Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  It was not that he had his English or American doctor to prescribe for him when sick, and his English or American apothecary to compound his potion; it was not that there was an English tailor and an American dentist, an English bookseller and an English baker, and chapels of every shade of Protestantism, with Catholic preaching in English every Sunday. These things were more or less matters of necessity, but Colville objected that the barbers should offer him an American shampoo; that the groceries should abound in English biscuit and our own canned fruit and vegetables, and that the grocers’ clerks should be ambitious to read the labels of the Boston baked beans. He heard — though he did not prove this by experiment — that the master of a certain trattoria had studied the doughnut of New England till he had actually surpassed the original in the qualities that have undermined our digestion as a people. But above all it interested him to see that intense expression of American civilisation, the horse-car, triumphing along the magnificent avenues that mark the line of the old city walls; and he recognised an instinctive obedience to an abtruse natural law in the fact that whereas the omnibus, which the Italians have derived from the English, was not filled beyond its seating capacity, the horse-car was overcrowded without and within at Florence, just as it is with us who invented it.

  “I wouldn’t mind even that,” he said one day to the lady who was drawing him his fifth or sixth cup of tea for that afternoon, and with whom he was naturally making this absurd condition of things a matter of personal question; “but you people here pass your days in a round of unbroken English, except when you talk with your servants. I’m not sure you don’t speak English with the shop people. I can hardly get them to speak Italian to me.”

  “Perhaps they think you can speak English better,” said the lady.

  This went over Florence; in a week it was told to Colville as something said to some one else. He fearlessly reclaimed it as said to himself, and this again was told. In the houses where he visited he had the friendly acceptance of any intelligent and reasonably agreeable person who comes promptly and willingly when he is asked, and seems always to have enjoyed himself when he goes away. But besides this sort of general favour, he enjoyed a very pleasing little personal popularity which came from his interest in other people, from his good-nature, and from his inertness. He slighted no acquaintance, and talked to every one with the same apparent wish to be entertaining. This was because he was incapable of the cruelty of open indifference when his lot was cast with a dull person, and also because he was mentally too lazy to contrive pretences for getting away; besides he did not really find anybody altogether a bore, and he had no wish to shine. He listened without shrinking to stories that he had heard before, and to things that had already been said to him; as has been noted, he had himself the habit of repeating his ideas with the recklessness of maturity, for he had lived long enough to know that this can be done with almost entire safety.

  He haunted the studios a good deal, and through a retrospective affinity with art, and a human sympathy with the sacrifice which it always involves, he was on friendly terms with sculptors and painters who were not in every case so friendly with one another. More than once he saw the scars of old rivalries, and he might easily have been an adherent of two or three parties. But he tried to keep the freedom of the different camps without taking sides; and he felt the pathos of the case when they all told the same story of the disaster which the taste for bric-à-brac had wrought to the cause of art; how people who came abroad no longer gave orders for statues and pictures, but spent their money on curtains and carpets, old chests and chairs, and pots and pans. There were some among these artists whom he had known twenty years before in Florence, ardent and hopeful beginners; and now the backs of their grey or bald heads, as they talked to him with their faces towards their work, and a pencil or a pinch of clay held thoughtfully between their fingers, appealed to him as if he had remained young and prosperous, and they had gone forward to age and hard work. They were very quaint at times. They talked the American slang of the war days and of the days before the war; without a mastery of Italian, they often used the idioms of that tongue in their English speech. They were dim and vague about the country, with whose affairs they had kept up through the newspapers. Here and there one thought he was going home very soon; others had finally relinquished all thoughts of return. These had, perhaps without knowing it, lost the desire to come back; they cowered before the expensiveness of life in America, and doubted of a future with which, indeed, only the young can hopefully grapple. But in spite of their accumulated years, and the evil times on which they had fallen, Colville thought them mostly very happy men, leading simple and innocent lives in a world of the ideal, and rich in the inexhaustible beauty of the city, the sky, the air. They all, whether they were ever going back or not, were fervent Americans, and their ineffaceable nationality marked them, perhaps, all the more strongly for the patches of something alien that overlaid it in places. They knew that he was or had been a newspaper man; but if they secretly cherished the hope that he would bring them to the dolce lume of print, they never betrayed it; and the authorship of his letter about the American artists in Florence, which he printed in the American Register at Paris, was not traced to him for a whole week.

  Colville was a frequent visitor of Mr. Waters, who had a lodging in Piazza San Marco, of the poverty which can always be decent in Italy. It was bare, but for the books that furnished it; with a table for his writing, on a corner of which he breakfasted, a wide sofa with cushions in coarse white linen that frankly confessed itself a bed by night, and two chairs of plain Italian walnut; but the windows, which had no sun, looked out upon the church and the convent sacred to the old Socinian for the sake of the meek, heroic mystic whom they keep alive in all the glory of his martyrdom. No two minds could well have been further apart than the New England minister and the Florentine monk, and no two souls nearer together, as Colville recognised with a not irreverent smile.

  When the old man was not looking up some point of his saint’s history in his books, he was taking with the hopefulness of youth and the patience of age a lesson in colloquial Italian from his landlady’s daughter, which he pronounced with a scholarly scrupulosity and a sincere atonic Massachusetts accent. He practised the language wherever he could, especially at the trattoria where he dined, and where he made occasions to detain the waiter in conversation. They humoured him, out of their national good-heartedness and sympathy, and they did what they could to realise a strange American dish for him on Sundays — a combination of stockfish and potatoes boiled, and then fried together in small cakes. They revered him as a foreign gentleman of saintly amiability and incomprehensible preferences; and he was held in equal regard at the next green-grocer’s where he spent every morning five centessimi for a bunch of radishes and ten for a little pat of butter to eat with his bread and coffee; he could not yet accustom himself to mere bread and coffee for breakfast, though he conformed as completely as he could to the Italian way of living. He respected the abstemiousness of the race; he held that it came from a spirituality of nature to which the North was still strange, with all its conscience and sense of individual accountability. He contended that he never suffered in his small dealings with these people from the dishonesty which most of his countrymen complained of; and he praised their unfailing gentleness of manner; this could arise only from goodness of heart, which was perhaps the best kind of goodness after all.

  None of these humble acquaintance of his could well have accounted for the impression they all had that he was some sort of ecclesiastic. They could never have understood — nor, for that matter, could any one have understood through European tradition — the sort of sacerdotal office that Mr. Waters had filled so long in the little deeply book-clubbed New England village where he had outlived most of his flock, till one day he rose in the midst of the surviving dyspeptics and consumptives and, following the example of Mr. Emerson, renounced his calling for ever. By that time even the pale Un
itarianism thinning out into paler doubt was no longer tenable with him. He confessed that while he felt the Divine goodness more and more, he believed that it was a mistake to preach any specific creed or doctrine, and he begged them to release him from their service. A young man came to fill his place in their pulpit, but he kept his place in their hearts. They raised a subscription of seventeen hundred dollars and thirty-five cents; another being submitted to the new button manufacturer, who had founded his industry in the village, he promptly rounded it out to three thousand, and Mr. Waters came to Florence. His people parted with him in terms of regret as delicate as they were awkward, and their love followed him. He corresponded regularly with two or three ladies, and his letters were sometimes read from his pulpit.

  Colville took the Piazza San Marco in on his way to Palazzo Pinti on the morning when he had made up his mind to go there, and he stood at the window looking out with the old man, when some more maskers passed through the place — two young fellows in old Florentine dress, with a third habited as a nun.

  “Ah,” said the old man gently, “I wish they hadn’t introduced the nun! But I suppose they can’t help signalising their escape from the domination of the Church on all occasions. It’s a natural reaction. It will all come right in time.”

  “You preach the true American gospel,” said Colville.

  “Of course; there is no other gospel. That is the gospel.”

  “Do you suppose that Savonarola would think it had all come out right,” asked Colville, a little maliciously, “if he could look from the window with us here and see the wicked old Carnival, that he tried so hard to kill four hundred years ago, still alive? And kicking?” he added, in cognisance of the caper of one of the maskers.

  “Oh yes; why not? By this time he knows that his puritanism was all a mistake, unless as a thing for the moment only. I should rather like to have Savonarola here with us; he would find these costumes familiar; they are of his time. I shall make a point of seeing all I can of the Carnival, as part of my study of Savonarola, if nothing else.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to give yourself limitations,” said Colville, as one of the maskers threw his arm round the mock-nun’s neck. But the old man did not see this, and Colville did not feel it necessary to explain himself.

  The maskers had passed out of the piazza, now, and “Have you seen our friends at Palazzo Pinti lately?” said Mr. Waters.

  “Not very,” said Colville. “I was just on my way there.”

  “I wish you would make them my compliments. Such a beautiful young creature.”

  “Yes,” said Colville; “she is certainly a beautiful girl.”

  “I meant Mrs. Bowen,” returned the old man quietly.

  “Oh, I thought you meant Miss Graham. Mrs. Bowen is my contemporary, and so I didn’t think of her when you said young. I should have called her pretty rather than beautiful.”

  “No; she’s beautiful. The young girl is good-looking — I don’t deny that; but she is very crude yet.”

  Colville laughed. “Crude in looks? I should have said Miss Graham was rather crude in mind, though I’m not sure I wouldn’t have stopped at saying young.”

  “No,” mildly persisted the old man; “she couldn’t be crude in mind without being crude in looks.”

  “You mean,” pursued Colville, smiling, but not wholly satisfied, “that she hasn’t a lovely nature?”

  “You never can know what sort of nature a young girl has. Her nature depends so much upon that of the man whose fate she shares.”

  “The woman is what the man makes her? That is convenient for the woman, and relieves her of all responsibility.”

  “The man is what the woman makes him, too, but not so much so. The man was cast into a deep sleep, you know — —”

  “And the woman was what he dreamed her. I wish she were.”

  “In most cases she is,” said Mr. Waters.

  They did not pursue the matter. The truth that floated in the old minister’s words pleased Colville by its vagueness, and flattered the man in him by its implication of the man’s superiority. He wanted to say that if Mrs. Bowen were what the late Mr. Bowen had dreamed her, then the late Mr. Bowen, when cast into his deep sleep, must have had Lina Ridgely in his eye. But this seemed to be personalising the fantasy unwarrantably, and pushing it too far. For like reason he forbore to say that if Mr. Waters’s theory were correct, it would be better to begin with some one whom nobody else had dreamed before; then you could be sure at least of not having a wife to somebody else’s mind rather than your own. Once on his way to Palazzo Pinti, he stopped, arrested by a thought that had not occurred to him before in relation to what Mr. Waters had been saying, and then pushed on with the sense of security which is the compensation the possession of the initiative brings to our sex along with many responsibilities. In the enjoyment of this, no man stops to consider the other side, which must wait his initiative, however they mean to meet it.

  In the Por San Maria Colville found masks and dominoes filling the shop windows and dangling from the doors. A devil in red and a clown in white crossed the way in front of him from an intersecting street; several children in pretty masquerading dresses flashed in and out among the crowd. He hurried to the Lung’ Arno, and reached the palace where Mrs. Bowen lived, with these holiday sights fresh in his mind. Imogene turned to meet him at the door of the apartment, running from the window where she had left Effie Bowen still gazing.

  “We saw you coming,” she said gaily, without waiting to exchange formal greetings. “We didn’t know at first but it might; be somebody else disguised as you. We’ve been watching the maskers go by. Isn’t it exciting?”

  “Awfully,” said Colville, going to the window with her, and putting his arm on Effie’s shoulder, where she knelt in a chair looking out. “What have you seen?”

  “Oh, only two Spanish students with mandolins,” said Imogene; “but you can see they’re beginning to come.”

  “They’ll stop now,” murmured Effie, with gentle disappointment; “it’s commencing to rain.”

  “Oh, too bad!” wailed the young girl. But just then two mediaeval men-at-arms came in sight, carrying umbrellas. “Isn’t that too delicious? Umbrellas and chain-armour!”

  “You can’t expect them to let their chain-armour get rusty,” said Colville. “You ought to have been with me — minstrels in scale-armour, Florentines of Savonarola’s times, nuns, clowns, demons, fairies — no end to them.”

  “It’s very well saying we ought to have been with you; but we can’t go anywhere alone.”

  “I didn’t say alone,” said Colville. “Don’t you think Mrs. Bowen would trust you with me to see these Carnival beginnings?” He had not meant at all to do anything of this kind, but that had not prevented his doing it.

  “How do we know, when she hasn’t been asked?” said Imogene, with a touch of burlesque dolor, such as makes a dignified girl enchanting, when she permits it to herself. She took Effie’s hand in hers, the child having faced round from the window, and stood smoothing it, with her lovely head pathetically tilted on one side.

  “What haven’t I been asked yet?” demanded Mrs. Bowen, coming lightly toward them from a door at the side of the salon. She gave her hand to Colville with the prettiest grace, and a cordiality that brought a flush to her cheek. There had really been nothing between them but a little unreasoned coolness, if it were even so much as that; say rather a dryness, aggravated by time and absence, and now, as friends do, after a thing of that kind, they were suddenly glad to be good to each other.

  “Why, you haven’t been asked how you have been this long time,” said Colville.

  “I have been wanting to tell you for a whole week,” returned Mrs. Bowen, seating the rest and taking a chair for herself. “Where have you been?”

  “Oh, shut up in my cell at Hotel d’Atene, writing a short history of the Florentine people for Miss Effie.”

  “Effie, take Mr. Colville’s hat,” said her mother. �
��We’re going to make you stay to lunch,” she explained to him.

  “Is that so?” he asked, with an effect of polite curiosity.

  “Yes.” Imogene softly clapped her hands, unseen by Mrs. Bowen, for Colville’s instruction that all was going well. If it delights women to pet an undangerous friend of our sex, to use him like one of themselves, there are no words to paint the soft and flattered content with which his spirit purrs under their caresses. “You must have nearly finished the history,” added Mrs. Bowen.

  “Well, I could have finished it,” said Colville, “if I had only begun it. You see, writing a short history of the Florentine people is such quick work that you have to be careful how you actually put pen to paper, or you’re through with it before you’ve had any fun out of it.”