A Room with a View
been a little frightened, both by Miss Lavish and by Mr. Eager, she
knew not why. And as they frightened her, she had, strangely enough,
ceased to respect them. She doubted that Miss Lavish was a great
artist. She doubted that Mr. Eager was as full of spirituality and
culture as she had been led to suppose. They were tried by some new
test, and they were found wanting. As for Charlotte—as for Charlotte
she was exactly the same. It might be possible to be nice to her; it
was impossible to love her.
“The son of a labourer; I happen to know it for a fact. A mechanic of
some sort himself when he was young; then he took to writing for the
Socialistic Press. I came across him at Brixton.”
They were talking about the Emersons.
“How wonderfully people rise in these days!” sighed Miss Bartlett,
fingering a model of the leaning Tower of Pisa.
“Generally,” replied Mr. Eager, “one has only sympathy for their
success. The desire for education and for social advance—in these
things there is something not wholly vile. There are some working men
whom one would be very willing to see out here in Florence—little as
they would make of it.”
“Is he a journalist now?” Miss Bartlett asked.
“He is not; he made an advantageous marriage.”
He uttered this remark with a voice full of meaning, and ended with a
sigh.
“Oh, so he has a wife.”
“Dead, Miss Bartlett, dead. I wonder—yes I wonder how he has the
effrontery to look me in the face, to dare to claim acquaintance with
me. He was in my London parish long ago. The other day in Santa Croce,
when he was with Miss Honeychurch, I snubbed him. Let him beware that
he does not get more than a snub.”
“What?” cried Lucy, flushing.
“Exposure!” hissed Mr. Eager.
He tried to change the subject; but in scoring a dramatic point he had
interested his audience more than he had intended. Miss Bartlett was
full of very natural curiosity. Lucy, though she wished never to see
the Emersons again, was not disposed to condemn them on a single word.
“Do you mean,” she asked, “that he is an irreligious man? We know that
already.”
“Lucy, dear—” said Miss Bartlett, gently reproving her cousin’s
penetration.
“I should be astonished if you knew all. The boy—an innocent child at
the time—I will exclude. God knows what his education and his inherited
qualities may have made him.”
“Perhaps,” said Miss Bartlett, “it is something that we had better not
hear.”
“To speak plainly,” said Mr. Eager, “it is. I will say no more.” For
the first time Lucy’s rebellious thoughts swept out in words—for the
first time in her life.
“You have said very little.”
“It was my intention to say very little,” was his frigid reply.
He gazed indignantly at the girl, who met him with equal indignation.
She turned towards him from the shop counter; her breast heaved
quickly. He observed her brow, and the sudden strength of her lips. It
was intolerable that she should disbelieve him.
“Murder, if you want to know,” he cried angrily. “That man murdered his
wife!”
“How?” she retorted.
“To all intents and purposes he murdered her. That day in Santa
Croce—did they say anything against me?”
“Not a word, Mr. Eager—not a single word.”
“Oh, I thought they had been libelling me to you. But I suppose it is
only their personal charms that makes you defend them.”
“I’m not defending them,” said Lucy, losing her courage, and relapsing
into the old chaotic methods. “They’re nothing to me.”
“How could you think she was defending them?” said Miss Bartlett, much
discomfited by the unpleasant scene. The shopman was possibly
listening.
“She will find it difficult. For that man has murdered his wife in the
sight of God.”
The addition of God was striking. But the chaplain was really trying to
qualify a rash remark. A silence followed which might have been
impressive, but was merely awkward. Then Miss Bartlett hastily
purchased the Leaning Tower, and led the way into the street.
“I must be going,” said he, shutting his eyes and taking out his watch.
Miss Bartlett thanked him for his kindness, and spoke with enthusiasm
of the approaching drive.
“Drive? Oh, is our drive to come off?”
Lucy was recalled to her manners, and after a little exertion the
complacency of Mr. Eager was restored.
“Bother the drive!” exclaimed the girl, as soon as he had departed. “It
is just the drive we had arranged with Mr. Beebe without any fuss at
all. Why should he invite us in that absurd manner? We might as well
invite him. We are each paying for ourselves.”
Miss Bartlett, who had intended to lament over the Emersons, was
launched by this remark into unexpected thoughts.
“If that is so, dear—if the drive we and Mr. Beebe are going with Mr.
Eager is really the same as the one we are going with Mr. Beebe, then I
foresee a sad kettle of fish.”
“How?”
“Because Mr. Beebe has asked Eleanor Lavish to come, too.”
“That will mean another carriage.”
“Far worse. Mr. Eager does not like Eleanor. She knows it herself. The
truth must be told; she is too unconventional for him.”
They were now in the newspaper-room at the English bank. Lucy stood by
the central table, heedless of Punch and the Graphic, trying to answer,
or at all events to formulate the questions rioting in her brain. The
well-known world had broken up, and there emerged Florence, a magic
city where people thought and did the most extraordinary things.
Murder, accusations of murder, a lady clinging to one man and being
rude to another—were these the daily incidents of her streets? Was
there more in her frank beauty than met the eye—the power, perhaps, to
evoke passions, good and bad, and to bring them speedily to a
fulfillment?
Happy Charlotte, who, though greatly troubled over things that did not
matter, seemed oblivious to things that did; who could conjecture with
admirable delicacy “where things might lead to,” but apparently lost
sight of the goal as she approached it. Now she was crouching in the
corner trying to extract a circular note from a kind of linen nose-bag
which hung in chaste concealment round her neck. She had been told that
this was the only safe way to carry money in Italy; it must only be
broached within the walls of the English bank. As she groped she
murmured: “Whether it is Mr. Beebe who forgot to tell Mr. Eager, or Mr.
Eager who forgot when he told us, or whether they have decided to leave
Eleanor out altogether—which they could scarcely do—but in any case we
must be prepared. It is you they really want; I am only asked for
appearances. You shall go with the two gentlemen, and I and Eleanor
will follow behind. A one-horse carriage would do for us. Yet how
difficult it is!”
“It is indeed,” replied the girl, with a gravity that sounded
sympathetic.
“What do you think about it?” asked Miss Bartlett, flushed from the
struggle, and buttoning up her dress.
“I don’t know what I think, nor what I want.”
“Oh, dear, Lucy! I do hope Florence isn’t boring you. Speak the word,
and, as you know, I would take you to the ends of the earth to-morrow.”
“Thank you, Charlotte,” said Lucy, and pondered over the offer.
There were letters for her at the bureau—one from her brother, full of
athletics and biology; one from her mother, delightful as only her
mother’s letters could be. She had read in it of the crocuses which had
been bought for yellow and were coming up puce, of the new
parlour-maid, who had watered the ferns with essence of lemonade, of
the semi-detached cottages which were ruining Summer Street, and
breaking the heart of Sir Harry Otway. She recalled the free, pleasant
life of her home, where she was allowed to do everything, and where
nothing ever happened to her. The road up through the pine-woods, the
clean drawing-room, the view over the Sussex Weald—all hung before her
bright and distinct, but pathetic as the pictures in a gallery to
which, after much experience, a traveller returns.
“And the news?” asked Miss Bartlett.
“Mrs. Vyse and her son have gone to Rome,” said Lucy, giving the news
that interested her least. “Do you know the Vyses?”
“Oh, not that way back. We can never have too much of the dear Piazza
Signoria.”
“They’re nice people, the Vyses. So clever—my idea of what’s really
clever. Don’t you long to be in Rome?”
“I die for it!”
The Piazza Signoria is too stony to be brilliant. It has no grass, no
flowers, no frescoes, no glittering walls of marble or comforting
patches of ruddy brick. By an odd chance—unless we believe in a
presiding genius of places—the statues that relieve its severity
suggest, not the innocence of childhood, nor the glorious bewilderment
of youth, but the conscious achievements of maturity. Perseus and
Judith, Hercules and Thusnelda, they have done or suffered something,
and though they are immortal, immortality has come to them after
experience, not before. Here, not only in the solitude of Nature, might
a hero meet a goddess, or a heroine a god.
“Charlotte!” cried the girl suddenly. “Here’s an idea. What if we
popped off to Rome to-morrow—straight to the Vyses’ hotel? For I do
know what I want. I’m sick of Florence. No, you said you’d go to the
ends of the earth! Do! Do!”
Miss Bartlett, with equal vivacity, replied:
“Oh, you droll person! Pray, what would become of your drive in the
hills?”
They passed together through the gaunt beauty of the square, laughing
over the unpractical suggestion.
Chapter VI
The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr. Emerson,
Mr. George Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, and
Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive Out in Carriages to See a View; Italians
Drive Them.
It was Phaethon who drove them to Fiesole that memorable day, a youth
all irresponsibility and fire, recklessly urging his master’s horses up
the stony hill. Mr. Beebe recognized him at once. Neither the Ages of
Faith nor the Age of Doubt had touched him; he was Phaethon in Tuscany
driving a cab. And it was Persephone whom he asked leave to pick up on
the way, saying that she was his sister—Persephone, tall and slender
and pale, returning with the Spring to her mother’s cottage, and still
shading her eyes from the unaccustomed light. To her Mr. Eager
objected, saying that here was the thin edge of the wedge, and one must
guard against imposition. But the ladies interceded, and when it had
been made clear that it was a very great favour, the goddess was
allowed to mount beside the god.
Phaethon at once slipped the left rein over her head, thus enabling
himself to drive with his arm round her waist. She did not mind. Mr.
Eager, who sat with his back to the horses, saw nothing of the
indecorous proceeding, and continued his conversation with Lucy. The
other two occupants of the carriage were old Mr. Emerson and Miss
Lavish. For a dreadful thing had happened: Mr. Beebe, without
consulting Mr. Eager, had doubled the size of the party. And though
Miss Bartlett and Miss Lavish had planned all the morning how the
people were to sit, at the critical moment when the carriages came
round they lost their heads, and Miss Lavish got in with Lucy, while
Miss Bartlett, with George Emerson and Mr. Beebe, followed on behind.
It was hard on the poor chaplain to have his _partie carrée_ thus
transformed. Tea at a Renaissance villa, if he had ever meditated it,
was now impossible. Lucy and Miss Bartlett had a certain style about
them, and Mr. Beebe, though unreliable, was a man of parts. But a
shoddy lady writer and a journalist who had murdered his wife in the
sight of God—they should enter no villa at his introduction.
Lucy, elegantly dressed in white, sat erect and nervous amid these
explosive ingredients, attentive to Mr. Eager, repressive towards Miss
Lavish, watchful of old Mr. Emerson, hitherto fortunately asleep,