CHAPTER II
THE IMPRESSION-SEEKER
Have you reckoned the landscape took substance and form that it might
be painted in a picture?
Or men and women that they might be written of, and songs sung?
Or the attraction of gravity and the great laws and harmonious
combinations and the fluids of the air as subjects for the savants?
Or the brown land and the blue sea for maps and charts?—Walt Whitman.
It was probable that Mrs. Venables came to Naples in order to absorb impressions. This was the business of her life; she made of herself a sponge, and let the waters of her experiences fill her. Later, she squeezed them out. It is admitted, of course, that any sponge will a little colour with its own individualities of hue the water which passes through it. She had really a fine power of discerning and appraising significance in matters the most ordinary. When all is said, to be easily 'struck' (her own word) must be accounted a gift, like any other of the manifold gifts of receptiveness. Mrs. Venables was struck—immensely struck—by the picturesque (her own word again) gaiety of the Toledo in the late November evening. Her walk through it was a veritable orgie to her. Her intelligent profile wore at moments a strained look; it was as if the impressions pressed in with almost too great a rapidity and force for capture. Capture was all she attempted; digestion might come later. The same anxious strain may be observed in the face of the gourmand confronted, he half fears, with more than his match. This anxiety perhaps takes the edge from entire enjoyment; but Mrs. Venables had not entered into life to receive pleasure, but impressions. It was all copy to her: the pedlars' stalls with their lights and groups of loafers, the unkempt men and women gutter-picking ('the mozzonari, Warren,' said Mrs. Venables, impressed), the people eating macaroni under the awnings of travelling cooks, the rag-sellers and the bone-buyers, and the general noisy sociability. It was all absorbed; it would all be squeezed forth in due time; nothing would be kept back, for the atmosphere of Southern Italy, so unique, depended on these details. 'Be truthful, and you will certainly be interesting,' was Mrs. Venables' theory of art; not at all 'Be interesting, and you may possibly be truthful incidentally.' For which she deserved credit, as the holder of a commendable ideal.
Her son Warren knew that this walk was of the nature of an orgie. The curve of his mother's fine lips would alone have conveyed that to him. The set of his own evinced a little amusement; the scene to him was ordinary enough, and there seemed to him to be a good many rather obnoxious people about. People, obnoxious or agreeable, were not to him copy, unless he wanted to paint them. His dark, clever face missed the ideality of his mother's; his speculative eyes saw a good deal more.
Outside a café a noisy group lounged. One of them was reading something aloud from a paper; it seemed to be amusing. An explosion of laughter interrupted the stuttering voice of the reader, as the Venables passed. The reader, glancing up, looked Warren Venables full in the face. Then the stuttering voice went on. More laughter exploded.
'What are they reading?' Mrs. Venables wondered, as they left the group behind them.
'Oh, some rotten thing....' Warren Venables looked abstracted for a moment or two. Then he jerked back his head, in sudden enlightenment. 'That was it—he was in my house in my last year at school. An infant with a horrid stutter; I used to lick him for it; never knew whether it was meant for cheek or not.... What was his name, now?' He pondered it.