Chapter VI: Villa Borghese

We had planned nothing more enterprising than a stroll in the Villa Borghese; and we wandered freely in the ilex-shade, we inspected the children at play in the grass, we stood awhile to watch the young Roman athletes smiting the ball in their ancestral game, we took another turn beneath the magnificent umbrellas of the pines, we lingered for the finish of a bicycle-race in the great Greek stadium; and I don’t deny that we loitered and strolled and looked for something else to watch because we found it difficult to make an excuse for separating. The fact is that we hadn’t very much to talk about after all, without Mr. Fitch between us to be dazzled. Apart from him we made no very stimulating audience for each other, and we clutched at an interest in the games and the races to cover the bare patches of our conversation.

That very small interest was cracking under the strain when there appeared a fortunate diversion. Maundy, after a pause, had said that the leading bicyclist was a splendid Roman type, which was just what _I_ had said before the pause; and he had remembered this and had hastily suggested another stroll, and I (after a pause) had observed that the park was extraordinarily classic (an earlier remark of Maundy’s); when it chanced that in a green alley we came in sight of an old gentleman seated on a bench, a battered but dignified relic of a man, who faced the prospect mildly and blankly, waiting, as it seemed, till some one should happen to pass by and sweep him up. “There’s old Rossi,” cried Maundy, and he rapidly explained that he had lodged with the old man’s family when he first came to Rome, and he was sorry, but he must stop for a minute--we both jumped at the diversion, a timely one.

We were still a little way off, and as we began to move towards the old man two women appeared, an older and a younger, bearing down upon him from the opposite direction. They were delayed for the moment, as they approached, by their own conversation, which seemed to shoot up into an argument demanding settlement before other matters could be taken in hand. We hung back, Maundy and I, and finally the old man was taken in hand, literally enough, and in a style which suggested that the argument had ended to neither lady’s satisfaction. He apparently needed a good deal of rousing and re-arranging of shawls and wraps, and I noticed that the argument showed signs of beginning again over his heedless head. At length he was brought to his feet, his stick was put in his hand, and the party prepared to set forth. Immediately the two ladies caught sight of us, recognized Maundy and raised a cry of delight. Ah, what a fortunate meeting! They had been arguing in Italian, but they now spoke a free crisp English; they greeted us with much politeness, dropping the old man as one might put down a parcel on a chair. He blinked and subsided upon his bench again, while I was introduced to the ladies--Miss Teresa Shacker (so the name reached me at least) and Miss Berta Rossi; in these terms Maundy referred to them, and they were good enough to express their extreme pleasure in making the acquaintance of his friend.

They quickly took his friend into their confidence; I learned that they were aunt and niece, sister-in-law and daughter of the speechless old bundle on the bench. Aunt and niece were very much alike. Teresa the aunt was tall and spare, with pouched white cheeks, a coil of black hair on which her headgear stood high, and long arms assertively kid-gloved and buttoned and tight. Berta the niece was white with slightly more lustre, black with a little more profusion, gloved and hatted with the same defiance. 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. Long practice had made them perfect, and the entertainment ran without a hitch. All the talking was theirs; they talked in an antiphon so glib that it must have been rehearsed--only that was impossible, since it fitted the chance of our encounter; so they talked, let me say, with the skill of the old Roman improvisers, who never hesitated for a rhyme on any subject you could set them. Half an hour later I knew a prodigious amount about Teresa and Berta, and I don’t think they knew anything at all about me.

Who were they, and what? Their English dialect, in the first place, was a study by itself. “What a pleasure,” said one of them, “to hear some English speaking!”--and immediately they explained to me that they were “mad for England,” such was their phrase, and that I must talk to them of nothing but England for their pleasure. “For we,” said Teresa, “being English maternally, love to talk our language like anything, and we are both a little wee bit cracked on the head about England”; and Berta put in that they weren’t English, not strictly, but rather Virginian--“Ah,” said Teresa, “but Virginian is most English of all, as you know so well--and you mustn’t come down on us for a couple of Yankee women, no, not at all.” “Yankee, good God!” cried out Berta, “ah no, not a bit of it; our family came of England in the beginning by origin; I ’ope you haven’t thought that we spoke as Americans, so very ogly, all in the nose!” “We are always fewrious at everybody,” said Teresa, “who will believe us American.” “But Mr. Maundy has told you about us--is it true?” asked Berta; and Teresa chimed in with the next versicle, and Berta caught her up with the response, and between them they brought out their history in much profusion of detail and folded me into their family circle with a will.

They bethought themselves of the old man on the bench and proceeded to display him. He was enrolled for the part of a benignant Œdipus, tired at the end of a long day, weighted with his knowledge of the jealousies and vindictive passions of the world, but not embittered by them, only mellowed by many hoary years of patience and fortitude. It was a fine exhibition of patriarchal and republican simplicity. He neither spoke nor moved nor seemed to hear anything that was said, but his attendant maidens gave life to the part on his behalf. The grand old man, survivor of a heroic age--had he been the inspiration of Mazzini, the counsellor of Cavour, Garibaldi’s right hand?--all three perhaps, and anyhow a flaming brand of freedom in the bad days of which we younger folk knew only the eloquent tale. To think of those terrible times of oppression, of persecution and bigotry! This patriot had given all, had sacrificed fortune and strength to the cause of Italy in her woe, when the land lay groaning beneath the yoke of tyrant and priest. But there were traitors even in the camp of enlightenment, and his feelings had suffered the cruelest laceration. His feelings were more to him than any personal hopes or ambitions, so that little need be said of the utter collapse of these also. He had withdrawn from the struggle, had married a wife who was all sympathy, and had passed into a profound retirement. 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.

Out it all came in a cataract. I kept my head as well as I could, and I glanced with respectful admiration at the bundle of shawls that had borne these historic shocks. But the ladies let him drop once more, having played out his part for him; and they launched into a strophe of which the burden was Leonora, poor Leonora with the fever of art in her veins, and yet so human, a true woman, proud to devote herself to the task of binding the wounds of a hero. Maundy--where was Maundy all this time? He was fidgeting restlessly on the edge of our group, and I judge that the tale of the hero and his bride wasn’t new to him; he now managed to interrupt it with a word to excuse himself, to bid us good-evening and depart. He left me in the hands of Teresa and Berta; I saw them close about me and cut me off from the chance of declaring that I too must be going on my way. Really, these women--they were like famished creatures, rejoicing in the taste of fresh blood; they hadn’t the least intention of resigning the chance. So they found they should like to walk a little further under the trees, to enjoy the evening; it occurred to them both that the evening ought to be enjoyed, for they were passionately fond, they said, of the country.

“You English are all so fond of the country,” said Teresa, “you are such lovers of sporting!” She had meant to say “we English,” but she wasn’t so awkward as to correct herself. She broke off into an ecstasy over the evening sunshine. “I adore,” she cried, “the solitude, the quiet of the country.” The spot where we happened to be pausing was not very countrified; for close to our green alley was an enclosure covered with little chairs and tables, from which there went up a volley of the brilliant chatter of Rome; but it reminded Teresa of the country days to which they always looked forward in the summer, when they went away to the mountains or to the baths. What mountains? Well, they sometimes went to Frascati--“si sta tanto tanto bene in campagna,” exclaimed Teresa without thinking, and she remembered at once that the language into which she dropped without thinking should be English, the native English in which she habitually (she made it clear that she habitually) thought and dreamt. As for the “baths,” they went occasionally to the sea; Berta was the girl for the sea--she would like to walk for miles along the shore, alone with nature, quite out of sight of everybody. “Our Italian friends think me an extraordinary gurl,” she brightly confessed, “as mad as a--as a hunter.” She had a misgiving as she produced this English idiom, but she recovered herself to pick up the next _réplique_. “We shock our Italian friends jolly well,” she said; “ra-_thur_!” The last word had an English note that quite reassured her.

But how was it that they came to be so English? Oh, they recurred again to the strophe of Leonora--who was Teresa’s sister, you understand, and Berta’s mother. Leonora and Teresa, they were daughters of the house of Shacker--I never arrived at the true form of the name, which can’t have been this; but they passed rather lightly over the strain of the Shackers, and I had only a doubtful glimpse of a Polish nobleman, an exile from an ungrateful country, who had once upon a time sought refuge in Rome, and had found in Rome a piece of good fortune in the midst of many and unmerited disasters. He had found a wife--and this was the point where Teresa flung up her hands and eyes in a mute effusion of piety for the shade invoked. In those old days, it appeared, there was a high and noble worship of art, of _true_ art, that you wouldn’t meet with anywhere now; and the proof was that a woman, a pure and splendid young sculptress from Virginia, could follow the calling of her art and carve the chaste marble in her studio, here in Rome, and be worshipped herself and respected by the chivalry of the other carvers and painters around her--oh, Teresa couldn’t express the beauty of the homage that had encircled this grand severe young figure, white as the stone she chipped, whose life was dedicated like a nun to the service of art. No man could touch her, none, save only the poor Polish outcast--one of the handsomest men of his time indeed, but now slipping on the brink of starvation and despair. Oh what a romance! The snow-white marble had taken fire; the handsome Pole became the father of Leonora and Teresa, the fair young sculptress their mother.

And so I now, about twenty minutes after our first meeting, possessed their history. Already they felt I was a friend; and Berta, who might reasonably think it was her turn to make a speech, began to hope that perhaps we might chance upon her brother--she believed he was with a party of companions in the park, not far off. Her brother? Yes, we now reached the next generation, the children of the aged patriot. They were two, Berta and Luigi; and Berta couldn’t help wishing that I and her brother might become acquainted, we had such a deal in common. Luigi, she said, was dreadfully clever; he wrote articles in a newspaper, at least he would do so if he had the chance; but a man without influence was so terribly helpless, and Luigi was so awfully proud. Teresa interposed to the effect that Luigi, like the rest of them, was indeed half a stranger in Rome, though circumstances had compelled him to be born and to live there. “Ah,” said Berta, “if only he could get on to a nice position in London--everybody is happy who goes to London, I think!” Luigi’s great distress, according to Teresa, was that in Rome he was able to meet so few nice Englishmen. “And you,” said Berta, “you are in business, yes?” They both looked at me expectantly; it was the first question they had put me, and it was followed by a close and lengthy cross-examination. I came out of it rather badly; I could give my story nothing like the brilliance of theirs, though I obediently supplied them with the details they demanded. They noted my information, but they hardly seemed to be impressed by it. Berta presently suggested that we should turn back towards the tea-garden and look for Luigi.

We discovered Luigi surrounded by a group of young companions who certainly weren’t nice Englishmen. They looked to me like decidedly second-rate Italians, but it didn’t appear that Luigi found them uncongenial. They were all lounging and talking round one of the little tables, and Luigi’s chair and his straw hat were tilted back at the same angle, and while he volubly held forth to the circle his loud black eye (he had the same plum-like eye as his sister and his aunt) was scanning and following the stream of people who passed on their evening promenade. He watched with care; Berta pointed him out to me as we approached, and she waved her parasol to summon him; but he shook his forefinger in reply without shifting his tilt or interrupting his discourse. Berta waved more urgently, and her thumb flicked out sideways in my direction as she looked at him; and Luigi then stared at me very frankly, lifted himself from his place and came forward to join us. He was a short and sturdy young man, smartly appointed, with a flashing smile that was polite, indifferent, insolent--that was anyhow very great. He paid no attention to his sister and his aunt, beyond waiting for them to pronounce an introduction. He smiled upon me and he spoke--and there was a sad drop in his style when he spoke, for his English came of a meaner strain than that of his ladies. It was not less fluent, it was more correct; but it had a vulgar flatness that wasn’t inherited from the sculptress of Virginia. He was a pretty young gentleman so long as he was silent, but he was common and dingy and commercial when he opened his mouth. I suppose he had successfully caught the intonation of the Englishmen he _had_ been able to meet in Rome.

Teresa began to recount with vivacity the story of our acquaintance. Luigi listened to her for a moment and then murmured a few quick words of Italian, I don’t know what they were, before which poor Teresa seemed to drop like a stone. He had cut her short in the middle of a word and her mouth hung open; but she said no more, she dumbly signalled to Berta, and two anxious women stood waiting before Luigi for their orders. He turned away from them and they understood; they spoke up bravely, reminded me (or told me) that I had promised to take tea with them on the following day, and declared that they must now hasten back to convey their old man home. They hurried away, and Luigi immediately displayed his smile again, suggesting that I should walk with him. His young friends appeared to hail him, to invite us both into their party; but he denied them without a glance, with the same slight shake of his forefinger, talking to me and drawing me off as he did so. He talked familiarly; he asked no questions, and at first he was chiefly concerned to explain to me the great disadvantage at which a gentleman almost necessarily finds himself in Rome. It is all very well if you are rich; but if you aren’t, and if you happen to be a gentleman, why then Luigi thought there was no place in the world where you were so rottenly situated as in Rome. Roman society is utterly snobbish, and a gentleman doesn’t care to push among people who think themselves too good for him; and the company of a lot of bounders is unpleasant to a gentleman, and Luigi could assure me that it was a treat for him to shake hands with a gentleman, and not only a gentleman, mind you, but a man of the world, the right sort. He was pleased to imply that I was the right sort, and he cordially took my arm.

Luigi was odious. With a gush of memory from across the years it returns to me, the odiousness of Luigi. There was a touch of gallantry about Teresa and Berta, a swing of bravery in their pretensions--and a real impulse of unselfishness, poor creatures, in their care and respect for this vulgar youth. He was their pride, the object of their disinterested ambition; they took thought for him and used their simple arts on his behalf; and Luigi repaid them by spending an hour in implying to me that his family were an unfortunate drag upon a spirited gentleman. I soon understood that I wasn’t to judge him by the dreadful commonness of his womankind; he was in the unlucky possession of a rarer refinement, a loftier pride, a diviner discontent than the rest of his house; and yet here he was, tied and handicapped, as I could see for myself, by a family incapable of profiting by his example. We took incidentally a brief glance at the loyalty with which he stuck to them, admitting the claim on him of two foolish women and a helpless old man, however unworthy; that was the kind of good fellow he was--too faithful and dutiful, perhaps, to do justice to the power that was in him. But though it was splendid of him to make the sacrifice, it was also very distressing that such a remarkable nature should be sacrificed at all; so back we came to the miserable scope that this infernal old Rome has to offer to the talents of a gentleman, if he is not prepared to cringe and crawl for his opportunity. Luigi had much to say of it, and he passed an agreeable hour.

The sun burned lower, the great lordly pines were smitten with gold, the shadows crept along the green dells of the open park; and there came a moment at last when rebellion seized me, and I actually turned upon Luigi with a passionate outburst. It didn’t last long, and he took very little notice of it; he merely paused, checked the flow of his lament, and proceeded again when I held my peace. Not long ago, you remember, I had been told at considerable length that my poor old Rome was no place for an artist; and that tirade of the opera-singer now came over me, while my companion ingeminated his cry that it was a place unworthy of Luigi. The opera-singer seemed the less fatuous of the two. I can easily bear to hear the name of art re-uttered in Rome, for the thousand-millionth time, in any connexion, on any pretext. Is Rome a step-mother to the arts?--it may well be so, and very likely Rome has thought nothing of smashing an artist, carelessly, disdainfully, at all the changes of the moon since the suckling of the twins. I can imagine that it may lie in the character of Rome to be often brutal to the arts; and by all means let an artist (though not that egregious Bannock indeed, for choice) stand up and hurl out his reproach. But when Luigi, in the face of Rome, maunders on with his vulgar stuff about the feelings of a gentleman, I rebel--I say that to mention these flimsy refinements in the noble great park of the Borghese is more than my sense of fitness will endure. A gentleman!--what has Rome to do with this nonsense of gentility, tediously and querulously droning in the mouth of Luigi? No, Luigi; Rome, I believe, has had some slight acquaintance with greatness and grandeur since the twins fell out with each other, but Rome hasn’t the mind to contemplate _your_ precious distinctions. You might as well suggest to a poet of heroism, to the chanter of an immemorial saga, that he should study the manners of a tea-party in a suburban drawing-room.

My outburst took another form, however; these sentiments let it loose, but it was differently worded. Luigi only stared and waited till I had finished. I ended on the cry that seemed never to be far from my lips in those days, the cry of envy at the sight of the fortunate folk who could do their cringing, if it had to be done, in Rome. I said that I should willingly crawl the length and breadth of the city for the reward of an abiding place within the walls; I shouldn’t mind what pope or king might think of me. Luigi very naturally felt that I hadn’t quite grasped his situation. He resumed his discourse, and he began to point out to me that in my place and with my opportunities he would indeed go far. No doubt, for example, I had very influential friends. Not very? Well, only give _him_ the chance of a footing in England, an opening that would bring him into the society of gentlemen--and he developed his theme still further, guiding it, as I presently noticed, into preciser detail than before. The sun had hardly faded from the tree-tops when I learned that a person in my position, with my advantages, was just the person whose hand Luigi had long desired to shake. And what did he take my position to be, and where, pray, did he recognize its advantages? I didn’t put the question as plainly as this, for indeed I had no wish to meet Luigi when he came to detail. I clung to generalities, and I suggested that there were plenty of most ungentlemanly people in London. “I’m sure I shouldn’t think any of _your_ friends ungentlemanly,” said Luigi.

What are you to do with a youth like that? I own that I felt a little excited by the thought that somebody, were it only Luigi, should turn to me for patronage; and Luigi would certainly never discover just how much of it I had to dispense. And yet he had taken my measure fairly enough; he didn’t suppose that my own credit was very high, but I could “mention his name,” he said, in certain quarters, and he shot out a suggestion or two which showed that he had already considered the ground and was prepared. Any chance was a chance worth seizing; any simple Englishman thrown in his way might be a step on his ladder. But he was shrewd; and when he found that his hints were left lying where they fell, he turned aside to disparage his unfortunate family again--his sister, his aunt, his father, a bunch of futility that hindered a man in his effort to announce and express himself in the world. In a few words it was delicately implied that anybody who lent a hand to Luigi would never be embarrassed by Luigi’s family--the admirable youth would see to that. He was rather uneasy to think that already his women had engaged me to visit them; he knew, to be sure, that their pride and delight was to serve Luigi, but a prudent man doesn’t entrust his business to the bungling devotion of two ignorant women. With this in mind he insinuated that I needn’t trouble myself with their officious invitations; though if I cared to see something of the town under _his_ guidance, why indeed he was very much at my disposal. Rome the inexhaustible! The sacred place as Luigi saw it was quite unlike the city of Deering’s vision, or of Jaff’s, or of Cooksey’s; but he too was convinced that his was the real and only Rome, such as it was--a poor thing compared with the Strand of London.