Chapter I: Fontana Delle Tartarughe

I found 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 and my 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_--!” He _did_ look experienced, with his broad-brimmed hat and his neat black clothes, as I moved towards 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 in _my_ repertory; 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 knows what, 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. Moreover _my_ lodging, which I had thought so knowingly 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. Deering _lived_ in 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 Latin _civiltà_. 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, and he 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 who _are_ the 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 the _real_ Rome, 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 the ghetto 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 you _call_ the 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 of _that_ kind 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 the _vie de Bohème_ was 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 his sweet 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 and a 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. Deering talked 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 of literature 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 and directed 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.