Part 10

The finest instrument of her superiority, could the rest of the company perceive it, was her Italian accent. It was probably lost on them, but it did all its execution on me. She continued to talk Italian, though Teresa plumped out her rich-vowelled English in return, and though Erda disdained the use of any speech but her elemental Gothic. Miss Gilpin’s Italian, you see, was remarkably perfect; her intonation had the real right ringing edge to it, which you don’t often hear upon English lips. She pounced upon the stresses and bit off the consonants and lingered slidingly upon the long vowels--but I needn’t describe it, you easily recall the effect; and the point of it was that she had acquired it all by her taste, by her tact, by her talent--not merely because she couldn’t help it, rubbing against the language all the time (like Olga or Teresa) in the middle-class tagrag of the town. To me at least the distinction was very clear. Poor old Teresa, with her English airs, betrayed herself by the genuine slipshod of her swift Roman interjections, now and then, aside to her niece or to Emilio; she would mumble or hiss out a word or two in which there was no mistaking the carelessness of the native. Miss Gilpin, exquisitely intoning her lovely syllables, had none of the smirch of professionalism; she seemed to bring the language of Dante into the drawing-room of a princess--and yet she was just a clever little English lady, smart and pretty and well-bred, and you couldn’t for a moment suppose she was anything else.

She was the authoress of several cultivated and charming works, so I have always understood, in which Italian history and Italian landscape were artfully blended--her art showing peculiarly in this, that her gush of romance (over the landscape) was redeemed from weak femininity by her scholarship, while her severity and soundness (over the history) was humanized by her descriptions of peasant life, village humours, parochial ceremonies; and so you learned about the popes and the great ladies of the Renaissance, and at the same time you slipped unawares into the very heart of the old unspoilt enchanting country, the real Italy--or perhaps I should put it the other way round, the vintage and the white oxen and the kindly old village-priest coming first, leading you easily onward and upward to the very heart of the Renaissance. Anyhow Miss Gilpin had her note, and I believe she struck it to considerable applause. But she didn’t assume the style of a woman of letters--in this matter too there was nothing professional about her. She was still the Englishwoman of good connexions, who happened to be related by marriage or even friendship to two or three of the most splendid houses of Rome--but who wore this accidental embellishment very simply, just as a matter of course, needing no words--and who lived by herself, lived daintily on small means, lived in Italy because she loved the dear villagers and the white oxen; and when you had taken in all this, she had still in reserve the telling fact that she wrote these remarkable books, the kind of books you wouldn’t expect from an elegant little Englishwoman of the Alban hills--or indeed from a woman at all, considering their scholarly and manly style; so that she beats the professional literary hack upon his own ground without making a parade of it--showing up his assumptions and pretensions rather cleverly, don’t you agree? There were plenty of people who _did_ agree, and who told her so; and altogether Miss Gilpin, living amusingly and unconventionally in the Alban hills, might be thought to enjoy a happy and original position in her world. Erda was one of the quaint impossible friends that dear little Nora Gilpin always managed to unearth, with her talent for discovering interest where other people would fail to notice it.

Behold Miss Gilpin, then, seating herself at ease in one of the great gilded arm-chairs and making a circle around her of Minna Dahl’s yet more impossible, frankly impossible, rout of acquaintance; though it happens that among them to-day is an awkward young Englishman, looking very much out of his place and apparently with nothing to say for himself, who isn’t quite the kind of thing that Minna generally produces on these occasions. (Yes, in Miss Gilpin’s company I am reduced to giving Erda her own poor name.) An eye may be kept upon the young Englishman--Miss Gilpin will have a word with him before she goes. For the present she rustles and warbles, settling herself in the cardinal’s chair; and she sends Emilio on an errand for something she has left below, she remembers a question she particularly wished to ask Madame de Shuvaloff (how lucky a chance!), she places Berta at her side, not noticing the slight defiance in Berta’s attitude, with a little friendly tap; and here is a pretty group, gathered and constituted all in a minute, to brighten the blankness of Minna’s gaunt unhomely drawing-room. For indeed the dark saloon of the historic passions had become a drawing-room at once; Miss Gilpin, as she sat there, had somehow given it the clever touch that makes a room personal, individual, a part of yourself--the touch that is so slight, though it achieves such a difference. How is it done? She simply pushes a chair or two, breaking their rigid rank, she lays her handkerchief on the bare table and casually throws her moss-green scarf over the back of an angular couch; she draws Berta on to a low stool beside her (Berta’s face was a study indeed), she raises her eyes with a clear gaze of thanks to the cavalier who returns with her tiny embroidered bag; and the proud old room seems to have surrendered to her charm, adapting itself to her, attentively serving to accommodate her friends and her scattered possessions. Poor Minna Dahl, she is strangely without the knack of making a place comely and habitable.

But Minna Dahl, for a woman like Miss Gilpin, is refreshing in her singularity; that is the secret of dear Nora’s odd friendship for this uncouth and unlovely German whom she has picked up somewhere in her neighbourhood. The lone German, with her offhand manners and her dreadful clothes, makes a pleasing change for a creature so compact of civilization as Miss Gilpin. Ah, there are times when we are sick of culture, bored by style, exasperated by the finer feelings; and then the relief, the repose in the company of somebody who never reads, never feels, never questions--who exists in placid contentment like a natural fact, like a tree in the solid earth! Miss Gilpin could tell you that after visiting Minna she returns with the sense of having spent a fortnight alone by the sea-side; she goes home to the world, to her book and her style, invigorated by great draughts of quiet weather, her imagination laved by the soothing surging monotony of the ocean tides; these are her very words. She could also tell you that Minna’s abysmal ignorance of the Italian Renaissance, and Minna’s atrocious Italian accent, and Minna’s failure to obtain the least little footing in the splendid houses of Rome--Miss Gilpin could tell you (but these are not her words) that by all this too she is very considerably fortified as she trips home to tea. For the fact is that Miss Gilpin is _not_ as young as she was, and the reviewers are less respectful to her scholarship than they used to be, and perhaps she begins to be aware that she mustn’t visit the Marchesa and the Principessa _too_ often in these days; and so, and so, as Miss Gilpin flutters away to her solitary chair by the evening lamp, she quite congratulates herself on the rare chance of a quiet time with her work, snatched from the claims of the world--which wasn’t the way she had put it when she set out, rather wearily, to call on old Minna this afternoon. Who then shall grudge her the strength she is imbibing at this moment, while she dismisses Emilio with a smile and repeats (in her pure intonation) a phrase that Minna has just mangled in her strange Teutonic Italian?

Mimi, the horrid child, had been misbehaving again in some way, and she and her mother had been fighting it out, and Minna had serenely interposed and excused the child--“In somma, non è un gran che,” said Minna with her _bocca tedesca_; and then, chiming upon the air, the same words tinkled like silver bells from the mouth of Miss Gilpin--with a difference that can’t be written in print, though it yawns to the ear as the distance between the Altmarkt and the Piazza del Popolo. Miss Gilpin perhaps hadn’t done it on purpose, but the effect was to bring the eyes of Erda (Erda once more!) largely sweeping round upon her, with a gleam of amusement under which Miss Gilpin for an instant faltered. Erda towered above her, good-humoured, ironic, solid; and Miss Gilpin had the sudden misgiving (how well I know it) that she was being watched by a dispassionate onlooker. She sat enthroned in her chair of state, with her satellites and her litter of possessions about her; and Erda stood dispossessed in the background, claiming no rights in the place or the scene; and yet that passing glimpse of Erda’s amusement disarranged the plan, and a wan chill for a moment blenched the satisfaction of Miss Gilpin. Oh, it was nothing, it vanished--at least it vanished for Miss Gilpin; she was herself again, she held and graced the situation. For me, however, it was enough to restore my Erda to her predominance--or rather to reveal that she had never lost it. To suppose that little Miss Gilpin could really install herself in the empty seat of grandeur, fill it with her fine shades and her diminutive arts! Erda is still there, massive in her simplicity, knowing no arts, needing none.

To me it was a relief, I must say, when at last Miss Gilpin broke up the party and we streamed forth again into the brilliant evening. Erda dismissed us all with a deep farewell at the gateway, leaving us to face the renewed problem of the path, the fatigues of the journey, the tram that we should probably miss, the train of which Emilio had forgotten the hour. Miss Gilpin hastily made off to her own abode, near by, waving a light loose invitation to us all to visit her there “next time,” and annoying Berta extremely by disappearing before she could have observed the very guarded manner of Berta’s reply. “She won’t see _me_ there in a horry,” said this young woman with proper pride. Mimi refused to walk another step, Olga stormed, Emilio spread his hands and shook his fingers in a wrangle with Teresa over his forgetfulness; and so we proceeded to the tram and the train and the scramble of our fretful times. But for my part I carried back to Rome a vision that I kept securely and that is still before me: Erda closing the gate behind us, Erda remounting the black stairway and re-entering the solitude of her great room, Erda standing there in the middle of it, all by herself, never moving, while again the old night rolls in upon her from the dead plain.

X. VIA SISTINA

Miss Gilpin, before she fled, had duly taken the measure of the awkward young Englishman; a probing question or two had given her all the insight she required. And the consequence was that a very little later, when she happened to be spending a day or two with some friends in Rome, I was summoned to present myself at their apartment in the Via Sistina. I had an idea that this was decidedly an upward step for me. Miss Gilpin’s level, as I understood it, was a higher than I had touched as yet, and I set off in response to this call from the Via Sistina with some complacency. It was only a few days ago, after all, that I had drifted to the Fountain of the Tortoises in the condition of a mere romantic waif, knowing nobody, knowing nothing of the true life of the real Rome; and now the shut doors were opening, I had passed within, I had my own Roman circle like Deering himself. I watched a British family-party issuing from their hotel in the Piazza di Spagna for the sight-seeing of the afternoon--I watched them with amused supremacy. They whispered to each other, noticing me, that I was evidently an old hand, a familiar resident; or if they didn’t I whispered for them--and so sympathetically that I was quite flattered by the respectful envy of their tone. The next moment I was face to face with Deering himself; he was being besieged, as it chanced, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, by those dreadful little boys in velvet breeches and matted curls of whom we had spoken the other day.

He was vexed that I should see him at this disadvantage. The little beasts, they were treating him as they treat the common tourist; they hadn’t noticed the extreme Romanism of his hat. Deering vilified them most idiomatically, but they had no sense of style. The right way with violent children is more universal, I think; it applies to them all and everywhere, if you have the command of it; but Deering was singularly helpless, and the children bothered and clung to him, recognizing their prey. When at last he had beaten them off he was greatly ruffled, and he snapped at me rather pettishly, demanding to know where I came from and was going. That was easily explained; but how could I account for the presence of Deering on the Spanish Steps, in the thick of the rabble of the English ghetto? We mounted the splendid flight, evading a courteous gentleman who merely wanted us to look, for he said so, at a remarkable collection of mosaic jewelry which he happened to be carrying in a cabinet under his arm; Deering winced at his approach and answered me with raised voice in Italian. His pretty hands danced before him in the urgency of his surprise, his amusement, at finding himself in these haunts of the simple Briton; it took him back, he said, to the days of his innocence; and it flashed upon me that Deering had now turned yet another corner of his emancipation--the newest and latest perversity, perhaps, was to throw over the marble halls of the Via Nazionale and to come round again to the tea-room of the English old maids at this end of the town. The rate at which Deering refines upon refinement is bewildering to a plain man. But no, Deering hadn’t pursued his culture to this point as yet, though no doubt he would arrive there in time; it was just an accident that had led him into the neighbourhood of the tea-room this afternoon.

And a lucky accident too--for I was pleased to tell Deering how I had followed the thread which he had placed in my hand the other day. “My poor friend,” he said, “how you have bungled it! Is it to this that I have brought you?” He warned me that I had missed my opportunity, he wasn’t responsible for my floundering plunges. Yet he bade me proceed, and he should look on from a distance and mark the progress of my madness. “Return to me,” he said, “when you recover your senses.” Madness, he plainly indicated, lay in the direction of Miss Gilpin and the Via Sistina; the coils of the friends of Miss Gilpin, once they have caught an imprudent explorer, effectually destroy his chances of attaining to--well, to what? If Deering is going to start his old refrain about the “real Rome” I have now my answer; I have discovered this much at least, that there are many more “real Romes” than are dreamed of in his preciosity. Already a dozen people, I assured him, had opened my eyes to the reality of Rome; some said it no longer existed, some said it was a very poor affair, some said it was a secret only known to themselves; but they all had their views, and I didn’t yet feel able to discriminate finally, to determine which of them was in possession of the truth. I must go forward and hear more; and I promised to let him know when I came to a conclusion. “Go your way by all means,” said Deering, “and come and tell me when you escape.” So we left it at that, and we parted at the head of the magnificent stairway; Deering carried his swaying grace (but he _was_ developing plumply, I observed as he went) towards the gardens of the Pincio, and I turned in the other direction down the narrow switchback of the Via Sistina.

These friends of Miss Gilpin occupied a dim and constricted apartment, and they too were rather dim. They were English, they consisted of husband and wife and daughter, and they disappointed, I must own, my idea that I had ascended the scale of initiation when I reached their door. Mr. and Mrs. Clarkson, Miss Agnes Clarkson--you can’t make much of a romance out of names like these; you must take them as you find them, wan respectable gentle-mannered Britons, who had been spending the winter in the south because Mr. Clarkson has a delicate chest. They had found the winter colder than they had expected, and perhaps they had found it long. Rome is delightful, is wonderful, is full of beauty and instruction--Mrs. Clarkson, hooking comfortably at her crochet, entirely recognized this; but then so much of its beauty, and practically all its instruction, is too bitterly cold in the winter season for Mr. Clarkson’s chest; and no, they hadn’t been able to go about very much, or indeed at all, though they had enjoyed their walks upon the Pincio; and their rooms were excellent, all they could desire, but Mrs. Clarkson, as she leaned uncomplainingly against the rococo spikes and jags of her chairback, was bound to say that a hired apartment was never the same as one’s home--great indeed as is the privilege and pleasure of foreign travel. Mrs. Clarkson had on the whole no more to say, but her husband took the view that the winter was over now, and he mentioned that he was thinking out an excursion or two for them to make before they returned to England; and as for Miss Agnes Clarkson, a hollow-cheeked maiden with a suffocated voice, she really had nothing to say at all, beyond reminding us that it would soon be too hot for sight-seeing in comfort. Dimness seemed indeed to settle upon us all, and we scarcely knew what to talk of next.

But this was in the absence of Miss Gilpin, who happened to be out when I arrived. The door presently opened, and the flimsy draperies were caught aside by Miss Gilpin’s hand as she peeped into the room with a little air of coyness and archness--I don’t know why, unless because it was one of her methods of entering a room, and she thought this one as good as another. She floated in on a waft of sweetness and light, followed by a gentleman. “More company for you,” she exclaimed--“I’ve brought Mr. Bashford!” She stood aside, directing Mr. Bashford, installing him in the circle with proprietary gestures and cries; and she reached out back-handed to me as she did so, pacifying my impatience till she could give me her attention. The Clarkson family were roused, a faint warmth kindled their chill. “Why, father,” said Mrs. Clarkson, “you remember Mr. Bashford--he came here when Miss Gilpin was with us the last time.” “To be sure, to be sure--we are quite in society when Miss Gilpin is with us!”--and Mr. Clarkson amiably bestirred himself to meet the incursion of the world. Agnes swept her mother’s work-basket out of a chair, her father’s patience-cards off the table; she ministered as she could, but society seemed to disregard her. She fidgeted round the room, disturbing the thin litter of home-life which they had sprinkled over the alien bedrock of the Via Sistina--very thin and sparse it was, easily swept into a corner with a few English volumes from the circulating library. Within five minutes of the departure of the Clarksons every trace of their settlement in the south could have been obliterated; you wouldn’t have supposed that the Clarksons belonged to a conquering race. But they were grateful, it seemed, for the brightening of their dimness; if they couldn’t do much for themselves, they were glad to be taken in hand by their brilliant friend.

Their brilliant friend was aware of it. Miss Gilpin was now free to encourage the shy young man she had run across at Castel Gandolfo; she beckoned him into a corner and soon put him at his ease. Miss Gilpin is known for her cleverness in drawing out shy young men and winning their confidence; it is an art that perhaps you don’t usually associate with little literary ladies of a certain age, and that is just what makes it so pretty and so clever in Miss Gilpin. She does it with all the naturalness in the world--you mustn’t imagine that she makes a foolish affectation of youth, of playfulness, or that she vulgarly uses her charm. No, her manner is brisk, sensible, downright--but I needn’t dwell upon it at this juncture, for she had no difficulty with the present young man. She made short work of me; having tamed and civilized and made me presentable within five minutes, she returned to the Clarksons and sought to create a circle of general talk. The poor Clarksons, they couldn’t be left longer in their helplessness; their charming friend must give them the support of her social ease. But Miss Gilpin really used more tact than they needed, for the Clarksons were talking away quite gaily with Mr. Bashford. They were talking about a family whom they had met last winter at Torquay, nice kind quiet people, to whom it most oddly appeared that Mr. Bashford was related. “Do you hear that, Agnes?” cried Mrs. Clarkson, “Mr. Bashford is a cousin of the Marshams.” Why, how small the world is! Agnes had seen a great deal of the Marshams at Torquay, and it was worth while having come to Rome, she seemed to imply, for the unexpected chance of talking about them to a friend and a cousin. “Have you heard from them lately?” she asked--it might have been the first question she had asked in Rome with a sincere interest in the answer. Miss Gilpin even spoilt things a little by her intervention; Mrs. Clarkson had dropped her crochet to tell Mr. Bashford about a drive she had taken with Mrs. Marsham last winter, but the story faltered and the hooking was resumed before the competent sweep of Miss Gilpin’s tact. She was so brilliant that it became rather dull and dowdy to talk about the Marshams.

Mr. Bashford, however, was not to be discouraged; he chanced to have received a letter quite recently from his cousins, and he was anxious to tell Miss Agnes that they had this year selected Bournemouth for their winter retreat, and had there been enjoying the best of weather. “Do you hear that, mother?” exclaimed Miss Agnes; “the Marshams have been at Bournemouth.” The Clarksons, very remarkably, had themselves been at Bournemouth the year before last, and Mr. Bashford really envied them the experience. Mr. Bashford was not noticeable in appearance, at least upon the golf-course at Torquay; though for the streets of Rome he was perhaps too weather-bronzed, too tawny-haired, too baggy in his homespun clothing. One may well wonder how it happens that Mr. Bashford, who certainly hasn’t a delicate chest, can have strayed so far from the first green at Bournemouth in this fine spring weather. He and Mr. Clarkson are there again, it seems, as they fall into an absorbing discussion of the merits of the course--Mr. Bashford knows it well, having played many a round there a few years ago. “Now they’re off!” says Mrs. Clarkson, smiling over her hook; and she too, good soul, might be seated in her corner of the ladies’ drawing-room at the Sea View Hotel, while she tranquilly enquires of Miss Gilpin whether she isn’t badly “wanting her tea.” Mr. Bashford, in short, had made the Clarksons feel thoroughly at home; the long chill of the Roman winter was a thing of the past, they breathed the kindly and temperate air of the Marine Parade. Mr. Bashford, you may judge, was just such another poor wandering exile, driven by mischance into a region where the servants simply can’t, with the best will in the world, learn how to serve an English tea--Mrs. Clarkson protested feelingly that _she_ had done what she could to teach them, and in vain.