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Children of the Market Place, a novel by Edgar Lee Masters |
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Chapter 53 |
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_ CHAPTER LIII I begin to wonder about my Reverdy. At the school I see him in association with English boys. He is not so strong as they, not so handsome, not so alert and apt. Isabel has never had a child and wants one with consuming passion. This boy is mine, but am I better off than Isabel? My life grows clearer to me. I have receded from it and can see it better. I can look out upon Rome and then close my eyes and recall Chicago. I think of my long years of money making; then I turn to reflection upon art and life. I thrill in the presence of Isabel; then I remember the mild but tender passion which Dorothy aroused in me. I thrill before Isabel, but I give my feelings no expression. There are looks, no doubt, hesitations of speech, flutterings of the heart, that she may hear. But she is encompassed with flame that bars my way. I do not try to pass. We are all friends together, Isabel, Uncle Tom, and I. No plans are made which exclude Uncle Tom. Isabel and I have no secrets, no stealings away, no intimacies however slight, no quick withdrawals upon the sound of his step. Everything is known to Uncle Tom. I had impulses to all clearness of conduct in the circumstance that Uncle Tom is so much my friend. He treats me like a father; he is always doing generous things for me. He is delighted to see Isabel go with me to a church or a gallery, when he is too tired or too ill to accompany us, and that is often. And day by day Isabel was happier. She became a creature of glories, shining transparencies. We had books together, music together, our work together. We had the companionship of the morning and the evening meal, sacred rituals between beings who love each other. We had infinite talks together with Uncle Tom or alone, as it happened. If Uncle Tom saw our exaltation, nevertheless he knew all that was between us. For it was beauty of life that Isabel and I shared, and who cannot know between whom this secret exists, if he have eyes to see? He knew I loved Isabel, if he had not forgotten all that moves in the blood of a man of forty-two. He knew that she loved me--at any rate in some quality of love. For Isabel used this word freely in the ecstasies of her spirit, in the rapturous atmosphere of Italy. "I love James, Uncle Tom--not as I love you; but I really love him! How wonderful that he should come to us. He is like my brother, but he is something more. He is a great friend." Uncle Tom would smile benignantly upon this radiant woman, whom he had married for her youthful vitality, for which he gave the happiness that comes of wealth. Perhaps in his ageing psychology he did not know that there was passion in our hearts. Yet I think he was a great soul, wishing Isabel to have every happiness. I know he was my friend. There was nothing in him of the envy of January because of my younger years, nor reproof for the Maytime sunshine that was in the heart of Isabel. Isabel and I had been to the Vatican several times. Uncle Tom disliked pictures; above all he dreaded the fatigue of walking and the cold of the churches and rooms where he was obliged to remove his hat. One afternoon Isabel proposed that we go again to the Vatican; there was a face there she wished to show me. We asked Uncle Tom to come with us; but this was one of the days when he did not feel strong enough for anything. He was keeping to his room. Perhaps later he would go to Canape's. "You two go along. You will get on without me." Isabel took me directly to the suite which was decorated by Pinturicchio for Alexander VI. We looked at the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Magi, and the Resurrection. Somehow I was more moved by these paintings than by anything I had yet seen in Rome. The soul of this painter took possession of me. Then recalling what Isabel had said I asked her: "Where is the face, Isabel, you wished to show me?" "There," she said. "Turn around." I did and saw a bronze bust on a pedestal. "That, you mean?" Isabel nodded. I walked closer to it. It was Pinturicchio. A deeper emotion than I had ever before felt before a work of art took possession of me. Such wisdom, benignity, genius! What a soul belonged to this man! I looked about to see if we were watched by guards. As we were alone I put up my hands to caress this face, moved by some unknown impulse. Touching the silken surface of the bronze my whole imaginative power seemed to awake; my life spread out before me. I know not what it was; memories of so many things; not least of all Isabel's presence understanding what I felt. My eyes blinded; my shoulders shook a little. Isabel came to me and gently put her hand on my arm. We walked away. "Who was Pinturicchio?" I asked of Isabel. And she told me. I took a guide-book out of my pocket and began to read. "There is a story," it said, "that Pinturicchio was starved by his wife during his last illness." I closed the book. After all had not Douglas been starved in the finer part of his genius by the life to which he was wedded? How would his face look in bronze, ridged with reason and controversy; what could ever bring him out of the dust and noise of the levels where he was battling, even to the plateaus to which poor Serafino had climbed? After that I looked at everything of Pinturicchio's I could find in Rome. We found his Coronation of the Virgin, his frescoes of St. Antonio. But Isabel, who had already been to the Villa d'Este with Uncle Tom, began now day by day to plan another excursion there. She had not gone up to Tivoli, nor seen the cataracts; we could do all of this in an afternoon if we did not stop to wander through Hadrian's Villa. This time Serafino went with us; but Uncle Tom was again indisposed, and laughingly bade us to go on and leave him to an afternoon at Canape's with his cronies. Serafino rode on the box with the driver, and that left Isabel and me to something like a privacy, as we drove by the quarries of travertine where the slaves of old Rome went blind and died hewing out the stone that went to the building of the Coliseum and the theaters of Marcellus and Pompey. We passed the little stream whose waters were blue with sulphur, filling the air with its odor. The grasses and herbs were green; here and there an almond tree was in blossom. The dark cypresses of Hadrian's Villa stood like spires of thunder clouds against the wonderful azures of this uplifting sky. Before us were the mountains, pine-clad, vineyard-clad; and far up the gleam of a cascade shone like a bent sword in the sun. Serafino took us through the room of the d'Este Palace telling the driver to meet us at one of the entrances to the grounds. When we emerged and descended to the Hundred Fountains he turned away giving us the directions to reach the carriage. He knew that this was a place where lovers would wish to dispense with a guide. We walked through the avenues of great cypress trees and came to the farther end of the pools whose curbs were decorated with flowering urns. There we looked at the palace and listened to the song of the merles. Beside this all was silence, only the stir of the wind against the soft strings of the trees--the most melodious harp in the world! We climbed to an eminence, stood by an iron fence and gazed down upon the fisheries surrounded by graceful bushes and trees. Then we found the Fontana dell' Ovato, and a seat before it. It was a semicircle of stone perforated by arches over which the water musically poured. Here we rested, listening to the merles, the falling water, the whispering of the wind. Ghosts of dead delight seemed to pass us; unseen presences of passionate gallants and capricious loveliness, hungering hearts wounded by life, by beauty, by desire, spoke to us through the murmuring water, the stir of the wind, the intense silence when all sounds were turned away by the veering of the delicious air. And Uncle Tom was in Rome at Canape's drinking with his American cronies! Only myself knew my starved heart, but surely he knew the heart of Isabel. What was the attitude of mind in allowing this free association between Isabel and me? Does the heart of age become deadened? Does it understand; does it but partly divine these secrets; does it for any of these reasons cease to be sensitive? Then suddenly, as Isabel and I sat there in these enchanting surroundings, an uncontrollable emotion seized me, one that had no regard for a future, that sought only to realize wholly and at once an ecstatic present. For what could be between us? I could not marry Isabel; and what could be? Blindly, without a thought of any of these things, I took Isabel's hands and drew her to me frightened and trembling. Instantly I saw what I had done. Our life of frank companionship fell away from us. A new birth was ours; but of what wonder and terror and danger! Isabel exclaimed: "Oh, my friend!" Then she lost her voice and whispered, "My friend!" She became relaxed, leaned back her head, closed her eyes. Tears crept down her cheeks. And I was silent, in a kind of madness of fear, passion, regret, nameless sorrow. What could I say, to what could she listen? There was a long silence. Then Isabel began to speak. "Help me, my friend," she said. "How can I tell you how to be my friend? Still it must be. I care for you so deeply. Let me speak, but understand me as I try to speak, and help me. You are young and strong. You are so companionable; I never grow tired of you--but you must know that I am not different from you in all impulses, imaginings. But be my friend. Take into your being the beauty we have together; these flowers of friendship attend and keep for our garden--our Villa d'Este. Let it be open to the sky and wind as this is, a place where innocence and kindness may come, where children may play and the old rest. Ah, my friend, you have lived and now be strong for me. Uncle Tom is so fond of you. Think of all you have. You have had a wife, and you have a son. Be noble, be understanding, for really you see I am poor and you are rich. If possible these hands of passion which you have placed on mine must change, and my hands must forget what you have done. Otherwise what is the future to be?" Isabel began to sob, between her words crying: "Oh, be my friend!" How could I comfort her? The very comfort that her heart craved was that which her sorrow strove to deny me the giving. I drew out my watch; we had long overstayed our time, for we were to lunch at the Sibylla in Tivoli. We walked slowly to the entrance where Serafino waited for us with the carriage. He was smoking a pipe, calm and happy, and in companionable conversation with the driver. At a table near the Temple of Vesta here on the Castro Vetere, the waterfalls below us, Horace's Villa above us, we dined and became happy again. When we got back to the pension Uncle Tom was there to greet us and to receive Isabel's kiss upon a mischievously yielded cheek, and to hear her rapturous account of the afternoon. And I went forth with little Reverdy in the Borghese Gardens; afterwards to continue my studies of the etchings of Piranesi. _ |
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