Part 3

I never saw Jaff and Edna perform their turn at the Trianon, indeed I never saw them again; I don’t know what became of them or whether they managed to get what I soon found they ardently desired. They disappeared into the void, so far as I was concerned, and all I can do for them is to breathe a far-away blessing on their pretty young heads--young no longer now, wherever they are. Their ambition at that time, as I soon discovered when Edna began to talk seriously to Deering, was by hook or by crook to reach America; they were going to have such brilliant times, such dashing successes, if once they could get clear away from this old rotten Europe. “Darling sweeting Deering,” said Edna--she crooned, and this was when she began to be really serious, mellifluously in Deering’s ear; “you _do_ love us, don’t you?” She coaxed, she blandished him discreetly; and even as she piped her childishness in her weak cockney vowel-tones she looked forlorn and wan after all, a child over-tired and not far from tears. Poor thin-armed Edna, she knew what she wanted and she wasted no time over laments and grievances. “Deering dear,” she said, “_if_ you love us, I’ll tell you a secret--you’re a duck, and I’ve always said so.” Deering gleamed at her sarcastically, and she shot out a lively grimace, an imitation of his look, with a good deal of humour. “And so, ducky Deering, _as_ you love us, I’ll tell you another.” But she didn’t--she dropped suddenly grave and wistful, and sat silent. I remember that quick shine of gravity through her play, and I hope more than ever that she and Jaff have found their fortune, wherever it may have awaited them, and enjoyed it.

Nobody else came to join us; but these three were enough to give me a picture that abides with me, a picture in which Rome becomes a place of less account than Wolverhampton, and a picture in which our good Deering becomes, so strangely, a personage of weight and worth, a pillar of the world. For you see what he stood for, what he was turned into, when he entered his new Bohemia of the Via Nazionale, the unromantic Bohemia which may remind me of imperial Rome, but certainly not of the Rome of poor dear Hawthorne. Deering, seated between Bannock and Jaff, fluttered over by pretty Edna, was changed into a man of substance, a man to whom the struggling Bohemian stretched an appealing hand; for Deering had his own firm ground above them--and he might step down into their midst on a fine afternoon, but he could always get back again, if he would, for a comfortable evening out of reach of the mountebanks. Did I see them drawn by the charm of his elegance, the grace of his fair hand as he toyed with his rose-tipped cigarette? Oh they felt it, no doubt, but they felt it for the mark of his security in the great free expensive world; if Deering could trifle so daintily with his pleasure it was because he commanded such resources--such a power of connexions, of ramifying alliances, and of sound money too, mark you, as like as not. I thought I understood very well. Not every day did Bannock or Jaff or Edna meet with a Deering, school and college style, Cambridge and Oxford bred, the real right thing--not every day, at least in the wilderness of Rome, and never and nowhere at all, perhaps, a Deering so indulgent and a Deering of that exquisite insight into the mentality of the artist. Coax him and court him then, by all means--I don’t blame you.

Edna’s way was much the best, but of course she had the unfair privileges of her sex. It wasn’t only that she could pat him on the head (most discreetly, I must say) even among all those painted mirrors; but she could gush at him with her nonsense instead of orating or lamenting, and then she could drop suddenly silent and wan, lonely as a child in that chattering crowd. This last effect, it is true, was uncalculated; she didn’t invent her swift and pallid subsidence, poor Edna, or thoughtfully make use of it; but it was a part of her feminine privilege, none the less, for of the trio of mountebanks Edna, being a woman, was by far the oldest, and this last effect was the sign of her age. She looked like a child--but Bannock and Jaff, beside her, _were_ children, fretful and bewildered and inexperienced; Edna was a hundred years old in comparison, and her weariness was that of a grown-up human being, far beyond the petulant fierce resentments of a child. She was a woman, she had the privilege of maturity in her power to taste the flatness and dreariness of the scuffle, while the men went on nagging and beating their heads against its injustice. And so, though her way seemed roundabout, she reached the point long before they did; with the echo of her nonsense still in the air she had caught Deering into an earnest discussion, subdued to an undertone which warned off the rest of us, and I could hear her explaining and developing her scheme, laying it before Deering in quick nervous phrases while she absently fingered the objects on the table. That was Edna’s way--and I don’t know at all what her scheme was or how she intended that Deering should help her, but I think she achieved her purpose.

Jaff meanwhile was babbling to Bannock about the glory of America, or rather he was asking a great many questions about it and never leaving Bannock the time to unroll his answers. The barytone was properly ready to exalt his country if he were given the chance, and I noticed that the big pocket-book was again in his hand. But he was placed in a difficulty; for the pocket-book showed how America honours the artist--I caught a few words as he opened it, “By God, that country loves a Man, but she _worships_ an Artist”--and yet he was not as eager as you might have expected to return home for her delight. The young singer, he had no plan of going back again; instead he had a very clear-cut design of conquest on the stage of Europe, a design of which he managed to expose the opening section (it took us in a bound as far as Cracow, I remember); and Jaff’s urgent desire to be fed with the report of Buffalo, her sympathy and bounty, did a little embarrass the home-raised artist of that place. But Jaff was enthusiastic enough for two, for twenty; he spun to and fro in his imagination while Bannock was finding the first of his clippings; and for my part I sat and watched them, entirely forgotten by the whole party, and felt like the lady in Comus, considerably out of it.

The silver chirrup of Edna’s laughter rang forth again at last, her grave-eyed colloquy was at an end. She slipped from her place on the sofa, seized Jaff and plucked him out of our circle, kissed her hand to us all and danced him off through the crowd--and that was the last I saw of the mercurial pair. Good luck to them, I say; and I don’t withhold my blessing from the solemn Bannock, who now evidently intended to settle down firmly to _his_ grave talk with Deering, the distraction of the other young people having cleared out of his way. He would have preferred that I too should take my departure; but Deering held me back when I rose, and we sat on together, the three of us, for a very long hour. I relieved the time with more pink potions, while Bannock circled the globe through the stages of his campaign. I was numb and dumb as before; but Deering held out bravely, wagging his head with judicial comment as the story marched over kingdom and continent. One point alone I noted, one conclusion I drew; whatever it cost him, Deering occupied a position in the Via Nazionale to which he was not indifferent. He owed it to everything that he supposed himself to have shed and cast away, finally, when he put on his broad-brimmed hat and eschewed the English ghetto; he owed his position to his value (poor Deering!) as a substantial and respectable Briton. But why dwell on a painful subject? Deering had been welcomed into a society that included an opera-singer and two dancers, he was at home and on his feet there; and which of the respectable Britons at that moment strolling on the Pincio, glaring at each other and listening to the band, could imaginably say the same?

III. PIAZZA DELLA CANCELLERIA

When at length we tore ourselves from the embraces of Bannock, on the pavement by the tram-line, the dusk of the warm day was falling--it was nearly dinner-time. I had no wish to leave my hold of Deering, having once secured him; he would surely now take me, I suggested, to dine in some clever place where I could pursue my research and discover still more of the world. Yes, he would; and he mused a little space, debating on what new aspect of reality my eyes should next be opened. On the whole he elected for the Vatican--so he strangely said; and he explained what he meant as we descended the street, rounded its sharp twist, and struck into the shabby expanse of the Piazza di Venezia. (The great sugar-cake of the Monument of Italy, which has now smartened the piazza to the taste of Domitian and Caracalla, hadn’t in those days begun to appear; it still lurked low behind a tier of dingy hoarding.) We were to dine, said Deering, at an eating-house near the Vatican--not geographically near, but under its spiritual shadow; and by this he signified that the company which it kept was papal, very black and papal indeed--he was all for varying my experience to the utmost. What a command of variety he possessed! He could lead me from the Trianon to the Vatican in ten minutes--as free of the one as of the other, no doubt; and he smiled naughtily as he admitted that his love of observation took him into many queer places.

The Vatican, I urged, was the queerest place in the world--for _him_; not that indeed I thought so in my own mind, but I knew it would please him to think so in his. I easily saw my Deering, in fact, as a frequenter of the “black,” demurely flirting with papistry, breathing the perfume of that distinction, that fine-bred aloofness which it wears with such an air. From some wonderful old saloon of the Farnese palace or the Cancelleria (how did I know about them?--from Zola, of course), with its beautiful faded hangings, with the high-backed papal throne turned to the wall under its canopy, you may look down upon the jostle of the vulgar as from nowhere else; and the most exquisite edge of your disdain will fall (Deering would particularly appreciate this) on the tourist, the hot-faced British matron, the long-toothed British spinster, bustling or trailing around in their dowdy protestantism. Obviously the very place for Deering, it seemed to me; but I quite understood that I was to be surprised and amused at finding him associated with ecclesiasticism of any sort, on any terms, even in a quaint old cook-house like that to which he had presently guided me. While we proceeded thither I delivered a sally or two on the subject of his horrible perversity--that _he_ of all people should have friends in the camp of the obscurantist! To have abandoned the fallen day of the Gioconda’s dream (or was it her cave?) for an American bar--that was all very well, and I had seen his point. But for Deering, the enlightened and illuminated, to be hobnobbing with priestcraft, cultivating _that_ sensation--I threw up my hands in mirth and horror. Deering was thoroughly pleased.

Our cook-shop was close to the palace of the Cancelleria, and the solemnity of the vast pile hung above us in the dusk as we lingered for a minute in the square. It discouraged my raillery; one can hardly take a line of levity over the Romish persuasion in the presence of a Roman palace. The eyes of its huge face are set in a stare of grandeur, of pride, of massive obstinacy, quite unaware of the tittering insect at its feet. If a grey-haired cardinal ever looks out of one of those windows, holding aside the thread-bare folds of the damask--as he may, for all I know--he looks without disdain upon the pair of tourists, standing below, who find the page in their red handbooks and read the description of the palace aloud to each other. He looks without disdain, because utterly without comprehension; he has never so much as heard of these alien sectarians, uninvited pilgrims from the world of outer barbarism. That is my impression, and I scanned the rows and rows of the Chancery windows in the hope of discovering some worn ascetic old countenance at one of them; I should like to see a cardinal lean out to enjoy a breath of evening air after the long studies of the day. But Deering laughed at my admirable innocence--again!--and assured me that I should see no cardinals here; they lived mostly in cheap lodgings near the railway-station, and spent the day in poring over the share-list of the morning paper. He didn’t really know, I retorted; he gave me the answer that he considered good for me. “Wait then,” he said, “till you meet with a cardinal outside the pages of a book”--but I never did, nor possibly Deering either.

“Ah,” cried Deering suddenly, “Cooksey will tell you--Cooksey calls all the cardinals by their Christian names.” We were just approaching the low door of the Trattoria dell’ Oca, and a stout little man in a loud suit was entering there in front of us. “Cooksey my dear, wait for your friends,” cried Deering; and the little man faced round and greeted him with a pleasant chuckle. Cooksey was red and genial; in his bright check suit and his Panama hat he looked like the English globe-trotter of tradition--I was instantly reminded of Mr. Meagles among the Allongers and Marshongers. I can’t imagine any one more calculated, I should have said, to send Deering shuddering and faint in the opposite direction; but Deering smiled on him with all his sweetness, and we passed together into the dark entry of the Goose. A plain but distinguished Roman lady, heavily moustached, sat at a high desk inside; she bowed graciously and called a sharp word to a chinless man, evidently her husband, who dashed forth to make us welcome. Cooksey and Deering were familiar customers, and we were handed to a table in an inner room, close to the mouth of a small black recess--a cupboard containing a little old dwarf-woman, like a witch, who was stirring a copper sauce-pan on a stove, for the cupboard was the kitchen. It was a much nicer place than the gilded hall of the Via Nazionale, and an excellent meal, though slippery, was produced for us from the cupboard. As for the wine, it came from the chinless man’s own vineyard at Velletri--a rose-golden wine, a honey-sweet name.

Now for Cooksey. Deering tackled him at once on the question of the cardinals, with malicious intention; and Cooksey shook his head, chuckling, and remarked that they were a low lot, no doubt, take them for all in all. “A poor degenerate lot,” he declared--“the college has gone to pieces very badly. All exemplary lives, they tell me--and not one of them would poison a fly, let alone a guest at his own table.” Cooksey had jumped to our humour very pleasantly; he twinkled and assured me that he longed, as Deering did and I must too, to hear of scandals and dark secrets upon the backstairs of the Vatican. “But all I ever find there,” he said, “is a pail of slops--I tumbled over one this morning.” “You were on duty, were you?” asked Deering. Cooksey said yes, and he went on to explain to me (“lest you should misconceive my position”) that it wasn’t his duty to empty the slops. “That’s the duty of Monsignor Mair, and I told him so, and he answered me back very saucily indeed. I had to pursue him with a mop.” Cooksey, I learned, held an office of some kind in the papal court--“unpaid, lavishly unpaid”--which kept him in Rome for a term of months each year. “And it’s still seven weeks to the holidays,” he said, “and I’ve spent all my tin, and I daren’t ask the Holy Father to lend me any, because the last time I did so he said he’d write home and tell my people I was getting into extravagant ways.” Cooksey was delightfully gay; he assumed the humour of a school-boy and it became him well, with his red face and his jolly rotundity.

He ran along in the same strain, playing his irreverent cheer over the occupation of his day. Nothing had gone right with him, he said, since the morning; it wasn’t only the slop-pail, it had been one of his unlucky days from the start. “First of all I was late for early school,” he said; “I dashed round to church before breakfast (I always think of it as early school), and I was three minutes late, and I fell with a crash on the butter-slide which Father Jenkins had made in the middle of the nave. That’s his little way--he thinks it funny; he reckons always to catch somebody who comes running in at the last moment, and he scored heavily this morning--I hurt myself horribly. And then I couldn’t attend to my book because I was attacked by a flea, and just as I was cracking it on the altar-step I found I had forgotten to button my braces; and while I was attending to that I jabbed my stick in the face of a savage old woman who was kneeling behind me; she gave me such a look--and the other fellows told me afterwards I must go and apologize to her, because it seems she’s a very special pet convert of Father Jenkins’s and would be sure to complain to him if she was assaulted in church--that was the way they put it. However I was comforted by one thing; just as I was leaving I heard a great bump on the floor, and Father Jenkins had tumbled on his own slide, the old silly, while he was rushing out to rag the sacristan about something; and he sat there cursing and swearing (_inwardly_, I will say for him), and I wanted to make a long nose at him, but I was afraid it might be forbidden in church, like spitting--not that the reverend fathers can say much about _that_!--” Dear me, Cooksey _was_ volatile; he ran on more and more jovially, gathering impetus as he talked.

I wished I could have questioned Deering about him--he seemed such an odd product of the Vatican. The papal functionary was a middle-aged man; he enjoyed his dinner with much emphasis, hailing the chinless man from time to time (in fluent Italian idiom, but with a British accent that caused Deering to glance round uneasily at the other tables)--summoning the chinless man, Amerigo by name, for a word and a jest, peering into the cupboard to banter the little witch-woman with the freedom of an old admirer. “They know me, bless their hearts,” he remarked to me; “they rob me as they all rob us all, and they know I know it and we’re the best of friends. They’re all thieves together, these Romans--I tell ’em so, and they like it. Now watch--” He called to Amerigo with an air of indignation and began to accuse him--I forget how it was, but it appeared that Amerigo was in the habit of grossly over-charging him in some particular, and Cooksey was determined he would bear it no longer, so he said, striking his knife-handle on the table defiantly; and Amerigo spread his hands in voluble self-defence, earnestly contesting the charge, and Cooksey held up his fist and retorted again, and they argued the point--till Amerigo suddenly smiled across his anxious face, darting a look at me as he did so, and Cooksey lunged at him playfully in the stomach and clapped him on the shoulder. There was a burst of laughter, in which Amerigo joined industriously, complaisantly, looking again at me. Perhaps I misunderstood him, but he seemed to regard me as the audience for whom the scene had been played. He had an eye in his head.

Dismissing Amerigo, Cooksey began to examine me on my business in Rome, and I was soon able to turn his enquiries upon himself. I found that he had frequented Rome for many years, a dozen or more--“ever since a certain event took place for me,” he said; and he paused, waiting for me to ask what the event had been. He waited so explicitly that I felt no delicacy; I put the question. “Oh, the _event_,” he said; “the event was simply that I happened to become a Catholic.” He was grave for an instant, apparently implying that my question was not in the best of taste; but he overlooked it and passed on. He offered to do me the honours of Rome, the kind of Rome I probably hadn’t discovered for myself; and I nearly exclaimed that Deering was doing exactly that for me at the moment--Cooksey was the kind of Rome, or one of the kinds, that had been hidden from me till to-day. But all I said was something suitably grateful, and he announced that he should take me in hand. “You’ll find I keep very low company,” he observed, “monks and Jesuits and such. My respectable English friends refuse to meet me when they come to Rome. They think it disreputable of me to know so many priests. But if you’re not afraid I’ll show you a few; rum old devils they are, some of them--it’s all right, I call them so to their faces. We’re none of us shy of a little plain speaking; you should hear Cardinal ----” the name of the plain-spoken cardinal escapes me; but Cooksey had plenty to say of him, dwelling with relish on the liberal speech of his eminence. Then he slanted off into anecdotes, stories and scenes of clerical life, in a funny little vein of frivolity and profanity that seemed by several sizes too small for him, so stout and red and comfortable as he sat there. He absorbed his dinner with a loud smacking satisfaction, and he told stories of which the roguery consisted in talking very familiarly of saints, of miracles, of the furniture of churches. “But I shock you,” he remarked to me at length, enquiringly.

Did Cooksey shock me? Oh yes, he was sure of it, and he explained why he was sure. “We all strike you as profane,” said he; his “we” stood for those of his persuasion, that which I think of as the “Romish.” He himself, he said, would have been frightened to death by such talk in old days; he had been taught (like me, no doubt) that it was “beastly bad form” to be simple and jolly in these matters. “We aren’t solemn, I confess,” he proceeded; “we’re cheerful because we aren’t nervous, and we aren’t nervous because we happen to feel pretty sure of our ground. Now in old days I was as solemn as eight archbishops.” But he pulled himself up. “I apologize, I apologize (the second time to-day!--but you’ll be kinder than that old cat of Father J.’s). I’ll try to behave with proper decorum--a great fat rascal like me! You wouldn’t think I was born in the diocese of Bath and Wells. When I go back there now I feel like a naughty boy in a sailor suit; I _can’t_ remember that I’m a damnable heretic whom the dean and chapter ought to burn out of hand.” So Cooksey settled that he was shocking, and the thought seemed to make him more comfortable and expansive than ever. But with some notion of attesting my own liberalism I then ventured on an anecdote myself, a tale of a man who had prayed to a miracle-working image, somewhere in Rome, and had been embarrassed by the shower of wonders that had thereafter befallen him. It is quite a good story, the point being that each of the miracles wrought was slightly off the mark, not exactly what the man had asked for, and the humour appearing in the detail of the saint’s misapprehension--he means so well, his mistakes are all so natural. I told it brightly and candidly.