The Project Gutenberg eBook ofRoman picturesThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Roman picturesAuthor: Percy LubbockRelease date: October 6, 2023 [eBook #71818]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMAN PICTURES ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Roman picturesAuthor: Percy LubbockRelease date: October 6, 2023 [eBook #71818]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
Title: Roman pictures
Author: Percy Lubbock
Author: Percy Lubbock
Release date: October 6, 2023 [eBook #71818]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMAN PICTURES ***
FONTANA DELLE TARTARUGHEFONTANA DELLE TARTARUGHE
ByPERCY LUBBOCKAuthor ofEarlham&The Craft of FictionNEW YORKCHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONSMade and printed in Great Britain by Charles Whittingham and Griggs (Printers), Ltd., London.
IFOUND myself loitering by that pretty little Fountain of the Tortoises, not for the first time; but this time (it was an afternoon of late April, long years ago) I looked stupidly at the boys and the tortoises and the dripping water, with a wish in my mind for something more. But what? I had drifted hither and thither about Rome, from the Gate of the People to the Baths of Caracalla—drifted day after day in my solitude through a month of April more divinely blue and golden than the first spring-days of the world; and whether I was in the body or out of the body I scarcely knew, for I moved in a great bubble of imagination that I had never known the like of in all the years (perhaps twenty) of my life before I came to Rome. I had escaped from the poor chamber of myself; for the imagination I dreamed and revelled in was surely none of my own. It was of the spirit of all time, livelier, lovelier than I could say, a power and a freedom that a rather lean young soul, ignorantly aspiring, may enter into and take possession of unconsciously, without an effort—in Rome.
But I do remember lingering about the Fountain of the Tortoises at last, between sun and shadow, with a wish that something now, something or some one, would break into my solitude and my dream; not that I was tired of either, but because my dream andmy solitude would be still more beautiful if I could look at them for an hour across an interval, across the kind of division that is created by—yes, exactly!—by the sight to which I presently raised my eyes, turning away from the dapple and ripple of the fountain. A young man, passing across the square, met my blank gaze at this moment and suddenly threw out a sign of recognition; and I saw with surprise that it was my precious Deering, of whose presence in Rome I had been quite unaware. Deering it was!—after four or five lonely weeks, in which I had never happened to see a face that I knew, it was Deering who linked me to the real world again by crossing the Square of the Tortoises at that hour of that afternoon. I had left my shining bubble in a flash (he hadn’t noticed it) and joined hands with common life.
We weren’t really on terms of intimacy; but in the strangeness of Rome our little English acquaintance had the air of a cordial friendship. I gushed over with a warmth that surprised me and that would have been impossible at home; the fountain and the palaces and the Roman sunshine had pushed me forward into a familiarity that I shouldn’t have ventured upon elsewhere. He was of my own age, but so much more exquisite and mannerly that I looked raw indeed at his side; I was an aspiring amateur, he was a citizen of the world. At school I had tried to avoid him, because I had courted (vainly, vainly) the society of the more fashionably and the less refined; but I was eager enough to seize him by both hands in my new freedom and to take advantage of his riper experience. “Why,Deering—!” Hedidlook experienced, with his broad-brimmed hat and his neat black clothes, as I movedtowards him and directed my greeting, a little too effusively.
He took it with a brilliant smile, he whipped off his hat and held it to his stomach. “Eh, come sta?” he said, standing bare-headed; “è pezzo pezzo che non ci vediamo.” He fluted the words with mellifluous assurance, and I did my best to meet his humour with my own poor bits and shreds of Italian. There were no flute-notes inmyrepertory; but I made a jest of my round British style and mouthed out some attempt at a Roman compliment. As quick as thought he countered it with another; and that was surely enough of the joke—the joke of our standing there bare-headed, flourishing our hats at each other with Italian airings; so I let loose my pent-up English talk, after those weeks of unnatural silence, and tumbled out exclamation and question as they came—I was voluble, enjoying the release of the tongue, and there were forty things I wanted to say and hear, for this meeting was quite unexpected and exceedingly opportune; and so I chattered forth my surprise and pleasure, and then—and then I found them left upon my hands, somehow, and I looked rather a fool.
“Ma senta, senta,” said Deering. He smiled, but he was firm. He couldn’t deal with me on these insular terms in Rome; he made me feel it without explanation, but the fact was that he simply couldn’t allow me to be so inappropriate, so falsely attuned to the time and place. There we stood in the heart of Rome, with the palaces of princes around us, secluded among winding streets all dark with wicked history; and here was Deering, disguised as a Roman himself, with a great black hat and a suit of dead-black clothes; and I had stuttered out my poor innocent school-talk, college-gossip, heaven knowswhat, a scrannel-pipe to the suave warble of his flute. Had I come all the way to Rome to be still a British undergraduate even there? Well, as for that, he very soon put it right. He was kindness itself, but he had the upper hand of me in these foreign parts, where he was so serenely at home and I so ecstatically at sea. His was the advantage, as indeed I quite understood, and he used it from the first. He gently set me in my place, not without an indulgent smile.
“Senta, senta pure,” he said—or words to that effect; whatever they were they keenly struck me as the very words I had wanted and missed in my ignorant solitude. That was the way to talk to a Roman; I might have missed it for ever, but Deering had picked it up, no doubt, the first time he put on his broad-brimmed hat. How long had he been in Rome? I was allowed to ask that question at least, and it appeared that he had come to Rome for a week, six months before, and had stayed on and on because he had happened to find rooms that pleased him. They were far from the “English ghetto,” so he said, meaning that they were far from the hotels and the Piazza di Spagna and touristry in general; and he had just finished his siesta and was on his way to a café in the Via Nazionale, where he usually spent some hours of the afternoon. And I, where was I going? As a matter of fact I had vaguely thought of wandering away and away, out of the city and into the country—from whence I should return in the dusk, luxuriously tired, solemnly enraptured, to climb the long stairs to my own little lodging, my Arcadian meal and couch. But this I concealed from Deering; I felt at once I must protect my dear sentimental delights from his ironic eye. Moreovermylodging, which I had thought soknowingly Roman, proved to be full in the middle of the English ghetto; I kept this too from him as long as I could.
His siesta, his café, his rooms remote from the vulgar—oh I had such a vision, as he mentioned these, of the kind of Roman career that I had failed to go in for hitherto. Deeringlivedin Rome, I had floated on the surface. Never mind—I threw over my private romance and adopted Deering’s reality on the spot. He seemed to be immensely informed, and there was a charming insolence in his wisdom; I might put my tenderest fancies behind me and screen them in his presence, but he saw that I was a soft young enthusiast, and he patronized me with the sweetness of his coo, his smile, his winning gesture. He delicately blasted whatever had appeared to me of interest and renown, he showed me the crudity of my standards. I might feel a passing twinge, for I hadn’t been used to regarding myself as a thing with which Deering could be indulgent and amused. And yet I was flattered, I was magnified by his fastidious irony; it brought me into a new world of mind and taste, more exclusive than my own.
But I obviously couldn’t give way to him in the matter of being so very Italian that we mightn’t talk our own language. He could take me into another world, but to endow me at the same time with a new speech was a miracle beyond him. “Ma come, ma come,” he said encouragingly; he implied that in the real life of illumination we are all free of the golden tongue, the tongue of the clear Latinciviltà. It seemed he could hardly frame his lips to the uncouth noises of the northern Goth. He brought out an English phrase with an air of handing it over to me between disgustful finger-tips, andhe relapsed unconsciously as he did so into the sweeter idiom. Ah Deering, Deering! That unconsciousness of his was a finished performance, I could believe he had practised it before the glass. “But you, my dear,” he said, “you surely speak the language like the rest of us—eh magari!” I confessed that I spoke the language like a barbarian fresh from my native wild; I should listen to him and the rest of them with pleasure, but to me he must talk our poor old English. “And whoarethe rest of you?” I demanded.
He answered my question at some length, inadvertently recovering his former tongue. In six months of Roman life he had made many friends; he had fallen into a circle that suited him as aptly as his rooms. “I scarcely know how it happened,” he said, “but I seemed to find my feet here from the first.” He apparently attributed a great deal of his fortune to the café of the Via Nazionale; a right instinct had taken him there in the beginning, and thereafter all had run smoothly. He had met a journalist, he had met an actor or a lawyer or a doctor—anyhow he had met somebody whom the ordinary Cook-driven tourist, slaving round the ruins and the galleries, would have missed infallibly; and so he had entered a company which belonged—he insisted on it—to therealRome, the city unsuspected of our gaping countrymen. His secret was to “live the life of the place,” he said; and let there be no mistake, the life of the place is to be found among the shops and tramways of the business quarter, nowhere else. It must be owned that in Rome a stranger runs many a risk of overlooking the true life on these terms, which are the terms that Deering laid down with high lucidity; for even if you avoid theghetto of the tourist on one hand, and the romantic desolation of the Campagna (to which I myself was addicted) on the other, you may still make a further mistake—and I put it to Deering that it really depends on what youcallthe life of Rome. There is the community of the “student,” for example; and I should have thought that Deering, with his rare vein of taste in the arts, would haunt the workshops of young sculptors, ragged painters and poets—weren’t they as plentiful in Rome as summer flies?
I had interrupted Deering’s exposition; he wanted to tell me more about the ease with which he had dropped into the heart of Rome. But he broke away from that, with another of his patient intelligent smiles, to explain to me how much I failed to understand. There was no more any life ofthatkind in Rome—no romantic art. Did I think that those horrible theatrical old men, those bedizened little boys and girls, who still loaf upon the Spanish Steps and waylay the foreigner—did I think they were genuine “models,” waiting for real painters to carry them off and paint them? I supposed then that I was living in the Rome of Hans Andersen and Nathaniel Hawthorne? He abounded in his sarcasm. Ragged poets indeed! My notion of thevie de Bohèmewas a little behind the times, fifty years or so. “Ah you live in books,” said Deering—he rallied me on it; “in Rome you must come out of books—I shall drag you out of Hawthorne.” As a matter of fact he knew the young poets of Rome, he had several friends among them; it was no use my looking for them in garrets and operatic wine-cellars near the Tiber; the Via Nazionale was the place, vulgar as I thought it with its crowds and trams and plate-glass—and he was off again, with hissweet flat voice and his neat enunciation, describing the extraordinary favour that the journalists had shown him, or perhaps the actors.
It was remarkable, he said, how they accepted him as one of themselves. “There seems to be something of the Italian in me,” he mentioned once or twice, “nothing to be proud of!”—and he smiled with pride. I could honestly tell him that there was at least nothing English in his appearance, since he had taken to powdering his nose and to clothing himself like an undertaker. The remark about his nose I indeed reserved, but my allusion to his clothes was a happy one. He immediately glanced with quiet approval at his hands, and I remembered how in earlier years, when we were both small boys at school, he had once pointed out to me that he had hands “like a Botticelli.” He ought to have been grateful to me for the self-restraint I had shown in withholding that confidence from the light. I had been surprisingly discreet, I had never used his Botticelli hands against him in our free-spoken circle, and I was glad of it now. Here in Rome, set free from the old snobberies of boyhood, I was ready to take his hands quite seriously, and even the paste of powder with which he had corrected the tint (inclining rather to Rubens) of his nose. His black clothes were designed to set off his elegant wrists and tapering fingers; and if a nose invariably scorched by the sun was a weight on his mind, as I know it was, he found support in the well-drawn oval of his face. He was not very tall, and unfortunately he was not very slender; it was only too plain to see that before long he would be plump. But nevertheless he might reasonably tell himself that his figure, as he stood by the fountain and thoughtfully eyed his hands, had a hint anda suggestion, I don’t say more, of something you might call—of something he hoped I was calling—a lily-droop, swaying lightly.
I can see him bend and sway accordingly; and I can recall the bright stream of sensation in my own mind, where the old desire to scoff at his elegancies had apparently changed to respect and envy. What a free world, I thought, what a liberal and charming, in which a stupid prejudice could dissolve and drop away so quickly! Perhaps I didn’t quite understand that my respect was not so much for Deering as for myself, not so much for Deering’s pretty graces as for my own emancipation; but my envy of his Italian ease and competence was indeed sincere. I would seize, yes I would, such an opportunity of learning, discovering, experiencing; I would follow Deering, accept his guidance and pay him his price—for his price was a small one, merely a little tacit backing of his own view of himself. He would expect me to agree with him that his face had a species of haunting charm; he would expect me, at any rate, not to imply that it hadn’t. It was a trifling indemnification for the many times he had been told in former days that he had a face like a rabbit. I would gladly support him in abolishing the memory of all that ribaldry; I should be rewarded by observing my own tolerance with satisfaction and by becoming acquainted at the same time with this “real Rome” of Deering’s—he was still fluting on about its reality.
We shuffled for a while to and fro across the sunny little square. Now and then a bare-headed woman came pattering by, twisting her neck for a firm round stare at us as she went; children looked on from a distance, struck dumb in their play by our oddity. Deeringtalked and talked; he too felt the relief of uttering himself, no doubt—for I could well believe that the real Rome didn’t supply a listener who understood him as I did. Not one of those actors or poets, for example, could measure the difference between Deering of old, flouted and derided, and this remarkable young personage, ornament of a strange society, who was now willing to be the patron of such as I. Deering talked, I appreciated the difference; I did my part with a will, and he bloomed in the warmth of my recognition. For six months, moreover, he had been displaying the new, the very newest culture, and his associates hadn’t really been in a position to perceive it. An Englishman who avoided the old ruins and churches, who sat through the April afternoon at a marble-topped table—why his companions would of course take him for an Englishman who behaved, for a wonder, in a natural and commendable fashion; and this was where I again came in so aptly, for I could do justice to the originality and the modernity of his proceeding. It wasn’t as though Deering sat in a café because he knew no better, because he was the kind of person whose ideas are bounded by plush and gilt and plate-glass. He sat there, avoiding the nightingales on the Aventine, the sunset in the Campagna, because he knew all that and more, and because the rarity of the perversity of his culture led him back again, round again, to the scream of the tramway in the “business quarter.” I, who had watched him of old, could be trusted to distinguish these niceties; there it was that I came into the game, and he didn’t hesitate—he brought me into play.
“Yes,” he murmured, musing gently upon my state of romance, “yes, I should like to drag you out ofliterature once for all. Come out of your books, come to Rome—come with me.” I could truthfully say that I would go with pleasure; and as for my books, I was quite willing to let him label me as he chose—I accepted the part for which he cast me. I was the victim of the romantic fallacy, and it all came of my looking for life in antiquated fiction—in Zola even, in Zola as like as not—instead of looking for it in the raw red world: such was the part he assigned me, and I have ever been one to fall in with an arrangement of this kind. People, I long ago found, are never happy till they have decided that you are this or that, some recognizable type; and for yourself the line of least resistance is always to let them have their way. In my time I have played many parts, acting up to the theory and the expectation of my different companions; it saves trouble, it spares one the effort of assertion. There are even those with whom I have been able to assume the very attitude that Deering had now adopted towards me, the attitude of a liberal patron towards a muddle-headed young innocent; and then I have patronized as glibly as I now submitted. Deering saw in the look with which I answered him the exact shade of awkward modesty that he demanded. It was well; he approved my fluency in the part that had fallen to me.
It was settled, then, that he was to hale me out of my sentimental twilight into the broad noon of reality; I had lived for too long in a dream, and now he promised himself the amusement of dispelling my illusions. So be it; I told him I asked nothing better than to follow his lead, and I told myself that at least I had a sharper eye for the “facts of life” (my phrase) than ever Deering would have. We were both well-pleased,therefore; and I wonder at which of us the spirit of Rome, glancing that afternoon over the Square of the Tortoises, smiled and chuckled most benignly. It was Deering at any rate, of the two of us, who made the more intricate object of study; anybody might be drawn, even Rome, to pause and consider him as a child of his time. When he slipped his arm through mine and daintily drew me forward on our way—the way to reality!—I don’t think the first comer would have guessed that he was about to become my sponsor in the raw red world. His graceful hands seemed rather to flutter in deprecation of any world more earthly than the sea-pallor, say, of a sunrise in the manner of Botticelli. But that, for Deering, was just the fun of it. Of the sea-pale dawn he could honestly say, and he did say, “J’ai passé par là”; in an earlier stage of his culture he had duly swooned in the ecstasy of the burnished moment, the discriminated pulse of the perfected sensation; but at that time he had worn an Eton jacket, and years had flown since then, and by now his eye-lids were more than a little weary of the raptures he had outlived. He, more precocious than I, had left his books at the moment when I was making the first discovery of mine; he no longer read any books at all, he told me, and if he didn’t add that life was his book it was only because the phrase, when he was about to utter it, struck him as old-fashioned and obvious. “‘Youth’s sweet-scented manuscript’—you remember?”—he ventured on that, guarding himself with a slightly acid intonation of the pretty words.
And so Deering turned me away from the ilex-shadows and grey spaces of an evening on the Aventine and in the further country; he clung to my arm anddirected me to the clatter of the city, and that was how it all began. He gave me a push, with his benediction, and one thing led to another, and I started to collect some Roman pictures of a new sort. I stored away my more sentimental bits and notes of impression, carefully saving them from the eye of Deering; I laid them aside, and certainly they are not worth disturbing again at this late hour. But as for these others, the new sort, I think it might be amusing to bring them briefly to the light, one by one; though I don’t pretend that even with Deering to point the way I penetrated far into Rome or the world either. After all his offers to induct and indoctrinate me, nothing came of them to speak of; I saw not a sign of rawness or redness, that I can remember—so I suppose I must conclude that the heart of life escaped me still. But even the fringes of life, if that is all they were, seemed strange and memorable in Rome; nobody who lived in Rome, nobody who breathed the golden air as a matter of course, nobody who trod the sacred soil as an everyday affair, could be less than a wonder to a rather lean young northern soul, whose lodging in the Piazza di Spagna had only been hired by the month. The spring days were endless, but they flashed away faster than I could count; presently they would all be gone, and I should have to leave Rome to the few free happy creatures, such as Deering, who could stay because they liked it, stay in Paradise because they happened to prefer it—I should think they might! As Deering and I, arm in arm, left the square and the babbling fountain, I was quite overcome by my jealousy of his detachment from cares and ties, from the stupid thrums of responsibility that so soon drag most of us away from the Rome of our desire.
“So here you are living in Rome,” I said dejectedly, “with nothing to prevent you from staying for ever.” Deering was his own master, I knew, and he sedulously cultivated a frosty indifference to any claims at home, such as they were, that might have hampered him. I didn’t exactly admire his ruthless way, but I certainly envied it. I should like to have had that faculty of ignoring, blankly and serenely, what I chose to ignore; it would have been a great convenience. All I needed was a little of Deering’s real independence of opinion; for I can’t think I was embarrassed by many good warm qualities of heart and temper. Deering was no unkinder than I, only bolder, more secure in his power to stand alone. And then he had another immense advantage; he could always be sympathetically impressed by his own performance, he was an excellent audience of himself. “Living in Rome?” he echoed—“you don’t know me! I shall take to the road again before long. But you’re not tormented, as I am, by the gypsy in the blood. There are times when I envy the like of you, the decent, the home-keeping——” He broke off with a sigh—a sigh in which I could almost hear the involuntary murmur of applause. Yes, the gypsy in the blood was a good stroke, and I think a new one.
WHEN we presently swung open the plate-glass door of the café that had done so much for Deering, he was manifestly anxious—suppose that just on this afternoon it should fail of its effect! For his sake as well as for my own I hoped we should find reality there as usual. He glanced searchingly among the tables, most of which were crowded about by hot and talkative men; there was a tremendous rattle of conversation in all parts of the big pillared saloon. He paused for a moment, and then he nodded with relief in the direction of a distant corner; he twisted his way there between the tables, I followed him, and we found a gap upon a plush seat, under a huge mirror painted with sprays of climbing water-lilies. We squeezed ourselves into the vacant space with polite apologies, and Deering immediately introduced me to a young man who sat facing us, a big young man with a low collar and a straw hat much too small for him. Deering mentioned his name, “Mr. Bannock,” and Mr. Bannock extended a large hand and said he was happy to meet me.
He was a young and rather common American; he smiled upon me with a wide mouthful of teeth and said he was pleased to make my acquaintance. I began to respond as I could, but he interrupted me to say that he was glad to know a friend of “our friend Mr. Deering.” I began again, but he broke in to observe that our friend Mr. Deering was a lovely man. I rejoined that Deering was quite the loveliest of—— “And I can tell you something about him that you may not know,” said Mr. Bannock, spreading his palm at Deering as though he were showing off a picture; “our friend Mr. Deeringis not only a lovely man, he is a great artist—and I go further, I say that Mr. Deering possesses the most remarkable understanding of, and sympathy with, the mentality of the artist that it has ever been my lot to encounter. And when I assert that even an old friend of Mr. Deering like yourself may be ignorant of that side of his character, I am thinking of that positively damnable modesty of his, which has prevented him, which alwayswillprevent him——” But I can’t do justice to the turn of the periods of Mr. Bannock, which coiled around and around me like an anaconda, slowly deadening my attention. Between the limber muscularity of his phrases and the glittering crescent of his teeth I was numbed and fascinated. He continued to address me as an old but not a very perceptive friend of Deering’s, and I felt like a wisp in his firm clasp.
From Deering’s character he passed to the mentality of the artist in general; “mentality” was a word to which he returned rather often, and I think it must have been a new word in those days, for I have always associated it peculiarly with Mr. Bannock. He sketched some of the characteristics of the artist—“the artist as I see him,” he said; he mentioned that possibly pride, “hard clean masculine pride,” was his dominant quality. The lecture proceeded, Deering and I sat dumb before the speaker. Mr. Bannock had a gesture to match his phrase; he scooped the air with his broad palms, he sawed it with the edge of his hand, he riddled it with his outspread fingers. His arms were perpetually in movement from the shoulder; they withdrew to his side, they unfolded, length upon length, to ram home the strongest points of his discourse. It was the professional skill of his gesticulation, neither awkward nor yet spontaneous,that presently gave me a clue to Mr. Bannock; or perhaps it was not only this, but something in his talk about “the artist—the artist who aims at a certain poignancy of beauty—a beauty thatstabs”; anyhow I soon connected him with the stage, and I wondered how a large-faced young American, with a strange brassy accent in his speech, should find his occupation on the stage of Rome. Deering, when the coils of oratory happened to loosen for a moment, enlightened me.
Mr. Bannock, it appeared, sang at the opera; Deering said so, and Mr. Bannock gave a loud trumpet-snort of laughter at the words. “Sing? Come, Mr. Deering, tell your friend another!” The snort expressed derisive irony, I gathered. “I sing, oh I sing superbly—sometimes! You can come and hear me at the opera ’most any evening—now and then! I shall be singing there this very night—next year!” He was bitter, he was wounded by some thought in his mind; his elbow was on the table, his chin on his hand, a sneer upon the expanse of his face. I didn’t clearly understand, but Deering seemed to have made agaffe, and I felt awkward for half a minute. But it was all right; Mr. Bannock was exalted by a grievance of which Deering had reminded him. He rose to it with melancholy passion. I didn’t like to question him, and for some time he was enigmatic, darkly ejaculating; but then he addressed himself directly to me. He said that I might like to hear a story—it chanced to behisstory, but that didn’t matter; it would interest me as the story of an artist,anyartist in these days. He was engaged, he said, in an operatic company, here in Rome, which had bound itself by many solemn promises; he was to have the singing of several parts, small parts indeed, butparts in which some people had thought him—well, satisfactory. He wouldn’t have me rely onhisword for it—he should like me to look at a paragraph or two that had appeared in the press at home; he produced an immense pocket-book and began to hand me papers, explaining that he didn’t do so from conceit, but simply that I might see how matters stood. This company in Rome had engaged him, and it was a fact, account for it as I might, that the seven operas in which he was to have sung were never produced, were withdrawn whenever they were announced, though he had good reason to know that the public were asking for them. The company preferred to go forcing on the public a couple of ancient pieces, played invariably to an empty house; and why did they so prefer? He could tell me a story aboutthat, and about the woman who squalled the chief part in the blamed old things. How often had he himself appeared in a month, did I suppose? Would I guess? Twice—in what happened to be the two poorest parts of his repertory. Well, he had told me the story for a curious illustration of the treatment of art in these places; as a friend of Mr. Deering’s I was interested, for sure, in anything that touched the artist, and the artist, poor devil, is a man whofeelswhen he is touched.
Yes, he feels—life cuts and hurts him; but then the leading strain in his character, you remember, is his pride. “Hard clean—” but Mr. Bannock bethought himself to vary the phrase this time; the pride of the man was now stark, stern, steel-true. His pride was becoming more and more alliterative when I happened to glance at Deering, who was silently occupied with a tiny glass of some vivid pink liquor. From the shapeless face and cheap hat and dirty collar of Mr. Bannock I looked round at Deering beside me, and I received a singular shock. Deering bent over his pink potion with a languid air, cultivating his flower-frailty much as usual; but I saw him in a new light, and he appeared to me fresh and fine, wearing a peculiar wholesome difference in the clack and racket of the marble saloon. We were allies, after all; my sense of our partnership gushed suddenly warm behind my eyes. Didn’t he make the aggrieved young barytone look dingy?—and I turned back to Mr. Bannock with a perception quickened for an accent in his manner, for a tone in his sonority, which I began to observe more intelligently. I thought I saw that Mr. Bannock was a little shy of Deering, a little impressed, like me, by his freshness and fineness.
But another young man had sidled his way towards us through the close-ranked tables, and both my companions hailed him freely and drew him into our party. This was a quick-eyed youth, slender and shabby; he greeted us with a word or two jerked out of him briefly as he sat down, and then he saw that I was a stranger and bounced upon his feet to shake hands with me across the table. “Mr. Jaffrey,” said Deering, introducing him, “but you may call him Jaff.” I liked the look of Jaff—he seemed very simple and bashful. Deering summoned a waiter and gave an order; he treated Jaff as his own property, with a peremptory kindness that sat well on him. “You shall drink what I choose to give you,” he said, meeting Jaff’s expostulation. Jaff was English—as English as Peckham Rye; and I began to think he might be a poet, when Deering told me that he danced—danced at the “Eden” or the “Wintergarden” or some such place, which I took to be a gaudy setting for a youth so gently coloured as this. He was exhausted, tired to death; he drank off the draught that Deering had prescribed, he sank back in his chair and sighed; and then he brightened up with a stammer of apology and leaned forward to take his part in our circle. Deering contemplated him pleasantly, and mentioned that a dancer’s was a violent life. “I believe you,” said the young man, with a sudden hard emphasis of disgust.
He then began to talk at a great rate; he poured out his tale in a flood, twitching his head, snapping his eyes at us all in turn. Peckham Rye sounded more and more clearly in his voice, which ran up in nervous squeaks as his story culminated; his broken and bungled phrases were extremely unlike Mr. Bannock’s. Mr. Bannock, by the way, seemed also inclined to be indulgent and protective towards Jaff. “We all spoil him,” Mr. Bannock remarked to me, patting Jaff on the shoulder. But Jaff didn’t notice him particularly, or me either; as his story grew shriller and more urgent it was directed especially at Deering, with questions and appeals to him which Deering nodded a sympathetic reply to now and then. Rather a spoilt child, perhaps—but I liked the young dancer, and his story soon touched my own sympathy too. He was tired and hungry and discouraged under his eager friendliness; he seemed to have been strained too tight by a life of ill luck. And then, as he talked on, there appeared a sad little vein of ugliness in his candour; his eagerness was streaked with bits of cruelty and cunning which he looked too simple, too slight and light, to have imagined for himself. His story, I dare say, didn’t greatly differ from the resentful Bannock’s; it was all about the lying, cheating, swindling, bullying which reigned in the high places of the “Olympia” or the “Trianon.” But Jaff was not so much resentful as tired and bewildered; and he couldn’t meet the assault of life with any massive conceit of himself, only with his poor little undigested fragments of bleak experience.
Were these two, I wondered, fair examples of the bright company which Deering had described? In that case it was less Roman and more Anglo-Saxon than I had supposed, but certainly they drew the eye to a background of life in Rome that was strange to me. The romance of Rome didn’t count for much in the agitation of these two young aliens; they hadn’t noticed that the city differed from another, except in the harshness of its behaviour to a stranger. Here at once, then, was a pair of settlers in Rome who trod the seven hills as though they were dust of the common world. Bannock and Jaff hadn’t lived in books, and they might just as well have lived in Buffalo or Wolverhampton for any gold they breathed in the Roman air. In twenty minutes Deering had brought me a thousand miles from the Fountain of the Tortoises, quietly dribbling its poetic prattle in the shadow of ancient splendour. Life in the Via Nazionale had a harder edge to it, no doubt—and I saw in a moment that life in the Via Nazionalewasthe real thing, in a kind of a sense, for in truth it was much nearer to Rome of the Caesars than I had ever been before, in all my meditations by quiet fountains. Consider, imagine that you were suddenly dropped into the heart of imperial Rome, with a friend to conduct you, Horace or Martial, as Deering had conducted me—would you presently find yourself romancing among old ruins in the sunset? No, you would be sitting among acrowd in a new-gilded saloon, your elbows on a marble-topped table, and it is more than likely you might be listening to a tale of grievance and indignation from a couple of alien mountebanks, lately arrived in Rome and already wishing themselves back in their own Iberia or Pannonia. Taken in this way by an intelligent imagination, Via Nazionale would prove a profounder romance than the Palatine Hill at shut of an April evening.
There I was, you see, back again in my literary yearnings! It seemed impossible for me to take life plainly; Ihadto dress it up somehow in romantic rags. I could feel the needle-point of Deering’s irony, if I should tell him what I was already making of our session under the painted mirror. “Can’t youlive—isn’t life enough for you?”—he would blandly smile the question at me, fingering the tiny slender cigarette that he lit after swallowing his potion. I didn’t tell him, so I hadn’t to meet the question; but I really might have asked, if it came to that, whether Bannock and Jaff, taken plainly, furnished life enough forhim. Of course they were only an instalment—we should see more in good time. But meanwhile they abounded, the two of them, in their exceedingly diverse styles; they appeared intent on providing our friend (me they had quite forgotten) with as much of the material of their distresses as they could squeeze into the hour. They got considerably in each other’s way; each wanted the ear of Deering to himself, but I noticed that Mr. Bannock, for all the power of his winding coils, had by no means the best of it with Jaff’s more nimble and headlong dash. Jaff, moreover, was favoured by Deering,and the pat of Mr. Bannock’s hand on Jaff’s shoulder grew sharp and impatient. “Yes, yes, my dear man,” he said, “we all have our little troubles—but I want to lay a case before you, Mr. Deering, and I don’t want you should necessurrily think of it asmine, though mine it be. I take the larger ground, and I ask you, Mr. Deering, to follow me in proclaiming to God’s firmament that the tragedy of the artist, poor devil, is a tragedy of five lawng——”
Indeed, indeed Mr. Bannock was impressed by Deering; he admired my Deering’s fine white hand and expensive black suit. HecourtedDeering—I could see it in the bend of his attention, I could hear it in the respectful catch of his voice, when he listened and replied to some interpolation of Deering’s in the midst of the long long tragedy. “Allow me to say, Mr. Deering, that that is an exceedingly true observation.” And as for Deering himself, though he found the style of the young barytone oppressive, he was evidently drawing a trifle of satisfaction from his homage. And more and more I was impressed myself by the charm of Deering’s graceful and well-appointed superiority over his companions, over the scuffles and squabbles out of which the poor young mountebanks appealed to him. I began to measure the distance between the stage of the Trianon—where Jaff had been prancing through long hours of rehearsal, so I gathered, bawled at all the time by “that old beast Levissohn”—between Jaff’s Trianon and the Botticelli picture in which Deering lived aloof. Bannock and Jaff, they were attracted to the elegant leisure of the picture, and no wonder. There weren’t many Botticellis intheirworld; it was to their creditthat they made the most of one when they had the chance. And Deering, though the dancer was shrill and the singer ponderous, did most evidently appreciate their act of homage.
I was caught by a word of Jaff’s (he had managed to burst into the long tragedy of the artist), something he said about expecting presently to see “Edna—my sweetheart, you know.” He threw it out carelessly, and I was struck by the casual felicity of his calling Edna his “sweetheart”—pleasing old word! Edna was to join us immediately; she had been detained at the Trianon (where she performed with Jaff) by “poor Madam Dowdeswell,” who had been having a rare scrap with Levissohn, the beast. Edna would turn up in a minute, and I was picturing Jaff’s sweetheart becomingly when he spoilt the effect of the word by using it again—he said that Levissohn had got a new sweetheart now, a fool of a Russian girl, and the prettiness went out of the word as I perceived that it was technical, prescriptive, not a chance flourish. Too sugared in its archaism for the cultured, it lived vulgarly in the speech of Jaff and his circle—I noticed the oddity and disliked it. But I looked with interest on Edna when she did presently appear, slipping through the crowded room towards us like a lithe little fish. Jaff gathered her in and handed her to our table with agreeable authority; they made an appealing pair together, so childish and so English, and I could have wished to snatch them up and carry them off, away from Madam Dowdeswell and Levissohn, it I had known at all where else to put them. Edna was small and restless, a scrap of bright quicksilver; she slid into the talk of our table with a shimmer of playfulness, infantile nonsense and cajolery that refreshed us; herthin cockney freedom danced over us all. She scrambled on to the plush seat by Deering and flung an arm confidentially round his neck.
I never saw Jaff and Edna perform their turn at the Trianon, indeed I never saw them again; I don’t know what became of them or whether they managed to get what I soon found they ardently desired. They disappeared into the void, so far as I was concerned, and all I can do for them is to breathe a far-away blessing on their pretty young heads—young no longer now, wherever they are. Their ambition at that time, as I soon discovered when Edna began to talk seriously to Deering, was by hook or by crook to reach America; they were going to have such brilliant times, such dashing successes, if once they could get clear away from this old rotten Europe. “Darling sweeting Deering,” said Edna—she crooned, and this was when she began to be really serious, mellifluously in Deering’s ear; “youdolove us, don’t you?” She coaxed, she blandished him discreetly; and even as she piped her childishness in her weak cockney vowel-tones she looked forlorn and wan after all, a child over-tired and not far from tears. Poor thin-armed Edna, she knew what she wanted and she wasted no time over laments and grievances. “Deering dear,” she said, “ifyou love us, I’ll tell you a secret—you’re a duck, and I’ve always said so.” Deering gleamed at her sarcastically, and she shot out a lively grimace, an imitation of his look, with a good deal of humour. “And so, ducky Deering,asyou love us, I’ll tell you another.” But she didn’t—she dropped suddenly grave and wistful, and sat silent. I remember that quick shine of gravity through her play, and I hope more than ever that she and Jaff have found theirfortune, wherever it may have awaited them, and enjoyed it.
Nobody else came to join us; but these three were enough to give me a picture that abides with me, a picture in which Rome becomes a place of less account than Wolverhampton, and a picture in which our good Deering becomes, so strangely, a personage of weight and worth, a pillar of the world. For you see what he stood for, what he was turned into, when he entered his new Bohemia of the Via Nazionale, the unromantic Bohemia which may remind me of imperial Rome, but certainly not of the Rome of poor dear Hawthorne. Deering, seated between Bannock and Jaff, fluttered over by pretty Edna, was changed into a man of substance, a man to whom the struggling Bohemian stretched an appealing hand; for Deering had his own firm ground above them—and he might step down into their midst on a fine afternoon, but he could always get back again, if he would, for a comfortable evening out of reach of the mountebanks. Did I see them drawn by the charm of his elegance, the grace of his fair hand as he toyed with his rose-tipped cigarette? Oh they felt it, no doubt, but they felt it for the mark of his security in the great free expensive world; if Deering could trifle so daintily with his pleasure it was because he commanded such resources—such a power of connexions, of ramifying alliances, and of sound money too, mark you, as like as not. I thought I understood very well. Not every day did Bannock or Jaff or Edna meet with a Deering, school and college style, Cambridge and Oxford bred, the real right thing—not every day, at least in the wilderness of Rome, and never and nowhere at all, perhaps, a Deering so indulgent and a Deering ofthat exquisite insight into the mentality of the artist. Coax him and court him then, by all means—I don’t blame you.
Edna’s way was much the best, but of course she had the unfair privileges of her sex. It wasn’t only that she could pat him on the head (most discreetly, I must say) even among all those painted mirrors; but she could gush at him with her nonsense instead of orating or lamenting, and then she could drop suddenly silent and wan, lonely as a child in that chattering crowd. This last effect, it is true, was uncalculated; she didn’t invent her swift and pallid subsidence, poor Edna, or thoughtfully make use of it; but it was a part of her feminine privilege, none the less, for of the trio of mountebanks Edna, being a woman, was by far the oldest, and this last effect was the sign of her age. She looked like a child—but Bannock and Jaff, beside her,werechildren, fretful and bewildered and inexperienced; Edna was a hundred years old in comparison, and her weariness was that of a grown-up human being, far beyond the petulant fierce resentments of a child. She was a woman, she had the privilege of maturity in her power to taste the flatness and dreariness of the scuffle, while the men went on nagging and beating their heads against its injustice. And so, though her way seemed roundabout, she reached the point long before they did; with the echo of her nonsense still in the air she had caught Deering into an earnest discussion, subdued to an undertone which warned off the rest of us, and I could hear her explaining and developing her scheme, laying it before Deering in quick nervous phrases while she absently fingered the objects on the table. That was Edna’s way—and I don’t know at all what her scheme was or howshe intended that Deering should help her, but I think she achieved her purpose.
Jaff meanwhile was babbling to Bannock about the glory of America, or rather he was asking a great many questions about it and never leaving Bannock the time to unroll his answers. The barytone was properly ready to exalt his country if he were given the chance, and I noticed that the big pocket-book was again in his hand. But he was placed in a difficulty; for the pocket-book showed how America honours the artist—I caught a few words as he opened it, “By God, that country loves a Man, but sheworshipsan Artist”—and yet he was not as eager as you might have expected to return home for her delight. The young singer, he had no plan of going back again; instead he had a very clear-cut design of conquest on the stage of Europe, a design of which he managed to expose the opening section (it took us in a bound as far as Cracow, I remember); and Jaff’s urgent desire to be fed with the report of Buffalo, her sympathy and bounty, did a little embarrass the home-raised artist of that place. But Jaff was enthusiastic enough for two, for twenty; he spun to and fro in his imagination while Bannock was finding the first of his clippings; and for my part I sat and watched them, entirely forgotten by the whole party, and felt like the lady in Comus, considerably out of it.
The silver chirrup of Edna’s laughter rang forth again at last, her grave-eyed colloquy was at an end. She slipped from her place on the sofa, seized Jaff and plucked him out of our circle, kissed her hand to us all and danced him off through the crowd—and that was the last I saw of the mercurial pair. Good luck to them, I say; and I don’t withhold my blessing from thesolemn Bannock, who now evidently intended to settle down firmly tohisgrave talk with Deering, the distraction of the other young people having cleared out of his way. He would have preferred that I too should take my departure; but Deering held me back when I rose, and we sat on together, the three of us, for a very long hour. I relieved the time with more pink potions, while Bannock circled the globe through the stages of his campaign. I was numb and dumb as before; but Deering held out bravely, wagging his head with judicial comment as the story marched over kingdom and continent. One point alone I noted, one conclusion I drew; whatever it cost him, Deering occupied a position in the Via Nazionale to which he was not indifferent. He owed it to everything that he supposed himself to have shed and cast away, finally, when he put on his broad-brimmed hat and eschewed the English ghetto; he owed his position to his value (poor Deering!) as a substantial and respectable Briton. But why dwell on a painful subject? Deering had been welcomed into a society that included an opera-singer and two dancers, he was at home and on his feet there; and which of the respectable Britons at that moment strolling on the Pincio, glaring at each other and listening to the band, could imaginably say the same?
WHEN at length we tore ourselves from the embraces of Bannock, on the pavement by the tram-line, the dusk of the warm day was falling—it was nearly dinner-time. I had no wish to leave my hold of Deering, having once secured him; he would surely now take me, I suggested, to dine in some clever place where I could pursue my research and discover still more of the world. Yes, he would; and he mused a little space, debating on what new aspect of reality my eyes should next be opened. On the whole he elected for the Vatican—so he strangely said; and he explained what he meant as we descended the street, rounded its sharp twist, and struck into the shabby expanse of the Piazza di Venezia. (The great sugar-cake of the Monument of Italy, which has now smartened the piazza to the taste of Domitian and Caracalla, hadn’t in those days begun to appear; it still lurked low behind a tier of dingy hoarding.) We were to dine, said Deering, at an eating-house near the Vatican—not geographically near, but under its spiritual shadow; and by this he signified that the company which it kept was papal, very black and papal indeed—he was all for varying my experience to the utmost. What a command of variety he possessed! He could lead me from the Trianon to the Vatican in ten minutes—as free of the one as of the other, no doubt; and he smiled naughtily as he admitted that his love of observation took him into many queer places.
The Vatican, I urged, was the queerest place in the world—forhim; not that indeed I thought so in my own mind, but I knew it would please him to think so in his. I easily saw my Deering, in fact, as a frequenter of the“black,” demurely flirting with papistry, breathing the perfume of that distinction, that fine-bred aloofness which it wears with such an air. From some wonderful old saloon of the Farnese palace or the Cancelleria (how did I know about them?—from Zola, of course), with its beautiful faded hangings, with the high-backed papal throne turned to the wall under its canopy, you may look down upon the jostle of the vulgar as from nowhere else; and the most exquisite edge of your disdain will fall (Deering would particularly appreciate this) on the tourist, the hot-faced British matron, the long-toothed British spinster, bustling or trailing around in their dowdy protestantism. Obviously the very place for Deering, it seemed to me; but I quite understood that I was to be surprised and amused at finding him associated with ecclesiasticism of any sort, on any terms, even in a quaint old cook-house like that to which he had presently guided me. While we proceeded thither I delivered a sally or two on the subject of his horrible perversity—thatheof all people should have friends in the camp of the obscurantist! To have abandoned the fallen day of the Gioconda’s dream (or was it her cave?) for an American bar—that was all very well, and I had seen his point. But for Deering, the enlightened and illuminated, to be hobnobbing with priestcraft, cultivatingthatsensation—I threw up my hands in mirth and horror. Deering was thoroughly pleased.
Our cook-shop was close to the palace of the Cancelleria, and the solemnity of the vast pile hung above us in the dusk as we lingered for a minute in the square. It discouraged my raillery; one can hardly take a line of levity over the Romish persuasion in the presence of aRoman palace. The eyes of its huge face are set in a stare of grandeur, of pride, of massive obstinacy, quite unaware of the tittering insect at its feet. If a grey-haired cardinal ever looks out of one of those windows, holding aside the thread-bare folds of the damask—as he may, for all I know—he looks without disdain upon the pair of tourists, standing below, who find the page in their red handbooks and read the description of the palace aloud to each other. He looks without disdain, because utterly without comprehension; he has never so much as heard of these alien sectarians, uninvited pilgrims from the world of outer barbarism. That is my impression, and I scanned the rows and rows of the Chancery windows in the hope of discovering some worn ascetic old countenance at one of them; I should like to see a cardinal lean out to enjoy a breath of evening air after the long studies of the day. But Deering laughed at my admirable innocence—again!—and assured me that I should see no cardinals here; they lived mostly in cheap lodgings near the railway-station, and spent the day in poring over the share-list of the morning paper. He didn’t really know, I retorted; he gave me the answer that he considered good for me. “Wait then,” he said, “till you meet with a cardinal outside the pages of a book”—but I never did, nor possibly Deering either.
“Ah,” cried Deering suddenly, “Cooksey will tell you—Cooksey calls all the cardinals by their Christian names.” We were just approaching the low door of the Trattoria dell’ Oca, and a stout little man in a loud suit was entering there in front of us. “Cooksey my dear, wait for your friends,” cried Deering; and the little man faced round and greeted him with a pleasantchuckle. Cooksey was red and genial; in his bright check suit and his Panama hat he looked like the English globe-trotter of tradition—I was instantly reminded of Mr. Meagles among the Allongers and Marshongers. I can’t imagine any one more calculated, I should have said, to send Deering shuddering and faint in the opposite direction; but Deering smiled on him with all his sweetness, and we passed together into the dark entry of the Goose. A plain but distinguished Roman lady, heavily moustached, sat at a high desk inside; she bowed graciously and called a sharp word to a chinless man, evidently her husband, who dashed forth to make us welcome. Cooksey and Deering were familiar customers, and we were handed to a table in an inner room, close to the mouth of a small black recess—a cupboard containing a little old dwarf-woman, like a witch, who was stirring a copper sauce-pan on a stove, for the cupboard was the kitchen. It was a much nicer place than the gilded hall of the Via Nazionale, and an excellent meal, though slippery, was produced for us from the cupboard. As for the wine, it came from the chinless man’s own vineyard at Velletri—a rose-golden wine, a honey-sweet name.
Now for Cooksey. Deering tackled him at once on the question of the cardinals, with malicious intention; and Cooksey shook his head, chuckling, and remarked that they were a low lot, no doubt, take them for all in all. “A poor degenerate lot,” he declared—“the college has gone to pieces very badly. All exemplary lives, they tell me—and not one of them would poison a fly, let alone a guest at his own table.” Cooksey had jumped to our humour very pleasantly; he twinkled and assured me that he longed, as Deering did and I must too, tohear of scandals and dark secrets upon the backstairs of the Vatican. “But all I ever find there,” he said, “is a pail of slops—I tumbled over one this morning.” “You were on duty, were you?” asked Deering. Cooksey said yes, and he went on to explain to me (“lest you should misconceive my position”) that it wasn’t his duty to empty the slops. “That’s the duty of Monsignor Mair, and I told him so, and he answered me back very saucily indeed. I had to pursue him with a mop.” Cooksey, I learned, held an office of some kind in the papal court—“unpaid, lavishly unpaid”—which kept him in Rome for a term of months each year. “And it’s still seven weeks to the holidays,” he said, “and I’ve spent all my tin, and I daren’t ask the Holy Father to lend me any, because the last time I did so he said he’d write home and tell my people I was getting into extravagant ways.” Cooksey was delightfully gay; he assumed the humour of a school-boy and it became him well, with his red face and his jolly rotundity.
He ran along in the same strain, playing his irreverent cheer over the occupation of his day. Nothing had gone right with him, he said, since the morning; it wasn’t only the slop-pail, it had been one of his unlucky days from the start. “First of all I was late for early school,” he said; “I dashed round to church before breakfast (I always think of it as early school), and I was three minutes late, and I fell with a crash on the butter-slide which Father Jenkins had made in the middle of the nave. That’s his little way—he thinks it funny; he reckons always to catch somebody who comes running in at the last moment, and he scored heavily this morning—I hurt myself horribly. And then I couldn’t attend to my book because I was attacked by a flea, andjust as I was cracking it on the altar-step I found I had forgotten to button my braces; and while I was attending to that I jabbed my stick in the face of a savage old woman who was kneeling behind me; she gave me such a look—and the other fellows told me afterwards I must go and apologize to her, because it seems she’s a very special pet convert of Father Jenkins’s and would be sure to complain to him if she was assaulted in church—that was the way they put it. However I was comforted by one thing; just as I was leaving I heard a great bump on the floor, and Father Jenkins had tumbled on his own slide, the old silly, while he was rushing out to rag the sacristan about something; and he sat there cursing and swearing (inwardly, I will say for him), and I wanted to make a long nose at him, but I was afraid it might be forbidden in church, like spitting—not that the reverend fathers can say much aboutthat!—” Dear me, Cookseywasvolatile; he ran on more and more jovially, gathering impetus as he talked.
I wished I could have questioned Deering about him—he seemed such an odd product of the Vatican. The papal functionary was a middle-aged man; he enjoyed his dinner with much emphasis, hailing the chinless man from time to time (in fluent Italian idiom, but with a British accent that caused Deering to glance round uneasily at the other tables)—summoning the chinless man, Amerigo by name, for a word and a jest, peering into the cupboard to banter the little witch-woman with the freedom of an old admirer. “They know me, bless their hearts,” he remarked to me; “they rob me as they all rob us all, and they know I know it and we’re the best of friends. They’re all thieves together, these Romans—I tell ’em so, and they like it. Now watch—” He called to Amerigo with an air of indignation and began to accuse him—I forget how it was, but it appeared that Amerigo was in the habit of grossly over-charging him in some particular, and Cooksey was determined he would bear it no longer, so he said, striking his knife-handle on the table defiantly; and Amerigo spread his hands in voluble self-defence, earnestly contesting the charge, and Cooksey held up his fist and retorted again, and they argued the point—till Amerigo suddenly smiled across his anxious face, darting a look at me as he did so, and Cooksey lunged at him playfully in the stomach and clapped him on the shoulder. There was a burst of laughter, in which Amerigo joined industriously, complaisantly, looking again at me. Perhaps I misunderstood him, but he seemed to regard me as the audience for whom the scene had been played. He had an eye in his head.
Dismissing Amerigo, Cooksey began to examine me on my business in Rome, and I was soon able to turn his enquiries upon himself. I found that he had frequented Rome for many years, a dozen or more—“ever since a certain event took place for me,” he said; and he paused, waiting for me to ask what the event had been. He waited so explicitly that I felt no delicacy; I put the question. “Oh, theevent,” he said; “the event was simply that I happened to become a Catholic.” He was grave for an instant, apparently implying that my question was not in the best of taste; but he overlooked it and passed on. He offered to do me the honours of Rome, the kind of Rome I probably hadn’t discovered for myself; and I nearly exclaimed that Deering was doing exactly that for me at the moment—Cooksey was the kind of Rome, or one of the kinds, that had beenhidden from me till to-day. But all I said was something suitably grateful, and he announced that he should take me in hand. “You’ll find I keep very low company,” he observed, “monks and Jesuits and such. My respectable English friends refuse to meet me when they come to Rome. They think it disreputable of me to know so many priests. But if you’re not afraid I’ll show you a few; rum old devils they are, some of them—it’s all right, I call them so to their faces. We’re none of us shy of a little plain speaking; you should hear Cardinal ——” the name of the plain-spoken cardinal escapes me; but Cooksey had plenty to say of him, dwelling with relish on the liberal speech of his eminence. Then he slanted off into anecdotes, stories and scenes of clerical life, in a funny little vein of frivolity and profanity that seemed by several sizes too small for him, so stout and red and comfortable as he sat there. He absorbed his dinner with a loud smacking satisfaction, and he told stories of which the roguery consisted in talking very familiarly of saints, of miracles, of the furniture of churches. “But I shock you,” he remarked to me at length, enquiringly.
Did Cooksey shock me? Oh yes, he was sure of it, and he explained why he was sure. “We all strike you as profane,” said he; his “we” stood for those of his persuasion, that which I think of as the “Romish.” He himself, he said, would have been frightened to death by such talk in old days; he had been taught (like me, no doubt) that it was “beastly bad form” to be simple and jolly in these matters. “We aren’t solemn, I confess,” he proceeded; “we’re cheerful because we aren’t nervous, and we aren’t nervous because we happen to feel pretty sure of our ground. Now in old days I wasas solemn as eight archbishops.” But he pulled himself up. “I apologize, I apologize (the second time to-day!—but you’ll be kinder than that old cat of Father J.’s). I’ll try to behave with proper decorum—a great fat rascal like me! You wouldn’t think I was born in the diocese of Bath and Wells. When I go back there now I feel like a naughty boy in a sailor suit; Ican’tremember that I’m a damnable heretic whom the dean and chapter ought to burn out of hand.” So Cooksey settled that he was shocking, and the thought seemed to make him more comfortable and expansive than ever. But with some notion of attesting my own liberalism I then ventured on an anecdote myself, a tale of a man who had prayed to a miracle-working image, somewhere in Rome, and had been embarrassed by the shower of wonders that had thereafter befallen him. It is quite a good story, the point being that each of the miracles wrought was slightly off the mark, not exactly what the man had asked for, and the humour appearing in the detail of the saint’s misapprehension—he means so well, his mistakes are all so natural. I told it brightly and candidly.