Chapter III
In the Borghese Gardens
In no city of Europe is there a public park comparable to that which Rome gave her citizens when she opened the gates of the Borghese Gardens. Here, among the wide avenues, the fountains, the ilex, the cypress, and the stone pine, is a place of romance, a spot which seems to have been created that man and woman might walk therein, and, walking, love.
Anne went often to the gardens, and claiming her American privilege of independence, she went alone, contrary to the Roman custom. Walking there in the sunshine she was possessed by the spirit of the place, and thought of love, though she smiled at herself for so thinking. Her heart was free: there was no man whose coming or going had the power to quicken her pulses; but she was in a world whose preoccupation with the relationship of men and women to one another was stirring her imagination. She saw men who conceived of woman as a being who existed only to be loved, and it was inevitable that she should resent such a conception. But it no longer seemed to her impossible that there might exist men whose supreme vocation it was to love.
She had been educated to the consciousness of an imperfect and unhappy world which needed the more or less strenuous attention of each individual: men and women must work in such a world, work either to win money and power which would make them less imperfect and unhappy than the rest, or work to comfort and save the rest. What room was there, then, for women who only existed to be loved, and men whose only vocation it was to love them? That such men and women were a paramount influence in the society about her was stirring her supple and sensitive nature. Her imagination was troubled. Instincts, dissatisfactions, longings which she had been dimly conscious of at home, or which had been awakened only by poetry, music, or some poignantly beautiful instant of earth or sky, were becoming definite things to her as she walled alone between the ilex trees of Roman gardens. She felt her youth, and youth without love suddenly appeared to her as a futile and abnormal thing. Were not those brief hours, those hours that must seem strange compared with the rest of life, the hours of passion, of wonder, of exquisite or terrible madness, worth all the others that one lived between the cradle and the grave? Men had loved her, for she had the power which is often found in women who are as quick to respond with nerves and imagination as they are slow to yield those depths of being which must be reached before love can take possession; but she found herself now regretting a coolness and fastidiousness of temperament which had made it impossible to yield, and it seemed both sad and ridiculous that life should send her only men whom she could not love.
On that same morning Gino Curatulo was also walking in the garden, and he met her face to face just by the fountain which is called the Fountain of the Horses, because of the equine heads which stand at the corners of its wide basin.
A broad and empty avenue stretched before and behind them, and on both sides paths led away into the shade of ilex trees,—a dense, vital, and almost resilient shade, unlike any other. The grave-like chill that lives in the shadows of semi-tropical countries was there also, and in the chill and darkness were more fountains, dimly seen, and a gray-white temple.
Anne was but vaguely conscious of these things as she stood by the fountain in the wide spaces of clear sunshine, and greeted the Italian, who stood close to her, shaking hands with scarce repressed eagerness.
In these surroundings he did not look so foreign as when she had first met him, and she was again conscious of a violence of life in him which made it impossible to feel in the man and the situation that something of the unreal which the Anglo-Saxon associates with the Latin; though his carefully selected boutonnière, his slightly upturned mustache, the over-elaboration of his dress made him, as Margaret had said, a figure such as one would put upon an American stage to represent the foreign nobleman, the adventurer, or the villain.
“Is it indiscreet to ask of what you have been thinking while you walked so slowly this long time?” he asked.
“The question is not so indiscreet as an answer might be,” she answered, recalling the thoughts in question with some confusion; “but have you seen me this long time?”
“I have seen you since many minutes. Does it annoy you that I watched you?” he asked, quick to interpret her expression.
“Yes,” she answered frankly.
“I am sorry. I promise not to do so again. The next time—” He smiled, and his smile was rendered extraordinarily brilliant as much by its sud-den illumination of expression as by the vivid flash of white teeth in his dark face; and Anne found herself as though hypnotized to smile in return. “The next time,” he continued, “I shall not watch, I shall speak to you at once—if I may.” The last three words were added as a mechanical tribute to good manners.
He was observing her attentively, and few details of her severe little walking-suit escaped him; but he found its very severity and lack of display refreshing, and looked at the wing of clear scarlet which lay against her hair as though he adored it.
Anne was aware of the look, and began to enjoy herself immensely.
“I did not expect to meet you in the gardens,” she said. “They tell me that in the morning, when one may not make calls, you walk upon the Corso, or stand about opposite the big café with other men, watching the people who pass.”
“So they have spoken to you of me, and you have listened.”
“What they told me was interesting,” said Anne, “for in the stories you were not always standing in front of a café.” She paused suddenly, regretting that in her play she had touched on a grave subject.
“Is it permitted that we walk a little together?”
he asked after a slight pause; and from a sudden seriousness of manner she knew that he understood.
They went up the wide avenue side by side and were almost alone, for at that late morning hour the garden is deserted.
“It is Lady Fitz-Smith who spoke of me to you?”
“There were others.”
“She is my friend; there are others!” He shrugged his shoulders and smiled unpleasantly.
“There are some who say you are frivolous, and waste your life.”
“There are many in this city who do worse things with their lives than wasting them,” answered Gino dryly.
“In my country it is considered a very wicked thing to waste a life,” said Anne.
“Yours must be a strange, a terrible country,” he answered, evidently amused by her gravity on such a subject. “For us it is already much that we do no harm.”,
“That cannot be,” she protested, “or you would never have had a Risorgimento.”
“Let us say, then, that to me it is enough that I do no harm.”
“But the world needs us—each one of us,” she cried.
Gino Curatulo swung his cane and looked at her sideways. “Pooh!” he said, and it seemed to her that there was a dancing madness of gayety in his eyes; “forgive me if I say, ‘Pooh!’ to any words of yours,” he added, “but when you talk so of a man’s duty, what else can I reply?”
“I do not understand you,” said Anne. “Do you not recognize the duty of man to work in some way for other men?”
“I certainly do not if he prefers to do nothing,” he answered with decision and evident sincerity.
Anne considered the remark for a while in silence as she walked beside him, and was surprised to find that it did not displease her more. She even found something of charm in the audacity of his claim to individual freedom of action.
“If it is the duty of man to work, what becomes of women?”
“In my city many women work also.”
“And at what, may I ask, do they work?”
“At such things as Civil Service Reform, pure-food regulations, and endless charities.”
Signor Curatulo paused in his walk and looked at the American girl with evident stupefaction.
“Surely,” he said, “it is only the plain and the unattractive women who do such work.”
“No, indeed,” she answered. “Some of the leaders in these movements are beautiful and charming women. But in my country women are under an obligation to be something else than charming.”
“What a strange race of women will grow up among you!”
“It is a different world, a different world,” she said half aloud, expressing her bewilderment at his point of view.
He did not answer, and seemed to await further expression of her perplexity. When it came it surprised him.
“We are ethical,” she said. “You are atavistic. Yes, in spite of your forms, your etiquettes, your elaboration of ceremonies, you are nearer atavism than we are!”
“Nearer atavism!” he murmured; “‘it is astounding!”
“Perhaps you do not understand the word in English,” she suggested.
“I understand it so perfectly that if I did not look at you I should think myself talking with a professor of sociology.”
He was stupefied to hear such a phrase from such lips. In what hardy, what barbarous atmosphere were young girls, then, educated in that strange country from which she came!
But he did not misunderstand her, as some men of his race and class would have done. Her face had for him the freshness of uncut flowers, the same virginity, the same unused look. It was even presumable that up to this moment no man had been permitted to kiss her.
Anne met his eyes, and for the first time she was afraid of Gino Curatulo. She felt the touch of something not to be played with, and she knew that she had been playing. Curatulo knew it also; but he did not intend that she should play always. When he spoke again he did so quietly, and she divined a certain tender chivalry in his instant withdrawal of an expressiveness that had alarmed her.
They had come to the angle of the villa gardens from which a modern and uninteresting road leads tothe Pincian Hill, and here Mrs. Garrison’s automobile was waiting for her by appointment.
“Is it permitted that I walk with you here again often?” asked Curatulo.
Anne had recovered her self-possession. She considered him a moment or two with her muff against her lips, then she asked a counter question:—
Do you always tell the truth?”
He seemed on the point of giving a mechanical and vigorous assent, but hesitated, smiled, and told it.
“Not always.”
“Will you tell the truth now?”
“It depends.”
“Can a girl walk with a man in the gardens of Rome more than once and not be unpleasantly talked of?”
“I am afraid—not,” he answered.
“Then, Signor Curatulo, why do you ask this thing of me?”
His eyes were eloquent, but he answered nothing.
“We will not walk in the gardens again,” she said.
“As you will,” he answered gravely.
She stepped into the car, and he lifted his hat, holding it in his hand as she drove by.