“Your kindness—I can’t express my gratitude—” she began tremulously.
“Nonsense! This is a business transaction, and I am coming out of it very well. I should not get a man to do the work for that absurdly small sum. I am underpaying you on purpose because I hate women.”
Olive laughed. “Commend me to misogynists henceforth.”
She wanted to begin at once, but her host assured her that he would rather she waited until the shelves were put up.
“You will have to sort them out several times, according to date, language and subject. Perhaps Jean can help you when he returns. He is away just now.”
Watching her, he saw the deepening of the rose.
“I—I can’t remember exactly what happened the night I came, Mr Avenel. You know I had not been able to find work, and though mypadronawas kind she was very poor too. She pawned my things for me, but they fetched so little, and I had not had anything to eat for ever so long when he came. He has not gone away because of me, has he?”
Hilaire threw the fish another biscuit; it fell among the lily leaves at the feet ofthe weather-stained marble nymph of the fountain.
“I must decline to answer,” he said gravely, after a pause. “I understand that you are twenty-three and old enough therefore to judge for yourself, and I do not intend to influence either you or Jean, if I can help it. You will be perfectly free to do exactly what you think right, my dear girl. I will only give you one bit of advice, and that is, look at life with your eyes wide open. Don’t blink! This is Friday, and Jean is coming to see you on Wednesday.”
Olive told herself that Hilaire was very good to her in the days that followed. He came sometimes into the room where she was, to find her sitting on the floor amid the piles of books she was trying to reduce to some kind of order.
“You do not get tired? I am afraid they are rather dusty.”
“Oh, not at all,” she assured him. She was swathed in a blue linen apron of Marietta’s and had tied a cotton handkerchief over her hair. “I like to feel I am doing something for you,” she said. “I wish—you have been—you are so kind.”
On the Wednesday morning she covered some of the books with brown paper and pasted labels on their backs. She tried not to listen for the creaking of the great gates as they swung open, for the grating of wheels against the stones, for Jean’s voice calling to his brother, for his quick step upon the stair, but she heard all as she wroteVita Nuovaon the slip intended for an early edition of theRape of the Lock, and put theDecameronaside with some sermons and commentariesthat were to be classified as devotional literature. He did not come to her then, but she was desperately afraid that he might. “I am not ready ... not ...”
When, later, she came into the dining-room she seemed to be perfectly at her ease. Jean’s eyes had been fixed on the door, and they met hers eagerly as she came forward. “Are you better?” he asked, and then bit his lip, thinking he had said the wrong thing.
“Oh, yes. But—but you look pale and thinner.”
Her little air of gay indifference fell away from her. As he still held her hand she felt the tears coming and longed to be able to run upstairs and take some more sal volatile, but Hilaire came to the rescue.
“Well, let’s have lunch,” he said. “I hate tepid food.”
When they had taken their places Jean gave the girl a letter.
“It came for you to the Lorenzoni. I called at the porter’s lodge this morning and Ser Gigia gave it me.”
“Such a waste of good things I never saw,” the butler said afterwards to his wife. “As you know, thepadronenever eats more than enough to fill a bird, but I have seen the signorino hungry, and the young lady too. To-day, however, they ate nothing, though thefrittatawas fit to melt in one’s mouth. I should not have been ashamed to set itbefore the Archangel Gabriel, and he would have eaten it, since it is certain that the Blessed One has never been in love.”
After the meal, to which no one indeed had done justice, Hilaire explained that he was going to write some letters.
The younger man looked at Olive. “Come with me,” he said abruptly. “I want to play to you.”
“I want to hear you,” she said as she rose from the table.
He followed her into the music-room and shut the door. “Well?”
She chose to misunderstand him. “It is charming. Just what a shrine of sound should be.”
The grand piano stood out from the grey-green background of the walls beyond, there was a bronze statuette of Orpheus with his lute on a twisted Byzantine column of white and gold mosaic, and a long cushioned divan set on one side broke the long lines of light on the polished floor.
“What are you going to play?” she asked.
“Nothing, at present,” he said, smiling at her. “I want to talk to you first. You are not frightened?”
“No.” She sat on the divan and he stood before her, looking down into her eyes.
“I think I had better try to tell you about my wife,” he said. “May I sit here? And may I smoke?”
“Yes.” She drew her skirts aside to make room for him next to her. “I want to hear you,” she said again.
“Imagine me, a boy of twenty-two, convalescing in country lodgings after an illness that seemed to have taken the marrow out of my bones. Hilaire was in Japan, and I—a callow fledgling from the nest—was very sick and sorry for myself. There were some people living in rather a large house at the other end of the village who took notice of me. They were the only ones, and I have thought since that my acquaintance with them really did for me with everyone else. They were not desirable—but—well, I was too young, and just then too physically weak to avoid their more pressing attentions. Old Seldon was one of those flushed, swollen men whose collars seem always to be too small for them. He tried to be pleasant, but it was not a great success. There were two daughters at home, and Gertrude was the eldest. She had been married, and the man had died, leaving her penniless. As you may suppose she had not come back to veal. I was sorry for her then because she seemed a good sort, and she was very kind to me; she was five years my senior—”
“Go on,” Olive said.
“I used to go to the house nearly every evening. She sang well, and I used to play her accompaniments, while the old man hungabout the sideboard. He never left us alone, and the younger girl, Violet, used to meet the rector’s son in the stables then. I heard that afterwards. They lived anyhow, and owed money to all the tradespeople round.
“One night I was awakened by a knocking outside; my landlady slept at the back, and she was deaf besides, so I went down myself. The wind put my candle out as I opened the door, but I saw a woman standing there in the rain, and I asked her what she wanted. She made no answer, but pushed past me into the passage, and went into my sitting-room. I followed, of course.
“Well, perhaps you have guessed that it was Gertrude. Her yellow hair hung down and about her face; she was only half dressed, and her bare arms and shoulders were all wet. Her skirts were torn and stained with mud. She told me her father had turned her out of the house in a drunken fury and she had come to me. Even then I wondered why she had not gone to some woman—surely she might have found shelter—however, she had come to me. I was going to call up my landlady, but she would not allow it because she said that no one but I need ever know. She would creep home through the fields soon after sunrise and her sister would let her in. The old man would be sleeping heavily.... The end of it was that I let her go up to my room while I lay on the sofa in the little parlour.The horsehair bolster was deucedly hard, but I was young, and when I did get off I slept well. When I woke it was nearer eight than seven, and I had just scrambled up when my landlady came in. One look at her face was enough. I understood that Gertrude had overslept herself too.
“The sequel was hateful. There was a frightful scandal, of course; the father raved, the women cried, the rector talked to me seriously, and—Olive, mark this—Gertrude would not say anything. I married her and we came away.”
“It was a trap,” cried Olive.
“We had not one single thing in common, and you know when there is no love sex is a barrier set up by the devil between human souls. After some years of mutual misery I brought her here. Poor Hilaire has hated respectable women ever since—she was that, if that counts when there is nothing else. Just virtue, with no saving graces. She is living in London now, is much esteemed, and regularly exceeds her allowance.”
“Was she pretty?”
Jean had let his pipe go out, and now he relit it. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I suppose so. Frizzy hair and all that. I fancy she has grown stout now. She is the kind that spreads.”
“Life is all so hateful,” sighed the girl. Jean moved away from her and went to thewindow. Hilaire was limping across the terrace towards the garden steps. When he was gone out of sight Jean came back into the room.
“My brother is unhappy too. The woman he loved died. Oh, Olive, are we to be lonely always because the law will not give me a divorce from the woman who was never really my wife, never dear to me or near to me as you are? Joy is within our reach, a golden rose on the tree of life, and it is for you to gather it or to hold your hand. Don’t answer me yet for God’s sake. Wait!”
He went to the piano and opened it.
Rain ... rain dripping on the roof through the long hours of night, and the weary moaning of the wakeful wind. Thronging memories of past years, past youth, past joy, past laughter echoing and re-echoing in one man’s hungry heart. Light footsteps of children never to be born ... and then the heavy tread of men carrying a coffin, and the last sound of all—the clanging of an iron door....
The grave ... the grave ... it held the boy who had loved her, and presently, surely, it would hold this man too, sealing his kind lips with earth, closing his brown eyes in an eternal darkness.
He played, as thousands had said, divinely, not only with his hands but with his soul. The music that had been a work of genius became a miracle when he interpreted it, andindeed it seemed that virtue went out of him. His face was drawn and pale and a pulse beat in his cheek. Olive, gazing at him through a blur of tears, knew that she had never longed for anything in her life as she longed now to comfort this pain expressed in ripples, and low murmurings, and great crashing waves of the illimitable sea of sound. Her heart ached with the pity that is a woman’s way of loving, and as he left the piano she rose too. He uttered a sort of cry as she swayed towards him, and clasped her in his arms.
“I love you,” he said, his lips so close to hers that she felt rather than heard the words.
Jean came to the villa a little before noon on the following day. Hilaire, who was in the library, heard his voice in the hall calling the dogs, heard him whistling some little song tune as he opened and shut all the doors one after the other.
“‘O l’amor e’ come un nocciuolaSe non se apre non si può mangiarla—’”
“‘O l’amor e’ come un nocciuolaSe non se apre non si può mangiarla—’”
“Hilaire, where are you? I thought I should find you on the terrace this fine morning. Where is she?” he added eagerly as he laid a great bunch of roses down on the table. “Is her headache better? Has not she come down yet?”
He looked across the room to where his brother’s grey head just showed above the high carved back of his chair.
“Hilaire! Why don’t you answer?”
In the silence that ensued he distinctly heard the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece and the falling of the soft wood ashes in the grate; the beating of his own heart sounded loud to him. One of the dogs was scratching at the door and whining to be let in.
“Hilaire.”
“She is gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yes. She left this letter for you.”
“Ah, give it to me.” He opened and read it hurriedly.
“I thought you meant dead at first,” he said. His brown eyes had lost the light that had been in them and were melancholy as before; he stood still by the table looking down upon his roses. They would fade, and she would never see them now. Never ... never ...
“Come and sit by the fire and let’s talk it over quietly,” said Hilaire. “Oh, damn women,” he mumbled as he drew at his pipe—the fifth that morning. It was the first time in a week that he had uttered his pet expletive. “What does she say?”
“You can read her letter.”
“Would she mind?”
“Oh, no,” Jean said bitterly. “She loves you—what she calls loving—next best after me. She told me so.”
Hilaire carefully smoothed the crumpled, blotted page out on his knee.
“My dearest Jean,—I am going away because I am a coward. I dare not live with you, and I dare not ask you to forgive me. Last night as I lay awake I thought and thought about my feeling for you and I was sure that it was love. I used to think of youoften last summer and to wonder where you were and what you were doing, and I hoped you had not forgotten me. I did not love you then, but I suppose my thoughts of you kept my heart’s door open for you, and certainly they helped to keep out someone else who came and tried to get admittance. Oh, one must suffer to keep love perfect, but isn’t it worth while? You may not believe me now when I say that if I cared for you less I should stay, but it is true. Oh, Jean, even when we were so happy for a few minutes yesterday something in me looked beyond into the years to come and was afraid. Not of you; I trust you, dearest; but of the world. Men would stare at me and laugh and whisper together, and women would look away, and I know I should not be able to bear it. I am not brave like that. Oh, every word I write must hurt you, I know. Remember that I love you now and shall always. Good-bye.—Your“Olive.”
“My dearest Jean,—I am going away because I am a coward. I dare not live with you, and I dare not ask you to forgive me. Last night as I lay awake I thought and thought about my feeling for you and I was sure that it was love. I used to think of youoften last summer and to wonder where you were and what you were doing, and I hoped you had not forgotten me. I did not love you then, but I suppose my thoughts of you kept my heart’s door open for you, and certainly they helped to keep out someone else who came and tried to get admittance. Oh, one must suffer to keep love perfect, but isn’t it worth while? You may not believe me now when I say that if I cared for you less I should stay, but it is true. Oh, Jean, even when we were so happy for a few minutes yesterday something in me looked beyond into the years to come and was afraid. Not of you; I trust you, dearest; but of the world. Men would stare at me and laugh and whisper together, and women would look away, and I know I should not be able to bear it. I am not brave like that. Oh, every word I write must hurt you, I know. Remember that I love you now and shall always. Good-bye.—Your
“Olive.”
“I should keep this.”
“I am going to. Hilaire, did you know she was going? Did she tell you?”
The older man answered quietly: “Yes, I knew, and I sent her to the station in the motor. I had promised a strict neutrality, Jean, and she was right to go. Some women, good women, may be strong enough to bear all the suffering that is entailed upon them bya known irregularity in their lives. She is not. It would probably have killed her though I am not saying that she would not have been happy sometimes, when she could forget her shame.”
Jean flinched as though his brother had struck him. “Don’t use that word.”
“Well, what else would it be? What else would the world call it? And women listen to what the world says. ‘Good name in man or woman is the immediate jewel of their souls’; Othello said something like that, and it’s often true. Besides, you know, this woman is pure in herself, and from what she told me I understand that she has seen something of the seamy side of love lately—enough to inspire her with dread. She is afraid, and her fear is exquisite; a very fine and rare thing. It is the bloom on the fruit and should not be brushed off with an ungentle hand. Poor child! Don’t blame her as she blames herself or I shall begin to think she is too good for you.”
Jean sat leaning forward staring into the fire.
“Do you realise that when I brought her here it was from starvation in a garret? Where is she going? What will she do? Oh, God! The poor little slender body! Do you remember she said it was happiness just to be warm and have enough to eat?”
“That’s all right,” Hilaire said hastily.“She is going to a good woman, a friend she made in Siena. The letter you brought was from her, and she wrote to say she had been ill and wished Olive could come and be with her for a while.”
“I see! And she was glad to get away.”
“My dear man, did you really think she would be so easily won? She loves you, and you not only made love to her yesterday afternoon; you played to her—I heard you—and I knew she would have to say ‘Yes’ to everything. Now she says ‘No,’ but you must not think she does not care.” Hilaire got up, came across to where his brother sat, and laid a caressing hand on his shoulder. “Dear Jean, will it comfort you to hear me swear she means every word of that letter? It’s not all over. You will come together in the end. Her poor blue eyes were drowned in tears—”
“Oh, don’t,” Jean said brokenly. The hard line of his lips relaxed. He hid his face in his hands.
Hilaire went out of the room.
Olive was alone in the compartment of the train that bore her away from Florence and from Jean. She had a book; it lay open on her lap, and she had tried to read, but the lines all ran together and the effort to concentrate her thoughts made her head ache. She was very unhappy. It seemed to her that now indeed life was emptied of all sweets and the taste of it was as dust and ashes in her mouth. She was leaving youth and joy behind; or rather, she had killed them and left a man to bury them. At Orvieto she nearly broke down. It would be so easy to get out and cross over to the other platform and there await the next train back to Florence. She had her hand upon the handle of the door when a boy with little flasks of wine in a basket came up and asked her to buy, and as she answered him she heard the cry of “Partenza!” It was too late; the moment had passed, and after a while she knew that she was glad she had not yielded. She was doingthe right thing. What was the old French motto? “Fais ce que doit, advienne que pourra.” The brave words comforted her a little. She was very tired, and presently she slept.
She was awakened by the discordant yells of the Romanfacchinion the station platform. One of them carried her box to the office of the Dogana, but a large party of Americans had come by the same train and the officials were too busily engaged in turning over the contents of their innumerable Saratogas to do more than scrabble in chalk on the side of her shabby leather trunk and shake their heads at the proffered key, and soon she was in avetturaclattering down the wide new Via Nazionale.
Signora de Sanctis lived with her sister in one of the old streets in the lower part of the city near the Pantheon—the Via Arco della Ciambella. The houses there are built on the foundations of the Baths of Agrippa, and a brick arch, part of the great Tepidarium, remains to give the street its name. The poor fragment has been Christianised; a wayside altar sanctifies it, and a little painted shrine to the Madonna adorns the base. The buildings on that side are small and mean and overshadowed by the great yellow palace of the Spinola opposite. Olive’s friends lived over a wine shop, but the entrance was some way down the street.
“Fortunately, my dear,” as they remarked, “though really the place is very quiet.People go outside the gates to get drunk.”
Both the women seemed glad to see her. Her room was ready and a meal had been prepared and the cloth laid at one end of the work-table. The younger sister was a dressmaker too, and the floor was strewn with scraps of lining and silk. A white dress lay on the sofa, carefully folded and covered with a sheet of tissue paper.
“You look tired, Olive. Were you not happy in Florence?”
The girl admitted that the Lorenzoni had not been very kind to her. She had left them and had been living on her savings. It had been hard to find other employment. “I want to work,” she said. “You will let me help you, and I hope to get lessons.”
She asked to be allowed to wash the plates and dishes and put them away in the tiny kitchen. She was in a mood to bear anything better than the idleness that left room for her own sad thoughts, and she wished that they would let her do some sewing. “I am not good at needlework, but I can hem and put on buttons,” she pleaded.
Signora Giulia smiled at her. She was small, and she had a pale, dragged look and many lines about her weak eyes. “No, thank you, my dear. I have a girl apprentice who comes during the day, and I do the cutting out and designing and the embroidery myself.You must not tire yourself in the kitchen either. We have an old woman in to domezzo servizio.”
It was nine o’clock, and the narrow streets were echoing now to the hoarse cries of the newsvendors: “Tribuna!” “Tribuna!”
“I will go and unpack then, and to-morrow I shall find some registry offices and try to get English lessons.”
“Yes, go,nina, and sleep well. You look tired. You must get stronger while you are with us.”
For a long time she could not sleep. In the summer she had played with the thought of love, and then she had been able to close her eyes and feel Jean Avenel close beside her, leaning towards her, saying that she must not be afraid, that he would not hurt her. It had been a sort of game, a childish game of make-believe that seemed to hurt no one, not even herself. But now she was hurt indeed; the remembrance of his kisses ached upon her lips.
When Tor di Rocca had asked her to go away with him she had felt that it might be worth while, that it would be pleasant to be cared for and loved, to eat and drink and die on the morrow, but the man himself had been nothing to her. A means to an end.
She had been wholly a creature of blind instincts, the will to live, to creep out of thedark into the sunshine that is inherent in the animal, fighting against that other impulse, trying to root up that white fragile flower, watered throughout the centuries with blood and tears and rare and precious ointment, that thorn in some women’s hearts, their pale ideal of inviolate purity.
The spirit had warred against the flesh, and the spirit had won then and now. It had won, but not finally. She was dismayed to find that temptation was a recurrent thing. Every morning when she woke it returned to her. It would be so easy to write “Dearest, come to me.” It would be so easy to make him happy. She thought little of herself now and much of Jean. Would he stay on with his brother or go away again? Had she hurt him very much? Would he forget her? Or hate her?
During the day she trudged the streets of Rome and grew to know them well. Here, as in Florence, no one wanted to pay for learning, no one wanted an English girl for anything apparently. If she had been Swiss, and so able to speak three languages incorrectly, she might have found a place as nursery-governess; as it was, the people in the registry offices grew tired of her and she was afraid to go to them too often.
There was little for her to do in the house. The old woman who came in did the cleaning, and they lived on bread andricottacheeseand a cabbage soup that was easily prepared, but sometimes she was able to help with the sewing, and now and then she was allowed to take the finished work home.
“It is not fit! They will take you for an apprentice, asartina.”
Olive laughed rather mirthlessly at that. “I am not proud,” she said.
“I sat up until two last night to finish the Contessa’s dress. She is always in a hurry. If only she would pay what she owes,” sighed the dressmaker.
Olive promised to bring the money back with her, and she waited a long while in the stuffy passage of the Contessa’s flat. There were imitation Abyssinian trophies on the walls, lances and daggers and shields of lathe and cardboard and painted paper. The husband was an artillery captain, and his sword stood with the umbrellas in the rack, the only real thing in that pretentious armoury.
The Contessa came out to her presently. She was a large woman, and as she was angry she seemed to swell and redden and gobble as turkeys do.
“Are you thegiovinetta? You will take this dress away. It is not fit to put on.” She held the bodice in her hand, and as she spoke she shook it in Olive’s face. “The stitches are all awry; they are enormous; and half the embroidery is blue and the otherhalf green. I shall make her pay for the material. The dress is ruined, and it is the last she shall make for me. She must pay me, and you must tell her so.”
Olive collected her scattered wits. “If the Signora Contessa would allow me to look,” she said.
The stitches were very large, and her heart sank as she examined them. The poor women had toiled so over this work, stooping over it, straining their tired eyes. “I think we can alter it to your satisfaction, but I must ask you to be indulgent, signora. I will bring it back the day after to-morrow, if that will suit you.” She folded the bodice carefully and wrapped it in the piece of paper she had brought it in, fastening the four corners with pins.
“The skirt goes well?”
“It will do,” the Contessa admitted as she turned away. “Anacleto!”
A slender, dark-eyed youth emerged from the shadows at the far end of the passage, bringing a sound and smell of frying with him. His bare brown arms were floury and he wiped them on his striped cotton apron as he came forward to open the door. He wore a white camellia thrust behind one ear.
“It would be convenient—Signora Manara would be glad if you could pay part of her account,” faltered Olive.
The Contessa stopped short. “I could,but I will not,” she said emphatically. “She does her work too badly.”
The young servant grinned at the girl as she passed out. She was half-way down the stairs when he came out on to the landing and leaned over the banisters.
“Never! Never!” he called down to her. “They never pay anyone. I am leaving to-morrow.”
The white camellia dropped at her feet. She smiled involuntarily as she stooped to gather up the token. “Men are rather dears.”
She met Ser Giulia coming down the stairs of their house. The little woman looked quickly at the bundle she carried as she asked why it had been brought back.
“She wants it altered!Dio mio!And I worked so hard at it. How much of the money has she given you?”
“She has given nothing; I hope she will pay when I take the work back.”
But the other began to cry. “Perhaps the stitches are large,” she said, sobbing. “I know my eyes are weak. No one will pay me, and I owe the baker more than ten lire. Soon we shall have to beg our bread in the streets.”
“Don’t,” Olive said hurriedly. “Don’t. I have been with you more than a month and I have not found work yet, but I will not be a burden to you much longer. I shall findsomething to do soon and then you need not do so much and we shall manage better.”
“Oh, child, I know you do your best.”
“Don’t cry then. I will get money somehow. Don’t be afraid.”
Olive sat idly on one of the benches near the great wall in the Pincian gardens. She had been to an office in the Piazza di Spagna and had there been assured for the seventh time that there was nothing on the books. “If the signorina were a cook now, there are many people in need of cooks,” the young man behind the counter had said smilingly, and she had thanked him and come away. What else could she do?
It was getting late, and a fading light filtered through the bare interwoven branches of the planes. The shadows were lengthening in the avenues and grass-bordered paths where the seminarists had been walking in twos and threes among the playing children. They were gone now, the grave-faced young men in their black soutanes and broad beaver hats; all the people were gone.
“O Pasquina!Birichina!”
Olive, turning her head, saw a young woman and a child coming towards her. The little thing was clinging to its mother’s skirts, stumbling at every step, whining to be taken up, and now she dropped the white rabbitmuff and the doll she was carrying into a puddle.
“O Pasquina!”
The child stared open-mouthed as Olive came forward and stooped to pick up the fallen treasures, and though tears were running down her little face she made no outcry.
“See, the beautiful lady helps you,” the mother said hastily, and she sat down on the bench at Olive’s side and lifted the baby on to her lap to comfort her.
“She is tired. We have been to the Campo Marzo to buy her a fine hat with white feathers,” she explained.
Olive looked at her with interest. She was not at all pretty; her round snubby face was red and she had a bruise on her chin, and yet she was somehow attractive. Her small, twinkling blue eyes were so kind, and her hair was beautiful, smooth, shining, and yellow as straw. She wore no hat.
Her name was Rosina. The signorino was always very good, and he gave her an afternoon off when she asked for it. On Christmas night, for instance, she had drunk too much wine, and she had fallen down in the street and hurt herself. The next day her head ached so, and when the signorino saw she was not well he said she might go home and sleep. She had been working for him six weeks. What work? She seemed surprised at the question.
“I am a model. My face is ugly, as you see,” she said in her simple, straightforward way; “but otherwise I am beautiful, and I can always get work with sculptors. The signorino is an American and he has an unpronounceable name. He is doing me as Eve, crouched on the ground and hiding my head in my arms. After the Fall, you know. Have you been to the Andreoni gallery? There is a statuette of me there called ‘Morning.’ This is the pose.”
She clasped her hands together behind her head, raising her chin a little. Olive observed the smooth long throat, the exquisite lines of the shoulders and breast and hips. Pasquina slipped off her mother’s knees.
“Are you well paid?”
“It depends on the artist. Some are so poor that they cannot give, and others will not. The schools allow fifteen soldi an hour, but the signorino is paying me twenty-five soldi. In the evenings I sing and dance at acaffènear the station.”
Olive hesitated. “Do—do artists ever want models dressed?”
Rosina looked at her quickly. “Oh, yes, when they are as pretty as you are. But you are well educated—one sees that—it is not fit work for such as you.”
“Never mind that,” Olive said eagerly. “How does one begin being a model? I will try that. Will you help me?”
Rosina beamed at her. “Sicuro!We will go to Varini’s school in the Corso if you like. The woman in the newspaper kiosk in the Piazza di Spagna knows me, and I can leave Pasquina with her.An’iamo!”
The two girls went together down the wide, shallow steps of the Trinità dei Monti with the child between them.
Poor little Pasquina was the outward and visible sign of her mother’s inward and hopelessly material gracelessness; she symbolised the great gulf fixed between smirched Roman Rosina and Jean’s English rose in their different understanding of their own hearts’ uses. Olive believed love to be the way to heaven; Rosina knew it, or thought she knew it, as a means of livelihood.
The model was very evidently not only familiar with the studios. The cabmen on the rank in the piazza hailed her with cries of “Rosi”; she was greeted by beggars at the street corners, dustmen,carabinieri, crossing-sweepers, and Olive was not wholly unembarrassed. Yet Rosina escaped the vulgarity of some who might be called her betters as the world goes by being simply natural. When she was amused she laughed aloud, when she was tired she yawned as openly and flagrantly as any duchess. In manners extremes meet, and the giggle and the sneer are the disastrous half measures of the ill-bred, the social greasers. Rosina had never been sly in herlife; she was ever as simply without shame as Eve before the Fall, and lawless because she knew no law. The darkness of Northern cities is tainted and cold and cannot bring forth such kindly things as therosine—little roses—that spring up in the warm, sweet Roman dust.
“Here is Varini’s.”
They passed through a covered passage into a little garden overgrown with laurels and gnarled old pepper trees; there was a fountain with gold fish, and green arums were springing up about a broken faun’s head set on a pedestal ofverd’ antico. Some men were standing together in the path, a pretty dark-eyed peasant girl with them. They all turned to stare, and thecioccaraput out her tongue as Olive went by. Rosina instantly replied in kind.
“Ohè! Fortunata! Benedetta ragazza!Resting as usual? Does Lorenz still beat you?”
She described the antecedents and characteristics of Lorenz.
The slower-witted country girl had a more limited vocabulary. Her eyes glared in the shadow of her white coif. “Ah,” she gasped. “Brutta bestia!” and she turned her back.
The men laughed, and Rosina laughed with them as she knocked on a green painted door in the wall. It was opened by a burly,bearded man, tweed-clad, and swathed in a stained painting apron.
“Oh,Professore, here is a friend of mine who wants work.”
“Come in,” he said shortly, and they followed him into a large untidy studio. A Pompeian fruit-seller in a black frame, a study for a Judgment of Paris on a draped easel, and on another easel the portrait of an old lady just begun. There were stacks of canvases on the floor and on all the chairs.
“Turn to the light,” the artist said brusquely; and then, as Olive obeyed him, “Don’t be frightened. You are new, I see. You are so pink and white that I thought you were painted. You are not Italian?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
She was silent.
He smiled. “Ah, well, it does not matter. You can come to the pavilion on Monday at five and sit to the evening class for a week. You understand? Wait a minute.” He went to the door and called one of the young men in from the garden.
“Here is a new model, Mario. I have engaged her for the evening class. What do you think of her?”
“Carina assai,” approved Mario. He was a round-faced, snub-nosed youth with clever brown eyes set very far apart, and a humorous mouth. “Carina assai!” he repeated.
“Fifteen soldi the hour, from five to seven-thirty,” said the professor. “Come a little before the time on Monday; the porter will show you what costume you must wear and I shall be there to pose you.”
“Now I shall take you to M’sieur Michelin,” Rosina said when they had left Varini’s. “He is looking for a type, and perhaps you will please him. He isstrano, but good always, and he pays well.”
“It is not tiring you?”
“Ma che!I must see that you begin well and with the right people. Some painters arecanaglia. Ah, I know that,” the girl said with a little sigh and a shrug of her shoulders.
They went by way of the Via Babuino across the Piazza di Spagna, and up the little hill past the convent of English nuns to the Villa Medici. Rosina rang the gate-bell, and the old braided Cerberus admitted them grumblingly. “You are late. But if it is M’sieur Camille—”
Camille Michelin, bright particular star of the French Prix de Rome constellation, lived and worked in one of the more secluded garden-studios of the villa; it was deep set in the ilex wood, and the girls came to it by a narrow winding path, box-edged, and strewn with dead leaves. A light shone in one of the upper windows; the great man was there and he came down the creaking wooden stairs himself to open the door.
“Who is it? Rosina? I have put away the Anthony canvas for a month and I will let you know when I want you again.”
“But, signorino, I have brought you a type.”
“What!” he said eagerly, in his execrable Italian. “Fresh, sweet, clean?”
“Sicuro.”
“I do not believe you. You are lying.”
Camille was picturesque from the crown of his flaxen head to the soles of his brown boots; his pallor was interesting, his blue eyes remarkable; he habitually wore rust-coloured velveteen; he smoked cigarettes incessantly. All men who knew and loved his work saw in him a decadent creature of extraordinary charm; and yet, in spite of his “Aholibah,” his “Salome,” and his horribly beautiful, unfinished study of Fulvia piercing the tongue of Cicero, in spite of his Byron-cum-Baudelaire after Velasquez and Vandyke exterior he always managed to be quite boyishly simple and sincere.
“Where is she?” Then, as his eyes met Olive’s, he cried, “Not you, mademoiselle?” His surprise was as manifest as his pleasure. “My friends have sworn that I could never paint a wholesome picture. Now I will show them. When can you come?”
“Monday morning.”
“Do not fail me,” he implored. “Such harpies have been here to show themselvesto me; fat, brown, loose-lipped things with purple-shadowed eyes. But you are perfect; divine bread-and-butter. They think they are clean because they have washed in soap and water, but it is the stainless soul I want. It must shine through my canvas as it does through Angelico’s.”
“I hope I shall please you,” faltered the girl. “I—I only pose draped.”
He looked at her quickly. “Very well,” he said, “I will remember. It is your head I want. You are not Roman; have you sat to any other man here?”
“No. I am going to Varini’s in the evenings next week.”
“Ah! Well, don’t let anyone else get hold of you. Gontrand will be trying to snap you up. He is so tired of thecioccare. What shall I call you?”
“Nothing. I have no name.”
“I shall give you one. You shall be called child. Come at nine and you will find the door open.” He fumbled in his pockets for some silver. “Here, Rosina, this is for the little one.”
The virtue that bruises not only the heel of the Evil One but the heart of the beloved is never its own reward. The thought of Jean’s aching loneliness oppressed Olive far more than her own. She believed that she had done right in leaving him, but no consciousness of her own rectitude sustained her, and she was pitifully far from any sense of self-satisfaction. Her head hung dejectedly in the cold light of its aureole. Sometimes she hated herself for being one of the dull ninety-and-nine who never stray and who need no forgiveness, and yet she clung to her dear ideal of love thorn-crowned, white, and clean.
She had hoped to be able to help her friends, but that hope had faded, and she had been very near despair. There was something pathetic now in her intense joy at the thought of earning a few pence. She lied to the kind women at home because she knew they would not understand. They might believe the way to the Villa Medici to be the primrose path that leads to everlasting fire—they probably would if they had ever heard of Camille. She told them she had found lessons, and the wolf seemed to skulk growlinglyaway from the door as she uttered the words.
“You need not be afraid of the baker now,” she told Ser Giulia. “He shall be paid at the end of the week.”
Her waking on the Monday morning was the happiest she had known since she left Florence. She was to help to make beautiful things. Her part would be passive; but they also serve who only stand and wait. She was not of those who see degradation in the lesser forms of labour. Each worker is needed to make the perfect whole. The men who wrought the gold knots and knops of the sanctuary, who wove the veil for the Holy of Holies, were called great, but the hewers of wood and carriers of water were temple builders too, even though their part was but to raise up scaffoldings that must come down again, or to mix the mortar that is unseen though it should weld the whole. Men might pass these toilers by in silence, but God would surely praise them.
Praxiteles moulded a goddess in clay, and we still acclaim him after the lapse of some two thousand years. What of the woman who wearied and ached that his eyes might not fail to learn the least sweet curve of her? What of the patient craftsmen who hewed out the block of marble, whose eyes were inflamed, whose lungs were scarred by the white dust of it? They suffered for beauty’s sake—not,as some might say, because they must eat and live. Even slaves might get bread by easier ways. But, very simply for beauty’s sake.
Olive might have soon learnt how vile such service may be in the studios of any of thecanagliapoor Rosina knew, but Camille, that sheep in wolf’s clothing, was safe enough. What there was in him of perversity, of brute force, he expended in the portrayal of his subtly beautiful furies. His art was feverishly decadent, and those who judge a man by his work might suppose him to be a monster of iniquity. He was, in fact, an extremely clever and rather worldly-wise boy who loved violets and stone-pines and moonlight with poetical fervour, who preferred milk to champagne, and saunterings in green fields to gambling on green cloth.
That February morning was cloudless, and Rome on her seven hills was flooded in sunshine. The birds were singing in the ilex wood as Olive passed through, and Camille was singing too in hisatelier: