Roman pictures

by Percy Lubbock

I expected a howl from Mimi, but she took it unmoved; she knew her mother. Teresa, it was evident, knew her less, for Teresa gloomed anxiously upon the prospect, trying to hold little Olga to her words and beginning to offer advice and warning. You couldn’t trust a Roman cook—surely Olga had discovered that; and lodgers, in these bad times, are precious articles and you must handle them cautiously. “But how many did you say—?” It broke upon Teresa that Olga had played with her over the number, and her face was a pleasant mixture of dignity a little ruffled and mannerliness striving to meet a joke. Madame de Shuvaloff became instantly serious; and though it didn’t appear that the disaster of the dinnerless pensioners weighed on her, she was desperate, unutterably hopeless, over the tragedy of a woman’s life in the great horrible world. “Men,” she said bitterly, “do what they will with us”—and the eyes of Berta and Teresa met in a swift glance as they hastily struck up their give-and-take on the question of the likeliest methods of attracting the right kind of lodger to share one’s home. One should possibly advertise in the newspapers—but the topic was unfortunately chosen, for Madame Olga immediately flung off into a rippling titter of mirth, thin and savage, at the notion of “attracting,” were it only as boarders at one’s table, the men who make the world so black a place for a woman. “All beasts!” she declared flatly; and this was her opportunity for a story that she addressed particularly at me, glaring with her great eyes in the horror of what she told.

Truly the Russian wild sends out strange little emissaries to the cities of civilization. This tiny frail slip of a woman, who looked as though a puff of air from the frozen plain would shrivel her dead, had somehow scrambled across Europe and held her own and lodged herself in a cranny of Rome; and there she had stuck, she had survived, you couldn’t tell how, with a tenacity of slender claws that could grasp and cling where a heavier weight would have found no chance of foothold. She was evidently indestructible. The world, by her account, massed its ponderous strength to crush her; but there was nothing in her that might be crushed, no superfluous sensitive stuff to be caught by a blow; there was nothing but one small central nut or bead of vitality, too hard for the world itself to crack. She thrived upon the conflict; I don’t for a moment suppose that the world was as unkind to her as it was, for example, to poor foolish old Teresa; but she believed herself to be singled out for its crudest attack, and the thought was exquisite and stimulating. She had, moreover, a real artistic passion; her fire and thrill were genuine when she talked of the strange things that were doing among the artists; but I note that it had to be the art of the present, the art of a chattering studio rather than of a hushed museum—she couldn’t have thrilled and fired before the beauty of the past and dead, where there aren’t the same intoxicating revolutions to be planned and exploded upon an unsuspicious age. Drama she needed, and of drama you can always have your fill if you know as well as she did how to make it. Why yes, she created a notion of mysterious conspiracy, somewhere lurking in the background, by her very refusal to explain and apologize when she was late for lunch.

As for her story of the baseness of men, told with extreme earnestness in three languages, she made a very good thing of it and we were all impressed. But much more striking than her story was the picture that rose before me of her establishment, her boarding-house by the Tiber, where a dozen lodgers (she reduced them to a dozen), mostly like herself from the Russian inane, gathered and mingled, quarrelled and stormed at each other, conspired, bribed the cook, made love to the landlady (of course I have only her word for it), eloped without settling their bills, lent her five-franc notes to pay at least for the next meal—but chiefly talked, talked day and night, sat interminably talking, while Olga rated the servants or hunted for the lost key of the larder, while Colomba had hysterics and dropped the soup-tureen, while Mimi killed flies at the window and had her own little crisis of nerves over a disappointment about a box of chocolates. All these visions appeared in the story—which was a story of the monstrous behaviour of one of the lodgers, a young man of whom Olga had tried to make a friend. A friend!—yes, Olga believed in friendship, in spite of a hundred disillusions; she believed in a species of friendship that transcends the material, the physical; but we needn’t go into that, for though she had believed in it, the young man’s behaviour had pretty well killed her faith, once for all, and she now saw that there could be no true friendship in a world where half the world (the brutes of men) have no sense of honour, none of loyalty, none of idealism, transcendentalism, immaterialism; and Teresa still held her lips placidly bunched while Olga circled among these safe abstractions, but the little wretch came presently down with a bump again upon plainer terms, and it behoved Teresa to intervene with all her decision. Olga said that the young man had proved to be not only destitute of these safe vague qualities, but terribly in possession of other qualities, quite of the opposite kind, which she proceeded to name; and their names lacked that soft classical buzz and blur (idealism, materialism, prunes-and-prism—the termination is reassuring), and on the contrary were so crude and clear-cut that Teresa pushed back her chair and suggested another delightful long ramble in the forest, a “country afternoon,” such as we all adored.

There really was no malice in Olga, the little wretch; for to be malicious you must at least have some consciousness of the feelings of other people, you must know what will hurt them; and Olga was aware of no feelings, no subject of sensation, save her own and herself. Imagine all the relations of the world to be arranged like the spokes of a wheel, with no crossing or tangling before they reach the middle; and Olga herself in the middle, with every thread of feeling that exists all radiating away from her into space: that was the order of nature as Olga saw it, that indeed was her fashion of introducing order of any kind into the universe. One must simplify somehow; and if, unlike Olga, you suspect people of thinking and feeling on their own account, all anyhow, turning the cart-wheel into a tangle—well then you must order your private affairs, your habits, your household at least, into some kind of reposeful pattern. Olga had no need of a stupid mechanical pattern, the mere work of her own hands, to be imposed upon the facts around her. Let Colomba rave, let the lodgers hurl their boots among the crockery (she happened to mention it as one of their ways), let the boarding-house seethe and heave like a page of Dostoevsky: no matter, the universe kept its grand simplicity, all lines met at the centre, Olga was there. The story of the base young man had no bearing upon anybody but herself; Teresa was shocked, but Olga didn’t care, didn’t notice, and she went on absorbed in her narrative—or she would have done so if Mimi hadn’t made another diversion (to be frank, she was sick before she could get to the door) in which the young man was finally dropped and forgotten.

Emilio now joined us, very hot and shiny from the train, and as soon as he had refreshed himself we issued forth—an orderly procession, for Mimi clung pensively awhile to her mother’s arm; and it was agreed that we should enjoy ourselves unconventionally, fearlessly, in a walk through the greenwood to Castel Gandolfo. We mustn’t forget, however, that Fräulein Dahl, Berta’s German friend, would be descending from Castel Gandolfo (where she lived) to meet us; and we immediately saw that whichever of the forest-paths we chose we should certainly miss her. “We had better go perhaps no further than this,” said Berta, pausing under the blue posters of the wall we had already studied that morning; and Emilio proposed the amendment that it would be safer still to wait in the middle of the town, by the tram-station, where the lady would be sure to look for us. But Berta yearned for the country; so she and Teresa spread a couple of newspapers upon a dust-heap under the posters, gathered their skirts, deposited themselves with care, and pointed out that one had a charming glimpse of the country from this very spot. A little way up the lane indeed there was leafy shadow and the beginning of a woodland ride; and Olga, restlessly ranging, called to us to come further and take to the forest. But Teresa and Berta were established, and they declared themselves at ease where they were—though I can’t say they looked very easy, with their veils pulled down and their knees drawn neatly together, both clutching the ornate handles of their umbrellas. “People will think we are strange gurls,” said Berta, “sprawling by the road like this!” Emilio had to make the best he could of their wild English ways; he leant with resignation against the picture of a highly developed young woman in evening dress, who held out a box of pills with a confident smile; he sucked at a long cigar in silence. Mimi really did sprawl; she lay where she fell, she slept the sleep in which one repairs the disasters of a recent meal.

I followed her mother up the shadowy path into the woodland, where we were to watch carefully for Berta’s expected friend. When at last you are clear of the pigs and chickens of Albano you plunge immediately into the Virgilian forest that spreads and spreads over the hills, between the two deep bowls of the lakes. The ancient darkness of ilex leads you on, and the darkness changes to hoary sun-sprinkled oak-shadow, to open spaces where the big white rock-rose flowers against the outcrop of the grey stone, and the path stumbles on into damp green tunnels among the chestnut saplings; and a laden mule, driven by a bare-footed boy, appears with a jangle of bells that carry me off and away, deeper and deeper into the time-softened goodness of the wondrous land, the Saturnian land, the great mother of kindly beast and songful man—for the boy sings as he plods up the pathway, with long sweet notes that are caught by a hungry ear, caught and lost, caught again in the far distance with an echo of the years of gold, of the warm young earth in its innocence. How can we praise the land that Virgil praised? Leave the word to Virgil, listen while he repeats it again—again. I can hear nothing else till the last sound of it has died; and my companion, the strange little wild thing from the east, lifts up her finger and is silent and motionless till it ceases. What does Olga know of the golden years and the Saturnian land? Nothing, nothing whatever; but she listens with uplifted finger, entranced by the freedom of the forest, for a few fine moments forgetful of her own existence. Then she is herself again, flitting and scrambling down the path to meet a figure that approaches through the green shadows.

IX. CASTEL GANDOLFO

FRAULEIN DAHL came striding up the woodland path with a free swing of her arms and flourish of her staff—not a Virgilian figure, yet classical too in her way, carrying her head in the manner of a primeval mother-goddess of the tribes. Didn’t the old Mediterranean settler, pushing inland from the coast where he had beached his boat—didn’t he, somewhere in the ilex-solitude of the Italic hills, encounter certain ruder and ruggeder stragglers from the north?—and hadn’t these tall and free-stepping strangers brought with them their matriarch, the genius of their stock, a woman ancient as time and still as young as the morning, with her grey eyes and her broad square brow and her swinging tread? No doubt my ethnology is very wild, but thus it sprang into my mind and took form at the sight of the woman who approached—for whom the name of Fräulein Dahl, so flat and so featureless, seemed absurdly inadequate.

She flopped when she saw us, she stood serene and large while the little Russian dashed about her with cries and pecks. Olga hung upon her with excited endearments, with lithe gesticulations that made the new-comer look entirely like a massive and rough-hewn piece of nature, unmoved by the futile humanity that scrambles upon her breast. I really can’t speak of her by the name of a middle-aged spinster from Dresden (which indeed she was); for I can only think of her as Erda, as the earth-mother of the ancient forest; and when she addressed me in her deep voice and her Saxon speech, brief and full, it was as though she uttered the aboriginal tongue of the northern twilight, the Ursprache of the heroes. I ought to have answered only with some saga-snatch of strong rough syllables, like the clash of shield and spear beneath the spread of the Branstock; and as I couldn’t do this, and my poor little phrases of modern politeness were intolerably thin and mean for such an encounter, I must own that my conversation with Erda didn’t flourish, and I had mainly to look on while Olga, not troubled by my scruples, clawed and dragged her into the fever of our degenerate age. Think of Erda clutched by the skirt, pecked with familiar kisses, haled out of the forest into the presence of Teresa and Berta, where they sit on their dust-heap and wave their black gloves in a voluble argument, the heat and the flies having by this time fretted their tempers and considerably flawed, it would seem, their joy in the freedom of the country. But nothing can disturb the large repose of Erda’s dignity, and the groundlings of the dust recover themselves as she appears, suddenly sweeten their smiles and their voices, advance to meet and greet a middle-aged spinster from Dresden, hard-featured and shabbily clad.

It took a long while to settle how best, how with the greatest propriety and safety, to make the journey of a mile or two from the dust-heap to the height of Castel Gandolfo, where our new friend had her abode. How are we to be perfectly certain that if we drive by the highroad we shan’t wish we had walked through the wood?—but before deciding to walk through the wood, let us remember that since Teresa sprained her ankle at Porto d’Anzio last summer it has never been the ankle that it was before. Emilio eagerly advised caution, caution! “Aha!” said Berta, “he knows he will be forced to carry her all day on his back, as at Porto d’Anzio.” (What a picture!) Emilio felt the heat distressingly, liberally; his gloss was already much bedimmed, he was in no case to shoulder the lovely burden this afternoon. But Erda brandished her staff and struck out for the forest, Olga fluttered after her, Mimi awoke refreshed with a sudden convulsion of black legs and flung herself in pursuit; and Teresa laughed surprisingly on a high reckless note, lunging quite vulgarly at Emilio with her umbrella, and declared herself equal to carrying him, if need be, “pig-a-back jolly well all the time!”—such was her phrase. This was the right vein of rollick for the adventure of a country holiday, and in this spirit we accomplished the journey, not a little elated by the sense of our ease and dash. Emilio did his best to reach our level; he stepped out vigorously, mopping his brow, and after some careful cogitation in silence he edged to my side and nudged me, pointing to Teresa and Berta where they breasted the stony path in front of us. “They are verri sporting gurls,” said Emilio.