A modern trio in an old town

by Katharine Haviland-Taylor

After lunch I had two more hours of practising and then I could do as I liked again. Sometimes I walked—always if I hadn’t in the morning—and sometimes I read or wrote, and once in a while Miss Meek asked me to play “draughts,” by which she meant checkers, or Miss Bannister would call me in her room to show me some old, faded, once brown, now yellowing photographs of the house where she had lived as a girl, and where her father, who had been “The Vicar,” had died. And I always said they were beautiful, and she would nod, and keep on nodding for quite a while, and point out the vine that her mother had planted, and the place where her father sat under the trees and read his books, and the spot where she and her little sister, who was dead, had had their dolly parties. I think she enjoyed doing it, and I was so glad that I could look at the photographs and say that they were lovely! and ask her little questions which she seemed to like answering.

Dinner and the evenings were all about the same, with Mr. Hemmingway “a-hemming” and trying to remember, and Miss Meek barking out “Oh, lud!”, or asking Leslie how “Lady Vere de Vere” was this evening? And Miss Bannister squeaking out questions and then telling whoever answered them that she didn’t care what they said. And “not to bother, please—” and then—my room, for Leslie and Viola were very thick at that time—and they wouldn’t have included me in any of their plans, even if I had let my pride weaken and let them see that I was a little lonely sometimes.

Of course I knew that I was in Florence to work, and that I was the luckiest girl in the world to be there, and I told myself that over and over again! But a person’s heart will go on feeling just as it wants to—in spite of all the person’s reasoning and sense—and I must admit that some of those hours after dinner found me—well, not exactly happy. I think I really would have been pretty close to the edge of honestly real misery if it hadn’t been for my Artist, who was working a good deal at night.

After I’d snapped on my electric light, which only lit the center of the great big room and made deep shadows behind each piece of furniture and turned the corners into inky blotches, I used to go to my window. If my artist were working, I’d go back to the electric turn, switch it off, and then cross the room again, scramble up to sit on the sill, rub my shins, for I always seemed to hit something in crossing! and—watch.

At first, he was painting with a model, and the model was a little Italian boy, and that was the most fun to see, because the artist’s arranging him was interesting. He worked quickly those nights, and not very long. . . . Then came his working alone, and—what Leslie would have called, “Real drama, my dear!” For more than once I saw him stand away from his canvas, and study it in a way that told me he didn’t think it right. . . . And once he dropped his palette on a table, flung himself down in a chair and dropped his head in his hands.

I can’t describe how interested I got in that picture and in the artist. I liked him even then—which does seem silly—but I did, and although I had never seen him enough closely to know his face, nor, of course, the picture, I felt that I must go tell him that it was fine, and that he mustn’t be discouraged! I reached the point—and after only a little time of looking into his work room—of talking half aloud, and saying all the things I wanted to say right to him.

“It’s really good,” I would say, “you mustn’t get discouraged! What do you do with that stick you hold?”

Of course he didn’t answer, but it helped me, and I will say here that when any one is miserable from thinking of the kind of noise that they are used to at home, and the way their mother looks when she sits by the table with the drop light on it, mending, it is a good thing to get really interested in some one else! I know. I speak from experience!

That was the way the first week went; the second one started out with the most interesting experience, and it ended with another one—and one that I never, at that point, would have imagined could be! But Fate has a great many little knots in her threads which make her change the pattern as she weaves, and Viola’s dislike of sickness, and being with sick people, made Fate pause, then take a stitch and—draw me close to Leslie!

I reckoned time, quite naturally, not with the start of a calendar week, but from the day that I took my lesson. And it was on Wednesday, at five on a rainy afternoon, just after my second lesson that I came up the Via Tornabuoni all alone, stopped to buy three cream puffs, and then thought I’d step into the Duomo which almost fills the big Piazza del Duomo, and from its dome looks not only over all the city but far off to the hills.