Roman pictures

by Percy Lubbock

I need hardly say that if there was any run of mankind with whom Father Holt felt sure of himself it was the run of the Anglican clergy on a tourists’ holiday in Rome. It didn’t, of course, come a great deal in his way, but he might reasonably feel that he had all its few varieties by heart. He well knew the breezy tact, or the burly independence, or the shining forbearance, or the envious—but enough, he knew them all, all the tones of their response to the courteous charm of a Jesuit. He thought he knew; and as he circulated in his distinction among Miss Gainsborough’s rabble he approached the broad back of Mr. Champerdown with all his ease. He rounded the back, he faced Mr. Champerdown (who was seated); he addressed him in that fine finished manner which he wore so lightly; and he didn’t even pause to verify its effect, it was just a polite word in passing for the clumsy big cleric—of the breezy kind, probably, prepared with a volley of manly tact and taste that Father Holt had no wish to confront. So he turned to pass on, having made his attentive sign, and in the next moment there happened the rare chance I speak of. A large hand, reaching out to a surprising distance, fell upon his shoulder—fell upon the whole of him, as it rather seemed, and gathered him up and drew him back and placed him where Mr. Champerdown could survey him conveniently; the thing was done so deliberately, so gigantically, so gently, that it was as though you were to screw round in your chair and to pick up a mouse or a small bird from the ground—some little unsuspecting funny creature, taken unawares, whom you had the fancy to examine more closely. With perfect gentleness Mr. Champerdown held the bright-eyed bird and inspected it—and only for an instant or two, before he set it down again uninjured. That was all he wanted—just to take a singular opportunity, the first he had had, and to see for himself what a Jesuit in a Roman drawing-room looked like in the hand. It was delightfully done, and it was over in a moment; but in that moment the expression of Father Holt was enough to make one forget a more vivid pre-occupation than Mrs. Clarkson. “Yes, always,” she said, “rightly or wrongly”—and her neighbour manifestly jumped to overtake her mild rumination.

When at length old Martha felt entitled to put us to flight I was careful to find myself descending the great staircase at the side of Mr. Champerdown. We issued forth together into the silence of the Corso—Miss Gainsborough’s portal was at the silent end of the long straight highway—and he serenely accepted my company. He pointed the way towards the Place of the People, hard by, and we walked out into the middle of the broad empty square. A night of May, a night of Rome—and moreover a night of full moonshine: the beauty of the night was too great to be praised. Two speechless men, alone in the emptiness, stared around them at a marvel of beauty that was close to them, all but touching their eyes and cheeks—that was infinitely remote and unattainable in the height of space. It was caressing and kind—and yet it drew away and away, impalpably melting, re-appearing, receding; and at last it had led our sight further and further, this way and that, creating a void in which not only a pair of speechlessly wondering men, but the great open square itself was absorbed and lost. And then again it lay empty before us, the glimmering Place of the People, snowy in the moonlight; and we passed over and stood before the triumphal archway of the city-gate, where it rose up to breast the splendour of the May-night and of Rome. We gazed for a while, still silent, and we turned again; and now, as though we had just entered by the northern gate, the city lay before us that was the goal of our patient pilgrimage. We had reached Italy at last, and the end of the journey and the threshold of the city. My companion stopped dead, his big forehead thrown back; and he lifted his arms, he stood in an attitude of amazement, of salutation, of adoration—all that and more was in the gesture with which he acknowledged the presence of Rome. It reminded me—of what did it remind me?—of something in the Bible, in the book of the law; it was the “heave-offering,” and he raised it aloft and offered it here in the night upon the threshold. “Ave Roma!”—his voice trolled out soft and profound in the stillness.

I never again saw Mr. Champerdown, nor heard of him; but before we parted that night I had welcomed and enjoyed the possession that he restored to me. It was the thought of Rome—obliterated by the voices and the faces of the evening, and indeed of the last many days; it was the sight of the city, obscured unawares by the crowding heads of our pilgrim band. The broad shoulders of Mr. Champerdown seemed to have ploughed an opening in the throng, and there was Rome; even the mere noise of his power and humour, and the notion of his power and humour for the first time fronting Rome—this had been enough to bring out the vision again in all its force. One inevitably forgets the look of it in the jumble of our pious company; only a very few of them here and there have the faculty of clearing the way. With one of these few I had stood before the Gate of the People; and I gladly accepted, I gratefully commemorate, the help of his remarkable gift. It came just in time; for my Roman days were now running out, I should soon have to depart with whatever I could save from them; two or three more fragments thrown upon the medley of my impressions will complete the pile. But the vision of Rome was safe, ensphered in that memory of the spring-night and the moonshine—safe and secure for me to carry away when I must go.

XIII. THE FORUM

JULIA OF ASSISI, fresh from the heart of things Franciscan, had been painfully struck by the heartlessness of Rome. In all the grandeur and the pride of the Seven Hills there is something which made her say to herself, as soon as she arrived, that it wasn’t the same as Assisi—a weak phrase, but she found the right expression before long. A want of heart!—for a time she wandered disconsolate, feeling that it was no place for her. What then was delight to discover in Rome her old friend and ally Professor Minchin—a man, as I believe, of European reputation, and a man for whom Julia has one of the frankest and most gurgling of passions. See her, hear her, on a perfect morning in the Forum, as she presents him with the party she has collected for the treat of a tour, under his guidance, among the excavated ruins. He knows them intimately, from the temple to the sewer; there is a heart of things Roman after all, and the Professor undertakes to reveal it. Not in the great bleak galleries and the tawdry churches, but here among broken columns and crumbling masonry, still half buried in historic dust—here is that human and homely touch, or note, or message (for either word is used, if we follow Julia), which at first one took to be lacking altogether in Rome. The darling Professor had made all the difference to her enjoyment of the place; no wonder that she whinnied and panted in her enthusiasm, while she tried to keep us in a bunch and to marshal us properly for our treat.

The Professor seemed conscious of Julia as of some disturbance in the air, some unexplained flutter or flicker that confused him slightly; but he brushed it aside, he vaguely greeted the rest of us, and he flung himself immediately into the zeal of his task. Miss Turnbull, I know, was a young woman easily stirred to ideal raptures, but I soon acknowledged that the Professor was irresistible. He had the appearance partly of a moth and partly of a scarecrow; and the mixture, as I recall it, surprisingly gives him the likeness of a soft and ragged rain-cloud, swept by a kindly gust. He veered at high speed across the broken floor of the Forum, and Julia had much difficulty in holding the half-dozen of us in her embrace while she trundled us after him. The Professor had his view of the particular drain or paving-stone where the study of Rome begins; and there was nothing for it, said Julia, but to accept his rule and to squeeze as we might into the awkward pit or cleft in which the fundamental object is to be found. “Mind the tail of your skirt, Mrs. Rollesby,” cried Julia, growing heated; “there’s room for Kathleen at this end, out of the puddle; wait, Professor, wait—I want Mr. Ram to hear this; really, Mr. Ram, if you crouch you can easily get in.” We were a handful, but Julia kept her head; the most trying member of the party was the Professor, who heeded nothing but the book which he had drawn from his pocket and from which he was gleefully reading aloud—translating as he went, for it was an ancient text.

It wasn’t the best situation for a classical lecture, and Mr. Ram, splashing in the puddle, sighed faintly in good Italian. “Per l’amor di Dio!” he murmured; he was very helpless, and the girl called Kathleen seized him with a manly arm and set him to rights on his perch. Crouching, scuffling, apologizing, we wedged ourselves about the lecturer—with sudden changes of pressure when Mrs. Rollesby leaned and peered over her capacious bosom (she may have been one of Emmeline’s heroines) to see what was happening to her skirt. Under the Professor’s elbow sat a bewildered maiden with a pulled-out neck like a hen’s, and she distracted the whole company by taking notes of the lecture on a little pad—scrawling down words like “republican (said to be)” and “(?) Etruscan,” which we all tried to read. Julia listened fervently, her lips moving in the effort to get the message of the paving-stone by heart; and the message ran on, ran on, now translated from the ancient book, now poured forth at an amazing rate in the exposition of the Professor. He was inspired; he stood upon the mouth of the sewer (if sewer it was—“masonry doubtful (perhaps),” obscurely noted the hen-necked girl)—he stood there and flourished his book and flaunted his interpretation and ransacked the ages, casting up the history of races, of immigrations, of the colour of men’s hair, of the obscenities of their religion, of the shapes of their water-pots; and he whipped open his book again and triumphantly quoted, he dashed it away to remind us of Pelasgic sources and Punic infusions and Iberian influences; and perhaps I rather recall the heads of his discourse as they reached the bewildered pad than as they fell from the Professor, but they were various and bristling and abundant; for it all came in, it all came round, it all came finally back to the stone on which Mr. Ram was trying to twist himself into a tolerable attitude without spoiling his trousers. “Ah,” exclaimed Julia uncontrollably, “how one feels it on the very spot!” Mr. Ram seemed to think so too; he raised himself, ruefully inspecting the damp green traces it had left on the very spot. The Professor dived again into his book like a man possessed.

He kept us at last so long in our narrow pit that we must surely have laid the foundations of Rome and tunnelled its drains with all thoroughness; the notes on the pad were still dubious, but Mrs. Rollesby began to wonder if we hadn’t now reached the surface of the soil—she too had taken her share of the ooze of the ages. She signed to Julia with winks and nudges—and Mr. Ram appealed to Julia with a woeful smile, to which Kathleen added an imperative frown; everybody looked to Julia to take action—everybody except the maiden with the pad, intent upon the uncertainties of learning. The Professor was Julia’s property, it was for her to deal with him; and he had clearly forgotten that we were still underground, he didn’t even notice that the reason why he couldn’t get at the pocket in his coat-tail (he made a sketchy motion towards it now and then) was that the hen’s-neck stretched in the way. We might just as well be sitting comfortably in the sun, and between her responsibility and her rapture poor Julia was flustered. “Soon, very soon—the blue-eyed infusion predominant—I’ll get him to move in a moment—their pots were shallower”: Julia tried to whisper encouragingly to Mrs. Rollesby without dropping the thread of the message. (I don’t answer for her version of it.) But the Professor swept over her head, beaming in the zest of his approach to the real inwardness, the ultimate significance, the true truth of the origin of Rome—it appeared that we were only there, even now, and the first damp stone, so homely and said to be so Etruscan, had still to be laid. We were to stick in our cleft indefinitely, I thought, for Julia’s tactful advances and coughs made no impression. The hen-necked girl scratched out “Etruscan” and wrote wildly “theory abandoned (if at all)”; and the Professor struck her forcibly on the jaw as he flung out upon the climax, the glad surprise to which he had been gradually leading us—his discovery of the solution, the answer to all the queries of the distracted student.

“But first,” he said, “I fear I must disturb you.” He explained with apologies that we should be better able to judge the weight of his argument if we followed him—and he was gone, leaping to the upper air with a sudden agility that brought on one of the tiresome attacks to which Mrs. Rollesby is subject on being startled. These attacks take the form of an extraordinary surging and quaking of the bosom, and she has to be seized and supported and propelled to a spot where she can sit on something less painful than a heap of brickbats. So she says; but the girl Kathleen (who proved to be her niece) declared rather brutally that a little smart exercise would do her all the good in the world. “If she will gobble at breakfast she’ll palpitate before lunch—naturally,” said Kathleen, who was as taut and muscular as a young tree. With all this the Professor had given us the slip, our party was adrift and scattered, Mr. Ram saw a chance of escape—he feared and detested Kathleen. But Julia signalled so excitedly through a gap in some ruinous brickwork, not far off, that she drew us together again for the Professor’s revelation. Mrs. Rollesby, still surging, was somehow hoisted through the gap, and here we found a more convenient space and a less Etruscan boulder, on which she was deposited. There was more room; but it seemed that the secret of Rome still lurks in rather confined and dingy places. The Forum on a spring morning is a sweet spot, and Mr. Ram assured me that he loved every stone of it; the columns tower against the blue sky, roses scramble among the mouldering walls, the dark ilex-crown of the Palatine hangs nobly on its height. But the Professor dragged us away from the view and the roses, he thrust us into a dusty corner where there was nothing to be seen except the blank face of the brickwork to which he joyously pointed. Now, he said, we could perceive for ourselves the conclusion to which his argument had tended; and he shone so radiantly with his glee in the surprise prepared for us that Julia bravely gave a cry and a gasp of recognition on behalf of all. He was enchanted with his success. “I knew you would see it at once,” he said proudly; “that speaks for itself.” He patted and caressed it with the hand of a collector, a connoisseur; it appeared to be a little rim or ledge of greyish cement between the reddish bricks.

His triumph illuminated the shabby corner. Julia’s falsity, Mrs. Rollesby’s palpitation, Mr. Ram’s uneasy mistrust in the neighbourhood of Kathleen—he was rapt above all these in his blissful vision. I don’t know that any of us attained to a share in it; for even Julia, who perhaps came nearest, was so much disturbed by her own rashness and by the fear of being unmasked that she was altogether thrown out in her absorption of the message. She was soon in a fearful state of muddle between the homely touch and the human note, and if the Professor had had eyes for anything post-Iberian (but the pad must surely have got this word wrong) he couldn’t have failed to see that her attention wandered. I attribute my own confusion in the matter of the sewer and the grey cement in the first place to the hen-necked girl (whom Julia addressed as “Hicksie dear”)—for the eye was fatally drawn by her pad; and secondly to Mrs. Rollesby’s alarming attack—which in spite of her niece’s treatment abated little on the boulder, some of the symptoms being so tumultuous that they even affected the Professor in his cloud. Mr. Ram, moreover, was inclined to attach himself to me, as the only member of the party who wasn’t rather rough with him; for the dry bones of learning, he said, left him cold, and he wanted to point out to somebody that the past only lives for us when it is touched by a poetic imagination. So he pointed it out to me, and in principle I agreed with him; but I couldn’t admit that the Professor was wanting in poetry. To me he seemed romantically poetic, and though his argument escaped me I appreciated the spirit of his dream.