Part 7

Teresa began to recount with vivacity the story of our acquaintance. Luigi listened to her for a moment and then murmured a few quick words of Italian, I don’t know what they were, before which poor Teresa seemed to drop like a stone. He had cut her short in the middle of a word and her mouth hung open; but she said no more, she dumbly signalled to Berta, and two anxious women stood waiting before Luigi for their orders. He turned away from them and they understood; they spoke up bravely, reminded me (or told me) that I had promised to take tea with them on the following day, and declared that they must now hasten back to convey their old man home. They hurried away, and Luigi immediately displayed his smile again, suggesting that I should walk with him. His young friends appeared to hail him, to invite us both into their party; but he denied them without a glance, with the same slight shake of his forefinger, talking to me and drawing me off as he did so. He talked familiarly; he asked no questions, and at first he was chiefly concerned to explain to me the great disadvantage at which a gentleman almost necessarily finds himself in Rome. It is all very well if you are rich; but if you aren’t, and if you happen to be a gentleman, why then Luigi thought there was no place in the world where you were so rottenly situated as in Rome. Roman society is utterly snobbish, and a gentleman doesn’t care to push among people who think themselves too good for him; and the company of a lot of bounders is unpleasant to a gentleman, and Luigi could assure me that it was a treat for him to shake hands with a gentleman, and not only a gentleman, mind you, but a man of the world, the right sort. He was pleased to imply that I was the right sort, and he cordially took my arm.

Luigi was odious. With a gush of memory from across the years it returns to me, the odiousness of Luigi. There was a touch of gallantry about Teresa and Berta, a swing of bravery in their pretensions--and a real impulse of unselfishness, poor creatures, in their care and respect for this vulgar youth. He was their pride, the object of their disinterested ambition; they took thought for him and used their simple arts on his behalf; and Luigi repaid them by spending an hour in implying to me that his family were an unfortunate drag upon a spirited gentleman. I soon understood that I wasn’t to judge him by the dreadful commonness of his womankind; he was in the unlucky possession of a rarer refinement, a loftier pride, a diviner discontent than the rest of his house; and yet here he was, tied and handicapped, as I could see for myself, by a family incapable of profiting by his example. We took incidentally a brief glance at the loyalty with which he stuck to them, admitting the claim on him of two foolish women and a helpless old man, however unworthy; that was the kind of good fellow he was--too faithful and dutiful, perhaps, to do justice to the power that was in him. But though it was splendid of him to make the sacrifice, it was also very distressing that such a remarkable nature should be sacrificed at all; so back we came to the miserable scope that this infernal old Rome has to offer to the talents of a gentleman, if he is not prepared to cringe and crawl for his opportunity. Luigi had much to say of it, and he passed an agreeable hour.

The sun burned lower, the great lordly pines were smitten with gold, the shadows crept along the green dells of the open park; and there came a moment at last when rebellion seized me, and I actually turned upon Luigi with a passionate outburst. It didn’t last long, and he took very little notice of it; he merely paused, checked the flow of his lament, and proceeded again when I held my peace. Not long ago, you remember, I had been told at considerable length that my poor old Rome was no place for an artist; and that tirade of the opera-singer now came over me, while my companion ingeminated his cry that it was a place unworthy of Luigi. The opera-singer seemed the less fatuous of the two. I can easily bear to hear the name of art re-uttered in Rome, for the thousand-millionth time, in any connexion, on any pretext. Is Rome a step-mother to the arts?--it may well be so, and very likely Rome has thought nothing of smashing an artist, carelessly, disdainfully, at all the changes of the moon since the suckling of the twins. I can imagine that it may lie in the character of Rome to be often brutal to the arts; and by all means let an artist (though not that egregious Bannock indeed, for choice) stand up and hurl out his reproach. But when Luigi, in the face of Rome, maunders on with his vulgar stuff about the feelings of a gentleman, I rebel--I say that to mention these flimsy refinements in the noble great park of the Borghese is more than my sense of fitness will endure. A gentleman!--what has Rome to do with this nonsense of gentility, tediously and querulously droning in the mouth of Luigi? No, Luigi; Rome, I believe, has had some slight acquaintance with greatness and grandeur since the twins fell out with each other, but Rome hasn’t the mind to contemplate _your_ precious distinctions. You might as well suggest to a poet of heroism, to the chanter of an immemorial saga, that he should study the manners of a tea-party in a suburban drawing-room.

My outburst took another form, however; these sentiments let it loose, but it was differently worded. Luigi only stared and waited till I had finished. I ended on the cry that seemed never to be far from my lips in those days, the cry of envy at the sight of the fortunate folk who could do their cringing, if it had to be done, in Rome. I said that I should willingly crawl the length and breadth of the city for the reward of an abiding place within the walls; I shouldn’t mind what pope or king might think of me. Luigi very naturally felt that I hadn’t quite grasped his situation. He resumed his discourse, and he began to point out to me that in my place and with my opportunities he would indeed go far. No doubt, for example, I had very influential friends. Not very? Well, only give _him_ the chance of a footing in England, an opening that would bring him into the society of gentlemen--and he developed his theme still further, guiding it, as I presently noticed, into preciser detail than before. The sun had hardly faded from the tree-tops when I learned that a person in my position, with my advantages, was just the person whose hand Luigi had long desired to shake. And what did he take my position to be, and where, pray, did he recognize its advantages? I didn’t put the question as plainly as this, for indeed I had no wish to meet Luigi when he came to detail. I clung to generalities, and I suggested that there were plenty of most ungentlemanly people in London. “I’m sure I shouldn’t think any of _your_ friends ungentlemanly,” said Luigi.

What are you to do with a youth like that? I own that I felt a little excited by the thought that somebody, were it only Luigi, should turn to me for patronage; and Luigi would certainly never discover just how much of it I had to dispense. And yet he had taken my measure fairly enough; he didn’t suppose that my own credit was very high, but I could “mention his name,” he said, in certain quarters, and he shot out a suggestion or two which showed that he had already considered the ground and was prepared. Any chance was a chance worth seizing; any simple Englishman thrown in his way might be a step on his ladder. But he was shrewd; and when he found that his hints were left lying where they fell, he turned aside to disparage his unfortunate family again--his sister, his aunt, his father, a bunch of futility that hindered a man in his effort to announce and express himself in the world. In a few words it was delicately implied that anybody who lent a hand to Luigi would never be embarrassed by Luigi’s family--the admirable youth would see to that. He was rather uneasy to think that already his women had engaged me to visit them; he knew, to be sure, that their pride and delight was to serve Luigi, but a prudent man doesn’t entrust his business to the bungling devotion of two ignorant women. With this in mind he insinuated that I needn’t trouble myself with their officious invitations; though if I cared to see something of the town under _his_ guidance, why indeed he was very much at my disposal. Rome the inexhaustible! The sacred place as Luigi saw it was quite unlike the city of Deering’s vision, or of Jaff’s, or of Cooksey’s; but he too was convinced that his was the real and only Rome, such as it was--a poor thing compared with the Strand of London.

VII. VIA DELLA PURIFICAZIONE

There is a little dirty wedge of the streets of old Rome, there is or there still was a few days ago, which runs up the hill of the Ludovisi, on the way to the Pincian Gate. The garden of the Ludovisi crowned the hill, I suppose, in the days of Kenyon and Roderick Hudson, and now the vast new inns of the tourist stand there; but even before the time of Rowland and Roderick the old streets had encroached up to the very edge of the garden, and there they are still, with the great hotels towering above them--a handful of tangled byways between the boulevard on one side and the tram-line on the other. These papal relics are exceedingly squalid, I must own, what with the cabbage-stalks in the mud and the underclothing that hangs drying in the windows; but they are charmingly named, and Luigi’s family lived in the Via della Purificazione.

From the doorstep of the house a narrow black staircase tunnelled its way upward, and I climbed in the darkness and the dankness to the apartment of my friends on the fifth story. I rang and stood waiting, not in vain, for the delightful shock that seldom fails you on a Roman threshold; I knew it well and I counted on it, for nothing gives you a swifter tumble into the middle ages than the Roman fashion of receiving a stranger. You stand on the landing, and you might suppose that the commonplace door would open to the sound of the bell and admit you in a moment. Not at all; there is a dead silence, as though somebody listened cautiously, and presently a shrill cry of challenge from within--“Chi è?” So it happens, and for me the house becomes on the spot a black old fortress-tower of the middle ages, myself a bully and a bravo to whom no prudent householder would open without parley; that deep dark suspicion, that ancient mistrust of the stranger at the door--it pulls me over into the pit of the Roman past, suddenly yawning at my feet. I used to wait for the cry when I knocked at a Roman door, and to wish that I could answer it and call back with the same note of the voice of history. It takes a real Roman to do so, and I chanced to hear a real young Roman do so once or twice; he answered the challenge with a masterful tone of command that he had acquired long ago, in days when he shouted and fought in the streets of Rome, a fine young figure in the train of the Savelli or the Frangipani.

Luigi’s family kept a dishevelled old maid-servant, wild of hair and eye; insanely staring and clutching the tails of her hair she ushered me through a dark entry into the family apartment. It was a bewildering place; there were plenty of rooms, freely jumbled together, but their functions were confusingly mixed. I couldn’t help knowing, for example, as I passed from one to another, that Teresa was hooking herself into her gown by a small scullery-sink in which there stood a japanned tea-pot and a cracked bedroom looking-glass. I was deposited finally in a very stuffy little parlour, smothered and stifled with a great deal of violent blue drapery and tarnished gilding. The door was closed upon me, but it didn’t cut me off from the affairs of the household. There was a rattling of tea-things in the kitchen and the voice of Teresa giving directions in an urgent whisper; and from somewhere else there came another voice, a man’s, that was new to me--a voice which uttered a fruity torrential Italian, quite beyond any apprehension of mine, though I could easily tell that it wasn’t the language of formal compliment. Before long Teresa rustled brightly into the parlour, one hand outstretched, the other searching stealthily for an end of white tape that had slipped through her hooking and wandered over the back of her skirt. She welcomed me on a high-pitched note, at the sound of which the man’s voice immediately stopped; and she drew me forth through another small room, containing an unmade bed, to an open window and a balcony that commanded a fine wide view of the city. The balcony was large enough to hold a table and two or three bedroom chairs; and there we found Berta, together with a man who offered himself politely for introduction to the new-comer.

“Mr. Daponte,” said Berta, presenting him. He was a very short thick man of forty or so, chiefly composed of a big black moustache and a pair of roving discoloured eyes; he was glossily neat, though rather doubtfully clean. He bowed, while the ladies graciously exhibited him and explained that he spoke no English. “But he understands very well,” said Berta, “and he loves to listen.” The gentleman showed his understanding by a grin and a flourish of his large dirty hands, and a remark seemed to be labouring up from within him, so that we all paused expectant. It was an English remark, but it miscarried after all. “I speak--” said Mr. Daponte; and he spoke no more, appealing mutely to the women to help him out. But the Medusa-head of the old servant appeared in the window at that moment, and she fell over the step to the balcony and landed the tea-tray with a crash on the table; and in the commotion, while Berta busied herself over the cups and plates, Teresa drew me aside and whispered archly, indicating the little gentleman, “He will be the hosband of my niece.” Berta looked round and performed a blush--she felicitously glanced, that is to say, and stirred her shoulders as though she blushed; and she gave a little push to her swain in a girlish manner, which took him by surprise and mystified him for an awkward instant; but then he nodded intelligently and responded with a playful blow. “Tea, tea!” cried Teresa, smiling largely; and we packed ourselves round the table to enjoy a plate of biscuits and a pale straw-coloured fluid which Berta poured from the japanned tea-pot.

The view from the balcony was magnificent, only you had to overlook the nearer foreground. We seemed to be swung out upon space, above the neighbouring house-roofs; and beyond and below them was a great sweep of the sunlit city, with the dome of St. Peter like a steel-grey bubble on the sky-line. But the nearer house-roofs, crowding into the foreground, made a separate picture of their own, and I found it difficult to look beyond them. There is much oriental freedom of house-top life in Rome, on fine summer evenings; you scarcely catch a glimpse of it from the street below, but on Teresa’s balcony we were well in the midst of it. Bath-sheba wasn’t actually washing herself, but she felt safe and at ease in the sanctity of the home, lifted up to the sky, and she displayed her private life to the firmament. Little gardens of flowers in pots, tea-tables like our own, groves and pergolas of intimate linen, trap-doors and hatches from which bare-headed figures, informally clad, emerged to take the evening air--it was a scene set and a drama proceeding there aloft, engaging to the eye of a stranger, and our balcony was hung like a theatre-box to face the entertainment. Close in front, just beneath us, there was a broad space of flat roof on which the householder had built an arbour, a pagoda of wire with greenery trained about it; and in the arbour sat the householder himself, a grey-headed old priest, crossing his legs, smoking his cigar and reading his newspaper; and a pair of small children scuttled and raced around him, while he placidly took his repose, and rushed shrieking to meet a young girl, who climbed from below with a basket of clothes for the line; and the priest looked up, waved his cigar and cried out a jest to the girl, who stood with her basket rested on her hip, merrily threatening the children who clutched at her skirt. The blast of a cornet came gustily from another roof-sanctuary, further off, and there a young man was perched astride upon a bench, puffing at his practice in solitude. And so on from roof to roof, and I found myself sharing all this easy domestic enjoyment of a perfect evening with rapt attention.

The voice of Teresa recalled me; for Teresa was appealing to me to confirm her, to say that she was right in telling Emilio (Emilio was Berta’s betrothed)--in telling him some nonsense, whatever it was, about the splendour of London, its size or shape, its social charm; Teresa was certain of her fact, for once she had spent a fortnight in London, and now she dwelt upon the memory. A sole fortnight--but how she had used it! She had discovered in some handbook a scheme for the exploration of all London, within and without, in fourteen days; it appears that after fourteen tours of inspection, each of them exactly designed to fit into a long summer’s day, you may be satisfied that you have left no stone of London unturned. Only to be sure you must rigidly stick to the directions of the handbook, and Teresa had to regret that they didn’t include the spectacle of Queen Victoria; which was the more to be deplored because actually she had had the chance, and yet couldn’t take it because the handbook forbade. You see she had duly taken her stand one morning, according to plan, before Buckingham Palace; and a crowd was assembled there, and a policeman had told her that the Queen was to appear in ten minutes; but ah, the handbook gave her only five for the front of Buckingham Palace, and then she must seize a certain omnibus and be off to the Tower; and she couldn’t upset the whole admirable scheme on her own responsibility, now could she?--so she hadn’t seen the Queen, and she couldn’t convince Emilio of something or other which I could certainly confirm if I would. What was it? Apparently Teresa had just been telling me; but I was so much interested in the young man with the cornet that I had missed the point.

For me the point lay rather in the surprise of our meeting together upon a roof in Rome to talk about Buckingham Palace. I met the appeal rather wildly, but Teresa was contented; Emilio perceived that she knew more of London than I did, and the two women struck up a familiar selection from their repertory, the antiphonal strain of their singular affinity to all things of England, of the English. How they adored the “dear old country,” they said--how they were drawn by that call in their blood, of which I knew. Berta too had seen London, she had spent three days with her father in a boarding-house of Bloomsbury; she had saluted and recognized her home. So lost, so transfigured were they in their Englishry that the Roman evening all about them was again forgotten, it touched them not at all. Berta begged me to remember how from Gower Street you may step round the corner into the sparkling throng of Tottenham Court Road; and “the policemen!” she cried, and “the hansom cabs!” and “Piccadilly Circus!”--Berta hadn’t much gift of description, it was enough for her to cry upon the names of her delight. Emilio’s gooseberry-tinted eyes were strained in the effort to understand our English talk; he could offer no opinion upon its subject, for all his mind was given to its translation, word by word, in his thought; but perhaps he didn’t entirely approve of the general drift, for it was not quite seemly that Berta should display an experience of the world in which he couldn’t share. She gave him no attention, however; for she was quite carried away, the mad thing, by her fond enthusiasm over our dear old country. She was a little bit cracked on the subject, her aunt had said; and her aunt leant forward and tapped her on the cheek with tender ridicule. “You silly child!” said Teresa--for it was not to be forgotten that the call of the English blood came from _her_ side of the family, and that Berta stood at a further remove than she from the pride of their lineage. “But her father,” added Teresa, “is just as bad. He was always italianissimo, as they say here, but he loved the English freedom. The Italians do not understand our adorrable freedom.”

No, of course not. Rome, that had old genius of tyranny, lay outspread beneath and around us, bathed in the spring-sweetness of the first of May. The white-headed priest had folded his newspaper and was attending to his flower-pots, snipping and fondling his carnations; while the two children were struggling with bleating cries for the possession of a watering-can, which they busily hoisted under the old man’s direction to the row of the pots; and the girl, stretching her linen on the line, cried to them over her shoulder to be careful. The young man upon the further roof had laid aside his cornet and was singing, singing as he leant upon a parapet--a trailing measure that lingered upon clear high notes with a wonderful operatic throb and thrill. On another roof another group had assembled, lounging about a table on which a woman placed a great rush-bound flask of wine; they were a group of men, four or five of them, in dark coats and black soft hats, and they stretched their legs about the table and talked in comfort while the woman filled their glasses. I thought of Gower Street and Tottenham Court Road; but Berta’s pitch was too high for me, and I felt that I flagged and dragged upon them in their fine English flight. But what matter?--so much the more brilliantly their native patriotism soared and shone; and I couldn’t but see that it was a true passion, genuinely romantic and pure, by which they were transported above the daily dullness of the Street of the Purification, above the lifelong habit of Rome.