XLIV Two Years Overseas — Life in Rome and Geneva
The main events of the two years spent abroad by our small family, including “The Invaluable,” as we soon came to call Rose O’Neill, are set down in Loiterings in Pleasant Paths, a chatty volume of travel and sojourn, published soon after our return to America. The private record of those two dozen months would far surpass the book in bulk. It will never be written except as it is stamped upon “the fleshly tables of the hearts” of those who lived and loved, studied, and revelled with us.
We had meant to pass the first winter in Paris, but the most beautiful city of the world was unfriendly to my sore and aching lung. After an experiment of six weeks, we broke camp and sped southward. Ten days in the fair Florence I was to learn in after years to love as a second home, repeated the doleful tale of fog, rain, and chill that pierced our bones.
An old Richmond friend, with whom I had had many a jolly frolic in my early girlhood, was now Reverend Doctor Taylor, a resident of Rome. After the exchange of several letters, we adopted his friendly advice that we should give the Eternal City a trial as the refuge we sought—so much less hopefully than at first, that I entreated my husband, on the rainy evening of our arrival in Rome, not to push inquiries further, but to let me go home, and die in comfort there.
Doctor Taylor had ordered rooms for us in a family hotel well spoken of by Americans, and was at the station to conduct us to our quarters.
I was deposited upon a sofa, when my wraps were removed, and lay there, fairly wearied out by the railway journey. The room was fireless and carpetless. I could feel the chill of the stone flooring and the bare walls through the blankets in which I was swathed by distressful Rose, who “guessed these Eyetalians hadn’t the first notion of what American comfort is!” Three long French casements afforded a full view of leaden, low-stooping skies and straight sheets of rain. When a fire of sticks, besmeared with resin, was coaxed into a spiteful flare, the smoke puffed as spitefully into the room, and drifted up to the ceiling twenty feet overhead. Invited by my ever-hospitable husband to seat himself near an apology for a cheery hearthstone—less pitiful to him after his ten years’ residence in Italy than to us, the new arrivals—our friend fell into social chat of ways and means. The carpet would be down to-morrow; the sun would shine to-morrow; I would be rested to-morrow.
He broke off with a genial laugh there, to impart a bit of information we were to prove true to the utmost during the next year:
“Everything is ‘domano’ with Italians. I think the babies are born with it in their mouths. One falls into the habit with mortifying ease.”
I am afraid I dozed for a few minutes, lulled by the patter of rain and the low-toned talk going on at the far (literally) side of the apartment. A lively visitor used to wonder if we “could see across it on cloudy days without an opera-glass.”
This was the next sentence that reached me:
“Thus far, we have met with discouragement. March is the most trying month to weak lungs in America. And ever since we landed in Liverpool we have had nothing but March weather. I think now we shall push on to Algiers”—glancing ruefully at the murky windows. “Upon one thing I am determined—to find a land where there is no March, as we know the month. For one year I want to secure that for my wife’s breathing apparatus.”
“I know of but one such region.” The answer was in the slight drawl natural to the George Taylor I used to know; the speaker stared sombrely into the peevish fire.
“And that?” interrogated the other, eagerly.
The drawl had now a nasal touch befitting the question:
“‘No chilling winds, no poisonous breath
Can reach that healthful shore!’”
“Heavens and earth, man! That is just where I don’t want her to go yet! Nor for many a long year!”
The laugh I could not suppress helped to warm and brighten us all. Do any of us suspect how much we owe to the funny side of life?
Thus began my Roman winter. With “domano” came the sunshine and the carpet, and the first of the hundred drives in and about the storied city, that were to bring healing and vigor, such as even my optimistic husband had scarcely dared to anticipate. That I am alive upon this wonderful, beautiful earth at this good hour, I owe, under God, to those divine four months among the Seven Hills. Doctor Terhune had received the appointment to the Chaplaincy of the American Chapel in Rome before we left Paris. He decided to accept it within a week after our arrival in the Eternal City. It was a cosey corner for pastor and flock—that little church in Piazza Poli, belonging to an Italian Protestant corporation, and occupied by them for half of each Sunday, by American tourists and transient residents of Rome for the other half. All my memories of the wonderful and bewitching winter are happy. None have a gentler charm than those which renew the scenes of quiet Sunday forenoons when visitors from the dear home-land, who had never before looked upon the faces of their fellow-worshippers, gathered by common consent in the place “where prayer was wont to be made” in their own tongue. There were no strangers in the assembly that lingered in the tiny vestibule and blocked the aisle when the service was over. The spirit of mutual helpfulness spoke in eye and speech. It should not have been considered singular that those thus convened were, almost without exception, refined and educated, and so unlike the commonly accepted type of travelling American, that we often commented upon the fact in conferences with familiar friends. We felicitated ourselves that we caught the cream of the flow of tourists, that season.
“It is a breath of the dear old home-life!” said more than one attendant upon the simple services, where the congregation was kaleidoscopic in outward seeming, the same in spirit.
I cannot pass over this period of our foreign life without a tribute to one whose friendship and able co-operation in the work laid to Doctor Terhune’s hand, did more than any other one influence to make for him a home in Rome. Dr. Leroy M. Vernon, who subsequently became Dean of the University of Syracuse, in New York State, was the rarest combination of strength and gentleness I have ever seen. He had been for some years resident in Rome; was an enthusiastic archæologist and art-student, speaking Italian with fluency and grace, and thoroughly au fait to the best literature of that tongue. From the beginning of their acquaintanceship, the two men fraternized heartily. In the ripening of liking into intimacy, they walked, rode, talked, and studied together. What the association was to the younger of the two, may be imagined by one who has had the privilege of close communion with a beloved comrade who held the key to the treasure-house one has longed all his life to enter.
“The winter in Italy with Vernon was worth more to me than a course in the Academy of Fine Arts, combined with ten years of archæological lectures from experts,” was the testimony of the survivor, twenty years later, when the news of the dean’s death was brought to us.
They loved each other tenderly to the end of mortal companionship.
Who can doubt that it has been renewed in the City where eager minds are never checked by physical weakness, and aspiration is identical with fulfilment?
In mid-May, when the Pincio put on its beautiful garments in the purple flowering of the Judas-trees, and the tawny Tiber rolled between hills of living green, we turned our backs upon what those marvellous months had wrought into our own familiar dwelling-place, and took our sad, reluctant way to Florence. Five weeks there were varied by excursions to Fiesole, Bologna, and Venice. Our next move was to Lucerne. Leaving the children in care of “The Invaluable,” we ran up to Heidelberg, joining there our kinspeople, the Ashleys, and travelling with them leisurely over mountain and through pass, until we brought up in Geneva.
We were hardly settled, as we supposed for the season, in the bright little town of Calvin and Voltaire, when a summons came from the American Chapel in Paris for Doctor Terhune’s services, pending the absence of the regular incumbent in America, whither he had been summoned by the illness of his mother. We had no thought that the separation of the head from our transplanted family would be a matter of even a few weeks, whereas it lasted for four months. There was visiting back and fro; a reunion at Christmas under the massive crowns of mistletoe, such as grow nowhere else—not even in the Britain of the Druids—and a memorable New-Year’s dinner at the Hôtel Metropole, arranged under American auspices, the chief pride of the feast being mince-pies, concocted by Yankee housewives, and misspelled among the French dishes on the gorgeously illuminated menus. In February, my eldest daughter and myself went to Paris for a fortnight—a tentative trip which proved beyond a question that the air of the city on the Seine was rank poison to the healing lungs. We hurried back to jolly, friendly Geneva, where I could walk five miles per diem in air that was the very elixir of life to my system, physical, mental, and moral. Even the lusty winds from Mont Blanc, and the rough gales that lashed Lake Leman into yeasty ridges for a week at a time, wrought strength, instead of harm. That bodily strength grew apace was but one element in the fulness of content in which we basked throughout the eight months we spent in the lakeside city, behind which the Alps stood in sublime calmness that was in itself tonic and inspiration. We had a pleasant appartement in the Pension Magnenat, directly upon the quay. From our drawing-room windows we looked across the lake upon the Juras, capped with snow, and made beautiful exceedingly all day long, by changeful lights and shadows, reflected in the waters in opaline, prismatic hues we had never seen surpassed, even in Italy.
The American colony in Geneva has a stable reputation for intelligence and good-breeding. One expects to find these in university towns abroad, as at home. It may not have been unusually delightful that winter. Perhaps climate and health combined with our peaceful domestic life, to incline us to be more than satisfied with our social environment. Certain it is that the circle of congenial associates, that had widened to take us in, as a part of a harmonious corporate whole, was, to our apprehension, ideally charming. Everybody had some specific work or pursuit to explain his, or her residence in Geneva. The younger men were in the university, or in preparation for it, with “coaches”; the girls were studying French, German, and Italian, or painting from nature under such instructors as Madame Vouga, whose renown as a painter of wild flowers was international. We matrons had a reading-class, enlivened by the membership of our daughters, that met weekly at the house of some one of the party. To it we brought our easels, boards, and paint-boxes, our embroidery, or other fancy-work. One of the girls read aloud for two hours—history, biography, or essay—and at five o’clock what had been read was discussed freely over afternoon tea. A club of young people of both sexes read German, alternately with Italian and French plays, on Wednesday night, in my salon, I playing chaperon at my embroidery-frame at a side-table, and admitted to the merry chat that went around with coffee and cake, when the reading was concluded. Some of the members of that informal “Club” have made their mark in the large outer world since that care-free, all-satisfying sojourn in what we forgot to call an alien land, so happily did we blend with the classic influences, lapping us about so softly that we were never conscious of the acclimating process.
The tall youth, who submitted meekly (or gallantly) to correction of lingual lapses in his rendering of Molière or Wallenstein or Ariosto, from the girl at his elbow—revenging himself by a brisk fire of badinage in honest English after the books were closed—is an eminent metropolitan lawyer, whose income runs up well into the tens of thousands; another, a Berlin graduate, is the dignified dean of a law school attached to an American university; another is a college professor; another, a Genevan graduate, is rising in fame and fortune in an English city; one, beloved by all, completed a brilliant course at Harvard, and when hope and life were in their prime, laid his noble head down for his last sleep in Mount Auburn. The gay girls are staid matrons and mothers now, with sons and daughters of their own, as old as themselves were in that far-off, care-free time.
I have written “care-free” twice upon one page, and because I can conjure up no other phrase that so aptly describes what that veritable arbor on the Hill Difficulty we call “Life,” was to me. Household cares were an unknown quantity in the well-conducted pension. Our breakfast of French rolls, coffee, tea, boiled eggs, honey, and, for the younger children, creamy milk, was brought to our salon every morning. A substantial luncheon (the déjeuner à la fourchette) was served in the pension salle à manger at one, and a dinner of six or seven courses, at seven. Our fellow-guests were, for the most part, unobjectionable; a fair proportion were agreeable and desirable acquaintances. About one-third were Americans; another third were English; the rest were Italians, Germans, Russians, and French. A table at one end of the room was assigned to English-speaking boarders, and we soon made up a pleasant clique that did not, however, exclude several foreigners. Thus we persisted in calling them to ourselves. There were excursions every few days to places of interest within easy reach. Coppet, the home and burial-place of Madame de Staël; the Villa Diodati, where Byron and Shelley lived and wrote; Ferney the château from which Voltaire wrote letters to the magnates of the world, and within the walls of which he entertained all the famous wits and many of the beauties of his stirring times; Chillon, immortalized by Bonnivard and the poem founded upon his captivity—were some of the memorable haunts with which frequent visits made us familiar.
Exercise was a luxury in the ozone-fraught air, fresh every morning, and work was the natural result of the abounding vitality thus engendered. In no other quarter of the globe have I found such sustained vigor of mental and physical forces as during our residence in Switzerland. I record the fact gratefully, and as a possible helpful suggestion to other sufferers from the overstimulating climate and prevalent energy of American life. Rome was a gracious rest; Geneva was upbuilding.
It was a positive wrench to the heartstrings to leave her in May, and take our course leisurely northward.
The summer was given, and happily, to England, our headquarters being, successively, the Isle of Wight, Leamington, and Brighton.
Late in September, we sailed for New York.