The conquest of Rome

by Matilde Serao

CHAPTER III

Mild, genteel applause, coming from small, female, well-gloved, though rather listless hands, greeted the noisy conclusion of the pianist, an insignificant, meagre, dark little dot of a creature, who was invisible behind the piano.

'What feeling!' exclaimed the wife of a Puglian deputy, a stout woman with a torrent of black curls on her red, shining forehead.

'Splendid, splendid, delightful!' said Signora di Bertrand, the wife of a high functionary, a frail Piedmontese, with a Madonna face, wearing a brocaded cloak threaded with gold.

And from one lady to another, from group to group, along sofas, from easy-chairs to small stools, under the palm branches in the pots, under the brackets bearing statuettes, from the pianoforte to the door, swiftly ran the current of feminine approval. Those standing on the threshold of the Ministerial drawing-room nodded two or three times, as if secretly wearied. Only His Highness, the Oriental Prince in exile, ponderously ensconced in an armchair, made no sign. With his bloated, sallow visage, grown here and there with patches of nondescript, speckling beard, with the contemplative apathy of a bulky Oriental, he remained quiet, thinking perhaps of the dramatic incantations of the Aidas who had been one of the boasts of his throne, as he sat with his big, round eyes half shut under the soft, red rim of his fez.

But the female chatter reopened, and Donna Luisa Catalani, the Minister's wife, the mistress of the house, who had rested during the music, renewed her round of bows and compliments and smiles; and her white cashmere gown, her diamond rosettes, her small head, her provokingly pretty face, her somewhat peculiar headdress, were to be seen everywhere, as though there was not one Donna Luisa, but ten of her.

'How fatiguing these receptions are!' languidly said the Countess Schwarz, an extremely thin woman, with livid countenance, with fluffy fringe, in imitation, probably, of Sarah Bernhardt. Sunk in a comfortable easy-chair, and huddled in her furs like a sick, shivering bird, she merely moved her lips to sip her cup of tea.

'Donna Luisa is not tired; she is made of iron,' murmured Signora Gallenga, wife of the Secretary-General of Finance, coughing slightly and smoothing her pointed, Chinese eyebrows. 'It would be too much for me. I am glad my receptions are small. Were you at the Parliament to-day, Countess?'

'I never go.'

The graceful Piedmontese saw the error of her question. Count Schwarz had succeeded in becoming a provincial councillor, but never a deputy.

'I was there,' interposed Signora Mattei, the wife of another Secretary-General, a Tuscan woman as brown as a peppercorn, with fiery eyes, a rapid tongue, and a black hat buried under poppies. 'It was an interesting meeting.'

'And not to have been there!' exclaimed Signora Gallenga. 'How unfortunate! And did Sangiorgio speak?'

'Yes, yes——'

But a 'hush' now circulated through the room. A robust lady, with a mighty bosom tightly cuirassed in red satin, with a broad, good-natured face, sang a moving romance by Tosti. She had undone her pelisse, throwing it back on her shoulders, and with her hands in her muff, her veil down on her eyes, quite serenely, without a single quiver in a line of her face, she poured out her lamentations in the music of the Abruzzan master. Donna Luisa, standing in the middle of the drawing-room among fifty ladies seated, listened with the polite attention of a hostess; but she was assailed by an uneasy feeling, since she observed that in the two adjoining parlours there were people—ladies waiting to come in. It was the most important reception of the season; in the drawing-room reigned the quiet of a hothouse and the sweet, sugary smell of a place where there are many women. Standing along the wall, encased in severe frock-coats, was a row of commanders, bald and silent, who had left the Court of Accounts at half-past four, of officials from the Treasury, of men from other Government offices. But they preserved the statuesque immobility of the bureaucratic make-up, the unwearying patience, the endless, incalculably long expectation by dint of which they passed from one grade to another, until they had forty years of service behind them; to them this reception was an infinitesimal fraction of the forty years of service.

A sigh of relief was audible; the romance was finished, and Luisa Catalani complimented the singer, who was smiling like the full moon. Then the hostess immediately left the room; there were seven or eight ladies in the next room.

'What was the Chamber like to-day?' asked a fair, pale-faced Minister's daughter, who had newly arrived.

'Very warm. I do not understand how our men keep from getting ill,' replied another, spreading out her fan by way of original illustration.

'Sangiorgio spoke very well,' murmured Signora Giroux, a little lady with white hair and a sweet smile—her ladyship of the Agricultural Department.

'He is from the South,' remarked Donna Luisa Catalani. 'Was there anyone in the diplomatic gallery?'

'Countess di Santaninfa and Countess di Malgra.'

'Fine hats?'

'Might pass,' answered the pallid blonde abstractedly.

Over in a corner a group of girls was prattling in lively fashion, with their jackets unbuttoned because of the heat, and showing the fine texture of their dark cloth dresses. Enrichetta Serafini, daughter of the Minister of Public Works, a brunette in mourning, was talking for half a dozen, and gathered about her were the Camilly girl, an Italian born in Egypt; the Borla girl, a predestined old maid, condemned by the everlasting youth of her mother; the Fasulo girl, a lymphatic person, with large, meditative eyes, an accountant's niece; the Allievo girl, a nice, quiet thing; and the single aristocratic bud, all fair under the white plume in her hat—Donna Sofia di Maccarese.

'I prefer Tosti to all the rest,' maintained Enrichetta Serafini. 'He can make one weep.'

'Denza, too, makes one weep at times,' observed the Borla girl, who did not know how to sing, and was obliged to listen to her fifty-year-old mother.

'And you, Donna Sofia, which do you like best?'

'Schumann,' she murmured, without another word.

The others stopped. They did not know his music. But the Serafini girl, nervous and vivacious, answered:

'But all that music must be sung well. Pardon me'—lowering her voice—'perhaps you like the lady who has just sung?' And the whole group giggled surreptitiously.

'The best singer in Rome is the Fiammanti,' added the young Camilly girl, with her round, white face, with her languid gaze—this Oriental transplanted to Italy.

The other girls remained silent. The Borla pursed her lips in token of reproof; the Fasulo cast down her eyes; the Allievo blushed; only Donna Sofia di Maccarese did not change countenance, either not knowing or not caring about Countess Fiammanti.

'Is it true that she is to marry the deputy Sangiorgio?' asked the Serafini.

'No, no,' replied the Camilly, with a peculiar smile.

This time the girls exchanged the mute, expressive looks into which society compels girls to condense their meaning. In the drawing-room a great concourse of ladies had gathered; the warm atmosphere of heavy clothes was spreading, and an odour of tea and opopanax, of beaver and marten. Nearly all of them were talking now, in couples, or in groups of three or four, with certain nods and certain subtle modulations of the voice, gossiping about the Chamber of Deputies, gravely discussing the Honourable Bomba's delivery, saying which gallery they liked best, commenting on the colour of the carpets, describing the flesh-coloured waistcoats of the Honourable Count Lapucci and the romantic face—like a pensive Christ's—of the Honourable Joanna. And Signora Gallenga, an authority on literature, announced the following:

'This year the Abruzzo is fashionable in literature and the Basilicata in politics.'

So they thought they were doing politics in right earnest, elated by their own chatter, they, with their light little heads. But no other performer moved to the piano, and as the placid, middle-aged lady who had languished with Tosti was taking her third cup of tea, a hardly perceptible stir took place in the drawing-room, and Donna Angelica Vargas, tall and lovely, walked across the room with her rhythmic step, seeking out Donna Luisa Catalani. She was dressed in black, as usual, with an iridescence of some sort about her person and her hat. Donna Luisa ran towards her with her prettiest smile. They made low bows to each other, and a subdued colloquy began between them.

The people in the room pretended not to hear, from politeness, but an embarrassing silence prevailed, as sometimes happens among a number of persons none of whom wants to speak first. His Highness Mehemet Pasha had opened his eyes wide, and ogled the beautiful Italian, so chaste in appearance, but whose large eyes reminded him of his Eastern women, for whom he perhaps was longing. Then those large, fine eyes, shining like the black pearls on her dress, cast an intelligent glance all round the room, and as Donna Luisa Catalani turned away, singly, by twos, by threes did the women come and surround Donna Angelica Vargas, to exchange amenities with her; and although her husband was not Prime Minister, although she was the wife of a Minister of Commerce holding a non-political portfolio, although in that drawing-room were three or four wives of political Ministers, important men, pillars of the Cabinet, yet she was the centre of all this adulation, and in the simplicity of her manner there lay something queenly.

* * * * *

To feel the cold less, while writing in that long, narrow parlour, without a fire, in the Via Angelo Custode, Sangiorgio had thrown an old coat over his legs. At eight the servant had brought him a cup of coffee, in bed, and while she was cleaning the chilly room he put on his clothes, so as to begin work. The girl did the other room quickly, and went away without a word, looking sullen and resentful, like all poor wretches who cannot reconcile themselves to penury and hard work. But the sweeping being done in haste, dirt remained in the corners of the floor. The window-curtains were yellow with dust, and a horrible smell of stale rubbish hung in both rooms. Barely had the servant vanished, trailing her feet in a pair of men's shoes, when Sangiorgio, without a look at that melancholy inner courtyard, with balconies full of old boxes and broken glass, and worm-eaten, filthy loggias, set to writing at a small student's table. He had settled down to work, among a lot of Parliamentary papers and a heap of letters from the Basilicata, on large, white sheets of commercial foolscap, dipping his pen into a wretched clay inkpot. Towards ten o'clock an intolerable sensation of cold had crept over his feet and legs; he still had three hours' work before him, and therefore went to his bedroom for an old overcoat, which he spread over his legs. He did this automatically, without taking his mind off the Parliamentary report which had absorbed him for a week. The fire that burned within him was manifest in the large, clear handwriting with which he covered the big sheets of paper; his preoccupation showed plainly in his face, in his—as it were—introspective glance, ignoring all things external.

Sheets of paper were now heaping up at his left; he did not stop writing except to refer to Parliamentary Blue-books, or to consult a fat volume of agricultural reports, or a dirty, little, torn notebook. At eleven, as he was engrossed in his task, the slight grating of a key was heard, and a woman entered, closing the door noiselessly behind her.

'It is I,' she said softly, clasping a bunch of roses to her breast. He lifted his head, and stared at her with the bewildered eyes of one not yet sufficiently aroused from his employment to recognise a new-comer.

'Do I disturb you?' asked Elena, with her flutelike voice. 'Yes, yes, I am disturbing you! Go on with your writing—do your work. I will read a book.'

'There are no books here you would like,' he replied, not remembering to thank her for having come.

She rummaged among the papers with her slender hands, gloved in black and hampered by the bunch of roses. Sangiorgio smiled at her complacently. She was always so fascinating, with those heavy lips of hers, red and moist, with those strange eyes of indefinable colour, with that graceful opulence of figure, that even to look at her, to have her present, here, in his own room, was always a new delight to him.

'There is nothing there!' she laughed. 'I could never read about the quantity of polenta the peasants of Lombardy eat, and how many potatoes the Southerners. That would make me too melancholy. Do your writing—do your writing, Franz; do not mind me.'

And he got up, and went over to kiss her on the eyes, through her thin veil, as she liked it; she made a face like a greedy child receiving a sweetmeat. He returned to his writing. Elena walked up and down in the parlour, as if trying to get warm: in this room, on this bleak March day, it was freezing.

'Are you not cold, Franz?' asked Elena from the sofa, whence she was curiously eyeing the pictures on the hooks.

'A little,' he answered, without ceasing from his writing.

She again reviewed the room in all its squalor, realized in what a state of decent poverty he existed, and watched him, writing so swiftly at that little table, where he was obliged to draw in his elbows so as not to brush the papers over the edge. And into the eyes of the woman watching the tireless worker came a new light of tenderness which he did not see.

Now leaning against the mantelpiece, she reviewed her surroundings, first examining the three photographs of a corporal, a stout gentleman, and a boy belonging to the Nazzareno school, and then the three libellous oleographs representing the Royal Family.

'Franz, have you ever had your photograph taken?' she inquired, looking at herself in the mirror, and adjusting the bow on her hat.

'Yes, at Naples once, when I was a student,' he answered, turning over some Parliamentary records.

'And have you it now?'

'No, of course not.'

'If you had it, I should want it,' she insinuated in a voice like a child's.

'Is the original not enough for you?'

'No,' was Elena's reflective response. He got up again, came over and took her hands, and asked her:

'Then, you like me?'

'Yes—yes—yes,' she sang on three musical notes.

Francesco returned to the table, where he resumed his work. She hazarded a step to the threshold of his bedroom, and cast a glance inside.

'Franz,' said she, 'you did not come to the Valle last night.'

'There was the Budget Committee up till eleven. Afterwards I was too tired.'

'A number of people came to see me in my box—Giustini, for instance. How do you come to be so intimate with him?'

'He is useful to me,' he answered simply, without looking up.

'He speaks ill of you.'

'I hope so.'

'To be sure, he never praises anyone but mediocrities. You will become a great statesman, Franz!'

'Oh, that will take a long time,' he replied tranquilly, noting down some figures on a small piece of paper.

'Gallenga and Oldofredi came, too. Oldofredi makes love to me.'

'Quite right of Oldofredi,' he murmured gallantly.

She laughed, and vanished into the adjoining room. It was so cold and ugly that for a moment she shrank back in repulsion. She scanned the woollen arabesques on the bedquilt, which the servant had given a furious shaking. But it was the large grease-spot on the blue-cloth easy-chair which caused her to turn her head; her feminine instincts made her wince at that grease-spot. She walked about the room in search of an unavailable article: on the chest of drawers were only two candlesticks without candles and a clothes-brush, and nothing that would serve her purpose; on the toilet-table were only two combs and a broken bottle of Felsina water. The place was as bare as a hermit's cell. At last she descried, on the stand near the bed, a water-bottle and glass, and, beaming with pleasure, untied her bundle of roses, thrust three or four into the neck of the decanter, a few into the cup, dropped a handful on the coverlet at the foot of the bed, and then, being at a loss where to put any more, stuffed two under the pillow. Moving cautiously, she went back to the chest of drawers, and opened the top drawer, which contained neckties and gloves; here, too, she left some of her roses. A portrait lay thrown in there, still in its envelope. It was her own. A light shadow of displeasure flitted across her face, and quickly disappeared. In that miserable room, in that murky light that came from the courtyard, in that stench of kitchen slops, the roses gave out a vernal freshness, the essence of a garden, a remembrance of sunlight, an atom of fragrance.

'I have finished,' said Sangiorgio, appearing in the doorway.

'Let us go home to lunch.'

'Do you think we shall have done by half-past one?'

'Why?'

'I have an appointment with a constituent.'

'Well, I hope so, as I also have an appointment—at two.'

'With a constituent?'

'With Oldofredi.'

'Indeed,' he answered, putting on his overcoat.

'He is to tell me how he came to be unwilling to marry Angelica Vargas.'

'Was he intending to marry her?'

'Yes, and he did not want to. Perhaps, though, it was she who refused. Nearly everyone dislikes Oldofredi, especially in Parliament. Do you know him?'

'No; I am not interested in him.'

'You are quite pale; what is the matter?'

'I don't know; probably it is the cold.'

'Come, come away to my house; there is a fire there, and you can warm yourself!'

He accompanied her, without saying a word about the roses.

* * * * *

The Honourable Oldofredi was not a particularly assiduous frequenter of the Parliamentary library. He occasionally went there to look for a friend, but did not read; he never asked for books or papers. Malicious tongues among the deputies, forsooth, had it that he did not know how to read. Now, as he entered the library that day, and found Sangiorgio seated in front of a veritable mountain of books, flying through statistical works, skimming over the pages of volumes of political economy, history, and social science with that impetuosity in research and preparation which characterizes the provincial Southerner, at the sight of this the fatuous Oldofredi smiled disdainfully. He had first put his head in at the door, to see if it was the colleague he was in search of; then, prompted by some new idea, he went in, although he had not seen his friend. He began to saunter idly up and down, blowing the remains of a cigarette out of a small amber mouthpiece. The Honourable Oldofredi, despite his reputation as a Don Juan and a swashbuckler, was neither a handsome nor a powerful man; he was a machine of bones and sinews badly put together, the whole of his elongated person had an unpleasant, battered appearance, his face was of a repulsively cadaverous hue; in his eyes lay vacant stupidity, and all his limbs were so disjointed as to make him look like a perambulating automaton.

Sangiorgio, from the moment he rested his eyes on him, could not take them away again. A sort of irritating fascination drew the Basilicatan's attention from the statistics and the works on political economy, and attracted him to the deputy from the Marches, whom he detested and hated through some vague instinct of sectionalism, lover's jealousy, and ambition. While Oldofredi walked to and fro, he stared at him fixedly, holding his pen over the paper. This Don Quixote, disliked by the whole Chamber, hateful to all the women, ignorant, stupid, and devoid of ability, who with all these forbidden qualities had nevertheless always been successful in his re-election, in having himself talked about, and in holding a position of prominence in political and social life—this man weighed on Sangiorgio's stomach like some indigestible food to which repugnance is instinctive. Oldofredi was a political sword-swallower. His duels were no longer a topic of conversation, unless in a vague way, as if about something doubtful and distant, because it was so many years since anyone had ventured to challenge him. But no personal dispute could happen in which he was not concerned as second, or arbiter, or adviser, and neither inside the Chamber nor out of it was there a surer or readier authority on fighting. This endowed this coarse, commonplace individual with a halo of romance, and in the annals of gossip it was stated that women were prompt to lay their wavering virtue at the feet of this Orlando of the Marches, who in their eyes could be counted on as a formidable champion to cover their transgressions.

'Have you seen friend Bomba by chance, Honourable Sangiorgio?' queried Oldofredi, stopping opposite the writer.

'I? No,' replied the other curtly, raising his head.

'Where can he be hiding? He is not in the hall; that ass of a Borgonero was making a speech there about some foolery or other. I have been looking for Bomba everywhere. He can only be here, in the company of that idiot of a Giordano Bruno. Do you, Sangiorgio, believe Giordano Bruno existed?'

'I? yes,' he answered dryly.

Sangiorgio gave Oldofredi a frigid stare, which would have baffled a less conceited talker. But he continued to walk up and down, with his nose in the air. He lighted another cigarette, making a noisy rustle with his long, ugly, ungainly person, which disturbed the quiet of that studious place. In the little adjoining room at the right the Honourable Gasperini, the white-bearded Tuscan with a subtle smile and a pair of sharp eyes behind his spectacles, had already looked up twice in the midst of his perusal of some financial thesis; he had shrugged his shoulders, annoyed at Oldofredi's obtrusiveness. Arrived at the other door, which opened into the room on the left, he stood still on the threshold, and leaned against the jamb, with his hands in his pockets. In this room the Honourable Giroux, a slow, grave old gentleman with half-closed lids and sleepy look, was reading in a large tome bound in parchment. Oldofredi smiled; then, returning to Sangiorgio's table, accosted him with another sneer:

'He is in there, you know, with Copernic.'

'Who?' asked the other, with the same studied coldness.

'Giroux. Not satisfied with bothering people about his own philosophical absurdities, he has invented some for Copernic. Who may this Copernic be? Pah! Giroux will swear he knew him in Turin, and that he was a carbonaro!'

And Oldofredi burst out laughing. But he did not see the strong and set expression of displeasure in Sangiorgio's face; he did not observe the slight nervous tremble which made the pen dance between the Southern deputy's fingers.

'And over on the other side is Gasperini, the ex-secretary, who certainly is reading the proceedings of the British Parliament, so as to be able to argue against Giroux to-morrow. What do you think of it?'

'Nothing.'

'Well, I shall pick up Gasperini with two fingers, and put him into Giroux's arms; then their reconciliation will be accomplished, Copernic and Bentham will bless them, and Italian finance—and agriculture, too—will go on in the same way as before—that is to say, as badly as possible.'

This he announced in a loud voice, not caring whether the others overheard him. Sangiorgio glanced at both doors, as though signifying his apprehension.

'No, they are not listening. When Giroux is with Copernic he hears nothing, and Gasperini is befogged in English finance. And what if they did hear!'

He made his favourite motion of defiance with his shoulders, one of the gestures which had won him the reputation of being a brave man.

'They might answer you,' replied Sangiorgio in an equivocal tone.

'Oh no! they would not answer at all! More likely they would make a note of it, and remind me of it at a future time, in the hall, in a lobby, or in a newspaper. That's the way in politics. Or probably they would try to forget to do even that, as so many others have forgotten. You seem to be new here; you have a great deal left to learn. One thing, my dear sir, I can inform you of myself: in politics one must never reply immediately, to a man's face, directly. Either one forgets or one waits.'

'And supposing you should get an immediate answer?' rejoined Sangiorgio more glacially than ever.

'What! Imagine, my dear new deputy, that for five years in these precincts I have gone about saying the whole truth to everybody concerning facts, men, and events, at the top of my voice, merely to relieve my liver. Has anyone had the courage to defend himself, to answer me to my face? No one has—no one, my dear new deputy!'

'And how is that?' said Sangiorgio, his eyes rooted to the paper he had been writing upon, as if in reflection.

'Come, now! It is because the old ones have exhausted their whole supply of courage—if they ever had any—and the young ones have not yet begun to draw on theirs—if they ever do have any.'

'Do you think so, Oldofredi?'

'Great heavens! Do I think so! The Chamber is full of cowards!'

'It is not, Honourable Oldofredi.'

'Cowardice and Company, that is the name of the firm!'

'I assure you it is not, Oldofredi.'

'You are giving me the lie, it seems to me?'

'Certainly.'

'Do you give me the lie?'

'Yes—I do.'

'You want to prove to me that the Chamber is not cowardly?'

'Yes.'

'I live in the Via Frattina, No. 46, I dine at the Colonne, and I shall be at the Apollo this evening.'

'Very well.'

'Good-day.'

'Good-day.'

Oldofredi shrugged his shoulders, flicked the ashes off his cigarette, and went out, shaking his loose limbs. Sangiorgio dipped his pen into the inkpot, and resumed his writing. The occupants of the next room had heard nothing, especially as the conversation had been carried on in an ordinary tone of voice. Gasperini was turning over the English financial reports, Giroux was immersed in Copernic, and Sangiorgio made notes from Tullio Martello's 'Storia dell' Internazionale.'

---