A characteristic of our Relicthood en bloc was its idleness. I never saw one of them with a piece of knitting or any other work in her hands during all the weeks we were there. In fine weather they loitered and basked in the garden, gossiping or amusing themselves with novelettes cut from the penny papers and passed from one to the other in turn. The front door stood almost always open, and the suburban neighborhood about it was during pleasant days largely flecked by the grave gowns and white caps belonging to our pension. Nearly all were Bonapartists (for was not trade good during the Empire?) and found the present times sadly out of joint. Nearly all had stood behind counters or at cashiers' desks, and had thus never learned more strictly feminine employments, and now, retired upon their rentes, they found time heavy upon their hands. None were conspicuously dévote: they had never been so in their younger days, and they were not of natures to be spiritualized by long familiarity with life. Death could not be far off from most of them, but they never spoke of it, never seemed to think of it; and, although life was dull, they clung to it as by monotonous habit that is but knows not why.
Still another of our well-remembered pensions was on the bright Vesuvian Bay. The flaming mountain overlooked us, Naples floated beyond us like a dream-city, before us the Mediterranean shimmered and shone like a sultana's satin tunic. We could drop a stone from our windows into the sea; we ran dripping from our sea-baths up long stairs, across tiled balconies, into our vast rooms; all day and all night the swish and lisp of the soft tides mingled with our voices and dreams.
As somebody said of us that summer, we were a "cosmopolitan mess," a hotch-potch of nationalities, such as is always found in so general a rendezvous as Italy. We were rather less of a hotch-potch, however, than in London, but somehow it seemed to us that our peculiarities were more salient than they could ever appear in proper and conventional Bloomsbury. We were largely German, as the travelling population of Italy is. In Bloomsbury our medium of expression was the English language, and English was the language at table, no matter how foreign our company. But in this Italian pensione, where the faces were continually changing, the languages changed as often. One day only English was the rule, and those who could not unite with the majority remained mute. Another day, with a tremendous incursion of Teutons, who always seem to travel in hordes, only German gutturals held the table, and we who had no facility with them muttered meek French or sullen English to our neighbors. The next day French would be the rule, and Teuton must mumble in it and Anglo-Saxon stammer or hold its peace. Curiously enough, although we were in Italy, Italian was rarely, almost never, spoken among us, our only use of it being in orders to the servants. Our landlady was English, with an Italian husband, but they both held only upper menial places in the establishment, and never dreamed of sitting at table with us or of meeting us upon any terms of equality. This want of familiarity with Italian proves how little mere travellers and haunters of pensioni ever know of the middle-class inhabitants of the country. The Italians themselves stir from home very seldom; they almost never admit foreigners into their own houses, and when forced abroad seek cheap Italian inns rather than the innumerable boarding-houses infested by the outer barbarian. Italian peasant life is open to all foreigners, but not that of the middle classes.
Our landlord had a daughter whose cheek was pale and whose garments hung loosely upon her. When first we remarked this and her heavy eye, everybody laughed.
"The usual story,—loves and rides away," was remarked in various languages.
It was heartless to laugh, but we could not help it. For wan and drooping landlords' daughters had become so familiar to us in Italian pensioni that we needed only to glance at the set of each one's gown and the tint of her cheek to know if HE were still present and wooing or had faithlessly ridden away. The race, however, was not always to the rider.
One evening under our window, when the air swooned with languid scent of lemon- and orange-blossoms, we heard a sobbing and a sighing that reminded us of the Mock Turtle in "Alice in Wonderland." Glancing out, by the soft light of the summer moon, enhanced by the shimmering water, we saw two persons who seemed to be weeping in each other's arms under a shuddering ilex. The stouter one—he was not the taller—we recognized as a young Teuton for whose sake we had seen a gown very loose and a cheek very wan afar off among the Alban Hills only a month before.
"I love you, Tita, I love you. I have thought I loved a dozen times before, but I was mistaken. I never loved any girl before," he boohooed.
"Dio mio!" laughed the girl. "All the Tedeschi say that who come here. I wonder they are not tired of the old tune. I—I am fiancé to a bel Espagnol who rode away a month ago, and who ought to have been back before now."