XXXI
THEY finished their letters and went up to their rooms to rest, for they had “done” several churches and the Campo Santo during the morning.
“Thank the lord,” said Ida, as they walked up the stairs after waiting ten minutes for the lift, “there are no picture galleries in this town that onemustsee. The rest of the programme is streets and architecture, which is worth while. These internal streets make me feel as if I were going right through to China, or whatever is underneath Italy. Genoa, before it had any houses on it, must have looked like Last Chance Gulch, Helena, Montana.”
They had reached their connecting rooms. Ida extended herself on a sofa, Ora made herself as comfortable as possible in a chair and lit a cigarette.
“Say, kid,” pursued Ida, “you smoke too much. Follow my illustrious example. I go just so far and no farther—one cigarette after each meal because it makes me feel nice and aristocratic. You’re the kind that lets a habit run away with you. I deliberate. You drift. See?”
Ora laughed. “Funny thing, nature! Anyone would say quite the opposite of each of us.”
“It’s like life. Not a blooming thing is just what you figure it out beforehand. Here I wanted the Collins house and I’ve got the Murphy. And Greg, that I figured on being a millionaire by the time I got back, has gone and tied himself up in litigation, or is heading that way.”
“You ungrateful wretch! You came to Europe ‘figuring’ on making a thousand dollars serve for the entire trip and you already have had eleven thousand. Most rules work both ways. But you don’t really want to go back?”
“I do. It’s been growing for some time and now it’s ingrowing. You can get enough of anything and I’ve had enough of Europe. Besides, I’d like to get back to a country where lifts are elevators and don’t go to sleep a few times on the way up; where it doesn’t take an hourto draw a bath, which it does wherever it’s pronounced băth; where you can drink plain water, and don’t have cheese or garlic or grease in all your food; where you are never taken for what you ain’t; where you are never cheated and overcharged because you’re an American; where you don’t have to see a sight a minute; where you don’t have to talk up to people who don’t give a hang about anything that interests you; where you are not looked upon as a rank outsider by ancient aristocrats and concierges, no matter how polite they try to be; and where the word democracy means what it is. Over here every socialist—I’ll bet every anarchist—would give his front teeth to be a king, a duke, or even a rich bourgeois. That’s what’s the matter with all of them. Give me America, above all, old Montana. A little money and a lot of ‘go’ are all you need out there.”
“Oh, Ida! Ida! will you never appreciate the glory of Europe? Is that all you have got out of it?”
“I’ve squeezed it dry, all right, and I’ll take back a lot more than I figured on. Watch me when I’m swelling round Butte, imitating the chaste simplicity of a British duchess—minus the duds they generally sport. There’s nothing like Europe to teach you what’s what—especially the way we’ve seen it—put you wise in ten thousand different ways, and fill your mind with pretty pictures—that ain’t in galleries. But after all it’s just a course in the higher education, and you’re outside of it all, every minute. To live you’ve got to go back to your own country.”
“That’s true enough!”
“Could you marry a European and live over here for the rest of your life and never see those mountains again that just seem to belong to you—or even screaming old Butte?”
“No!” Ora spoke with uncommon vehemence. “I couldn’t!”
Ida raised herself on her elbow and looked at her friend shrewdly. “I can’t see that you’ve enjoyed yourself so much over here. It seems to me that you’ve got your fun out of showing me round. You had more real gaiety in you in Butte. You may not know it but you look pretty sad sometimes.”
“Life is sad—mighty sad.”
“Is it? That’s a new one for me. I think it a prettyfine old proposition. What went wrong with you—early in the game?”
“Nothing. Travel is tiring, I’m not as strong as you are.”
“You’re as tough as a pine knot, for all you look like a lily expecting to be decapitated by the first wind. Well, you won’t tell if you won’t, but I’ll tell you what you need. You’ve never been in love and that’s a sort of ache in women until they’ve taken a good dose of the only medicine. I rather hoped you’d met your fate in the Marchese Valdobia. He’s the sort you once told me was your type, and you seemed to like him pretty well for about five weeks in Rome. The lord knows he was tall enough, and dark enough, and thin enough, and looked as if he had a beastly temper besides. Then you turned him down good and hard. I was sorry——”
“My dear Ida! Are you regretting that I did not have a liaison with Valdobia? I remember your virtuous sentiments in Butte. Perhaps it is time for us to return!”
“Oh, I’m all right. But I’m that advanced I wouldn’t mind you having an affair the least bit if it would make you happy——”
“Happy! What happiness do you imagine there can be when you are absolutely at the mercy of a man?—when you never know whether you will see him again or not?—a woman has no real hold on a lover. Matrimony with the man you love may have its agonies, but at least you live with him, you make his home; his interests are yours, he is dependent upon you for comfort and sympathy; there are a thousand ways in which you can endear and enchain him. But a lover, whom you meet in secret for one purpose only, who can give you no real companionship—oh, no! I shall not court that particular form of suffering. Life is hard enough without that! I’ve known women with lovers and so have you.”
“I don’t say it would last forever; nothing does, for that matter. But at least you would live for a little while—come down off the unearthly plane you roost on now. Whatever you went through, it would leave you all-round developed and philosophical—in a frame of mind to see and accept life as it is. You need hardening. I was born hard. You’re as soft as mush, for all you look like those marble bores in the Vatican, and as romantic as if you’dspent all your life in a castle in a wood with the drawbridge up. I believe you even keep a diary——”
“Diary——” Ora sat up straight.
“I’ve seen and heard you writing by the yard, late at night, mostly. It wasn’t letters, because we always get those off our chest just after breakfast—fine system. Unless you’re a budding author——”
“They were letters!” Ora, who was strung up to a high pitch and merely smoking for relief, felt a defiant impulse to indulge in the impudence of confession. “I’ve written yards and yards of letters to a man——”
“What? And you don’t send them off!”
“I don’t know him.”
“Good lord, what next? An ideal, I suppose.”
“Yes—that’s it.”
“Do you mean you never saw him—anyone to suggest him—it? What gender has an ideal, anyhow?”
“I saw him—talked with him, once. I said I didn’t know him.”
“And you’re in love with him!”
“Not in the least. He simply jolted my imagination, gave me the idea of what might be—have been. I—it is hard to express—I feel in a sort of mental—spiritual?—affinity with him. When I write I have a queer sense of absolute communion—as if we were talking—I suppose it is because I know he would understand if I could send the letters——”
“And you’ve never sent one?”
“Of course not. It is—well, just a little private one-sided drama I’m living; a sort of book of which I am the heroine. While I write I am alive. The rest of the time I wonder what I was put on this earth at all for.”
“Look at here, Ora, the best thing we can do is to send for old Gower and go back to Rome. You’ll be having nerves first thing you know. No, we’d cut out the annex. I’m dead sick of her, and everybody knows we’re all right; in Rome they don’t care, anyhow. You could have a real romance. We’d take one of those old palaces, haunted, moth-eaten, with one of those antique porters that looks as if he’d let out midnight lovers ten centuries ago, and beds that twenty centuries have died in. That would just suit you. I’d enjoy a second-hand romance first rate, and be the trusted friend.”
“Ida, you are incorrigible! Even if I cared a penny about Valdobia do you suppose I would betray my husband?”
“Rats! Don’t you suppose Mark has a girl down on The Flat? Greg has, I’ll bet—well, don’t look as if you were going to faint. What’s the use of being a dog in the manger? Mark’ll be the same old devoted when you get back.”
“Oh, do keep quiet! And I wish I might never see Butte again. I think I’ll write to Mark and ask him to move to New York. He now has plenty of money to wait, and it wouldn’t take him long to establish himself anywhere——”
“I thought you loved Montana—wanted to do something big for her——”
“We’ve been away a long time. I fancy I’m weaned. It is only once in a while that I feel a pull—merely because I was born there.”
“Well, Mark won’t leave, believe me. He’s Western from the cut of his back hair to his love of the free-and-easy. No New York for him except the all-night two or three times a year. Butte’s your fate unless you leave him.”
“I’ll never do that, but I’d like to stay over here for another year or two. Remember, I was brought up in Europe—and—and—Imightmeet the man—If you want to know I’ve tried. I’d never go as far as you suggest, but I could get something—companionship, perhaps, out of it.”
“When you meet the man you’ll forget all you ever knew, and men don’t companion for a cent when there’s nothing in it. I haven’t been turning them inside out these last six months for nothing; what I don’t know about men wouldn’t fill a thimble. Why don’t you round up your letter-man?”
“That is forever impossible.”
“Do give me a hint who he is. I’m half dead with curiosity. Where’d you meet him?”
“Keep quiet. I’m going to take a nap.”
“Well,” said Ida, yawning and stretching herself, “so am I, if you’ve closed up. When we get back to Butte and there’s no more sight-seeing on, we’ll have to cut out these siestas or we’ll get fat, and then good-bye.”