by Grant Allen
“But this is very interesting,” Arthur Wingham continued, in a reflective voice. “I never thought of that before. Italy must swarm with returned emigrants — people who have made money in England, and who bring back their children, practically as English boys and girls, to Lombardy or Tuscany.”
“I went to Leather Lane Board-School,”
Mariana chimed in, anxious to show that she had had the advantage of the best education. “Rosalba didn’t. She wasn’t big enough.” And she looked down on me from her majestic height of three inches taller with a calm expression of cultivated compassion.
“So this is Rosalba?” the artist mused, laying his hand on my head — and I felt proud of the recognition.
“Then your name’s Marier-Ann?” He glanced inquiry at my sister.
“No, it ain’t,” Mariana replied, colouring up. “That’s only what the girls used to call me in London. Rosalba calls me so still, when we speak English together, on purpose to rile me. My proper name’s Mariana Lupari. We talk English to each other when we don’t want these Italian folks to understand us.”
For we stood, we two, on a rare and select pinnacle above the rest of the world — poised aloft between heaven and earth as natural international aristocrats. From our mother’s teaching, we had learned to despise the mere Italian as an inferior creature; from our father’s, and indeed from the universal opinion of the Monti Berici, we had grown to look upon Englishmen (represented in our midst only by tourists who toiled painfully up our hill to visit the Madonna del Monte) as an awkward race of ignorant barbarians, seldom able to understand the most elementary Italian, but flocking day after day in the same aimless fashion to stare at the same familiar objects with the same bland grin, and to worry us with the same endless and imbecile questions. Mariana and I felt sick of directing the bewildered creatures from the door of the Madonna to the Rotonda Palladiana, along a road well known to every child in the parish.
The consequence was that we looked down upon the Italians because they were not English, and looked down upon the English because they were silly ignoramuses.
Our new friends seated themselves on the parapet by the arcades, where green lizards basked in the sun, and began to draw us out. We were extremely ductile. It flattered our vanity to be treated as centres of interest; and the tourists in grey and brown were obviously interested in us. We told them everything about our family and friends, magnifying not a little the ancestral grandeur and wealth of the Lupari, and expatiating on the fact that when we lived in London our papa had a clean white shirt-front every day of the week, and wore a tie exactly like an English padre’s. We also dwelt with pride upon the extent and beauty of our landed possessions — four acres, nearly — and on our papa’s connection with the famous General Garibaldi. Mariana talked most, being now well warmed up to a congenial theme; the tourists sat and laughed at all her sallies. The more they laughed, the more she spurred her active imagination. Before she had finished, I think our papa had been elevated into a colonel on Garibaldi’s staff, and was shown by facts to have been mainly instrumental in driving certain strange wild beasts known as Austrians out of Lombardy and Venice.
Her talk was so racy and so irresponsible — for Mariana has never allowed her fancy to be restricted by petty considerations of conformity to fact — that even John Stodmarsh forgot for a time his desire to see everything that was starred in Baedeker, and loitered and laughed through the precious half-hours that ought to have been conscientiously devoted to the crumbling inanities of the Rotonda Palladiana. The smell of wine-vats hung on the air, the cicalas shrilled to us. We might have stood there before them all day, cutting capers and making antic faces for Arthur Wingham’s sketch-book, or chasing grasshoppers to their holes with wild shrieks of laughter, had not our mother happened to notice our prolonged absence, and therefore to suspect the intervention of tourists, our usual tempters from the path of duty. She hurried up the hill, breathless. “An’ for phwat didn’t ye come home to yer dinner?” she asked us angrily.
Mariana mounted her high horse. “We have been showing the church to a couple of English gentlemen,” she answered with her habitual dignity.
Mother surveyed the intruders with mitigated scorn. An English gentleman she respected — in his proper place, Pall Mall; “but phwat would they be wanting coming to these outlandish counthries,” she used to exclaim, “searching out tumble-dhown disrepairious churches, whan there’s foiner buildings to be seen in London than in the length and breadth of this blessed Italy?” It always surprised mother to think that his Holiness should consint to live in Rome, when’t was Ould Oireland that would have been glad to extind him the roight hand of welcome. If I am to be entirely frank (as I desire to be in these personal memoirs), I must admit that among the people for whom Mariana and I had a condescending contempt I cannot refrain from reckoning my mother. As Londoners and Englishwomen, we were sadly conscious of her taint of mere Irishry.
The tourists, however, succeeded in engaging her agreeably in conversation. My mother was affable, when affably approached. She imparted to them her views on the Italian situation. Was it neighbours, indeed? Shure, who would want to go an’ mix theirselves up with a jabberin’ pack of beggarly Italians? (As representatives of the ancestral Lupari, we resented this insult to our ancient land from a mere Irishwoman like mother.) Barrin’ the priest — an wasn’t even the priest hisself, God bless him, an Italian? — who would she be afther wanting to speak to in all Veechentzer? Her husband? — yes, her husband was an Italian too; but thin, that was different. Hadn’t he lived in England, an’ inculcated English habits, an’ lamed to spake like a Crischun? Whoile these other Italians, who had nivver been furder off nor Veechentzer in their loives — who could understand what they said, bar the childer? Oh, yes, the childer spoke Italian, as you moight say, to the manner born; but for herself, bein’ a lady, she wouldn’t bemane herself to spake it She kept herself to herself; and she laid so profound an accent on that impressive to that I am not quite sure I ought not spell it t-double-o.
In these later years, looking back upon that remote past through a mist of time, I find it hard to realise that the queer little savage who made dust-pies, and charmed cicalas from their crannies, and performed the obsequies of the patriot dead, and accosted strangers on the Monte Berico, was really myself, or that the curious uprooted Irishwoman who regarded all Italy as an outlandish desert was really my mother. I seem to look back upon it all as upon some vague story I once read in my childhood. The truth is, we cannot disentangle ourselves from our acquired personalities; and to me in Venetia now — dear campanile-sprinkled, rose-embowered, mulberry-leaved Venetia — all that early life appears to have been passed in some other country. The reason is, I saw Vicenza then, half with the eyes of a London street child, half with those of an Italian peasant; I see it now, if you will pardon my saying so, with the eyes of an educated English lady.
The gulf is so immense that I bridge it with difficulty.
It was the same with my father’s trade. At the present day I can order lunch with equanimity at any other restaurant in London — but not at Gatti’s. I speak in a hushed voice to Gatti’s waiters. I know what great gentlemen they are, and I feel afraid to call for lobster mayonnaise and a flask of Chianti without apologetic deference. Are they not philanthropists in disguise, who serve tables from a sense of duty?
For a like reason, you must provisionally forgive my picture of my mother. Do not chide me for unfilial frankness. It is not my fault if I have outgrown my surroundings. Besides, to explain all just now would be premature — the grammarians say, proleptic. I must ask you to wait, as part of my Method.
“Is it to show ye the way to the Rotonda?” mother asked at last, in answer to a request of John Stodmarsh’s. “An’ phwat for would ye want to see the Rotonda at all, at all. ‘T is the desolate tumble-dhown edifice it is, for annyone in their sinses to go an’ visit. They’ll be charging ye half a lira to show the place to ye, an’ sorra a t
hing is there in it to show that ye wouldn’t foind better anny day in London. Shure, phwat English gintlefolks would come to see Italy for whan they might be visiting the grand, majestic scaynery of the west coast of Oireland, wid the mountains an’ the clouds an’ the ruined great historic castles of the ould Oirish kings, is a thing that annybody with a brain in their heads moight wondher at. But ‘t is the Lord’s doing, an’ no mistake, that whan ye won’t go insoide a Cahtholic church at home, ye’ll come abroad of yer own free will to sake for them, and so have the seeds of the thrue religion instilled unbeknown to yerselves widin ye. — Is it the Rotonda ye want? The childer will show ye the way to the Rotonda, if ye must waste your money on a delapidated, ruinatious, unsoightly buildin’; but moind ye come back sthraight from the door, Mariana, an’ bring along Rosalba, or it’s the palm of me hand will be makin’ better acquaintance wid ye.”
We nodded assent and guided them to the Rotonda, which was indeed, as mother had said, a dilapidated, ruinatious place, with damp peeling plaster, and shabby time-stained Ionic colonnades — a hall of past splendours, sinking fast to the final stage of Italian decay. At the lichen-eaten doorway by the main entrance our tourists knocked and paid their half-lira. We children drew back, unable to accompany them within that mysterious portal, on whose threshold we had stood and peeped in vain so often. Arthur Wingham laid his hand on my head once more before he passed through the doorway. “Good-bye, Rosalba!” he said kindly.
“Good-bye, Mariana! I have got your portraits here, and some day they shall hang on gallery walls in London!”
John Stodmarsh gave Mariana half a franc, but said nothing.
As we hastened home, mindful of mother’s threat (which was no idle verbiage), I said to Mariana, “I like the one in brown best. È piu carino. He spoke so nice to us.”
Mariana curled her disdainful lip. “The one in grey gave me ten soldi,” she answered.
So they faded out of our lives. Perhaps, save for what happened long afterwards, and especially for the accident of Arthur Wingham’s sketch-book, these two tourists might even have dropped for ever from my memory, like all the other tourists who, day after day, mopped their foreheads on the steep arcaded path up the shadowless hill, and spoke evil freely of the Italian sun, and stared open-mouthed at the Mass of St. Gregory, as old Giuseppe, that authority on art, directed them to do in the Madonna del Monte.
CHAPTER III
I MAKE A DISCOVERY
A DOMESTIC critic — God bless him! — who is peering over my shoulder as I write, and attempting to interfere with the originality of my work, here raises an objection. “If you cannot recollect your own dialect, my child,” he says, “how comes it that you can so perfectly recollect your mother’s?”
Now, I call that objection silly. It shows a man’s usual lack of power to project himself into somebody else’s situation. Of course I can recollect my mother’s dialect: I stood outside it; I could observe and criticise it. Even at that age, Mariana and I, being irreverent chits, used to mimic it with success. But my own dialect formed part of myself; I was not aware that I talked cockney; I thought I talked English. In later days I outgrew my accent by slow degrees through intercourse with more refined and cultivated speakers; but I never knew I was outgrowing it; and now I cannot even reproduce it tolerably by an effort of memory. Will that satisfy you, stupid?
Our life on the Monti Berici — to return from this digression — is the earliest stage which I can recall with distinctness. Perhaps I see it through the golden mist of childhood. We had very good times there, Mariana and I; very good times on the whole, though mother was trying. We attended the communal school, where I learned to read and write Italian. Mariana, for her part, had learned to read and write English in London; she gave herself airs on the strength of the supposed superiority of the Leather Lane Board-School, which was extremely “grand,” and where she alone had gone, to the one we both shared on the Monte Berico. “Grand” was always Mariana’s pet epithet of commendation; it mirrored an ideal. I picked it up from her, though I never quite assimilated the feeling it embodied. Nowadays, Mariana no longer speaks of things as “grand”; she has outgrown that adjective. But she loves them “smart” — which is, after all, a distinction without much difference.
By Mariana’s aid I learned to read English too, though I could never quite get over the topsy-turvy insular silliness of the English mode of printing, which puts e’s for is, and as for e’s in the weirdest fashion. However, I conquered this erratic orthography; I managed to master the strange system of conventions by which many letters were made to do duty for a single sound, while many sounds were attached, en revanche, to a single letter. The conquest of written English thus achieved put me in a position to read all the literature our house afforded. Our library was not large, and chance had selected it; but, considering our position, it was choice and liberal. We had the Life of Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italian, and the Famous Murders, and two startling paper-covered sensational novels whose honoured names, like their authors’, have escaped me. In English we had The Path to Paradise, and the Life of St. Theresa, and the Cornhill Magazine for June, 1870, and a fragmentary copy of The Cook’s Companion.
All these were profoundly interesting in varied ways — especially the last; it opened up such vistas of unimagined luxury. But there were three other books on the kitchen shelf which I much preferred to them.
One had lost its cover, though it retained its title-page. It was called The Thousand and One Nights; A New Translation. What “A New Translation” might mean I had not the slightest idea; Giùseppe thought it referred obscurely to the body of some saint; but I loved that book; something strange and foreign in it, as of another world, took hold of my fancy. I had no conception of what a Caliph was, though I gathered from the text that he was a very “grand” gentleman, even grander than the Sindaco; nor had I the dimmest glimmering of what was meant by a sultana, or a mosque, or a dervish, or a dromedary. But I knew that Islam was the right faith which everybody in that world ought to hold, like the Holy Church in ours; and I was no more shocked by the heterodoxy of the book than I was shocked in fairy-tales by the complete absence of any mawkish modern morality. “So he out with his sword, and cut off the old woman’s head, and then went on with his journey singing.” In that tolerant spirit — the true spirit of literature — I accepted the Thousand and One Nights, not even knowing that they were called Arabian. For me, they dropped from the clouds; I think I suspected them of belonging rather to the moon or the stars than to any mere terrestrial Araby or Egypt.
The second book among my favourite books was also in English. It had neither cover nor title-page, so I did not know who wrote it Indeed, I fancy I had not yet arrived at the point of understanding that books were written by somebody; I accepted them just as books — a natural product, like music or strawberries. This second book was quite unlike the Thousand and One Nights; it did not tell a tale outright, by means of narrative, but made a number of separate speakers say each his own part, so that by putting all together you arrived at last at a comprehension of what was happening. Still, it was like the Thousand and One Nights in this — that it did not tell a single story alone, but several. Each of these stories had a name of its own; those I liked best were called A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Roméo and Juliet, As You Like It, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. There was also a lovely tale whose name was The Tempest; but, unfortunately, the first few scenes of that were torn out, like the title-page, so I could never make out how Ferdinand and his companions were stranded on the island, Julius Caesar was good, though I thought it too much like the Famous Murders, but Hamlet was sad trash; while all the Henrys (except one with Falstaff in it) were too dull for anything. Oddest of all, though the book was in English, almost every name and scene was Italian! Roméo lived at a place called Verona, whose white towers we could make out in fine weather from the Madonna del Monte; while that wicked man, Shylock, was a Jew in Venice, and Portia came from Padua, where father
used to go from time to time to confer with the Party. It shocked me afterwards to learn that in England everybody mispronounced Roméo’s name as Romeo.
The third book, which I loved best of all, was written in Italian — very old and quaint and grandiose Italian. It also had lost both cover and title; but it was, oh, in beautiful verse, and extremely orthodox. No Islam there, no Koran, but the Christian epic. It told one all about Heaven and Hell and Purgatory, and — this was its chief charm — it was composed by somebody who had really been there. That made it so interesting; because, though our own priest knew a great deal about Heaven and Hell, it was only at second hand, from books and pictures. But the signore in the poetry-book — a saturnine, disdainful, bitter-tongued gentleman — had actually seen everything he described, and knew precisely what each floor of Hell was made of. I liked them all, and read them all eagerly. Heaven I thought just a trifle vague — a somewhat shadowy Paradiso. Hell, on the contrary, had a fiery and icy materiality about it that was quite convincing — a most vivid Inferno. Purgatory I despised as fit only for people who had the courage neither of their sins nor their virtues. I hate half-measures. Give me a harp and crown, or to wallow with Ugolino!
These three books formed the basis of my education. Only long after did I learn how fortunate I had been in having for the constant companions of my childhood Shakespeare, Dante, and the nameless but immortal Egyptians. I carried them out on the hillside, and read them where hedges of box and cypress breathed their resinous breath in the sunshine. By their aid I learned to converse with fairies and goddesses.
