Meanwhile I was able, as I say, to compare his note and accent with those of his family; and the result was that I warmed a good deal towards the valiant cheer of Berta and Teresa. They had dropped into the background (so far as that is possible on a small balcony where five people were now squeezed about the table) when Luigi made his appearance; they abdicated and he assumed the rule of the entertainment; and it became so common and squalid under his direction that I clearly saw the bravery which the women had lent it till he came. We had been munching the biscuits with perfect dignity, and when Luigi began apologizing for them he seemed to degrade us all. Teresa had handed the plate like one who does honour to herself and her guest, and even Emilio, whose table-manners were not very good, had pulled himself together to imitate Berta’s dainty fingering of her tea-cup. But now Emilio went entirely to pieces; he gulped, he filled his mouth with the dust of the biscuits and forgot about it while he greedily questioned Luigi, raising some matter of a promise or an appointment which Luigi rather sulkily discouraged. “Afterwards!” said Luigi crossly, in English, and Emilio gloomed in silence and resumed his mouthful of dust. I don’t think those women had a gay or comely time of it when they were alone with Luigi; I had a vision of interminable sessions on that balcony, day after day, Luigi grumbling his discontent and his pity of himself in an endless acrid argument with the women, while the priest took his evening repose hard by and the young man on the further house-top blasted perseveringly upon his cornet.
How strange and sad that these people should have no more suitable stage for their dreary wrangles than a balcony swung out upon so much of the history of the world, an airy platform from which you could wave your handkerchief to the dome of St. Peter! I tried to measure what it might mean to Berta that in the midst of the golden-brown city beneath us, the treasury outspread before her every morning when she looked from her chamber, you could distinguish the smooth unobtrusive crown of the Pantheon; I pointed it out to her and found she had never noticed it before. “La Rotonda?” she said; “but the Rotonda should be—” she didn’t know where it should be, she didn’t know anything about it at all, she had never seen the view from her balcony, though she knew it was very fine. “We have a so beautiful prospect,” she said, surveying it with aroused curiosity, as though for the first time. “In Bloomsbury the view is not so fine,” I suggested; and she turned her back upon Rome to protest that I didn’t know my own good fortune, with beautiful London to enjoy whenever I would. But I liked her for the word; she loved London for the beauty of Gower Street, not for its openings and its chances; and she looked coolly upon Rome, not because it is no place for a gentleman, but because in Rome she had had more than enough of the care of a decayed old father, of the struggle with mounting prices and expenses—and very much more than enough, I dare say, of Luigi’s sulking and complaining, though she still managed to think she thought him a handsome and brilliant young man. She had, however, secured a husband; Emilio wasn’t handsome, but like Luigi she took her chance where she found it.
VIII. ALBANO
DAY after day the bounty of the springtime was unfailing; and the day of our excursion to Albano began as a crystal, towered to its height in azure and gold, sank to evening over the shadowy plain in pearl and wine. If the world had been created and hurled upon its path to enjoy a single day, one only, before dropping again into chaos, this might have been that day itself—and quite enough to justify the labour of creation. But in Rome that labour is justified so often, between the dusk and the dusk, that the children of Rome have the habit of the marvel; so I judge, at least, by Teresa and Berta, who occupied most of the time of our small journey in wondering why they had forgotten to bring the two light wraps which they were accustomed to take with them in the country. Berta could only remember that she had laid them down for a moment in the—in the scullery-sink, I suppose, with the cracked looking-glass, but she stopped herself in mentioning the spot. And Teresa had all but lost her very smart ivory-hilted umbrella in the crowded tram, on the way to the station; and she was so much upset that more than once she thoughtlessly broke out to Berta in Italian—a sure sign in Teresa of ruffled nerves. We travelled to Albano by train, and in our flurry of discomposure we couldn’t for a while attend to the landscape; but presently Teresa reflected that the light wraps would be safe where they were (she had read where they were in Berta’s eye), and we could abandon ourselves to our national delight in the country.
The excursion had been the happy idea of the two ladies. Luigi luckily found that he had inevitable business in the city, and of course there was no question or exposing the aged patriot to the risks of travel—he seldom ventured abroad; but a friend of Teresa’s was to join us at Albano, a charming Russian lady in reduced circumstances, and perhaps Emilio would follow us later, and Berta had sent word to another friend of hers, a German girl, who lived out there, and possibly we should find Miss Gilpin too—only it seemed that Miss Gilpin was rather “proud of herself,” Berta said, rather “high,” and if she knew that Madame de Shuvaloff, poor thing, was to be one of our party she might think it beneath her; for Madame de Shuvaloff, you understand, had been reduced to keeping a boarding-house near the Ponte Margherita, to support herself and her little girl, and Berta for her part could see nothing dishonourable in poverty, but some people—“som people,” said Teresa trenchantly, “think it wrong for som people to be even alive, isn’t it?” We must, then, remember that if Miss Gilpin should condescend to accompany us—“condescend?” cried Berta, “I shall just give her a good piece of somthing if she condescends, oh yes I shall!” “You silly gurl,” said Teresa, “always in a passion about somthing!”—and Teresa began to reckon the number of our party for luncheon, confusing herself inextricably in the effort to keep the certain and the probable and the unlikely in separate categories.
We had crossed the shining plain, had tunnelled into the hills and arrived at Albano before we had time to delight very much in the country; and even the glorious free English ramble that we were to take in the woods before luncheon consisted mostly of debates and delays, harassing doubts, wrong turnings—for Teresa was positively afraid of her niece’s boldness, once the girl was let loose in the country, and she was resolved that the crazy thing should incur no unpleasantness, so she darkly mentioned, such as may easily befall one in the wild places of the mountain. The wildness, Teresa seemed to hold, begins where the back-streets and the chicken-runs and the rubbish-heaps of the Albanians leave off; and our hour of adventure ran out while we peered round corners, measured the risk of climbing a stony path that disappeared in an ilex-wood, and recollected that we mustn’t be led on to wander too far before the time appointed for our party at the trattoria. “How quick the morning passes in the country!” exclaimed Berta, casting out a black-gloved hand to beat off the flies and the puffs of white dust—the flies and the dust in the safer parts of the country are very thick. “But we must hurry back,” Teresa reminded us; and we turned away from the prospect of the ilex-wood, keeping to the shade of a high wall covered with bright blue posters, and stepped out with more assurance to regain the street of the tram-line, the town-piazza above the railway-station, and the homely eating-house where Madame de Shuvaloff and the rest were to meet us.
Our party kept us waiting interminably, and in the end it consisted only of the Russian lady, reduced and charming, with her sharp and shrill little girl. Everybody else, it seemed, had failed us, whether in forgetfulness or in pride. But no matter, Teresa and Berta could make a party, as I have noted, out of the leanest material; and Madame de Shuvaloff (it is but a random shot that I take at her name) was one of those who occupy a large amount of room for their size. We waited long for her; but she came straggling into the trattoria at last—a tiny scrap of a woman with a thin pale face and huge eyes, a clutching and clawing and shrieking little creature, like a half-fledged young bird of prey escaped from the nest. She strayed in upon us as though by accident, and with a shriek and a flourish of her claws, catching sight of us, she scrambled over chairs and tables, beat her wings in startled surprise, dashed herself against the walls and ceiling—I give the impression I received—and disappeared again, fluttering out through the doorway with a cry for something she had left behind. It was her child that she had lost, and there was a scuffle without, an encounter of clashing beaks, and she returned with the child in her talons—a still smaller but quite as active young fledgling, which struggled and shook itself free and bounced across the floor to its perch at our table. Teresa and Berta sat up, very decent and straight-backed, to meet the shock of the party, and with the subsiding of the first commotion they were able to keep it more or less in hand. Our guests were induced to compose themselves on their chairs in the likeness of human beings.
They did their best, and the little girl indeed (her mother called her Mimi) straightened her frock and folded her hands and pursed her lips in a careful imitation of Teresa, enjoying the pretence of social and lady-like manners. She improved on her example with a coquettish dart of her eyes (at the gentleman of the party) under lowered lids; she had a native expertness beyond the rest of us, and at intervals through the meal she remembered to use it. But she broke down when a dish of food appeared, and she then became the voracious nestling, passionate to be the first to get her fingers into the mess and to secure the likeliest lumps. She screamed to her mother in a jumble of languages to give her that bit, the best, not the nasty scrap beside it; her mother ordered and protested, Mimi fought and snatched—on the arrival of anything fresh to eat there was an outbreak of the free life of the wild. Mimi, pacified with the lump she needed, was again a young person of gracious style; and Teresa, quite powerless before these glimpses of the unknown, could resume her control of the occasion and the ceremony. Mimi then, momentarily gorged and at ease, watched us with a flitting glancing attention that I in my turn was fascinated to watch. Her mind was keenly at work, transparently observing and memorizing; she noted our attitudes, our speech and behaviour, she stored them away for her benefit; and I wondered what words she was using, what language she thought in, while she seized and saved up these few small grains of a social experience. Whenever she caught my eye on her she began immediately to make use of them; she consciously arched her neck, she fingered her fork with elegance, she shot her glances with eloquent effect.
Her mother meanwhile—but her mother was indeed a baffling study. Teresa was quite right, she was charming; she was perfectly simple and natural, and just as much so when she was human as when she clawed and shrieked in her native bird-savagery. When she was human she talked with a curious questing ingenuity in any or all of the civilized tongues. She raised us above trivialities, she neglected Teresa’s questions about her journey, her plans, her unpunctuality; she started (in French) a fanciful disquisition upon some very modern matter of painting or dancing or dressing, some revolution in all the arts that was imminent; and it seemed that she was deep in the inner councils and intrigues of the revolution, which had its roots in a philosophic theory (she slipped, without missing a step, into German) that she expounded in a few light touches of whimsical imagery (suddenly twisting off into Italian); and I can hear her assuring Teresa that the black misery of a woman’s life will flush into pink, will whiten to snow of pure delight, if she breaks through the bonds of—I forget what, of earthly thought, of esthetic imprisonment; and I can see Teresa’s blank white face, her bonnet-strings neat under her chin, her lips decently arranged as though her mouth were full of dough, while she waits her opportunity to declare that this modern art is all “too ogly, too drrreadfully horrible and ogly for words.” The little visitor smiled sweetly and darted with nimble grace into further reaches of her argument—where she evoked a stonier stare upon the faces of Teresa and Berta, who began to look straight across the table at nothing at all as though they could suddenly neither see nor hear. There seemed to be no malice in Madame de Shuvaloff, but there was no shame either. She talked most improperly (in French), breaking through the last of the bonds that restrain us, not indeed from the snowier heights, but from the pinker revelries of speculation; and I don’t know where it would have ended or how Teresa would have tackled the daring creature at last, but Mimi (who had quite understood that she was to look inattentive when these topics were broached)—Mimi presently distracted her mother and all of us by hurling herself (out of her turn) at the fritto misto, in a passion of fear lest the dish should be rifled and spoilt before it reached her.
Mimi was not a nice child, but her mother was decidedly attractive—far more artless, more unconscious, more heedless than her daughter. What in the world was the history behind them? Madame de Shuvaloff never explained herself, and it “passes me,” as Luigi would say, how she came to be keeping a Roman pension by the Ponte Margherita. Russian she was, Russian was at the bottom of all her tongues; but evidently it had for so long been overlaid by the rest of Europe that she had almost forgotten it was there. Each of her languages, however, was a language of her own, full of odd pretty tones and inflexions that coiled and scooped and curled with a singular music. When the struggle over the fritto misto died down Teresa seized the word with decision, the word that seemed furthest from Madame de Shuvaloffs indelicacy, and with Berta’s ready help she kept the conversation on a purer level. We talked of the terrible rise in the price of provisions: did Olga know (Olga was Madame de Shuvaloff) that Luigi had found it was entirely due to the weakness of the government?—the criminal weakness of the ministry before the threats of the bassa plebe; and if you ask how it is that the common people insist on an increase in the cost of living, which seems improbable, Teresa assures you that in fact they don’t know what they want, such is their ignorance and their folly. We only perceive that the country is in a sad condition, and Luigi declares—but Madame Olga suddenly shrieks out with a shrill exclamation, followed by a little fountain of airy laughter, for she has just remembered that she forgot to give any directions to her servant, before leaving Rome this morning, and she believes the creature capable of anything—of anything—and heaven knows what will have happened to the midday meal of her pensioners! “How many is your table?” asked Teresa with sympathetic concern. “Eighty!” cried Madame Olga lightly, and she fumbled in her bag and showed us a couple of five-franc notes that she had expressly borrowed from one of her guests, only last night, for Colomba the cook to go marketing with to-day. Well, isn’t it unlucky? “I shall lose them all—all my eighty!” the little lady humorously wailed. “I lose them always; Mimi and I, we shall starve!”