IV People Who Pass Close By
The San Martino Young Ladies
Arrived at Rome, Laura and Cæsar went up to the hotel, and were received by a bald gentleman with a pointed moustache, who showed them into a large round salon with a very high ceiling.
It was a theatrical salon, with antique furniture and large red-velvet arm-chairs with gilded legs. The enormous mirrors, somewhat tarnished by age, made the salon appear even larger. On the consoles and cabinets gleamed objects of majolica and porcelain.
The big window of this salon opened on the Piazza Esedra di Termini. Cæsar and Laura looked out through the glass. It was beginning to rain again; the great semi-circular extent of the square was shining with rain.
The passing trams slipped around the curve in the track; a caravan of tourists in ten or twelve carriages in file, all with their umbrellas open, were preparing to visit the monuments of Rome; strolling pedlars were showing them knick-knacks and religious gewgaws.
Cæsar’s and Laura’s rooms were got ready and the manager of the hotel asked them again if they had need of nothing else.
“What are you going to do?” said Laura to her brother.
“I am going to stretch myself out in bed for a while.”
“Lunch at half-past twelve.”
“Good, I will get up at that time.”
“Good-bye, bambino. Have a good rest. Put on your black suit to come to the table.”
“Very well.” Cæsar stretched himself on the bed, slept off and on, somewhat feverish from fatigue, and at about twelve he woke at the noise they made in bringing his luggage into the room. He got up to open the trunks, washed and dressed, and when the customary gong resounded, he presented himself in the salon.
Laura was chatting with two young ladies and an older lady, the Countess of San Martino and her daughters. They were in Rome for the season and lived regularly in Venice.
Laura introduced her brother to these ladies, and the Countess pressed Cæsar’s hand between both of hers, very affectionately.
The Countess was tiny and dried-up: a mummy with the face of a grey-hound, her skin close to her bones, her lips painted, little penetrating blue eyes, and great vivacity in her movements. She dressed in a showy manner; wore jewels on her bosom, on her head, on her fingers.
The daughters looked like two little blond princesses: with rosy cheeks, eyebrows like two golden brush-strokes, almost colourless, clear blue eyes of a heavenly blue, and such small red lips, that on seeing them, the classical simile of cherries came at once to one’s mind.
The Countess of San Martino asked Cæsar like a shot if he was married and if he hadn’t a sweetheart. Cæsar replied that he was a bachelor and that he had no sweetheart, and then the Countess came back by asking if he felt no vocation for matrimony.
“No, I believe I don’t,” responded Cæsar.
The two young women smiled, and their mother said, with truly diverting familiarity, that men were becoming impossible. Afterwards she added that she was anxious for her daughters to marry.
“When one of these children is married and has a bambino, I shall be more contented! If God sent me a cheru-bino del cielo, I shouldn’t be more so.”
Laura laughed, and one of the little blondes remarked with aristocratic indifference: “Getting married comes first, mamma.”
To this the Countess of San Martino observed that she didn’t understand the behaviour of girls nowadays.
“When I was a young thing, I always had five or six beaux at once; but my daughters haven’t the same idea. They are so indifferent, so superior!”
“It seems that you two don’t take all the notice you should,” said Cæsar to the girls in French.
“You see what a mistake it is,” answered one of them, smiling.
The last round of the gong sounded and various persons entered the salon. Laura knew the majority of them and introduced them, as they came, to her brother.
OBSERVATIONS BY CÆSAR
The waiter appeared at the door, announced that lunch was ready, and they all passed into the dining-room.
Laura and her brother were installed at a small table beside the window.
The dining-room, very large and very high, flaunted decorations copied from some palace. They consisted of a tapestry with garlands of flowers, and medallions. In each medallion were the letters S.P.Q.R. and various epicurean phrases of the Romans: “Carpe diem. Post mortem nulla voluptas,” et cetera.
“Beautiful decoration, but very cold,” said Cæsar. “I should prefer rather fewer mottoes and a little more warmth.”
“You are very hard to please,” retorted Laura.
Shortly after getting seated, everybody began to talk from table to table and even from one end of the room to the other. There was none of that classic coolness among the people in the hotel which the English have spread everywhere, along with underdone meat and bottled sauces.
Cæsar devoted himself for the first few moments to ethnology.
“Even from the people you find here, you can see that there is a great diversity of ethnic type in Italy,” he said to Laura. “That blond boy and the Misses San Martino are surely of Saxon origin; the waiter, on the other hand, swarthy like that, is a Berber.”
“Because the blond boy and the San Martines are from the North, and the waiter must be Neapolitan or Sicilian.
“Besides, there is still another type: shown by that dark young woman over there, with the melancholy air. She must be a Celtic type. What is obvious is that there is great liveliness in these people, great elegance in their movements. They are like actors giving a good performance.”
Cæsar’s observations were interrupted by the arrival of a dark, plump woman, who came in from the street, accompanied by her daughter, a blond girl, fat, smiling, and a bit timid.
This lady and Laura bowed with much ceremony.
“Who is she?” asked Cæsar in a low tone.
“It is the Countess Brenda,” said Laura.
“Another countess! But are all the women here countesses?”
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
At the other end of the dining-room a young Neapolitan with the expression of a Pulcinella and violent gestures, raised his sing-song voice, talking very loud and making everybody laugh.
After lunching, Cæsar went out to post some cards, and as it was raining buckets, he took refuge in the arcades of the Piazza Esedra.
When he was tired of walking he returned to the hotel, went to his room, turned on the light, and started to continue his unfinished perusal of Proudhon’s book on the speculator.
And while he read, there came from the salon the notes of a Tzigane waltz played on the piano.
ART, FOR DECEIVED HUSBANDS
Cæsar was writing something on the margin of a page when there came a knock at his door. “Come in,” said Cæsar.
It was Laura.
“Where are you keeping yourself?” she asked.
“Here I am, reading a little.”
“But my dear man, we are waiting for you.”
“What for?”
“The idea, what for? To talk.”
“I don’t feel like talking. I am very tired.”
“But, bambino; Benedetto. Are you going to live your life avoiding everybody?”
“No; I will come out tomorrow.”
“What do you want to do tonight?”
“Tonight! Nothing.”
“Don’t you want to go to the theatre?”
“No, no; I have a tremendously weak pulse, and a little fever. My hands are on fire at this moment.”
“What foolishness!”
“It’s true.”
“So then you won’t come out?”
“No.”
“All right. As you wish.”
“When the weather is good, I will go out.”
“Do you want me to fetch you a Baedeker?”
“No, I have no use for it.”
“Don’t you intend to look at the sights, either?”
“Yes, I will look willingly at what comes before my eyes; it wouldn’t please me if the same thing happened to me that took place in Florence.”
“What happened to you in Florence?”
“I lost my time lamentably, getting enthusiastic over Botticelli, Donatello, and a lot of other foolishness, and when I got back to London it cost me a good deal of work to succeed in forgetting those things and getting myself settled in my financial investigations again. So that now I have decided to see nothing except in leisure moments and without attaching any importance to all those fiddle-faddles.” “But what childishness! Is it going to distract you so much from your work, from that serious work you have in hand, to go and see a few pictures or some statues?”
“To see them, no, not exactly; but to occupy myself with them, yes. Art is a good thing for those who haven’t the strength to live, in realities. It is a good form of sport for old maids, for deceived husbands who need consolation, as hysterical persons need morphine....”
“And for strong people like you, what is there?” asked Laura, ironically.
“For strong people!... Action.”
“And you call lying in bed, reading, action?”
“Yes, when one reads with the intentions I read with.”
“And what are they? What is it you are plotting?”
“I will tell you.”
Laura saw that she could not convince her brother, and returned to the salon. A moment before dinner was announced Cæsar got dressed again in black, put on his patent-leather shoes, looked at himself offhandedly in the mirror, saw that he was all right, and joined his sister.