Her Roman Lover/Chapter 5
Chapter V
Incense
Mrs. Garrison took her sight-seeing seriously. With a guide-book in her hand and frequent references to catalogues, she garnered facts with thoroughness and enthusiasm. Executive as she was in organizing her perfectly running household, she was no less so in classifying schools of art, and possessing herself of a clarifying knowledge of dates. She could have repeated all the arguments concerning the original inspiration of Lo Sposalio, and knew how and when Romans changed the form of Ionic capitals; but if you had asked her which pleased her most, it would have puzzled her to tell you.
In his capacity of guide she found Curatulo disappointing. His knowledge had evidently been acquired by erratic impulse, and was not nearly so much to be relied upon as that of the custode; but he cared very much for certain things and expressed himself about them in a way which pleased and interested Anne more than her aunt’s accurate information.
“I love Rome as few of those who are Romans love her,” he said, while taking tea with them in the crimson salon after their first expedition. “Her greatest lovers—and she has had so many that she may be called the supreme courtisane of cities—have been those from other countries and other races. And of the great men, the statesmen, the rulers, the artists, who have made her glorious, few were born under her walls. They came from distant lands and gave her their best, willing to find in her their fame or their disgrace. What has she in herself that she should draw men so? Has she a great harbor or a great river that she should have been chosen as the capital of the most powerful empire that the world has known? They will tell you that she had fine salt marshes, and that these were of vast importance to her people. But cities have possessed salt marshes without being great, as they have been great without salt marshes. Her first empire fell, and another rose in its place,—an empire of God, and those who call themselves vicars of Christ chose her as the capital from which they would rule the Christian world. In our own age Italian patriots bled and died that she and none other should be capital of the new nation which is now lifting her head among the others of Europe. What had she that empires old and new, empires of heaven and of earth, should build themselves between her walls? That she is now a museum of art and history is not wonderful when one thinks of the history that was made here, and that the greatest artists of the ages have come here to decorate her, to make her beautiful. But if Mrs. Garrison will read her histories of art she will find that not one of these artists save Montegna, who cannot be called very great, was a Roman. And of all the great men who have made her fortunes their own, few were born here. She has been supreme; but she has been barren. Not with her own sons has she ruled and become splendid, but by her strange power of drawing the sons of other lands to give their lives in her service; and here lies her fascinating mystery.”
It was not difficult for the imagination of Anne to become possessed by the mystery and beauty, the ugliness and squalor that is Rome; and it soon became for her, not a place to see, but an experience that worked upon her nature, a quickener to new and vital feelings, which is what Rome has always been to those who have loved her most.
Superficially concealed by modern and common-place streets, a confusing network of electric-car lines, and a number of large and offensively new hotels, the old Rome still remains, and her immense collection of art treasures garnered from all centuries and all nations, the desolate poetry of her ruins, and the majesty of her history, became something in the girl’s consciousness which no after years could efface. What she did not realize was the extent to which these things were becoming identified with the man who was making them live for her.
The first expedition with Gino Curatulo was followed by a second and a third, with Mrs. Garrison always in attendance.
“Is it to be always like this?” he asked.
“What would you wish it to be?” answered Anne, in the small voice she used when guilty of pretense.
“You know very well what I wish,” he answered; and she was silent, for it was futile to pretend that she did not.
They were just entering St. Peter’s, where they had been somewhat unwillingly conducted by Margaret, who wished to hear a mass in one of the chapels.
“They say a regiment of soldiers was camped here once without any one knowing it,” she said. “I should hardly think it was as large as that.”
“It seems large to me,’ Anne said wearily, gazing down the vast nave that stretched before them. Groups of people were dotted here and there, and seemed to be moving slowly, futilely, over the marbles, as upon some very distant stage, or the floor of some strange world, so large that it dwarfed all men who found themselves within it.
Looking through the entire length of the nave to the dome which hung spacious as an infinite thing, mystical with faint blue incense where the sunlight poured into it, the eye rested upon the baldichino, a mighty, far-off presence, and the spirit received the only baptism of emotion which this temple of Christendom can give it.
Immediately around them the light was bright, hard, almost shadowless, and the marbles of wall and arches were bright also, and many-colored, which displeased the girl, and seemed, as they have seemed to many others, definitely irreligious.
“They say those angels holding the fonts are seven feet high,” said Mrs. Garrison. “I think that must be a mistake.”
Curatulo, who walked by the other side of Anne, followed the direction of her eyes.
“You like it?” he asked, pointing onward to the space under the dome.
“It is the one thing here that pleases me.”
“T think I must measure those angels some day,” said her aunt.
“All that you say, all that you feel, all that you think, delights me,” continued the voice of Curatulo; “never have I known a companion who perceived so exquisitely.”
“Is n’t it shameful to see those poor, ignorant people encouraged to kiss the toe of that brazen image?” said Mrs. Garrison, as they came upon the statue passed off upon the “faithful” as that of St. Peter.
A peasant knelt on the cold stone beneath the image, his hat pressed to his chest, his eyes, expressionless and hypnotized, fixed upon the lifted bronze hand. A woman and child came by, wiped the foot that has been many times kissed away, put their lips to it, crossed themselves, and passed on.
“What does it mean to them?” asked Anne wonderingly.
“If they kiss it a certain number of days, they win a certain number of years from Purgatory,” explained Curatulo.
“Did you see them wipe the foot before kissing it?” asked Mrs. Garrison dryly. “It seems odd that a foot which can have power to take you out of Purgatory can’t protect you from germs. But I beg your pardon, Mr. Curatulo, you may be yourself a Catholic.”
“I am,” he answered carelessly , “but do not let that disturb you. I do not believe any of it.”
“You do not believe any of it, and you call yourself a Catholic!” exclaimed Mrs. Garrison.
Both women were amazed by a position especially common to the Catholics of Italy, but by no means limited to them. Catholicism retains sufficient control over modern Roman life to make it important for Italians who would serve their city in any capacity to avow an outward allegiance to the Vatican.
“Is there, then, a difference between not believing a religion and not belonging to it?” asked Anne, turning her clear eyes upon Curatulo.
He was unaccustomed to logic or definite thought in woman, and it surprised him especially in one so young, so fragilely slender, so manifestly created to be loved by man.
“What does it matter?” he said. “The subject does not interest me. Am I never to speak to you without whispering, because of some one who walks on the other side?”
She did not answer him at once, and before she could do so her aunt noticed a strange chanting that echoed persistently through the vast aisles, and declared it to be the performance of a mass she had come to hear.
Anne, whose school-days were not long passed, thought that the voices of the very old men who gossiped on the walls of Troy while the battle raged below must have sounded with much of the same dry and pitiful futility, and she shared her fancy with Curatulo, who said bluntly that he knew nothing of what happened on the walls of Troy—it was another of the subjects that did not interest him.
They came to a chapel where the mass was being said, and stood among the crowd of those who stood and knelt outside the stone balustrade. Within the chapel sat the officiating priests, some of them with strong hard faces, some with weak sensual ones, and all of them looking bored. From their midst, as they dozed, or took snuff, or yawned behind their hands, came a mechanical chanting, a dry sound which seemed to proceed almost automatically. Anne wondered at such a spectacle, as existing presumably for the two-fold purpose of glorifying God and lifting the spirit of man towards Him, and again she wished to share her impression with the man beside her; but he had neither thoughts nor words for anything but her relation to himself. His voice came to her through the chanting:—
“I tell you that you have an exquisite charm for me, and your reply is to argue with me upon a religious position. I ask you when I may see you, you talk to me of old men on the walls of Troy. Are all Americans like you? What do such things mean except that you do not like me?”
The thin cracked voices of the priests continued from the chapel, and a cloud of incense rose from the swinging censers; but these things were becoming to the girl a little dreamlike, for there was genuine pain in the words of Curatulo.
Her aunt had moved away, pressing closer to the railing in order to see a mosaic over the altar.
“You know,” said Anne, “that I like you.”
She spoke with her profile toward him, but she felt that he looked at her, and without seeing, she felt the eagerness of that look.
“Then do something to please me. Let us be sometimes alone together. Let us visit the wonders of this city with no one by who talks of dates and the height of angels. And when we are tired of the city, let us go out to the Campagna Romana, which I will teach you to love as I love, for it is so beautiful and sorrowful and no other city in the world has such a setting. When we have driven out there, we will leave our carriage and walk over the fields to a little grove where the ilex trees stand closely together because the great plains about them are so bare; or we will go farther yet, to where the aqueducts have been standing for thousands of years. And we will stand by them together and look over the plains where there are no shadows, to the mountains, and you will feel an impression of something mysterious and immense. Perhaps even the tears will come to your eyes with a nostalgia for you know not what. Will you come?”
She was aware that the people were kneeling about them, and as a bell rang the host was raised. The priests had ceased their chant and the incense rose in silence, but all this was more and more like a dream to her.
There was heat and emotion in his words, and Anne was moved by them as by the lyrical passion of drama, or music, or poetry. They awakened response in the regions of her mind and spirit, and gave the man who spoke them a power over her which no charm of person or temperament could have won him.
“Will you come?” he pleaded. “Ah, if I could stand with you once on those plains and look with you to those mountains, I could teach you something, something you do not know, and which is so precious that for the sake of it you would take all the rest of life and tie it into a pocket-handkerchief and toss it into the sea!”
Something seemed to be coming to Anne from 
“I cannot go with you,” she said. “You must know that I cannot.”
“How should I know such a thing?” And he asked her again, urging her with a strength and eloquence that vibrated along the nerves of her spirit; but she knew what going alone with him to the Roman Campagna would mean: Gino Curatulo would never submit to the constraint a Northern man under the same circumstances would put upon himself; so she continued to deny him, and suddenly he was silent, neither asking her again nor speaking at all. She did not know how deeply he was hurt until she saw that there were tears in his dark and rather heavy eyes; and, partly because she was very tender-hearted, partly because he had moved her more vitally than he himself guessed, she was near to crying herself as they turned and, joined by Margaret, walked through the long nave to the door.
When they came out upon the stone terraces of steps that lead down to the immense piazza with its curved enclosing wings of colonnades, it was just after sunset and very cold. A tramontana blew from over the mountains, bending the waters of the twin fountains and scattering them till the pavement was wet for many yards.
Curatulo, who had been carrying Anne’s coat, now held it up for her to put on.
“You are teaching me—patience,” he said so low that Margaret could not hear. “It is a virtue I never thought to learn.”
He refused Mrs. Garrison’s invitation to go back with them and have tea, but lingered by the closed door of the limousine, hat in hand, with his brown fingers on the window-sill.
“When do I see you again?” he asked of Anne. She had expected anger from him, and it was evident that he had none, though he bore his disappointment gravely.
“It is so cold,” said Anne, “and you have no overcoat. Please come back with us.”
He shook his head. “It is better not,” he answered, his eyes telling her that for the moment he could not trust himself with her.
“When do I see you again?” he repeated.
“We go to the British Embassy to-night.”
“What time shall you be there?”
The girl turned to her aunt.
“What time do you think?” she asked.
“How can I tell at this hour?” answered the older woman, with an unusual restraint in her as-pect. “If we all go, we shall doubtless all meet there sooner or later.” And she turned to wave away a beggar, whose prayers she would have considered it almost wicked to gratify.
“I think it will be about half-past ten,” said Anne to Curatulo.
“Thank you,” he murmured, holding out his hand; and when she put hers into it he kissed her fingers quickly, and was gone.
Anne drew back into the shadow as her car started rapidly homewards. The ceremony at St. Peter’s had passed before her as a thing in a dream, and as in a dream Rome slid by the car window. Narrow and disheveled streets that surround the Castel St. Angelo, a stark, gaunt pile of masonry that reared itself black against a pallid sky, the crossing of the bridge where Bernini’s angels pose in wind-blown attitudes over the Tiber’s faded waters, the plunge again into more and darker streets, and the confused and precarious threading of their way among a squalid and excitable crowd of people toward the final ascent in quietness as they drove under the trees through the avenue to the portone of their own palace, were all things seen as in a dream, but a dream in which impressions are mysteriously significant, pregnant as though with unexplained meaning and event.
Anne leaned her hot cheek against the window-pane, and the passing of the dreamlike things and the sense of the man who moved somewhere among them and sought her love, possessed her consciousness.