Part 5

She was small and shabby and very neat; her hair, under her black veil, was scraped together in a little grey knob; she had a strange old mantle upon her, short to her waist, of much-worn black, and her tiny arms appeared beneath it, with hard white cuffs, ending in gloves that were like the Russia-binding of a prayer-book. She was not pretty, but she was perfect; her eyes were very sweet and soft, and her face had no colour in it at all, and the light that shone out of her eyes seemed to shine equally through the diaphanous pallor of her cheek. I never saw any one so transparent; she looked infinitely fragile--because it was as though you could see through her and could see that she hadn’t a drop of common life to give her substance. I could hear the gentle purity of her voice, with its quiet and even intonation. She was English, though the name and the title that Cooksey had spluttered in my ear were not; she was intensely English--she couldn’t otherwise have talked with that smooth silk-thread of a monotone which was so well in keeping with the pearl-glimmer of her face. She was perfect indeed; and if she dressed in her rusty black and wrung her hair into its knob with the purpose of making the utmost of her wondrous distinction--why then she did rightly and her style was consummately chosen, for her distinction was enhanced beyond measure by her queer little white-cuffed dowdiness. All the rest of us were things of such tawdry attractions, such twopenny pretensions; she must have walked in a moving circle of perpetual vulgarity, for I can scarcely imagine a face or a word or a movement that wouldn’t strike you, at the moment when you looked away from her, as the commonest trash.

Didn’t I even perceive that Father Holt’s distinction was not what it had appeared a minute ago? It was now just a thought too sleek, too glossy, too well-appointed; and I wondered wildly if I was never to come to the end in my discovery of finer shades and finer. So the best has still a better--but indeed I _had_ come to the end at this point, for I have never reached a better in her kind than the great little old lady of that morning in St. Peter’s. Lady Mullinger positively creaked with reverential contemplation; she didn’t aspire to attracting any sign of notice from the great lady--who seemed, however, to ignore our company in modest and delicate shyness, not in pride--but she pored, she gloated upon the vision with all her being. Poor Charlotte was forgotten, Cooksey had dropped out of the world; Lady Mullinger was intently committing to memory the details of so historic an impression. Much would be heard of it, no doubt, at tea in the big room on Thursday. Meanwhile I was not far behind her, I confess, in using the opportunity of the moment; I was fascinated by this sudden exaltation of my standard in the grace of the highest style.

But the brilliance and the rumour of the great church, filled more and more with crowding movement, made it soon impossible to attend to any other than its own distinction. This was a staring and thumping affair by comparison with the small voice of perfection; but mere size, when it is miles high, and mere gold, when it is inches thick, and mere noise, when it is in the throats of all the tribes, will use their overbearing power and assert their dignity. There was nothing perfect in the seethe and clamour of the pilgrims, nothing in the sprawl of ostentation over the whole adornment of the scene; but it was a vast and riotous and haphazard work of genius, all of it together--the overflow of an imagination no better than my own, or not so good, but as large as an ocean against my own poor painful tap-trickle. The passion that rolled along the nave and swept round the hollow of the dome, toppling, breaking in uncontrollable excitement--I hung over it, clinging to my perch on the tribune, and I flung into it my own small cup-full; but how could I think to swell it with these few drops, claiming to ally myself with genius of _that_ enormity? It was vain, I was the flimsiest of onlookers; and the pilgrims could bring a tribute to Rome that was profuse enough, indiscriminate and coarse enough, to fill the chamber prepared to receive it, to brim the church of St. Peter in an hour or two. Their capacity was well-matched; Rome and the pilgrims, they wrought upon the same scale, they understood each other.

Rome, yes--but what about the Romans? Father Holt surveyed the struggle of the pilgrims with something like the high indifference of the philosopher at a show of gladiators; he inclined his ear to the little transparent old princess beside him, he received her remarks with courteous care; and as for her, she was as far aloof from the common scramble as a flower that unfolds upon the cliff-edge above the booming ravine. Cooksey indeed was intent on the display with all the eager bulge of his eyes; but he had frankly relapsed into sight-seeing, he was just a Briton in foreign parts. Lady Mullinger, though she murmured to her neighbour that the zeal of the crowd had “filled her heart,” couldn’t really attend to anything but the princess; she glanced perfunctorily at the crowd, but she was trying all the while to catch the silvery murmur that was holding the privileged ear of Father Holt. It was altogether evident that our party on the scaffold was neither of Rome nor of the pilgrimage, and the great affair proceeded beneath us with a roar and a rush that sounded more and more remote in my hearing, even while now it mounted to its culmination. That “real Rome,” of which I thought I had been learning so much, was magnificently bestirring itself to accept the homage of its swarming subjects, and I tried to look through their eyes and to see what they saw in their jubilation.

They at least had no doubt, they knew where to look for the genius of Rome. Far away across the church and down the nave, somewhere near the great portals at the end, there was a side-door, and a broad lane from this door had been cleared through the crowd. Rome was very soon to issue from the door, it was for Rome that the lane was kept open along the roaring church. But a church, do I say?--it was the temple of Rome, the “great main cupola” of the Roman genius. It stands upon the hill of the Vatican in our day, and it has stood there for some little time; but its rightful place is the Capitol, the mount of triumph--it is there that the temple belongs. Kings and queens were led captive to that shrine, the multitude mocked and jeered at their abasement; and I see what is wanting to the due completeness of the resounding assembly in St Peter’s--it is the presence of captive kings and queens, brought low by the power of Rome, over whom the multitude might exult with glee and ferocity. And indeed the multitude would, it is easy to see; _I_ shouldn’t, nor Father Holt, nor the rest of us up here, and that is why we feel thus cut off from the tumult beneath us; but the pilgrims would delight in deriding the poor dazed wretches, and their reverence for the majesty of Rome would be the more enhanced. This joy, which they would have tasted upon the Capitol, is denied them upon the tomb of Peter; but they have lost nothing else by the shifting of the shrine. Rome above all, Rome the wonder of the world, is still the attraction of their worship; and from the door of the temple that we watch with strained expectation, suddenly hushed as the great moment approaches, Rome is about to emerge and appear before us. Look, it is there--a high swaying throne or pedestal, borne upon the shoulders of faithful knaves, and an ancient white-robed figure that sits aloft, springing upright and subsiding again with outstretched hand, and a smile, a fixed immemorial smile in a blanched face, beneath a pair of piercing eyes: Rome, Rome indeed.

V. VIA GIULIA

And Cooksey took me to tea, that same day, with his little old friend Mr. Fitch. I was greatly charmed by Mr. Fitch, who was small and frail and wore a dust-coloured beard; and his first suspicion of me (he was afraid of the young) was allayed when he found that I knew and adored a particular Roman church or two, remote and neglected, which he didn’t suppose that a casual intruder like myself would have discovered. I remember how Cooksey threw an arm of patronage around me and explained that he had been my guide to the holy places of the city; but Mr. Fitch caught my eye with a twinkle of intelligence, quickly withdrawn, which set up a happy understanding between us on the spot. He did the honours of his apartment with pleasant chirps and fidgets, hospitably bustling about the tea-tray, beaming and fussing and apologizing, with bird-like cries to the stout maid-servant who was energetically seconding his welcome.

Mr. Fitch was a scholar, a student, who worked daily in the library of the Vatican. I believe he was a hundred years old, and indeed he looked it; but he didn’t appear to have _grown_ old, only to have suffered a slow deposit of time to accumulate upon his person. Time was deep upon his hair and face and clothes; but a few score years more or less could have made no difference to the cheerful little bird-spirit in his breast, and it was because he was shy and defenceless, not because he was old, that he feared the onslaught of the young. A young person, however, who was found to have made his way unaided to the church of San Cesareo, far away among the vineyards on the verge of the city, was one towards whom Mr. Fitch could hop and twitter in kindly confidence, and he did so. Before we parted he invited me to lunch with him a day or two later, and I fully understood that this was for him a remarkable demonstration. “Gina!” he called, and Gina, the voluble maid-servant, came from the kitchen with a run, to receive his command concerning the festival. She was delighted, she swept me into the happy plan, she seemed to be immediately arranging a treat for two merry little children, for me and Mr. Fitch. We were like children between her broad palms, all but hugged to her bosom; and with dancing eyes she told us to leave it all to her--she would do something splendid. “Gina will see to it,” said Mr. Fitch; and he asked her whether he shouldn’t invite some other young thing to join the party--what about the giovanotto who had called the other day? “Quel poverino?” said Gina--yes, the very thing. So we should be a party of three; and Gina clapped her hands and ran back to the kitchen, as though to set about her preparations there and then.

Mr. Fitch lived in the Via Giulia, deep in the depth of Rome, not far from the great mass of the Farnese palace. He had the craziest little apartment, a tangle of rooms with bare tiled floors, in which his funny frumpy English furniture, which might have come straight (and no doubt it had) from his mother’s parlour at Cheltenham, looked strangely shocked and ill at ease. Forty years of the Via Giulia (it can hardly have been less) had not reconciled the mahogany overmantel and the plush-topped tea-table to the ramshackle ways of foreign life; mutely they protested, keeping themselves _to_ themselves, wrapped in their respectability. Mr. Fitch, I think, had never so much as noticed their plight; he sat on a chair, he made tea on a table, and one chair or table was as good as another for the purpose. He himself looked homely and frumpy enough, to be sure, lodged there under the wing, so to speak, of Julius the Pope; but _he_ didn’t feel at a loss, and he tripped along the proud-memoried street of his abode, with his decent English beard and his little mud-gaiters on his boots, as brisk as a sparrow. He accompanied us down the street and left us to go and invite the “poverino” to meet me at lunch; I see him waving us good-bye at some grand dark street-corner, where he turned and pattered off on his errand. Cooksey treated him with large protective kindness and contempt, out of which the old man seemed to slip with a duck of his head and a gleam of fright and amusement in his two bright eyes.

The luncheon-party, a day or two later, was a great success. I climbed to the apartment on the stroke of the hour, but the other young man was already there before me, and Mr. Fitch ceremoniously performed an introduction. The name of the youth was Maundy, and he proved to be one of those aspiring priests, novices, seminarists--I don’t know what their rightful name may be, but you know them well, you remember how they converge in long lines upon the Pincian Hill towards evening, how they pick up their skirts and romp with the gaiety of the laity upon the greensward of the Villa Borghese. Maundy was his name, and he didn’t look, for his part, as though he had had much romping; he was pale and meagre, he reclined in a contorted cat’s-cradle of thin arms and legs on one of Mr. Fitch’s fringed and brass-nailed arm-chairs. If Gina’s word for him meant a poor young specimen of chilly lankness she was right; his limp black soutane (is it a soutane?) couldn’t disguise his sharp-set knees or the lean little sticks of his arms. He jumped up, however, quite alert and spritely for our introduction, and he greeted me with a friendly high-piping composure that made it unnecessary to pity him. I had begun to pity him, as I always do feel compassionate, so gratuitously, at the sight of his kind--at the sight of the young novices, caught and caged and black-skirted in their innocence, renouncing the world before they have had the chance to taste it; but Maundy turned the tables upon me in a moment, and he revealed himself as a perfectly assured young son of the world, with whom I had no call to be sympathetically considerate. He shook hands with me, using a gesture which at that time, so long ago, was reputed a mark of distinction--I forget how it went exactly, but I think the pair of clasped hands was held high and waved negligently from side to side. Maundy achieved it with an air, not failing to observe that I had stepped forward to meet him with the ordinary pump-handle of the vulgar.

And so we sat down to Gina’s admirable meal, and Mr. Fitch was in a flutter of pleasure and excitement, and Maundy talked and talked--he led the conversation, he led it almost beyond our reach, he led it so masterfully that it hardly escaped him at all. Mr. Fitch lost his hold on it at once; he sat with his head on one side, making small clucking noises of assent and question now and then, while Maundy piped and swept away from us in his monologue. But no, I oughtn’t to say that he left us both behind, for he kept turning and waiting for me to catch him up, he flatteringly showed me that he wished for my company. “Such a blessing,” he said, “to get away from piety”--and he intimated with a smile that it was I who represented the impious. He desired my company, not my talk; and he might have been breaking out with the relief of unwonted freedom, soaring forth into topics that were discouraged in the congregation of the poor caged lambs; and I dare say he enjoyed the spread of his wings among the tinted and perfumed vapours of his fancy. It was all beyond Mr. Fitch, who clearly couldn’t explain him with my ready mixture of metaphor; Mr. Fitch was bewildered. But to me the fancies of Maundy were sufficiently familiar; I knew the like of them from of old, and I fear we both took a certain pleasure in noting the bedazzlement of our host. The good soul, he sat and plied us with food and wine, while Maundy rattled away in his emancipation and I assumed the most impious look (I had small opportunity for more than looks) that I could accomplish.

Maundy threw off a light word or two about his place of residence and instruction in Rome--the seminary, the college, I forget how he referred to it. He seemed disdainful of all its other inmates; he couldn’t regard them as companions for a person of intelligence and fine feeling. How he came to have placed himself among them, submitting to their rule, he didn’t explain at the time, but I afterwards made out a little of his history. He had written a great deal of poetry at Oxford, and he had kept an old silver oil-lamp burning night and day before a Greek statuette, and he had had his favourite books bound in apricot linen, and he had collected thirty-five different kinds of scented soap--and I know it sounds odd, but he appeared to consider these achievements as natural stages on the path to Rome. He didn’t go quite so far as to say that he repented of having made the journey and embraced the Roman discipline; but after a year in the college or the seminary his mind, I think, was in a state of more painful confusion than he allowed me to see. Somehow the argument at one end, the Oxford end, where he had draped his dressing-table with an embroidered rochet (he told me so), seemed to have so little in common with the argument at the other, the Roman end, where he walked out with his young associates for exercise in the Villa Borghese and not one of them had heard of the poetry of Lionel Johnson; and somehow he had perceived the discrepancy without discovering where the chain of his reasoning had failed, and in the privacy of his discontent he was still floundering backwards and forwards, trying to persuade himself of the soundness of all the links--and perhaps seeking with a part of his mind (a growing part) to be convinced that he had reasoned wrong. Something of this kind, I believe, was fretting his life in Rome, and how it may have ended I never knew; he didn’t confide his troubles to me--he simply hailed me as one who would possibly understand what it meant to him to have once, in an eating-house of Soho, been introduced to Aubrey Beardsley.

“The _passion_ of his line,” he said, referring to that artist; and again, “The passion of his _line_!”--and he described the scene in Soho, mentioning that the impression had wrought upon him so potently that afterwards he had sat up all night, with some golden Tokay beside him in a blue Venetian glass (not drinking it, only refreshed by the sight of it), and had written a poem, a sonnet of strange perfumes and fantastic gems, which he had dedicated in Latin to the hero of the evening. And then he had gone out into the dawn, and had wandered through Leicester Square to Covent Garden, and had bought a bunch of mauve carnations; and he had thought of sending them, with the sonnet, to the master who had inspired him--but then he had returned to his lodging and had burnt the sonnet, heaping the carnations for a pyre, having resolved to guard the experience, whole and rounded and complete, in the secrecy of a faithful memory. He pointed out that to share these things is to lose them; as soon as you turn them into words for another’s eye they cease to be perfectly yours, they are dissipated into the common air; which was why a friend of his, at Oxford, had insisted that one should write no words, paint or carve no colour or line, but only make one’s images and pictures and poems out of the rainbow-tinted substance of memory, that exquisite material always awaiting and inviting the hand of an artist. So one avoids, you see, the sick disillusion of the writer who flings forth his maiden fancy to the ribaldry of the crowd; and Maundy himself had tried to rise to this height of disinterested passion, and in the dying perfume of the mauve carnations he had sacrificed what he saw to be a vulgar ambition. Oh yes, depend upon it, the greatest works of art have never been seen of any but their maker; and to Maundy it was a beautiful thought, the thought of the white secret statues locked away by the thousand in their secluded shrines, safe from the world, visited now and again by the one and only adorer who possessed the key. “But stay,” said Mr. Fitch, “have you considered--” oh yes, Maundy had felt the weight of that objection, and Dickson after all (Dickson was the friend at Oxford) had written and printed his volume, but that was because he had found no other way to rid himself of an obsession; the white statue in his case had become more real than life, and he had cast it forth to retain--to retain, you might say, his sanity.

Well, we must publish or go mad; that is the melancholy conclusion. Mr. Fitch stared doubtfully, and I shook my head like one whose hold upon his senses is precarious indeed. Maundy was quick to interpret my movement, and it encouraged him to yet giddier flights. He was hovering upon the climax of one of these when Gina happened to come clattering in with a dish; and she paused, sinking back upon her heels, the dish held high before her, and she threw up her head and she flashed out such an amusing challenging bantering look at Maundy, where he flourished his thin fingers in the zest of his eloquence, that I have never forgotten the picture of her mirth and her plumpness as it was framed at that moment in the doorway. “Ah, the poor little fellow,” she said to herself, “he loves to talk!” And she too began to talk, breaking into his monologue with unabashed and ringing frankness; she set down her dish on the table with a dancing gesture, whipping her hands away from it like an actress in a play, and she stood by his side, patting him on the shoulder, approving him, scolding him, bidding him eat, eat!--and Maundy turned round to her with a peal of sudden light laughter, a burst of naturalness that changed his whole appearance; so that Gina had transformed the temper of the party and had raised it at once to a breezier level of gaiety than it would ever have touched without her. It was delightful; I couldn’t understand a word she said, for her words flew shining and streeling over our heads as quick as thought, and I dare say Maundy answered their spirit rather than their meaning; but he responded well, he had some good neat conversational turns of idiom that he shot back at her with a knowing accent, and she chuckled, she threatened him, she bustled out of the room with a smile for me and Mr. Fitch and a last fling of playfulness over her shoulder for Maundy. Mr. Fitch had said that Gina would “see to it,” and he was quite right; we started afresh in a much better vein, all three of us, after her incursion.

Mr. Fitch produced a bottle of “vino santo” at the end of the meal and charged our glasses. The sacred liquor was exceedingly good, and he took heart from it to talk more freely. Gina had relaxed the strain of Maundy’s preciosity, and he had begun to cross-question our host about his occupation, his early life, his establishment in Rome, with an inquisitive and youthful familiarity under which the old man shyly and prettily expanded. He told us how in the dim ages he had received a commission to do a little historical research among the manuscripts of the Vatican, and how he had taken his seat in the library, with a pile of volumes around him, and had never left it again from that moment to this. His first commission was long ago fulfilled, but it had revealed a point of singular interest, some debatable matter in connexion with a certain correspondence about a question raised in a contemporary version of an unofficial report of a papal election in the seventeenth century--yes, a matter which had chanced to be overlooked by previous investigators; and Mr. Fitch, sitting fast in his chair at the library, day after day, year after year, had been enabled to throw a little light upon the obscurity, and had even published a small pamphlet--“not, I must admit, for the very cogent reason that prompted your friend at Oxford, but from a motive that I justify as a desire for historical accuracy, and that I condemn as vanity”; and Mr. Fitch, so saying, beamed upon us with a diminutive roguishness, more sparrow-like than ever, which he immediately covered by plying us anew with the sacred bottle.