Part 8

He arrives at the terminus with only one companion; the rest, with nods, have vanished away at one street corner or another. Gradually he is sorting himself out. Both he and his companion know that there are a hundred and twenty seconds to spare. The companion relates a new humorous story of something unprintable, alleged to have happened between a man and a woman. The receiver of the story laughs with honest glee, and is grateful, and the companion has the air of a benefactor; which indeed he is, for these stories are the ready-money of social intercourse. The companion strides off, with a nod. The other remains solitary. He has sorted himself out, but only for a minute. In a minute he is an indistinguishable unit again, with nine others, in the compartment of a moving train. He reads an evening newspaper, which seems to have come into his hand of its own agency, for he catches it every night with a purely mechanical grasp as it flies in the street. He reads of deeds and misdeeds, and glances aside uneasily from the disturbing tides of restless men who will not let the social order alone. Suddenly, after the train has stopped several times, he folds up the newspaper as it is stopping again, and gets blindly out. As he surges up into the street on a torrent of his brothers, he seems less sorted than ever. The street into which he comes is broad and busy, and the same newspapers are flying in it. Nevertheless, the street is different from the streets of the centre. It has a reddish or a yellowish quality of colour, and there is not the same haste in it. He walks more quickly now. He walks a long way up another broad street, in which rare autobuses and tradesmen’s carts rattle and thunder. The street gets imperceptibly quieter, and more verdurous. He passes a dozen side-streets, and at last he turns into a side-street. And this side-street is full of trees and tranquillity. It is so silent that to reach it he might have travelled seventy miles instead of seven. There are glimpses of yellow and red houses behind thick summer verdure. His pace still quickens. He smiles to himself at the story, and wonders to whom he can present it on the morrow. And then he halts and pushes open a gate upon which is painted a name. And he is in a small garden, with a vista of a larger garden behind. And down the vista is a young girl, with the innocence and grace and awkwardness and knowingness of her years--sixteen; a little shabby, or perhaps careless, in her attire, but enchanting. She starts forward, smiling, and exclaims: “Father!”

Now he is definitely sorted out.

*****

Though this man is one of the crowd, though nobody would look twice at him in Cannon Street, yet it is to the successful and felicitous crowd that he belongs. There are tens of thousands of his grade; but he has the right to fancy himself a bit. He can do certain difficult things very well--else how, in the fierce and gigantic struggle for money, should he contrive to get hold of five hundred pounds a year?

He is a lord in his demesne; nay, even a sort of eternal father. Two servants go in fear of him, because his wife uses him as a bogey to intimidate them. His son, the schoolboy, a mighty one at school, knows there is no appeal from him, and quite sincerely has an idea that his pockets are inexhaustible. Whenever his son has seen him called upon to pay he has always paid, and money has always been left in his pocket. His daughter adores and exasperates him. His wife, with her private system of visits, and her suffragetting, and her independences, recognises ultimately in every conflict that the resultant of forces is against her and for him. When he is very benevolent he joins her in the game of pretending that they are equals. He is the distributor of joy. When he laughs, all laugh, and word shoots through the demesne that father is in a good humour.

He laughs to-night. The weather is superb; it is the best time of the year in the suburbs. Twilight is endless; the silver will not die out of the sky. He wanders in the garden, the others with him. He works potteringly. He shows himself more powerful than his son, both physically and mentally. He spoils his daughter, who is daily growing more mysterious. He administers flattery to his wife. He throws scraps of kindness to the servants. It is his wife who at last insists on the children going to bed. Lights show at the upper windows. The kitchen is dark and silent. His wife calls to him from upstairs. He strolls round to the front patch of garden, stares down the side-road, sees an autobus slide past the end of it, shuts and secures the gate, comes into the house, bolts the front door, bolts the back door, inspects the windows, glances at the kitchen; finally, he extinguishes the gas in the hall. Then he leaves the ground floor to its solitude, and on the first-floor peeps in at his snoring son, and admonishes his daughter through a door ajar not to read in bed. He goes to the chief bedroom, and locks himself therein with his wife; and yawns. The night has come. He has made his dispositions for the night. And now he must trust himself, and all that is his, to the night. A vague, faint anxiety penetrates him. He can feel the weight of five human beings depending on him; their faith in him lies heavy.

In the middle of the night he wakes up, and is reminded of such-and-such a dish of which he partook. He remembers what his wife said: “There’s no doing anything with that girl”--the daughter--“I don’t know what’s come over her.” And he thinks of all his son’s faults and stupidities, and of what it will be to have two children adult. It is true--there _is_ no doing anything with either one or the other. Their characters are unchangeable--to be taken or left. This is one lesson he has learnt in the last ten years. And his wife. . . ! The whole organism of the demesne presents itself to him, lying awake, as most extraordinarily complicated. The garden alone, the rose-trees alone,--what a constant cause of solicitude! The friction of the servants,--was one of them a thief or was she not? The landlord must be bullied about the roof. Then, new wall-papers! A hinge! His clothes! His boots! His wife’s clothes, and her occasional strange disconcerting apathy! The children’s clothes! Rent! Taxes! Rates! Season-ticket! Subscriptions! Negligence of the newsvendor! Bills! Seaside holiday! Erratic striking of the drawing-room clock! The pain in his daughter’s back! The singular pain in his own groin--nothing, and yet. . . ! Insurance premium! And above all, the office! Who knew, who could tell, what might happen? There was no margin of safety, not fifty pounds margin of safety. He walked in success and happiness on a thin brittle crust! Crack! And where would they all be? Where would be the illusion of his son and daughter that he was an impregnable and unshakable rock? What would his son think if he knew that his father often calculated to half-a-crown, and economised in cigarettes and a great deal in lunches?. . .

He asks, “Why did I bring all this on myself? Where do I come in, after all?”. . . The dawn, very early; and he goes to sleep once more!

*****

The next morning, factitiously bright after his bath, he is eating his breakfast, reading his newspaper, and looking at his watch. The night is over; the complicated organism is in full work again, with its air of absolute security. His newspaper, inspired by a millionaire to gain a millionaire’s ends by appealing to the ingenuousness of this clever struggler, is uneasy with accounts of attacks meditated on the established order. His mind is made up. The established order may not be perfect, but he is in favour of it. He has arrived at an equilibrium, unstable possibly, but an equilibrium. One push, and he would be over! Therefore, no push! He hardens his heart against the complaint of the unjustly treated. He has his own folk to think about.

The station is now drawing him like a magnet. He sees in his mind’s eye every yard of the way between the side-street and the office, and in imagination he can hear the clock striking at the other end. He must go; he must go! Several persons help him to go, and at the garden-gate he stoops and kisses that mysterious daughter. He strides down the side-street. Only a moment ago, it seems, he was striding up it! He turns into the long road. It is a grinding walk in the already hot sun. He reaches the station and descends into it, and is diminished from an eternal father to a mere unit of a throng. But on the platform he meets a jolly acquaintance. His face relaxes as they salute. “I say,” he says after an instant, bursting with a good thing, “Have you heard the tale about the--?”

ITALY--1910

I--NIGHT AND MORNING IN FLORENCE

Amid the infantile fluttering confusion caused by the arrival of the Milan express at Florence railway station, the thoughts of the artist as he falls sheer out of the compartment upon the soft bodies of hold-alls and struggling women, are not solely on the platform. This moment has grandeur. This city was the home of the supreme ones--Dante, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Brunelleschi. You have entered it.. . . Awe? I have never been aware of sentiments of awe towards any artists, save Charles Baudelaire. My secret attitude to them has always been that I would like to shake their hands and tell them briefly in their private slang, whatever their private slang was, that they had given immense pleasure to another artist. I have excepted Charles Baudelaire ever since I read his correspondence, in which he is eternally trying to borrow ten francs from some one, and if they cannot make it ten--then five. There is something so excessively poignant, and to me so humiliating, in the spectacle of the grand author of La Charogne going about among his acquaintance in search of a dollar, that I would only think about it when I wished to inflict on myself a penance. It is a spectacle unique. Like the King of Thule song in Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, it resembles nothing else of its kind. If the artist does not stand in awe before that monumental enigma of human pride which called itself Charles Baudelaire, how shall the artist’s posture be described?

No, I will tell you what occupied the withdrawn and undefiled spaces of my mind as I entered Florence, drifting on the stream of labelled menials and determined ladies with their teeth hard-set: Was it more interesting for an artist to be born into a great age of art, where he was beloved and appreciated, if not wholly comprehended, by relatively large masses of people; where his senses were on every hand indulged and pampered by the caress of the obviously beautiful; where he lived among equals, and saw himself continually surrounded by innumerable acts creative of beauty; and where he could feel in the very air a divine palpitation--or, on the other hand, was it more spiritually voluptuous for the artist to be born into a stone age, an age deaf and dumb, an age insensible to the sublime, ignorantly rejecting beauty, and occupying itself with the most damnable and offensive futilities that the soul of an artist can conceive? For I was going, in my fancy, out of the one age into the other. And I decided, upon reflection, that I would just as soon be in the age in which I in fact was; I said that I would not change places even with the most fortunate and miraculous of men--Leonardo da Vinci. There is an agreeable bitterness, an exquisite _tang_, in the thought of the loneliness of artists in an age whose greatness and whose epic quality are quite divorced from art. And when I think of the artist in this age, I think of the Invisible Man of H. G. Wells, in the first pride of his invisibility (when he was not yet hunted), walking unseen and unseeing amid multitudes, and it is long before? anybody in the multitudes even notices the phenomenon of mysterious footmarks that cannot be accounted for! I like to be that man. I like to think that my fellows are few, and that even I, not having eyes to see most of them, must now and then be disconcerted by the appearance of unaccountable footmarks. There is something beyond happiness, and that is, to know intensely and painfully that you are what you are. The great Florentines of course had that knowledge, but their circumstances were; not so favourable as mine to its cultivation in an artist. Therein lay their disadvantage and lies my advantage.

Besides, you do not suppose that I would wish to alter this age by a single iota of its ugliness and its preposterousness! You do not suppose I do not love it! You do not suppose I do not wallow in the trough of it with delight! There is not one stockbroker, not one musical comedy star, not one philanthropic giver of free libraries, not one noble brewer, not one pander, not one titled musician, not one fashionable bishop, not one pro-consul, that I would wish away. Where should my pride bitterly exercise itself if not in proving that my age, exactly as it exists now, contains nothing that is not the raw material of beauty? If I wished to do so, I would force some among you to see that even the hotel-tout within the portals of the city of Giotto is beautiful.

*****

At dinner I am waited upon by a young and beautiful girl who, having almost certainly never heard of Gabriele d’Annunzio, yet speaks his language and none other. But she wears the apron and the cap of the English parlour-maid, in plenary correctness, and, knowing exactly how I should be served in England, she humours me; and above us is a vaulted ceiling. Such is the terrible might of England. I am surrounded by ladies; the room is crammed with ladies. By the perfection of their virtuosity in the nice conduct of forks alone is demonstrated their ladyship. (And I who, like a savage, cannot eat pudding without a spoon!) There is a middle-aged gentleman, whose eyeglasses are wandering down his fine nose, lost in a bosky dell of women at the other end of the room; and there is myself; and there is a boy, obviously in Hades. And there are some fifty dames. Their voices, high, and with the sublime unconscious arrogance of the English, fight quietly and steadily among each other up in the vaulting. “Of course, I used to play cricket with my brothers. But, will you believe me, I’ve never seen a football match in my life!”

“No, we haven’t seen the new rector yet, but they say he’s frightfully nice.”

“Benozzo Gozzoli--ye-es.” It is impossible not to believe, listening to these astounding conversations, that nature, tired of imitating Balzac any longer, has now taken to imitating the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward.

The drawing-room is an English drawing-room--yes, with the _Queen_ and “the authoress of _Elizabeth and her German Garden_” and a Bechstein grand. There are forty-five chairs and easy chairs in it, and fifty ladies; the odd five ladies sit low upon hassocks or recline on each other in attitudes of intense affection. And at the other end is a male, neither the man with the pincenez nor the boy in Hades, but a third who has mysteriously come out of nothing into existence. I have entered, and I am held, as by a spell, in the doorway, the electric light raining upon me, a San Sebastian for the fatal arrows of the fifty, who fix on me their ingenuous eyes--

And dart delicious danger thence

(to cull an incomparable phrase from one of the secular poems of Dr. Isaac Watts). And now there are more ladies behind me, filling the doorway with hushed expectation. For in the appalling silence, a young sad-orbed creature is lifting a violin delicately from its case on the Bechstein, at which waits a sister-spirit. “Do tell me,” says an American voice, intrepidly breasting the silence, “what was that perfectly heavenly thing you played last night--was it Debussy? We thought it must be Debussy.” And the violinist answers: “No; I expect you mean the Goltermann. It _is_ pretty, isn’t it?” And as she holds up the violin, interrogating its strings with an anxious and a critical ear, I observe that beneath the strings lies a layer of rosin-dust. Thirty years ago, in the fastnesses of the Five Towns, amateurs used to deem it necessary to keep their violins dirty in order to play with the soulfulness of a Norman Neruda. I would have been ready to affirm that observation of the cleanliness of the instruments of professionals had killed the superstition long since; but lo, I have tunnelled the Simplon to meet it again!

I go. Somehow, I depart, beaten off as it were with great loss. I plunge out into dark Florence, walking under the wide projecting eaves of Florence to avoid the rain. And in my mind I can still see the drawing-room, a great cube of light, with its crowded frocks whose folds merge one into the next, and the Bechstein, and the strains of Goltermann, and the attentive polite faces, and that sole man in the corner like a fly on a pin. I have run away from it. But I know that I shall go back to it, and that my curiosity will drink it to the dregs. For that drawing-room is to the working artist in me the most impressive and the most interesting thing in Florence. And when I reflect that there are dozens and dozens of it in Florence, I say that this age is the most romantic age that ever was.

*****

I know where I am going, for my first business in entering a town, whether Florence, Hull, or Constantine, is always to examine the communicative posters on its walls and to glance through its newspapers. There is a performance of Spontini’s _La Vestale_ at the Teatro Verdi. Nothing, hardly, could have kept me away from that performance, which in every word of its announcement seems to me overpoweringly romantic. The name of Verdi alone.... I heard Verdi late in my life, and in Italy, long after I knew by rote all the themes in _Tristan_ and _Die Meistersinger_, after _Pelleas et Mêlisande_ had ceased to be a novelty at the Paris Opéra Comique, after even the British discovery of Richard Strauss, and I shall never forget the ravishing effect on me of the first act of _La Traviata_; no, nor the tedium of the other acts. I would go to any theatre named Verdi. Then Spontini! What is Spontini but a name? Was it possible that I was about to hear an actual opera by this antique mediocrity whose music Berlioz loved beyond its deserts? Had anybody ever heard an opera by Spontini?

The shabbiness of the _façade_ and of the box-office, and of the suits of the disillusioned but genial men within the box-office--men who knew the full meaning of existence. A seat in the _parterre_ for two lire--say one and sevenpence halfpenny--it is making a gift of the spectacle! The men take my two lire with an indulgent gesture, exclaiming softly with their eyes and hands: “What are two lire more or less in the vast abyss of our deficit? Throw them down!” Then I observe that my ticket is marked _posto distinto_--prominent seat, distinguished seat. Useless to tell me that it means nothing! It means much to me: another example of Italian politeness, at once exquisite and futile.

Would the earl in the gate at Covent Garden, even for thirty-two lire on a Melba night, offer me a distinguished seat?.. . Long stone corridors, steps up, steps down, turnings, directive cries echoing amid arches; and then I am in the auditorium, vast.

It is as big as Covent Garden, and nearly as big as La Scala. It has six galleries, about a hundred boxes, and four varieties of seats on the ground floor. My distinguished seat is without the first quality of a seat--yieldingness. It does not acquiesce. It is as hard as seasoned wood can be, though roomy and well situated. And in a corner, lying against the high rampart of a box for ten people, I see negligently piled a great pyramid of ancient red cushions, scores and scores of them. And a little old ragged attendant comes and whispers alluringly, delicately in my ear: “_Cuscina_.” Two sous would hire it and a smile thrown in. But no, I won’t have it. I am too English to have that cushion.. . . The immense theatre, faced all in white marble, with traces here and there in a box of crimson upholstery, is as dim as a church. There are hundreds of electric bulbs, but unlighted: the sole illumination comes from a row of perfectly mediæval gas-burners along the first gallery. After all, economy must obtain somewhere. I count an orchestra of over seventy living players; the most numerous body in the place: somehow they must support life. Over the acreage of the _parterre_ are sprinkled a few dozens of audience. There is a serried ring of faces lining the fifth gallery, to which admittance is tenpence, and another lining the sixth gallery, to which admittance is sixpence. The rest is not even paper.

Yet a spruce and elegant conductor rises and the overture begins, and the orchestra proves that its instruments are real; and I hear Spontini, and for a little while enjoy his faded embroideries. And the curtain goes up on “a public place in Rome,” upon a scale as spacious as Rome itself. Everything is genuine. There are two leading sopranos, one of whom is young and attractive, and they both have powerful and trained voices, and sing like the very dickens. No amateurishness about them! They know their business; they are accomplished and experienced artists. No hesitations, no timidities, no askings for indulgence because really I have only paid two lire! Their fine voices fill the theatre with ease, and would easily fill Covent Garden to the back row of the half-crown gallery. The same with the tenor, the same with the bass. Spontini surges onward in an excellent concourse of multitudinous sound, and I wonder what it is all about. I have a book of the words, but owing to the unfortunate absence of Welsbach mantles I cannot read it. I know it must be all about a vestal who objected to being a vestal, on account of a military uniform, and I content myself with this grand central fact. Then the stage brightens, and choruses begin to march on; one after another; at least a dozen: soldiers, wrestlers, populace, dancers, children. Yes, the show is complete even to ragamuffins larking about in the public place in Rome. I count a hundred people on the stage. And all the properties are complete. It is a complete production and an expensive production--except probably in the detail of wages. For in Italy _prime donne_ with a _répertoire_ of a dozen or fifteen first-class rôles seem to go about the streets dressed like shop-girls. I have seen it. All this is just as exciting to me as the Church of S. Croce, even as explained by John Ruskin with a schoolmaster’s cane in his lily-hand.