Mr. Fitch lived in the Via Giulia, deep in the depth of Rome, not far from the great mass of the Farnese palace. He had the craziest little apartment, a tangle of rooms with bare tiled floors, in which his funny frumpy English furniture, which might have come straight (and no doubt it had) from his mother’s parlour at Cheltenham, looked strangely shocked and ill at ease. Forty years of the Via Giulia (it can hardly have been less) had not reconciled the mahogany overmantel and the plush-topped tea-table to the ramshackle ways of foreign life; mutely they protested, keeping themselves to themselves, wrapped in their respectability. Mr. Fitch, I think, had never so much as noticed their plight; he sat on a chair, he made tea on a table, and one chair or table was as good as another for the purpose. He himself looked homely and frumpy enough, to be sure, lodged there under the wing, so to speak, of Julius the Pope; but he didn’t feel at a loss, and he tripped along the proud-memoried street of his abode, with his decent English beard and his little mud-gaiters on his boots, as brisk as a sparrow. He accompanied us down the street and left us to go and invite the “poverino” to meet me at lunch; I see him waving us good-bye at some grand dark street-corner, where he turned and pattered off on his errand. Cooksey treated him with large protective kindness and contempt, out of which the old man seemed to slip with a duck of his head and a gleam of fright and amusement in his two bright eyes.
The luncheon-party, a day or two later, was a great success. I climbed to the apartment on the stroke of the hour, but the other young man was already there before me, and Mr. Fitch ceremoniously performed an introduction. The name of the youth was Maundy, and he proved to be one of those aspiring priests, novices, seminarists—I don’t know what their rightful name may be, but you know them well, you remember how they converge in long lines upon the Pincian Hill towards evening, how they pick up their skirts and romp with the gaiety of the laity upon the greensward of the Villa Borghese. Maundy was his name, and he didn’t look, for his part, as though he had had much romping; he was pale and meagre, he reclined in a contorted cat’s-cradle of thin arms and legs on one of Mr. Fitch’s fringed and brass-nailed arm-chairs. If Gina’s word for him meant a poor young specimen of chilly lankness she was right; his limp black soutane (is it a soutane?) couldn’t disguise his sharp-set knees or the lean little sticks of his arms. He jumped up, however, quite alert and spritely for our introduction, and he greeted me with a friendly high-piping composure that made it unnecessary to pity him. I had begun to pity him, as I always do feel compassionate, so gratuitously, at the sight of his kind—at the sight of the young novices, caught and caged and black-skirted in their innocence, renouncing the world before they have had the chance to taste it; but Maundy turned the tables upon me in a moment, and he revealed himself as a perfectly assured young son of the world, with whom I had no call to be sympathetically considerate. He shook hands with me, using a gesture which at that time, so long ago, was reputed a mark of distinction—I forget how it went exactly, but I think the pair of clasped hands was held high and waved negligently from side to side. Maundy achieved it with an air, not failing to observe that I had stepped forward to meet him with the ordinary pump-handle of the vulgar.
And so we sat down to Gina’s admirable meal, and Mr. Fitch was in a flutter of pleasure and excitement, and Maundy talked and talked—he led the conversation, he led it almost beyond our reach, he led it so masterfully that it hardly escaped him at all. Mr. Fitch lost his hold on it at once; he sat with his head on one side, making small clucking noises of assent and question now and then, while Maundy piped and swept away from us in his monologue. But no, I oughtn’t to say that he left us both behind, for he kept turning and waiting for me to catch him up, he flatteringly showed me that he wished for my company. “Such a blessing,” he said, “to get away from piety”—and he intimated with a smile that it was I who represented the impious. He desired my company, not my talk; and he might have been breaking out with the relief of unwonted freedom, soaring forth into topics that were discouraged in the congregation of the poor caged lambs; and I dare say he enjoyed the spread of his wings among the tinted and perfumed vapours of his fancy. It was all beyond Mr. Fitch, who clearly couldn’t explain him with my ready mixture of metaphor; Mr. Fitch was bewildered. But to me the fancies of Maundy were sufficiently familiar; I knew the like of them from of old, and I fear we both took a certain pleasure in noting the bedazzlement of our host. The good soul, he sat and plied us with food and wine, while Maundy rattled away in his emancipation and I assumed the most impious look (I had small opportunity for more than looks) that I could accomplish.
Maundy threw off a light word or two about his place of residence and instruction in Rome—the seminary, the college, I forget how he referred to it. He seemed disdainful of all its other inmates; he couldn’t regard them as companions for a person of intelligence and fine feeling. How he came to have placed himself among them, submitting to their rule, he didn’t explain at the time, but I afterwards made out a little of his history. He had written a great deal of poetry at Oxford, and he had kept an old silver oil-lamp burning night and day before a Greek statuette, and he had had his favourite books bound in apricot linen, and he had collected thirty-five different kinds of scented soap—and I know it sounds odd, but he appeared to consider these achievements as natural stages on the path to Rome. He didn’t go quite so far as to say that he repented of having made the journey and embraced the Roman discipline; but after a year in the college or the seminary his mind, I think, was in a state of more painful confusion than he allowed me to see. Somehow the argument at one end, the Oxford end, where he had draped his dressing-table with an embroidered rochet (he told me so), seemed to have so little in common with the argument at the other, the Roman end, where he walked out with his young associates for exercise in the Villa Borghese and not one of them had heard of the poetry of Lionel Johnson; and somehow he had perceived the discrepancy without discovering where the chain of his reasoning had failed, and in the privacy of his discontent he was still floundering backwards and forwards, trying to persuade himself of the soundness of all the links—and perhaps seeking with a part of his mind (a growing part) to be convinced that he had reasoned wrong. Something of this kind, I believe, was fretting his life in Rome, and how it may have ended I never knew; he didn’t confide his troubles to me—he simply hailed me as one who would possibly understand what it meant to him to have once, in an eating-house of Soho, been introduced to Aubrey Beardsley.
“The passion of his line,” he said, referring to that artist; and again, “The passion of his line!”—and he described the scene in Soho, mentioning that the impression had wrought upon him so potently that afterwards he had sat up all night, with some golden Tokay beside him in a blue Venetian glass (not drinking it, only refreshed by the sight of it), and had written a poem, a sonnet of strange perfumes and fantastic gems, which he had dedicated in Latin to the hero of the evening. And then he had gone out into the dawn, and had wandered through Leicester Square to Covent Garden, and had bought a bunch of mauve carnations; and he had thought of sending them, with the sonnet, to the master who had inspired him—but then he had returned to his lodging and had burnt the sonnet, heaping the carnations for a pyre, having resolved to guard the experience, whole and rounded and complete, in the secrecy of a faithful memory. He pointed out that to share these things is to lose them; as soon as you turn them into words for another’s eye they cease to be perfectly yours, they are dissipated into the common air; which was why a friend of his, at Oxford, had insisted that one should write no words, paint or carve no colour or line, but only make one’s images and pictures and poems out of the rainbow-tinted substance of memory, that exquisite material always awaiting and inviting the hand of an artist. So one avoids, you see, the sick disillusion of the writer who flings forth his maiden fancy to the ribaldry of the crowd; and Maundy himself had tried to rise to this height of disinterested passion, and in the dying perfume of the mauve carnations he had sacrificed what he saw to be a vulgar ambition. Oh yes, depend upon it, the greatest works of art have never been seen of any but their maker; and to Maundy it was a beautiful thought, the thought of the white secret statues locked away by the thousand in their secluded shrines, safe from the world, visited now and again by the one and only adorer who possessed the key. “But stay,” said Mr. Fitch, “have you considered—” oh yes, Maundy had felt the weight of that objection, and Dickson after all (Dickson was the friend at Oxford) had written and printed his volume, but that was because he had found no other way to rid himself of an obsession; the white statue in his case had become more real than life, and he had cast it forth to retain—to retain, you might say, his sanity.
Well, we must publish or go mad; that is the melancholy conclusion. Mr. Fitch stared doubtfully, and I shook my head like one whose hold upon his senses is precarious indeed. Maundy was quick to interpret my movement, and it encouraged him to yet giddier flights. He was hovering upon the climax of one of these when Gina happened to come clattering in with a dish; and she paused, sinking back upon her heels, the dish held high before her, and she threw up her head and she flashed out such an amusing challenging bantering look at Maundy, where he flourished his thin fingers in the zest of his eloquence, that I have never forgotten the picture of her mirth and her plumpness as it was framed at that moment in the doorway. “Ah, the poor little fellow,” she said to herself, “he loves to talk!” And she too began to talk, breaking into his monologue with unabashed and ringing frankness; she set down her dish on the table with a dancing gesture, whipping her hands away from it like an actress in a play, and she stood by his side, patting him on the shoulder, approving him, scolding him, bidding him eat, eat!—and Maundy turned round to her with a peal of sudden light laughter, a burst of naturalness that changed his whole appearance; so that Gina had transformed the temper of the party and had raised it at once to a breezier level of gaiety than it would ever have touched without her. It was delightful; I couldn’t understand a word she said, for her words flew shining and streeling over our heads as quick as thought, and I dare say Maundy answered their spirit rather than their meaning; but he responded well, he had some good neat conversational turns of idiom that he shot back at her with a knowing accent, and she chuckled, she threatened him, she bustled out of the room with a smile for me and Mr. Fitch and a last fling of playfulness over her shoulder for Maundy. Mr. Fitch had said that Gina would “see to it,” and he was quite right; we started afresh in a much better vein, all three of us, after her incursion.
Mr. Fitch produced a bottle of “vino santo” at the end of the meal and charged our glasses. The sacred liquor was exceedingly good, and he took heart from it to talk more freely. Gina had relaxed the strain of Maundy’s preciosity, and he had begun to cross-question our host about his occupation, his early life, his establishment in Rome, with an inquisitive and youthful familiarity under which the old man shyly and prettily expanded. He told us how in the dim ages he had received a commission to do a little historical research among the manuscripts of the Vatican, and how he had taken his seat in the library, with a pile of volumes around him, and had never left it again from that moment to this. His first commission was long ago fulfilled, but it had revealed a point of singular interest, some debatable matter in connexion with a certain correspondence about a question raised in a contemporary version of an unofficial report of a papal election in the seventeenth century—yes, a matter which had chanced to be overlooked by previous investigators; and Mr. Fitch, sitting fast in his chair at the library, day after day, year after year, had been enabled to throw a little light upon the obscurity, and had even published a small pamphlet—“not, I must admit, for the very cogent reason that prompted your friend at Oxford, but from a motive that I justify as a desire for historical accuracy, and that I condemn as vanity”; and Mr. Fitch, so saying, beamed upon us with a diminutive roguishness, more sparrow-like than ever, which he immediately covered by plying us anew with the sacred bottle.
And then he told us of the long evenings he had spent, year after year, in wandering among the ancient byways of the city—every day, when he was turned out of the library at the closing hour, he had set forth to explore the grand shabby old city that had now perished, he said, bequeathing little but its memory to the smart new capital of to-day. Rome had changed around him, he only had remained the same; but he could truthfully claim that he knew nothing, save by report, of Rome’s rejuvenation—say rather of its horrible pretentious bedizenment in the latest fashion; for he had long abandoned his old pious pilgrimages, he now went no farther than his lodging here and the library over there, and he was proud to declare that he had never set eyes on a quarter of the monstrosities of which he heard tell. There was a break of indignation in his voice as he spoke of them; he had loved that Rome of the far-away golden evenings, it was all he ever had loved except his work, and he had been robbed of it, bit by bit, till nothing was left him but his well-worn seat among the state-papers and the pontifical dust that nobody had taken the trouble to clear away. I don’t mean that he said all this, but it was all in his gentle regretful tone; he seemed to stand solitary and disregarded among the riot of modernity, and to utter a little tiny dismal reproach, barely audible in the din—the plaintive “how can you, how can you?” of a small bird whose nest has been trampled down by a pack of stupid louts on a holiday. It was hard on him; the louts might just as well have stamped and scuffled somewhere else; but so it was, they had violated his wonderful Rome, and nobody noticed the sad small squeak of protest that arose here and there from a scholar, a student, a lover.
What did Maundy think of it all? Mr. Fitch brightened in hospitable care for our amusement; he didn’t often have two young things to lunch with him, and he mustn’t blight the occasion with his griefs; and so he recovered his spirit and tried to set Maundy off again in one of his droll tirades. What did Maundy think of it? Oddly enough the question of Rome, in the light in which it appeared to Mr. Fitch, hadn’t seemingly occurred to him; Maundy’s Rome had been predominantly a matter of Spanish altar-lace and rose-tinted chasubles, and a year by the Tiber had brought him to think that Oxford is now more purely, more daintily Roman than the city of the Popes; and that was really his only conclusion on the subject, and I don’t believe he had given a thought to the Roman romance, vanished or vanishing, that had inspired the tenderness of Mr. Fitch. Maundy knew nothing of San Cesareo, nothing of the enchanted evenings among the ruins and the cypresses that were still to be recaptured, I could give Mr. Fitch my word for it, even in the desolation of to-day. “Ah yes, no doubt of it,” said Mr. Fitch, “if one happens to be twenty years old to-day!”—but this he threw out in passing, and he returned to the strange case of Maundy, which perplexed and troubled him. It seemed that Maundy, whenever he went wandering through Rome, had only one interest in view; I forget what it was, but it had something to do with a point of ritual that Maundy excessively cherished; and he used to go hunting round the city to discover the churches in which it was properly observed, keeping a black-list of those which failed to make good. It was the only aspect in which San Cesareo could engage him, and Mr. Fitch and I had both neglected it.
With Rome ancient or modern Maundy was otherwise little concerned. He listened blankly to Mr. Fitch’s melancholy regrets; for him they were the mild ravings that you naturally expect from the very old. He was ignorant of the past, so ignorant that it couldn’t raise the least stir in his imagination; he had lived upon flimsiness, upon a little sentiment and a little second-hand art, and he hadn’t the stomach, I suppose, for Rome. It was curious to see how his insensibility puzzled Mr. Fitch. Maundy’s glibness about unknown artists, about poems that hadn’t been written and statues that drove you mad, had certainly surprised and impressed him; but the gulf of vacuity that yawned beneath Maundy’s culture was a shock. Of course it only showed what a featherweight of a tatter it was, that culture; if you are thus artistic in the void, with the empty inane below you, it proves that your art hasn’t substance enough to make it drop. But Mr. Fitch was too humble and kindly for that harsh judgment, and he seemed to be beating about in his courtesy to find an explanation more honourable to Maundy. Surely the young man was very able, very original and brilliant; if he spurned the treasures of the past he must have some clever new reason for doing so. I think I could have told Mr. Fitch that Maundy’s reason was no newer than simple ignorance; and perhaps I began to parade my own slender stock of learning to mark the contrast. But Mr. Fitch was unconvinced, and I still see him eyeing young Maundy with a sort of hesitating admiration, hovering on the edge of a question that he couldn’t formulate. As for Maundy, he was thoroughly at ease; Mr. Fitch had confessed that the name of Aubrey Beardsley was unknown to him.