A Room with a View
“I can’t stop. Let me go my wicked way. A porter—”
“Eleanor!”
“I’m sure it’s all right,” put in Lucy. “The Emersons won’t hear, and
they wouldn’t mind if they did.”
Miss Lavish did not seem pleased at this.
“Miss Honeychurch listening!” she said rather crossly. “Pouf! Wouf! You
naughty girl! Go away!”
“Oh, Lucy, you ought to be with Mr. Eager, I’m sure.”
“I can’t find them now, and I don’t want to either.”
“Mr. Eager will be offended. It is your party.”
“Please, I’d rather stop here with you.”
“No, I agree,” said Miss Lavish. “It’s like a school feast; the boys
have got separated from the girls. Miss Lucy, you are to go. We wish to
converse on high topics unsuited for your ear.”
The girl was stubborn. As her time at Florence drew to its close she
was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent. Such a one
was Miss Lavish, and such for the moment was Charlotte. She wished she
had not called attention to herself; they were both annoyed at her
remark and seemed determined to get rid of her.
“How tired one gets,” said Miss Bartlett. “Oh, I do wish Freddy and
your mother could be here.”
Unselfishness with Miss Bartlett had entirely usurped the functions of
enthusiasm. Lucy did not look at the view either. She would not enjoy
anything till she was safe at Rome.
“Then sit you down,” said Miss Lavish. “Observe my foresight.”
With many a smile she produced two of those mackintosh squares that
protect the frame of the tourist from damp grass or cold marble steps.
She sat on one; who was to sit on the other?
“Lucy; without a moment’s doubt, Lucy. The ground will do for me.
Really I have not had rheumatism for years. If I do feel it coming on I
shall stand. Imagine your mother’s feelings if I let you sit in the wet
in your white linen.” She sat down heavily where the ground looked
particularly moist. “Here we are, all settled delightfully. Even if my
dress is thinner it will not show so much, being brown. Sit down, dear;
you are too unselfish; you don’t assert yourself enough.” She cleared
her throat. “Now don’t be alarmed; this isn’t a cold. It’s the tiniest
cough, and I have had it three days. It’s nothing to do with sitting
here at all.”
There was only one way of treating the situation. At the end of five
minutes Lucy departed in search of Mr. Beebe and Mr. Eager, vanquished
by the mackintosh square.
She addressed herself to the drivers, who were sprawling in the
carriages, perfuming the cushions with cigars. The miscreant, a bony
young man scorched black by the sun, rose to greet her with the
courtesy of a host and the assurance of a relative.
“Dove?” said Lucy, after much anxious thought.
His face lit up. Of course he knew where. Not so far either. His arm
swept three-fourths of the horizon. He should just think he did know
where. He pressed his finger-tips to his forehead and then pushed them
towards her, as if oozing with visible extract of knowledge.
More seemed necessary. What was the Italian for “clergyman”?
“Dove buoni uomini?” said she at last.
Good? Scarcely the adjective for those noble beings! He showed her his
cigar.
“Uno—piu—piccolo,” was her next remark, implying “Has the cigar been
given to you by Mr. Beebe, the smaller of the two good men?”
She was correct as usual. He tied the horse to a tree, kicked it to
make it stay quiet, dusted the carriage, arranged his hair, remoulded
his hat, encouraged his moustache, and in rather less than a quarter of
a minute was ready to conduct her. Italians are born knowing the way.
It would seem that the whole earth lay before them, not as a map, but
as a chess-board, whereon they continually behold the changing pieces
as well as the squares. Any one can find places, but the finding of
people is a gift from God.
He only stopped once, to pick her some great blue violets. She thanked
him with real pleasure. In the company of this common man the world was
beautiful and direct. For the first time she felt the influence of
Spring. His arm swept the horizon gracefully; violets, like other
things, existed in great profusion there; “would she like to see them?”
“Ma buoni uomini.”
He bowed. Certainly. Good men first, violets afterwards. They proceeded
briskly through the undergrowth, which became thicker and thicker. They
were nearing the edge of the promontory, and the view was stealing
round them, but the brown network of the bushes shattered it into
countless pieces. He was occupied in his cigar, and in holding back the
pliant boughs. She was rejoicing in her escape from dullness. Not a
step, not a twig, was unimportant to her.
“What is that?”
There was a voice in the wood, in the distance behind them. The voice
of Mr. Eager? He shrugged his shoulders. An Italian’s ignorance is
sometimes more remarkable than his knowledge. She could not make him
understand that perhaps they had missed the clergymen. The view was
forming at last; she could discern the river, the golden plain, other
hills.
“Eccolo!” he exclaimed.
At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of
the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little
open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end.
“Courage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above.
“Courage and love.”
She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view,
and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating
the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems collecting into
pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But
never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the
well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the
earth.
Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man.
But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone.
George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he
contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant
joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue
waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and
kissed her.
Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called,
“Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!” The silence of life had been broken by Miss
Bartlett who stood brown against the view.
Chapter VII
They Return
Some complicated game had been playing up and down the hillside all the
afternoon. What it was and exactly how the players had sided, Lucy was
slow to discover. Mr. Eager had met them with a questioning eye.
Charlotte had repulsed him with much small talk. Mr. Emerson, seeking
his son, was told whereabouts to find him. Mr. Beebe, who wore the
heated aspect of a neutral, was bidden to collect the factions for the
return home. There was a general sense of groping and bewilderment. Pan
had been amongst them—not the great god Pan, who has been buried these
two thousand years, but the little god Pan, who presides over social
contretemps and unsuccessful picnics. Mr. Beebe had lost everyone, and
had consumed in solitude the tea-basket which he had brought up as a
pleasant surprise. Miss Lavish had lost Miss Bartlett. Lucy had lost
Mr. Eager. Mr. Emerson had lost George. Miss Bartlett had lost a
mackintosh square. Phaethon had lost the game.
That last fact was undeniable. He climbed on to the box shivering, with
his collar up, prophesying the swift approach of bad weather. “Let us
go immediately,” he told them. “The signorino will walk.”
“All the way? He will be hours,” said Mr. Beebe.
“Apparently. I told him it was unwise.” He would look no one in the
face; perhaps defeat was particularly mortifying for him. He alone had
played skilfully, using the whole of his instinct, while the others had
used scraps of their intelligence. He alone had divined what things
were, and what he wished them to be. He alone had interpreted the
message that Lucy had received five days before from the lips of a
dying man. Persephone, who spends half her life in the grave—she could
interpret it also. Not so these English. They gain knowledge slowly,
and perhaps too late.
The thoughts of a cab-driver, however just, seldom affect the lives of
his employers. He was the most competent of Miss Bartlett’s opponents,
but infinitely the least dangerous. Once back in the town, he and his
insight and his knowledge would trouble English ladies no more. Of
course, it was most unpleasant; she had seen his black head in the
bushes; he might make a tavern story out of it. But after all, what
have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room. It
was of drawing-room people that Miss Bartlett thought as she journeyed
downwards towards the fading sun. Lucy sat beside her; Mr. Eager sat
opposite, trying to catch her eye; he was vaguely suspicious. They
spoke of Alessio Baldovinetti.
Rain and darkness came on together. The two ladies huddled together
under an inadequate parasol. There was a lightning flash, and Miss
Lavish who was nervous, screamed from the carriage in front. At the
next flash, Lucy screamed also. Mr. Eager addressed her professionally:
“Courage, Miss Honeychurch, courage and faith. If I might say so, there
is something almost blasphemous in this horror of the elements. Are we
seriously to suppose that all these clouds, all this immense electrical
display, is simply called into existence to extinguish you or me?”
“No—of course—”
“Even from the scientific standpoint the chances against our being
struck are enormous. The steel knives, the only articles which might
attract the current, are in the other carriage. And, in any case, we
are infinitely safer than if we were walking. Courage—courage and
faith.”
Under the rug, Lucy felt the kindly pressure of her cousin’s hand. At
times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not
what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it
afterwards. Miss Bartlett, by this timely exercise of her muscles,
gained more than she would have got in hours of preaching or cross
examination.
She renewed it when the two carriages stopped, half into Florence.
“Mr. Eager!” called Mr. Beebe. “We want your assistance. Will you
interpret for us?”
“George!” cried Mr. Emerson. “Ask your driver which way George went.
The boy may lose his way. He may be killed.”
“Go, Mr. Eager,” said Miss Bartlett, “don’t ask our driver; our driver
is no help. Go and support poor Mr. Beebe—, he is nearly demented.”
“He may be killed!” cried the old man. “He may be killed!”
“Typical behaviour,” said the chaplain, as he quitted the carriage. “In
the presence of reality that kind of person invariably breaks down.”
“What does he know?” whispered Lucy as soon as they were alone.
“Charlotte, how much does Mr. Eager know?”
“Nothing, dearest; he knows nothing. But—” she pointed at the
driver—“_he_ knows everything. Dearest, had we better? Shall I?” She
took out her purse. “It is dreadful to be entangled with low-class
people. He saw it all.” Tapping Phaethon’s back with her guide-book,
she said, “Silenzio!” and offered him a franc.
“Va bene,” he replied, and accepted it. As well this ending to his day
as any. But Lucy, a mortal maid, was disappointed in him.
There was an explosion up the road. The storm had struck the overhead
wire of the tramline, and one of the great supports had fallen. If they
had not stopped perhaps they might have been hurt. They chose to regard
it as a miraculous preservation, and the floods of love and sincerity,
which fructify every hour of life, burst forth in tumult. They
descended from the carriages; they embraced each other. It was as
joyful to be forgiven past unworthinesses as to forgive them. For a
moment they realized vast possibilities of good.