Rough-Hewn Part 52

Miss Mills did sight-seeing too. The tacit understanding which grew up at once was that they were all four seriously to see Rome and to make up for the very haphazard way in which heretofore they had been profiting by their situation. It was certainly, thought Livingstone, a most agreeable way to do sight-seeing, in the company of two such good-looking girls, one of them with money to burn. Of course he could have wished, they all would have preferred, some one less lumpish than that great, grim Crittenden to complete their quartet. But not every American is capable, thought Livingstone, tying his necktie in the morning and looking at himself in the gla.s.s, not every American is _capable_ of taking on European polish. And of an American business-man what could you expect? Livingstone admired and did his best to imitate the exquisite good-breeding of the two young ladies, which kept them from ever showing the slightest impatience with Crittenden. As far as they were concerned it would have been impossible for Crittenden to guess that he was not in the same cla.s.s with the other three. An occasional quick look of astonishment from Miss Allen when Crittenden made one of those crude speeches of his, and a recurring expression of quiet fatigue on Miss Mills's face when they had had a little too large a dose of Crittenden were the only traces of their real feelings which showed on the surface.

That famous soiree at Donna Antonia Pierleoni's had seemed to be the start of all this agreeable new period of sociability. Livingstone abhorred fatuous men, but it really was rather a remarkable coincidence that after seeing him for the first long talk they had ever had, Miss Mills should at once have decided to come to the _pension_ where he was staying. She had never had a real opportunity to know him before that, Mlle. Vallet always shadowing her around, the conversation always stiffly in French in deference to Mlle. Vallet's feelings. That, after her first real impression of him, she should immediately have moved into a room three doors down the corridor from his--any man might be pardoned for considering it marked, really marked. It quite fluttered Livingstone with the idea of the possibilities involved--although he scorned fortune-hunters above all other men. It was not her fortune, it was her wonderful little person that he admired, the perfection of the finish of every detail of her body and mind. Livingstone often felt a sincere reverence as he looked at her beautiful hair and skin and clothes and hands and feet that had cost--oh, n.o.body knew how much to bring them to that condition. And her accomplishments, her exquisite French and pure Italian, her knowledge of art-critics, and which Luini was considered authentic and which spurious! The harmonious way she sat down or stood or sat at table! There was a product of European civilization at its finest! How crude and coa.r.s.e-grained the usual striding, arm-swinging American girl would seem beside her, like a rough, splintery board beside a finished piece of marquetry. Even Miss Allen, who was, one might say, carelessly and indifferently European simply because she happened to have been brought up in France, often seemed rough and abrupt compared to her. There was nothing of the deliberate, finished self-consciousness about Miss Allen's manners, which Livingstone had learned to admire as the finest flower of sophistication. It was true she really did play the piano very brilliantly. But still she had to make her living somehow! One could be reasonably sure with her good looks that she was counting on using the concert platform, if indeed she got to it, as an angling station from which to fish for wealthy eligibles. Crittenden needn't fool himself that she would ever look at _him_, with that ridiculous little inheritance he had played up so, on his arrival in Rome!

Not that Crittenden seemed to be trying to make an impression! Quite the contrary. Was there anybody who, more than that poor fellow, seemed possessed to put his worst foot foremost? If they hadn't been pitiable, Livingstone could have laughed at the breaks Crittenden constantly made, at the way he was everlastingly showing himself up as entirely an outsider to their world.

That evening, when they fell to talking of their favorite dishes, was a sample. As a parlor amus.e.m.e.nt they had been challenging each other to construct imaginary meals such as would be perfection if you could only get them together,--sole frite from the Amba.s.sadeurs; roast duck with the inimitable sauce of Foyot's; Asti Spumanti, the _real_; Brie straight from the only farm in the Seine-et-Marne that made it right ...

all that sort of mouth-watering, exquisite imaginings. When Crittenden's turn came, had he risen to the occasion? Had he made the slightest effort to make a decent appearance? No, he had said, "Oh, count me out on this. I have a regular hired-man's appet.i.te, and if it begins to fail, I go out and run a mile and then I can eat anything!"

Livingstone tried his best to cover up such breaks with hasty, tactful improvisations of talk, but he had noticed the amazed stare with which Miss Allen had received this particular revelation of Crittenden's crudity.

Miss Mills had stared, too, or as near to it as she ever came, over in the Capitoline, when she had asked Crittenden if he happened to know anything about Constantius Chlorus, at whose ugly face they were just then looking. Crittenden had answered in that coa.r.s.e, would-be comic jargon he occasionally affected, that he didn't remember reading a thing about him, but if there was anything in physiognomy he must have been a ward-heeler who had sandbagged his way to the head of the machine. Miss Allen had not been able to avoid laughing at him outright then, and Miss Mills's look had been all too eloquent.

But the worst was the pig-headed provinciality of his att.i.tude about picture-galleries, his avowal of a regular commercial-traveler's ignorance of paintings and his refusal to try to learn to appreciate them. "There are only, so far as I can make out," he said, "about a dozen canvases in all Europe that I really _like_ to look at. And you don't catch me trailing around till my feet drop off, looking at all the thousands of second-raters that give me a pain. Why should I?"

Livingstone was so shocked and grieved by the cra.s.sness of such a statement that he really longed to take Crittenden in hand. He knew so well how to learn to like pictures, because (although he would not have admitted it to any one) he had begun as cra.s.sly as Crittenden. He _knew_ what to do; he could tell Crittenden step by step how to pull himself up to a higher level, because he had done it himself. You read esthetic books, lots of them, and all the descriptions of paintings you could lay your hands on, and all the stories you could find in Vasari or any one else about the lives of the painters (Livingstone had a whole shelf of books of that sort that were _fascinating_ reading--as amusing as La Vie Parisienne)--and you read what Ruskin and Symonds had thought about this or that canvas, and what Berenson's researches had proved about its authenticity. If you could, you took the book right along with you to the gallery, reading about the picture as you looked at it; and you kept at it till you _did_ see in it what people said was there. That was the way to form your taste! Even Crittenden could get somewhere along those lines if he tried.

But he seemed to have no interest in anything but history and Michael Angelo; Crittenden was perversely fond of dragging them over to the Sistine Chapel till their heads were ready to drop off with the neck-breaking fatigue of staring up at those sprawling figures.

There was, however, one advantage about the expedition to the Sistine Chapel. They were always so fearfully tired afterwards that they took a cab back to the Piazza Venezia and had ices together at a cafe. It was the first time since he had lived in Europe that Livingstone had been able to walk into a cafe with a handsome woman and watch the other men stare. That was a European manoeuver which he had not somehow been able to accomplish, a tailor-suited, low-heeled, sailor-hatted American girl-tourist with her Baedecker in her ungloved hand, being by no means a figure to make other men stare. Of course it was perfectly evident that Miss Mills and Miss Allen were only nice girls (he hoped it was not _too_ apparent that they were only Americans), but they were handsome and Miss Mills was always stunningly dressed. It was next best to what Livingstone had always secretly longed to do, as, eating his frugal demi-glace, he had watched a medaled Italian officer or monocled, heavy-eyed man-about-town sitting opposite a conspicuous woman-de-luxe with high-heeled slippers, a provocative gown, and a huge hat shading her black-rimmed, roving eyes, the only movable feature of her spectacular face, painted and powdered to a hierarchic immobility.

That was the life! That was what Livingstone would love to do! Thus to _afficher_ yourself with a really bad woman, how deliciously un-American and cosmopolitan! On the other hand, those women were said to be very expensive and hard to handle, rapacious, without the slightest scruple as to how they emptied your pockets. Livingstone was in mortal terror of letting one of them get any hold on him and his tiny resources. He knew he would be no match for her. And anyhow all he wanted of one was to sit, jeweled and painted and conspicuously non-respectable, across a table from him at a cafe, so that other men would look at him as he now looked at other men. He often wished he could hire one just to do that.

However, in the meantime, it was a very pleasant pastime (and might, by George, _lead_ to something, who knew!) to sit across the table from two merely nice but really very good-looking and well-dressed girls and listen to their innocent prattle.

And although they were Americans, they had lived abroad so much that they had many European ways which Livingstone found very fascinating and superior. For instance, they were quite at home in Roman churches, and whenever they went to listen to special music in some chapel the girls had a quick, easy capacity for dropping to their knees in a quite unself-conscious way that made them to Livingstone's eyes fit right in with the picture. If it had not been for Crittenden, whose stiff provincial American joints never dreamed of bending, he would have knelt beside the girls. Not that he _believed_ in any of the religious part of it! But it was so European to go down on your knees in public. If he did, he was sure that people around them would think that he was a member of one of those ultra-smart English Catholic families.

Crittenden always was the great, hulking obstacle in the way of any flexible and gracious Europeanizing of their lives. Livingstone had seen the two girls recoil time and time again, shocked by his bruskness. And it was not only to women that he was brusk. He had occasionally an insufferable way of treating any one who approached him with a civil question, as when Livingstone on a sudden recollection had said to him, "Oh, but by the way, Crittenden, how about your being only five days in Rome?"

"_How_ about it?" Crittenden had repeated as though he'd never heard of it before.

"Why, you said you had to return at once--that inheritance, you know--you said you had only five days."

Crittenden had had the impertinence to stare at him hard and say coolly, "Oh, you must be mistaken about that."

Civilized people didn't have such manners!

And that other time, the evening when he had stayed up late on the terrazza to smoke with Crittenden, when he had asked, "But all men of the world agree that nothing is so full of flavor as an affair with a married woman. You, no doubt, Crittenden, have also had your experiences, eh?"

What sort of an answer did Crittenden consider it, to burst out with that sudden great horse-laugh as though Livingstone had been telling him a funny story? The man simply had no experience or understanding--a raw, crude, b.u.mptious provincial, that's what _he_ was! One who had not even sense enough to know how pitifully narrow his life was.

CHAPTER XLVII

Coming to know a new acquaintance was, thought Marise, as though you stood back of a painter, watching him stroke by stroke paint the portrait of a sitter whom you could not see.

Of course Mr. Neale Crittenden, like every one else, was physically quite visible, and, like every one else, entirely hidden by this apparent visibility. What you saw of people's surfaces and what was really there were two very different matters--Marise had learned this axiom if no other. What she saw of the newcomer was quite startlingly, disturbingly attractive to her. All the more reason to draw back warily and look carefully before she took a step forward. When on seeing him for the first time in the morning, or coming on him unexpectedly towering up above the crowd in some narrow, dark Roman street, she felt the ridiculous impulse to run to meet him like a child, she told herself impatiently that it was due to mere physical elements--his health, the great strength which made itself felt in his quietest movements, and a certain expression of his deep-set eyes which might very well not have the slightest connection with his personality, which might be a mere trick of bone-structure, the way his eyes were set in his head perhaps.

They chose the show priests for the great festivals at Lourdes for some such casual gifts of physical magnetism.

No, there was nothing whatever to be known from surfaces, Marise told herself. The subject of the portrait was always really quite invisible behind the thick, thick screen of his physical presence. All that was safe to do was to watch the strokes by which one by one he himself painted his own portrait.

Marise often told herself all this as she was hurrying down the corridor to be the first person in the breakfast room--the first, that is, after Mr. Crittenden, who was a very early riser.

I

To begin with there was the das.h.i.+ng outline sketch of the first two or three days when, in a few bold lines, he had seemed to set up the figure on the canvas; the rescue of the swallow; justice for the cat; that first walk and homesick talk about Ashley, and at the end those stammering words of his which had seemed to show--Oh, that had now turned unreal to Marise! He couldn't have said that--and meant it!

Then the soiree, the impression of force and originality he had made on the people he had met there, her natural certainty that he must of course have calculated that impression in order to profit by it--and then--at this recollection, Marise always laughed silently at her own astonishment when he had called Donna Antonia "a bad-tempered, stupid old woman." Donna Antonia certainly was that, and every one knew it. But n.o.body else would dream of saying it out loud, any more than they would give their honest impression of the ritual of a secret society.

II

And then, just when she had been so drawn towards him by his strength and kindness--that brusk blow in the face. Marise had felt many times before this a thin, keen blade slipped into her back by a hand that took care to be invisible. But never before had she encountered open roughness. It was staggering! Breath-taking! Always, as she remembered it, her first thought was, as it had been then, a horrified wonder why any one should wish to hurt her. Always afterward with the memory of his dreadful, stammering distress, his remorseful kissing of her hands, his helpless inability to unsay what he had said, she knew once more, as she had known then, that she had encountered something new, something altogether different from any human relations.h.i.+p she had ever known, a relations.h.i.+p where you did not say things in order to please or displease people, or to make this or that impression, but because you thought they were true. That was fine--oh, yes, that was fine. But it was like das.h.i.+ng yourself against hard stones--it hurt! And it made her fear the hand that had hurt her. She watched it, and sometimes all but put out her fingers to touch it, to see if it were really so strong and hard as it looked. She feared it. She envied its strength.

III

That had been a stroke of the portrait-painting brush which frightened her to remember. But there were others that made her laugh, like the time, off in a hill-village in the Roman country-side, when he stepped into a little shop to buy a box of cigarettes, and came back with a great paper-bag of the villainous, hay-like tobacco issued to the Italian army, unsmokable by any but an Italian private soldier. To their amazed laughter, he had replied sheepishly, with a boy's grin of embarra.s.sment that the little daughter of the shop-keeper, ambitiously doing her best to wait on a customer, had misunderstood his order and had weighed it out and tied it up before he realized what she was doing.

"I was afraid if I let them know she'd made a mistake her father would jump on her. Fathers do seem to do such a tall amount of scolding anyhow. And she was so set up over having made a sale all by herself."

Marise had laughed with the others over that, and laughed when she thought of it--but her laugh often ended abruptly in bewilderment--how was it he could be so kind, so tenderly kind to an Italian child he had never seen before, and so sternly rough with her? That rankled; and then, when she had had time to think, she recognized it, all over again, with the same start of astonishment, for the truth-telling she had never encountered.

IV

Mr. Livingstone had said something sentimental about man's love being based on the instinct to cherish and protect, and woman's on the desire to be cherished and protected. Eugenia had acquiesced; Marise, who hated talk, sentimental or otherwise, about love, had said nothing. But Mr.

Crittenden had protested, "Oh, Livingstone, you've got that twisted.

That's the basis of love between group-ups and children. You don't insult your equals trying to 'protect them'! Nothing would get me more up in the air than to have somebody 'protect' me from life. Why should I want to do it to anybody else? Protect your grandmother! A woman wants to be let alone to take her chances in life as much as a man!"

V

They were crossing the Forum, on their way to a stroll in the shady walks of the Palatine. From the battered, shapeless ruins of what had been the throbbing center of the world rose suffocatingly to Marise's senses the effluvium of weariness and decay. She always felt that Rome's antiquity breathed out upon her a cold, dusty _taedium vitae_.

She thought of this, turning an attentive face and inattentive ear to Mr. Livingstone, who was trying to make out from his guide-book where the Temple of Mars had stood.

"You're holding that map wrong end to," said Mr. Crittenden.

"It's too hot to stand here in the sun," said Eugenia very sensibly.

They pa.s.sed on, over heaps of ancient refuse, into the ruins of the myriad-celled palace of the Caesars, silent now, not an echo left of all the humming, poisonous intrigues that had filled it full.

"Here," said Mr. Livingstone, stopping in a vaulted, half-wrecked chamber, ostensibly to comment on things, really to get his breath after the climb, "here in such a room, only lined and paved with priceless marbles, and hung with Asiatic silks, here you lay at ease in an embroidered toga on a gold-mounted couch, and clapped your hands for a slave to bring you your Falernian wine, cooled with snow from Monte Cavo,--that was the life!"

"I thought it was in the Arabian Nights you clapped your hands for a slave," said Eugenia.