Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 13
XIII
Rowland went very often to the Coliseum; he had established with this monument and with its exuberance of ruin, in those days all untrimmed, a relation of the tenderest intimacy. One morning, about a month after his return from Frascati, as he was strolling across the vast arena, he observed a young woman seated on one of the fragments of stone which are arranged along the line of the ancient parapet. It seemed to him that he had seen her before, but he was unable to give her a frame. Passing her again he perceived that one of the little red-legged French soldiers who were at that time on guard there had made her the object of an irresistible military advance. She smiled upon him with a radiance, and Rowland recognised the address (it had ever pleased him) of a certain comely Assunta who sometimes opened the door for Mrs. Light's visitors. He wondered what she was doing alone in the Coliseum, and put it together that she had admirers as well as her young mistress, but that, being without the same domiciliary conveniences, she was using this massive heritage of her Latin ancestors as hall of audience. In other words she had an appointment with her lover, who would do well from present appearances not to delay. It was a long time since Rowland had mounted to the upper tiers of the great circus, and, as the day was splendid and the distant views promised to be particularly clear, he determined to give himself this pleasure. The custodian unlocked the great wooden wicket, and he climbed through the winding shafts where the eager Roman crowds had pressed and surged, not pausing till he reached the highest accessible stage. The views were as fine as he had supposed; the lights on the Sabine mountains had never so seemed the very blurs of the scroll of history. He lingered, he gazed to his satisfaction; then he began to retrace his steps. In a moment he paused again on an abutment somewhat lower, from which the glance dropped dizzily into the deep vast cup. There are accidents of ruggedness in the upper portions of the Coliseum which offer a very fair imitation of the large excrescences on some Alpine face. In those days a multitude of delicate flowers and sprays of wild herb age had found a friendly soil in the hoary crevices, and they bloomed and nodded as on the shoulders of a mountain. Rowland was turning away when he heard a sound of voices rise from below. He had but to step slightly forward to find himself overlooking two persons who had seated themselves on a narrow ledge in a sunny corner. They had apparently an eye to extreme privacy, but they had not observed that their position was commanded by the abutment on which Rowland stood. One of these high climbers was a lady, thickly veiled, so that even if he had not been placed directly above her he could not have made out her face. The other was a young man whose face he also missed, but who presently gave a toss of clustered locks that was equivalent to a master's signature. A moment's reflexion satisfied him of the identity of the lady. He had been unjust to poor Assunta, sitting patient in the gloomy arena; she had not come to it on her own errand. Rowland's discoveries made him hesitate and delay. Should he retire as softly as possible, or should he call out a friendly good-morning? While he was debating he found himself hearing his friends' words, which availed to make him unwilling to retreat, and yet rendered awkward the disclosure of a position that must have kept him an auditor.
"If what you say is true," said Christina with her silvery clearness of tone—it made her words rise with peculiar distinctness to Rowland's ear—"you 're simply as weak as any other petit jeune homme. I 'm so sorry! I hoped—I really believed you were strong."
"No, I 'm not weak," Roderick returned with vehemence; "I maintain I'm not weak! I'm incomplete perhaps; but I can't help that. Incompleteness is a matter of the outfit. Weakness is a matter of the will."
"Incomplete then be it, since you hold to the word. It's the same thing," Christina went on, "so long as it keeps you from splendid achievement. Is it written then that I shall really never know what I've so often dreamed of?"
"What then have you dreamed of?"
"A man whom I can have the luxury of respecting!" cried the girl with a sudden flame. "A man whom I can admire enough to make me know I 'm doing it. I meet one, as I 've met more than one before, whom I fondly believe to be cast in a bigger mould than most of the vulgar human breed—to be large in character, great in talent, strong in will. In such a man as that, I say, one's weary imagination at last may rest; or may wander if it will, but with the sense of coming home again a greater adventure than any other. When I first knew you I gave no sign, but you had struck me. I observed you as women observe, and I fancied you had the sacred fire."
"Before heaven I believe I have!" Roderick broke out.
"Ah, but so very little of it! It flickers and trembles and sputters; it goes out, you tell me, for whole weeks together. From your own account it does n't much look as if you 'd take either yourself or any one else very far."
"I say those things sometimes myself," came in Roderick's voice, "but when I hear you say them they make me feel as if I could scale the skies."
"Ah, the man who 's strong with what I call strength," Christina replied, "would neither rise nor fall by anything I could say! I 'm a poor weak woman; I 've no strength myself, and I can give no strength. I 'm a miserable medley of vanity and folly. I 'm silly, I 'm ignorant, I 'm affected, I 'm false. I 'm the fruit of a horrible education sown on a worthless soil. I 'm all that, and yet I believe I have one merit. I should know a great character when I saw it, and I should delight in it with a generosity that would do something toward the remission of my sins. For a man who should really give me a certain feeling—I have never had it, but I should know it when it came—I would send Prince Casamassima and his millions to perdition. I don't know what you think of me for saying all this; I suppose we have not climbed up here under the skies to play propriety. Why have you been at such pains to assure me, after all, that you are a little man and not a great one, a weak one and not a strong? I innocently imagined at first that your eyes—because they 're so beautiful—declared you strong. I think they declare nothing but just their beauty. That would be enough—if you were a being like me. But I want some one so much better than myself! Your voice, at any rate, caro mio, condemns you; I always wondered at it; it 's not the voice of a conqueror!"
"Give me something to conquer," Roderick answered, "and when I say that I thank you from my soul, my voice, whatever you think of it, shall speak the truth!"
Christina for a moment said nothing, and Rowland was now too interested to think of moving. "You pretend to such devotion," she went on, "and yet I 'm sure you have never really chosen between me and that person in America."
"Do me the great favour not to speak of her," Roderick almost groaned.
"Why not? I say no ill of her, and I think all kinds of good. I 'm certain she is a far better girl than I, and far more likely to make you happy."
"This is happiness, this present palpable moment," said Roderick; "though you have such a genius for knowing what will be most odious to me."
"It's greater happiness than you deserve then! You 've never chosen, I say; you 've been afraid to choose. You 've never really looked in the face the fact that you 're false, that you 've broken your faith. You 've never looked at it and seen that it was hideous and yet said 'No matter, I 'll brave the penalty, I 'll bear the shame.' You 've closed your eyes; you 've tried to stifle remembrance, to persuade yourself that you were not behaving so badly as you seemed to be, that there would be some way, after all, of doing what you liked and yet escaping trouble. You 've faltered and dodged and drifted, you 've gone on from accident to accident, and I 'm sure that at this present moment you can't tell what it is you really wish."
Roderick was sitting with his knees drawn up and bent and his hands clasped round his legs. He dropped his head, resting his forehead on his knees. Christina went on with a sort of infernal pitiless calm. "I believe that really you don't greatly care for your friend in America any more than you do for me. You 're one of the men who care only for themselves and for what they can make of themselves. That 's very well when they can make some thing great, and I could interest myself in a man of extraordinary power who should wish to turn all his passions to account. But if the power should turn out to be, after all, rather ordinary? Fancy feeling one's self ground in the mill of a third-rate talent! If you 've doubts about yourself I can't reassure you; I 've too many doubts myself about everything in this weary world. You 've gone up like a rocket in your profession, they tell me; are you going to come down like the stick? I don't pretend to know; I repeat frankly what I 've said before—that all modern sculpture seems to me vulgar, and that the only things I care for are some of the most battered of the antiques of the Vatican. No, no, I can't reassure you; and when you tell me—with a confidence in my discretion of which certainly I 'm duly sensible—that at times you feel terribly scant, why, I can only answer, 'Ah then, my poor friend, I 'm afraid you are scant!' The language I should like to hear from a person offering me his career is that of a confidence that would knock me down."
Roderick raised his head, but said nothing; he seemed to be making with his companion some long, deep, dumb exchange. The result of it was that he flung himself back at last with an incoherent wail. Rowland, admonished by the silence, had been on the point of turning away, but was arrested by a sudden gesture on Christina's part. She pointed a moment into the blue air, and Roderick followed the direction of her gesture.
"Is that little flower we see outlined against that dark niche," she asked, "as intensely blue as it looks through my veil?" She spoke apparently with the amiable design of directing the conversation into a less painful channel.
Rowland, from where he stood, could see the flower she meant—a delicate plant of radiant hue, which sprouted from the top of an immense fragment of wall some twenty feet from their place. Roderick turned his head and looked at it without answering. At last glancing round, "Put up your veil!" he said; and then on the girl's complying: "Does it look as blue now?"
"Ah, what a lovely colour!" she murmured as she leaned her head to one side.
"Should you like to have it?"
She stared a moment, then laughed as if in spite of herself.
"Should you like to have it?" he repeated in a ringing voice.
"Don't look as if you would eat me up," she answered. "Do you suppose I want you to get it for me?"
Roderick rose to his feet and stood looking at the little flower. It was separated from the ledge on which he stood by a rugged surface of vertical wall which dropped straight into the dusky vaults behind the arena. Suddenly he took off his hat and flung it behind him. Christina then sprang to her feet.
"I 'll get it for you," he said. She seized his arm. "Are you crazy? Do you mean to kill yourself?"
"I shall not kill myself. Sit down!"
"Pardon me. Not till you do!" And she grasped his arm with both hands.
Roderick shook her off and pointed with a violent gesture to her former place. "Go there!" he harshly cried.
"You can never, never!" she pleaded with clasped hands. "I do entreat you."
Roderick turned and looked at her, and then in a voice which Rowland had never heard him use, a voice which roused the echoes of the mighty ruin, "Sit down!" he thundered. She hesitated a moment, after which she sank to the ground and buried her face in her hands.
Rowland had seen all this and he saw what fol lowed. He saw Roderick clasp in his left arm the jagged corner of the vertical partition on which he proposed to try his experiment, then stretch out his leg and feel for a resting-place for his foot. Rowland had measured with a hard stare and a dry throat the possibility of his holding on, and pronounced it uncommonly small. The wall was garnished with a series of narrow projections, the remains apparently of a brick cornice supporting the arch of a vault which had long since collapsed. It was by lodging his toes on these loose brackets, and grasping with his hands at certain mouldering protuberances on a level with his head, that Roderick intended to proceed. The relics of the cornice were utterly worthless as a support. Rowland's sharpened sense had made sure of this, and yet for a moment he had hesitated. If the thing were possible he felt a sudden high bold relish of his friend's attempting it. It would be finely done, it would be gallant, it would have a sort of ardent authority as an answer to Christina's sinister persiflage. But it was not possible! Rowland left his place with a bound and scrambled down a near flight of steps, and the next moment a stronger pair of hands than Christina's were laid upon Roderick's shoulders.
He turned, staring, pale and angry. Christina rose, pale and staring too, but beautiful in her wonder and alarm. "My dear young idiot," said Rowland, "I 'm only preventing you from doing a very foolish thing. That 's an exploit for spiders, not for young sculptors of promise."
Roderick wiped his forehead, looked back at the wall; he closed his eyes as if with a rush of retarded dizziness. "I won't resist you," he said. "But I 've made you do as I told you," he added, turning to Christina. "Am I weak now?"
She had recovered her composure; she looked straight past him and addressed Rowland. "Be so good as to show me the way out of this horrible place!"
He helped her back into the corridor; Roderick followed after a short interval. Of course, as they were descending the steps, came questions for Rowland to meet, also more or less surprise. Where had he come from? how happened he to have appeared just at that moment? Rowland answered that he had been rambling overhead and that, looking out of an aperture, he had seen a gentleman preparing to undertake a preposterous gymnastic feat and a lady swooning away in consequence. Interference seemed in order, and he had made it as prompt as possible. Roderick was far from hanging his head as might become a man who had been caught in the perpetration of an extravagant folly; but if he held it more erect than usual our friend believed that this was much less because he had made a show of personal daring than because he had triumphantly proved to Christina that, like a certain person she had dreamed of, he too could speak the language of decision. Christina descended to the arena in silence, apparently occupied with her own thoughts. She betrayed no sense that the sequestered nature of her interview with Roderick might have invited an explanation; she appeared tacitly to assume that Rowland would have seen stranger things in New York. The only evidence of her recent agitation was that on being joined by her maid she declared that she was unable to walk home—she must have a carriage. A fiacre was found resting in the shadow of the Arch of Constantine, and Rowland suspected that after she had got into it she disburdened herself under her veil of a few natural tears.
Rowland had played eavesdropper to so good a purpose that he might justly have omitted the ceremony of denouncing himself to Roderick. He preferred, however, to let him know that he had overheard a portion of his talk with Christina.
"Of course it seems to you," Roderick said, "a proof that I 'm hopelessly infatuated."
"Your companion seemed to me to know very well how to handle you," Rowland returned. "She was twisting you round her finger. I don't think she exactly meant to defy you; but your preposterous attempt to pluck the flower was a proof that she could go all lengths in the way of making a fool of you."
"Yes," said Roderick meditatively; "she's quite wiping her feet on me."
"And what do you expect to come of it?"
"Not a thousand a year." And Roderick put his hands into his pockets and looked as if he were considering the most colourless fact in the world.
"And in the light of your late interview, what do you make of your young lady?"
"If I could tell you that, it would be plain sailing. But she 'll not tell me again that I 'm a muff."
"Are you very sure you 're much stronger than she was willing to allow?"
"I may be as weak as a cat, but she shall never dare—she shall never care—to say it!"
Rowland said no more until they reached the Corso, when he asked his companion whether he were going to his studio.
Roderick started out of an absence and passed his hands over his eyes. "Oh no, I can't settle down to work after such a scene as that. I was not afraid of breaking my neck then, but I feel in a devil of a shake now. I'll go—I'll go and sit in the sun on the Pincio!"
"Promise me this first," said his companion very solemnly, "that the next time you meet Miss Light it shall be on the earth and not in the air!"
Since his return from Frascati Roderick had been working doggedly at the statue ordered by Mr. Leavenworth. To Rowland's eye he had made a very fair beginning, but he had himself insisted from the first that he liked neither his subject nor his patron, and that it was impossible to feel any warmth of interest in a work on which the baleful shadow of Mr. Leavenworth was to rest. It was all against the grain; he wrought without love. Nevertheless after a fashion he wrought, and the figure grew beneath his hands. Miss Blanchard's friend was ordering works of art on every side, and his purveyors were in many cases persons with whom Roderick declared it was an infamy to be associated. There had been famous tailors, he said, who declined to make you a coat unless you should get the hat you were to wear with it from an artist of their own choosing, and it struck him that he had an equal right to exact that his statue should not form part of the same system of ornament as the "Pearl of Perugia," a picture by an American aspirant who had, in Mr. Leavenworth's opinion, an eye for colour scarcely matched since Titian. As a liberal customer, Mr. Leavenworth used to drop into Roderick's studio to see how things were getting on and give a friendly hint or exert an enlightened control. He would seat himself squarely, plant his gold-topped cane between his legs, which he held very much apart, rest his large white hands on the head, and enunciate the principles of spiritual art — a species of fluid wisdom which appeared to rise in bucketfuls, as he turned the crank, from the well-like depths of his moral consciousness. His benignant and imperturbable pomposity gave Roderick the sense of suffocating beneath an immense feather-bed, and the worst of the matter was that the good gentleman's placid vanity had a surface from which the satiric shaft rebounded. Roderick admitted that in thinking over the tribulations of struggling genius the danger of dying of too much attention had never occurred to him.
The deterrent effect of the episode of the Coliseum was apparently of long continuance: if Roderick's nerves had been shaken his hand needed time to recover its steadiness. He cultivated composure upon principles of his own; by frequenting entertainments from which he returned at four o'clock in the morning and lapsing into habits which might fairly be called irregular. He had hitherto made few friends among the artistic fraternity; chiefly because he had taken no trouble about it and because, further, there was in his demeanour an elastic independence of the favour of his fellow-mortals which made social advances on his own part peculiarly necessary. Rowland had told him—on grounds that worthy might have been at a loss to defend—that he ought to fraternise a trifle more with his colleagues, and he had always answered that he had not the smallest objection to fraternising; let his colleagues arrive! They arrived on rare occasions, and Roderick was not punctilious about returning their visits. He declared there was not one of them the fruits of whose genius gave him the least desire to delve in the parent soil. For Gloriani he professed a consistent contempt, and having been once to look at his wares never crossed his threshold again. The only one of the fraternity for whom by his own admission he cared a straw was small Singleton; but he took the more diverted view of this humble genius whenever he encountered him, and quite forgot his existence in the intervals. He had never been to see him, but Singleton edged his way from time to time timidly into Roderick's studio, and opined with characteristic modesty that brilliant fellows like Hudson might consent to receive homage but could hardly be expected to render it. Roderick never acknowledged applause, and apparently failed to follow with any curiosity the footsteps of appreciation. And then his taste as to company was never to be foretold. There were very good fellows who were disposed to cultivate him, but who bored him to crying out, and there were others beyond even the wide bounds of Rowland's charity with whom he appeared to delight to rattle. He gave the most fantastic reasons for his likes and dislikes. He would declare he thirsted for the blood of a man with a flat nose, and he would explain his unaccountable fancy for some competitor wholly featureless by telling you that he had an ancestor who in the thirteenth century had walled up his wife alive.
"I like to talk to a man whose ancestor has walled up his wife alive," he would say. "You may not see the charm of it, and think my poor gentleman a dull dog. It 's very possible; I don't ask you to admire him. But he appeals to me—I mean that fact about him does: it sets him off. The old fellow, the rude forefather, left her for three days with her face exposed, and placed a looking-glass opposite to her, so that she could see, as he said, if her gown was a fit!"
His accessibility to odd association had led him to acquaintance with a number of people outside of Rowland's well-ordered circle, and he made no secret of their being very queer fish. He formed an intimacy, among several, with a strange character who had come to Rome as an emissary of one of the Central American republics, to drive some ecclesiastical bargain with the papal government. The Pope had given him the cold shoulder, but since he had not prospered as a diplomatist he had sought compensation as a man of the world, and his great flamboyant curricle and negro lackeys were for several weeks one of the striking ornaments of the Pincian. He spoke a queer jargon of Italian, Spanish, French, English, American, humorously relieved with scraps of ecclesiastical Latin, and to those who enquired of Roderick what he found to interest him in so "dreadful" a type, the latter would reply, looking at his interlocutor with his lucid blue eyes, that he had a beautiful freedom of mind. The two had gone together one night to a ball given by a lady of some renown in the Spanish colony, and very late, on his way home, Roderick came up to Rowland's rooms, in the windows of which he had seen a light. Rowland was going to bed, but Roderick flung himself into an arm-chair and chattered for an hour. The friends of the tropical envoy were as amusing as himself, and very much in the same line. The mistress of the house had worn a yellow satin dress and gold heels to her slippers, and at the close of the entertainment had sent for a pair of castanets, tucked up her petticoats and danced a fandango, while the gentlemen sat cross-legged on the floor. "It was awfully low," Roderick said; "all of a sudden I perceived it and bolted. Nothing of that kind ever amuses me to the end; before it's half over it bores me to death; it makes me sick. Hang it, why can't a poor fellow enjoy things in peace? My illusions are all broken-winded; they won't carry me twenty paces. I can't laugh and forget; my laugh dies away before it begins. Your friend Stendhal writes on his book-covers (I never got further) that he has seen too early in life la beauté parfaite. I don't know how early he saw it; I saw it before I was born—in another state of being. I can't describe it positively; I can only say I don't find it anywhere now. Not at the bottom of champagne glasses; not, strange as it may seem, in that extra half-yard or so of shoulder that some women have their ball-dresses cut to expose. I don't find it at noisy supper-tables where half a dozen ugly men with pomatumed heads are rapidly growing uglier still with heat and wine; nor when I come away and walk through these squalid black streets and go out into the Forum and see a few old battered stone posts standing there like gnawed bones stuck into the earth. Everything 's mean and dusky and shabby, and the men and women who make up this so-called brilliant society are the meanest and shabbiest of all. They have no real spontaneity; they are nothing but parrots and popinjays. They have no more dignity than so many grasshoppers. Nothing is good but one!" And he jumped up and stood looking at one of his wrought figures, which shone vaguely across the room in the dim lamp light.
"Yes, do tell us," said Rowland, "what to hold on by!"
"Those things of mine were pretty devilish good," he answered. "But my idea was so much better—and that 's what I mean!"
Rowland said nothing. He was willing to wait for Roderick to complete the circle of his metamorphoses, but he had no desire to officiate as chorus to the play.
"You think I 've the 'cheek' of the devil himself," the latter said at last, "coming up to moralise at this hour of the night! You think I want to throw dust into your eyes, to put you off the scent. That 's your eminently rational view of the case."
"Pardon my not taking any view at all," said Rowland.
"You 've given me up then?"
"No, I 've merely suspended judgement. I 'm waiting."
Roderick looked at him a moment. "What are you waiting for?"
Rowland made an angry gesture. "Oh miserable, oh merciless youth! When you 've hit your mark and made people care for you, you should n't twist your weapon about at that rate in their vitals. Allow me to say I 'm sleepy. Good-night!"