XI. A SOUNDING-LINE IN THE DARK WORLD
THE ADVICE OF TWO ABBÉS
The Abbé Preciozi several times advised Cæsar to make a new attempt at a reconciliation with the Cardinal; but Cæsar always refused.
“He is a man incapable of understanding me,” he would insist with naïve arrogance.
Preciozi felt a great liking for his new friend, who invited him to meals at good hotels and treated him very frequently. Almost every morning he went to call on Cæsar on one pretext or another, and they would go for a walk and chat about various things.
Preciozi was beginning to believe that his friend was a man with a future. Some explanations that Cæsar gave him about the mechanism of the stock-exchange convinced the abbé that he was in the presence of a great financier.
Preciozi talked to all his friends and acquaintances about Cardinal Fort’s nephew, picturing him as an extraordinary man; some took these praises as a joke; others thought that it was really very possible that the Spaniard had great talent; only one abbé, who was a teacher in a college, felt a desire to meet the Cardinal’s nephew, and Preciozi introduced him to Cæsar.
This abbé was named Cittadella, and he was fat, rosy, and blond; he looked more like a singer than a priest.
Cæsar invited the two abbés to dine at a restaurant and requested Preciozi to do the ordering.
“So you are a nephew of Cardinal Fort’s?” asked Cittadella. “Yes.”
“His own nephew?”
“His own nephew; son of his sister.”
“And he hasn’t done anything for you?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s a pity. He is a man of great influence, of great talent.”
“Influence, I believe; talent, I doubt,” said Cæsar.
“Oh, no, no! He is an intelligent man.”
“But I have heard that his Theological Commentaries is absolutely absurd.”
“No, no.”
“A crude, banal book, full of stupidities....”
“Macché!” exclaimed the indignant Preciozi, neglecting the culinary conflict he was engaged in.
“All right. It makes no difference,” replied Cæsar, smiling. “Whether he is a famous man, as you two say, or a blockhead, as I think, the fact remains that my uncle doesn’t wish to have anything to do with me.”
“You must have done something to him,” said Cittadella.
“No; the only thing is that when I was small they told me the Cardinal wished me to be a priest, and I answered that I didn’t care to be.”
“And why so?”
“It seems to me a poor job. It’s evident that one doesn’t make much at it.”
Cittadella sighed.
“Yes, and what’s more,” Preciozi put in, “this gentleman says to anybody who cares to listen, that religion is a farce, that Catholicism is like a dish of Jewish meat with Roman sauce. Is it possible that a Cardinal should bother about a nephew that talks like that?”
The Abbé Cittadella looked very serious and remarked that it is necessary to believe, or at least to seem to believe, in the truths of religion.
“Is the Cardinal supposed to have money?” asked Cæsar.
“Yes, I should say he is,” replied Preciozi. “Your sister and you will be the only heirs,” said Cittadella.
“Of course,” agreed Preciozi.
“Has he made a will?” asked Cæsar.
“All the better if he hasn’t,” said one of the abbés.
“If we could only poison him,” sighed Cæsar, with melancholy.
“Don’t talk of such things just as we are going to eat,” said Preciozi.
The dinner was brought, and the two abbés did it the honour it deserved.
Preciozi deserved congratulations for his excellent selection. They ordered good wines and drank merry toasts.
“What an admirable secretary Preciozi would be, if I got to be a personage!” exclaimed Cæsar. “Twenty thousand francs or so salary, his board, and the duty of choosing the dinner for the next day. That’s my proposal.”
The abbé blushed with pleasure, emptied his glass of wine, and murmured:
“If it depended on me!”
“The fact is that the way things are arranged today is no good,” said Cæsar. “A hundred years ago, by the mere fact of being a Cardinal’s nephew, I should have been somebody.”
“That’s true,” exclaimed Preciozi.
“And as I should have no scruples, and neither would you two, we would have plunged into life strenuously, and sacked Rome, and the whole world would be ours.”
“You talk like a Cæsar Borgia,” said Preciozi, aroused. “You are a true Spaniard.”
“Today one must have something to stand on,” said Cittadella, coldly.
“Friend Cittadella,” retorted Cæsar, “I, as you see me here, am the man who knows the most about financial matters in all Spain, and I believe I shall soon get to where I can say, in all Europe. I put my knowledge at the service of whoever pays me. I am like one of your old condottieri, a mercenary general. I am ready to win battles for the Jewish bank, or against the Jewish bank, for the Church or against the Church.”
“For the Church is better. Against the Church we cannot assist you,” said Preciozi.
“I will try first, for the Church. To whom can you recommend me first?”
The two abbés said nothing, and drank in silence.
“Perhaps Verry would see him,” said Cittadella.
“Hm!...” replied Preciozi. “I rather doubt it.”
“What sort of a party is he?” asked Cæsar.
“He is one of those prelati that come out of the College of Nobles,” said Cittadella, “and who get on, even if they are no good. Here they consider him a haughty Spaniard; they blame him for wearing his robes, and for always taking an automobile when he goes to Castel Gandolfo. The priests hate him because he is a Jesuit and a Spaniard.”
“And wherein does his strength lie?”
“In the Society, and in his knowing several languages. He was educated in England.”
“From what you two tell me of him, he gives me the impression of a fatuous person.”
A bottle of champagne was brought in and the three of them drank, toasting and touching glasses.
“If I were in your place,” said Cittadella, after thinking a long while, “I shouldn’t try to get at people in high places, but people who are inconspicuous and yet have influence in your country.”
“For instance....”
“For instance, Father Herreros, at the convent in Trastevere.”
“And Father Miró too,” added Preciozi, “and if you could talk to Father Ferrer, of the Gregorian University, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
“That will be more difficult,” said Cittadella.
“You could tell them,” Preciozi suggested, “that your uncle the Cardinal sent you, and hint that he doesn’t want anybody to know that he is backing you.” “And if somebody should write to my uncle?”
“You mustn’t say anything definite. You must speak ambiguously. Besides, in case they did write, we would fix it up in the office.”
Cæsar began to laugh naïvely. Afterwards, the two abbés, a little excited by the food and the good wine, started in to have a violent discussion, speaking Italian. Cæsar paid the bill, and pretending that he had an urgent engagement, took leave of them and went out.
A SPANISH MONK
The next day Cæsar went to look up Father Herreros. He had not yet succeeded in forming a plan. His only idea was to see if he could take advantage of some chance: to follow a scent and be on the alert, in case something new should start up on one side or the other.
Father Herreros lived in a convent in Trastevere. Cæsar took the tram in the Piazza Venezia, and got out after crossing the Tiber, near the Via delle Fratte.
He soon found the convent; it had a yellow portal with a Latin inscription which sang the gymnastic glories of Saint Pascual Bailón. Above the inscription there was a picture, in which a monk, no doubt Bailón, was dancing among the clouds.
On the lintel of the gate were the arms of Spain, and at the sides, two medallions bearing hands wounded in the palm.
The convent door was old and quartered. Cæsar knocked.
A lay-brother, with a suspicious glance, came out to admit him, told him to wait, and left him alone. After some while, he came back and asked him to follow him.
They went down a small passage and up a staircase, which was at the end, and then along a corridor on the main floor. On one side of this corridor, in his cell, they found Father Herreros.
Cæsar, after bowing and introducing himself, sat down, as the monk asked him to do, in a chair with its back to the light. Cæsar began to explain why he had come, and as he had prepared what he was going to say, he employed his attention, while speaking, on the cage and the kind of big bird which were before his eyes.
Father Herreros had a big rough head, black heavy eyebrows, a short nose, an enormous mouth, yellow teeth, and grey hair. He wore a chocolate-coloured robe, open enough to show his whole neck down to his chest. The movement of the good monk’s lips was that of a man who wished to pass for keen and insinuating. His robe was dirty and he doubtless had the habit of leaving cigarette stubs on the table.
The cell had one window, and in front of it a bookcase. Cæsar made an effort to read the titles. They were almost all Latin books, the kind that nobody reads.
Father Herreros began to ask Cæsar questions. In his brain, he was doubtless wondering why Cardinal Fort’s nephew should come to him.
After many useless words they got to the concrete point that Cæsar wanted to take up, Father Herreros’s acquaintance in Spain, and the monk said that he knew a very rich widow who had property in Toledo. When Cæsar went to Madrid, he would give him a letter of recommendation to her.
“I cannot keep you any longer now, because a Mexican lady is waiting for me,” said Father Herreros.
Cæsar arose, and after shaking the monk’s fat hand, he left the convent. He returned to Rome on foot, crossing the river again, and looking at the Tiberine island; and arrived without hurrying at the hotel. He wrote to his friend Azugaray, requesting him to discover, by the indications he gave him, who the rich widow that had property in Toledo could be.
THE LICENTIATE MIRÓ
The next day Cæsar decided to pursue his investigations, and went to see Father Miró.
Father Miró lived in a college in the Via Monserrato. Cæsar inspected the map of Rome, looking for that street, and found that it is located in the vicinity of the Campo de’ Fiori, and took his way thither.
The spring day was magnificent; the sky was blue, without a cloud; the tiled roofs of some of the palaces were decorated with borders of plants and flowers; in the street, dry and flooded with sunshine, a water-carrier in a cart full of fat, green bottles, passed by, singing and cracking his whip.
Cæsar crossed the Campo de’ Fiori, a very lively, plebeian square, full of canvas awnings with open stalls of fruit under them. In the middle stood the statue of Giordano Bruno, with a crown of flowers around its neck.
Then he took the Via de’ Cappellari, a narrow lane and dirty enough. From one side to the other clothes were hung out to dry.
He came to the college and entered the church contiguous to it. He asked for Father Miró; a sacristan with a long moustache and a worn blue overcoat, took him to another entrance, made him mount an old wooden staircase, and conducted him to the office of the man he was looking for.
Father Miró was a tiny little man, dark and filthy, with a worn-out cassock, covered with dandruff, and a large dirty square cap with a big rosette.
“Will you tell me what you want?” said the little priest in a sullen tone.
Cæsar introduced himself, and explained in a few words who he was and what he proposed.
Father Miró, without asking him to sit down, answered rapidly, saying that he had no acquaintance with matters of finance or speculation.
Cæsar felt a shudder of anger at the rudeness with which he was treated by this draggled little priest, and felt a vehement desire to take him by the neck and twist it, like a chicken’s.
Despite his anger, he did not change expression, and he asked the priest smilingly if he knew who could give him advice about those questions.
“You can see Father Ferrer at the Gregorian University, or Father Mendia. He is an encyclopedist. It was he who wrote the theological portion of the encyclical Pascendi, the one about Modernism. He is a man of very great learning.”
“He will do. Many thanks,” and Cæsar turned toward the door.
“Excuse me for not having asked you to sit down, but...”
“No matter,” Cæsar replied, rapidly, and he went out to the stairs.
In view of the poor result of his efforts, he decided to go to the Gregorian University. He was told it was in the Via del Seminario, and supposed it must be the large edifice with little windowed bridges over two streets.
That edifice was the Collegio Romano; the Gregorian University was in the same street, but further on, opposite the Post Office Department. Father Ferrer could not receive him, because he was holding a class; and after they had gone up and come down and taken Cæsar’s card for Father Mendia, they told him he was out.
Cæsar concluded that it was not so easy to find a crack through which one could get information of what was going on in the clerical world.
“I see that the Church gives them all a defensive instinct which they make good use of. They are really only poor devils, but they have a great organization, and it cannot be easy to get one’s fingers through the meshes of their net.”
XII. A MEETING ON THE PINCIO
A WALK IN THE VILLA BORGHESE
At the beginning of Holy Week Laura returned to the hotel, at lunch-time.
“And your husband?” Cæsar asked her.
“He didn’t want to come. Rome bores him. He is giving all his attention to taking care of the heart-disease he says he has.”
“Is it serious?”
“I think not. Every time I see him I find him with a new disease and a new diet; one time it is vegetarian, another nothing but meat, another time he says one should eat only grapes, or nothing but bread.”
“Then I see that he belongs to the illustrious brotherhood of the insane.”
“You are not far from joining that brotherhood yourself.”
“Dear sister, I am one of the few sane men that go stumbling around this insane asylum let loose we call the earth.”
“What you say about men is the truth, even though you are not an exception. Really, the more I have to do with men, the more convinced I am that any one of them who is not crazy, is stupid or vain or proud.... How much more intelligent, discreet, logical we women are!”
“Don’t tell me. You are marvels; modest, kindly toward your rivals, so little given to humiliating your neighbours, male or female....”
“Yes, yes; but we are not so conceited or such play-actors as you are. A woman may think herself pretty and amiable and sweet, and not be so. That is true; but on the other hand, every man thinks himself braver than the Cid, even if he is afraid of a fly, and more talented than Seneca, even if he is a dolt.”
“To sum up, men are a calamity.”
“Just so.”
“And women spend their lives fishing for these calamities.”
“They need them; there are inferior things which still are necessary.”
“And there are superior things which are good for nothing.”
“Will you come and take a drive with me, philosopher brother?”
“Where?”
“Let’s go to the Villa Borghese. The carriage will be here in a moment.”
“All right. Let us go there.”
A two-horse victoria with rubber tires was waiting at the door, and Laura and Cæsar got in. The carriage went past the Treasury, and out the Porta Salaria, and entered the gardens of the Villa Borghese.
The morning had been rainy; the ground was damp; the wind waved the tree-tops gently and caused a murmur like the tide. The carriage rolled slowly along the avenues. Laura was very gay and chatty. Cæsar listened to her as one listens to a bird warbling.
Many times while listening he thought: “What is there inside this head? What is the master idea of her life? Has she really any idea about life, or has she none?”
After several rounds they crossed the viaduct that unites the Villa Borghese with the Pincio gardens.
FROM THE PINCIO TERRACE
They approached the great terrace of the gardens by an avenue that has busts of celebrated men along both sides.
“Poor great men!” exclaimed Cæsar. “Their statues serve only to decorate a public garden.” “They had their lives,” replied Laura, gaily; “now we have ours.”
Laura ordered the coachman to stop a moment. The air was still murmuring in the foliage, the birds singing, and the clouds flying slowly across the sky.
A man with a black box approached the carriage to offer them postcards.
“Buy two or three,” said Laura.
Cæsar bought a few and put them into his pocket. The vendor withdrew and Laura continued to look at Rome with enthusiasm.
“Oh, how beautiful, how lovely it is! I never get tired of looking at it. It is my favourite city. ‘O fior d’ogni cittá, donna del mondo.’”
“She is no longer mistress of the world, little sister.”
“For me she is. Look at St. Peter’s. It looks like a shred of cloud.”
“Yes, that’s so. It’s of a blue shade that seems transparent.”
Bells were ringing and great majestic white clouds kept moving along the horizon; on the Janiculum the statue of Garibaldi rose up gallantly into the air, like a bird ready to take wing.
“When I look at Rome this way,” murmured Laura, “I feel a pang, a pang of grief.”
“Why?”
“Because I remember that I must die, and then I shall not come back to see Rome. She will be here still, century after century, full of sunlight, and I shall be dead.... It is horrible, horrible!”
“And your religion?”
“Yes, I know. I believe I shall see other things; but not these things that are so beautiful.”
“You are an Epicurean.”
“It is so beautiful to be alive!”
They stayed there looking at the panorama. Below, in the Piazza del Popólo, they saw a red tram slipping along, which looked, at that distance, like a toy.
A tilbury, driven by a woman, stopped near their carriage. The woman was blond with green eyes, prominent cheek-bones, and a little fur cap. At her feet lay an enormous dog with long flame-coloured hair.
“She must be a Russian,” said Cæsar.
“Yes. Do you like that type?”
“She has a lot of character. She looks like one of the women that would order servants to be whipped.”
The Russian was smiling vaguely. Laura told the coachman to drive on. They made a few rounds in the avenues of the Pincio. The music was beginning; a few carriages, and groups of soldiers and seminarians, crowded around the bandstand; Laura didn’t care for brass bands, they were too noisy for her, and she gave the coachman orders to drive to the Corso.
MEETING MARCHMONT
They passed in front of the Villa Medici, and when they got near the Piazza, della Trinitá de’ Monti they met a man on horseback, who, on seeing them, immediately approached the carriage. It was Archibald Marchmont, who had just arrived in Rome.
“I thought you had forgotten us,” said Laura.
“I forget you, Marchesa! Never.”
“You say you came to Rome....”
“From Nice I had to return to London, because my father was seriously ill with an attack of gout.”
“He is well again?”
“Yes, thank you. You are coming back from a drive?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you want to come and have tea with my wife and me?”
“Where?”
“At the Hotel Excelsior. We are staying there. Will you come?” “All right.”
Laura accepted, and they went to the Via Veneto with the Englishman riding beside them.
They went into the hotel and passed through to the “hall” full of people, Marchmont sent word to his wife by a servant, to come down. Laura and Cæsar seated themselves with the Englishman.
“This hotel is unbearable,” exclaimed Marchmont; “there is nothing here but Americans.”
“Your wife, however, must like that,” said Cæsar.
“No. Susanna is more European every day, and she doesn’t care for the shrieking elegance of her compatriots. Besides, her father is here, and that makes her feel less American.”
“It is an odd form of filial enthusiasm,” remarked Cæsar.
“It doesn’t shock me. I almost think it’s the rule,” replied Marchmont; “at home I could see that my brothers and sisters hated one another cordially, and that every member of the family wanted to get away from the others. You two who are so fond of each other are a very rare instance. Is it frequent in Spain that brothers and sisters like one another?”
“Yes, there are instances of it,” answered Cæsar, laughing.
Mrs. Marchmont arrived, accompanied by an old man who evidently was her father, and two other men. Susanna was most smart; she greeted Laura and Cæsar very affably, and presented her father, Mr. Russell; then she presented an English author, tall, skinny, with blue eyes, a white beard, and hair like a halo; and then a young Englishman from the Embassy, a very distinguished person named Kennedy, who was a Catholic.
TEA
After the introductions they passed into the dining-room, which was most impressive. It was an exhibition of very smart women, some of them ideally beautiful, and idle men. All about them resounded a nasal English of the American sort.
Susanna Marchmont served the tea and did the honours to her guests. They all talked French, excepting Mr. Russell, who once in a long while uttered some categorical monosyllable in his own language.
Mr. Russell was not of the classic Yankee type; he looked like a vulgar Englishman. He was a serious man, with a short moustache, grey-headed, with three or four gold teeth.
What to Cæsar seemed wonderful in this gentleman was his economy of words. There was not one useless expression in his vocabulary, and not the slightest redundancy; whatever partook of merit, prestige, or nobility was condensed, for him, to the idea of value; whatever partook of arrangement, cleanliness, order, was condensed to the word “comfort”; so that Mr. Russell, with a very few words, had everything specified.
To Susanna, imbued with her preoccupation in supreme chic, her father no doubt did not seem a completely decorative father; but he gave Cæsar the impression of a forceful man.
Near them, at a table close by, was a little blond man, with a hooked nose and a scanty imperial, in company with a fat lady. They bowed to Marchmont and his wife.
“That gentleman looks like a Jew,” said Cæsar.
“He is,” replied Marchmont, “that is Señor Pereyra, a rich Jew; of Portuguese origin, I think.”
“How quickly you saw it!” exclaimed Susanna.
“He has that air of a sick goat, so frequent in Jews.”
“His wife has nothing sickly about her, or thin either,” remarked Laura.
“No,” said Cæsar; “his wife represents another Biblical type; one of the fat kine of somebody’s dream, which foretold abundance and a good harvest.”
The Englishman, Kennedy, had also little liking for Jews.
“I do not hate a Jew as anti-Christian,” said Cæsar; “but as super-Christian. Nor do I hate the race, but the tendency they have never to be producers, but always middlemen, and because they incarnate so well for our era the love of money, and of joy and pleasure.”
The English author was a great partisan of Jews, and he asserted that they were more distinguished in science and the arts than any other race. The Jewish question was dropped in an instant, when they saw a smart lady come in accompanied by a pale man with a black shock of hair and an uneasy eye.
“That is the Hungarian violinist Kolozsvar,” said Susanna.
“Kolozsvar, Kolozsvar!” they heard everybody saying.
“Is he a great virtuoso?” Cæsar asked Kennedy.
“No, I think not,” answered Kennedy. “It seems that this Hungarian’s speciality is playing the waltzes and folk-songs of his own country, which is certainly not anything great; but his successes are not obtained with the violin, but among the women. The ladies in London fight for him. His game is to pass himself off as a fallen man, depraved, worn-out. There you have his phraseology.... They see a man to save, to raise up, and convert into a great artist, and almost all of them yield to this temptation.”
“That is comical,” said Cæsar, looking curiously at the fiddler and his lady.
“To a Spaniard,” replied Kennedy, “it is comical; and probably it would be to an Italian too; but in England there are many women that have a purely imaginative idealism, a romanticism fed on ridiculous novels, and they fall into traps like these, which seem clumsy and grotesque to you here in the South, where people are more clear-sighted and realistic.”
Cæsar watched the brave fiddler, who played the role of a man used up, to great perfection.
After tea, Susanna invited them to go up to her rooms, and Laura and her brother and Kennedy and Mr. Russell went.
The English author had met a colleague, with whom he stayed behind talking, and Marchmont remained in the “hall,” as if it did not seem to him proper for him to go to his wife’s rooms.
Susanna’s rooms were very high, had balconies on the Via Veneto, and were almost opposite Queen Margherita’s palace. One overlooked the garden and could see the Queen Mother taking her walks, which is not without its importance for persons who live in a republic.
Susanna was most amiable to Laura; repeated to all of them her invitation to come and see her again; and after they had all promised to see one another frequently, Cæsar and Laura went down to their carriage, and took a turn on the Corso by twilight.
XIII. ESTHETICS AND DEMAGOGY
SUSANNA AND THE YOUNGSTERS
From this meeting on, Cæsar noticed that Marchmont paid court to Laura with much persistence. A light-hearted, coquettish woman, it pleased Laura to be pursued by a person like this Englishman, young, distinguished, and rich; but she was not prepared to yield. Her bringing-up, her class-feelings impelled her to consider adultery a heinous thing. Nor was divorce a solution for her, since accepting it would oblige her to cease being a Catholic and to quarrel irrevocably with the Cardinal. Marchmont showed no discretion in the way he paid court to Laura; he cared nothing about his wife, and talked of her with profound contempt....
Laura found herself besieged by the Englishman; she couldn’t decide to discourage him entirely, and at critical moments she would take the train, go off to Naples, and come back two or three days later, doubtless with more strength for withstanding the siege.
“As a matter of reciprocal justice, since he makes love to my sister, I ought to make love to his wife,” thought Cæsar, and he went several times to the Hotel Excelsior to call on Susanna.
The Yankee wife was full of complaints against her husband. Her father had advised her simply to get a divorce, but she didn’t want to. She found such a solution lacking in distinction, and no doubt she considered the advice of an author in her own country very true, who had given this triple injunction to the students of a woman’s college: “Do not drink, that is, do not drink too much; do not smoke, that is, do not smoke too much; and do not get married, that is, do not get married too much.”
It did not seem quite right to Susanna to get married too much. Besides she had a desire to become a Catholic. One day she questioned Cæsar about it:
“You want to change your religion!” exclaimed Cæsar, “What for? I don’t believe you are going to find your lost faith by becoming a Catholic.”
“And what do you think about it, Kennedy?” Susanna asked the young Englishman, who was there too.
“To me a Catholic woman seems doubly enchanting.”
“You would not marry a woman who wasn’t a Catholic?”
“No, indeed,” the Englishman proclaimed.
Cæsar and Kennedy disagreed about everything.
Susanna discussed her plans, and constantly referred to Paul Bourget’s novel Cosmopolis, which had obviously influenced her in her inclination for Catholicism.
“Are there many Jewish ladies who aspire to be baptized and become Catholics, as Bourget says?” asked Susanna.
“Bah!” exclaimed Cæsar.
“You do not believe that either?”
“No, it strikes me as a piece of naïvety in this good soul of a novelist. To become a Catholic, I don’t believe requires more than some few pesetas.”
“You are detestable, as a Cardinal’s nephew.”
“I mean that I don’t perceive that there are any obstacles to prevent anybody from becoming a Catholic, as there are to prevent his becoming rich. What a high ambition, to aspire to be a Catholic! While nobody anywhere does anything but laugh at Catholics; and it has become an axiom: ‘A Catholic country is a country bound for certain ruin.’”
Kennedy burst out laughing.
Susanna said that she had no real faith, but that she did have a great enthusiasm for churches and for choirs, for the smell of incense and religious music.
“Spain is the place for all that,” said Kennedy. “Here in Italy the Church ceremonies are too gay. Not so in Spain; at Toledo, at Burgos, there is an austerity in the cathedrals, an unworldliness....”
“Yes,” said Cæsar; “unhappily we have nothing left there but ceremonies. At the same time, the people are dying of hunger.”
They discussed whether it is better to live in a decorative, esthetic sphere, or in a more humble and practical one; and Susanna and Kennedy stood up for the superiority of an esthetic life.
As they left the hotel Cæsar said to Kennedy:
“Allow me a question. Have you any intentions concerning Mrs. Marchmont?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Simply because I shouldn’t go to see her often, so as not to be in the way.”
“Thank you ever so much. But I have no intentions in relation to her. She is too beautiful and too rich a woman for a modest employee like me to fix his eyes on.”
“Bah! A modest diplomat! That is absurd. It is merely that you don’t take to her.”
“No. It’s because she is a queen. There ought to be some defect in her face to make her human.”
“Yes; that’s true. She is too much of a prize beauty.”
“That is the defect in the Yankee women; they have no character. The weight of tradition might be fatal to industry and modern life, but it is the one thing that creates the spirituality of the old countries. Beyond contradiction American women have intelligence, beauty, energy, attractive flashes, but they lack that particular thing created by centuries: character. At times they have very charming impulses. Have you heard the story about Prince Torlonia’s wife?”
“No.”
“Well, Torlonia’s present wife was an American girl worth millions, who came with letters to the prince. He took her about Rome, and at the end of some days he said to her, supposing that the beautiful American had the intention of marrying: ‘I will introduce some young noblemen to you’; and she answered: ‘Don’t introduce anybody to me; because you please me more than anybody’; and she married him.”
“It was a pretty impulse.”
“Yes, Americans do things like that on the spur of the moment. But if you saw a Spanish woman behave that way, it would seem wrong to you.”
Chattering amicably they came to the Piazza Esedra.
“Would you care to have lunch with me?” said Kennedy.
“Just what I was going to propose to you.”
“I eat alone.”
“I do not. I eat with my sister.”
“The Marchesa di Vaccarone?”
“Yes.”
“Then you must pardon me if I accept your invitation, for I am very anxious to meet her.”
“Then come along.”
RUSKIN AND THE PHILISTINES
They reached the hotel and Cæsar introduced his friend to Laura.
“He is an admirer of yours.”
“A respectful admirer... from a distance,” explained Kennedy.
“But are there admirers of that sort?” asked Laura, laughing.
“Here you have one,” said the Englishman. “I have known you by sight ever since I came to Rome, and have never had the pleasure of speaking to you until today.”
“And have you been here a long time?”
“Nearly two years.”
“And do you like Rome; eh?”
“I should say so! At first, I didn’t, I must admit. It was a disappointment to me. I had dreamed so much about Rome!” and Kennedy talked of the books and guides he had read about the Eternal City.
“I must admit that I had never dreamed about Rome,” said Cæsar. “And you boast of that?” asked Laura.
“No, I don’t boast of it, I merely state it. I understand how agreeable it is to know things. Cæsar died here! Cicero made speeches here! Saint Peter stumbled over this stone! It is fine! But not knowing things is also very comfortable. I am rather like a barbarian walking indifferently among monuments he knows nothing about.”
“Doesn’t such an idea make you ashamed?”
“No, why? It would be a bother to me to know a lot of things offhand. To pass by a mountain and know how it was thrown up, what it is composed of, what its flora and fauna are; to get to a town and know its history in detail.... What things to be interested in! It’s tiresome! I hate history too much. I far prefer to be ignorant of everything, and especially the past, and from time to time to offer myself a capricious, arbitrary explanation.”
“But I think that knowing things not only is not tiresome,” said Kennedy, “but is a great satisfaction.”
“You think even learning things is a satisfaction?”
“Thousands of years ago one could know things almost without learning them; nowadays in order to know, one has to learn. That is natural and logical.”
“Yes, certainly. And the effort to learn about useful things seems natural and logical to me too, but not to learn about merely agreeable things. To learn medicine and mechanics is logical; but to learn to look at a picture or to hear a symphony is an absurdity.”
“Why?”
“At any rate the neophytes that go to see a Rafael picture or to hear a Bach sonata and have an exclamation all ready, give me the sad impression of a flock of lambs. As for your sublime pedagogues of the Ruskin type, they seem to me to be the fine flower of priggishness, of pedantry, of the most objectionable bourgeoisie.”
“What things your brother is saying!” exclaimed Kennedy.
“You shouldn’t notice him,” said Laura.
“Those artistic pedagogues enrage me; they remind me of Protestant pastors and of the friars that go around dressed like peasants, and who I think are called Brothers of the Christian Doctrine. The pedagogues are Brothers of the Esthetic Doctrine, one of the stupidest inventions that ever occurred to the English. I don’t know which I find more ridiculous, the Salvation Army or Ruskin’s books.”
“Why have you this hatred for Ruskin?”
“I find him an idiot. I only skimmed through a book of his called The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and the first thing I read was a paragraph in which he said that to use an imitation diamond or any other imitation stone was a lie, an imposition, and a sin. I immediately said: ‘This man who thinks a diamond is the truth and paste a lie, is a stupid fool who doesn’t deserve to be read.’”
“Yes, all right: you take one point of view and he takes another. I understand why Ruskin wouldn’t please you. What I do not understand is why you find it absurd that if a person has a desire to penetrate into the beauties of a symphony or a picture, he should do so. What is there strange in that?”
“You are right,” said Cæsar; “whoever wants to learn, should. I have done so about financial questions.”
“Is it true that your brother knows all about questions of money?” Kennedy asked Laura.
“He says so.”
“I haven’t much belief in his financial knowledge.”
“No?”
“No, I have not. You are a sort of dilettante, half nihilist, half financier. You would like to pass for a tranquil, well-balanced man, for what is called a philistine, but you cannot compass it.”
“I will compass it. It is true that I want to be a philistine, but a philistine out in the real world. All those great artists you people admire, Goethe, Ruskin, were really philistines, who were in the business of being interested in poetry and statues and pictures.”
“Moncada, you are a sophist,” said Kennedy. “Possibly I am wrong in this discussion,” retorted Cæsar, “but the feeling I have is right. Artists irritate me; they seem to me like old ladies with a flatulency that prevents their breathing freely.”
Kennedy laughed at the definition.
CHIC AND THE REVOLUTION
“I understand hating bad kings and conquerors; but artists! What harm do they do?” said Laura.
“Artists are always doing harm to the whole of humanity. They have invented an esthetic system for the use of the rich, and they have killed the Revolution. The chic put an end to the Revolution. And now everything is coming back; enthusiasm for the aristocracy, for the Church; the cult of kings. People look backward and the Revolutionary movement is paralysed. The people that irritate me most are those esthetes of the Ruskin school, for whom everything is religious: having money, buying jewels, blowing one’s nose... everything is religious. Vulgar creatures, lackeys that they are!”
“My brother is a demagogue,” said Laura ironically.
“Yes,” added Kennedy; “he doesn’t like categories.”
“But each thing has its value whether he likes it or not.”
“I do not deny different values, or even categories. There are things of great value in life; some natural, like youth, beauty, strength; others more artificial, like money, social position; but this idea of distinction, of aristocratic fineness, is a farce. It is a literary legend in the same style as the one current in novels, which tells us that the aristocrats of old families close their doors to rich Americans, or like that other story Mrs. Marchmont was talking to us of, about the Jewish ladies who were crazy to become Catholics.”
“I don’t see what you are trying to prove by all this,” said Laura.
“I am trying to prove that all there is underneath distinguished society is money, for which reason it doesn’t matter if it is destroyed. The cleverest and finest man, if he has no money, will die of hunger in a corner. Smart society, which thinks itself superior, will never receive him, because being really superior and intelligent is of no value on the market. On the other hand, when it is a question of some very rich brute, he will succeed in being accepted and fêted by the aristocrats, because money has a real value, a quotable value, or I’d better say, it is the only thing that has a quotable value.”
“What you are saying isn’t true. A man doesn’t go with the best people merely because he is rich.”
“No, certainly; not immediately. There is a preparatory process. He begins by robbing people in some miserable little shop, and feels himself democratic. Then he robs in a bank, and at that period he feels that he is a Liberal and begins to experience vaguely aristocratic ideas. If business goes splendidly, the aristocratic ideas get crystallized. Then he can come to Rome and go into ecstasies over all the humbugs of Catholicism; and after that, one is authorized to acknowledge that the religion of our fathers is a beautiful religion, and one finishes by giving a tip to the Pope, and another to Cardinal Verry, so that they will make him Prince of the Ecumenical Council or Marquis of the Holy Crusade.”
“What very stupid and false ideas,” exclaimed Laura. “Really I appreciate having a brother who talks in such a vulgar way.”
“You are an aristocrat and the truth doesn’t please you. But such are the facts. I can see the chief of the bureau of Papal titles. What fun he must have thinking up the most appropriate title for a magnate of Yankee tinned beef or for an illustrious Andean general! How magnificent it would be to gather all the Bishops in partibus infidelium and all the people with Papal titles in one drawing-room! The Bishop of Nicaea discussing with the Marquis of the Holy Roman Empire; the Marchioness of Easter Sunday flirting with the Bishop of Sion, while the Patriarchs of Thebes, Damascus, and Trebizond played bridge with the sausage manufacturer, Mr. Smiles, the pork king, or with the illustrious General Pérez, the hero of Guachinanguito. What a moving spectacle it would be!”
“You are a clown!” said Laura.
“He is a finished satirist,” added Kennedy.
CÆSAR’S PLAN
After lunch, Laura, Kennedy, and Cæsar went into the salon, and Laura introduced the Englishman to the San Martino girls and the Countess Brenda. They stayed there chatting until four o’clock, at which time the San Martinos got ready to go out in a motor car, and Laura, with the Countess and her daughter, in a carriage.
Cæsar and Kennedy went into the street together.
“You are awfully well fixed here,” said Kennedy, “with no Americans, no Germans, or any other barbarians.”
“Yes, this hotel is a hive of petty aristocrats.”
“Your sister was telling me that you might pick out a very rich wife here, among the girls.”
“Yes, my sister would like me to live here, in a foreign country, in cowlike tranquillity, looking at pictures and statues, and travelling pointlessly. That wouldn’t be living for me; I am not a society man. I require excitement, danger.... Though I warn you that I am not in the least courageous.”
“You’re not?”
“Not at all. Not now. At moments I believe I could control myself and take a trench without wavering.”
“But you have some fixed plan, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I expect to go back to Spain, and work there.”
“At what?”
“In politics.”
“Are you patriotic?”
“Yes, up to a certain point. I have no transcendental idea of patriotism at all. Patriotism, as I interpret it, is a matter of curiosity. I believe that there is strength in Spain. If this strength could be led in a given direction, where would it get to? That is my form of patriotism; as I say, it is an experimental form.”
Kennedy looked at Cæsar with curiosity.
“And how can it help you with your plans to stay here in Rome?” he asked.
“It can help me. In Spain nobody knows me. This is the only place where I have a certain position, through being the nephew of a Cardinal. I am trying to build on that. How am I going to arrange it? I don’t know. I am feeling out my future course, taking soundings.”
“But the support you could find here would be all of a clerical nature,” said Kennedy.
“Of course.”
“But you are not Clerical!”
“No; but it is necessary for me to climb. Afterwards there will be time to change.”
“You are not taking it into account, my dear Cæsar, that the Church is still powerful and that it doesn’t pardon people who impose upon it.”
“Bah! I am not afraid of it.”
“And you were just saying you are not courageous! You are courageous, my dear man.... After this, I don’t doubt of your success.”
“I need data.”
“If I can furnish you with any....”
“Wouldn’t it be disagreeable for you to help a man who is your enemy, so far as ideas go?”
“No; because I am beginning to have some curiosity too, as to whether you will succeed in doing something. If I can be of any use, let me know.”
“I will let you know.”
Cæsar and Kennedy took a walk about the streets, and at twilight they took leave of each other affectionately.