Rough-Hewn Part 53

"In Rome you probably cracked a whip," suggested Mr. Crittenden. "But I bet you a nickel it didn't make any difference _what_ you did, your slave came when he got good and ready and brought you another kind of wine from the one you ordered--and lukewarm at that. They'd probably used up all the Monte Cavo snow to cool the wine down in the slaves'

hall."

"What possible basis have you for saying all _that_?" cried Mr.

Livingstone, exasperated.

"That's the way things are! Folks that try to use slave labor always get what's coming to them in the way of poor service."

"Oh, but in Rome you had the right to kill him!" cried Mr. Livingstone, jealous of his rights.

"Sure you could kill him--and in New York you can fire your stenographer. What good would that do you? You couldn't get intelligent service out of the next slave either, unless you had him educated to be intelligent, and if you did that he'd be such a rare bird that you'd save him for something better than standing around waiting for you to clap your hands at him. He'd be running your business for you."

"Oh, pshaw, Crittenden, why be so heavy-handed and literal! Why wet-blanket _every_ imaginative fancy?"

"Oh, I didn't realize you were imaginatively fancying," said Mr.

Crittenden, laughing. "I thought you were trying imaginatively to reconstruct the life of ancient Rome. And I was trying to do my share."

They pa.s.sed through dusky, ill-smelling pa.s.sages, clambered over a pile of rubble and stood in twilight at the foot of a long, steep, vaulted stairway. Far up, like a bright roof to its obscurity, were green leaves, blue sky, bright suns.h.i.+ne. All that sparkling, clear radiance seemed to heighten the boyish fit of high spirits that had entered into the usually rather silent Mr. Crittenden. He pointed up to the stairway and cried, "From antiquity to the present! I'll meet you at the top!"

and off he went, bounding up the high, steep steps two at a time, as if his vitality had suddenly swept him away in the need for violent exertion.

When the two girls emerged later, "Ladies, allow me to introduce to you the present day," he said, calling to their attention with a sweep of his hat the dark, sumptuous green of the cypresses and pines, the splendor of the golden-blue sky, the fresh sprinkled smell of the earth on the shady paths. "Not so bad for poor little old actuality, is it?"

The girls sank breathlessly on a bench. Livingstone appeared, slowly hoisting himself up the steps, one at a time, and puffing. Mr.

Crittenden walked around and around restlessly, as though that upward swoop had been but an appetizer to his desire to let out the superabundance of his strength. He looked, Marise thought, like a race-horse fretting and pawing and stepping sideways. How could he have that eager look in this dusty cemetery of human strength and eagerness?

Glancing up at his face, she saw it lighted and s.h.i.+ning with amus.e.m.e.nt--what seemed like tender, touched amus.e.m.e.nt. He was looking at something down the path. Marise looked with him and saw a workingman, one of the gardeners, digging in the earth of a rose-bed. Beside him capered and staggered a little puppy, a nondescript little brown cur with neither good looks nor distinction, but so enchanted with life, with itself, with the soft, good earth over which it pranced that to see it was, thought Marise, like playing Weber's "Perpetual Motion." As she looked it tried to run in a wavering circle around its master, tripped over its own feet, tumbled head over heels in a soft ball, clumsily struggled up and sat down to draw breath, a pink tongue hanging out of its wide, laughing mouth, its soft young eyes beaming with mirth at its own adventures. Its master glanced down and addressed some clucking, friendly greeting to it, which threw it into an agony of joy. Wagging its tail till its whole body wagged, it flung itself adoringly at its master's trousers, pawing and wriggling in ecstasy.

Mr. Crittenden caught Marise's eye, and shared with her in a silent smile his delighted sense of the little animal's absurdity. "Perhaps if we looked down from this height and got a bird's-eye view we could settle that point," said Eugenia to Mr. Livingstone, who was still concerned about the location of the Temple of Mars. "There's a fine view from the wall at the end of this path."

They strolled together to the wall, and Mr. Livingstone spread out on it his plan of the Forum.

Marise looked down dispiritedly at the mutilated pillars and broken pieces of carved marble, and most of all at the bits of old Roman flagged paving. Nothing gave her a more acrid sense of futility than those old, old flag-stones over which so many thousands of human feet had eagerly, blindly sought their journey's end. Had any of them ever found what they sought? She murmured under her breath, "Isn't it all horribly, horribly depressing? Doesn't it make you feel all those endless centuries bowing your shoulders down to the earth--why not now as well as later?"

She had stated it as she felt it, a truism, what every one must feel.

Eugenia and Livingstone accepted it as such. "Yes, I often feel as ancient as the stones," said Eugenia pensively.

Mr. Crittenden put in hastily, "Not on your life, it doesn't depress me!

Why should it? You don't seem to realize, Miss Allen, what an immense difference there is between us! I never really took it in before myself--not until this visit to Rome. But it's immense! Enormous! Let me tell you about it. They're dead and we are alive! Alive!"

Marise looked up at him, thinking that in truth she had never felt any one so alive. He bent his eyes to hers as Livingstone, with a little gesture of giving him up, drew Eugenia to the corner of the wall and traced lines on his map.

Mr. Crittenden went on whimsically, "I don't believe you ever fully considered the great importance of that point, Miss Allen. It came home to me all over again as I was looking at that puppy. Millions of dogs have lived and died before him; but by some amazing miracle life is just as fresh a wonder to him as if he were the first puppy ever born into the world! It's incredible! I never realized it till I struck all these relics of dead-and-gone men--it's incredible how none of them, not all the millions of them, can tarnish the newness of my own life for me! I can go my own new path over those old paving-stones--me and the puppy--and you--and all of us!"

Marise laughed a little, still looking at him, listening to something he was not saying, which played about his bold, clear face like sunlight and shone on her as warmly.

Now a spark of wildness came into his eyes, half laughingly reckless, half desperately in earnest. "You saw what happened to the puppy when its master threw it a kind word? Well, I haven't the gift of wriggling all over so wonderfully as that, and I haven't any tail to wag, but when you look at me like that, Miss Allen, I...."

"We _think_ the third line of pillar-stumps is the side wall of the Basilica Julia," said Eugenia, stepping towards them, the guide-book in her hand.

VI

They were standing under the great gray dome of the Pantheon, innocent clear daylight flooding all the great gray building.

"Oh, isn't it beautiful, their idea of leaving the circle open to the sky?" Marise burst out. "Doesn't it make our dark, modern churches with their imitation Gothic stained-gla.s.s seem cheap and affected? Every church all over the world ought to be like this, and then we human beings might be fit to live with."

Livingstone put in a horrified protest, "What! Miss all that exquisite twilight that makes a church a church? I was just thinking how fiercely, literally bright this noonday sun is. Daylight leaves no mystery, nothing to your imagination."

Marise turned confidently to Mr. Crittenden as an ally. She was sure, as sure of anything in the world, that he must be on her side. But he hedged and said neutrally, "Oh, great Scott! It would be a horrible act of tyranny to have every church like this. There are lots of folks who'd hate it. They have a right to have some things their way, haven't they?"

"Oh, I _didn't_ think _you'd_ take that side," said Marise, feeling betrayed and longing for a sweeping, exclusive affirmation to match her own. He so often hedged, it seemed to her, wanted to qualify statements.

Oh--it came to her with a start--that was another form of truth-telling!

He was trying to make his statements express the truth, rather than his feelings!

He now said, judicially, "As far as I personally go, it depends what I'm looking at. If I'm looking at a very fine statue or something that seems really beautiful to me, I want as good a light as possible to see it in.

If--if I should ever have any personal happiness in my life, I'd want daylight to see it by. But when it's a question of looking at the interior decoration of the average modern church, why, the more mystery and twilight the better."

This made Marise laugh. He often made her laugh, more than she had ever laughed before. And yet he never told funny stories.

He now went on, "I suppose it depends on your opinion of what there is to see. If you think your imagination can do better for you than reality, of course you want a lot left to it, and plenty of dark corners for it to work in. Just now, it seems to me that reality is so much beyond anything my poor, starved imagination could have done...."

He did not look at Marise as he spoke. His tone was perfectly matter of fact. She wondered what the other two made out of it. She knew very well what she made out of it.

VII

They were sitting on the terrazza in the evening, with several other people from the _pension_, having their coffee sociably around the big round table and looking out over the roofs and domes and church-towers of Rome. The conversation had been chit-chat, as was usual during meal-times, and Mr. Crittenden had contributed little to it. His ma.s.sive capacity for silence when he had nothing special to say was a constant source of wonder to Marise. Not to "make talk," even very commonplace talk, was a betrayal of a tacitly accepted code as much as calling Donna Antonia a "bad-tempered, stupid old woman." She had been taught that it was one of the pretenses which must be kept up under penalty of the ruin of all civilized intercourse. She envied and resented his freedom from it.

She addressed herself directly to him now to force him out of his reflective taciturnity. "Do you agree to that, Mr. Crittenden?"

"To what?" he asked, making no decent pretense of being abashed because he had not been following the conversation.

"Why, Mr. Livingstone was saying that artists are the only human beings to be envied, the only human beings who really _live_, intensely."

"They're the only ones who talk about it," he offered as his variation on the dictum. "That's what an artist _is_, isn't he? Somebody who happens to be put together so that it kills him to keep anything to himself. He just goes up in smoke, if he can't run and tell the world what he has seen, or tasted, or handled, or got hit by, and the way it made him feel. I admire and revere artists. They certainly do a lot for the rest of us. But I don't see any reason to think that they feel things any more intensely than anybody else, and I don't see anything so terribly enviable in their lot. There seems to be a lot of hard work about it, if you judge by the way they carry on. I don't see why you can't enjoy beauty and feel tragedy, even if you keep your mouth shut.

You can feel it just the same, can't you? I'm sure I've felt things about a million times more intensely than anything that ever got into a book. And I can't say I'm any less satisfied with my fate because I'm not thriftily trying to use those same feelings as raw material for an art."

Marise was laughing outrageously by the time he had finished, partly at what he said, partly at Mr. Livingstone's scandalized expression. She was ashamed of the way she laughed over Mr. Crittenden's teasing of poor unconscious Mr. Livingstone.

"You don't understand, Crittenden, you don't get my point at all.

There's something--something--" Livingstone brought it out with a remnant of the provincial self-consciousness before fine phrases which he so deplored, "there's something G.o.d-like, divine, in being an artist, _creating_ something."

Mr. Crittenden moved from his negligent pose, tightened up a little.

"Oh, if you mean by 'artist' a cla.s.s broad enough to take in everybody who creates something, yes, of course, they're the only ones who really live. That's what most of us are trying to get a chance to do, trying to create a little order out of chaos. But that's pretty nearly the whole ant-heap of the human race, isn't it? Except the leisure cla.s.ses."

Mr. Livingstone was in despair of making the Philistine understand.

"It's something we have so little of in America, it's hard for an American to recognize its existence," he murmured to the company in extenuation of his compatriot's denseness.

Mr. Crittenden sat up straighter. "I used to make my living buying and selling lumber in the New England states," he said, addressing himself for once to the company, "and on one of my trips I met a man in a narrow mountain valley up there who was a creator if there ever was one. He had started life as a mechanic, left school and went to work at sixteen, in a shop filled with soulless cogs and bolts and screws and springs. And his creative instinct rose up and seized on those things as the appointed raw stuff for his creation. When I saw him he was the head of one of the biggest metal-working factories in the country, a good many hundred men working for him, and devoted to him, turning out tools that have simplified the tasks of mechanics the world around. I never saw a happier man. I never saw a human life more completely fulfilled. Yes, you're right, Livingstone. The creators are the enviable ones."