Part 5

Often as we took advantage of their hospitality, we never found the Vedders alone and, chiefly American as was the group at their fireside, it was never without a foreigner or two. The first person we were introduced to on the first visit was the Englishman who would have deserted us in the Ghetto had we let him have his way, and who, when he saw us, looked as if he wished the Vedders had learned to be less indiscriminate in their hospitality. We had the satisfaction of knowing that we made him supremely uncomfortable. He frowned upon us then as he continued to all through the winter. He could not forgive us for having found him out and was evidently afraid we were going to tell everybody about it. He was something very learned and was occupied in writing a book on Ancient Rome; later he became something more important at South Kensington. But no degree of learning and importance helped him to forget, or anyway to forgive. At chance meetings years afterwards in London he frowned, as no doubt he would still had he not long since gone to the land where I hope all frowns are smoothed from his frowning brow.

If he frowned, there was another Englishman who smiled: an elderly man with the imperturbable serenity of a Buddha. He also had written books, I believe. I remember articles by him, with art for subject, in the Portfolio at a time when everybody had taken to writing about art, and I think his name was Davies. But it would be more in character to forget that he ever worked or had a name. When I was in Rome he had risen above activity and toil to the contemplative life and, I suppose, to the income that made it possible. One night he explained his philosophy to me. Men could not be happy without sunshine, he thought. The sun was house, food, clothes, furniture, identity, everything, and as most of the year in England sunshine was not to be had at any price, he had come to live in Rome where almost all the year it was his for nothing. He sat on the Pincian or in other gardens during the day, doing nothing in the sunshine--that was living. And he urged me to follow his example and not to wait until half my life had been wasted in the pursuit of happiness where it was not to be found. He may have been right, but I never needed to become a philosopher to value the virtue of indolence,--my trouble is that I have never had the money to pay for it. Any man has the ability to do nothing, a great authority has said, and I can answer for one woman who has more than her fair share of it. I have always envied the North American Indians for their enjoyment of what it seems Burke attributed to them: "the highest boon of Heaven, supreme and perpetual indolence."

As regular a visitor was a huge long-bearded Norwegian who looked a prophet and was an artist, and who spent most of the winter in the study of Marion Crawford's novels, I cannot imagine why, as they roused him to fury.

"Marion Crawford," he would thunder at us as if somehow we were responsible, "Bah! He is a weak imitator of Bulwer, that is all, and he has not Bulwer's power of construction. He is not Bulwer. No. He is a weakling. Bah!"

My only quarrel with Marion Crawford's books was that they never excited strong emotion in me, one way or the other, and I was so puzzled by his excitement that I remember I went to the trouble of getting out Mr. Isaacs and A Roman Singer from Piali's Library in the Piazza di Spagna, that centre of learning and literature for the English in Rome where, one day when I asked for Pepys's Diary, they offered me Marcus Ward's. A new course of Marion Crawford left me as puzzled as ever for the reason of the Norwegian's rage, and I was the more impressed with the possibilities of a temperament that could heat itself to such a degree at so lukewarm a fire.

We were as certain to find this fiery Norseman and the two Englishmen any night we called as Vedder himself. Other men came and went, amongst them a few Italians and Frenchmen and more Americans, Coleman for one among them, but none could have appeared as regularly, so much fainter is the impression they have left with me. Naturally, they were mostly artists and at Vedder's, as at the cafe, the talk was chiefly of art. There was little of his work to see, for his studio was some distance from his apartment. But it was enough to see Vedder himself or, for that matter, enough to hear him. In his own house he led the talk, even Forepaugh having small chance against him. He was as prolific, a splendidly determined and animated talker. It was stimulating just to watch him talk. He was never still, he rarely sat down, he was always moving about, walking up and down, at times breaking into song and even dance. He was then in his prime, large, with a fine expressive face, and as American in his voice, in his manner, in his humour as if he had never crossed the Atlantic. The true American never gets Europeanized, nor does he want to, however long he may stay on the wrong side of the Atlantic. When I was with Vedder, Broadway always seemed nearer than the Corso.

He had recently finished the illustrations for the Rubaiyat and the book was published while we were in Rome. It was never long out of his talk. He would tell us the history of every design and of every model or pot in it. He exulted in the stroke of genius by which he had invented a composition or a pose. I have heard him describe again and again how he drew the flight of a spirit from a model, outstretched and flopping up and down on a feather bed laid upon the studio floor, until she almost fainted from fatigue, while he worked from a hammock slung just above. I recall his delight when a friend of Fitzgerald's sent him Fitzgerald's photograph with many compliments, asking for his in return. And he rejoiced in the story of Dr. Chamberlain filling a difficult tooth for the Queen and all the while singing the praises of the Rubaiyat until she ordered a copy of the edition de luxe. In looking back, I always seem to see Mrs. Vedder pasting notices into a scrap book, and to hear Vedder declaiming Omar's quatrains and describing his own drawings. There was one evening when he came to a dead stop in his walk and his talk, and shaking a dramatic finger at us all, said:

"I tell you what it is. I am not Vedder. I am Omar Khayyam!"

"No," drawled the voice of a disgusted artist who had not got a word in for more than an hour, "No, you're not. You're the Great I Am!"

Vedder laughed with the rest of us, but I am not sure he liked it. He could and did enjoy a joke, even if at his expense. I remember his delight one night in telling the story of an old lady who had visited his studio during the day and who sat so long in front of one of his pictures he thought it was having its effect, but whose only comment at the end of several minutes was: "That's a pretty frame you have there!" He was sensitive to criticism, however, though he carried it off with a laugh. Clarence Cook was one of the critics of his Omar who offended him.

"It's funny," Vedder said, "all my life I've hurt Clarence's feelings. He always has been sure I have done my work for no other reason than to irritate him, and now that's the way he feels about the Omar."

The laugh was not so ready when Andrew Lang--I think it was Lang--wrote that Vedder's Omar Khayyam was not of Persia, but of Skaneateles. And after I suggested that it was really of Rome, and some mistaken friend at home sent my article to Vedder, I never thought him quite so cordial.

And so the winter passed. For us there was always a refuge from our cold rooms at the cafe or at Vedder's, and it was seldom we did not profit by it.

Occasionally during our rambles we stumbled unexpectedly upon old friends "doing Italy" and genuinely glad to see us, as we were to see them, inviting us to their hotels at every risk of the disapproval of manager and porters and waiters; and so powerful was the influence of Rome and the cafe that now the marvel was to sit and listen to talk about Philadelphia, and where everybody was going for the summer, and who was getting married, and who had died, and what Philadelphia was thinking and doing, as if, after all, there were still benighted people in the world who believed not in art, but in Philadelphia as of supreme importance.

Occasionally we made new friends outside of our pleasant cafe life. I have forgotten how, though I have not forgotten it was in Rome, thanks to a letter of introduction from Dr. Garnett of the British Museum, that we first met Miss Harriet Waters Preston, who, for her part, had already introduced me to Mistral--how many Americans had heard of Mistral before she translated Mireio?--and who now accepted us, cycling tweeds and all, notwithstanding the shock they must have been to the admirably appointed pension where she stayed. She also climbed our six flights, her niece and collaborator, Miss Louise Dodge, with her, probably both busy that winter collecting facts for their Private Life of the Romans, and where could they have found a more perfect background for the past they were studying than when they looked down from our windows over Rome, to the Campagna beyond, and upon the horizon the shining line that we knew was the Mediterranean,--over all the beauty that has not changed in the meanwhile, though old streets and old villas and old slums have vanished. And at these times, in the talk, not Philadelphia, but literature was for a while art's rival.

And there were days when we played truant and climbed down in the morning's first freshness from the high room overlooking Rome and the work that had to be done in it, and loafed all day in Roman galleries and at Roman ceremonies, or strayed to places further afield--Tivoli, Albano, Ostia, Marino, Rocca di Papa,--getting back to Rome with feet too tired to take us anywhere except up our six flights again. And there were nights when the affairs of Rome drew us from the cafe. I remember once our little group interrupted their interminable arguments long enough to see the Tiber in flood, down by the Ripetta, where people were going about in boats, and Rome looked like the Venice to which I had then never been, and we met King Humbert and Queen Margherita in his American trotting wagon driving down alone so as to show their sympathy, for, whatever they may not have done, they always appeared in person when their people were in trouble: not so many weeks before we had watched the enthusiasm with which the Romans greeted King Humbert on his return from visiting the cholera-stricken town of Naples. And I remember on Befana Night we adjourned to the Piazza Navona to blow horns and reed whistles into other people's ears and to have them blown into ours. For the humours of the Carnival there was no need to leave the cafe, where one Pulcinello after another broke into our talk with witticisms that kept the cafe in an uproar, and for me destroyed whatever sentiment there might have been in the thought that this was my last night in Rome--the last of the friendly nights of talk in the Nazionale to which we always returned no matter how far we might occasionally stray from it--the friendly nights of talk when I learned my folly in ever having believed that anything in the world mattered, that anything in the world existed, save art.

Pulcinello, the newest of our Roman friends, went with us from Rome, following us to Naples, a familiar face to lighten our homesickness for the rooms full of sunshine at the top of the high house on the top of the high hill, and for the blue plush and the gilding and the mirrors and the talk of the Nazionale.

And Pulcinello went with us to Pompeii, reappearing during our nights at the Albergo del Sole, that most delightful and impossible of all the inns that ever were. It may have vanished in the quarter of a century that has passed since the February day I came to it, when the sky was as blue as the sea, and a soft cloud hung over Vesuvius, and flowers were sweet in the land--can anyone who ever smelt it forget the sweetness of the flowering bean in the wide fields near the Bay of Naples? But Pompeii could never be the same without the Sole. And it was made for our shabbiness, its three tumbled-down little houses ranged round the three sides of an unkempt, mud-floored court; our bedroom without lock or latch and with a mirror cracked from side to side like the Lady of Shalott's, though for other reasons; the dining-room with earthen floor, walls decorated by a modern-primitive fresco of the padrone holding a plate of maccheroni in one hand and a flask of Lachrima Christi in the other, a central column spreading out branches like a tree and bearing for fruit row upon row of still unopened bottles, a door free to all the stray monks and beggars of Pompeii--to all the fowls too, including the gorgeous peacock that strolled in after its evening walk with the young Swiss artist on the flat roof of the inn where, together, they went before dinner to watch the sunset.

Throughout dinner, at the head of the long table where we sat with the Swiss artist and an old German professor of art and an older Italian archaeologist, the talk, as at the Nazionale, was of art, so that it also, like Pulcinello, crying his jests through the window or at our elbow, made me feel at home. While we helped ourselves from that amazing dish into which you stuck a fork and pulled out a bit of chicken or duck or beef or mutton or sausage; while the old professor and archaeologist absent-mindedly stretched a hand to the column behind them, and plucked from it bottle after bottle of wine; while the beggars whined at the open door, and the monks begged at our side, and Pulcinello capered and jested and sang; while the American tourists at the other end of the table deplored the disorder and noise until we sent them the longest and most expensive way up Vesuvius to get rid of them; while the fowls fought for the crumbs;--the talk was still of art and again of art, in the end as in the beginning. I might not understand half of it, coming as it did in a confused torrent of German, Italian, French, and English, but the nights at the Sole, like the nights at the Nazionale, made this one truth clear: that nothing matters in the world, that nothing exists in the world, save art.

III

NIGHTS

IN VENICE

IN VENICE

We reached Venice at an unearthly hour of a March morning and the first thing I knew of it somebody was shouting, "Venezia!" and I was startled from a sound sleep, and porters were scrambling for our bags, and we were stumbling after them, up a long platform, between a crowd of men in hotel caps yelling: "Danieli!" "Britannia!" and I hardly heard what, out into a fog as impenetrable as night or London. The muffled, ghostly cries of "gundola! gundola!" from invisible gondoliers on invisible waters would have sent me back into the station even had there been a chance to find so modest a hotel as the Casa Kirsch open so preposterously early, and my first impressions of Venice were gathered in the freezing, foggy station restaurant where J. and I drank our coffee and yawned, and I would have thought Ruskin a fraud with his purple passage describing the traveller's arrival in Venice upon which I had based my expectations, had I been wide enough awake to think of anything at all, and the hours stretched themselves into centuries before a touch of yellow in the fog suggested a sun shining in some remote world, and we crawled under the cover of one of the dim black boats that emerged vaguely, a shadow from the shadows.

I had looked forward to my first gondola ride for that "little first Venetian thrill" that Venice owes to the stranger. But I did not thrill, I shivered with cold and damp and fog as the gondola pushed through the yellow gloom in the sort of silence you can feel, and tall houses towered suddenly and horribly above us, and strange yells broke the stillness before and behind, when another black boat with a black figure at the stern, came out of the gloom, scraped and bumped our side, and was swallowed up again.

And after we were on the landing of the Casa Kirsch, and up in our rooms, and the fog lifted, and the sun shone, and we looked out of our windows with all Venice in our faces, and J. took me to see the town, my impressions were still foggy with sleep. For, from Pompeii, where there had been work, to Venice where there was to be more, we had hurried by one of those day-and-night flights to which J. has never accustomed me, the hurried, crowded pauses at Naples and Orvieto and Florence and Pisa and Lucca and Pistoia turning the journey into a beautiful nightmare of which all I was now seeing became but a part: the Riva, canals, sails, Bersaglieri, the Ducal Palace, the Bridge of Sighs, St. Mark's, the Piazza, gondolas, women in black, white sunlight, pigeons, tourists, the Campanile, following one upon another with the inconsequence of troubled dreams. And then we were on the Rialto and J. was saying "Of course you know that?" and I was answering "Of course, the Bridge of Sighs!" and the many years between have not blunted the edge of his disgust or my remorse. But my disgrace drove me back to the Casa Kirsch, to sleep for fifteen blessed hours before looking at one other beautiful thing or troubling my head about what we were to do with our days and our nights in Venice.

What we were to do with our days settled itself the next morning as soon as I woke. For Venice, out of my window, was rising from the sea with the dawn, everything it ought to have been the morning before, and I had no desire to move from a room that looked down upon the Riva, and across to San Giorgio, and beyond the island--and sail-strewn lagoon to the low line of the Lido, and above to the vastness of the Venetian sky.

Nor was there trouble in providing for our nights. Before I left home a romantic friend had pictured me in Venice, wrapped in black lace, forever floating in a gondola under the moon. But my Roman winter had taught me how much more likely the gas-light of some little trattoria and cafe was to shine upon me in my well-worn tweeds, my education having got so far advanced that any other end to my day of work could not seem possible. The only question was upon which of the many little trattorie and cafes in Venice our choice should fall, and this was decided for us by Duveneck, whom we ran across that same morning in the Piazza, and who told us that he slept in the Casa Kirsch, dined at the Antica Panada, and drank coffee at the Orientale, which was as much as to say that we might too if we liked. And of course we liked, for it is a great compliment when a man in Venice, or any Italian town,--especially if he is of the importance and distinction to which Duveneck had already attained,--makes you free to join him at dinner and over after-dinner coffee. It is more than a compliment. It launches you in Venice as to be presented at court launches you in London.