CHAPTER XLVI
"This is the life!" thought Livingstone many times during the next weeks. He had not enjoyed himself so thoroughly since he came to Europe to live. He was now provided, as he expressed it, with all the cultural advantages of Europe and all the social atmosphere of an American summer-resort; for Miss Mills seemed to wish to try, along with pension life, the unchaperoned familiarity of real American girl-life. Mlle. Vallet, her old school-teacher, companion-dragon was unceremoniously left behind, or sent out by herself to do the conscientious sight-seeing which took all her evenings to record in her diary.
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 glass, 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 class 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 soirée 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, nobody 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 coarse-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 amusement 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 Ambassadeurs; 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 appetite, 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 partticular 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 coarse, 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 attitude 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 crassness 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 crassly 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 café. It was the first time since he had lived in Europe that Livingstone had been able to walk into a café with a handsome woman and watch the other men stare. That was a European manœuver 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 café, 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 un-self-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, bumptious provincial, that's what he was! One who had not even sense enough to know how pitifully narrow his life was.