ROMAN PICTURES
I. FONTANA DELLE TARTARUGHE
I FOUND myself loitering by that pretty little Fountain of the Tortoises, not for the first time; but this time (it was an afternoon of late April, long years ago) I looked stupidly at the boys and the tortoises and the dripping water, with a wish in my mind for something more. But what? I had drifted hither and thither about Rome, from the Gate of the People to the Baths of Caracalla—drifted day after day in my solitude through a month of April more divinely blue and golden than the first spring-days of the world; and whether I was in the body or out of the body I scarcely knew, for I moved in a great bubble of imagination that I had never known the like of in all the years (perhaps twenty) of my life before I came to Rome. I had escaped from the poor chamber of myself; for the imagination I dreamed and revelled in was surely none of my own. It was of the spirit of all time, livelier, lovelier than I could say, a power and a freedom that a rather lean young soul, ignorantly aspiring, may enter into and take possession of unconsciously, without an effort—in Rome.
But I do remember lingering about the Fountain of the Tortoises at last, between sun and shadow, with a wish that something now, something or some one, would break into my solitude and my dream; not that I was tired of either, but because my dream and my solitude would be still more beautiful if I could look at them for an hour across an interval, across the kind of division that is created by—yes, exactly!—by the sight to which I presently raised my eyes, turning away from the dapple and ripple of the fountain. A young man, passing across the square, met my blank gaze at this moment and suddenly threw out a sign of recognition; and I saw with surprise that it was my precious Deering, of whose presence in Rome I had been quite unaware. Deering it was!—after four or five lonely weeks, in which I had never happened to see a face that I knew, it was Deering who linked me to the real world again by crossing the Square of the Tortoises at that hour of that afternoon. I had left my shining bubble in a flash (he hadn’t noticed it) and joined hands with common life.
We weren’t really on terms of intimacy; but in the strangeness of Rome our little English acquaintance had the air of a cordial friendship. I gushed over with a warmth that surprised me and that would have been impossible at home; the fountain and the palaces and the Roman sunshine had pushed me forward into a familiarity that I shouldn’t have ventured upon elsewhere. He was of my own age, but so much more exquisite and mannerly that I looked raw indeed at his side; I was an aspiring amateur, he was a citizen of the world. At school I had tried to avoid him, because I had courted (vainly, vainly) the society of the more fashionably and the less refined; but I was eager enough to seize him by both hands in my new freedom and to take advantage of his riper experience. “Why, Deering—!” He did look experienced, with his broad-brimmed hat and his neat black clothes, as I moved towards him and directed my greeting, a little too effusively.
He took it with a brilliant smile, he whipped off his hat and held it to his stomach. “Eh, come sta?” he said, standing bare-headed; “è pezzo pezzo che non ci vediamo.” He fluted the words with mellifluous assurance, and I did my best to meet his humour with my own poor bits and shreds of Italian. There were no flute-notes in my repertory; but I made a jest of my round British style and mouthed out some attempt at a Roman compliment. As quick as thought he countered it with another; and that was surely enough of the joke—the joke of our standing there bare-headed, flourishing our hats at each other with Italian airings; so I let loose my pent-up English talk, after those weeks of unnatural silence, and tumbled out exclamation and question as they came—I was voluble, enjoying the release of the tongue, and there were forty things I wanted to say and hear, for this meeting was quite unexpected and exceedingly opportune; and so I chattered forth my surprise and pleasure, and then—and then I found them left upon my hands, somehow, and I looked rather a fool.
“Ma senta, senta,” said Deering. He smiled, but he was firm. He couldn’t deal with me on these insular terms in Rome; he made me feel it without explanation, but the fact was that he simply couldn’t allow me to be so inappropriate, so falsely attuned to the time and place. There we stood in the heart of Rome, with the palaces of princes around us, secluded among winding streets all dark with wicked history; and here was Deering, disguised as a Roman himself, with a great black hat and a suit of dead-black clothes; and I had stuttered out my poor innocent school-talk, college-gossip, heaven knows what, a scrannel-pipe to the suave warble of his flute. Had I come all the way to Rome to be still a British undergraduate even there? Well, as for that, he very soon put it right. He was kindness itself, but he had the upper hand of me in these foreign parts, where he was so serenely at home and I so ecstatically at sea. His was the advantage, as indeed I quite understood, and he used it from the first. He gently set me in my place, not without an indulgent smile.
“Senta, senta pure,” he said—or words to that effect; whatever they were they keenly struck me as the very words I had wanted and missed in my ignorant solitude. That was the way to talk to a Roman; I might have missed it for ever, but Deering had picked it up, no doubt, the first time he put on his broad-brimmed hat. How long had he been in Rome? I was allowed to ask that question at least, and it appeared that he had come to Rome for a week, six months before, and had stayed on and on because he had happened to find rooms that pleased him. They were far from the “English ghetto,” so he said, meaning that they were far from the hotels and the Piazza di Spagna and touristry in general; and he had just finished his siesta and was on his way to a café in the Via Nazionale, where he usually spent some hours of the afternoon. And I, where was I going? As a matter of fact I had vaguely thought of wandering away and away, out of the city and into the country—from whence I should return in the dusk, luxuriously tired, solemnly enraptured, to climb the long stairs to my own little lodging, my Arcadian meal and couch. But this I concealed from Deering; I felt at once I must protect my dear sentimental delights from his ironic eye. Moreover my lodging, which I had thought so knowingly Roman, proved to be full in the middle of the English ghetto; I kept this too from him as long as I could.
His siesta, his café, his rooms remote from the vulgar—oh I had such a vision, as he mentioned these, of the kind of Roman career that I had failed to go in for hitherto. Deering lived in Rome, I had floated on the surface. Never mind—I threw over my private romance and adopted Deering’s reality on the spot. He seemed to be immensely informed, and there was a charming insolence in his wisdom; I might put my tenderest fancies behind me and screen them in his presence, but he saw that I was a soft young enthusiast, and he patronized me with the sweetness of his coo, his smile, his winning gesture. He delicately blasted whatever had appeared to me of interest and renown, he showed me the crudity of my standards. I might feel a passing twinge, for I hadn’t been used to regarding myself as a thing with which Deering could be indulgent and amused. And yet I was flattered, I was magnified by his fastidious irony; it brought me into a new world of mind and taste, more exclusive than my own.
But I obviously couldn’t give way to him in the matter of being so very Italian that we mightn’t talk our own language. He could take me into another world, but to endow me at the same time with a new speech was a miracle beyond him. “Ma come, ma come,” he said encouragingly; he implied that in the real life of illumination we are all free of the golden tongue, the tongue of the clear Latin civiltà. It seemed he could hardly frame his lips to the uncouth noises of the northern Goth. He brought out an English phrase with an air of handing it over to me between disgustful finger-tips, and he relapsed unconsciously as he did so into the sweeter idiom. Ah Deering, Deering! That unconsciousness of his was a finished performance, I could believe he had practised it before the glass. “But you, my dear,” he said, “you surely speak the language like the rest of us—eh magari!” I confessed that I spoke the language like a barbarian fresh from my native wild; I should listen to him and the rest of them with pleasure, but to me he must talk our poor old English. “And who are the rest of you?” I demanded.