Erda guided us by winding ways to her abode—which was a great black gaunt old villa, masked by a high wall, muffled by thickets of mystery; she opened a door in the wall, and immediately the place was so grand and sad, so brave and dark, that its influence arose and hushed us as we crowded into the dank courtyard. Me at least it silenced, and I should wish to forget Teresa’s remark when the door closed behind us and she felt the mounting chill of the scarred and stained old pavement beneath her tread. Erda had found the right retreat for the austerity of the poetry of her style; here she lived alone, screened from the world, musing in her big cool mind upon the processes of time. I wanted to tell her that she had no business to admit this party of haphazard starers into her privacy; for Teresa would be certain to make other remarks, like her last, when she tramped under the vaulted entry and climbed the bare stone stairway and beheld the heroic emptiness of the great saloon. She made many indeed; but Erda’s far-away smile passed over our heads, and you could see that it wasn’t a few bits of trash like ourselves, idly invading her sanctuary, that would profane the height of her solitude. For my part I strayed about the great saloon, looked from the windows at the shining view of the broad Campagna, tried not to listen to Olga’s polyglot chatter—and wondered how this singular being occupied herself in her lonely days. For after all she was a German spinster, a stranger and a pilgrim like the rest of us; and one ought to be able to picture the detail of her life as she lived it, between the azure bowl of the Alban lake behind her and the silvery plain in front, instead of surrendering the impression to the romance of the ancient poetry she had brought with her from the north.
She appeared to have brought nothing else. The great room contained no personal trace of her whatever, nothing but a few old chunks of furniture that were evident relics of the noble owners of the house. On the walls there were pale vestiges of festal painting, on the chairs and tables there was a glimmer of exhausted gold; and there was nothing else, not a stick, not a crock, to suggest that a stranger had arrived to take possession of the past. The woman from Germany stood in the middle of the wide floor, distantly smiling; and she filled the space like a monument, with a grand pervasion of her presence, a distribution of her authority—so that she seemed to inhabit the amplitude of her retreat, to populate it, even though she had never sat down in one of the gilded chairs, never written a line or opened a book there, never put the room to any of the common uses of life. If I tried to imagine how she employed herself when she was alone, I could only see her still standing there in the midst, smiling out of her big tolerant serenity, while the evening darkened and the night shut her in with her secret thoughts. I wonder what they were. There seemed to be all the simplicity of the world in her air and poise—and deeps of old wisdom too, full of such long and wild experience as would trouble the repose of most of us; but she didn’t care, the memories of the dark forest and the fighting men and the clashing assemblies had never disturbed her secular dream; and now at last, driven from the haunts of her tribe, she had found a place empty and large enough to contain her for a few centuries more, perhaps, till the vulgar invasion becomes too much for her even here—and I should like to know where she will then betake herself. And what would she think, meanwhile, if she guessed how my fancy had transformed a plain and elderly Saxon, living for her convenience in a fine old villa near Rome?—for she had no romantic view of herself, she saw her own image as unceremoniously, I am sure, as any of the trivial starers might see it, who for the moment were making free with her domain.
She really was, however, more splendid than she knew; and it can’t be denied that a truly intelligent inspiration had brought her to the fine old Roman villa. The empty shell of the grand style, so long abandoned, was the one place in the world for her; for she needed greatness and grandeur, and she couldn’t have found either among the tattle and the comfort and the sentiment from which she had escaped; and she needed desolation, a faded grandeur, a dilapidated greatness, secure from the smart uneasy assertion of our own age’s ridiculous attempt to be magnificent. Erda was surely the most peculiar of all the Roman pilgrims I encountered; she had come to Rome because it is big and bare—and yet not inane, not dumb to reverberating echoes, like the mere virginal monstrosity of untrodden lands. The echoes of the great saloon were innumerable; old festivities, old revelries creaked and croaked in it above a droning and moaning undertone in which I could distinguish, with a very little encouragement, the most awful voices of lust and hate and pride. Erda had only to stand still and silent in the evening gloom to discover that she had the company of all the passions that had clashed about her in the time of the heroes; she felt at home there, no doubt—she couldn’t have endured an atmosphere soaked in the childish spites and jealousies of the present. Yes, she was rightly installed and lodged—and let that be enough for us; I check the trivial curiosity that sets me wondering how she really existed, how she came by the possession of the strange old house, how long she had lived there.
Oddest and unlikeliest of all, if it comes to that, is the fact that Olga and Teresa should have had the entry of her solitude, should be cackling in unconcerned familiarity beneath her smile, should be putting her foolish questions which I try to disregard. I hadn’t the least intention of asking them how they had made the acquaintance of the earth-mother; I didn’t want to know, for example, that when she first came to Rome she had dwelt for a time in Olga’s dishevelled boarding-house; and you never can tell, if I should press too closely I might be met with nonsense of that kind. I much prefer to stand apart, in the embrasure of one of the high windows, and to notice how flat the thin shriek of these women was falling in the vacancy of the saloon. No wonder Erda could afford to smile. With one turn of her hand she could have bundled the whole party out of her sight and her mind; I never so clearly saw the contract between the real person, standing square upon her feet, and the sham, drifting and pitching helplessly because it hasn’t the human weight to hold it to the ground. Even Emilio, who had seemed weighty enough as he trudged and mopped himself in the forest-path, had now shrunk to a ducking deprecating apologizing trifle to whom nobody attended. The women indeed maintained their flutter and gibber unabashed; but their noise didn’t even reach to the great ceiling of the room, it broke up and dropped in mid-air; it utterly failed to mingle with the real echoes of the place, deeply and hoarsely speaking above our heads.
There now, however, when we had quite given up expecting her, arrived Miss Gilpin. She appeared in the doorway and she stopped on the threshold for a moment, collecting the eyes of the company before she made her advance. She was a trim little woman, not very young, but with an extremely pretty head of fox-brown hair; and with a graceful gesture of both hands she sang out a greeting to us all, at a distance, in a small tuneful voice, standing where the light fell upon the bright coils of her hair; and with her arms still wide she tripped along the floor to join our party, giving a hand here and a smile there in a sort of dance-figure of sweetness and amiability—pausing finally, before me the stranger, with a kind little questioning smile, while she waited and looked to Erda for an introduction. You haven’t forgotten, perhaps, that Miss Gilpin had a certain reputation of pride; and indeed she was a public celebrity, for she was the authoress of books, of several books, though she didn’t rely upon these for her effect on entering a room. Her mazy motion and her hair and her gracious ways were enough for a beginning, let alone the flattering charm of her inclination when I was duly presented. She pressed my hand as though to say that already she marked me off from the rest of the company—whose second-rate mixture we could both appreciate, she and I; but for her part she didn’t mean to be wanting in civility to the good souls, and so—“Cara mia!—che piacere!—dopo tanto!”—she warbled her cries and beamed and inclined her head in a manner to make everybody feel exceedingly plain and coarse.
The finest instrument of her superiority, could the rest of the company perceive it, was her Italian accent. It was probably lost on them, but it did all its execution on me. She continued to talk Italian, though Teresa plumped out her rich-vowelled English in return, and though Erda disdained the use of any speech but her elemental Gothic. Miss Gilpin’s Italian, you see, was remarkably perfect; her intonation had the real right ringing edge to it, which you don’t often hear upon English lips. She pounced upon the stresses and bit off the consonants and lingered slidingly upon the long vowels—but I needn’t describe it, you easily recall the effect; and the point of it was that she had acquired it all by her taste, by her tact, by her talent—not merely because she couldn’t help it, rubbing against the language all the time (like Olga or Teresa) in the middle-class tagrag of the town. To me at least the distinction was very clear. Poor old Teresa, with her English airs, betrayed herself by the genuine slipshod of her swift Roman interjections, now and then, aside to her niece or to Emilio; she would mumble or hiss out a word or two in which there was no mistaking the carelessness of the native. Miss Gilpin, exquisitely intoning her lovely syllables, had none of the smirch of professionalism; she seemed to bring the language of Dante into the drawing-room of a princess—and yet she was just a clever little English lady, smart and pretty and well-bred, and you couldn’t for a moment suppose she was anything else.
She was the authoress of several cultivated and charming works, so I have always understood, in which Italian history and Italian landscape were artfully blended—her art showing peculiarly in this, that her gush of romance (over the landscape) was redeemed from weak femininity by her scholarship, while her severity and soundness (over the history) was humanized by her descriptions of peasant life, village humours, parochial ceremonies; and so you learned about the popes and the great ladies of the Renaissance, and at the same time you slipped unawares into the very heart of the old unspoilt enchanting country, the real Italy—or perhaps I should put it the other way round, the vintage and the white oxen and the kindly old village-priest coming first, leading you easily onward and upward to the very heart of the Renaissance. Anyhow Miss Gilpin had her note, and I believe she struck it to considerable applause. But she didn’t assume the style of a woman of letters—in this matter too there was nothing professional about her. She was still the Englishwoman of good connexions, who happened to be related by marriage or even friendship to two or three of the most splendid houses of Rome—but who wore this accidental embellishment very simply, just as a matter of course, needing no words—and who lived by herself, lived daintily on small means, lived in Italy because she loved the dear villagers and the white oxen; and when you had taken in all this, she had still in reserve the telling fact that she wrote these remarkable books, the kind of books you wouldn’t expect from an elegant little Englishwoman of the Alban hills—or indeed from a woman at all, considering their scholarly and manly style; so that she beats the professional literary hack upon his own ground without making a parade of it—showing up his assumptions and pretensions rather cleverly, don’t you agree? There were plenty of people who did agree, and who told her so; and altogether Miss Gilpin, living amusingly and unconventionally in the Alban hills, might be thought to enjoy a happy and original position in her world. Erda was one of the quaint impossible friends that dear little Nora Gilpin always managed to unearth, with her talent for discovering interest where other people would fail to notice it.
Behold Miss Gilpin, then, seating herself at ease in one of the great gilded arm-chairs and making a circle around her of Minna Dahl’s yet more impossible, frankly impossible, rout of acquaintance; though it happens that among them to-day is an awkward young Englishman, looking very much out of his place and apparently with nothing to say for himself, who isn’t quite the kind of thing that Minna generally produces on these occasions. (Yes, in Miss Gilpin’s company I am reduced to giving Erda her own poor name.) An eye may be kept upon the young Englishman—Miss Gilpin will have a word with him before she goes. For the present she rustles and warbles, settling herself in the cardinal’s chair; and she sends Emilio on an errand for something she has left below, she remembers a question she particularly wished to ask Madame de Shuvaloff (how lucky a chance!), she places Berta at her side, not noticing the slight defiance in Berta’s attitude, with a little friendly tap; and here is a pretty group, gathered and constituted all in a minute, to brighten the blankness of Minna’s gaunt unhomely drawing-room. For indeed the dark saloon of the historic passions had become a drawing-room at once; Miss Gilpin, as she sat there, had somehow given it the clever touch that makes a room personal, individual, a part of yourself—the touch that is so slight, though it achieves such a difference. How is it done? She simply pushes a chair or two, breaking their rigid rank, she lays her handkerchief on the bare table and casually throws her moss-green scarf over the back of an angular couch; she draws Berta on to a low stool beside her (Berta’s face was a study indeed), she raises her eyes with a clear gaze of thanks to the cavalier who returns with her tiny embroidered bag; and the proud old room seems to have surrendered to her charm, adapting itself to her, attentively serving to accommodate her friends and her scattered possessions. Poor Minna Dahl, she is strangely without the knack of making a place comely and habitable.
But Minna Dahl, for a woman like Miss Gilpin, is refreshing in her singularity; that is the secret of dear Nora’s odd friendship for this uncouth and unlovely German whom she has picked up somewhere in her neighbourhood. The lone German, with her offhand manners and her dreadful clothes, makes a pleasing change for a creature so compact of civilization as Miss Gilpin. Ah, there are times when we are sick of culture, bored by style, exasperated by the finer feelings; and then the relief, the repose in the company of somebody who never reads, never feels, never questions—who exists in placid contentment like a natural fact, like a tree in the solid earth! Miss Gilpin could tell you that after visiting Minna she returns with the sense of having spent a fortnight alone by the sea-side; she goes home to the world, to her book and her style, invigorated by great draughts of quiet weather, her imagination laved by the soothing surging monotony of the ocean tides; these are her very words. She could also tell you that Minna’s abysmal ignorance of the Italian Renaissance, and Minna’s atrocious Italian accent, and Minna’s failure to obtain the least little footing in the splendid houses of Rome—Miss Gilpin could tell you (but these are not her words) that by all this too she is very considerably fortified as she trips home to tea. For the fact is that Miss Gilpin is not as young as she was, and the reviewers are less respectful to her scholarship than they used to be, and perhaps she begins to be aware that she mustn’t visit the Marchesa and the Principessa too often in these days; and so, and so, as Miss Gilpin flutters away to her solitary chair by the evening lamp, she quite congratulates herself on the rare chance of a quiet time with her work, snatched from the claims of the world—which wasn’t the way she had put it when she set out, rather wearily, to call on old Minna this afternoon. Who then shall grudge her the strength she is imbibing at this moment, while she dismisses Emilio with a smile and repeats (in her pure intonation) a phrase that Minna has just mangled in her strange Teutonic Italian?
Mimi, the horrid child, had been misbehaving again in some way, and she and her mother had been fighting it out, and Minna had serenely interposed and excused the child—“In somma, non è un gran che,” said Minna with her bocca tedesca; and then, chiming upon the air, the same words tinkled like silver bells from the mouth of Miss Gilpin—with a difference that can’t be written in print, though it yawns to the ear as the distance between the Altmarkt and the Piazza del Popolo. Miss Gilpin perhaps hadn’t done it on purpose, but the effect was to bring the eyes of Erda (Erda once more!) largely sweeping round upon her, with a gleam of amusement under which Miss Gilpin for an instant faltered. Erda towered above her, good-humoured, ironic, solid; and Miss Gilpin had the sudden misgiving (how well I know it) that she was being watched by a dispassionate onlooker. She sat enthroned in her chair of state, with her satellites and her litter of possessions about her; and Erda stood dispossessed in the background, claiming no rights in the place or the scene; and yet that passing glimpse of Erda’s amusement disarranged the plan, and a wan chill for a moment blenched the satisfaction of Miss Gilpin. Oh, it was nothing, it vanished—at least it vanished for Miss Gilpin; she was herself again, she held and graced the situation. For me, however, it was enough to restore my Erda to her predominance—or rather to reveal that she had never lost it. To suppose that little Miss Gilpin could really install herself in the empty seat of grandeur, fill it with her fine shades and her diminutive arts! Erda is still there, massive in her simplicity, knowing no arts, needing none.