Part 11

But no, the story of Mr. Bashford was not such as you might suppose. Later on I learned it, and I found to my surprise that this golfing gossiping puffing Englishman, with the red face and the yellow moustache, was actually _romano di Roma_ in all the conditions of his life. He had been born in Rome, he had lived all his years in Rome; he possessed by inheritance a tenement in the Piazza Navona and a farm in a valley of the Volscian hills; English weather had counted for nothing in his complexion, and to the English golf-club he had only been admitted as a holiday-making stranger from foreign parts. He was the son, I discovered, of a certain mid-Victorian amateur of the arts, an independent gentleman of some quality, who had been an early and earnest disciple of the eloquence of Ruskin. Mr. Bashford the elder had followed the teaching of his master with zeal, but not blindly--for it must be allowed that Ruskin fell away from the gracious culture of his prime into many a harsh extravagance of taste and doctrine. It was to the _true_ Ruskin that this disciple remained himself ever true: Ruskin whom one pictures, a grave and blue-eyed young man, stepping out into the early summer morning of a little Tuscan town to set up his easel in a deserted sacristy, an echoing cloister--where he will work through the long hours with piety and concentration, glorifying the beauty that a simple industrious God-fearing peasantry (if only they would bear it in mind) may always possess and impart to a man of feeling, trained among the refining influences of Gothic architecture at Oxford. I am not, if you please, describing Ruskin, but I am describing him closely as he appeared to an earnest disciple (with a delicate chest) in the sixties of the nineteenth century. This was the devotee who settled in Italy--“whether” (as he puts it in his diary) “for health’s sake or for love of St. Ursula I know not”--settled in Italy with a wife (“my entirely precious and meek-eyed Dora,” says the same document), and there became responsible for the gentleman who at this moment is observing to Mr. Clarkson that he has found it advisable to use an iron upon the fourth tee at Ilfracombe.

Ruskin and St. Ursula--Italy, my Italy--the ineffable meekness of dear old Brother Angelico: by names, by phrases of this kind I suggest the atmosphere that was about the cradle of Mr. Bashford the son. But human children, we know, have long ago brought to the highest pitch the art of self-protection; and little Bashford, I dare say, was not yet weaned when he cautiously shut the doorways of his head against the assault of his parents’ enthusiasm. It was firmly done, it was final; little Bashford proceeded to grow as he pleased into the big red middle-aged Bashford who is now before our eyes. In other circumstances he might have allowed his nature to remain more plastic, at least in the cradle; but his was a special case, an English babe exposed to culture in foreign parts. There was nothing for it but to guard himself utterly and absolutely; and I think we may say that only an English babe could have carried the affair so successfully through to the end. For forty years and more an insidious culture, reinforced by the unwholesome excitement of foreign ways, had been beating upon the skull of Mr. Bashford, and all without creating the faintest disturbance within it; secure behind its powerful sutures he had lived the life of which the accidents of his birth had conspired to deprive him. He was in no position to trifle with the danger. It is all very well for people like Deering and Cooksey to allow themselves the freedom of flirtation with the spirit of Rome; they are well grounded upon their insular training and will come to no great harm. And similarly the parents of Mr. Bashford, colonists of the first generation--they could follow the siren voices unafraid, carrying with them the probity of their English birthright. It is a very different matter for their offspring, denied the advantages which they enjoyed. He, poor lamb, thrown from the beginning upon the dubious world of all that isn’t English, must take his own deliberate precautions; and he doesn’t hesitate, he begins in time--and at forty he will meet you in the Via Sistina with the certainty that his clothes and his speech and his colour belong unmistakably to the land in which he wasn’t born.

His case, it must be owned, is more interesting than his talk. Miss Gilpin fidgeted openly and did her best to break up the alternation of leisurely anecdote into which Mr. Bashford and Mr. Clarkson had now contentedly fallen. But she had no success; she only made Mrs. Clarkson rather nervous and uneasy with her acid interjections. Dear Miss Gilpin was a little difficult in a plain household; she couldn’t understand that when the men are occupied and happy it is foolish indeed to disturb them. Mrs. Clarkson, more experienced, would willingly have let them go prosing on about their games and rubbish as long as they chose; Agnes and she could sit quiet and get on with their work. But Miss Gilpin was brilliant, and to be sure they were indebted to Miss Gilpin for her attention; Mr. Clarkson forgot his bad throat when she appeared, and had been quite annoyed with Agnes for reminding him in Miss Gilpin’s presence (though he had told her always to remind him) to put on his flannel chest-protector before going out. Such was the tissue of Mrs. Clarkson’s thought, week in and week out, during their winter in Rome; and if I seem to be interpreting my short observation of her too freely, I can only say that her mind was an open page of very simple words. But something had to be done to restrain Miss Gilpin from interrupting poor father’s favourite story of the sheep in the bunker; he had just reached the crowning point at which he broke off with a laugh and a pause before proceeding--“Believe me or not, there was the old sheep on her back in strong convulsions”--and Mrs. Clarkson positively hissed at Miss Gilpin to stop her, to detach her from the circle of the men, before she should spoil the climax with one of her tiresome clever remarks. Mrs. Clarkson, as it happened, was too late; Miss Gilpin swept the story of the sheep off the board and resolutely placed there some livelier topic of her own.

Mr. Clarkson clutched the falling fragments of his tale and was evidently ruffled; and as for the good Bashford, he stared solidly at Miss Gilpin’s challenge and made no movement to take it up. His expression, as I now watch it again, gives me the secret of his massive integrity. He looked at Miss Gilpin as I might blankly look at some diagram or equation of the higher mathematics--at something so disconnected with my being that it doesn’t even rouse my curiosity. That was how Mr. Bashford saved himself from going to pieces in the climate of Rome. If you divide the world into two parts, calling one of them “my sort” and the other “not my sort,” your position is unassailable; in the first case you needn’t question what you know already, in the second it is no concern of yours. Mr. Bashford had been able to remain true to himself through a lifetime so unnaturally Roman because anything that wasn’t “his sort” was a problem, as you might say, in the differential calculus. See him, then, regarding in that light the playful sallies of Miss Gilpin--a good little woman, no doubt, but not at all his sort; he has nothing to say to her, he doesn’t attempt to find anything to say to her, he merely waits. She for her part can’t bring herself to acknowledge defeat; she always thinks she may yet succeed in striking a spark out of that sleepy old Bash. “Ah, Mr. Bashford, when you look at me like that I feel as though I were indecently exposed!”--this, believe me or not, is one of her flings at his stolidity; but he takes it without the flicker of an eyelid, and he leaves it to Mr. Clarkson to find some happy retort, as daring as her attack, yet expressed in all good taste. Mrs. Clarkson, glancing up, noted that that clever little woman had certainly a way with her; poor dear father had already forgotten that she had spoilt his story.

When at length I said good-bye to the Clarksons I didn’t tell them that they had given me a new experience. It was the first hour I had spent in Rome of which I might truthfully say that I had spent it in the Sea View Hotel. In the heart of Rome our little group had gathered and talked; but with Rome all about us, jangling its bells and calling its street-cries, we had sat secluded upon a few square feet of our native soil. And did I say that the Clarkson family seemed to have entered a strange land with no conquering mien? That was a superficial judgment; for what have the Clarksons done but to change their patch of the Via Sistina into English ground?--and that so easily, so instinctively, that they are quite unaware of their own prepotency. No need for them to create their colony with laborious arts; Mr. Clarkson spreads his game of patience on the table, his wife winds her wool over a chair-back, his daughter goes out to buy a cake for tea--and the thing is achieved. True they are not as comfortable as they were at Torquay, and they miss the Marshams; but you can’t have everything, and the English chemist is very obliging, and what with the English banker and the English news-agent Mr. Clarkson can always find an object for a walk. Of course if you ask _why_ they have come to Rome, seeing that the Roman climate is far more treacherous than that of our nice mild “English Riviera”--well, certainly it is difficult to see how the Clarksons are in candour to answer the question. But it isn’t fair to expect them to grasp their motive and to put it into words--they are not used to being called upon so harshly. One goes to Rome for the winter because, if one has private means and delicate health, it is what one _does_; that is enough for the Clarksons. And next winter, when they are happily restored to Torquay, they will be able to tell the Marshams about the intensely interesting time they passed in Rome.

XI. PIAZZA NAVONA

Old Miss Gainsborough was stately and splendid; she made such an effect on me, as she sat enthroned in Bashford’s big frowzy sitting-room, that I had no attention for the kindly struggles of my host in his care for my entertainment. Mr. Bashford, though perhaps suspecting that I was not his sort, wrestled for a while with his manly silence and produced a remark or two; but he was relieved to find that I was happy in watching Miss Gainsborough, and he was more than ready to relax his effort and to let me take my entertainment as I chose. So we watched Miss Gainsborough together--she was sitting at a distance, very upright on an uncomfortable bench, talking to a large untidy female who writhed at her side among the cushions of a low arm-chair. “Ah, Miss Gainsborough, you and I, as old Romans, know better than that!”--the female crooned out the words with an ecstatic lunge towards the bench. “Ah, Lady Mullinger, you and I, as old frumps, had much better hold our tongues!”--and as the answer fell with a rap upon the extended knuckles of the female I recognized my acquaintance of the other day, the day of the pilgrims in the church: Cooksey’s Lady Mullinger, who had tried to arrange that helpful little tea-party for poor Charlotte. She was only for a moment disordered by Miss Gainsborough’s retort; then she collected herself for a good laugh at her friend’s delightful wit.

Miss Gainsborough, handsome, high-coloured, decorated with much magnificence, surveyed Lady Mullinger with a contemptuous eye. “What’s the woman laughing at now?” she demanded--and her ladyship was convulsed anew. They had been talking of some one lately arrived in Rome, to whom they alluded as Lady Vera; and it appeared that Lady Vera in the innocence of her zeal had been shocked by the language of the old Romans, such as Lady Mullinger, when they spoke of matters that to her, Lady Vera, were breathlessly sacred and august. It was the eternal game, you see, to which Cooksey had already introduced me--the game at which you score off the new-comer by your careless natural freedom in the inner ring; but Miss Gainsborough stamped on it summarily--not, I judge, because she had any objection to it herself, but because Lady Mullinger was a fool and needed a smacking. The annoying part of it was that the more she was smacked the louder she cackled. “For the Lord’s sake sit up and behave yourself,” cried Miss Gainsborough; and she called across the room--“Bashford, come and see if you can make her sit quiet and not guffaw like a jackass whenever I open my mouth!” Bashford, rosily perturbed, got up and planted himself before Miss Gainsborough; he seemed to have some idea of protecting Lady Mullinger, but he couldn’t do much for her with the other lady’s daunting eye upon him; he made vague noises of remonstrance and hoped for the best. “Speak up,” said Miss Gainsborough; “be a man, Bashford, and tell her to behave like a reasonable creature!”

Lady Mullinger was indeed deplorable; she writhed, she quaked with obsequious enjoyment; nothing could discourage her ecstasy, not even the fact that her witty friend, addressing herself to Bashford, completely ignored it. Bashford was prudent, but he faced Miss Gainsborough squarely, masking his dread of her with his burly solemnity; she heckled him sharply and shrewdly, not without humour; and Lady Mullinger hung upon the spectacle, industriously applauding unnoticed--except that Bashford now and then, as an honourable and mannerly host, tried to hand her some little share of Miss Gainsborough’s attention to himself. But you can’t help a woman like Lady Mullinger to save her face; she is driven to expose her indignity, do what you will. I take it that in spite of many years of sedulous Romanism she was still beating blindly against the wall of that impregnable fortress of the “old Roman”; and just as she always hoped to entice Father Holt some day to her tea-party, so she couldn’t be reconciled to the sight of Miss Gainsborough chuckling, grandly carousing, digging Mr. Bashford in the ribs with imperious freedom--and turning her straight back upon Lady Mullinger as though she didn’t exist. Poor soul, I thought of her comfortably gossiping with Cooksey the other day--what a pity it seems that she and Cooksey can’t acquiesce in their prime disability and console each other, without breaking themselves upon the fortress. Their disability is of course the fact, never to be lived down, that only an inspiration and a conviction and an enthusiasm brought them to Rome; they weren’t in any way (there are more ways than one) born there.

It seems unfair, but it can’t be helped; Lady Mullinger had better have turned her back (her round and wriggling back) upon Miss Gainsborough and gone off to her pleasant game of tattle with Cooksey. For Miss Gainsborough was as hard as a rock; she was one of the old guard, possessing hereditary rights in Rome that had been bequeathed to her, with the bone of her nose and the slash of her tongue, by I don’t know how many stubborn generations of antiquity in the midland shires. You could note them in the insolence of her eye, in the depth of her riotous chuckle, in the coarse old provinciality of some of her tones. She stood upon the pyramid of her fathers, a last survival--terribly out of date in a world where there are fewer and fewer people to whom we may safely be rude. Miss Gainsborough’s grandmother, perhaps, may have trodden upon the necks of freeborn men and women to her heart’s content; and it must be bitter to her granddaughter to reflect that at _her_ end of time she is reduced to pounding an occasional old goose like Lady Mullinger. Such a triumph is too easy--it is beneath her; and yet I suppose we can hardly expect that Miss Gainsborough, with so much fighting bullying blood in her clear cheek, should hold her hand and soften her tongue when Lady Mullinger comes cringing to meet the attack. As a matter of fact Miss Gainsborough didn’t bother her head about this question, or indeed any other; she inherited her stinging hand and her few tough stalwart opinions, and she gave you either or both in the face if you showed a sign of weakness.

Bashford was horrified, but not weak; he received her rich old banter with a smiling front in silence; and in large silence he still attended when she presently dropped her sportive play and took up some subject of the moment, some dire political portent that she had detected in the newspaper of that morning--over which she was implacable in majestic wrath. It mattered little to _her_, an old woman who would soon be safe with her fathers, rest their souls!--but Bashford, a mere youth, would live to see the fulfilment of her word; and her word, smartly rattling among the tea-cups, was Damnation! Nobody listened to _her_, nobody cared; and the mad infatuation of a crowd of sheep, of swine, of serpents--oh you may laugh, but Miss Gainsborough will call them all the bad names she can think of; and when the crash comes you will remember that _she_ wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. Afraid? Well, Miss Gainsborough hadn’t after all a great deal to be afraid of, it occurred to me; she sat pretty comfortably entrenched within her fortress, hurling her defiance at a world which couldn’t touch her; and the shy observer who was watching her from across the room was almost moved to a desperate rejoinder, something to the effect that she hadn’t perhaps considered an argument which the young observer could have expounded with persuasive force, with reason invincible. Shyness saved me, I am glad to think, from the fatuity of offering reason and persuasion to Miss Gainsborough--as though she bothered her head about the why or the wherefore of the opinions that she brandished. They were solid in the hand, they had seen good service and hadn’t failed her; so she laid about her vigorously, like her fathers before her. Lady Mullinger, struck solemn by the thought of the world’s insanity, fervently breathed her assent; and Bashford too was very grave--he feared, so he said, that Miss Gainsborough was only too much in the right of it.

I sat as it chanced by a low window, and a turn of the head gave me a view of half the long length of the Piazza Navona--the old circus or race-course or whatever it was in ancient days. The oblong space with its rounded end--it shows you the line where the Roman chariots traced and raced; for when the games of imperial Rome were over, the track was built about with houses, and now there is a palace on one side, and a church, and three great splashing fountains down the middle; and still the sweep of the track is marked by this open space in the midst of the city, and Bashford’s apartment was like the royal box for the monarch and his minions and his dames. Bashford could hardly sit for the monarch, nor I for the minion; but his dames, one of them at least, might look over the heads of the crowd, surveying the contest, and never be known for an intruder from other lands and times. Miss Gainsborough would have figured admirably upon the scene; and it seemed the waste of a great opportunity that the empress should be here, and the race-course--and yet no crowd, no chariots, only the Piazza Navona sleepily resting and lounging in the hot afternoon. Miss Gainsborough has come too late; the force that she wields has no meaning, no purchase upon the madness of to-day--it has no terror for the Piazza Navona. A few idlers were sprawling out there in the shade, easy-going children of the generation that Miss Gainsborough had chastised and warned; but it was impossible to think that a single knee would tremble if she were to appear at the window and speak her mind. The world couldn’t touch her--but then the world has no will to touch her; these Roman idlers stretch their limbs in the softness of the year, smiling good-naturedly when she orders them to instant execution.

It is too true--her vigour is wasted upon Rome. She may bully Lady Mullinger; but upon Rome at large, the picture of indifference, her ancestral authority produces no impression. She might surely, however, betake herself to a country more capable of understanding her message. At this moment she happened to be lifting her voice against “that rascally feller,” and again, “those good-for-nothing louts”--and the rascal was a puzzle-headed English statesman, and the louts were a large proportion of the English race; and if Miss Gainsborough had their infamy so much at heart it seemed unfortunate that only Bashford and Lady Mullinger should have the benefit of her conviction. “True, true,” said Bashford--“a bad business, I’m afraid”; and “If they could only be _told_!”--Lady Mullinger despairingly sighed. I thought I saw Miss Gainsborough seated upon the pedestal of all that had gone to produce her--acres of English soil, dozens of big stout Warwickshire land-owners, hundreds of other people’s labour and fidelity: an imposing mass, not unworthily crowned by this handsome old image with the bright cheeks and the floriferous bonnet. But what was such a magnificent pile of British solidity doing in Rome, I should like to ask her--in Rome, where its effect was lost in the alien air, and where there was nobody to render it the tribute of admiration, of sacred terror, of fierce exasperation (all three) which it plainly deserved. Her Roman tea-parties could offer Miss Gainsborough no kind of justice. From Lady Mullinger she might indeed receive admiration, and from Bashford terror, and from me my little mite of silent rebellion; but I had to acknowledge that we made an inadequate show, grouped about the base of this remarkable monument. It ought to be set up in London, breasting the big rude crowd of its countrymen--not in Rome, where to the loungers of the Piazza Navona it must be meaningless.

But what far-fetched fancies to be teased with in the presence of Miss Gainsborough--who certainly felt that she had plenty of good sound meaning wherever she was. Perhaps her establishment in Rome was a stately protest against the conduct of the louts and rascals at home; perhaps she preferred the homage of a tea-party to the jostle of a crowd; in any case she did as she chose and owed no account to anybody--least of all to an obscure young observer, hitherto barely noticed, on whom her eye now fell with a command to approach. Miss Gainsborough, I must own, could be very gracious to the young, though she was inclined to despise the shy. Youth pleased her, even awkward and inarticulate youth, and the call of her friendly sarcasm was encouraging. “Come and sit by me, you talkative young man, and don’t let old Platt get near me. Bashford’s expecting old Platt, and he and I always fight like the dooce. I shan’t quarrel with you, because you’re straight from home--Lord, I can tell that! I only get to blows with old monkeys who’ve forgotten _where_ they came from--if they ever came from anywhere. Bashford was born in Rome, poor lamb, but he’s a good lump o’ home stuff for all that--look at him, with his great red face! Ho, Bashford, you’re blushing at my pretty speeches, I’m sure, only it don’t show on your manly bloom. When Platt comes I’m going to elope with this young man; he’ll please to carry me off before I forget that I’m a lady.” She tapped me impressively on the shoulder and bade me be ready to snatch her up the moment she seemed likely to lower herself by violent conduct. Lady Mullinger, who could learn nothing, crowed out on this with a joyous titter; and the moment of my privilege seemed indeed to have arrived--Miss Gainsborough’s fingers twitched and tingled.