“Ah,” cried Deering suddenly, “Cooksey will tell you—Cooksey calls all the cardinals by their Christian names.” We were just approaching the low door of the Trattoria dell’ Oca, and a stout little man in a loud suit was entering there in front of us. “Cooksey my dear, wait for your friends,” cried Deering; and the little man faced round and greeted him with a pleasant chuckle. Cooksey was red and genial; in his bright check suit and his Panama hat he looked like the English globe-trotter of tradition—I was instantly reminded of Mr. Meagles among the Allongers and Marshongers. I can’t imagine any one more calculated, I should have said, to send Deering shuddering and faint in the opposite direction; but Deering smiled on him with all his sweetness, and we passed together into the dark entry of the Goose. A plain but distinguished Roman lady, heavily moustached, sat at a high desk inside; she bowed graciously and called a sharp word to a chinless man, evidently her husband, who dashed forth to make us welcome. Cooksey and Deering were familiar customers, and we were handed to a table in an inner room, close to the mouth of a small black recess—a cupboard containing a little old dwarf-woman, like a witch, who was stirring a copper sauce-pan on a stove, for the cupboard was the kitchen. It was a much nicer place than the gilded hall of the Via Nazionale, and an excellent meal, though slippery, was produced for us from the cupboard. As for the wine, it came from the chinless man’s own vineyard at Velletri—a rose-golden wine, a honey-sweet name.
Now for Cooksey. Deering tackled him at once on the question of the cardinals, with malicious intention; and Cooksey shook his head, chuckling, and remarked that they were a low lot, no doubt, take them for all in all. “A poor degenerate lot,” he declared—“the college has gone to pieces very badly. All exemplary lives, they tell me—and not one of them would poison a fly, let alone a guest at his own table.” Cooksey had jumped to our humour very pleasantly; he twinkled and assured me that he longed, as Deering did and I must too, to hear of scandals and dark secrets upon the backstairs of the Vatican. “But all I ever find there,” he said, “is a pail of slops—I tumbled over one this morning.” “You were on duty, were you?” asked Deering. Cooksey said yes, and he went on to explain to me (“lest you should misconceive my position”) that it wasn’t his duty to empty the slops. “That’s the duty of Monsignor Mair, and I told him so, and he answered me back very saucily indeed. I had to pursue him with a mop.” Cooksey, I learned, held an office of some kind in the papal court—“unpaid, lavishly unpaid”—which kept him in Rome for a term of months each year. “And it’s still seven weeks to the holidays,” he said, “and I’ve spent all my tin, and I daren’t ask the Holy Father to lend me any, because the last time I did so he said he’d write home and tell my people I was getting into extravagant ways.” Cooksey was delightfully gay; he assumed the humour of a school-boy and it became him well, with his red face and his jolly rotundity.
He ran along in the same strain, playing his irreverent cheer over the occupation of his day. Nothing had gone right with him, he said, since the morning; it wasn’t only the slop-pail, it had been one of his unlucky days from the start. “First of all I was late for early school,” he said; “I dashed round to church before breakfast (I always think of it as early school), and I was three minutes late, and I fell with a crash on the butter-slide which Father Jenkins had made in the middle of the nave. That’s his little way—he thinks it funny; he reckons always to catch somebody who comes running in at the last moment, and he scored heavily this morning—I hurt myself horribly. And then I couldn’t attend to my book because I was attacked by a flea, and just as I was cracking it on the altar-step I found I had forgotten to button my braces; and while I was attending to that I jabbed my stick in the face of a savage old woman who was kneeling behind me; she gave me such a look—and the other fellows told me afterwards I must go and apologize to her, because it seems she’s a very special pet convert of Father Jenkins’s and would be sure to complain to him if she was assaulted in church—that was the way they put it. However I was comforted by one thing; just as I was leaving I heard a great bump on the floor, and Father Jenkins had tumbled on his own slide, the old silly, while he was rushing out to rag the sacristan about something; and he sat there cursing and swearing (inwardly, I will say for him), and I wanted to make a long nose at him, but I was afraid it might be forbidden in church, like spitting—not that the reverend fathers can say much about that!—” Dear me, Cooksey was volatile; he ran on more and more jovially, gathering impetus as he talked.
I wished I could have questioned Deering about him—he seemed such an odd product of the Vatican. The papal functionary was a middle-aged man; he enjoyed his dinner with much emphasis, hailing the chinless man from time to time (in fluent Italian idiom, but with a British accent that caused Deering to glance round uneasily at the other tables)—summoning the chinless man, Amerigo by name, for a word and a jest, peering into the cupboard to banter the little witch-woman with the freedom of an old admirer. “They know me, bless their hearts,” he remarked to me; “they rob me as they all rob us all, and they know I know it and we’re the best of friends. They’re all thieves together, these Romans—I tell ’em so, and they like it. Now watch—” He called to Amerigo with an air of indignation and began to accuse him—I forget how it was, but it appeared that Amerigo was in the habit of grossly over-charging him in some particular, and Cooksey was determined he would bear it no longer, so he said, striking his knife-handle on the table defiantly; and Amerigo spread his hands in voluble self-defence, earnestly contesting the charge, and Cooksey held up his fist and retorted again, and they argued the point—till Amerigo suddenly smiled across his anxious face, darting a look at me as he did so, and Cooksey lunged at him playfully in the stomach and clapped him on the shoulder. There was a burst of laughter, in which Amerigo joined industriously, complaisantly, looking again at me. Perhaps I misunderstood him, but he seemed to regard me as the audience for whom the scene had been played. He had an eye in his head.
Dismissing Amerigo, Cooksey began to examine me on my business in Rome, and I was soon able to turn his enquiries upon himself. I found that he had frequented Rome for many years, a dozen or more—“ever since a certain event took place for me,” he said; and he paused, waiting for me to ask what the event had been. He waited so explicitly that I felt no delicacy; I put the question. “Oh, the event,” he said; “the event was simply that I happened to become a Catholic.” He was grave for an instant, apparently implying that my question was not in the best of taste; but he overlooked it and passed on. He offered to do me the honours of Rome, the kind of Rome I probably hadn’t discovered for myself; and I nearly exclaimed that Deering was doing exactly that for me at the moment—Cooksey was the kind of Rome, or one of the kinds, that had been hidden from me till to-day. But all I said was something suitably grateful, and he announced that he should take me in hand. “You’ll find I keep very low company,” he observed, “monks and Jesuits and such. My respectable English friends refuse to meet me when they come to Rome. They think it disreputable of me to know so many priests. But if you’re not afraid I’ll show you a few; rum old devils they are, some of them—it’s all right, I call them so to their faces. We’re none of us shy of a little plain speaking; you should hear Cardinal ——” the name of the plain-spoken cardinal escapes me; but Cooksey had plenty to say of him, dwelling with relish on the liberal speech of his eminence. Then he slanted off into anecdotes, stories and scenes of clerical life, in a funny little vein of frivolity and profanity that seemed by several sizes too small for him, so stout and red and comfortable as he sat there. He absorbed his dinner with a loud smacking satisfaction, and he told stories of which the roguery consisted in talking very familiarly of saints, of miracles, of the furniture of churches. “But I shock you,” he remarked to me at length, enquiringly.
Did Cooksey shock me? Oh yes, he was sure of it, and he explained why he was sure. “We all strike you as profane,” said he; his “we” stood for those of his persuasion, that which I think of as the “Romish.” He himself, he said, would have been frightened to death by such talk in old days; he had been taught (like me, no doubt) that it was “beastly bad form” to be simple and jolly in these matters. “We aren’t solemn, I confess,” he proceeded; “we’re cheerful because we aren’t nervous, and we aren’t nervous because we happen to feel pretty sure of our ground. Now in old days I was as solemn as eight archbishops.” But he pulled himself up. “I apologize, I apologize (the second time to-day!—but you’ll be kinder than that old cat of Father J.’s). I’ll try to behave with proper decorum—a great fat rascal like me! You wouldn’t think I was born in the diocese of Bath and Wells. When I go back there now I feel like a naughty boy in a sailor suit; I can’t remember that I’m a damnable heretic whom the dean and chapter ought to burn out of hand.” So Cooksey settled that he was shocking, and the thought seemed to make him more comfortable and expansive than ever. But with some notion of attesting my own liberalism I then ventured on an anecdote myself, a tale of a man who had prayed to a miracle-working image, somewhere in Rome, and had been embarrassed by the shower of wonders that had thereafter befallen him. It is quite a good story, the point being that each of the miracles wrought was slightly off the mark, not exactly what the man had asked for, and the humour appearing in the detail of the saint’s misapprehension—he means so well, his mistakes are all so natural. I told it brightly and candidly.
“Ah well,” said Cooksey, and he didn’t laugh. I was so frankly surprised that my jaw dropped, as people say; I blushed hotly—there yawned between us a pause. “On that subject,” said Cooksey, “I’m afraid we must agree to differ. I happen to hold another view of the force of devotion.” He stared with fixed eyes, munching slowly. I never was more taken aback, and I was young enough to feel a burning shame of my blunder. It seemed so awkward, so gawky of me to have offended in that way; a civilized human being doesn’t jar the harmony of a circle in an amusing old eating-house by the Cancelleria—he is sensitive to the tone of the place. So Cooksey had it all his own way, and I sank in shame. He didn’t let me off, not a tittle; he heavily maintained his stare and his silence. It spoilt the rest of the evening for me, it soured the wine of Velletri; though Cooksey, when he had deliberately finished his gesture of disapproval, agreed to pretend that nothing had happened, changed the subject and talked about the excavations on the Palatine. Before long he was merrily continuing the story of his day, part of which he had spent with a German archeologist in the House of Augustus; he told us how his ill-luck had pursued him still, how he had accidentally sat on the camera of the German and reduced it to powder; he ignored the black hole I had made in the talk and turned his back on it. But there it was, and I couldn’t forget it; my clumsiness fretted me.
Cooksey had it all his own way at the time, but I reacted afterwards and I didn’t fail to perceive that he had treated me unfairly. I was hot with indignation, and it was long before I felt any kindness in return for not a little on his part towards me. He was friendly, he was helpful; it was assumed that we “agreed to differ” upon certain subjects, and on that footing he gave me his protection. And I am sure I don’t now grudge him the fun of his severity when I tried in my presumption, that first evening, to take a hand in his game. It was his game, and I couldn’t expect him to admit an outsider like me; it was mine to look on, a home-bred novice, and be a trifle fluttered and shocked. Deering, I observed, was highly amused at my discomfiture; he sat a little apart, looking pale and penetrating by contrast with Cooksey’s red breadth and weight, and he watched us with a charming sneer that was lost upon Cooksey, not upon me. He enjoyed the sight of my indoctrination, my collision with this new little bit of the world of Rome. If he couldn’t show me a cardinal he could produce an associate of cardinals—or at any rate a man who had chased Monsignor Mair with a mop on the backstairs of the Vatican, which was surely as good. Already I had the means of correcting my fancy about the palace of the Cancelleria—another illusion dispelled! Ascetic faces, solitary study, proud aloofness indeed! Cooksey’s pranks and rogueries told a different story; the guarded fortress of distinction that I had imagined—I had now an inkling of its tone, in Deering’s opinion.
I don’t know about that; but Cooksey was undoubtedly a queer novel case for my attention. He was showing off, it was clear; he was flourishing his levity at an outsider; and his unexpected slap at my intrusion, when you think of it, was extremely enlightening. He did so enjoy, you see, his place as a member of the ring, inside the fortress; years had not withered the freshness of it, had not staled the complacency of his position. “Look at me, look,” he seemed to say, like a child who has climbed a tree and balances on a branch; and then “look again,” like a man walking familiarly on the terrace of a great grand house, while a party of sightseers are marshalled by the butler. “See how easily we carry our high estate—don’t you wish you were one of us, sharing the fun?” And then, if you venture to presume, “Ah, would you? No you don’t—take that!” If you ever were the guest of the grand house and happened to be pacing the terrace, carelessly, while the public were shuffling through the state apartments and looking out of the windows, you would sympathize completely with the mind of Cooksey. I can imagine the sensation—who has not admired the nonchalant figure upon the terrace, the creature of privilege at whom the public gaze from afar? See him stroll at his ease, pause carelessly, call and wave lightly to a companion under the sacred trees. Ah it is good to let the uninitiate see how free one is, how playfully at home in the sanctuary of their envy—for one can’t doubt that they do feel envy and are quick to be conscious of their exclusion. Sweet, to be sure, are the uses of parade, sweet and fresh after many a year.
One can’t have the public, however, stepping into the enclosure and blundering into the fun of the talk; one draws back coolly if they begin to take a liberty; and that too is a movement and a gesture enjoyable in its quiet dignity. Cooksey, at the moment when he was delivering his rebuke to me, was intensely dignified; I clearly remember the calm decency with which he set me down. “On that subject we must agree to differ”; it was as though I had dealt him an ugly blow, but he could make allowances for my want of the finer feelings. At the same time it was more than a personal matter, and he couldn’t let me off my punishment; so he gravely stared and allowed the lesson to sink home. It was all the heavier for the contrast of his disapproval with the gay rattle of his ordinary style. Cooksey, I had to admit, was much nearer the heart of Rome than either Deering or I. He had arrived from as far afield as we; but he had not only detached himself from Bath and Wells, he had become a responsible member of the Roman state and had the right of chastising us in its name. All the majesty of Rome was at his back—majesty I say advisedly, for you don’t look for anything majestic in modern Rome, you didn’t in those days at any rate, save in the historical shadow of the Vatican. Cooksey was himself explicit upon this point. He happened to make some allusion to the vulgar new gingerbread (so he described it) of the upstart Italian monarchy, the coarse intruder whom the Vatican was coldly staring down in its ancient pride. Cooksey, needless to say, was whole-heartedly on the side of the noble and patient old sufferer against the upstart and the bully; and indeed as he put the matter the Vatican seemed the only fit place for a gentleman of feeling. The moral support behind him was immense, and his flippant style was accordingly the more suggestive. Where would be the charm, where the consequence, of a jest about slop-pails and butter-slides, if they belonged to the household of the upstart? But in the midst of the immemorial state of the other place it is very amusing, no doubt, to find them in their homely incongruity, or to say you have found.