It happened in Rome; in our apartment on the Piazza di Spagna. We had a visit from a Countess. She was heralded by her visiting-card, on which blazed a coronet--an awe-inspiring visiting-card, imposing enough to reduce to the ground the most blatant democrat. What did the unknown Countess want? we asked each other with palpitating hearts. Had she come to invite us to visit her ancestral castle in the Sabine Hills? Was she a messenger from the Queen of Italy summoning us to an audience in the Quirinal Palace? What did this high-toned lady want? My wife faced the music alone. She entered the room, and saw a shabbily dressed old lady rambling about amongst the furniture.
"Ah!" exclaimed the Countess; "please excuse me the liberty of admiring your old Italian furniture; it is very fine indeed. I am so fond of it. I used to have my rooms full of it, but we sold it all to dealers. They gave us a good price for it. We are reduced in circumstances now, and I have called to ask if you would buy some jam from me. I make it myself, and have good clients among the English and American residents. I charge 3.50 lire for a jar, and allow 50 centimes for the empty jar if returned when I call again."
She produced some glass jars of jam and honey from a basket she carried under her cloak. Refined-looking jars; artistically labelled jars, assuring the purchaser that the jam within was made under perfect hygienic conditions. The wording of the labels was printed in accurate English; but the Countess could not speak English, not a broken sentence of it could she utter. The conversation was carried on in French. We bought a jar of jam and a jar of honey, and are looking hopefully for the return of the 50 centimes on the empty jars when next she calls on business intent.
It is no hedgerow jam, no common cottage mixture of blackberry and apple she offered us, but highly aristocratic peach jam from choicest fruits grown in coroneted orchards. And the honey she offered was superior honey; not the produce of old-fashioned garden flowers and wild heather from the hills--anybody breeds that plebeian honey. Her bees were classic to the core, lived in the garden of Hesperides, and fed only on orange-blossoms and acacia. No honey had an aroma equal to hers.
Dear, good old soul! There was lots of fine metal in her character; she was a piece of rare old silver plate with hall-mark clearly impressed on it, but in somewhat battered and bruised condition. She had been roughly handled in the hard-hammering world. She had lost everything but manners and breeding. She could sell jam with the grace and dignity of a Queen bestowing royal favours on a subject. She was striving to maintain herself honourably in the sight of all men, and she would die in the last ditch rather than beg. Her pluck lured her on to the winning-post.
There are sensitive people who, when hard-hit by Fortune, mope like moulting fowls and creep into dark corners of the earth; they do not strut in the market-place and shout loud-throated their woes to the crowd; they lower their flag and surrender themselves to fate. Their vanity supports their poverty, and their poverty breaks their heart. Really, these people are victims of false shame. False shame deludes their common sense. It discolours their imagination, enfeebles their will-power, and drives them on to the rocks to feed with the goats. Their misfortune assumes an exaggerated character in their own minds. They fancy that the world stares coldly on them in their adversity and whispers contemptuously against them behind their backs, and they collapse in the frigid atmosphere with which they surround themselves.
Their vanity betrays them into surmising unwholesome things. They fidget about themselves in their supersensitiveness. They adore public opinion, and fancy themselves filling a large place in its consideration, and they dread the smiting lash of its hostile criticism. The truth is humiliating but very refreshing to our morbid disposition, and the truth is that people are not thinking much about us, however conspicuously we imagine ourselves to be painted in the picture. We are only one of a crowd of common people, nor even the most interesting figure in it. It is unwise to esteem ourselves to be of immeasurably more consequence than we really are. The busy world at best gives us only a passing thought. Dr. Johnson bluntly said: "No man is much regarded by the rest of the world. The utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear is to fill a vacant hour with prattle and be forgotten." If a man thinks no more seriously of his own misfortunes than his neighbour thinks of them, his troubles will be lightly borne.
However, the world is much more good-natured than the man of morbid temper gives it credit for. Penetrate through its cold reserve, and you often find within a warm, sympathetic heart. The good English heart is oft-times hedged by a chevaux de frise of English hauteur hard to break through, but get within the lines and you receive a cordial welcome.
Our sturdy Countess was not afflicted with false shame. She had pride, but not vanity. Vanity is a coquette and says, "What do you think of me?" and tremblingly awaits your verdict. Pride says, "I am as good as you are, and I don't care a damn." It is not every decadent Countess who sells jam to keep her end up in this see-saw world. It requires grit and a rare brand of pride uncommon in the quality to rise to the occasion. There is a vain pride that welters into nothingness in the dismal hour of failure, and starves tragically like a rat in a trap rather than help itself or accept help from others. There is another pride--robust, full-blooded pride--that spurns the conventionalities of caste, takes off its coat and fights misfortune face to face resolutely for its daily bread, and wins through. This is where our heroic Countess steps in splendour.
Why immolate oneself on the altar of family pride? A false goddess sits enshrined there on a false throne. Why live on the reputation a forefather won in the Middle Ages? That reputation is now spent capital; it is worthless scrip on the social market to-day. Build another reputation for yourself, clean and sweet and new. If ill luck drops you in the ditch, to maintain inviolate the family honour you must get up and with ungloved hands work your way out of it like a man. Sell jam.