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 dashing 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 soirée, 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 nobody 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 relationship she had ever known, a relationship 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 dashing 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 embarrassment 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 tædium vitæ.
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 passed on, over heaps of ancient refuse, into the ruins of the myriad-celled palace of the Cæsars, 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.
"In Rome you probably cracked a whip," suggested Mr. Crittenden. "But I bet you a nickel it didn't make any difference what you did, your slave came when he got good and ready and brought you another kind of wine from the one you ordered—and lukewarm at that. They'd probably used up all the Monte Cavo snow to cool the wine down in the slaves' hall."
"What possible basis have you for saying all that?" cried Mr. Livingstone, exasperated.
"That's the way things are! Folks that try to use slave labor always get what's coming to them in the way of poor service."
"Oh, but in Rome you had the right to kill him!" cried Mr. Livingstone, jealous of his rights.
"Sure you could kill him—and in New York you can fire your stenographer. What good would that do you? You couldn't get intelligent service out of the next slave either, unless you had him educated to be intelligent, and if you did that he'd be such a rare bird that you'd save him for something better than standing around waiting for you to clap your hands at him. He'd be running your business for you."
"Oh, pshaw, Crittenden, why be so heavy-handed and literal! Why wet-blanket every imaginative fancy?"
"Oh, I didn't realize you were imaginatively fancying," said Mr. Crittenden, laughing. "I thought you were trying imaginatively to reconstruct the life of ancient Rome. And I was trying to do my share."
They passed through dusky, ill-smelling passages, clambered over a pile of rubble and stood in twilight at the foot of a long, steep, vaulted stairway. Far up, like a bright roof to its obscurity, were green leaves, blue sky, bright sunshine. All that sparkling, clear radiance seemed to heighten the boyish fit of high spirits that had entered into the usually rather silent Mr. Crittenden. He pointed up to the stairway and cried, "From antiquity to the present! I'll meet you at the top!" and off he went, bounding up the high, steep steps two at a time, as if his vitality had suddenly swept him away in the need for violent exertion.
When the two girls emerged later, "Ladies, allow me to introduce to you the present day," he said, calling to their attention with a sweep of his hat the dark, sumptuous green of the cypresses and pines, the splendor of the golden-blue sky, the fresh sprinkled smell of the earth on the shady paths. "Not so bad for poor little old actuality, is it?"
The girls sank breathlessly on a bench. Livingstone appeared, slowly hoisting himself up the steps, one at a time, and puffing. Mr. Crittenden walked around and around restlessly, as though that upward swoop had been but an appetizer to his desire to let out the superabundance of his strength. He looked, Marise thought, like a race-horse fretting and pawing and stepping sideways. How could he have that eager look in this dusty cemetery of human strength and eagerness?
Glancing up at his face, she saw it lighted and shining with amusement—what seemed like tender, touched amusement. He was looking at something down the path. Marise looked with him and saw a workingman, one of the gardeners, digging in the earth of a rose-bed. Beside him capered and staggered a little puppy, a nondescript little brown cur with neither good looks nor distinction, but so enchanted with life, with itself, with the soft, good earth over which it pranced that to see it was, thought Marise, like playing Weber's "Perpetual Motion." As she looked it tried to run in a wavering circle around its master, tripped over its own feet, tumbled head over heels in a soft ball, clumsily struggled up and sat down to draw breath, a pink tongue hanging out of its wide, laughing mouth, its soft young eyes beaming with mirth at its own adventures. Its master glanced down and addressed some clucking, friendly greeting to it, which threw it into an agony of joy. Wagging its tail till its whole body wagged, it flung itself adoringly at its master's trousers, pawing and wriggling in ecstasy.
Mr. Crittenden caught Marise's eye, and shared with her in a silent smile his delighted sense of the little animal's absurdity. "Perhaps if we looked down from this height and got a bird's-eye view we could settle that point," said Eugenia to Mr. Livingstone, who was still concerned about the location of the Temple of Mars. "There's a fine view from the wall at the end of this path."
They strolled together to the wall, and Mr. Livingstone spread out on it his plan of the Forum.
Marise looked down dispiritedly at the mutilated pillars and broken pieces of carved marble, and most of all at the bits of old Roman flagged paving. Nothing gave her a more acrid sense of futility than those old, old flag-stones over which so many thousands of human feet had eagerly, blindly sought their journey's end. Had any of them ever found what they sought? She murmured under her breath, "Isn't it all horribly, horribly depressing? Doesn't it make you feel all those endless centuries bowing your shoulders down to the earth—why not now as well as later?"
She had stated it as she felt it, a truism, what every one must feel. Eugenia and Livingstone accepted it as such. "Yes, I often feel as ancient as the stones," said Eugenia pensively.
Mr. Crittenden put in hastily, "Not on your life, it doesn't depress me! Why should it? You don't seem to realize. Miss Allen, what an immense difference there is between us! I never really took it in before myself—not until this visit to Rome. But it's immense! Enormous! Let me tell you about it. They're dead and we are alive! Alive!"
Marise looked up at him, thinking that in truth she had never felt any one so alive. He bent his eyes to hers as Livingstone, with a little gesture of giving him up, drew Eugenia to the corner of the wall and traced lines on his map.
Mr. Crittenden went on whimsically, "I don't believe you ever fully considered the great importance of that point, Miss Allen. It came home to me all over again as I was looking at that puppy. Millions of dogs have lived and died before him; but by some amazing miracle life is just as fresh a wonder to him as if he were the first puppy ever born into the world! It's incredible! I never realized it till I struck all these relics of dead-and-gone men—it's incredible how none of them, not all the millions of them, can tarnish the newness of my own life for me! I can go my own new path over those old paving-stones—me and the puppy—and you—and all of us!"
Marise laughed a little, still looking at him, listening to something he was not saying, which played about his bold, clear face like sunlight and shone on her as warmly.
Now a spark of wildness came into his eyes, half laughingly reckless, half desperately in earnest. "You saw what happened to the puppy when its master threw it a kind word? Well, I haven't the gift of wriggling all over so wonderfully as that, and I haven't any tail to wag, but when you look at me like that, Miss Allen, I …"
"We think the third line of pillar-stumps is the side wall of the Basilica Julia," said Eugenia, stepping towards them, the guide-book in her hand.
VI
They were standing under the great gray dome of the Pantheon, innocent clear daylight flooding all the great gray building.
"Oh, isn't it beautiful, their idea of leaving the circle open to the sky?" Marise burst out. "Doesn't it make our dark, modern churches with their imitation Gothic stained-glass seem cheap and affected? Every church all over the world ought to be like this, and then we human beings might be fit to live with."
Livingstone put in a horrified protest, "What! Miss all that exquisite twilight that makes a church a church? I was Just thinking how fiercely, literally bright this noonday sun is. Daylight leaves no mystery, nothing to your imagination."
Marise turned confidently to Mr. Crittenden as an ally. She was sure, as sure of anything in the world, that he must be on her side. But he hedged and said neutrally, "Oh, great Scott! It would be a horrible act of tyranny to have every church like this. There are lots of folks who'd hate it. They have a right to have some things their way, haven't they?"
"Oh, I didn't think you'd take that side," said Marise, feeling betrayed and longing for a sweeping, exclusive affirmation to match her own. He so often hedged, it seemed to her, wanted to qualify statements. Oh—it came to her with a start—that was another form of truth-telling! He was trying to make his statements express the truth, rather than his feelings!
He now said, judicially, "As far as I personally go, it depends what I'm looking at. If I'm looking at a very fine statue or something that seems really beautiful to me, I want as good a light as possible to see it in. If—if I should ever have any personal happiness in my life, I'd want daylight to see it by. But when it's a question of looking at the interior decoration of the average modern church, why, the more mystery and twilight the better."
This made Marise laugh. He often made her laugh, more than she had ever laughed before. And yet he never told funny stories.
He now went on, "I suppose it depends on your opinion of what there is to see. If you think your imagination can do better for you than reality, of course you want a lot left to it, and plenty of dark corners for it to work in. Just now, it seems to me that reality is so much beyond anything my poor, starved imagination could have done. …"
He did not look at Marise as he spoke. His tone was perfectly matter of fact. She wondered what the other two made out of it. She knew very well what she made out of it.
VII
They were sitting on the terrazza in the evening, with several other people from the pension, having their coffee sociably around the big round table and looking out over the roofs and domes and church-towers of Rome. The conversation had been chit-chat, as was usual during meal-times, and Mr. Crittenden had contributed little to it. His massive capacity for silence when he had nothing special to say was a constant source of wonder to Marise. Not to "make talk," even very commonplace talk, was a betrayal of a tacitly accepted code as much as calling Donna Antonia a "bad-tempered, stupid old woman." She had been taught that it was one of the pretenses which must be kept up under penalty of the ruin, of all civilized intercourse. She envied and resented his freedom from it.
She addressed herself directly to him now to force him out of his reflective taciturnity. "Do you agree to that, Mr. Crittenden?"
"To what?" he asked, making no decent pretense of being abashed because he had not been following the conversation.
"Why, Mr. Livingstone was saying that artists are the only human beings to be envied, the only human beings who really live, intensely."
"They're the only ones who talk about it," he offered as his variation on the dictum. "That's what an artist is, isn't he? Somebody who happens to be put together so that it kills him to keep anything to himself. He just goes up in smoke, if he can't run and tell the world what he has seen, or tasted, or handled, or got hit by, and the way it made him feel. I admire and revere artists. They certainly do a lot for the rest of us. But I don't see any reason to think that they feel things any more intensely than anybody else, and I don't see anything so terribly enviable in their lot. There seems to be a lot of hard work about it, if you judge by the way they carry on. I don't see why you can't enjoy beauty and feel tragedy, even if you keep your mouth shut. You can feel it just the same, can't you? I'm sure I've felt things about a million times more intensely than anything that ever got into a book. And I can't say I'm any less satisfied with my fate because I'm not thriftily trying to use those same feelings as raw material for an art."
Marise was laughing outrageously by the time he had finished, partly at what he said, partly at Mr. Livingstone's scandalized expression. She was ashamed of the way she laughed over Mr. Crittenden's teasing of poor unconscious Mr. Livingstone.
"You don't understand, Crittenden, you don't get my point at all. There's something—something—" Livingstone brought it out with a remnant of the provincial self-consciousness before fine phrases which he so deplored, "there's something god-like, divine, in being an artist, creating something."
Mr. Crittenden moved from his negligent pose, tightened up a little. "Oh, if you mean by 'artist' a class broad enough to take in everybody who creates something, yes, of course, they're the only ones who really live. That's what most of us are trying to get a chance to do, trying to create a little order out of chaos. But that's pretty nearly the whole ant-heap of the human race, isn't it? Except the leisure classes."
Mr. Livingstone was in despair of making the Philistine understand. "It's something we have so little of in America, it's hard for an American to recognize its existence," he murmured to the company in extenuation of his compatriot's denseness.
Mr. Crittenden sat up straighter. "I used to make my living buying and selling lumber in the New England states," he said, addressing himself for once to the company, "and on one of my trips I met a man in a narrow mountain valley up there who was a creator if there ever was one. He had started life as a mechanic, left school and went to work at sixteen, in a shop filled with soulless cogs and bolts and screws and springs. And his creative instinct rose up and seized on those things as the appointed raw stuff for his creation. When I saw him he was the head of one of the biggest metal-working factories in the country, a good many hundred men working for him, and devoted to him, turning out tools that have simplified the tasks of mechanics the world around. I never saw a happier man. I never saw a human life more completely fulfilled. Yes, you're right, Livingstone. The creators are the enviable ones."
"That wasn't in the least what I said, or meant!" protested Mr. Livingstone warmly.
"It happens to be fresh in my mind," said Mr. Crittenden, half apologizing for his unusual loquacity, "because to-day, walking on the Due Macelli, I happened to see a case of his tools, and outside, just glued to the window, a young Italian mechanic, gazing in at them, his face on fire with his admiration and appreciation. Quite a long way, isn't it, for a Yankee creator to reach out a helpful and stimulating hand? But he's a first-rater, of course, a genius. The rest of us can't hope to do that."
Later, as they all went down the stairs together, Marise asked him, "But there isn't anything … is there? … that the rest of us, not creative geniuses, can hope to do that's creative?"
She had not the faintest idea what he could find to answer. She herself could conceive of no answer possible. With all the intelligent people she had ever known, it had been axiomatic that there was no answer.
He did not speak at once. She had noticed that he often took time to reflect seriously on what you had said before he replied. Marise had never seen any one before who seemed to give so much more care to understanding what you said than to concocting something that would sound well to say in answer. There were times when, incredible as it seemed, Mr. Crittenden seemed really to use language to express what he meant rather than to attain his ends. She waited now, and as she waited she was aware of the erectness and vigor of the tall body stepping beside her. In the corridor he halted for a moment, facing her, his head bent thoughtfully, his eyes shadowed by his broad brow, his hand, that powerful athlete's hand of his, meditatively over his mouth as he considered.
He had given her question a good deal of thought, and yet when he took his hand down to speak he said abruptly, impulsively, as though the words had broken up through what he had been meaning to say, "Couldn't we … any of us … couldn't we hope to create a beautiful human relationship? Beautiful and enduring?"