XII. A MEETING ON THE PINCIO
A WALK IN THE VILLA BORGHESE
At the beginning of Holy Week Laura returned to the hotel, at lunch-time.
“And your husband?” Cæsar asked her.
“He didn’t want to come. Rome bores him. He is giving all his attention to taking care of the heart-disease he says he has.”
“Is it serious?”
“I think not. Every time I see him I find him with a new disease and a new diet; one time it is vegetarian, another nothing but meat, another time he says one should eat only grapes, or nothing but bread.”
“Then I see that he belongs to the illustrious brotherhood of the insane.”
“You are not far from joining that brotherhood yourself.”
“Dear sister, I am one of the few sane men that go stumbling around this insane asylum let loose we call the earth.”
“What you say about men is the truth, even though you are not an exception. Really, the more I have to do with men, the more convinced I am that any one of them who is not crazy, is stupid or vain or proud.... How much more intelligent, discreet, logical we women are!”
“Don’t tell me. You are marvels; modest, kindly toward your rivals, so little given to humiliating your neighbours, male or female....”
“Yes, yes; but we are not so conceited or such play-actors as you are. A woman may think herself pretty and amiable and sweet, and not be so. That is true; but on the other hand, every man thinks himself braver than the Cid, even if he is afraid of a fly, and more talented than Seneca, even if he is a dolt.”
“To sum up, men are a calamity.”
“Just so.”
“And women spend their lives fishing for these calamities.”
“They need them; there are inferior things which still are necessary.”
“And there are superior things which are good for nothing.”
“Will you come and take a drive with me, philosopher brother?”
“Where?”
“Let’s go to the Villa Borghese. The carriage will be here in a moment.”
“All right. Let us go there.”
A two-horse victoria with rubber tires was waiting at the door, and Laura and Cæsar got in. The carriage went past the Treasury, and out the Porta Salaria, and entered the gardens of the Villa Borghese.
The morning had been rainy; the ground was damp; the wind waved the tree-tops gently and caused a murmur like the tide. The carriage rolled slowly along the avenues. Laura was very gay and chatty. Cæsar listened to her as one listens to a bird warbling.
Many times while listening he thought: “What is there inside this head? What is the master idea of her life? Has she really any idea about life, or has she none?”
After several rounds they crossed the viaduct that unites the Villa Borghese with the Pincio gardens.
FROM THE PINCIO TERRACE
They approached the great terrace of the gardens by an avenue that has busts of celebrated men along both sides.
“Poor great men!” exclaimed Cæsar. “Their statues serve only to decorate a public garden.” “They had their lives,” replied Laura, gaily; “now we have ours.”
Laura ordered the coachman to stop a moment. The air was still murmuring in the foliage, the birds singing, and the clouds flying slowly across the sky.
A man with a black box approached the carriage to offer them postcards.
“Buy two or three,” said Laura.
Cæsar bought a few and put them into his pocket. The vendor withdrew and Laura continued to look at Rome with enthusiasm.
“Oh, how beautiful, how lovely it is! I never get tired of looking at it. It is my favourite city. ‘O fior d’ogni cittá, donna del mondo.’”
“She is no longer mistress of the world, little sister.”
“For me she is. Look at St. Peter’s. It looks like a shred of cloud.”
“Yes, that’s so. It’s of a blue shade that seems transparent.”
Bells were ringing and great majestic white clouds kept moving along the horizon; on the Janiculum the statue of Garibaldi rose up gallantly into the air, like a bird ready to take wing.
“When I look at Rome this way,” murmured Laura, “I feel a pang, a pang of grief.”
“Why?”
“Because I remember that I must die, and then I shall not come back to see Rome. She will be here still, century after century, full of sunlight, and I shall be dead.... It is horrible, horrible!”
“And your religion?”
“Yes, I know. I believe I shall see other things; but not these things that are so beautiful.”
“You are an Epicurean.”
“It is so beautiful to be alive!”
They stayed there looking at the panorama. Below, in the Piazza del Popólo, they saw a red tram slipping along, which looked, at that distance, like a toy.
A tilbury, driven by a woman, stopped near their carriage. The woman was blond with green eyes, prominent cheek-bones, and a little fur cap. At her feet lay an enormous dog with long flame-coloured hair.
“She must be a Russian,” said Cæsar.
“Yes. Do you like that type?”
“She has a lot of character. She looks like one of the women that would order servants to be whipped.”
The Russian was smiling vaguely. Laura told the coachman to drive on. They made a few rounds in the avenues of the Pincio. The music was beginning; a few carriages, and groups of soldiers and seminarians, crowded around the bandstand; Laura didn’t care for brass bands, they were too noisy for her, and she gave the coachman orders to drive to the Corso.
MEETING MARCHMONT
They passed in front of the Villa Medici, and when they got near the Piazza, della Trinitá de’ Monti they met a man on horseback, who, on seeing them, immediately approached the carriage. It was Archibald Marchmont, who had just arrived in Rome.
“I thought you had forgotten us,” said Laura.
“I forget you, Marchesa! Never.”
“You say you came to Rome....”
“From Nice I had to return to London, because my father was seriously ill with an attack of gout.”
“He is well again?”
“Yes, thank you. You are coming back from a drive?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you want to come and have tea with my wife and me?”
“Where?”
“At the Hotel Excelsior. We are staying there. Will you come?” “All right.”
Laura accepted, and they went to the Via Veneto with the Englishman riding beside them.
They went into the hotel and passed through to the “hall” full of people, Marchmont sent word to his wife by a servant, to come down. Laura and Cæsar seated themselves with the Englishman.
“This hotel is unbearable,” exclaimed Marchmont; “there is nothing here but Americans.”
“Your wife, however, must like that,” said Cæsar.
“No. Susanna is more European every day, and she doesn’t care for the shrieking elegance of her compatriots. Besides, her father is here, and that makes her feel less American.”
“It is an odd form of filial enthusiasm,” remarked Cæsar.
“It doesn’t shock me. I almost think it’s the rule,” replied Marchmont; “at home I could see that my brothers and sisters hated one another cordially, and that every member of the family wanted to get away from the others. You two who are so fond of each other are a very rare instance. Is it frequent in Spain that brothers and sisters like one another?”
“Yes, there are instances of it,” answered Cæsar, laughing.
Mrs. Marchmont arrived, accompanied by an old man who evidently was her father, and two other men. Susanna was most smart; she greeted Laura and Cæsar very affably, and presented her father, Mr. Russell; then she presented an English author, tall, skinny, with blue eyes, a white beard, and hair like a halo; and then a young Englishman from the Embassy, a very distinguished person named Kennedy, who was a Catholic.
TEA
After the introductions they passed into the dining-room, which was most impressive. It was an exhibition of very smart women, some of them ideally beautiful, and idle men. All about them resounded a nasal English of the American sort.
Susanna Marchmont served the tea and did the honours to her guests. They all talked French, excepting Mr. Russell, who once in a long while uttered some categorical monosyllable in his own language.
Mr. Russell was not of the classic Yankee type; he looked like a vulgar Englishman. He was a serious man, with a short moustache, grey-headed, with three or four gold teeth.
What to Cæsar seemed wonderful in this gentleman was his economy of words. There was not one useless expression in his vocabulary, and not the slightest redundancy; whatever partook of merit, prestige, or nobility was condensed, for him, to the idea of value; whatever partook of arrangement, cleanliness, order, was condensed to the word “comfort”; so that Mr. Russell, with a very few words, had everything specified.
To Susanna, imbued with her preoccupation in supreme chic, her father no doubt did not seem a completely decorative father; but he gave Cæsar the impression of a forceful man.
Near them, at a table close by, was a little blond man, with a hooked nose and a scanty imperial, in company with a fat lady. They bowed to Marchmont and his wife.
“That gentleman looks like a Jew,” said Cæsar.
“He is,” replied Marchmont, “that is Señor Pereyra, a rich Jew; of Portuguese origin, I think.”
“How quickly you saw it!” exclaimed Susanna.
“He has that air of a sick goat, so frequent in Jews.”
“His wife has nothing sickly about her, or thin either,” remarked Laura.
“No,” said Cæsar; “his wife represents another Biblical type; one of the fat kine of somebody’s dream, which foretold abundance and a good harvest.”
The Englishman, Kennedy, had also little liking for Jews.
“I do not hate a Jew as anti-Christian,” said Cæsar; “but as super-Christian. Nor do I hate the race, but the tendency they have never to be producers, but always middlemen, and because they incarnate so well for our era the love of money, and of joy and pleasure.”
The English author was a great partisan of Jews, and he asserted that they were more distinguished in science and the arts than any other race. The Jewish question was dropped in an instant, when they saw a smart lady come in accompanied by a pale man with a black shock of hair and an uneasy eye.
“That is the Hungarian violinist Kolozsvar,” said Susanna.
“Kolozsvar, Kolozsvar!” they heard everybody saying.
“Is he a great virtuoso?” Cæsar asked Kennedy.
“No, I think not,” answered Kennedy. “It seems that this Hungarian’s speciality is playing the waltzes and folk-songs of his own country, which is certainly not anything great; but his successes are not obtained with the violin, but among the women. The ladies in London fight for him. His game is to pass himself off as a fallen man, depraved, worn-out. There you have his phraseology.... They see a man to save, to raise up, and convert into a great artist, and almost all of them yield to this temptation.”
“That is comical,” said Cæsar, looking curiously at the fiddler and his lady.
“To a Spaniard,” replied Kennedy, “it is comical; and probably it would be to an Italian too; but in England there are many women that have a purely imaginative idealism, a romanticism fed on ridiculous novels, and they fall into traps like these, which seem clumsy and grotesque to you here in the South, where people are more clear-sighted and realistic.”
Cæsar watched the brave fiddler, who played the role of a man used up, to great perfection.
After tea, Susanna invited them to go up to her rooms, and Laura and her brother and Kennedy and Mr. Russell went.
The English author had met a colleague, with whom he stayed behind talking, and Marchmont remained in the “hall,” as if it did not seem to him proper for him to go to his wife’s rooms.
Susanna’s rooms were very high, had balconies on the Via Veneto, and were almost opposite Queen Margherita’s palace. One overlooked the garden and could see the Queen Mother taking her walks, which is not without its importance for persons who live in a republic.
Susanna was most amiable to Laura; repeated to all of them her invitation to come and see her again; and after they had all promised to see one another frequently, Cæsar and Laura went down to their carriage, and took a turn on the Corso by twilight.