Roman pictures

by Percy Lubbock

Cooksey had introduced me to the beautiful priest, and I had one of his sharp glances to myself. For half a second I thought he was going to be interested in me, and I sat up with pleasure; but then I was turned down, I was placed with the rest of the company, and I perceived that I was no finer or rarer or more exquisite than Cooksey himself. It was worse, however, for Cooksey than for me, and the contrast between his natural exuberance and his shrivelled loose-jawed malease under the eye of Father Holt was melancholy indeed. Father Holt was the real thing, Cooksey could only pretend to be the real thing in his absence. You can’t attain to the heart of Rome, after all, by the simple and obvious methods of a Cooksey; you can’t set off from Bath and Wells, travelling to Rome because Rome attracts you, and then expect to find yourself on terms of equality with Father Holt, whose foot was on the stair of the Vatican when Doctor Tusher (your spiritual forbear) was scraping to his lordship and marrying the waiting-maid. Cooksey could impose upon me with the airy flourish of his intimacy with a world from which I was locked out; but he was reduced to the position of a very raw new boy in the company of the born initiate. Poor old Cooksey—it was a shame that I should be there to see it.

He couldn’t renew his pleasant gossip with Lady Mullinger, and he rather stupidly persisted in trying to range himself with Father Holt. He received his measured stint of Father Holt’s admirable manners, and his uneasy gratitude was pathetic. Where was now my Cooksey of the liberal jest, of the gay scuffle with Monsignor Mair? The conversation drooped, and presently Father Holt had slipped off again into the background, where there now arose a small stir of a new arrival. He was at the head of the staircase which ascended to the scaffold, he was welcoming somebody who emerged from below; and this was a little old lady, at whom the eyes of the company were turned with cautious curiosity. Cooksey nudged me, whispering her name and her title, both very splendid; as discreetly as I might, I stared at her with all my attention. None of us ventured to join Father Holt in the graceful and natural ceremony that he made of handing her to her place in the front of the platform. He dropped into the chair by her side, he engaged in a talk with her that we couldn’t overhear, and he was subtly transfigured as he did so. There was no change in his composure and his bland dignity; but he seemed to sink with relief into a society where he felt at home. The rest of us were silent, we couldn’t set up a rival society in the face of that exhibition; and besides we wished, I think, to miss nothing of its effect.

She was small and shabby and very neat; her hair, under her black veil, was scraped together in a little grey knob; she had a strange old mantle upon her, short to her waist, of much-worn black, and her tiny arms appeared beneath it, with hard white cuffs, ending in gloves that were like the Russia-binding of a prayer-book. She was not pretty, but she was perfect; her eyes were very sweet and soft, and her face had no colour in it at all, and the light that shone out of her eyes seemed to shine equally through the diaphanous pallor of her cheek. I never saw any one so transparent; she looked infinitely fragile—because it was as though you could see through her and could see that she hadn’t a drop of common life to give her substance. I could hear the gentle purity of her voice, with its quiet and even intonation. She was English, though the name and the title that Cooksey had spluttered in my ear were not; she was intensely English—she couldn’t otherwise have talked with that smooth silk-thread of a monotone which was so well in keeping with the pearl-glimmer of her face. She was perfect indeed; and if she dressed in her rusty black and wrung her hair into its knob with the purpose of making the utmost of her wondrous distinction—why then she did rightly and her style was consummately chosen, for her distinction was enhanced beyond measure by her queer little white-cuffed dowdiness. All the rest of us were things of such tawdry attractions, such twopenny pretensions; she must have walked in a moving circle of perpetual vulgarity, for I can scarcely imagine a face or a word or a movement that wouldn’t strike you, at the moment when you looked away from her, as the commonest trash.

Didn’t I even perceive that Father Holt’s distinction was not what it had appeared a minute ago? It was now just a thought too sleek, too glossy, too well-appointed; and I wondered wildly if I was never to come to the end in my discovery of finer shades and finer. So the best has still a better—but indeed I had come to the end at this point, for I have never reached a better in her kind than the great little old lady of that morning in St. Peter’s. Lady Mullinger positively creaked with reverential contemplation; she didn’t aspire to attracting any sign of notice from the great lady—who seemed, however, to ignore our company in modest and delicate shyness, not in pride—but she pored, she gloated upon the vision with all her being. Poor Charlotte was forgotten, Cooksey had dropped out of the world; Lady Mullinger was intently committing to memory the details of so historic an impression. Much would be heard of it, no doubt, at tea in the big room on Thursday. Meanwhile I was not far behind her, I confess, in using the opportunity of the moment; I was fascinated by this sudden exaltation of my standard in the grace of the highest style.

But the brilliance and the rumour of the great church, filled more and more with crowding movement, made it soon impossible to attend to any other than its own distinction. This was a staring and thumping affair by comparison with the small voice of perfection; but mere size, when it is miles high, and mere gold, when it is inches thick, and mere noise, when it is in the throats of all the tribes, will use their overbearing power and assert their dignity. There was nothing perfect in the seethe and clamour of the pilgrims, nothing in the sprawl of ostentation over the whole adornment of the scene; but it was a vast and riotous and haphazard work of genius, all of it together—the overflow of an imagination no better than my own, or not so good, but as large as an ocean against my own poor painful tap-trickle. The passion that rolled along the nave and swept round the hollow of the dome, toppling, breaking in uncontrollable excitement—I hung over it, clinging to my perch on the tribune, and I flung into it my own small cup-full; but how could I think to swell it with these few drops, claiming to ally myself with genius of that enormity? It was vain, I was the flimsiest of onlookers; and the pilgrims could bring a tribute to Rome that was profuse enough, indiscriminate and coarse enough, to fill the chamber prepared to receive it, to brim the church of St. Peter in an hour or two. Their capacity was well-matched; Rome and the pilgrims, they wrought upon the same scale, they understood each other.

Rome, yes—but what about the Romans? Father Holt surveyed the struggle of the pilgrims with something like the high indifference of the philosopher at a show of gladiators; he inclined his ear to the little transparent old princess beside him, he received her remarks with courteous care; and as for her, she was as far aloof from the common scramble as a flower that unfolds upon the cliff-edge above the booming ravine. Cooksey indeed was intent on the display with all the eager bulge of his eyes; but he had frankly relapsed into sight-seeing, he was just a Briton in foreign parts. Lady Mullinger, though she murmured to her neighbour that the zeal of the crowd had “filled her heart,” couldn’t really attend to anything but the princess; she glanced perfunctorily at the crowd, but she was trying all the while to catch the silvery murmur that was holding the privileged ear of Father Holt. It was altogether evident that our party on the scaffold was neither of Rome nor of the pilgrimage, and the great affair proceeded beneath us with a roar and a rush that sounded more and more remote in my hearing, even while now it mounted to its culmination. That “real Rome,” of which I thought I had been learning so much, was magnificently bestirring itself to accept the homage of its swarming subjects, and I tried to look through their eyes and to see what they saw in their jubilation.

They at least had no doubt, they knew where to look for the genius of Rome. Far away across the church and down the nave, somewhere near the great portals at the end, there was a side-door, and a broad lane from this door had been cleared through the crowd. Rome was very soon to issue from the door, it was for Rome that the lane was kept open along the roaring church. But a church, do I say?—it was the temple of Rome, the “great main cupola” of the Roman genius. It stands upon the hill of the Vatican in our day, and it has stood there for some little time; but its rightful place is the Capitol, the mount of triumph—it is there that the temple belongs. Kings and queens were led captive to that shrine, the multitude mocked and jeered at their abasement; and I see what is wanting to the due completeness of the resounding assembly in St Peter’s—it is the presence of captive kings and queens, brought low by the power of Rome, over whom the multitude might exult with glee and ferocity. And indeed the multitude would, it is easy to see; I shouldn’t, nor Father Holt, nor the rest of us up here, and that is why we feel thus cut off from the tumult beneath us; but the pilgrims would delight in deriding the poor dazed wretches, and their reverence for the majesty of Rome would be the more enhanced. This joy, which they would have tasted upon the Capitol, is denied them upon the tomb of Peter; but they have lost nothing else by the shifting of the shrine. Rome above all, Rome the wonder of the world, is still the attraction of their worship; and from the door of the temple that we watch with strained expectation, suddenly hushed as the great moment approaches, Rome is about to emerge and appear before us. Look, it is there—a high swaying throne or pedestal, borne upon the shoulders of faithful knaves, and an ancient white-robed figure that sits aloft, springing upright and subsiding again with outstretched hand, and a smile, a fixed immemorial smile in a blanched face, beneath a pair of piercing eyes: Rome, Rome indeed.

V. VIA GIULIA

AND Cooksey took me to tea, that same day, with his little old friend Mr. Fitch. I was greatly charmed by Mr. Fitch, who was small and frail and wore a dust-coloured beard; and his first suspicion of me (he was afraid of the young) was allayed when he found that I knew and adored a particular Roman church or two, remote and neglected, which he didn’t suppose that a casual intruder like myself would have discovered. I remember how Cooksey threw an arm of patronage around me and explained that he had been my guide to the holy places of the city; but Mr. Fitch caught my eye with a twinkle of intelligence, quickly withdrawn, which set up a happy understanding between us on the spot. He did the honours of his apartment with pleasant chirps and fidgets, hospitably bustling about the tea-tray, beaming and fussing and apologizing, with bird-like cries to the stout maid-servant who was energetically seconding his welcome.

Mr. Fitch was a scholar, a student, who worked daily in the library of the Vatican. I believe he was a hundred years old, and indeed he looked it; but he didn’t appear to have grown old, only to have suffered a slow deposit of time to accumulate upon his person. Time was deep upon his hair and face and clothes; but a few score years more or less could have made no difference to the cheerful little bird-spirit in his breast, and it was because he was shy and defenceless, not because he was old, that he feared the onslaught of the young. A young person, however, who was found to have made his way unaided to the church of San Cesareo, far away among the vineyards on the verge of the city, was one towards whom Mr. Fitch could hop and twitter in kindly confidence, and he did so. Before we parted he invited me to lunch with him a day or two later, and I fully understood that this was for him a remarkable demonstration. “Gina!” he called, and Gina, the voluble maid-servant, came from the kitchen with a run, to receive his command concerning the festival. She was delighted, she swept me into the happy plan, she seemed to be immediately arranging a treat for two merry little children, for me and Mr. Fitch. We were like children between her broad palms, all but hugged to her bosom; and with dancing eyes she told us to leave it all to her—she would do something splendid. “Gina will see to it,” said Mr. Fitch; and he asked her whether he shouldn’t invite some other young thing to join the party—what about the giovanotto who had called the other day? “Quel poverino?” said Gina—yes, the very thing. So we should be a party of three; and Gina clapped her hands and ran back to the kitchen, as though to set about her preparations there and then.