Percy Lubbock

“ But you can’t help a woman like Lady Mullinger to save her face; she is driven to expose her indignity, do what you will. I take it that in spite of many years of sedulous Romanism she was still beating blindly against the wall of that impregnable fortress of the “old Roman”; and just as she always hoped to entice Father Holt some day to her tea-party, so she couldn’t be reconciled to the sight of Miss Gainsborough chuckling, grandly carousing, digging Mr. Bashford in the ribs with imperious freedom—and turning her straight back upon Lady Mullinger as though she didn’t exist. ”

“ 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 Nazionale was the 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. ”

“ The loose luxuriant evening flowered around us while Berta and Teresa established their effect; and their effect stood forth, hard and high-lighted as a bit of china, quite eclipsing the lazy sprawl of sun and shadow among the trees. There was an artistic passion in their looks and tones as they wrought. The accidents of a dim old man, a dark grove and an April sunset, fell away from them, were forgotten, and in the cleared space they created a social occasion out of the slender material that we offered, Maundy and I. They found it sufficient, they set to work with lucid determination. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Oh she had read them, you may be sure, and she warmly agreed with Miss Gadge that there was nothing in their frankness which could inflame a wholesome mind. Indeed Miss Turnbull often thought that if, as a woman grown, she possessed some power of appreciating the big things, the real things, the human things, she largely owed it to her long immersion in the romances of Emmeline. There comes a time, no doubt, when we turn to life itself, to the book of the heart, rather than to an imaginary picture of it, however sincere; a mere novel then loses its hold on us and we reach out to our kind. ”

“ 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 ”

“ I had a vision of interminable sessions on that balcony, day after day, Luigi grumbling his discontent and his pity of himself in an endless acrid argument with the women, while the priest took his evening repose hard by and the young man on the further house-top blasted perseveringly upon his cornet.
How strange and sad that these people should have no more suitable stage for their dreary wrangles than a balcony swung out upon so much of the history of the world, an airy platform from which you could wave your handkerchief to the dome of St. Peter! ”

“ Champerdown, with his power and his laughter, was for the first time in Rome. With a sense of satisfaction that was queer and sweet I repaired my loss.
But wait—for before I can attend to this matter our sumptuous meal is at an end, Miss Gainsborough pushes back her chair, Emmeline pops a last large chocolate into her mouth and clutches her shawl, and we stream back in procession to the crimson and golden drawing-room. Old Martha was bearing herself valiantly, and nobody could say that she denied the barbarians the best of her splendour, though her disdain might gleam in her eye. ”

“ My trade is paint, and I stick to it. An honest tradesman before the world—that’s what an artist should make and keep himself. Before the world, mark you!—his dreams are his own affair. Ah, his dreams—!” Mr. Vickery paused, dropping his brush, and he smote his hand to his eyes and held it there in a long silence. “My God, his dreams!” he murmured. The little group of us stood in a row below him, hushed and intent. The grand old figure of the painter towered against the monument of his toil, and the light of a spacious age seemed to beat on him in the hush. ”

“ Peter like a steel-grey bubble on the sky-line. But the nearer house-roofs, crowding into the foreground, made a separate picture of their own, and I found it difficult to look beyond them. There is much oriental freedom of house-top life in Rome, on fine summer evenings; you scarcely catch a glimpse of it from the street below, but on Teresa’s balcony we were well in the midst of it. Bath-sheba wasn’t actually washing herself, but she felt safe and at ease in the sanctity of the home, lifted up to the sky, and she displayed her private life to the firmament. ”

“ The struggle of poverty was hard; but what is poverty when it is sweetened by the heart’s affections? The poor lady, Teresa’s sister, was dead these many years; she had bequeathed her husband, her two young children, to Teresa’s care. Poor Leonora had had a soul too great for her frame; the artistic inheritance in her blood would not allow her to rest. She was the daughter of an artist, and the fire had descended on her—that fire which had been withheld (perhaps mercifully, who knows?) from Teresa, the younger sister. ”

“ Mr. Vickery, taken as he stood, too freely gave away the honour of Roman romance to be revealed to Deering. With me it was safe; but that sardonic observer, I am sure, wouldn’t consent to view the old survivor as I did, as I still can, when he placed himself before the dark tapestry with the golden light streaming full upon his patriarchal nobility. For me he was the man who remembered the great days, who had roamed in the Campagna with poets, and the man in whose studio the shadows of genius were still to be seen and talked with if one loved them. ”

“ Erda was surely the most peculiar of all the Roman pilgrims I encountered; she had come to Rome because it is big and bare—and yet not inane, not dumb to reverberating echoes, like the mere virginal monstrosity of untrodden lands. The echoes of the great saloon were innumerable; old festivities, old revelries creaked and croaked in it above a droning and moaning undertone in which I could distinguish, with a very little encouragement, the most awful voices of lust and hate and pride. ”

“ It takes more than three days, it takes a lifetime and a lineage, to teach you the true cackle of scorn, the thin unmistakable pipe of irony, which you may hear and salute upon the lips of Cooksey and of Deering. They are the sons of the dear old country, and I should recognize their accent anywhere; Berta and Teresa, if they live for ever, if they live till the reign of the next English pope, will never acquire it. ”

“ Miss Gilpin was now free to encourage the shy young man she had run across at Castel Gandolfo; she beckoned him into a corner and soon put him at his ease. Miss Gilpin is known for her cleverness in drawing out shy young men and winning their confidence; it is an art that perhaps you don’t usually associate with little literary ladies of a certain age, and that is just what makes it so pretty and so clever in Miss Gilpin. She does it with all the naturalness in the world—you mustn’t imagine that she makes a foolish affectation of youth, of playfulness, or that she vulgarly uses her charm. ”

“ 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.{22}
“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. ”

“ Even after long years it might make us both uncomfortably flush to recall the sound of our voices as we plied one another with the well-known strokes—for they are all well-known, the possibilities of the game have been ransacked a thousand times over. Not one of us all, I suppose, ever really deceived another; and yet we are unable to talk with candour and freedom—and Miss Gadge is by no means a spiritless talker—until we have paid our debt to the devouring snobbery which overtakes us in Rome. ”

“ A few idlers were sprawling out there in the shade, easy-going children of the generation that Miss Gainsborough had chastised and warned; but it was impossible to think that a single knee would tremble if she were to appear at the window and speak her mind. The world couldn’t touch her—but then the world has no will to touch her; these Roman idlers stretch their limbs in the softness of the year, smiling good-naturedly when she orders them to instant execution.
It is too true—her vigour is wasted upon Rome. She may bully Lady Mullinger ”

“ When at length old Martha felt entitled to put us to flight I was careful to find myself descending the great staircase at the side of Mr. Champerdown. We issued forth together into the silence of the Corso—Miss Gainsborough’s portal was at the silent end of the long straight highway—and he serenely accepted my company. He pointed the way towards the Place of the People, hard by, and we walked out into the middle of the broad empty square. A night of May, a night of Rome—and moreover a night of full moonshine: the beauty of the night was too great to be praised. ”

“ She looked like a child—but Bannock and Jaff, beside her, were children, 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. ”

“ If the world had been created and hurled upon its path to enjoy a single day, one only, before dropping again into chaos, this might have been that day itself—and quite enough to justify the labour of creation. But in Rome that labour is justified so often, between the dusk and the dusk, that the children of Rome have the habit of the marvel; so I judge, at least, by Teresa and Berta, who occupied most of the time of our small journey in wondering why they had forgotten to bring the two light wraps which they were accustomed to take with them in the country. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ The Clarkson family were roused, a faint warmth kindled their chill. “Why, father,” said Mrs. Clarkson, “you remember Mr. Bashford—he came here when Miss Gilpin was with us the last time.” “To be sure, to be sure—we are quite in society when Miss Gilpin is with us!”—and Mr. Clarkson amiably bestirred himself to meet the incursion of the world. Agnes swept her mother’s work-basket out of a chair, her father’s patience-cards off the table; she ministered as she could, but society seemed to disregard her. ”