by Grant Allen
The younger man took no notice of his friend’s remark, which did not seem to interest him, but went on sketching my face and figure in different attitudes. I danced about accordingly. “I sha’n’t have such another chance again, perhaps,” he observed in explanation, holding his book at arm’s length and examining his work critically with his head on one side. “She wears the native costume, which is so rare nowadays. Besides, the little flibbertygibbet’s pretty!”
“Has character too,” the other added.
“Yes; that small, mobile, daintily protruding chin always means character — a strong will, but capricious. It is a whimsical chin. She will live to fascinate.”
The elder man regarded him with contemptuous toleration. “Well, I hope you won’t be long,” he said, casting an eye towards the white dome of the Madonna del Monte. “I particularly wish to see this Montagna in the church; it’s starred in Baedeker. That’s one of the worst faults I have to find with you painter fellows, Wingham. You come to Italy, the fatherland of art, and yet you think more of making your own wretched little modern sketches than of looking at all the wonderful works the really big men have bequeathed to humanity. I pointed that out in London, when we were starting on this trip. A fellow I know said to me at the club: ‘How nice for you that Arthur Wingham is going with you! It must be such an advantage to visit Italy in company with an artist!’ And I answered: ‘Don’t you believe it, my dear sir. I know what Wingham will be doing all the time. Instead of standing awestruck before Michael Angelo and Raphael, he’ll be fidgeting over little studies of his own every minute — picturesque small beggar-children’” — he waved his hand demonstratively towards Mariana and me—”’or red-sailed fishing-boats off the quays at Venice!’”
The man in brown, called Wingham, closed his sketch-book hastily. “You ‘re right, Stodmarsh,” he answered, colouring up in turn, for he was naturally sensitive. “You touch it with a needle. It makes me ashamed to think I should be scribbling wretched sketches, which I could do in London, after all, when this may be my one chance of seeing Italy.”
He popped the book into his pocket, securely fastened by its elastic band, and moved on towards the big church. We danced around them as they went. “Let us see the Montagna,” he continued, slowly, “which is starred in Baedeker.” He fell into a musing vein.
“Think of that! Starred in Baedeker! — And yet, after all, Montagna was young once, I suppose, and wandered on these hills, just like us, in springtime, and made sketches and studies of peasants and their heads — and was not yet an old master, nor starred in Baedeker.” He paused for a second and gazed at the great grey town. “No man, when one comes to think of it, Stodmarsh, is born ready-starred — except, of course, St Dominic: he has to earn his star; and when he has earned it even from the judicious Baedeker, you look at him and admire him. But would you have admired Montagna, that’s the question” — he struck his stick on the ground— “before Baedeker existed: when he was wandering on these slopes, with a sketch-book in his pocket, jotting notes as he went of sun-brown Italian children?”
The man in grey looked huffy. “Oh, if you intend to be didactic,” he interposed, “and satirical as well, I think we had better make straight for the church. Satire is not your forte. I prefer even your thumb-nail sketches to your satire.”
I have said that they were both young. The one called Wingham I judged to be about twenty — at least, he looked of an age with Gabriele Valmarano, whom we knew to be over nineteen. The other, Stodmarsh (who had a squarer and more portly figure, very thick-set for his years), I imagined to be twenty-two or thereabouts. Arthur Wingham had poetical features and a budding black moustache, — mere lines faintly pencilled on his upper lip, — which he caressed somewhat oftener than its size seemed to justify. John Stodmarsh was close-shaven, with a solid chin and that clear-cut, logical, doctrinaire type of face which in the lower ranks of life betokens a coachman, and in the upper a political economist. I know that now; at the time I only thought it most sober and quizzical.
They strolled into the church, and presumably proceeded to examine the Montagna, whatever that might be. Mariana and I trooped in close after them, as is the nature of Italian childhood; when forestieri came to admire our Madonna, we always accompanied them to watch the effect our sanctuary produced. We also wanted to discover this mysterious Montagna, of which till then we had never heard. But we soon came to the conclusion that our tourists’ knowledge of Italian must be extremely slight; for they went straight up to the old-fashioned altar-piece on the right of the high altar, and began staring hard at the queer dark picture and calling it the Montagna. Now, we knew very well this was nothing of the sort; for’t was really Our Lady and the blessed saints mourning over the dead body of the Signore, which we speak of as a Pietà. The elementary religious ignorance these Inglesi displayed in calling that a Montagna surprised and shocked us. But we remembered what mother had often told us, that most Englishmen were atheists.
What made the impression still more painful was the duplicity of old Giuseppe, the sacristan; for that bad old man, hearing the forestieri describe this Pietà as a Montagna, aided and abetted them in their error with base compliance, instead of withstanding them to their faces, as I had done in the matter of the word Berici. He murmured in acquiescence, “Si, si; Montagna,” and wagged his shaky head sapiently, and waited about, rubbing his hands in expectation of a few sous, with a mendacious servility that quite astonished us. For we knew he understood perfectly well that this was really the Blessed Madonna and the dead Signore; since he had often explained the meaning of the picture to us, and had even told us which of the grand ladies around was the blessed Magdalen, with her alabaster box of ointment, very precious, and which was San Giovanni, and which Giuseppe of Arimathea, his patron and namesake. We were Italians, and our respect for truth was not quixotic; we handled it carelessly ourselves at times: but this cringing concession to the ignorance and prejudice of the stranger heretics — merely because they were known to be dispensers of soldi — set our patriot backs up.
Still, we sauntered round the big, bare church, following the man Stodmarsh, who stalked about in the most businesslike way, with his little red book in his hand, reading every line as he went, and evidently engaged in the favourite tourist pursuit of verifying Baedeker. We could see at a glance he was a tourist who understood his trade; because he stopped the proper length of time, as by custom established, no more and no less, before each separate statue or altar-piece. Strangers, we knew, always stood longest and gazed up hardest before the soaring work that Giuseppe described as the Mass of St. Gregory; they also listened with marked attention while he related in devious detail how it had been torn to shreds by godless revolutionists and then neatly mended again. We knew that story by heart, and could have repeated it word for word in the same quavering recitative as old Giuseppe, throwing in the explanatory nods and waves of the hand at all the right points, so as to make it more comprehensible to the poor ignorant forestieri. Now, Stodmarsh went round and looked and listened at each of the wonted places, according to Baedeker and old Giuseppe; so we could tell at once he was a traveller who knew something about travel. He understood how the Madonna del Monte ought to be visited by one who wished to fulfil the whole duty of a tourist!
But the man in brown, called Wingham, how he puzzled us! Instead of walking once right round the church, as he ought to have done, and stopping like a docile pupil wherever Giuseppe told him, so as to admire the proper things in due proportion, this singular person spent a ridiculously long time standing before the picture of Our Lady and the Signore, with his mouth half open, and staring at it as Maso, the idiot of the hill, stares at passers-by when he doesn’t recognise them. He kept gazing at it first from one side and then from the other, with his hand shading his eyes: standing near it now, and then far away from it; peering close into parts of it that were quite uninteresting, and catching bits of the background (where there were no figures at all) in different
lights, after the silliest fashion. Mariana and I stood behind, and tittered and giggled. It was quite clear this young man knew absolutely nothing about the complete art of being a tourist. He behaved so foolishly that Mariana took pity upon his innocence and stupidity at last, and, pointing to the figure in the centre of the picture said distinctly, “Questa è la Santissima Maddalena!” at which the man in brown only smiled, and answered softly in very doubtful Italian, “Si, si, my child, I know; but just look at her robe; how exquisitely, how superbly that hem is painted!” Then we both tittered again, because he not only used the wrong word for hem, but also made it feminine!
After he had finished with the Pietà (from which he withdrew his eyes with a regretful air, because Stodmarsh called him), he walked all round the church, not looking at the right things at all, and muttering wearily, “Yes, yes!” when Giuseppe directed his attention to the Mass of St. Gregory, but stopping now and then to examine some rose-marble column or some alabaster relief of odd little saints in the act of martyrdom — things which no tourist before had ever admired — sometimes even things that Mariana and I, who were not tourists at all, used to look at with interest because they were so funny. “Very quaint!” he called them. His delight in these trifles justly annoyed better-informed Mr. Stodmarsh, who kept on calling out, “Come on, come on! You know we have still to see Palladio’s Rotonda.” And Wingham answered almost angrily, “Oh, confound Palladio, and confound his Rotonda!” Indeed — and here I trust to my memory — he used a stronger expression, which that artificially cultivated maidenly modesty I spoke about just now prevents me from transcribing. But still, he used it. Maidenly modesty may conceal facts; it cannot alter them. As for old Giuseppe, he fingered his stubbly chin, and eyed the man in brown as one eyes a suspected lunatic.
Of course we followed them out of the church as we had followed them into it. We did not want to be obtrusive, but we always held it a point of hospitality personally to conduct the stranger round the Monti Berici. We would not even have grudged trailing after our new friends as far as the station at Vicenza, so high was our sense of our duty towards the foreigner. But outside the church, after he had dropped half a franc into Giuseppe’s expectant though unwashed palm, the man in brown paused again and stared at me. “I must have another try at that child,” he exclaimed in an apologetic voice, half turning to Stodmarsh. “I can’t quite catch the little sprite. Her face is so elusive!”
I did not feel sure whether to be called a sprite and described as elusive was complimentary or otherwise; but I gave my tourist the benefit of the doubt and, showing my white row of Italian teeth, smiled on him benignly.
This was too much for Mariana, who was always considered prettier than I, and whose vanity was hurt because the artist had not sketched her demure face as well as my roguish one; so she gave me a push on the church steps which nearly knocked me over.
I recovered my balance with dignity, and determined that this conduct should not be repeated. I looked right into her eyes, therefore, and observed with spirit in my shrillest voice:
“Naow, then, Marier-Ann, if you do that agin, — I shall gao stright in an’ tell your mother!”
CHAPTER II
AFTER THE EXPLOSION
THESE few simple words — spoken I am assured in a fine cockney accent — produced an effect upon our tourists which fairly astonished us.
Arthur Wingham stood still and gazed at me, with his mouth agape, as he had gazed at the Pietà. One might have imagined he had never heard anybody speak English before, so breathless was his amazement. He fell back a pace or two, and regarded me with fixed eyes. Then he stammered out in a slow voice, “Why — this child — is a Londoner!”
I drew myself up very straight and replied with dignity, “Of course I’m a Londoner!” Pride has ever been my besetting sin. I was proud of my birth as I was proud of my ancestry.
“Then you ‘re not Italian at all!” he went on, observing me with a subdued air of pained regret. He seemed to think I had succeeded in getting my portrait drawn under false pretences.
“Of course I’m Italian!” I answered again, cutting a quick little caper which ought alone to have vouched for my nationality. To a child of ten, everything is “of course.” He or she expects the stranger to know what to him or her is a familiar piece of common knowledge.
John Stodmarsh, knitting his brows, brought his logical intelligence to bear upon the problem. “Oh, I see,” he interposed, with an air of conviction. “Don’t you catch at it, Wingham? These are organ-grinders’ children.”
Organ-grinders, indeed! The blood of the Lupari boiled within me. “My Pa’s not an organ-grinder!” I cried, just indignation finding words spontaneously.
“He was employed at Gatti’s,” Mariana added with a saucy toss of her pretty head: for in the poor Italian colony in London, whose feelings we still retained, to be employed at Gatti’s was as a patent of nobility. It distinguished one immediately from the vendors of ice-cream, or the purveyors of works of art in plaster of Paris.
“Ah, just so. A waiter!” John Stodmarsh put in; and we both hated him for it: for our papa had been a grand gentleman in a black tail-coat and a white tie in London — so grand, indeed, that we children were not even allowed to nod recognition if we met him in his official dress near the Adelaide Gallery. It hurt our tenderest feelings that this mere tourist in a grey tweed suit — a common crush-hatted, red-book-ridden tourist — should say “A waiter!” in such a contemptuous tone of so grand a personage. The blood of the Lupari rose once more to 212° Fahrenheit “He was a waiter in London,” Mariana put in — I have no doubt what she really said was more like “witer”; “but he has retired from business” — she swelled with conscious importance, for Mariana always thought a great deal of herself and her family— “and now, he is a landowner here on the Monte Berico.” John Stodmarsh looked at Arthur Wingham, Arthur Wingham looked at John Stodmarsh. Then both burst out laughing. Stodmarsh’s laugh was stolid British; the painter’s was shy; it proceeded rather from embarrassment than from amusement.
“But if so — you have understood all we said,” he stammered out abruptly.
He spoke in so regretful a tone that I forgave him at once for having called my poor little nose “a bit snubby.” He was clearly ashamed of himself, though it was the unrepentant Stodmarsh, after all, who had ventured to describe us as “picturesque little Italian beggar-children.”
“Of course,” Mariana answered, with a becoming curl of her supercilious lip — whatever else I may have said or thought of Mariana, I have never denied that she was and is extremely pretty. “Ain’t we born Londoners?”
Arthur Wingham’s confusion and vexation were manifest. “It never occurred to me, Stodmarsh,” he said in a low voice, turning to his friend, “that these children could possibly understand English.”
“Oh, it doesn’t much matter,” Stodmarsh answered, lighting a cigarette. “Though we might have known — p’f, p’f — they were not likely to be real Italians, they’re so theatrically Italian in dress and get-up.”
I flared once more. “We are real Italians,” I exclaimed aggressively. “My Pa’s a Garibaldian.” I fired the fact point-blank at him, like a Martini-Henry.
“Revolutionary ruffians!” the man in grey responded, between his puffs.
“How long have you lived here?” the artist asked, still hot and uneasy.
“Two years,” I answered. “But, all the same, we ain’t forgotten London.”
This will fully explain to you, I hope, how it was that we understood what the tourists said to one another. Also, you may now perhaps perceive why I did not unfold as much to you from the first; which casts light on my Method. (Every novelist nowadays cultivates a Method.) If I had told you at the beginning, the revelation would have lacked the element of surprise. And that further demonstrates, as has been remarked before, how Wisdom is justified of all her children.
“Our Ma’s English,” Mariana observed, looking up at the tw
o astonished men with her coquettish eyes wide open.
“At least, she’s Irish,” I corrected. I was aware that a caste difference separated Irish from English; and, while anxious to uphold the honour of the Lupari, I did not desire to bolster it up under false pretences.
“Noble London twangs they’ve got, certainly,” Stodmarsh remarked in a patronising aside. I winced, but recognised that he owed me a return for my open ridicule of his pronunciation of Berici.
And noble London twangs we had, no doubt. I cannot deny it. Still, I will not endeavour here to reproduce our peculiar form of speech as it existed at that moment. I am not an adept in the cockney tongue; I have forgotten it as utterly as the Tichborne Claimant forgot his French, and could scarcely now write it down correctly, were it but as a literary exercise. Years of intercourse with cultivated speakers, both in English and in Italian, have so killed that past, both for Mariana and for me, that we fail even to recall it accurately. Everybody who has heard Mariana in Gounod’s Faust knows how exquisitely clear and pure are “The Lupari’s” pronunciation and articulation in either of our alternative mother tongues. But we must then have spoken like all our neighbours. Indeed, when I first revisited the Monti Berici in my later days, I had difficulty in understanding what my old friends the Valmarani and the Rodari said to me. You must forgive me, therefore, if, after the one specimen of our speech which I first flung before your eyes, I abstain from the attempt to write out our childish sayings in the now unfamiliar cockney dialect.
I will further confess that even that one little specimen itself is not wholly due to my unaided memory. There still exists, framed and hung on the wall of Arthur Wingham’s studio, a stray page from his first Italian sketch-book: it contains a rough drawing of a wild and stray-haired Vicenzan girl, in native costume, wearing an ineffable expression of monkeyish perversity; beneath which are inscribed those precise words, taken down on the spot, “Naow, then, Marier-Ann, if you do that agin, I shall gao stright in an’ tell your mother.” By means of this priceless piece of documentary evidence saved from the wreck of years, as well as by my own and the painter’s memories, I have pieced together the scene as I now relate it for you.
