Do not think it unkind that I did not come to Milan to kiss you and say good-bye. I had not the heart to do so. Aldo, too, said we could not afford it, and, indeed, our combined viatiques and our jewellery only just enabled us to come here.
We landed three days ago. Yesterday morning I sent you a postcard: "Arrived happily." Happily! Oh, mother dear, I think there must be a second higher and happier heaven for those who are brave enough to tell untruths of this kind. Enough; we landed, Anne-Marie looking like a spoilt princess; I with my Monte Carlo hat and coat, and high-heeled, impertinent shoes; and Aldo, a pallid Antinous, with forty-five dollars in his pocket-book.
Then came the Via Crucis of looking for rooms. Mother, did I ever stay at the Hôtel Nazionale in Rome, and descend languidly the red-carpeted stairs to the royal automobile that was to drive me to the Quirinal? Did I ever sit at home in Uncle Giacomo's large arm-chair and listen benignly to moon-struck poets reading their songs? Did I ever with languid fingers ring bells for servants, and order what I wanted?
"Cio avvenne forse ai tempi
D'Omero e di Valmichi——"
That was another Nancy. This Nancy trudged for hours through straight and terrible streets called avenues, with a dismal husband and a tired baby at her side. Third Avenue, Fourth Avenue, then quickly across Fifth Avenue, which had nothing to do with us, and again across to Sixth Avenue ... and everywhere dirty shops, screaming children, jostling girls, rude men, trains rushing overhead, street-cars screeching and clanging. Then, at last, Seventh Avenue, where there were streets full of quiet, squalid boarding-houses, fewer screaming children, fewer dirty shops, and no trains. We went into a cheap, clean-looking place that a porter had told us of. A woman opened. She looked at my hat and coat, and at my shoes, and said: "What do you want?" "A room——" began Aldo. She shut the door without answering. At the next house a woman in a dirty silk dressing-gown opened the door. "Yes, they had rooms. Eight dollars a day. Meals a dollar." In the next house they took no children. In the next, no foreigners. Our expensive clothes in their cheap street made them suspicious. Aldo's handsome face made them suspicious. His Italian accent frightened them. And Anne-Marie cried every time a new face appeared at a new door.
At last Aldo said: "I will go to the Italian consul. You wait here in a baker's shop." The consulate was at the other end of New York, and was closed when Aldo got there. When he returned, harassed and haggard, I had made friends with the baker's wife. She was German. I told her our History of the Wolf—that I was a poetess, and had met the Queen, and all about Monte Carlo. I don't think she believed or understood much, but she was sorry for me; and Anne-Marie, hearing us talk German, suddenly started piping: "Schlaf, Kindchen, schlaf!" The woman caught her up in her arms, and said: "Ach, du süsses! How does she come to know that?" And she took us all to 28th Street to the house of her sister, who gave us this room. It is clean, and the woman is kind.
And now, what?
I have bought myself a frightful pepper-and-salt coloured dress, and a black straw hat. I look like a "deserving poor." And Anne-Marie is wearing a dark blue woolly horror belonging to the woman's daughter. She must wear it, or Frau Schmidl would be offended. Frau Schmidl is the only friend we have in America.
For the ranch is a myth of Aldo's. He never was on a ranch in his life. He met a Frenchman once with weak lungs, who had been in Texas, and who gave him all the romantic details that he used to recount to us. Do you remember, mother? On Lake Maggiore? He talked vaguely, and not much, it is true, of those bucking bronchoes he used to ride across the sweeping Western prairies, feeling the wind in his hair.... When I reproach him for his fables, he tells me that it was our fault. We insisted upon the details. We would hear all about it! He says Clarissa started the ranch legend, because she thought it sounded well. Then she left him to keep it up as best he could. Poor Aldo! He hates us in these clothes. And he hates the German things Frau Schmidl gives us to eat. He has gone to the Italian Consul for the third time to see if he can find some correspondence to do. I could give lessons, but it seems that there are many more people who want to give lessons than there are who want to take them. And then—there is Anne-Marie, who has to be taken care of. Anne-Marie! Frau Schmidl loves her because of her name. She says it is echt deutsch! She is a stout, fair woman, who speaks English strangely. When she enters the room, she says, nodding and laughing, "Now, and what makes the Anne-Marie?"
The Anne-Marie likes the sound of the language, and imitates her. I dread to think what English the Anne-Marie will learn.