Miss Gainsborough was holding a banquet; and Father Holt and Mr. Vickery (the patriarch) had been retained for the occasion as a pair of faithful henchmen, who would kindly be at hand to beat off the crowd when she collapsed. She was giving them their directions to this effect when the crowd began to gather, and I own there was some disillusionment again for me in the sight of the trio who first appeared. Miss Gainsborough’s drawing-room glowed and shone, prepared for all the brilliance of a historic capital; and anybody might have felt that high expectations sagged a trifle when there presently drifted through the curtained portal the long plain faces of the Clarksons. They, poor creatures, had perhaps the same reflection, discovering me upon the hearth-rug; when for once you dine in the Corso it is flat to encounter the mere Briton to whom you have been kind in your lodging. But other faces quickly crowded upon us, and the room was filled with chatter and stir; the party was a large one, and among the gathering of many strangers Miss Agnes and I, trying to make conversation as we looked at the show, might imagine that we beheld the flower of historic pride. I at least was ready to make the most of it, for the honour of the Corso and of ourselves; but Miss Agnes blinked more doubtfully with her short-sighted eyes and appeared dissatisfied. Was it possible that old Martha was putting us off with our own sort, a rabble of floating touristry—whom she swept together and polished off from time to time with a perfunctory banquet? Yes, when a few minutes later I was sent to dinner with Miss Gadge it seemed all too probable.
How we do despise each other, we simple pilgrims! There is no meanness to which we are ashamed of stooping if only we may so persuade the rest of the herd that we are not as they, gaping in the rawness of innocent wonder. Miss Gadge and I were quite capable, I believe, of deliberately lying to each other about our condition and rank in the general pilgrimage; there was instant rivalry between us, a competition into which we dropped as a matter of course. Even after long years it might make us both uncomfortably flush to recall the sound of our voices as we plied one another with the well-known strokes—for they are all well-known, the possibilities of the game have been ransacked a thousand times over. Not one of us all, I suppose, ever really deceived another; and yet we are unable to talk with candour and freedom—and Miss Gadge is by no means a spiritless talker—until we have paid our debt to the devouring snobbery which overtakes us in Rome. I try to smother some degrading puffs and flourishes of my own that return to me; but I may claim that no less vivid in memory are the struttings and bouncings of Miss Gadge. The game was drawn when at last we abandoned it, and we have never since had occasion to start it again. Years have flown, and if Miss Gadge and I were to meet once more at a dinner-party in the Corso we should meet as strangers; yet I can hear the insinuating tone in which she would begin by asking me whether this was my first visit to Rome. “Not quite!” I should answer, with a dangerous ironic smile; and I should allow her to commit herself further before crushing her with the load of my superiority. I should find, furthermore, that it isn’t easy to crush a bouncer of such experience as Miss Gadge.
As for the particular crowd that old Martha had collected that evening, the suspicion of Miss Agnes was confirmed. We were a fortuitous lot, jetsam of the hotels and the boarding-houses, with only Father Holt and Mr. Vickery to give us a stiffening of the real Rome. They toiled, I have no doubt, manfully; but they were outside my range (Miss Gainsborough kept them jealously near herself—not that she seemed likely to collapse), and I was plump in the midst of the conversation, everybody knows the kind, which we pilgrims make for ourselves when we assemble together. It begins with the unseemly game I have described, and when this has been played to a draw it goes on to an endless chant, recurring points of admiration and exclamation, over the churches and the ruins and the hill-towns that have stirred our gushing affections. The dear sweet places, we name them in succession; and like Berta when she grew so lyrical over Gower Street and the hansom-cabs, we hardly need more than the sweet pretty names—they are conversation enough by themselves. Hark to the swelling chorus!—our shrewd hostess knew she could trust us, her body-guard was merely for her own protection against a clack of ecstasy that bored her to death. She at her end of the table was again declaiming, arraigning, denouncing in her grandest manner; the rest of us left the world to its fate, and assured each other that Assisi—that Perugia—that Siena—needed no more words to express what we all agreed that they were. In half a dozen eager colloquies about the table this truth was upheld.
Take the case, for example—not of Miss Gadge, occupied for the moment with her other neighbour; but take the case of Miss Turnbull, who happened to have arrived that very day from Assisi, where she had spent a fortnight alone with her feelings. These, she was clear, were unutterable; but so were mine, and when we threw them together the effect was instant. “Assisi!” we both exclaimed in an outburst. Miss Julia Turnbull—she was a fair and flushed young woman of thirty; and she had travelled up and down over Italy, quite by herself, and had never had the smallest difficulty with the Italians. Wherever she went it was the same story—nothing but perfect friendliness and delightful manners. Treat an Italian as you would treat anybody else, and he will behave accordingly—if this result of Miss Turnbull’s experience seems ambiguously worded, nothing could be plainer or franker than her ringing laugh and her broad blue gaze. With these she had made all sorts and conditions of friends in her walks around Assisi; she had talked to every one she met, they told her of their joys and troubles—dear things, they seemed to feel that Miss Turnbull was akin to themselves; and perhaps there was something of the south, something of the soil in her—she couldn’t otherwise account for it. Anyhow she had realized that it was among the peasants and the simple folk of the country, not among the professors and the theologians, that (to use her own image) one “touched the heart of things Franciscan”; and she had not only touched it, she had borne it away with her, and some day perhaps she would put it in a little book—but it would evidently take her a long while to think of the necessary words. And so meanwhile, “Assisi!”—the book, for Miss Turnbull and me, was already in the cry of the name.
“A book? who’s going to write a book?”—Miss Gadge caught up the echo with a pounce. Miss Gadge was small and lean and dry, with a pair of nippers that clawed and lacerated her nose to maintain their hold against her emphatic nods and jerks. If we were talking of books we might be interested to know the name of the grey-haired lady on the other side of the table—“but don’t seem to be noticing her; look presently,” said Miss Gadge; and in a very unnecessary whisper she breathed a literary nom de guerre of thumping circulation, I believe, in those days. That simple old lady, so unobtrusive in her plain white shawl, was she; and Miss Gadge was her friend and had the privilege of travelling with her on an Italian tour—a tour undertaken for a purpose that Miss Gadge oughtn’t really to mention, but that she did confide to us because we were interested in books. Emmeline (so Miss Gadge referred to the authoress) had a new novel shaping in her mind, and this time she was going to “bring in Italy”; and so she had come to Italy to take it in, as you might say, before bringing it in—she was one who felt that a novel was only of value in so far as it was sincere. And if you have ever had the chance of watching a novelist (a sincere one) while he or she is simply waiting, imbibing and inhaling the atmosphere that is presently to be brought in—you can believe that Miss Gadge was almost afraid, at times, of interrupting the studies and meditations of her friend, lest she should mar such an exceedingly delicate process. It isn’t as though it were merely a matter of taking notes and accumulating facts; Emmeline constantly remarked to Miss Gadge that it was something far more intimate that she desired. She already had her “plot” quite clear in her head—it had come to her at Bournemouth; the atmosphere could only sink in gradually, taken on the spot.
The old lady in the shawl was placidly attending to her dinner, and we could observe her without indiscretion. I had for my part a real curiosity in doing so. In those far-away years it wasn’t every day that I saw a novelist, and I looked upon the mild brow of Emmeline with questioning wonder. From that smooth forehead they had sprung, those generously passionate romances that had been considered too rich and ripe—all the men in them were “clean-limbed,” all the women “deep-breasted”—for Miss Turnbull to read as a school-girl. Oh she had read them, you may be sure, and she warmly agreed with Miss Gadge that there was nothing in their frankness which could inflame a wholesome mind. Indeed Miss Turnbull often thought that if, as a woman grown, she possessed some power of appreciating the big things, the real things, the human things, she largely owed it to her long immersion in the romances of Emmeline. There comes a time, no doubt, when we turn to life itself, to the book of the heart, rather than to an imaginary picture of it, however sincere; a mere novel then loses its hold on us and we reach out to our kind. Yes, yes—but what so painfully impressed Miss Gadge, for one, was the vainness of our attempts in that direction; our lives are isolated, barriers divide us—I am not sure that Miss Gadge had ever been able to feel she had truly attained to the life of another, for all her striving. Ah, to that Miss Turnbull had much to say; there are currents, divinations, magnetic chords—but though there is much to say about them, it appears to be difficult to say it clearly; Miss Turnbull got entangled in the chords to such an extent that she lost her bearing in the currents. But Miss Gadge was ready with the true conclusion; in these perplexities, in these obstructions, it is the genius of the artist that will point the way. Where the rest of us fumble and hesitate the novelist marches straight; he knows, she knows, how to throw down the barrier and to unlock the soul. There she sits, bless her, just across the table; and if she seems to be thinking of nothing but the lobster’s limb that she is tapping and cracking so busily—type of how many a heart that she has smitten and laid gaping with her pen—one needn’t doubt that she is taking in, at this very moment, more of the meaning of life than the rest of us put together. Perhaps we shall find that she has brought it in, with Italy, when we read her next.
The conversation of these ladies had joined hands across me; they were so much more familiar than I was with the hearts and chords and barriers that I could have nothing to say. But they didn’t appear to get very far with the subject of their discussion; they soon managed to lose it in the difficulty of agreeing what it was. Miss Gadge thought that essentially it was the spirit in which she and Emmeline were conducting their tour; and if that were so it was obvious that Miss Gadge should first describe, without interruption, the nature and the quality of the spirit. This she was quite willing to do—taking as an illustration a day they had lately spent among the “ghosts of the centuries” (I quote Emmeline) in the Campagna; and she began the day in much detail, dwelling on the tone in which Emmeline had said of the Appian Way, “It speaks to me, it speaks to me!”—like that. But Miss Turnbull’s view of the subject in hand was different; and she slanted off to her view by a rapid cut at a drooping youth who sat exactly opposite to me, nursing his chin in a slender and very flexible hand. “Mr. Pole, say you agree with me; say you think that on the plane of art—” Miss Turnbull was great upon “planes”; but we all know the slipperiness of that one, and she crashed heavily when the youth Pole, after listening unmoved for a minute or two, sighed out some cruel and insidious comment. Such a languorous slim-throated slender-handed youth—he was just what Deering had planned to be, what Deering perceived that he daily more fatally failed of being; I thought compassionately of Deering as I noticed the waxen nose and the relaxed waistcoat of the youth Pole. He tripped up Miss Turnbull on her plane, gave a limpid glance at the havoc of her fall, and returned to the seclusion of his graceful attitude.
Miss Turnbull had met him at Assisi, and though she didn’t think much of him as a man—he had none of the square-jawed virility of Emmeline’s heroes—she was impressed by his authority as an artist. She had never seen any one who appeared to live so exclusively upon the most treacherous of all the planes; half protesting, half admiring, she acknowledged the supremacy of the feat. Miss Gadge on the other hand was so loud in her scorn that it might have flawed the Narcissus-dream in which the youth was apparently sunk—he was bending his gaze as though the loveliest of visions were reflected in the table-cloth. The disregarded nymph at his side was Miss Agnes, and it wasn’t her poor dreary countenance, mooning over his shoulder, that would divide the attention of Narcissus; and he was equally heedless, it seemed, of the sharp word of Miss Gadge, though she flung it viciously into the mirror of his contemplation. She had no patience with these affected young men; to one who has lived in familiarity with a true artist the sight of the sham is a disgust—the nippers quivered at the thought. Emmeline often says that all great art is intensely human; she says too that every great artist is essentially a man; and Miss Gadge puts in, fondly, what Emmeline in her modesty leaves out—that a great artist is also “very woman,” if that happens to be her sex. Well, it follows that a thing like that, limp and boneless, soft where he ought to be rugged and square, pale where he ought to be “flushing through his tan,” is a creature of a kind that Miss Gadge has such a horror of that she seems capable of actually forcing him to listen to her candid opinion. A very little more and she would have him by the slim white throat; Miss Gadge doesn’t profess to be artistic herself, only to reverence the gift in others, and she is not such a very woman but that she could easily collar the fair young Pole.
Luckily there was beside her a moderating influence; her neighbour on her right was an English parson, as rugged and brown and broad-beamed a man as Emmeline could picture in her most womanly moments; and his deep rumbling laughter diverted Miss Gadge from her indignation. He was laughing at Pole, he was laughing at her too, he was laughing at everything that was too small to be taken seriously; there was drollery and laziness and potency in his laugh. He leaned back in his chair and derided Miss Gadge, and she bristled up at first with snaps and jerks; but she was a puny little being, all splutter and shrillness, in the grasp of his indolent humour, and she was very soon tittering happily at his thrusts. Was he too one of our oddly mixed pilgrimage? Miss Turnbull knew all about him, and she told me his story in an undertone of ardent admiration. All that she knew, however, cast no light on the compelling richness of his laughter—which was an attraction that held and interested me more and more as I caught the rumour of his encounter with Miss Gadge. My other neighbour’s tale was of no account; it was about offices and dignities and benefices—nothing to the point; but I learned at any rate that his name was Mr. Champerdown and that he was in Italy, I think indeed he was abroad, for the first time in his life. Ah, that gave me a sudden lift of mind, like a recollection of something forgotten. The gushing Julia, the pouncing Gadge, the drooping Pole, not to mention the neglected Agnes and the placid Emmeline, had driven something out of my thought which returned refreshingly, all in a moment, when I learned that Mr. Champerdown, with his power and his laughter, was for the first time in Rome. With a sense of satisfaction that was queer and sweet I repaired my loss.
But wait—for before I can attend to this matter our sumptuous meal is at an end, Miss Gainsborough pushes back her chair, Emmeline pops a last large chocolate into her mouth and clutches her shawl, and we stream back in procession to the crimson and golden drawing-room. Old Martha was bearing herself valiantly, and nobody could say that she denied the barbarians the best of her splendour, though her disdain might gleam in her eye. The entertainment proceeded, broke out afresh, developed and extended; old Martha controlled a shifting circle at one end of the room, Mr. Vickery displayed his roaring picturesqueness at the other, Father Holt glided and sparkled with watchful courtesy in the midst. Trays of cups appeared—and then more trays of jugs and glasses—and then of little crystal plates and dishes; there was always a tray of something delicate and charming at one’s elbow to fill the pause while Mrs. Clarkson waited for one’s next remark. She had to wait often and long, for she had the gift of exhausting a separate subject with each remark of her own; there was nothing to add when she had mentioned that she thought so too. She couldn’t be tempted with the jugs and glasses, but she waited calmly—she waited so mildly that I lost myself in watching a small drama, enacted in my view, and I only jumped back to her when at last she repeated that she had always thought so, rightly or wrongly. Mrs. Clarkson wasn’t easily remembered from one remark to another, and it happened that the drama in question was unusual and expressive. Not many people have ever seen Father Holt at a loss; it is a rare chance, and indeed one has to be quick to seize it. He is extremely sensitive to his surroundings, very adaptable, very deft; but once in a while he is over-confident, and he makes a slip.