Chapter II: Via Nazionale

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. Deering is 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 always _will_ prevent 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 that _stabs_”; 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 a _gaffe_, 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 be _his_ story, but that didn’t matter; it would interest me as the story of an artist, _any_ artist 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, but parts in which some people had thought him--well, satisfactory. He wouldn’t have me rely on _his_ word 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 about _that_, 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 who _feels_ when 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 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. 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 a crowd 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; I _had_ to 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 you _live_--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 for _him_. 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 as _mine_, 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. He _courted_ Deering--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 in _their_ world; it was to their credit that 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; her thin 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; “you _do_ love 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, “_if_ you 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, _as_ you 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 their fortune, 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 of that 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, _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. 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 how she 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 she _worships_ an 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 the solemn Bannock, who now evidently intended to settle down firmly to _his_ grave 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?