Chapter VIII: Albano

Day after day the bounty of the springtime was unfailing; and the day of our excursion to Albano began as a crystal, towered to its height in azure and gold, sank to evening over the shadowy plain in pearl and wine. If the world had been created and hurled upon its path to enjoy a single day, one only, before dropping again into chaos, this might have been that day itself--and quite enough to justify the labour of creation. But in Rome that labour is justified so often, between the dusk and the dusk, that the children of Rome have the habit of the marvel; so I judge, at least, by Teresa and Berta, who occupied most of the time of our small journey in wondering why they had forgotten to bring the two light wraps which they were accustomed to take with them in the country. Berta could only remember that she had laid them down for a moment in the--in the scullery-sink, I suppose, with the cracked looking-glass, but she stopped herself in mentioning the spot. And Teresa had all but lost her very smart ivory-hilted umbrella in the crowded tram, on the way to the station; and she was so much upset that more than once she thoughtlessly broke out to Berta in Italian--a sure sign in Teresa of ruffled nerves. We travelled to Albano by train, and in our flurry of discomposure we couldn’t for a while attend to the landscape; but presently Teresa reflected that the light wraps would be safe where they were (she had read where they were in Berta’s eye), and we could abandon ourselves to our national delight in the country.

The excursion had been the happy idea of the two ladies. Luigi luckily found that he had inevitable business in the city, and of course there was no question or exposing the aged patriot to the risks of travel--he seldom ventured abroad; but a friend of Teresa’s was to join us at Albano, a charming Russian lady in reduced circumstances, and perhaps Emilio would follow us later, and Berta had sent word to another friend of hers, a German girl, who lived out there, and possibly we should find Miss Gilpin too--only it seemed that Miss Gilpin was rather “proud of herself,” Berta said, rather “high,” and if she knew that Madame de Shuvaloff, poor thing, was to be one of our party she might think it beneath her; for Madame de Shuvaloff, you understand, had been reduced to keeping a boarding-house near the Ponte Margherita, to support herself and her little girl, and Berta for her part could see nothing dishonourable in poverty, but some people--“som people,” said Teresa trenchantly, “think it wrong for som people to be even alive, isn’t it?” We must, then, remember that _if_ Miss Gilpin should condescend to accompany us--“condescend?” cried Berta, “I shall just give her a good piece of somthing if she condescends, oh yes I shall!” “You silly gurl,” said Teresa, “always in a passion about somthing!”--and Teresa began to reckon the number of our party for luncheon, confusing herself inextricably in the effort to keep the certain and the probable and the unlikely in separate categories.

We had crossed the shining plain, had tunnelled into the hills and arrived at Albano before we had time to delight very much in the country; and even the glorious free English ramble that we were to take in the woods before luncheon consisted mostly of debates and delays, harassing doubts, wrong turnings--for Teresa was positively afraid of her niece’s boldness, once the girl was let loose in the country, and she was resolved that the crazy thing should incur no unpleasantness, so she darkly mentioned, such as may easily befall one in the wild places of the mountain. The wildness, Teresa seemed to hold, begins where the back-streets and the chicken-runs and the rubbish-heaps of the Albanians leave off; and our hour of adventure ran out while we peered round corners, measured the risk of climbing a stony path that disappeared in an ilex-wood, and recollected that we mustn’t be led on to wander too far before the time appointed for our party at the trattoria. “How quick the morning passes in the country!” exclaimed Berta, casting out a black-gloved hand to beat off the flies and the puffs of white dust--the flies and the dust in the safer parts of the country are very thick. “But we must hurry back,” Teresa reminded us; and we turned away from the prospect of the ilex-wood, keeping to the shade of a high wall covered with bright blue posters, and stepped out with more assurance to regain the street of the tram-line, the town-piazza above the railway-station, and the homely eating-house where Madame de Shuvaloff and the rest were to meet us.

Our party kept us waiting interminably, and in the end it consisted only of the Russian lady, reduced and charming, with her sharp and shrill little girl. Everybody else, it seemed, had failed us, whether in forgetfulness or in pride. But no matter, Teresa and Berta could make a party, as I have noted, out of the leanest material; and Madame de Shuvaloff (it is but a random shot that I take at her name) was one of those who occupy a large amount of room for their size. We waited long for her; but she came straggling into the trattoria at last--a tiny scrap of a woman with a thin pale face and huge eyes, a clutching and clawing and shrieking little creature, like a half-fledged young bird of prey escaped from the nest. She strayed in upon us as though by accident, and with a shriek and a flourish of her claws, catching sight of us, she scrambled over chairs and tables, beat her wings in startled surprise, dashed herself against the walls and ceiling--I give the impression I received--and disappeared again, fluttering out through the doorway with a cry for something she had left behind. It was her child that she had lost, and there was a scuffle without, an encounter of clashing beaks, and she returned with the child in her talons--a still smaller but quite as active young fledgling, which struggled and shook itself free and bounced across the floor to its perch at our table. Teresa and Berta sat up, very decent and straight-backed, to meet the shock of the party, and with the subsiding of the first commotion they were able to keep it more or less in hand. Our guests were induced to compose themselves on their chairs in the likeness of human beings.

They did their best, and the little girl indeed (her mother called her Mimi) straightened her frock and folded her hands and pursed her lips in a careful imitation of Teresa, enjoying the pretence of social and lady-like manners. She improved on her example with a coquettish dart of her eyes (at the gentleman of the party) under lowered lids; she had a native expertness beyond the rest of us, and at intervals through the meal she remembered to use it. But she broke down when a dish of food appeared, and she then became the voracious nestling, passionate to be the first to get her fingers into the mess and to secure the likeliest lumps. She screamed to her mother in a jumble of languages to give her _that_ bit, the best, not the nasty scrap beside it; her mother ordered and protested, Mimi fought and snatched--on the arrival of anything fresh to eat there was an outbreak of the free life of the wild. Mimi, pacified with the lump she needed, was again a young person of gracious style; and Teresa, quite powerless before these glimpses of the unknown, could resume her control of the occasion and the ceremony. Mimi then, momentarily gorged and at ease, watched us with a flitting glancing attention that I in my turn was fascinated to watch. Her mind was keenly at work, transparently observing and memorizing; she noted our attitudes, our speech and behaviour, she stored them away for her benefit; and I wondered what words she was using, what language she thought in, while she seized and saved up these few small grains of a social experience. Whenever she caught my eye on her she began immediately to make use of them; she consciously arched her neck, she fingered her fork with elegance, she shot her glances with eloquent effect.

Her mother meanwhile--but her mother was indeed a baffling study. Teresa was quite right, she was charming; she was perfectly simple and natural, and just as much so when she was human as when she clawed and shrieked in her native bird-savagery. When she was human she talked with a curious questing ingenuity in any or all of the civilized tongues. She raised us above trivialities, she neglected Teresa’s questions about her journey, her plans, her unpunctuality; she started (in French) a fanciful disquisition upon some very modern matter of painting or dancing or dressing, some revolution in all the arts that was imminent; and it seemed that she was deep in the inner councils and intrigues of the revolution, which had its roots in a philosophic theory (she slipped, without missing a step, into German) that she expounded in a few light touches of whimsical imagery (suddenly twisting off into Italian); and I can hear her assuring Teresa that the black misery of a woman’s life will flush into pink, will whiten to snow of pure delight, if she breaks through the bonds of--I forget what, of earthly thought, of esthetic imprisonment; and I can see Teresa’s blank white face, her bonnet-strings neat under her chin, her lips decently arranged as though her mouth were full of dough, while she waits her opportunity to declare that this modern art is all “too ogly, too drrreadfully horrible and ogly for words.” The little visitor smiled sweetly and darted with nimble grace into further reaches of her argument--where she evoked a stonier stare upon the faces of Teresa and Berta, who began to look straight across the table at nothing at all as though they could suddenly neither see nor hear. There seemed to be no malice in Madame de Shuvaloff, but there was no shame either. She talked most improperly (in French), breaking through the last of the bonds that restrain us, not indeed from the snowier heights, but from the pinker revelries of speculation; and I don’t know where it would have ended or how Teresa would have tackled the daring creature at last, but Mimi (who had quite understood that she was to look inattentive when these topics were broached)--Mimi presently distracted her mother and all of us by hurling herself (out of her turn) at the _fritto misto_, in a passion of fear lest the dish should be rifled and spoilt before it reached her.

Mimi was not a nice child, but her mother was decidedly attractive--far more artless, more unconscious, more heedless than her daughter. What in the world was the history behind them? Madame de Shuvaloff never explained herself, and it “passes me,” as Luigi would say, how she came to be keeping a Roman _pension_ by the Ponte Margherita. Russian she was, Russian was at the bottom of all her tongues; but evidently it had for so long been overlaid by the rest of Europe that she had almost forgotten it was there. Each of her languages, however, was a language of her own, full of odd pretty tones and inflexions that coiled and scooped and curled with a singular music. When the struggle over the _fritto misto_ died down Teresa seized the word with decision, the word that seemed furthest from Madame de Shuvaloffs indelicacy, and with Berta’s ready help she kept the conversation on a purer level. We talked of the terrible rise in the price of provisions: did Olga know (Olga was Madame de Shuvaloff) that Luigi had found it was entirely due to the weakness of the government?--the criminal weakness of the ministry before the threats of the _bassa plebe_; and if you ask how it is that the common people insist on an increase in the cost of living, which seems improbable, Teresa assures you that in fact they don’t know _what_ they want, such is their ignorance and their folly. We only perceive that the country is in a sad condition, and Luigi declares--but Madame Olga suddenly shrieks out with a shrill exclamation, followed by a little fountain of airy laughter, for she has just remembered that she forgot to give any directions to her servant, before leaving Rome this morning, and she believes the creature capable of anything--of anything--and heaven knows what will have happened to the midday meal of her pensioners! “How many is your table?” asked Teresa with sympathetic concern. “Eighty!” cried Madame Olga lightly, and she fumbled in her bag and showed us a couple of five-franc notes that she had expressly borrowed from one of her guests, only last night, for Colomba the cook to go marketing with to-day. Well, isn’t it unlucky? “I shall lose them all--all my eighty!” the little lady humorously wailed. “I lose them always; Mimi and I, we shall starve!”

I expected a howl from Mimi, but she took it unmoved; she knew her mother. Teresa, it was evident, knew her less, for Teresa gloomed anxiously upon the prospect, trying to hold little Olga to her words and beginning to offer advice and warning. You couldn’t trust a Roman cook--surely Olga had discovered that; and lodgers, in these bad times, are precious articles and you must handle them cautiously. “But how many did you say--?” It broke upon Teresa that Olga had played with her over the number, and her face was a pleasant mixture of dignity a little ruffled and mannerliness striving to meet a joke. Madame de Shuvaloff became instantly serious; and though it didn’t appear that the disaster of the dinnerless pensioners weighed on her, she was desperate, unutterably hopeless, over the tragedy of a woman’s life in the great horrible world. “Men,” she said bitterly, “do what they will with us”--and the eyes of Berta and Teresa met in a swift glance as they hastily struck up their give-and-take on the question of the likeliest methods of attracting the right kind of lodger to share one’s home. One should possibly advertise in the newspapers--but the topic was unfortunately chosen, for Madame Olga immediately flung off into a rippling titter of mirth, thin and savage, at the notion of “attracting,” were it only as boarders at one’s table, the men who make the world so black a place for a woman. “All beasts!” she declared flatly; and this was her opportunity for a story that she addressed particularly at me, glaring with her great eyes in the horror of what she told.

Truly the Russian wild sends out strange little emissaries to the cities of civilization. This tiny frail slip of a woman, who looked as though a puff of air from the frozen plain would shrivel her dead, had somehow scrambled across Europe and held her own and lodged herself in a cranny of Rome; and there she had stuck, she had survived, you couldn’t tell how, with a tenacity of slender claws that could grasp and cling where a heavier weight would have found no chance of foothold. She was evidently indestructible. The world, by her account, massed its ponderous strength to crush her; but there was nothing in her that might be crushed, no superfluous sensitive stuff to be caught by a blow; there was nothing but one small central nut or bead of vitality, too hard for the world itself to crack. She thrived upon the conflict; I don’t for a moment suppose that the world was as unkind to her as it was, for example, to poor foolish old Teresa; but she believed herself to be singled out for its crudest attack, and the thought was exquisite and stimulating. She had, moreover, a real artistic passion; her fire and thrill were genuine when she talked of the strange things that were doing among the artists; but I note that it had to be the art of the present, the art of a chattering studio rather than of a hushed museum--she couldn’t have thrilled and fired before the beauty of the past and dead, where there aren’t the same intoxicating revolutions to be planned and exploded upon an unsuspicious age. Drama she needed, and of drama you can always have your fill if you know as well as she did how to make it. Why yes, she created a notion of mysterious conspiracy, somewhere lurking in the background, by her very refusal to explain and apologize when she was late for lunch.

As for her story of the baseness of men, told with extreme earnestness in three languages, she made a very good thing of it and we were all impressed. But much more striking than her story was the picture that rose before me of her establishment, her boarding-house by the Tiber, where a dozen lodgers (she reduced them to a dozen), mostly like herself from the Russian inane, gathered and mingled, quarrelled and stormed at each other, conspired, bribed the cook, made love to the landlady (of course I have only her word for it), eloped without settling their bills, lent her five-franc notes to pay at least for the next meal--but chiefly talked, talked day and night, sat interminably talking, while Olga rated the servants or hunted for the lost key of the larder, while Colomba had hysterics and dropped the soup-tureen, while Mimi killed flies at the window and had her own little crisis of nerves over a disappointment about a box of chocolates. All these visions appeared in the story--which was a story of the monstrous behaviour of one of the lodgers, a young man of whom Olga had tried to make a friend. A friend!--yes, Olga believed in friendship, in spite of a hundred disillusions; she believed in a species of friendship that transcends the material, the physical; but we needn’t go into that, for though she _had_ believed in it, the young man’s behaviour had pretty well killed her faith, once for all, and she now saw that there could be no true friendship in a world where half the world (the brutes of men) have no sense of honour, none of loyalty, none of idealism, transcendentalism, immaterialism; and Teresa still held her lips placidly bunched while Olga circled among these safe abstractions, but the little wretch came presently down with a bump again upon plainer terms, and it behoved Teresa to intervene with all her decision. Olga said that the young man had proved to be not only destitute of these safe vague qualities, but terribly in possession of other qualities, quite of the opposite kind, which she proceeded to name; and their names lacked that soft classical buzz and blur (idealism, materialism, prunes-and-prism--the termination is reassuring), and on the contrary were so crude and clear-cut that Teresa pushed back her chair and suggested another delightful long ramble in the forest, a “country afternoon,” such as we all adored.

There really was no malice in Olga, the little wretch; for to be malicious you must at least have some consciousness of the feelings of other people, you must know what will hurt them; and Olga was aware of no feelings, no subject of sensation, save her own and herself. Imagine all the relations of the world to be arranged like the spokes of a wheel, with no crossing or tangling before they reach the middle; and Olga herself in the middle, with every thread of feeling that exists all radiating away from her into space: that was the order of nature as Olga saw it, that indeed was her fashion of introducing order of any kind into the universe. One must simplify somehow; and if, unlike Olga, you suspect people of thinking and feeling on their own account, all anyhow, turning the cart-wheel into a tangle--well then you must order your private affairs, your habits, your household at least, into some kind of reposeful pattern. Olga had no need of a stupid mechanical pattern, the mere work of her own hands, to be imposed upon the facts around her. Let Colomba rave, let the lodgers hurl their boots among the crockery (she happened to mention it as one of their ways), let the boarding-house seethe and heave like a page of Dostoevsky: no matter, the universe kept its grand simplicity, all lines met at the centre, Olga was there. The story of the base young man had no bearing upon anybody but herself; Teresa was shocked, but Olga didn’t care, didn’t notice, and she went on absorbed in her narrative--or she would have done so if Mimi hadn’t made another diversion (to be frank, she was sick before she could get to the door) in which the young man was finally dropped and forgotten.

Emilio now joined us, very hot and shiny from the train, and as soon as he had refreshed himself we issued forth--an orderly procession, for Mimi clung pensively awhile to her mother’s arm; and it was agreed that we should enjoy ourselves unconventionally, fearlessly, in a walk through the greenwood to Castel Gandolfo. We mustn’t forget, however, that Fräulein Dahl, Berta’s German friend, would be descending from Castel Gandolfo (where she lived) to meet us; and we immediately saw that whichever of the forest-paths we chose we should certainly miss her. “We had better go perhaps no further than this,” said Berta, pausing under the blue posters of the wall we had already studied that morning; and Emilio proposed the amendment that it would be safer still to wait in the middle of the town, by the tram-station, where the lady would be sure to look for us. But Berta yearned for the country; so she and Teresa spread a couple of newspapers upon a dust-heap under the posters, gathered their skirts, deposited themselves with care, and pointed out that one had a charming glimpse of the country from this very spot. A little way up the lane indeed there was leafy shadow and the beginning of a woodland ride; and Olga, restlessly ranging, called to us to come further and take to the forest. But Teresa and Berta were established, and they declared themselves at ease where they were--though I can’t say they looked very easy, with their veils pulled down and their knees drawn neatly together, both clutching the ornate handles of their umbrellas. “People will think we are strange gurls,” said Berta, “sprawling by the road like this!” Emilio had to make the best he could of their wild English ways; he leant with resignation against the picture of a highly developed young woman in evening dress, who held out a box of pills with a confident smile; he sucked at a long cigar in silence. Mimi really did sprawl; she lay where she fell, she slept the sleep in which one repairs the disasters of a recent meal.

I followed her mother up the shadowy path into the woodland, where we were to watch carefully for Berta’s expected friend. When at last you are clear of the pigs and chickens of Albano you plunge immediately into the Virgilian forest that spreads and spreads over the hills, between the two deep bowls of the lakes. The ancient darkness of ilex leads you on, and the darkness changes to hoary sun-sprinkled oak-shadow, to open spaces where the big white rock-rose flowers against the outcrop of the grey stone, and the path stumbles on into damp green tunnels among the chestnut saplings; and a laden mule, driven by a bare-footed boy, appears with a jangle of bells that carry me off and away, deeper and deeper into the time-softened goodness of the wondrous land, the Saturnian land, the great mother of kindly beast and songful man--for the boy sings as he plods up the pathway, with long sweet notes that are caught by a hungry ear, caught and lost, caught again in the far distance with an echo of the years of gold, of the warm young earth in its innocence. How can we praise the land that Virgil praised? Leave the word to Virgil, listen while he repeats it again--again. I can hear nothing else till the last sound of it has died; and my companion, the strange little wild thing from the east, lifts up her finger and is silent and motionless till it ceases. What does Olga know of the golden years and the Saturnian land? Nothing, nothing whatever; but she listens with uplifted finger, entranced by the freedom of the forest, for a few fine moments forgetful of her own existence. Then she is herself again, flitting and scrambling down the path to meet a figure that approaches through the green shadows.