Vines twine round the fruit-trees; black pigs and their families make their appearance in tribes; the lake of Thrasymene, near which Hannibal defeated the Romans, spreads itself out before us. The train is going from Florence to Rome. Towards mid-day a girl enters the carriage, apparently English or North American, with brown eyes and brown hair, that curls naturally about her head; she has her guitar-case in her hand, and flings it up into the net. Her parents follow her. As there is room in the compartment for forty-eight persons without crowding, she arranges places for her parents, and after much laughter and joking the latter settle off to sleep. The Italians stare at her; but not I. I sit with my back to her. She sits down, back to back with me, then turns her head and asks me, in Italian, some question about time, place, or the like. I reply as best I can. She (in English): "You are Italian?" On my reply, she tells me: "I hardly know twenty words in Italian; I only speak English, although I have been living in Rome for two years."
She then went on to relate that she was an American, born of poor parents out on the Indian frontier; she was twenty-six years old, a sculptor, and was on her way from Carrara, where she had been superintending the shipment of one of her works, a statue of Lincoln, which the Congress at Washington had done her the honour of ordering from her. It was only when she was almost grown up that her talent had been discovered by an old sculptor who happened to pay a visit and who, when he saw her drawing, had, half in jest, given her a lump of clay and said: "Do a portrait of me!" She had then never seen a statue or a painting, but she evinced such talent that before long several distinguished men asked her to do busts of them, amongst others, Lincoln. She was staying at his house that 14th April, 1865, when he was murdered, and was consequently selected to execute the monument after his death. She hesitated for a long time before giving up the modest, but certain, position she held at the time in a post-office; but, as others believed in her talent, she came to Europe, stayed first in Paris, where, to her delight, she made the acquaintance of Gustave Doré, and where she modelled a really excellent bust of Père Hyacinthe, visited London, Berlin, Munich, Florence, and settled down in Rome. There she received plenty of orders, had, moreover, obtained permission to execute a bust of Cardinal Antonelli, was already much looked up to, and well-to-do. In a few weeks she was returning to America.
As she found pleasure in talking to me, she exclaimed without more ado: "I will stay with you," said a few polite things to me, and made me promise that I would travel with her to Rome from the place where we were obliged to leave the train, the railway having been broken up to prevent the Italian troops entering the Papal States. At Treni a Danish couple got into the train, a mediocre artist and his wife, and with national astonishment and curiosity watched the evident intimacy between the young foreigner and myself, concerning which every Scandinavian in Rome was informed a few days later.
From Monte Rotondo, where the bridge had been blown up, we had to walk a long distance, over bad roads, and were separated in the throng, but she kept a place for me by her side. Thus I drove for the first time over the Roman Campagna, by moonlight, with two brown eyes gazing into mine. I felt as though I had met one of Sir Walter Scott's heroines, and won her confidence at our first meeting.
XLI.
Vinnie Ream was by no means a Scott heroine, however, but a genuine American, and doubly remarkable to me as being the first specimen of a young woman from the United States with whom I became acquainted. Even after I had seen a good deal of her work, I could not feel wholly attracted by her talent, which sometimes expressed itself rather in a pictorial than a plastic form, and had a fondness for emotional effects. But she was a true artist, and a true woman, and I have never, in any woman, encountered a will like hers. She was uninterruptedly busy. Although, now that the time of her departure was so near, a few boxes were steadily being packed every day at her home, she received every day visits from between sixteen and twenty-five people, and she had so many letters by post that I often found three or four unopened ones amongst the visiting cards that had been left. Those were what she had forgotten, and if she had read them, she had no time to reply to them. Every day she sat for a few hours to the clever American painter Healy, who was an admirer of her talent, and called her abilities genius. Every day she worked at Antonelli's bust. To obtain permission to execute it, she had merely, dressed in her most beautiful white gown, asked for an audience of the dreaded cardinal, and had at once obtained permission. Her intrepid manner had impressed the hated statesman of the political and ecclesiastical reaction, and in her representation of him he appeared, too, in many respects nobler and more refined than he was. But besides modelling the cardinal's bust, she put the finishing touches to two others, saw to her parents' household affairs and expenses, and found time every day to spend a few hours with me, either in a walk or wandering about the different picture-galleries.
She maintained the family, for her parents had nothing at all. But when the statue of Lincoln had been ordered from her, Congress had immediately advanced ten thousand dollars. So she was able to live free from care, though for that matter she troubled not at all about money. She was very ignorant of things outside her own field, and the words my work were the only ones that she spoke with passion. What she knew, she had acquired practically, through travel and association with a multiplicity of people. She hardly knew a dozen words of any language besides English, and was only acquainted with English and American writers; of poets, she knew Shakespeare and Byron best; from life and books she had extracted but few general opinions, but on the other hand, very individual personal views. These were based upon the theory that the lesser mind must always subordinate itself to the higher, and that the higher has a right to utilise freely the time and strength of the lesser, without being called to account for doing so. She herself was abjectly modest towards the artists she looked up to. Other people might all wait, come again, go away without a reply.
Rather small of stature, strong and healthy,--she had never been ill, never taken medicine,--with white teeth and red cheeks, quick in everything, when several people were present she spoke only little and absently, was as cold, deliberate and composed as a man of strong character; but at the same time she was unsuspecting and generous, and in spite of her restlessness and her ambitious industry, ingratiatingly coquettish towards anyone whose affection she wished to win. It was amusing to watch the manner in which she despatched the dutifully sighing Italians who scarcely crossed the threshold of her studio before they declared themselves. She replied to them with a superabundance of sound sense and dismissed them with a jest.
One day that I went to fetch her to the Casino Borghese, I found her dissolved in tears. One of the two beautiful doves who flew about the house and perched on her shoulders, and which she had brought with her from Washington, had disappeared in the night. At first I thought that her distress was half jest, but nothing could have been more real; she was beside herself with grief. I realised that if philologians have disputed as to how far Catullus' poem of the girl's grief over the dead sparrow were jest or earnest, it was because they had never seen a girl weep over a bird. Catullus, perhaps, makes fun a little of the grief, but the grief itself, in his poem too, is serious enough.
In the lovely gardens of the Villa Borghese, Vinnie Ream's melancholy frame of mind was dispersed, and we sat for a long time by one of the handsome fountains and talked, among other things, of our pleasure in being together, which pleasure was not obscured by the prospect of approaching parting, because based only on good-fellowship, and with no erotic element about it. Later in the evening, she had forgotten her sorrow altogether in the feverish eagerness with which she worked, and she kept on, by candle-light, until three o'clock in the morning.