Chapter X: Via Sistina

Miss Gilpin, before she fled, had duly taken the measure of the awkward young Englishman; a probing question or two had given her all the insight she required. And the consequence was that a very little later, when she happened to be spending a day or two with some friends in Rome, I was summoned to present myself at their apartment in the Via Sistina. I had an idea that this was decidedly an upward step for me. Miss Gilpin’s level, as I understood it, was a higher than I had touched as yet, and I set off in response to this call from the Via Sistina with some complacency. It was only a few days ago, after all, that I had drifted to the Fountain of the Tortoises in the condition of a mere romantic waif, knowing nobody, knowing nothing of the true life of the real Rome; and now the shut doors were opening, I had passed within, I had my own Roman circle like Deering himself. I watched a British family-party issuing from their hotel in the Piazza di Spagna for the sight-seeing of the afternoon--I watched them with amused supremacy. They whispered to each other, noticing me, that I was evidently an old hand, a familiar resident; or if they didn’t I whispered for them--and so sympathetically that I was quite flattered by the respectful envy of their tone. The next moment I was face to face with Deering himself; he was being besieged, as it chanced, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, by those dreadful little boys in velvet breeches and matted curls of whom we had spoken the other day.

He was vexed that I should see him at this disadvantage. The little beasts, they were treating him as they treat the common tourist; they hadn’t noticed the extreme Romanism of his hat. Deering vilified them most idiomatically, but they had no sense of style. The right way with violent children is more universal, I think; it applies to them all and everywhere, if you have the command of it; but Deering was singularly helpless, and the children bothered and clung to him, recognizing their prey. When at last he had beaten them off he was greatly ruffled, and he snapped at me rather pettishly, demanding to know where I came from and was going. That was easily explained; but how could I account for the presence of Deering on the Spanish Steps, in the thick of the rabble of the English ghetto? We mounted the splendid flight, evading a courteous gentleman who merely wanted us to look, for he said so, at a remarkable collection of mosaic jewelry which he happened to be carrying in a cabinet under his arm; Deering winced at his approach and answered me with raised voice in Italian. His pretty hands danced before him in the urgency of his surprise, his amusement, at finding himself in these haunts of the simple Briton; it took him back, he said, to the days of his innocence; and it flashed upon me that Deering had now turned yet another corner of his emancipation--the newest and latest perversity, perhaps, was to throw over the marble halls of the Via Nazionale and to come round again to the tea-room of the English old maids at this end of the town. The rate at which Deering refines upon refinement is bewildering to a plain man. But no, Deering hadn’t pursued his culture to this point as yet, though no doubt he would arrive there in time; it was just an accident that had led him into the neighbourhood of the tea-room this afternoon.

And a lucky accident too--for I was pleased to tell Deering how I had followed the thread which he had placed in my hand the other day. “My poor friend,” he said, “how you have bungled it! Is it to this that I have brought you?” He warned me that I had missed my opportunity, he wasn’t responsible for my floundering plunges. Yet he bade me proceed, and he should look on from a distance and mark the progress of my madness. “Return to me,” he said, “when you recover your senses.” Madness, he plainly indicated, lay in the direction of Miss Gilpin and the Via Sistina; the coils of the friends of Miss Gilpin, once they have caught an imprudent explorer, effectually destroy his chances of attaining to--well, to what? If Deering is going to start his old refrain about the “real Rome” I have now my answer; I have discovered this much at least, that there are many more “real Romes” than are dreamed of in his preciosity. Already a dozen people, I assured him, had opened my eyes to the reality of Rome; some said it no longer existed, some said it was a very poor affair, some said it was a secret only known to themselves; but they all had their views, and I didn’t yet feel able to discriminate finally, to determine which of them was in possession of the truth. I must go forward and hear more; and I promised to let him know when I came to a conclusion. “Go your way by all means,” said Deering, “and come and tell me when you escape.” So we left it at that, and we parted at the head of the magnificent stairway; Deering carried his swaying grace (but he _was_ developing plumply, I observed as he went) towards the gardens of the Pincio, and I turned in the other direction down the narrow switchback of the Via Sistina.

These friends of Miss Gilpin occupied a dim and constricted apartment, and they too were rather dim. They were English, they consisted of husband and wife and daughter, and they disappointed, I must own, my idea that I had ascended the scale of initiation when I reached their door. Mr. and Mrs. Clarkson, Miss Agnes Clarkson--you can’t make much of a romance out of names like these; you must take them as you find them, wan respectable gentle-mannered Britons, who had been spending the winter in the south because Mr. Clarkson has a delicate chest. They had found the winter colder than they had expected, and perhaps they had found it long. Rome is delightful, is wonderful, is full of beauty and instruction--Mrs. Clarkson, hooking comfortably at her crochet, entirely recognized this; but then so much of its beauty, and practically all its instruction, is too bitterly cold in the winter season for Mr. Clarkson’s chest; and no, they hadn’t been able to go about very much, or indeed at all, though they had enjoyed their walks upon the Pincio; and their rooms were excellent, all they could desire, but Mrs. Clarkson, as she leaned uncomplainingly against the rococo spikes and jags of her chairback, was bound to say that a hired apartment was never the same as one’s home--great indeed as is the privilege and pleasure of foreign travel. Mrs. Clarkson had on the whole no more to say, but her husband took the view that the winter was over now, and he mentioned that he was thinking out an excursion or two for them to make before they returned to England; and as for Miss Agnes Clarkson, a hollow-cheeked maiden with a suffocated voice, she really had nothing to say at all, beyond reminding us that it would soon be too hot for sight-seeing in comfort. Dimness seemed indeed to settle upon us all, and we scarcely knew what to talk of next.

But this was in the absence of Miss Gilpin, who happened to be out when I arrived. The door presently opened, and the flimsy draperies were caught aside by Miss Gilpin’s hand as she peeped into the room with a little air of coyness and archness--I don’t know why, unless because it was one of her methods of entering a room, and she thought this one as good as another. She floated in on a waft of sweetness and light, followed by a gentleman. “More company for you,” she exclaimed--“I’ve brought Mr. Bashford!” She stood aside, directing Mr. Bashford, installing him in the circle with proprietary gestures and cries; and she reached out back-handed to me as she did so, pacifying my impatience till she could give me her attention. 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. She fidgeted round the room, disturbing the thin litter of home-life which they had sprinkled over the alien bedrock of the Via Sistina--very thin and sparse it was, easily swept into a corner with a few English volumes from the circulating library. Within five minutes of the departure of the Clarksons every trace of their settlement in the south could have been obliterated; you wouldn’t have supposed that the Clarksons belonged to a conquering race. But they were grateful, it seemed, for the brightening of their dimness; if they couldn’t do much for themselves, they were glad to be taken in hand by their brilliant friend.

Their brilliant friend was aware of 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. No, her manner is brisk, sensible, downright--but I needn’t dwell upon it at this juncture, for she had no difficulty with the present young man. She made short work of me; having tamed and civilized and made me presentable within five minutes, she returned to the Clarksons and sought to create a circle of general talk. The poor Clarksons, they couldn’t be left longer in their helplessness; their charming friend must give them the support of her social ease. But Miss Gilpin really used more tact than they needed, for the Clarksons were talking away quite gaily with Mr. Bashford. They were talking about a family whom they had met last winter at Torquay, nice kind quiet people, to whom it most oddly appeared that Mr. Bashford was related. “Do you hear that, Agnes?” cried Mrs. Clarkson, “Mr. Bashford is a cousin of the Marshams.” Why, how small the world is! Agnes had seen a great deal of the Marshams at Torquay, and it was worth while having come to Rome, she seemed to imply, for the unexpected chance of talking about them to a friend and a cousin. “Have you heard from them lately?” she asked--it might have been the first question she had asked in Rome with a sincere interest in the answer. Miss Gilpin even spoilt things a little by her intervention; Mrs. Clarkson had dropped her crochet to tell Mr. Bashford about a drive she had taken with Mrs. Marsham last winter, but the story faltered and the hooking was resumed before the competent sweep of Miss Gilpin’s tact. She was so brilliant that it became rather dull and dowdy to talk about the Marshams.

Mr. Bashford, however, was not to be discouraged; he chanced to have received a letter quite recently from his cousins, and he was anxious to tell Miss Agnes that they had this year selected Bournemouth for their winter retreat, and had there been enjoying the best of weather. “Do you hear that, mother?” exclaimed Miss Agnes; “the Marshams have been at Bournemouth.” The Clarksons, very remarkably, had themselves been at Bournemouth the year before last, and Mr. Bashford really envied them the experience. Mr. Bashford was not noticeable in appearance, at least upon the golf-course at Torquay; though for the streets of Rome he was perhaps too weather-bronzed, too tawny-haired, too baggy in his homespun clothing. One may well wonder how it happens that Mr. Bashford, who certainly hasn’t a delicate chest, can have strayed so far from the first green at Bournemouth in this fine spring weather. He and Mr. Clarkson are there again, it seems, as they fall into an absorbing discussion of the merits of the course--Mr. Bashford knows it well, having played many a round there a few years ago. “Now they’re off!” says Mrs. Clarkson, smiling over her hook; and she too, good soul, might be seated in her corner of the ladies’ drawing-room at the Sea View Hotel, while she tranquilly enquires of Miss Gilpin whether she isn’t badly “wanting her tea.” Mr. Bashford, in short, had made the Clarksons feel thoroughly at home; the long chill of the Roman winter was a thing of the past, they breathed the kindly and temperate air of the Marine Parade. Mr. Bashford, you may judge, was just such another poor wandering exile, driven by mischance into a region where the servants simply can’t, with the best will in the world, learn how to serve an English tea--Mrs. Clarkson protested feelingly that _she_ had done what she could to teach them, and in vain.

But no, the story of Mr. Bashford was not such as you might suppose. Later on I learned it, and I found to my surprise that this golfing gossiping puffing Englishman, with the red face and the yellow moustache, was actually _romano di Roma_ in all the conditions of his life. He had been born in Rome, he had lived all his years in Rome; he possessed by inheritance a tenement in the Piazza Navona and a farm in a valley of the Volscian hills; English weather had counted for nothing in his complexion, and to the English golf-club he had only been admitted as a holiday-making stranger from foreign parts. He was the son, I discovered, of a certain mid-Victorian amateur of the arts, an independent gentleman of some quality, who had been an early and earnest disciple of the eloquence of Ruskin. Mr. Bashford the elder had followed the teaching of his master with zeal, but not blindly--for it must be allowed that Ruskin fell away from the gracious culture of his prime into many a harsh extravagance of taste and doctrine. It was to the _true_ Ruskin that this disciple remained himself ever true: Ruskin whom one pictures, a grave and blue-eyed young man, stepping out into the early summer morning of a little Tuscan town to set up his easel in a deserted sacristy, an echoing cloister--where he will work through the long hours with piety and concentration, glorifying the beauty that a simple industrious God-fearing peasantry (if only they would bear it in mind) may always possess and impart to a man of feeling, trained among the refining influences of Gothic architecture at Oxford. I am not, if you please, describing Ruskin, but I am describing him closely as he appeared to an earnest disciple (with a delicate chest) in the sixties of the nineteenth century. This was the devotee who settled in Italy--“whether” (as he puts it in his diary) “for health’s sake or for love of St. Ursula I know not”--settled in Italy with a wife (“my entirely precious and meek-eyed Dora,” says the same document), and there became responsible for the gentleman who at this moment is observing to Mr. Clarkson that he has found it advisable to use an iron upon the fourth tee at Ilfracombe.

Ruskin and St. Ursula--Italy, my Italy--the ineffable meekness of dear old Brother Angelico: by names, by phrases of this kind I suggest the atmosphere that was about the cradle of Mr. Bashford the son. But human children, we know, have long ago brought to the highest pitch the art of self-protection; and little Bashford, I dare say, was not yet weaned when he cautiously shut the doorways of his head against the assault of his parents’ enthusiasm. It was firmly done, it was final; little Bashford proceeded to grow as he pleased into the big red middle-aged Bashford who is now before our eyes. In other circumstances he might have allowed his nature to remain more plastic, at least in the cradle; but his was a special case, an English babe exposed to culture in foreign parts. There was nothing for it but to guard himself utterly and absolutely; and I think we may say that only an English babe could have carried the affair so successfully through to the end. For forty years and more an insidious culture, reinforced by the unwholesome excitement of foreign ways, had been beating upon the skull of Mr. Bashford, and all without creating the faintest disturbance within it; secure behind its powerful sutures he had lived the life of which the accidents of his birth had conspired to deprive him. He was in no position to trifle with the danger. It is all very well for people like Deering and Cooksey to allow themselves the freedom of flirtation with the spirit of Rome; they are well grounded upon their insular training and will come to no great harm. And similarly the parents of Mr. Bashford, colonists of the first generation--they could follow the siren voices unafraid, carrying with them the probity of their English birthright. It is a very different matter for their offspring, denied the advantages which they enjoyed. He, poor lamb, thrown from the beginning upon the dubious world of all that isn’t English, must take his own deliberate precautions; and he doesn’t hesitate, he begins in time--and at forty he will meet you in the Via Sistina with the certainty that his clothes and his speech and his colour belong unmistakably to the land in which he wasn’t born.

His case, it must be owned, is more interesting than his talk. Miss Gilpin fidgeted openly and did her best to break up the alternation of leisurely anecdote into which Mr. Bashford and Mr. Clarkson had now contentedly fallen. But she had no success; she only made Mrs. Clarkson rather nervous and uneasy with her acid interjections. Dear Miss Gilpin was a little difficult in a plain household; she couldn’t understand that when the men are occupied and happy it is foolish indeed to disturb them. Mrs. Clarkson, more experienced, would willingly have let them go prosing on about their games and rubbish as long as they chose; Agnes and she could sit quiet and get on with their work. But Miss Gilpin was brilliant, and to be sure they were indebted to Miss Gilpin for her attention; Mr. Clarkson forgot his bad throat when she appeared, and had been quite annoyed with Agnes for reminding him in Miss Gilpin’s presence (though he had told her always to remind him) to put on his flannel chest-protector before going out. Such was the tissue of Mrs. Clarkson’s thought, week in and week out, during their winter in Rome; and if I seem to be interpreting my short observation of her too freely, I can only say that her mind was an open page of very simple words. But something had to be done to restrain Miss Gilpin from interrupting poor father’s favourite story of the sheep in the bunker; he had just reached the crowning point at which he broke off with a laugh and a pause before proceeding--“Believe me or not, there was the old sheep on her back in strong convulsions”--and Mrs. Clarkson positively hissed at Miss Gilpin to stop her, to detach her from the circle of the men, before she should spoil the climax with one of her tiresome clever remarks. Mrs. Clarkson, as it happened, was too late; Miss Gilpin swept the story of the sheep off the board and resolutely placed there some livelier topic of her own.

Mr. Clarkson clutched the falling fragments of his tale and was evidently ruffled; and as for the good Bashford, he stared solidly at Miss Gilpin’s challenge and made no movement to take it up. His expression, as I now watch it again, gives me the secret of his massive integrity. He looked at Miss Gilpin as I might blankly look at some diagram or equation of the higher mathematics--at something so disconnected with my being that it doesn’t even rouse my curiosity. That was how Mr. Bashford saved himself from going to pieces in the climate of Rome. If you divide the world into two parts, calling one of them “my sort” and the other “not my sort,” your position is unassailable; in the first case you needn’t question what you know already, in the second it is no concern of yours. Mr. Bashford had been able to remain true to himself through a lifetime so unnaturally Roman because anything that wasn’t “his sort” was a problem, as you might say, in the differential calculus. See him, then, regarding in that light the playful sallies of Miss Gilpin--a good little woman, no doubt, but not at all his sort; he has nothing to say to her, he doesn’t attempt to find anything to say to her, he merely waits. She for her part can’t bring herself to acknowledge defeat; she always thinks she may yet succeed in striking a spark out of that sleepy old Bash. “Ah, Mr. Bashford, when you look at me like that I feel as though I were indecently exposed!”--this, believe me or not, is one of her flings at his stolidity; but he takes it without the flicker of an eyelid, and he leaves it to Mr. Clarkson to find some happy retort, as daring as her attack, yet expressed in all good taste. Mrs. Clarkson, glancing up, noted that that clever little woman had certainly a way with her; poor dear father had already forgotten that she had spoilt his story.

When at length I said good-bye to the Clarksons I didn’t tell them that they had given me a new experience. It was the first hour I had spent in Rome of which I might truthfully say that I had spent it in the Sea View Hotel. In the heart of Rome our little group had gathered and talked; but with Rome all about us, jangling its bells and calling its street-cries, we had sat secluded upon a few square feet of our native soil. And did I say that the Clarkson family seemed to have entered a strange land with no conquering mien? That was a superficial judgment; for what have the Clarksons done but to change their patch of the Via Sistina into English ground?--and that so easily, so instinctively, that they are quite unaware of their own prepotency. No need for them to create their colony with laborious arts; Mr. Clarkson spreads his game of patience on the table, his wife winds her wool over a chair-back, his daughter goes out to buy a cake for tea--and the thing is achieved. True they are not as comfortable as they were at Torquay, and they miss the Marshams; but you can’t have everything, and the English chemist is very obliging, and what with the English banker and the English news-agent Mr. Clarkson can always find an object for a walk. Of course if you ask _why_ they have come to Rome, seeing that the Roman climate is far more treacherous than that of our nice mild “English Riviera”--well, certainly it is difficult to see how the Clarksons are in candour to answer the question. But it isn’t fair to expect them to grasp their motive and to put it into words--they are not used to being called upon so harshly. One goes to Rome for the winter because, if one has private means and delicate health, it is what one _does_; that is enough for the Clarksons. And next winter, when they are happily restored to Torquay, they will be able to tell the Marshams about the intensely interesting time they passed in Rome.