It had occurred to him that he would miss the daily routine—but when a man has but six months to live the loss of the old interests must seem a very transient consideration. But one aspect of the change had not revealed itself to him. He had not set out in search of the unexpected, and the legal surface of his mind had received very few impressions that could be described as unexpected. He had accepted the inevitable. Like an old man, he had asked to be allowed to sit for a little while in the sun and to see Rome before he died. Rome was a lawyer’s city. Always it had had a distant glamour for him. Pax Romana; lex Romana.
He did not foresee—or forefeel. . . .
But the first glimmerings, a kind of strange stirring of his self, happened when he raised the blind of his “sleeper” and saw mountains, snow, peaks flushing with the dawn, black pine woods, a river rushing over rocks. In his blue-and-white pyjama suit he stood and gazed. He had the “sleeper” to himself, and yet suddenly he had a feeling that there was another man standing beside him in that narrow space.
“Magnificent!”
He uttered the word and it surprised him. It was as though some other self had uttered it.
III
Callendar had reserved a room at the Hôtel Eliseo in the Via Porta Pinciana. The hotel was a small one; it had been recommended to him for its comfort, its reasonable charges and its view, for towards the Via Pinciana the upper windows overlooked the Borghese.
Arriving very late at night he found Rome sleeping, but restlessly so, for in these post-war days the Romans never seem to sleep. Taxis and trains make of the night a bowl of black glass that is broken eternally upon the pavements of progress. But Callendar was very tired. He went up to his third-floor room and slept in spite of motor-cars and argumentative Latins.
He woke with a sense of freshness. He got out of bed and, unfastening a shutter, pushed it back to uncover a miraculous picture. The stealth of the dawn still glided in and out among the trees. He found himself looking at a stretch of the old red Aurelian wall and, beyond it, into the greenness of the Borghese, with its grassy spaces and its stately trees. The sunlight was dispersing a thin white mist. It shone upon the tops of the huge stone pines, the ilexes, the cypresses. Dim hills floated against a sky of a soft blueness. And to the left lay, apart of Rome, the Pincio, the Villa Medici, St. Peter’s, the Janiculum.
Callendar stood and gazed.
“Wonderful!”
Yes, it was very wonderful and, for the first time since judgment of death had been passed upon him, he was conscious of a little tremor, a spasm of inward pain, a kind of vague yearning.
The day was young, but he had no wish to go back to his bed. Doomed he might be, but he was a live man, standing upright; and as he glanced at the bed he seemed to see it as a flat, white surface upon which a stiff, straight figure would soon be lying. Death, with its lower jaw tied up and its eyes carefully closed!
Something stirred in him. He crossed the room and rang the bell and, returning to the window, watched the sunlight on those Roman trees.
Someone knocked at the door.
“Hot water, please—and coffee.”
Callendar had some French, but no Italian; and young Italy does not ask to be addressed in French. English is preferred, especially American-English.
“ ’Ot water, sir. Cer-tain-lee.”
Callendar was shaving himself when he seemed to become intimately and strangely aware of his face as his own face. He had looked at it in a mirror each morning, but on this Roman morning he looked at it differently. So—that—was James Callendar! His age was forty-seven. He had quite a youngish look. There was very little grey in his brownish hair; he had a good skin, clear eyes, no stringiness about the throat.
“I’m going to die,” he thought.
It seemed rather incredible. He could smell hot coffee. The tray was waiting on the table by the window, with a plate of rolls and a dish of butter.
He felt hungry.
Having finished his shaving, he sat down at the table and enjoyed the coffee and rolls; while, beyond the old red Roman wall the sunlight grew stronger and the sky more blue. The stone pines threw shadows. The tall trees seemed to wrap themselves in a deep tranquillity.
Somewhere below a man was singing, and Callendar rose and stood at the window. Between the street and the old wall a florist had his garden and a gardener in patched blue trousers was carrying out pink and white azaleas and placing them in a row ready for transport to some shop. The man was singing. He had a right to sing. He was young and the spring was coming.
Callendar felt strangely mocked.
IV
He had thought of Rome as a city of the memorable dead, of forgotten Popes and Cæsars, of palaces in ruins, of marble and alabaster and the red robes of cardinals. He found it a city of life and, like life, full of intoxicating contrasts. It is the living who matter, not the dead. Funeral bells are out of fashion. And young Rome is flamboyant and noisy, and its sacred chariot is the motor-car and its god a youth in a black shirt.
Callendar was astonished—and more than astonished. The raw and galliard youth of the city was provoking. It was a city of infinite beauty and of dreadful discords.
He wandered. He was jostled. And about the sunset hour on his first day he stood by Bemins fountain and looked past the diminished colour of the flower-stalls up the grey sweep of the Spanish steps. He went slowly up the steps and towards the ilexes outside the Villa Medici. He looked over Rome.
He heard Rome, modern Rome.
In the dusk it sounded to him like a zoo gone mad, full of frightened and bleating beasts, or like an immense playground where thousands of vigorous children were blowing tin trumpets. It was a chaos of hooting cars, an increasing noise that was childish and horrible and ridiculous.
He was shocked.
For he had come to Rome to sit in the sunlight and to spread his hands consentingly towards the fate that the gods had chosen for him. He had come, as it were, to contemplate death in a city of the mighty and the memorable dead; and death was not here—but the living.
Yes; raw, red-lipped, eager life—swaggering, urgent and vociferous. It clashed cymbals and blew trumpets and beat drums. It was full of elemental vibrations and their effect upon Callendar was distressful. He felt that he had no right to be disturbed by this human vitalism; and yet he was disturbed by it, a pale and dusty St. Anthony in the sudden presence of a crowd of southern girls.
Yes, it seemed symbolical.
He turned back from under the massive gloom of the ilexes and retraced his steps. He descended into the Piazzi di Spagna. He was turning into the Via Condotti, keeping close to a shop window to let one of the red trams grind its way past him in that narrow space, when a woman accosted him. She was dark and pale; she had queer, glittering eyes; she thrust her elbow against his body.
Callendar walked on quickly.
“La belle dame sans merci,” he thought.
Troubled and depressed, he returned to his hotel.
V
When a man walks into a hotel dining-room and sits by himself at a little table in a corner he is challenging observation and Callendar was observed.
To the women who sat on either side of the doorway he appeared as a tall, spare man with a thoughtful face, rather shy eyes and an air of aloofness. He was sufficiently young to be interesting. Since his Oxford days, he had been well tailored.
Also, he walked across the yellow carpet of the white dining-room as though going to his own particular corner in his London club. He had an air of dissociation and seemed unaware of human eyes. That he was a sick man was not apparent. When he spoke to his waiter or to the maître d’hôtel his voice had a slight huskiness, but to strangers its blurred timbre sounded natural.
“Legal—my dear.”
“Or—a doctor.”
“No; a little too dry—I think.”
He was a man of detail with an orderly mind. When he removed himself after dinner to the lounge and sat in one of the deep p
lum-coloured arm-chairs whose padded arms were protected with lace mats that were for ever getting disarranged, he would smooth out these lace covers. He would smoke one cigarette with an air of leisurely primness. He sat and read Hare’s “Rome,” not as though he enjoyed it, but rather like a professional man conscientiously reading a lease or a will.
That he could be of any interest to women was a possibility unrealised by him. Still more impossible would it have seemed that he could be interested in a woman. Such vexings of the spirit were the privilege or the curse of live people, and Callendar had come to Rome feeling like a man who was dead. Or as a ghost of a man permitted to walk the earth for a little while before vanishing into some other dimension.
The Hôtel Eliseo was very full. If you dined early you had a chance of obtaining a comfortable chair and Callendar dined to the minute. The fullness of the hotel did not concern him. He did not notice people. He was like a ghost moving among a number of solid humans. At least, that is how he behaved and felt until the eternal liveness of Rome somehow seemed to reinfect him with a new vitality. It happened on the third day that he opened his eyes and looked at people. He was feeling a little lonely.
He observed his neighbours at the other tables or in the lounge. Mostly they were women and elderly women, English, American, Colonial. There was an Italian family that talked like a public demonstration. An elderly son dined brightly with a decrepit mother and aunt. There were two young things seeing Rome with a conscientious father. Also, life was not lacking. Smartness flashed here and there like a precious stone in a dull setting.
Callendar could not help observing the two women who shared a table by one of the white pillars. They were just out of earshot, but well within range of an exchange of glances. They were very smart women. They came in late to all meals. They ordered special dishes. They were a source of anxiety to the head-waiter.
One was small and thin and yellow-headed and restless. Her lips were narrow and red. She threw hard and blue-eyed glances about the room, and was always fidgeting and posturing and touching things on the table with little, affected gestures. A feverish woman, sharp, silly, cruel, greedy. Her friend and vis-à-vis had one of those formless faces of a bluish-red, with exuding brown eyes and a mouth that was always unbuttoned. She looked heavily amiable—to herself—perhaps—more than to others. Her smartness suggested effort. She had a very unfinished physical product to polish, and she was a woman who would wear the latest thing in hats even though the hat should set on her head like a shako knocked out of shape. The little woman was a Mrs. Pym, the fully fleshed friend a Miss Gubbins. Unfortunate patronymic. They knew Callendar’s name long before he knew theirs. There are women who will ask a concierge any sort of question.
But it did occur to Callendar—it had to occur to him—that these two women contrived to be a good deal in his vicinity. They asserted themselves in his corner of the lounge. At meals he was always meeting the restless and questioning blue eyes of Mrs. Pym.
They had marked him down. He was the one solitary man of a possible age in the Hôtel Eliseo.
They talked a great deal and for the benefit of the world at large.
“Oh, my dear, that new Venus at the Diocletian is simply—a dream.”
For Callendar read his Rome religiously. And you had to consider a man’s prejudices, though a man who wears a decently cut dinner-jacket and a tie tied by himself should be of more use at the “Excelsior” than in a museum.
“My dear—wasn’t it lovely last night?”
“Yes, the little capitano——”
“Rather too monkeyish, my dear. Too much shimmy-shimmy. I prefer to dance English.”
It was obvious to them both that Callendar should be able to dance. A man with a Savile Row cut to his coat! And an unattached man, too—and probably a bachelor. So Mrs. Pym dropped her cigarette case close to Callendar’s feet and waited till Callendar had to pick it up for her.
“Thanks—so much.”
She turned on her glitter.
“Do have one—won’t you—for the trouble.”
So Hare had to be laid upon the table between the coffee cups and the chase was begun.
But Mrs. Pym had other responsibilities. She was a widow, but the mother of two children—Eileen and Pam, who resided on the top floor of the Hôtel Eliseo and came down to meals with their governess three-quarters of an hour before their elders. Callendar had noticed the children, two quiet little bob-headed things. He had not paid any attention to Una Summerhayes, the governess.
But, coming in rather tired one morning after wandering about the Palatine, he was sitting in the lounge opposite the glass doors of the dining-room when Mrs. Pym’s children and their governess came out.
Callendar happened to glance up. The governess was looking over the heads of the children into the lounge. She was a dark girl, in age about eight-and-twenty, tall and well made. Her face was full and pleasant, with large brown eyes. But it was the expression upon her face that arrested Callendar’s attention and stirred in him a sudden consciousness of life—as he had not known it.
The girl was afraid.
At least—that was his impression. She came out through the glass doors of the dining-room like a large-eyed and timid creature emerging from a cage. It was as though she feared something in the sedate and comfortable little lounge, but what that something could be Callendar could not conjecture.
Anyway, he was staring rather hard at her and suddenly her eyes sank to his with a flicker of resentment and shyness. She seemed to flinch. She went quickly by him after the two children as though she feared that he was going to speak to her.
He noticed one or two details. Her skin had a pallor that was not the pallor of perfect health. She wore her dark hair bobbed and it needed the attention of a hairdresser, having been allowed to grow too long. Her beige-coloured knitted coat fitted her badly. Obviously it was a cheap article and probably she could not afford a better.
But the picture of her frightened, flinching face remained with him and seemed to grow more vivid and challenging when Mrs. Pym and her friend came in late to lunch and threw smiles in his direction and twittered and preened themselves like a couple of paroquets.
Some men retain a kind of boyish innocence to the end of their days, and Callendar was that sort of man; but as a lawyer he had had his experience of women, even of the yellow-haired, meagre, predatory type as represented by Mrs. Pym. She was a very vain little woman and a very hard one. It would appear that something had annoyed her. She called up the head-waiter and, with the menu held in one sharp-fingered hand, rated him and the cuisine.
“It is perfectly absurd. Veal and macaroni every other day. Have an omelette cooked at once.”
The man was very polite, malignantly polite.
“We are not Italians—you know.”
“I will order an omelette for madame.”
He was moving off when she called him back.
“Send in one of the page-boys. I want a message taken.”
The page-boy was sent in and stood, cap in hand, beside Mrs. Pym’s chair.
“Go up to Number Eighty-three and tell the English girl I wish to speak to her. Understand?”
He understood neither her English nor her Italian and the head-waiter had to be called in to interpret. Meanwhile, Callendar was busy eating macaroni and grated cheese and was keeping his eyes from the other table. This little bully of a woman was making him feel uncomfortable, and he understood the feelings of the head-waiter—who was a man and an Italian.
A moment later he realised that Mrs. Pym was addressing him. Her voice was a different voice, thinly gay and gracious.
“People—are—trying—aren’t they? I—do—hate making complaints—but sometimes one has to.”
“Of course,” he agreed.
She smiled across at Miss Gubbins.
“A morning of rows, my dear. We had a row with a wretched cabman who wanted to charge us ten lire for driving us from St. Peter’s. In E
ngland—we should have sent him to prison for daring to come out with such a horse.”
Callendar saw the governess entering by the glass doors. She came up the room, walking very quickly, with a queer set look on her face. She stood beside Mrs. Pym’s table, her brown eyes fixed upon the top of Mrs. Pym’s bright head.
“You sent for me?”
Mrs. Pym’s face seemed to sharpen. She did not trouble to look at the girl.
“Miss Summerhayes, did I see you in the Via Nationale this morning with Eileen and Pamela?”
Callendar, suddenly and intensely interested, watched the girl’s face.
“Yes. The children—wanted—to look at the shops.”
Mrs. Pym kept her standing there for a moment in silence.
“Didn’t I give you orders—that the children were to go to the gardens?”
“I think you did.”
“You think! You will do what I tell you—in the future. That’s all.”
Miss Summerhayes reddened and Callendar felt himself flushing in sympathy. She gave one downward glance at Mrs. Pym’s head and walked away from the table, looking over the heads of the people as though she wished to forget that they were there. The head-waiter hurried to open the door for her, for he, too, knew what it was to be politely mute. She gave him a faint smile.
Mrs. Pym was examining the contents of her wine bottle. You could not trust foreigners when a cork had been drawn.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 28