligent people
she had ever known, it had been axiomatic that there _was_ no answer.
He did not speak at once. She had noticed that he often took time to
reflect seriously on what you had said before he replied. Marise had
never seen any one before who seemed to give so much more care to
understanding what you said than to concocting something that would
sound well to say in answer. There were times when, incredible as it
seemed, Mr. Crittenden seemed really to use language to express what he
meant rather than to attain his ends. She waited now, and as she waited
she was aware of the erectness and vigor of the tall body stepping
beside her. In the corridor he halted for a moment, facing her, his head
bent thoughtfully, his eyes shadowed by his broad brow, his hand, that
powerful athlete's hand of his, meditatively over his mouth as he
considered.
He had given her question a good deal of thought, and yet when he took
his hand down to speak he said abruptly, impulsively, as though the
words had broken up through what he had been meaning to say, "Couldn't
we ... any of us ... couldn't we hope to create a beautiful human
relationship? Beautiful and enduring?"