Like all talkers who know too much, Forepaugh had, what Carlyle called, a terrible faculty for developing into a bore. Some of our little group would run when they saw him at the door, others took malicious pleasure in interrupting him and suddenly changing the conversation in the hope to catch him tripping. But out of all such tests he came triumphantly. I never thought him more wonderful than the evening when somebody abruptly began to talk about Theosophy in the middle of one of his confidences about the Italian Court. It was no use. Without stopping to take breath, at once Forepaugh began to tell us the most marvellous theosophical adventures, which he knew not by hearsay, but because he had passed through them himself. We might express an opinion: he stated facts. And it seemed that he had no more intimate friend than Sinnett, and that to Sinnett he had confessed his scepticism, asking for a sign, a manifestation, and that one afternoon when they were smoking over their coffee and cognac after lunch in Sinnett's chambers, then on the third floor of a house near the Oxford Street end of Bond Street—Forepaugh was carefully exact in his details—Sinnett smiled mysteriously but said nothing except to warn him to hold on tight to the table. And up rose the table, with the litter of coffee cups, cigars, and cognac, up rose the two chairs, one at either end with Sinnett and Forepaugh sitting on them, and away they floated out of the open window—it was a June afternoon—and along Bond Street, above the carriages and the hansoms and omnibuses and the people as far as Piccadilly, and round the lamp post by Egyptian Hall, up Bond Street again, and in at the window. "Hold on," said Sinnett, and "I never held on to anything as tight in my life as I did to that table," said Forepaugh in conclusion.
He always reminded me of the man who so annoyed my Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, by always knowing, doing, or having everything better or bigger than anybody else. "Why, if I were to tell him I had an elephant in my back yard," my Uncle used to say, "he would at once invite me to see the mastodon in his." Forepaugh had a mastodon up his sleeve for everybody else's elephant.
V
By Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company
ELIHU VEDDER
If Forepaugh gave us a great deal of information we had no possible use for and talked us to despair, he was really a good fellow whom we should have missed from our table. And it was through him J. and I were first made welcome in that one house open to us, to which I have been all this time in coming. For it was Forepaugh who told Vedder we were in Rome, and Vedder, once he knew it, would not hear of our shutting his door in our own faces, nor would Mrs. Vedder, whatever the condition of our wardrobe.
Vedder may have revealed many things in his recent Digressions, but not the extent of the hospitality he and his wife showed to the American who was a stranger in Rome, where, even then, they had been long at home. Mrs. Vedder carried her amiability to the point of climbing our six flights of stairs and calling on me in the rooms that suited us admirably for our work but were less adapted to afternoon receptions, and she would have gone further and shown me how to adapt them by moving every bit of furniture from where it was and arranging it all over again. Not the least part of her friendliness was not to mind when I did not fall in with her plans, as I couldn't, since so long as the sun shone in at the windows all was right with the rooms as far as I could see. I was in the absurd stage of industry when I did not care where my Roman furniture stood so long as my Roman tasks got done. Even our padrona told me her surprise that, foreigner as I was, I seemed to do as much work as she did, which I accepted as a compliment. After that first attempt Mrs. Vedder did not return to climb our six flights, but she would not let us off from climbing her four or five.
Often as we took advantage of their hospitality, we never found the Vedders alone and, chiefly American as was the group at their fireside, it was never without a foreigner or two. The first person we were introduced to on the first visit was the Englishman who would have deserted us in the Ghetto had we let him have his way, and who, when he saw us, looked as if he wished the Vedders had learned to be less indiscriminate in their hospitality. We had the satisfaction of knowing that we made him supremely uncomfortable. He frowned upon us then as he continued to all through the winter. He could not forgive us for having found him out and was evidently afraid we were going to tell everybody about it. He was something very learned and was occupied in writing a book on Ancient Rome; later he became something more important at South Kensington. But no degree of learning and importance helped him to forget, or anyway to forgive. At chance meetings years afterwards in London he frowned, as no doubt he would still had he not long since gone to the land where I hope all frowns are smoothed from his frowning brow.
If he frowned, there was another Englishman who smiled: an elderly man with the imperturbable serenity of a Buddha. He also had written books, I believe. I remember articles by him, with art for subject, in the Portfolio at a time when everybody had taken to writing about art, and I think his name was Davies. But it would be more in character to forget that he ever worked or had a name. When I was in Rome he had risen above activity and toil to the contemplative life and, I suppose, to the income that made it possible. One night he explained his philosophy to me. Men could not be happy without sunshine, he thought. The sun was house, food, clothes, furniture, identity, everything, and as most of the year in England sunshine was not to be had at any price, he had come to live in Rome where almost all the year it was his for nothing. He sat on the Pincian or in other gardens during the day, doing nothing in the sunshine—that was living. And he urged me to follow his example and not to wait until half my life had been wasted in the pursuit of happiness where it was not to be found. He may have been right, but I never needed to become a philosopher to value the virtue of indolence,—my trouble is that I have never had the money to pay for it. Any man has the ability to do nothing, a great authority has said, and I can answer for one woman who has more than her fair share of it. I have always envied the North American Indians for their enjoyment of what it seems Burke attributed to them: "the highest boon of Heaven, supreme and perpetual indolence."
As regular a visitor was a huge long-bearded Norwegian who looked a prophet and was an artist, and who spent most of the winter in the study of Marion Crawford's novels, I cannot imagine why, as they roused him to fury.