A Room with a View
very slowly and from immense distances, they touched the stone with
their fingers, with their handkerchiefs, with their heads, and then
retreated. What could this mean? They did it again and again. Then Lucy
realized that they had mistaken Machiavelli for some saint, hoping to
acquire virtue. Punishment followed quickly. The smallest he-baby
stumbled over one of the sepulchral slabs so much admired by Mr.
Ruskin, and entangled his feet in the features of a recumbent bishop.
Protestant as she was, Lucy darted forward. She was too late. He fell
heavily upon the prelate’s upturned toes.
“Hateful bishop!” exclaimed the voice of old Mr. Emerson, who had
darted forward also. “Hard in life, hard in death. Go out into the
sunshine, little boy, and kiss your hand to the sun, for that is where
you ought to be. Intolerable bishop!”
The child screamed frantically at these words, and at these dreadful
people who picked him up, dusted him, rubbed his bruises, and told him
not to be superstitious.
“Look at him!” said Mr. Emerson to Lucy. “Here’s a mess: a baby hurt,
cold, and frightened! But what else can you expect from a church?”
The child’s legs had become as melting wax. Each time that old Mr.
Emerson and Lucy set it erect it collapsed with a roar. Fortunately an
Italian lady, who ought to have been saying her prayers, came to the
rescue. By some mysterious virtue, which mothers alone possess, she
stiffened the little boy’s back-bone and imparted strength to his
knees. He stood. Still gibbering with agitation, he walked away.
“You are a clever woman,” said Mr. Emerson. “You have done more than
all the relics in the world. I am not of your creed, but I do believe
in those who make their fellow-creatures happy. There is no scheme of
the universe—”
He paused for a phrase.
“Niente,” said the Italian lady, and returned to her prayers.
“I’m not sure she understands English,” suggested Lucy.
In her chastened mood she no longer despised the Emersons. She was
determined to be gracious to them, beautiful rather than delicate, and,
if possible, to erase Miss Bartlett’s civility by some gracious
reference to the pleasant rooms.
“That woman understands everything,” was Mr. Emerson’s reply. “But what
are you doing here? Are you doing the church? Are you through with the
church?”
“No,” cried Lucy, remembering her grievance. “I came here with Miss
Lavish, who was to explain everything; and just by the door—it is too
bad!—she simply ran away, and after waiting quite a time, I had to come
in by myself.”
“Why shouldn’t you?” said Mr. Emerson.
“Yes, why shouldn’t you come by yourself?” said the son, addressing the
young lady for the first time.
“But Miss Lavish has even taken away Baedeker.”
“Baedeker?” said Mr. Emerson. “I’m glad it’s _that_ you minded. It’s
worth minding, the loss of a Baedeker. _That’s_ worth minding.”
Lucy was puzzled. She was again conscious of some new idea, and was not
sure whither it would lead her.
“If you’ve no Baedeker,” said the son, “you’d better join us.” Was this
where the idea would lead? She took refuge in her dignity.
“Thank you very much, but I could not think of that. I hope you do not
suppose that I came to join on to you. I really came to help with the
child, and to thank you for so kindly giving us your rooms last night.
I hope that you have not been put to any great inconvenience.”
“My dear,” said the old man gently, “I think that you are repeating
what you have heard older people say. You are pretending to be touchy;
but you are not really. Stop being so tiresome, and tell me instead
what part of the church you want to see. To take you to it will be a
real pleasure.”
Now, this was abominably impertinent, and she ought to have been
furious. But it is sometimes as difficult to lose one’s temper as it is
difficult at other times to keep it. Lucy could not get cross. Mr.
Emerson was an old man, and surely a girl might humour him. On the
other hand, his son was a young man, and she felt that a girl ought to
be offended with him, or at all events be offended before him. It was
at him that she gazed before replying.
“I am not touchy, I hope. It is the Giottos that I want to see, if you
will kindly tell me which they are.”
The son nodded. With a look of sombre satisfaction, he led the way to
the Peruzzi Chapel. There was a hint of the teacher about him. She felt
like a child in school who had answered a question rightly.
The chapel was already filled with an earnest congregation, and out of
them rose the voice of a lecturer, directing them how to worship
Giotto, not by tactful valuations, but by the standards of the spirit.
“Remember,” he was saying, “the facts about this church of Santa Croce;
how it was built by faith in the full fervour of medievalism, before
any taint of the Renaissance had appeared. Observe how Giotto in these
frescoes—now, unhappily, ruined by restoration—is untroubled by the
snares of anatomy and perspective. Could anything be more majestic,
more pathetic, beautiful, true? How little, we feel, avails knowledge
and technical cleverness against a man who truly feels!”
“No!” exclaimed Mr. Emerson, in much too loud a voice for church.
“Remember nothing of the sort! Built by faith indeed! That simply means
the workmen weren’t paid properly. And as for the frescoes, I see no
truth in them. Look at that fat man in blue! He must weigh as much as I
do, and he is shooting into the sky like an air balloon.”
He was referring to the fresco of the “Ascension of St. John.” Inside,
the lecturer’s voice faltered, as well it might. The audience shifted
uneasily, and so did Lucy. She was sure that she ought not to be with
these men; but they had cast a spell over her. They were so serious and
so strange that she could not remember how to behave.
“Now, did this happen, or didn’t it? Yes or no?”
George replied:
“It happened like this, if it happened at all. I would rather go up to
heaven by myself than be pushed by cherubs; and if I got there I should
like my friends to lean out of it, just as they do here.”
“You will never go up,” said his father. “You and I, dear boy, will lie
at peace in the earth that bore us, and our names will disappear as
surely as our work survives.”
“Some of the people can only see the empty grave, not the saint,
whoever he is, going up. It did happen like that, if it happened at
all.”
“Pardon me,” said a frigid voice. “The chapel is somewhat small for two
parties. We will incommode you no longer.”
The lecturer was a clergyman, and his audience must be also his flock,
for they held prayer-books as well as guide-books in their hands. They
filed out of the chapel in silence. Amongst them were the two little
old ladies of the Pension Bertolini—Miss Teresa and Miss Catherine
Alan.
“Stop!” cried Mr. Emerson. “There’s plenty of room for us all. Stop!”
The procession disappeared without a word.
Soon the lecturer could be heard in the next chapel, describing the
life of St. Francis.
“George, I do believe that clergyman is the Brixton curate.”
George went into the next chapel and returned, saying “Perhaps he is. I
don’t remember.”
“Then I had better speak to him and remind him who I am. It’s that Mr.
Eager. Why did he go? Did we talk too loud? How vexatious. I shall go
and say we are sorry. Hadn’t I better? Then perhaps he will come back.”
“He will not come back,” said George.
But Mr. Emerson, contrite and unhappy, hurried away to apologize to the
Rev. Cuthbert Eager. Lucy, apparently absorbed in a lunette, could hear
the lecture again interrupted, the anxious, aggressive voice of the old
man, the curt, injured replies of his opponent. The son, who took every
little contretemps as if it were a tragedy, was listening also.
“My father has that effect on nearly everyone,” he informed her. “He
will try to be kind.”
“I hope we all try,” said she, smiling nervously.
“Because we think it improves our characters. But he is kind to people
because he loves them; and they find him out, and are offended, or
frightened.”
“How silly of them!” said Lucy, though in her heart she sympathized; “I
think that a kind action done tactfully—”
“Tact!”
He threw up his head in disdain. Apparently she had given the wrong
answer. She watched the singular creature pace up and down the chapel.
For a young man his face was rugged, and—until the shadows fell upon
it—hard. Enshadowed, it sprang into tenderness. She saw him once again
at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, carrying a burden of
acorns. Healthy and muscular, he yet gave her the feeling of greyness,
of tragedy that might only find solution in the night. The feeling soon
passed; it was unlike her to have entertained anything so subtle. Born
of silence and of unknown emotion, it passed when Mr. Emerson returned,
and she could re-enter the world of rapid talk, which was alone
familiar to her.
“Were you snubbed?” asked his son tranquilly.
“But we have spoilt the pleasure of I don’t know how many people. They
won’t come back.”
“...full of innate sympathy...quickness to perceive good in
others...vision of the brotherhood of man...” Scraps of the lecture on
St. Francis came floating round the partition wall.
“Don’t let us spoil yours,” he continued to Lucy. “Have you looked at
those saints?”
“Yes,” said Lucy. “They are lovely. Do you know which is the tombstone
that is praised in Ruskin?”
He did not know, and suggested that they should try to guess it.
George, rather to her relief, refused to move, and she and the old man
wandered not unpleasantly about Santa Croce, which, though it is like a
barn, has harvested many beautiful things inside its walls. There were
also beggars to avoid and guides to dodge round the pillars, and an old
lady with her dog, and here and there a priest modestly edging to his
Mass through the groups of tourists. But Mr. Emerson was only half
interested. He watched the lecturer, whose success he believed he had
impaired, and then he anxiously watched his son.
“Why will he look at that fresco?” he said uneasily. “I saw nothing in
it.”
“I like Giotto,” she replied. “It is so wonderful what they say about
his tactile values. Though I like things like the Della Robbia babies
better.”
“So you ought. A baby is worth a dozen saints. And my baby’s worth the
whole of Paradise, and as far as I can see he lives in Hell.”
Lucy again felt that this did not do.
“In Hell,” he repeated. “He’s unhappy.”
“Oh, dear!” said Lucy.
“How can he be unhappy when he is strong and alive? What more is one to
give him? And think how he has been brought up—free from all the
superstition and ignorance that lead men to hate one another in the
name of God. With such an education as that, I thought he was bound to
grow up happy.”
She was no theologian, but she felt that here was a very foolish old
man, as well as a very irreligious one. She also felt that her mother
might not like her talking to that kind of person, and that Charlotte
would object most strongly.
“What are we to do with him?” he asked. “He comes out for his holiday
to Italy, and behaves—like that; like the little child who ought to
have been playing, and who hurt himself upon the tombstone. Eh? What
did you say?”
Lucy had made no suggestion. Suddenly he said:
“Now don’t be stupid over this. I don’t require you to fall in love
with my boy, but I do think you might try and understand him. You are
nearer his age, and if you let yourself go I am sure you are sensible.
You might help me. He has known so few women, and you have the time.
You stop here several weeks, I suppose? But let yourself go. You are
inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. Let yourself
go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand,